It Happened in Brooklyn

BAR FIGHT

2010-09-29T09:18:00.002-04:00

Last night I got into a friendly argument with one of my professors at an Irish bar on 108th Street.

The image, I know, is rather pat. A couple of students (three of us), young (or once-young), nursed our drinks (Jameson rocks, scotch and soda, white beer), while sitting at the bar of a mostly empty establishment (one other person there in the corner + bartender) while the professor, a wonderful and well-known writer, enjoyed his cocktails (Makers Manhattan--up) and expounded on one of his favorite topics: dead, white, British male authors.

"It's not a question of why should you read this," he said.

"Sounds boring," I said. "I'm pretty busy."

"Nobody ever asked us whether or not something was helpful. Helpful? They said Read This. And we did."

"What about Cervantes?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Read Cervantes."

"It's the first picaresque novel," offered one of my classmates.

"Read Cervantes, sure. But England," said my professor. "England! This is our cultural heritage. You want to be a writer? You've got to read these guys. 16th Century, 17th Century. It used to be that everyone read them. I wish..." and here his manner turned wistful. "I wish that everyone, that more people, more writers..."

"I've read a bunch of Shakespeare," I said.

"Everything done has been done before." He said with finality, then nibbled on his maraschino cherry.

"What about Grace Paley?" I asked. And he ordered another drink to avoid hitting me.

With our professor in a cab on his way back to Brooklyn we three young (or once-young) students had a chance to consider what he'd said about England and the Canon and dead white British male authors in general. We came to the conclusion collectively--at least I remember the conclusion being collective, but I have, on other occasions, assumed that because I was the loudest and said the most, everyone agreed with me--that these dead white British male authors, though undoubtedly worth reading, are our cultural heritage only by far remove. That we Americans have inherited the frontiersman mentality of our founders, and that American Literature really came into its own in the twenties, after WWI. Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald (less so), these are our cultural forefathers. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as well, for their revolutionary spirit despite their Isle homeland.

In the 20s we Americans discovered that we were our own people. We had helped win a war in Europe, we were reacting against Victorianism and Protestantism. We were a generation removed from the Civil War. American writers were creating their own language--they were shedding the dead, white, male British authors (though, admittedly, all the modernists are dead and most of them are white men), in favor of new considerations about the possibilities of language and story.

Dull-minded optimists no more, we set out history-free. And now, 100 years later, that is our history.

He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were such a nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It was exciting. But he would not go through all the talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not now when things were going good again.

Ernest Hemingway, Soldier's Home

MISTAKES OF AN ESTEEMED AUTHOR

2010-08-30T10:37:00.004-04:00

When I learned that a certain Esteemed Author (henceforward known as EA) was on the list of writers who would be visiting my school during the coming year as a guest lecturer, I thought it would be responsible of me to purchase and read at least one of her novels. I'd enjoyed stories by EA in various highly competitive literary publications, and had reason to expect that I would enjoy a novel. I love novels!

EA has a new book out, which is undoubtedly why she agreed to guest lecture. It's in hard cover, so it was out of the question. I don't like reading hard cover books. They're expense is not the reason, although the fact that I detest how careful I must be with one relates to their cost. I consume books like food. I read them everywhere--the bath, for example, which is why so many of my paperbacks expand slightly at the bottom--and often while drinking coffee. I crack spines like they're peanut shells. Having finished a book, especially a long book, the page corners will be arched, the cover will be seamed and torn and stained, if it is still attached. Don't lend me a book. Even if I beg, just say no. Shamefaced, I will return it to you, with another book--a new one I hope you'll like, that I will have purchased to make up for the state of your borrowed possession. Sorry, I say now. And lend at your own risk.

I did no research about which of the previous publications would best for acquainting myself with EAs work. I did what everyone does--I read the back. Of the two I found at my local bookstore, one was about a castle and the other one was about a fashion model. Easy! Plus the model one had been a finalist for the National Book Award, so I could feel, as I brought my choice to the distracted hipster-nerd reading N+1 at the till, that my shallowness was in my faith in committees, not my love of the stories about Beauty and Blow.

Did I enjoy the book? I did. I read it quickly and late at night. I found myself looking forward to arriving at home after an evening out so I could return to its story. The characterizations were good and strong. Its structure relied on a quirky, ever-shifting point of view that hopped around from one liar to another, which was pleasurable in the way it can be pleasurable to watch a friend converse with someone when you know she's trying to make a move. Co-conspirational, I guess you could call it. Fun!

I had some reservations. The language seemed a bit over-mediated; cliches abounded. But it was good--a bit over-done, but good. Then, last night I came across a sentence that killed the entire book for me. The narrator is relating a car trip from New York City to Rockford, IL.

"By the time we approached Chicago, we'd been driving more than twenty-four hours".

Wrong. Not possible. The trip to Chicago from New York, which I have done myself many times, on some occasions all in one day, takes about fifteen hours. I say this from memory, so I could be a little off, but eight hours to Cleveland, seven hours from Cleveland to Chicago seems about right. Let's give her an hour--or two, even. Traffic we'll say. Construction. It could only take eighteen hours if someone stopped every hour, had four course meals. Drove forty. But we will give her eighteen to be nice.

But twenty-four? No way.

And so the whole book unravels. Maybe it's unfair, but the reliability/unreliability of a narration is not always about the reader's relationship to the characters, but to his/her relationship to the author. The book is filled with facts--about Rockford, about modeling, about terrorism and the early days of the internet. But the wrongness of this fact, sprung on the reader at a climactic point near the end of the long book, makes me question the entire enterprise. Am I being too hard on EA? Should I be more forgiving of someone, just a person writing a book the way I am a person, writing?

Sigh.

SITTING AT A CAFE WITH VICKI...

2010-06-04T14:37:00.003-04:00

And from across the table, she sent the following email:

are you listening to this conversation next to us? hilarious. for the sake of the retelling i shall call them clare and marcy:

marcy: so you have all your nieces and nephews, your brothers' kids!

clare: no, all my nieces are from john's side.

marcy: oh, so none from your brother?

clare: no, actually i don't have a brother. but i have a sister.

marcy: oh, that's right! a sister. an older sister.

clare: younger.

marcy: oh, yes! a younger sister. and she's an... artist. some sort of an artist.

clare (with her mouth full): first grade.

marcy: a first grade artist! well that's great.

clare: no, a first grade teacher.

marcy: right! and her name is.... breanna.

clare: joya. 

marcy: ha, well, i guess i don't really remember that much about your sister! well that's all great! 

clare: yeah, it's nice. we're really close. i'm going to go and see her next weekend.

marcy: oh how nice! on staten island?

clare: new jersey.

marcy: right.
Later...

this is why i'm laughing:

marcy: the thing about these parties is that they begin...... and they end. 

 

SOMETIMES IT REALLY IS TOO LATE

2010-05-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to a charity event at the Galapagos Art Space with my friend Robin. We walked in blind, not knowing anything about the bands that were playing. The first band was Care Bears on Fire, made up of three fifteen-year-old Brooklyn rockers. They looked like their clothes and haircuts had been approved by some larger cool-making powerhouse, like a record label, and the lead singer's voice was no match for the drummer's ADHD, but nonetheless we were transfixed. Robin, a YA author, turned to me and sighed: "Well, I guess that's never going to happen for us. I guess we're never going to be 10th grade rock stars."

I nodded, looked back at the girls jumping around as if on a bed at a slumber party. "I guess not," I said, sadly. I asked her if she wanted a drink, she said no, and then we talked about God.

Care Bears on Fire:

And here's the trailer for the Lifetime movie of Robin's series The Seven Deadly Sins:

LOVE IS NOT A VICTORY MARCH

2010-05-24T13:17:00.003-04:00

On Saturday night I heard a singer/songwriter cover "Hallelujah".

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music do ya?

I've heard the song many times in many iterations. There's the original Leonard Cohen version, of course, and the Jeff Buckley, which is phenomenal. I remember the song played over the final credits of Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat (a flawed but good movie, I still contend, despite the historical irregularities and art hysteria. For more on Schnabel see this post.) I once heard a Balkan gypsy band cover the song at the Ukranian National Home in the East Village, and I have sung it myself, looking out at Manhattan and at the river, when I could still see those things from my living room windows, while my boyfriend accompanied me on his classical guitar. Our audience was ourselves, some unwitting neighbors, and my cat who, if asked the question at the end of the stanza quoted above would answer if she could: No. No I don't care for music. Thanks for asking.

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall and the major lift
Its a cold and its a broken Hallelujah!

There's a long tradition of Jewish songwriters writing Christian spirituals. Summertime was written by a Jew, after all.

I always loved this part:

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.

I used to live alone before I knew you--we're in a world, as my last writing teacher would say. And the world has things in it that are hard to understand, things like The Lord of Song and oblique sexual references and the problems of songwriting. But it also has people who know rooms. People who sit on chairs. People who have histories that are filled with things we all understand like loneliness. I used to live alone before I knew you.

She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

It is a beautiful song, which is why I've heard it so many times in so many ways. And there is something so therapeutic about singing Hallelujah over and over again, unapologetically, as if speaking to the Lord of Song or love or something or someone equally big and important. But there is something that is also sad about it. I think it is the quietness of the droning repetition that makes it seem like whomever the singer is addressing is not listening, is gone.

THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE MOVIE FAME

2010-05-18T18:25:00.002-04:00

It was late when we finished watching Fame. My cousin Sam was asleep on one of the couches in his parents’ TV room. I walked to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror. I am there, I thought. Or: That is my life. Or: That is the life I want to live. Or: That is me.

I think it was around 1992, which would make me fourteen. We were on the Northshore of Chicago. I had never visited New York City, but had dreamt of it all my life.

Was it my own doomed career as a performer that caused me to attach myself so whole-heartedly to the lives of the characters in the film? Was it the romance of triumph and failure and New York?

TIMES SQUARE

There is a beautiful scene near the end of the film that begins with a wide shot of Times Square. We see the passing cabs, the neon advertisements. In the horizon the Manhattan skyline is lit up for night. The soundtrack is not the urban cacophony one expects from the scene, but the quiet strumming of an acoustic guitar accompanying a soft male voice singing a love song.

The camera pans, and we see that a light is on in an apartment above a huge painted advertisement for Annie and the flashing neon sign for The Palace Theater. It’s our friend Montgomery (Paul McCrane), playing guitar near the window of his apartment. We enter the apartment on a medium shot of Montgomery, who shares the li’l orphan’s curly red hair and parentlessness. The camera zooms out, revealing a complete lack of furniture in the apartment, proof of his famous mother’s perennial absence. His two best friends, a straight girl and a straight boy, are out for the evening, falling in love without him. He is gay. He is in love with his analyst. He is all alone.

‘Cause I need to let you know that I might be needing your love, he sings.

The red neon flashes through the window. On—off. On—off. Montgomery sits on the sill, motionless except for his strumming.

Throughout Fame, New York throbs like the lighted sign in Montgomery’s window. Promise! Threat! Glory! Demise! On—off. On—off. Things are never as easy as they seem like they will be to these kids. All of the characters will learn that talent and hard work and desperate, clawing, desire will not be enough. The city will take them all in the end.

When Doris shows up for her first day of school, she drops her babyish headshots and they scatter all over the sidewalk: Whoever you think you are, you’ll end up flat and dirty on the sidewalks of New York.

Nobody is as confident as Coco, played by Irene Cara. She is sure that she has what it takes to make it—to have a name that people remember, as she sings in the title track. (Is there an irony to the fact that of all the wonderful young actors, she alone becomes famous, and it is for her role on the soundtrack rather than in the movie?) We hear her boasting about her glorious future while walking through Times Square with Bruno (Lee Carreri). But the camera knows better. The camera goes wide as the seedy late-seventies Times Square carries on with its own agenda, indifferent to Coco and whatever she thinks she might contribute. When Coco is flattered and conned into appearing in a porn film, it happens in Times Square. “Stick your finger in your mouth,” demands the smut director. “Like a little schoolgirl.”

You don’t know shit. That’s what New York says.

Once I walked onstage at the Schubert Theater. It was a Tuesday, between shows. I took a bow. Then I went back to my boss’s dressing room and refilled his mini-fridge with diet sodas.

STANDUP COMEDY

Comedy can be pain, if you’re broke. You can live with your mother and two little sisters and say, “I live with three chicks.” Violence can trespass doors and walls. It cannot be locked out, but it can be locked in and it can be funny.

Ask any kid in the South Bronx what he wants to be when he grows up, what will he say? “I want to be an ex-junkie, man.”

Ralph Garci (Barry Miller). Maybe he was poor and I was never poor, maybe he was Puerto Rican and I was just an assimilated Jew, but both of us were liars. He would do anything to make anyone laugh.

The longest shot in the film follows Ralph and Doris (Maureen Teefy) down the steps into the subway. Ralph has just performed standup for the first time and the set went so well that he scored a regular gig. He rushes down the stairs, high from success, full of future. Doris steps onto a graffiti-filled train and he chases her down the platform, waving kisses.

Making people laugh beats dope, he says. It beats sex.

When I moved to New York City, Catch a Rising Star, the club where Ralph makes his debut, had closed down. I got onstage elsewhere. Pain can be funny. Sitting alone in a furnished house, singing a love song and accompanying yourself on a piano, these things and other things that mean loneliness, can make people laugh. Wanting, needing your love.

YOU JUST DON'T HAVE IT

There is a scene in Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage that I think of often. Philip is living in Paris, pursuing a career as a painter and he asks his teacher to assess if he has a chance as an artist. He begs for his honesty. His teacher’s reply? “...Take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it.”

It. What is it? To have it or not is the obsession of every aspiring artist. I must give up everything for this, the artist thinks. And what if nobody is telling me that I have no chance?

There is a scene in Fame where Miss Berg (Joanna Merlin) tells Lisa (Laura Dean) that she simply doesn’t have what it takes to be a dancer; that letting her into the school was a mistake. She makes this pronouncement without apology, cruelly, betraying no empathy for Lisa’s position. It is only after Lisa leaves, when Miss Berg leans against the door, that we see to whom she is really speaking. She is, after all, a teacher in a high school. No one is throwing roses at Miss Berg. She is taking no curtain calls.

In a dramatic sequence that follows, we are made to believe that Lisa will throw herself in front of a subway car. In fact it is her tights, and not herself, that she tosses onto the tracks. Oh well—that’s her attitude. But what about Miss Berg? Her time to do something else has come and gone. Glory glory. Is it there for the taking after all?

I knew someone in high school who was, at one time, marginally famous among a very select group of people. I followed his career obsessively. I often fantasized that I would meet him somewhere with some wonderful news of my own fantastic career. I never did run into him, though. And I mostly had no news. Mostly, I worked.

GAY PEOPLE

In 1992, when I saw the film in my cousin’s TV room, I didn’t know anyone yet who had identified themselves as gay. Even as recently as that, if eighteen years can be considered recent, kids mostly waited until college to come out. This was generally accomplished by a series of painful conversations with one friend after another until, whether from newfound courage or sheer momentum, the gay youth of my generation had the last and most difficult confrontation, with the parents.

I want to show you a picture, said my friend Shale, home after his first semester at NYU. This is Sean. He is my boyfriend. Tears. Hugs: I feel so close to you now.

But, as I say, in 1992 I was only a freshman in high school, and the homosexuality in Fame seemed simultaneously tragic and frightening. The tragedy was what it meant about a person—that he had to eat lunch alone on the stairwell, that he had to sing to himself for company in his lonely apartment. Poor Montgomery. Beloved as he was by his friend Doris, he was nevertheless an outsider. Finding love, as I understood it then, would be impossible for him. This was heartbreaking to me because, despite my heterosexuality, I feared the same fate would befall me.

But then something happens at the end of the film, and I began to panic. Montgomery reveals that being gay is not defined only by sadness and loneliness, but also by sexuality. Why did I find this so sinister? Was it my youth? Was it homophobia?

We’re back at the comedy club and Ralph is high or drunk or, in any case, in no condition to make people laugh. This is familiar territory—bright lights and slurring, belligerence. Doris and Montgomery express concern for their friend and Ralph, wearing only a blazer over his bare chest, explodes. He accuses Montgomery of being after him. He calls him a faggot.

No!—thought my fourteen-year-old self. And my sixteen-year-old self. And my twenty, twenty-two, twenty-six-year-old self. This is not a slimy porno theater-midnight cowboy we’re talking about here, this is sweet, wise, soft-spoken Montgomery McNeil. Montgomery who loves Doris, who holds her arm and walks her down the street while she acts like a blind person, counseling her on an unrequited crush. Montgomery who says poignant things like, “Gay used to be such a happy kind of a word once.” And “Never being happy isn’t the same as being unhappy, is it?”

Then, during a scene that happens in the dressing room of the comedy club, after Ralph has disgraced himself onstage, ambiguity is introduced. It’s a crappy dressing room, with chairs piled up on top of one another, clothes hanging everywhere. Ralph sits shirtless, looking at his own reflection, dimly lit by two light bulbs, the only two of the row above the mirror that work. Montgomery emerges from the shadows. He is dressed in a checkered shirt, a wide swirling tie, linen pants. Combined with his curly red hair, the outfit makes him look like a clown, and makes Ralph seem even more naked.

First thing, Montgomery makes an off-color joke. A sexual joke. It has been Ralph’s responsibility to provide that brand of humor throughout the film, but now he’s too messed up to carry out his role, so Montgomery does it for him. In one way, it seems like a generous thing to do. In another, it seems that Montgomery is claiming some power for himself. He stands, sober, clothed, clownish, while Ralph is sitting, naked, sweating, high. Even as they leave the sexually charged small talk behind and shift into the current predicament—how do you know if you’re good—Montgomery distributes little bits of wisdom about actors and society while nearing ever closer to Ralph’s nude torso. Closer and closer he advances, eventually sitting down on a chair next to Ralph, putting a hand on his exposed shoulder. Then, quickly checking their reflection in the mirror, he lowers his chin down, resting it on Ralph’s shoulder, and wraps his hands around Ralph’s arms. Ralph continues talking, though he casts his gaze downward. Montgomery looks at Ralph and at their reflection in the mirror.

I never quite knew how to take this scene. Was Ralph correct when he accused Montgomery of being after him? The blocking of the scene would support that idea. Should I feel embarrassed for Montgomery? Ralph’s refusal to make eye contact with him during the embrace might indicate embarrassment. But why doesn’t he do something? Say something? Push Montgomery off? What is going on between them? The way I wanted to read it is that Montgomery loves Ralph and Ralph loves Montgomery enough to allow Montgomery to love him without losing his dignity. What I can acknowledge now, as an adult, is that something else may be happening in this scene, something about sex and domination. Maybe Montgomery wants Ralph, and maybe Ralph knows it. Maybe Ralph wants Montgomery, or what seems more likely, given Ralph’s established narcissism, is that what he wants is to be wanted.

I can take it even farther. At various points in the film, Ralph speaks at some length about the rough circumstances of his childhood in the South Bronx. He is most loquacious after being informed that a junkie has broken into his apartment and attacked his six-year-old sister. The film never makes the nature of the attack explicit, but it is clear that Ralph assumes that it was sexual. This is the reality of Ralph’s home life. Children must confront adult sexuality. There is something that seems habitual about the way Ralph looks away from Montgomery when Montgomery rests his chin on Ralph’s shoulder, which might suggest an early trauma. It may have been that in order to survive, Ralph needed to learn how to look away from men’s sexual dominance.

Or it could just be an intimate moment between friends.

The dressing room scene is the last scene in the film with dialog. Between that and the big final graduation number, there is only one brief scene in which we see Ralph, Doris and Montgomery being fitted for graduation caps. Ralph gives Montgomery a kiss on the lips that feels like a joke, but is it? Montgomery smiles. Doris walks away, complacent, silent. Did Montgomery steal her man?

OUT HERE ON MY OWN

Just a really beautiful song. Irene Cara, skinny in that way that people really aren’t skinny anymore, sits at a piano, showing an unchecked earnestness that the self-protective Coco has never revealed before. She is on a stage, but the houselights are on, making the emotional charge of the performance feel less theatrical and more authentic. Doughy Bruno watches her, wanting her. She is singing a song that he wrote for her, and the song is about being alone. I dry the tears I’ve never shown. Out here, on my own. Theirs is a sweet estrangement, between the artist and the muse. Bruno can have her only through the music he writes for her, but in that way he can possess her more than any man. He is her consciousness; she is his voice.

But do I go too far now? It is, after all, a high school movie.

WHY FAME?

I used to be embarrassed about how much I loved this movie. A guilty pleasure is how I referred to it, as if it were something I might hide under my bed and consume when nobody was looking. It is a musical with a disco sensibility; it contains a scene where people in leotards dance on cars in Midtown traffic. These qualities seemed to epitomize the uncool. How could I simultaneously love this film and take myself seriously as a film viewer?

I am older now, and have given up on being cool. I can love the movie without footnoting my feelings about it with excuses. Director Alan Parker is no hack. The film is lit beautifully, and he is clever with the camera. The craft of the film feels right and effortless. Parker captures dazzling performances on two levels: of the young actors portraying characters in this film, as well as the acting, singing, dancing and music playing that those characters display with a joy so soaring that it feels perilous. We watch these characters confront the world and lose, but we retain faith in their talent. In the end, nothing is resolved, but we feel hopeful nevertheless. The words of the final song are Whitman’s: And in time, and in time, we will all be stars!

AFTERWARD

My first week in New York I went to a party at PS 122, which is the school where Parker shot most of the interiors of Fame. The school had been abandoned, but after it was converted into the fictional Performing Arts High School for the film, it gained a second life as an important venue for avant-garde performance in the eighties and nineties. The party I went to was to celebrate the work of the venue’s curator, who had been at PS 122 from the beginning and was retiring. I looked around at the famous faces I had only ever seen on video or on the back covers of their books and plays that I had read. I realized that beyond an individual man’s retirement, the party was a celebration of an entire era, once so vital, that was now passed. I looked around and I thought of Fame. My heart sunk. I had finally made it to New York, only to discover that it was over. I had missed it.

Oh Well, I thought, the same sentiment Lisa expresses about her rejection from the dance department. I helped myself to another crudité and worked up the courage to introduce myself to Eric Bogosian.

RE: YOU'LL WANT TO BUY SOME OF THIS

2009-11-13T09:44:00.008-05:00

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:58 AM, JF wrote:
Live Action New York 09: Scandinavian Performance Art

Scandinavian performance art is on the move. Live Action New York 09
features in its first edition some of the most important contemporary
Scandinavian performance art in an intense and exciting event going
beyond mainstream contemporary art, Live Action New York 09 is here
and now, it's ephemeral, it has attitude, it's fleeting, and it is
avant-garde. Don’t miss out.

On Thu, 11/12/09, GE wrote:
Can one actually buy performance art? And if so, what does one do with the performer, when they become tiresome?

On Nov 12, 2009, at 11:06, VH wrote:
I believe there's a no-kill shelter for them out in Williamsburg, but really one should only adopt a PAT (performance artist trendster) if they can take care of them for life.

2009/11/12 JM wrote:
We adopted a mime from them a few years ago. It was terrible. She fractured her skull walking into an imaginary door, and we had to have her put to sleep.

On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:10 PM, JF wrote:
That was not an accident. It was suicide, induced by the fact that you kept throwing imaginary banana peels on the floor in front of her every time you saw her.
I still have the imaginary Shetland wool sweater she knit for me.

On Thu, 11/12/09, IM wrote:
You guys, I am right here. Okay? It was pretend...it was just art. Okay? OKAY? I am alive and well and living in Brooklyn.

I am happy to have escaped a cold fate in off-Drottninggatan theater, though. The unions made everything impossible.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 2:42 PM, VH wrote:
Evidence indeed that a performance artist is for life, not just for Christmas.

On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Gregory Edwards wrote:
You guys are missing the whole thing. Thing of it is, performance artists can make real good pit fighters. Back in Chicago, got a few second-hand from a breeder on the west side, ran my own kennel for while. Lots of fringe theater in Chicago, but you got to have the eye for the feisty ones. And if you take to breeding yourself, you gotta cull the soft ones. What you want is a real nasty, screechy, open-mike type—lots of piercings and such—but try as you might, some times you end up with a mime... or worse, a grad student. Then it's head in the bag, dunk 'em in pool. Nothing else to be done. But if you get a real bad-assed street artist, pissed-off protest type—well, all you gotta do is force-feed them red meat, and read them an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal time to time. Don't hardly need to beat them. When they hit the ring, it's holy hell out there.

A LETTER TO RAYMOND CARVER

2009-10-27T09:57:00.003-04:00

Dear Mr. Carver:

I know that you were frail. I know your alcoholism was not too many beers at the bar. I know that it wasn't just embarrassing at dinner parties. I know that sobriety makes a drunk feel vulnerable, weak, as though the booze were an extra layer of skin. I have seen the newly sober try to make their way from a door to another door without their cozy armor. I have seen, in other words, men suffering from self-doubt.

Still, still. To see how you let someone come in and control you, someone like GORDON LISH of all people, a buffoon, an ass-kisser, a self-promoter. Was he your maker? Or just your teacher?

What is important is the work. I haven't been able to get the work out of my pen, though I only recently realized that it was there. Getting turned-on by your work is an old habit of mine, one that can never be cured, even by controversies about authorship.

And I've been there, Ray. I have had people tell me--after so long, after waiting and waiting for someone to pick up the ringing line, as I sat with the phone cradled, slipping off my ear from sweat, I waited and waited for an answer, and when it finally came, how could I question the quality of the voice? I know what it is to hear someone you don't know, someone who seems to be in possession of some power, say without reservations, "I believe in you."

Well, not without reservations. "I believe in you, but..."

It's okay, Ray. And anyway, you freed yourself from Lish's apron strings eventually. Maybe if you'd studied, like I do, if you'd been subjected to the opinions of so many critics, you would have gotten there anyway.

But even if you hadn't, I forgive you, Mr. Carver. Your work has meant so much to me. Thank you for writing it. I will thank Mr. Lish, should I ever have the opportunity, for editing it. I would not be the same writer without it.

All the best,
Ilana Manaster

SOMEBODY SPIKED THE PBR WITH TRUTHINESS

2009-10-16T09:41:00.009-04:00

I was at a bar near my school last night. The place was lousy with writing students, pleasantly pickled from the free wine we'd guzzled by the styrofoam cupful at the school-sponsored reading we'd just attended, chatting amongst ourselves between sips from our $3 PBR tallboys. And maybe the combination of cheap red wine and corny beer overstimulates the tendency for alcoholic honesty. Or maybe there was something about the night, cold in a way that is impossible to dress for, cold-wet, weathery. Whatever the cause, I found myself engaged in one intense personal conversation after another with people with whom I'd had only the most superficial exchanges in the past. Relationship questions, questions of the heart, of beauty, of happiness. Sexuality and anxiety. These were the topics of conversation. Sip. Sip. Can I have two more PBRs please? Anyway, so your girlfriend is a sex worker. Sip. Sip. So you escaped the wilds of gay San Francisco. Hm. You're afraid you may never find love again.

Strangely, and those who know me will agree that it is strange, I was doing very little of the sharing. I just tippled happily, enjoying the warmth. Someone mistook me for a transvestite. I comforted him. He just misunderstood something I said, I didn't want him to feel embarrassed. We were all feeling fine.

"You're very intense," one man said to me while he was waiting in line for the bathroom. "You look people in the eye."

Soon it was time to go. I'd surpassed my cutoff time of midnight, after which the trains get wonky, lengthening the journey home by an hour or more. I said goodnight to my newly exposed friends and descended the subway stairs.

I am reading an excellent book. I have so much assigned reading, but I am reading this book anyway, because I like it too much to stop. It's called The Washington Square Ensemble and it is by Madison Smartt Bell and during the very long journey home I immersed myself in it. The chapter I was reading was about the Attica riots of 1971--good, nasty, violent stuff.

At 14th street I got out to change trains. I heard my name called--it must have been 2AM. Sitting across from me, undoubtedly for the better part of an hour, though I didn't notice him, was a student from my school. I have a workshop with him, and what I will say about him is that he has achieved a fair amount of success as a Hollywood actor. I don't really know him very well, and my attempts to engage him in conversation have not gone well up until then.

Well, it seems that the PBR truthiness did not affect only my classmates, because next thing I know I am launching into a conversation (would you call it a conversation if the other person is only smiling and nodding?) about fame and personal relationships and god knows what else. I ask him if he has a hard time with it. I tell him I work for an actor--as if that would explain why I could so easily talk to him like a regular person, which I was clearly incapable of doing. How do you like the workshop? That would have been another way to go. What are you working on? No. Sigh. I am an idiot among fools.

We said goodbye and I walked to my transfer. I hit myself on the head with my phone in embarrassment. I wished there was somebody I could call, but it was so late, and anyway, I was underground.

STAR GAZING

2009-08-20T00:15:00.004-04:00

You can't see stars in New York. Well, you can see Claire Danes walking her dog, but that's not the kind of star-sighting that inspires a person to contemplate the universe. Instead we have a skyline. A beautiful, awe-inspiring skyline, no doubt about it. And if you are lucky enough to have access to a view, you can gaze upon it and think about your future. "I'm here, New York City!" you can call out to Manhattan. "I'm here to stay!!!" But the sky against which those awesome buildings scrape boasts only an occasional night flight into JFK. No stars, shooting or otherwise.

And I wonder if that does something to us, we city people. I wonder if it makes us feel so much more important than we are. A skyline is intimidating, but somehow conquerable. The vast, infinite curtain of light that is a summer night sky over a skittish mountain lake, on the other hand, can make a person take pause. Because even if you can get a same-day reservation at Il Mulino or you are a regular attendee of Paris Fashion Week, or you have seventeen Rolexes and a wife who looks like she belongs in a calendar hanging on the wall of a car repair shop, put in the context of infinity, no one is that much of a big shot.

BORDER JUMPING IN THE SUBURBS

2009-08-07T10:57:00.007-04:00

Suburbia was marketed at its inception as an exclusive, banded enclave for "desirable" inhabitants. We separate things into unlike categories, we surround ourselves with people who we identify as being like us. So we snuggle into our white protestant suburb or jewish suburb or black suburb or italian suburb. We have our own social gatherings; we hope and expect our children to marry from within. We exclude; we are excluded. We are comfortable with that. Crossing these boundaries of difference instills an anxiety in the community, for the insulated as well as for the trespasser.

This is the subject of John Hughes' films. They were funny and touching and entertaining, but more than that, they explored the thrill and anxiety of breaking down boundaries, between childhood and adulthood, cool and uncool, rich and poor, city and suburb. Are the rules of exclusion that cause a white woman to call the police when she sees a black man trying to enter a house in a wealthy white neighborhood any different than the sociological breakdown of a high school cafeteria? Stay Where You Belong, that's how our society would prefer us to behave. But the characters in Hughes' film perforate those borders; they will not allow themselves to be banded.

Consider the following scene from Pretty and Pink. To ask Andie out for the first time, Blaine leaves his friends, the rich kids who eat inside, and steps out to a courtyard where Andie and her friends eat lunch. Out in the courtyard, Blaine is greeted with a general hostility, and he is visibly self-conscious.

Andie: Is this your first time out here?
Blaine: Yeah. I don't think I'm very popular out here.
Andie: I don't know. You're just fine inside...

Or The Breakfast Club, wherein five high school students are removed from the daily pressure to stay in their own circles, and discover the meaninglessness of those differentiations.

You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s how we saw ourselves at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

During the rest of the week it is the differences between these kids that defines them. On Saturday, in the library, with no one else around they realize that they have more uniting them than dividing them.

I wrote a paper about Suburbia as a location for 80's movies that I will post here.

In the meantime, John Hughes, rest in peace. And here's some Duckie for all of us. Sigh.

MEDITATION ON A PAIR OF PANTS

2009-07-26T09:58:00.005-04:00

Last night I was thinking about a pair of pants I used to have. They were a very deep black, soft, wide-ribbed corduroy. I bought them from the Gap.

I didn't buy much at the Gap when I was growing up, so when I did I would cherish the iconic blue plastic shopping bags with the chord tie enclosure. I would use the same bag for my lunch, or a change of clothes, or whatever other plastic bag type necessity I could fulfill. I would use them until they were worn away, until the blue had been scratched out and faded to a dull grey. One time I noticed that Cory Baskin, one half of the Baskin twins, a kid who was very smart and nice but also really really cool; all the girls liked him, he always had the newest Michael Jordan sneakers, his hair was black and spiky and he had a swath of freckles and a cute little button nose, but anyway I saw him carrying a white, plastic TJ Maxx bag, a variety of bag that even if I used a different one every day, I would barely dent my mother's supply. This may have been my first understanding of the difference between being and trying to be, and that the really cool kids never had to try.

But the pants I refer to came later. I bought them when I was at home from college to wear while in Europe. They fit really well, and had a nice bell at the bottom, and they were so warm and soft. I loved them alot.

That's all. I was just thinking about those pants.

A PRETTY PERFECT SENTENCE, WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO IS NOT ME BUT SHOULD BE.

2009-07-23T18:40:00.002-04:00

Most of the time I like who I am, but a lot of the time I hate who I am, and that's why people meditate I think.

Here's the source.

BOMB THE SUBURBS

2009-07-20T15:01:00.004-04:00

A few years ago, Graffiti took a kind of hold over my imagination.

I don't know any graffiti writers. I grew up in a suburb of strivers; we were none of us risk takers when it came to the law. We chose government-approved paths towards recognition: grades, college. Networking. Auditions. That's me. I throw dinner parties, I go to sample sales. I would sooner move to Madison, WI than write my name on the side of a bridge.

I am afraid of heights, for one. And toxins. And the law.

But I got into graffiti anyway. Not the products of it, because really, I couldn't care less, but the motivation behind it. Because while some of us are content to lead basically happy lives, hoping that the triumphs outweigh the setbacks, job, spouse, home, etc, others of us suffer from the plague of grandiosity. Those of us in the latter category, and I say us with a head shake and sigh at my own unfortunate inclusion therein, picked up the notion somewhere that we were meant to live a large, bubble-lettered life. So we get MFAs or don't. We make things in our basements, in coffee shops. We have ideas for screenplays. We get the kind of jobs that could never be mistaken for a serious career: Art Handler, Barista, Personal Assistant, passing time until we are launched into the stratosphere.

And the project of the graffiti writer is just a simplified version of that exact desire.

Look at me. That's a tag. Know my name. I am alive.

I was going to write this blog about Dash Snow, an "artist", famous for doing a bunch of drugs and sleeping with a bunch of women and letting his friend take naked pictures of him. He died last week. He's an admittedly annoying figure. Heroin overdose at 27, he has a daughter named Secret, he would do go into hotel rooms and shred a bunch of phone books and do fistfuls of ecstasy until he felt like a hamster, his family is one of the richest in the country. A friend told me that his original proposal for the Whitney Biennial was to display drug paraphernalia: needles, coke, straws. Irritating, right? The whole mess. It just makes you roll your eyes.

But he was a graffiti writer. He started out trying to get famous by writing his name boldly all over town. I feel like that says something.

His friend, Ryan McGinley, who is actually a legitimately badass photographer said this about him, which I thought was interesting:

One of my favorite things about Dash was always his unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air without being aware of it. I would just smile and watch the smoke twirl into the letters S A C E. That’s how I’ll always remember him.

WHILE WAITING FOR OVERRATED PIZZA...

2009-07-19T18:32:00.003-04:00

Picture our heroine, along with her partner and their friend, Ravi, who is leaving New York for Washington DC where he will be starting a new job. Picture the three, the rain coming down in torrents as they wait outside a pizzeria, hoping that the forty-five minute wait time estimated by the proprietor is closer to accurate than it seems like it might be from the sizable mob of would-be patrons huddling alongside them, under the awning, trying to stay dry. Picture Ravi, impish, with the Brit-like accent of his native Sri Lanka, making conversation about his future life in our nation's capital.

RAVI: I like Adam's Morgan. Or Dupont Circle. They're nice.

Gregory nods.

ILANA (Naming the only place she's heard of in DC): Georgetown?

GREGORY: Georgetown!

RAVI: Oh, yes. I would like to live there. It is so beautiful.

GREGORY: But there's no subway stop there.

RAVI (looking forlorn): That's true.

ILANA (straining for a cheerful solution): You could always get a bicycle!

RAVI (brightening): I suppose...

ILANA (feeling quite pleased with herself): You could bike to work!

RAVI: But the weather is so hot there. It's so humid. It was a swamp you know.

ILANA: Ravi...

RAVI: Yes, the weather in DC is just terrible. Too damn hot.

ILANA: Ravi, you're from Sri Lanka!

RAVI: Yes?

ILANA: Isn't that country basically jungle?

RAVI: Well, why do you think I left? Twenty-five years was enough for me!

GREGORY: It wasn't the war?

RAVI: War? No! It was the humidity!

THE MAKING OF MEN

2009-07-07T15:29:00.004-04:00

I am visiting Chicago for a few days, my hometown, and last night I had the great pleasure of reconnecting with a few friends who were, during an earlier period of my life, a part of my daily existence. To see the faces of these friends, to embrace them, made my heart leap; I was joyful. Like a grandmother at a graduation I held their familiar/unfamiliar faces in my hands and I looked deeply at the adults that they have become. The women have grown beautiful and grounded. More secure. Stronger. I see them older in a way that is probably not much different from the way they see me. We know who we are, we women in our thirties. It is a gratifying thing to be an observer and participant in that process.

But what struck me last night was not the changes in the women, but the changes in the men. Because they are men now, and I found myself saying that so often last night. "You seem like a nice man," I said to my friend's boyfriend. "You've turned into a man!" I said to another friend's brother. Is it their seriousness? Their respect? The way they can be counted on? The way they say what they mean? One man, my old friend, who was so young once, emotional and naive and unsure of his footing, his manhood should not surprise me, but it does, nevertheless.

Soon we will be old. Soon I will look back on this time as my laughable youth.

BEEN LISTENING TO A LOT OF OASIS

2009-07-02T10:22:00.001-04:00

Don't know why. Thought I'd share.

SUCK IT, HENRY JAMES

2009-06-23T10:23:00.005-04:00

Sometime last fall I was sitting with my friend at a coffee shop. I had spent the day before in a haze of despair, having been tasked with calling Time Warner Cable for one or another client, an errand I have completed with little pomp and circumstance a thousand times in these five years I have worked as an assistant, but for some reason on that day, the day before the one I spent in the coffee shop, the chore became symbolic of a larger, existential problem:

What the flip am I doing with my life?

I couldn't call. I could only pace, stare at my phone, read about people's babies on Facebook and scour help wanted ads on craigslist. I needed a change. So the next day we started making a list, my friend and I, of possible life-altering actions I could take so that I might be assured of a future free of Time Warner Cable phone trees. "You could write the quick and dirty young adult novel," she suggested. "Or a screenplay. Or you could go back to school..."

Fast forward through two months of rapid-fire application preparation. There were recommendations to hustle, a standardized test to take, personal essays to write, plus I had to figure out what excerpt from my novel I should send to each school. I even had to write a literary essay. But come April I had heard from all seven institutions to which I had offered myself in judgment. I accepted a position in the MFA Fiction program at Columbia.

The School of Arts has a lecture series, and they offered the last of the year as a welcome event for admitted students. James Wood, a critic and sometime novelist, was the speaker at the packed event. He read from his latest book, How Fiction Works, and referenced one after another after another pinnacle of western literature, which I knew by name and author, but had never read. It was sad, actually, sitting there on the campus of my future alma mater, seeking to further my career as a writer of literature, finding that my incoming knowledge of anything before 1950 was sadly lacking.

And then, as if reading my mind, another new student with whom I'd struck up acquaintance in the post-lecture bad-wine-and-cheese-and-question portion of the event, the shindig element, found a way to make me feel even more sheepish and undereducated.

"Let's play a game," she offered. I noticed that no one other myself had helped themselves to more wine. "What you do is, you use your hands to reenact the death of a writer, then the other people have to guess what it is." So she flattened out one hand, palm up, which functioned as a kind of stage. Using the index and middle fingers of her other hand, she "walked" across the stage a few steps, then coughed violently, and tipped the hand over. Dead.

I swished my plastic cup of wine, noticing that I had poured red over a half-full cup of white. The result was a kind of murky orange color, which I took down in a single gulp.

"It's Keats!" she said mirthfully. "Get it?"

Yeah. No, I didn't. I don't know one single thing about Keats. Still don't. Not how he died, where he lived, what he wrote. I know that Cary Grant did acid enough to see the future; I know that Eric Clapton kept a jar of brandy and lemonade on his nightstand; that someone is doing a remake of "Fame", but Keats? Yeah, no.

And I tell this story now, because the humiliation I suffered at the admitted students event has sent me on a rampage of classical literature consumption. I read Magic Mountain, for chrissake. And Henry Miller. Now I am on Henry James.

And I don't like it one bit. I will say that for the record. He's like Jane Austen but with none of the fun. If he were a woman writing about marriage proposals and fortune seekers and villas in Tuscany, he would be considered un-serious. But he isn't. He's a humorless white man with a strong distaste for ending paragraphs. Joke's on you, Western Literature.

BRAVE BETTY

2009-06-20T11:13:00.005-04:00

I sat next to Betty in Business Class on my way back to New York from Los Angeles. This was a couple of months ago.

Betty takes the trip alot; the New York-Los Angeles-New York trip. She told me that she did, but she didn't have to tell me, it was easy to ascertain from her familiarity with the seat, the blankets, even the flight attendants. "She's got a teenaged kid," she told me about a pretty, blonde stewardess. "Can you believe that?"

Betty dressed impeccably. A Prada-Armani, black with diamonds kind of lady. She brought a New York Times and a sandwich. She refused all offers of food except the peach and cookie dough ice cream dessert, a woman blessed with a tiny figure, even in her late middle age. Her voice was deep and gravelly with a borough accent, cigarette-scented and tough. She was ballsy, I could tell that. Legions of men in her life have undoubtedly called her a ball-buster behind her back. Or maybe to her face, at the risk of getting punched in the nose.

Her father had died, then her mother. She lived alone in Gramercy Park, though she didn't seem the slightest bit lonely. She was a successful deal maker in the music business.

"I walk into the bathroom and there's a bag there, how much do you want to bet its from coach?" The leather company, I thought? But that's not what she meant. The pretty blonde stewardess returned with her answer. "It belonged to someone from coach," she affirmed. "I told you!" said Betty triumphantly, shaking her head at the audacity of someone from steerage using the Business Class bathroom. It sounds horrible, maybe, but on Betty it was kind of charming. I am coach, I wanted to say, and maybe I did.

I am not a great flyer. I can't seem to wrap my head around how the airlines know that a plane is working properly, so every sound, every sharp turn, is, to me, confirmation of my worst fear: that the plane is busted and we're going to free fall. My anxiety is at its highest during take-off and landing.

We'd sat on the tarmac for awhile, Betty and I, maybe an hour, getting to know one another. When we finally took off, I looked at her, thought I should let her know, in case I started singing quietly to myself, which I often do on planes to calm my nerves.

"You're not afraid of flying?" she said, seeming more than slightly disappointed in me. She shook her tiny head. "You have to be brave," she said. "You have to be brave in this life."

I think of that, almost daily. She was right, after all.

YET ANOTHER INSCRUTABLE COMMENT FROM THE WEB

2009-06-20T00:38:00.000-04:00

What does this mean?

Didn't Do it For Me | Reviewer: Darren | 5/8/09

I love this song, but neil diamond is such an esstatisical person that i almost feel akward hosting such inferbious music at a social gathering. Constiteritary to my prior knowings, this music was too "mozarty" for me. Thanks for posting the luyrics thanks a lot.

THE NAUGHTS

2009-06-01T09:59:00.006-04:00

I went to see the Model as Muse show at the Met last weekend. It was a fun "fashion throughout the ages" sort of show, told using famous models as the protagonists of the story. Highlights were Linda Evangelista (see right), the feminist fashion of the seventies, and a movie where a model dons a huge metal dress. As is often the case with these kinds of exhibits, each era was summarized with a particular look, song, attitude. The nineties, for example, was all about Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs and grunge. Do I even need to say? "Smells like Teen Spirit" wailed tortured and pissed off through the speakers. Walking along the park with Gregory after the show I presented the question: What would the room for the current decade look like? In other words, looking back at this pop cultural moment, what will be remembered?

Gregory offered Will.I.Am's "Yes We Can" song/video. I suggested Judd Apatow and his cronies. Irony seemed to rule the day, especially in the first half of the decade, as if to say, "look, we're fucked. Nothing to be done about it." Gregory added Jon Stewart and Colbert. Books? Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, what would you call them? The comic book writers? I'm not sure about art. Probably something on the web. Youtube. Facebook. The iPod. Fashion? Philip Lim, right? Stella McCartney. Zac Posen. Lots of pork. Locavores. The Sopranos.

But what about music? What would they pipe through the speakers in the Naught room? Flippin' Britney Spears? How depressing. Fall Out Boy?

Maybe this is the decade when music became more or less irrelevant. In a ten (nine) year period of major tragedy, war, governmental incompetence, torture, environmental crisis, economic meltdown, whose voice came through, our sentinel? Where was our Dylan, Cobain. Where was Marvin Gaye asking, "What's Going On?"

Finally, I had a Eureka moment. The song of the decade. The song for the Naught Room of the future:

"VULCANS ARE LIKE SPACE JEWS"

2009-05-17T15:15:00.002-04:00

So says Gregory to me this morning. No explanation needed, seems to me.

FREE TO BE

2009-05-15T17:02:00.002-04:00

I saw this today (research, I swear) and I started crying a little...

IT'S JUST ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

2009-05-12T13:51:00.003-04:00

"I just don't feel like I get as drunk as other people," I boasted to my friend last night. It was girls' night. We were sitting in a back "garden" (alley) of our first destination, sipping our first glass of wine, waiting for the other two to arrive.

Two hours later found me traipsing down Sackett Street, singing all the hits from My Fair Lady at full voice:

ARE THERE LILAC TREES IN THE HEART OF TOWN?

I asked an indifferent Monday night borough neighborhood.

CAN YOU SEE A LARK IN ANY OTHER PART OF TOWN?

Here I went for a highly inelegant tour j'ete.

DOES ENCHANTMENT SOAR OUT OF EV'RY DOOR?
NO IT'S JUST ON THE STREET WHERE YOU...

I never finished the phrase, to everyone's great relief, though my performance's abrupt termination had nothing to do with any concern for my friends' suffering ear drums, something they must have realized when they saw me running down the street squealing. Swept up as I'd been with the romance of this Musical Theater Classic, I'd leaned into a window dreamily as I belted. The window into which I'd leaned was on the first floor of a brownstone. Why I assumed the apartment would be unoccupied, I couldn't now guess, but it wasn't. Maybe a foot in front of the window, a man sat in an easy chair, quietly watching television.

I am sure that it was the volume of my interpretation of the Lerner and Loewe ballad rather than its musicality that caused the poor relaxing man-at-home to look up towards his window, and I wonder what he thought when a woman in a hat and poncho screamed in his face and ran down the street.

Don't get as drunk as other people, I says. Total. Lie.

NOM DE PLUME

2009-05-07T12:52:00.003-04:00

One of the great joys of writing a novel is that one can feel justified indulging one's interest in any passing curiosity, all in the name of research. In the last year I have made myself an expert in topics ranging from the history of Coney Island high school basketball to "pump and dump" penny brokerage schemes of the early nineties. Productive? Not really. But its better than looking at a cursor blink menacingly at you when you don't know what to write next.

Towards this end, I have spent much of the last week reading about the rock-glam-punk scene of the late sixties and early seventies. I am fascinated by the different ways women participated in the scene, either as artists (Patti Smith, Debbie Harry), as muses (Patti Boyd, inspiration for "Wonderful Tonight" and "Layla" by Eric Clapton) and as groupies. This last category with provided me with hours of distraction. If you have any interest in groupie lore I recommend I'm with the Band and Let's Spend the Night Together by Pamela Des Barres. Oh, the places she's been!

In any case, though I think I have mostly worked it out of my system, I had a small New York Dolls-Iggy Pop spasm today, when I came across the name of a world famous punk journalist, the man who claims to have been the first to coin the phrase, Legs McNeil.

Legs McNeil, I thought, what a name! And it got me thinking...being that I am basically unpublished (other than this blog, of course, and a short story in a teeny tiny Brooklyn literary journal), I can have any name I want! Legs Manaster would be amazing, but a bit copy cat. Plus, what if the book gets published and someone wants to interview me and the interview starts with, "Anyway, Legs..." How could I get through that?

Iggy Pop got his name by combining two nicknames. I've had very few nicknames in my life. Lonnie Manaster is lame. In high school I had a friend who called me Twiggy, a barely-guarded dig at my chubbiness. My friend Emily and I call each other Balki. Balki Manaster? Twiggy Manaster? None of them are as good as Legs...

Many people have called me by my last name. My boss, for example. I often refer to myself by my last name. As in, "Jesus, Manaster. Get it together!" I could be Manaster Manaster! Like Mister Mister, only stranger and harder to pronounce correctly.

Obviously none of these will do, so I am turning to you, my meager readership, to come up with a good pen name. Something zippy, provocative. The whole thing is a publicity stunt, after all, so best not to waste it.

What say you?

THE WORTHY OPINIONS OF COCKDICK9

2009-04-30T01:21:00.003-04:00

This is a quote from some people responding to this classical music youtube video:

wongksa (5 days ago)

If they are classically trained at the prestigious Juuilard, they should not play something like this, what a waste, way too commercial and showy, selling sex appeal... insulting the classical pianists in a way...

Cockdick9 (4 days ago)

Why can't classical musicians play something sexy. Music should reflect life.

Adelaidis (2 days ago)

I strongly agree with you, Cockdick9.

UPSTAIRS ON GREENE STREET

2009-04-27T18:05:00.010-04:00

There is a building on Greene Street, exactly one block away from my boss's converted loft, you wouldn't notice that there was a door necessarily, if you weren't looking for it, it's green I think, heavy and wooden and in need of a paint job, like it was made from the top of an old picnic table. I know someone who lives there. His name is Eliot and he has been living in the same apartment since the mid-seventies when he ran a nightclub called Reno Sweeney in the West Village. He is an old friend of my mother's.

Before Saturday, Eliot and my mother had not seen one another since 1973 when she was younger than I am now, but not by much, and she was exceedingly beautiful. "Whenever we wanted anything we always had Debra ask for it," Eliot said, "because she was so lovely nobody could say no to her."
"And you paid for it, didn't you!" my mom responded, laughing broadly, showing off the gap between her teeth that accounted for some of her power to bewitch, "I never had a cent!"

Eliot's apartment is on the top floor, and there is no elevator. There isn't even a proper stairwell. The stairs stretch directly up from the door, like they might if they led to a monument or to a court house. They are worse for the wear; I seem to remember the stairs sagging in the middle, giving the impression of a resigned old hag, guarding the stubborn inhabitants who refuse to give up their insanely affordable living accomodations for modern conveniences like an elevator.

"I just had a hip replaced," he told us as he took the last few stairs. "Go on in, its open."

The walls are real wood paneling and there are shelves everywhere for books and CDs and DVDs. Everything is custom designed, custom built, not that it's fancy, but it shows forethought. Its bespoke, I suppose you could say, down to the specially made file cabinets where Elliot stores packets of original printings of the posters he designed for the club. There is one of Edith Beale, "Little Edie" from Grey Gardens that I have to show you because it is amazing.

A lot of the people that Eliot and my mother knew from back then have died of AIDS.

It didn't seem at all strange to Eliot that I was there with my mother, with the black hair and dark eyes she gave me, not as beautiful as she was but comparably quirky. On Saturday we'd even dressed similarly: she in a long white blouse with an antique onyx pin at the throat and matching earrings, me in a white blouse and an oversized shapely summer hat. He chatted on about his life, his parents and siblings, his career in the music business. He talked about the club.

There is an old dumbwaiter near the windows. A support beam in the kitchen is covered in buttons, the pin kind, and there's a bowl filled with matches. The DVDs are organized by year. There is an antique stove in the living area and a bed covered with boxes.

"I've given my life to this apartment," Eliot said. "I am going to die here." And it didn't seem sad. Nothing about the place was sad or lonely at all. It was full of life; full of a life. Or lives. The place practically teemed with the past.

THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE IT

2009-04-19T11:17:00.004-04:00

On Friday night I went with my boss to see Guys and Dolls on Broadway. After the show we went backstage and congratulated his friends in the cast, of which there were many. It is intensely awkward back there, in the wings of the theater, re-introducing oneself to people who just performed for thousands. "Thanks for inviting me to your Bar Mitzvah," I said lamely to one of the stars, in a poorly-conceived attempt to dissipate the awkwardness. "Here's your check for eighteen dollars. Don't spend it all in one place."

I always hated seeing people after my own shows. I could never stomach those exchanges.

We ended the night at Bar Centrale, a restaurant on 46th Street, that is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful in New York. Before we ordered I excused myself to use the bathroom. Finding it occupied I turned back towards our table. I saw my boss, his friends, his girlfriend. The place was lousy with actors and theater enthusiasts, underlit and hushed, dressed in perfect casual finery, leaning over tables under oversized light fixtures, or perched on zebra-print bar stools. I stood for a minute and I thought about "show people", and how lucky I'd been to find myself with such priveledged access to this environment. I thought about being a young girl and listening to Barbra Streisand's Broadway album from my white dual-deck stereo, imagining Broadway as a magical, glamorous, glistening place where all the women wore hats and stoles and all the men could jump to high heaven and hold a long note.

"Bess, you is my woman now," I'd sung to my reflection. "You is, you is, and I ain't going no where no how, less'n you share the fuuun!"

SPRINGTIME THOUGHTS ON SUMMER

2009-04-07T09:48:00.004-04:00

The possibilities of summer stretch out before you on a beautiful spring day like a dare, like a high bar that maybe you're not quite ready for, maybe you're not the pole vaulter for the job, maybe you'll clock your shoulder or your head against that nasty, mocking bar, maybe you'll free fall down the wrong side, maybe you'll impale yourself on the way down.

Or maybe you'll make it.

Summer is a whore in a doorway. I am beginning to make out her form now. I can just see the tip of her shoe, her profile. She makes promises to me and I am hopeful and expectant and a little afraid.

Look at her beautiful lip, the curl of her eyelash. You can just tell. This bitch knows her way around a lie.

RHAPSODIZING GRAND CENTRAL

2009-04-06T08:33:00.004-04:00

The first time I came to New York I came through Grand Central.

My freshman roommate in college was from a small town in Westchester County called Ardsley. During our first break, a long weekend in October, I went home with her. Most of the trip was spent tooling around her suburb with her friends, in much the same way I spent most of high school, replacing Camel Lights, convenience stores, bong hits and Phish with Newports, Delis, Method Man and blunts. They were serious weed smokers, these kids. Two of the most memorable events that happened during my time in Ardsley involved weed: 1. Went to a movie theater that was basically empty and spent the movie puffing on a joint. 2. Drove to a "comic book store" in the Bronx and bought a garbage bag full of dirt weed. I watched from the car as they casually strolled in, like they were jonesing for the new X-men. Came out with enough pot to sonnambulate Rhode Island.

Once, when my roommate's hometown boyfriend was visiting her at college, he rolled a novelty "I Heart NY" cigar into a blunt. It was the size of a footlong polish sausage. When they were done smoking it, it was difficult to differentiate my roommate from an overstuffed ottoman. But I digress.

My roommate's mother must have felt bad for me. Here I was, less than an hour from the as-yet unseen Manhattan, stuck sucking on 40s in front of a video store. So she bought three tickets to a matinee of Sunset Boulevard, and against my roommate's natural inclination, we headed into the city. The last stop on the train was Grand Central Terminal.

Yesterday I boarded a train at Grand Central and I remembered what it was like the first time I saw it. Cavernous and beautiful and bustling with people. The info desk at the center, so romantic, a perfect place to wait for whatever is coming next. The clock and the stairs and the chapel-like domed ceiling, the green glow of the Pershing Square Cafe shining in from across 42nd Street. My heart leaped the first time I saw it; This is New York, I remembered thinking, like I was Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.

I returned to Grand Central again and again before I moved to the city. One night I came to town with a friend of mine and we had no place to stay, so we checked our stuff at the Grand Central coat check and headed to the village. We landed at Small's, which was, at the time, a famous after-hours BYO jazz bar. We saw a jazz quartet play with a tap dancer as the percussionist, one of the most memorable live music experiences of my life, then went back to Grand Central and slept on the train-themed cafe tables. When I flew to New York, I would take a bus to Grand Central, and carry on my journey from there. More recently, when I was trying to inspire a wayward cousin of mine to dispense with the drama and graduate from high school, I sent her a mobile picture of Grand Central Station. "This is in the city where I live," I wrote. "You could live here too."

Grand Central Station is my Ellis Island.

THE LEECHES OF PARIS

2009-04-02T09:29:00.003-04:00

While reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a book that is told from the perspective of a New Yorker living in Paris, I was struck by this passage:

Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my way into his heart. I had him at such a point that he would come running after me, in the street, to inquire if he could lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me together in order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like a pear that is ripening on the tree.

I have been such a character, not the leech, but the easy mark, the poor sap, a moneyed American in Paris.

When I was not quite twenty-one years old, having taken a semester off of college, I endeavored to explore Europe on my own for four months. I landed in Paris maybe halfway through the trip and I fell in love with it. My descriptions of the city in my journal from this period are littered with adjectives like elegant and graceful and picturesque. And though I spent many idol hours walking and sipping espresso, smoking Galoises and thinking about Degas, my most memorable time was spent at the 3 Ducks Hostel. I have included some pictures below (not mine--god love the internet).

The hostel had a bar. And the bartender was a pint-sized American painter named Jason. And when I read that passage in Tropic of Cancer, I saw myself, francs flapping in my hand, huffing down some charming Parisian Rue. Running towards Jason.

Now I would know better. I would be unmoved by his charming frankness, his tendency, shared by many men of his stature, to live large, to play commander-in-chief of social situations, to host. But not then. Then, young as I was, inexperienced, I was moved by his rough features, by the paint on his pants, his thirst for beer.

He was broke, that was clear. In addition to his post behind the bar at the 3 Ducks, he had worked out a living situation that guaranteed him a little room and a studio in exchange for picking up some kid from school every day and speaking English to him. He took me to his studio. I remember large abstract paintings, I remember yellow. I thought there was emotional content to the work. He assured me that there was not.

After we went to a bar for some beers. Stella Blanc, I remember. He told me about growing up poor in Kansas City, about spending a few days in jail. I paid for the beer, gave him cigarettes. Did I give him money?

He told me, I remember, that I seemed like a Lesbian.

I wrote him a note. I didn't remember writing it, but I made a note of it in my journal, only that I'd written it, nothing to do with its contents. What could it have said, I wonder. "I believe in you"? "Don't ever give up"? It pains me to think of that note now. Were there some francs tucked into the envelope that I left at the bar? I can't remember now. I can only remember the beer, the cigarettes and the roguish smile. The smile of a con man. I remember thinking that he was probably an alcoholic.

I left Paris and returned a few weeks later. "I saw [Jason] yesterday and he was kind of cold to me," I wrote.

That's when I met the buskers. More on that later.

TEARS OF A COMMUTER

2009-03-31T16:03:00.002-04:00

I see grown people crying on the street all the time. Mostly women. Sometimes they are crying into the phone. Sometimes they are just walking down the street, crying.

I want to ask them what is wrong, sometimes. I want to take their pictures.

It has been often noted that in a large city, in a city like New York, you can be in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of Rush Hour, and you can feel like you are all by yourself. You can cry there, in the street, passing stores and restaurants and people in the midst of a day, you can wait for the light and jump out of the path of a careening bike messenger while quietly sobbing, as if you were home with your cat and a pint of ice cream.

I am sure I have cried on the street. I have cried almost everywhere.

I used to cry a lot in my car.

HER HAIR REMINDS ME OF A WARM, SAFE PLACE WHERE AS A CHILD I LAYEEAIED!

2009-01-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

I went to see the Wrestler yesterday. Sad movie. Last night I lay awake in bed, replaying the final scene in my head, accompanied, as it is in the film, to that good old Guns N Roses classic, Sweet Child O Mine.

What kind of dreams does such a soundtrack produce, you may ask?

I don't remember much, except that it involved my boss. And Tobey Maguire. And the parking lot of my high school. What adventures awaited us out in front of HPHS, I couldn't say. But I do remember my dream self thinking: "Wow. This is going to make an awesome blog entry!"

And didn't it?

NO MORE CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

2009-01-21T18:19:00.005-05:00

The introduction to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book, A Coney Island of the Mind, reads like this:

The title of this book...expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them--as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

I went down to Coney today. Because I had to see if the rumors were true. They were:

The Shore Hotel for Lease

More stuff for Lease

The Wonder Wheel with no cars on it

Just some lady walking around in the freezing cold in her pajamas.

Commerce. Greed. Property. Equity. These are not the makings of a circus, not for the soul or the mind or the heart. If there is any kind of festival left on Surf Avenue and 8th Street, it is of the memory.

A man saw me taking pictures. "Getting your last ones in, huh?" he asked me. "It's so sad, ain't it?" He told me he'd been living in the neighborhood for thirty-three years. "It used to make me so happy," he said, "come summertime, when you'd see all the crowds coming off the subway. I came home from work, it was nice to see people have a good time."

People who thought Coney Island was depressing--because of its seediness, the poverty, the projects--they missed it.

And yet gobble up at last
to shrive our circus souls
the also imaginary
wafers of grace

FOR MY SISTER

2009-01-21T10:15:00.002-05:00

Barack is the first president to be a lot of things: black, Hawaii-born, part Kenyan. But there is one other thing that is often overlooked.

We now have sworn in the first White Sox fan in the history of the presidency.

Go Sox!

BARACK'S PREDECESSOR--A DIFFERENT BILL

2009-01-19T09:45:00.004-05:00

The front page of the Sunday Arts section of the New York Times featured this article by Monohla Dargis and A.O. Scott called, "How the Movies Made a President". The writers claim that fifty years of edgy portrayals of black men in the movies have prepared the country for Obama's presidency. The piece is basically fluff; the writers go on to name black male types as they have appeared in film and television, many of whom have nothing at all to do with Barack Obama. The "black provocateur", for example, in the Richard Pryor tradition is really more Jesse Jackson than Barack. "Black Yoda"? Okay, Condi Rice, maybe, Colin Powell. But Yoda is a behind-the-scenes kind of fella, and there is nothing behind-the-scenes about a presidency. It is both oversimplified and overly inclusive to plot the cultural journey that led to Barack Obama's acceptance by the American majority using every single black man we have ever seen on the big screen as stepping stones.

But about halfway through the article, the writers land on something interesting when they get to The Cosby Show.

"The novelty of that series, at once revolutionary and profoundly conservative, lay in its insistence, week after week, that being black was another way of being normal.
The traditional composition of the Huxtable family, with the father as its benevolent, sometimes bumbling head, was part of the series’s strategy of decoupling blackness from social pathology. “The Cosby Show” did not deny the existence of serious problems in black America — not least the problem of absent fathers — but the presence of Cliff Huxtable, in his own home and yours, suggested that the problems were not intractable."

Could Barack Obama have been elected without the Cosby Show? Who knows? I think that Bill Cosby did a lot of work for Obama. We already have a cultural memory of feeling totally comfortable, feeling right at home, in the house of two highly educated, wealthy, successful black adults. Can't you just picture the Obamas in that Brooklyn Heights home we loved so well? Maybe its Christmas Eve, the girls, who are supposed to be asleep, are huddled on that great staircase. Michelle, looking fierce, is "mad" at Barack for sneaking a cigarette (his version of Cliff's weakness, the hoagie), but they're smiling, so in love, he gives her an early Christmas gift, tickets to see Harry Belafonte or an original issue of her favorite Ella Fitzgerald record, she forgives him his weaknesses. Then the doorbell rings, its Bill and Hillary from across the street, coming to bring some side-character Christmas cheer, it's Michelle's mother, who calls the girls down, everyone can see them anyway, and they all gather together on those couches that may as well have been from our own childhoods, we know them so well.

Roll credits.

A CONVERSATION FROM LAST NIGHT

2009-01-18T13:17:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine (a cantorial soloist) argued that really good Jewish music can be as joyful and transcendent as good gospel music. I am currently listening to Aretha Franklin's album, Amazing Grace. Now, nobody loves the hora more than I do. The sweaty-handed, nauseating circle-of-fun, accompanied, as it so often is, by the terrified expressions and white knuckled chair-grips of the uplifted guests of honor, is my favorite part of a Jewish wedding. I have been known to rock out to a good V'shamru or Adon Olam, as well. But as much as I love Barbra and Bette and Benny Goodman and the Gershwins, nothing makes me want to sing Hallelujah! like a large-boned, big-titted black lady. You be the judge.

THINGS TO DO IF YOU WANT TO INDULGE A DEPRESSED MOOD

2008-11-13T14:41:00.003-05:00

Catch up on Perez Hilton posts.
Eat something that tastes bad and is incredibly high in fat/calories.
Check out baby pictures on Facebook of the offspring of people you never really liked.
Google the name of someone you know who is more successful than you.
Apply for a job you really really want.
Consider how you came to possess the job you have.
Look into graduate schools.
Remember how much happier you were when you were thinner.
Listen to Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, Amy Winehouse. Read Wikipedia entries about them. Also about Kurt Cobain and Edie Sedgwick.
Blog

ADDENDUM WRITTEN ON A BUS

2008-11-12T17:50:00.002-05:00

I just wanted to add to my previous post that after encountering the crazy lady in the blue car, we spent the rest of the day referring to her as Girlbeard. It's a lot of fun to say. You should try it. Girlbeard. Ha!

THE SECOND TIME I VOLUNTEERED FOR OBAMA...

2008-11-12T09:20:00.004-05:00

...It was in Scranton, PA. Actually outside of Scranton. In a little suburb called Olyphant. Who knew Scranton had suburbs? (If I sound citified, it's because I am. Picture me and my friend, a beloved homosexual, ambling cheerfully down the pedestrian-free sidewalks of Scranton to the charming coffee shop and roaster [With wifi! And soy milk!], while we waited to be assigned turf. Picture how impressed we are with the selection of goodies and sandwiches and specialty espresso drinks. Be embarrassed on our behalf.)

I dressed badly for the trip, which is disheartening, since I pride myself on putting together outfits appropriate for any given occasion. When we went to the Atlantic Antic, a famous street festival that stretches for miles through downtown Brooklyn, I wore a hooded sweatshirt and my brown trucker hat that has "Dope" spray painted in Wild Style on its face. I wanted to keep it real, you know? But to Lackawanna County (Was I hung over when I dressed? Or still drunk?) I wore a short brown suede skirt with striped knee socks and oversized fake Uggs, a long sleeved shirt, and a brown, down, Elie Tahari vest with a huge dramatic hood. When I got out of the car to ask for directions, my friend who had been driving shook his head at me.

Out on the streets of Olyphant, the mood among we three Brooklynites who had made the trek could not have been more ebullient. The sun was out, the trees boasted their Autumn glory from the peaks of the Poconos that surrounded us, and Obama was kicking major ass in the polls. Most of the people we spoke to were already on our side, we were just reminding them to get out and vote on Tuesday. It was a good day. Then someone waved us down from a once-blue American car. It was a real beater, probably from the 70's when cars came in two sizes: hearse and boat.

She was a big lady, she possessed the kind of pillowy largesse that happens when a person never ever ever moves. She had the chin hair of a young Hasid, and the voice of a shy schoolgirl. But she was unwell. You could see that right away. I thought she was an alcoholic. My friend said schizophrenic.

"Are you with the Republicans or the Democrats?" she asked me. I had an Obama sticker right on my crazy vest which was maybe six inches from her nose, but I answered her anyway.

"Democrats," I said. I suddenly realized that the two boys were no longer beside me. They were across the street. And down the block.

"Oh, yeah? I like that one...oh, what is his name...Obamy?" It wasn't good. Curse those boys for ditching me! "Are you, uh, yous are workin' for that Obamy?" I explained that we were volunteers. She said she wanted to volunteer as well. She asked me where the office was located and I told her. "Oh yeah," she said. "Right by the Medical Center right? You turn right, that Medical Center is just down the road there."

The only thing I had done in Scranton was arrive and buy lunch.

"I'm not sure..." I managed.

"Oh, gosh, it's right there, isn't it? You from here?"

"No."

"It's right there next to the Medical Center!" I remembered that it was near the Curry Donuts. I told her as much.

"I spent all day cleaning out my attic," she moaned. "I don't know what I'm gonna do about the basement." I nodded with understanding. "What's your name?" she asked me. "Maria? Or Debra?"

"Sure," I said. "Debra. Why not?"

"I want to call you Debra," she said.

"Okay, yeah," I said. "You can call me Debra."

She looked at me for a second.

"What's with those crazy boots, Debra?" she asked me.

She drove away pretty soon after that.

Obama won Lackawanna County. FYI.

HONEY, WILL YOU TAKE OUT THE POLITICAL UNREST?

2008-11-10T10:47:00.004-05:00

Last night, as I was walking home, I found this sign tossed in the garbage:

It was quite heartwarming, I must say, to see someone toss out their hard-earned fury with the trash. Indicators that we are at the end of a dark era abound, and for someone like me, who is having a lot of difficulty absorbing the magnitude of our accomplishment, gestures like the one made by my relieved lefty neighbor can be very helpful.

I say our accomplishment for two reasons. The first, and most poetic, is for the reemergence of the American Collective as a coalition of reasonable individuals. Ours is a country founded on angry action in the face of inept or immoral governance, and the size of our most recent refusal to fall prey to more inadequate leadership is inspiring.

The second reason why I take some ownership of the success of Obama's campaign is because I volunteered. Twice. The first, and undoubtedly more effectual of my volunteerships happened in Philly during the primary. I was in North Philly, an African American inner-city community, where I had a lot of interesting conversations. Here is the summary of my experience that I wrote in an email at the time:

One woman said to me, "I don't like that Hillary, she cries too much. She's always singing the blues." (I sort of loved the image of HRC leaning into the mic at a debate and busting out "My Man's Gone Now"). A lot of people were concerned for Obama's health, convinced he would be assassinated. I also talked to a lot of folks who had given up hope for their place in civic life. "We're lost up here," said a man I met in a laundromat while he sat on a table, sipping a beer. "Nobody even knows we're here." One guy I met in front of a church kept turning around to look at me as he was walking away. "You shouldn't get so worked up," he said, "You're only going to get disappointed." "Better to be disappointed and know you tried," I called back. He smiled wide at me, shook his head. "That was a low blow," he said. "I wasn't expecting you to say that!" I saw something in the smile...hope? It seemed like hope.
It was really wonderful to talk to people who had not decided, or hadn't given the primary too much thought. It was very empowering to be armed with such a positive message, to have such confidence in my candidate. There were plenty of people who paid a little attention and plenty of others who had latched onto only snippets of information garnered from who knows where. One crazed Hillary supporter in the laundromat screamed out, "He is in with Bush! Obama is in with Bush!" When I asked her where she learned that she just rolled her eyes and said, "TV." She didn't let her guard down very far, but I could detect a little shock in her eyes when I told her that Clinton had voted in support of the war in Iraq. And you should have heard the other folks in the place when I mentioned the war. "What are we doing over there?" the guy with the beer asked. "It's not our war!"

I also volunteered in Scranton before the general election. More on that to come...

I KNOW NORMAN MAILER WAS KIND OF A DICK...

2008-10-27T22:26:00.001-04:00

But I just love this letter.

To William F. Buckley, Jr.

January, 1966

Dear Bill,

I send you the enclosed not because I love National Review so much, for I don’t—it’s not so good as it ought to be, and often it’s tiresome, especially when one knows in advance what your trusted old line contributors are going to say—but as a personal mark of respect to you. Your letter was the best letter I ever read by an editor asking for funds. . . .

One request. Please keep my contribution in the secret crypts. It is not that I fear public opinion so much as ceaseless repetition. Repetition kills the soul and I would not wish to spend one hundred evenings in succession explaining to various outraged and somewhat stupid people in calm clear fashion my complex motives for giving a gift to a magazine for which I feel no affection and to an editor with whom on ninety of a hundred points I must rush to disagree. They would not understand that good writing is good writing, and occasionally carries the day.

Yours,

Norman

QUICKIE

2008-10-15T13:21:00.002-04:00

A Virginia McCain hack on MSNBC just pronounce lambasted as Lamb Basted. As in,

"If you squeeze some of the cooking juices over the lamb, I'm sure you will be happy with the resulting deliciousness. Everyone loves their lamb basted!"

TOURIST

2008-10-15T11:57:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I had a meeting in an office.

I've worked in offices. I had a friend in high school whose parents ran a tiny hot dog company out of Deerfield, IL. I worked there for awhile. There were five full-time employess:

M: My friend's Dad. He started the company after his family's kosher sausage company got bought by Sara Lee. Passionate about hot dogs.

B: My friend's Mom. Sweet-tempered, supportive, office manager and cheerleader.

R: Saleswoman. Her brother is a famous TV and movie producer. I remember her telling me a story about how she met Meg Ryan and she is so much prettier in person. I have since met the woman, and I can't say I agree. It seems like she showed her plastic surgeon a picture of Mr. Potato Head:

T: He was one of those Asperger's guys that, according to workplace comedies, seem to be a common feature of office culture. I'm glad he was there because now I can watch portrayals of his type and laugh knowingly. ("Spot On!" I can shout, while wiping my eyelids of their mirthful moisture.)

B: Receptionist of sorts. She was forever ordering office supplies. She was also single and a cancer survivor. I know this because the first time I met her she said, "Hi. I'm B. I'm single and a cancer survivor."

I was sort of a shipping clerk. Mostly I would stand in the back, taping labels to vacuum sealed frozen hot dogs. Freezer tape, if you don't know, smells uncannily of girl parts.

Point is, I've worked in an office. But the meeting I had yesterday was in a serious office. A corporate culture kind of office. The kind where a receptionist sits at a desk by the elevators and says things into a phone like, "Mr. So-and-So, Ilana is here to see you now." I was there for a Brainstorming session. A group of us sat in a corner on bouncy, kindergarten-colored furniture, the kind of furniture that was undoubtedly designed after a brainstorming meeting on "creativity maximization" . As we talked, someone wrote on an oversized Post-it Pad, periodically ripping off pages and hanging them on the wall.

It's not that I'm rock and roll. I'm really not. I live in South Brooklyn, after all. Brownstone and baby Brooklyn. The Brooklyn for corporate types who like trees. But something about being in that environment, on that furniture...it made me feel like this:

THE END OF SOME ERAS

2008-09-08T16:21:00.005-04:00

Astroland, an amusement park next to the boardwalk in Coney Island, closed for good yesterday. My friend Vicki and I went down to Coney Island to give it a last look. It was sad. Look at how fun it was:

In other fin de siecle news, the musical Rent had it's last curtain call on Broadway last night. The original cast joined the final cast for a last rendition of Seasons of Love:

I guess it's time for some new eras. Any ideas?

JOYFUL NOISE

2008-08-29T21:10:00.003-04:00

It's amazing how quiet real quiet sounds to ears trained on noise.

I am way out on Long Island. My non-celebrity boss lent me his house in the Hamptons while he hangs in Greece for three weeks. I am holing up here by myself for a few days to get some serious work done on the very many projects that I have lately been neglecting. They could use some attention, poor things. My projects are like the children of a drunk, absent Mom. "I promise I'll be better," I tell them. And they nod, listen. They want to believe.

Anyway, I arrived at the house at 6:45 or so and almost immediately hopped on my bike to make the twenty-minute ride to the grocery store. Why the urgency?

I hosted a really fun party last night, and I can't seem to bounce back from fun as quickly as I once could. I was in dire need of a cup of coffee and there is no coffee maker at the house. (Sad, right?)
I needed to buy some food for fridge. There is nowhere to eat in the Hamptons. Last week when I was here I wandered around the very swanky village of East Hampton looking for dinner. The place was brimming with upscale boutiques and completely bereft of eating establishments. The one restaurant I found had a $23 salad. I ended up seeing a movie and eating popcorn for dinner.
I missed my bike and wanted to ride it.

By the time I left the store it was dark. I have a bike light now, thankfully. That's a mistake you only make once! (Because my mother reads the blog I will not subject her to the scary image of me riding up a completely unlit country road with my cell phone on my handle bars to light the road ahead of me. Oh! I blew it! Sorry Mom! Um, if it's any comfort, I was wearing a helmet!)

I like to sing when I'm riding my bike through the city. A lot of people do. If you live in a big city and start listening for it, you'll hear a chorus of cyclists singing full voice as they ride. I don't know why I do it. There's an aspect of joyful outburst to it; there's also a desire to make myself louder and bigger due to my vulnerability among the noisy, burly cars.

Here in the country--and it really is the country--on the way back from the grocery store, I found myself once again bursting into song while steering Alberta (my bike). But the source of my need to sing was different than it is in town. It wasn't noise or brawn, but quiet that got me nervous. The quiet was everywhere, stubbornly pungent like tear gas, like the smell of garlic on hands.

I sang the whole way home. Showtunes, specifically:

Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect I'm afraid

Darkness and loneliness and silence everywhere. The house was no better than the road had been. Immediately after closing the front door behind me, I ran around turning on lights, music, calling Gregory.

My apartment in Brooklyn is right on a highway. When we first saw the place we weren't sure we could handle the noise.

Maybe the need for noise is what separates townspeople from country folk.

I AM REALLY EXCITED FOR THIS MOVIE!!!

2008-08-05T12:42:00.000-04:00

The Price of Success from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.

I WAS SO MUCH OLDER THEN, I'M YOUNGER THAN THAT NOW

2008-07-23T11:21:00.005-04:00

I recently reconnected with a camp counselor on Facebook. He asked me how I was, and I wrote him a very long, emotional letter about how much he meant to me. Money quote:

I didn't know who I was when I met you, Marcus, I just knew that I wanted to be like you.

and:

When you imagine the motley crowd of misfits that are better off for having known you, please picture me among them.

His response? A sweet and casual thanks for saying that and glad I could help and seems like you're doing well which is good because I always liked you. Lovely, really, and perfectly appropriate. Far more appropriate than my epic diatribe about the past and youth and wisdom.

I don't know what I expected, something more melancholy, maybe, a kind of meditation on the magical time we shared. But this particular person has helped and inspired many many people in the course of his life, he probably gets letters like this all the time. He was undoubtedly more important to me than I was to him, which is the exact nature of the teacher-student (master-apprentice, counselor-camper, shrink-patient) relationship.

I have had a number of relationships with younger people, as a counselor or teacher, and more informally, as someone a bit older who has experienced things. A young comic comes to mind, my friend's aspiring filmmaker little brother as well. And I've listened to them, shared my experiences, hoped to be some sort of guide or resource. Thinking of these relationships now it seems that the joke is on them because, what the hell do I know about anything? I feel that I know less and less and less.

I asked Marcus about this in my letter, since I realized he was only 23 when I knew him, only seven years my senior, and he seemed to me like he knew everything. His response:

I was learning how to be grown up too and shared that to the best of my ability.

Teachers always say they learn as much from their students as they teach them, but maybe this means something different from what I thought it did. Maybe, in teaching, we make ourselves aware of what we know and what we have still to learn.

VEGAN LUNCH CHALLENGE

2008-07-22T08:40:00.005-04:00

I recently had a conversation with a radical friend of mine. He's the type of guy who says things like, "It isn't a question of if we run out of water, Ilana, but when we run out of it." He took issue with the Green Movement, specifically with what he saw as a merger of environmentalism and consumerism, Green Chic. I argued that whatever someone's motivations for driving a Prius or using recycled paper products, it decreases our national footprint, a good thing for everyone. A government, civil or social, cannot hope to control the souls of its constituents. The best it can do is attempt to guide their actions, by doling out praise for those actions that are deemed good for society, (You have solar panels on your roof? Hoorah for you!) or punishment for those that are deemed bad (Litterer? Off with your head!).

My friend's argument was that there is a kind of back-patting that accompanies some of this visible environmental friendliness that does not translate to any actual net gain for the earth. Powering your home with wind power, for example, means little if you are jetting off to the Bahamas or to Europe or to Bora Bora four times a year. Still, I argued, better than nothing. Baby steps, said I.

Then I saw this little fact from the PBJ campaign:

Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you'll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

Now, I don't drive a Prius, I drive a bike, so I could easily be self-righteous about carbon emissions. But I can do more than my part, can't I? In fact, we will all have to do more than our share of habit shifting if we have any hope of effecting any actual change. We can't afford to rest on our meager laurels.

So I am pledging, here and now, to have a vegan lunch every weekday. I will do my very best to avoid all animal products, and in so doing, I hope to reduce my carbon footprint by 12.5 pounds a week. Wow. I will feel so good about myself after a few weeks, I might feel compelled to reward myself with a tropical vacation!

Just kidding.

Anyone else up for this challenge?

CLASS NOTES

2008-07-13T01:25:00.007-04:00

I sent an update to the Class Notes section of my alumni newsletter, and they wouldn't publish it! This is an outrage! Especially considering the stuff they do publish. Like this little golden nugget (I have gone to the trouble of boldfacing the especially annoying bits):

"In Jan '07 I moved to Tel Aviv with the hopes of making new friends and establishing a new life for myself. Besides missing my family and friends in the US, my biggest fear was finding a job that would be even half as interesting and well paid as the one I had in Boston. To my surprise, within my 1st 2 weeks living in Israel I got a job offer that was not only as interesting but well paid. It's now been about 2.5 years that I've been with Sparta Systems as a sr acct exec to the European market as well as a regional sales mgr, managing a team of 5. At the same time, I'm finishing up my 1st year in an exec MBA prog part of Kellogg (NW) and Tel Aviv U. I have met amazing people here and have built a very strong network. I live a 10-minute walk from the beach (Mediterranean Sea) and am truly enjoying my life. In Aug, I'll be coming back to the US and will spend 2 weeks in Chicago (taking classes on campus in Kellogg). In addition to classes, Jim Smith MEd '01 will be flying in from Portland, OR, and we'll be going to a Cubs game with some of my classmates. After the 2 weeks, I'll head to Boston for a few days to see my family and friends before heading back to Tel Aviv. All in all, besides a bit of stress due to work and school and lots of business travel to Europe, I can't complain. Life is good."

Life may be good, anonymous classmate of mine, but it is also short. If you told me this story in person, I would nod, smile, and pass the time counting your blinks. Incidentally, did we know each other? I don't remember anyone from college.

Rather than cry myself to sleep (I'm doing that anyway, by the way, because it's hotter than stew in here), I thought...why wait to be published when you can publish yourself? (sad) So here's the update I sent my alumni newsletter. Enjoy!

I'm doing so awesome, it's pretty unbelievable. Career? Out of this world. Babies? I have six or seven babies and more husbands than I can even count. Seriously, it's killer being me. I live in Brooklyn, where I totally rock.

I just thought people should know what I've been up to.

NOT BAD

2008-07-11T14:03:00.003-04:00

This is the view from the killer terrace that belongs to one of my clients who is never in town:

This is me reclining on one of the chaise lounges of said killer terrace while waiting for some guys to finish re-installing a bronze mirror:

I really should stop complaining about work.

MAKE ME A MATCH, FIND ME A FIND, CATCH ME A CATCH

2008-07-08T10:17:00.005-04:00

In addition to my own celebrity, I work for an interior designer. A few weeks ago, he told me about a new client--single, straight, Harvard grad with an immaculate brownstone in the West Village. My response?

"Single you say? Brownstone? Do you think I could set him up with a friend of mine?"

I have always been a bit of a yenta (matchmaker, for those of you who are neither Jewish nor musical theater-educated). I love the idea of bringing people together, whether it is two people I love, two people I know, or a person I love with a person I have never met but who went to Harvard and is single and anyway what the hell else do you want? I can't seem to stop my match-mindedness, despite the fact that it has gotten me in trouble FOR YEARS. Because, let's be honest, most relationships fail. And if they fail and someone gets hurt, they blame not the tall, handsome, brownstone-owning former Lacrosse player, but the tall, dark, mettling Jewish girl shrugging sheepishly in the corner. In other words, me.

But I was in Chicago this weekend, playing poker with a bunch of my old camp friends. All of them are boys, many of them are single, and I just couldn't help my yenta wheels from churning. "Come to New York," I kept saying. "I have the perfect girl for you." Because the single women to single men ratio in NYC is totally off-kilter. My wonderful, single girlfriends are suffering a huge disadvantage here. Check out this map:
Chicago, as you can see, also has more single women to men. As my Chi-town girls know all too well.

So, what's a girl to do? Move to Los Angeles or Dallas or Denver? Just to find a single dude? Or suffer through the humiliation of an over-enthusiastic, old world-minded 30 year old jewess?

Up to you, girls.

AN OFFER THEY CAN REFUSE

2008-06-30T09:41:00.007-04:00

I never thought I would be in a position to understand, first hand, the plight of Kay Corleone. You remember her from the Godfather, right? Diane Keaton. Outsider. Whose needs and desires are determined by this sinister collection of men. They loom. They whisper. They make plans.

I never suspected that I could identify personally with Kay, but that was before I came in contact with: THE CONDO BOARD.

I don't have a condo. I have a small rent stabilized one-bedroom in Brooklyn. When we asked the super, Carlos, about going on the roof, he shrugged. "Officially, you're not supposed to go up there. I tell people, just don't jump off!" Then he cracked up. This is the kind of management attitude I look for in a building.

My boss has a condo. Nothing can be done to the apartment--we couldn't put in a new bathroom, build a wall, nothing--without the board's approval. And for the last three months the Board has been holding my air conditioning proposal hostage.

"Looks good," the building manager said in March. "We just have to pass it to the architect and then the board will approve it."

That was the last I heard about it.

I call. "Oh hey, Ilana," she says. "No, I haven't heard anything." I picture a fat man with a wet cigar standing behind her, holding his fist and shaking his head. Beads of sweat form on her forehead.

Soon, she starts screening my calls. I have to call from other phones. I email in desperation. I consider CCing my boss. Because the AC is busted in the master bedroom and it's getting hotter and even though he's in LA he could descend at any time and oh! the humiliation! if he came to New York to find his bedroom hotter than Wisconsin in August, what kind of celebrity personal assistant would I be then? And what kind of wrath would I have to endure? No! I won't have it! I will yell! I will carry on! I mean, do you have to be a made guy to get anything done around here?

The building manager finally called me back last week. "Well the board met last night (Where? The Bada Bing? The pork store?) and they decided that your boss's Air Conditioner is not a priority."

Sigh.

THE TEARS THAT I CRIED FOR THAT WOMAN, THEY'RE GONNA FLOOD YOU BIG RIVER

2008-06-28T09:18:00.007-04:00

In 2006 Greg and I took a road trip on two lane highways along the Mississippi. It was one of the most amazing trips I have ever taken in my life. We started in Davenport, IA, saw the green green earth of Iowa and Illinois ("It just seems like you could grow anything here!" said Greg). We got pulled over by a cop in Nauvoo, Illinois who undoubtedly took us for one of the millions of Mormon families that make pilgrimage to the tiny town, clogging the streets and cleaning out its candy supply. We went to Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the whole town a kind of theme park dedicated to its famous literary son. We passed St. Louis, stayed in Cape Girardeau, MO where we were shocked to wake up in the Rush Limbaugh's hometown to discover a place that sold delicious multigrain muffins.

Now much of these river towns are underwater. They're a resilient bunch, though, the people who camp on the banks of that river. Are they like abused spouses? Sharing a house with a loving, committed partner with periodic outbursts of violent rage? Are we Americans who live near oceans or lakes or desert or mountains, are we the friend who, one day, over coffee, after yet another excuse (I fell down the stairs, the levees weren't tall enough, etc.), do we suddenly grab the wrist of our abused friend, do we look her deep in the eyes and say: "It doesn't have to be like this! You gotta get out of there! I will help you..." Does she free her wrist from our grasp, pat us on the shoulder and say, "But I love him. He's so wonderful so much of the time. You don't understand..."

HANGOVER EXCERCISE

2008-06-26T09:39:00.005-04:00

Ever work out after a night of heavy drinking and find that the smell coming off you allows you to reconstruct moments of the previous evening that you may have forgotten? (Oh! Sniff Sniff Sweat-- I forgot about that chicken calzone!)

One time my boyfriend drank too much and threw up on a homeless person. The homeless person was totally disgusted. That's right. My boyfriend grossed out a homeless guy. It's one of the many of my partner's skills that I wasn't aware of during our early courtship. Also, he's stupidly good at the card game Spite and Malice. It's annoying.

THE PROBLEM OF OBSERVATION

2008-06-20T10:51:00.009-04:00

I am, or have been, a dialogue writer. Plays, screenplays, teleplays, even standup comedy is dialogue, and is, as such, a first person enterprise. There is no floating observer, casually coming to conclusions about the characters. In a play the audience is the third person.

But now I am writing prose, and I am plagued by the question of intimacy in observation. Most of my favorite books are in 1st: Lolita (is there a more interesting troubled narrator than Humbert Humbert?) Invisible Man, Jonathan Lethe m writes almost entirely in first person, Augie March, Roth's Zuckerman books. But there are beautiful third person books, too numerous to list, Cunningham comes to mind, and Moody, and of course, all the Russians and the French. Intimate tragic books that are filled with she and he rather than I: Of Human Bondage, Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter. First person seems funnier, more acerbic, more modern. More American. More ironic. Less beautiful. Dirtier.

But at what cost? To follow one character and neglect all others, it seems unfair!

It is not a negligible decision. It is the decision that defines an entire book.

Sigh. I fear the problem is that I am too in love with the little literary darlings I've created, that I want to have everything--first person voice, multiple character perspectives. Then I read this little passage in a book called Writings by Agnes Martin--an artist. (The set of four lithographs to the left are hers--Untitled 1998.)

Humility, the beautiful daughter
She cannot do either right or wrong
She does not do anything
All of her ways are empty
Infinitely light and delicate
She treads an even path
Sweet, smiling, uninterrupted, free

Sounds good doesn't it? Let the work, and not my ego make decisions for me.

In other news a friend of mine sent me this picture. Subject: Irony
Ilana's beloved replied, "They just take you out back to the range, and have you stand in a bucket?"

There. That was third person. What did you think?

BEEN WRITING

2008-06-17T12:21:00.008-04:00

So I haven't been blogging much. But I'm getting complaints, which is nice. Since last I updated I have:

Cleaned up excrement that belonged to a celebrity other than my boss.
Traveled for ten days in the Basque Country with my Dad, sister and boyfriend without breaking up or becoming estranged from anyone.
Spent a lot of time in Coney Island.

I am writing a novel (I know, right? Who the hell do I think I am?) that takes place partially in Coney Island. I was there when it was closed and took some cool pictures. Want to see? Thought you might:

Saddest place in the world, right?

I could start publishing excerpts of the novel...is that something you guys would be interested in? Post a comment and let me know.

I'M SORT OF UNCOMFORTABLE TALKING ABOUT THIS, BUT I NONETHELESS CANNOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT

2008-03-20T11:12:00.004-04:00

For awhile I was writing about pregnancy. I wrote a couple stories, the play I am writing now has a pregnant person. Here's an excerpt from a play I wrote last year that I abandoned:

LIZZY
This is reality, mother! I am pregnant. With child. Knocked up. Corked. Embarazada.
JOAN
I don’t see why you insist on doing this to me. You have always had it in for me. Ever since you were a little girl.
HAROLD
(Incredulously)
Pregnant. Huh.
LIZZY
This has nothing to do with you. This is about me and what I want.
HAROLD
(HAROLD chuckles)
Well, Joannie? She’s certainly not a lesbian.
JOAN
Lesbians can have children Harold.
LIZZY
I am not a lesbian!
JOAN
It happens all the time.
HAROLD
Why do you know so much about lesbians?
JOAN
I don’t know so much. I know something, that’s all. About an alternative culture that I was perfectly ready to accept in my own daughter...
LIZZY
I am not a fucking lesbian!
JOAN
But now-- well, this is much worse than being gay. Did you hear me, Elizabeth? Much worse.
LIZZY
What about cancer? Would you have preferred that too?
HAROLD
I don’t know. I mean, not that I think being a lesbian is bad or anything...
LIZZY
Oh Jesus Christ.
HAROLD
But, I’m glad you like boys, Lizzy. I must say. That was a bit of a relief.
JOAN
Of course. Relief. I think that is the perfect word to describe the way that I am feeling right now. Relieved and relaxed.
LIZZY
Mom, calm down.
JOAN
Calm and serene and relieved. Right Harold? May I have a drink before I faint?

I seem to have gotten it out of my system, though. No one has been pregnant for awhile. Now I keep writing about race and racial tensions. One piece after another about it. I don't even realize I'm doing it until it's done. And the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

Apparently, I'm not the only one.

AH, LOVE.

2008-03-07T09:29:00.005-05:00

A quote from my boyfriend:

Don't give me the ass face just before I leave for work!

We're going to DC today. I need a break from the primary. One might think, "You're going to our nation's capital to escape the presidential nomination?" To which I would respond, "I never said I was very smart."

The last time I was in DC was in 8th grade. I remember that Josh Mintzer and I fought non-stop, until Josh got moved to another bus. I was good with the comebacks then. It was a defense mechanism I had to develop to counteract my underdeveloped fashion sense. If you go to school in nothing but a sweatshirt and a pair of red and white striped tights, you learn to hurl whatever tools you can get a hold of at the nasty hyenas that will undoubtedly greet you in homeroom.

I also remember that our tour guide in DC walked around with an open umbrella to make herself conspicuous, and got bleary eyed when describing the zoo's difficulties in getting the pandas to procreate. Apparently mama panda kept rolling over and squashing her babies in her sleep. This story was undoubtedly told to us to elicit our pathos, but we were thirteen. We thought it was hilarious. I remember the tour guide gesturing wildly about the tragedy, while I sat there on the bus with my friends, staring at the seat back in front of me, tears rolling down my cheeks, desperately suppressing the guffaw that was screaming from my belly, clamoring for release.

Anyway, we're going to see every museum. To walk hand in hand on the mall. It should be fun. I am sure I will have plenty to share when I get back, so stay tuned...

THIS IS ALL I CAN SAY TODAY. MY HEART IS DARK.

2008-03-05T16:23:00.000-05:00

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

¡VIVA!

2008-02-28T11:32:00.001-05:00

I loved this...keep an eye out for the lady in the laundromat towards the end of the video. It's a nice touch.

BAD CITIZEN

2008-02-27T10:17:00.001-05:00

By Gregory Stuart Edwards

I tend to vote. I pretty much obey the law. I have thus far refrained from open insurrection against the government. Contrary to the fancies of a particularly obstinate IRS agent a couple of years back, I have always paid my taxes. And I was born in Iowa. So maybe I’m not a Great American, but I like to think I’m a Decent Enough American.

By and by, the State of New York determined to test this premise. A little more than a month ago, I received in the mail a pink perforated summons to report for jury duty at the Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn. My friends reacted with great sympathy; I got a lot of “man, that sucks” and “lemme tell you how to get out of it.” But I, awash in civic virtue, and convinced of my essential decency, never once did entertain the preparation of a series of excuses and/or prejudices which would disqualify me from service. This was my duty as an American, dammit; I was no dodger.

I can recall a moment way back in 1991, when the country was busy cheering on Iraq War Part I, and there was some widespread consideration given to the prospect of reinstating the Draft. The subject somehow came up in my high school French class, and I remember my teacher suggesting that, should the Draft come back, John — the only other male in the class — would readily head to battle, whereas I would most likely flee to Canada. I took great offense to this notion — despite its implication that I was smart and John was a meat-head. Go to War? Of course I would go to war! I was a 17 year-old male, flush with testosterone, and my universe divided neatly into three distinct categories: boring stuff, stuff that gave me an erection, and stuff I wanted to blow up. Going to war promised to remove me from the first and provide me a great deal of the third, with the prospect of a great deal of the second upon my triumphant return from battle.

Seventeen years on, my carnal and destructive appetites have become a bit more manageable; however, I have discovered in adulthood an entirely new desire: the desire to Judge. With my many years of experience as a human being, I was anxious to display my abundant wisdom in rendering the most impartial and well-reasoned of verdicts. Not only was I not going to try to get out of jury duty, I told people, I was smugly certain that I was going to get picked to serve on a trial.

I will now tell you the Great Untold Secret of the American Judicial System: no sane person — NO ONE — actually wants to sit on a jury. In fact, were I asked to define the term “jury,” I would say, “a collection of citizens held against their will, and forced to arbitrate the problems of complete strangers.” This is not, however, to suggest that other individuals summoned to serve will expend the same amount of effort to get themselves disqualified. Some people receive full salary for time spent in the courthouse; others genuinely hate their jobs. And then there’s me: someone who both enjoys how he ordinarily spends his days, and receives no money whatever for time missed from work, yet for reasons of vanity concludes that he must serve.

In brief, my jury selection went like this: I showed up in court at 8:30am last Tuesday, sat in the Central Jury Room until noon, then got called in as part of a group of about 20 to a cramped “empaneling room.” Three lawyers had us fill out questionnaires, then we broke for lunch. When we returned, the attorneys questioned us all in turn as to our impartiality. The more savvy and ballsy of us either (a) said straight away that they could not be impartial, (b) claimed to have specific knowledge of the details of the case, or (b) pretended to not speak English. All strategies seemed equally effective. Two and a half hours of questions later, simply by dint of having not tried to get myself off the jury, I was sworn in as Juror #3. I was sent home, and told that the trial would start the next day.

The trial did not start the next day. Neither did it start Thursday. Nor Friday. We selected jurors were, however, required to report each day, and sit around doing nothing. Our group gradually gravitated to the so-called “lounge” area, so as to avoid the hoi polloi in the Central Jury Room. And the griping began. Griper-in-chief was a fifty-something woman who was the only person in our group to have served on a trial before, so she knew that we were in for a bunch of bullshit. Periodically, she would bring our group complaints (e.g., “we’ve just been sitting here for days; no one has told us anything; we’re all very angry”) to the Empaneling Clerk, who would laugh in her face, and say that we were basically screwed: We were on a trial involving the City of New York, and the City liked to drag these cases out.

On one of these occasions, the Clerk let loose something else. The Griper was explaining again why it was impossible for her to be on this trial (something to do with her vacation days), and he replied, “Look, the only person who can get you off this trial now is the judge, and he’s probably not going to do it for that reason.”

Ah-ha… So, it was still technically possible to get off this case. You just needed to convince the judge. I went home that evening and googled information about serving on a jury. One page that came up explained that a juror can ask the bailiff to present the judge with a written note, requesting an audience. But what would the note say? Obviously, a mere explanation that jury duty was bad for me wasn’t enough. I would need to explain why me being on the jury was bad for the case: I would need to declare in open court that I could not be impartial, that I was not even a Half-Decent American.

But was this actually true? I reasoned thusly: As a freelancer, being on this case meant both lost wages, and potential endangerment of future earnings. Given that this was a civil case, with a plaintiff seeking financial compensation, my determination of a reward would be influenced by the fact that it would have come at my own expense, so to speak. I don’t know and will never know if this would have been true; I do know that I had started using the name of the plaintiff as a curse word.

Monday morning, my jury was finally moved upstairs to our official trial jury waiting room. I had come in with a printed letter to the judge, which I gave to the Court Officer. About 15 minutes later, he brought me in alone to the courtroom.

I walked in through the jury door, and nervously stood in the box. I know there were a number of other people in the room, though my vision seemed to tunnel in on itself. The lawyers were there, the court reporter was there, there was a woman seated in the spectator’s gallery. The plaintiff and defendants may well have been there, too. I don’t know; I was having trouble just focusing on the judge.

He was a sixty-ish Jewish man with thick glasses and a serious Brooklyn accent.

“Why didn’t you state your problems earlier?” he asked.

“Because I was just answering the questions the lawyers asked. I wasn’t trying to get out of it.”

“But if you had said something earlier, we could have gotten another juror.”

“I know, your honor. I’m sorry. I’ve never been on a jury before, and I thought it was my duty. But in the last week, I’ve lost two jobs because I’ve been unavailable.”

This went on for a few minutes, just so he could be sure I knew just how much of an ass he thought I was. Then, the questions turned to the other jurors. Did they know I was trying to get off the jury? I said I suspected they did. Had I discussed the note with any of them? I said I had not. The judge was obviously concerned that there would be a bum-rush of jurors with notes all trying to get off the case. He winced and shook his head at me, then told me it would be taken care of… and not to talk to any of the other jurors about this. I would corrupt them. I was a Rotten American.

I returned to the jury waiting room. The other jurors asked how it went. I shrugged my shoulders. Ten minutes later, we were all called into court, and told that the trial wouldn’t actually start until Monday. I felt better about my note.

Within another 15 minutes, I had received my discharge, and skipped down the courthouse steps. I felt deliciously free — reminiscent of how I felt upon my high-school graduation. I had weaseled my way out of my civic duty after all, and it felt great.

Vive le Canada!

BABY LOVE

2008-02-26T09:32:00.006-05:00

I know, I know. But I've been ill, seriously. And I'm still waiting for that guest blog, Gregory.

Tuesday night some friends of mine had a baby. I went to see them the next day...the hospital is a block away from my house and I was home anyway, making pork tenderloin with tomatillo sauce. How much do I love matinee day? Boss is onstage, I am...left alone.

So, I walk into the hospital room. I am the first to visit--it's Wednesday, after all, people work--and there they are: the happy couple and their new baby. They started telling me the story about the water breaking, rushing to the hospital, the triage nurse getting a handful of amniotic fluid. There were med students, intense pain, tearing and vomiting--the works. Thirteen hours later, there is little Isaac.

I looked at my friends. They looked happy, sure, cuddling in with their new little ankle biter. But mostly they looked absolutely spent. My reaction, far from the expected, "Oh! I can't wait to have one of my own!" was rather more, "Jesus Christ, what an ordeal!" It really did seem very unpleasant.

We'll see how I feel when the kid starts talking.

THE PRODIGAL PRODIGY

2008-02-17T11:23:00.004-05:00

From a NY Times review of the Julian Schnabel retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987:

These works suggest that Mr. Schnabel's primary gift may be very different from what it has been generally thought to be.

Schnabel made a ton of dough in the 80's during that Mary Boone era, the artist as rock star era, when Jean Michel Basquiat was in a Blondie video, when people wore Vivien Westwood and piled into bathroom stalls two and three at a time in places like Max's Kansas City and the Tunnel and Mr. Chow, to hoover cocaine and comment on each other's fabulousness.

At least, that's how I imagine the era from pictures and movies and books like "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney. I wasn't there. In 1987, when Schnabel was already established enough to have a retrospective at the Whitney, I was nine. I was busy deflecting mockery for my backwards shorts (I always had trouble with shorts) and sneaking around the neighborhood with homemade maps pretending to be teen detective Encylclopedia Brown.

But back to Schnabel. The thing about Julian Schnabel is that his rise was the most meteoric, his paintings the most expensive. He didn't have the dignity that comes with early death (Basquiat, overdose, Keith Haring, AIDS), so there he was, rich as a sultan, as his famously broken crockery-enhanced paintings mocked from the walls of upper east side townhouses, huge and dark and, if I may be so bold, ugly. He compared himself to Picasso, he walked around in pajamas. Maybe it all came too easily for him, or maybe there was a kind of buyer's remorse. It's like digging up an old Cabbage Patch doll and thinking, "My mother waited in line, all that time, for this?" In any case, the critics turned against him. Schadenfreude ruled. People wanted to see this cocky artist, this rock star; they wanted to see him disappear.

And for awhile, he did. And then he started making movies.

Last night I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie about a glamorous man at the height of his career, who suffers a massive stroke that leaves him unable move or communicate except through the movement of one working, blinking eye.

A movie about one blinking eye, and I was completely transfixed. The visual quality of the film, a kind of love poem to the power of imagination and memory, spoke to me and my own experience, despite its apparent departure from the experience of this poor blinking frenchman.

Glamour struck down, reborn as something more human, more sublime. There is an understanding that comes with failure.

HILLARY AND FEMINISM

2008-02-14T11:01:00.005-05:00

Could it be that we are beyond feminism? Beyond racism? Could we have reached the moment when a person is to be judged based on his/her suitability rather than by gender or race? It seems to me that Obama believes we have, and Clinton (or Rodham Clinton, as it were) believes we have not.

Yesterday a friend said to me, "But blacks could vote before women could vote." The more I consider this argument, the stranger I think it is. This same friend argued that it was because of her being a woman that she was forced to vote in favor of invading Iraq. I have been a woman my whole life, and of the difficulties I have faced as a result of that fact, I have never counted the opportunity to make sound moral decisions among them. Whether or not I took advantage of those opportunities was a question of my relationship with my own self, and not with the world, whatever its bias.

Some have argued that Hillary's feminism is blown by her attachment to "her husband's flapping coattails", and although I believe it is a valid argument, (We are all very familiar the ex-president's embarassingly paltry respect for women), my issue is with the hearts and minds of we voters who consider ourselves to be progressive. We have a responsibility to take our collective civil rights movement to the next level, by voting based on who we believe to be the best candidate, and by no other considerations of a person's race or gender. African Americans, women, Mexicans, Chinese, what have you, all deserve that kind of consideration.

I promise to let go of these politics...seriously. Stay tuned for a guest blog from one Gregory Stuart Edwards, which should go live sometime today or tomorrow.

Happy Valentines Day! What a day for feminism, right? Nothing like exchanging heart shaped boxes of chocolate and tennis bracelets for sexual favors to really take down the patriarchy!

THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL BLOG. PERIOD.

2008-02-13T10:17:00.005-05:00

But I am politically obsessed right now, making it nigh impossible for me to talk about anything else. I have a friend who is a die-hard Giants fan. He reads everything on the Giants, their website, news sources, blogs. He has a serious presence on their fan site. I think my relationship to my candidate has morphed into this fan/home team dynamic. I can't refresh websites fast enough. I pace around, waiting for election results, scouring the web for something: a poll, campaign drama, unjustifiable opinion. I DON'T CARE.

I think the ones who understand this best are Andrew Sulliv an's dogs.

ALARM CLOCKS THAT HAVE BEEN PURCHASED FOR MY BOSS: A SERIO-COMEDY IN SIX PARTS

2008-02-10T22:17:00.001-05:00

The designer bought a little analog travel alarm clock. Immediately rejected. Too small. Not digital.
I bought this Philipe Starke alarm clock/radio/barometer. He couldn't figure out how to set it.
I went to Pottery Barn and bought a big oversized digital alarm clock. It was too dark. He complained that he couldn't see the numbers.
I went to a fancy audio store near his apartment and bought the nicest clock they had. It has seriously killer sound. He couldn't figure out how to set it AND the numbers were too small.
Feeling desperate, I called the L.A. assistant for the brand and serial number of the clocks he uses in B. Hills. At last he seemed contented, until one alarm went off in the middle of the night, he couldn't turn it off and when he unplugged it, it continued to sound due to battery backup. Eventually he pried the batteries out and threw them against the wall, undoubtedly pretending the wall was my face.
Finally, I purchased this timex alarm clock. No radio, no dual-alarm setting. Just alarm, clock, and an on-off switch on the side. He seems to like it...for now.

Muah ha ha ha ha!

KICKASS BAR PARTY PHOTOS

2008-02-08T00:29:00.000-05:00

For tips on how to host a great bar party, see previous post. For mindless pictures, see below.
(Please note the pink-topped cupcakes and the pink brittle-filled chinese takeout container. The devil is in the details after all, fair readers...)

Party
After-party

HOW TO THROW A KICKASS PARTY IN A BAR

2008-02-07T15:06:00.000-05:00

The last weekend in January, I celebrated what some might call a milestone birthday. I am a lady, so I will refrain from mentioning a number, but suffice it to say that I am officially too old to have an ironic haircut. To commemorate my aging, I did what many a city-dweller who is without the square footage necessary to stuff 35 or 40 of his/her closest friends with food and drink is wont to do, I hosted a party in a bar. Based on the things that really worked about my party, as well as a couple of elements that could have gone better, I developed a guide to hosting a bar party that will be a memorable one for you and your guests. The key issue to keep in mind is that people hang out in bars all the time. You want this to feel different than just another Saturday night in a bar.

1. Screw Evite
I'm sure there was a time when the Evite's snazzy graphic design and open call for cleverness got our party-going hearts a-flutter with anticipation, but the sun went down on those days at about the same time that Enron went under. We don't want to click a link to see the party details, we don't want our response to be available to all invitees, we could care less about the pink background and japanimation-style martini glass you chose as your template. It isn't dignified, honestly. I'm not saying snail mail, that's a bit drastic, but there is much to be said for a well-worded email. Say something nice about how much you look forward to seeing everyone...speak clearly and from the heart. Your guests are much more likely to respond to an email than post on an Evite.

2. Location, location, etc.
This is a tough one. I went to about 5 bars looking for the perfect spot for my party. (Hello Pub Crawl! Get that celebration started early!) I knew that I wanted something that felt festive, but wasn't too loud. I sent out my emails early, before I knew where the event was going to take place, so I knew roughly how many people would be there. Ideally, I was looking for a bar in Brooklyn that had either a private room or a reservable section (necessity for party atmosphere) where 35 people could comfortably hang. I checked Time Out, New York Magazine, and asked my friends.
I ended up choosing Royale Brooklyn, a gorgeous dive/lounge on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. I went with a friend and loved the vibe. I called the manager the next day and he let me reserve three banquettes in the back room for free! He told me the DJ got started at 11PM, so I called the party for 9 so that we might have some time to booze and chat before the party got too raging. Just how raging it would get, I didn't know, which is why I recommend feeling out your bar of choice on the same night that your party will take place. A Thursday is not a Saturday is not a Tuesday, as I would find out.

3. Dinner
Many birthday boys and girls feel compelled to reserve a table at a restaurant for fifteen or thirty of their closest friends. This, in my mind, is a mistake. First of all, your closest friends probably don't all know/like each other. Second, anybody who has ever paid $45 for a green salad knows that splitting a bill fifteen ways is no fun at all. I had a table for seven at Fragole, inviting close neighborhood friends who knew each other. Believe me when I tell you that no one was upset to be left out of dinner. (Side note: If you find yourself at Fragole, and I certainly hope you do, you absolutely must have the Insalata Rustica. The mozzarella is so fresh, it's practically still milk. The grilled calamari is also scrumptious.)

4. Treats
Now, some of you may shake your heads and call me Martha, but I believe that putting out some homemade snacks in an attractive container goes very far for making a bar-party more party, less bar. I went to Pearl River and bought pink and gold Chinese takeout containers (to match the pink and gold bar--I know, I know), and filled them with homemade sweet and salty nut brittle. This brittle is really easy, and everybody loves it, seriously. Then I bought pretzels and this chipotle-lime popcorn and--voila! Bar snacks with class. Bring anything, homemade or not, and it will bring your party together.
I am not a baker, so I asked my friend Melissa to handle the birthday pastries. She showed up with about 1000 teeny tiny chocolate cupcakes with pink buttercream frosting designs on the top. They were delicious and so so cute. If your friends have talent, for chrissake, take advantage of it! That way they get a chance to shine too. Melissa, if you read this, I would love if you could put the recipe in the comments!

5. Activities
Remember being, like, six, and going to a birthday party where there would be all sorts of games planned? Well, what the hell is wrong with that? Now that we're adults, that doesn't mean we're immune to boredom! I brought a polaroid camera, a shit ton of film and a bunch of pens. I made all of my friends take pictures and tape them into a book (It was a blank notebook made out of a Debbie Gibson album cover. Am I your hero or what?) and write messages. Polaroids are really fun. And the messages, especially as the night wore on, are priceless.

6. Plan an after-party destination
Hey, remember how I mentioned how little I knew about a Saturday night vibe at Royale? Well, by about 1AM the place was jammed to the point where a conversation was impossible. This would have been the perfect time to say, "Okay, team, we're falling out to such-and-such down the street! Follow me!" And I could have grabbed the brittle and beat it. That is what we ended up doing, in the end, but about half an hour later than we should have. A lot of people went home. The after-party was a lot of fun anyway, a wonderfully quiet end to a rockin' evening. It's always good to leave your guests wanting more, right? The one person I would say didn't want more was my friend Balki (Emily). She ate seven cupcakes and two cupcake tops. Yum.

Anyone else have some hot tips for a kickass bar party? Anyone at my party who thought it blew?

IT'S HARD OUT HERE FOR A JUNIOR

2008-02-04T15:41:00.000-05:00

The first time I considered becoming a drug dealer was in the shower of my parents house, during my junior year of high school. I do my best thinking in the shower. I use it as a rehearsal space for standup routines, Oscar speeches and hypothetical confrontations with my boss.

“Listen, Ilana…”
“No. I’m done listening to you. How ‘bout you listen to me for a change?”

I also use my time in the shower to work out knotty problems in art and life. During this particular shower in 1995, I accomplished little in the way of body cleaning, since my mind was filthy with thoughts of crime.

Now, as I said, this was the suburbs, in an area outside Chicago called the North Shore. It was a nice place, not exactly buzzing with criminal activity. Ours was a leafy town with big houses and SUVs and miles of prime beachfront property on Lake Michigan. We had a second-run movie theater operated by an older, burly gentleman with coke bottle glasses, a mustache, and a disdain for children; just the kind of man one might expect to live with his mother and belong to a secret society of stargazing alien communicators. In exchange for two crumpled, sweaty dollars, he would grumpily hand over a ticket and a huge, shiny fifty-cent piece. This was the sort of thing that happened in my town. They shot scenes from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Risky Business” there. Our fathers were lawyers and doctors and brokers and CPAs. Our mothers were teachers and nurses and Real Estate agents and stay at home Moms.

There were policemen in my town, of course, and on two occasions the long arm of the law reached out and goosed the mischief-making behinds of members of my family. First, they picked up my cousin Sam for skateboarding in public. It was a long time coming, he had been warned and warned, but unfortunately the powers-that-be chose to teach my cousin a lesson on the very same day he was to be called to the Bima as a Bar Mitzvah. My family freaked. My aunt took to doing laps around the kitchen island, sobbing, “What are we going to say, Arthur? Sorry, you can all go home. The Bar Mitzvah boy has been unforeseeably detained in the Slammer!!!" Not for the first time, my uncle was dispatched to call a guy who knew a guy. Or my uncle might have known the guy himself. I wouldn’t put it passed him. In any case my cousin was sprung in time to perform his Rite of Passage.

The second appearance of a family member in the town blotter was when they escorted my slightly older sister to our house in a police car and wrote her up for public drunkenness. Alas, I was away at camp and missed it. (I, like many in my town, summered in Wisconsin, singing songs about friendship and complaining about the food), but I relish the mental image of an un-amused cop dragging my sister by the scruff and slinging her at the slippered feet of my be-bathrobed father. In my fantasy she throws up, right there in the driveway, but she’s a State’s Attorney now, so I suppose no one will ever know what happened that night.

My bathroom was pink and white, and my very own since my sister moved to the attic. My favorite feature was the old Hollywood dressing room-style lights around the mirror. I used to sit for hours under those lights, singing showtunes into a curling iron and studying my face to determine what angle made me look most like Mayim Bialik from Blossom. It was under the glow of those twelve incandescent bulbs, I tried to remove a round brush from the tangled mess I had made of my best friend’s hair using gobs of peanut butter. When her mother came to pick us up and saw the brush jutting out of her daughter’s head, dripping with Skippy, her mouth got wide, her eyebrows reached for the heavens, it was the kind of horrified expression normally reserved for slutty coeds in slasher movies whose time is up.

But those childish capers are but a distant memory now, as I stand under the showerhead awash in worry. The problem, to which dealing drugs seems a viable solution, is the occasion of my third moving violation in as many months. I am one of those people who just shouldn’t drive, and thankfully for all who travel by car, I no longer do. The unlucky few who took me driving with my learner’s permit came back with a new perspective on life that often accompanies a near-death experience. “As we were merging on the highway, “ my Aunt Patsy said, reaching for her inhaler, “I realized that life is short; that I should stop sweating the small stuff and start living!” At my driver’s test, when the proctor asked me to pull over, I drove over the curb, barely missing a speed limit sign. Needless to say I came away empty handed, my head heavy with shame. I did pass the second time, to the terror of all who knew me.

In addition to the three speeding tickets, I also totaled a Volvo. (I thought a two-way intersection was a four-way intersection and got nailed in the passenger side door by my father’s pottery instructor in a Ford Pinto.) Understandably, my parents were losing patience. I put off telling them about the third ticket and the due date was rapidly approaching. The wrath I endured from my father, a commodities broker and first-class screamer, after my second ticket, made appealing to my parents for help with the unimaginably exorbitant sixty-dollar fine, out of the question. I could get a job, I thought, but there’s no way I could make that much money fast enough. Plus, I am in a play. A speeding ticket shouldn’t keep a person from Godspel, should it? That didn't seem right.

So dealing drugs. It was the only solution. I could gather the scratch for the ticket in no time, and no one would be the wiser. Around my school I was known more as a theater person and a wisecracker than as a bad ass, but reputations change. My features could get hard, dangerous. I pictured myself walking down the hallway towards the language lab with a chinchilla coat. And a cigar. Yeah. (Shaft music. Fantasy sequence.)

I turned off the faucets, opened the glass doors that slid on the bathtub, reached for a towel, and exhaled with the satisfaction that comes from finding a good solution to a bad problem. A drug dealer. That’s what I was now. A kingpin. I stepped onto the bathmat, dried myself off, walked into my bedroom and dressed. A half an hour later I told my parents about the ticket.

In the end I realized getting money from my parents to pay a speeding ticket was more likely than getting money from them to get a stash together so I could sell drugs to minors. It was a practical, rather than a moral decision. I was a teenager, after all. My mental functions were foggy with hormones. Looking back, I realize that I was never really that close to descending into the underground...or was I?

PHOTO LOVE

2008-01-30T18:04:00.001-05:00

I received a package today in my P.O box from Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York. A client of mine (an interior designer I worked with for a time) had been interested in buying a piece from them some time ago. Well, to put it better, I found a beautiful piece by an Indian artist named Natvar Bhavsar that I wanted my client to buy. Alas, he was not as enthusiastic about the painting as I was, but the gallery, god bless them, continues dutifully to mail me wonderful and expensive-looking publications. Apparently they consider me a serious collector. The book I received today was a book of photographs by Ken Heyman.

What amazes me about documentary photography is the degree to which it creates nothing new. The photographer simply captures what is already happening without him. It seems so much less tortured than writing or painting where one is expected, with few tools, to create something wholly new and unexpected.
A photographer's genius comes from his ability to take an entirely realized tool--the world--and make it beautiful.

New Blog Schedule

2008-01-30T15:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry about my absence, fair furried readership of my heart. I am re-organizing the way this blog will work from here on out. Starting tomorrow, the blog will be published every Monday and Thursday. Monday will be a personal story or anecdote in the style of the blog to date, and Thursday will be a review (art, theater, film etc.) or a story about someone else. (Maybe by someone else? Guest bloggers?)

Whadaya think, guys? Does that suit?

THE GREATEST LOVE SONG EVER WRITTEN

2007-12-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe that's overstating a bit, but I heard it this morning for the four hundredth time and I just think it's genius. It's a song from William Finn's show, March of the Falsettos. I heard it this morning while I was working on a play and I was struck with the awe of an aspiring painter standing in front of a Cezanne still life:

"I will never in my life make anything so perfect."

Here's to trying anyway, right kids? Cheers.

A Marriage Proposal

I love you dear
I think you’re swell
You’re never near me close enough to tell
If I’m delightful or not.

I need your wrist
I praise your thigh
There’s not a guy
There’s not a piece of paper
There’s not a man in pants
Who can love you the same as I

Often times lovers are crazy people
Sometimes they kill each other
Just like a biblical brother
Did to his biblical brother.
Back in biblical Times.

Biblical times?
Biblical times?
Biblical times.

All those Biblical times!

I love your eyes.
I love your face.
I want you by my side to take my place
If I get sick or detained.

Don’t brush your hair, you’re perfect.
Don’t start to cry.
There’s not a guy,
There’s not a horse or zebra,
There’s not a giant man,
Who could love you the same as I.

Forget that giant man,
He won’t love you the same as I.

I’m not a giant man,
But I’ll love you until,
Love you until
I die.

TOO BAD ABOUT JOHN RITTER BEING DEAD

2007-11-28T19:14:00.000-05:00

My boss's publicist called me today because another one of her clients, a seriously b-list babe named Kim Something, is moving to NYC and needs an assistant. She was wondering if I knew anybody...

I suggested Law, my friend and co-writer of my genius, undoubtedly soon-to-be-produced television pilot. He is organized, enthusiastic and broke. Plus, he has seen me in the throws of my professional challenges (Oh no! Boss lost the AC adapter to his favorite UK-purchased personal DVD player. Whatever am I to do?! To Radio Shack, Cabbie! On the double!) so he knows what to expect.

To my suggestion the publicist responded:
"Is he gay?"

Implication: Not gay? Not interested. And poor Law is married. To a woman.

What is this, some kind of reverse homophobia? Affirmative Action for the light-footed among us? Is a homo more equipped to book a table than a straight dude? Better at buying sliced turkey or light bulbs?

The gays have been taking jobs from straight women for years now: Interior decorator, makeup artist, aerobics instructor, arm candy. Now they are taking jobs from straight men? When will it stop? Soon we non-queers will be made irrelevant!

And then I realized...what we had on our hands was the makings for a fantastic new sitcom.

20-something single male pretends to be gay so he can work his dream job--assistant to obscure TV actress! Hijinks ensue when he has to keep his over-active love life a secret from his boss---quite possibly the only woman he really loves!!

I knew that prejudice had it's benefits.

SELLING OUT

2007-11-27T11:12:00.000-05:00

Vegas Elvis, sell out?

Elvis grew up poor. He started singing because he thought it might make him some money. "Artistic integrity" is the stuff of high-minded academics. It's the kind of phrase we unsuccessful writers comfort ourselves with during long, sleepless nights where dreams of time and age and anonymity have us sitting up, sweating, doing Sudoku.

"But I have never sold out," we say, panting, panicked.

Of course, no one ever asked us to.

A SLOW DAY AT THE OFFICE, A SERIO-COMEDY

2007-11-15T17:12:00.000-05:00

PART ONE: SOME THINGS ARE NOT FUNNY
This is not a political blog, and for the most part, I am not a political person. But today I am going to share something I read in the New Yorker:

On Social Security, Clinton has avoided a detailed approach to fixing the system, which is expected to run out of money by the twenty-forties; for now, she would appoint a trusty “bipartisan commission” to recommend solutions. Obama proposes raising the ceiling on income that is subject to the payroll tax. As a political strategy, this appears to be a terrible idea. A potential crisis in the Social Security system is a long way off. Why, then, would a new President spend political capital on yet another tax hike when he will almost certainly seek to undo the Bush tax cuts for more immediate demands, like universal health care? When I asked Obama about this, he smiled and leaned forward, as if eager to explain that my premise was precisely the politically calibrated approach that he wanted to challenge. “What I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to continue hiding the ball,” Obama said, “and not tell the American people the truth—”
I interrupted: “Politically it makes sense—”

He finished the sentence: “—to not tell people what we really think?”

I am so very tired of being lied to. I am so ready for someone to tell me the truth. Anyone else?

PART TWO: I'M GONNA EAT YOUR ASS UP LIKE STEAK AND SHAKE
But that's enough serious for today. Here's one of my favorite moments of onscreen musical comedy. The basketball scene from Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style.

I TAKE REQUESTS

2007-11-13T08:33:00.000-05:00

My oldest friend, Jordana, was in New York this weekend, and she expressed an interest in making an appearance in this blog. I am not a diva. I will happily fulfill requests from loyal readers!

Full Disclosure: This is the first request I have received. I didn't realize that I had loyal readers. Sometimes I worry that my life/blog is like a Sting song, "Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh./ Another lonely day with no one here but me, oh."

I have known Jordana for so long, that in the course of our evening out with friends on Saturday, she said, "Oeenka!" and I knew that she was referring to Demi Moore's nipples in the movie, Ghost. If that's not friendship, I don't know what is.

In elementary school I got a curling iron with a brush attachment thoroughly stuck in Jor's hair. I had picked up the conventional wisdom that peanut butter is just the thing for liberating objects from hair. For the record, it isn't.

When we were in middle school we would go to open swim at the high school. We would shower in the locker room afterwards and get a Strawberry Crush from the pop machine. We felt so "Sixteen Candles".

Also in middle school, we were assigned a country to study for an entire year: art projects, cooking projects, research papers, all of which would culminate in a Culture Fair at the end of the year. Groups were assigned countries like China or England or France. We got Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe! We wrote a song:

"Zim, ba-ba-ba-bab, take me away away away to Zimbabwe!"

We would sing the song at the Bat Mitzvahs of everyone in the group.

Freshman year of high school, Jordana, Annie (you remember Annie, readers. She was the child with the ziplock baggies) and I decided to choreograph a dance for the annual dance show. Annie and I were committed to making our dance an allegory for the fall of communism. Jordana thought that was stupid. The teacher in charge of the show sided with Jor.

We once shared a bottle of wine at the foot of the Andes. I felt arty. She felt posh. During that trip we visited a Chilean vineyard. Our tour group was overrun with Mormons. We concluded that the Mormons were either doing reconnaissance or looking for sinners to convert.

It was nice to see Jor.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

2007-11-05T08:37:00.000-05:00

Last night, while eating homemade Croatian goulash at my friend Jeremy's house, I put the following question to the group:

If you could be any et hnicity other than your own, what would it be?

I answered first. I chose Cuban. Good food, wonderful music, an interesting fiery culture. Bright and hot and sunny.

Josh, in a move that betrayed a lack of interest or understanding in our game, said Canadian. When we protested he changed to Ukrainian, because the men there are good looking.

Jeremy picked Swedish.
"I love the food," he said. "And it's a very progressive culture."
"But what about the suicide rate?" I asked. Jeremy shrugged. I offered, "It will be a short life, but at least it will be a Swedish one!"

Then onto Greg. My partner in love and life. He took a moment to deliberate. Finally, he chose Russian. For their crazy/seriousness, he said. Good art. Drinking and dancing and violin playing into the wee hours. A funny people.

To recap: I picked Cuba. He picked Russia. Chiles and black beans and plantains vs. potatoes and vodka and beets. Sarongs and old cars and mambo on the one side. Fur-lined hats and great coats and Rachmaninoff on the other.

Well, at least we will always have Communism.

MY DISTASTE FOR DRAMA, DESPITE MY REPUTATION

2007-10-31T10:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning I gave some coins to a beggar on the subway. After saying no to thousands like him, yesterday I was moved to give. And he didn't have a sob story--he was rather soft-spoken, really, "God Bless Everybody", he said. "Sorry to bother you." He was a man, maybe a little older than I am, maybe my age, barely asking, though not ashamed. And it was the softness--of his voice, his tread, and his reluctance to intrude, that pushed me, almost immediately, into my purse for change.

Movies have ruined me for vociferous suffering.

In 2000 I stayed at my grandmother's house in Dayton, Ohio for a long weekend before I moved to South America for a year. It was a goodbye visit. My grandmother had, by then, been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the disease that would finally end what had been a difficult last chapter. By this point she was completely without her short term memory. I remember riding in a car with both my grandparents in Chicago during the previous year:

"Where are we going?" my grandmother asked.
"To Debra's house." My grandfather responded. Pause. Inhale--Exhale.
"Where are we going?" my grandmother asked again.
"To Debra's house for dinner."

And on and on and on during the ninety minute car ride. Eventually I started making up responses:

"To the beach, Nanny. We're going to Jamaica."
"To Renaissance Italy. We're going to luncheon with the Medicis!"

My grandfather was not amused by my tactics. He thought I was not being fair to her, by keeping her in the dark:

"She's in the dark, Papa," I said. "There's nothing you can do about it. You may as well do what you can to keep yourself from going crazy."

But anyway, that was before the cancer.

One night, during this goodbye visit to Dayton, I heard my grandmother walking around the house screaming, "The pain! The pain! The pain!" She was holding her ribs, grasping at the walls. It all seemed very dramatic to me, a bit 1970s Bette Davis. I said as much to my Aunt Kathy:

"She's dying, Ilana," she said. "It probably hurts."

Sometimes I suspect that I am such an asshole.

FLEXIBILITY

2007-10-26T12:29:00.001-04:00

When I was a kid I could sit on the floor with my foot behind my neck.

When I was a young adult I could expect change from myself and others.

It's amazing how tight our bodies and our souls become with age.

A LOS ANGELES WEDDING

2007-10-24T21:29:00.000-04:00

A personal assistant for a legitimately famous person should be able to get herself to a wedding without incident.

A personal assistant, organized as she must be to keep track of rehearsals and travel plans and poker games and Regis and Kelly appearances, in order to remember bologna-yes/lamb-no, that the light bulb next to the bed needs replacing, that Thursday is boss's sister's birthday, any personal assistant worth her swag would be able to bring a wedding invitation into the cab meant to carry her to the event. She would realize that brides say a lot of things in the course of planning a wedding. She would know that just because a bride says, "I am really mellow about the whole thing", or "It will be at the Beverly Hills Hotel", that doesn't mean it's true. A personal assistant knows this.

She leaves the hotel way ahead of time, our intrepid personal assistant, not because she may show up at the Beverly Hills Hotel only to discover that they have no record of the wedding in question, because she would know by checking the invitation in her hand that the Beverly Hills Hotel is not her destination. She would leave the hotel way ahead of time, looking effortlessly chic, just in case the wedding venue is miles and miles up a hill with few signs and no lights. She would never feel relieved when another guest waves down the cab from her car because she is also lost and late. Our P.A would never pay the cabbie and jump in the car with her boyfriend and this stranger so that she would not be the last to arrive at the event. She would have been there for many minutes before the ceremony began, of course. She would have had time for a drink. And a fresh coat of lipstick in the mirror of the flower-strewn powder room.

A hermit, maybe, a telemarketer might huff up the last few feet to the top of the hill just in time to see the windswept bride say "I do."

Not a personal assistant for a lauded movie actor. That would be ridiculous.

OLD FRIENDS

2007-08-02T10:42:00.000-04:00

I am in Chicago...my hometown.

Last night I had sushi (Delicious, buttery, could stand up to any NYC sushi restaurant) with two old friends of mine with whom I have had similarly complicated relationships: I stopped speaking to Danny because I didn't like his girlfriend, Joey stopped speaking to me because his girlfriend didn't like me. And last night, all I could think about was how much fun I was having; how nice it was to be with people who had walked a ways with me on the long, craggy-rocked path I have hiked towards adulthood. It occurred to me that I meet people all the time, people whose emotional lives are undoubtedly pocked with the relationships that formed them, people who love their family and their old friends, people who stop a bullet for someone I will never meet.

I have met too many people now to give myself to my friends as readily as I once did. I am so quick to find fault, easily bored, difficult to impress. There is something about my friends from my hometown--It is one reason why this place, this gladhanded city by the lake, has such a hold on my heart.

SNACKS

2007-07-26T16:04:00.000-04:00

I have never been one of those people who carries little baggies filled with healthy snacks along in my bag. I didn't come from a baggie-toting kind of family. When we were kids, my friend Annie always had a baggie packed with carrots and cucumber and another baggie with advil and vitamins. Her mother is a nurse. Annie was always prepared for any eventuality. My mother was a floral designer. We always had tissue paper in the house.

I often see grown people--women, mostly--feasting on bagged goodies on trains and planes and the like. It takes a kind of foresight...

"Yum! What a delicious breakfast! I am quite satisfied. Of course, that satisfaction will not last forever. Some wheat thins in a baggie might be just the thing I will need later, when I am no longer full".

My brain just doesn't function like that:

"Yum! What a delicious breakfast! I am quite satisfied. I wonder what it would feel like to be turned completely inside-out."

Spending a flight pining away for someone else's bell pepper strips is no way to travel.

(Is this the best fucking topic I could come up with for blogging? How pathetic!)

Is there something profound here? If I could think enough into the future to pack some veggies for the road maybe I would be happier? More successful? Less prone to fits of dispair?

(I have a master's degree).

(Parenthetical remarks are meaningless and should be ignored.)

If I started carrying baggies around, would more people read my blog? That would be an absurd correlation, don't you think?

THE GREATEST SENTENCE I HAVE EVER READ ON THE INTERNET

2007-07-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

"Even if you hate Park Slope and you think you'd like this video, you'd hate this video because it's not even bad funny."

SITTING IN UNION SQUARE...

2007-07-13T09:55:00.000-04:00

I look over the shoulder of the bearded boy next to me, scribbling in his moleskein notebook. I see the words, "life" and "hate" and "imagine" and I remember being young and disdainful of money. I think of my beardy ex-boyfriend. He just won some kind of a fancy grant.

Fuck him.

It was a long day. An early day featuring plumbers and a kidney bean-shaped coffee table and a 16-year-old girl from LA who asked me where kids her age hung out in New York. I made something up because, after all, how would I know?

Today I schlepped a drawing worth tens of thousands of dollars on a city bus. Because I could. Because it was practically door to door service. Because it was free. Because I don't think I should treat a drawing better than I treat myself. If the bus is good enough for me, it's good enough for an overpriced Dzama.

Am I becoming a hater? Sometimes I feel like the kind of person to which the "Mean People Suck" bumper stickers are referring.

TIME THE REVELATOR

2007-07-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

This morning I picked up a magazine from May of this year and felt a twinge of nostalgia for time gone by. To recap: I felt nostalgia for May when it is barely July. There was an ad for the final Sopranos episodes, long since broadcast and analyzed to death by the viewing public and those in the business of helping that public understand the things it sees on something called an "idiot box".

(I don't mean to bad-mouth television or those it employs. I wrote a pilot after all. And if any of my five readers have a contact in Hollywood, please do not hesitate to share! Desperate times indeed.)

It just seemed so sad that the time had passed. Only that it had come and gone, not that it was any more wonderful than the here and now.

My nostalgia for a month ago brings to mind the first job I had upon moving to New York. It was in a cosmetics store in Soho (actually, Nolita, but I refuse to acknowledge Nolita [North of Little Italy] as anything other than a bogus real estate construct). I spent most of my days in the store alone, since there were very few customers and therefore, no real need to employ more than one salesperson at a time. I filled my hours reading and giving myself one makeover after another. The store's owner lived in Canada most of the time. It really was a pretty cushy job, though I often left the store with some outrageous shit on my face. It was a strange era for me, fashion-wise. Yellow eyeshadow, for example, is the kind of experiment only a bored makeup salesperson would venture. A smarter one than I would insist on a full wipe down before the day's end. Me? I thought I looked fierce.

In any case, the owner left maybe three CDs that we were meant to play at the store. Before the end of my first week, I was sick to death of the mellow Euro techno-pop albums. There was one album though, someone must've left it there, Gillian Welch. I listened to it over and over again:

And every day it's getting straighter
Time's the revelator
The revelator

PUNK WISDOM

2007-06-26T16:23:00.000-04:00

PUNK WISDOM: Fuck you very much for asking. I will be only myself. Time spent thinking of what I should be doing is lost time, time I might have used to do something fun. Of course, thinking these things is the antithesis of punk. PUNK WISDOM is not about thinking, it is about doing. It is about the present as opposed to the future or the past.

Perhaps this is the stuff from which great things are made.

Or maybe I'm just punchy from the heat.

It Happened in Williamsburg

2007-06-22T15:17:00.000-04:00

Last night I hosted a comedy show in Williamsburg.

For those of you who aren’t from around here, you may appreciate a short geography lesson. I live in South Brooklyn, or Brownstone Brooklyn. It’s a charming, picturesque area filled with boutiques and yoga classes and stay-at-home Dads. People have backyards here. They know about wine. If they don’t have kids yet, they are practicing their parenting skills on their dog(s). North Brooklyn, the area that includes Williamsburg, used to have a lot of loft space, so gentrification of the former slum (anyone read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”?), was begun some years ago by artists looking for space. The artists have since been more or less priced out, and have left in their wake a hip, if ugly, area. Lots of tattoos and vintage dresses and serious philosophical talk about non-serif fonts and internet phenomena. Lots of bands with names that have the word “Cheese” in them.

I used to live in North Brooklyn. Even though I went to art school, and a small, liberal arts college, and have short hair, I could not really hang with the scene there. For me, and I judge not the many who have made it their home, Williamsburg and the neighborhoods around it is just a little too far on the “Trying” side of the “Being vs. Trying” spectrum. I chose the quieter, if less hip, South, and I shall never go back.

Unless it’s for stage time, of course, for which I have gone to far worse places, believe me.

This was a bar show. Often, bars that have stages set up for bands will find their one comedian friend and say, “Hey, friend. You’re a comedian. That’s a stage. How ‘bout getting a show together? We’ll have a comedy night! Everyone loves laughter!” The problem with this mentality is that unlike a band, a comedian is dependent on a focused audience in order to be effective. Usually the bar will set up some tables and chairs in front of the stage, where a few brave souls will sit and watch the show, while another throng of people gathers around the bar, somewhere away from the stage. The poor comic has to try to get his/her hilarious message to those who are interested, over the swell of the drunken, half-listening bar rats in the background. This was exactly the situation I faced last night. I would add only that the microphone was turned up too high, so my set was twice interrupted by some feedback in the style of the late Jimi Hendrix, but without the LSD.

Sounds pretty bad, right? We comics are sluts for stage time. We’ll do any show, anywhere.

I was hosting, as I said, which I do often and pretty well. I open the show, do maybe ten minutes, then introduce each comic. To be a good host you have to be able to improvise—make fun of the crowd without alienating anyone, and know when it’s good to do a couple jokes in between acts (like if someone just bombed or if the audience seems tired), and when it’s better to just bring on the next act. The audience also sees you as the person in charge, so if shit goes wrong, you may have to address it.

My friend Ben was in the middle of his set, about halfway through the show, when the heckling started.

We comedians can handle heckling. “I think I’m funnier than you” drunken spouting in a club, that sort of goes with the territory. But these guys last night were out of hand. There were three of them, and they sat way back at the bar, miles from the stage. I would describe their style and attitude as Hipster-Thug; trucker hats and hair and little jeans, with a side helping of blood lust.

Ben was having a great set, one of the funniest I’ve ever seen him do, and I’ve seen Ben’s act maybe fifty times. He was really getting into his groove when all of a sudden, from the back of the bar, with the subtlety of a Celine Dion power balad we hear: “You suck! Get off the stage! You’re a fucking pussy”, etc. Ben got mad, started yelling back. It went on from there. Comic after comic went on stage, interrupted periodically by touretic outbursts from these PBR-pickled hooligans. By the time I got on stage to bring up the last comic, the threesome had moved from the back of the bar to the table closest to the stage. They had quieted down some, but I could tell they were waiting to make their move. I decided to do a couple of jokes, loosen the mood a bit, when one of the three—big-ish with black curly hair so perfectly coiffed that it looked like a wig—stood up and asked me for the microphone.

There was no way I was going to give this guy this mic. Even though everyone in the bar who wasn’t a comic was begging me to do it, screaming for me to do it, even as he got closer and closer to the stage with a menacing look and his hand out, I was never going to put my mic in it. Because fuck him. After all that? I’m going to give this douchebag what he wants? No way!

I started doing a sort of Southern preacher thing. “I’ve worked too hard to get up on this stage! I’ve done open mics that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy! Can I get an amen, my brothers!” Still the guy stood there. I kept talking, making shit up, talking about how the guy could play me in a movie of my life, telling stories until finally he and his friends turned and walked out of the bar.

Let’s hear it for the little victories in life.

Afterwards, Joe, one of the guys who runs the show, approached me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re my fucking hero,” he said to me, “You can MC my show anytime.”

I just smiled, shook my head. “I’m not a hero, Joe, just a girl doing her job."

I was a camp counselor, after all. If you've faced a cafeteria filled with hormone happy Jewish kids on a ritalin vacation, you're pretty much ready for anything.

Good to know I could finally put those skills to good use.

Things I have done to make myself visible (In no particular order)

2007-06-17T18:35:00.000-04:00

1. Wear very bright pink lipstick.
2. Perform—on a stage and elsewhere.
3. Behave in such a way so as to convince others that I am funny and creative.
4. Walk around in outrageous clothes and jewelry.
5. Keep a blog.
6. Write—plays, screenplays, letters, emails, jokes.
7. Lose weight.
8. Say incendiary things in public.
9. Try hard to be someone’s friend.
10. Project myself as a talented person.
11. Sing.
12. Dance.
13. Cook.
14. Go to parties and act impressive
15. Find a good relationship.

16. Play hard to get.

"Half the time we're gone but we don't know where.
And we don't know where."

Addendum

2007-06-15T10:52:00.000-04:00

Beyond being drug addicts and prostitutes, the disappeared women of Vancouver were people. Their underclass status allowed the police to be niggardly with time and money, causing the investigation to stretch on for years, enabling a serial killer to abduct more women.

For specific information about these women as individuals, rather than as nameless, faceless sex-working drug addicts, check out www.missingpeople.net. Here are some images from Lincoln Clarke's book Heroines, about women in the Downtown Eastside.

Visible Art, Invisible Lives

2007-06-14T19:10:00.000-04:00

I am collecting my thoughts on art and usefulness. I was ready to write a whole snarky entry about a performance video I saw at the Brooklyn Museum’s Global Feminisms show. The piece is by Rebecca Belmore, a native Canadian artist (I have come to understand that her First Nations background is important to her definition of herself and her art, which is why I include that information). Her piece is called The Named and the Unnamed. Here is the aforementioned snarky entry that I had begun to write about it:

“What is the point of this shit?”

This is the question I asked myself while watching a video of a Canadian woman expending considerable effort freeing the skirt of her red dress from the wooden board to which she had just nailed it. It was hard work, pulling the skirt from the nails, and it caused much ripping and sweating and groaning from the Canadian. Then, the minute she finished yanking the skirt from the final nail, she walked a few feet over from where she had been standing, and started nailing the tattered remains of the skirt onto another board just so she could wrench it off again.

It is not the artifact itself that seemed pointless to me--there was a kind of beauty in the repetitive action, the sight and sound of the ripping material, the saturated red superimposed on the drab urban squalor in the background. Its projection over a scattering of illuminated tungsten light bulbs added to its pleasing visual effect, as did the black words scrawled across the arms of the artist. If beauty were the purpose of the piece, I would not hesitate to applaud it as an unqualified success.

But that’s not why she did it, this Canadian artist. Beauty was the intentional and somewhat unimportant byproduct of a statement she wanted to make. Rebecca Belmore (That’s the artist’s name) wanted to—commemorate? memorialize? draw attention to?—the disappearance of some other Canadian women.

And then I started reading about these disappearances, and my will to critique sort of deflated. It really is a pretty gruesome story. Some 54 prostitutes disappeared from Vancouver’s Skid Row, the Downtown Eastside, between 1983 and 2001. The police did not even get involved until 1998, and did not make an arrest until February of 2002 when they arrested a pig farmer named Robert Pickton. His ongoing trial for the murder of 27 women began in January of 2006.

I don’t know. Originally I was struck by the time and effort that this Rebecca Belmore wasted in making this piece. Wouldn’t she have done more good by funneling those resources into a more direct action? She could have volunteered at a women’s shelter or a rehab center or raised money for the victims’ families. But she is an artist, the argument goes, not a social worker or a fundraiser or a politician. Her role is to commemorate, memorialize, draw attention to an issue. But, to what end?

Artists did not cure AIDS, for example. They wrote about it, painted about it, performed about it, sang about it, filmed movies about it, did anything they could think of to commemorate, memorialize draw attention to it. But cure it? Did they help anyone? Well, they helped themselves, undoubtedly, since AIDS directly affected so many in the art community. But Canadian junkies don’t go to art shows. Prostitutes are not healed by performance art. What about homophobes? Do they go? Policy makers? Do Republicans go to galleries?

It’s a confusing issue, kids, ain’t no question about it. Maybe I myself stand as reason enough for Belmore to have made the piece. I saw it, I remembered it, it inspired me to look up the story of the missing women, inspired me to write about it here. Maybe it will inspire you to read about the women too. And to—what? Feel something about them?

Many of these women’s disappearances went unnoticed for a long time, often years went by before they were reported missing. That is the saddest part of the story for me. It is heartbreaking to imagine a life so solitary that its end concerns no other living soul. And still, right now on this earth we all share, there are people alive and alone; people whose solitude is so complete that their status as alive or dead makes little difference to anyone but themselves.

I am reminded of something said to me once...

I lived in Chile for a year after I graduated college. I met many Chileans who had spent some ten, fifteen, twenty years abroad, in exile. The idea of exile and torture and political upheaval was, of course, incredibly thrilling to me—an American bored by my country’s stability. I was like a teenager jealous of her friend’s trouble at home. Drama, after all, is the fascination of suburban youth.

I remember a conversation I had with one woman who had spent the eighties in either Switzerland or Sweden—the countries have very similar-sounding Spanish names and I never could remember which was which. I was commenting on how unnerving I found the Chilean habit of openly staring at strangers in the street. She responded by saying, “Yes. I noticed when I was in Switzerland (Sweden), everyone looked down, looked away. Nobody looked at me there. I felt as if I’d become invisible, like I’d disappeared.”

Rebecca Belmore got me to notice her, and through her I noticed these 54 lost girls. Because of a piece of art, people previously invisible to me had become visible.

Maybe there is a hope for art, after all.

Sigh...

Very Modern Bride

2007-06-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

I am not really a person who goes in for schadenfreude. Paris Hilton’s pending mental breakdown in the face of honest-to-goodness incarceration, for example, does not add any kick to my coffee. Perhaps it’s because Paris’ life never seemed so wonderful to me before her conviction. A person who posts a video of herself staring blankly into a video camera while being taken from behind by Shannon Doherty’s ex-boyfriend, is not really a person I feel needs to be destroyed.

Someone who just won $10,000, on the other hand? Fire away, says I!

Heather Warnken was voted Modern Bride of the Year by the readers of Modern Bride magazine. What’s so winning about Heather? Well, let’s hear what she had to say in her audition video:

I want an inspiring career. I want my work to really matter. But, above that, my biggest goal in life is to be a success as a mother and soon a wife to the love of my life.

That is modern!

If I can survive my law school finals while planning the most memorable destination wedding Sonoma has ever seen for 200 of our closest friends and family, and always keep putting love and family first, I guess that makes me the Modern Bride of the Year.

Jeez. Well, it doesn’t seem like you’re very serious about your wedding, Heather. I hope you’re not letting your law studies distract you from important decisions about flower arrangements and seating charts. Maybe you should put that “career” thing on hold for awhile…at least until you’ve figured out what your theme should be! That is, if you really want it to be memorable.

Other highlights of Heather’s application?

If I were given a superlative title like in high school yearbooks, I’d be voted: Biggest Character (per my fiancé!)

What does that mean? Anyone? Help me understand!

Here is my personal favorite:

If I were stranded on a desert island with my fiancé and could bring only three things, they would be: An Ipod with speakers, a blanket and sunblock!

Me? I’d go with matches, food, and book with a title like: “The Definitive Guide for Surviving on a Desert Island”. But sunblock is good. A blanket's good. I mean, you're going to be there awhile, you may as well get some color. An ipod will be great, too. At least up until the point when you need to charge it. Then you might have to eat your ipod.

Ah, wedding season.

Summer Festival

2007-06-10T17:56:00.000-04:00

Walking in a crowd, dodging other people in a crowd--this is a summer festival in a northern city.

Garbage overflows from bins, napkins in varying degrees of cleanliness fly by. The sound of songs you know sung by a band you don’t mixes with the regular city sounds of subways and horn-honking and crazy people. You eat and drink in huge quantities at stadium prices, prices that seem bloated, even in this extortionate town.

You meander through bodies, sidestepping children and dogs and the inebriated masses, feeling a little lost, a little overwhelmed. Then you see the hand in front of you reach back, searching for your hand. And you provide your hand for the seeker—such an easy thing to give, really. It is no trouble at all, really.

And all at once you realize that you have been found.

DENTAL DRAMATICS PART II: Criminals and Communists

2007-06-08T17:20:00.000-04:00

The morning that followed Friday night of Memorial Day weekend was inevitably Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. I discovered that most people who work in dental offices, like most people who work in libraries or hedge funds or post offices or as personal assistants to moderately famous film actors, desire not to work. And Saturday of Memorial Day weekend is a perfect day to fulfill that desire. Why would anybody want to look into the dank open mouth of a stranger, for example, when he/she could stay home and grill hot dogs to celebrate our men overseas?

I don’t begrudge anyone her will to BBQ. Just last night we grilled up a tasty pork tenderloin with a fragrant dry rub and some leftover mop sauce. Delish! My point is only that most people’s preference for grilling over working made the task of finding an open dental office on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend a hefty challenge. But, employing the kind of resourcefulness that becomes a personal assistant, especially one who teeters on the verge of utter catastrophe as often as I do, I located an open dental office in downtown Brooklyn.

Downtown Brooklyn is the bustling epicenter of my borough’s criminal justice system. If cheap lunch, world-weary public servants, irritable bureaucrats, or hardened criminals/unjustly accused innocents is what you’re after, downtown Brooklyn would be a wonderful place to start looking. Hotbed of cutting-edge dentistry? Not so much.

Atlantic Dental is flanked by a Kennedy Fried Chicken on one side and a school uniform/ ladies’ lingerie/ bed linen/ auto supply store on the other.

I opened the door at #1 Flatbush Avenue and climbed a dark, rickety stairwell, not unlike the one in Taxi Driver where Travis shoots Harvey Keitel. Atlantic Dental sits on the top of the stairs, on the second floor, protected by a metal cage. I followed the arrow to the intercom and waited to get buzzed in.

Buzzed into a dental office. Are you following this, readers? These are the desperate measures you too would go to if you had a hole in your molar big enough to store a spare Gummy Bear. You too would spend an hour in the “waiting room”, watching The Mod Squad on a teeny tiny ceiling-hung TV, waiting for the receptionist to call your name over the intercom from behind a thick sheet of bulletproof glass. You too would freeze for an additional hour in over air-conditioned back room, sitting on a sky blue dental chair with a huge gash down the center of it, leaking stuffing, while you stare at a poster advertising a new tooth-whitening system that is obviously intended for people who do not release hunks of tooth along with spinach and poppy seeds from their mouths when completing their nightly flossing ritual.

At last the dentist came in. He “said” that his assistant would give me x-rays. I use “said” because what the dentist spoke was really not all that similar to English. The dentist, along with every other employee at Atlantic Dental, as far as I could tell, conducted 100% of his communications with other employees in Russian. In fact, when the aforementioned assistant guided me to the x-ray room, she did so in the company of a husky, buzz-cut man, with whom she did not cease her Russian conversation, even as she was positioning my head on a kind of shelf and commanding me to stare straight ahead and bite.

“Do you see my feet?” she asked, taking a break from her conversation about horseradish or the Ukraine or the size of my ass or any other subject equally incomprehensible to me in this very foreign language.

“No,” I said. “How could I see your feet?” My head was, after all, on a shelf. Her feet were underneath the shelf. I am not a superhero.

More Russian. The man said something about something and she responded with some other thing. Really, I don’t speak any Russian at all. I don’t speak French either, but I would liken the experience of hearing French to sitting in a hotel in a city with the lights turned off and the blinds closed. Hearing Russian is like being wrapped in shroud, in a locked wooden trunk, in the depths of the deepest cave, on an uninhabited planet.

“Please, can you see my feet?” she asked again. Seriously, I was ready to punch this woman. She was small and blonde and pretty, and I was ready to smack her so hard she’d pray for the return of communism.

Speaking of communism…

The dentist himself was about fifty years old. His English was not good enough to work in a bagel store, let alone a dental office. Thus, we can deduce that the man in charge of solving the problem of my holey molar had received his training in? Communist Russia. Does that mean he was assigned dentistry as a career? What were the classes like? “Communist Dental 101: Dentistry as Torture device.” “Interrogator/Dentist: The glories of the hook and scrape for getting truth from subversives.”

Anyway, back to the x-ray machine.

As the huge gap in my tooth most likely makes obvious, I had not been to the dentist in a long time. I have since come to learn that dentistry, like so much of our modern world, has become computerized. A little camera, a couple of clicks and—voila!—there’s your teeth on a big screen. Not knowing this, however, I thought nothing of resting my chin on this very tall machine and waiting while it took a slow picture of my entire mouth. It seemed perfectly natural that the blonde slap-needing assistant should leave the room with her bearish companion and close the door while the picture was being taken. In retrospect, I feel lucky that my leg didn’t turn green. Chernobyl, after all. We can’t forget Chernobyl.

We had to wait for the x-ray to develop so I retired to my sad, freezing room and resumed my study of the tooth-whitening poster. At last the dentist came in and “informed” me that I needed a root canal. I asked him to be more specific, but of course, he had no idea what I was saying. He wrote me a referral for an endodontist—not a specific one, just any old endodontist I could find, and sent me on my way, bearing the x-ray and my as-yet unfilled hollow tooth.

On the way out I saw two men huddled just inside the doorway of #1 Flatbush Avenue, smoking a blunt. It was a good day.

DENTAL DRAMATICS PART I: The Fellowship of the Floss

2007-06-05T12:25:00.000-04:00

It was Friday night, the vanguard of Memorial Day Weekend. It was hot—lemonade hot. Newspaper-flapping hot. The kind of hot that inspires people to forget about hygiene and dive head first into nasty public pools and beaches, desperate for relief. The kind of hot that leaves people heavy and slow to laugh, like a snake after a kill. A midsummer hot, a July hot, the kind of hot that makes me imagine what it will be like when I go to a museum with my child to visit snow.

My roommates, like most of New York City, had fled, seeking out a more pastoral setting for their long weekend, respite from the pungent pizza and garbage smell of New York in summer. Greg and I were looking forward to an empty house, with periodic visits from friends and much intense grilling.

We spent a quiet Friday night at home, and here I was now, flossing, diligently working the space between my second and third molars on the right side. This, my widest space, often stores large offerings from past meals in strings and chunks, so I took extra pains, as I always do, to insure that the gap was free and clear of debris. But I must been expecially enthusiastic that night, because on its final swoop through the space, my floss discharged a sizable nugget—it was hard and sharp and heavy enough to knock against the sink with a “ping” and plummet towards the bathmat with gravitas.

I retrieved the hunk of stuff from the mat and held it up to the light. It was immediately apparent, even to my untrained eye, that what I beheld was a large piece of my own tooth, white-esque and jagged, with a hollow and unmistakably brown interior. I studied it for a moment, with a kind of scientific curiosity, then burst into tears.

An hour later found my poor boyfriend failing to comfort me as I grieved the loss of my tooth, the onset of tooth decay and my failure to heed the dire warnings so prominently displayed on posters in the dental offices of my youth.

“My teeth are rotting out of my mouth!” I wailed.

“There there,” said Greg, patting my fetal-curved back.

“I'm like a hillbilly! I am an Appalachian!” I moaned. (I do apologize to any Appalachian readers. In moments of intense anguish, we can often be insensitive and xenophobic.)

The next day was Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, and I had to find emergency dental care…

To be continued…

DINNER PARTY FANTASY

2007-02-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

If you could have three people living or dead at a dinner party at your house, who would you have?

This is the kind of question entertainment journalists are always asking celebrities. Having spent the last few years working closely with a celebrity, the question takes on a different meaning. I can imagine a phone call, "Hey, Manaster. Hank Aaron, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ are coming to my house tomorrow night. Can you organize dinner? Jesus is a vegetarian, I think, but you should call his assistant and find out for sure. I don't have the number but I think George Clooney's assistant knows her..."

And I'd do it, wouldn't I? I'd call my boss's publicist who would track down Clooney's publicist, who would get me in contact with Clooney's assistant, who would put me in touch with Jesus's assistant, on whose voicemail I'd leave a sweet message asking about Mr. Of Nazareth's culinary demands. She would text me some hours later that Jesus is mostly a vegetarian, although he has a weak spot for lamb. Armed with this knowledge, and with the knowledge that my boss hates lamb, I would call a very good, but not too froo-froo caterer who I met at the premiere for my boss's last thing. She would be silent for a moment, thinking, and then a light would go off and she would suggest that we serve pizza and beer and salad for $95 a head. I would say, "That sounds great, I'll see you tomorrow night." And I would cancel my plans and hang in the kitchen while Jesus and Hank Aaron and Abraham Lincoln and my boss suck on hot cheese and talk sports and pop psychology.

I have dinner parties all the time, and nobody has ever asked me this question. Well, if you want something done right...

Ilana, if you could have three people living or dead at a dinner party at your house who would you have?

Hmm, a tough question, self. I'm glad you asked. I would have Iris Murdoch, Deborah Eisenberg, and Romaine Brooks. We would have fresh oysters and salad and alcohol by the truck load. For dessert there would be strawberry shortcake and coffee and more alcohol and a live gypsy band. We would laugh and laugh and laugh, and then we'd pose naked for Romaine who, giddy with drink, would paint us up as French whores.

It would be good fun. And I wouldn't call anyone's assistant.

AND THE WIENER IS...

2007-02-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning on NPR Brian Leher did a segment on "Most Memorable Concert". I thought I'd share mine...

In April of 1996 Radiohead played a show at the Metro, a small rock venue near Wrigley Field, in Chicago. At the time they were a band with one album and one song, "Creep". Their album OK Computer would be released in 1997, and debut at #1 on the UK charts. It would go on to win a Grammy for Best Alternative Album and be nominated for Album of the Year. Ok Computer was, arguably, THE album of the late 90's.

I went to the show with my cousin Sam and, as usual, some random girl. It was his idea to go. He would have gone without me I'm sure, but he didn't have a license. We took my Dad's Jeep Grand Cherokee. I figured I was heading out to see a band that was on the verge of obscurity. I assumed that I had caught them on a downswing--I usually don't get wind of things until they're over. I was looking forward to hearing "Creep".

Little did I know that I would never again be as cool as I was the day I saw Radiohead play the entirety of a yet-unreleased OK Computer for 100 people. That was it. My life since that moment can be described as a long party at my house, in my honor, with no guests.

It was an awesome show. We danced our asses off. We were all sweat and smiles and rock and roll when the band finally called it quits. We filed out with the rest of the lucky hipsters.

We parked across the street from the Metro at a hot dog stand called "Wiener Takes All". We took our time getting back to our car. We bought some cigarettes, had a hot dog and fries and talked loudly in superlatives about what we had just witnessed. Finally, we ambled towards our car. I asked Sam for the keys.

I had given Sam my keys, despite my better judgement, because I was rather hefty at the time and there was no room between my thigh and my pocket for a set of keys. I didn't want to take a purse into a rock show! That would just be stupid! Sam is built like a Barbie doll. There was room for a pineapple in his pocket. He wouldn't have to do anything with the keys, just hold them in his pocket until the end of the show.

A word on my cousin Sam: He got arrested on the day of his Bar Mitzvah for skateboarding on city property. If I have a knack for getting myself into scrapes, Sam has a full-fledged talent.

He crowd surfed. Of course! Who could resist the urge to climb onto the arms of this crowd while hearing this band at this moment in their careers? He crowd surfed. I stood there with my hand open, in front of my fathers locked, immobile car, watching Sam turn out his pockets onto the pavement. The knowledge of what happened descended upon us in the parking lot of Wiener Takes All like God did upon Jacob at Beth El.

Reader, you've probably guessed it. Sam lost the keys.

We dove back into the Metro and scoured every inch of the floor. We poked through cigarette butts and pot roaches, everything slimy with wet dirt and sweat and beer.

We could not find them anywhere.

I went into hysterics. I tried calling a locksmith but it was insanely expensive and I was an unemancipated youth. I tried calling my parents, but they were nowhere to be found. Sam's parents were also out. It was the father of the random girl, god bless him, who drove to the city and picked us up. He had quit smoking, I remember, but he chewed on cigars. The cigar on his mouth was flat and wet.

We left the car at Wiener Takes All until the next day when I drove in with my Dad and a spare set of keys.

I think we all felt like Wieners that day.

Happy Birthday, Sam!

DOUBT...

2007-02-09T15:12:00.000-05:00

...will get you in the end, won't it?

One must not be intimidated. One must not be cautious. On must use broad strokes and risk ruining everything.

And yet, I am often plagued with doubt. I often have a foot walking forward and another backing up. I want to sit, sometimes. Recline. Just to sit and play with the grass, make daisy chains out of life. I once wrote a monologue about a woman who spun the world's largest ball of twine, and once she'd done it, she couldn't think of what to do next. "Stop spinning? Why would I do that?"

I'm not being very concrete. All six of my readers may be confused. "Why so glum, chum? " They may ask.

Oh, nothing. I'm just trying to get both my feet going in the same direction.

Fuck you, doubt. I am superhuman. I am violent and strong and unpredictable.

I am a bluejay on a tulip in a field. I am an abandoned shoe in the mud. I am a baby.

Fuck you, doubt. I am youth.

TIME TOO EARLY

2007-02-02T06:34:00.000-05:00

To wake up too early and think of all you have not accomplished. This is New York City.

To wake up too early to the sound of your own insecurities. To the clicking of an old clock wound daily by your aspirations. To wake up too early knowing that you stand in your own way—like a dead body under the wheels of your car that looks just like you. You still have a long way to go. What are you going to do about the corpse with your likeness wedged under the wheels of your car? Some people are honking. Others are passing you by.

To wake up too early with visions of some movie you saw once. It is a movie about love and happiness and understanding. It is a movie that has some very fine performances, and memorable dialogue. It is the movie that is not your life, but which plays, nonetheless, in your mind at this too-early hour, keeping you from sleep.

To wake up too early, thinking of coffee.

To wake up at all, well, that in itself is something.

A COLD WEATHER STALKING

2007-01-29T00:20:00.000-05:00

It’s finally cold. Cold makes me think of Chicago, of course. Freezing, waiting for the train. What kind of crazy city planner puts exterior trains in a city as cold as Chicago?

I was sort of stalked once. I was on a train in Chicago, a redline train which, for those of you who have never lived there, is the train where they keep all the crazy people. The train stopped, I remember—I mean, it halted between stops. We were all just sitting there, helplessly waiting in that inter-stop netherworld. The crazies were getting restless. A man with a bucket kept singing “I have no shoes, I’ve got the blues” in a reggae style. I was reading a book, as is my wont, trying to ignore the tense unrest of my fellow passengers as we sat on a train going nowhere.

Some men consider a woman who is reading or writing to be an open target (For further evidence of this phenomenon, please see my very first blog entry). The freaky-midwest-serial-killer-type who sat down next to me was no exception. “What are you reading?” He kept asking. “Is it good? What other books do you like? Why?” It was as if he had just finished reading an article in FHM magazine entitled Ask her questions about herself and ten other ways to get a stranger into bed. I tried to pretend that I didn’t speak English, but my English book sort of blew that cover. I tried ignoring him, he kept on. I tried excusing myself, politely requesting to be left alone. He was having none of it. And there was nowhere to go, you see, as we were stuck, as I said, on a immobile El train. So I sat for a long time and just endured. I stared blankly at my book and comforted myself with the knowledge that I would never again have to see any of these people—not the crack heads or conspiracy theorists, not the amateur rappers or the shoeless reggae singer, and definitely not the serial killer who droned on incessantly for the duration of the train’s respite from its south-bound, late night journey. I would never have to see him again.

Three days later he showed up at my office.

I was working as a Field Manager for an environmental organization. He showed up to canvas for clean air. Somewhere the Fates, those wretched bitches, were cracking up.