SUCK IT, HENRY JAMES

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

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

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

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"

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

FREE TO BE

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

IT'S JUST ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.