august philippic

I saw a movie tonight so romantic I will not tell you the title. It featured a Brancusi statue, a concert pianist, a soap opera, and a café. A thunderstorm hitting as a girl steps onto the rooftop, and the angle gets a little wider and the Eiffel Tower looms behind. Here is a woman who has slept with father and son. Here is a woman who mouths the words of French pop music as she jams to her iPod. Here is a woman who gets a job in a place that only hires men. Here are people beloved by all Paris who wish only (well, not only, and certainly not always) to be left alone.

A striptease in a concert hall. By the soloist.

And the music – music as overtly sexual as late-night cable; music that will float you out to sea like an elderly Inuit, music like lavender, like cloves, like milk and honey.

I saw a movie tonight that was a postcard to art, a comedy in the fullest sense of the word (think Balzac). It reminded me of when I used to come to New York only for movies, for popcorn and for the feel of a city and for a breath of the hope of love. Those movies, like this one, made me want to drink coffee and write, repeating endlessly until I keeled over or ossified like a Brancusi sculpture. I’m still shaken.

Tags: visions, New York, august, grooves by august
2 Comments »

Patrick Ewing receives the ball in the low post. He puts his jaw back where it’s supposed to go. He scowls at all comers, and dunks. That’s Knick basketball.

Being a Yankee hater, I can live with the Mets. I dislike the Giants, the Jets, the Rangers, the Devils, and the Islanders. I can live with the Nets. But the only team I love, the only team I care about in this, my adopted city, my new found regional center, is the New York Knicks.

So naturally, I’m rooting for them to lose. I want Isiah Thomas to no longer be my neighbor. I want Madison Square Garden to be more aesthetically appealing than Penn Station. I want basketball.

In any normal conference, this is a team that would be a doormat. It doesn’t deserve to exist. It’s laughing at Darwin, sneering at any kind of logic, they kind of hang around despite their remarkable suckiness.

I just want them to lose. Lose, lose, lose. As long as Isaiah Thomas is in the building, I want them to lose. I want humiliation. I want the Garden to be Artaudian in its theater of cruelty. I want Isaiah gone.

Because if you don’t have a team, are you at home?

Tags: philippic, New York by august
4 Comments »

Walking in Penn Station, the walls are human and shifting. No path is reliable, no surveillance complete. The cops with automatic rifles are the opposite of comforting; one pictures the aftermath of a bomb punctuated by their strafing. Here is the place people go who wish to be somewhere else; the building of clocks to measure one’s progress toward departure (for even arrivals are departures, opportunities to escape Penn Station).

Penn Station is a place that creates desire. It so deadens that the heart erupts at even the slightest opportunity to prove that it is still beating. A bookstore! A Starbucks! Pizza! New Jersey poets engraved in the walls! My god, I am alive, barely. Umberto Eco once wrote (upon seeing the stadium show of a very bad band) of his initial amazement at the choreography of an audience at a concert – how the entire audience might erupt in a moment at some cue he could not discern. Eco theorized that the answer must lie in the music itself. It must normally be so boring that even the slightest variation is a signal: a pathetic doo-dittle-dee goes the guitar. And the crowd roars!

So with Penn Station. Departing, I count the seconds to my train, and race my fellow commuters (Why are we running? The trains are never full, yet we form a sonic boom of briefcases, strollers, and palm pilots. We are running to leave Penn Station). Arriving, I trace the paths of rats on the subway platform, waiting for another train to get me the fuck out of Penn Station. All the while I am unsettled, breathless, disturbed at the thought that my train might go and I would be stuck here. I feel like the angle in the Wim Wender’s move Wings of Desire, who recorded the feelings of humans and only wanted to become one of them. I am full of this desire.

Desire drives me to commerce. A cup of coffee, a lousy buck fifty cup of coffee, staves off despair. It is the power chord that sends me cheering with the audience. I warm my hands on it even when I am already sweating. Its charcoal-and-syrup aroma revives me like smelling salts. If I have a doughnut as well (Krispy-Kreme is in Penn Station. To me, it is the Sistine Chapel. I pilgrimage there only on festival days), then my transformation is complete. I sip the coffee on the train and feel its glorious bitterness, then follow with Michelangelo doughnut. Which is the moment I return to any sense of self-control.

Today I find myself longing for some sense of redemption in the ritual and the pageantry and the beauty of the day: the buds and cherry blossoms, the children waddling in their Sunday finery, the hats. I was mostly reminded of how much of my life is separated from those things. Products are easier to sell if they fulfill needs, and what better way to create need than to fill the world with intense and unbearable ugliness? Much as I might wish my church or my park was a microcosm of the cosmos, I fear Penn Station is the axis mundi, the place I am always going to get somewhere else and nowhere, all at the same time.

Tags: New York by august
No Comments »

When I lived in Seattle, I was so healthy and so grunge — bike helmet strapped to my backpack, grass stains on my shirt from ultimate frisbee, tivas. This dress was a delicate balance of life-affirming and Nirvana, one must be ready to pivot quickly, to be morose with goths or to climb Mt. Baker.

Moving to New York (with several intermediate stages) has changed me. My wife frowns on flannel. My shoes require occasional applications of polish. I am thankful for the ubiquity of cleaners. Although I do not go out of my way to be cool, I do strive to avoid embarrassment around those who do.

New York has also changed the way I move in space. Clothing is part of the issue, the Seattle puddle I might jump in; the New York puddle would stain my trousers. But more: the hard press of people drives me to open spaces: to Grant’s tomb, the Great Lawn, the Hall of Arms and Armor. I am far more conscious of my movements, of my trajectory relative to those around me, of my pace and weight and sillouette, of my clothes. And I have new models. Goodbye Eddie Vedder; hello Alain Delon. Goodbye, frisbee player and wannabe mountain climber; hello househusband and wannabe assassin.

I want to move through New York the way Alain Delon moves through Le Samourai: clean, unyielding, as silently as possible. Under Jean-Pierre Melville’s direction, Delon (assassin, master of his motion) inhabits washed out, minimalist spaces. His apartment is furnished with a bed and a parakeet that moults when the place has been cased. His hat and tie suggest a very competent tailer, and even greater competence is shown in his manufacture of an alibi for a murder he did commit. There is love, of a sort, and danger and suspense, but mostly this is a movie of movement. Melville’s camera follows Delon obsessively, and dialogue is of secondary interest.

The movie also makes me nostalgic for the days when European high-culture could see in American low-culture a Middle Earth of middlebrow inspiration. Melville has been thinking about Sam Spade, he has been watching Cary Grant. His sensibilities are not unlike those of Frank Lloyd Wright (although the aesthetic effects are quite different). The fashion in this morning is elegant sixties — the kind that James Bond proported to offer.

But when I walk through New York tonight, Lazemby will be the farthest thing from my mind. I will go with deliberate paces and clean trousers. I will be tucked in and my held will be tilted as if I were wearing a hat. My imaginary overcoat will conceal my imaginary pistol, and my apartment will be free of bugs. I will outwit the police. I will turn my plot in on itself. I will be methodical and lethal. And I will recite the koan that forms the epigram for Melville’s clasic film:

“There is no solitude greater than that of a tiger in the jungle. Unless — perhaps — it be that of a Samurai.”

Tags: visions, New York by august
6 Comments »