Eternal Spring

Last weekend, New York was treated to a premature summer. Such a dramatic burst of heat (and dry heat, mind you, not humid, like it’d been imported from the California desert or something with just enough faint Santa Ana-like winds for it to feel haunting) that before you knew it the City was in full-summer sensuality mode. Walking around the streets, you couldn’t help but be struck by the endless carnival of human beauty: one gorgeous, expertly-coiffed, fat-free, cocoa-buttered person after another strolling by seemingly unencumbered by anything but the care of their own good looks. It was hard not to stare, it was hard not to feel like some kind of combination of troll and vampire, it was hard not to feel titillated and not worthy at the same time, it was hard not to feel pained somehow by the beauty as far as the squinting eye could see, it was hard not to enjoy it but feel hollow in the too early summer sun as part of you wished you still had a parka to hide all your failures and dashed expectations under.

Everyone talks about winter being the difficult season but after this weekend that gave me pause, maybe its spring. It dawned on me that to be faced with another renaissance, another renewal, another rebirth was to be confronted with the realization that your springs are not eternal (to embrace a cliché), and that difficult recognition unleashes an exquisite panic. You know the one, right? It’s the “life is passing me by”/ “What is this existence, this life thing?” anxiety. Or as Diana Ross, the ultimate Supreme, sang to herself in Mahogany “Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you, where are you going to, do you know?” Skin barred, sun blazing, green buds sprouting, winter weather long gone and the natural obstacle of cold weather no longer a factor in the daily struggle, the answer seemed to be “FUCK NO”!

The weather in the City has returned to its normal 60-degree type spring fare. Summer has been temporarily staved off and jackets and boots are back on but we all know that it won’t be long till the halter tops are de-rigueur and the Greek Gods come out from under their sweaters to parade the streets with us mortals. The smallness of my life will, no doubt, be all too readily illuminated by the summer sun but by then the humidity will have kicked in and we’ll all be sweating - a reminder that perfection, like spring, is hardly eternal and as Shakespeare might have said, sweating his balls off on the streets of Manhattan under thousands of heat blowing air-conditioners “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Conscience might not but spring in New York certainly does.

Diminished Returns

In the months since I last posted (months, I tell ya, months) the American financial system has undergone the equivalent of a heart transplant. I happen to live in the place where its undergone surgery. In other words, I live in the rotten heart -- New York City. It's been a strange few months, to say the least. On the one hand, 2009 started out with this kind-of glorious optimism: the end of 8 years of unimaginable Bush era malaise, mendacity and mediocrity and the beginning of the Obama years. His inaguration day seemed like something out of a fiction, a mixture of extreme promise and hopefulness and sheer relief: it felt like the war had ended and all that was missing was a ticker-tape parade and a sailor kissing a girl on a corner.

Well, the fiction has ended now and the reality has set in and we have to trudge, slog, or as Churchill said, "muddle through" what everyone is calling "the new hard times". I am part of a generation that is not the "muddle through" kind. Again, I know I speak to a particular class and, to an extent, race. Most of my friends were not born in extreme poverty, the kind that has to muddle through no matter what returns their parents are getting on their 401k's because their parents never had them to begin with.

I am fortunate enough to have a day job right now which I am grateful for while at the same time resenting which is an odd juxtaposition. I have an ego and ambition, I imagine for myself a fully creative life one day that is not subject to performing administrative duties for others, for pay. But, all around me I have friends who are unemployed, getting laid off, borrowing money from parents and now they are forced to wait. All the while, we tell ourselves and each other that this is only temporary, because deep down despite our cultivated disaffectation, we feverishly believe or hope that the American Dream, as it were, is just laying dormant right now, and that, we too, will be rewarded for working hard, if and when the chance to do so comes back.

On Loving not Hating New York.

Living in New York can be like a badge of honor for some: an occupation almost. As if in response to the question "what do you do?" (always a favorite of mine because it comes with a lot of qualifiers: "I'm an actress,er, with a day-job but, no an artist, and no I don't always get paid for it, and, and, and...blech") they can answer "I live in New York". Being a resident of this City is a job, never mind the actual job. I often describe living here as Darwinian which I don't think is original or a stretch to say by any means though recently in describing it as such I did elicit a quizzical look from someone (who lives in L.A. - go figure). After you've been here a while you realize that, for better or worse, much of the rest of the world disappears into a hazy fog of "out there". I don't particularly care for the all-consuming tunnel vision that comes from living here but unless you are wealthy and have a country house or thousands of frequent flier miles the rest of the world becomes something you visit after a 4 hour Greyhound bus ride.

I would say that I have more of a love affair with this City than a love/hate relationship with it (though I do have days when I am felled by the daily challenges: waiting for the subway which is rapidly, almost shockingly, decaying with every passing year, tromping to and fro for even the most basic of middle class amenities, groceries, laundry, and don't even THINK about a car). Though I didn't grow up in the American suburbs my parents eventually did retire there. I am always shocked at how, well, contained life is in their development. How little contact there is with, well, the outside world funnily enough. My parents can go for days, if they so choose, just seeing each other and the good people who work at the Food Lion. They are older and spent 40 years traveling around the world (my Father was in the foreign service and his first post was Senegal and his last was Switzerland and in-between there were stints in Paris, and Rio and Hong Kong so these people have, you know, lived and seen a lot of shit and met a lot of people both paupers and princes)... which is to say that this is by no means a judgment call, at all.

Still it is, I suppose a comparison.

What I think I love about New York in contrast, to say, the cul-de-sac in which my parents are living out their golden years is the fact that there is no escaping the humanity and, by extension, the humility of being one of many. Butting up against these life stories, this constant throbbing mosaic of urban life, its ugliness, its beauty, its millions of triumphs and bitter disappointments. The fact that you can feel beautiful one minute and with just the opening door of a subway as ten women better dressed, more beautiful, taller - definitely taller- breeze in and sweep past, instantly humbled. For a drama lover there is nothing better than the endless mini-series of human storytelling that is perpetually being played out by 14 million of us against the indifferent steel and chrome, the City.

The Joyless Jazz Age (2000-2008, R.I.P).

It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Echoes Of The Jazz Age (Nov. 1931)

Well, here we are less than five days away from a major political realignment. The nightmare of the Bush years and the dreams of a 50-year Republican majority might meet their final resting place next Tuesday. Barring the capture of Bin Laden by John McCain, nay, Todd Palin in the rocky border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and a 2000-point rise in the Dow, I am going to go out on a limb and say we are about to witness a massive regime change.

Even if Obama turns out to be some magical combination of Lincoln, FDR and Clinton, I still think we are in for a rough ride here in this United, divided, States. The past 8 years have been horrifying and the ugly lights are coming on after a long night of very tawdry, destructive, partying. In the morning we will awake to a legacy of illegal war, torture and a seemingly insurmountable avalanche of debt. I am just regurgitating the cliché that this really is a “perfect storm”. Just when the government needs to follow the Keynesian model of “pumping the well” there is no, uh, you know, liquid left to do so.

Also, I am curious to see how a nation whose culture is so bound to consumerism does when identity cannot be bought with a credit card. People are tribal and I have long argued that part of our democratic pluralism has been bound to our ability to distract and buy (I think this comes with the death of religion, maybe?). This is not earth shattering analysis here but I fear we could witness some massive civilian violence.

Or not.

Perhaps, the culture is going to experience the kind of contraction that many of us felt was and is needed. By contraction, I think I mean the end of, what I called, “The Joyless Jazz age”. The years when “Sex and The City” became a major cultural touchstone and Paris Hilton, for better or worse, was so dominant a cultural force that love her or hate her you couldn’t ignore her. The years when, despite a war that was draining our resources the only people truly appalled enough to do anything radical about it were over the age of forty: a mother named Cindy Sheehan and some upper West Side Grandmothers, Code Pink. The years when three hundred channels of cable spewed “To Catch a Predator” and “Cribs”, “The Hills” and “The Swan”, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, and “The Biggest Loser”, “American Idol” and “The Littlest Groom”.

The Joyless Jazz Age is over and not a moment too soon. Let’s pray (as only a secularists can) that its replacement is not nearly as gruesome.

I’m hopeful but I might be giving away my television and buying a shotgun just in case…

American Pyscho (or what would Susan Sontag think?)

Not one to miss out on the cultural zeitgeist (if there is such a thing anymore) I went a few weeks ago one hot summer afternoon to see Batman, oh I'm sorry "The Dark Knight". It's always a relief to escape into a Dionysian-like stadium of air-conditioning and Laz-ee boy seats in the summer to watch a major motion picture and "Knight" certainly qualifies. It's been hard to escape the media blitz surrounding this film in large part because of the infotainment media (and, the public's?) ghoulish fascination with the death of Heath Ledger. The semi-glee with which entertainment reporters asked the cast members of this movie about "Heath" (a true testament of super fame is when you just become one word, "Madonna", "Jesus", "Nike", "Brangelina", "Heath") was discomfiting at best. One couldn't help but wonder if James Dean had it right all along? I thought of him and his motto of live fast, die young, leave behind a beautiful corpse every time I saw yet another poster of the Jihadi Joker staring out from the side of a building.

The film is all it promises to be: a dark, rollicking, action packed, thrill-a-minute ride but I couldn't help but find it a nasty piece of work. I agree with cultural theorists who say that no art is ever made in a vacuum (and if it is, it's usually pretty awful) and this picture, in particular, seems to feed on the queasy paranoia and fears of this surreal era. In some ways, it's a perfect parable of the Bush years but I found it hard to tell if the filmmaker wanted me to root or hiss for Batman. Still for better or worse, the anti-hero is still a hero. So our hero is Bruce Wayne, a billionaire vigilante willing to go to questionable lengths to keep the citizens of Gotham safe. The storyline infers that he has to because the government, the justice department and the local police force are too corrupt and incompetent to do the job. Even the new hotshot D.A, Harvey Dent, with his Spitzer and RFK-like intensity is no match-up for the sheer dementia of the Jihadi Joker. There are refrains of Dick Cheney's "you gotta go to the dark side" because the rule of law is a thing of the past, monsters have to be dealt with accordingly and to deal with one, you must become one in this cinematic fairy tale. Plus the scenes of catastrophe that thuddingly unfold one after another is this film and the mangled response of the police in particular hits a little too close to home. The view of government as essentially useless should be disturbingly familiar as it's been the prevailing philosophy of our ruling party. There were moments, in the film that I couldn't help but think of Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". Granted, this particular billionaire, Bruce Wayne's private security apparatus is altruistic in nature (he's out to protect the innocent and his hot ex-girlfriend) unlike the super rich that Klein describes in her book who pay for services that they think will keep them safe, everyone else be damned.

The flipside of this is that "Batman", err, Mike Bloomberg, no sorry, um, Bruce Wayne aka the Dark Knight is not bound to follow any rules or any laws, for that matter. He can go to a foreign country and abduct escaped criminals (remember when the CIA went to Italy and threw "the bad guys" into blacked out vans and they were transported to secret prisons?). In this case, our man, Batman, flies into Hong Kong under cover of night to get a ruthless accountant who is, of course, Chinese! I love that bit of casting which feeds into our western paranoia that the Chinese are taking all our money and have no morals or ethics. Movie villains are nothing if not a reflection of a culture's xenophobia. As the movie climaxes and the Jihadi Joker constructs greater and greater theater of destruction our hero is forced to take action and use his superior technology to spy on all 31 million of Gotham's citizens. Even this action disturbs his moral conscience, a trusted adviser played by one Morgan Freeman. Poor Morgan Freeman, ever since the Shawshank Redemption he has been doomed to play a thin facsimile of Nelson Mandela in almost every movie he has been cast in i.e. a black Saint with no real purpose other than to be a foil for the white guy's tolerance and goodness. (He must be a hero since he's got Morgan Freeman on his side!). Ultimately, Batman's invasion of people's privacy does have its consequences and Nelson Mandela resigns but it also has its rewards: it leads Batman to the Joker. The lesson here: spying might be questionable, kids, but in times like these, clock ticking, it's also a necessity. Holy Peepers Batman!

After two and a half, admittedly, expertly paced hours of sociopathic, sadistic scenes of destruction, I had, had enough. I can appreciate the skill of the filmmaking and some of performances and, yes, I am talking mainly about Heather Ledger who actually infuses his character with deeply grounded pathos - think Commedia delle Arte meets method - but utterly believable! You know: acting. Unlike Christian Bale, who plays it so by the book, gravelly voice (check), stiff upper chest (check), faraway stares (check), he comes off as utterly one dimensional which is fine, it's a comic book character. But, he's also a humorless snooze which becomes tiresome after two hours as does watching endless scenes of destruction. I was ready to get out of the Laz-ee boy seats and return to the hot, muggy streets after the Joker blows up a hospital. I know the filmmaker posits that the Joker simply wants to see "the world burn" but it's hard to watch this blockbuster if you actually read and consume news regularly: the world is burning. Lastly, for years, I have been regularly forced to hear Western neo-cons whinge on endlessly about the jihadi "worship of death" but as I watched "the Dark Knight" I had to wonder if, we really have any right to lecture anyone about civilization and democracy when this is the entertainment we eagerly make, celebrate and consume.

Things On My Mind.

A random, somewhat disparate, collection of t'ings I been t'inkin' about.

In no particular order...

Zimbabwe: Wow. I've been listening to a lot of news stories about this (the scary side effect of streaming NPR all day at an office job). But, seriously, it's like "The Last King of Scotland" all over again only this time, lets substitute Mugabe for Idi Amin. You forget how precious it is to be able to vote without getting petrol fuel poured on you because you dare to support the opposition. Our democracy is fragile (and it's been beaten to shit over the past 8 years) but we face none of the terror (yes, terror) that these people are facing right now. Beware the strong man of Africa... the nasty, lingering effects of colonialsim? Maybe.

The Gun Ban-Ban or the 2nd Amendment ruling or Why our Supreme Court can kiss my M@#tha-f!#@$g ass: Any hardened Hillary Clinton supporter need only take one look at this decision and consider John McCain's statement that he wants a court full of Roberts and Scalias and Thomases. This decision is a nightmare. The idea that the framers wanted every American to have a Glock in their home is lunacy. We have a standing army and no one's trying to overthrow the King. The constitution's genius is that it's malleable and the notion that our laws should ahere more to the realities of 1776 than 2008 is, in a word, assinine.

Wanted: The new Angelina Jolie movie. God, it looks awful but I love James McAvoy so much (yet another "Last King of Scotland" reference). Word is that it's despicably violent which I find curious given Ms. Jolie's reputation as a global humanitarian....I guess I find it odd that someone so concerned about the plight of refugees (usually fleeing their country because someone is out to the kill them and their entire family) would then turn and make a film that gratituitiously gorges itself on violence. Not to get too Tipper Gore circa 1987 on your ass, I do believe there is a correleation between what we are seeing and what we are doing... Count me among the moral majority. Hmmm, is this just an uneasy combo of art and activism?

Gallery Hopping in Chelsea: I am. Tomorrow. Going gallery-hopping. Taking my New Yorker and doing the art walk. I will report on the state of contemporary art on Monday. I am mildly hopeful.

Adventure: I am dying for it. I am in-between shows and this is never a good thing because then I have time to think (hence Rodin's penseur) and the wanderlust really creeps in. Not creeps so much as slaps me against the face and, like a devil, takes over my body, exorcism-style. I long for bigger and better things, dramatic, novel-like adventures like being a war correspondant or working for "Doctors without Borders" or, closer to home, engaging in, for me, debauchorous, unhealthy, behavior... In short, I become petulant and teenage.

Pity the individual with a romantic sensibility (I do).

Staples makes me sad.

I couldn't tell you why but I have had this odd prediliction since I was a child. A strange sensitivity almost or maybe I am just trying to dress up my affection for being maudlin or my fondness for being blue.

Shopping in Staples makes me sad.

Sometimes shopping in a Duane Reade brings on a similiar melancholy (I sound like the Edgar Allan Poe of Strip Malls) but for some reason not as bad...maybe the make-up section still makes it seem....fun.

Staples though brings home alienation to me and 21st century class structures and makes them manifest. I am almost always shopping there because I've been sent on a duck-duck-goose run for labels for some temp job I'm at. Everyone in there is usually some kind of business person or, rather, the underling of a business person looking mildly annoyed as they search for the "sign here" labels or "toner cartridges" while "Steely Dan" plays overhead. The workers are all in uniform and are usually very nice to whatever asshole they are dealing with. In those moments searching aisle five for "poster-board spray adhesive" all the Nietchszean-style nihilistic thoughts, all the suspicion of modernity comes flooding in and it's like "this, this is progress"? Maybe, I should move to Oregon, get a bow and arrow, and eat with my hands.

But, instead I pick up whatever I've been sent for, get in line, and fully wallow in the utter sadness that is part of the contract you sign when you are brought into this world.

Now that wasn't easy.