xtcian

6/22/02 Hoops isn't the same

6/22/02

Hoops isn't the same as it was in Chapel Hill; back then, there was a game every weekday except Friday, it would last for hours in the waning sun, and we were all playing really well. In August, the heat was inescapable, so we did the opposite we immersed ourselves in it, playing ball until we were drenched in the sweat of the person we were guarding. I made plays in those days that were truly impressive for someone who had started playing seriously at 19, a good ten years later than everyone else.

But that was before moving to Los Angeles, and now New York. Since 1997, I've been stuck in the once-a-week regular gig, with the occasional game scattered throughout the month. The "occasional games" might be at Chelsea Piers, sometimes with the guys in Astoria on the weekend, or some sort of pick-up game, but I know this: it's not enough, god dammit.

The Monday night game in LA was actually the "Young Adult Night" at the Mormon church in Arcadia, a good 45 minutes away from where I was living in Hollywood. Mormons are generally good people, and missionaries are on a strict ascetic regimen, but god help you if you play them on their "P" or preparation day. It's the day they can get all their ya-yas out, and in hoops, that manifests as fouls, hacks and muggings. It got to the point where I couldn't play with the missionaries anymore; they had way too much pent-up rage.

The Thursday night game in New York is better, because most of us are old friends, but I have to say, I suck in there. Maybe it's the lighting, maybe it's the often-judgmental order-barking, maybe it's because the other players never pass, maybe it's because my fucking back has taken the sting out of my game but I can't seem to find my game in that place. It's a pity, too, because it's the most Hoosiers-like basketball fantasy for the old-time purist you can get. Right in Soho on Mulberry Street, it's the ancient St. Patrick's Church, its cornerstone laid in 1809, the old gym a relic of bygone cagers. Weirdly, I have a lot more fun with Sean's friends in Astoria, or just with the Chipper down in Chapel Hill.

Basketball has always been a metaphor for me, and these days I'm mostly feeling the impermanence of youth. Physically, I feel similar to the days when I was 22, but there are two things that are much harder to overcome the next day: liquor and hoops. Which is probably a good thing I'm not in Chapel Hill anymore, because the town is powered almost solely by those two elements.

Lindsay misses his free throw to get in the next game at the Mulberry Street Garden

6/21/02 Okay, so I did

6/21/02

Okay, so I did the research, and it turns out I was right and wrong about "the longest day" thing. Today is the longest day of the year, but so was yesterday, and so will be the next two days after. The difference between them all is so slight as to be totally unnoticeable in New York, the sun sets at 8:29 pretty much all week. The cool thing is that the longest day of the year is even longer up here in Columbia County, where I write this: twelve whole minutes longer. Now, admittedly, I'll never see six of those minutes because they happen at 5:18 in the morning, but sometimes 6 minutes can make all difference in a tightly-contested hoops game that is desperately eking out the last visible photons of light as night approaches. I've been involved in countless unlit basketball games that carried on until someone got hit in the nose with the ball really hard.

The day today in Columbia County lasted 15 hours and 7 minutes; on December 20, it will last 9 hours and 4 minutes (click here to find out your town's stats). I find it almost excruciatingly hard to believe that from here on until Christmas the days will be getting shorter. Stuff like that would depress me if I weren't so busy and downing so much Celexa.

But for now, it's summer, and the gloaming lasts clear into the 9 o'clock hour, and days are sleepy, languid and forever. Our flowers have shot into the sky, and the grass in the pasture groans audibly into foot-long drifts. Chopin the dog, like an old Jewish retiree, sits on the hill by the barn and stares at the Catskills. My and Tessa's projects sling through the afternoon; every once in a while, we pass each other and sometimes she even shows me her boobs. Life is rich up here in Columbia County, I tellya what. I wish we could both dilly and dally here all the time.

a storm passes us just northwest

6/20/02 I'm not sure, but

6/20/02

I'm not sure, but I think this is the shortest night of the year. Much is always made of "the darkest night" (like in the Robert Frost poem) or the pagan glory of the summer solstice, but nary a mention is ever made of how short this night is. Probably because it isn't terribly interesting. Worse yet, it's most likely tomorrow night anyway.

Speaking of long days, we've entered into a curious part of the Pink House moviemaking process: at first, we were just glad that 58 hours of footage can be strung together to tell a story, but now we're trying to refine each tiny, singular moment until it's actually funny. It's as if we took a giant slab of marble, and managed to carve out the beginnings of form, much like the slaves of Michelangelo stuck forever in rock. Now we have to free the slave, make the right chisel marks for toes and fingers, and let the work have its ambulatory freedom. It's pure slogging, and what's worse, the cutting room is stiflingly free of oxygen.

It's strange being this close to a fine cut of the film, I'm finally being forced to think of things that I hadn't considered in well over a year. Stuff like "why is Charlotte winking at Michelle?" and "how did they get the money to hire Hobex?" and all the little plot points that make perfect sense when you're writing the screenplay at the Bourgeois Pig in 1999, but now must be reconciled in full color. It's amazing how much crap can be thrown away, as long as you have reached the point where fighting for unnecessary plot just makes you feel like a moron.

Paradoxically, the last few days have also reminded me of the tremendous, soul-dragging difficulty of the shoot itself. It shouldn't be this way, since now the actors have become the characters on screen, but each time something flies by, each time an edit works, I'm reminded of how arduous and horrifying that scene was to shoot. There are many pictures typifying our unrelenting fatigue on the set of The Pink House, but somehow, this is my favorite:

Tessa and I finding a swingset in someone's yard during the car scenes of the Pink House movie - click on the image to see more

6/19/02 Nobody has the tenacity

6/19/02

Nobody has the tenacity of my sister, something that was made clear to me again today by 10:45AM, as she set off to Bear Mountain to begin the 350-mile AIDS ride with her co-workers from the Union Square Caf. This is pretty amazing, considering she has a sub-par bike – most of the riders I saw were on $1200 cycles made from latticed polymers, weighing a third of an ounce – and that she never rode more than 70 miles in her training. But there I was, loading her bike and two others on the back of the car and schlepping them all up the Harlem Valley so they could pound out the four-day ride to Boston.

The other passengers were Beth and Simone Beth wants to be a yogi, Simone wants to be an actress, and both are servers at Union Square until either of those things happen. Beth still carried the knee scars from a wipeout she had last week. Those girls, who tonight are sleeping nervously in a tent on Bear Mountain, are, dare I say it, a good bit braver than I. What stuns me is Michelle's compassion; she's willing to slog 350 miles through the heat on an old mountain bike for an AIDS cure, and I'm reasonably sure she doesn't even know anybody with the disease.

Beth, Simone and Michelle pre-ride. Click on the picture for a short Quicktime movie showing a typical interaction between Sean and Michelle at dinner

After driving the gals upstate (and then backtracking back up again Michelle had forgotten her wallet), I dropped by New City to see Jamie Block at Prudential Securities. Nestled deep in an office park that could definitely have been worse (and would have been, if it were in North Carolina), his office had a clean, early-90s sheen with that curious landscaping that seems to be taking over America. While not as Orwellian as the stuff built in the '60s, there is almost something sadder about the intensely-manicured stretches of tiny lawn that greets the modern-day hotelgoer or investment counselor.

Jamie, of course, couldn't be happier. He actually likes playing with money, and is good at it, like his father was. It reminds me of the guilds, where the patriarch passed down his smithy job to the sons. Sure, the sons would try to be a bard for a few years, but pretty soon, the smithies would come calling. Two years ago, Jamie had a record deal at Capitol; now he's part of an investment group worth a quarter of a billion. And he's much happier. I kind of miss doing lines of coke off the stomach of a chick in the kitchen of a bar on Avenue B, but hey, why live in the past?

6/18/02 Nothing's more boring than

6/18/02

Nothing's more boring than listening to someone else's ailments, although that never stopped my Auntie Donna. Suffice to say I suffered today through the kind of sinus congestion that even the reliable Afrin couldn't conquer. I'm told that I have to get surgery for my deviated septum, which wasn't even deviated through anything fun like cocaine. I fucked up my sinuses by smashing my nose into the lip of a trashcan. At least I got something out of my three years in LA.

While Tessa went to watch the WNBA's Lady Liberty play the Orlando Miracle (God, I hate focus-group-tested sports names) at Madison Square Garden, I met Sean, Jordana and Michelle in the East Village for fish and or chips. Michelle's set to go on the AIDS ride tomorrow and wanted to give me my birthday presents before she left bike riding gloves, a leatherman, and a cool electronic odometer! Now I can see in glorious, vivid detail how many miles I can ride before I get exhausted and cranky.

Sean and Michelle describe Mom finding a used condom wrapper in Michelle's coat when she was 13

Later on, we went to Urban Outfitters and gawked at the pre-fab hipster T-shirts that say things like "Goldfarb Family Reunion 1982" on it, retailing for $26.99 I mean, who the fuck are they kidding? You can get the real thing on 1st Ave. for half the price, and that includes washing out the musty smell. I used to think that our generation (and I'm including you 25-year-olds, too, ya bunch of big-pants-wearin' rave muthafuckas) was impossible to target, that we could sniff someone selling our secrets back to ourselves and avoid the Man like the plague, but if Urban Outfitters is making money on these T-shirts, then maybe even those days are gone.

They did have O.P. shirts, though, and I almost bought one.

6/17/02 I like my friends

6/17/02

I like my friends Jon, Bud and Chip. The four of us started hanging out around Labor Day 1985 at the onset of college - desperate castaways from northern prep schools stuck in this sweltering southern bouillabaisse, knowing no one, clinging to each other the way expatriates in Paris no doubt clutch their Sunday New York Times. In those days, we dined on the Smiths, the Cure, took disastrous road trips in the cold rain where nobody got laid, and spent inordinate amounts of time making delirious fun of each other.

Bud was actually from North Carolina, so he had the vernacular down, and had a few friends from Statesville, so naturally, I relied on him to save me from the masturbatory self-involvement I'd perfected at Norfolk Academy. We used to take long walks around the woodsy expanse of campus, where I'd grill him about all things Carolinian. He also had a girlfriend that visited him from his hometown every few months, and I had yet to kiss a girl.

He introduced me to Jon, a frail yet culturally hyperliterate dude from Paoli, PA, and from then on, "Meat is Murder" never stopped wafting through the dorm. Jon had a knack for dating psychotic women, which had to be some sort of Freudian complement, because he's the least psychotic guy I know. On Christmas Eve in 1985 while my parents were throwing antiques at each other during the worst marital meltdown in North American history - Jon arranged a ski trip and got me on the next train to Vermont. And neither of us could ski. He's the only person who hated Duke as much as me (although 12 years of forced magnanimity in sports broadcasting may have made him soft).

Chip was the hardest to know, and in fact, spent the first three months of college fighting with Bud, who found him to be, well, a business major. The irony was that Bud was a business major too, at first, but thought Chip's prep middle-class background made him especially asinine. After a few months, however, all of us were going through majors like disposable razors. By the time we graduated, there were probably eleven or twelve majors between us.

Most college friends disband into that "I wonder what they're doing now" sort of distant friendship, but something in the water at Carolina has kept us all heavily immersed in each other's lives. Jamie Block and I were talking about "The Big Chill" today and remarked that we're now the same age as those fuckers, but we have none of the Lost Idealism and belief that our best days are behind us. I told him that when you change careers every two years, like most of us have, we are continually full of optimism (despite our griping to the contrary). Also, the people in that movie never saw each other after school, and we all managed to stick together.

Bud was my roommate, off and on, from the summer of 1987 clear until 1994. We once lived on cookie dough for a month. He never "graduated" from Carolina, but that never stopped him from writing me (as alter ego Dr. Thornton Long) countless notes on fake hospital stationery to get me out of doing stuff. Bud has a hibernating gene that makes him cocoon for years at a time, but is now entering a relatively extroverted phase. He hikes a lot of mountains with his girlfriend Baps, and they were just at the farm a couple of months ago.

Jon just moved to somewhere in New Jersey, and even though we suck for not getting together more, it's nice to have him close. He got married last year in a great ceremony in Lexington, KY to an awesome woman named Lisa. Jon and I always manage to keep extensive radio contact, and usually meet at the ends of the earth (i.e., wherever Carolina is playing in the Final Four).

After a stint in Washington D.C., Chip came back to Chapel Hill where we slacked from 1991 to 1997 together. Or should I say that I slacked; Chip always had a job. We have a basketball rivalry that has been a war of attrition since 1988, although I have dominated the last few years, due to his unwavering interest in Burger King sausage biscuits. My family has an irrational love for Chip, and that includes Tessa and my mom, who says that he's the funniest person she knows, as long as you listen carefully while he's mumbling.

There's so much more about the four of us, affectionately known to our various girlfriends as The Four Guys Not Named Biff, but decorum (and, dear reader, your attention span) prohibits going through them here. Suffice to say Jon's nickname is "Will You Stop Touching Me," Chip actually hit me on the head as hard as he could with the business end of a phone receiver, and Bud once ran across Chapel Hill barefoot to stop someone from jumping off a roof. Like I said, I like my friends Jon, Bud and Chip.

above: Chip, me and Jon outside our dorm in fall 1986
below: Chip, me and Jon at Jon's wedding, spring 2001
not pictured: Bud, who couldn't be bothered to get in the pictures

thanksgiving all-stars!

6/16/02

Wow, what can we say about this picture? A few things I'm sure of: I'm the photographer, and I'm using one of those unbelievably shitty 110 cameras with tiny film and a snap-on flash bulb, the kind I don't think they even make anymore. It is Thanksgiving 1978.

In the middle, turning around, is my sister-in-law Melissa, with her hair in full waffle late-70s regalia. At far left is her soon-to-be husband, my brother Kent (they got married three years later). The two people at far right are my brothers Steve and Sean, and my Mom smiles from the rear of the picture. Naturally, I have no idea where my Dad is, but I'm sure everyone in this picture can, if called on the phone right now, offer their conjecture.

What is really cool about this picture are the walls; I remember them being in a state of spackle-bedecked disarray for months. My dad, usually Gestapo-like in these control freak years, let us put a bunch of silly drawings up there and doodle all over it. Drawing on walls has been a family idee fixe for a long time - we drew all over the back of the London house, and there are some amazing pictures of Kent and Steve drawing on the walls of their condemned house in Hollywood, not long after their father, my mom's first husband, died in a car accident. There's something so wonderfully anarchistic about defacing a home wall. We did it in the Pink House as well, with a giant map of North Carolina; all guests were invited to mark the spot where they lost their virginity.

The yellowness of this picture is one of my favorite things about the 70s, and now all of my memories, preserved in photographs, are canting yellow along with them. The only place this picture will not get any more yellow is right here on the internet, which fascinates me. We've managed to slow down time right here on the blog.

And one last thing. Michelle says she is a vegetarian, but look at her in the picture (bottom left) - she's holding aloft the seared leg of a dead bird like she was the flesh-gorging victor of a feast in Valhalla. I mean, it's smeared all over her face. The girl is 29 now, but she's obviously in full-blown denial.