xtcian

8/10/02 A good djà vu

8/10/02

A good djà vu is hard to come by, but I had one today as I lay in a stranger's bed somewhere east of Easthampton, NY. We came here to the Hamptons because Tessa's film Five Wives is showing at the museum festival celebrating American movies that typify a certain region ("Five Wives," of course, representing Texas). This means staying at a gorgeous house with thoroughly modern architecture, but the second Tessa went for a run, I went for a nap – and was instantly brought back to an afternoon I spent in Kenya when I was thirteen.

Many of you reading this either know about, or have seen works by, Dan Eldon. Dan is famous, unfortunately, for dying the way he did: stoned to death by an angry mob in Mogadishu in 1993. He was a Reuters photographer, and his visionary journals were discovered not long after, becoming the book The Journey is the Destination. But that was still many years away.

Dan was my most consistent friend growing up, even if we didn't see each other for months at a time. His mother Kathy was from Iowa, where we lived, and we followed their family to London, and then Kenya, having awesome kid adventures along the way. We painted murals, dug G.I. Joe caves and played ping-pong until our arms were numb. But on this particular day, I was alone in their gigantic Nairobi house, on vacation, with all adults off doing other things, and Dan and his sister Amy at school. I sat in the love seat in the window and listened to the Beatles' "Love Songs" compilation, and just stared out the window at the beautiful, bizarre trees of their African yard. It was the first moment in my life, after thirteen years of whirlwind neverending "kiddie momentum" that I actually stopped and took stock of my life, and actually noticed the artistic, sad sweep of the tops of the trees. I know it sounds bizarre, but I think it was in that precise moment that I entered puberty.

And today I felt something in the cool breeze of the Hamptons, lying in a bed that is not mine, feeling that out-of-place sensation you get when left at other people's houses as a child, looking up at the tops of the trees sweeping the home stretch of the summer out to sea.

me with Dan Eldon, summertime 1977

8/9/02 Sex is such a

8/9/02

Sex is such a complicated issue in being endlessly fascinating, yet ruined by overanalysis. Nothing is less sexy, to me and most men anyway, than hashing out sexual issues either before or after the act itself. Of course, like Ron Shelton wrote in Bull Durham, a guy will listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay, and certainly talking dirty has its place in the porn lexicon (I think I majored in phone sex from 1992-94). But the analysis of sex itself in the cold dissection of hard daylight is pretty much a guaranteed soft-on.

I'm not much for sweeping gender-based statements, but many of the women I've known, including the brilliant and beautiful Tessa, are what I call "momentists," folks who really dig on the deconstruction of singular moments that happen to us, going over conversations had 5 minutes ago with a lice comb, taking great pains to find out exactly "what happened." I appreciate the philosophy of "being present" in the moment and understand its appeal, but being a dude, and a fairly hyperbolic one at that, I regard past moments with the same care jazz singers give to passing tones; it was simply a way to get from there to here, and it was probably embellished a little. Needless to say, we butt heads about this stuff a lot.

I mention this because we saw a perfect example of "sex momentism" today in a documentary made by Tessa's friend Leslie, a DV piece about a couple that seeks a solution to each other's hang-ups surrounding orgasm. I should really say it was a "mockumentary," because it was populated by actors and was really quite funny in a low-budget Guffman sort of way but its relentless hashing-out of all things sexual could have only been written by a woman. She did a great job of portraying the man's scarcely-concealed horror at having to go through tantric exercises and seeing a sex counselor, willing to have a his prostate probed if only to settle the matter once and for damn all.

Tessa and I plan on getting couples therapy before we're married I look at it as a "kicking the tires" sort of thing – but I know it's going to be a struggle for me to participate as much as I should. Tessa is actually very cool about this stuff (and would never make me do anything I don't want to do), but the desire to "not talk about the relationship" must be shackled to the 'Y' chromosome or to MY chromosome, because I think we're doing fantastic and have a ages-old desire not to muddy the dockwater. One thing age has given me, however, is the ego to accept that my ego doesn't know everything, and I'm willing to do a little couples therapy with the old Jewish adage: "It can't hoit!"

But on to the really important stuff we got Sean some candy-red Nike Shox VC Hoops shoes for a belated birthday present - which reminded me a little of the time in 1976 when I got him a basketball because I wanted one – but since he's playing hoops with bad knees on Astoria's famously crappy asphalt courts, I thought it would be nice for him to have the best shoe currently available. Thanks, of course, to the miracle of eBay, where I've made several friends who seem to work in the bowels of Nike, whereby certain pairs of shoes tend to "fall off the back of the truck" and "into their hands." It was another stroke of luck altogether to find the Nike Mique Women's Hoops shoe for Tessa, but now she, too is ready to take on all comers in Columbia County with her devastating 10-foot floater.

After dinner, Sean, Jordana and I went to see Full Frontal, the new Soderbergh movie, at the 23rd St. googleplex. A fun but unsatisfying ramble through one of Soderbergh's inside jokes, it may have the unfortunate effect of making people think that all DV features look like dogshit. I wish everyone could see the trailer for The Pink House; they'd understand what DV is capable of these days.

Ian's Leftist Pinko Freak Vegan Comment of the Day: okay, so they took out all the porn shops on 42nd St, but does anyone else find the proliferation of corporate neon crap reaching hundreds of feet into the air equally if not more offensive?

Jordana, Sean and me battle the trash, homeless, black Muslims, white Christians, Australian tourists and Sony on our way to the movie on 42nd St.

8/8/02 This one goes out

8/8/02

This one goes out to my friend Julie Morgan.

Any of you who live in New York knows how rough the summers can be; the pungent smell of cooked urine wafting up the stairs of the subway, the way your grundle starts to get a little jubbly down there, the 3-liter gulp of broiling bus exhaust as it misses your body by 17 millimeters. So it is truly amazing when the cold fronts from Canada swoop in, pushing every last droplet of humidity out to sea, and leaving us 79 and sunny. Today was one such day, so I'd like to call this blog entry "The Top 10 Greatest Things on Earth."

1. Cumulonimbus clouds. If you grew in Iowa and North Carolina like I did, you would have been privy to some of the greatest thunderstorms God ever orchestrated. Sure, the Texans like to think they have crazier weather, but it only seems crazier because of all the trailer parks. The cumulonimbus is the Savage Beast of the Sky, a beautiful shaft of pregnant water bubbling at 26,000 feet, about to open up a can of whoop-ass on you and yours. Before tornadoes, cumulonimbuses start getting green, like they're about to throw up. Poets like the cirrus clouds, or the dainty mackerel sky of an altocumulus. Not me I want the booming bass of a good rogering thunderstorm.

2. The part in Hucklberry Finn when Huck decides not to turn in Jim the slave. Huck Finn is required reading for every bored, acne-bedecked 9th grader, but it is one of those books (like "Catcher in the Rye") that makes you think school won't suck so bad after all. There is a passage where Huck decides to turn Jim in as a runaway slave, but his conscience won't allow it. Finally, in one of the best passages of literature ever written, he decides that he'll go ahead and "go to hell" and stick it out with Jim and it's so breathtaking and gorgeous and cathartic that I put the book down, looked up at the mackerel 1982 sky and decided to be a writer.

3. Cellos. Now, I was a violin major at Carolina, and spent 20 of my most prime, productive years fucking around in the back of the second violin section. I was a good violinist, but knew I would never have the discipline to be great. On the sly, however, during vast rests in the middle of symphonies, I would look longingly over at the cello section in rapt envy. Cellos are so cool these huge, gorgeous pieces of furniture you stick between your thighs and evoke low growls and unearthly, longing high notes. I always thought the cellists were cooler people, in their own little club, keeping to themselves and stealing smokes behind the auditorium. Put it this way: if I had been a cellist, I would have been great.

4. The clitoris. So misunderstood by men, and such a pity. Not quite the brazen sex organ of the penis, but needing a coaxing of a more coy sort, the clitoris, like writing, thrives on the philosophy "less is more."

5. Interstate 15 through the Virgin River Gorge. My family, being Mormon and raised in both Provo, UT and Los Angeles, has Interstate 15 down to an art form. Snaking from upper Utah to the dingy basin of Death Valley, I-15 cuts through a tiny piece of Arizona. And I mean "cuts," because the road is built into the canyon etched by the Virgin River Gorge (aptly named for my Mormon cousins, no doubt), and it is more fun than any video game yet coded. The river and you are both going 60 mph through hairpin turns and cliff walls formed by 3000 years of water and 40 years of dynamite. It's rumbling, gorgeous, intense, and when you are spit out into the flatlands of Nevada, you look in your rear view mirror with the post-coital buzz of a great lover.

6. "Save a Prayer" by Duran Duran. I wore thin the tape of my hijacked version of "Rio" listening to this song over and over: the vocal line is so beautiful, with John Taylor's bass line approaching genius, the two working in contrapuntal juiciness like a Bach 3-part invention. The song never falls into the predictable, always one chord change ahead of the listener. Forget the lyrics ("some people call it a one-night stand, but we can call it paradise") and just close your eyes, develop a crush on the girl at the movie theater concession stand, and be fifteen.

7. Pumpkins. Just one seed produces a vine 30 feet long with eight 60-lb. pumpkins on it. The flowers are male and female, and it has sex with itself. As the vines grow, they send little "feelers" reaching out to lash itself on whatever's near, then the vine itself plunges into the ground, basically to look for additional financing. The fruit can grow so big that cars can't carry it. And during the last week of October, we hollow them out, create ghoulish faces, dress up in outrageous costumes, collect candy and dance in ecstasy in the last great pagan holiday of our culture. I mean, how cool can a plant possibly be?

8. The Jack & Coke. The variations on it are flawed - the Southern Comfort & Coke can be a bit sweet, and the Jim Beam & Coke just doesn't have the mark of quality. Jack is still the best way to go for your average drink dollar, and something about the caffeine in Coke mixes with the giggle-juice in the bourbon to produce a perfect, hassle-free buzz which, if maintained, can last an entire night. Girl drinks are fine on occasion, and a nice single-malt scotch will make you feel part of an ancient brotherhood. But the Jack & Coke is a people's drink, brown with obfuscated intention, a social lubricant that allows for the bigger questions and gives the timorous the temerity to ask a girl to dance.

9. The 3-point shot. Dean Smith, who is the 11th greatest thing in the world, won his last National Championship on the shoulders of Donald Williams, one of the most beautiful shooters ever to play in college. His 3-point shot, taken almost 20 feet from the hoop, was as graceful as ballet, and drove daggers into opponents with effortless ease. The arc is a beautiful thing, and like a great novel or symphony, you're never really sure where it's going to land. The lay-up or dunk is just too "on the nose" for my literary tastes; I like the shot that keeps you guessing. And when you release that shot off the tips of your fingers, your hopes follow - and if it goes in, the beaming satisfaction is that of a parent watching his youngest child graduate.

10. New York Fucking City. I'm including all the boroughs here, even you, Staten Island. Tessa calls it a city of orphans, and truly, most of us could never live anywhere else. You could rollerskate down Avenue A with your hair on fire and a sparkler duct-taped to your dingdong, and nobody would bother you. People think New Yorkers are jaded and have "seen it all," but I think it's subtler than that: New Yorkers simply appreciate everyone's desire to express themselves, because its most likely why they're here as well. Look at the Zodiac ceiling of Grand Central, or the graceful buttresses of the Brooklyn Bridge, the art deco phallus of the Chrysler Building, or the sweeping fauna of Prospect Park – I mean, that shit didn't have to be there. New Yorkers just try harder.

The rest of the country thinks we're self-involved and smug, fetishizing every last detail of the city and crowing about how things only have cultural relevance if they end up here. I say, if you can show me a place where gays can kiss outside, where blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims and goofy white ex-fratboys can all joke on the same bus, where art is actually important to people, where investment bankers with families went back to work 100 yards from where 3000 of their compatriots were murdered a mere week after the event... then you can come join Tessa and me for a nice, cool beverage on our stoop in the beautiful rows of Park Slope. We would be glad to have you.

the kids in my family on Thompson St. in Soho: me, Sean, Michelle, Steve, Kent, November 2000

8/7/02 Smart celebrities are the

8/7/02

Smart celebrities are the ones that understand that they had a choice in the matter, and behave differently simply because they know the responsibility of being famous. It's the dumb ones that are always moaning about how they can't go to the store and say things like "you try being hounded." Like Morrissey sang, "you could have said no if you'd wanted to."

I think the same thing occurs when you write in a blog: the mere fact of making something available for public consumption ensures that you will necessarily have to deal with the opinions of others, and you had better be ready. Levels of expression by human beings occur in roughly the following states (from most private to public):

inner thought
inner thought written in a private diary
thought said out loud
thought expressed in front of a crowd of people
thought expressed in an online diary
idea expressed in a magazine
idea expressed in a movie or a song
idea expressed in a novel
idea etched in stone on side of mountain
idea buried in a time capsule
idea put in the Voyager satellite and launched into space

Now, the online diary occupies an interesting communication space just after "the spoken word," since the (unrecorded) spoken word can be misconstrued, re-purposed and even denied, thanks to the impermanence of memory. Blogs are also right before a magazine article, which, despite having a short shelf-life, remains searchable in print for a long time, has a modicum of research involved, and is delivered to thousands of people.

The online blog is in that limbo state between your private thoughts and public consumption, where half-theories and private anxieties are exposed to any number of people, like walking in on someone just hiking up their undies. It marks the liminal where an idea teeters from ethereal to universally searchable. This makes for a wonderful writing experience, because you can use free-form jazz and not research a damn thing just cull from your daily experiences and make gross generalizations about the world at large. The inherent disconnect, however, is that you have a tacit responsibility to be thoughtful to your audience the second you hit the "publish" button.

For instance, my brother Sean took offense at yesterday's blog, in which he accused me of being capricious and smug about moving to Brooklyn, since I'd said "everyone does it eventually." He's right: plenty of people don't move to Brooklyn, and work their whole lives just to live in midtown Manhattan. Just because I think something makes sense to me, doesn't mean it makes sense for everybody. Personally, I think Manhattan is overpriced, overcrowded, and best visited from the vantage point of a few miles away. But there are also millions of die-hard New Yorkers who would crater and disintegrate if they didn't get that special bagel every morning on the corner of 14th St. and 8th Avenue.

Which makes me think... do I need to get a graphic at the top of this page that says "In my experience..." so I don't have to type it in every time? It's like my brother Kent's friend in Minnesota who reads this every day because he thinks I'm a deliriously self-involved fuck. I agree with the fuck part, but how can you write a diary and not be self-involved? At the very least, the understood function of a blog is that it is just an opinion, written for free, naked and inchoate and fetal, about a work in progress called M-E. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with the theories I put in here last week.

There are so many blogs out there that I feel blessed that anyone even gives a shit; hell, they are 16 at my subway stop alone. I mean, any of you could be reading this chick instead of me. This thing was originally supposed to be about my coping with the drug Celexa, but it's useful for so much else. I'm going to have to be content with the misuse of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and accept that the viewing of this blog by other humans inherently changes it, and if newspapers are the "first draft of history," then blogs are the batter and not the cake.

Besides, I'm way more interesting than those knitting blogs.

Right?

8/6/02 There just comes a

8/6/02

There just comes a time when you have to move out of Manhattan. It may not be the time you think it is, and you may have serious reservations about missing the "fun" you could be having in the throbbing aorta of the city, but unless you have a ton of money or have some hideaway niche in a secret nook of the Village – the desire to move out is as instinctual as hunger. Or, put more specifically, the magnet that draws you to Manhattan is the same one that repels you to Brooklyn.

I didn't live in Manhattan long enough to get sick of it, but I did anyway. For years, however, I came up from North Carolina or from Los Angeles, and ended up on 1st Avenue in the East Village, where a disproportionate number of friends happened to live. The first wave, in the early 90s, was Jamie Block (5th St.), Ami Vitale (2nd St.) and of course, Tessa (on Ave. A, even though I never saw her place). Back then, the East Village was a fucked-up place swimming in heroin, and I recall never going past Avenue B unless you wanted to get your ass kicked.

The next wave of friends inherited the post-homeless, gentrified Giuliani East Village, all of whom moved there in 1997 or so: David Surowiecki, Jon and Catherine Gray, Lindsay and Dana, Lars, and then me in 2000. 1st Avenue became such a symbol of freedom to me, a great northward-churning strip that offered fun, purpose and an escape from the turgid, solipsistic, self-loathing I experienced everywhere else.

from the middle of 1st Avenue, looking north at sunset

Now, only Lars is left. Every single person who used to live on that avenue is now in Brooklyn, Prague, New Delhi or New City (NY). To a large extent, the very pheromonal buzz that brought us here had been largely squashed by '95 or so the "anti-folk" rage-mixed-with-nylon-strings intensity of Jamie's rock'n'roll scene was swept over in favor of lounge electronica and places with names like Karma. Soon enough, sorority girls were seen as far east as Avenue C, and the rent for shitholes near Tompkins Square Park lofted into the "$1700 for one bedroom" territory.

Like most things, I got to the party late: even though I had a stunningly well-compensated job on the Web, the dot-com wave had crested and washed ashore by June 2000. I had a place on the corner of 1st and 13th, and though my rent was small, I was growing tired of sleeping with my face against the ceiling and the screeching girls from Lake Ronkonkoma excoriating their boyfriends on cellphones. Something clicks in you after 30, you begin to experience the world in a way that isn't quite so overrun with endorphins, and you see the East Village for what it is: a lot of old, smelly buildings on a grid. There's plenty of drinking to be done if you're still looking for sex, but if you're past substance abuse, there's not much other recreation.

And so today I helped Dana and Lindsay move their things to Carroll Gardens, joining me and Tessa in the old clich we don't want to hear: "you move to Brooklyn for the space, and then New Jersey for the kids." I promise you none of us will be moving to fucking New Jersey, but the space is a big issue. I walked into Lindsay's new apartment and instantly saw how their books and belongings – long cramped into a dense, spiral nautilus – could stretch out and unfurl. Like my shrink says, "things in Brooklyn are built on a human scale."

The strange thing is that I still do miss a little drinking, a little swaying my head to the bleat of a bad band, and the little rush I'd get when I'd visit the boys from far-off lands and play hoops on Chrystie. There is still that vestigal hope that an avenue in the East Village can provide salvation, but you really do get to the age when you carry enough personality that you no longer fit in your Manhattan apartment.

8/5/02 Yeah, I know, it

8/5/02

Yeah, I know, it looks like a wedding invitation or maybe an invocation from the two of us, exhorting you to accept Jesus H. Christ into your ever-lovin' soul. Truth is, it's just a random moment on the Harlem Valley Rail Trail today, with me holding the camera away from us as far as I could muster, hoping we'd get the rainbow in the picture. Rainbows are among the most particular "you hadda be there" kind of moments, rarely translated onto film with even one-ninth of the glory of the original thing. But... I dunno, doesn't this one have the right spirit, at least?

8/4/02 There is something vaguely

8/4/02

There is something vaguely organic about being up here at the farm a day doesn't go by that we don't buy some goat cheese or milk or hydrangea grown or made exclusively at a farm called Aunt Bessie's Sheep Ranch or something. This place crawls with homegrown goodness, everything having that cow-poop-mixed-with-pablum smell that reminds you that you aren't very far from the source of hearty fuckin' goodness.

The truth is, it all tastes better, and on a larger scale, you feel like each dollop of local sheep cheese consumed somehow makes you Less a Part of the Problem, whatever the Problem might be. We actually have apricots and blueberries up here, which has been a nice re-education for me, since most of my flavor ideas have been long since warped by Starburst chews and sour gummi bears.

Somehow, none of the packaging for these local goods have changed they all sport the stripped-down homey style of 1887, or the ubiquitous green that says "I'm organic!" It reminds of my vegetarian years, roughly 1991-93, when I was besotted with the resurgence of community service amongst us Generation Xers, and got fat eating nothing but french fries. Part of that time I was dating Susan Comfort, and with that came no meat, relentless recycling, and repeated, horrified re-readings of Diet for a New America. I even wrote a couple of environmentally-themed songs at that time that were terrible. I mean, what the hell was I thinking???

One of the good things to come from those dioxin-free days was my involvement in a project called From the Hip, which was our little way of trying to convince the world that the members of Generation X weren't all Frito-munchin' scalawags with brainfuls of "Gilligan's Island" trivia. The project, of course, was doomed from the beginning.

We were never sure what kind of project it would be (a book? a video?) and though 280 young photographers scoured the country looking for "at-risk youths making a difference," only about three of them could take decent pictures. Most of our schemes in the summer of 1993 ended in humiliation at the hands of book agents and corporate sponsors, but none of that mattered to me: I was having too good a time.

It was then I got to know some fabulous people: Stasia Droze, who has since been like family; Lawrence Lucier, who became my confidante at CitySearch in 1996 and then my East Village roommate in 2000; even N'Gai Wright, who later became the character N'Wal in a little movie I'm working on called The Pink House. Our leader Tony Deifell, was an old Chi Psi buddy who always had a plan I learned a lot from his dogged determination, especially when we went to Washington D.C. to crack a few skulls.

Our project was a failure, as were most public service anthems dedicated to our generation (does anybody reading this remember Lead or Leave? At least those Third Millennium cats are still around). But like any project full of bright, intense young thinkers, we all have tons to say to each other even a decade later. That, and I really miss the "let's get together and put on a show" way of looking at one's career; we really did just rent an office in downtown Durham and hope for the best. These days, there's so much formality and structure that accompanies all our decisions - back then, if you had gas in the car, a paid phone bill and a place to get bourbon & cokes after work, anything seemed cool enough to try for a summer.

detail of the "From the Hip" group photo, showing me (with bouffant), Stasia Droze and Lawrence Lucier, August 1993