May 10, 2003
5/10/03 Boston, MA While Tessa
While Tessa and I frolicked up here in the beautiful spring of a Harvard Square afternoon, my brother Sean and his girlfriend Jordana went to the top of the Empire State Building, whereupon Sean withdrew a family ring and asked Jordana to marry him. By all accounts, she said yes.
This had been brewing for a long time, and though I think it was a surprise for Jordana (the news has been skimpy on the whole thing for us), it was an act of delightful congruity. Sean was always different than me growing up; his natural state was to couple up, whereas mine was to brood, curse and fume alone. He is a Good Boyfriend and a Great Husband I know, because I saw him through the first time around. The things he put up with, the effort he gave forth, and the ignominies he endured for She Who Will Not Be Named ruined his spirit just long enough for it to be recharged, phoenix-like, for something better. He's a perennial lover, which, like perennial plants, bloom brighter after a vicious pruning.
As for Jordana, she's a delicate work of art draped in the robes of literature, fascinating obsessions and wild arcana. She's also very surreal, which gives you instant access to the inner caves of our brood every time. Most of all, she's way more kind than anyone in our family has ever been; 20 years of fighting over french fries and gasping for recognition had left us willing to let others fend for themselves. Jordana isn't like that at all. I think she'd give up both kidneys unless someone reminded her she needed to keep one.
It seems strange that Sean and I are engaged at the same time we didn't mean to look like such breeders. We've also taken great care, throughout our lives, not to dip our toes into the waters of either complacency or conventionality. Yet here we are, all the same. I guess we just like boobs too much. Thank god we both found people who would never let us say something like that in a public forum.
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Sean and Jordana last May
May 9, 2003
5/9/03 Boston, MA My darling
My darling Tessa has now been on this Earth 34 years as of today, and to honor it, we declared it her "birthday." It was a beautiful day here in Boston, and since we were up at 7am, we got to see a lot of it. We spent the morning at the Quaker school, attending class with our nephew, listening to Native Americans sing songs about jack rabbits, and nailing 3-pointers in the gym during recess. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I would have been a much more well-adjusted human if I'd gone to a Friends school. "Diversity" is a boring word used too much in the early '90s for it to mean anything to contrarians like me, but when you see it in action, you can truly forget for a few seconds that our country is run by divisive, right-wing, religious morons.
Tonight we went to the local high school's dance performance, and it was way better than it ought to have been. Despite the unfortunate self-consciousness of some female performers who were obviously just about to drown their inner Ophelia, the rest of them were pretty stoked. Our niece, who performed in three different pieces, was the obvious standout. It may sound obnoxious, but I grew up watching concerts where my family members were far-and-away the best thing on stage in any given moment. It's cool to think I'm marrying into a similar brood.
After the show, we surprised Tessa with a little cake, a time-signature-free rendition of "Happy Birthday" (still under copyright from the Hill sisters, thanks!) and then I gave her what everyone other red-blooded American wants: the new iPod. Like the guy at the Mac store in Albany snorted, "This li'l guy is ambrosia in solid form."
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Happy birthday, baby! It's been exactly one year, and it remains the best answer in my life.
May 8, 2003
5/8/03 Boston, MA You must
You must excuse the brevity of these last few blogs, but tonight I find myself in the attic of an old tenement house outside Boston, and though it's only 2:22am (early for me) I have to be up at 7am to take my nephew-in-law to his Quaker School for Significant Elders Day.
That, and I just drove four hours through a pounding rainstorm, and finished a Salon article in the Nick of Tim. Frequent visitors to the page (yes, that means you, the guy on Christmas Island!) will read the article and note that I have cannibalized one of my own blogs for the first, and definitely not the last, time.
I mean, shit, there's good stuff in here, right? Am I not allowed a certain amount of belly button lint for recycling?
May 7, 2003
5/7/03 Brooklyn, NY I don't
I don't know how many of you will have the opportunity to add music to a movie, but it's a pretty harrowing high-wire act. If I were better at cuisine metaphors, I'd say it was like adding a certain kind of spice to a certain kind of soup, but even that beggars a question of quantity (2 tsps.) rather than flavor (turmeric, cilantro, coriander). My mom came over today with a batch of new music for the Pink House incidentals, and I realized how hard it must be for people who write film scores you have to be on-topic, moody, engaging, and endlessly interesting... yet the audience shouldn't even know you exist.
Mom has written some beautiful stuff for us, and in fact, it is sometimes too beautiful. When I say what I want, I'm reminded of John Lennon, who made the engineers on the Sgt. Pepper album take the 4-track tape out, cut it into pieces and dip it in Coke. I tell her I want it "more jazzy, more angular, more Impressionist, less resolved, less obvious" but what the hell exactly do I mean? The worst thing you can do to an artist is lack specificity (remember the Prince in "Amadeus" who wanted "less notes") but sometime you have to talk in vagueries.
Some unbelievably haunting and gorgeous work permeates my mom's repertoire, and I have no doubt we'll find the right balance for our college comedy. Nothing has been easy while making this movie, which is why it will be a huge success or a thudding failure; there is no ignoring this thing. I just hope Mom can deal with my ramblings in the meantime.
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mom, Tessa and I going through the cues
May 6, 2003
5/6/03 Columbia County, NY I
I was all set to blog on what I consider a maddening trend in sloppy moviemaking, but while we were at the Albany googleplex, Tessa stopped at the PetSmart and got Chopin the dog a little furry lamb doll with a squeaky bit inside. And I'd like to show what happened 45 seconds after he got his gift:
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Sometimes you have to appreciate cruel, unspeakable primality even under the most mundane conditions.
May 4, 2003
5/5/03 Columbia County, NY I
I want to "tread lightly on the Earth" and all that, but there are two of God's creatures I want dead, dead, dead: mosquitoes and japanese beetles. Mosquitoes suck for everybody, but they tend to single me out at pretty much any social event, and I have to spray Deep Woods Off all over my person just to get through the evening without looking like a leprosy patient. Sure, there are chemicals in Deep Woods Off™ that are outlawed by the Geneva Convention and caused Gulf War Syndrome, but there is NO WAY I'm going to be up all night tearing my skin off like I did each childhood summer in Iowa. I am going to kill every last one of those motherfuckers, and those that escape are going to have harrowing stories to tell their progeny.
The japanese beetles are even worse. I mean, mosquitoes fuck with me, but the beetles destroy the passions of Tessa. And you mess with my baby at your own peril. These metallic-backed wingd instruments of the Devil breed like amoebae in the summer and swarm o'er our bounty, eating all in their wake. In two days, a bunch of these bastards can wither two years of work (roses, marigolds, corn, pumpkins, whatever). I tried traps last year, but the traps got too full; the last to be trapped just climbed over their dead brethren to freedom.
But today I discovered the extra double secret weapon: milky spores. After pushing a "spreader" over every inch of grass (which feels a little like vacuuming your entire yard), this harmless bacteria goes into your soil and, like the plagues immortalized in the Passover seder feast, kills the first born of every japanese beetle. In fact, it kills them all. For 20 years.
By the end of five acres, I was miserable and hallucinating from the powder. But then the rains came and watered the spores deep into the ground, and as I watched from my second floor tower, I was cackling, cackling! Vengeance is mine! You will taste the bitter steel of my blade, o ye flying scourges! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
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5/4/03 Columbia County, NY You
You know how Abraham Zapruder stumbled into history just by standing around Dealey Plaza with an 8mm camera? Well, this is nothing like that, but I did snap a shot of Tessa today that might end up helping a very angry, very huge political group get their way up here in the Hudson Valley.
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While I was on the train, I noticed an unbelievably immense barge steaming up the Hudson, a ship so big it seemed it would surely run aground by the time it got up in our neck of the woods. This is one of those behemoths that scarcely seems to float from its own mass.
After picking me up from the Hudson train station, Tessa wanted to look at the water so we climbed up to the observation deck, and I noticed the barge coming our way. When it got close, I clicked the picture you see above.
At the same time, a very distressed young man ran up on the hill behind us, trying to get some pictures of his own. This ship is so fast that he missed his opportunity, and the beast roared behind the cliffs. The dude cursed, ran back to his car, slammed the door and floored it down the street then he parked and ran into a house festooned with posters and placards reading "SLC: Stop the Plant!"
For a teensy bit of backstory, a swiss company called Holcim wants to build a "death star"-like cement refining plant on the banks of the Hudson, complete with a two-mile conveyor belt and a 400-ft. smokestack belching filth into the sky. It would be called the St. Lawrence Cement factory, hence all the "Stop the SLC" signs you see all over Columbia County.
Now, I don't know how much of a disaster this would be ecologically, but you can read about the impact here and in the New York Times here. The breakdown is this: the Powers That Be sold the plant as a place where locals can benefit from the jobs created, and painted any opposition as a "small number of antique dealers and artists" (subtext: prissypants whiny liberals).
The truth is this: even the company itself admits that only one job would be created for the community (lucky bastard). And if you've driven north of New York City, you'd know there would have to be an awful lot of antique dealers and artists to account for the number of signs in peoples' yards trying to stop this thing.
Anyway, the environmental damage would be unforgivable, but also these HUUUUGE barges will be churning up the otherwise bucolic Hudson all day long, laden with mountains of cement. Tankers like the Ioannis K. pictured above. I don't know if the photograph does it justice, but it truly looks like someone stuck a jetski in a bathtub. I'm sure that's what that "Stop the SLC" dude has been trying to capture for months, and I may have inadvertently done so in one click. More on that later.
In other news, the cows are back.
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