"Man On Wire" tells the story of a Paris street performer and tightrope walker who decides that he's going to break into the just-built World Trade Center, rig a wire between the two towers, and then tightrope walk across it. And he does it.
It rained after the movie and we sat on the steps of BAM's Jay Sharp Building and talked about the movie. My friend said, this movie makes me feel like I don't do enough. She's an associate at a law firm who exercises several times a week, sees live music, socializes with a dozen friends, and then is up to watch the latest art house documentary. She sighed and looked out at the empty street. A different sort of street performer came up to us - one with a rap about a daughter with HIV who was going to the hospital, who had a well-studied furrow of anguish in his brow. I thought his performance warranted some quarters. After the tightrope walker succeeds in crossing between the Twin Towers, he gets a different kind of reward - sex in a loft downtown with a beautiful American stranger. And fame. The world offered itself up to the tightrope walker, in spontaneous response to his joyfully impossible act.
Sadly, the fame signals the end of the story. The childhood friend and accomplice shudders in tears recalling it. We get the sense he cried not because he felt betrayed (he was deported while the tightrope walker was feted), but because it was so beautiful. The sadness is built into the innocence.
We do do enough. We just don't live our lives like a story. Our lives are stories that we tell to ourselves over and over - but it changes at every moment, and it doesn't end. End of movie, fade to credits. Not that simple. So we can't know the outcomes of our actions, whether we were a heroine or a villain, whether we found the treasure, whether we saved civilization. What was uncanny about this story was that he could. And that what the story that the protagonist was driven to live was finally so ephemeral, so quick to fade into nothing. I hope my actions don't disappear like that, even if I don't get to know what happens til it's all over.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
So I was in austin, and I saw some music...
I liked Austin, Texas, and not least because it's like Brooklyn writ over several square miles. Just a few minutes of driving down South Congress Avenue or Barton Spring Road reveals quirky coffee shops, coffee shops cum bars, bike shops, and boutiques selling local designer jewelry, all overlaid over an alternate geography of Hispanic shops and venues. It was normal - more and more I think that this is just what America is looking like, and I have no complaints about that.
I felt less at home at the Austin City Limits Festival, where I spent my Friday. Attending it cemented my feeling that large music festivals take what's great about music and then turn it inside out. Wandering its expansive seven stages and giant crowds, I kept feeling that I was in the midst of a robust and mutually-enamored marriage between capitalism and "independent culture." It's a truism that music is a business, where actors distribute a product - a song that makes people feel good inside- to a consumer, hopefully a lot of them. Music festivals, in their inception utopian and semi-lawless gatherings where folks came to feel the communal love of the Rolling Stones and the like, are now gracefully corporate affairs, where that music is shared at the Dell Stage, or the AT&T Blue Room.
Corporate sponsorship aside, which is now standard operating procedure with any cultural venue, the festival seemed sprawling and disorganized. And the SOUND wasn't that good!!!!!!!! 70,000 people in one space, pushing each other all over the place, and Manu Chao's jam didn't even crackle. Plus, at the crossroads between all the stages, one could hear all the music at once. Gypsy ska and art rock work sequentially maybe, but not at the same time! It was also a huge effort to get to the festival and back, with long lines for the free shuttles. Folks came to the festival looking like they were going camping, and I see it more like they were going into combat.
Through nepotism was I able to enter the backstage areas saw some great performances from very close. David Byrne was wonderful. Manu Chao had the crowd at hello. Gogol Bordello were high energy and featured two punk cheerleaders in neon. Vampire Weekend were nice. It was funny seeing Del Tha Funky Homosapien. To be honest, I personally had a great time. Who doesn't like being escorted in a golf cart? And the food in the artists' village was good. I just would never have made the effort to be a plebeian in that crowd. And any day when I give up my fervor for populist art is a sad day. Viva la revolucion! Oh Diego Rivera, what has become of me?
I felt less at home at the Austin City Limits Festival, where I spent my Friday. Attending it cemented my feeling that large music festivals take what's great about music and then turn it inside out. Wandering its expansive seven stages and giant crowds, I kept feeling that I was in the midst of a robust and mutually-enamored marriage between capitalism and "independent culture." It's a truism that music is a business, where actors distribute a product - a song that makes people feel good inside- to a consumer, hopefully a lot of them. Music festivals, in their inception utopian and semi-lawless gatherings where folks came to feel the communal love of the Rolling Stones and the like, are now gracefully corporate affairs, where that music is shared at the Dell Stage, or the AT&T Blue Room.
Corporate sponsorship aside, which is now standard operating procedure with any cultural venue, the festival seemed sprawling and disorganized. And the SOUND wasn't that good!!!!!!!! 70,000 people in one space, pushing each other all over the place, and Manu Chao's jam didn't even crackle. Plus, at the crossroads between all the stages, one could hear all the music at once. Gypsy ska and art rock work sequentially maybe, but not at the same time! It was also a huge effort to get to the festival and back, with long lines for the free shuttles. Folks came to the festival looking like they were going camping, and I see it more like they were going into combat.
Through nepotism was I able to enter the backstage areas saw some great performances from very close. David Byrne was wonderful. Manu Chao had the crowd at hello. Gogol Bordello were high energy and featured two punk cheerleaders in neon. Vampire Weekend were nice. It was funny seeing Del Tha Funky Homosapien. To be honest, I personally had a great time. Who doesn't like being escorted in a golf cart? And the food in the artists' village was good. I just would never have made the effort to be a plebeian in that crowd. And any day when I give up my fervor for populist art is a sad day. Viva la revolucion! Oh Diego Rivera, what has become of me?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Austin, city of fauna
The most exciting thing that happened today was seeing Manu Chao's band get into a van in front of our hotel. We're staying in the same hotel as Manu Chao!
Actually, that's not true, we had a lot of fun. Yesterday, we went for a bike ride down the creek next to the hotel (not a creek, actually a famous and large river but I don't know its name), and ended up at the Barton Spring Pools. We asked a lady where it was on the way, and we pointed down to a rocky area with water and she said, Lord no, that's where the dogs go swimming. Today, we went to find the pool again, and it was closed for cleaning, so instead we went swimming where the dogs go swimming. Attractions: a lot of adorable dogs with tennis balls, of course. One tried to make out with me. I was so flattered.
Then we went to the Ironworks Barbecue, on Cesar Chavez, like four blocks from our hotel (everything so far in Austin has been four blocks from the hotel). That was four hours ago and I'm still digesting the pork ribs. I love that feeling of protein sitting in my stomach like a yummy lump - guarantee against future hunger, y'all! Attractions at Ironworks - watching turtles in the little brook behind the restaurant. Even more fun is throwing leftover bones into the creek and watching turtles swim REALLY FAST to drag them into a corner to hog on it. "Share, guys!" I shouted, but they didn't listen.
Even odder, last night we went to a major world attraction - the largest urban bat colony in North America lives underneath the South Congress bridge which is, yes, four blocks from our hotel. 750,000 to 1.5 million bats live underneath the South Congress Bridge, and they awake and leave their flock every evening in a batty swarm. We called the Bat Hotline (512-416-5700) and learned they were scheduled to take flight from between 7:45 and 8 pm. Really, it was just smelly. It was dark, we could vaguely see them looking like a band of mosquitos. It did take over half an hour - getting 750,000 bats to exit the South Congress Bridge is kind of like watching the crowd leave Shea Stadium after a Mets game. Much cooler, but only a little bit more fun. Attraction: getting to say, "It's literally batshit!" and being grammatically correct.
Actually, that's not true, we had a lot of fun. Yesterday, we went for a bike ride down the creek next to the hotel (not a creek, actually a famous and large river but I don't know its name), and ended up at the Barton Spring Pools. We asked a lady where it was on the way, and we pointed down to a rocky area with water and she said, Lord no, that's where the dogs go swimming. Today, we went to find the pool again, and it was closed for cleaning, so instead we went swimming where the dogs go swimming. Attractions: a lot of adorable dogs with tennis balls, of course. One tried to make out with me. I was so flattered.
Then we went to the Ironworks Barbecue, on Cesar Chavez, like four blocks from our hotel (everything so far in Austin has been four blocks from the hotel). That was four hours ago and I'm still digesting the pork ribs. I love that feeling of protein sitting in my stomach like a yummy lump - guarantee against future hunger, y'all! Attractions at Ironworks - watching turtles in the little brook behind the restaurant. Even more fun is throwing leftover bones into the creek and watching turtles swim REALLY FAST to drag them into a corner to hog on it. "Share, guys!" I shouted, but they didn't listen.
Even odder, last night we went to a major world attraction - the largest urban bat colony in North America lives underneath the South Congress bridge which is, yes, four blocks from our hotel. 750,000 to 1.5 million bats live underneath the South Congress Bridge, and they awake and leave their flock every evening in a batty swarm. We called the Bat Hotline (512-416-5700) and learned they were scheduled to take flight from between 7:45 and 8 pm. Really, it was just smelly. It was dark, we could vaguely see them looking like a band of mosquitos. It did take over half an hour - getting 750,000 bats to exit the South Congress Bridge is kind of like watching the crowd leave Shea Stadium after a Mets game. Much cooler, but only a little bit more fun. Attraction: getting to say, "It's literally batshit!" and being grammatically correct.
Robin Thicke @ Rainbow Room, 9/23/08
Written late at night and in one long run on sentence, practically. Bon appetit!
Oh Robin Robin Robin. How I wanted to love you. How I wanted to mouth the words to "Lost Without You" and swoon and pretend I was your girlfriend, Idlewild film actress who is also featured in the song's music video. Your endless rotation on major urban radio stations in early 2007 was my most recent favorite pop culture overdose moment. Your falsetto was so smooth that none of my friends believed you were white.
But I just COULDN'T love you on Monday night, at your short four song set at the Manhattan Magazine launch party on the top of the Rock surrounded by luxury menswear designers and personal shoppers. When you came out in your red tan and your nylon black pants, I did not love it. And while singing, when you kept pointing in the air during breaks, that was not great also. When you introduced the large man in the tracksuit as your "manager and best friend" and invited him to play piano accompaniment, I liked that. But when, after one song, you told him, into the mic, "Not like that, play it like this" and went to the keyboard to illustrate, that was just weird. Couldn't you have maybe conversated about the set list five minutes before the show? Why express frustration like an angry dad trying to teach your son spelling? Except your son was a 250-pound black man with a goatee, as well as your manager and best friend.
The audience seemed to like your performance, especially the women in pumps holding blackberries and the gay gay gay men. Comments after the show included, "I love him," "He is so sexy" and "He's a little like Justin Timberlake, I think." But they were also at a party where they had to hand one another business cards and angle a thirty second conference with the magazine editor in chief. You were not the main event. You knew this, I'm sure, as did your accountant. That is ok. You have to eat, and feed your beautiful actress wife, although she probably does not eat very much. But that is not the point. The point, Robin, and I'm getting to it slow cause I don't wanna hurt your feelings, the point is that. At the end of the day. I've realized. That. No matter how smooth your falsetto is. You. Are. White. Every time you said, "Come on y'all," I thought it. Every time you pulled the microphone stand against you and fondled it, I thought it. Every time you turned away from us, squeezed your eyes tight, and belted out your still sweet falsetto, I thought it. You cannot act in this way! Stop it. Be more like Harry Connick Jr.
And I know what you're thinking, Robin. It's true that Justin Timberlake is white, yes. But he was a Mouseketeer.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
a practical argument in favor of the practice of yoga
A part of me finds talking about yoga unspeakably rude. A reflex kicks in that also abhors subway preachers and informercials. When confronted with people who speak comfortably about the concept of attaining enlightenment, I get indignant. This is a liberal democracy. My soul is my property and you have no right to try and touch it with an invocation of the heart chakras or the Buddhist pantheon.
Yoga can actually be understood in a purely secular way - the practice of yoga offers the intelligence of the body. It trains the mind to see the body as a means. Like kung fu. But the part that rankles is the aspect that mucks about the dark places beyond immediately beneficial health results. It's the part of paints life as a spiritual quest, the one that connects the practice of asanas with curing others of pain. Yoga means unity - it is an utopian vision. In that way, practicing yoga offers a radical re-imagining of the world in which we live. It is a political act.
Moreover, the practice of yoga is always an offering, and in our culture we look at all free things with suspicion. We look all things given without expectation of compensation as a Trojan horse, a trick. At the same time, we tell ourselves that we are free, that all our actions are dictated only by our own hearts. Yoga suggests the reverse - that we give all of ourselves away, because freedom is an illusion. Anti-capitalist, indeed! Why, these folks are no better than IWW pamphleteers! Do they wish to assassinate Grover Cleveland as well?
Well, no. Sometimes being being a bloodless capitalist -- efficient, accurate and logical -- can feel like building an unbreakable bridge to nowhere. Sometimes the capitalist might just want to notice that she has organs. Sometimes the capitalist wants to forget that she exists, forget that she has an argument to make, that SHE MUST WIN. Sometimes she wants to see herself more clearly than as the aggregate of days in her life. In those cracks, in those forgotten moments, a yogi already resides.
Yoga can actually be understood in a purely secular way - the practice of yoga offers the intelligence of the body. It trains the mind to see the body as a means. Like kung fu. But the part that rankles is the aspect that mucks about the dark places beyond immediately beneficial health results. It's the part of paints life as a spiritual quest, the one that connects the practice of asanas with curing others of pain. Yoga means unity - it is an utopian vision. In that way, practicing yoga offers a radical re-imagining of the world in which we live. It is a political act.
Moreover, the practice of yoga is always an offering, and in our culture we look at all free things with suspicion. We look all things given without expectation of compensation as a Trojan horse, a trick. At the same time, we tell ourselves that we are free, that all our actions are dictated only by our own hearts. Yoga suggests the reverse - that we give all of ourselves away, because freedom is an illusion. Anti-capitalist, indeed! Why, these folks are no better than IWW pamphleteers! Do they wish to assassinate Grover Cleveland as well?
Well, no. Sometimes being being a bloodless capitalist -- efficient, accurate and logical -- can feel like building an unbreakable bridge to nowhere. Sometimes the capitalist might just want to notice that she has organs. Sometimes the capitalist wants to forget that she exists, forget that she has an argument to make, that SHE MUST WIN. Sometimes she wants to see herself more clearly than as the aggregate of days in her life. In those cracks, in those forgotten moments, a yogi already resides.
Monday, September 22, 2008
becoming
I write a lot on this blog about my desire to be a professional journalist. At this point, it's an inevitability. The question is what kind of journalist am I going to be? A good one, or a bad one?
I was having dinner with a favorite person the other day. He's just started working at a big name firm, in their corporate division. We were talking about our law school's career services office. He echoed what I've heard from a lot of people, which is that they're very nice, but they didn't help him find a job. But hadn't he gotten his job through fall recruiting? Fall recruiting is the system of job interviewing sponsored by the law school that helps place students in summer jobs, and then hopefully full-time positions upon graduation. He shrugged and said, "That method didn't work for me."
Well, I was shocked. He'd always struck me as a blue chip guy - one that starts at the top and stays up there. This suggested that his GPA hadn't been in the top ten percent. Our law school, as a competitive second-tier school, aggressively helps those in the top ten percent secure prestigious clerkships and firm jobs, and I'd assumed he'd been one of them. It's not impossible, but unlikely, for someone outside the top ten, or at most the top twenty, to land such a desirable job.
Turned out that he had done his own work to secure the position that he felt he'd deserved. And no doubt, the law firm could do no better. Still, what separated him from others was perhaps not his resume, but his attitude. Also, his networking prowess. He knew everyone at the law school, and was on first-name basis with most of the administrators. He did a lot of volunteer work, and that helped. He also just had a commitment to public interest work that he nurtured throughout the years when it was more in style to hide away in library cubby hole and do trusts and estates flash cards.
I think that the law school recruitment process is an apt metaphor for any career-seeking. In law, as in any field, it's critical to assess yourself on a chart different than the ones that other people will use to evaluate you. Others will use a default template, roughly accurate, but one that misses much for the sake of convenience. You have the luxury of time - you have known yourself longer than anyone else has. Use that insider knowledge to map your course.
I was having dinner with a favorite person the other day. He's just started working at a big name firm, in their corporate division. We were talking about our law school's career services office. He echoed what I've heard from a lot of people, which is that they're very nice, but they didn't help him find a job. But hadn't he gotten his job through fall recruiting? Fall recruiting is the system of job interviewing sponsored by the law school that helps place students in summer jobs, and then hopefully full-time positions upon graduation. He shrugged and said, "That method didn't work for me."
Well, I was shocked. He'd always struck me as a blue chip guy - one that starts at the top and stays up there. This suggested that his GPA hadn't been in the top ten percent. Our law school, as a competitive second-tier school, aggressively helps those in the top ten percent secure prestigious clerkships and firm jobs, and I'd assumed he'd been one of them. It's not impossible, but unlikely, for someone outside the top ten, or at most the top twenty, to land such a desirable job.
Turned out that he had done his own work to secure the position that he felt he'd deserved. And no doubt, the law firm could do no better. Still, what separated him from others was perhaps not his resume, but his attitude. Also, his networking prowess. He knew everyone at the law school, and was on first-name basis with most of the administrators. He did a lot of volunteer work, and that helped. He also just had a commitment to public interest work that he nurtured throughout the years when it was more in style to hide away in library cubby hole and do trusts and estates flash cards.
I think that the law school recruitment process is an apt metaphor for any career-seeking. In law, as in any field, it's critical to assess yourself on a chart different than the ones that other people will use to evaluate you. Others will use a default template, roughly accurate, but one that misses much for the sake of convenience. You have the luxury of time - you have known yourself longer than anyone else has. Use that insider knowledge to map your course.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
happy birthday happy fall
"I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?" -- Sylvia Plath
Yesterday I woke up sulky. I wanted the world handed to me on a silver platter and, barring that, I swore to myself that I would stay in bed all day. "That'll show 'em!" I thought to myself.
Myra called me - and I picked up on the eighth ring and whispered, "hello?" with a rasp that made it clear I was enduring a Herculean marathon of inactivity. She let me go, knowing that I was "taking a personal day."
Yet it was Basima's birthday. Basima is a girl with a lot of friends, from whom she demands the lightest form of fealty - I will arrange a party and you will come. Her happiness is built on seeing those she loves surrounding her. I am less gracious in my needs and sometimes I avoid her for this reason. Yet I had confirmed with her earlier this week, via gchat. And since I knew that she would expect nothing from me but my presence, and that in fact this presence would even bring her joy, I decided to go, despite lingering disbelief that that it should be so.
Basima seemed pleased that I showed my face, and she looked svelte and sexy, like always, in a tiny black dress. My friend Katie was also there, visiting from London, and she made throwaway witty comments at the bar. She wore a flowing crepe dress adorned with graphic sparkling appliques from her breast to her shoulder, from a secondhand shop in Antwerp.
I trudged home over the Williamsburg Bridge at half past eleven. A man in a red cap biked by at forty miles an hour yelling "Watch out!" too late and I jumped, yelling at his fast-receding back, "No, YOU watch out!" I came up on my street, filled with drunk people living like you can only do at a midnight in September in a neighborhood full of young people. And I was happy.
Yesterday I woke up sulky. I wanted the world handed to me on a silver platter and, barring that, I swore to myself that I would stay in bed all day. "That'll show 'em!" I thought to myself.
Myra called me - and I picked up on the eighth ring and whispered, "hello?" with a rasp that made it clear I was enduring a Herculean marathon of inactivity. She let me go, knowing that I was "taking a personal day."
Yet it was Basima's birthday. Basima is a girl with a lot of friends, from whom she demands the lightest form of fealty - I will arrange a party and you will come. Her happiness is built on seeing those she loves surrounding her. I am less gracious in my needs and sometimes I avoid her for this reason. Yet I had confirmed with her earlier this week, via gchat. And since I knew that she would expect nothing from me but my presence, and that in fact this presence would even bring her joy, I decided to go, despite lingering disbelief that that it should be so.
Basima seemed pleased that I showed my face, and she looked svelte and sexy, like always, in a tiny black dress. My friend Katie was also there, visiting from London, and she made throwaway witty comments at the bar. She wore a flowing crepe dress adorned with graphic sparkling appliques from her breast to her shoulder, from a secondhand shop in Antwerp.
I trudged home over the Williamsburg Bridge at half past eleven. A man in a red cap biked by at forty miles an hour yelling "Watch out!" too late and I jumped, yelling at his fast-receding back, "No, YOU watch out!" I came up on my street, filled with drunk people living like you can only do at a midnight in September in a neighborhood full of young people. And I was happy.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane!
Sometimes I hate talking to my sister. It's eerie, having a conversation with a person who is so like you, yet so clearly not, because you wish her death. Not her death, but her existence in another dimension of time and space. Funny, I feel that my sister may have a similar feeling, because she's moved to LA and refuses to return.
For much of my life, my sister has been louder than me. Except in later years, when over rice and kimchi I would be the only one to bother debating the erroneous sociological fact of the day with my dad, my sister was the voice of our childhood, shrieking at will, talking to strangers, mugging for the video camera. I was the weird slouching figure on the corner of the couch who alternated pulling at her split ends and thumbing through a book she was pretending to read in order to hide her seething jealousy at not being the center of attention. She always made me look dark and anti-social, which I was.
With her creepy inability to lie, her penchant for screaming with laughter at things that were objectively not funny, her desire to be helpful and thoughtful one minute, but then hit me in the face in the next, all these were reasons why I did not like her when I was nine and she was five.
She's not so different now, come to think of it. Which brings me back to the beginning of this story. What brought this on? I'm not going to tell you. Except that it started with her complimenting me. Ack, she's trying to kill me!
For much of my life, my sister has been louder than me. Except in later years, when over rice and kimchi I would be the only one to bother debating the erroneous sociological fact of the day with my dad, my sister was the voice of our childhood, shrieking at will, talking to strangers, mugging for the video camera. I was the weird slouching figure on the corner of the couch who alternated pulling at her split ends and thumbing through a book she was pretending to read in order to hide her seething jealousy at not being the center of attention. She always made me look dark and anti-social, which I was.
With her creepy inability to lie, her penchant for screaming with laughter at things that were objectively not funny, her desire to be helpful and thoughtful one minute, but then hit me in the face in the next, all these were reasons why I did not like her when I was nine and she was five.
She's not so different now, come to think of it. Which brings me back to the beginning of this story. What brought this on? I'm not going to tell you. Except that it started with her complimenting me. Ack, she's trying to kill me!
weekend
I had an amazing weekend everyone. Just a sneak peek at Db's world tour:
In the shadow of the parking lot lamp is Charlie, the driver. He has a steel gray mullet and watches Nascar. He drives all night. (note: he's been replaced).
In the shadow of the parking lot lamp is Charlie, the driver. He has a steel gray mullet and watches Nascar. He drives all night. (note: he's been replaced).
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
hint #1
Culture is the activity that gives us a handhold in the long, dull quiet between triumphs. It shifts our focus away from the hard truth of a loss - it's a trick to keep us floating when we know that we're sinking. It carries us from high to high, by keeping us from killing ourselves during the lows.
You're trapped in a cave, alone and in the dark. You say your name to yourself again and again, to remind you of who you are until the rescue team finds you. That's culture.
You're trapped in a cave, alone and in the dark. You say your name to yourself again and again, to remind you of who you are until the rescue team finds you. That's culture.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
le mariage
Myra rubs that spot on her finger where her ring would be, if she had one. Not that she wants one.
Myra was on the phone with her boyfriend's credit card company. Later, the customer service representative, patched in from somewhere in South Asia, asked her boyfriend if they should include his wife's contact information in his file. Daniel said, "She's not my wife. We just live together."
Aw, modern romance.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
bridge and struggle
When I'm on my bike going over the Williamsburg Bridge's punishing inclines, I never think that I'm not going to make it. I do often think, like today, that it SUCKS, and that I am very angry at the universe for making me suffer this way. Those are the moments when I'm likeliest to slow down, or swivel and fall. That's when I profit least from my complaints. At other times, I'm able to notice that anger, but also perceive the overriding desire to NOT STOP. Today, I was even able to observe a third thing: my wheels spinning over the the netted shadows of the suspension cables. Is that what it feels like to fly: to feel land-bound in your heart but to keep going?
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