Thursday, October 30, 2014
Celery, Paris, Addie, Woody, 1Oak
Improved post titles await. For now, a series of semi-disconnected subject-thoughts. Charlus returned from Paris about a week ago and it's been incredibly difficult and psychologically/emotionally devastating. I've been in the process of moving for the past two months but now I really must decamp. Charlus seems out to destroy my spirit--he's a man of ups-and-downs, and will admit himself to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which alarms me. He's an older gay man, had a partner years ago but things fell apart and they parted ways, and I think he's terribly lonely. He's wealthy, successful, and an aesthete--he went to Yale--but seems unable to find a new companion. I believe this may be due to horrible rage and resentment that reveals itself periodically, without warning, razor-tongue my mother calls it. I've been living in his apartment temporarily while I find my feet in the city, and he hasn't been at all supportive or understanding, which has caused me only sorrow. He's my mother's favorite brother, and she has four from which to choose. We were once thick as thieves, co-conspirators, Charlus and I, but he's put out with the fact that I'm interested in women. Charlus reaches heights of righteous indignation, and seems to resent anything and everything at some point, as life and people and family and friends continue to disappoint his standards.
So, I must move. I've sought out Harlem and Chinatown walkups, made sycophant with wealthy friends and acquaintances who perhaps might not mind a semi-permanent guest, and scoured Craigslist for intriguing roommate-wanted ads in the city, all to no avail. So: Hello, Brooklyn! Actually, I spend a significant amount of time in Brooklyn, and though I take an aesthetic pleasure in mincing along with the Blue Jasmine-esque attitudes of the elite toward the borough ("Imagine! I couldn't afford my apartment in Brooklyn."), I tend to miss the trees, the quiet streets, the less homogenous population, when I return to my current neighborhood in the city. When I walk around Chelsea these days and see a particularly yuppie/bougie/posh posse I tend to make an obnoxious and audible comment: "these white neighborhoods sure smell like piss" or "really grotty this area" or "imagine, people live here!" But my perverse tendencies extend far beyond Chelsea: I'm wont to point out to friends who live on the Lower East Side or in Alphabet City the following: if she/he had an immigrant ancestor who came through Ellis Island and spent some time in New York at the turn of the century, these were the neighborhoods this ancestor struggled to escape. Imagine how this ancestor would turn over in the grave should he or she ever know that the beautiful granddaughter or grandson had--out of choice--moved back to the terrible tenements, forking over a substantial sum each month for the privilege. Chelsea's pedigree might be somewhat superior, the home of James Stewart in Rear Window after all, and though I do love the east-west blocks between Ninth and Seventh, I detest Eighth, and can't abide the bridge and tunnel fiasco that's developed in Gansevoort. I went to 1Oak for the first time in a few months, just horrid. There was an atrocious has been C-lister in attendance, and I, being thoroughly a little fuck, couldn't resist loudly remarking to the Portuguese Kate Moss look alike to my left what a drag it is to run into people like [C-lister]...can't one go anywhere? Well, one could go to Brooklyn. Or Queens. Or the Bronx, to which I've made several food-related pilgrimages of late, for Ghanaian and Oaxacan cuisine, both excellent. But it's to Brooklyn I go, and this Sunday.
Where to go for a night out these days is a tough subject, one I'll tackle at some point. The short answer is I am without a favorite--I did the club kid thing when I was young(er) and capable of it and when the area still had a feeling of avant garde-ness, the LES/Chinatown scene that's developed in recent years but which is too cramped, too sweaty, too contrived, too full of euro-trash (ie Le Baron). I don't like $Skid Row and Bushwhack is just so far, so contrived...where on earth to go? I haven't had a great night out venue-wise since The Jane became trendy. What a loss. I simply no longer know where to go out, and I'm not wild about speakeasies. I believe New York has hit a nightlife nadir.
Charlus has talked for as long as I can remember, like Kate, of Brooklyn as the origin of grime, a savage and frightful farrago of disaster and blight (here's to you, Vladimir). I rather relish that sort of thing, because in speech it evokes a New York for which I've inherited a nostalgia, the New York of the nasty old Canarsie Line, the street crime, the brothels, the depravity, the disuse, the neglect, the potential. That potential is in the midst of being realized, and I wonder where the vision became crooked. Charlus in Paris discovered that many upmarket, contemporary, and otherwise of the moment lounges, bars, and nightclubs, have actual Brooklyn "Nights", and that it isn't uncommon to refer to this or that as being très Brooklyn. I immediately thought of Odette, and the shocking tendency of le Faubourg to pepper conversation with bits of vernacular English.
The other night I went to Duck Duck Goose on Montrose. Beforehand I stopped by my favorite Chinatown dumpling hovel and walked to the J at Essex. Hungry again, but wanting to purify myself, I found a Korean grocery near the Broadway J where I stepped off the train in Bushwick and picked up some carrot-orange juice and two bunches of celery, which I pronounce salary. It was once unintentional but has become an affectation. I brought the salary to Duck Duck Goose and began to eat it, gesticulate with it, point, toss, share etc., and received a lot of attention. My friend Lindsay, whose birthday party I attended in the last edition of this diary, was there when I arrived, and, at once assessing the situation, with jerky violence I reached into my inside coat pocket, detached a stalk and began to munch on it, a la Bugs Bunny. Lindsay, eyes-wide: "You are the most eccentric person I know." This was a real compliment--she knows everyone. I went on to tell a number of bar-friend-strangers that the two new things in Brooklyn were: (1) bringing fresh vegetables to the bar; and (2) mispronouncing the names of vegetables (salary, arigula, tranups, skosh, you get the point). Eighteen hip little creatures noted with their eyes this occurrence, to write about later on their hip little blogs. I wish these people could make their own fun. I suppose it's hard for some. If salary shows up at a Brooklyn bar, well, you saw it here first. We went to Brooklyn Bowl later on for a CMJ party, what a cemetery.
I almost moved into a room in Brooklyn Heights, a sublet. One of the potential roommates has been WA's personal assistant and the other reads Kafka's letters and George Bataille. They both like film. Unfortunately I didn't get the room, though it looks as if I'll see them socially.
I'm reading Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, increasingly entertaining though I feel again it is impossible to translate Russian. Tonight I found a book I've been searching for since 2008: The Fruit Palace: An Odyssey Through Colombia's Cocaine Underworld by Charles Nicholl. Found at The Strand, which would have a book one has been searching for for five years. I wonder if they have a nice edition of Ibn Battutah?
Cash told me several years ago I needed to read Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, and I searched in every used bookstore I visited (San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, DC; I once travelled), but each time left without finding a copy (though I did locate a good many other books). Well at the NYPL I found a copy and have finished the play. Cash told me that Iceman would remind me of our friends back where we come from. It's a depressing play about career alcoholics slowly inching towards death in a last-chance saloon in the West Village when the West Village was a filthy numbered ward. The play does not remind me of our friends.
The Knicks lost to the Bulls, but defeated the Bron-returned Cavs. What does that mean for the L? I don't know, but my loyalties are elsewhere. I'm in the no-longer-a-fan stage with a small market team I won't reveal because I'm keeping this anonymous. A high school classmate of mine who, due to religious conviction, remained a virgin until after college, has begun a career with high public visibility. This person recently slept with most of the roster of said NBA franchise. Mad world.
I can't decide whether or not to go out for Halloween tomorrow. Will I regret it? A significant part of me wants to visit Aire, lounge in the baths, and have an early night in.
I haven't been to an unusual or fascinating event of late, but in the next few days I'll do the Out to See in the Seaport, Phong Bui in Chelsea, Birdman (the Gone Girl of late October it seems), Angélique Kidjo, some other shit probs totes. In a few weeks I'll visit my great friend Brooklyn Zoo in DC.
I'm new to this, so future entries will have some tangible organization and will appear more frequently. Bye for now.
So, I must move. I've sought out Harlem and Chinatown walkups, made sycophant with wealthy friends and acquaintances who perhaps might not mind a semi-permanent guest, and scoured Craigslist for intriguing roommate-wanted ads in the city, all to no avail. So: Hello, Brooklyn! Actually, I spend a significant amount of time in Brooklyn, and though I take an aesthetic pleasure in mincing along with the Blue Jasmine-esque attitudes of the elite toward the borough ("Imagine! I couldn't afford my apartment in Brooklyn."), I tend to miss the trees, the quiet streets, the less homogenous population, when I return to my current neighborhood in the city. When I walk around Chelsea these days and see a particularly yuppie/bougie/posh posse I tend to make an obnoxious and audible comment: "these white neighborhoods sure smell like piss" or "really grotty this area" or "imagine, people live here!" But my perverse tendencies extend far beyond Chelsea: I'm wont to point out to friends who live on the Lower East Side or in Alphabet City the following: if she/he had an immigrant ancestor who came through Ellis Island and spent some time in New York at the turn of the century, these were the neighborhoods this ancestor struggled to escape. Imagine how this ancestor would turn over in the grave should he or she ever know that the beautiful granddaughter or grandson had--out of choice--moved back to the terrible tenements, forking over a substantial sum each month for the privilege. Chelsea's pedigree might be somewhat superior, the home of James Stewart in Rear Window after all, and though I do love the east-west blocks between Ninth and Seventh, I detest Eighth, and can't abide the bridge and tunnel fiasco that's developed in Gansevoort. I went to 1Oak for the first time in a few months, just horrid. There was an atrocious has been C-lister in attendance, and I, being thoroughly a little fuck, couldn't resist loudly remarking to the Portuguese Kate Moss look alike to my left what a drag it is to run into people like [C-lister]...can't one go anywhere? Well, one could go to Brooklyn. Or Queens. Or the Bronx, to which I've made several food-related pilgrimages of late, for Ghanaian and Oaxacan cuisine, both excellent. But it's to Brooklyn I go, and this Sunday.
Where to go for a night out these days is a tough subject, one I'll tackle at some point. The short answer is I am without a favorite--I did the club kid thing when I was young(er) and capable of it and when the area still had a feeling of avant garde-ness, the LES/Chinatown scene that's developed in recent years but which is too cramped, too sweaty, too contrived, too full of euro-trash (ie Le Baron). I don't like $Skid Row and Bushwhack is just so far, so contrived...where on earth to go? I haven't had a great night out venue-wise since The Jane became trendy. What a loss. I simply no longer know where to go out, and I'm not wild about speakeasies. I believe New York has hit a nightlife nadir.
Charlus has talked for as long as I can remember, like Kate, of Brooklyn as the origin of grime, a savage and frightful farrago of disaster and blight (here's to you, Vladimir). I rather relish that sort of thing, because in speech it evokes a New York for which I've inherited a nostalgia, the New York of the nasty old Canarsie Line, the street crime, the brothels, the depravity, the disuse, the neglect, the potential. That potential is in the midst of being realized, and I wonder where the vision became crooked. Charlus in Paris discovered that many upmarket, contemporary, and otherwise of the moment lounges, bars, and nightclubs, have actual Brooklyn "Nights", and that it isn't uncommon to refer to this or that as being très Brooklyn. I immediately thought of Odette, and the shocking tendency of le Faubourg to pepper conversation with bits of vernacular English.
The other night I went to Duck Duck Goose on Montrose. Beforehand I stopped by my favorite Chinatown dumpling hovel and walked to the J at Essex. Hungry again, but wanting to purify myself, I found a Korean grocery near the Broadway J where I stepped off the train in Bushwick and picked up some carrot-orange juice and two bunches of celery, which I pronounce salary. It was once unintentional but has become an affectation. I brought the salary to Duck Duck Goose and began to eat it, gesticulate with it, point, toss, share etc., and received a lot of attention. My friend Lindsay, whose birthday party I attended in the last edition of this diary, was there when I arrived, and, at once assessing the situation, with jerky violence I reached into my inside coat pocket, detached a stalk and began to munch on it, a la Bugs Bunny. Lindsay, eyes-wide: "You are the most eccentric person I know." This was a real compliment--she knows everyone. I went on to tell a number of bar-friend-strangers that the two new things in Brooklyn were: (1) bringing fresh vegetables to the bar; and (2) mispronouncing the names of vegetables (salary, arigula, tranups, skosh, you get the point). Eighteen hip little creatures noted with their eyes this occurrence, to write about later on their hip little blogs. I wish these people could make their own fun. I suppose it's hard for some. If salary shows up at a Brooklyn bar, well, you saw it here first. We went to Brooklyn Bowl later on for a CMJ party, what a cemetery.
I almost moved into a room in Brooklyn Heights, a sublet. One of the potential roommates has been WA's personal assistant and the other reads Kafka's letters and George Bataille. They both like film. Unfortunately I didn't get the room, though it looks as if I'll see them socially.
I'm reading Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, increasingly entertaining though I feel again it is impossible to translate Russian. Tonight I found a book I've been searching for since 2008: The Fruit Palace: An Odyssey Through Colombia's Cocaine Underworld by Charles Nicholl. Found at The Strand, which would have a book one has been searching for for five years. I wonder if they have a nice edition of Ibn Battutah?
Cash told me several years ago I needed to read Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, and I searched in every used bookstore I visited (San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, DC; I once travelled), but each time left without finding a copy (though I did locate a good many other books). Well at the NYPL I found a copy and have finished the play. Cash told me that Iceman would remind me of our friends back where we come from. It's a depressing play about career alcoholics slowly inching towards death in a last-chance saloon in the West Village when the West Village was a filthy numbered ward. The play does not remind me of our friends.
The Knicks lost to the Bulls, but defeated the Bron-returned Cavs. What does that mean for the L? I don't know, but my loyalties are elsewhere. I'm in the no-longer-a-fan stage with a small market team I won't reveal because I'm keeping this anonymous. A high school classmate of mine who, due to religious conviction, remained a virgin until after college, has begun a career with high public visibility. This person recently slept with most of the roster of said NBA franchise. Mad world.
I can't decide whether or not to go out for Halloween tomorrow. Will I regret it? A significant part of me wants to visit Aire, lounge in the baths, and have an early night in.
I haven't been to an unusual or fascinating event of late, but in the next few days I'll do the Out to See in the Seaport, Phong Bui in Chelsea, Birdman (the Gone Girl of late October it seems), Angélique Kidjo, some other shit probs totes. In a few weeks I'll visit my great friend Brooklyn Zoo in DC.
I'm new to this, so future entries will have some tangible organization and will appear more frequently. Bye for now.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Monday Ramble
 |
| Jefferson Market |
 |
| El Barto, SBTRKT, and No More Police Murder!, Montrose, Bushwick |
 |
| The Cloisters, One |
 |
| The Cloisters, Two |
 |
| I would like to meet Leviticus |
 |
| Crown Heights |
Phèdre, LA Dance, and Lindsay's Birthday
Lindsay had a birthday this weekend. I hadn't seen her since I've been back in New York and the last time I went to a party at her apartment was the first time I dropped acid. On that occasion, I blurted out immediately what was up when Cash, China, and I walked in the door that fateful November eve but there were so many people it didn't matter, and Lindsay was really drunk as usual and with wide-eyed delight mumbled that we would be safe here and she understood completely, but did she really? What if I had bitten someone? What then?
Lindsay is an old fashioned good time girl with rich white girl savvy and impudence to match. She sleeps around, she dresses well, she knows about whats hip and whats happening in New York (although she didn't know about happn until recently--an unusual slip). She survived cancer as a young child so her parents spoil her rotten and in many ways is the quintessential hipster; awhile ago she was "into" typography and bought an "N" for twenty or thirty dollars at a $Skid Row "vintage" outfit (I call "Williamsburg" $Skid Row or occasionally Skid$ Row). I find it difficult to find fault with Lindsay's parents: if you had the ability to spoil your miracle child, wouldn't you? Lindsay and I attended the same Montessori elementary, and I remember her as a lovable, big-hearted ugly duckling with a tendency to give herself over to mirth so entirely that she would accidentally urinate, like an excitable little pup. In those years, she idolized/loathed Phoebe, of Friends. She's beautiful now, and has been since high school, but has still retained a unique breathy, throaty lisp. After high school, Lindsay attended a well-known private college in Los Angeles, and when I visited LA during those years she turned my brother on to The Weeknd, we went to Heroes and Villains, etc. In New York she's hit a bad phase, and has become particular to the kind of startup kid scene that's suffocated San Francisco.
Lucky for me this past Saturday I began the night at Chery'ls in Prospect Heights with my cousin, her husband, and a perfectly cooked blackened fish + mac and cheese. For the second time they treated me and it's almost embarrassing, I'm not destitute (yet), so I bought them ice cream afterward at the tasty place a few doors down that's opened shops in Haiti and Rwanda too, which is cool, but must have a distinct appeal to a certain variety of unpleasant, unthinking caucasian. After ice cream I took a cab to my friend Dean's in Bed Stuy. Dean lives with two very, very talented twenty-year-olds who could easily sing on Broadway--I know what I'm talking about and don't make such a statement lightly--and another fellow with hair all over his face who has no discernible positive attributes. The problem is the talented two are lazy, Juilliard dropouts both, and the girl has taken up, of all things, cosmetology school. Why move from Florida to New York for cosmetology school? That's very similar to this idiot I know from college who joined a sorority and allowed her looks to fade, a Fantine with circumstances that invite neither compassion nor empathy, who lives in the East Village I believe and is currently enrolled in nursing school at NYU. Either her parents possess vast wealth (unlikely) or she or they have taken on terrible, terrible debt. So with this in mind I told Dean's roommate she could sing, really sing, because she can, and hopefully she felt a little bit of shame about her slothfulness and will get it together and start auditioning again.
Back to the birthday party. Lindsay started a new job recently at a fancy tech company and her circle of friends has changed. I've known her since grade school so I'm used to her tricks and idosyncracies and appreciate them, but I didn't expect her to ever surround herself with such a trite group of abstract nonpeople. I know she's trying to do a certain kind of online writing and has become successful enough, but the startup crowd really isn't worth associating with unless they have drug problems or serious family issues. They have nothing to talk about worth listening to. It was so much of a young professional party I almost felt like I should vomit on someone or network, or do something shocking and terrible to remind everyone that we're all going to die. Or something, anything unexpected. It's sad how rarely the unexpected occurs in contemporary culture. These kind of people have destroyed San Francisco.
Lindsay still lives in the middle of Skid Row right by the BQE so there was nothing to do nearby. Camille was there. Camille is aspirational, a woman with perfect bone structure, unusual, remarkable hair, and a dark, lurid family. Her mother has taught her how to make people do things for her, and this is a notable and negative quality of Camille. Her put-on professionality is unwelcome and she is capable of severity and malevolence. Camille and I nearly became involved, in college. I berated Camille for forgetting my birthday, and though she equivocated for a long while before finally admitting it, she eventually told me she had purposefully neglected to call me on my birthday, out of spite, because China had told her we all went out to the Hamptons and specifically excluded her. What the fuck? First of all we didn't go, and second of all, how bizarre and I'll have to scold China because she really shouldn't start trouble for no reason. And Camille brought the brat who ordered drinks for herself and all of her friends on my tab that night the ambulance came for China, and she still won't admit what she did or properly apologize, which is all I want from her, the brat. I am astounded at the adult children of yuppie social climbers who haven't been taught proper decorum or social graces, and believe they're just so infinitely clever, amusing, and delightful, and further, that everyone can see it. I want to chastise her parents! It's also sad, because life is rough and they'll have to learn that someday. However: there but for the grace of god go I...
I saw the LA Dance Company at BAM with a dancer friend/lover Jackie last Friday. I've been very interested in dance since I heard this interview (Bill T. Jones, inspirational, and I don't use that word at all frivolously) and in an oblique way for several years, but other than performances of the Nutcracker I have only occasionally had the opportunity to see ballet or dance en vivo. I don't know how to talk or write about dance, but I believe it is a medium similar to sculpture or painting which can illuminate different aspects of the writing process/the form and aesthetics of language that are difficult to glimpse in words. Jackie explained much about texture, phrasing, style, familiar words in novel guise. The first piece was bland, jejune: a dull postmodern catalog of sexual innuendo with grating, repetitive music and atrocious staging. The second, Murder Ballades, choreographed by Justin Peck, was exhilarating and fascinating and beautiful and almost brought me to tears which sounds ridiculous and pretentious but is honestly how I felt. In the program the composer Bryce Dessner talked about the piece as an exploration of violence in America and Sandy Hook and I saw it, the unsettling and brutal subtext amidst the fluid movement. There were hints of West Side Story and it was just beautiful and left me feeling ready to write, which I planned to do as soon as I got back to the apartment but didn't. The third piece I felt nothing for, but found the score repetitive and distracting, though Jackie loved it and said it made her feel like she was recollecting or reliving a beautiful memory, with time to think into the memory and remember a little more and a little more and a little more--that's how the repetitiveness of the music was, for her. To me it wasn't, but it also wasn't Kantian pure art so I suppose we can agree to disagree, this time. We did agree however that Randy Castillo was one of the more incredible dancers we had ever seen, which isn't saying much for me, but is a big deal coming from Jackie.
I found a copy of Phaedra in translation at the NYPL and mean to begin again on the murder-suey screenplay. Racine is pure language and pure beauty and I wish more people read and talked about the greatest tragedian since Shakespeare. I'll leave you with this, from Racine's Preface, which captures to an extent how I imagine my own Phaedra, life's unhappiness standing in for the Gods in 2014:
In fact, Phaedra is neither entirely guilty nor entirely innocent: she finds herself, by her destiny and by the anger of the Gods, engaged in an illicit passion of which she is the first to feel horrified. She tries with all her might to conquer it, she prefers to die rather than to declare it to anyone; and, when at last she is driven to reveal it, she speaks of it with a shame which makes only too clear that her crime is rather a punishment inflicted on her by the Gods than an impulse of her own will.
Lindsay is an old fashioned good time girl with rich white girl savvy and impudence to match. She sleeps around, she dresses well, she knows about whats hip and whats happening in New York (although she didn't know about happn until recently--an unusual slip). She survived cancer as a young child so her parents spoil her rotten and in many ways is the quintessential hipster; awhile ago she was "into" typography and bought an "N" for twenty or thirty dollars at a $Skid Row "vintage" outfit (I call "Williamsburg" $Skid Row or occasionally Skid$ Row). I find it difficult to find fault with Lindsay's parents: if you had the ability to spoil your miracle child, wouldn't you? Lindsay and I attended the same Montessori elementary, and I remember her as a lovable, big-hearted ugly duckling with a tendency to give herself over to mirth so entirely that she would accidentally urinate, like an excitable little pup. In those years, she idolized/loathed Phoebe, of Friends. She's beautiful now, and has been since high school, but has still retained a unique breathy, throaty lisp. After high school, Lindsay attended a well-known private college in Los Angeles, and when I visited LA during those years she turned my brother on to The Weeknd, we went to Heroes and Villains, etc. In New York she's hit a bad phase, and has become particular to the kind of startup kid scene that's suffocated San Francisco.
Lucky for me this past Saturday I began the night at Chery'ls in Prospect Heights with my cousin, her husband, and a perfectly cooked blackened fish + mac and cheese. For the second time they treated me and it's almost embarrassing, I'm not destitute (yet), so I bought them ice cream afterward at the tasty place a few doors down that's opened shops in Haiti and Rwanda too, which is cool, but must have a distinct appeal to a certain variety of unpleasant, unthinking caucasian. After ice cream I took a cab to my friend Dean's in Bed Stuy. Dean lives with two very, very talented twenty-year-olds who could easily sing on Broadway--I know what I'm talking about and don't make such a statement lightly--and another fellow with hair all over his face who has no discernible positive attributes. The problem is the talented two are lazy, Juilliard dropouts both, and the girl has taken up, of all things, cosmetology school. Why move from Florida to New York for cosmetology school? That's very similar to this idiot I know from college who joined a sorority and allowed her looks to fade, a Fantine with circumstances that invite neither compassion nor empathy, who lives in the East Village I believe and is currently enrolled in nursing school at NYU. Either her parents possess vast wealth (unlikely) or she or they have taken on terrible, terrible debt. So with this in mind I told Dean's roommate she could sing, really sing, because she can, and hopefully she felt a little bit of shame about her slothfulness and will get it together and start auditioning again.
Back to the birthday party. Lindsay started a new job recently at a fancy tech company and her circle of friends has changed. I've known her since grade school so I'm used to her tricks and idosyncracies and appreciate them, but I didn't expect her to ever surround herself with such a trite group of abstract nonpeople. I know she's trying to do a certain kind of online writing and has become successful enough, but the startup crowd really isn't worth associating with unless they have drug problems or serious family issues. They have nothing to talk about worth listening to. It was so much of a young professional party I almost felt like I should vomit on someone or network, or do something shocking and terrible to remind everyone that we're all going to die. Or something, anything unexpected. It's sad how rarely the unexpected occurs in contemporary culture. These kind of people have destroyed San Francisco.
Lindsay still lives in the middle of Skid Row right by the BQE so there was nothing to do nearby. Camille was there. Camille is aspirational, a woman with perfect bone structure, unusual, remarkable hair, and a dark, lurid family. Her mother has taught her how to make people do things for her, and this is a notable and negative quality of Camille. Her put-on professionality is unwelcome and she is capable of severity and malevolence. Camille and I nearly became involved, in college. I berated Camille for forgetting my birthday, and though she equivocated for a long while before finally admitting it, she eventually told me she had purposefully neglected to call me on my birthday, out of spite, because China had told her we all went out to the Hamptons and specifically excluded her. What the fuck? First of all we didn't go, and second of all, how bizarre and I'll have to scold China because she really shouldn't start trouble for no reason. And Camille brought the brat who ordered drinks for herself and all of her friends on my tab that night the ambulance came for China, and she still won't admit what she did or properly apologize, which is all I want from her, the brat. I am astounded at the adult children of yuppie social climbers who haven't been taught proper decorum or social graces, and believe they're just so infinitely clever, amusing, and delightful, and further, that everyone can see it. I want to chastise her parents! It's also sad, because life is rough and they'll have to learn that someday. However: there but for the grace of god go I...
I saw the LA Dance Company at BAM with a dancer friend/lover Jackie last Friday. I've been very interested in dance since I heard this interview (Bill T. Jones, inspirational, and I don't use that word at all frivolously) and in an oblique way for several years, but other than performances of the Nutcracker I have only occasionally had the opportunity to see ballet or dance en vivo. I don't know how to talk or write about dance, but I believe it is a medium similar to sculpture or painting which can illuminate different aspects of the writing process/the form and aesthetics of language that are difficult to glimpse in words. Jackie explained much about texture, phrasing, style, familiar words in novel guise. The first piece was bland, jejune: a dull postmodern catalog of sexual innuendo with grating, repetitive music and atrocious staging. The second, Murder Ballades, choreographed by Justin Peck, was exhilarating and fascinating and beautiful and almost brought me to tears which sounds ridiculous and pretentious but is honestly how I felt. In the program the composer Bryce Dessner talked about the piece as an exploration of violence in America and Sandy Hook and I saw it, the unsettling and brutal subtext amidst the fluid movement. There were hints of West Side Story and it was just beautiful and left me feeling ready to write, which I planned to do as soon as I got back to the apartment but didn't. The third piece I felt nothing for, but found the score repetitive and distracting, though Jackie loved it and said it made her feel like she was recollecting or reliving a beautiful memory, with time to think into the memory and remember a little more and a little more and a little more--that's how the repetitiveness of the music was, for her. To me it wasn't, but it also wasn't Kantian pure art so I suppose we can agree to disagree, this time. We did agree however that Randy Castillo was one of the more incredible dancers we had ever seen, which isn't saying much for me, but is a big deal coming from Jackie.
I found a copy of Phaedra in translation at the NYPL and mean to begin again on the murder-suey screenplay. Racine is pure language and pure beauty and I wish more people read and talked about the greatest tragedian since Shakespeare. I'll leave you with this, from Racine's Preface, which captures to an extent how I imagine my own Phaedra, life's unhappiness standing in for the Gods in 2014:
In fact, Phaedra is neither entirely guilty nor entirely innocent: she finds herself, by her destiny and by the anger of the Gods, engaged in an illicit passion of which she is the first to feel horrified. She tries with all her might to conquer it, she prefers to die rather than to declare it to anyone; and, when at last she is driven to reveal it, she speaks of it with a shame which makes only too clear that her crime is rather a punishment inflicted on her by the Gods than an impulse of her own will.
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