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.
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