Happy 68th David

Julie San Juan and I met for drinks in Greenpoint tonight. I met Julie in Puerto Rico, when Brooklyn and J Way and I visited in May of 2014. San Juan was my step back into the United States; prior to this visit, I had lived comfortably in the Yucatan for some time. J Way met Julie, and introduced Brooklyn and I; we were unimpressed. Julie has a valley girl style with new acquaintances, and we're judgmental. We were to be proven wrong, a fact that J Way has brought to my attention several times since. J Way is a delight, a savant full of general naïveté, a real miss who isn't afraid to tap ones knuckles with the ruler when one has stepped out of line. She's become more and more fun as she's aged, and will occasionally make rather colorful comments with an eye to Brooklyn or I, which we adore, of course.

Julie has an uncommon energy and wonderful zest for life. She's a skilled photographer, and entirely a product of good breeding. Though after a few drinks in Greenpoint one might hear her remark: "For some reason Asian people love my photos." Tonight ended with pierogi and borscht; Julie San Juan departs for San Juan tomorrow, and there she will likely be seduced by a mature boriqua of certain standing.

Sidenote: Bryncess and her man were up all night on coke in an attempt to summon Satan. They wound up taking the train to Rockaway Beach around six in the morning and swam in the Atlantic Ocean. It's January. Bryncess is rapidly becoming one of my more exciting friends. Meanwhile, la Chilean has arrived in Thailand, Kim is in the Dominican Republic, and I am in New York, where it is approximately 11 degrees.

The last time I saw Julie San Juan was just a few nights before la Chilena had the furry party. We met for drinks in Grandmother's living room, or Night of Joy, a few blocks from the BQE in $skid row. I rode into Brooklyn on an F train full of unusually attractive passengers, and I'd had time to have a nice look-see, as I'd boarded at 2nd Ave, where that V train to Queens was wont to lurk. We caught up, as people do, and shared tales of life on the edge of many things--we're both almost happy, almost in love, almost famous, and too painfully alive. People say New York has changed, New York has lost its soul, New York is gone. And they're right: New York has changed, because the world has changed. Each day we see more and more the twentieth century fading into the past--after all, we're fifteen years into the twenty-first--and there isn't a thing to be done about it. We mourn it, we tug at our hair and beat our breast, but it fades only further away. In the last century there was witnessed an explosion of culture for the ages, especially in music, and a birth of an urban underclass identity that proved polyvocal, multiethnic, and highly destabilizing and revolutionary.

Our culture--and here I return to New York, for New York is the United States in miniature and to an extent the world--has diminished. The world is simply a far less interesting place than it once was--it is smaller, more homogenous, populated less and less with the idiosyncratic and the useless, the beautiful and the damned. Cities are less the swampy mire of crime, vice, and creation which they once were. And this is the case with New York.

However, rest assured, so long as people like Julie and I are around, there will be a struggle to achieve something beautiful, something worth communicating even in the most rudimentary language or form, which this blog aspires to be. We try, we people born just several years too late, we struggle. I do, Julie does.

I'll record what Julie reports from Puerto Rico.

For now:

I'm delighted and grateful to be alive.

I can hardly wait to see the Mariinsky perform Swan Lake at BAM. I had dinner with a Justice (one of the women) on Monday, who described her experience of the Mariinsky as "absolutely one of the highlights of [her] life."

Now, to the point of this entry: Happy 68th, Bowie!

When I think of the gods of popular music, I think of David Bowie. There are others, of course, but Bowie has enjoyed remarkable longevity and remains relevant at 68. He is one of only two or three people I would like to meet whom I haven't yet.

I may, one day, list representative tracks from each of Bowie's albums, along with additional songs I consider to be related, to share similar motifs, to have influenced Bowie (e.g., for the self-titled 1967 debut, we could try Happy Land, and then hear and see the inimitable Marlene Dietrich, who beyond any doubt had a fantastic influence on Bowie). That's rather an enormous undertaking, however, so tonight I'll restrict myself to a few favorites:

Memory of a free festival

Teenage Wildlife

Station to Station

Sound and Vision (Low)

Starman

I'd Rather Be High

Golden Years on Soul Train

and

Heroes


Adieu,

Marcel