It's Raining in New York

On occasion I ingest extreme amounts of caffeine, typically when under duress or financial strain--i.e., more and more often these days. Since I'm always writing, I amuse myself in reading what I've written in this machine-monster-mode. I imagine it like this, of course:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls. 

Marinetti, 1909 (of course)

Rather than a rage in the belly of rogue locomotives (what an image), I produce a quiet fury of carefully constrained text devoid of much inspiration. It is the absolute inverse of my experience of writing after having had a few drinks (self-aggrandizing, sentimental, offensively saccharine, incoherent), but lacks the inchoate, free beauty I've been struggling to achieve. 

For months, I've been at a loss, when it comes to what I'm writing. A week ago an older friend handed me a copy of Patrick Modiano (in translation). I continue to believe (and have believed for some time) that the greatest insights regarding one's chosen medium are to be had in other mediums (or modes) of art. If you write, consider music, painting, and especially sculpture, dance, and photography. Photography explains art: photographers are a conduit for image, and show us a particular perspective, a particular way of looking at something, of seeing someone or some place. This is what medium is to art: a space in which to fix a particular way of seeing.

Modiano, in afterimage (Chien de printemps in French, Bitch of a Spring/Goddamned Spring, which I prefer), takes us on an iconic walk through Paris: we visit Place de la Concorde, we walk into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, we stroll down the main boulevards, and in the company of a photographer (Jansen) and a teenager (unnamed). The photographer, in his youth adopted by Robert Capa (of all people), has now adopted our teenage narrator. I'll quote the passage:

A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he'd told me you had to "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away."

This passage has been of incredible use, as I attempt to render the nearly indescribably beauty of a ride across the Manhattan Bridge, on the Q, hundreds of feet above the East River, the setting sun illuminating the harbor, the sky, the skyscrapers, and flickering lightly off cars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge: approach things gently and quietly or they pull away. Thank you, obscure relation! Thank you for providing me with the exact chisel I required to cut the nose, the eyes, the face, but might never have found on my own. Modiano's writing reminds me of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially L'Eclisse, The Passenger, and my favorite, L'Avventura. They're slow in pace--dull, almost--sumptuous, textured, layered, and highlight the glory and potential of the image. In L'Aventura, Monica Vitti beauty devastates. While we're on the subject, I want to quickly note a Godard that never fails to elate or animate (the trailer, that is, not the film): Vivre sa vie.

Of course, the other half of lovely writing is clever word-smithing, or sheer delight in the amusement and color and texture of language--as a writer one must exult in language. Take Miss Clack, for example, from Wilkie Collins' Moonstone, which, as you know, I finished just the other day:

I describe this aimless flitting about from one place of residence to another--this insatiate restlessness of body and appalling stagnation of soul--merely with the view to arriving at results. 

Miss Clack will be important to this journal as I will use her name for the name of a troublesome aunt, sister of my mother, who had twins at fifty-two via artificial insemination. We're estranged. She is an utter pill, and accused my mother--her older sister, and remember, this Clack had twins at fifty-two--of attempting to breastfeed the children. This Clack is a doctor. Can you imagine? I talked to a producer recently and mentioned I'm accustomed to managing "big" personalities--"diplomatic, Marcel, unlike you," he said--ah, but it begins at home! Yes, one musn't neglect the important skills one has picked up at home.

When one can appropriately position "insatiate" in a sentence, can help the word to expose itself as it must--one has succeeded as a writer. This emerald of a sentence, tucked into the first third of the Moonstone, is the other half of "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away," when it comes to writing. The inability of most--if not all--contemporary writers to do this characterizes the deplorable state of modern fiction. In English, contemporary writers seem to have lost the ability to do either, and are equally incapable of exulting and softly approaching shade, place, or person. An embarrassing and ignominious predicament!

It's raining in New York. I haven't yet found a ticket to the Mariinsky at BAM--howl, howl, howl, howl! O I'll crack heaven wide open with my laments!

I wish it might snow rather than this endless grey rain.




   

    

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.