Writhing in Apathy

Visit me on LarissaArcher.com

2011-08-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

Should I feel guilty about this? Blogger's been swell to me for years, but I'm finding Wordpress to be a bit easier to organize my work on.... Poor blogspot. Well, check me out anyway at www.larissaarcher.com (and link to me there, too! ;)

Jonah Raskin writes about pot; I write about him for SF Weekly

2011-08-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

"If baseball is the opiate of the masses, why aren't opiates given to the masses?"

This was possibly the most cogent question posed to Jonah Raskin on Thursday at Canessa Gallery after he read from his new book, Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, published by High Times Books. The poser of the question was a young man who spoke with what was (in the context) calm, Harvardian breviloquence about how his family had no problem with his pot-smoking despite their own abstinence from the herb.

He had asked it as a follow-up to a somewhat less calm (and significantly less breviloquent) comment made by one of the older members of the audience, which was that the government -- the Man, what have you -- wants people to enjoy baseball because when you're at the game, enjoying yourself, you're not thinking of how little money you make. (He's apparently never pushed his debit card to its withdrawal limit trying to buy garlic fries and a beer at AT&T Park.) (continue reading)

Fan Ho's A Hong Kong Memoir in the SF Examiner

2011-07-21T16:24:00.001-07:00

Fan Ho’s “A Hong Kong Memoir,” on display thorough Sept. 3 at Modernbook Gallery, might seem at first look like the work of an Asian Eugene Atget — documental (bordering on sentimental) images of a city and a life that has since been subsumed by political, social and economic changes, leaving this quaint black-and-white version unrecognizable.

However, examination of certain photographs yields an unexpected playfulness of composition and medium, and an unabashed theatricality that make these images notable for more than their simple beauty and value as a visual record of an altered world. Read more at the San Francisco Examiner:

the cool/weird dance project "Sex, Love, Money" in SF Weekly

2011-07-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

The reasons for marrying are probably as numerous as the marriages out there. Why do so many people choose to (legally) bind themselves to other humans for life? It means putting up with another's weird habits and Republican in-laws and holding in your farts (maybe) and the nagging feeling that you've bought into some societal or historical paradigm designed to sublimate your entire gender. Why do this when you could live the life of blissfully unscrutinized single slobs, with only your own sociopathic habits to withstand? The Samantha Giron Dance Project examines such compulsions in the new piece Sex, Love, Money starting Friday at CounterPULSE. (continue reading)

Guerrero Gallery wins the opening party contest. for SF Weekly.

2011-07-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

I've talked before about how helpful it is for galleries to offer food and refreshments at openings, that a lot of art seems more beautiful, profound, socially conscious, and politically relevant to the well-fed and slightly tipsy. I lamented the shocking lack of cheese cubes as well as the austere Kruschev-era-style Perrier-rationing at 49 Geary, an unfortunate state of things on its own, but especially piteous in light of something I heard at the most recent first Thursday. A couple of stalwart art lovers who'd attended the monthly art walk since 2001 said that in former days of plenty, not only did the galleries there serve more generous amounts of water, champagne, and wine -- and in glasses made of glass rather than plastic - but in what now seems like an ecstasy of largesse, offered entire wheels of cheese. I was ready to despair that America's best days really were behind it, and that that behind, happily fattened on bries as fragrant as the feet of French angels, had waddled away forever. (continue reading)

S*** got real at Cabaret Bastille

2011-07-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

Last night’s Litquake event, Cabaret Bastille at Cellspace, was almost a smashing good time. I admit I am disproportionately delighted by parties with costume themes, and there were some glorious vintage and vintage-inspired get-ups. Yvonne Michelle Cordoba (and friend?) performed lovely quasi-burlesque/belly dance at intervals. The problem was that the entertainment emphasis of the night was on the readings (popular contemporary authors reading the works of the lost generation greats). Cellspace is cavernous, and its sound system inadequate for the readings to have been audible to anyone further than four rows back. Except for Alan Black’s bellowing from James Joyce, most of the readings simply didn’t register (through no fault of the readers themselves).

Since both poor acoustics and absinthe brain-soakage made hearing or comprehending the readings impossible, my friends and I went upstairs to watch “blue films,” modern pornography’s quaint ancestor. (continue reading)

My Review of the Irving Penn exhibit at Fraenkel Gallery in the San Francisco Examiner

2011-07-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

If today’s fashion world pushes a narrow concept of beauty — tall, thin, young, more thin — 70 years ago that concept was even narrower, as the tall, thin young girls in the magazines also had to be white.

For several decades and 150 Vogue magazine covers, Irving Penn worked within these confines to produce images iconic for their beauty and graphical power. Compositions uncluttered by props, and frugal with color (usually black and white) left the simplest and most arresting elements for the eye to focus on: the sweep of a ruched sleeve, the black grid of netting against white plains of skin, the neck as long as the waist, the waist as slender as the neck.
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner:

I compare First Thursday Openings at 49 Geary and the Jazz Heritage Center for SF Weekly

2011-07-11T18:21:00.001-07:00

Dear 49 Geary: I'm afraid you just got served.

First Thursdays at the prestigious address are always intellectually, perhaps even spiritually satisfying, not only for art's enriching effect on the mind and soul, but also because, as with any intellectual or spiritual pursuit, you must suffer physical discomforts, deprivations, and abstentions to achieve enlightenment. The elevators are invariably so busy you don't bother to take them from floor to floor in the five-story complex, and instead opt to squeeze past the corridor texters to schlep the cold stone stairs, regretting the high heels you thought looked so Helmut Newton. (continue reading)

My Preview of Litquake's Cabaret Bastille for SF Weekly

2011-07-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

Historic queer icon, art world catalyst, and Bay Area native Gertrude Stein is enjoying posthumous adulation for her role in modern art history. SFMOMA’s current exhibit showcases her (and her family’s) game-changing art collection in “The Steins Collect,” and the Contemporary Jewish Museum shows art and archival materials by and about the woman herself in “Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.” Litquake furthers the flattery through the aspect of the avant-garde thinker’s life that most appeals to any San Franciscan’s aesthete/hedonist mix: the salon. (continue reading)

I wrote a Preview for the Irving Penn exhibit at Fraenkel Gallery

2011-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

When we think of classic glamour — pencil skirt, gloves, and arched-eyebrow glamor, the kind that would have looked askance through perfectly lined eyes and French milliner’s netting at you and your holey shoes and yoga pants — the image we conjure probably has its roots in the work of legendary photographer Irving Penn. His austere brand of elegance dominated fashion photography throughout the 1940s and ’50s, when he shot more than 150 covers for Vogue. The less-celebrated period of his career, however, is one he pursued independent of the fashion juggernaut, and one that chafed against the narrow concept of beauty extolled in his day job. (continue reading)

I write about Purple Rain at the Castro for SF Weekly

2011-07-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Purple Rain and the Castro Theatre are a film/venue combination of a perfection that might be matched only by screening Milk at the Castro, or The Hippie Temptation at the Red Vic, or Das Boot at Opera Plaza. Naturally, Friday night's Purple Rain screening was an event to dress for, and in addition to the requisite spectacular drag ensembles, many wore their flashiest '80s regalia: distressed denim, winged eye shadow, pumps with lacy anklets, bangles, bangles, and more bangles. (continue reading)

My review of Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris at the de Young Museum for Art Practical

2011-06-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

I paint the way some people write their autobiography…. I have less and less time and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about the movement of my thought.

—Pablo Picasso

This collection of “Picasso’s Picassos” comprises 150 of the thousands of pieces amassed by the artist and bequeathed by his heirs to the French government to allay its vampiric inheritance tax. Arranged chronologically, the abridged but representative array of Picasso’s career reflects his belief that painting is “just another way of keeping a diary"; the works become a multifarious self-portrait spanning seventy years. The exhibit begins with what one would swear is a Van Gogh, not merely for its effulgent colors, rough, thick brushstrokes, and the almost material quality of the light beams emanating from the candle, but also for its morbid preoccupation. La Mort De Casagemas (1901) depicts Picasso’s friend and poet, dead from suicide over a failed love affair. Picasso was twenty years old and newly enthralled by the avant-garde movement thriving in his adopted city of Paris; he quickly mastered its various innovations before launching into his Blue Period. (continue reading)

My chat with author Wendy Lesser on Shostakovich, SF Weekly

2011-06-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

No foreign sky protected me,
No stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
Survivor of that time, that place.
-- Anna Akhmatova, 1961

How does an artist work in the context of an oppressive political regime? This question never loses relevance (since oppression never does either), and it's especially in focus now, with Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei's recent incarceration and release. In Soviet Russia under Stalin's terror, how an artist maneuvered the need for personal expression against the erratic demands of an unpredictably umbrageous state meant the difference between living a pampered (if precarious) life and slavery in the gulag or death. Anna Akhmatova was among the USSR's most celebrated poets, yet her work was repeatedly condemned and censored by Stalin. Dmitri Shostakovich, the era's most famous composer, survived -- not unscathed, and not without being forced to make some risible and humiliating concessions, declarations, and betrayals (his forced public condemnation of the work of Igor Stravinsky he described as "the worst moment of my life"). Author Wendy Lesser has written an account of the artist's personal, professional, and political life as revealed through his 15 quartets in Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets. (continue reading)

Write-up of the opening night party for "The Steins Collect" at SFMOMA in ArtSLant

2011-06-13T16:29:00.001-07:00

Any San Francisco gathering too big to fit inside a bathtub inevitably becomes a fancy dress ball. We love Events and we love to think of ourselves more as participants than as spectators. This held true for the opening night party at SFMOMA for "The Steins Collect."

The great number of people (and the fact that many of them were wearing fancy hats) made getting a good look at most of the art from the formidable, and painstakingly amassed, collection impossible; I enjoyed it the most when I gave up on the art and abandoned myself to bald-faced people-gawking.

(continue reading)

The Cries of San Francisco in SF Weekly

2011-06-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

You don't have to pick a special day on Market Street to be yelled at by strangers. And it's not that unusual to encounter those in odd outfits trying to sell you objects and services of ostentatious uselessness. But Saturday, the "Cries of San Francisco," put on by Southern Exposure, offered a witty and sometimes touching variant on an old theme based on The Cries of London, Francis Wheatley's seminal 18th-century oil paintings depicting London's street sellers.

(continue reading)

My review of Doug Rickard's "A New American Picture" in the San Francisco Examiner

2011-06-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Roofs face the elements without shingles and collapsing, store fronts stand shuttered and windows boarded over, and gingerbread crumbles off formerly elegant facades. In Doug Rickard’s “A New American Picture” on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, the sense of desertion pervading the images remains strangely untempered by the spotty presence of people. They amble past decrepit houses and drive on cracked, untended roads. It’s hard to imagine the buses they wait for will arrive. They seem more like trespassers on long-abandoned property than residents of Detroit, Memphis, Fresno and Houston.

My write-up of "First Thursday" openings at 49 Geary in SF Weekly

2011-06-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

Clusters of young Americans propped themselves up on Golgothan stilettos, clutching their plastic cups of white wine with one hand and texting virtuosically with the other. Some hood-ish-looking young men in 'do-rags dragged their pants behind them from gallery to gallery. Many people had expensive-looking priapic-lensed cameras dangling from their necks.

(continue reading)

My review of Richard Learoyd's Presences at Fraenkel Gallery in Art Practical

2011-06-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

It’s hard not to feel like an overzealous dermatologist examining the subjects of Richard Learoyd’s exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery. His large-scale direct-positive images reveal a degree of epidermal detail one usually only gets to see while making out under an interrogation lamp. The shallow depth of field that marks Learoyd’s portraits and that shows imperfections with pitiless clarity—a rough patch here, an incipient pimple there, weirdly dilated pupils—somewhat mitigates the monumental quality lent them by the size of the images and the solid, sometimes brilliant hues he clothes his models in (when he clothes them).

(continue reading)

On Not Marrying

2011-04-21T00:31:00.000-07:00

Marriage has always held a place in the image of myself that seems so far away, I almost believe I will have to be a completely different person by the time it happens, the way a child must imagine herself to be an unrecognizable person by adulthood – several feet taller, dressed in adult clothing, speaking in an adult voice, concerned with adult tasks. It’s easy to imagine yourself as an adult when adulthood is so far away from you that it renders considering who you currently are, in your mental construction of the imagined future self, a bit ridiculous. When I was little I thought I’d be like Phylicia Rashad when I grew up. Such deserts of time stretched between myself then and my adult self that more drastic personal revolutions than a mere change in skin color would have to take place to transform me from a child who played with her toes to the dignified woman who could instill awe into the hearts of her unruly family with a few sotto voce threats and a confusingly sexy stare-down.

But I’m now at an age when many of my friends are getting married, or have already gotten married and are now starting their own families, or are even divorcing. And yet I feel just as distant from the woman I imagine myself needing to become in order to be married as I did when I was a child. It has in fact become more difficult to imagine myself so, because, unlike the enormous changes to my person I could take for granted would happen between then and the imagined now, I have to accept that I actually am mostly as I will be for the rest of my life. For instance, my skin color won’t change, but then neither will my personality; I’ll probably never be the sort of career woman and mother who can subdue her family with a sexy stare-down and then be at work at 8 in the morning to start a day of subduing New York’s legal system while wearing pointy high-heeled shoes and power suits. I don’t mind this, but it’s something I know won’t happen. The person I am now is basically what I have to work with, and my imagined married self has to look, and act, something like I do now. But I couldn’t be married and act the way I do. I mean, I could, but I wouldn’t want to be married to someone who’d put up with that.

What man could prepare himself for the size and scope of my vanity? It is epic, it is legion; I am the Beowolf of self-regard. I’m not exactly ashamed of this, but neither do I want someone beholding its hugeness every day, straining his philosophical faculties to make sense of his own minuteness in comparison with it. It’s not like I could hide my mountain of beauty products somewhere in the bathroom where he wouldn’t notice it, or get crushed under it, or sucked into its gravitational pull. I can’t just leave my toothbrush and some baby shampoo and an unassuming white washcloth out and pretend that’s all it takes to achieve this fresh-faced fakery that is my look. It’s not that I’m profligate with my products either; I use everything up and then buy more. How can I explain that I really do need one cleanser in the morning and a different one at night, and an exfoliator twice a week and a mask and a peel and different moisturizers for day and night and parts of my face and times of the month and it all makes perfect sense to me, but yes I understand there’s not enough room on the shelf for all these bottles so please build some more shelves? It is almost impossible to convey what eyelash conditioner is without appearing ridiculous. And also, I know aging drag queens who own less makeup than I do.

And clothing—I have a walk-in closet. It is my bedroom. I also have an annex of bulging wardrobes challenging the floorboards of my apartment in the Bronx. I like vintage clothes, which went out of style before I was born and thus will never go out of style in my heart. Unless I gain weight and they no longer fit me, why would I get rid of them? Yet I shun jobs that have a dress code that doesn’t include Uggs and yoga pants. I once turned one down in London because it would have required me to teeter about in high heels on Harrod’s marble floors for 6 hours a day. Any job that starts before ten in the morning is a job that will never see me in mascara, and only occasionally with clean hair. So I can’t even promise a consistent payoff to the avalanche we would be living under till death by suffocation do us part. I don’t like imagining my future husband trying to look manly while being crowded out of his own house by a burgeoning forest of chiffon ruching, bias-cut crepe, and those fake pashminas with pictures of peacocks in metallic thread I love so much. He would try to talk sense to me, offer to drive me to the Goodwill drop-off locations, or even help me to start an ebay boutique. I would grow to resent him for refusing to acknowledge the value of a minidress I wore both to my senior prom and to opening night at the opera twelve years later, or the fact that yes, gorilla fur is un-p.c., but totally worth it and so much warmer than any of my other capes, or that these are not rags, these are my Bag of Sentimental Panties and no, they are none of your business.

And what about our domestic life? Obviously I am too much of a feminist to ever willingly take on the role of housewife (and my secret is that my feminism in this regard is buttressed by a generous helping of laziness and apathy that eliminates housework as a serious consideration for me anyway). But normal couples cook, or take turns cooking. I know people who enjoy it. They buy ingredients, and read recipes, and wait patiently for stuff to boil. They close their eyes and lyricize about the near-spiritual satisfaction they get from communing with the various twigs and animal parts and different-colored dust they flavor stuff with. Then they sit down, fully clothed, at a table, with mats and serving spoons, and eat in silence or while exchanging civilized anecdotes about their lives. I only want to eat if I can sit pantsless in front of the internet while I’m doing it. And I only cook for parties. Spending time in the kitchen is only worthwhile if at least two dozen people will adore me afterwards. Otherwise I can just pick the M&Ms out of a trailmix bag, sprinkle them over a cup of applesauce and be done with it. I only use my stove to store my wicker basket collection and for my weekly death-by-garlic pasta binge, during which I prepare enough food to feed Haiti, and eat it all myself. I’m not sure I’d ever want a man to know these habits of mine, let alone be legally bound to share in them with me. And after ten or twenty years of letting him cook for me, I might start to suspect I’m taking advantage of him, and feel guilty about it.

As I get older, I wonder about how much of my life depends upon privacy, how much of my daily routine I would suppress if there were someone watching me. Do I want someone to witness me choosing to watch LOLCAT videos rather than read a Great Book, or even a good book, or even a full HuffPo article, before bed? Do I want to inflict my apocalyptic hormonal mood swings on an innocent man, or worse, stifle them for his sake and just guess at when the ulcer’s going to hit? Do I want someone possibly taking a dim view of my frequent daydreaming and then telling me to put some pants on and go get a job at Starbuck’s or Home Depot or wherever? I suppose that’s the fear, isn’t it, that the proclivities of mine I secretly suspect aren’t entirely benign but that I usually assume will appear charming to most other people, will be seen and comprehended in their unsimple totality by someone who would get to be as much of an expert on me as a husband would. And if he’s a man he would then encourage me, maybe even try to help me change, put his hands on my shoulders and turn me to face reality, which I always hate doing and which is why I generally can’t ass myself to do it on my own. And then I’d have to admit that I clung to a basically childish version of myself for longer than was seemly, and that instead of dragging myself up out of it, I needed a man to compel me to. God, I hate him already.

Word.

2011-03-03T22:35:00.000-08:00

A friend turned me on to The Believer magazine, which is now my bus and train reading. In the February issue, there’s a fascinating series of essays by transgender author T Cooper on different aspects of his transformation from female to male: unsent letters he wrote to his parents explaining his decision, personality changes he has gone through since his transformation, elements of womanhood that one would think he’d understand considering his past but doesn’t. But one essay, on the subject of his frustration at the “slip-ups” people still make regarding his gender such as accidentally referring to him as a “she,” suggests his frustration at not having his identity acknowledged and respected has surpassed his empathy for human error. It’s ironically the one closed-minded part of an otherwise illuminating, and entertaining, treatise.

Cooper argues,

“…say you have a good friend you’ve known for years. You used to go out to bars with this guy, snort drugs, hook up with strippers, and then wake up and do it all over again. If this guy is now 5 years sober and happily married with 2.5 perfect children, you probably wouldn’t call him up every day and ask him to score some coke and go whoring with you…It’s not the world he lives in, even if you still think or still wish he did. Maybe it never was to him, it never quite fit, and he had to go through all that to get to the happy rainbow place he is today.

Or, say you always played basketball with a buddy; that’s all you did together…But then your buddy is in a gruesome Staten Island Ferry accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, exiled permanently to a wheelchair. Would you forevermore go up to him, see him sitting there, and then be like, ‘Yo, you wanna go down to the corner and play some pickup? Oops! I didn’t mean to say that! Sorry, it’s just so hard to get used to!’

No, it’s fucking not…..it makes me feel like shit when people refer to me as she. It doesn’t matter if it’s with the best of intentions, or whether it’s obvious to those in earshot that I’m male, and nothing’s technically been lost, that there’s clearly been a mistake. Or even if they are talking about the past.’

(quoting his wife) ’How would I feel if I were called sir while I was out on a date, wearing a dress and heels and cherry lipstick? How abnegating it would be to have the world decide, no matter how many signals you give, that you are something you are not.’

Of course, his frustration is understandable, and so is his pain. But I’m not sure his impatience with people who slip-up, and his dismissal of them as somehow lazy or dismissive themselves, is fair. It got me thinking about how I “group” people in my mind, what the most basic thing about them I remember and associate with them is. What are the characteristics that, no matter how the signals they deliberately send change over time, identify them to me?

This analogy might not immediately be apparent, but the essay reminded me of the way I think of words: how I group them, how I remember them, how they affect me. Sometimes when I’m trying and failing to remember a word that is “on the tip of my tongue,” the closest attributes of the word itself that I can remember might be the number of syllables, or the rhythm of it, or perhaps whether it was Germanic, Latin or Greek in origin. If I remember speaking it aloud to myself, randomly throwing in a few rough breathing marks for fun and imitating a recording I once listened to of The Iliad recited in a dialect believed to be similar to Old Ionic, I know the word was Greek. If I recall intentionally mispronouncing it in an Italian accent, I’ll know it is from Latin. If it sounds sexy or romantic, I’ll know it’s Frenchified Latin. If it’s phlegmy and uncouth, it must be German.

But more palpable than my memories of the attributes of the word itself, are my memories of how I felt when I first encountered the word. I can remember whether I was happy or sad, in love, depressed, feeling accomplished and smug, or put-upon and useless. I can remember if I was eating at the moment, and if so, whether it was sweet or savory, and how I felt as I was eating, if I was just grazing or eating until I was full, or ate too much and felt sick. Or maybe I was just having a coffee and felt the acid tenderize my stomach as I first read or heard that word.

That’s another thing I can remember even if I can’t remember the word itself: I know if I heard the word on TV or read it in a book. If it was from the television I can remember whether it was on a news or commentary show or in a movie or serial. If it was news and commentary, I can remember if I agreed with the person who used the word, and if it was a serial, whether I had a crush on the character who used it. If it was in a book, I can remember if it was fiction or non-fiction, and if fiction, which voice spoke the word aloud in my mind’s ear: if the narrator was female, regardless of the cultural origin of the book, it was my own, as I pride myself on being good with dialects. If male, the voice belonged to Jeremy Irons, naturally. If it was non-fiction I can remember whether it was British or American, or a translation. I can remember if I learned the word in conversation, and whether that conversation was in America or Europe, and if in America, on what coast, and if on the west coast, whether it was with a friend from high school, the theatre, or the opera, and if in New York, at Saks or some other job, over drinks or lunch or shouted at a noisy party. I can remember my status relative to the person who used the word, if it was a boss or a teacher, or a colleague, or a nuisance—did I feel intimidated, worried, delighted, or annoyed when I heard this word? Do I associate the word with satisfaction (words I learn while happy) or frustration (words I learn while trying to distract myself from unhappiness)? I can remember that, if not the word.

The clues are ghosts, and ghosts of ghosts, not of the thing itself, but of who I was at the moment of reception. It’s why, whenever I hear or read the word “assuage” I recall myself, if ever so faintly, as an 18 year old crushing on a teacher, or why “parameter” triggers a surge of disdain: I remember my father, in our Oldsmobile some time in the ‘80’s, complaining about the clichés of the day, the trendy words he was so tired of hearing, such as people droning on about the “parameters” of something when they just wanted a fancy word for “limit.” “Diminute” makes me think of London, Shakespeare, a Kensal Rise flat filled with books and art, good friends, Turkish rugs, grass and red wine. This is because, having heard my teacher Ben use the word several times in class, I asked him one night at his home, where I spent my best English evenings, why he didn’t just say “diminish” (the answer is that “diminish” is a reflexive verb, and “diminute,” an obscure active one, or less obscure adjective). With “pervasive” I’m back in Santa Fe on a warm dry autumn night under a sky the color of rust, reading my classmate Chris’s freshmen biology essay, astonished at the brilliant 16 year-old’s ability to interpret the sodden innards of our dissected cat, and wondering if I’d ever be able to hold my own with such scholars. The sentence itself wasn’t too spectacular, something about how the arterial system of the cat was “not quite pervasive,” but I recall that mix of admiration and apprehension perfectly, for it revisits me every time I use, hear, or read that word. “Abstruse” places me back as a breathless stagehand over ten years ago, working a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in which the word appears), always over-sugared, over-caffeinated, and hungry from eating dinner too early before the marathon play. The fricative “s” escapes the plosive “b,” breaks the tab “t” and gushes out through “ru” and suddenly the coca-cola is spumy in my empty stomach, its sugars caustic on my teeth.

These peripheral experiences that I recall with every word, or instead of the word, if it eludes me, only mean that more than the literal or technical definition of a word, I remember how I felt at my initial encounter with it.

I’ve realized, however, that out of all this mnemonic detritus my experience attaches to a word the most basic thing I project onto it is gender. I can remember if it was a male or female who spoke it or wrote it when I noticed it. If it was a man, I remember which category I had placed him in: guide and mentor, friend and equal, romantic interest, romantic interest and friend and equal, romantic interest and mentor, or pest. If the speaker of the word was female, I remember if she was a mentor, a friend and equal, or if I felt threatened by her or confident that I threatened her, or if she was a friend I felt threatened by or towards whom I was careful not to act threateningly. But ridding the word of my collateral experience, it remains, to me, male or female. “Atavistic,” “frisson,” and “palimpsest” are all male, because I encountered them reading Martin Amis, A. A. Gill, and Will Self respectively. Female words are “Effulgence” (Wharton), “tautology” (another great Gill, my former classmate Karina), and “limn” (Fuck You, Michiko Kakutani). “Droll” is female (mother) and “subsume” is male (Michael Schneider). “Judicious” is female, and “histrionic” is male. The gender I associate with a word has only to do with the gender of the person from whom I first learned the word, however long ago, regardless of the actual definition, etymology, connotations, or the gender, if any, with which the word is usually associated. “Histrionic” is a word I usually hear used, justly or unjustly, in connection to femaleness (or to me specifically, totally without basis). But my first hit of it came from a male drama teacher, so male it stays.

Of course I’m not really talking about words, I’m talking about myself, and the associations I make that make no sense of anything but my own experience. However disparate my experience is from the truth about something, it provides a deeper meaning for me than the objective truth about that thing. And gender, somehow, is the most basic element of that experience. I wonder if it is so for other people as well. If I’m alone in a room, and my back is turned to the door and someone else walks in, I can tell if that person is a man or woman. And it’s not from some obvious “signal” like the sound of high heels on floorboard or the smell of perfume. It’s visceral and I can’t justify with evidence, but I’m almost always right.

Cooper analogizes the slip-ups people make regarding his gender with a slip-up no sane or sensitive person would make in two hypothetical examples, of the whoring buddy now settled and the basketball partner now paralyzed. But the activities one enjoys with a person, however regularly, and for however long, are not nearly as identifying as that person’s gender. The two examples Cooper uses are a false equivalency because it is much more natural to dissociate a person from the hobbies you shared with them than it is to suddenly start thinking of them in a whole different gender. Yes, one should acknowledge dresses and cherry lipstick as signals of how a person prefers to be regarded, but in the moment of a “slip-up,” one is guided by something deeper than the part of one’s brain that acknowledges and interprets signals, before that part of the brain can catch the mistake and correct it. I had a friend while living in Europe, a male who had made the transition to female long before I ever knew her. She did not tell me of the change she had made at all. I heard about it from a mutual friend but didn’t think much of it, since I’m from San Francisco and don’t find such stories to be too exotic. I would have known anyway, as her past maleness was unmistakable--again, not because of any signal I can put words to—I’ve known women who were taller, broader-shouldered, slimmer-hipped, deeper-voiced, had more, er, manly facial features, and wore less makeup on them. No, there was just something “male” about her, and, months into our friendship I slipped up once while ordering in a restaurant and referred to her as a “he.” I was mortified, of course, and hope I did not make her feel like shit, as T Cooper describes such gaffs as affecting him. But I also can’t quite agree that this slip-up is on the level of accidentally inviting a man in a wheelchair to play basketball. Hobbies and the accidents we suffer do not occupy space in the same atavistic chamber of our psyches as gender. I can understand “how abnegating it would be to have the world decide that you are something you are not” but a slip-up is not a decision, and cannot be resented in the same way.

Cooper and other people who have undergone gender transformation say they did it to honor what they know to be the truth about themselves. “…to be trans is to feel the truth so acutely you can’t fake it. It is to be so consumed with the truth of who you are that you are willing to risk everything to inhabit it.” But it is unreasonable to expect the world you live in not only to acknowledge that truth (that is indeed reasonable) but feel that truth as acutely, as unmistakably as you do, and to be offended when the signals you labor to exhibit are no match for what millions of years have hardwired into us. I read a study recently that told me I am likely to behave more protectively of myself around men when I am ovulating than when I am in the less fertile phase of my cycle; I will avoid sketchy areas, I will dress less provocatively, I will subconsciously regard men as potential rapists and try not to act as if I’m “asking for it,” in a biological mechanism designed to cope with my greater attractiveness during that time. My body wants to be impregnated and so subtly enhances the signals of my fertility, but it also wants to minimize the chances of the “wrong” male taking advantage (i.e. it wants a baby-daddy and not a rapist). Of course this is offensive. As a level-headed woman I prefer to think that I gauge my safety from situation to situation rationally, based on observations and crime statistics and the like. I also resent the implication that the hormones sloshing around in me will soak my deductive powers so thoroughly that on some primordial level I think any dweeb on the street is a threat to me in my fecundity. Who knows if the study itself will stick, but it says something about people and gender. Our reactions to maleness and femaleness are beyond what our conscious selves can grasp. It is what makes people like T Cooper know, in their deepest selves, what they are, despite all the contrary signals with which nature has assembled them. But it is also why (I suspect) it is unlikely that trans people will ever feel understood and acknowledged as totally as they understand and acknowledge the truth about themselves, whatever level of enlightenment our culture achieves. Not everyone ascribes a gender to words as I do (but, ahem, many cultures do), but everyone comprehends and reacts to gender, in ways that may be partly societal, but primarily evolutionary. Millions of years have taught us to recognize and react to gender. It is asking a lot of people that they not only reject, but forget.

Scared of Everything

2011-02-20T16:56:00.000-08:00

When I was a child I was scared of many things, all imaginary. I had a vintage Everyman Library edition of ghost stories that I tortured myself with at bedtime, and my parents foolishly allowed me to watch TV specials on alien abductions, hauntings, and unexplained phenomena and monsters. I endured periods during which it took me several hours of trembling beneath the covers to get to sleep at night, because it didn’t seem unlikely to me that Scotland’s Loch Ness monster might swing its head around my bedroom door, or that some bride suicide in her tattered whites would rather trouble me than the cad who jilted her.

Everything I was aware of in those hours before I fell asleep frightened me. After my father kissed me goodnight, he switched the light off by pulling a white string attached to the ceiling lamp. The centrifugal swinging of the string in the dark formed a faint vibrating image that in my imagination transmogrified into a bleakly staring face. I insisted my door be left ajar so that light from the hallway could stream in, and despaired if my parents went to bed before I fell asleep, turning the hallway light off and leaving on only a dim nightlight which barely illuminated my room at all and left me vulnerable to the horrors of the dark. Of course, even with the hallway light on, what was to prevent an alien from appearing in the doorway? There was really no good solution. I often opened my window curtain to let the light from our neighbor’s window, which shone from across the shaft, spill in to make a comforting pattern on my ceiling. They were awake and unafraid, chatting with the lights on, and so I could relax. But then they turned the lights off, went to sleep, and left my ceiling bare, and me with only the grim shapes hovering in dark relief against the blankness.

Ghosts and aliens alternated worrying me, depending on what I was reading or watching on TV. Those were the two big fears, although once in a while the Jersey Devil added some flash to my paranoid fantasies as well. Occasionally I’d enjoy an extended period free of night-fears, when I’d know how silly it had been to be so afraid of these, I knew, imaginary things, but then I’d catch a special on some alien they dissected at Roswell, or flip open my ghost storybook and read about the driver who finds out that the hitchhiker he picks up has actually been dead a week, and feel the arrant dread rising like mercury in me, and know that that was it for the next few months at least. It grew tiresome, this nightly anxiety; the fear itself was just so tedious, that I actually grew to resent myself for being so frightable. I’d like to say it had worn off by my teenage years, but I was such a fan of the X-Files that a milder form of my old fears would revisit me every week, but luckily not last more than a night or two. Particularly effective episodes were the one about the tiny Canadian insects that suck your body of its fluids if you stepped into shadow, the one about Eugene Victor Tooms, who lives in an elevator shaft and eats human liver, and the one in which a dying circus performer’s conjoined twin goes rogue and makes many fatal attempts to attach himself to someone more healthy, and Agent Scully eats a cricket (crickets look too much like cockroaches not to give me the heebie-jeebies).

I’m still afraid of the dark. I stupidly watched Paranormal Activity 2 the other night at my sister’s. Of course I’m too sophisticated now to be duped by spooky music and trick lighting, but it was the very banality with which the malevolence asserts itself in this film that made it able to catch up to my now-diminished frightability. Everything looks and sounds so normal. A pot falls from the hook in broad daylight, unartfully recorded by a standard CCTV lens, like the kind they use to catch shoplifters at Century 21. Well, my house has no spooky soundtrack, and no Hitchcockian-lighting effects, and pots fall off hooks all the time. The similarities are endless. And right now my 70 year-old atheist hippie mother isn’t at home to protect me from the hell-sent forces of evil. That was a bad movie night.

Furthermore, I live in a railroad-style apartment, in which all of the rooms branch off from one long hallway. Believe me, you don't have to be all that stoned to envision a torrent of blood splashing towards you from the kitchen.

There are things that would make more sense to fear, but somehow I can’t be bothered to fear them. I’m stoical about flying. I’m aware the plane might explode, but I’d rather go where I want to go and accept the risk. I don’t let a little mad-cow fear scare me off steak when I’m in Europe. I don’t wander about in “bad” neighborhoods, but neither do I worry about getting mugged or attacked. I wouldn’t think twice about returning home by train at 2:30 to my apartment in the Bronx. No, I’ll charge down the dark street past my fellow nightowls in all their colored bandanas and tear-drop tattoos, kicking the bullet casings aside on the way to my building, and then get home and worry about the scary shadow-shapes my dolls make along the wall.

Also, if it isn’t bragging (or even if it is, I guess), I’ve not been as fearful as I could be in my interactions with people. I don’t shrink from an argument, and I don’t believe that frequently bursting into tears should disqualify me as a rational being. I’m usually honest about what I’m thinking or feeling, and am even willing to be the first to admit to something, like with men. In fact, I’ve come to realize that not much happens in my life without my first making some mortifying confession. I suspect that such forthrightness can sometimes have an emasculating effect, and might cause my plans to backfire, but this, too, I am willing to risk in order to start something that won’t start without my own initiative. Sometimes I resent being left to do the courageous thing, but then I consider that they will eventually find out that I would rather hold my pee in all night than get up to use the bathroom if the nightlight is out or the heater is clanking more ominously than usual, and I figure I should get my points for courage in early.

On Spectacular Theatre

2011-02-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I attended the dress rehearsal of a production of The King and I at the Royal Albert Hall in London. For the most part, it was pleasant, although not being a regular musical theatre goer, I found the echoey effect of the miking on the voices to be distracting. Something else bothered me the whole time, and I couldn’t quite figure it out until late in the performance.

I read somewhere that 3 million pounds ($6 million USD at the time) had gone into the production. Aside from the stars of television and the West End stage who played the King and Anna, and the designers and director, who I know are all paid lavishly compared to performers, I assume the actors, musicians, and techs weren’t paid more than equity wage. It seemed a great portion of the expense went into the set and occasional special effects, which included real fireworks, flaming and fizzing against the vaulted ceiling. To fill the vast Hall (whose rent alone must be staggering) the in-the-round set comprised a convincingly dingy dock and suitably ornate, huge gilt chunks of palace espaliered with silk draping, but the star of the show—the thing most chatted about in the buzzy run-up to opening, was the submerged stage. The entire set perched on beams arising out of real-life, actually-wet, splashable H2O. I couldn’t tell why I resented this, I felt, solecistic bit of reality glistening in the house of make-believe. As soon as I entered the theatre, or arena, more like, before I could swoon over the spectacularity of it all, I had to wonder to myself, “How much must it cost to safely flood the Albert Hall?” But there was something else, unrelated to the display of extravagance which, as an echt poverty thespian I had been taught to disdain, that gnawed at me. It wasn’t even that throughout the whole performance that water was never actually used for anything—not a single pointy Thai model boat made its way through the model canals—thus emphasizing that it was basically a very costly bit of scenery intended to make us go “ooh” and not much else.

No, at one point, Princess Tuptim sat on the dock waiting for her lover, feet over the edge. Her feet didn’t quite reach the water, but she simulated tapping its surface with her toe, in that way that girls do while sitting on docks waiting for their lovers. I realized then why I disliked the set. That actress, tapping the surface of an imaginary pool of water with her toe, was all we needed to know that water was indeed there, to see her watching her reflection corrugate along its ripples, even to hear it lapping. Most theatres have to rely on that alone—the talent of the actor, that is--to make the fake paint-and-plywood world come alive. And part of the thrill of theatre is witnessing that, of recognizing an entire atmosphere from a wave of a hand, or tap of the toe. And in filling the stage with water, making it all so literal, the designers did our imaginative work for us, and robbed us of the thrill of recognition. I emphasize “recognition” because I think that that, as much as any of the beautiful language, music, or profound themes to be found in drama, is what moves us when we see a piece of theatre. What would War Horse have been with real horses? A very nice play about a boy who loves his horse so goshdarn much, through which we’d all have sat waiting for the inevitable equine hard-on or dropped turd. But with the virtuosic level of fakery of the actors manipulating their skeletal puppets to appear to walk, swing their manes, even breathe like horses, we were able to experience the thrill of recognition. That exact way a colt stumbles a bit while trying to stand on its knobby legs, or that special horsey way that horses sneeze, or that bewildered struggle of a horse not made for weight-bearing, dragging a load uphill, all hoofs and ankles digging into the soil—however beautiful it may be in nature, the artful representation reverberates differently in our souls, points our memory to some platonic form of horseyness (er, Equus?) that the “real thing” allows us to ignore. It may be because I’m not particularly an animal-lover, but I found that bit of fakery more affecting than, well, any actual horse has ever been for me. And judging by the wet faces surrounding me at the National that night, I think other people felt the same.

But back to Siam: fittingly, in the same performance, the famous subversive ballet reinforced my point. Without getting into the story too much, I’ll say it ended with the dancers simulating a mass drowning by unfurling a huge swathe of blue silk over their heads to totally cover them, and at the climax, thrusting their hands through hidden holes in the silk, an instantly-recognizable symbol. It didn’t take money or complicated engineering to create, just cleverness and imagination (not to diminute the cleverness and imagination that goes into engineering, but considering how many great shows have been put on in crumbling, sub-code earthquake deathtraps, it is perhaps not the “stuff” of great theatre, unless you’re seeing a show here). The audible, and audibly delighted, gasp in the auditorium at that moment, was, I think, a greater triumph than all of the hype about the flooded stage.

And finally, for all the extravagance of the production, the most affecting moment, and one that incited the audience of thousands to clap along, was “Shall We Dance?”—the exuberant polka that prim Anna teaches the King to dance to. Three million pounds spent on a production and the thing that gets people out of their seats is watching a couple of laughing, panting middle-aged actors gallop around the stage. It was a beautiful, joyful moment, and one in which the only sign that more money than normal was spent was her INSANE DRESS, to which photos do no justice. It was also a moment that did not invite unfavorable comparisons to Yul Brynner (except inasmuch as any comparison to His Bald Majesty in any context must be unfavorable). There’s a famously sexy moment from the movie in which the king insists on dancing as the Europeans do, “not holding two hands”—when Brynner, a masterful physical actor, extends his hand as if it were something else, and fuses it to the corseted waist of the appropriately half-beswooned Deborah Kerr. Daniel Dae Kim seemed to grab Anna’s waist out of pure enthusiasm for the dance itself and his surprise at the suddenly intimate contact, and at Maria Friedman’s visible frisson, made them both for a moment seem like teenagers, and like equals. It had a freshness that can only come from two people standing on a stage, any stage, and allowing themselves to experience something real.

I saw a performance about a year ago at NYU’s summer lab, a workshop for students and alumni of the graduate theatre programs. Everything was as minimal as could be but the talent. It was basically a beautifully written play, acted brilliantly, some of which was due to the talent and skill of the actors and some of course to the director guiding them to make each scene and its place in the story, clear. That was all. Everything else either didn’t exist or had substitutions that were chosen without any attempt at convincing replication at all. Whiskey glasses were jam jars filled with water. Shovels and shoveling were mimed. Bones and skulls were planks of wood and balls of rubber bands. Murders happened with no rupturing of cleverly concealed packets of fake blood. Sound effects were narrated by the stagehand. There was no set, just a stage painted black and a table. It was one of the best, most moving plays I’ve ever seen, and a premier example of how poverty theatre, done well in the aspects that matter (writing, directing, acting), makes a fool of spectacular theatre. I dare any proponent of the hogwash idea that great theatre requires expenditure of fortunes--and that people go to the theatre for the razzle-dazzle, or that cynical, intellectually and creatively lazy cliché, “to escape”—to see something like that and suggest it would have been a more moving experience for the audience if the actors had used real-looking bones and real shovels and real dirt and real fake blood and monstrous set pieces and marvels of engineering and Spielburgian special effects. People who see theatre like this show I saw in the grungy pit at NYU go to the theatre regularly, because it gives them something more substantial than razzle-dazzle (and doesn’t cost $125 a ticket. I’m talking to you, Broadway). People who go to the theatre for spectacle go once a year, because that’s all they need to get their fix of what essentially can only nourish a part of them that doesn’t ask for much beyond the cheap thrill of expensive pageantry. People go to the theatre to be moved in one way or another, and if the only way you are able to move them is with grandiose money-flinging and a literal-minded slavery to realism, you are doing something wrong, and should not be surprised that most people would rather stay at home and watch television.

Unfortunately the production at the Royal Albert Hall was not videorecorded; I would love to include a clip of my favorite moment, although perhaps some of the magic of the live performance would be lost in conversion. So I’m including a clip from the movie. Swoon.

Hell is Your People

2011-01-30T18:52:00.001-08:00

I got an invitation in the mail the other day to the annual “Russian Festival” at the San Francisco Russian Center, an event I attended regularly as a child. I remember tables of cherry pastries and pierogi, game stands where you could play for a quarter and win tiny plastic toys, and rather thrillingly athletic dance performances by local professional Russian and Ukrainian folk dance troupes. I also remember the weirdness of seeing my classmates from the Russian Orthodox school I attended part time in this other context, outside of school and with their families. At that age, the people in your life fit neatly into categories: there were my mother’s friends who ushered with her at the opera and always wore black, my father’s friends from Vesuvio’s, who grew their hair long and argued about poetry, his models, who were always naked and very sweet to me despite my frequent interruptions of their sittings, my friends from my regular school, who wore their hair in dookie braids and played football with me, and my classmates from Russian school, who wore navy blue skirts or pants and white blouses and were generally terrors. It was strange seeing them in normal clothing with nice grown-ups who resembled them and who didn’t seem aware of their awfulness. I assume I was awful then too, for at that age I would do anything to fit in. I even played along when they’d flip their bottom lips down and their upper lips up, a “game” we called “n***** lips”.

As she handed me the invitation (a print of a smiling Matryoshka, of course), she said that it had always been a regret of my American father’s that they had not worked harder to insert me into that world, the Russian immigrant community. This had been a platitude of my growing years, the importance of ensconcing oneself in the culture of one’s ancestry. For my parents, especially my mother, this importance had several bases, one being that one had to look outside the American mainstream for culture worthy of the name, and she had me watching Russian childrens’ shows, Russian opera and ballet, studying art, math, and chess, with teachers from institutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (all of which I still believe are leagues superior to their American counterparts). The other was a belief that in order to assess the virtues of whatever world one lives in, and even to gain respect within that world, one has to be able to stand aloof from it somewhat, to know things, have experienced things from a different world. I still like to be a little different from whatever circles I’m moving in at the moment, and find myself emphasizing what foreignness I can lay claim to when I’m with Americans, and acting the unrepentant ugly American amongst foreigners.

Of course the modern, western affection for multiculturalism reinforced these notions, and I never thought much about them. But when my mother mentioned this the other day, that even my Midwestern American father genuinely wished he had made more of a Ruskie out of me, for the first time I considered whether I shared the same wish, now that I’m an adult. I realized that it was no longer a given that I shared the same regret. I wasn’t sure, as my parents had been, that closer ties to the Slavic community here would have been a boon to my life. How, exactly?

A couple of days after that, I went to the Russian deli in the Outer Richmond and ran into an older male acquaintance—I say acquaintance although he was as good as a stranger to me, but seemed to know my mother. He spoke to me in Russian and I had to tell him in the few broken words at my disposal that I only understand a little, and speak badly. He looked crestfallen, stunned, bewildered at both my ignorance and my willingness to admit to it. He had a friend of his own with him, who was definitely a stranger to me, and who asked,

“Don’t you speak any other languages??”

“French.”

He looked off into the pickle shelves and then down at the floor, as if he might find the reason for my having wasted my life like this spelled out in the squashed caviar along the linoleum.

He looked back up at me, a scowling acheiropoietos, and said,

“It would be good to have….something else.”

I’m never as offensive as I want to be in the moment, so I replied with a curt, “Yes, it would” and walked off wondering how much more connection to my people I could stand. This incident on its own is of course unimportant; who cares what these alter kakers think? Let them wear their Texas cowboy hats and vote Republican and believe themselves more erudite than the spoiled layabout natives of their adopted country. But the incident is not unusual; all my life our Russian friends, and not only friends but strangers we met for the first time, like this man, have felt it’s ok to criticize as insufficient the education I was and was not getting from my parents. They felt it was ok to interrogate me as a child, and to criticize my mother to her face for not making it easier for gems like them to talk to me. The arrogance, the bald-faced rudeness, the presumption, but more than that, the supernatural patience and decency of my mother to refrain from telling them (in English) to fuck off back to bloody Odessa, or Novro-piss-sick, or Nouveau, New-Mafia Moscow, to go shoot a journalist or neglect a nuclear plant or bomb an orphanage or do fuck-all about sex trafficking or whatever our people are up to these days besides berating second-generations for not wanting to be more like them.

When I was younger, it always bothered me, but only as a well-aimed accusation. I felt they were right, their accusations righteous, and was ashamed of myself for not having tried harder to become more like them. But now I see that I can go ahead and be ashamed of them instead. Ruder and drunker than the British, more racist than the Confederacy, more arrogant than the French, more maternally-smothering than the Jews or the Chinese, tackier dressers than new-moneyed Italians, as untrustworthy as any souk pickpocket, as superstitious as Gorky’s peasants. And how do we explain the utter lack of regard for their own? There are Russians, millions of them even, who still mourn the death of Stalin, the outperforming autogenocide. When Moscow has money, it builds new towers and embellishes its squares and lets orphanages, hospitals, and asylums rot.

This is the work of Ukrainian photographer and documenter of post-Soviet wretchedness, Boris Mikhailov. Go ahead, do a google image search. I fucking dare you.

There’s a quotation from Dostoevsky that has been bastardized to read, “It’s easy to love mankind. It’s hard to love a man.” I think I can further bastardize it to say, “It’s easy to love your culture, but hard to love the people in it.” I’m thought a Russophile by everyone who knows me, and to an extent, it’s true. Most of my favorite works of art, in every medium, are Russian in origin. And the more I learn, the more I see that to get training of any seriousness in so many of these art forms, you need a Russian teacher. How sad it was to visit the great Pinacoteca in Milan, and study the art projects of its graduating students, and see that they haven’t learned even the basics of rendering the human skeleton, something I had mastered by age eleven with my teacher from Petersburg. Watch the Kirov do Swan Lake and then watch any American company do it; there is no question of the superiority of the training dancers receive at the Vaganova School. Sorry, ABT. The few weeks I spent in Moscow I still consider to be the best and most concentrated theatre training of my life. My favorite movies, my favorite operas, my favorite painters, actors, writers, poets, my favorite cities with my favorite architecture, my favorite pastries and soups and wines and garlic zakousky, my favorite sacred music and dirty jokes, all Russian. Yet I don’t perceive a connection between any of this and the gauche, heavy-handed, heavy-bottomed, boorish examples of this people that I meet and interact with in my day-to-day life. Have you ever been hit on by a Russian man in his twenties? Have you ever had to do business with a Russian? Did you ever get your money back?

This is all very grim for me to be thinking and saying. I will leave you with a video from my favorite cartoon series from my childhood. It’s called “Nu Pogodi!” or “Well, just you wait!” The wolf (the bad guy, not only morally bad but ill-kempt and uncouth) always pursues the rabbit (good and neat and classy). I watched this incessantly as a child. I cite it as an example of superlative Russian children’s television programming because along with being hilariously entertaining, it always slipped in high-cultural references, thereby sneakily teaching us about art while we thought we were just goofing off. My first exposure to Swan Lake was in this episode (around 4:30). Later, around minute 9, the wolf does a brilliant impression of the great subversive singer Vladimir Vysotsky, so beloved of the people that even the Soviet government couldn’t touch him. The second video down is just damn funny.

Eonnagata, Théatre des Champs-Elysées

2011-01-26T23:53:00.000-08:00

Another piece I was lucky enough to see in Paris was Eonnagata, a collaborative dance/dramatic work by Robert Lepage, Sylvie Guillem, and Russell Maliphant, at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées.

Now, I say lucky because I will happily see anything with Sylvie Guillem, of the world’s best legs and worst haircut, although much of the work she’s devoted the post-classical stage of her career to puzzles me somewhat, including this one. Eonnogata concerns the 18^th-century diplomat and spy, the Chevalier d’Eon, a famous cross-dresser and possible sufferer of Kallimann syndrome, which prevents the body from developing past puberty. The –“agata” bit came from “Onnagata,” male kabuki dancers trained to perform female roles. Robert Lepage is a noted Quebecois author and director of opera and theatre. He is also 54 years old, thick-waisted, sluggish and I can only assume has bollocks like a woodland caribou. The piece opens on him slashing at the air with a sword, lagging behind the crashing sounds which I suppose were designed to supplement the ferocity lacking in his presence, just as the choppy lighting effects almost mask the phlegmatism of his movements. Maybe he figured that what the greatest dancer of her generation and icon of French sexiness needed was to top off her career by sharing the stage with a pudgy, aging Canadian opera director. The piece proceeded to alternate between superficially realized Japonesque posturing and Rococo embellishments to a lot of incomprehensible storytelling.

I thought at first that I was witnessing something truly bizarre and was pleased that the days of having to go all the way to Paris to see something so outré were not over. Just trying to make sense of what was going on and why the worlds of the French transvestite and the Japanese drag artists were presented together, as if their combination offered something more than the obvious parallel, kept me engaged throughout the entire 90 minutes. But it turned out to be the usual gender-identity stuff. I felt I was watching what happens when people are powerful and successful enough to indulge their fetishes on a grand scale, that Guillem had the usual westerner’s cursory fondness for eastern kitsch, and that Lepage wanted to get to wear kimonos and lace bonnets onstage.

It’s not that it was unpleasant, although I didn’t exactly enjoy it. Eonnagata makes me wonder why she’s focused her formidable talents on works that don’t show them off particularly well. I have seen her a few times since she visited San Francisco in the late ‘80’s with La Bayadère and made the audience gasp as she caressed her own ear with her calf. She has since abandoned the classical repertoire for the modern. I can understand her wishing to discard relics like Bayadère, which didn’t really do her physique or extraordinary skills justice either—those works were originally created for dancers of much lesser abilities, whose training in no way matches the training of dancers today. It’s unlikely that Marius Petipa would have ever even seen a dancer with the kind of arches, extension, and jumps that the average corps dancer today has, and Guillem looks like a being from a superior alien race even amongst today’s most gifted dancers. While an artist like her can make those ballets look as alive and interesting as they ever will, watching her (on youtube, since her rejection of the genre includes refusing to release the films made of her in those roles commercially, and the only clips one can find are from people who managed to videotape the productions when they were broadcast) one wishes she would just break out of the tutu and abandon all the silent film hammery. Neither does the classical repertoire allow a dancer to remain in the game for as long as she has, and probably will—pointe-work is for younger bodies. So it makes sense that she would have left that genre for something more diverse, modern, and challenging to her, and better suited to her cold and slightly threatening stage presence than the blushing virgins and heartsick peasant girls that populate classical ballet. But I’ve found that what you get when you see a Guillem piece these days—and it is always a Guillem piece if Guillem is in it, regardless of what stocky clay-foot she’s using as furniture at the moment—is a little bit of Guillem and a lot of disappointing other stuff.

Her latest partner is the respected dancer and choreographer Russell Maliphant. More studied dance aficionados than I hold him in high esteem, but I do not see what they see, and I can’t help but think that Guillem has not only advanced his career by miles, but also elevated his art from the pedestrian and forgettable to the stratospheric by allowing him to attach himself to her. Of course I feel the same way about the great Joan Baez lending her divine voice and phrasing to an entire album of songs written by that smug twerp she dated in the early sixties, so take my opinion with a grain of salt if you want. As far as modern choreographers go, Maliphant’s work is fine, although I’m not sure it will place him in the pantheon of greats like Bausch, Tharpe, Ailey, Bejart, Cunningham, or Boris Eiffman. Maliphant is not to the world of choreography what Guillem is to the world of dance. And as a dancer, well, he’s short and has a big head and short limbs, like an unusually graceful rugby player. Some admire the athletic recklessness of his style, and fair enough, although when I’ve seen him he has seemed self-contained to a fault, and I wished he really would give off a sense of that athletic recklessness which is often touted as a perfect contrast to Guillem’s smooth exactitude. But again, he’s not to the world of dance what she is to the world of dance. He’s a very accomplished and very capable British dancer and she is the French alien with the unthinkable legs and criminal feet, in her time the most highly paid ballerina in the world, the press’s “Mademoiselle Non,” the Monstre Sacré who dismissed Paris Opera Ballet and its director—Rudolph Nureyev—as too provincial for her ambitions. I find the contrast between them painful to watch, and I want to console him afterwards. Imagine how I felt when both Maliphant and Guillem left the stage to Mr. Lepage.

Basically, I just don’t see what she gets out of the collaboration. More troubling, I don’t see what her audiences gets out of it, either.

I’m including some footage of Guillem at work, hopefully to show that the merits of her dancing are not merely gymnastic. The extreme arch of her feet, her shocking extension, the sense that she can perform even rapid movements smoothly and gracefully (where lesser dancers seem to have to choose between rapidity and grace)—all serve an expressive purpose, an artistic one beyond merely showing off. When the lines of the body can create a visual illusion that they go on farther than they do (and this, I think ,is the sought after effect of the physical elements considered virtues in ballet, which Sylvie Guillem possesses in spades—the fluid arch of the back and the leg stretched to hyperextension rising to a crest in the arch of the foot), the effect is both thrilling and strangely moving. It’s not just a matter of gawking at someone who can literally kick herself in the face. Dance, like verse drama, is a heightened portrayal of ourselves. In verse drama, we speak better than we really do in order to convey truths that paltry realism can’t carry. Shakespeare tells the truth about us more clearly than our own stammering, clunky inarticulateness ever could. It’s not “realistic” in that we can’t just yammer on and come out with the St. Crispin’s Day speech. But it’s real, as anyone who’s read or heard the speech and felt his throat clench and eyes well up knows. In dance, we need to see the body be more than it is in real life—longer, more graceful, more taut, more expansive, more able to move beyond itself—to perceive what it has to say. Buried in our natural oafishness is the ability to speak through our bodies, to say I am afraid, I am proud, I am sad, I am happy, I am horny, I love you, I want to kill. Dance, at its best, reminds us of that, because when a dancer is conveying these experiences we experience them along with her. And what do we go to the theatre for if not to be moved?

Pina Bausch's Le Sacre du Printemps

2011-01-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

I managed to get a ticket to the New Year’s Eve performance at Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier of a modern triple-bill, the piece of most interest to me being Le Sacre du Printemps. Over the phone (at 35 centimes a minute), I was told that the house was completely sold out, but I figured it was worth a try to visit the box office the night of the performance to check for cancellations. There I was told that there were no cancellations but that for 35 euros I could buy a ticket for a seat in which, if I sat, my view of the stage would be completely obscured but if I stood up, I could see perfectly, and since there was no one behind me, I could do that (equivalent seats at Covent Garden go for a quarter of the price but wotevs). I was shown to my seat as the lights went down, the fourth seat in a loge in the upper balcony with a three-quarters view of the stage. My chair had a tote bag in it, and when none of the three other patrons cramped together offered to move it, I picked it up to put it on the floor, at which point the woman in front turned around, grabbed and replaced the bag, then wagged her finger at me. In the darkness I pointed to my ticket and back to the chair, and she responded again with her finger. When I whispered, “This is my seat; I have a ticket for this seat—please move your bag!!” (I didn’t even bother trying to speak French at this point), the man next to her shout-whispered,

“Bee Kwaiaytte!! SHOEUT OEUP!!”

“This is MY SEAT; I HAVE A TICKET”

“SHOEUT OEUP RRAIT NAWW!!”

Apollo is a quieter work for Stravinsky, composed entirely for strings, and so I stomped off in my boots across the noisy wooden floors with the rest of the gallery shoeusheeng me over its gentle opening chords and let the heavy brass door clank shut behind me. After much cajoling, the usher agreed to help me defend my place, but only if I agreed to be verree, verree kwaiaytte. She then realized that she had shown me to the wrong seat (merde alors!) , and that my ticket was in fact for a seat at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped gallery, acutely angled to the stage. I couldn’t see sitting or standing, so I did what most of the people in the ‘gods’ did; I moved over to stand as close to the wall separating the side loges from the central loges as I could. Standing there I could see a little more than half the stage, which I figured was better than being kicked out of the Palais Garnier. I didn’t understand all the commotion over my making noise, however. The upper balconies were pretty noisy. People were talking, walking in and out, burping babies, necking, and openly videotaping the performance. I’ve never had a very strict attitude about audience decorum, except with regard to crinkling candy wrappers and open drunkenness, so I didn’t mind the Freihaus atmosphere of the place, although I did mind that it smelled like a toilet. My visit to the Grand Ballroom during intermission, however, confirmed that the stench pervaded even the high-ticket areas. I feel it’s worth noting that though the Paris Opera might follow dubious standards in bathroom hygiene, they do serve champagne, finger-sandwiches, and petits-fours at intermission, something I have yet to enjoy at Lincoln Center.

I want to talk about Pina Bausch’s Le Sacre du Printemps. I was not familiar with this version before that night. It’s a striking work, which gets certain themes across brilliantly—fear, desperation, the horrific injustices human beings inflict on one another in times of misery. But it doesn’t quite match the big, bad original in several, I think, major ways. This is the opening of Nijinsky's version, originally created for the Ballets Russes:

Nijinsky’s work first tells the story very clearly. At the first lonely, lovely, cadence from the bassoon, the lights rise on people huddled in clusters on the ground. Slowly they arise and stretch, as if out of hibernation. It is the onset of Spring, and the people begin to beat the earth and reach out to the sky, a prayer for abundance. Rival tribes skirmish. The village elder examines the sky for omens. In part 2, the lights rise on the village maidens already engaged in a synchronized, repetitive dance, as if they have been doing this all night. One maiden collapses three times. She is the weakest, the “Chosen One.” She is isolated and forced to perform a frantic, strenuous dance that ends in her death. She is hoisted towards the sky as an offering to the sun-god.

This is the great Beatriz Rodriguez as the Chosen One, in Joffrey Ballet's recreation of Nijinsky's original.

In Bausch’s version, I couldn’t figure out how or why the Chosen One is, well, chosen. I have embedded videos of this version below. The piece opens with a single woman, apparently in some pleasant, maybe vaguely erotic reverie on a red cloth laid out on a stage covered in dirt. Slowly other women emerge from the wings; some rush to a point and stop, others meander, or do slow-motion pliés in the dirt. One can’t really tell what any of them are up to. As the music swells and gets more complicated symphonically, the womens’ movements become more spastic and more stereotypically “modern dance” in effect—they flail their arms and kick at the air, jerk their heads and stare, and it is as yet unclear what their agitation signifies. Is this Spring’s reinvigoration of the earth and people? Is it civil unrest? Is it growing hysteria, heralded by the clarinet verging on overblow in video 1, 2:42? I can’t tell, but that’s not a problem for me—yet. As whatever is happening pans out, the woman who had been asleep on the red cloth wakes from her reverie, and shudders at the realization she is holding this red cloth, which, in a scene entirely in brown and nude, stands out as an obvious, ominous, symbol. The women seem repelled and frightened by the cloth dropped downstage left, and for the first time dance in unison (video 1, 3:45). Also for the first time, there is a sensible (to me, at least) tone to their movements: they beat themselves, hunch their backs, squat and lurch clumsily. It seems more like strenuous manual labor than dance. The dirt from the ground sticks to their skin as they sweat; their hair gets more and more disheveled. They begin to seem less like dancers in delicate flesh-colored gauze slips than like half-naked self-flagellating automatons. One dancer breaks away from the group and shakes, doubling over at the abdomen, suggesting enteric distress (video 1, 4:44). Are these people starving? However, the real menace arrives in the forms of the men, appearing at (5:05)—from the time they arrive onstage it is clear that in this society (if it is indeed a society in the literal sense that is being portrayed here) men have total mental and physical power over the women. They charge onstage and the women suddenly disperse and stare at the floor, looking guilty, and like they hope not to be noticed. The mens’ movements are sharp, athletic, expansive; women cower before them, and seem even more naked in their sheer dresses. The women start to play “hot potato” with the red cloth, which almost makes sense if the red cloth represents the death sentence one expects it to based on both familiarity with the traditional story and on the horror with which it has heretofore been regarded in this version—but at one point a woman grabs the cloth out of the dirt and dances with it. Wait a minute--if the cloth is, say, ‘death,’—like “The Lottery”’s cross-marked ticket, and the women all understandably recoil from it, as they have from its revelation, why does she do that. The men grow more abusive, dragging women across the stage and crowding like wolf packs around the isolated ones. This dynamic persists throughout the rest of the piece, until the choosing of the sacrificial victim, in which each woman, trembling and clutching the red cloth to her breast, approaches what might be some sort of priest or elder (video 3, 4:15), as if to ask whether she is the one who must enact the terrible ritual. Finally the priest ‘chooses’ one (video 3, 5:24), and dresses her in the red cloth, which is in fact a loose-fitting slip. Perhaps it makes sense that a modern female choreographer chose to insert and emphasize an element of male-on-female control and abuse into a story that had heretofore been about something different, but I think it detracts from the main theme of this piece, and the one that this piece can express so well: the power of the group over the individual. You can diffuse that theme with stuff about subjugation of one whole gender by the other, but why would you?

Nijinksy’s original portrays the terrifying Darwinian imperative we arose from: the weakest of the lot is destroyed without mercy or sentimentality. Bausch’s piece hints at various forms of wretchedness (starvation, fear, oppression, displacement--at one point (video 2, opening), all the dancers plod in a circle suggesting a sort of Trail of Tears-style mass exodus—but who can tell what’s going on, really?).

In Nijinksy’s work, on the other hand, the people don’t seem too troubled by anything. Their faces are placid, their movements exact, they are elaborately dressed and made-up and seem healthy, if emotionless. We get the impression that ritual human sacrifice is just these people’s idea of how to keep on keepin’ on. You could easily mistake this society for a fairly civilized one until you realize what they’re on about. It reminds me of the contradictions of ancient Rome—they were so advanced in so many ways, yet eviscerations were their Jersey Shore. There is no hint of any soul-searching, or indeed, of the concept of “soul.” The only fear we see is in the shaking knees of the “Chosen One” after she is chosen: she is the only one who conveys anything we would recognize as human emotion, and she only does that after she has been isolated from the group, the implication being that what we know as “feeling” is a luxury one can only enjoy, or suffer, if isolation from “the group” (or “mob” or “society” or what have you) is not in itself a death sentence. For all this people’s apparent sophistication—they wear clothes, they farm, they organize rituals and pray—they still live like animals of prey. Only the weak separate from the herd and so must die.

My point is that it is less terrifying to see the horrific things human beings do to one another in times of misery than it is too see them doing the same things as mundanities. But I suppose anterior to that, my dissatisfaction with the piece stems from resentment at not being able to tell what is happening on a superficial level, not being able to follow the story or deduce whether there even is a story. If a piece is entirely abstract, then one can give oneself over to be moved by whatever emotions or ideas those abstractions elicit. But if there is a storyline, or even a suggestion of a story, it should be made clear enough to allow us to focus, both intellectually and emotionally, on the themes, on the heightened vision of ourselves that dance can show us, the stuff that’s both higher and more profound than plot. One can’t give oneself over to be moved by portrayals of human experience while simultaneously trying to sort out what that experience is.

I’ve linked to high-quality videos of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s 1978 recording of the piece. Of course the dancers I saw at Paris Opera were slimmer and longer-limbed, but the choreography speaks for itself, and Bausch does choreograph for a diversity of both body type and technique.

Presenting....

2010-12-13T23:38:00.001-08:00

Available Light

The Photography of ...

By Larissa Archer

Book Preview

On the rechristening of Henry Miller's Theater update

2010-09-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

(I posted this as a note on my facebook page and got some interesting comments; I've included them here in the comments section below)

Sometimes I have to agree with Christopher Isherwood. There have been some stupid, crass, and embarrassing decisions made in the renaming of certain Broadway theaters. The renaming of the Plymouth and the Royale theaters after bureaucrats would be the worst examples if there weren’t also a Broadway house named for an airline company nobody even likes to fly with. Henry Miller's Theater was rechristened The Stephen Sondheim Theater the other night. This choice isn’t as bad as the first ones described here, but it is still an inappropriate one, and here’s why:

There’s no Broadway theatre yet named for either Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. Now, no matter how much Sondheim lovers love Sondheim, they cannot make a case for him having as great an influence over American cultural life as Williams or Miller. This is not a polemic on the quality of Sondheim’s work; I wouldn’t presume to be able to speak intelligently on the subject, and I have too many sensitive song-and-dance friends who would pout if I did. However, I don’t know anyone who isn’t already a musical theatre enthusiast who knows or cares either way about Sondheim or his musicals. But every American reads Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in school, and there is a reason for that. The influence of these writers and the importance of what they had to say extends beyond the realm of Theatre (where, aside from that Johnny Depp film, and a few episodes of Topper, Sondheim’s influence stops), into that of literature and even the way Americans see themselves. In fact, Arthur Miller reworked the basic formula for tragedy, which had not been tinkered with for over three thousand years, to state that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” The “heroic attack on life,” which from the birth of drama had been the exclusive domain of kings and gods, Miller imparted to the unknown, laboring, “small” man—the Willy Lomans, Eddie Carbones, and John Proctors of the world. In his essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller writes,

“I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity…. the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing--and need be nothing--but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.”

If it seems strange that that there were ever a question that this “compulsion to evaluate himself justly” is a universal, classless compulsion that drama must portray if it is to reflect the human condition accurately, it is because Miller had the insight to write a tragedy in the high tradition centered not on a king or a prince but on a traveling salesman. Drama has not been the same since.

How often does someone rework something that the ancient Greeks came up with and change it for the better? Not often. But Arthur Miller did. And with it, the way we think about heroism, fate, and the mirage of the American Dream.

We can take for granted that Sondheim changed, revolutionized, even, the musical both stylistically with his non-linear plots (which Miller also did first with After the Fall) and thematically in his divergence from the usual bright fare to darker, more introspective themes (which straight theatre had been doing for, again, several thousand years). But that says more about the musical as being a still-young art form, and about Sondheim’s great influence in helping it catch up with the other arts, than it does about him as an artistic force on the level of artists whose influence does what art should do, that is, change not only the mores and structures of its own genre, but of the society and culture that produced and witnessed it. If you write a book about the Chicago meatpacking industry, and the President of the United States reads it, throws his breakfast sausage out the window, and rallies his administration to create what eventually becomes the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, you have changed culture you live in, maybe even the world. If you create a character who personifies sensitivity, frailty, even spirituality, and place her in a losing match with one personifying brutality, pragmatism, and profanity, you’re holding a mirror up to a society in which those very forces are vying for primacy, and hopefully, inspiring people to guard as well they can what’s sensitive, frail, and sacred. If you write a play that makes not only Americans but people all over the world question the “American Dream” and the moral, human value of the characteristics that help one achieve success in a cold, inhuman, and corrupt system, you change the way people think about their own dreams and eventually, hopefully, how they will act. You have, in a way, changed the world. If you write a musical and it changes musicals, you haven’t changed the world; you’ve just changed musicals. Which warrants a name on a marquee, changing musicals or changing the way America thinks?

Paris, comme il faut.

2010-08-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

under the great Parisian sky...

La Colosse

I write my postcards at Cafe de Flore.

my favorite.

With French-Syrian poet Maram al-Masri, whose latest book, Je Te Menace d'une Colombe Blanche, I translated for her recent American reading tour...
9WNG58NR6QKK

2010-05-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

Sue Bayliss, Arthur Miller's All My Sons

another nice review

2010-04-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

in The Examiner.

Suddenly Last Summer

2010-03-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time to write or brain to think, but the show is going nicely, maybe. The director shows up once in a while to deliver some catastrophic notes which we do our best to assimilate the next night. We've gotten favorable reviews, here, here, and of course it's very gratifying to hear from happy audience members, some of whom reviewed the show on the site where they bought tickets, here. I've even run into people on the street who recognized me from the show and said some very kind things. Unfortunately the Chronicle only reviews smaller theaters when they produce a new play, or a west coast premier.
Still, one never really feels like one got it. Luckily, we've extended the run by two weeks, so I still have a while...

My Early 30th B-Day Party

2010-01-15T15:46:00.001-08:00

My mom and I threw one of our famous grove street parties for my 30th birthday, even though my actual birthday is not until the 24th. My original plan was to return to New York after the holidays and have my birthday there, and so we had to get the party in early if I wanted one at home. As it turns out, while I was here I auditioned for and won the role of Catherine in a production of Suddenly Last Summer, so I'll be staying a while longer anyway. Here I'm wearing a pearl necklace my mother made for me as a gift.
We really went too far with the food, as most of my Russian friends contributed dishes. We had steamed baby potatos with cream and herring, piroshki, caviar blinii, "herring in a fur coat" which is the pinkish boat-shaped dish above, a delicious herring and beet concoction, my own top-secret world-famous cured salmon on cream cheese and bread (this salmon is the only food I know how to prepare besides spaghetti and cereal, and I think it is enough), deviled eggs, two different Georgian garlic-aubergine dishes, potatoes Olivier (this is some sort of Russian potato salad and I still don't know its connection to Laurence Olivier), shredded sweet carrot salad, homemade buttermilk cheese (the other thing I forgot I know how to make) which we spread on crackers with kim chee, a Russian super-garlicky cheese which we spread on anything we could find, and a Dianda's rum cake the size of Utah. Our friend Robert brought homemade Kahlua and there was lots and lots of vodka.
My brother-in-law, Bill, my mom, and I. We're standing in front of a bunch of my drawings and watercolors from my artschool days, as well as a photo from my short-lived career as a hand model...
Our dear family friend Lisa Boyle, who's known me since mom was preggers. She was an opera singer in her day, and was once conducted by Stravinsky himself (the premiere of The Flood, which, curiously, took place in Santa Fe).
Me with Shea and Liam Wahab, sons of family friend Afreen. I've known them all their lives and embarrassed them heavily at my party by telling a story about them from when they were wee ones. Afreen held my father's wake at her house, an enormous gift to us for which I've never thanked her properly. At the time, I felt pretty down for obvious reasons, but also because I've never had much patience for the sort of palliative talk that goes on at such events. All the "I can feel his presence," "he's in a better place," and "he'll always be with you" platitudes were not having the intended assuasive effect on me, and I had had a difficult time all night not punching the wall or tearing my hair out. At the end of the evening, everyone had left and Afreen sat down to talk with me. I knew she was laboring to comfort me, and I didn't want her to labor; it was a futile effort, and the thing that mattered was that she cared, which I already knew. So although I knew she was just being lovely and caring, listening to her I just grew more tense and unhappy. I wished something might come along to break the solemnity of it all, and suddenly, Shea and Liam, both small children then, rushed in from their bedroom wearing only their pajama tops. They glanced at each other, I guess to get the starting note, and, in unison, started flicking their little things and shouting "Boing! Boing! Boing!" Afreen shreiked and chased them back into their room, leaving me laughing on the floor. It was definitely the best moment of the wake.
HAHAHAHA! That's my sister Maya in the foreground. Nicola, a high school friend to the left, and Steve and Anson further back, both of whom I haven't seen in nearly twenty years. We went to elementary school together and lost touch when we all moved on to middle school. We reconnected thanks to facebook. Anson's girlfriend Lac sits to his left.
Afreen, the mother of Liam and Shea, and her boyfriend Hartmund. People who have seen my book will recognize her from several of the photographs in it. She was one of my father's favorite models.
We had a mini-celebration for Rebecca's birthday, which is close to mine. Rebecca has known me all my life, having danced in my mother's troupe in the seventies and eighties. Another of my father's favorite models.
Me with Rachel, a dear friend from the theatre, and a great actress who's currently doing a smashing job of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
My sister Maya and her husband of twelve years, Bill. Disgustingly in love with each other.

Grove Street

2010-01-06T15:25:00.000-08:00

In the eighties and early nineties, Grove Street was not part of “Hayes Valley,” as it’s known now, but of “the western addition,” a neighborhood built west of the original town of San Francisco on the east bay as it expanded after the gold rush, and before it stretched all the way to the Pacific. Sometime in the myopic sixties, the rows of Victorian houses on Grove, Laguna, Fulton, and McAllister were destroyed and housing projects built in their place. One of these became the “Pink Palace,” an infamous, and pink, hotbed of gang crime and violence. One didn’t walk past it alone; in broad daylight, joggers had been dragged inside, raped and killed. Once even, police arrested a man there and brought him in handcuffs to their car, only to lose him to a rioting mob of Pink Palacites who dragged him from the car and back into the Palace, leaving the car, and the policemen, on their sides in the street. This incident terrified the city so much that the government soon after tore down the Palace and transferred its occupants to somewhere in Oakland.

That was in the mid-nineties. Before that, and before the dot-com boom and resulting gentrification, Hayes Valley was still the western addition and the Pink Palace still stood glowering over us, two blocks away from my home.

I was aware that this neighborhood was pretty grim; I was not allowed to play outside, gunfire could be heard any time of day, the middle-eastern men who owned bodegas on the corners came to work armed, and any car parked on the street overnight would be tireless, windowless, and stereo-less by morning. Even the glass that walled in the bus shelter was constantly getting smashed. I looked out our window once and saw a father coaching his son on the best angle to strike the shelter glass with his elbow in order to send the whole thing crashing down. It was what Maxfield Parrish would have painted had he turned his attention to ghetto tableaux. Our neighbors played rap music so loudly our windows shook. I was ten when Freaks of the Industry came out, and I sat in my room listening uncomprehendingly as lyrics about someone named Money B not letting the kitty-cat get past him thundered up from up from downstairs. I believe I heard the girl who lived in that apartment being attacked one night; there was a loud argument between her and a man, after which, he went silent, but for the next five minutes, she continued to cry and beg, “Get off me; please get off me…” Her story was sad; sometime after this incident, she won a full scholarship to study at University High School, probably the ritziest co-ed private high school in San Francisco, where boys with Yale chins and girls with Radcliffe boobs are groomed for the Ivy League. Her family went, “what, you think you’re better than us?” and so she continued in the dismal California public school system. As I said before, I was aware that I was in a ‘bad’ neighborhood, but that awareness was thrown into low relief when I entered Katherine Delmar Burke School for Girls in seventh grade.

Burke’s was a blonder-than-thou WASP nest that groomed girls for University High School. The Aliotos, the Pelosis, the Fleishackers, all the families who owned San Francisco sent their daughters there, except for the Feinsteins, the Swansons, and others who sent them to Convent of the Sacred Heart (where I transferred to for high school). Burke’s is nestled in between Sea Cliff and Lincoln Park. Everybody knows Pacific Heights, the ritzy hills in the middle of town; it’s famous and flashy. But not everyone knows Sea Cliff, an area of mansions right on San Francisco’s bayside edge, shielded from most of the city by a large and quiet residential neighborhood that extends to the Pacific and that is populated mostly with Asian immigrants. You can’t just drive through Sea Cliff on your way to somewhere else; its grandeur isn’t conspicuous from every other less grand vantage point in the city, as in the case of Pac Heights. Sea Cliff is about as exclusive as a neighborhood that doesn’t have gates around it can get. It’s a destination, a wealthy haven on the edge of the land; in fact, once in a while a house literally slides off the edge of the cliff and into the bay, and when this happens, it always makes the news. The city watches with a mixture of glee at the misfortune of the rich and genuine sadness as yet anther one of San Francisco’s architectural treasures tumbles onto the rocks.

In a city where the real estate prices rival those of New York (and sometimes surpass it), Burke’s, a school of 400 students, covers 3.5 acres of land, with a soccer field, two tennis courts, an NBA-sized gym, and five art and music studios, in addition to the academic buildings. When I was there, the school also owned a three-story house on its perimeter where it held the extra-curricular sewing classes, which I and maybe four other students took. Before Burke’s I had gone to a school that had a giant Baptist church attached to it, but no gym or sewing mansion, and I was used to playing what was supposed to be only ‘touch’ football but never was, on a tarred-over rolling incline that moonlit as the church’s parking lot on Sundays. So I came to Burke’s a scabby tomboy and thrilled at the chance to play any sport on a team and in a gym or on a field with actual grass instead of potholes and oilslicks. One night after a basketball game I drove home with the school van because my father, who usually made it to the games in the city but not to those in Marin, couldn’t pick me up. As the van pulled onto my street and approached my building, my teammates went silent and looked like they thought we must have taken a wrong turn onto the Gaza strip, so since I had to take the platters back from my mother’s vast post-game cheese-and-salami spread, I tried to manage my sports sac, backpack, and the platters myself so no one would have to get out of the van and help me, and god forbid, enter my building. But when all the platters slid out of my arms and crashed onto the sidewalk, Anne Holmes left the school van to help me carry everything. Anne was a year ahead of me, was the only girl on the team who could run faster than I, and was what I thought was an American version of the quintessential English rose: blonde, moneyed, long limbed, pink cheeked, of nose long and narrow (this was before I moved to London and discovered that the quintessential English Rose dyes her hair maroon, chain-smokes, and lives in Kensal Rise with a short tulip of a nose). She was always friendly to me so I was grateful that it was she who followed me into the building rather than one of the others. But my momentary relief died when the doorbell buzzed behind us as we walked up the stairs and Charles, who lived next door to us, flung open the door to his apartment, revealing its yellowed walls and releasing its stink of old grease and chicken and bellowed down the stairwell in his y-fronts and a shower cap (the only outfit I ever saw him in). I caught a glimpse of terror in Anne’s eyes before she set the platters on my doorstep and ran down the stairs. I was ashamed to be ashamed of Charles-next-door. He was inelegant, maybe, but seemed basically benign: he, too, was always friendly to us, unlike our other neighbors, one of whom had once threatened my father with a knife, and another of whom had called me a prejudiced bitch and spat in my face when I was eleven. However, when our building burnt down a year later, it was from a fire started by Charles-next-door, freebasing cocaine in his bedroom.

After the incident with Anne Holmes and Charles-next-door, I asked our coach to drop me off last from then on.

My covetousness was not assuaged by visiting my classmates’ homes. Another basketball-related event, our end-of-season awards dinner, I think, was held at Laurie Hannah’s house near the school right on Sea Cliff’s edge. Laurie Hannah’s house, a pink (again with the pink!) Spanish-style mansion from the ‘20’s, still clings to its seaside perch. I remember wondering if the sound of the waves crashing against the back wall under her bedroom window kept her up at night, but she always seemed pretty well-rested, so probably not. Her father was a cardiac surgeon and owned Hannah vineyards in Napa.

There were two routes my father could take when he drove me home from school. One was to drive south away from Sea Cliff and east onto Geary, a major street he could take all the way back to our neighborhood, or he could turn back into the winding Sea Cliff lanes and emerge further east onto California and take that slower-moving road back to the western addition. I often asked my father to take the scenic route so I could gawk at the homes there, and I have regretted it ever since. I don’t know how even at eleven or twelve, I could have been so crass as to subject a man who loved me to the fact that, however much he had given me, what I really wanted was something he never could give me. These were his waning years; he died before I wised up.

The fire in our building in 1993, and another fire on our block in a much larger apartment building, as well as the destruction of the nearby Pink Palace, roughly coincided with the dot-com boom that brought a lot of new money into the city. Everyone in our building except for us was sent either to jail or deported, and same for the larger building down the street. After the renovation of our building, which took about half a year, and during which my mother and I stayed in a room at the Commodore Hotel on Sutter street while my father was in the hospital, my mother took the task of finding tenants over from the property management company that had previously done that job, both for our building and the one next door to ours, which had emptied out for reasons I don’t remember. She filled both buildings with senior-age Russian immigrants. Immediately the whole street seemed, and I guess was, safer than before. Cars could stand untouched on the street all night. Gunfire was seldom heard anymore. No one in our building threatened us except with cardiac arrest-inducing meat pilaf. The city also tore down the remnants of the freeway extension that crossed Grove street and separated it from the more affluent area where the Opera, the Herbst Theater, the San Francisco Ballet building, the Symphony, and City Hall are clustered at the junctures of Grove and Van Ness. The freeway had been damaged in the 1989 earthquake and had stood for years, a disused eyesore and a symbolic barrier between the civic center and the ghetto. With the greater aura of safety on our block, people started referring to the neighborhood as Hayes Valley rather than the Western Addition, and yuppies and well-to-do homosexuals started renting and even buying flats near us. Women started jogging alone down the street and it didn’t seem like a suicide bid. It was becoming necessary to visit other neighborhoods to get drugs, as the DIY experts had all moved away. Glamorous businesses started popping up on Hayes (the next street over from Grove). One of the corner bodegas became a pilates studio. A restaurant opened whose menu consists entirely of pancakes. There’s a sushi bar, an imported Italian shoe shop, a Sake shop, and a gallery of rugs that benefit victims of war. There are coffeeshops manned by skinny hipsters in emo haircuts. There’s an ayurvedic skincare salon. For a while people who lived in wealthier areas would come to Hayes Valley in what I assumed was a timid attempt at “slumming it” (no one “slummed it” here when it was really a slum) but now it seems like they’re the ones who actually live here. One of my old classmates from Burke’s lives two blocks from me.

My mother, my sister, and I, who have lived here for over twenty years now (even though I spend most of my time elsewhere I feel like Grove street is home) somehow seem just as foreign now that our neighborhood is posh as we did when it was rough. Go figure.

Florence and London, December 2009

2009-12-29T18:54:00.000-08:00

I took a short trip to Florence and London before Christmas. I got stuck in Paris airport on my way into the UK and was delayed by a day and took the train instead, luckily one of the last before the Eurostar debacle. I still don't have my luggage, two weeks later. But I had a great time nevertheless. This is me looking perky on the Arno.
I always thought that this was called Piazza della Signorina, and that that was a very nice name to give to the civic center of Florence. Signoria makes more sense but is somehow less charming.
This is me on Via Cavour, around the corner from the Baptistry. Our hotel was once a mansion Franz Liszt bought for his girlfriend. Across the street was Rossini's house and next to that, Pallazzo Medici.

This is the library in the cathedral at Siena.This is the outer wall of the Medieval town San Gimignano, famous for its towers and excellent white wine.

I was stuck in Paris overnight on my way to London. I spent several hours in line with customer service, and then another hour outside with all these people waiting to be taken to the hotel. But every bus that came by was for a different hotel than most of us were placed in. Each time a bus pulled up, people crowded around it with their red noses and screaming children and begged to be let on while the drivers physically blocked the doors and screamed "non!" before driving off with empty cars. No one was there to give information, but when I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I wound my way back to the customer service desk where someone was yelling at the assistant in German, and realized that whatever he was yelling was probably similar to what I had hoped to address more temperately, and that my mission was futile. But then, someone who had been standing outside with me caught up with me to relay a rumor he had heard that they were giving out taxi vouchers since all the Air France buses had been canceled. I knocked a few old ladies over and punched a small child in the throat to get to the desk that supposedly held the vouchers. As I stood in line, I asked an air France employee who happened to be strolling by with an unlit cigarette in his hand (could the French be any more French?) if there were in fact taxi vouchers and if this was the right line to get them in, and he replied that yes, actually, all the buses had been canceled and that I was in the right line to get taxi vouchers which did indeed exist. I told him that there were dozens of people still waiting in the snow for the bus, and he shrugged and sauntered outside to smoke in the snow. When I got to the front of the line the customer service lady said, "wot taxee voushehrs? Zer arre non taxee voushehrs. You see zehr arre manee boeusses weetch arre coeumming..." A Scottish guy behind me yelled something incomprehensible at her, and I labored to maintain my composure against all my Ugly American instincts, and finally we both won our vouchers, and were immediately offered thrilling sums for them by the people further back in the line that had formed behind us and snaked across the terminal. I was turned down by five different drivers who either didn't honor air France vouchers or didn't know where my hotel was. By 3:30am I arrived at the hotel.
I was in London for another massive snowstorm. This is me in my old neighborhood on Kilburn High Road.
I had to glam up for Ben's birthday but only had the clothes I flew in and no makeup. So Nat let me borrow her sequined minidress and Degie made me up like Cleopatra. My Ugg boots didn't really match up, but whatevs.Camden town, as funky as ever.
My friend Matt treated me to brunch at Fortnum and Mason's. Scarves do a lot to help one appear elegant despite not having changed clothes in four days. The ace up my sleeve is that you can't smell a photo.
uh....maybe you should get high before watching this video. Even that might not help. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be doing an Irish jig or a highland fling, and I don't know how to do either. Of course that didn't stop me from trying. Laugh while you can, because Ben's going to make me take this down when he finds out I posted it.

R.I.P. Scottie Agar Jaickes

2009-11-28T20:25:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine died a few nights ago. We worked together at my old theater company in San Francisco. I met him the summer I spent reading Steinbeck and so I've always associated the two of them--perhaps because Scottie shared the great author's sense of social justice, and perhaps because he lived on and worked a plot of land in northern California, and seemed like an ideal Steinbeck character: smarter, of course, and more self-aware than Lennie, but innocent and quiet, kind, innately intolerant of gossip, pettiness, and malice. His forearms were tattooed with bombs and other weaponry (which he jokingly or maybe not jokingly referred to as his "prison tatts") and he spoke in a rough street dialect, but I only ever knew him as gentle and wise, with an astute and disinterested sense of what's fair and what's not, someone you could speak with safely. His great strength as an actor was that he was bold enough to be dull onstage--and was therefore riveting. I think what turns a lot of people off the theater is that so much of the time you can sense an actor's anxiety about his own performance, in his perceptible over-eagerness to please, to provoke, to elicit sympathy, to convince, and worst, to entertain. At best, this is, in the revelation of the lack of self-trust at its base, unmoving or even embarrassing for the audience, and at worst, something that reads as pandering which the audience rightly rejects with disdain. You could always relax watching Scottie because you knew that he wouldn't subject you to any "acting." The limitations he placed on himself (he didn't do accents or adjust his already singular physicality from role to role) were made up for by an unfussy realism that made much of what passes on the major stages of the theater world look like desperate showing-off.

I'm not a psychologist and wouldn't presume to draw a link between Scottie's talent as an actor and his best traits as a person, but I'd like to think that they are connected. I will miss him, onstage and off.

Santa Fe, Bandolier, and Magdalena

2009-11-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

Yes. That's me. with a gun. Steve Bodio showed me the basics of pointing and shooting and shooting range etiquette when I visited him and Libby in Magdalena, southern New Mexico, with Peculiar and Mrs. Peculiar. That's a "London Best" I'm holding.

in a volcanic ash cave in Bandolier.

Steve with his ....falcon. or goshawk?....oh no I'm going to be in trouble if I've named it incorrectly. damn! I watched her devour a quail in about a minute and a half. It was terrifying and bloody, and I can still hear the crunch of bird-bones in its beak. Who needs TV?

Dancing with Lee the Rancher at the Golden Spur in Magdalena. Mr. and Mrs. Peculiar and I slept that night in an RV in the Spur's parking lot. It was cozy.

Peculiar perched on the ruins....

Here we go again...

2009-08-15T01:00:00.001-07:00

I'm back in New York now and have to do something with my life, or at least, to find a job and stall. After a cocky start with the New York Times journalism and education job market, by the end of the first week I was fashioning ways to pad out my resume so I could more confidently answer the craigslist fetish ads. This all induced the sort of motivational narcolepsy that makes sighing myself to death seem the lesser of two evils, the other evil being something I can't bother myself to come up with. So the next week I spent flopping from one supine attitude of self pity to another, unwashed and awash in drowsy consideration of the difficulties of my life. Finally I decided there had to be more to life than stoned iphone tetris and facebook snooping, and that I should perhaps take a shower and go into the city.

The level of purpose one needs just to walk down the street here is preternatural. The ambition, the exuberance, the if-I-can-make-it-there, I'll-make-it-anywhere self-belief is only uplifting if you share it yourself, and you can only share it to the same degree if you haven't already gone through the slogging, the day-to-day smackdowns, the landslides of rejections, and the regular revelations of your own minuteness that comprise New York’s hazing ritual for the newly arrived. The benchmarks of adulthood, like finding employment that justifies your education, accommodation better than your college dorm, financial independence from your parents, are at their most elusive here. It's not that you lose your hope, it's that you go from having huge, king-of-the-hill dreams, to weeping with self-pride over landing a job in something other than catering. Looming larger is the spectre of what you might become if you don't save yourself from failure. You know you have to succeed at something—who cares what—or turn into one of those people barricaded in their studio apartments by piles of dried catshit and unsent letters to Mayor Koch, who pass their time in picking skintags and talking to cockroaches. You become an American English eccentric, except unlike actual English eccentrics, other Americans don't regard you in your sphincter-cringing social inappropriateness as a quaint national personage. New Yorkers can achieve orgasm through schadenfreude alone, and there's only one side of that word you want to be on.

It occurred to me that now that I'm in America, I could put my networking skills back to use. I'll say this for New York—it doesn't pretend not to function in significant part by nepotism. One of the less admirable aspects of London is that it, too, is ruled by nepotism, but pretends not to be. You're not supposed to mention it, or admit it's there, or suggest to anyone who has achieved anything that nepotism had anything at all to do with it, or, worst of all, attempt to make it work for you. English nepotism works in such a way that, hustle all you like, you're not cooking with gas unless your name and alma mater are doing their part. Most helpful is sharing a surname with other people who have already achieved renown in your field, and barring that, go to Oxford for politics, or Cambridge for the arts. Of course it helps you get into either if someone else of your surname also went there, particularly if they went on to achieve renown in their field. So the English have developed a system that allows them not to have to sully themselves with gauche American-style “pushiness”--that so-undignified compulsion to make colleagues out of friends and friends out of colleagues. They've made a virtue of showing they don't have to stoop to self-promotion--that's all the famous English self-deprecation is about--and they'll put their smugface on if you so much as ask them to pass along your resume. New Yorkers are more honest. They accept that connections are how it's done and expect you—in fact, don't respect you unless you sniff out opportunities everywhere you go and do your damnedest to exploit them, whether you came from the right family or went to the right schools or not.

I still have a few acquaintances and ex-colleagues here from the first go-around. First I contacted the ones who hadn't already fired me. Most had changed careers in the three years I'd been gone. Sometimes I think taking a Notes From Underground approach to life is good for a laugh, and choose my next move based on what could make the most hilariously terrible story. So I called Richard, my old editor at New York Moves. People who pretend they're above eating shit miss out on all the fun, I say. Alas, he never responded to the message I left on his voicemail. Other colleagues were from jobs regrettable except for their blogability, and I've already written that story; I'm too old to find amusement in sacrificing myself to someone else's robber baron dreams. And so I'm left with the less entertaining, last resort, which is to start over clean—back to those grim job market pages.

Most positions listed have names I don't even understand, names with words in them like development, support, coordinator, IP Telephony, unpaid. And most have descriptions that would make Bartleby consider retraining. The unbelievable thing is how the employers don't even bother to mask the disparity between what they expect of applicants and what they're offering. A benefitless part-time position writing ad copy for a manufacturer of beige thread in a Hoboken basement requires a post-graduate degree in journalism, a working knowledge of Quark, whatever that is, and preferably a previous internship at the White House. On their applications they ask you to describe your leadership skills and an event wherein you showed yourself to be a “team player.” The worst, though, was when I applied to work at the famous Strand bookstore. Along with all the usual fill-in fields on its application there's a ten-question author-to-title match test. I could only answer six of them. I saw that there was an inaccurate match-up, where it listed Master and Margarita, but not Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky, but nothing by him. I considered scribbling ”Fuck your trick questions” in the margin and flouncing off but realized that wouldn't make it any less humiliating not to be able to complete the quiz. To be fair, the only qualifications one should ever have to cite on The Strand's job application form are whether one can look bored and be unhelpful, but I thought pointing this out to the human resources manager wouldn't help my case. The only thing I had on my resume that might have put me ahead of the emo throngs who apply there every day is that I studied the “great books” program at college, and now I proved, to them and to myself, that not only do I not know the stuff I didn't study, I don't even know the stuff I studied instead of the stuff I didn’t study. And then it asked me whether I knew how to use a cash register. I staggered down the stairs and out onto Union square with crinkled chin, pretending that I'd got something stuck in both contacts.

I'm still looking. I'll let you all know whether I find anything newsworthy.

announcing.....

2009-07-15T09:39:00.001-07:00

The Ritual of ...

By Larissa Archer

Book Preview

Can you believe this pretentious fuck?

2009-03-03T13:51:00.000-08:00

I found a cafe the other night as I wandered in the Las Huertas neighborhood of Madrid that looked attractive, with a lived-in-looking art deco interior and a free window table like I prefer. I went in and ordered a glass of white wine and prepared to write or sketch in my notebook, for what seemed to be the perfect way to spend my first evening in Madrid. As I waited for my drink, I checked my Timeout guide on the chance that the place, Cafe Central, might be mentioned, and it was, as one of the prime jazz venues in all of Spain. So when the waiter told me that there would be a performance tonight and would I like to buy a ticket, I thought I could painlessly knock off one of my cultural duties as a tourist while simultaneously doing what I'd always rather be doing: sitting in cafe with a notebook. So I bought a ticket and got to “work.” However, as the show was about to start, the lights went down; I could no longer read or write, everyone else in the room simultaneously lit a cigarette, and I could only join the crowd blinking at the stage and try to avoid becoming enraged at the cloud of smoke thickening in the room.

What's worse, then the music started. Apparently, Bob Sands is a well-respected musician, and his quartet quite a hot ticket, although the cafe was not a large venue and wasn't nearly full. I guess when i hear the word “jazz” I always optimistically envision some sort of big band and Sarah Vaughn singing with a flower in her hair. I expect to hear some discernible melody rather than a cacophany of “riffs.”And for the drummer to show some restraint with the cymbal brush. And for one song to sound different from another. Fool.

So already I regretted paying the 11 euros my ticket cost, thinking what a lot of pretentious bullshit jazz is now and wondering if i could blame Miles Davis for this, but THEN--
get this, during the first song, when Mr. Sands was finished with all his frantic riffing, he stepped down from the stage, leaving his remaining trio of minions there to paddle along while he stood off to the side, in full view of the audience, smoking and drinking a beer! Now, I know a jazz performance is often a much more casual event than many other types of musical performances, and that this is indeed part of its charm, but doesn't that just seem unprofessional and bratty to anyone else? He did this during every song for the rest of the show (of course I left early, but i had seen enough). Not once did any of the other musicians get to smoke or drink or bugger off the stage like that when they weren't playing at being a star. Only he did, apparently to make sure everyone knew how much soul he was putting into this instrumental rorschach splatter, so much soul that the minute he was done showing off, he had to go lean against an amplifier and sedate himself. And not only that, but as he was smoking and drinking by the side of the stage and watching the lesser stars, he sort of jived along to their playing—like bobbing his head and swinging his free hand to some rhythm only he was able to identify.

Dear Mr. Sands,

Hello, asshole. I'M YOUR AUDIENCE. I'll be the judge of whether this is groovy or not, you FUCKING PEDANT!

Love, Larissa

Here is a video of him off in the corner. That big empty space is the unoccupied center stage, and that head which in the video you can barely make out bobbing up and down in the doorway is his.

Also, sometimes he would talk to the audience in that jazz station DJ voice, just under the breath a bit (I guess in an attempt at sexy?), speeding up and slowing down at nonsensical places in a way that suggested he'd really rather be scatting. “nowwwwwwwwwwladiesandgentlemenwe'dliketoplayalittlesongforyouentitled,uh-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAANDSvillllllle....uh one, uh two, uh onetwothreefour” I kept expecting to hear “daddy-o” thrown in somewhere. It was hard not to laugh at what, if this were Saturday Night Live, would certainly be a brilliant send-up of jazz musicians everywhere enchanted by their own coolth, but he wasn't joking or mocking anybody. It reminded me of how Rufus Wainwright always sounds like he's doing a hilariously cruel impersonation of himself, except he's not impersonating; he's just being himself, and that aural mix of cat rape and teenage whine is a sound he creates unironically.

And yes, one of the songs was entitled Sandsville. I know...

Barcelona, Mon Amour

2009-02-23T21:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm in Barcelona now. Off to Madrid tomorrow! Here is my haiku on the continuing construction work on the Sagrada Familia:

Stupid ugly crane
Ruining my photographs
Fuck you, crane.

on the roof of Casa Pedrera

at the Palau de la Musica Catalan

Escribo, a bakery on La Ramblas

at Schilling

R.I.P. Anne Berven

2009-02-12T14:22:00.001-08:00

I sang in Anne’s chamber choir all four years of college. I think it might have been the most enriching artistic experience of my life, and my college years certainly would not have been the same without it. I have many things to thank her for, foremost of which is introducing me to some fantastically beautiful music, and teaching me to listen to it, as well as sing it. I’m sure anyone lucky enough to have sung with her, been coached by her, or studied in her music class would concur. Her ear for how a piece should be sung: in what voice, which sections should stand out from the others and when in order to “tell the story” more clearly, how to keep from going flat when singing in French—was masterly. Perhaps these are all prerequisites for musical directors, but it’s surprising how many professional choirs sing Rachmaninov as if it were Mozart, or Palestrina as if it were Poulenc, or why some of them bring out the tenors in Russian music when the bassos clearly have the melody (that is if one should ever bring out the tenors over the bassos in Russian music).

Anne also taught me a lesson for which I’m grateful. Sometimes she reproached me for not having continued my music studies after college. She asked me once a few years ago, “How could you treat music like it’s this thing you can dabble with and then throw away, like it’s not worthy of a place in your life?” I bring this up because for me it was a new way of thinking about art—it is not just something to amuse yourself with while you pursue things you respect more; an art form such as music is something towards which one has a responsibility, like a person, or a political cause—not to be treated lightly. People often talk of theatre and responsibility, but the context is usually that of rescuing that art form from failure-by-inanition, or that of an artist’s responsibility to the audience, to move, to educate, to provoke. Anne was speaking of music as though it were itself a human being with a soul and dignity, and that to love it meant to honor it somehow—through continued consideration, examination, participation. It is not just something to entertain yourself with when nothing’s on TV, but something requiring an active and sustained, intellectual as well as emotional (and physical, for practitioners), study. I believe she felt music to be as much of an educator as are books, and that to disrespect it is to let a major aspect of one’s self, of one’s soul, atrophy. It might say something more about my own retardation that I hadn’t considered this until given a talking-to in my mid-twenties; nevertheless, I’m grateful that Anne was as critical as she was generous, and taught me this lesson unasked, which she did over chocolate martinis at Geronimo, a posh restaurant in Santa Fe where we sometimes went when we wanted to feel glamorous and get drunk.

She was also one of the funniest people I’ve known, and her humor added another delightful aspect to our rehearsals, which were never without laughter. I shall miss her.

Sometimes London is Funny

2009-02-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

This is what I did last night. I didn't play; I just shouted along with the players. I didn't realize there were so many people who knew how to play the ukelele. And that they all get together every wednesday night for a play-and-sing-along. London really surprises me sometimes. More surprising, however, was how many couples were making out. I didn't manage to videotape them (I definitely would have if I had been able to get a good shot--privacy be damned!). But.....so is ukelele music some big untapped aphrodesiac or something?

Stupid Magazines

2008-11-07T04:03:00.000-08:00

I was recently invited to submit some work to a new luxury magazine. That’s right—a magazine celebrating wealth, leisure, and conspicuous consumption. The editor sent me a list of possible topics including an examination of whether one should buy, part own, or lease private air travel, a spread on the custom interiors of the yachts of the world’s super-rich, and profiles on “Russian billionaires and their money: How they earned it and what they spend it on.” These are the one-off features for the first edition, and will be added to the regular stories on the current most attractive countries for basing off-shore businesses and the world’s poshest postcodes. The commissioning editor assembled and sent out these story ideas whose every tagline ends with, “when money is no object,” in the week Washington Mutual was devoured whole by JP Morgan Chase, a large hunk of London’s City was spontaneously laid off, the country of Iceland collapsed, and the US Congress was sweating over a preposterous bailout plan it would shortly reject, add another $180B to in special interest money, and finally pass in despair.

The story ideas were accompanied by a long-winded and dissembling paragraph on the humble scale of the magazine’s editorial budget and that therefore, Vivo, the world’s newest international luxury magazine, with headquarters in London and Dubai, unfortunately could not pay its writers. However, writers who brought with them contacts who proved lucrative would, at some future point when presumably the rag would have become the nouveau riche’s favorite monthly guide to untrammeled money-flinging, be “rewarded.” This, however, was not to say that we would be encouraged to “sell” anything. Except, of course, our fondness for social justice and our dignity.

This is obviously a laughable and outrageous example of the everyday iniquities served to people with talents other than capitalist pig-doggery. That a magazine glorifying new and unchallenged wealth is not able to, or willing to, offer its contributors even the usual niggardly compensation accorded freelance writers just makes it all the more eminently bloggable. Oh, the irony! Even an American can see it!

But actually, my guess is that most magazines not owned by Conde Nast operate by the same financial model. To an extent, it’s understandable. Writers want to be published and are often willing to work for little or no money, as long as they get a by-line, especially when they are starting out. I was. Contributor compensation is one thing a publisher can scrimp on, unlike the immovable costs of printing and throwing launch parties. Sometimes, however, one has to ask whether the magazine is betraying its own raison d’etre by paying little or nothing to the brains and labor behind it.

Take my old glossy, New York Moves Magazine. It looked like an upscale operation. It was printed on high-quality, thick paper, its office was in a hip loft space in Tribeca, and it threw regular parties in various venues of middling swankiness (though these might have been “rented” with advertising space). The only people I knew of to be on a proper payroll were the managing editor and the art director, both of whom were clearly paupers. Long-term readers of my blog will recall that my relationship with New York Moves came to an end when it surfaced to both the publisher, Moonah, and me that the editor, Richard, had been paying me twice the rate Moonah had allocated. In my fight to retain the salary, I had several arguments with Richard, the gist of which was basically,

Me: “I’m worth that much and more. Put some pants on and stand up for me!”

Richard: “I know you are but we simply don’t have the money and Moonah, who wears my pants, will never agree to it. ”

I never took the argument to what I now see as the next logical step:

“Why, then, should you bother to maintain this crummy magazine at all?”

If this seems an odd response to the modus operandi of this and countless other enterprises—theatres, art spaces, literary journals—consider that the “concept” of this magazine is supposedly a celebration of female empowerment. The subline is “Fashion and Lifestyle for the New York Career Woman.” They even dedicate an issue every year to New York’s “power women,” successful career women who would probably never dream of giving their time away. In his mission statement, Richard says, “I wanted to create a magazine for smart women that treated them like the sentient beings they are.” The magazine sets itself up as an arbiter of the ever-advancing status of womanhood. So how can it claim in good faith that female empowerment is its main interest when it expects women--and its staff is mostly female--to work for pennies or for free? What is more empowering than to be able to feed yourself and pay your rent through hard work and painstakingly-developed talent? Or, perhaps this is clearer: How discouraging is it to not be able to feed yourself or pay your rent despite your hard work and painstakingly developed talents? So many womens' magazines purport to be created with the same concept in mind—the empowerment, the advancement, the celebration of all things female—and, so many of them work on a similarly sigh-inducing budget. New York Moves and all its indistinguishable sisters preach empowerment but offer their own staffs only the opportunity to be used. The operation is hypocritical at its core.

Then there's the implied insult to the readership, and not only that of cynically selling an idea they do not uphold in practice. I wonder how all the upwardly mobile, educated, ambitious career women who read these magazines would feel if they knew they were being lectured on new-wave feminism by 20 year-old interns doing work experience for their B.A.'s at the New School? Likewise, how would Donald Trump feel knowing that the “pimp my yacht” feature he’s reading in Vivo was written by some part-time coat-check boy who’s only ever seen a yacht on Dynasty? Some of the writing that makes it to print makes me wonder if people ever feel insulted that magazine publishers, or editors, assume they are not discerning enough to recognize bad writing or weak thinking. It's not unheard of for good writers, even ones with some experience of the world, to be willing to write (or edit, or design, etc.) for free or little money, but a lot of the time in magazine publishing, people work at the level their skills merit. Face it, when people get really good at what they do, they start to expect to get paid for it. Most exceptions to the rule occur for the opposite scenario: the mystifying ability of people with paltry talents to land plum gigs at otherwise reputable publications (Independent, I’m looking at you and your sex columnist!) Apart from the occasional exception, the reader gets what the magazine pays for.

Maybe this is an overly-idealistic expectation, but no matter how noble the convictions and progressive the message a project has, if it is unable to function without violating those convictions and that message, then the project is a fraud and should be quit. When Oedipus realizes that he has lived his life mired in the horrors he sought to escape, he doesn’t rationalize the disaster. He doesn’t say, “Well it’s not ideal; of course I really wish things could be different, but on the bright side, if I hadn’t married my mother and killed my father I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I might as well just carry on.” No, he stabs his eyes out. These magazines, on the other hand, are run by people so arrogant as to believe their vanity projects more important than the ideologies which supposedly form the foundation of those projects. Instead of, er, stabbing their eyes out, they rationalize their hypocrisy and carry on. At New York Moves and its like, where they pretend to support Women’s Advancement while denying their own women this most basic tool for advancement, or at Vivo, the magazine dedicated to other people’s money, the survival of the magazine itself justifies the negligence of its philosophy, its content, and its creators.

All of my adult life I’ve been asked to work for free. My education was enormously expensive, and it taught me to do things that I fight and fail to use in even a humbly gainful way. The only steady and above-board (and still pathetic) money I’ve ever been able to make has been in jobs I didn’t need to graduate from middle school to perform. I’ve never had much patience for the common attitude that if I wanted to ensure that I could make a living I should have gotten a ‘proper’ degree and then a ‘proper’ job. It’s akin to saying that art and ideas are not important and that sensible people don’t bother with them, and if they do, they shouldn’t expect any better than to live out their lives as paupers. I think we can and should expect better. Putting the guilt on those pursuing traditionally risky vocations is just letting the people who exploit them off the hook. For every writer, or actor, or artist, or designer (and the list goes on) willing to “give it away” there are many others who can’t get a paid job as a result. No one at the helm of an enterprise will conduct it with integrity unless he is compelled to do so. And no one, not the apathetic consumers, not the opportunistic employers, and not the breathless interns or workers resigned to hobbyism, is providing that necessary compulsion.

I can’t think of an ending sentence. Maybe I should get an intern. Any takers?

R.I.P. Yma Sumac

2008-11-04T23:27:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite singers has died. Her passing has been overshadowed by the big news of the day--but here's a brief example of her work for those who don't know her.

If Schlock Shops were Bedbugs.....

2008-10-16T14:06:00.000-07:00

I’m beginning to worry about an unpleasant infestation occurring in my neighborhood of Kilburn. Every couple of weeks a grocery store or hardware shop closes and is replaced by a haphazard set-up shilling “leather” handbags for under a fiver or clothes your mother wouldn’t let you wear for two pounds. These shops comprise long stretches of the high road, rendered useless to residents who aren’t in the market for goods that fall apart if you breathe too hard on them. Of course the uncomfortable underlying knowledge is that it is unlikely that the companies employing people to make products that you can buy with the loose change from the bottom of your purse employ practices which would land them in Fortune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” list. But disregarding the murky social politics of it all, how much tat do Northwest Londoners need?

Kilburn High road has long hosted all sorts of bargain shopping, from Traid, my favorite fair-trade-supporting charity shop, to vast and varied pound shops that actually sell stuff for a pound. It’s heaven when you’re broke and you need bulk paracetemol, no-name drain cleaner, cheap Toblerone, or a sari painted with glitter glue. It’s also always had a lot of stores selling, well, crap. Blouses with cut-out bellies, plastic shoes, and of course the ubiquitous handbags, both knock-offs and ones that could only dream of knocking-off. But the number of this sort of shop has risen alarmingly in the past year.

It started with the closure of my local Sommerfield’s. This upset me, even though Sommerfield’s is the poor man’s Sainsbury’s (that is to say, poor indeed) mainly because it stocks black cherry-flavored Amore yoghurt, which Sainsbury’s does not, despite my pleas. But it was also odd to see a store in no danger of collapse close a branch in such a busy area. Unsurprisingly, residents of that postcode, of whom I am one, shortly after received notice that several buildings on that block with the Sommerfield’s store would in the coming year be gutted, renovated, and built up to include two additional stories of luxury condos. Sommerfield’s had simply shut up and moved out early. Within a week the large store housed the new “Amazon Discount Clothing,” with bargain racks pushed out onto the sidewalk and signs in the window reading, “Closing Down: Everything Must Go!” from the day it opened. A few months after, the other shops in that block of buildings, which include an army surplus store, a home and houseware emporium, a Muslim-friendly clothing boutique, and a suitcase shop, had all posted their closing down signs. Some businesses have just vanished, and in their places, having arrived as swiftly as the previous occupants had left, are the new bag-and-shoe shacks. It’s not only on that block of the high road where the luxury condos wait to be built and, no doubt, snapped right up in this fertile economy. Across the road, Soho Books has closed. Hand bags, again. Hand bags made of plastic leather, with plastic metal furnishings and plastic zippers and plastic fringe hanging off the plastic zipper grips. Hand bags that smell like car exhaust. Hand bags that melt if you leave them in the sun.

What the hell are Londoners carrying around that we need this extraordinary supply of cheap sacks to carry it in? And why are they all in Kilburn?? I have to bring my own tote to the grocery store now that the big chains are too eco-friendlier-than-thou to hand out plastic bags to customers. Where’s the outrage against the plastic tat industry? And how is it that wherever you open a Starbuck’s, all the other coffeeshops within a mile-radius wither and die, but somehow the presence of a giant Primark on the high road isn’t any threat to the cluster of equally low-end mini-marts sprouting up like mushrooms in its shadow? Is there a level of “tacky” where the rules of supply-and-demand just don’t apply anymore? Huge banks are collapsing and entire economies teetering toward abjection. Are the schlock shops the cockroaches of the retail world? Vile, but hardy enough to survive the economic winter in which creatures of better mettle perish?

Newsflash: Women can be Funny, too!

2008-10-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

I try not to get too worked up over stupid stuff I read in the papers….I’m sorry; I shouldn’t lie right at the outset like that. I read the papers specifically to feed my anger. Maybe I’m afraid my bile will get bored if it doesn’t have something to roil and churn over, or that I won’t have anything to brood about when my bedtime bong hit wears off and I wake up at five in the morning. Some things really gripe my ass, including many articles I’ve read recently in The Times, The Independent, and several other publications from which I’d expect greater breadth of comprehension.

BIG NEWS: There are funny women in the world! Actually, the news seems to be about just how funny we can be, because anything more than a middling talent for comedy in a woman is a shock. Even more shocking is the fact that some of today’s comediennes are pretty, as well as funny. Adding to the collective gasp at the display of more than one attribute at a time in a woman--and discussing the trend as something women are finally allowed to inhabit rather than considering that the trend might be one newly foisted on us--is Caitlin Moran, writing in The Times, “It's not like back in the 20th century, when women could be either funny but essentially unf***able - Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Jo Brand - or f***able but condemned to a lifetime of speaking other people's lines - Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carole Lombard…” Moran cites Sarah Silverman’s and Tina Fey’s recent appearances on the cover of Maxim and Marie Claire respectively as evidence that finally, this heretofore unseen species of female has emerged, one who possesses a talent only men are supposed to have but who didn’t develop it to compensate for her mediocre looks. As is often the case when the media starts discussing “revelations” of this sort, the only real revelation is in yet another example of the disconnect between reality and what the media says is reality. Ask everyone you know whether they have a female friend or relative who is both attractive and funny. I bet every one of them, bored with your question’s inanity, will say yes.
Actually, maybe the real revelation here is the one not being discussed. Maybe, in comedy, as in so many other professions now, it is no longer enough to be talented; the ones who are getting ahead are the ones like Silverman and Fey, who have looks and talent. If Roseanne were starting out today, I doubt she would gain the success she did twenty years ago, because it seems that more and more, talent unaccompanied by good looks will not suffice to help a woman achieve the success of her more “fuckable” competitors. Why, after all, put a fat funny woman on TV when finally there are skinny funny women we can put on instead? The 20th century, to which Moran glibly refers as to a stone age of outmoded unenlightenment, at least spared some of its talents the pressure to be beautiful. And now in our so-modern renaissance of equality and empowerment, we talk about those days when the merely talented could achieve success as dark and unevolved, compared to now, when, unless Maxim wants you in your panties on its cover, you just aren’t “it.” In any case, the successful contemporary comedienne left unmentioned in this and every other article I’ve read on the subject, is Kathy Griffin, who I would argue is as funny if not funnier than the two titanesses making the headlines. Griffin has famously undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries in an attempt, I assume, to validate her talent with the requisite fuckability.

It’s happening in other fields as well. Soprano Deborah Voigt was fired from the Royal Opera four years ago because she couldn’t fit into the cocktail dress designed for its production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Because of her great fame (developed over twenty years of singing in the best international houses, all that time being, by the way, enormously fat), it looked at the time like a first incidence of its sort in an art form known for the great heft of many of its stars. However, young singers new to the profession now will tell you that they not only have to keep the weight off, but they usually dress for auditions in dresses or skirts which show their legs at least up to the knee. They know that they will be considered for parts based as much on their sex appeal as on their vocal artistry. No wonder; I’ve attended a handful of opera productions in London in the past two years and have seen singers in leading roles wearing bikini’s, miniskirts, and merry widows with fishnets. I haven’t heard a lot of unforgettable voices, but I suppose that’s not what one goes to the opera for anymore. Voigt underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost a significant amount of her bulk and returned to the London stage in the same production earlier this year. It’s hard to think of that as a triumph for anyone but the people who fired her in the first place, people who assume their audience wants singers to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and who, in making decisions like these, are cultivating a new audience who is now learning to judge an artist as much, if not more, by her fuckability as by her art.

And of course there are many examples of this in other arenas as well. A friend of mine argues, “Can you imagine Ella Fitzgerald doing a music video today?… She’d be kicked off the set, and we’d never hear her voice.” I wonder if Zadie Smith would have attained the level of success she enjoys now, if she didn’t possess a formidable beauty in addition to her formidable talent. It’s difficult to tell, since her looks are so often remarked upon alongside praise for her work. Would anyone ever take Anne Coulter seriously in any capacity—publish her silly diatribes or put her on chat shows so she could insult Jews and berate 9-11 widows, if she didn’t have long blonde hair and wear skirts up to her gigi?

To quote Sarah Silverman, “What the cock is that shit?”

No one says, “That Bill Maher is so funny and smart! Too bad about his nose.” Nobody suggests that it’s surprising or somehow novel for a respected journalist like Anderson Cooper to also be a hottie. Nobody in the public sphere discussed the fuckability of George Carlin. People just aren’t as obsessed with mens’ looks as with womens.’ It’s understood and has been for centuries that a man’s worth lies in how well he does his job, not how he looks while he does it. That and how much money he makes. But that’s a different rant altogether.

And so we have journalists writing about this fake new movement, the advent of the funny beautiful woman. Along with this fake movement is the more real movement of the funny successful woman. Much has been made of Tina Fey’s status as the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live. While this says something about the changing status of women in comedy, it doesn’t say everything: left unsaid is the hypocrisy revealed in the Saturday Night Live modus operandi. SNL offers political and cultural satire from a liberal and progressive perspective. For 33 years it’s used humor to reveal and criticize inequality, intolerance, and other ills (in addition to equally relevant fare like “Landshark” and “Massive Headwound Harry”). What does it say about the show and its progressiveness that until Fey assumed the role of first female head writer there, 24 years after the show’s inception, the creative staff had been a notorious “old boys club”? I do not intend to diminute Fey’s success or her struggle to achieve it, but rather to highlight the peculiar backwardness of a cultural institution (as SNL has been called) which, as late as 1999, could still have been referred to as an “old boy’s club.”

It’s not so much that women are evolving. It’s that the worlds in which we work to make a living and a name for ourselves are small-minded and full of fear. It’s that these worlds have a long way to go before they can consider our talents, successes, and failures without embarrassing themselves and us. People act surprised when we display more than one talent at a time, or have bothered to cultivate any talents when we could have just coasted on our looks. Respected and successful thinkers like Christopher Hitchens can write essays about why women aren’t funny based on the fact that we have wombs and are innately prissy, and supports his theory by claiming that when we are funny we’re usually “hefty, dykey, or Jewish,” and still get published in Vanity Fair. People with influence can talk about something you and I and everyone we know already knew as if it’s some cultural break-through, and then pat themselves on the back for recognizing it and being progressive enough to acknowledge it as a good thing.

What the cock, indeed.

My Kilburn Apartment

2008-08-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to London and was looking for a room to rent, I didn’t take any of the precautions I now know to be necessary. I didn’t check the mattresses and furniture for bedbugs, I didn’t visit the neighborhood after dark to gauge its safety, I didn’t check my landlord’s record with the council to see if there were any lawsuits. I avoided the disasters to which I had left myself vulnerable only by luck.

The room I chose is in a pre-Dickensian tenement in the old Irish neighborhood of Kilburn. When I moved in there were two other people living in the flat, a pensioner from Liverpool named Ken, and a Philippino cleaning lady named Irma; one other room was empty. Ken told me that Irma used to have a another friend living in her room and that my room and the empty room downstairs each had two people living in them, all Philipino immigrants, bringing the tenant number of the four-bedroom flat to seven, but that that arrangement had recently been outlawed by the council for some reason having to do with taxation. Before he had arrived a few months before, his room had been occupied by a German woman named Lolita, who apparently still came around once in a while to steal silverware or other amenities that she claimed to have originally purchased for the house. It all seemed part of the exciting new world of London to me.

The day after I moved in, Ken asked, in the overly-tactful tones of someone whose job it is to tell you a loved one is dead, that I not put my tampons in the bathroom bin.

“But….where, then?” (blushing horribly)

“Well, the Philipinos used to do all that stuff in their rooms and then take them out in little baggies to the dumpster when they went to work in the mornings.”

“What?? No, I can’t do that—why do you know this??”

“I mean it’s unsanitary to have them just lying in the bin like that; it’s biological material and it decays and stinks and attracts flies.” His anxiety surprised me; it's not as if I flung them naked over my shoulder and watched them slide down the wall; I usually wasted half a roll of toilet paper wrapping them up like small mummies and stacked them neatly at the bottom of the can.

“I’ve never had a fly problem. I really don’t like talk—“

“I mean if you won’t keep it in your room, at least the bin in the kitchen has a lid so the flies won’t get at it.”

“I’m not walking my tampons to the kitchen.”

Actually, Lolita had recently stolen the lidded bin from the kitchen and ever since then we’ve thrown our garbage in an orange plastic grocery bag from Sainsbury’s which sits atop the kitchen table. Even had I been willing to make the journey with fistfuls of balled-up tissues from the bathroom to the kitchen every time I required a change, I figured that adding menstrual detritus to the used teabags and banana peels staring Ken in the face while he takes his tea would just aggravate his unease, so I bought a small bin with a flip lid for the bathroom. For the first few months I’d leave the bin empty and only line it with a grocery bag when I needed to use it, but I found that if Ken saw the orange handles peeking out from under the lid for more than five days in a row, he’d lecture me again about flies and decay. So now I replace the liner with another at the end of my period and leave it there for the rest of the month so he can’t tell when my periods are or how negligent I’m being without flipping open the lid and risking a faceful of rot and stench. Sometimes, tired of his policing, I consider collecting nine or ten of my used tampons and hanging them like windchimes over his door, but this fantasy usually only preoccupies me in those vengeful and intemperate days leading up to my periods; when the time is ripe for gathering, my moods have softened and I’m more concerned with finding burgers and chocolate.

Ken told his life story to me in fragments; when we get along, he often comes into the kitchen while I’m eating dinner and picks up at whatever chapter he left off, or repeats one he had told me before if it is sticking in his memory. He worked as some significant sort of bureaucrat in Whitehall all his life until offered a deceptively attractive early retirement package, which he accepted and has regretted ever since. Now he is past reemployment age, bored with the idleness to which he consigned himself, unable to enjoy much of a social life on his paltry stipend, and spends many hours a day sitting on the couch in the living room staring at the wall. Eventually he bought a TV license and took his old Panasonic out of storage and now watches sports and American movies from breakfast until he goes to bed at one thirty in the morning. He was married once, just after his retirement, to a Colombian woman named Bibiana who he claims comes from one of that country’s notorious drug cartel families and who finally wiped him out and ruined his credit: after giving up his lucrative job, he lost in his divorce from Bebe his house in Greenwich, his life savings, including his severance package from Whitehall, and most of his possessions. Every once in a while Bibiana calls up, asking for “Meester Ken” and Ken disappears with the phone into his room, and emerges two hours later, white-faced and shaking.

More naturally fussy than I am about housekeeping, Ken usually takes the dishes left after washing to dry by the sink, towel-dries them, and returns them to their cupboards. I consider life to be too short to be spent in pointlessly fastidious tasks like wiping down cereal bowls and polishing spoons, and have always been content to live out of the dish rack, so to speak. It saves the trouble of having to both open and close the cupboard door, and eliminates the threat of leaving it open and bumping one’s head against it while lost in concentration over the stir-fry. Also, I’ve probably seen too many movies, maybe watched too much X-Files, but there’s always in my mind a small but specific dread of opening the cupboard door and finding something hideous and unnatural sitting on the shelf next to the coffemugs—a severed foot, perhaps, or the chupacabra. Unlikely, I’ll admit, but better safe than sorry. When Ken and I are on the outs, he continues his meticulous attention to his own and the other housemates’ utensils and porcelainware but leaves mine on the rack. In our relatively peaceful household, this passes as “fightin’ words.” So in retaliation I put my goods in the cupboard and use his stuff instead. I replace my usual low-maintenance snacks of avocado and yogurt with more complicated meals requiring pots and large spoons and multiple plates, even a colander if I can find a use for it. After I wash them, I then leave all of them dripping and preferably still sudsy on the rack, forcing him to either fume silently as his own kitchenware air-dries, or to once again clean up after me like the harried hausfrau he failed to recognize is his true vocation. An advantage of this method is that unlike me, Ken did not buy his silverware at the 99p shop, and it’s refreshing to use knives that don’t bend when I try to cut cheese with them, and forks which don’t break off at the head and get lost in my spaghetti. Likewise, once we’ve made up, in a gesture symbolic of our renewed amity, Ken will take whatever I just washed, lovingly wipe it down so that it shines dry and pristine, and carefully return it to the cupboard.

Ken and I have been the only constant tenants of our apartment for these two years. Irma had an obese boyfriend who would break the tiles on the bathroom floor when he stepped out of the shower, and when we complained, she moved out. Then we got an American girl from Texas who was studying for a year at London School of Economics. She drank a lot and would introduce disgusting or otherwise objectionable topics when we were all eating in the kitchen, particularly if Ken was there. I remember an awkward dinner one night when she opened the discussion by asking Ken if she could borrow his razor to shave her nether bits before her date later that night. She would often attempt to provoke him in this way; I think she believed herself something of a brazen Yankee firecracker amidst the stodgy old-world Brits who just didn’t know what to make of someone so honest and uninhibited. Ken never responded with the level of aghastment I think she was seeking, but he did develop a keen and unyielding animosity towards her with which he bullied her into leaving after only two months. For a while we had a Japanese girl who was here on a workstudy program in PR and a Colombian woman who worked for a fishmonger in St. John’s Wood; we liked her even though she spoke no English because she would often bring us free fish, and even better, cook it for us with pilaf, but she left to move in with her boyfriend, also a fishmonger. Then we had two Japanese girls named Yoko. Downstairs Yoko still lives with us, but Upstairs Yoko moved out after a horrifying murder took place in our building.

I left the house one morning to find our street cordoned off and a policeman with a clipboard asking me for my name, my exact address, where was I going now, when did I plan on coming back and would I be available for questioning then? He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I found out on the news later on that a headless body had been found in the recycling cage in front of our house. When I came home that night the street was still roped off, I had to sign in again, and a large tent had been set up in our courtyard, with security guards and men in forensics suits milling about, taping black plastic over the windows and carrying boxes of things from the apartment. I caught a glance of a meat cleaver in one of them. Luckily they honed in on the man they believed committed the murder before I got home, but Ken and Upstairs Yoko had each endured three-hour interrogations that day.

It turned out that the body belonged to our neighbor on the first floor, who, it quickly surfaced, went by several names. To us he gave the name, “Kamal Kamal,” to our landlord Bilesh, “Alberto Reynondo,” and to others, some complicated Algerian name I can’t remember. He received, and still receives, mail addressed to all of his names. The man charged with the murder was our neighbor next door, who lived in the flat above the victim’s, and who was tracked down in Leeds two days later. He admitted to having dumped the head in a canal in nearby Little Venice.

It was all a very dismal business, and the Yokos were quite shaken by it, particularly as the murderer had chatted each of them up on different occasions. I felt that the least our landlord could do, considering it all, was to lower our rent, but when our contracts were up he instead raised it for each of our rooms by five pounds a week. Two months after the murder, the police returned control of the two empty one-bedroom apartments next door to Bilesh, who then rented both of them at two hundred forty pounds a week each to the family of Somalians who had been living in our basement for the past year. We were shocked Bilesh had the cheek to demand the market price, and the highest end of the market price at that, for these apartments which, even without considering what had taken place in them, were pretty shabby—ill-heated, no fire escape. We were even more shocked that the Somalians, who knew what had happened there, were willing to pay such a sum for them, but the council is paying their rent and they don’t seem to mind the ghosts. I suspect they’ve seen worse in their lifetimes.

Upstairs Yoko decided to move somewhere she believed more peaceful, although I doubt there’s anywhere in this ancient city that didn’t see, somewhere in its history, a similarly bloody episode. I considered moving at the time, but it somehow seemed an overreaction. Ken’s fussiness, a daily bother, is a much more powerful incentive to leave, as are Bilesh’s relentless increases on the rent every six months. And yet Kilburn is a pretty great neighborhood to live in, and I have a lot of closet space, and an extra bed in my room for when my mom visits me. Ken does make nice mashed potatoes for us once in a while. I guess it all makes for a good story.

Pensées Françaises

2008-04-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

Sarko and Carla visited L’Angleterre last week and of course images of the odd couple took up more space in the UK’s newspapers than reports of Zimbabwean election-rigging, Hilary-slamming, and new revelations of the brain cancer-mobile phones link put together. Actually, the rags showed only a few token pictures of Sarko in his platforms, and devoted most space to “Carlamania”: Carla in the seven outfits she wore during her two-day visit, Carla kissing the prime minister, Carla offering her dainty hand to the prince’s puckered lips, Carla tucking her dainty ankles under her chair on the cover of The Independent, Carla apparently having spent much effort not to out-glam the traditionally sub-chic wives of English politicians. Carla curtsying like a shy schoolgirl to the queen.

It is the last pose I mentioned, or rather the exaltation of praise from the mags on her impeccable manners and proper respect for British protocol with that picture as the exemplary image, qui me derange.

Why should the wife of the President of the Republic of France curtsy to the Queen of England? I’ve asked several Britons this, and most of them, in an attempt, I assume, to avoid a discussion of the modern relevance of feudal custom, said that the curtsy is foremost a gesture of respect for the great age of the hardy monarch. However, I know that this is la merde de la vache, parce que if 40 year-old Carla Bruni were meeting another head of state—say the US had an 85 year old female president (Ayez l’imagination!)—she would not curtsy. She would accept the aged figurehead’s offered hand for a business-like shake, perhaps dip her head a bit. She would not bend at the knees, she would not diminute her super model frame in a gesture of subordinance, however brief, to the leader of a foreign nation. It is not the queen’s age, but her status, which requires one to symbolically demonstrate the recognition of that status in one’s physicality.

But first of all, why should status transfer between the citizenries of different nations? Elizabeth II is not Carla Bruni’s queen. I’m not suggesting the French first lady should have spit on the ground before the English throne, but why should she be required to perform the same obeisance as would a subject to that throne?

Secondly, as ridiculous as this might sound, considering Elizabeth II had already been referring to herself in the royal “we” for over a decade before the Bruni was born, as well as that half a year ago Bruni was no more connected to politics than well, your average aging model-turned-pop singer, but as wife of the president of the republic of France, she’s technically, if not historically or in the affections of the public, equal in rank to the queen. One could argue that this isn’t so since she is the wife of, but is not herself, the head of the French government, but then neither is the queen the head of British government—the prime minister is. Nobody curtsies to Gordon Brown.

Is it all so simple as that she was visiting the queen on British soil and was therefore obliged to act according to British custom? I’m trying to imagine the queen visiting the French leader and his new wife on Rue St. Honoré, and I just can’t imagine her submitting her royal form to any attitudes of deference. And in that case, would Bruni once again curtsy in the same way I did when I was about to perform the twinkly-toes dance in ballet class when I was five? It just seems so undignified.

Any thoughts?

Paris Pix

2008-03-04T14:46:00.000-08:00

Hi. I'm still in London. I don't know what to do with my life. but I went to Paris over the New Year and for a bit after. There are lots more pictures on my facebook page, but a lot of my readers (those who haven't abandoned this neglected blog) are probably too shrewd to sign their identities over to the F-Monster.

A guide explaining "The Judgmentless Execution of the Moorish King" (bad translation mine) to schoolchildren.

I think the title of this sculpture was "I have nothing to wear today!"

You can try to capture the early evening moon, but it's never quite right.

at Brasserie Lipp. I appreciated how well-lit so many of the restaurants were. People go out in Paris--much more than in other gloomier, less social, less glamorous places that shall go unnamed but where even the pubs close at 11 as if that's any way to live--to see and be seen, and that peskily romantic dim lighting--used in lands where people don't know romance from their asses and rely on tired old gimmicks from outdated American rom-com's because if they're going to be hopelessly awkward socially and not know how to dress or get their teeth fixed or talk to women, the only chance they have is in impaired visibility--just doesn't work.

St. Chappelle. of course.

Edinb'rahhh and Moscow!

2007-09-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

I know I was supposed to write a more in-depth account of my blow-out at my old magazine, but I can't be asked. Instead, I'm posting pictures of my recent travels to Edinburgh for the fringe festival and Moscow, for a short course I did with the great Moscow Art Theatre. Edinburgh Castle.

me with a deep-fried Mars bar. Brilliant.

evening at Red Square

Novo Devitchi Convent
We were instructed never to photograph soldiers, police or otherwise official-looking people, but I found that after I chased these ones down Tverskaya Boulevard, interrupted their attempt to buy cigarrettes, and apologized a lot (in charmingly broken Russian, I like to think, something like, "Forgive my Russian Tongue. She is a Wretchedness. I am sweet little students of the great Moscow's Art Theatrical. Please I can you both to photograph with my sweet little non-journalistic camera machine? You are very spectacular. Please don't cast away your bags from McDonald's. They are a very spectacle."), they were very accommodating.
Gogol.

Anyone on facebook can see many more pictures on my page. 'ooorrrrrah!

The Latest Rejected Article!

2007-07-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

Yup, and this time for reasons I might delineate in a wrathful expose shortly, fired from my job!! For those of you who didn't know, for the last year, I've been a paid editor (and unpaid writer) for New York Moves magazine. The brief version goes something like: publisher Mamoonah finds out that chief editor Richard is paying me twice as much as she expects her skilled employees to be paid (that is, pittance or nothing), insists that my pay be slashed in half, I decline to work at the new truncated rate, am replaced with two twenty year-old interns out of Harvard (who allow such literary abuses to appear in print as "comprised of," "who's" where "whose" is required, nostalgic references to Sex and the City in nearly every article in every issue, and phrases which manage to be overwrought, out of place, and cliched, like "down that road lies madness...."). During my latest trip to the city, after receiving no responses to several emails and phone calls I make concerning $500 I am owed, as well as my hope to negotiate an agreeable payscale and continue my work there, I appear at the office to discuss it in person and am ushered back out into the corridor (interns all a-gawk) by chief editor Richard and lectured on the necessity for me to "get real," informed that I have made a nuisance of myself, the magazine no longer wants my contributions and would I please leave the building.
This is an article I had written at the behest of chief Richard on the subject of truth; he wanted something profound, like why truth is good and lies are bad (perhaps this was motivated by the fact that he had been lying to Moonah for several months about how much money he was paying me). Since I haven't blogged much recently, I'll post this for you to read while I contemplate why everything I'm involved in ends in flames.

How tenuous are the bases of our day-to-day interactions with our fellow men and women. How dependent we are upon these strangers for the management of the dross of our daily lives. We trust the butcher to be honest about the freshness of his meat. We trust our doctors to give honest diagnoses of our ailments, and not condemn us to unnecessary surgeries. We trust reviewers to give objective assessments of the movies we see, not based on any financial or personal entanglements they might have with the studios or artists. Of course, to trust blindly is naïve, and if one investigates any one of these relationships beyond the surface, one is likely to find betrayals of varying degrees of seriousness. The butcher wants to get rid of his aging beef and will probably extend its shelf life by a day or two in his claims of its newness. Most doctors in our country get paid extra per surgery, and thus have reason to err on the side of slicing into one whenever possible. It is common knowledge that a reviewer’s published opinions will often understandably coincide with the business interests of the publication for which he works. How much advertising does Warner Bro.’s buy in the Times?

Life would be significantly simpler and less stressful if honesty could be taken for granted in our interactions with strangers. The unfortunate fact is that because those interactions usually take the form of financial transactions, we are constantly assuming the pose of either one who profits by the other party, or one by whom the other party profits. It makes sense that widespread dishonesty would stem from this commercialism, and the only thing keeping us from plummeting further into treachery is whatever innate honesty people possess individually, or even collectively, that is, how much value our society places on honesty, even if only in lip service easily drowned out by the din of lies told in the name of the “bottom line.” In our impersonal relationships, based only on the assumption of honesty, the lack of that honesty causes the greater anxiety and majority of problems.

But what of our personal relationships, the basis of which is not the assumption of honesty but the assumption of love? These are not constructed around the exchange of goods and collection of profit, but around the mutual affection and wish for the well-being of the other. The accepted reckoning is that in such relationships, honesty is still the best policy most of the time. However, if it is a given that the basis of a relationship is love (this is of course an examination of forms, not of individual real-life cases, each of which is no doubt riddled with exceptions, qualifiers, and contradictions), then one can also assume that any lie told is told in the name of love and well-wishing, rather than profit and exploitation. The name for this is of course the “white lie,” and many deny its validity regardless of the motive. The white lie, detractors say, encourages people to cling to comforting but hollow notions about themselves, and they are wise who face those harsh truths and find comfort by some other way than self-delusion. When your wife asks if her butt looks big in these jeans, and indeed it does, is she not better off knowing it?

A friend of mine, let’s call him Ellis Richardson, and I are locked in a long-standing stalemate in our debate on the virtues of lying. His conviction is that every lie we tell, “white” or no, holds us back as people and as a society: we must endure the harshness of the truth (for the unmitigated truth is indeed a harsh thing) in order to come out healthier, happier, and freer: it is good for your wife to know her butt size to scale. My stance is that the truth can be too destructive when wielded indiscriminately; it is a tricky thing to unite candor and tact, and it takes some thick skin to be made happy and free by the clumsy imposition of some terrifying accuracy. I have, until now, avoided examining this topic too closely for fear of being persuaded by “Ellis” towards his blanket condemnation of any and all forms of lying, as this would discredit the staggering number of lies I’ve told in my life and prevent me from ever being able to lie with any integrity again.

But perhaps there is a compromise in the differentiation between the motives behind lies told for profit and those told out of affection. That Zorbas the Greek desires the dying Madame Hortense is a “white lie,” but her belief in the lie and their lovemaking give her a brief but truthfully-felt bit of happiness before her death. How much kinder is Zorbas’s lie than the cruel frankness of the old women who keep their perverse vigil at her bed, not bothering to conceal their intention to plunder her small home the moment she expires! It is Zorbas’s generous and affectionate nature, his greater engagement with love and pleasure than with ambition and profit, which make him trustworthy even in his dishonesty.

It is accepted wisdom that the person you love is the one person with whom you can be completely honest, but I would contend that rather, the person you love is the only person with whom you can be dishonest, as it is (or as long as it is) from a position of genuine goodwill. When you are loved by someone you can trust that if he lies it is because he believes that the lie is not only kinder but actually better for you than the truth. Whether the lie is ever better in fact seems to me no less reliable than that truth is always better, is always kinder, is beauty. One who knows you knows when your illusions are harmless or even healthy, and when they perpetuate destructive or delusive behavior, and if he loves you will feed or destroy those illusions accordingly. It is not for his own profit but that of his beloved, that the one who loves, lies.

In Defense of Sloth

2007-04-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't posted for a while, here's another article from New York Moves's Christmas/Seven deadly sins issue (the one to which I contributed "In Defense of Vanity" and "Blinded by the Light," linked below. Thank you, Odious, for the inspiration for my thesis; you know what I'm talking about.

No other city in the world is quite as unforgiving towards sloth as New York. The expense alone overwhelms anyone who doesn’t exert a near superhuman effort to break into and succeed in our job market, the most overcrowded and competitive in America. The glut of cultural offerings shames people who might otherwise content themselves with Monday night football and the occasional Cineplex outing into becoming reluctant but regular patrons of the arts: it’s simply too embarrassing to admit that one hasn’t seen the Bodies exhibit, or that one missed The History Boys or that one still hasn’t visited the new MOMA. Thousands of restaurants featuring the cuisine of hundreds of different cultures encourage the frequent dining-out customary to New Yorkers, many of whom return home after sixteen-hour days to snatch too few hours of sleep before waking at dawn to start the frenzied day all over again.

Yet within each New Yorker is a “Secret Sloth” as my driven friend Aggie named hers, who would rather call in sick and spend the day sitting on the couch watching sitcom reruns and slurping Cup O’Noodles. The fact is, work is stressful and takes up a lot of time, and most people who are making enough money to live in the city are doing it in high-pressure jobs that don’t necessarily offer any creative satisfaction but leave one too exhausted to pursue other interests with any gusto. The city’s recreational offerings also have a cultural and historical gravitas that discourages regarding them as recreational at all. In any other city one can simply take a walk in the park. In New York, however, Central Park carries with its very name the countless remembered scenes from film and literature, which crowd in upon one’s consciousness while one’s merely strolling along its perimeter. One almost feels an obligation to match one’s scarf to the autumn leaves. And under-accomplished if one fails to meet the love of one’s life while sitting on the bank of the duck pond pensively tossing breadcrumbs into the water. A day at the beach requires an hour-long train ride and once you get there, you have to search the shore for empty patches where you can bury your wallet, and then hope your feet miss the shards of bottle glass strewn in the sand as you wind your way through the screaming children towards the water. In New York, even leisure is never lazy.

Why bother with any of it when you could just sit around? I for one grow weary by the mere process of deciding how to best take advantage of this magnificent city. The opportunities for enrichment terrify me. I am exhausted by the possibilities. The very idea of how meaningful a Saturday afternoon can be makes me want to crawl back into bed and only move to change the channel from Nickelodeon to TV land. Are other New Yorkers leading productive, culturally rich and satisfying lives? Should I feel ashamed that this is what I really want? Does Gray’s Papaya deliver?

I have a friend who describes sloth as the only vice which is its own reward. The other vices drag other people, other things into the picture. They require effort. Greed links the wish for an immoderate amount of something to the pursuit and acquisition of the same. Gluttony requires the material of indulgence. Lust culminates (the luster hopes) in the physical act driven by, but not itself, lust. Wrath involves a world of associated passions, and its extremity can be quite taxing. Sloth just is. One is slothful to be slothful, that’s it. Nothing but sloth is needed, and nothing but sloth results. Sloth owes its existence only to the will to be slothful, the wish to do nothing rather than something. It’s a powerful temptation, and a self-perpetuating one once tasted. It is a particularly dangerous temptation in a city like New York, and the only one of the “seven deadly sins,” as they are so dramatically named, that New York by nature does not encourage. It is hard to walk down the street any day here without contending with lust, gluttony, envy,…. temptations towards each of these are plastered on every billboard, walking their dogs in the park, safe behind shiny glass at Bergdorf’s, wafting through the morning air outside Balthazar’s bakery...wrath emerges swiftly enough when hailing a cab at Columbus Circle on a Friday night. New York was made for sins like these. The city, however, has very little patience for anything less than a super-heightened level of activity from its inhabitants, and thus sloth is the only one of the deadly sins which is out of place here. When one gives in to sloth, one “drops out” of New York and its ethos in a very real way. Practically, one can’t survive here without the energy to succeed and the willingness to exercise it. Culturally, the city is wasted on one who’d rather lie in bed than partake of the thousands of world-class offerings.

And yet, that “Secret Sloth” within each of us—dare I assert that every New Yorker has one? Am I the only who finds the constant pressure to “do stuff” oppressive and pushy? My bed is soft and warm, and my TV has so many channels, and Cup O’Noodles is really quite good; it recently introduced an excellent white cheddar flavor. Even as someone brought up to work hard and drawn to New York by that superior and prolific cultural life for which it is famous, the task of getting out of bed and living life to the fullest is a hard sell.

Sloth, by nature, is a very anti-New York sin.

A Heartbreaking Performance of Staggering Genius

2007-02-20T13:09:00.000-08:00

Angela and me at our best. I'm trying to teach her the "Tijuana Booty-Slap, " or "TJ Booty," as UCSD co-eds called it on their week end orgies south of the border. This was at a fabulous Easter party she and I threw at my place in the Bronx last years. *sniff*...good times.....
p.s. make sure the sound's on!

New Year's Blogolution

2007-01-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

I was asked to write an article on the nature of change (or something, I don't really pay attention) for the January double issue, which has now turned into the hulking January-February-March triple issue, of New York Moves Magazine. I originally felt it best and most appropriate to write one of those "the problem with you lot..."-type pieces and keep myself out of it, but then my editor suggested that it would be more convincing if I at least pretended to use myself as an example, which I did, in part. This is for anyone wondering about the inaccuracies of my life story as told hereafter.

“How few the days are that hold the mind in place; like four or five hooks holding up a tapestry. Especially the day you know you’ve stopped becoming, the day you know you merely are. What ought to be moves far away; what is comes close.” -Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Much commentary has been devoted to the infamous New Year’s Resolution and its hurried evanescence in the weeks following the New Year. Its inherent, doomed optimism is the stuff of sad jokes and wan regrets, yet every year, people resolve again to lose that weight, to quit smoking, to save more money,… as if they haven’t made these promises to themselves every previous year, and broken them through neglect, lack of discipline, or plain unwillingness. I’d wager most peoples’ New Year’s Eve resolutions didn’t survive their New Year’s Day hangover, let alone the ensuing weeks that have brought us to the threshold of spring. We are accustomed to breaking the promises we make to ourselves, and it is almost touching to see how innocently we go on making those promises, not just every New Year, but every new day.

But is our eagerness to make these abortive resolutions a sign of hope or self-delusion? As a country we descended from people who were willing to drop everything and sail thousands of miles into unknown and dangerous territory in order to pursue a lifestyle they dreamed would be better than the one they were stuck in, and we pride ourselves in our touted “ingenuity.” Change is an integral part of our makeup, and probably the makeup of any healthy human being, but what does it say about us that we seem to be constantly on the hunt for newer, better, and often unrealistic versions of ourselves, only to abandon the hunt with such ease most of the time? We spend thousands of dollars every year on fad diets we know must fail. Most of us can’t afford a new wardrobe every season but strain our credit limits chasing this tantalizing image of our chic new selves, hoping (and knowing full well it is an empty hope) that by “bettering” our appearance, so will our social, professional, and romantic lives be bettered too. We spend years in psychotherapy, only to find that, though we’ve “learned” a lot about ourselves and our atavistic compulsions, our ability or even willingness to change those habits somehow never caught up. Whose bookshelf isn’t crowded with half-read self-help books?

This isn’t to say that people don’t or shouldn’t change at all; New York is indeed the place to find people who have made real and lasting changes to their lives and themselves. But it seems that change—real change, not the kind bidden in a drunken vow made at 12:01 on New Year’s morning--can only happen a few times, those “four or five hooks holding up the tapestry” of one’s life. And it also seems that those few true changes only really happen, conversely, when we rid our minds of unrealistic pipe dreams and face up to our situation, and the changes that are indeed possible to make in that situation.

Some years ago, on another coast and after receiving yet another rejection letter for a story of which I was rather proud (the sort of defeat which always reminded me of my other disappointments: financial dependence, empty love life, facing a lifetime of obscurity, the usual), I came to realize that, by my own standards, and I’m sure, those of anyone with any sense of reality, I was a failure. But in that moment of crying into my pillow, it occurred to me that I had been in the same position, crying for basically the same reasons, more times than I could bear to count. And I also realized that the reason I hadn’t made any drastic changes to my life in any aspect was because for the past few years I had fooled myself into believing that if I made little changes, the bigger gains I dreamed of would magically come to me. My love life would fix itself in time if I just “improved” myself: I read constantly to sharpen my intellect, I worked out often, even did ballet, to stay in superior shape, I developed an eye for vintage fashions and always dressed elegantly. My career would blossom if I refined my skills and made myself into a great writer—some important commissioning editor or agent was bound to glimpse one of my stories or be charmed by my pitch letter and want to represent me. Basically, the changes I was making to my lifestyle were too timid to have any real impact because I was convinced that my real life—my destiny! was somewhere in the future, and it was my task to endure the nowhere life I was in and prepare for the coming miracle by making twee adjustments to my fundamentally defective modus operandi. I would not admit to myself that the paltry life I was enduring those years was indeed my life, my real life, and that unsatisfied, flailing girl, the real me.

I won’t go into the details of what happened after my revelation, but hope it suffices to say that I have experienced real change, several of them, even, since then, my move to New York being the primary one, and catalyst to all the others. And I think these changes were only made possible the moment I let go the cozy platitude that I was becoming, and embraced the ghastly truth that I was.

We are obsessed with becoming, and perhaps this has to do with our youth-fixation (for when we are young it is our duty to devote ourselves to becoming) or maybe it is the epic pressure of the American Dream which bullies people into disdaining their lot for a more dazzling one. Whatever the cause, it seems the constant encouragement to chase an idea of how much better, happier, more perfect one could be, provides a convenient and ever-renewable distraction from recognizing, and making peace with, who one is to begin with. Your first day of maturity is not your 21st birthday, or the first day of your job, or the day you first make love, but “the day you know you merely are.” Vital to change is the recognition that your real life, your real self, is not some perfected being waiting in the distant future for you to grow into them, but who you are right now, shortcomings, discontents and all.

Baby Pix!

2006-12-30T15:21:00.000-08:00

Hey, that last post was a total downer. Here are some baby pictures for you to admire until I post for real again.

Blinded by the Light

2006-12-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

I didn't choose that title for another of my articles in the Christmas issue of New York Moves magazine, but that's what they named it. Several editorial changes were made, to which I objected noisily, but I included the piece in unmutated form here:

Both the faithful and the cynical complain a lot around the holidays. The faithful, that commercialism has debased the original spiritual purpose of Christmas, and the cynical, that we continue to pay lip service to this debased spiritual purpose. I for one have grown bored with both sides as hopelessly unfamiliar with human nature, objecting as though it’s news that we gravitate toward the material rather than the spiritual, and then try to make ourselves feel less crass by attaching a lot of Hallmark platitudes to our materialism. Of course we do.

My complaint is more specific, involving the reason I believe the spiritual aspects of Christmas, or, really, the trappings of any religion, are ignored so easily in the first place. From a literary point of view the stories of the world’s religions are some of the most astonishing ever imagined: in them are heroes and antagonists, obstacles, magic (for that’s really what a “miracle” is, isn’t it?), and distinctive moral themes from which one may learn how to live. To take Christianity in particular, in addition to the blockbuster spectacles of the Old Testament, the New Testament features the peculiar story of a tri-partite god who arranges for his son/self to take human form through virgin birth, and preach to those who’d listen a new and, at the time, completely innovative ideology. He foresees (and if one takes the “Judas Texts” into account, hand-picks and instructs his traitor), and sets into motion his own gory death whereby, through some mystical magic, the sins of mankind are purged. In this moment of his assuming the world’s evils, the earth darkens as god, the father, cannot look on such impurity, and in his dying moments god, the son, cries out at his abandonment. He then rises from the tomb and, before ascending to heaven, promises to return “in the blink of an eye.” Thus is man saved from his mortality.

This story shouldn’t leave me cold.

The problem for me is that this story has been told to me in so many dumbed-down forms over the years, starting the first day of kindergarten at a ghetto Baptist school in San Francisco, it has become part of the mere noise of my past, like the Sesame Street theme song or the emergency siren test that blasted through the city every Tuesday at noon. Every Monday and Wednesday morning at my elementary school, we convened in the chapel to listen to a sermon given not by an ordained minister, but by one of our teachers or the school’s pious headmaster. These often involved badly-painted placards illustrating some de-sexed episode from the Old Testament, or a bloodless version of the story of Golgotha. These were followed by their imploring us to “accept Jesus into our hearts” so that we may receive “salvation.” Imagine what this could mean to a seven year old. I actually envisioned a tiny Jesus, complete with curly hair, beard, white robes, and melancholy face, grasping onto nearby arteries while curled into one of the cramped chambers of my heart, blood sloshing about his sandals, his head bumping against the wall as it pumped. I worried he’d stumble out when I played on the swings. “Accept Jesus into your heart” was such a regular theme that I really can’t remember any of the other specifics of this brainwashing, but I do remember shyly asking my parents before they put me to bed one night if they would “accept Jesus into their hearts” so that they could go to heaven, and then, perceiving a lack of seriousness in their response, worrying all night over the fate of their souls in the afterlife. Which of course made me think on the possibility of their deaths. Which made me even more miserable.

For what was all this propaganda? How could they fail to see that an unripe mind cannot but reduce this majestic doctrine to absurdity?

More importantly, how could they fail to see that the doctrine would not only be lost on us at that age, but that our over-exposure to it would numb us against any power it might have had once we were mentally and spiritually ready for it later?

In A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit argues against the trend to teach sex-ed at a younger and younger age (which is purportedly done in an effort to beat the long arm of the sex-focused media to the punch), claiming that to introduce the details of the subject to a mind before the interest in it has arisen naturally has a warping, rather than educative, effect. Having learned the specifics myself long before I stopped believing in “coodies,” I’m inclined to agree with Shalit. I’d argue the same principle applies to religion.

At my school, as at any parochial school which includes religious inculcation as part of its agenda, we were fed some very grand and complex ideas, but before we had reached an age, or a state of mind-readiness, when it would have been possible for us to perceive the grandeur or even to perceive the complexity of those ideas (hence my imagined travel-sized Jesus). These ideas became “old hat” long before it ever occurred to us to ask what it really means that god died on a cross, or that this is in fact a supernaturally outrageous and heavy concept that should baffle, terrify, shock, and excite us. By exposing and over-exposing us to concepts unsuited in every way to our lack of maturity, they robbed us of the opportunity to be baffled, terrified, shocked, or excited by them then or later. The insult to injury is that their one concession to our unreadiness was in the anemic, baby-talk dilutions of these concepts they fed us. Not the Confessions of St. Augustine, but the Jesus is my Homie rap, undid me as a believer.

I’ll never forgive my elementary school for having wasted hours of my life filling my head with meaningless platitudes when I never did get a good grasp on long division. Or for the nights I spent crying into my pillow, envisioning my heathen parents unsaved and in flames. I am tired of the faithful and the cynical, and all their whining about the desecration of Christmas. These complainers seem to think that the thing that has been desecrated is the holiday itself, and our cheerful desecration of it, a symptom of some cultural disease which only surfaces, herpes-like, once a year. The truth is, few of us could ever even dream of appreciating the sacredness of the ritual or the mystery of Christ’s story at all. It is our own minds that have been desecrated, befouled from infancy with the stale rhetoric of people more interested in turning us into congregation drones than in helping us cultivate what innate religiosity--indeed—true spirituality, we may possess. I suspect the natural spirituality of a human being is a delicate and ephemeral thing, easily killed by over-feeding or careless handling. My own was beaten numb; actually, it was bored to death. It is no surprise to me that at Christmastime we shop and eat and drink ourselves senseless, when for so many of us, the story of Christ occupies the same mental space as the tooth fairy, and the word of god is a bubble-gum jingle.

In Defense of Vanity

2006-11-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I've been a bad, bad blogger, but I have a good excuse, which is that I've been spending all my time studying the art of classical acting and the thea-tah. Instead of dutifully keeping the world abreast of the ordinary horrors of my existence, I've been reading plays, scanning verse, enunciating, combatting a new and uncharacteristic stage-fright, and breathing in and out. The only thing other than course-related work I've done in the past few months has been writing for the magazine I've mentioned on this site before. So, now that some of the issues of New York Moves to which I've contributed have hit the press, I can replicate them for a geographically broader audience..... here's one:

There’s a story from my babyhood that I often ask my mom to repeat, partly because it’s so damn cute, but mostly because it’s about me, and I like hearing stories starring me. She says that whenever I cried, she’d hold me, and I would angle myself to face the large antique mirror that hung on the door in our kitchen and then just watch my reflection as I cried. She’d have to hold me up in front of the glass for a good twenty minutes while I sniffled and sobbed until I started kicking her in the chest, which meant I was finished and now hungry. If I was in another room at the time of an upset, she’d pick me up, and I would twist and strain in her arms as she held me, and instead of the usual uninhibited wailing, my sobs had a hesitant, questioning quality--my perceptive mother would then carry me to my favorite spot in the kitchen where I’d finally let it all out “on camera.”

Even today I can’t resist checking myself out whenever I’m distraught. My face flushes so that my eyes look greener, my lips get red and puffy, the tears make my eyelashes all shiny and they stick together like a doll’s. But even better is how very soulful I look when I’m upset. I take advantage of my heightened state and perform Meryl Streep’s famous speech from Sophie’s Choice where she admits her father was an abusive Nazi abettor: I pretend the mirror is the window of Stingo’s Flatbush apartment, stare out into the imaginary Brooklyn dusk, cock my left brow, let a single tear roll down my cheek, and whisper, “…he said, ‘Zozia, your intelligence eez pulp………pulp!!...’” Or I pretend that JFK, Jr. and I are sitting in a coffeeshop in the Village and he’s breaking up with me because of insurmountable class differences or he can’t handle my Slavic temperament or maybe Caroline feels threatened by my libertine tendencies, and he’s really a homebody at heart after all. Tomorrow all the beauty of my pathos will be plastered across the Daily News and the Post. Single women all over New York will discuss the tragedy over cosmo’s after work, and the men will shake their heads and wonder how John-John could have let someone like me get away.

Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. And not just crying, but toning, moisturizing, concealing, highlighting, powdering, SPF-ing, eyelash-combing, eyebrow-smoothing, and practicing smiles of varying degrees of toothiness. I’m currently trying to cultivate the ability to blush on command, very tricky indeed. I have spent thousands of dollars (in my lifetime, not like last week or anything) on hair removal, exercise classes, facials, not to mention clothing to accentuate all my favorite body parts. All to achieve that “I just rolled out of bed looking like this” look. Or better, that “I was born out of a giant seashell, locks a-flowing and heralded by naked baby angels” look.

I actually went to school with someone who laid legitimate claim to the natural Venus look: her name was Rafaella (how apt), and she had long blonde hair that curled and shone even though she washed it with pine tar soap. She never wore makeup and didn’t need to, as her skin was clear and her cheeks and lips naturally pink. No matter how little sleep she got, she never had dark circles under her eyes. She never bothered shaving, but why would she, with legs sprinkled with a soft down, invisible except when sparkling golden in the sun. I never saw her exercise, yet her legs were those of a dancer, without the duck-like turn-out. She never wore a bra, explaining that her C-cups were too small to need one (a thousand times, damn her). The ace up my sleeve is that since she’s too much of a hippie to moisturize or use sunscreen, the harsh New Mexico sun will dry her up like a yellow raisin by the time she’s 35. Hoorah!

Rafi was indeed the campus Venus, sort of a paradigm for unfussy hotness. Something bothered me, though, when people spoke of her, and despite the case I just made for my own monstrous and complicated vanity, it wasn’t quite competitiveness or jealousy, although I will understand if my reader thinks I’m a lying liar. When people discussed the Hotness of Queen Rafi, what they focused on almost more than her hotness itself was her seeming obliviousness to it: more than her actual beauty, it was her utter lack of vanity about it that most impressed people. “She’s so gorgeous, and she doesn’t even know it…” I couldn’t put words to it at the time, but it was peoples’ admiration of Rafi’s unawareness of her assets that offended and troubled me.

This is how people spoke of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, and is usually part of the hype over any starlet newly minted by the studios and the magazines. Even Vogue, that juggernaut of our collective obsession with the superficial, in a recent spread on Keira Knightly, cites couture giantess Vera Wang as gushing “…to be so beautiful and yet to be so unaware of it I find incredibly modern.” Please, Vera, tell us more about modernity.

There are two reasons not to praise someone for lacking vanity.

We live in a world which makes an unprecedented racket about physical beauty and places all sorts of debilitating pressure on people, and especially on women, to conform to evermore minutely finicky and widely unrealistic standards of physical perfection. It is unfair and hypocritical to expect a woman to be oblivious to, let alone unworried by, her physical assets or defects. How sick and self-destructive is it for us to uphold morals in direct conflict with our own self-generated ethos?

Secondly, it is backward and sexist to praise a woman for lack of awareness of any kind. In our society, beauty is power. A woman aware of her beauty, whether god-given or self-cultivated, is actually aware of a weapon in her arsenal that, if she’s smart about it, she can employ to her advantage. Someone (it’s usually a man) who praises a woman for her obliviousness to this very powerful asset is actually admitting his relief that the woman is wasting a tool she could use to gain the upper hand (with him) or to get ahead in our image obsessed society. Praising lack of vanity, like praising innocence, is praising the inability to function fully in this world.

For this embargo on vanity to be anything but bogus and oppressive, our society must either shift its monomaniacal obsession with physical attractiveness or allow for a less exclusionary definition of beauty, And until I see leg hair, ass fat, and crow’s feet on the cover of Vogue (which in the new world will be a women’s literary-political-theological journal), I’m not buying it.

Another Rejected Article!

2006-08-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

My magazine editor recently offered me the "Rant" section of the issue, basically free rein to, well, rant, on anything I choose. I wrote an article that he handed back to me, declining to publish it. Our conversation went thus:

Editor: There is no place in this magazine for something so narrow-minded, ill-informed, wrong-headed, depressing and depressive, untruthful--

Me: Why not?!?!

Editor: Prissy--

Me: Prissy only if you look at the world through pervert-colored glasses!!

Editor: Your readers will dismiss you as a frigid, frustrated suburban biddy--

Me: I'm OK with that!!

Editor: That is not what this magazine is about.

Me: BOLLOCKS IT'S NOT!!

Editor: Bollocks it is.

Me: (mo'ded silence)

Editor: (grins nefariouosly)

It reminded me a little of my conversations with the director at my old theatre:

Director: Larissa, I can't cast you in (name of play)--

Me: Why the hell not?!

Director:--because you're too/not enough (adjective) for the role of (proper name). Don't worry; there will be parts that suit your (noun) more (adverb). (Proper name)'s audition was more/less (adjective) and she (verb)'s more (adverb) for the part.

Me: Like hell she is/does!!

Director: Don't argue with me.

Me: (mo'ded weeping)

Director: (glowers nefariously)

Anyway, here I can publish the article in all its prissy glory. In your face, Conde Nast!
(or whoever owns the magazine)

I had an acquaintance for a while whom I didn’t know well, but who seemed worth getting to know—he had pretty red hair and was taller than I (which always grabs my attention-I don’t know why more men don’t try it), and had a relaxed arrogance that I should probably learn to read as a warning sign but haven’t yet. I was curious about him and pleased when he approached me at a recent party in the Village. But when he spoke, his intentions were so unappetizingly clear—so impersonally sex-driven –that out of abashment and instinctive non-whoriness I mentally aborted those embryonic “maybe” thoughts I had harbored for him and felt my loins frosting over as I waited for the barrage of come-ons to end. So unworried was he that his baldfaced bluntness was inappropriate, unappealing, or even downright repulsive to any woman who wasn’t a slipshod floozy, that when I declined, instead of rethinking his tactic and hazarding a different one, he demanded that I explain why I wasn’t interested. As flummoxed as I was at hearing that a one night stand with the likes of him or bloody-anyone should fill my heart with giddy joy or whatever, the second shock of being challenged to justify myself left me stunned. I should have slapped him, and only later did I realize how unfortunate it really was that I hadn’t slapped him, because there was a deeper insult I hadn’t articulated to myself in the moment: He not only thought I was the kind of person (slipshod floozy) who would respond to such crassness, but he felt he could say it to my face. Maybe the way I describe this incident makes the boy sound like some displaced macho freak from a David Mamet play, but I’d wager that his “strategy,” if you can call something so un-thought out and artless a strategy, is not so unusual. Every woman my age I know has endured similar interactions; I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of girls a decade younger than I had as well. Now, men don’t make a habit of repeating maneuvers that don’t work for them, so I’ll venture that as depressing as it is to acknowledge it, many women fall for this lunkheaded vulgarity.

As a contrast, I’ll offer a short anecdote about my father: In the years following the second world war, he was laid up with TB at the veteran’s hospital in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Though not a misanthropist, he remained somewhat aloof from the other patients, whom he considered to be graceless Yankees. Instead of joining the other men in their regular entertainments: gambling, spitting, and harassing the nurses, he amused himself by resuming a practice his mother had taught him: tatting (a method of needlework used to create lace designs on the edges of fabric). This is not a skill most men learn these days, but in his time, and in the South, it was common for a mother to teach her son the same homemaking skills she taught her daughters. In any case, the nurses were disarmed by my father’s gentlemanly manners and impressed with his artistry, and soon started bringing him their knickers to be embellished. He’d get a plain pair of panties and return them trimmed with pink daisies. The other men, who at first had snickered at his practice of this womanish art, now realized that they had been outdone; for all their gropings and lunkheaded overtures, it was my father whose bed was perpetually flanked by a bevy of squealing, giggling nurses waving their silken underthings in delight. Southern charm had triumphed over Northern boorishness.

I began this article intending to extol the second manner of wooing I described, the artful over the obtuse, but then I realized that this would be akin to saying I want a man who will trick me out of my panties, and decided to reconsider. I am inclined to appreciate the gentleness of my father’s manner, not to mention the implied understanding that a woman must be too intelligent and classy to succumb to blunt propositioning (an understanding clearly lacked by that boy I should have slapped). And it angers me that there are so many men who need to be slapped, and so few women who will slap them. After all, the proper response to being objectified, underrated, and insulted is not to sleep with the offender (which must happen often enough to make it worth men’s while to continue to act this way), but to slap him down, yes?

But on second thought I see that it’s no better to surrender to the charming, artful, and subtle, than to the crude, brazen, and heavy-handed. Behind them both is the same coarse pragmatism that should be recognized for what it is: not a genuine interest in the woman as a human being and individual, but rather an undiscriminating quest for poon, however elegantly dressed. My artful father was not a lecher, but he could have been, and a very successful one. I suspect that the artless boy I regret not slapping is also a successful lecher.

Now my question is: Why is it that, whatever the current and local trends are for seducing women, whether they involve straightforwardness or dissembling, women can be counted on to respond positively to them? Who cares if a few hardheaded icequeens like me won’t stand for it? Men seduce on the principle of carpet-bombing: throw enough missiles and you’re bound to hit something. As I said before, enough women must respond to these techniques to give men reason to continue employing them. They sleep with men who have not given any convincing indication that they love or respect them, and then whine that the men they’re sleeping with don’t love or respect them. What else, besides shoes, was Sex and the City about?

Perhaps I am just more frustrated than my peers at the atmosphere between the sexes, which to me appears cluttered with miscarried intentions and run-down hopes. But even I am not entirely pessimistic. Something must work; people do fall in love and enjoy satisfying relationships, even if such sweet tales are spectacularly upstaged by epics of failure and regret. But regardless of how a romance turns out in the end, there are ways of approaching a woman initially which don’t insult her intelligence or outrage her class. I believe a woman can always tell, though she may be awash in denial about it, when a man is merely putting his boner on hold until he can come up with that perfect line which is the “Open Sesame” of her pants, and when he is speaking to her because he genuinely finds her interesting and might want her company for activities other than boning. It is to keep the terrible debilitating loneliness at bay that she will hold onto her denial even when her instinct tells her she’s being scammed. In Tennessee Williams’s brutal play Orpheus Descending, fallen belle Carol Cutrere explains why she sleeps with man after man despite the physical danger to her frame, too slight to survive childbearing, too slight even to endure the weight of a man without agony: ”The act of lovemaking is almost unbearably painful, and yet of course, I do bear it, because to not be alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.” Even a hardheaded icequeen (my editor adds, “prissy auto-didact”) can understand this choice, this lethal need to forget, however briefly, how alone we actually are. To silence that inner howling for intimacy we will go with the boorish propositioner or the eloquent playboy--will knowingly accept the ersatz for want of the genuine.…and as the howls rise up again, we feel ourselves turning into the bitter cynics we never believed we could be.

Or perhaps not. As much heartache as is out there, perhaps…….the devices one sex uses to get closer to the other aren’t really to blame, are rather just that, devices, not the substance of the problem. I guess it didn’t do me any more harm to be subjected to the artless boy’s blunt invitation than it did those nurses to loan their underwear to my skillful father. Such villainies seem rather twee compared to the disaster of a full-fledged, authentic love falling apart, the hopes of two vested people destroyed, which truly is the frightening thing.

To Whom it May Concern,

2006-08-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

I am issuing a public plea, an appeal, if you will, to the hearts of my readers as a last humble effort to obtain the support I need to follow my dreams.

Sometimes I get a sneaking suspicion that acting is not a highly respected vocation. In fact, if my findings from my grant search are any indication, the world is actually more interested in finding a cure for cancer and promoting peace in the middle east than it is in cultivating the next generation of Shakespearean actors. Did you know that the Peace Corps has no theatrical division? And that you can’t get a deadline extension on the Fulbright?

When “philanthropists” like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates ignore my queries and Tony Hopkins won’t return my calls, I feel so hurt and confused by the lack of generosity in this world, I ask myself, “Where is the Love?”

Fifty thousand dollars seems so little to ask. What is it, a shiny new car? A downpayment on a house? Think of what you could be buying with your hard-earned money, if you stopped thinking about what the suburban middleclass bourgeois expected of you, and started thinking about what you expected of you…..

If I fail to inspire you, gentle readers, with the spirit of Giving, then for the length of my sojourn in London, I will have no choice but to eat conventionally-grown fruit, wash my face with tap water, and toil for 10-15 hours a week in some sweaty oppression inflicted by the school’s ministry of “Work!Study!” This will leave precious little time for Sloane-ing, coffeeshop blogging, or contemplation of The Beautiful. And from what I hear, the mines just don’t pay like they used to.

Imagine.

And do the right thing. Cash, personal checks, and applications for pre-nuptial divorce settlements gratefully accepted.

Sincerely, Larissa

New York's Historic Second Avenue Deli is Now a Chase Manhattan Bank.

2006-08-12T10:43:00.001-07:00

...the very means by which oustanding success declines makes the process doubly destructive to cities....For some reason, banks, insurance companies and prestige offices are consistently the most voracious double destroyers in this way. Look to see where banks or insurance companies are clustered, and you will too often see where a center of diversity has been supplanted, a knoll of vitality leveled. You will see a place that is already a has-been or is becoming so.

-The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Britblog II

2006-06-11T16:21:00.000-07:00

So, yes, I was in London for 10 days recently, where I auditioned and was accepted at the Central School for Speech and Drama for their MA program in classical acting. Woo-Hoo! In addition to my elation at the prospect of spending the next year immersed in the classics, after my short visit in London I realized that I had to attempt a longer stay and become more familiar with this great city.

When I made plans to stay in the home of a friend of mine and his flatmate, both bachelors, I envisioned a home decorated in the style of New York’s infamous Coyote Ugly bar: abandoned bras dangling from the ceiling fans, floors sticky with spilt booze, galaxies of dust and bodyhair hovering in the corridors and smeared boxerbriefs drooping off doorknobs. However, Brian and Marcus, old college buddies, live in a charming neighborhood in southeast London named Ladywell, on this picturesque street:

And they maintain a terrifying purity in their home. I’d wake up in the early morning to shouts of “ZERO TOLERANCE!” thundering from the kitchen and stumble in (trying not to slide to my death across the dustless hardwood floors) to find one of my hosts at the foaming kitchen sink, lathering furiously while the laundry washer trembled at his side. At first I thought “zero tolerance” was a warning to whichever flatmate was duty-bound at the moment to do the cleaning by the one who was currently off the hook, a “YOU FEAR HOGAN!!”- style reprimand for an AWOL dishwasher or bathtub scrubber or floor sweeper. But it is in fact a battle cry in the style of “WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!”—a mantra by which the obligated revs himself up before a trying shift of degreasing. “ZERO TOLERANCE!” from Marcus washing dishes in the kitchen, “ZERO TOLERANCE!” from Brian scrubbing tiles in the lavvy. It was a virtual cacophony of hygiene. Not only were my prejudices about the bachelors debunked by the gleaming cleanliness or their home; I immediately felt an inner panic concerning my own slobbery in contrast. The idea of exposing my slovenliness and disgracing my country before these olympians was too humiliating and I could not rest peacefully for fear of allowing some disgusting habit of mine to surface in a moment of unawareness. What if I should accidentally leave my sneakers where somebody might smell them? Or get caught cleaning my mascara wand with my toothbrush? Or forget about all the snails I trampled on the stairs to the house and tread guts all over the living room carpet? For the entire time of my stay I obsessively picked my hair out of the drain after I showered, buried my soiled clothing in double plastic bags deep inside my suitcase, and wrapped the Q-tips I cleaned my ears with in tissue before I pushed them to the bottom of the rubbish bin. The potential for disaster was high and I had to remain vigilant. The only suggestion of squalor made by my hosts was the expanding stalagmitic array of empty liquor bottles on the kitchen floor surrounding the garbage can. And even that didn’t seem as filthy as it would in any major American city home, where each of those bottles, even those with but a drop of wine in the bottom, left overnight would by morning be stuffed with drowned roaches, drawn to their besotted doom by the pungent aroma of the pickling booze.

Anyway, the first night I was there, the night before my big audition at Central, Brian, a prominent acting teacher and director, and Marcus, owner of a talent agency, and I converged in the living room for a discussion on a life in the theatre.

Brian: “I hardly ever go to shows anymore. I’d much rather get a nice bottle of wine and watch Big Brother, any night.”

Marcus: “Or Top Gear. Top Gear’s better.”

B: “Right. Brilliant. I’ve no wish to sit in some uncomfortable middle-class chair surrounded by white people and watch a bunch of actors…acting…”

M: Well, it’s a defunct art form, isn’t it?”

B: “A dinosaur. Why go to a play if there’s a boxing match on?”

M: “I mean, if actors were pilots, and pilots were forced to wear their uniforms out, and you saw just how many bloody pilots there were, you’d say, ‘Why are we training so many bloody pilots? There are only so many planes.’ What’s your exit strategy, Larissa?”

L: (silent as I fight back tears)

B: “You definitely need an exit strategy. When you sit down with yourself and say, ‘I need to say goodbye to this’. For some guys it’s thirty-five, but for women it might need to be sooner-- shorter shelf-life, yes?”

M: “Don’t get discouraged about this; it’s just important that you have a plan for what to do with your life in case you don’t make it…more wine?”

I’d like to discuss the British colloquial use of “brilliant,” which I find to be unfailingly entertaining and funny. In America, “brilliant” suggests a high degree of virtuosity exhibited in a work of art or idea (e.g.. Meryl Streep’s brilliant performance in Sophie’s Choice), or an exceptionally talented or skillful person (e.g. the brilliant painter Picasso), or sometimes an unusually bright color (as in my brilliant pink hat). We only veer away from the literal sense of the word by applying it to decidedly negative and unbrilliant things in a blunt and obvious version of sarcasm, as in “Whose brilliant idea was it to paint the door shut?” The British, on the other hand, seem to prefer to place the word somewhere in the middle, in reference to something they regard as positive and worthy of praise, but utterly unconnected to talent or skill in the fine arts or philosophy.

“They serve up a brilliant pig’s blood pudding at Maggie’s.”

or,

Jack: “Her dress just snapped off like a broken condom.”
Algernon: “Brilliant.”

I’m convinced this usage denotes a deeply cynical streak in the British character (which after a ten-day visit I feel completely justified to diagnose). They over-rate things normally understood to be of limited value as if to spit in the face of the higher things in life. “There is no real genius left in the world; the gods are dead, but bollocks to them, we’ve got pig’s blood!” Cynical or not, though, I still laugh whenever I hear “brilliant” used this way. Oh, and “bollocks,” too, every time.

I guess the most troubling thing about London was how very poor I was there. On the first day of my trip the exchange rate was two dollars to the pound and on subsequent days it hovered around $1.80-$1.88/pound. I’m used to being a rich American abroad and having to restrain my spending habits in order to discourage gypsy thieves and also not to appear overly vulgar and ugly—the “Ugly American”! Of course this happy illusion can only be upheld in countries crippled by poverty. In London, however, I had to pause before I ordered an $8 falafel sandwich or a $7 latte. A one-day three-zone travel card was $20; student tickets to the Gielgud Theatre were $30!! Although it killed my buzz not to be able to gorge myself at the most pretentious restaurants or use the loose change at the bottom of my purse to fill my suitcase with precious national treasures, I did enjoy the unfamiliar feeling of self-pity brought on by my newfound destitution. I pretended I was in one of those movies where Julia Roberts or Jennifer Lopez lives a ho-hum working-class life while dreaming of the big time and then is rescued by a handsome and mysterious millionaire with grey hair, to become the jewel in the crown of the upper class while never forgetting her roots. I stood outside Harrod’s imagining the over-the-shoulder shot capturing my look of yearning reflected in the window as I gazed at the inaccessible riches within. Later on in the movie, having captured the heart of the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor, I’m inside the store for the first time, perched somewhat clumsily on a dresser’s podium to show my unfamiliarity with the ways of the rich. Tailors buzz around me and Richard Gere sits enthroned in the corner, beaming at my genuineness and exuberance, nothing like those society ladies he’s used to. When my gown for the big night is finally finished, I see it in the mirror—so different from my welding outfit—and with tears in my eyes, whisper, “I’ve never felt satin like this before…”

When I wasn’t daydreaming about my rise to the top I did my best to have a good time despite my lack of funds. Luckily, the museums are mostly free, some theatres offer student tickets for as low as $15, and people can be pretty generous if you pout at them. One day I struck up a conversation with a couple at the famous Cutty Sark Pub on the Thames. The man, clearly of the working class (from what I could discern from his accent and my vast knowledge of masterpiece theatre character types), described his travels in America, “Oi just show op wit’an empty syootcase an’ boi moi clowthin’ theh, don’ even bothah packin nutin’…oi git a noice syoot or tyoo, an’ a couple pair o’jeans an’ some jackits an’ T-shuhts and tennies….oi dew that whenevah oi take vacashin in Nyoo Yoork, oi dew.” He has a job with the city of London pumping oxygen in after the sewage as it floats down the Thames. I couldn’t follow his explanation of the science of it all exactly, but apparently, fish don’t normally object to swimming through excrement, but because of the great multitudes of turds progressing down the river, and the fact that feces somehow eats up or destroys the oxygen in the water, if left unaided, the fish die of suffocation. Throughout history the Thames has been a giant floating death camp for millions of unsuspecting fish, swept along with the unrelenting tide of poo, and creating what was called the “Big Stink.” But my friend at the pub and his crew save the day by reoxygenating the river so the fish and sewage can coexist happily together. When I told him that I held a B.A. in Liberal Arts and was pursuing a graduate degree in classical acting, he took pity and treated me to a half pint of cider.

Well, that’s enough of my trip for now. I’m sure once I’m living there I’ll have more to say. I’ve included a few more pictures, one of me having high tea on Primrose Hill, one of the romantc, moody Thames, and a 'political' image taken at posh Sloane square...

Brit Blog

2006-05-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

...a great city is a kind of labyrinth within which at every moment of the day the most hidden wishes of every human being are performed by people who devote their whole existences to doing this and nothing else. Along a road there walks a man with a desire repressed in his heart. But a few doors away there are people utterly devoted to accomplishing nothing but this desire...
When I discovered this, I was almost tempted to think that I had stripped bare my deepest wishes and found that others shared them and that even if this were a kind of hell, perhaps it was my destiny.

-Stephen Spender, World Within World

More on my London travels soon.....

Things That Give Me Hideously Vivid Nightmares, Chapter One

2006-04-14T21:04:00.000-07:00

On Wretchedness

2006-04-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

An interesting, disturbing dialogue has commenced amongst several of my thoughtful blogger friends, Odious, Jack, and Kate, on the subject of, well, wretchedness: Why and when one is most susceptible to it (or, blessedly, not), how one attempts to keep it at bay, and the compellingly asserted possibility that it is an unnecessary pain born and sustained only by a lack of faith in the overarching divine goodness available to us if only we should believe it’s there and actually meant for us. I recognize my own experience in Odious’s self-doubt, apathy, feelings of guilt over being apathetic, even in his attempts to blur out with over-stimulation and constant fidgeting that ugly self-realization perpetually lurking in his periphery.

This…. longing for goodness is so striking that I worry a great deal about my lack of it. I do what is right grudgingly at best and with a feeling that everyone had better appreciate the sacrifice I'm making in trying to be a good person, rather than chasing joyfully after goodness without a thought of anything else. I am not attracted to the Good; or if I am, I keep it hidden, to disguise my failure to be good as successful apathy. This self-deception is too often triumphant. It is, of course, pride that keeps me from confessing my desire, and I've so suppressed it that I feel it only sporadically anymore. It takes quite a shove to make me realize how much I would like to be good.
I don't know about anyone else, but Pascal's "distraction from wretchedness" becomes more and more my motivation. I find myself singing, not because I like the song, but because old iniquities are coming to mind and I don't want to remember them. I read while I watch movies, because with only one distraction I might notice my fallen state, and the knowledge of how low I am is intolerable.

However, Jack’s position, that truly believing in the benevolence and even love of God cultivates a happiness magnificent enough to dwarf the insecurities, worries, and, yes, wretchedness, that come from a blinkered preoccupation with the secular, seems not just a mollifying sentiment but a wise and practical tenet to live by.

If we really believed, I mean really, experientially believed that we were personally loved by the Being Who created the universe, would we really be bothered if someone disagreed with us, belittled us, or really, harmed us in any way? Would it matter? The insecurity that compels us to lash out in despair would finally be resolved. Why would we need earthly validation if we knew that our real selves -- not the narrow mean selves we're forced into being -- were forever irrevocably loved.

Indeed, I suspect that if I ever prove capable of taking Jack’s invocations to heart successfully, I will look back on my hours (months? Years? Decades?) of anxiety and dissatisfaction as needless capitulation to pointless doubt, hours spent in godlessness, while God was right there had I just been wise and courageous enough to believe. But it is hard to believe.

Not “in God”— Since the first time it was mentioned to me in a ghetto Baptist school when I was five, it has never been difficult for me to believe in the existence of a God; this probably indicates more my sloppy and unscientific nature rather than any effortless inclination to religiosity. No, it’s hard to believe that the belief in God’s love is enough to assuage the sting of even the pettiest insult, let alone the devastation of real human tragedy. I’m not assuming Ivan Karamazov’s stand of, “how can we believe in a God who allows babies to be murdered?”—he made his point very convincingly and even so was soundly mo’ded by the gentle and persistent devotion of Alexei. I can accept that God allows suffering and I wouldn’t assert something so myopic as that this proves His lack of benevolence or even His absence altogether—but I can’t help but draw the line at His love for each of us being a palliative or encouraging conviction.
For something to offer encouragement or alleviation from wretchedness, one has to believe that that thing promises real respite from the things that make one wretched. But we know that whether God loves us or not, we are stuck until we die in a world which promises a near-constant barrage of insults, failures, grievances, tragedies, disappointments, iniquities, deaths, humiliations, resentments, sorrows, loss, and wretchedness. We cannot point to anyone whom, perhaps, God loved more and thus made to suffer less, nor anyone whom God definitely loved less and so who conversely suffered more. No, God loves us all equally, and yet suffering is doled out at best, randomly; at worst, with the totality of a carpet bombing. Knowing that God’s love has no effect on the events, good and bad, that befall us in our lives, and that neither does it gravitate in greater quantity to those who work harder to be worthy of it (i.e. those who make a more concerted effort not to be assholes), how can the knowledge that He loves each of us provide real solace?

Reduced to bluntness, my point is, “God loves me. ...And?”

God loves me and he loved Genghis Khan, and Ann Frank and Stalin, and the Grand Inquisitor and Dostoevsky and the slaughtered babies and their mothers and Milosevic and my dead father. This may be true, and I believe it is true. But how on earth can I glean comfort from it?

My Rejected Article

2006-03-23T19:26:00.000-08:00

So some of you know that I'm writing for a trendy New York glossy these days (well, if it were more popular, it would be "trendy;" at this stage it's merely aspiring to trendiness). They have commissioned several articles from me (well, if I were getting paid it would be "commission;" at this stage it's merely orders I obey), one of which was this one I've posted. My managing editor asked me to write a treatise on the ugliness and outdatedness of shoulder pads for the March issue (yes, it's a political science review). So I did, and for reasons not revealed to me, my article did not make the cut. This didn't hurt my feelings too badly, as so far I've been rejected thrice by the New Yorker and roundly ignored by the Times, and with such giants on my resume of failure I've come to excuse the rejections of humbler enterprises as "slavery to fashion." But you can read it for free. Bon Appetit!

Once in a while when I was in college my friend Araminta and I needed to assuage our blues with a trip off-campus. Rarely did this involve much planning ahead or even a token glance in the mirror before we got into her long-suffering Volvo and drove to Denny’s. In fact, we usually just set out in whatever sorry rags we had been studying in; sometimes sweats, sometimes PJ’s, sometimes whatever faded t-shirt and long john’s we had worn to class every day that week. While neither of us was a vision of glamour on these occasions, I noticed that she had a distinct advantage which saved her from utter frumpiness. For a moment I considered that it might be the two cup sizes she had on me, but then it occurred to me that the world is over-run with giant-busted women, and very few of them have that “je ne sais quoi” elegance that Araminta had in her bedraggled paisley jammies. What was it?

I realized then that it was her mannishly square shoulders which made even her most casual and untailored garments seem chic and complete. Such shoulders, in their broadness, accentuated the smallness of the waist, provided a frame for the bust, and minimized the width of the hips (a woman built like this rarely has to worry whether her “butt looks big”—what could possibly look big next to those shoulders?). Surprisingly, this broadness across the back that I described as “mannish” emphasized the femininity of her figure, and she didn’t have to do any “dressing up” to look, well, dressed up.
This realization made me wonder why I seem to be the only woman who mourns the loss of the shoulder pad in womens’ fashion today. Why would women have ever given up something so flattering and, forgive what I’m about to say, aesthetically empowering?

I should explain. The shoulder pad entered womens’ fashion in the 1940’s as a variation on the soldier’s uniform. The country was largely supportive of the war effort and naturally, fashion reflected this. It also helped that Adrian dressed his muse, the popular film star Joan Crawford, in suits with padded shoulders, and also that rations on various fabrics restricted designers from indulging in the usual flourishes to add excitement to their designs: full skirts, puffy sleeves, etc. They suddenly had to be very economical in their creations, and the sleek, sparse suit padded and squared off at the shoulders proved an appropriate, and elegant, solution. Women’s social role shifted as well; she entered the workplace, taking over many of the jobs usually occupied by men who were now abroad, and the authoritative look afforded her by this simple adjustment to the cut of her clothes fit her new image perfectly. She didn’t look like a man, but she did look powerful, in a way only men had previously been able to appear.

Then the war ended, and with it not only the rations on fabric, but the need for women in the workforce; in fact, a massive campaign was launched to drag women back into the home to free up those jobs for the returning G.I.’s. After enjoying a taste of a fairly independent life outside the home, women were now maneuvered back into their formerly sequestered lives (a problematic trend astutely, famously, documented by Betty Freidan in The Feminine Mystique). Not surprisingly, fashion took full advantage of the lift on rations and came out with skirts embellished with extra yards of fabric. Fashion also relaxed its wartime strategy of militarizing the female image. The ‘soldier’ look was yesterday and the new look was far softer and less structured, except in the infamously pointed brassieres popular in the fifties. This look was somehow, in the never-humble opinion of this amateur social scientist,…so obedient. Poodle skirts, skinny-heeled slingbacks, and good girl peter pan collars: the only body parts to enjoy special emphasis were the good ol’ mammaries (just in time for the baby boom! Co-inky-dink?). The shoulders, which in the forties had been enhanced to the effect of suggesting strength, professionalism, and an authority at least superficially on par with that of the male, were now allowed their natural weak slope, their former emphasis now dropped several inches south.

Jump ahead to the 1980’s: women once again storm the workforce, not due to any national crisis, but simply because it is the next step in the progression towards equality with men, initiated by the women’s lib movement. As newcomers to the corporate world, women do what they can to fit in, the pervasive mentality being that women have to prove they belong in this traditionally masculine domain. Women’s office clothes now mimic the man’s suit: though the bottom half is a skirt with pumps (because we couldn’t go so far as to let women actually be comfortable in slacks and flat shoes and even, god forbid, unshaved legs) the top half is a smart blazer with, again, shoulder pads. These shoulder pads, however, are an exaggerated version of those of WWII. The new shoulder pad doesn’t merely level and extend the shoulder a centimeter or two; it often takes the shape of a curve, which creates small humps at either shoulder, achieving that “linebacker” look bemoaned by reactionaries to the trend,--or it extends so far out that the wearer has to turn sideways to enter doorways. Perhaps this is a manifestation of “80’s excess,” or perhaps designers just don’t want to be caught repeating a trend that had been made popular by someone else four decades previous, so they revamp it in this mutant state. In any case, the look lasts for about as long as it seems necessary for women to masculinize their image, which is not much longer than the first decade of their corporate life.

Since then, women have felt more at home in the business world and thus entitled to dress as women rather than as masculinized females. The shoulder pad has been shrugged off. Will it come back? Most likely if it does, it will be for purely aesthetic reasons, as there are so many fewer arenas left in which appearing manlier could benefit a woman; she has her own identity now, and that identity has been, at least in theory, validated by her society. The author, if you haven’t guessed already, mourns the shoulder pad’s absence in popular fashion, also for purely aesthetic reasons, but does not foresee its return any time soon. Why? There are two reasons for her pessimism. One of them is that fashion has basically fallen off the deep end in its escalating pursuit of skankiness. The questions now seem to be, “how much of my pubic hair do I need to wax off in order to wear these extra-low-rider jeans?” and, “does the bra strap peeking out of my tank top match the thong peeking out of my pants?” In other words, the whole ideology behind today’s fashion appears to be “how to be sexy (in that “Sexiness for Boneheads” way taught by MTV)” rather than “how to look good.” Coco Chanel once said that the proper goal for a woman when she dresses herself should not be to look rich, but to look elegant. There is a sorry lack of such subtlety in today’s trends. Sexiness is defined by what seems like a checklist of the obvious. Tits showing? Check. Ass showing? Check. Gams showing? Double check. Midriff exposed? Check. The sexiness of a woman in a tailored and, yes, padded, dress or blazer (think Lauren Bacall in To Have and To Have Not, think Kate Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, think Evita) is too complicated to make the cut in today’s world where Paris Hilton is an style icon and rap-video hootchies herald the newest accessories your fourteen-year old will be begging you to buy her. A padded garment emphasizes a body part that is not distinctly sexual, and thus has very little hope of gaining popularity until a massive shift takes place in the collective psychology of our society.

The other reason I don’t think the shoulder pad will come back any time soon is because women simply don’t know what looks good on them. So many of us don’t realize that it is preferable to look like a linebacker than like an overgrown cheerleader. If women knew what looked good on them, these fashions would have died far sooner:
1) Jeans with large areas, usually thighs and/or buttocks, bleached out (“Do these make my ass look fat?” You bet.).
2) Shoes designed to suggest the head of a duck-billed platypus: the turned-up toe and the heel extended behind the ankle make one’s foot look two sizes larger. No good!
3) Baby-T’s: even if you do have washboard abs, is it really appropriate to have your stomache showing oustide of the gym or a beach on St. Bart’s? And for the rest of us, why abuse your pooch by making it bulge over the top of your jeans? Not attractive!
4) Pink eyeshadow: Why buy over-priced eye cream if you’re then going to wear makeup that makes you look like you’ve been crying and that’s why your eyes are puffy (and yes, pink eyeshadow makes your eyes look puffy!).
5) The Jennifer Aniston ‘do: Sorry ladies, those two years back in the ‘90’s when you all were whipping your stylists into a frenzy over that ill-begotten coiffure? Bad idea! It made your head look big, it hid your face, and it emphasized the lines on your neck (and you who had such lines were too old to be imitating 20-something sitcom stars. For shame!).
6) The ruffled mini: and sorry, Paris, the only woman with the legs for this skirt is my three-year-old niece. Give it back!
7) I already mentioned this but it bears reinforcement: Consider this, ladies, would Jackie Kennedy have worn an exposed thong?

These are just a few of the objectionable trends of recent years. Perhaps I should start a “Top 100” list.

Valentine's Day Shvitz

2006-03-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

The Russian Turkish Baths are a legendary New York institution, referenced by some of the last century’s great writers such as Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets. Under Russian management throughout its entire 114 year-old history, the baths are set in a brownstone with a famous red staircase in the East Village, the city’s old Russian-Ukrainian neighborhood. For twenty-five dollars, one gets a sagging pair of shorts, an ill-fitting, un-closing robe, and a thin, undrying towel, and can enjoy an uninterrupted day of steaming and unclogging. Unlike many of the popular newer spas, like the Japanese Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe or Kabuki Springs in San Francisco, or the numerous trendy dayspas in New York, the Russian Turkish baths do not present a sleek, glamorous, or relaxing environment. There are no soothing aromatheraputic scents wafting in through the grates, no sliced cucumber for one’s eyes, no new-age instrumentals playing over hidden speakers, and the slippers lying around the locker room were almost certainly not sterilized since the last person wore them (when one leaves after a session of steaming, one might experience a perplexing mix of feeling cleaner than one has ever felt in one’s life and a conviction that one has contracted a skin condition). There’s often a burly middle-aged man stomping about in his soaked shorts shilling his massages to the patrons, sometimes by actually grabbing one of their forearms and kneading it until it’s red. The patrons aren’t the young yoga-toned professionals in anklets and lotus-tats who frequent the Japanese spas; they’re mostly ancient, thick-trunked Russians and African Americans with patchy leg hair and spinal humps—I have never seen so many naked blacks and Slavs in one place, and getting along so well!

On Valentine’s evening, the Russian Turkish Baths hosted a public party, and I immediately knew this was indeed the thing to do on Valentine’s. I enlisted my good friend Angela (see “Totally Belated Halloween Post,” paragraph 3) to accompany me to this fete, which featured a boisterous gypsy band, unlimited vodka (which I found a little odd considering it was in a place that specialized in inducing lightheadedness and dehydration in its customers) and pierogi with sour cream. The crowd that night was younger and fitter than usual, and seemed more dedicated to the art of toxing than that of detoxing, replenishing their lost liquid with a constant stream of booze. People relaxed the usual New Yorker embargo on eye contact and spent the evening aggressively wooing each other, a trend that Angela and I avoided by getting into a serious debate on the Landmark Forum in the Turkish room; I guess men leave you alone once they realize just how argumentative you can be. One man proved more fearless than his colleagues, however. In the early part of the evening we noticed a young, small, reedy blond man shuffling back and forth in his flip-flops from the various steam rooms, carrying a laminated sheet of paper, which he offered for examination to one after another of mostly disinterested-looking bathers. In my dizzy state (which forced me to spend much of my time sitting on a bench in the common area nodding dully to the procession of men who approached me thinking I was waiting to get hit on), I didn’t think this man and his paper odd, although later I wondered how I could have overlooked the absurdity of someone carrying anything other than a bottle of vodka in the steaming areas. This man (I feel odd calling him a ‘man,’ as he couldn’t have been older than 22) approached Angela and me while we sat on the bench catching our breath. He introduced himself as “Avi,” the exoticism of his name contrasting noticeably with his rather whitebread appearance. A recent graduate of University of Michigan, Avi was trying to start his career as a boardgame inventor. Here he showed us the mysterious paper, steam-dampened even through the laminate, which depicted the ‘map,’ if you will, of a four-person boardgame inspired by the horrors occurring on the Gaza strip. The players represent Hamas, militant Israel, moderate Islam, and moderate Israel, with “global opinion” acting in a manner similar to monopoly’s chance card, and suicide attacks and car bombings as the modes of stealing/losing points towards the objective, Gaza control. The game itself, if dubiously informed, might have been pretty clever and appropriate for self-consciously intellectual New Yorkers, but the inventor’s sliding around the Turkish baths in his trunks presenting the game with an elaborate explanation of the rules and objectives to drunken strangers in bikinis, seemed somewhat uncouth. No matter, I started to nod off from faintness while Avi managed to engage the reluctant but unfortunately lucid Angela in a more personal discussion. In my stupor I caught snippets of their conversation indicative that I really should remain alert enough to eavesdrop more thoroughly—something about “rope burn,” and “transcendant pain.” Later Angela reprimanded me for failing to rescue her from an unwelcome invitation to a session of bondage and domination by the delicate Avi, who apparently enjoyed the strain of clamps on his nipples. I apologized for my negligence, secretly delighted that I could now use my low blood pressure as an excuse to obliviate from unwanted chatting.

Angela and I then proceeded to the Russian Room. A note on the Russian Room: this is an asset of the Baths that I have not encountered in any other spa I’ve patronized. The interior resembles what one might imagine the inside of a volcano to look like, craggy, dark, steamy, with sloped, rough walls—except along the walls are two rows of faucets out of which pour constant streams of ice-cold water into buckets. This room is so damn hot, hotter than anything in the Japanese or Finnish spas, that as soon as you step inside, you have to grab one of these buckets of chilled water and dump it on your head. This comforts you for about a minute and a half, until your hair starts to burn the back of your neck and you have to douse yourself again. Now you sit down on the wooden bench, flinch as you burn your ass on the molten cedar and curse loudly so everyone peers out at you from under their head towels, and then you pick a random towel, soaked with either some stranger’s sweat or the water collecting in the uneven plains of the floor, throw it on the bench and clumsily aim your ass on it before you faint and crack your head open against the jagged wall-boulders. Now you start to wheeze and you swear that you can actually hear the delicate cilia lining your lungs sizzle and char like so much dry brush. You wince at the worrisome sensation that the liquid membranes on the insides of your eyelids are burning your eyeballs. You dunk your head into the bucket nearest you, and take long, grateful gulps from the water, which is so cold that, at any other time, you would complain that it’s freezing your sensitive teeth and hazardous to your singing voice. You eventually resign yourself to your discomfort, as the danger of slipping, tripping, burning, or fainting on your way to the door scares you into staying put. Now your eyes adjust and you find that as long as you hog one of the buckets of water and sip at it like a giant beer mug, you can almost stand it without wanting to die. Now you notice that there are maybe fifteen other people in the room, all lounging and chatting and not seeming at all as though their every pore is screaming in protest at the heat. Gays in mud masks, burly middle-aged Russians comparing forearm bulk, babas in soaked robes, bemoaning the bitchery of their American grandaughters. In the corner atop an elevated platform, a youngish studly-type, lent a slightly-thuggish aura by the towel wrapped ‘do-rag style about his shorn head, straddles a topless woman lying on the bench, holding her ankle fast against her ear for several spectacular seconds until he lowers her leg to the bench and proceeds to flog her breasts with a soapy oak branch. You then realize that the disturbingly flexible topless girl is Angela, and the man with the best job on earth offers this service for $35 a pop. Then Angela emerges sudsy and glowing from this ‘treatment,’ slurrily testifying to the profound bliss induced by the Russian stretch-and-whip (a review you find suspect as you know Angela to be an undiscriminating enthusiast of any activity requiring toplessness, flexibility, and flagellation). She even offers to buy the treatment for you as a Valentine’s ‘gift,’ and expresses annoyance at your refusal. The other patrons overhear your bickering and join with Angela in pressuring you on, pooh-poohing your objections and then just shouting over your increasingly-frantic protests. Then they start splashing you with cold water from the buckets, which feels surprisingly unpleasant, perhaps because of the village-lottery atmosphere which has suddenly overtaken the Russian Room. Finally, the hooded strongman saunters over to you and unwinds the towel from his head, revealing a sensitive face touched with concern.

“Hello. I am Sasha. I not hurting you.”

He pouts at your resistance, offers you his beefy cocked arm, and gazes benevolently into your eyes. You hesitate a moment, then place your weary hand in the crook of his elbow. With a beatific, dippy grin on your face like Blanche du Bois receiving the kindness of strangers, you lean on his shoulder and ascend the steps to the whipping bench.

I remember very little else from that night other than treading through thick slush and the sharp 2am chill through an uncommonly quiet East Village to the subway for the long ride home, where I crawled, clean and chastened, into bed.

On Discovering Porn in My VCR

2006-02-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

I sent this one out as a private email almost a year ago; several readers may recognize it. I withheld it from public viewing on principle of good taste or decency or morals or some other such easily-disposable principle. My living arrangements and company have since changed, as has my interest in protecting the secrets of the "star" of this story, due to a complicated and uninteresting (except to scholars of the greedy and wicked), battle over my then-abode, involving threatened misdemeanors, illegal rent hikes, and forged eviction notices sent over blackberry's. Ah, New York life...

Several times a year I leave New York for a few days to do a trunk show for my mother's jewelry business. When I come back from these short trips, I inevitably find my room changed in a subtle but disturbing way. After the first of these trips, I came home and noticed a pair of my hostess's sling-back heels resting on the floor beside my bed. I didn't think much of it, as this used to be her bed, and I don't object to her taking a nap in it when I'm not there rather than having to arrange her cumbersome fold-out bed in the living room. When I turned on the TV, a small, bright red light in the lower right-hand corner of the machine flickered on. I guessed that this meant there was a videotape in the machine, which there was, one entitled "Niblets." My hostess works for a company which designs educational programs for schoolkids deriving inspiration from, of all things, mainstream Hollywood movies. She used "Shakespeare in Love" to launch an Elizabethan history seminar, and somehow wrangled "Elf" into a program for promoting awareness of the four food groups. So I imagined "Niblets" would be, perhaps, fairy tales brought to life by animated baby forest creatures, gerbil Cinderella and such. However, when I reinserted the tape and it started to play, instead of baby gerbils waltzing at a forest-critter ball, I got a giant black man sodomizing a disgruntled-looking blonde in the back of a van.
My hostess had not only been in my room and in my bed, she had watched porn in it--and then I understood that her slingbacks were not merely, innocently, resting on the floor; they were strewn there in that, "let me sexily kick off my slutty shoes and play with myself in my subletter's bed while watching jungle-fever porn" kind of way, the heel of one caught up in the lace ruffle duster and the other lying on its side. Only then did I realize that my sheets and pillowcases had been changed. What had gone on here? It occurred to me that she might not even have enjoyed herself alone in my sanctuary. At the time she was dating a real-estate broker who, she had once mentioned, was an excessive and boozy porn fanatic; a typical night at his Bridgehampton home, even a dinner party with friends, nearly always commenced with him sliding in a DVD from his vast hard-core collection for all to watch on his 90 inch plasma screen TV, disregarding the typically ungrateful response from his guests and lover while he broke out the box-wine. She had also obtained for me a job in his brokerage firm (see "Confessions of a Telemarketer, " paragraph 6), so this miracle of men was also my boss. When it occurred to me that the man who paid me every week with damp bills pulled out of his back pocket, might have lumbered in my bed in all his bloated hairiness and left personal remnants in my sheets, I found myself grasping for a pen or plastic take-out fork until I remembered that I couldn't actually stab out my mind's eye. Meanwhile on the tube, the interracial romance had come to an end and was succeeded by a couple in a bowling alley, another black man, this one with dreadlocks, pleasuring an elven redhead over the ball dispenser. This was one in several short films (hence the title?), most about fifteen minutes long, all shot in exotic locations and with multi-ethnic casts. All, in addition, seem to have been filmed with a low-grade camcorder, as the director/cameraman issued blocking orders from directly behind the camera. The performers would seem perplexed and had to turn their heads in uncomfortable-looking angles and look into the camera (and, illusively, disconcertingly, into my own eyes) to ask him to repeat his requests, unheard over the din of their own gamboling. This cinematographical quirk resulted in one amusing episode, in which a sleek Asian woman fellated a gentleman with a mullet, while the director barked complaints from behind the camera about the insufficiently-tousled state of her hair, the inadequately-feline arch of her back, her general lack of enthusiasm for her task. The harried actress silently withstood the onslaught of criticism until she pulled the instrument out of her mouth, and, still gripping it like a microphone in her manicured fist, bellowed directly at her audience, "Why dontchoo git yo' ass ovah heah an' blow 'im yo'self, limp-dick muthahfuckah?" For a moment I didn't know how to respond.
Many of the films suffered from noise and interference from "offstage," as when, in yet another van-sequence, someone started knocking on the side of the vehicle and jiggling the door handles, which panicked the cast and crew into silence for about three seconds until the picture froze and went to static and the next film began. Ron Jeremy himself showed up in one of the features, engaged with what looked like a half-asleep teenager, her head hanging over the bed's edge, while he uttered jokes about his bellyfat. She was barely awake enough to laugh politely.
I realized that I could not remove the videotape from my machine or even broach the subject with my hostess. Any action would admit to my knowledge of her taste in entertainment, which may be awkward for us, as well as cause her to wonder if I suspected her of engaging in inappropriate activities in my boudoir during my absence, also unspeakably awkward for both of us. Finally it would force me either to admit to my distaste for her indulging herself in my room and bed, potentially offensive and hurtful to her (who either harbors no qualms about such things, liberated Manhattannite that she is, or who simply made the mistake of not covering her tracks), or feign acceptance of the situation as normal in a swinging hostess/impressionable subletter arrangement, which might invite further unchecked debauchery in my own sacred quarters by her and unknown greasy men. I realized that I even had to rewind the tape to the exact spot where I had begun to play it, for if she came in again while I was at work and saw that the tape had advanced several hours beyond where she had left it, she would believe that I too was a closet porn enthusiast and think she needn't exercise even a modicum of stealth in her thrill-seeking. I could only leave it in the machine and expect that the next day while I was out, the red lightbulb would go off in her head and she would rush into my room hoping beyond hope that I hadn't watched the tape and found out her dirty secret, and, relieved that it was stopped at the scene where she had left it, remove the tape and hide it, never mentioning the faux pas. Then I decided to examine the mysterious storage box in the corner under the TV tray, which I had never been curious enough to open. Needless to say, in it were some forty tapes, all with names like "Behemoth," "Double-Stuff Chaos," and "Eileen Dover: Busty Cop".
A whole week went by, with that red light glaring at me. My hostess, who usually only spends one or two nights per week at the apartment, stayed there the entire time, with nary a word about the displaced object, let alone the anticipated removal of it. Only at the end of the week when she was gathering her things to drive over to her house in Sag Harbor did she breeze into my room while I was watching TV, eject the tape, and toss it in the mystery box to include with her luggage, all right in front of me and without a word. I could only play dumb and marvel at her shamelessness.
This has happened three times since the first occasion, despite the permanent removal of the mystery box. I come home to the red light giving me the eye, I see that my bed is either more rumpled than I left it or newly-clothed and neater than I ever make it, I press play to witness some grisly sex-act, and wait in vain for my hostess's sense of the appropriate to kick in. The VCR in the living room, where she officially sleeps, never has the red light on. Apparently, only in my own sweet bed and on my television can she indulge her libidinal fancies. As I write, the red light is hovering in my periphery like a burst capillary, and I have to figure out what to do about it before tomorrow, when my mother arrives for a visit.

Writhing in Apathy

Visit me on LarissaArcher.com

Jonah Raskin writes about pot; I write about him for SF Weekly

Fan Ho's A Hong Kong Memoir in the SF Examiner

the cool/weird dance project "Sex, Love, Money" in SF Weekly

Guerrero Gallery wins the opening party contest. for SF Weekly.

S*** got real at Cabaret Bastille

My Review of the Irving Penn exhibit at Fraenkel Gallery in the San Francisco Examiner

I compare First Thursday Openings at 49 Geary and the Jazz Heritage Center for SF Weekly

My Preview of Litquake's Cabaret Bastille for SF Weekly

I wrote a Preview for the Irving Penn exhibit at Fraenkel Gallery

I write about Purple Rain at the Castro for SF Weekly

My review of Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris at the de Young Museum for Art Practical

My chat with author Wendy Lesser on Shostakovich, SF Weekly

Write-up of the opening night party for "The Steins Collect" at SFMOMA in ArtSLant

The Cries of San Francisco in SF Weekly

My review of Doug Rickard's "A New American Picture" in the San Francisco Examiner

My write-up of "First Thursday" openings at 49 Geary in SF Weekly

My review of Richard Learoyd's Presences at Fraenkel Gallery in Art Practical

On Not Marrying

Word.

Scared of Everything

On Spectacular Theatre

Hell is Your People

Eonnagata, Théatre des Champs-Elysées

Pina Bausch's Le Sacre du Printemps

Presenting....

On the rechristening of Henry Miller's Theater *update*

Paris, comme il faut.

another nice review

Suddenly Last Summer

My Early 30th B-Day Party

Grove Street

Florence and London, December 2009

R.I.P. Scottie Agar Jaickes

Santa Fe, Bandolier, and Magdalena

Here we go again...

announcing.....

Can you believe this pretentious fuck?

Barcelona, Mon Amour

R.I.P. Anne Berven

Sometimes London is Funny

Stupid Magazines

R.I.P. Yma Sumac

If Schlock Shops were Bedbugs.....

Newsflash: Women can be Funny, too!

My Kilburn Apartment

Pensées Françaises

Paris Pix

Edinb'rahhh and Moscow!

The Latest Rejected Article!

In Defense of Sloth

A Heartbreaking Performance of Staggering Genius

New Year's Blogolution

Baby Pix!

Blinded by the Light

In Defense of Vanity

Another Rejected Article!

To Whom it May Concern,

New York's Historic Second Avenue Deli is Now a Chase Manhattan Bank.

Britblog II

Brit Blog

Things That Give Me Hideously Vivid Nightmares, Chapter One

On Wretchedness

My Rejected Article

Valentine's Day Shvitz

On Discovering Porn in My VCR

On the rechristening of Henry Miller's Theater update