Chelsea Morning

Taking a look around might just be the most entertaining thing you've done this year.

I'm familiar with that rapid pace, slick suited, head down, ready for battle sort of mentality, I breathe it everyday. Do more, be more, vindicate, captivate, elucidate. This is New York, baby, play all your cards. It makes you. It teaches you. But that unexpected moment your chin tilts up and you forget battle and just look, now that is magic. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of the two, the unwavering focus and the pleasure of static observation that increases their luster, but being here, I'm looking harder than I ever have.

Growing up in Missouri, I loved to join my Dad, sitting in his lawn chair, in the mouth of the garage. That's a thing dads do there, watch their part of the world go by. Sometimes after cutting grass or just at the end of the day. Watch blackbirds scatter as neighbors drive down the street. Hold root beers. Watch suns set.

I get glimpses in my Chelsea day. I like to watch Tenth Avenue scurry from the fishbowl window on The High Line. I like to leave work distracted, unaware, and 19^th street, Dan Flavin, blue light seduction, paradox of light and gallery cracked concrete leaving me brand new. I like La Bergamote and the humming cooler holding meringue and buttered brie sandwiches. Honey sold by the jar. I like sunsets on the Hudson, behind the big boats that hold very different people than the monks that worship in the monastery taking up the whole avenue block that's close to 192 Books where they sell the best art books, and across the street there's that great place called Printed Matter where you can find some decently priced prints.

And to think I could have missed all that.

Mise en Place

I lean in close to a well marketed box of Lucky Charms, the bright green of the leprechaun's jacket and the marshmallow rainbow blurring together. I turn my head to the left and look down an isle of faced cereals. Sugar and vitamins packed in a way we understand: loud, colorful, unique, in a box. Not just cereal, fruit too, its all waxed up and bright, the way we like it. And the chickens, nice and big – please no bones, how grotesque. 

I've just seen Food Inc. and my thoughts are consumed by our food industry. The horrific scenes of chickens unable to walk due to their accelerated growth rate, cows' stomachs filled with cheap corn instead of E. coli fighting grass, and growers and slaughter house workers immune to the antibiotics they are contractually bound to pump into their animals. The film exposes the monopoly a few powerful entities have over growing, production and consumption, resulting in a capitalist approach to eating wherein health is far from the objective. Things just got too big. That's when our food system started sucking.

So now we're talking about power. How did these big companies get all the power? They had something we wanted – convenience and availability. But why did we need help? Why did we need it quicker and faster? My theory is that our society is still confused from the shift of females into the workplace. We used to have one person that took care of the home. As females started working outside of it, we didn't divide those activities between genders, we divided them between ourselves and a third party. Mom, Dad, and Corporate America. Mama's little helper, no longer a pill, but a corporation, or several of them really, got the job done.

Let's get specific. I was glancing through my grandmother's cookbook, the Better Homes and Gardens “New Cook Book,” and found a whole section devoted to canning. Back in her day, if the family wanted tomatoes in December, Mom spent a few days water bathing, sealing, and labeling in the hot months, so the winter months were plentiful. Today most of us count on the availability of perky red tomatoes year round. They ripen on the way over - mmm - maybe they should put that on the new “tomato labels.” Eventually Mom wasn't around to spend entire days canning or preparing food, so we came up with other solutions. Turns out many were shady and environmentally uncouth.

As a society we asked capitalism to do for us what we were doing already - growing and preparing food. These activities should have merely been distributed between the sexes and small businesses, not between board rooms. Maybe this is just the anti-authoritarian soul in me, but why not do more for ourselves? By giving these responsibilities to Walmart, McDonald's, etc, we lose more than variety, taste, and nutrients, we loose power. And is power not one of the reasons women began working? Power over their lives, their abilities, and their creativity? Unless we fight for small businesses and local growers, Corporate America will strip us of our power just as quickly as we've earned it. Mmm magically delicious.  

On Making Your Own Assignments

How do we measure success? If we had a sort of make-believe success measuring machine, say a large vat of mystery fluid, which fluid calculates success through various complicated mystery fluid displacement theories when persons are placed in said make-believe success measuring machine, would this device derive the expected result? In other words, would the CEO of a thriving publicly traded company triumph over me, the freelance writer in a success competition? 

Here's what we know about our CEO participant: He's pulling in seven figures, his place was featured in Metropolitan Home – wait something just in, oh he was featured in Metropolitan Home twice (the NYC apartment and the Long Island summer house), he's the top dog in the company, makes all the decisions (well except the ones the stockholders make), and most people find him quite intimidating. Whew, that's a lot of mystery fluid displacement. Now our second participant, me, a writer: no real decision making power in my job which I do to supplement my income, definitely no interior design magazine features, no summer house, and I doubt even spiders are intimidated by me. Those guys in the lab coats are yawning, this experiment isn't very interesting, Participant A has the obvious advantage.

Yowzers! The make-believe success measuring machine is going into turbo mode, mystery fluid is splashing everywhere, the results are off the chart! Participant B has displaced every drop of mystery fluid. “Participant B, what's your secret?” Professor Glockenspielencochler screams as he throws up his arms in bewilderment. 

Ok enough of that, my argument, though, is that true success comes from feeling fulfilled, and as a writer, I can't imagine anything more fulfilling than what I get to do: make things out of nothing. Thoughts, experiences, and fragments of life become anything I want. In his essay, Scavenging, Jonathan Franzen compares writing fiction to a thriftful dumpster dive. Franzen touts, “What mattered to me was the rescue,” - A reflection on saving a paint splattered chair and his work as a writer. It matters to me too, trash to treasure, I love it. And the part that really gets me off is getting to decide how to go about the rescue. I decide the direction, the pace, and the goal. I make my own assignments. That is success. 

Come Once More

Spring is here and I'm waking up again.

Asleep for a winter. Retired for a season. Forgetting things smelled and that sometimes I'm happy.

My body is warm and the rhythm of this walking sets in me like swing. It feels good, the feel's right, lucky me. It's not just spring, it's spring in New York, where walks can last all day. The cathartic meandering of a Saturday stroll is lost in the snow and the cold of winter. Avenues hurt as wind whips your face, but like an old love, those same avenues in April and May charm you, hold you, and inspire you again. Your body remembers but somehow it all feels new again.

My steps are unsure at first. Muscles not yet strong, but curiosity for the world pushes me around the corner. What will I find and who will I meet? Something smells good and I hear her voice. I grab the white textured wall for strength and my small toes feel carpet turn to wood. Mom sees me enter the kitchen and smiles down at me. She's making apple crumb pie. The air smells tart. Dropped apples lie by her feet. Twenty-two years later I'll discover Riverside Park in this same stumbling stupor. A spot of green against the water as I walk westward turns into an elongated strip of park stretching North and South. I see an Upper West Side teenager walking the family poodle. I start thinking about what it would have been like to grow up here and where this kid will venture to encounter his unknown.

I'm tall and sure. Grown-up and self-reliant. Still learning how to walk.

Come Spring.

Art Imitates Art

I’m on an early bus between New York and Boston and I’m experiencing that moment of wonder when I haven’t traveled above ground in a while. I remember neighborhoods are not little islands floating along subway lines but rather pieces of a connected land mass. I watch Flatiron blend to Midtown, Midtown to the Upper West Side, and the Upper West Side to the Bronx with voyeuristic delight. The identity of each neighborhood more apparent in its juxtaposition to the rest and the cracks between transitional secrets left off the map.

Trees replace buildings and I think about the internal, cultural and architectural imitation that makes each neighborhood recognizable. It seems to be a natural process we undergo as humans - imitation that is. Within an infinite number of groups we mimic each other in the way we behave. So why when it comes to art does imitation sound like a bad word?

In her early journals, Susan Sontag on Djuna Barnes said, “That is the way I want to write - rich and rhythmic - heavy, sonorous prose that befits those mythic ambiguities that are both source and structure to an aesthetic experience symbolized by language.” This statement struck me as extremely bold because as an artist, Sontag had the humility to recognize a certain level of imitation as integral to her process as a writer.

“That is the way I want to write.” I’m fearful that this phrase sounds so alien to me because we’ve turned into a generation and a culture so focused on identity and star quality that we deny one of our most natural behaviors - imitation. It’s safe to say Sontag’s writings were not so similar to Barnes that they went unnoticed, so why not be openly mindful of other styles and aesthetics around us, let them become a part of us, and use this vocabulary to start an entirely new conversation?

Makin' It

What's worse than reruns of silly married humor shows like King of Queens, wait I mean Everybody Loves Raymond, wait I mean King of Queens, wait...

American Idol, that's the gem, that's the show that somehow surpasses the repulsive emptiness of homogenized Mr. and Mrs. week night repartee.

You see, entertainment can either by really good, like Itzhak Perlman, Radiohead, unforgettable, humbling loveliness, or it can be so terrible your face sort of turns to the side and one eye closes as you pray to your [insert appropriate religious figure] for the whole thing to be over. Both experiences are equally gratifying.

It's so bad it's good.

So it's Tuesday night and I'm looking to be entertained anyway I can get it. And what better way to legitimize my position in the thinking, working, real people world than to watch a gaggle of appropriately ethnic hopefuls sing their hearts out to a nation of couch potatoes. Oh yeah I'm swimming in lukewarm cynicism and boy does it feel nice. Pass me the loofah and bring on the next contestant.

They're one of two types: so terrible they're on the show for comedic relief or lucky enough to be on the verge of halfway decent. Simon, Paula, and that other guy uncomfortably stifle laughter at the slow kids like they have no idea these unfortunate pop culture goldfish were preselected just to be ridiculed.

I'm down. Next round. Bring it on.

And then she enters, “This is all I've ever wanted. This is my life, my love, and my purpose." The water just turned cold and I'm somehow jealous of this crazy dreamer who wants nothing more in life than to win American Idol.

The truth is, the world's in a state of hopelessness right now. Every night on the train I overhear a conversation about a friend, a lover, a mother, a someone being laid-off. Where will we be tomorrow and does retirement even exist? Or, what worries me the most – the economy's all mucked up because we're greedy and how do we ever escape that?

Well, we've gotta try and we've gotta make it our life, our love, and our purpose. No matter how foolish it looks, we do have to have hope. So Barack, honey, I'm not sure what your falsetto sounds like, but how about some Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay with Sasha and Malia doing the whistle part.

It's Just Listening

Christmas 2008: I attended a performance of Handle's Messiah at Lincoln Center. I'd been there before, but the repeat experience I was looking for was not that of landmark familiarity but rather the telling of a familiar story.

I find my seat amongst a predominately older crowd, some of them nuns. I'm thinking, this is a weird combination of people. Why are we all here together? We don't have to wait long before the betuxtacled tenor lobs us a clue, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.” I close my eyes as his solo finishes and for a moment I forget where I am – I'm fighting reality with memory. I hear Messiah but I'm not sitting in New York. I'm leaning against an organ in the loft of the Methodist church in my hometown. My little, twelve-year-old legs tucked under my butt and my whole body feeling the clunky vibrations of my sister's bare feet on the organ's foot pedals.

I heard a lot of stories from that loft. Week after week we came for another telling. An hour of my life laid in the hands of a chosen few: a minister, a man, an inspired youth. Sure there was talk of Jesus and God on those Midwestern Sunday mornings, but it was really all about the stories. Take time out, listen, gain a perspective, and find comfort in that experience. It's a practice I never forgot.

The Hallelujah Chorus prevails and I'm sad this story is over. I exit Lincoln Center, six habits close behind, contemplating the existence of comfort in a life devoid of green felt offering plates. I don't go to church so what is my religion? I imagine it's the act of placing my consciousness in the stories of the art, literature, music, and people in my life. Take time out, listen, gain a perspective.

After Communion Sunday, my friends and I would sneak into the church kitchen to eat the left over body and blood of Christ. Being careful not to spill grape juice on our white acolyte robes, we giggled and broke off pieces of homemade bread. New Yorkers like to share food too. We meet for dinner, brunch, hell, we'll even meet up for a cupcake. Inevitably our heads are not bowed, but we're dressed up and listening, trying to understand each other's stories. I find that pretty comforting.