have you been there

 

 From the diary, last year:

A phone call with X and he is so lost, though perhaps reaching the end of it. He just needed to talk, and I felt afterward that I had been there before where you know what people are telling you and you wish they wouldn't because you know it already and if you want to be contrary then why can't they just let you after all you are suffering so much a little antidotal delusion should be allowed, encouraged even.

Sam Tata, Balloon Seller, Paris 1956

new and not new

My oh my, Spring came this morning, maybe to stay for awhile now, and I guess it was the way it always is, new and not new, funny how I forget what this feels like every year, every year awake like not really before.

Also to say, last night Jess called me out to Skinny Dennis, where I saw Margo Valiante, and maybe she was the one who summoned all of this with her guitar and strong arms, the Spring, the waking, the sudden green shocks along the sidewalk. She'll be at Skinny Dennis again on May 1st and possibly every Thursday next month? She has the best growl, go listen for it!

photograph by Thomas Cadrin

red, rock, sand, bone

I miss my desert holiday, so let's go back for a minute. From my diary, last month:

Today we visited a vortex in Sedona. It's important when identifying vortexes, proclaiming them, to have a bald patch of earth or rock, a space where nothing is immediately elevated above the body. This is what I learned today. A vortex is an opening, preferably someplace high and empty, energy in spareness.

In this country, lost in its rock formations, mountains of disorienting proportion, I find limitations in language. Shades of earth, heights and expanses, the scale of light and dark, this is all too exquisite and refined for my own expression. In the same way the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, the desert must have a hundred words each for red, rock, sand, bone.

Throbbing Pulse by Louise Bourgeois

taken home

From the diary again, years ago:

Today while being taken home around Arc de Triomphe where there was a patriotic march and flag draping and gathering of citizens, I wanted to cry all at once in a surge of affection for this country, a place that has given me so much to feel about. Later I sat on a bench on the hill beneath Sacre Coeur and felt not much but not nothing.

Anyone know who took this picture?

in from out

Oh it's been awhile! So here's an old diary entry (from November) I just came across:

Tosca at the Met tonight and I felt a part of some scripted scene, in a thrilling way because it was familiar to me. As though I had seen someone else play that part, the part I was playing, and it had moved me. This came to mind when I stood on the balcony in the atrium before the chandeliers, eating my sandwich, looking down through it all at the fur coats and pudgy waistcoats below with their champagne flutes and dinner reservations. You know that film, the one where they meet at the train station and it seems film noir but not quite and sad but not quite. They are at the station restaurant, there is an old fashioned clock, they have so little time. Now I'm reminded of that. But really, I was as in a movie, there on the balcony with my sandwich, looking in from out and yet still being looked at from somewhere else.

Sargent, study for The Spanish Dance

today, the brightness

The sun and sky in Santa Fe are bold things, taking precedence over house, road, shrub. The light yesterday evening before the movie theater (we saw Child's Pose) demanded attention. Today, the brightness has overtaken the adobe homes, the blossoming branches, the pepper garlands hanging in the courtyards.

I'm in New Mexico with Ilene! Tomorrow, hot springs and one-lane mountain roads on our way to Arizona.

in concert

I ended up at the funniest little concert Tuesday night, a klezmer/bluegrass trio in the basement of the synagogue at 53 Charles Street in the West Village. Andy Statman played clarinet and mandolin, accompanied by a drummer and a bassist. There were fewer than ten of us in the audience, though I've heard there's usually a crowd. We were ushered through a dark corridor and into a long room lined with books, old photographs, boxes of napkins and plastic cutlery, board games and menorahs, and a mess of paintings propped up wherever they would fit. Upon arrival, Herman, the synagogue president, immediately opened the liquor cabinet, shuffling through dusty bottles of scotch and rum (so strong!) and passing them around.

Andy will be back in the basement tonight (Thursday), probably around 9 PM. Don't worry if you arrive on time and the place looks empty - on Tuesday, at five past nine, the doors were locked, and we had resigned ourselves to just having a wine picnic on the synagogue steps when Herman pulled up in his minivan, rolled down the window and yelled out that he'd let us in as soon as he found a parking spot.

Andy Statman Trio

53 Charles Street

Thursday March 13

9 PM or thereabouts

Recommended donation is $15 if you can. Go!

And thank you, Danny, for this strange and wonderful discovery.


Split Decision by Kayla Varley