41: rip john updike.

3.18.32 - 1.27.09

the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste.

-j updike, rabbit, run


(serious fans* will note that i used the end of that sentence as the final header quote on the basilica.)

*of mine, not updike.

addendum.

new rule: if youve bathed with someone, theyre automatically cash flow, no matter your frequency of contact at any given time.

happy three oh palm.

BORN TO DON
in the day you negotiated an email address at a late summer lavender farm
at night you get married, eat an astro pop, pop in the guest house for some warmth
sprung from yorkville under googie skies
some char-broiled laughs, and a bevvy of those crisp stringy fries
bro
laddy this town strips the paint from your hood
and if spru could, hed wish you nothing but good
mixing you martinis all night long
cuz boy veys like us, palmy we were born to don
(yes palm we were)

rabbi let me in, i like the lakers to win, i need to sign your little ketubah
and you know me and hales, we just gotta set sail
for vieques and never aruba
together we could sell this banksy, we'll refresh till we're dead, and palmy, we'll never get cranky
bro
will you sanction me a slice of the stromb?
cuz donnie im just a mr. cocktoston, but squish just must know the spread
in the game tonite, i dont mean libor, baby libor's dead
(yes fannie it's dead)

beyond the fifth floor starched collar bdo's stream to the metro cafe
frank and max raise a brood under the longest of odds and we watch musicals with bobby flay
the juice of blank rises bold and true, some think it could reach all the way to the moon
lets go to that nick spot and do what we do and palm let's play a mishka tune
yeah

the trail of tears's jammed with the broken splitters after the lizard king left town
theyre all hiding in the handicapped bathroom with no place to put churrasco down
together palmy we can live in this slope, like obama loves hope, i will love this neurotic don
bro
someday man i think its soon, we're gonna write that arch day song
that we really want to pen and they'll all sing it strong
cuz dudes like us, palmy we were born as dons
oh oh oh oh

BORN IN THE D OF A
water boarded in a dead koy pond
evie's in the den watching gg all night long
you end up on hardscrabble, gotta make that train
youre gonna take that long ride to get away from the brane

born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a

liz's dad's feeling his marley oats
ari's in the field taking photos of goats
the rest of the crew's passing that jersey moat
i have to toast them with this song i wrote

born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a

i had a stepdad, wasnt no answering machine
when we order food at palm's, we gotta keep it clean
dont get the mashed potatoes at the spring street natch
when milk puts up a fight youve got intolerance to match

born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a

now down in the shadow of the blx
lookin at shepherd fairies like duchovny looks at sex
i wont have this place smelling like, well you know
get in the pontoon boat and we'll take it slow now

born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a
born in the d of a
youre just a cool rockin son of shiny in the d of a

its just too good.

brian williams even drew the parallel during the telecast yesterday, though he cloaked it under the guise that cheney's condition was unfortunate because 'some people will make the comparison to dr strangelove,' or something like that.

actually, it was a clever way to do it.

and i had been one of those people.

someday just began.

i wrote this on a beach in grand cayman on a biz trip in may 07, as you may recall. prescient!

talk about life benchmarks. this is a planetary benchmark.

still, let me relate it to little ol me.

this will be the third inaugural ill remember.

i remember the day clinton got sworn in in 93. tamara m had given me a tiny black and white watchman the year before for my bar mitzvah. i never used it, but i brought it to school that day in eighth grade. the ceremony conveniently took place during my class's lunch hour. i sat in the dalton cafeteria with a few of my similarly precociously nerdy friends looking over my shoulder, watching something my father - and the world at large - had tacitly convinced me i might never see in my lifetime, even though i was but 13: a democratic president taking office.

i remember feeling much as i would feel in october 96, when the yanks won the series for the first time in my life: i cant believe this is actually happening. it seemed too good to be true. like, i shouldnt get to feel this light and airy and happy about something so ostensibly external, something so far from my day-to-day life. something that seemed more symbolic than anything else.

dubya's day was fittingly melancholic for me. it was on a saturday during mlk weekend. i had flown home from ann arbor in no small part b.c i was still smarting from my breakup with j.go, and also b.c i wanted to spend more quality time with aya before she went back to brown. i remember watching that swearing in with her and my mom, from the latter's old bedroom. maybe it was a blessing in disguise that i was in a daze. seeing bush's ascension didnt cut me to the quick as i thought it should have; i was generally numb. then we watched clinton give a long, wistful speech, after which he was finally pried away, his fingernail marks trailing a wake from the spotlight.

im curious to see how this inauguration consolidates in my mind.

critical lift.

40.

nora went to dc to see c & s this past weekend. c is with child, and due pretty much any day now. i emailed nora to see how the visit went, and she wrote back with the best description of the final stages of human gestation ive ever come across:

I felt the kid move. a LOT. in this weird, slow-motion, swimming kind of way. you can feel his/her whole body kind of pass by your hand - you get the idea that if her belly was clear, the whole scene would remind you of an aquarium, where some big, lazy fish saunters by you (can a fish saunter?) behind the glass.

39: discreet sexual acts in public places.

before heading for the hallway, she looked along the corridor that led to the other wards on this side, further ahead, to the lavatories, and ultimately to the kitchen and refectory. there were blind inmates lying up against the walls, those who on arrival had been unsuccessful in finding a bed, either because in the assault they had lagged behind, or because they lacked the strength to contest a bed and win their battle. ten meters away, a blind man was lying on top of a blind woman, the man caught between her legs, they were being as discreet as they could, they were the discreet kind, but you would not have needed very sharp hearing to know what they were up to, especially when first one and then the other could no longer repress their sighs and groans, some inarticulate word, which are the signs that all that is about to end. the doctor's wife stopped in her tracks to watch them, not out of envy, she had her husband and the satisfaction he gave her, but because of an impression of another order, for which she could find no name, perhaps a feeling of sympathy, as if she were thinking of saying to them, dont mind my being here, i also know what this means, continue...

-josé saramago, blindness

accessory wish list 1.

i bring you:

the grundtal clip.

there's also a gruntdal hook, grundtal spotlight, grundtal mirror, and my personal favorite - the grundtal rail:
check em all out here and here.

(of course, we're still waiting on the grundtal cozy.)

thank you brammy.

how could i ever forget.

one of the strangest, and possibly most disconcerting sensations in life is when you relate an unforgettable memory you have of someone to said person, and they don't remember it at all.

lemme explain.

on our last night in russia this past july, pops and i were catching a train from st petersburg back to moscow at midnight (we had a sleeping car; it was cool). pretty taxed from a week of running around the two cities, we spent much of the final hours before the train sitting in our hotel lobby. there was (and still is, i suppose) a piano bar adjcent to the lobby. that night, a singer was accompanying the pianist; they were doing jazz and pop standards. (my dad obv could name the authors of each jazz song, and the year in which it came out.)

at one pt, the pair began playing i cant make you love me, a classically vh1-90s-pop song which was originally performed by bonnie raitt and bruce hornsby, and which i think is powerfully sad. the slightly broken english, the russian accent of the singer only heightened that effect.

still, my mind was transported back to 1993, when i went with a friend to see bruce hornsby at the erstwhile-named paramount theater at msg. (i liked hornsby, but wasnt a huge fan; my friend had barely heard of him. we had somehow been given the tickets by a third party. i cant remember the details; it involved one of our parents' businesses.)

my friend was in the middle of a long, tempestuous, and ultimately doomed relationship with a guy she was very much in love with. it wouldnt end until years later, but i divined that she already knew it was never going to be what she wanted it to be.

this was driven home when hornsby played i cant make you love me (one of the singers in his band filled in for raitt). the chorus of the song is simple:

i cant make you love me if you dont
you cant make your heart feel something it wont

this was one of those times when you cant be certain if you intuited the situation and then confirmed that it was indeed happening, or the other way around - you saw it, and it instantly made so much sense that it felt like you had precognated it.

in the middle of the song, i looked over at my friend, and i saw tears streaming down her face. i knew what she was thinking. i knew who she was thinking of. the music's the thing...

every once in a while i hear that song, but every time i do, i think of my friend that night. that experience no doubt played no small part in making it one of my favorite unrequited love songs of all time. it was something, to hear that song and think of that night in ny, in russia, an ocean away, more than a decade later.

and yet, when i told my friend this story upon my return (i had never previously told her about the association), she had no memory of the original night.

i couldnt believe it. id been periodically thinking of her that night for fifteen years.

anyway, i said this kind of thing was disconcerting, but it's also romantic, when you think about it: the idea that random things you do, that you take for granted even, can mean so much to someone else.

the sounds of silence.

i like the little sounds. the sounds you can only hear when theyre the only sounds. breath, in and out. water being poured in a glass. the sound a book makes as it rubs against two other books when you take it off the shelf. oil sizzling in a pan. the scribbling sounds of my father's colored pencils as he works on his diary. teeth, crunching into an apple. the sounds of clothing, a sweater coming off, pants. kissing skin. feet rubbing together. a match striking, the first pull on a cigarette. a desk chair rolling on carpet. a finger scratching a head. knuckles cracking. putting the dishes back in the cabinet. a letter opening. pissing.

typing.