“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”—Muriel Rukeyser

UNMOVED

Okay so I never would have bothered watching The Golden Globes if it weren’t for the gleeful irreverence I have come to expect from Ricky Gervais. I like to see the pointy bit of snark puncture the inflated, self-generating praise at these award ceremonies. I doubt that we’ll ever see the likes of a Native American woman accept an award as she did for Marlon Brando’s role in The Godfather and excoriate the Hollywood community, at his behest, for their racist portrayal of her people. No simpering squaw she.

There surely wasn’t a sign of that at the Golden Globes among the ribbon-wearing glitterati—even with Ricky’s barbs—in that room full of entitled celebrities who can single handedly turn back time. I mean did anyone catch Cher up on stage? Still, Gervais was chewed up and spit out by critics the next day. Nothing of his ‘schtick’ made them laugh—not the gleeful reference in a crowd of tight smiles to cosmetic surgery (duh), exorbitantly expensive, confidentiality-demanding celebrity divorce (duh), celebrity adoptions (duh), and the hysterically funny introduction to a now not-so-closeted anti-Semite—“I like a drink as much as the next man…unless the next man is Mel Gibson”—tickled those critics (double-duh!). It’s what the Brits delightfully call ‘taking the mickey.’ Married as I am to one of their kind I have been at the mercy of that sport, but when I have tried, in vain, to invoke it myself, well, woe betide to the American who tries that in a roomful of Brits. It’s a distinctly British phenomenon and better left to the well-practiced experts.

This year I actually got to see a few fine films and a few that were crap. Being able to afford a movie is relatively new again, so, “Yay” for the senior discount. The Mister, more than a decade from that dubious milestone, stands aside at the ticket window and, full-bearded, is automatically allowed the discounted price of admission. Who knows where we will be in ten years so get it while we can say I. Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Precious, The White Ribbon, Moon, District 9; all were deeply satisfying film experiences for this moviegoer. Some were hysterically funny, others imaginative on a small budget, politically challenging for our time and deeply moving if not strongly disturbing. What they all had in common was uncommonly good story telling. Other films like Sunshine Cleaning, Crazy Heart and the mostly hauntingly beautiful film, Before Tomorrow, were not entirely brilliant works of art or strong directorial achievements or even significantly great performances but they had more than their share of good moments. Kate and Anna McGarrigle scored the music for the Innuit film, Before Tomorrow, and it is especially poignant in light of the sad passing of Kate McGarrigle. But small as these films are, they gave us a couple of hours of pleasurable escape with—I’ll say it again—good story telling; gentle reminders that not every film has to be great and if I don’t find myself repeating my social security number in my head or thinking about what needs to be done at home or did I leave the oven on, or what hellish kitten chaos will greet me when I return, that’s a plus. Other films I saw, like Up In the Air which pretended to be comedy about people losing their jobs and suicide was only meant to get the preppy head of the firm to rethink his strategy for firing employees; Pirate Radio manipulated (re: watered down) history and which I can’t begin to dislike enough despite brilliant turns by Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; and the even more forgettable, which I can’t remember, were crap.

It was a pleasure to see Mo’Nique glowingly accept her award for an outstanding performance in Precious that must have been brutally hard for her to elicit such soul-searing pain and still create a real human being. The rest of the awards? Not so much. I had not seen most of the films and the television entries escaped my notice for the most part. Medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy are just soaps with blood and gore. I can’t watch House because I have seen too many hysterically funny episodes of Black Adder and Jeeves and Wooster to be able to bear Hugh Laurie’s dour, pill-popping, American persona. I do like Nurse Jackie's dour pill-popping American personality though.

But even before the awards night talk of Avatar had already shifted argument into high gear that sometimes very nearly approached verbal knock down drag out proportions. Basically I would have been happy to ignore yet another over-the-top animated spectacle. 3D glasses that oik up the price of admission are no draw either. As well, James Cameron is a director I avoid, actually run from. The Mister and I were fairly rigid with boredom during the epic-long screening of Titanic and finally bolted over the knees of the audience irritated from their rapture as we made our way to the exit, not really caring how many more times Jack would call shuddering from the freezing ocean: “Rose! Rose!”

It started with me curious as to why certain friends whom I consider to be enlightened ended up raving about it. I read an article condemning it for being a “White Savior” movie and passed that along. Indignation ensued and I was told in no uncertain terms how wrong, how pathetically far reaching the author, an African American woman, was in her misguided criticism of the film. Following the earlier threads on facebook among people I do know, some I hardly know, and some of whom I have never met and now can call “friends” I sensed dissention in the ranks. Some loved it, some didn’t. Those with children had another take, which usually meant, “What can I do? There are so few good kids’ films about?” A few, from abroad, threw in the ‘American schmaltz’ complaint. Some reported it was the best thing they’ve seen since Star Wars. Others claimed it bored them to death or it gave them a migraine.

I decided to see for myself and headed to Times Square for a ridiculously early showing of the film at a humongous theater on 42^nd Street. Ten o’clock in the morning is the time I am usually on the running track at the reservoir in Central Park or if I have had a late night of it, fast asleep under warm kittens that have finally given up trying to tell me when to rise. But the film had already left other theaters around town presumably—in the spirit of the current vampire-y trend—having drawn the last bit of viewers’ blood, and swollen with a take of over a billion dollars would now focus corporate’s insatiable appetite for revenue by re-inventing itself as a DVD with all the requisite extras to further pad the coffers. An unexpected perk was the relatively low admission price of six dollars for any showing before noon. I had my choice of seats, being only one of half a dozen viewers in the cavernous theater. A couple of older men made their way up into the rarified air and I overhead one of them say as he forged past me slightly out of breath: “Look at the size of this. We gotta go higher. The screen is still big.”

I lifted the armrests beside me and settled in for the duration. First I had to sit through half a dozen previews of what looked like the same film. It certainly sounded like the same soundtrack: A Carl Orff chorale extravaganza assaulted my hearing again, and again, and then again. Blood and gore splashed across the screen from one preview to the next until the characters and the over wrought special effects became indistinguishable from each other. I get it: Gary Oldman is evil. Denzel Washington is good. Russell Crowe is, well, Russell Crowe. Titans will clash and Robin Hood will forever be remembered as Gladiator II. None of these films will be on my “must see” list anyway. But I was more than a trifle irked by the preview for some hate-spewing rhetoric by those old reliable liars Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly. Both men are off-putting enough but leering back at me from a huge screen with nostrils the size of moon craters they were positively frightening—and before noon no less. Then there was that patriotic team of propagandists, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, with yet another stirring drama about what war really, really is like. Tucked right in there among all these previews was an ad for some arm of the military and this really, really infuriated me. It was shot like a Wagnerian opera on steroids with—you guessed it—that Orff chorale hammering away at the viewer. The tag line? “A Hero Will Rise.” Because we know what war is like—really, really like—don’t we?

But I was talking about Avatar, the film that won the two highest awards at the Golden Globes of best director and best film and might as well have stuck a gun in Quentin Tarrantino’s back and growled, “You wuz robbed!” From the beginning, like a dog sensing dangerous territory ahead, my (imaginary, yes) hackles were raised. After the opening shot of the Marines being dropped onto the planet Pandora (subtle, not) and the one black actor to fill the screen, the entire cast—apart from one young Asian woman and a male scientist who might have been Indian or Pakistani—was white, white, white—the human cast that is—until one chubby black man suddenly appears with no discernible purpose among the white scientists near the end of the film.

Black actors delivered voices of the main characters of the Na’vi. The gentle natives were all blue, of course. The features of these exquisitely built and incredibly strong inhabitants of Pandora were not those of a thin-lipped, weak-chinned white scientist who had no compunction at all about prodding her Asian assistant to “Chop, chop” to her demands. When that same anthropologist is somehow allowed into their midst, the Na’vi women gather around her cooing stupidly about how pretty she is. Right. One would have thought the director might have gone to a little more trouble in finding an actor who really was prettier than this gorgeous race of females. And a people so evolved as the Na’vi, with their long, deeply rooted history of communing with and respecting Nature can easily be understood, even conquered by a seemingly under educated, white Marine, self-described as a ‘jar head’ in just a few months. Right, again. It’s an old rehashed story that should be put to sleep once and for all. But Cameron seems not to have any compunction about stealing bits from other old, rehashed stories like Kevin Costner’s epic failure, Dancing With Wolves. Resorting to stealing an old engineering joke and calling the precious substance the Marines are sent to kill for ‘unobtainium’ is just lazy. Billion dollar lazy

Any rant about the racist implications is much better served by reading an article by Ezil Danto online. She is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, political and social commentator, author, and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. No shrinking violet, she states categorically that Avatar is indeed a ‘White Savior’ movie and wastes no time with literary special affects in backing that up. Her references to Haiti are eye opening. She aptly quotes Richard Pryor: “Do you have any dreams? They’ll want them too.”

And as for one friend’s stated opinion that Avatar was so brave a film and such a powerful condemnation of the Bush years that she wondered how it ever got made I say there is more bravery and blatant excoriation of our government in any one episode of the former television series Boston Legal or a film like “Three Kings” which, under the guise of comedy, fingered the real criminals of war.

Will kids come away from this extravaganza wanting to change the world, reverse the course of murderous civilizations that exist on our planet today intent on bending nature to its will? Will they go no further than thanking that bit of chopped beef on a bun before devouring it or will they actually see a connection between torturing animals for food and creating even more aggression in the world? Will they grow up to actively resist being drafted to fight unjust wars and bear the punishment that will rain down on them from a government hell bent on ‘civilizing’ the natives of the world who do worship nature? Will they ultimately be depressed to find out that there is no mythical Pandora and shiny, tiny things that alight on the Chosen One will never alight on them? Will they be disappointed to learn that a white man is not the highest order of all beings and must, in most cases, destroy the lives and rituals of others who do not believe as he does, have a darker skin than he does and who aren’t particularly impressed with ‘pretty’ when ‘pretty becomes their jailors. Or will blue skin and snakey dreads become the Halloween costume of choice this year? Maybe the film needed Ricky Gervais in the lead, you know, just to lighten the moment.

To friends who are parents and ask what I think is a good children’s film I am woefully unprepared. I adored Babe and the follow up, much darker story of Babe, Pig in the City. I grew up to Lady and the Tramp and Bambi. Later it was the likes of Old Yeller until as a young woman I discovered foreign films, especially the black and white kitchen sink dramas of British filmmakers. Ken Loach’s 1968 film Poor Cow was my introduction to the genre and I never looked back. Until a saccharine-laced French film called Cousin, Cousine I thought all foreign films were the best. I have just seen the most current kitchen sink from Britain directed by Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank, with a jaw dropping performance by a non-actor named Katie Jarvis.

I left Avatar as soon as the big yellow eyes appeared on the screen and in the elevator I struck up a conversation with a young man who worked there. “Have you seen Avatar?” I asked him. He had. Did he like it? He gave me a non-committal smile and said he did. Sensing some doubt, I asked why he liked it. He smiled again shyly, mumbled something about special effects, and asked if I liked it. “No”, I said quite more determinedly than I had intended. He asked me how come and I replied that I was kinda over the story of the almighty white guy going in and rescuing the natives. His eyes widened. He said, yeah, he knew what I meant. “Did you see Pocahontas?” he asked. When I replied that I had not he said, “Same thing.”

Shrek will be 3D in its next incarnation. Hopefully filmmakers like Werner Herzog and The Coen Brothers will resist the temptation. But as far as Avatar goes, I think children deserve better. I think we all do.

“It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”—Marcel Proust

RESOLUTION NUMBER NINE

It’s the second day of the year. There are a couple of Christmas crackers still to be snapped. The last of the mince pies have been gobbled and very nice they were. Like certain scalloped-shaped cakes, they stir slumbering memory for The Mister. Christmas treats like Malteasers, Cadburys, Walker’s squirrel and stilton crisps, and chocolate tree ornaments have long since been devoured and are already forming unwanted pockets of bodily excess on my person. Requisite holiday alcohol in addition to the red wine staple—like rum for the soy eggnog, bourbon for the organic Christmas pudding from Sainsbury's, gifts of Grey Goose vodka and ruby port—has been drunk. A prettily decorated bottle of sangria mix remains unopened. Directions to just add brandy and fruit make the sangria sound suspiciously like a bottle of red wine and better left for the summer. We managed to resist the annual intake of Stone’s Ginger wine. Champagne at the New Year was not given much thought except to agree that we wouldn’t miss it. Bailey’s only rears its preservative-laden head when we are in Montauk so we avoided that car crash of a hangover this time.

A few nights in a hotel on the ocean at the tip of Long Island has, for the most part, been the preferred setting in which to welcome a New Year. Montauk was not in the cards for us this time. Old cat passing and new kittens’ arrival decided for us and we stayed close to home. We declined invitations to parties and went instead to V&T’s with a good friend on New Year’s Eve and indulged in one or a few slices of their brick oven pizza. Later the Mister and I were watching fireworks shot over the now defunct Tavern On the Green, joined by a couple of our neighbors. It was cold. It was raining. The street-wise ducks made barely a protest and from the looks of it as they sailed around the reservoir they were also enjoying the spectacle of wintry fireworks over the skyline. It was lovely.

Runners thundered past us at a few minutes after midnight on the drive below the bridle path. Some were in costume for the annual Midnight Fun Run, which The Mister and I participated in many years ago. My favorite was the quartet of ver-r-ry happy young women outfitted to represent the numbers 2,0,1,0. They quit the race where we stood at the 97^th street entrance and wobbled themselves into many configurations of those numbers as they made their precarious way on the path to Fifth Avenue. Bewigged in neon-colored afros they giggled and fell all over each other. But they did manage to hail a taxi. The ‘clowns in a car’ reference did not go unnoticed as we watched them drunkenly pile on top of each other in the cab. We went back to our apartment and settled into vicarious party going while watching Tom Jones on Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny and finally drifting to a classic episode of The Honeymooners where Ralph saves the day.

The Mister and I require only one thing regarding the New Year when we have not been able to get to Montauk; that we are near a body of water. Central Park’s reservoir served for the eve and on New Year’s Day we took the long subway ride to Brooklyn, standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Coney Island with a lot of other New Yorkers, and fewer tourists, to watch members of The Coney Island Polar Bears Club lead the rest of a crowd of enthusiasts—or lunatics—into the freezing ocean on the first day of 2010. Unlike the one-time, toe-dipping participants on Friday afternoon, Polar Bear Club members continue their endorphin-raising mad winter bathing every Sunday. For a native New Yorker like me, it was a welcome atmosphere, being surrounded by the generally good nature and sly humor of other New Yorkers who were born here. I can’t explain it any other way than no matter how crappy a childhood or what youthful memories lay best undisturbed, it feels like going home. And The Mister is still a sucker for a twangy New York vernacular.

It wasn’t all funny faces, gooseflesh and deflated beefcake on the beach. The Polar Bear Club sponsors Camp Sunshine in Maine and everyone was encouraged to donate. On the shores of Sebago Lake little kids with big life-threatening illnesses get to spend time with their families; a respite in a beautiful and rustic haven.

I went to a Camp Sunshine when I was a girl. We lived in Astoria, in the borough of Queens. I went away one summer to a place I suspected, even then, was a camp for underprivileged children. My mother saw a listing for the place in the church bulletin. Any cost would have been prohibitive to my parents but the free pass of the righteous had them packing us off straightaway . Our summer camp adventure took my sister and me to the Watchung Hills in New Jersey for two weeks. Uncle Frank drove us there and back. In the car with us was my Aunt Fran and my non-driving parents. Camp Sunshine was less than an hour’s drive from New York City. A nudist camp, en route, with the same name caused Uncle Frank to lose his way every time. The joke never got old. On the weekend they visited and my sister and I would be collected at the camp and we’d drive into the nearest town of Bernardsville. Years later I’d recognize the place as Kennedy-Bouvier stomping grounds and probably a town of horsey polo playing residents who didn’t take kindly to our father and uncle downing beers in the town bar while we kids were left to our mother and aunt in a laundromat on the main street with a weeks’ worth of dirty clothes.

Church deaconesses, called sisters, organized the Christian camp’s activities. Bunk house arrangements based on age kept me relatively free from the unwanted attentions of a younger sister who operated largely on wrath. There was a swimming hole—mud hole more like— that we hiked to; rows of wary urban fledglings trudging under gigantic power lines over scrappy unmarked trails through fields of cow pats . The first tentative dip and the unfamiliar ooze between my toes on the bottom scuttled any further attempts. Blasted from our tiny bunk beds at the crack of dawn by sadistic “Sisters of Mercy” we stumbled in the near dark trying to dress while the badly played trumpet bleated relentless reveille; relieved if we were not the ones chosen to empty the chamber pots of a morning.

Breakfast was a bleak affair and we looked like diminutive prisoners, shadowed under the mildewed rafters of a screened-in shed, seated bleary-eyed at long wooden benches before our bowl of gruel. I am not given to early rising still. A chaperoned field trip to a penny candy store was made bearable for kids with no pocket money when we were told we could ‘sign’ for our sweet purchases. Thereafter we were given a set amount from our visiting parents and told to make do. Fields of corn surrounded the camp and successfully prevented me from venturing too far. I was a project girl. Corn, free standing fields of it in huge numbers, was an unknown not to be traversed. Escape was an overreaching desire

The following summer I wriggled out of the camp experience. Realizing a too small bedroom which had to be shared with an annoying younger sister would be free of said sister if I stayed at home, I hit on some reasonable excuse or other—I can’t remember what—and probably enjoyed blissful solitude for a week or two, not to replicated before I was finally on my own.

Even then I was keeping some kind of record. I had diaries, pink leatherette volumes decorated with a pony-tailed teen in perky attitude and poodle-skirt. A flimsy lock was meant to be broken by a prying younger sister and I didn’t seriously begin to keep a journal until I was in my early 20s. Because I have been writing short stories for the past year I have been mining my journals for details I thought I had forgotten but which come back to me in requited light. It’s a fascinating read for me because I have sometimes forgotten the strength of my youth in order to forget the pain. As compelling, if a little off-putting, is the seeming drive to be morosely honest in my accounts.

I had kept up in my journals with admiral persistence but it became sporadic at best in the last four or five years. The most valuable thing I take away from re-reading my old journals is that writing things down in a kind of honest heart-to-heart with yourself can only be a good thing. I had already resolved to return to journal keeping, apart from the blogging and short story writing, when I was given a journal at the holiday. I considered it to be a sign from the Universe and vowed to make some notation every day that affords a glimpse beneath the surface of events, no matter the difference between that exploration and merely listing what I ate and drank of a day, what the weather was like, who I spoke to and what upset as well as delighted me at any time. The eight other resolutions I made this year can remain private and will only see the pages of my journal. The journal is resolution number nine.

“A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.” Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop.

WINTER SOUP

Climate Change haters are at this very moment cooking up bogus tales to mask their stupidity. Senators are shuffling the health care deck. The ‘some-of-my-best-friends’ racists are telling impolite jokes. Homophobes in Houston are holding their breath. The voter turnout was, after all, only 16 per cent. They may not have voted but they’ll have their say. English friends will be divided on The Royals and once again I will wait for any sign from The Mister that he will listen to the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. Soldiers in the military, misguided say I, will continue to bomb the crap out of places where humanity is seemingly not an issue. A prisoner will be put to death and still not sway the revenge seekers. Movies will be argued about and neither side convinced. The God is Great God Is Dead argument will carry on. But even the disagreeable agree on one thing: soup in winter.

“In the soup.” Generally the phrase brings to mind a difficult situation. The job is lost, the rent is late, the toilet’s backed up, or the dinner burned. But the unpleasantness in life can be turned around. “In the soup” can mean something entirely different and very beneficial.

THIS RECIPE FOR WINTER SOUP IS EASY AND HEALTHFUL

Ingredients

Gallons of water, hot but comfortable to the touch

1 cup of Epsom salts per gallon of hot water used

1-2 tbs. each of essential oils, like lemon, eucalyptus, lavender, geranium, etc.

1 glass of red wine (or white if you prefer) set aside.

Directions

Clean, wash, rinse a large tub.

Fill to brim with the hot water, dissolving the salt under the running water

Add any amount and combination of essential oils

Remove clothes

Submerge to the neck

Simmer for 20 minutes or so, adding hot water as necessary.

Check fingertips for pruning.

Remove the meat (you) from the tub.

Dry off, slip into something comfortable, and raise that glass of wine.

“I place my mark and do not hide.” Isamu Noguchi

GOING INTO THE STONE

An unseasonably warm Saturday this weekend brought The Mister and me to Queens, specifically Long Island City. Young, newly married friends of ours had invited us to their apartment on Crescent Street to meet the new addition to their family. Rennie and David had rescued Buddy, a two-year-old bichon poodle mix, from a shelter. Recently they dropped by our apartment to meet the two kittens named Billie and George who captured our hearts when The Mister and I decided, after our old cat Sidney left us, that a house was not a home without cats and it was time for a visit to the ASPCA.

I grew up in Astoria and knew well the surrounding areas of Long Island City. When we exited the subway at Queensboro Plaza and crossed above the busy roadway feeding onto the 59^th Street Bridge I recalled immediately the times I would accompany my Aunt Frances to the unemployment office in the building linked by the little bridge to the subway station. When the Golden Age of Vacuum Tubes faded women with small hands like my diminutive aunt were needed to assemble transistor radios. In the late 50s some new invention rendered her nimble fingers unnecessary. I was a little girl and she an out of work employee off the production line of the Fisher Radio Corporation. Now The Mister passes through this area when he rides in to work with a co-worker. What he sees are the prison busses releasing men into post dawn freedom and the women who, for a fee, will remind a lot of them what they didn’t have behind bars.

But on a sunny late Saturday morning the entrance to the station was crowded only with grumbling passengers disembarking from shuttle busses because subway service was once again disrupted in Queens. Rather than fight our way onto the waiting shuttle bus with a disgruntled mob we opted to walk the distance of the two short stops along Crescent Street to our friends’ apartment. Turning on to Crescent Street I was startled to see a Ramada Inn. On a block further down was another utilitarian looking structure with the ironic sign: Country Inn.

The blocks closest to the Great Iron Wall of the elevated subway were the lackluster streets I remembered as a child, though some evidence of the little shingled houses remain among the barbed wire and acres of rotting automobiles. Now there are satellite dishes breaking the low skyline above flat roofs. An American flag hung from an aluminum awning above a window in a shingled house as faded as the stars and stripes. In the background, a quartet of smoke stacks, looming evidence of the city’s power source. A vacant lot once held a rather down at heel flea market. Rosenwach is a grim, fenced fortress behind which are housed those ubiquitous water tanks. The neighborhood is where taxis go after their shifts are up; where the silver quilted carts of fast food vendors set out of a morning stocked with dirty water dogs, bloated tasteless pretzels and the strange gray matter called gyros. A view of the stagey Manhattan skyline in the distance is highlighted in the foreground with footlights of razor wire.

Gas stations and swathes of forbidding chain link fence soon give way to more habitable signs of life like laundromats, a storefront music studio, and a deli. Two-story brick homes that I recall growing up are still there. Not so is the jealousy I felt for school friends who lived in those homes. Coming from a housing project, I hopelessly compared their lives, which were a luxury of porches and back yards and a room of their own, to mine. These houses are probably multiple dwellings now.

Queens is a buzz of nationalities and has always been though the tides of ethnicity shift over the years as immigrants improve their lot in life and move on. A Punjab car dealership, shiny Greek diners and some of the mock-Tudor-style that reminds The Mister of England. An angry looking bald eagle painted on a shuttered storefront suggests the conservatism underneath. Relatively new are the young people who come to New York and have been priced out of their Manhattan dream. Modern apartment buildings—terraced condos—have risen and are still rising along the East River.

Our planned destination was the Noguchi Museum a couple of miles away. Good weather days demand that we walk, so after leaving a very disappointed Buddy behind, we carried on with our friends in the direction of the museum. We detoured into Socrates Sculpture Park, which I am embarrassed to admit I have not been to. Maybe because I always remembered that area as a toxic dumping ground, an abandoned landfill that street-wise girls like I was stayed far away from. But since the late 80s, the area was conceived by the sculptor Mark di Suvero and developed into an open studio and exhibition space for artists. It has also turned out to be a pretty neat park with fine views of Manhattan and the promise of river breezes in the summer. The winter lawn, uneven and patchy, seemed at the moment to be the domain of the free wheeling dogs off leash. We meandered around a rag tag collection of outdoor sculpture, some of which looked pretty weather beaten. My favorite was the giant rat atop a very tall pedestal, which was dripping with what looked like bird shit. On its back a sculpted pigeon gave credence to the title of the piece: Massive Dump. Runner up was the subway station entrance to nowhere.

When one arrives at the Noguchi Museum it seems a very uninspired place from the exterior, an unadorned brick box of a building. I have been here a few times before but not since the extensive renovations. I confess to appreciating more the rawness of a place like an artist’s studio left as is or say Ellis Island when it was almost a dangerous place to tramp around but where you were more likely to feel the ghosts of the place.

But the museum was a good place to culturally re-fuel, especially after a theatrical production of Albert Camus: The Misunderstanding, which we saw on Thursday night at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. A relentlessly grim adherence to dialog left the rather underwhelming actors with no where to go but screaming. The final onstage scream had The Mister and me racing for the exit stairs, he mumbling something about The Wooden Tops school of acting.

A place like the Noguchi Museum is a refuge. One can leave the convolutions of politics behind: a 2,000-plus page health care bill which can’t be good, the question of whether the radiation from Three Mile Island is significant or not and the specter of Sarah Palin not exactly paling these days. Her book of lies notwithstanding, it’s as one witty blogger writes: “Just like the bible thumpers; speak loudly and carry a small sack o facts.” And that too hastily restarted Big Bang machine that has scientists in a dither? It’s time for a refuge.

We wandered the nearly empty galleries and the original space that was the sculptor’s working studio pausing before whatever piece commanded our attention. The Zen-like presence of the sculptures shared their calm with us. Each piece had, I don’t know, a quality of knowing. As a viewer one could only remain outside the influence of any of the larger abstracts for so long before being brought spiritually closer to the quiet strength of those works. One can imagine the stone breathing, having a pulse and a heartbeat.

Isamu Noguchi’s long time assistant and collaborator Shoji Sadao revealed in a video that if Noguchi felt he cut too much from the stone he would leave it for a year or whatever time it took and the stone would heal like a person.

I have been writing short stories and lately returned to the journals from years ago that I used to keep religiously. It has been many, many years since I have read these pages because I did not, as a rule, reread any of the journal entries. I kept the journals on the top shelf of the bookcase, unreachable, and all those memories tightly sealed between the covers of each journal. Now I am reading my journal from the winter of 1975. It was a raw time for me. I was deeply wounded by a marriage that I never should have been part of. Pages and pages of howling at the moon fill those years. But a remarkable thing has been happening as I conjure up inspiration for my fictional short stories and excavate what I had been avoiding for so long. Wounds have healed. A sad and tortured childhood holds pockets of comic splendor and reminders of a kind of faith I had as a child that I would find my way. The deep cuts that I received (and, in all honesty, gave out) are no longer raw. The journals have taken their time but the cuts have been closed. I am left now to carve new stories from the stone.

We left the museum and enjoyed a brunch in Astoria with our young friends. I was no longer a little girl who didn’t understand why her family wasn’t like the Ozzie and Harriet bunch, nor was I that young woman married and miserable in another’s family that never made her feel welcome. I was with The Mister and a young couple whose ideals I respect and whose future will see them flourish.

I was a grown woman and I was with friends.

PHOTOGRAPH ABOVE: THE MOUNTAIN 1964 Red Persian Travertine 20 x 11 x 24 inches

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“There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.” Matsuo Basho

FULL MOON IN ME

Last night the tide of uncertainty and the displacement that comes from the regular push and pull of life’s little dramas suddenly rose up in me in a tremulous wave. The Mister and I had just settled in the back room to work on a new song. He looked at my face and did not have to ask. He put down the guitar. We got our shoes back on. At Fifth Avenue The Mister turned as if being called. I followed his gaze to the full moon above us. We made our way to Central Park. Walking along the darkened bridle path below the reservoir the night sky was pinpointed with stars we rarely see in our electrified urban landscape. We continued below the reservoir and across to the west side through the area known as The Pinetum, breathing in the fresh scent of evergreen. The children’s swings stood empty, reminding me that so much of the drama I carry around is still about protecting the child in me, that the little dramas take over for brief periods when it is too difficult to dwell on bigger things. The moon was now in front of us. The little dramas that had been weighing on me took off like bats from a cave. I watched them until they became indistinguishable from the leaves still clinging to branches. We started back home along the reservoir, stopping for the wary raccoon, trading knowing glances when a runner in a t-shirt with the Eiffel Tower glides past us, taking in the never disappointing skyline of Manhattan to the south. A full moon stirs deeply the well of emotion and can be both upsetting and calming. The trick is to follow its lead.

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.-- Walter Winchell

GREENHILL ROAD

I don’t live here anymore

But I find my way around

My family’s moved on

Like the sun behind a cloud

Sitting here in Victoria Park

Heading back before its dark

On Greenhill Road

You will find me

Leave a troubled life

Far behind me

Up on Greenhill Road

If you hide me

For a day

For a night

For a year

For whatever feels right

I feel alright

I’m not angry anymore

But I find myself undone

They’re fading away

All the photographs are gone

Sitting here in Victoria Park

Heading back before its dark

On Greenhill Road

You will find me

Leave a troubled life

Far behind me

Up on Greenhill road

If you hide me

For a day

For a night

For a year

For whatever feels right

I feel alright

I’m not waiting anymore

Gonna find my own way home

Those shadows are long

Like the day that ends alone

Sitting here in Victoria Park

Heading back before it’s dark

The best songs come from

Familiar places, clues, and traces

Trust me darling it’s the safest

Up on Greenhill Road

You will find me

Leave a troubled life

Far behind me

Up on Greenhill road

If you hide me

For a day

For a night

For a year

For whatever feels right

I feel alright

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©fairalldanzmusic

A Paradise Built In Hell. The extraordinary communities that arise in Disaster. By Rebecca Solnit.

From the epilogue: The doorway in the ruins.

"Who are you? Who are we? The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggest that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes gives us a chance to change. They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative. Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges. Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis. One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild. And it demonstrates the viability of the dispersed, decentralized system of decision making. Citizens themselves in these moments constitute the government—the acting decision-making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered. Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place."

When His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was a quantum leap. He is not seen as solely a Tibetan anymore; he belongs to the world. —Richard Gere.

MACASPIRATION

As John Lennon once famously sang, “Well, well well.”

Woke up on Friday morning to the news that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Prize for Peace. I won’t lie. I was gob smacked, and not in a good way. The Mister revealed the same stunned expression when I told him the news. What in the world was going on? I reasoned this was gonna be one more thing that, if I bitched about it, which would only serve to deepen the brand on me—the malcontent—among my peers. Between long standing malcontentniks, also known as friends, there would be a flurry of e-mails in a number of languages basically all saying the same thing: “WTF?”

So, blessed or cursed with (depending on how you look at it) the concept of ‘once you know you cannot un-know’, and just a tad envious of the ‘ignorance as bliss’ crowd, The Mister and I decided to see the new film, A Serious Man. Like our emotions, the sky was undecided. Drizzle gave way to fleeting blasts of sunshine and as if afraid of its own light the sky quickly retreated into dullness again. As we could not depend on the weather to lighten our spirits we embraced the gift from the Universe at the Sunshine Cinema, which was the latest from the Coen brothers whose films are always original and even when it takes a second viewing to see the genius, never fail to be much more than the latest fad or the remake of a wan contemporary screenplay that has sat on a best seller list hidden in novel form.

An afternoon show time brings back fond memories of lonely retreats into darkened movie theaters. Escaping for a few hours the failed marriage, a confusing or unhealthy friendship, ever present money worries and those doubts running a full gamut of a young woman’s fears of her relationship with her creativity, her current lover, the rest of the world, or simply to enjoy a film on her own. Only now I have rediscovered this afternoon delight with a man who shares a current list of banes and the need for creative solitude.

Much of my older adult life it seems has been lived in a state of disbelief. I can barely understand why so much of what has gone on socially and politically has not been met with loud protest. We accept, so readily, promises that are not kept by our elected leaders, or worse, have turned up in dispiritingly low numbers to protest the promises of some who did keep their destructive promises. Disbelief crosses my expression enough now to know when to mask it as such. Disbelief has transformed into action for me on occasions when disbelief isn’t enough. If, after a requisite lecture from an animal loving rescuer of the tortured and abandoned, I make the connection to the inhumanity of the death penalty in our own country and I am met with cries of “Well, some of them just deserve to be put to death,” then I struggle with the disbelief and resolve to step up the effort to end the death penalty.

Post 9/11, my disbelief was at its zenith I think. Huddled merely a month later in the pre-dawn cold on Broadway and 96^th street with literally handfuls of people who were not going to be herded into a war mentality based on supremely misguided revenge and despite the personal attacks on them would get on the bus and keep getting on the bus to Washington D.C. to do what should be part of our American DNA and that is protest a murderous injustice and a lie. Eventually more citizens would be persuaded but not until the road to protest had been cleared of minefields. Not until it was peopled more by a convivial bunch thumping tambourines and hoisting giant papier maché puppets.

Disbelief rears its startled head when intelligent people I know regard our president as nothing less than a rock star. Their eyes glaze over and it’s practically a guaranteed that they have Ambien dreams about the guy as a vegan because, you know, that’s the only gripe they have with him. Suggesting that we rename the Health Care Bill the Dazed and Confused Bill to the multitudes who depend on Prozac to get through their day simply lands flat. That our economic future was handily taken from us and given to the very financial institutions that raped us in the first place isn’t cocktail party conversation where I wouldn’t fit in anyway because I don’t own a t-shirt that spells OBAMA in glittering sequins.

Where I am maddened by Obama’s response to the Nobel, that “These challenges won't all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime,” and call it ass-covering, others will simply dismiss me as a malcontent and say he’s being pragmatic.

It is safer conversational territory if we keep to the latest sweeping documentary from Ken Burns and don’t ever stray into disbelief over the enduring hit show in town, its ads plastered across cheery red double-decker tourist busses. I’m talking about Bodies: The Exhibtion down at the South Street Seaport, which is still pulling the punters in. Never mind where those skinned, plasticized bodies came from in China—the poor, the dissident, and the criminalized—it’s educational, innit?

Recently The Mister and I traveled out to Brooklyn to hear Tom Hayden speak at the United Methodist Church in Park Slope. The pews were packed but practically every head was some shade of gray unless there was no hair at all. The very few young people at the back of the church were introduced as Hayden’s Brooklyn relatives. I’m not saying that one of the founding members of Students For a Democratic Society way back in the early 60s, the guy who rallied campuses all over the nation to actively protest the Viet Nam war, the primary author of the Port Huron statement, described by Howard Zinn as “one of those historic documents which represents an era,” who is still ‘a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, eradicating sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation’ has lost his edge. Nope, not from the looks of pleasingly plump matrons in sensible shoes who were jostling with any excuse to wrap their dimpled arms around him. He spoke with conviction, although softened somewhat in the re-telling, of importance of grass roots organizing. The lull was only broken when he admonished the audience not to abandon our president but to demand from him the promises that he made be kept. That got a few cranky oldsters stirred up all right and shouts of “He’s abandoned us!” livened things up, but only briefly.

So what’s a girl and a boy to do? Off to the movies!

A Serious Man—a wonderfully funny and moving film by the way—fully validated a suspicion that life is shit, the bad guys have won, and good deeds will most certainly be punished. Pleas for answers fall on deaf ears. Your personal gods do not have call waiting so expect a busy signal. We are in the Age of MacAspiration now, so very 21^st century. A big MacAspiration will have to satisfy hunger for real progress. Promises are all we can count on. Our energies will have to be redirected to avoid the herding instinct toward mandatory vaccinations and American President Idol. We’ll have to accept, as some commentator posted, that the Nobel Committee might just be handing Obama the equivalent of a lollipop and a pat on the head, telling him to make them proud. We might have to give up the notion that this prize means anything at all and remind ourselves that Henry Kissinger can call himself a Nobel winner and Ghandi never did. It just might be that after so many destructive years of George W. Bush we are now entering an era of good intentions. That we are in dire straits in this country—have not repealed the death penalty, which is racist and proven to be an unsuccessful deterrent to crime not to mention mistakenly putting innocent people to death; that our politicians and doctors have sold themselves to corporate America and arm twist too many of us into a pharmaceutical dependence instead of focusing on prevention and a healthy drug-free lifestyle—that will all be swept under the feel good rug of good intentions. Welcome to wishful thinking folks.

The Mister and I enjoyed a delicious meal at our fave vegetarian Indian restaurant, our appetites sharpened from an impulsive round trip ride on a Staten Island ferry after we had just seen A Serious Man. I reminded him of the boy we saw in the black t-shirt that bore the message: I CARRY THE APOCALYPSE. Our level of disbelief is spread over news items like the ones in the U.K. that say citizens will be rewarded for studying one of the ubiquitous CCTV cameras for anything suspicious and turning their neighbors in. Or that libraries will, instead of being funded by the government so they can improve service, hire workers who are visible to the populace and stock the shelves with worthy reading material, will be in partnership with the faceless monolith of Amazon. Laughing disbelief is relegated to the news of a Miss Plastic competition in Hungary. Breast implants, nose jobs and facelifts and not a fiery baton twirler or a plea for world peace in the lot. Newly asymmetrical beauties, along with their plastic surgeons, share the awards. I save the best news for last: Marge Simpson is to bear all in the November issue of Playboy!

Over little spiced dishes in my choice of tiffen wallah and a fragrant Malai Kofta for The Mister we recall the many bits in A Serious Man that made us howl with laughter. We both know there is a message somewhere in the story, but are not exactly sure what it is. Perhaps it is that Nature is the great leveler. But, none of that matters anymore. We came away smiling and thinking about the film, still thinking about it at dinner and probably will still be thinking about it for some time. The songs of Jefferson Airplane looped happily in our heads among the hauntingly beautiful Yiddish songs sung by cantors featured in the film. The Mister looked up at me, and smiled. “I think we’re quite well suited.”

When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joys within you dies

Don’t you want somebody to love

Don’t you need somebody to love

Wouldn’t you love somebody to love

You better find somebody to love.