Of Objects and Things (Present Day)

Yesterday I bought two things: a new memory stick for my digital camera and a new cell phone.

We are undoubtedly spoiled brats, but it's also amazing how easily we adjust to inconvenience.

For example, I was using a cell phone with about twenty minutes of talk time. I had read online reviews of the phone before I bought it, so I knew that the battery was its biggest challenge, that battery life was subordinated to size and weight. I considered getting a new phone, so I wouldn't have to hawkeye the length of my conversations, turn the phone off when not in use, and carry my charger around just in case. But I didn't seem to need a new phone.

My camera, which I got some three or so years ago, came with an 8-megabyte memory stick, which was good for about 30 decent-sized pictures. When I went home last May for my cousin's wedding, I was sure to bring the USB cord so I could download pictures to my parents' computer and free up the memory for more snapshots. Several times I thought about getting a larger memory stick so that I wouldn't always worry about wasting space and so I wouldn't be so afraid to click. But I didn't seem to need a new memory stick.

One sees immediately how ridiculous it all is. Cell phones, batteries, digital cameras, memory sticks: the petty improvements for which we all strive. What's wrong with the x you had? Did you really need a new y? I mean, some people don't even have a z! You've heard these arguments, even argued with yourself, and you are no doubt aware of their sneaky rebuttals:

"But the memory stick was on sale for $30! I mean, I got 128 megabytes! That's, like, over ten times more memory than I had!"

"But the new cell phone was free! I mean, all I had to do was verbally agree to another year with them, and then I send in the rebate, and it's free, and I have a working phone!"

Fine lines, my friends. Fine lines. The three months I spent sleeping on the floor were unnecessary martyrdom. I thought a $20 army cot would be a humble step in the direction of appropriate comfort, but there is no reason why I should have fretted over the $300 sofa-bed from Ikea, which came a whole year later.

What I'm trying to say is that in this life humans need three things: sofa-beds, memory sticks, and cell phones.

Salties, Bean Hollow Salties

Several months ago, I took my parents down south. Our ultimate goal was Nepenthe, a place to forget pain and sorrow and also a restaurant hanging off the cliffs of the Big Sur coast.

After breakfast at Louis' Diner overlooking the ruins of the Sutro Bath, we traced down Highway 1 through Daly City and Pacifica, and a cell phone rang around Half Moon Bay. It was my aunt and my grandmother. My parents told them we had just begun our adventure. I pointed left and right: Did they see the hills? Did they see the ocean? Wasn't it amazing?

They knew the name of Half Moon Bay because I often came on 92 through the mountains from Redwood City in my first year here, and Half Moon was the first coastal town I discovered. I started with the state beach there but eventually grew restless. City seemed north, so I headed south. On one of my voyages I stopped at a dozen or so places along the coast between Half Moon and Santa Cruz. On later voyages, when I was trying to be brown, I would be forced south, past the fog, in search of sun, which often enough peeped through brightening clouds around Davenport.

On this day Bean Hollow State Park stuck out its thumb, and we pulled over. I had stopped there before: a tiny semicircle of beach of multicolored pebbles. It would not be comfortable on a busy day; there was room for only three or four people, and they would need to be intimate.

We got out, and while my inclination was to take the short flight of wooden stairs to the beach, my parents climbed a bluff. Suddenly we could see why Bean Hollow State Park was here: beyond the crest a dusty path led to the Martian landscape of a tidal pool area.

While ghosts of our intention continued south toward our goal, we in our bodies stopped for an hour or more and explored this exotic space.

A Note to Lynx Eye, or Now for a Word from Our Sponsors

Dear Pam,

Congratulations on the latest issue of Lynx Eye! I was honored and excited to learn that I would be in the 10th anniverary double issue, but I never expected to be featured in the Presenting section. I am stunned and deeply grateful (although at first I ran around in little circles and pulled at my hair while screaming, "I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!").

I'm making my way through the volume -- what wonderful pieces! "Rules for Beach Patrons" is stellar for its slow burrowing into this mysterious high-school aged, socially challenged genius, and for its poetic and impressionistic snapshots of the sparkling teenage life around him.

I hope this note finds you well; the holidays are upon us! Thanks again, and I trust we'll keep in touch.

Sincerely,
Paul

Malcolm, "Those of His Kind"

In The Gay Deceivers we cannot resist Malcolm. He overwhelms us, yes, with what some call flamboyance, some flame, some flair. He italicizes syllables: "I decorated it myself! Isn't it just gorgeous?" His hands are always flitting, floating, and his hips gyrate and are carried by wind. Like a tall oat he celebrates his leanness, his malleability; he bends with gay abandon. In walk, which some call sashay, some chassé, he achieves flight.

We love Malcolm because he loves us and will take care of us even if we hate him. As one of our straight protagonists wakes up and walks downstairs, we see first shock with a little disgust that the queeny landlord has made himself at home in our kitchen. But Malcolm has made breakfast into a thing of beauty, and we are transfixed. With a rose tucked alternately behind his ear and between his teeth, he has become Carmen (the habañera plays in the background). The onions, as much as the desperation of a woman who knows that death awaits, make him cry. Our straight protagonist watches now with a faraway smile. Whom does he see? What does he feel? We wonder, like the army’s enrollment officer, “Is-he-or-isn’t-he?”

He isn’t. Not in this particular movie. But in this moment love reaches beyond sex and sexuality. We know Malcolm’s omelets will be as delicious as his love is unconditional. But we are in a hurry, like our protagonist, off to work or somewhere else we think important. We listen when Malcolm says, “Sit down. That’s no way to eat one of my breakfasts!” We sit and eat.

Beauty and truth must be sisters. We are all imbued with the Great Commonality. We can still feel when one of us is lost, when another arrives. But Malcolm is still connected by a great cosmic umbilical cord to the Eternal Mother, to the Great Origin. In the mythic terms of gender, he is woman and man in one: the love that comes when one traces back to the Original Womb and then out through the universe, and the force to disseminate and plant that love in others.

Hung out to dry

It is 5:36pm, and I will write for thirty minutes.

But what should I write about? Sci-fi? A murder mystery? A sexual scandal?

"They’ll never understand," she said.

"All the more reason to keep it a secret," he said.

"Do you come here often?" he asked.

"First time, actually," the other replied.

"Do you want to dance?"

He had made two extraordinary finds at the book sale: an enormous coffee-table book of costumes through the ages and a CD of a one-act opera about, of all things, the Yellow Wallpaper.

Once he got home and put away the groceries, he got out his book and CD. They wouldn’t exactly go together, but he’d try them both out anyway. He opened the CD and was surprised to find . . .

As he drove home, the smile began to slip from his face. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the pack of cigarettes there. He lit up, smoked, exhaling the air out into the hot car. He was sweating already, he could feel it on his thighs, on his back against the seat. It was hot.

He pulled into . . .

When he learned he could fly, he contained his joy.

My house is closed up for sex. Inside my house I do nothing but sex.


"Do you want to go back to my place," I asked.

The drinks had clearly affected him. He tilted his head to the side and said, "Yeah, that’d be great." I grabbed his hand and led him through the throng to the exit.

"You want me to drive?" he asked.
Heaven is only a few steps away,
and those few steps are through sunshine and rain.
My feet are bare, cold in my shadow,
but they can take me there,
can walk across those few feet,
those feet of emptiness.

I can jump if I have to.

I jump across those three feet of space and am in heaven. A blue angel, with the face of a puppy, welcomes me with an outstretched wing. There is a table, wooden, with two chairs of a light yellow wood. These are all sitting outside a cafe. I sit down and God brings me coffee, a large mug and a metal pitcher of cream. I pour the cream in and watch it swirl around. Something is stirring my coffee, and I watch as light tendrils of cream spiral around and around, moving as water down a drain, until the coffee is tan. I drink the coffee and see it go down my throat. I’m invisible, and all you can see is that coffee, leaving the white coffee cup, traveling in a thin tube to land in a suspended puddle in the middle of what was me. I am now vapor, my body is space and air, and the coffee in my stomach falls and splatters the chair where I was sitting. And now I’m floating above the city, which for as far as the eye can see consists of three-story buildings arranged in blocks. I am shaped like the letter S, though more graceful, just a little twist of breath racing through the sky. I have fangs like a viper, and the air makes a hissing sound as it passes me. I land and am horny. Now I am eight feet tall. Eight feet tall.

Closed for Thanksgiving

But the Movie Groove is open.

Orchestra Rehearsal

I watched Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal last night. Rachel had recommended it some two or three years ago, told me I would appreciate the accurate caricatures of the various instrumentalists. This I did for the first forty-five minutes or so: the first violins are the prima-donnas and boast that they sometimes lead the conductor; the cellos consider themselves the heart of the orchestra, and most like the human voice (which flute and oboe also claim); the brass are the sports fans, the lovable men who sit on the couch, though the trumpeter rightly claims that a "clinker" from him would destroy the piece, whereas the violins can get away with all kinds of inaccurate screeches; and the percussionists are the outthe wild ones, scoffing at melody and "arpeggios."

But then the movie becomes a different beast altogether. After an intimate interview with the conductor in his green room, we find that the instrumentalists have revolted: the walls are painted with violent Italian words, and they liken the conductor to a metronome: "The metronome is metronomous; musicians are autonomous!" they chant.

The politics of the piece are lost on me; I'd rather be led by a benevolent fairy-tale king (or queen) or crown-prince (but probably not princess; princesses are spoiled) than think about the evil but tedious machinations of the world's actual governments. So instead Fellini reminded me of my own musical anger, when, having determined that I didn't quite belong in the world of music, I was compelled to come up with reasons to hate it:

Classical music is a stuffy and class-based art; it comes from the courts, from the powerful, from the rich. And it is essentially still located there: it is learned in expensive and elite institutions, and it is presented in elite and expensive auditoriums. We must pay too much to sit too far away to see or hear, and then we must dress up (some say out of respect for the talent before us) and sit still as museum pieces, being sure to clap only at the correct moments. (You may watch me out of the corner of your eyes; I have, alas, been initiated.)

It is esoteric, designed for the few. I could play Bach like Chopin, Debussy like Beethoven, and wouldn't even raise eyebrows. Some might prefer their classical pieces to be imbued with impressionism. It is arbitrary; beauty in classical music can be reduced to a few sets of rules based on stuffy ideas of proportion and balance: the two-note slur informs all musical phrases, which should crescendo or decrescendo in a graceful arch and for god's sake must do so proportionately. And of course you must ritard here, because it says so; although in the Urtext there is no ritardando, and this may have been added in 1870 by Hummel. There is of course some debate still. But obviously the ritardando "adds a sense of completion. I realize that the phrase naturally comes to a close here, so the ritard may be superfluous. Nonetheless, try it both ways, and I'm sure you'll agree."

Of course, this was all retaliation against the more obvious fact that I couldn't cut it as a classical pianist. And none of it is true.

The truth is that after the the violent riots, the orgy of anarchy, Fellini's instrumentalists suspend their autonomy and bow again before the baton. And I bow before their music and seek, in my quiet moments, Verdi, and Mozart, and Mahler, and find myself whistling classical class-based and stuffy themes.

Fighting the wrong battles

I stood up for the wrong thing yesterday.

A woman sitting in front of me on the train signaled the conductor: “Excuse me, miss. The machine wasn’t working where I got on.”

“Um, actually, ma’am, if the validator’s broken, you’re supposed to find a conductor and let them know before you sit down.”

“But I didn’t know where you were,” the woman continued.

“Ma’am, we step out of the train at each stop.”

“Well, usually when this happens, and I tell the conductor, they say I can just get it validated at my final stop.”

The conductor drew herself in for a moment. “I don’t know about other conductors. . . . Not everyone, ma’am.”

“I’ve never had a problem before. I ride all the time.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, ma’am,” and here the woman began protesting and squirming in her seat, “but if we had been checking for tickets I would have had to write you a citation.”

“Well, I’ll just call the 800 number,” the woman said with a sneer.

Here I piped up. Out of respect for the train and its conductors, for the institution of public transportation? Out of compassion for the conductor, because the woman’s lines reminded me so much of my own difficult customers? Out of outrage at the woman’s self-importance and sense of entitlement? Out of defiance toward my generally passive nature?

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, sitting up and looking between the headrests at the woman in front of me, “but the conductor is completely right. Everyone knows to find the conductor if the machine’s not working.”

Until Blanche Dubois sings...

Long ago we got a DVD of Andre Previn's opera of Streetcar Named Desire. I was intrigued. I had to see what kind of Blanche Renee Fleming would make. And what tenor living or dead could play Stanley Kowalski? In fact, who but Brando?

So I put the DVD on and was immediately impressed by the music itself: modern, but not by too much. Not as jazzy as one might expect, but certainly sultry, and undoubtedly sad. Blanche came on, looking about 8' by 4', and sang. Or should I say say-yang. It was beautiful. Compelling. It's hard to look away from Blanche.

But there was work to do, so my attention was drawn to other things.

And then disaster struck: In those days, we let less-OCD people put stickers on the new movies. Streetcar's sticker curled up a little to the right. The DVD player wouldn't let it go. There was a struggle. And then there was much scratching. And from then on Stanley's arrival was unbearably jerky. We tossed the disc.

It's much later. I'd noticed the CD of the opera in the Redwood City Library. But there were other things to try out: Faust, Jessye Norman singing Duparc, Cecilia and Bryn (that was a dull one), Marian McPartland at Yoshi's and with Carmen McRae, etc. But I finally checked it out last week. The verdict: crazy genius. Also funny. There are few stories less suitable for opera, and maybe that's why it works.

And now, the DVD reordered, I listen to my CDs and wait...

"Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" And the audience laughs.

We None of Us Have Any Right

Dear Julia,


I've been thinking about our phone conversation the other day. There was one thing you said that really hurt my feelings, even though I wasn't able to express myself at the time. It didn't seem quite appropriate; besides, we had a lot of ground to cover. But I won't be at peace myself until we have addressed it.

You said, as I recall, "Looking at your resume, I see only one thing — your work at XYZ Co. — that applies to this position." That was a slap in the face, Julia. How easy it is for you to discount these years in customer service, or those years in the arts! Were you unmoved by my success in school, my interesting choice of majors? Do you care so little for the whole person?

I'm very disappointed, Julia, and this reveals more than anything that your position is not a fit for me. But don't worry. Somewhere in this hungry world you will find someone whose resume sparkles with relevance — who has, in fact, been preparing his or her whole life for this moment, when he or she may sell his soul for $30K per year and work in your esteemed auspices. Meanwhile, if you change your mind, you know how to reach me.


Sincerely,
Paul G. McCurdy

Wine barrels of particular color

Went to Napa Valley with my parents (some time ago). My dad said, "I don't know. Just turn left here," and we found a winery balanced on top of a hill. We had to ride an air tram to get to it. Among other things, there were yellow barrels.

This happened last night

It didn't feel like it was leaning at the time.


Last night we climbed the stairs -- all of them -- to the top of the tower. Every twenty or so, I had to stop to catch my breath. He kept going. I'm still catching up after, you know, a couple years or so of damage.

Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Maryland, New York -- indeed, everything east of the Mississippi was covered in gloom. To the west we could see the vaguest outline of the Wall (the sun, of course, had not yet gone down there).