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 Thursday,
28 August 2003
Like a four-leaf clover. No, a wheel. No, wait, like a Confederate
flag. My high school was positioned in the middle of a field, in
the middle of the four small Southern towns that sent their sons
and daughters there to learn about civics and grammar and acne and
dating.
Somehow, at my high school, there was not the diversity of social
groups that you find at other high schools. Chunky gold nuggets,
however, did attend my high school. They dangled from thick gold
chains that fell over the soft cloth of turtlenecks; they adorned
odd-smelling shirts of raw silk; they rested on top of blouses covered
with embedded rhinestones.
Boys who got perms in the backs of their heads attended my high
school, too. They twisted their acid wash jeans at the cuffs and
rolled them high enough to make room for high-top Nikes and scrunched
white tube socks. They played their Skynard while leaning on their
Cameros in the parking lot, the skin above their lips hiding underneath
savannas of peach fuzz.
Curling irons and hair spray built the girls' hair that attended
my school, stiff helmets that framed the tan baseline-rimmed faces,
rows of pink eyelids, and sugar bowls full of powder. Keds and Sam&Libby
made themselves at home on the tips of the crossed legs bobbing
underneath the desks; Polo logos were stitched on top of beating
hearts; Oakley sunglasses on chords hung around tanned necks.
The cafeteria offered cream-filled doughnuts and soggy pizza squares,
and the commons area presented a rainbow of carbonated caffeinated
beverages. The overly strict principal stood tall and skinny in
the hallway outside of his office and had a perpetual look of disapproval
on his face. When he rose to power during my sophomore year, he
was quick to ban the following articles of clothing: open-toed shoes,
two pair of shorts worn at the same time (), Umbros, tank tops, "offensive"
t-shirts, and skirts that didn't fall past the tips of girls' fingertips
when their arms were pressed against their sides.
It seems odd to me now, but during my freshman year, there was a
sanctioned "smoking pit" outside of the building, where
fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds could light up during breaks and
in the five-minute rushes between classes.
There weren't many parties produced by my high school; one had to
go for those. There were sports, of course, and there
was almost always a pack of people hanging around a truck or two
in a certain grocery store parking lot, killing time and blaring
music and flirting. If they weren't in the parking lot, they were
probably in a certain nearby town which was famous for its "cruising"
problem—teenagers stop-starting at 5 miles-per-hour down the
main street, whistling and strutting, laying low in reclining seats
with single hands propped on top of steering wheels. Promises made
between passing open car windows, maybe to meet in the McDonald's
parking lot before circling around the block another time. Class
rings, gossip exchanged.
Despite all of the ways I felt displaced in high school, I did have
acquaintances and friends (some of whom I'm still in touch with).
Which is why I find it so annoying that there is no scheduled for my class. Which means I don't
get to participate in this reportedly surreal social experiment,
full of stories and spouses and babies and surprises. High school
reunions are supposed to be a given, right?
Monday,
25 August 2003
Sunday,
24 August 2003
There's a scene
in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a fly lands on an
actor's face and crawls into his open mouth while he's delivering
his lines. Rather than stopping the scene or spitting or reacting
in any way, the actor continues, seemingly undisturbed.
Which is the image I tried to think about when I held the digital
video camera in my hands and pushed a hard plastic piece into my
face until I was fairly sure it made a reddish dent, in an effort
to hold the camera as steady as possible. When I stood on a ledge
with one eye closed and the other focused in the viewfinder, trying
not to think too much about . When a drop of rain slid down the inside
of my arm, when something itched, when my tense muscles needed stretching
and lengthening. He let a fly crawl in his mouth. You can stay
still for a few more seconds.
Sometimes I start to count silently, "one-one thousand, two-one
thousand, three-one thousand," when I try to endure a little longer. I counted when the
drop of rain crept toward my armpit.
Endurance and sore arms, yes, but filming has been fun. The director has given me a good balance
of autonomy and guidance, and I've gotten pretty comfortable with
the new, memory-filled creature, who lets his subjects move and
talk, rather than trapping them in a single, silent 2-dimensional
rectangle. By the end of a day of shooting, my eyes are framing
everything in front of them, not unlike the shape-castles the brain
builds after playing too much Tetris.
Here's a picture
from filming on Friday evening. I think it looks a little fake,
like we're standing in front of a poster.
This weekend I also shot the first with my Super 8 camera, which I bought in July:
few seconds of break dancing, and about three minutes of Wigstock.
I have no idea how it's going to turn out, and I have no projector,
so it looks like it's going to be a while before I find out.
Thursday,
21 August 2003
The observation deck on the Empire State Building is on the 86th
floor. To get there, you must first be corraled in a zig zag in
the basement, where you will be forced to stand in front of a bad
drawing of the Empire State Building and get your picture taken.
(Later, the picture of your dead-looking face will be marketed to
you at $15 per two copies). You will listen to a peppy man with
a microphone tell you how you need both the audio tour and the "sky
ride," both of which come at an extra cost. You will decline
all three.
As you slowly thread through the line, certain people will become
quite familiar to you; you pass them facing this way, facing that
way. You match bone structure and hair color with languages and
try to determine the various countries. In this line, it's tacitly
understood that it's okay to check other people out, because there's
nothing else to look at.
Tickets in hand, $11 each. The first floor hosts a maze identical
to that in the basement; it is not the last one between you and
the 86th floor. (To go up, it seems, you must do lots of back-and-forth.)
In the elevator, you will breathe on the shoulders of strangers,
watch the digital numbers above the door rise surprisingly fast,
and swallow at least twice to clear your ears. When you step out
of the elevator on the 80th floor, you'll see a sign that says,
"Almost there!" Yet around the corner, you spy another
snake made of people, and you hear another peppy headset-wearing
man say, "Only six more floors!"
After the second elevator, you are finished with lines; however,
not unlike lines, there are slow-moving and stationary people in
front of you, but for no apparent reason this time. You must make
yourself narrow and slide past. There are so many people; you forget
that you're one of them.
The path around the building is narrow, and the sturdy metal fence
high. You notice that the sea of lights below you meets the horizon,
and that the toy buildings at your feet are the short and stumpy
cousins of the supermodel you're standing on. Your camera feels
slippery in your hands as you hold it over the edge of the building,
as you try in vain to capture the expanse of the surrounding 3-D
city on a 4x6 piece of glossy paper. It's windy and warm and the
earth is glowing, none of which will come through.
You will be uncertain when you should leave, or at what point you've
enjoyed it enough. You decide on two slow trips around the top:
East River, Queens, Chrysler, Central Park, Midtown, Jersey, Downtown,
Flatiron, Union Square, Brooklyn. (Repeat.) Then back in line.
Monday,
18 August 2003
We were walking in the traffic lane across the Williamsburg Bridge
when we heard , which inspired us to think of alternatives,
most of which involved the word "."
That's when it occurred to us that there were already probably fancy
graphics, a theme song, and a collection overeager reporters. We
were far from watching any TV, but as we walked through the city
streets, in the mass exodus of Manhattan, we could hear chunks of
radio coverage, pouring out of car windows and portable devices,
hosts that attracted hovering human bodies, whose ears were bent
toward the crackly voices.
The chaos of traffic light-less streets drove some well-meaning
citizens out into the intersections, to hold a flat palm one direction
and wave a "c'mere" to the perpendicular lane. A man in
a bicycle helmet at Union Square yelled at the cars for not letting
a wave of pedestrians pass; much later, a man in my neighborhood
spent hours directing traffic with . We talked about the type
of people who put themselves in that position, and noted that, somehow,
none of us was that person. Mollie said she was fascinated by them.
On the other side of the bridge, at least two hours after we'd started
our journey, we ran into a guy who'd been stuck on the subway, on
the L between Bedford Ave and First Ave, underneath the East River.
He said he and the other passengers waited in the hot dark for 30
minutes before the first announcement was made, and they waited
an additional 30 before they could walk through the tunnel, the
opposite way they'd originally been heading. (Eventually I would
hear about tourists who were , people stuck on rides at Coney
Island, businessmen and women propping themselves up on train station
walls.)
My own story is less dramatic; I was sitting at my desk when I heard
the electricity sucked out of the city. Heard, because it sounded
like a giant powering-down, as if all of the electricity had been
thrown over the edge of a cliff. For a moment, the buzz I normally
don't notice was silent; and then the light chatter of what just
happened? began.
Moments after we returned to a "simpler time," everyone
in the office was gathered in the main conference room to assess
. It occurred to me almost immediately
how much I genuinely like the people there, and if I am going to
be stuck in a building for any length of time, I had chosen a good
one to be in. We also hovered around a radio, mouths dropping as
we heard first the entire city was black—then Albany—then
Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit—which gave us our first understanding
of the size of the invisible beast.
On the streets were lines in front of , discounted ice cream shops and ice cream trucks,
and . At my place, I cooked veggie burgers
for Mollie and Lisa on my gas stove, and we drank Becks and ate
and talked in the fading light of my apartment. When we left again
to join the others, we needed flashlights. We could see stars. I
heard two different people make the comment that suddenly it was
as if we were in the middle of nowhere, as if we were in the country,
as if we were camping. I thought it was funny and wrong and something
only someone living in New York would say. We could see thirty stars
instead of none, and we were surrounded by people everywhere we
went, turning the power outage into a party, as if they'd been set
free by the absence of electricity. Fires in trash cans, music,
singing, sidewalk games, more radios.
We sat in bars powered by candles, and we sat on the rocks next
to the East River, looking across at the humbled, darkened skyline.
Helicopters buzzed over tops of the buildings as if in search of
nectar; the moon was orange and big. It felt wrong to simply ignore
the plans I'd made earlier, but of course there wasn't much else
to do but embrace the new plans, the ones that didn't include subways
or cell phones or lights or showers.
The next day, Lisa and I rode bikes around Brooklyn in search of
power, which it had acquired spottily. Hot and muggy and full of
rotten food, Brooklyn gave a little cheer when the power returned,
not unlike the way it celebrated when the power left town.
Sunday,
17 August 2003
(The following was written last Thursday, pre-blackout.)
Three split seconds in which I thought I might get stuck in an elevator
in the past two days, and an array of Goldilocks responses from
my split-second brain. The first happened when I was running late.
Rather than being upset that the elevator was going to make me even
later than I already was, or simply worrying that I might be stuck
in an elevator, I immediately thought what a great excuse getting
stuck in an elevator would be. (Un)fortunately, the elevator stepped
back in line within seconds. (This porridge is too hot.)
The second happened in the building where I take . The elevators there are small, elderly, and slow. So when
I saw the door closing, I threw out my arm to stop it, and it retracted,
as expected. A man on the other side (whom I'd never seen before)
hissed at me, "Hurry up! I've got to catch a train." I
jumped in the elevator, and he began punching a button over and
over again as if he were playing pinball. "You didn't see me
do this," he said, taking a sideways glance at me as he pushed
some other, more mysterious button, one that I think was supposed
to deceive the elevator into thinking that the ground floor was
the only destination that mattered. The elevator buckled for a moment
at his request, and it promptly occured to me that I was being
for my earlier elevator-related wish. It coughed and choked and
spat, and then suddenly it began the slow ride down, sending us
straight into the pit of the building. Just before it came to a
stop, my elevator partner randomly asked me if I needed a ride to
Penn Station. (This porridge is too cold.)
The third. On my way out of the building with a few other coworkers,
the door tricked me into thinking it was going to open on a non-floor,
as it exposed an inch of metal in the space where bodies normally
pass through. Rather than thinking that I was about to be stuck
in a metal box with a pack of skirts and heels and oxygen-breathing
bodies, my split-second brain found the prospect interesting, as
if it were part of the plot. Before my rational brain had a chance
to object and be annoyed or concerned, the elevator was on its way
again. (This porridge is just right.)
Wednesday,
13 August 2003
I'm sitting on some loose slats of wood that are stacked in a corner.
They're uncomfortable, but I can't think about rearranging them;
I'm too nervous, and I'd rather focus on remembering my lines. I
know my lines pretty well, or at least I did a few minutes ago,
but I'm afraid that they'll scatter at the moment I need them, like
roaches responding to the flip of a light switch.
I've been given a form to fill out, something about the I've chosen, the dates I'm free, and my favorite place
in New York, but I'm feeling too panicked to be remotely clever,
so I fill it out in a quick, bland sweep. The person sitting next
to me doesn't seem nervous. He's wearing a gas station shirt, has
a mess of layered brown hair, and is lounging on the slats of wood,
in direct opposition to my hunched-over body (which is tearing away
at cuticles like it's unwrapping candy). I can see the number on
his form; he auditions immediately after me.
The women across from me are quietly going over their lines, rehearsing
them with each other in staccato bursts. I can't see their numbers.
The building I'm in is apparently a maze of auditions. I can hear
a hint of theater in almost every word that I can make out, and
there are layers and layers of mismatched singing voices emanating
from hollow-sounding rooms. Pianos, directive words, the same phrase
being uttered repeatedly, growing with passion. I feel like I'm
sitting on the set of Fame.
My name is called by a guy I've met before. He jokingly mispronounces
"Whiteman" and smiles at me to let me know he was kidding;
I don't remember how he said it ("Whitman"?), and I don't
remember if I thought to smile back. I don't remember much about
the actual audition at all, except that I was standing in a small
room behind a piece of tape, with a mirror in front of me and a
digital video camera pointed at me. I do know that my lines felt
limp and lifeless at that moment; I was too worried about forgetting
them to make them seem believable.
Post-audition, I'm sitting on the floor in the hallway, wishing
I would've practiced my lines until I'd engraved them on my brain,
that I would've not stayed out so late the night before, that live
performances could be Photoshopped, that I would be instantly good
at whatever I tried, that I didn't feel so exposed and disappointed.
The audition room door opens again, and the guy in the gas station
shirt skips out, proclaiming, "That was fun!,"
in direct opposition to my anxiety and my upside-down stomach.
...
That was a month ago; today I I got the part. The guy with the gas station shirt is
going to be in it too.
Unrelated: I put up a few more pictures,
from the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island (in June). I missed
the actual parade but got there in time for leftover mermaids and
rain.
Tuesday,
12 August 2003
You can have people over whenever you like; you're not going to
disturb anyone. Listen to whatever you want, on repeat, if that's
your thing. Decorate the place with your own cheap furniture and
wall art, and decorate the floor with clothing when you're feeling
lazy. Wash the dishes, or not; everything will remain as you left
it. (No one is going to surprise you with a sink full or dirty [or
full of clean].) Take a shower with the door open. Manipulate the
temperature as you wish. Your phone conversations will be completely
private, and the call is always for you. Or you can choose not to
talk at all.
Use most of your strength to open that can of tomato sauce, ignoring
your pesky, screaming wrist. Carry all of your groceries up the
stairs, clean up after yourself, change that light bulb, and pay
all of the bills. Exterminate that giant roach. (Fortunately, you
pay a lot more attention to the first paragraph.)
The people in the Human League CD I'm listening to at the moment
are not people at all. They are from the "eighties" and
they are electronic, invisible specks on a CD that are translated
to my ear by lasers. In fact, everyone from decades past (even decades
I lived through, like the eighties) are decidedly alien. So far
away, full of different fashion, world events, perspectives. Of
course, somewhere I know that people (on the whole) are stubbornly
the same, but the part of me that remains fascinated with the past
is unconvinced. My standards for movies take a dive when the movies
are at least 15 years old, because there's so much more to watch.
Monday,
11 August 2003
Hi there. I put up some new pictures: New
York spring.
Sunday,
10 August 2003
I don't hear the rooster anymore, which is good, I suppose, since
someone once told me that the rooster was very likely employed as
a cock fighter. I'd wondered why I could hear such a creature in
Brooklyn, especially so regularly, but cock fighting had never occurred
to me. Originally I'd found the sound of his voice amusing.
Some Sundays the evangelist's sermon penetrates my windows as noticeably
as daylight. He mostly speaks in Spanish, which I prefer, though
that makes me wonder how I know that he's an evangelist. I suppose
he could be an auctioneer of some sort, or a political activist.
But something in his voice gives him away.
The thumping bass of the drive-by vehicles sets off the car alarms
like dominoes, which inspires hands to turn dials on the portable
stereos until their speakers shake from over-stimulation, which
turns talking into yelling and laughter into shrieking. This is
the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built.
I arrived in New York one year ago . It of course doesn't feel like a year, but somehow like
both one month and several years, simultaneously.
Thursday,
07 August 2003
She doesn't like it when I crush the drug into a rocky powder and
stir it in her food, a process which involves a knife and basic
finger-avoiding precision. Nor does she enjoy when I wrap her in
a blanket, shove my fingers into the hinge connecting her jaw, and
push a sour pill down her throat. In scenario A, she doesn't ingest
the medicine that's supposed to make her disappear. In scenario B, she claws and bites
and hates. As for the daily urine analyses, I've resorted to setting
her down in front of her litter box and uselessly making requests
in English.
We spoke German almost exclusively during the first half of the
evening, which felt something like trying to exercise after months
of being sedentary. It was slow to travel from my brain to my mouth,
but eventually I was able to slip behind the German curtain, finding
myself inclined to respond to the Indian waiter in a language that
was neither Indian nor English (though stopping myself before it
actually happened). Sometimes, on my own, I'll decide to "think"
in German, or somewhat forcefully compose thoughts in full sentences,
but I tend to recycle the same vocabulary bank that drifts around
in the accessible part of my head. It's good to hear the genuine
thing, to listen and fatten the bank.
I've been observing, "helping" Corey film a documentary,
pinning microphones on lapels, and taking still photographs, images
which may possibly be incorporated in the final product. On Monday
I was drafted to be in the play that is the subject of the documentary,
in the non-speaking part of "photographer." My main function,
besides being a body pointing a camera, was to bleach the actors
with my flash, an apparatus which naturally chose to die on stage
exactly when it was supposed to perform. Fortunately it offered
a few death gasps before it completely faded (it worked about one
out of every four tries), which I'm pretty sure means I didn't completely
botch the role. And I was careful to slap and struggle and curse
the flash as inconspicuously as possible, since I don't think those
things were part of my assignment.
Monday,
04 August 2003
Sunday,
03 August 2003
The seat next to me had blood smeared in it. I tried to imagine
why, scenarios which included everything from a torn cuticle to
a punch in the head to a knife wound. There wasn't much of it, just
a few streaks which appeared to have been swiped with a finger in
a half-motivated effort to clean it up. There was also a balled-up
tissue riding along next to me, which perhaps knew something about
what had happened, who the blood had come from. Across the aisle
from me were three very hyper children who appeared to be siblings.
The boys liked to perform—beat on the seats like drums, slide
down the subway poles like firemen—because it made their sister
squeal with delight. They were oblivious to everyone on the train
but themselves, oblivious to the streak in the seat next to me.
It was 2 a.m.
She was almost glowing in her Crayola yellow suit, her white-blond
hair, gold jewelry, and layers of dusty pale powder, as if she'd
borrowed the rays of a cartoon depiction of an angel. She immediately
stood out, and at first I thought she was just from another part
of the city, from uptown maybe. Her make-up was almost thick enough
to be a mask. Before I realized that she was Barbara Walters, it
occurred to me that she looked rather familiar. She was strolling
down 6th Avenue with Macauley Caulkin, as if the two of them often
stroll down 6th Avenue together. A pack of TV cameras trailed them
like the train of a wedding dress.
His clothes were faded and dirty, and his tan face was creased with
deep wrinkles, as if he'd left both in the sun a little too long.
White whiskers poked out of his angular face; he was old and skinny,
although probably not as old as he looked. Folded over into the
shape of a half-open book, standing with his chest parallel to the
ground, he held his arms out in a Superman pose and gripped a peeled,
half-eaten banana. Rather than eat it, he shakily brought it up
to his lips and tried to take a sip from it, as if it were a beverage.
There were only a few of us sitting in the dark, spray-painted bar,
and we were all engaged in conversation, minus the youngish black
guy who was sitting next to me. So I said hello and introduced myself,
just in case he was interested in joining in. He seemed friendly,
but a little off, though I couldn't pinpoint why. Perhaps it's
because he stares straight ahead when he talks? He told me his
name and that he was 27, and then he pulled out a yellowed article
from his back pocket. "It's written about my high school basketball
team," he said, proudly. "My name's in it." He held
it out for me to see, and then he carefully refolded it and returned
it to his pocket.
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2003 | July 2003>>
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