There is no business as usual. There has never been business as usual, only life continuing with the knowledge of suffering nearby that could end, should end, doesn’t end. I’m listening to Bach, and I’m telling you stories.
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An Anarchy of Thought
The time I spent in Arizona, I was in love with New York. When I would return to New York, I would feel the heavy ugliness of my building—the chipped floors and stained walls of the halls—as soon as I opened the door of my apartment, and the ugliness would follow me onto the streets. The city was less crowded then than it is today, and I could still walk for miles on Broadway and on Columbus Avenue, find a place to sit along the way, and write something in a notebook. All this was a form of breathing.
In Arizona, I would love the look of our house with its large rooms, desert gardens, and glistening pool. I would love the quiet, and I would feel sad about not knowing anyone. I would also feel free. Roses grew along the paths I walked there, and there were lemons and grapefruits to pick. The walks there were a form of breathing, too. I was breathing my escape from New York. I was breathing the feeling of having fallen out of love with the city I missed.
It might have been I was only moving through time and space and no longer living my former life—the life in the city that gave me the way I write. The sense of belonging to the place where I was born was unconscious. In my conscious sense of myself, I’m skating on thin ice all the time, anxious I will lose the sense of belonging to this group or that group, or I will lose this friend or boyfriend. I don’t think I belong anywhere other than New York. It’s perhaps that I don’t belong anywhere, anymore.
It’s strange I still want to be asked to do catering jobs, because in the past, when I entered the world of catering, it had represented for me a chosen form of failure I found irresistible. It’s strange I want that aspect of my former life to continue in the life I’m living now, but I think I do because it also made me happy to slip away from the sense elsewhere I felt of skating on thin ice. I had fallen through the ice, and see, the place below the ice was yet another place.
I find it strange when people see me as confident. I’m something other than confident. I’m dissident about the way the world generally understands people. All people are living secret lives, apart from the cities of how they are understood in their cultures and even by themselves. Now, I have entered the age of confidence that is separate from the age of success or of appreciation. It’s not necessary to have that appreciation or to want it, but everyone does want it, even if they don’t know how to admit this to themselves.
There was the age of New York City, and there was the age of Arizona and becoming a thing with Richard that is so profoundly enriching to everything I think and do, I can’t grasp it, really, so I take it for granted, the way we take happiness for granted, as a thing it’s hard to see. Here and now, in the age of Hudson, I love the sense of having fallen out of love with New York. When I go back to the city, I’m waiting for a wave of love or of guilt or of memory to overtake me and suck me back to where it’s been said by me and by others that I belong. The wave doesn’t come in this form, at least the form that could suck me back to the streets and to the life lived on those streets.
When I was on those streets, even before meeting Richard and spending slabs of time in Arizona, I would be wondering when I could leave again, and I would feel weird to myself for wanting to leave again, and I would feel there was something wrong with me for having lost the taste for what is supposed to be the taste for life itself. I have fallen in love with the natural world, you could say, and I understand how looking at nature, even when you are not fully immersed in it, does something sweet to the pulsing sense of threat and failure I think, in the past, I must always have been feeling—along with pleasure.
In other news . . .
The Killer
I enjoyed The Killer (Netflix), directed by David Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender as a high-end paid assassin. He botches an assignment and becomes the target of a klatch of who knows who they are and it doesn't matter pursuers. He then has to tick off each one before they can kill him.
In a story like this, there isn't a lot of dialogue, as you can imagine, so the words spoken are mostly what's going on—delivered in a running voiceover—in the mind of the killer. What's going on in his mind is the near emptiness sought in Zen meditation. I may have this wrong. The point of the analogy is that the mind of the killer is focused and methodical, and I felt I had much to learn from him. I also felt a kinship with his rigorous OCD attention to cleaning up after himself. In the tape in his head, he reminds himself often to feel nothing about anyone and give not one fuck about anything other than surviving an attack.
I also learned about the things you need to store neatly in multiple storage units spread across the country, including hundreds of packets containing passports, credit cards, and different currencies. Fassbender looks superbly fit, all thin and ripped, and I thought: You really must get a trainer for your lazy-assed self and do something about the ruinous way your body has grown to look.
The direction is brilliant, and the way the story is told in these short chapters of target-and-kill admirably offers information strictly on a need-to-know basis. How thrilling to see the core principle of narrative writing practiced here, the core principle of telling a story if you want to keep readers reading. Also, Fincher accomplishes the near-impossible feat of seducing you to the side of a hugely despicable person.
The murder of Tilda Swinton was satisfying for some sadistic reason I'm not going to delve into here. I was left curious to know more about what she had been eating in the posh restaurant where she had her last meal and last flight of scotch.
Almost Famous
Recently, we watched Almost Famous, directed by Cameron Crowe and made in 2000—it’s set in 1973. Richard hadn't seen the movie before, and I didn’t remember much of it.
Kate Hudson gives the standout performance as a groupie who sees herself as Holly Golightly, and she makes you think about the various kinds of usable girls in the past we found glamorous and deluded, girls we were and weren't, living free lives as girls in another age. You thought it was part of young sex to shake off the sting of being used, and you never shook it off.
The movie also stars Billy Crudup as her rock star lunk, and he's just about unrecognizable as a handsome emptiness, stamped out of cookie dough. Patrick Fugit, as a 15-year-old Crowe, arouses all the glorious excitement of beginning life as a counter culture journalist, a life we didn't think another experience could rival (and we were right), while around us we were told the things we looked up to had already passed their sell-by dates—the same things every crop of youngs are told by been-there-done-that older dudes.
Then we watched the final episode of this season's The Morning Show, and there was Crudup again, entirely transformed into Cory Ellison, a shark whose directional signals don't always lead to a bloody kill. He soars over the rest of the excellent cast. He's in the hallway, waiting to testify about trumped up charges of sexual misconduct, and he talks to Bradley, whom he’s in love with although she’s gay and who also loves him in the way love is a shark that has lost its directional signals. She leaves him in the hall, and he's so filled with emotion that clouds his eyes, he awkwardly tries to straighten a plaque that bonded to the wall. OMG, the girls this season just had to come out on top, and they massed together to take down fucking Paul Marks (no offense, Don Draper). Go, girls!
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"In my conscious sense of myself, I’m skating on thin ice all the time," and also "Now, I have entered the age of confidence that is separate from the age of success or of appreciation." Yes and. Both things true. Tracking this sense of precarity that accompanies my mid-age stability, step for step. Here's to feeling weird to ourselves, and knowing ourselves all the more for that!
Couldn’t agree more about that scene from The Morning Show... both Crudup stealing the show week after week, and the girls coming out on top for once! That third season is by far the best yet.