one thing today

  Art is an intellectual as well as an emotional language. The most important thing in any picture is that it has something to say.   Paul Outerbridge

  Made dinner for eight last night - all fellow channel thirteeners, all OK safe&sound after not seeing each other for three years.  A good seven hour party.  We’re giving encroaching old age (poetic license) a good name.   Tom and Maureen sang Cole Porter after the meal and more vino and laughter ensued. They’re my peeps, one of them since my 20s. Spent more time with them than my family. They are the ones I chose and they chose me and I love to hold them near still now.

  The one thing I really regret missing recently is Justin Pecks new dance at Lincoln Center. He's 28 and the most esteemed ballet  director in the country. He did the choreography for the new West Side Story.   One review noted - What we are witnessing is a deep internal shift in the way these dancers think about their own bodies. There seems to be no external eye, no objectifying watcher; there is only them, dancing from the inside. They just go.  Its made me think how bold brave the abstract expressionists were - painting their insides -  braving ridicule and maybe deemed silly and unimportant to the world. They showed us. Way to go.

I’ve been kind of obsessed with enjoying a recent Paul Simon and friends concert … and an Elton John one from round 2000.   He is such a showman - jumping all over his piano and making moves only a more svelte character should attempt - but they are perfect on him … making the hordes dance with joy and sing full out.   Paul does the same thing in his more modest way.   And it makes me wonder what that does to them - to have the power to make thousands of people remember   back in their lives … decades - where they were and who they were with and what they desired back then and worried about.   It must be such a rare thing - to have that much power over so many people hungry for shared fun.    

  Walking around the city - it's hard to figure out how some of the graffiti gets made.  Maybe some long limbed, intrepid extraterrestrials work in the dead of night making urban art that couldn't be created by mere homospaiens.  And when I was a good little Roman Catholic altar boying, speaking in Latin and giving up chocolate milk for Lent - we got a smushed thumb print on Ash Wednesday - not a fat, black cross.  The people on the street today looked like they were in some Stephen King cult classic who shared unimaginable secrets and desires to eat me and Alisha, the tasty looking petite waitress rather than the cheeseburger deluxe I was devouring . 

As I’ve said before - when it rains it floods. Especially lately. David Crosby, Raquel Welch, Stella Stevens, the rock star drummer of the week, kid tv actors far too young. And it moves in closer.   Bob Pook and Richard Belzer.  When I was a fledging free lancer at Saturday Nite - Pook made the bumper graphics and things with lots of pop. He also made me laugh and was very cool and kind to me unlike many others there.   Belzer exuded  droll,  warmed up the audience and sold the cast coke. Jane Curtin was the only one who passed.   She was like the sensible older sis librarian. Whenever I read an an obit, I pay most attention to the age.   Gulp.   Far too close for solace at this point in the game.   The trend now is to not include the cause.   No matter anyhow anyway. Gone is long gone gone.

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.   — Khalil Gibran Beauty is in the heart of the beholder . — H. G. Wells Beauty lies not in a flawless complexion but in the stories that are told by each transitioning line on a face.  Beauty is not something you buy; instead, beauty is what lies within. If people were more concerned with how they looked on the inside than on the outside, the world would be a nicer place to exist.  

Hoagy Carmichael. Stardust.   OMG.  And now the purple dusk of twilight time Steals across the meadows of my heart High up in the sky the little stars climb Always reminding me that we're apart You wander down the lane and far away Leaving me a song that will not die Love is now the stardust of yesterday The music of the years gone by Sometimes I wonder how I spend The lonely night Dreaming of a song The melody haunts my reverie And I am once again with you When our love was new And each kiss an inspiration But that was long ago And now my consolation Is in the stardust of a song Besides the garden wall When stars are bright You are in my arms The nightingale tells his fairytale A paradise where roses grew Though I dream in vain In my heart, it will remain My stardust melody The memory of love's refrain

Against our wishes, my dad used to walk around his neighborhood and tell the kids at the bus stop he hoped they did their homework.   Yeah, try that now and say goodbye to your neck.   But … if you’re ever feeling blueish - get out early, grab some Starbucks and watch the shortest shorties head to school with their sleep deprived parents thinking about their 10:30 pitch. Lots of harried dads here carrying their kids backpacks which are often as big as their charge. They are the living, lovely, natural, cosmic continuity - these future hedge funders, addicts, philanthropists, bowlers, collagists, scammers, think tank presidents, bus drivers, opera singers, bakers, hostage negotiators - all of them now, so sweet and clean open fragile fresh - walking to learning and making sure those flattening blues we got blow off far away.  

  Street game can always be refined.   But I did OK today. I walked thru my favorite pocket park.    A new dad is taking pictures of his wife and tiny as a teacup baby. How old is she (she wears a band with a flower on on her head) Two weeks he says. I think about asking them if they want me to take a photo of the three of them.   And then I think not.   They are so new to their new roll and she is so small she quivers with fresh life.   I continue down the street and hear a guy say to his buddy … whenever I fuck my girlfriend raw, I know it’s very im portant to remember that … and I judge right. I can’t slow up to enough hear him finish his point without getting caught. Darn. Two blocks north, I run into cop/lawyer Joe from massage school a long, long time ago. I tell him I was just thinking of him two minutes before (which, unbelievably enough, was true). But I don’t relay I couldn’t remember if his name was Bill or Ed or Tom (he said to me ... tell her Joe says hello ) Street game

  Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself  inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are. -Paul Strand

  I couldn’t sleep last night and watched several episodes of NYPD Blue .   I just finished a great memoir of David Milch, one of the series creators. After Tony Soprano, I think Andy Sipowicz is my favorite TV character.  H is scenes with his young son Theo were always very moving.   T he actor who played him, Austin Majors, just died.   He was 27. He never lost his sweet smile.  

Gold is a lie agreed upon. There is no intrinsic value in gold. It's only the energy it releases in the people who believe it in. We have to find the lie to agree upon that allows us to live together righteously.

 

8th ave this afternoon … gay boys with their pants so tight out in the sunny light … German tourists with good time faces chug drafts at sidewalk tables … pet shop window puppies acting all cute trying to get adopted …   a bulky, ignored 14 year old kid says to a pretty cop … I’ve never seen a cop look like you  … moms stroll with beauty contestant bambinos ... a homeless guy with joyful game shows it off ...  and that’s just in one block ... and still ... people have said to me ...   I don’t know how can you live here . 

Went to see a movie whose theme is  a relationship born in deception always leads to more .   For decades now, I’ve thought almost every movie I’ve seen has been too long.   And carefree, romping snowball fighting couple montages should be banned from this day forward.  And now, as eternal night creeps closer and closer and faster and faster, I fail to see more and more why romance is the be all and end all of it all. It’s the silly thing that twists us up the most. But, I guess it's fun except when it isn't.

  I am a daily viewer of white underbelly on Youtube - mostly thirty minute, sometimes as much as hourlong interviews mostly with people on skid row in LA. Today is happy, sage Michael, born and bred there.   He tells us ...  the early worm catches the bird …  re: drugs … yes, I have battled during my weary walk  when they gave Tarzan a shirt, he ran right back to the jungle  I can’t stay at my relatives house, I hear everyone breathing in their beds and I can’t sleep  once I understand what your flavor is I know how much to offer  the most important thing,  - be humble, listen, hear the stories, don’t tell them    And party hard but wake up the next morning.  

  RANDOM NOTES:  Celeb sightings  Rhea Perlman and daughter (apple doesn't fall far) Claire Danes (73% sure - sunglasses) ---------------------------------------------- Someone on Youtube left a comment re: Joni’s song Blue I’m only two years old and this is my favorite song.   ----------------------------------------------- It’s a good thing babies are so impossibly cute and beautiful because they’re also annoyingly needy and cry way too much.   Cheers!

  Sweet Sam is a 22 year old brand new Upper West sider who works at a gym and vols at Gods Love.   He has the most beautiful eyes.   P ale blue and delicate light gray strands. An acting teacher once told his student that his motivation to make his fellow scene mate smile was to see her gorgeous teeth.   Like that. I asked Sam a lot of questions so we could make eye contact. Someone at our table said … you know they announced today we don't have to wear our masks anymore. We took them off. My new pal suffers from a raging case of acne.  

Just finished watching Sounder for maybe the tenth time or more. I readied myself for the famous scene when Dad stumbles home after he went missing and was imprisoned for most of the film. First the dog notices him far off, then his wife, then the kids. She runs   across the field and onto the dirt road: racing, aching, trembling, coiled, making heart wrenching small noises, insanely tense. I think it's the most outstanding movie embrace of all time. It runs thru my body every time and yes, again, tears. 

I think we think our dreams are as fascinating to others as they are to us.  They are  not. So I promise - once a year only.   I am in my prime and am working at the tv station and I get a request to sing with Barbra Streisand and some unknown tiny Polynesian singer named Tiki.   I go to a fancy recording studio with Marilyn, the talent coordinator we have at work.   I keep saying, why - about me being there.   She tells me they think Tiki and I have quirky voices and Babs is in the mood to do a quirky album.   But I don’t sing I say. La Strei bursts into the studio points at me and says I've met you before, my little pretty and I say, you were concerned about buying the right swimming pool liner. Marilyn hands me a list of names and phone numbers of mostly top shelf PR people and one state senator, and says, after each buy   - call these people and talk it up. I say you mean I should say … hello, we just laid down a wild version of People and its gonna blow peoples mind.   Sh

  just my luck ... just when I'm about to hop a train north to visit a couple of my peeps upstate ... I read in the Times that we are in for a "generational Artcic outbreak" ...  finally they name something new ... very Soylent Greeny .... so I shall add a layer and be on my way ... other than that, the big news is its Thursday and a year ago it was 2/2/22.