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.