Letter From New York Sept 18 2009

September 18, 2009

Or: as it seems to me…

September 11, 2001 came into the world as one of the most achingly beautiful days that nature ever gave the New York area. Into it flew death, destruction and the end of the world as we knew it – in smoke, dust, rending of steel and glass, terror and tears much of the fabric of the world was torn. It seemed that way then and still seems so when I review the world in silence, objectively. In THE GO BETWEEN, Pinter’s line was: the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The time before 9/11 is a foreign country, we did things differently there.

September 11, 2009 dawned as one of the dreariest days in a summer of dreary days; dark, rainy, funereal – a day befitting a somber anniversary. Water pelted the windows of my bedroom. On the radio, I listened to a woman re-live her 9/11 experience, resulting in me reliving mine. There had been a dread I felt as this anniversary approached; I did not think we would escape unscathed. I feared some terrible event happening, the weight of the possibility infused my actions, an extra burden to carry as I passed through life with a heightened sensitivity to negative possibility.

Thankfully, the day was busy, full of business, things to be done, distractions, meetings, scurrying from one end of Manhattan to another and then…it was time to go home to the cottage. As we all know now, nothing happened, no building fell, no one died, nothing…thank God.

However, a scant three days latter the NYPD conducted a raid in Queens, carting off trunk loads of evidence from an apartment there What the papers are buzzing about is that this group in Queens may be an Al Qaida cell, planning some event with hydrogen peroxide bombs.

Hydrogen peroxide? Isn’t that what Marilyn Monroe used to get that color of blonde she had? Isn’t it what we put on our cuts and scrapes? It’s also what the London bombers used in 2005 to wreck havoc to the public transport system and to kill dozens. I have learned hydrogen peroxide and Tang can be a fatal combination. Tang? A childhood drink given “stardust” by the Space Program is now an ingredient in an explosive cocktail easily transportable by backpack? The past is a foreign country, indeed.

I don’t know if the men being investigated are guilty of anything. It seems there were no arrests though I suspect every one of them is being followed everywhere while evidence is sifted to see if they, indeed, were doing something nefarious. Regardless, the story underscores the anxiety I felt in the run-up to the 9/11 Anniversary. If there are chops to this story, part of what is so disturbing is that this is a group of Afghani Al-Qaida, something not seen before and, perhaps, motivated by a desire for tribal revenge for familial deaths in Afghanistan by American forces – revenge seems to be required for the death of relatives and knows no geographical limits. Ah, another part of the tangled web we’ve woven in the years since 9/11.

Yet the world goes on. We all keep putting one foot in front of another and mind our daily business, dealing with the Great Recession, the demands of jobs and clients, needs of friends and lovers, the vagaries of the strange weather, all the things that make up the fabric of everyday life despite the background noise of potential terror groups and all the frightening things unleashed upon our world since that achingly beautiful day that changed the world forever – a day that was a tipping point if ever there was one.

So this is the new reality, the new country in which we are living and there will be more days in which a quiet dread will come upon us because we know absolutely there are those out there that hate us enough to kill us while at the same time we must find the courage to embrace life and find meaning in it as we accept catastrophe is a greater possibility that ever.

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Letter From New York 9/11/09

September 11, 2009

Or: as it seems to me…

Labor Day is the emotional if not literal end of summer. The season lingers until later in September but Labor Day… Labor Day is the acknowledged end. Labor Day, in recollection, was a languorous Holiday celebrated by adults while I did my best to mask the knot in my stomach at returning the next day to school. (Particularly painful was the holiday prior to my entering third grade; I was going to be subject to the infamous Sister Neva – a fate to be avoided. Alas, I could not and she proved as daunting as the legend.)

Labor Day weekend in my childhood was a time of barbeques, gatherings of family friends, adults sitting in lawn chairs with highballs and cigarettes while the scent of burgers wafted through the back yard air. It was a moment of indolence. If the phone rang it was generally a guest asking if there was some last minute barbeque component needed.

Flash forward to today. Indolence is on the backburner. Today all Labor Day means is that the velocity and volume of demands diminish. My phone rang with more business demands than social overtures. Business didn’t stop; it slowed. I think the last really languorous Labor Day happened sometime just as email was entrenching itself as part of the business motif. Now I am old enough to remember a time before email – yes, I know that makes me suspect in some circles but it’s true. Before email the world breathed a little easier. Now, with email, cell phones and PDA’s, we are trapped in the immediacy of NOW which does not recognize the boundaries of Holidays and personal time.

Labor Day rest is gone as are vacations. My friends no longer tell anyone they are on vacation. Emails are simply answered from PDA’s poolside. God forbid we tell anyone we have signed off for a moment – they might discover what we fear: they can survive without us. And we can survive without them.

It is anticipated – and we allow the anticipation – that we are always available, that everyone has the right to reach out to us and we will be there. At the ready. With the answer.

It is the world we have created and accepted and it is not going to go away. Yet there are hints people are attempting to deal with it better. Pre-Labor Day weekend I was on the phone with friends and found myself flattened against my desk chair in despair as I witnessed twenty new emails come in demanding my attention as the screen refreshed. My friend Meryl suggested some good coping mechanisms I am doing my best to adopt. I am working to not obsess on the computer and set it aside to do some real work as opposed to responding in Pavlovian fashion to every email popping up on the screen.

Added to the weight of electronic tethers, this year’s Labor Day Weekend came a scant four days before the anniversary of 9/11, the eighth such anniversary and for some reason, at least to me, it was arriving with a sense of discomfort. Mentions of it seem to bring me to the edge of tears for reasons I am not sure I can explain. Is it, I wonder, that I thought eight years ago, that eight years out there would have been some kind of rock solid resolution? I understand intellectually that is not a reasonable expectation. Emotionally, I want one. For God’s sake, World War II was over in about half this amount of time. Instead, we are still in Iraq and digging in in Afghanistan. In emotionally distancing ourselves from 9/11 we threw a self-indulgent economic party. Between the wars and self-indulgence we have nearly bankrupted ourselves.

At a dinner with friends we talked about the world that is emerging. Something new is arising from all of this and we are afraid of what is coming – everything has changed. Technology has altered our world as much as 9/11 and the Great Recession. Put them all together and you have a brand new world – not necessarily brave.

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Letter From New York

September 4, 2009

A tale of two towns…

Or – as it seems to me…

September 4, 2009

Much of America paused this past Saturday to watch or listen to some of, if not all, of the funeral service for Edward Moore Kennedy, aka Ted Kennedy, Senior Senator from Massachusetts, the last of the fabled Kennedy brothers and the last male of that Kennedy generation –a bridge to the Camelot years – in other words, someone who was, pretty much, a living legend. He was the only Kennedy brother to live deep into adulthood, the others dead young, this one dying, hopefully peacefully, of natural causes – the only one of the four brothers to do so – male siblings felled violently in war or by assassins.

His brother Joe died a war hero; his brother Jack was the assassinated President and Bobby the martyred politician of such fierce promise. Teddy was the one who seemed to be getting his hand caught in the cookie jar of life – at least when he was younger. He seemed a bit of a charming n’er do well, then forever marked by his handling of the Chappaquiddick accident that claimed the life of Mary Jo Kopechne. That incident almost cost him the authoritative voice the Kennedy name and the iconic weight of his siblings granted him. Later he emerged as a statesman, the lion of the American Senate who was able to get legislation passed, pulling foes together for a common good.

He was a large man, florid, his face marked by the excesses of his life, eloquent, determined, witty, and close to the emotional rawness that comes with loss. I only encountered him in person once, long ago, when he delivered a eulogy for a friend’s cousin. The cousin had been a wealthy man, gay, and an AIDS activist who succumbed to the disease in the years just before the cocktail granted life extension to thousands. I don’t recall the words Kennedy said; I do recall they were inspiring and full of meaning, providing comfort to the family. One came away with the feeling that a lifetime of grieving gave him a gateway into that particular experience.

Perhaps that is what we remember most about Ted Kennedy and why we forgave him his trespasses; he buried so many and so many of us grieved with him over his losses. He was so eloquent in eulogizing Bobby that his words regarding his brother will continue to echo as long as Bobby is remembered. We will remember Teddy, as we will all Kennedy brothers, for their words, well chosen and eloquent, delivered with an elegance that has always seemed more European than American.

The Kennedy family seemed quintessentially American while at the same time sophisticated in an almost un-American way – they seemed to lack the rough edges of most of us. Uncharacteristically, the American nation forgave, eventually, the Kennedys their elegance and even began to emulate it and embrace it. That was part of the Kennedy magic – they could and did win us over. Teddy probably should have lost the love of the public. The Kennedy charm would not have been enough if he had not risen above his flaws. Once he shook the expectation that somehow he should be President, he devoted himself to becoming a skilled Senator, learning the job and performing it well. Tempered by all the tragedy he endured, he not only empathized, he acted upon his empathy. Each Massachusetts family that suffered a loss during 9/11 received a phone call from Kennedy, with follow-ups as necessary. If he knew you and you suffered loss, he would reach out. His strength in life was formed by his ability to survive and endure loss. When others experienced it, he reached out across the sad gulf that is grief to comfort.

His flaws were many, his politics unapologetically liberal [truly the last of a breed], his character suspect early on and almost universally admired later. He endured the tragedies visited upon him by both fate and the flaws of his own character, seeking redemption in hard good work for what he saw as the public good. May he rest in peace, at last.

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A Tale of Two Towns August 25, 2009

August 25, 2009

Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature…

The cicadas are chirping in a dark, damp night – it has been damp all summer.  I am beginning to believe it will be damp the rest of my natural life.  This summer is headed towards the history books as the coolest and possibly wettest summer in recorded history.  I feel I am living in Oregon again. Weather is the subject of conversation everyone can safely go to rather than face the high emotions of health care reform – and it is as important a subject.   Whether you call it global warming or just natural climate change, something is happening that is different and in its difference is deeply unsettling.

Friday afternoon a riptide of a storm raced through Claverack while I was beginning my way home and by the time I got home roads were ravaged by downed trees and power lines.  Cut off from home, I was offered a port in the storm by my friend Alana.

Saturday morning unveiled the extent of damage – hundreds of trees broken and fallen, homes shattered, my tree sheltered cottage lucky with only one tree down; it had fallen against another tree saving the house.  The weather service called it sheer wind; locals claimed seeing mini-tornadoes tear through their yards and fields, ripping up the landscape and their trees in a sight none remembered before – this was weather as it had not been experienced in living memory.

And that is what is troubling us all – experiencing weather phenomena that no one recalls and no one recalls being told about before.  No one I know has a grandmother who told them a story of the time mini-tornadoes ripped through the town.  Though many who lived through this last Friday will tell their grandchildren…

What is happening with the weather seems new to us.  It may just be the natural cycle of the planet – or not.  It may be global warming – or not.  The debate will go on; what is irrefutable is that what is happening with the weather has little to do with the oral history passed down to us.  What’s going on today wasn’t talked about when I was a child sitting on the steps of my parent’s house and weather was discussed.  There was a sense then that weather had a pattern, a rhythm that had gone on, if not forever, for as long as anyone remembered.

Not so today.  What is happening with the weather has a decreasing amount to do with what we have known and more to do with assimilating what we are experiencing.  Today on NPR I was listening to a report about a glacier in Antarctica, four times the size of Scotland, which seems to be in the process of disappearing – something that seems to have really started about ten years ago.  We are assaulted by stories like this – glaciers disappearing here and there, ocean temperatures far above what they were.  No adult in my childhood told me these kinds of stories.  I don’t remember sitting on the front stoop of my parent’s home being told we were moving into a new weather world that broke all the rules of all the remembered generations.  And that’s because when I was a child the weather rules still reigned – what had happened seemed likely to happen again — yet now we are living in a world where what is happening is not what has happened before.

We are living in a frightening world.  There was an ad campaign not so many years ago – not your father’s Oldsmobile.  Well it’s not your father’s weather anymore either.   Oldsmobile is gone and so is the weather we used to know.  Might be Global Warming, might just be a natural cycle.  Doesn’t matter – the world of weather is changing and it is, like so much around us, a bit frightening.

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A Tale of Two Towns

August 16, 2009

A Tale of Two Towns

August 16, 2009

Woodstock bellowing in the tunnels of time…

This weekend marked the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the music fest that helped define a generation – peace, love, drugs, sex, rock and roll. All of that was present at Woodstock.

Thinking on it over this anniversary weekend, I am glad I wasn’t there. I hate crowds. In a field? No in-door plumbing? My sister will tell you that camping, to me, has always meant a Holiday Inn. Music? I’m tone deaf. It was not an event made for me, personally. Yet, it is one of the iconic moments of a generation. It was instantly romanticized and remains so today. It became a symbol for what baby boomers hoped they would be and, unfortunately, on many levels, not what we turned out to be.

Once the threat of service in Viet Nam disappeared, the boomers [I am one of them] turned their energies away from creating a better society towards the golden calf of consumerism. Many of my friends post-college started their professional careers in social services which they soon left for real estate, law school, corporate careers that paid well. Hippies became Yuppies. Instead of trading lines of poetry, a generation turned to trading tips on the newest gadgets.

Timothy Leary gave a speech in 1966 that included the catch phrase: turn on, tune in, drop out. By 1976, turning on, tuning in and dropping out was passé. Corporate careers were the next new big thing. A movement that promised a better mankind came and went in a decade. Boomers surrendered to their bread and circuses, gadgets, careers, bigger homes, flashier cars, accumulating experiences as some other group would collect postage stamps.

Lessons learned in psychedelic trances, in the muddy fields of Woodstock, in the solidarity of opposing war, coupled with the intoxicating possibility of changing society, all slipped away in the responsibilities of being “grown up.” And out of danger.

As boomers face the final acts of their lives, I am wondering if others of my generation are wondering if we let opportunities slip by – that our choices may not have been the best in the long run, that the wonderful youthful innocence with which we once faced the world was replaced by a veneer of worldly sophistication, the ennui of “been there, done that.”

I am asking these questions of myself as I face the third act of my life. My contemporaries are doing the same I suspect. It is interesting to watch the results of the current economic malaise upon the boomers I personally know. Many have been put out of good jobs and find themselves “on the beach” looking for the next gig. There is not one I know personally who is not asking themselves what they want to do next and there is not one who has not articulated to me a desire to do something now that will “make a difference – the feeling it is time, again, to do something to make a difference.” Admittedly this is non-scientific and I am extrapolating this to many in my generation, yet it is universal among the individuals with whom I have spoken.

I don’t know the entire motivation behind these impulses. Is it that we desire to make amends for profligate ways, that facing mortality there is a desire to go eventually into that good night with some more good deeds under our belts. Is it that we feel life has given us a chance to “do-over,” to actually do a bit of paying it forward? I do not know a boomer who is not asking hard questions of themselves and about their time on earth. Is it that we, as a generation, are asking ourselves if we did not allow ourselves to be seduced by the very culture we were repudiating? That once Johnson had given us “the Great Society” our obligations had ended?

Part is confrontation with economic reality, part is facing mortality, part is being reminded by anniversaries like Woodstock that there was another time and another consciousness in our lives and that perhaps we have failed to pay as good attention to that time and consciousness as we – perhaps – should have?

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Tale of Two Towns August 5, 2009

August 5, 2009

Doesn’t matter what town…

Not so long ago I wrote about the woman who was on the cleaning staff of my office building who was murdered. One of the elevator operators has been arrested for the crime. It was shocking and since then I have not been comfortable in the building. It is hard not to think about that act of violence; it hangs on the building, a heavy shroud of violent sadness I sense whenever I am there – which won’t be for much longer as I am moving offices shortly.

That particular blog elicited a large number of responses – many emails simply repeating the same two words: very disturbing. My beloved sister-in-law wrote me a long note. She “wonder(ed) how we can ever get back to a civilized society? One without such a dark side.” That line has tumbled around my brain ever since. I think it is common to believe things were better in the past, that we were better beings previously and that we have descended into a dark morass, darker than ever before but from which we can escape.

I don’t think man has ever inhabited that kind of Camelot.

The dichotomy in mankind that inspires and repulses at the same time is that we are so capable of goodness and we are so capable of darkness.

The 19th Century lithographers, Currier & Ives, are associated in today’s mind with a time that is frequently recalled as that kind of a Camelot – they captured all kinds of aspects of American life, including those we now associate with all the good things about Christmas. Yet as Currier & Ives were capturing those bucolic images of American life, we were sending cholera infected blankets to Native Americans as a way of thinning their numbers.

Cruelty to other members of the human race has been one of the things we humans have excelled at since the dawn of time. Get conquered in war and chances were during most periods of human history it was a death sentence – or at best you got sold off into slavery. Slavery – now that’s a fine institution that’s done a good deal for us; we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of American slavery and will continue to deal with it for a long time to come even though long strides have been made.

Everyday, everywhere human beings do terrible things to other human beings. Yet, despite that, there are things we are doing as individuals and as groups that show the other side of the two-sided human coin. Somewhere in the world today someone will risk their life to save another life as well as someone who take one. We live with this two faced aspect of man everyday when we walk the streets of any town, anywhere. Could be Hudson. Could be Claverack. Could be New York City. Walking the streets anyplace means we will be exposed to the possibility of evil and the possibility of goodness.

We’ve come a long way since the days of the human sacrifice of children to the god Moloch. I’ve been thinking about that the last couple of weeks as I am working on an initiative to help bring attention to the International Day of Peace celebrated on the 21st of September. Odyssey is working to get a million people to take a minute and think about, pray for or envision world peace – a world without nuclear arms. At least hundreds of thousands of people have participated in the past twenty-two years, probably millions. I don’t recall a time in history when such large groups of people have joined together to promote a concept that has been mostly alien to us – peace. It gives me hope. And it is hope that drives us towards goodness.

Put it in your calendar. On the 21st of September take a moment to think about, pray for, envision a world with peace breaking out everywhere. Help make it a million minutes for peace.

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A Tale of Two Towns, July 27, 2009

July 28, 2009

Letter From New York
July 26, 2009

A Tale of Two Towns

Anniversaries…

This past Saturday felt like an old-fashioned summer day; warm to the edge of hot, muggy to the edge of insufferable, sun showers – crowds swarming Warren Street, moving from shop to shop with the riverfront swelled by crowds looking to study the Halfe Maen [Half Moon], the half size replica of Henry Hudson’s vessel which was docked in Hudson as part of the 400th Anniversary Celebration of Captain Hudson’s historic voyage up the river that bears his name.

Standing on the waterfront, looking at the half sized Half Moon I thought: at full size I might have trusted it to carry me up and down the river but across the Atlantic? No. I prefer something more the size of the Queen Mary II for that voyage. Looking at the wooden craft, I imagined 400 years ago. It must have taken tremendous courage – or foolhardiness – to set sail from the old world for the new. The Half Moon may have been the height of maritime technology at the time but it’s not very spectacular four centuries later when we can compare it to the Queen Mary II – the Half Moon would probably easily into one of QM II’s holds.

While I was attempting to imagine crossing an ocean in a ship twice the size of the craft I was staring at, I found myself thinking of another anniversary that occurred last week – the 40th anniversary of man’s landing on the moon. Apollo 11 was the height of space technology at the time and yet the further we get from that moment when Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” we now know that their craft was the space equivalent of the Half Moon, best available but crude at best.

A few months ago I read somewhere that the Apollo 11 mission was not expected to succeed. In fact, speechwriters worked hard at crafting words for President Nixon so that he could announce their deaths to the world should the mission, as expected, fail. The best-case scenario seemed to be that Apollo 11 would probably have to abort and return to earth without successfully landing on the moon.

However, the Eagle did land.

Standing on the riverfront while appraising the Half Moon, I found tears coming to my eyes as I thought of the courage of Hudson and his men willing to toss themselves out onto the cold Atlantic in a voyage of exploration. The feeling was intensified when I thought of the men of the Apollo 11 mission: Collins, Armstrong, Aldrin, men who chose to risk their lives to learn more about the unknown, to stretch man’s reach to the moon if not yet to the stars, to begin the long hard journey out into space – “the final frontier,” to toss themselves out in the coldness of space in a voyage of exploration.

The only autograph I have ever asked for was from Buzz Aldrin, one of the Apollo 11 three. At the request of my friend Howard Bloom, I orchestrated a meeting for him at History Channel. As he was about to get into the car to head for the airport, I couldn’t resist and it sits framed in a place of pride in my home office. I want to be reminded of that kind of courage as often as possible.

Life often seems daunting and impossible, occasionally causing even the most stalwart of souls to edge on despair. It is good when edging on those moments to think of those who risked their lives to stretch the horizon of the world inhabited by other human beings.

Thankfully, Nixon did not have to give that speech and the first three men to the moon are still alive and were able to celebrate their anniversary. Hopefully, by the 50th anniversary of their feat we will have returned to the moon and start the long march to the stars – because it is the “final frontier” and the human race seems to do best when it stretches its imagination and efforts to know the unknown, to find the wonder of being human.

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A Tale of Two Towns: July 19, 2009

July 19, 2009

A Tale of Two Towns

Death comes as the end…

My mother was a great fan of Agatha Christie; I believe she read everything Ms. Christie wrote as Agatha Christie; if memory serves me correctly Christie also wrote books under the name of Mary Westmacott. I don’t recall those having much space on our bookshelves.

Christie, if it was possible, made murder elegant – people rarely died violently, often of poisons, and almost every one of her characters were ladies and gentlemen – or those who served them.

Unfortunately, murder is rarely so neat and never elegant. Christie type deaths don’t happen in real life – something deeply clear to me this past week. A week ago Wednesday a general notice went out to everyone in my office building not to come in – there was a “police action” happening in the building. In this post 9/11 world that has come to have terrifying connotations with immediate thoughts of bombs.

What actually happened was that one of the cleaning people, Eridania Rodriguez, had gone missing the night before and could not be found. The surveillance cameras caught her arriving; they could not find her leaving. For four days the police searched the building until the following Saturday, Eridania’s body was found in an air conditioning duct that was scheduled to be sealed off. Her hands and feet were bound in tape, a gold crucifix was draped over the tape that covered her face and which had been the instrument of her death; she had been asphyxiated.

Nothing in her life would indicate that she could be a candidate to come to a gruesome end. Eridania [Iris] Rodriguez was a single mother of three children, a hard worker, who lived in the northern tip of Manhattan. People who knew her characterized her as a good person, a good mother, and a caring individual. Not a person who deserved to be gruesomely murdered. She came from the Dominican Republic in the early 1980’s looking for a better life with her parents and siblings. She was working the American immigrant dream. And it ended in an American nightmare.

In looking at the pictures of her that have appeared in the paper, I am sure we had passed each other in the hallways and in the elevators. It is not unusual for me to know the cleaning staff of any building in which I am working; I frequently am still working while they are working. There is almost no degree of separation between this poor woman and me. In addition, her brother is a world-class body builder, Victor Martinez. He’s competing in the Mr. Olympia competition [the one that made Arnold famous] and is developing a reality series about his efforts with a producer friend of mine.

Not only is it profoundly disturbing that this poor woman has been murdered working in my office building, it is also, and perhaps even more so, haunting that no one knows who murdered her. The police believe it is someone else who works in the building; there is a suspect but not enough evidence to arrest. Walking the hallways with me is very likely someone who has committed murder. It leaves me – disturbed, deeply. I do not feel at ease there anymore. I am concerned for my colleagues who work nights and wonder what provisions are being taken to keep them safe.

Eridania’s murder reminds me that life can be capricious and unjust; unexpectedly ended, reminding me to do my best to leave nothing unsaid that needs to be said, to not forget to say I love you to someone, to hope that I forgive rather than resent, to admire the beauty of a moment.

DEATH COMES AS THE END was the title of one of Ms. Christie’s novels and death is the end, at least this side of paradise. The cruel death of this woman reminds me of the fragility of life and the random cruelty that walks the planet and the gruesome cruelty with which we often deal with one another, one human to another.
This just in:
A 25-year-old male elevator operator in the building was arrested for Eridania’s murder when DNA tests of skin under her fingernails matched his.

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Tale of Two Towns: Living the Great Recession, July 10, 2009

July 11, 2009

A Tale of Two Towns
Living in The Great Recession

July 10, 2009

For those who follow closely, you will have noticed there was no missive last week; it was the 4th of July weekend, there were masses of papers to be sorted through for work and there just wasn’t time for everything. It was a quiet 4th; the holiday night was spent with a friend at Tannery Pond, listening to exquisite chamber music where the fireworks were aural rather than visual. Particularly wonderful were several Beethoven from the early 19th Century. Following, at home, I continued the path of solitary thinking that has been part of my spring and summer – assessing life – mine and the world in which I find myself living.

It is an interesting time, the one in which we are living. The economic malaise has now become an ongoing reality of our lives; it is more a chronic illness than a transitory one. As I write this it is a weeknight and I am at the cottage – a rare thing now for weekdays – but our train crowd gave a “furlough” party for our friend Ty West who works on a PBS Production. Donations and corporate support are at a nadir so it has become incumbent on their survival to furlough employees and it is Ty’s time. He is, being the man he is, taking the difficulty with good grace and understanding. I suspect it is not easy for him; it would not be for me.

His story is one of many that I know; pullbacks are everywhere. The friends who went down with the LPD bankruptcy are all still “on the beach” looking for the next thing, which is elusive. It underscores the grace under which I have been living – a fact that plays into the contemplative state in which I have been living since that shutdown.

On the party train tonight one of the “regular” passengers who joined our celebration was a young stock analyst from one of the boutique firms that inhabit “Wall Street.” As I tended bar [my task on train parties (for each one I must come up with a theme drink, tonight’s was the “Furlough Tini” a mixture of vodka, lemonade, crème de Framboise and crème de cassis, producing a concoction that had shades of pink [pink slip] but wasn’t quite, hence: furlough – an unpaid absence from a job with the opportunity to return and a clear indication of a sad economic reality], this young man opined that the market was headed lower and that at the end of the day it would all be better in some future we aspire to. It made for poignant conversation regarding depleted portfolios, delayed retirements and returns to work from retirement by men such as his father.

We are living in a poignant time. On many levels, individuals live as they always have though comprises are everywhere. Retirees return to the work place, home buying is deferred, roommates are taken in, purchases and vacations deferred or downsized, friendships matter more and values are reevaluated. Friendships feel more potent; what are we without people, people who love us.

In this current economic crisis, the most profound since the Great Depression, we are all in trouble. Yet our trouble is still quite modest compared with much of the world – the world in which 60 to 70 % of its population must walk three hours to find fresh water. It does put it all in perspective, doesn’t it? When I got off the train tonight I left behind three sinks full of ice, unused, melting into oblivion and completely normal for the western world in which we live. It was the young stock analyst who pointed out to me that the majority of the world is desperate for what we take for granted – still.

What gnaws at many of us is that there may soon come a day when we can’t take for granted the ice we’ve paid for melting casually in any kind of sink… Everyone I know senses some new day ahead of us. While unsure what that day may be, more people seem anxious than eager while also suspecting it might just be a time with sounder values.

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A Tale of Two Towns: June 26, 2009

June 26, 2009

Contemplating it all…

A long time ago in that faraway country that was my youth, I wrote papers for school in long hand and then typed the final product on a black Royal portable that had been around our home since long before I was born. Were I now my age when that portable Royal was young, I would be sitting in front of it with a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray with a martini to accompany them while I typed with the hard, tough strokes of a manual typewriter, working to make sense of the world in which I was living — rather like a Walter Winchell [anyone remember him?] or a Hemingway or Fitzgerald, were I to aim very high.

It has been that kind of week — the kind in which the world needs figuring out. Half way across the world, protests continue to sputter in Iran over the election as the Twitter posts also sputter. Once separated by nanoseconds, minutes if not hours now separate the Iranian posts. What remains to be seen is the lasting changes that will come from this. And there will be lasting changes – Iran, as much as the Mullahs may pretend, will never be the same.

There was a piece of video I watched last weekend, uncorroborated when I saw it though later it was, of a young woman shot and dying on the streets of Tehran. It was shocking, horrible, real: it was the ultimate price people pay for protest. Neda was her name, a 26-year-old graduate student who wanted to lead tours; she went out to protest the elections and was killed with a bullet fired, probably, by the pro-government paramilitary Basiji. The video has become a rallying image around the world for the Iranian Protest Movement. It will be an image that will live on and haunt the Iranian government. Beautiful, full of life and now gone, her power to galvanize will remain.

As “#Iranelection” is trending downward on Twitter, soaring upwards in the world of internet chatter are tweets about Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, two icons who died yesterday and who are being remembered by the legions who idolized them. Both of them will be remembered for their great influence on pop culture in their time and for the feeling that something went wrong for both of them, with Michael Jackson the winner in that dubious category. From beloved superstar to very, very weird dude it was a long hard bumpy ride down the superstar slope. Still beloved by many, he had become to many others a parody. Dogged by rumors of pedophilia, drug abuse, and just plain over the top weird behavior, Michael Jackson will remain a symbol of all that can go wrong with a superstar life and will be up there with icons like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland – talent that got very lost along the way.

Farrah was the epitome of beauty for every straight boy when I was much younger and the poster of her in that red bathing suit was ubiquitous; you couldn’t ignore it if you tried. That’s what she’ll be remembered for – that and some later life behavior that seemed to indicate drug troubles. What probably won’t be remembered is the depth of her performance in THE BURNING BED or the haunting portrayal of heiress Barbara Hutton in the mini-series POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL.

So it’s come to this: I think the ’70’s and ’80’s are now officially done – they have just moved into that past that is that foreign country. The iconic links we had to them, pop culture wise, are gone and we are left with individual memories, adrift now in our remembrances. Pop Culture is only part of the essence of those times.

More important than Farrah or Michael were events like the fall of Saigon and the iconic photo of the helicopter retreat from the U.S. Embassy and the crash of the Challenger. Pop Culture seems to define us while somehow failing to be the essential substance of a time.

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