They Don't Make These

Nostalgia is a cheap whore. It's always available. A low cost alternative to living in the here and now.

I've lived my life in this city and I'm not leaving anytime soon. New York City wears people out. The noise, the dirt, the bugs, the quadrupled rent increase, the broken heart instead of the Broadway bright light. But most folks I meet aren't actually from around these here parts. They've all come here with a purpose and then been sabotaged by the vagaries of urban reality, amazed by how little they seem to matter.

There's lots I miss. The bad old Times Square, The Pan Am sign, graffiti, subway tokens and chicken pot pie from McBells, my favorite Irish pub. But systems change, businesses close, buildings are torn down and what the hell are you going to do about it?

Some of us blessed or cursed with the collecting gene take comfort in the accumulation of objects that connect us to our past. We keep it small. You won't see me on the Bowery protesting the demise of CBGB's, but when they come for my 9 button, cream-colored AT+T phone from the 70's, that I still use and that has a ring loud enough to hear coming up in the elevator, they'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. And by the way, I am writing this with a No. 2 pencil and then transferring my handwritten notes to the computer, if you must know.

These are the things you can control and apparently it runs in the family. My father spent his adult life writing exclusively with a Flair felt-tip marker pen, with brown ink, until that specific type was discontinued. Over the years, when I'd happen to pass an old stationary store, i'd check to see if they had any leftovers in stock, to no avail. But one day, after years of search, I found my brown whale, in a junky old store on Avenue A and 3rd Street I'd passed many times, somehow without thinking to ask. There they were. I recognized the contoured barrel grip instantly, which gives them an almost sensual plumpness in the center. The store owner scrounged around and came up short of two dozen. I asked if he could get more and he told me, with a trace of wistfulness and surprise at my interest, "They don't make these," which of course, I already knew.

When I gave them to my father as a birthday gift, he was moved beyond words. "Where did you find these?" he asked me, repeatedly. Tears welled up in his eyes. It was almost painful to see how connected he was to this slender symbol. To know that if he conserved well and wasted no ink, he'd most likely have enough brown pens to last the rest of his life. I felt a bit like an enabler, like I was encouraging some morbid and destructive pursuit. This is a man invested in detachment, disdainful of friendships, hard to know and prone to the spouting of comforting bromides, crying over a box of pens.

Spend any length of time in this city and you will learn that nostalgia is useless, the city has no patience for your memories. Tar will cover cobblestone, Disney will replace porn. In the meantime, support your local red sauce joint. Buy a used book from the dollar bin.

I think of my daughter hanging from the monkey bars in Tompkins Square Park, holding on as long as she can, her knuckles whitening in the cold November afternoon. At a certain point, she's going to have to let go.
                                                                                                                                                                

Flawed Perfection

Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" may not be the best album ever made, but it's my favorite, made all the more intriguing by it's unreliable narrator. It's like Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" over a seductive groove.

It's a "barbaric yawp" of a song cycle, full of anger, pain, bitterness, paranoia, crippling regret and pledges of love spoken too late. There was nothing like it when it was released in 1978 and no one in the increasingly sanitized, auto-tuned world of R & B would have the balls to make it now.

The painful dissolution of Gaye's marriage to Anna Gordy (sister of legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy) is the albums obsessive subject. The profits from the record were her reward for enduring his wrath. The album didn't sell much and confused fans of Marvin's trilogy of masterpieces that preceded it: "What's Goin' On", "Let's Get it On", and "I Want You", a winning streak that changed rhythm and blues music forever. Although the album bubbles along in his signature slinky way, his fans didn't know what to make of it when out came lines like "If you really loved me with all of your heart, you wouldn't take a million dollars to part", sung in an almost anesthetized monotone.

But this record wasn't for them. It wasn't for anybody. In fact, it sounds like music that should never have been listened to, so vulnerable and confessional, like reading a teen-age girls heartbroken diary. What sets "Here, My Dear" apart from the other sensitive 70's singer/songwriters of the era is Gaye's willingness (perhaps inadvertant) to expose his demons, to allow himself to look bad. Does the man who wrote the lines "What I can't understand is if you love me how could you turn me in to the police", really seem like he's ready for a stable, trusting relationship? Could you imagine Jackson Browne writing those lines?

But it's not just the lyrics that set the album apart. In "Anna's Song", the record's definitive track, Gaye begins singing in a low mumble, sounding deadened, defeated. He starts to sing her name, once, twice and on the third time the music stops and he delivers the note. I have listened to this note, the second syllable of her name, perhaps more than any in recorded history and it still has a profound impact. His voice is so wracked with pain and anger that it's almost unlistenable, yet, as always, perfectly in tune. That one thrilling, dramatic note that he seems to hold for an eternity, foreshadows for me, the tragic descent into drugs and deep paranoia that was to come. I hear that note and it sounds to me like someone trying desperately to hang on to his life, to his gift and to his sanity. It's not even about Anna anymore. It's about holding on. And you can hear it in that moment. Holding on was something he was no longer able to do.

The Next Bob Dylan is...

The next Bob Dylan is not a folk singer. You're not going to hear those reassuring strummy G and C chords played on an acoustic guitar. There will be no harmonica and you might even have a hard time understanding the lyrics at first. Critics have waited for 40 years to elect a successor and along the way have anointed such disparate talents as Billy Bragg, John Prine, Willy Nile and more recently Conor Oberst as the saviours of the message.

And speaking of The Message: "Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge". Or how about "Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me". Are you getting close? The next Bob Dylan is...Hip-Hop! And you missed it! Prowling around the alleys of Greenwich Village looking for some scruffy Literature major was a waste of time, professor. Perhaps it's time to trade in that corduroy jacket with the scholarly leather elbow patches for a pair of Adidas.

Grandmaster Flash, KRS One, Public Enemy, NAS, Kanye West, Eminem. Hip-hop artists have been turning out socially conscious, politically astute, radical and revolutionary work for the past 25 years, but because it has a beat, it has largely eluded the cultural elite. Hip-hop is the driving force in music today and is the replacement beat of this generation in the same way that rock n roll usurped swing in the 50's. Hip-hop is the most articulate, incendiary, socially relevant and yes, literary voice in music. There are no rock acts that take such delight in wordplay as Kanye West or Lupe Fiasco. Just as Dylan did in his prime, these artists bowl you over with their articulate rage, their scalding sense of humor and their apocalyptic visions.

So in the words of Biggie Smalls: "And if you don't know, now you know".

First Person

At college, I was taught to remove the first person from my writing and stick to the third. First person was tawdry somehow. Cheap and easy and adolescent. I bought into this hard and wrote many stories about she and he.

But now, for the sake of putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keys, one must, screw that, I'm going to abandon that concept. I've been avoiding my own voice for so long now, that I really have forgotten what I sound like.

I know I will re-read this shortly and feel an illicit thrill that I managed to convey even this small amount of information coherently. So this is about finding my voice. How horrible does that sound? Like some super-positive Oprah spoon-fed pablum.

Then let's just say this is about writing and not about editing. This is about finishing.