The Oddness of the Near Past

Few things are as perplexing as the recent past as it starts developing an odd patina, even the morning after an event. I've been finding that in my obsessive transferring of VHS tapes to digital, a project that I started in 2006 and am intent on completing by the end of this summer. I've not made accurate estimate of just how many hours that translates out to, but I'd say it's somewhere between 1,500 to 2,100 hours. How many of these I'll actually sit down and watch again is probably slim, but at least I can say that I have that option. The shot on the right represents the stash I transferred from Friday morning until tonight. I promise that I have enough of a life that I don't sit deligently monitoring the process and usually don't do that many in one weekend. But it's been dreary and rainy lately.

The photo below has been circulating a lot the past six and a half years as an eerie premonition. But does anyone recall the video above that aired as a TV ad for Jet Blue in June 2001? Needless to say it was shelved three months later.

I will have to post some Enron commercials I've come across as well.

Six Years

The sixth anniversary of 9/11 (so far today, and I hope it stays that way) has no greater significance than previous ones besides another year of administrative ineptitude in the White House and the cumulative impact of a continued ineffective response to the events of that day. Since there has been absolutely no progress since that day, it's a reminder that the opposite of progressives are conservatives but regressives.

My personal memories of that day are etched in the experience of standing in line at the Oakland Airport to take a group of donors to Oaxaca. The announcement of the FAA shutting down all flights came seconds before my section was announced. Watching the events in the airport bar on TV with other travelers made it less isolating until suddenly the airport cleared and I was one of the last passengers there, certain that there was no chance I'd be able to fly the next day but booking my ticket just in case. I had the misfortune of riding back to offsite parking with my suitcase of still perfectly clean clothes with an Airforce reservist from Fairfield who ranted about "We knew this was coming! We knew this was coming! I'm gonna go get 'em!"

I spent the night at the apartment of a guy I was dating at the time (neurotically depressed, unemployed and personalizing the events with "This is one more thing I'll have to deal with now!") With his bedroom window in the shadows of Twin Peaks, we heard helicopters hovering all night long, a phenomenon I'd never seen before or since in San Francisco and have never heard explained.

These memories have not enough distance for comfort and come back to me today as I prepare for an event in Marin and acknowledge my still resident anxiety of crossing the landmark Golden Gate Bridge, especially on a landmark day.

JUNK THIEF EXCLUSIVE: Bin Laden Signs 5-Year Contract with 'Just for Men'

Film at 11; new video now in heavy rotation on VH1.

Manhattan from the 29th Floor

It's been a while, quite a while, since I got excited about music or DVD releases on a fateful Tuesday. But this week yielded two that I've been waiting on for some time.

Panned and a box office dud, Factory Girl is reputed to be worth giving another chance, as a recent Times article explained. I'm saving it for a release from the torture of being trapped in a for conference a week and a half (aggggHHHH) starting Monday. Didn't I just do that in October? Yes, I did. Anyway, I hope it doesn't prove to be a complete bust.

The other much anticipated release was Suzanne Vega's Beauty and Crime. I've had more than one beau say, "If I have to hear that whining bitch one more time, I'm out of here." They've said worse about Mark Eitzel. Vega has never been on heavy rotation for an extended time in my Walkman, Discman or iPod, but she's provided an appropriate bookmark several times in my life. I vaguely liked her first two albums that yielded her two signature hits (to some people the only two songs she ever wrote). But it was her next two albums that stuck with me. And two songs -- "Institution Green" from 1990's Days of Open Hand and the title track from 1992's 99.9 Fahrenheit Degrees seemed to be the signature songs for the time I lived off and on in Manhattan and Brooklyn (1989 - 1994), a time when the city was falling apart but it also felt that there was true political will emerging from the nightmare of a dozen years of Reagan/Bush. The best and worst of times, I think it's been called. How often, as I passed vacant, desperate eyes, I wanted to blurt out that lyric "you...seem to me...like a man on the verge...of burning....99.9...Fahrenheit degrees..."

The third song of hers that served as a signature, though never as strongly as those two, was "Caramel" from 1996's Nine Objects of Desire that heralded my move to California. Appropriately it had a pretty and jazzy bossa nova veneer that belied something sinister lurking beneath. How fitting that it was used to promote the very smooth and sinister Closer.

Her 2001 Songs in Red and Gray was praised by some as a return to her folky roots. But it was a bit too musky, moldy and depressing even for me. Coming at the time of a break up (both hers and mine) and having the ill-fated timing of being released the Labor Day just before 9/11, it has rarely had repeated playing on my system. I gravitated to Bjork's cozy Vespertine, released the same week.

I appreciate Beauty and Crime on many levels. As Vega has said, she doesn't see Manhattan as just the polished, glistening wonderland of Giuliani, Bloomberg and Sex and the City. Some of that is because she was there before, but also because as a native she still sees more than the veneer. And the album exudes that on several levels and pulls from many points in her career. "The Pornographer's Dream" feels like a book end to "Caramel". "Edith Wharton's Figurines" is a piece of classical chamber pop that feels the lingering ghosts of an era even before Vega's day. And, there are plenty of 9/11 references. Some reviewers have blasted her for doing what's been done better before. I'd argue that she brings a bit more perspective and reflection that make the memories stronger, reminding us that the wound is not gaping but is still raw.

I appreciate that there are so many references to the past -- ours and Vega's own -- but unlike the girl in "Luka" she's now (as stated in "Manhattan Is a Woman") up on the 29th not second floor, looking down on Manhattan for perhaps a broader view. As usual, Vega is both jaded and vulnerable, weary but driven by a voracious appetite for all that the city has to offer.

I suspect I'll be listening to the disc for a few more weeks, but like most Vega releases, it won't be in heavy permanent rotation. Perhaps equal to that of Days of Open Hand.

And, yes, it sounds like I still live or want to live in Manhattan. We'll work on that in another post.

Let's Throw Baby from the Plane

Did Aunty Christ just get a job with Continental Airlines? Or did my Horror Summer Flick post gain the attention of the aviation industry? Well, I am only so bold as to resort to noise reducing headphones, but the news item about the talkative toddler being asked to leave the flight is amusing. Outrage? Naw, serves the little brat right. The flight attendant likely endured the horrors of post-9/11 travel years before that creature was even conceived. Now can I do the same thing if I get some 250+ pounder in the seat next to me when I fly again in a couple of weeks?

Is this Aunty Christ early in her career?

UPDATE: We just learned of the group CAPBOR, a passengers' rights group. I think one of their first causes should be to support the right of flight attendants to eject rowdy babies and toddlers or administer the use of duct tape to keep the noise down.

That Winter

(As many of you know, I've been in my intergenerational writing group, a primarily LGBT -- actually just plain old G -- though recently being about 20% straight. I've also just started a 9-week writing group with author/poet Louise Nayer. Both have been useful, and I've gotten back on the wagon of creating something other than the vlog/blog scratches and scribbles. To merge those two worlds, I've sharing the prose poem below that has received a decidedly mixed response. I'd appreciate feedback.)

The horrible dream never came true.

So you tell yourself that you never saw it – our entire neighborhood in flames, all the children trapped inside.

Tiny fingers reaching through broken glass and iron bars hot as a sizzling grill.

No water left on earth to fight the flames, only blood and Coca-cola sputtering from the corner hydrant.

Even the ghosts had abandoned us.

You told me that the world had become too big and young for you to put up a fight anymore. You preferred to live in a secret kingdom under a red toad stool. Everything was so easy to control down there away from the sun. I enjoyed drinking from tiny tea cups with you until I realized I could do the same on my own and not hear you reading your list of regrets. I still smell the fungus left from that winter we spent down there.

Do you still tell the story of dressing up like your dead brother to revive your mother’s imagination? Then she ran away with your brother and left you with her pearls to contemplate.

Some nights I see my ancestors pushing their rag carts through the streets of Vienna, dead men’s clothes picked off that layer that separated them from the bones. They could see glistening Aryan hair in the windows of the city’s grand homes, marble blue eyes staring out at them and believing the gas lamp glow was enough to warm the brown eyed baby with matted hair in the rag cart.

I almost see them tonight as I look out from this restaurant, distracted at times by the worrisome, hacking cough of the waitress, her hunched shoulders appearing to carry the meal she wishes she could serve. I sense fire and tiny hands reaching from her throat, wanting to place her palm on my forehead, wanting to quiet the dream.

Maybe it’s there -- two walls of fire merging, and the rains return.