“The absurdity is glaring”: Summers End with the Clash, 2023, #TheClashMovie #EastVillage #EastVillageNYC #CommunityGarden #EastVillageCommunityGarden #PublicSpace
That was a this is your life kind of a week or two.
Saturday, mom and I found ourselves chatting about friends and lives, those who are here, those who are leaving, and what happens in between, her roommate departing, mom’s friends mostly in homes now, mom remaining, here but not here.
Later, meeting Craig and Doug. I remember meeting or should I say encountering Doug in the fall of 1980 in my first year at Greenhill High. He was School chewing out Coach Semedie, our gym teacher later fired for snacking a kid like one of us, during recess. It was my first year in an integrated classroom after three years in schools for "special kids". I was a tad reserved feeling unsure. Doug was cocksteady, making everyone laugh, speaking truth to power. We always saw each other. After Mom moved out, Dad let us to our own devices. Doug left off color phone messages for my dad to hear in Dallas. My friends became my surrogate family, spending weekends together, stoned, smoking clove cigarettes, watching the Shining over and over again, terrified and giggling about it all. The absurdity was glaring. We always laughed. During Tuffys wedding we practically peed in our pants during the toasts, waiting to hit the all you can eat buffet till after the many speeches.Doug called after Treh shuffled off. None of us knew what happened, more in awe that we’d known him and that that was over, forever, or maybe not. The conversation continued, one story after another, most of us still trying to reconcile what happened with what was becoming.
Tim Murphy recalled a lost friend in Speech Teach, his new novel. Borrowing from EM Foster, reading like Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami, @timmurphynycwriter reminds us of the feelings, of the need to figure out what happenned, what became of who we were, and what we’ve become over the years. Friendship is a mystery. We are all grappling with the remains of the ties between us all.
Dad's been gone nine years now. And I see mom weekly.
Heres to still having a few friends, we toast on Saturday morning over brunch, her best friends moving into assisted living, while she stays on her own, ever independent.
Sunday, would be friends all day, in Prospect Park with Andrew and Virginia talking about Camus and Shoppenhauer, meditating on what came of it all, the week of actions at climate week, our friends who were with us all along the way.
“Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love,” wrote Camus in The Rebel, Andrew’s sage, these days, probably my favorite philosopher. “Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.”
Yet, the reality we live, the messy, complicated storylines are not so simple to read.
“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy,” says Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. “And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring.” God knows, we see that today, the devouring and neglect, the consumption, the repetition of past trials, the absurdity.
Biking across the Manhattan Bridge, I thought about Camus and the stranger, greeting Simone in Paris streets, offering her an ear when she was down, ever reminding us as seasons change, that our lives have an innate power:
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
I wondered what these two would think of our New York, home to the richest and the poorest, seemingly living on top of each other, everyone else scrambling and hustling, ebikes honking, scooting past.
At Earth Church, on Ave C, Billy talks about storms and floods. Would it gave been different if the trees had been in east river park to exorb water, we wonder, reflecting on the storm the week before. Trees are the opposite of cops, sings the choir, be friends with the animals with the butterglies, beautiful earth.
Ray and I hang out at Village Works and then read poems before showing our movie, The Clash, chatting about the fights for Elizabeth Street and Childrens Magical Gardens with JK, Back from Italy, regaling us with stories of running from volcanos in Stromboli. JK was full of poems, regaling us with her tale of the Holographic Rag:
Holographic Rag
God and the Devil went to sea
On the ship “From Here to Eternity”
They cruised upon the quantum foam,
And ventured many miles from home.
They left the harbor with plenty of clearance
But soon ran into some interference -
It wasn’t pirates, it wasn’t the weather,
You could have knocked them over with a feather.
They’d hit a terrible spacetime storm,
‘Twas gravity waves of the oddest form.
The vessel was sinking into the ocean
With a mysterious enfolding motion.
They clung to the mast – like barnacles,
And tossed overboard their personal articles
Till all there was left were subatomic particles
That turned to waves and began to rise
And just at the moment they capsized
God said “Brother, go down below!”
Devil said “God, but don’t you know -
If you should send me down to Hell
My numbers will swell and swell and swell;
So thoroughly entangled are we
That ‘twill happen to you what happens to me.”
God turned to the Devil and said, “My brother,
If I’m your father, are you my mother?”
The Devil said, “Partner, close your eyes.
I think it’s time to synthesize.
It’s not about good, nor evil, my friend,
It's all consciousness, from beginning to end.
Let’s forsake our isolating duality
And sail this ocean of spirituality.
So they slipped into the plasma stream
And shook themselves from this awful dream.
And remember ere the setting sun
That what seems so separate
Is truly One.
The only sin is our separation
From the great dance of mind-blowing wiggly vibration.
Lilith in Mongolia, 6/27/17…
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.
I shared stories about the trees I’d seen, the Kamakaze Lover that Damian told me about by Tzaurah Litzky.
And Brennan Cavanaugh shared some verse.
Even Ray had a few to share:
East Village Summer Evening (August 2021)
East Village summer evening
Last of the sun over Avenue B;
Community Garden on Sixth Street
Dripping with vines
Verdant
Flowering
Lush from all the rain
A secret sanctuary garden
Where aging hippies congregate,
Face masks dangling;
Sluggish bees
Exhausted from the day
Rest in the humid twilight air;
Spoken word
Drifting
From the stage
Mixes with the tired bees
As the aroma of marijuana
Comes in fresh with the breeze.
The sad season hovers
Just ahead;
As September approaches I sense it
Every year.
I hear a siren
Closer
Closer
It passes
The artist resumes.
This tropical night –
Feels like New Orleans, I hear someone say –
Makes my skin warm
My pandemic body hungry
For contact;
Words
Recited by poets
Wafting
Touching
Caressing
Our souls
Substitute for arms and lips and breath.
The wooden bench below me
Hard
I brace myself
Hold tight to August;
My city
Cradling me this moment
Reveals
Magic
And
Endless
Grief
Poem after poem, before Frank dropped by, along with the other garden buddies. And we watched the film in the environment in which it was meant to be shown, on the wall, in a community garden.
As Ray put it,
“Summer may technically be over but we managed last night to squeeze out one more East Village summer evening with a poetry reading and screening of THE CLASH, the fantastic film by @benjaminshepard about the fight to save community gardens and other public spaces in NYC. It was wonderful to see this film about saving community gardens projected onto a wall inside a community garden. And the beautiful stained glass window of the neighboring synagogue, illuminated and hovering next to the movie, was one more added element of East Village summer magic.”
We rode home into the night, into a week of teaching and figuring it out, reading, and meeting my students, and friends.
Listenning to Jazz at Barbes Tuesday, gossiping about the House vote and the Trump trials and Ukraine and music and Berlin.
A fight broke out, breakdowns on the street, all too common in our city ever in flux, a woman hurling the trash can into the street, another New Yorker unhinged.
Thursday morning, we met at Center street, greeting friends outside the court. The wheels of justice churn forward,navigating charges for our civil disobedience during climate week. We do a little every day. Is it enough to change the tides? Who knows? In the meantime the lines at the court are long, full of people, mostly people of color facing charge after charge after charge. Stopping for a coffee afterwards, Savitri and I talk about Jordan Neely, the Michael Jackson impersonator killed on Subway last spring, wonderring if anyone could have done something different to come to his aid. The conversation continued into the classroom, my students unpacking ways of de escalating in the streets of nyc, thinking about the desperation out there, about ryan, the young activist everyone knew, killed on Monday night, waiting for a bus after a longer long year of fighting fossil fuel pipelines in brooklyn.
Could have been any of us, bad place at the wrong time.
Sarah Schulman puts it..."There are strung out suffering people everywhere in NYC. There are migrant families walking around the streets needing help and support. We have the worst mayor we have every had. Tax NYU and Columbia. Impose vacancy taxes on empty storefronts and offices. Help people and make new housing the collective priority of our lives. People need help."
And the temperature changed, fall leaves turning yellow. I’m compelled to find something out there. Many of us are.
"Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight
Won't somebody help me chase the shadows away?
Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight
Take me through the darkness to the break of the day"... the drag queens sang at ABBA night at c'mon everybody, Black queer bodies, girlfriends, in drag show meanderring into the Brooklyn night.
Next morning, Mom met me at the Met, taking in the majestic, Olympia by Édouard Manet, more stunning than I’d imaged, spending the day exploring the portraits of Emile Zola and their references to Goya, the Third of May, Execution of Emperor Maximilian, the dialogue between friends, ideas and influences overlapping through time, Caroline joined us for lunch, chatting about the show. I recall the first time I saw Olympia in Florence in 1991, not really understanding but completely understanding. Her symmetry and power, the gaze and enui, work and tributes, everyone understands, mom understands, we all understand, even if she doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Manet/Degas examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in the genesis of modern art. Born only two years apart, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists whose work shaped the development of modernist painting in France…examining the ways in which their careers intersected …. this exhibition investigates how their artistic objectives and approaches both overlapped and diverged. …the interactions of these two artists in the context of the family relationships, friendships, intellectual circles, and sociopolitical events that influenced their artistic and professional choices, deepening our understanding of a key moment in the 19th century.”
Out of the Upper East Side, we journey to queens on a funny trip to the Knockdown Center for some afternoon dancing, a little dreampop, some writing on the wall, giggles with new friends, a few movies with the teenager, on their own journey, Bottoms and tops, stories and struggles.
Cloudy and moody, Sunday biking across the bridge, to Judson in Washington Square, to the news of the horrors of history reappearing, prisons and uprisings, violence and trauma, retribution and reaction, history and grief repeating themselves anew. A year ago, we were in Warsaw. The trials of permawar continue.
We pray for peace, all afternoon, from the West Village to the East.
And out to Ridgewood for Mr Sunday, fall colors and changing seasons in New York, meeting friends in between, before a final stop at our favorite disco, full of bodies shaking.
Caroline and I remembered the old days when the DJ sets were on the Gowanus, years ago, before the horrible rezoning, imposing the bland upon us all.
I felt an acute sense of grief at Judson, missing Bob and Dorris David, and the other elders who passed during the pandemic, two of the heros who greeted me every Sunday. And thought about the kids who used to come to Judson before they grew up and moved out into the world. Some of us are not quite back from it all.
I talked with with Judsonites and Colin and Jessica all afternoon, as the summer turned to fall.
The bulletin began with the words:
I guess we are always dueling with ourselves.
At night, I dream of being a criminal in Berlin, a drugstore cowboy trying to get away with it, knowing in the back of my mind the costs are too high, but wanting to be high nonetheless, losing myself in techno abandonment, club after club, escaping into the underground, the dreamscape, between the Alexanderplatz Tower and the cabaret, through the Weimar demimonde, the strolls in between, criminals and communists cavorting, riding on the train, between the S and the U, the overground and underground, the trams, the smell of bad perfume and pot, body oder and opium, on our way to sex clubs and discos, Irmgard Keun dashing off notes from her sex work cabaret dairy here, meeting with journalist Joseph Roth, running into Sameheads with my friends, maybe Federico, or Sysophus with Caroline, making plans for which clubs to go to on which nites, as summer meanderrs into a lost world, strobe lights in the dark, bodies moving, back to a summer soul party in Ridgewood, looking at each other, watching, wondering, none of us really knowing.
Still, we long for freedom from exile, for peace. Yet, can it be found.
Or is it no place on earth.
People are screaming, insisting.
We lurch backward, the same conflict,the same wounds reappear.
“It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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