New Year's was odd and lovely, from an end-of-the-year service at Judson memorial church and lunch at Cafe Reggio on McDougal Street, to dinner with the crew at Bar Tobac, to a holiday gathering with friends in Chinatown, into late-night dancing. We watched the fireworks as the clocks struck midnight in Chinatown. Grabbed a cab back to Brooklyn, then a train north to catch the Merge Party till 530 am. I’ve started going to these whenever I can:
“One of NYC’s finest underground parties, Merge goes turbo-mode for New Year’s Eve. With Juliana Huxtable, Akua, Ron Like Hell and more on the billing, you can’t go wrong.... Merge is a Brooklyn-based, queer party that aims to cultivate sonic liminoid experiences through techno music. We will work together to incubate the collective queer body, and experience its transformation under the influence of techno. We seek release, mutual understanding, deeper access to the personal, interconnected, and ethereal. We honor the sound through dance, self expression, and hyper-immersion…..
“Exit via Jefferson St & Wyckoff Ave at SW corner” said the maps. Outside, party people were everywhere, the streets filled with charactors, some drunk, looking for something, queer, gender-bending. I walked past Housre of Yes, along Wykoff, down Flushing, to the secret location, waiting in line for half an hour, without the fear of rejection of Berlin clubs, walking in by 215 am, off the hook, strobe lights and beats, bodies and music, sensations filled the night, high, sharing, shaking. I walk in greet my friends, a few Grace Jones characters and I share a space on the floor, shaking it into a trance, hallucination of light and sensation, walking out with the sun rising and off to sleep.
A few hours rest, up by 1115 AM, and off at noon for a plunge into the water, marking the day and beginning of something new, something majestic, crisp sky and water, hunger over partygoers everywhere, people drinking beer, families out for the day, enjoying the moment alive together, careening into the water, fresh and lovely, facing fears, senses alive, screaming with life, hugs, snapshots. We owe the water everything, offering gratitude, splashing about, freezing, awakening, alive for now.
After the plunge, Babs and Virginia, Judy, Boyd and I walked down the boardwalk to Tatiana’s, our replacement for Vulna’s, our previous favorite Russian restaurant, shuttered after the pandemic, for a little chat about love and war, a pint and a smile, toasting in the new year, greeting the seagulls, the magic light splashing along the majestic boardwalk, strolling back on the train, for the F back toward the Gowanus.
We all reconverged at our house for the philosopher's soccer game and a few other Monty Python gags, satire, a few jokes on us, Run Lola Run, dancing with fate and chance, screams with ever moving, ever running Lola, and Cabaret, with Sally Bowles reminding us about the German for what she was doing all afternoon, the one word in German, Bumson, that she knows perfectly, to start off the year and the dream, with friends and fire. I was still a little bewildered from dancing with the Steppenwolf the night before. As Jack Kerouac experienced it,
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
In the meantime, the People’s Front of Judea had issues to discuss, partisans fighting for the right to be themselves:
"Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality."
There is something absurd about us all, worth appreciating. Our entire lives are constituted by our choices, to live, to care, to hold, to step forward, to connect, to move forward or backyard, between advances and retreats, reactions and reproachments. The movies reveal it, one secret at a time, through time, one movie night at a time.
All afternoon, I’d found myself thinking about the years, the good and the bad, the demons that lurk and strike inside, at others, at myself, at my loved ones again and again, wondering where it is all moving, forward, backward, into the dream of waking, sleeping, growing, time passing, no longer a young man, into a new year, kids here for a minute, and half out the door.
“Indeed the future has already broken into the present,” says Ivan Illich in The Church, Change and Development, in the bulletin in Judson Church. “We each live in many times. The present of one is the past of another, and the future of yet another. We are called to live, knowing that the future exists, and that it is shared, when it is celebrated. The change which has to be brought about can only be lived. We cannot plan our way to humanity. Each one of us and each of the groups with which we live and work must become a model of the era we desire to create.”
Past stumbles into present, future into the past, into new plans, shadows dancing, playing, creating illusions, and feelings, bike rides along the East River, up to see doctors, plans for my knee, finally surgery, thinking about organizing we are going to do to beat back fascism, saving democracy, one demo at a time.
And off to the Met. I find myself strolling through the museum, past old friends, into the artist's studio, from Klimpt to Picasso, past Joan of Ark, Gustave Courbet's nudes, new subjectivities, struggles over everyday life, glimpses of bodies, Women in the Waves, through the origins of Fauvism, photographs of the Eastern Mediterranean, into the dreamscape, into the water, looking at everything that was and is, the paintings still hanging in the beloved old museum.
Back home, a message arrived in my in box from Boyd, explaining why he jumped in with us:
“Every January 1st, I have jumped into the (freezing) Atlantic Ocean. Some folks are like, that’s cool. Other folks are like, what?! You’re crazy! If someone decides to do a thing that other people find a bit crazy, it seems that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” to paraphrase our founding fathers, “requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to” do such a thing. Those causes include: reminding yourself that you’re alive, reminding yourself that you’re going to die, and, well, a great invigorating excuse to warm your belly with a shot of whiskey, whoop it up with a few friends (and 4000 strangers), and afterwards, taking a long triumphant walk down the Coney Island boardwalk and eat a big meal at one of those Russian gangster-run places on Brighton Beach. This upcoming year has a whole lot of new and unknown in store for me. When I write about the climate crisis or our broken politics or my own existential angst, I’m not just cathartically off-gassing into the void (okay, that’s part of it), I’m also trying to connect with folks who are hurting in the same ways I am. I’m heartbroken at what we’re doing to our planet and our people; frustrated at the wounds the Left inflicts upon itself; grief-struck by what it takes to be a whole human.”
And we lurch forward into the great unknown year, with elections and trials, migrations, war and hopes for peace, out of the logjams of the past, into something better of it all, walking through old New York, greeting the daydream...hellos, goodbyes, a few black and white film stills and giggles.
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