The Best Kind of Charlatan

"Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often." -- Leonard Cohen, accepting the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters

He went on to tell a beautiful story about how he found his musical-authorial voice. It was 10 minutes of exquisite poetry. It left me breathless. Watch it here:

I wouldn't call it "white."

I'm really disappointed with myself. I told a small lie to try and save face about something I should have done months ago. It was so stupid -- I was embarrassed that I hadn't remembered to take care of it, and ashamed that it's gonna be hard to do right now, since I'm coming off of the summer income drought and can't really afford to pay what it's gonna cost to square this away.

Still, there was no reason to lie, but I did it almost reflexively. This is a problem, and I need to be better than this.

HGTV'd, for REALZ

I've spent an unpardonable amount of time watching HGTV over the past several weeks. It makes me feel like a bit of a numbnuts -- same stupid formulas recycled in show after show (not to mention the 22 minutes of life I lose every hour I let its dull glow penetrate my skull and destroy my motivation and capacity for independent thought).

But it represents something else -- reinvention and renewal made easy by moving into a new space and redecorating it, adding a "pop of color" here or decoupaging an old shitty table to "pump up the 'wow' factor." It's a kind of therapy, and it taps into our need and hope that we can make substantial life changes in short amounts of time with minimal effort. I watch each home makeover with a combination of fascination and repulsion.

It's all superficial, of course. It's too hard to confront what we hate about ourselves. We bury that shit really, really deep for a reason. But someone with half a brain and a grain of self-awareness (and it's always the person we hope to convince otherwise) will always be able to suss it out; we are never that person. So we apply layer after layer of shellack and paint and hope that no one will notice -- and maybe we, ourselves, will forget -- that the structure is fundamentally flawed.

Home

Just returned home from an easy run. Things outside feel different, good -- breezy, cool, open, fallish. I'd like to say that this is the start of a plan -- I'll go running three times a week, hit the gym three times a week, yaddayadda. That never, ever works for me. So I'm trying something different. I'll go when I can. And if I can't, that's okay. No beating myself up over a failure of commitment. No unrealistic goals. Just day by day. As long as it feels good, I'll keep doing it, and will stop when it doesn't.

Here's something sweet -- I turned the corner onto my block to find this waiting for me:



...and this...



...and this...



The windy leftovers of Irene are swooshing through my windows, airing the place out after a summer of creeping heavy humidity. Somehow, the breeze makes its way into my head. I like this.

He's baaaaaaaaack...(soon)...

The great Bill Moyers is coming back to television in January, 2012. Best news I've had in months. I think I'll celebrate by whipping out (and watching) my DVD of The Power of Myth.

A Gate at the Stairs: Thoughts, Observations

Lorrie Moore's writing rips your heart to pieces and then asks plainly that you deal with it and move on. It is hard and unrelenting and also gentle and kind and wholly empathic. I've read reviews of her work that range from "brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical" (Jonathan Lethem, New York Times, 2009) to "jarringly cute," and loaded with "impossibly overblown insights." (Adam Mars-Jones, The Guardian, 2008.)

There was a strongly mixed reception to her first full-length novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), the story of a 20-year-old college girl's first real encounters with mind- and heart-numbing disappointment and loss, and that mix is sharply divided between reviewers from major publications and reviews from casual readers on websites like Amazon.com and personal blogs. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian loved it; Salon, the least favorable of the professional reviews, managed to acknowledge the work's relative strengths. But the recreational readers here, here, here, and here called out Moore for self-indulgence, and said frequently that the book lacked plot and cohesion, was glib, and drummed up some unbelievable conceits.

I can see why many readers found it frustrating, since I saw some of the same disjointedness in the plot and found one or two of the twists a bit pat and, it pains me to say this, a bit manufactured. I also wasn't sure if I was supposed to hear the voice of a slightly or significantly aged protagonist. Ultimately, though, I was absorbed and moved by the great heart and soul that shone through. A Gate's style, in some ways, strikes me as stream-of-consciousness, deeply reflective, and, rather than the story itself being the end, it's the journey and the individual moments that come together to make the greatest impression. It feels like a woman reliving extraordinary pain (made more so by the circumstance of youth and inexperience) and using it as a tool to examine anger and frustration borne of what were, manifestly, bad choices. The message is clear: We pick ourselves up and we continue. More important, though, the message isn't laced with morality -- it's neither a good nor a bad thing. It just is. This is both scary and comforting.

Believer magazine interviewed Moore back in 2005 and she tossed out this observation: "At some point, to some extent, what is both right and wrong with your work is what's right and wrong with you." That's rough, but it's true and beautiful. And my head and heart are glad I spent several hours pouring over her right and wrong.

I am quite sure that, at 11:30am on a Sunday, someone is smoking weed right outside my living room window. That, plus thunder and wind all swishy through the trees and, otherwise, quiet, make for a good start to the day.

Sorry, Gil -- it appears the Revolution is being streamed live via webcam.

I read The Guardian regularly, and have followed their coverage of the News Corp/News International phone hacking scandal closely. Over the past week, I've been all over the UK riots. I sat on the subway home tonight thinking about how powerfully insulated the developed West is from the reality of the rest of the world. Think about the police states and dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Northern Africa. A few people possess most of the wealth while most of their citizens live in dire poverty with no chance for upward mobility. (Even worse, the wealth is supplemented by payoffs from Western nations who use these countries as strategic allies and conveniently forget the social and economic abuse they inflict on their people.) The uprisings in Egypt, Syria, and Libya have all shown what can happen when you strip people of their basic humanity.

When civil unrest happens in places like Africa and the Middle East, it's easy to detach from the powerful, frightening reality of it because we've been taught to view people who live, talk, look, or pray differently than we do as "other." When it's in England -- a first-world nation (in theory) full of white people who speak the same language as we do -- it begins to feel real.

It's amazing, given how immediately connected we all are to everything through the internet and mass media, that we aren't more sensitive to all of it. I guess when you've been saturated with fast-moving action movies full of explosions and high-speed chases, and video games that allow you to shoot up and dismember your opponents, everything, at some level, begins to seem unimpressive. Entertainment-based shock treatment.

It all started with the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man and father of four, by London police. There are all sorts of allegations -- he was a drug dealer, he was a gang member, etc. -- and police reports suggested he had a loaded gun, and that a bullet that found its way into one of the police officer's radios was his; there's been no evidence of that.

MP David Winnick told The Guardian, "There are accusations, we have heard it on the home affairs select committee, that black people are stopped and searched more often. That can hardly be done on the basis that they are terrorist suspects. If you add to that continuing deprivation, growing unemployment, a feeling of lack of opportunity, it makes a pretty toxic mix."

And it spiraled out of control. Looting, murders, arson, and who knows what else. It's heartbreaking, because there's a lot of justifiable anger, but instead of harnessing that rage to the purpose of social good, a lot of these kids are just breaking into stores and setting fire to shit because they can. It's heartbreaking for the small businessmen and women who have lost their livelihoods, for the communities that will take huge economic hits -- who wants to Starbucks in a neighborhood that's full of potential thugs? (Not that we need another Starbucks anywhere...) -- and also for the kids who are so misdirected and unsupported that they think this is their only recourse. And fuck a culture that tells them that owning things is more important than having ideas.

If it can happen in England, it can happen here. Truth is, we should all be very afraid for what's to come.

In the United States, the combination of the state of healthcare and education, the lack of regulation of large, wealthy corporations, and the ability of those large corporations to go unchecked in their contributions to political candidates (under the umbrella of free speech...Jesus Fucking Christ) is gonna blow up in our collective face. Without our social safety net, our Unions, and reasonable regulations on corporations and industry, we're basically a banana republic.


*Two of the above photos were taken from The Guardian, one of which can be found here. I was stupid and didn't get the link for the first photo, and now can't find it.

This is the view outside my living room window. Pitter-patty rain; otherwise, silent. These are the best days to live in this apartment.

Donald Rumsfeld Is a Lizard from Outer Space that Eats Mexican Babies

The second season of Louis CK's show "Louie" premieres Thursday, June 23 at 10:30pm on FX. He is a fucking genius, and you should watch. I have no problem calling you an idiot and an asshole for not doing so.

Until then, get a load of this:

Wha Happen?

The War on Me is going about as well as Afghanistan.

This and next week are intense, day job-wise. The program I work for begins next Monday and, because I'm only part time, I don't have enough hours to get everything done, so I effectively become full time. So I'm hammering away and, as I reach the saturation point, I am making some seriously stupid mistakes. Mostly careless, really, but also stupid for being so careless.

As I get pissed off at myself, I eat and drink more. I also continue to not exercise. Honestly, at this point, can I complain about feeling chunky and expect anyone to take me seriously? What will it take for me to get up off my ass?

I have at least three singer friends who take really good care of themselves, are diligent in their careers, and are constantly working to be better human beings. I sit and think about how I can't catch a break. Being a negativity-soaked turd doesn't help anything. Again, what am I afraid of?

January and February were scary -- I had four kidney stone attacks, two of which were MAJOR, in two months. I went to the doctor and did this ridiculous home pee test where I had to piss into an enormous hazard-cone orange jug for a day, then send a small bit of it to a lab in Chicago that specializes in analyzing the urine of kidney stone patients to see what's causing the stones.

(My mother had kidney stones from the time I had my first memories of her until before she died. Her father had them. My aunts have them. That shit is in the family.)

The results of the test were sent to my urologist. I didn't hear from him, so I called the office and an assistant told me that I had to make an appointment to find out what was going on. That pissed me off, and I tried to get in touch with a nurse to see if she could give me the results over the phone. She called me back, but I never responded. Considering the tremendous amount of agony those little spiky motherfuckers cause, I should have dealt with this back in March. But it's June, and here I am not dealing with my problem. All I have to do is pick up the phone.

Okay, so, also, my teeth. Two root canaled molars that have lost their fillings. I've not dealt with them either, though they often cause me pain. Actual, physical pain. And the money situation. It isn't dire -- I've managed to put a bit away so that I'm not living on credit cards this summer while half of my income disappears -- but is the product of some serious dysfunction that isn't as bad as it once was. It needs to be kept in serious check, and I don't always succeed.

I've talked to my therapist about all of this. We've dug into it, but there's only so much he can do. From what I can see, I'm seriously risk-averse. There's a part of me that's terrified of change and would rather watch things turn to shit than do the hard work to make life better. It breeds ever more self-loathing, and I'm back to feeling like I'm faking my way through life. Which, of course I am.

I feel cheated out of a childhood, and all the procrastinating and wallowing in shit emotional habits won't fix that. One of these days, I need to wake up, get out of bed, and decide to be an adult.

I would like to blog about something that isn't about my mini-self-apocalypses. I'd like to wake up. I feel like I've been asleep for years.

*I would be seriously remiss if I didn't properly credit the amazing woman whose illustration I'm using to give my angst some shape. Her name is Francesca Crescentini, and here's where she blogs and sells her fantastic stuff. She has a beautiful, tremendous imagination. Take a look.

War on Me

I've just declared war on my consumer debt. Last summer's purchase of a brand new laptop, a new TV, and two air conditioners really set me back. This is unacceptable.

I've also given myself two goals, both reasonably achievable:

1) Run the Memorial Day Half Marathon in Lenox, MA.
2) Sing a full opera role in my kinda-new fach.

I need tangibles. It's the only way I can break out of this whatever-the-hell-it-is.

NY Phil's 2011-12 Season

The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross has a really terrific blog post about the NY Philharmonic's upcoming season. He also mentions the recent rolling out of the Phil's digital archive, which has a tremendous amount of correspondence and documents detailing the organization's backroom inner workings. It includes access to Leonard Bernstein's conducting scores, a score of the Mahler 1 that the composer annotated, and letters detailing their muscular efforts to bring Shostakovich to New York. Very, very cool.

Read about it here: NY Phil Announcement

Made in USA

"This is America. This is the democracy you bring us." This is what an Egyptian holding a tear gas canister labeled "Made in the USA" said to Richard Engle, NBC News' Cheif Foreign Correspondent, who is currently reporting on the riots in Cairo.

Everything we say and do matters. Everything.

Qurazy

And once again, it seems, my oversensitivity caused me to read something into a situation that wasn't there. Breathe, Ranta. Breathe.