Thursday, September 1, 2011

31


August was water, I let it pour past.  There was some middle I remember when nothing could be done.  I thought of the "dog days."  I missed the group that I'd been performing with in late July, and I felt caught between a year of relative freedom and ease and an upcoming entrance into another long bout of school and work.  A good friend's father died, a great man who lived a long life and helped a small town in New Jersey maintain its life and commerce.  I went back to that town for the memorial service with another good friend who just happened to be in town on vacation.  We ate ice cream and took a familiar walk.

The rest seemed like paperwork, lots of signing up for payrolls and health insurance and courses and what else I'm not so sure.  At times it felt like they'd maximized the printing out of forms while minimizing the sharing of information.  This is my first experience at a public university; that familiar feeling of government bureaucracy, with all the severely guarded turfs, bothers me.

I will be busy in the autumn, and sure enough it is here.  Hollywood has turned the movies toward the serious.  People bustle in a different way.  These past few days there has been the palpable sense of realization, of goodbye, on the streets.  Summer was fast.  There was a hurricane, a crazy few days of everyone huddling inside, prepared for the worst.  We here in the city were spared, though the suburbs were hit hard.

I went to the beach, I saw a lot of movies--indoor and out--with AK.  We drove upstate just in time for me to come down with a bad cold: while everyone went swimming, I laid in the sun with a white cat, watching tiny bugs in the grass that I'd forgotten to pay attention to since childhood.  I should have written more to you, August.  As it is, I'm not quite ready for the busyness of September and the wicked sharp turn of another winter.  Maybe soon the birds will collect as they do from their disparate summers, telling manic loud tales for a day or two before deserting us for warmer climes.  All that easy time of summer seems somehow too easily gone now.  A tricky month, September steals in like a Virgo.


three little songs:

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

8



Another August 8.  I have a strange feeling today, a broad emotion, not unbeautiful finally after many recent days of anger and angst and fear and all those terrible small emotions that have filled me like a charge, like an extension of static electricity from a computer.  Quite literally, I've been captivated enough by the news of the USA's debt crisis and attending worse political crisis that I am under the undue influence of too much light from the computer screen.  Now, finally, it's like the skin of that emotion lifts and I find underneath it what I've been waiting for: a more serene and quiet speaking.

Tomorrow I play Stephen Spielberg in conversation with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger in a video made by an Austrian artist.  The dialogue is all about how I (Stevie S) swallowed a transistor when my father presented it to me and told me it was the future.  I miss my own father.  That feeling of the man who could come home and tell you how it all would be, how it was, how the world (that great place waiting for me that I imagined so thick with order and schematic) was, and how it changed.  I spend my mythic time now (I mean the time we always devote to figuring out symbolically our place in existence) deconstructing a lot of that authority, finding less comfort there, seeing how distorted those old tales made my thinking.  And then every once in a while, smarting with wounds that are the particularity of my experience, I want to be absolved of difference, I want to have a father again in the old way, from a place of universal uncomplication.

This August, against my romantic impulse, I stayed in New York.  To do bureaucracy, the digging in, the paying of bills, the not being absent.  To make a life more firmly here, not fly away with all that action's attendant confusions.

So I feel today, tonight, like I did when first I was a kid and thought of the peculiarity of Augusts, when the summer begins to remind me of a lion contemplating a burning sunset.  What was this lion for?  What long walks will stretch out?  In August, I find the equivalence of yearning from life and yearning from the other side.  Like here we ghosts and mortals tango, waltz, and do our little flying acts.


Tuesday, February 1, 2011

(enero, 31)

(y enero en BsAs)


(el frío en nueva york por fin y de repente me convenció a tomar el viaje al sur.  los primeros días acá, me sentí como mis huesos, helados, estaban lentamente abriendo otra vez al verano.  horacio me acompañe en mi costumbre de gran gira de los parques de palermo, donde los cisnes reciben las turistas y los ciudadanos.)
(fue un otoño dificil, lleno de decisiones y sus consequencias.  dormí bien acá todas las noches, afuera de mi departamento y la nieve.)


(me encanta lo que hay de lo provisional en argentina.  como un amigo me describió la plaza de mayo  como sólo una vision de ciertas personas, no tanto un ejemplo de aesthetica nacional.  siempre pienso que permiten acá que las aceras tengan algunas grietas; que no hay la fealdad de demasiado manteniamento ni demasiada crueldad de abandono)


(en new york, quizás, la estatua es para el ego, la libertad, mientras acá la libertad es para el espiritú.)


(llegué, mis huesos descongeló, comí de la parilla de juan y maru, y mis pensamientos, también congelados en mis huesos, se fueron a caminar.  planes del futuro sin gravedad.  fui para ver una obra que se trata de los últimos 10 años, la memoria, y el cambio en esta época cuando por fin faltamos un narrador, un archetypo humano.  hablé con un pintor sobre la vida artistica, la vida, la balance entre otro y sí mismo.  terminé con el libro de patti smith que se trata de su amistad con robert maplethorpe.  y ya soñe en mis caminos con volver otra vez, con otra vez escapar el invierno.)


(encontré una mañana de paseadores, otra vocación que he considerado.)


(y a veces, a una distancia la vida es así.  en los últimos días, me enfermé un poquito del estómago.  quizás a causa de un viaje por bici en una parte de la costenera muy (pero muy) sucia, quizás a causa de una cena en un restaurante muy turístico.)


(hoydía esta locura del vuelo al opuesto extremo del mundo: a un invierno helado, al trabajo, seguro, que no todavía parecerá abstracto.  que en los pies de las estatuas, los gatitos siempre se sueñen bien.)