Those are some big shoes to fill...

click here for some nice photographs i'll try to write intellegently about later. i will keep to a minimum "there was was an old woman who died in a shoe puns." maybe.

there are half a dozen reasons and people to explain why this poem has been in my head lately.

Robert Creeley / Myself

What, younger, felt

was possible, now knows

is not - but still

not chanted enough -



Walked by the sea,

unchanged in memory -

evening, as clouds

on the far-off rim



of water float,

pictures of time,

smoke, faintness -

still the dream.



I want, if older,

still to know

why, human, men

and women are



so torn, so lost,

why hopes cannot

find better world

than this.



Shelley is dead and gone,

who said,

"Taught them not this -

to know themselves;



their might could not repress

the mutiny within,

And for the morn

of truth they feigned,



deep night

Caught them ere evening . . ."

people who live in glass houses...

“Philip, do I take my hat off or do I leave it on? Am I indoors or outdoors?” – Frank Lloyd Wright to Philip Johnson on his glass house.

I’m watching Charlie Rose interview Philip Johnson 2 days after he died. He’s talked to enough people that when most important people die – unexpectedly or not – he is able to pull out an interview. I’m jealous of Charlie now, and often, whenever I see him with someone having a conversation more interesting than most I’ve ever had. I’m seeing the self-proclaimed “oldest-living homosexual” talk to him, and I wonder how it is that these are people I have come across in my life. Four years ago, I came down an elevator in a job in a building in a life I no longer have – and am happy for that – to see this man on the ground floor, Johnson, waiting to come up to press party held in New York for a museum/zoo he designed in Texas. There were armadillos and there were and peacocks at this party, and that is not a lie.

When someone is 98, they should have done a lot, and he rightly had a lot to talk about, though both these interviews in the show were several years old.

I don’t know what kind of sailor he’d have made, but apparently Johnson wanted to join the navy as a young man. Not allowed of course, even then, but what he said to Charlie gets it better than any GLAAD campaign or Will & Grace episode ever has. Not allowed, and “That kind of official hurt is quite strong.”

A bit later, he’s back on his game – someone you’d want to have dinner with. Or at least sit next to while he was eating and bitching about someone. Here he is, a billion years old and he’s flirting with Charlie Rose the way that Alicia Keyes did just a few weeks ago. There are none, of course, but I want to ask my friend who works on the show for tickets. Or an internship. I could enforce wardrobe continuity, for instance. Charlie often ends up with one of his French cuffs somehow tumbling out of his suit jacket. Guests don’t seem to mind, and he sure as hell doesn’t, but it’s always struck me as the ultimate sign of confidence to be able to interview a world leader looking like you’ve just stumbled out of a bar. I realize, of course that some people think he’s a hack, but they’re wrong.

Back to the architect and my old job: Held up on either arm by two people helping him make his way to a party I’d never be invited to, I knew even then that someone like that was someone I’d remember. Tall, skinny, impossibly large, but appropriate, round glasses. It’s years later, he’s dead, I’ve moved on, but every time I walk by his lipstick building, think of the four seasons restaurant dinner I’ll someday enjoy with friends, see the trump tower at Columbus circle that he made his own after making it less ugly, I think of him.

Charlie just asked Philip where he’d be buried. “Scattered,” he replied. I think back to that elevator, and I wish I’d said hello.

If you are one for recommendations

Go google Franz Wright now. Read what you can find. Go buy or borrow
"Walking to Martha's Vineyard", and be surprised its something I'd
recommend, and wonder how it is you haven't read it sooner.

feed a cold? starve a fever?

or the other way around? i forget, but it's about that time of year again where i get sick for awhilee. a partial solution will be to eat like the improbable child of star jones and the brawny towel lumberjack.

this meal i'm having now will be cheaper than the bottle of nyquil i bought last night on the recommendation of a coworker. i've often heard of people so down on their luck and into the booze drinking this as a substitute for their usual colt 45 or crystal palace, but i can't imagine ever wanting to have any more of this shit than is absolutely necessary. why make it taste like licorice? why make anything taste like licorice? disgusting.

when on bastille day the french of my neighborhood take the streets over with their sand bowling games, wine, and replica guillotines, it's one of my favorite times of year, until i try that drink they make with ricard that tastes of licorice and wish they would take their sand and balls back inside and dump the ricard into the gowanus.

my little poem-a-day desk calendar continues to impress. below is from dana gioia, currently the chairman of the NEA but a poet as well.

Curriculum Vita
The future shrinks
Whether the past
Is well or badly spent.

We shape our lives
Although their forms
Are never what we meant.

on a trifle

on a trifle

"this isn't a bad place"

this was written for a friend, but i rambled, and so it's here...

File under: comments too long for here.

i read this at first feeling somewhat bitter, but then remembering that there is enough of that in this world, and in me. instead, and I don't know why, Kath, so don't yell at me or ask for cogent reasoning, I thought of the poet jorie graham.

She came into my head as I was thinking about the end of your post here. i'm sure now that you need to read her, and maybe hate her, but there are things there for you to find. things I have gone back to again and again, and things you should know about.

i picked up her book when we all worked in barnes & noble, back when things where somehow more simple, but profoundly less interesting. i was restocking, or reshelving, or whatever it was called, and i found her book left on a table in the cafe. 'the dream of the unified field', collected poems. This was all so long ago.

i had never heard of her before, and it makes me both grateful and sad that i will never know the person who pulled that book off the shelf and left it for me to find.

This is now turning into something that better belongs on my little page in the world, but keep it here if you like.

You wrote what you wrote at the end about good things existing in the midst of aggravation and uncertainty and this was what sat down at a table in my head and decided to stay. It's from a poem I nervously had to read in a staff meeting, but was better than I was nervous. I don't have line breaks with me, so it's just this:

"There are moments in our lives, which, threaded, give us heaven."

All this to say, don't put up with the bullshit the world and its people are often so good at, but also don't be afraid to thread together the good you find in them either. I'm shuddering as I type
this, but maybe it's as close as we get. and if so, maybe that's enough. it has to be.

F-line residents explained

map of my favorite subway line's riders and their stops. kind of interesting, but i don't think lawyers' brokers get out at smith-9th street.

7 x 4

when turning 28, or any age, i advise the following: have a friend whose birthday is a day before yours, so you can share that with them and avoid calling too much attention to yourself. then, have a dinner that is just like every other dinner you've ever had at robin des bois, but is somehow changed for the better because of the people around you. wonder what's going on, where you wanted to be and should have been by now, and tell yourself to shut up. it's okay. and will be. i talked to a stranger once and happened upon a better friend than i ever could've hoped for.

Money advice from the man I'll likely vote for next time around

I like Bloomberg. I'm still not exactly sure why sometimes, but I do. This is part of the reason.

from the NY PostJanuary 11, 2005 -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be getting ready to sell his financial information giant to fund a mammoth philanthropic effort after he quits public office.
Bloomberg L.P. — the media and financial information company that is the source of much of his wealth — will be sold to finance the charitable binge, he said recently.

"I will not go back to the company," he said. "What I'd like to do is eventually I will sell because if I don't, my estate will have to, and I want to run a foundation."
...
Bloomberg said he views the charitable giving of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and wife Melinda as a model he'd like to emulate.
...
Bloomberg left little doubt that night at the 92nd Street Y what his ultimate goal in life will be after politics. "Going out and spending the rest of my life giving it all away would be great," he said.

"Somebody once said that the ultimate in financial planning is to bounce the check to the undertaker. I'm going to try to do that."

ultimate until they dig you up again and leave you by the side of the road.

sedaris

the hot one. in one of the more entertaining photographs i've seen in awhile.

Remember that circular apartment building from a few weeks ago?

Well, it makes me want to leave New York.

Makes me want to have $300,000 first, of course, but then I'd consider leaving. Read below from the NYT:

In New York a small apartment can run you well over $1 million. And it just sits there. For about $300,000 you could be living in Suite Vollard, an apartment building in Curitiba, Brazil, where each of the 11 floors is a 3,000-square-foot apartment that rotates on command, at adjustable speeds and in either direction. (The bathrooms and kitchens are housed in a fixed core, as are the fireplaces.) João Carlos Peters, the marketing director of the company that built Suite Vollard, said it is the only building in the world where each floor can spin independently. For information, www.moro.com.br or 011-55-41-3013-1234. STEPHEN TREFFINGER

the funny thing about people's separate lives is that what we all think privately, we probably more or less have in common. i just got off the phone with a friend who summed up everything right and wrong about his life right now, and i'd swear he was talking about mine.

we live in these little boxes of our own, but they're startlingly familiar sometimes. that can either be a comfort or not. i'm going to go have dinner with him and talk about it.

happy new year.