Absences and News

Since my last post, I moved from home.

The move is more than a little disconcerting, because I moved very close by, and it's as if I've never left except for a few miscellaneous nights that I spend alone. This pattern should get smoothed out when my brother goes to college, which is on September 3rd.

I've taken so many trips though, so many adventures I haven't had the time or energy to catalog. That changes soon. I know I make many excuses, but I just have to get back in the game.

5. Two Trees

I took this picture about two weeks ago. Since I took this picture with my mother's iPhone it doesn't do the sky justice. It was the same blue as my mother's rich peacock sari that hangs in her closet, the one that I covet and was almost mine but never have worn.

This picture is from Father's Day. My dad waited in the car while I brought home the family takeout. I snapped this in front of the restaurant, in the parking lot, my back to a raging highway.

On our way home, we listened to Murray Perahia's Bach partitias. The descent in the B-flat gigue is so complicated and fluid I always feel off-center listening to it. The best music quietly thrills. The best sky is peacock blue. The best Father's Day spent eating Macaroni Grill takeout; fettuccine with broccoli, caramelized onions, and tomato cream.

4. Gangbusters

The moment I saw her, I knew she was different.

On Tuesday I waited for Chin in front of her Wall St office, but I didn't know whether we were supposed to meet at six or six-thirty. While leaning against the aboveground wall of the subway station, I almost impaled myself on the spiky rail. For a while I woman-watched. Though I like to look at men, the Wall St tomcats are known for their ruthless efficiency and pinstriped suits. They jack my heart rate, make me feel guilty for simply sitting on my impaled ass; it's not worth it.

But the women are a little less kinetic. They sashay in thin pencil skirts. They teeter on their heels. And maybe they are worse than the dudes. Like walking jumper-cables, the pinstriped men feed on my innate restlessness and guilt, but the women stab me. They look so put together. Their precise hair and eyebrows resemble war paint. Every one of them walks with confidence. They're fit-as-fiddle mini-cabooses engineered to tastefully jiggle teaspoons of well-placed rack and ass fat. When they laugh, they show off fluorescent white teeth. I knew similar girls both in high school and college, girls who did their homework and smiled at the right people and stabbed their perfect heels in the carpet as if they knew what they were doing. Future Female Business Leaders of America. They live the dream. Underemployed bums like me are the wreckage that sags beneath the crushing force of their success.

After a few minutes of this, I saw a thin woman in a wrinkled white shirt and gray pants. She wore almond loafers. Her outfit relaxed me. She could stretch her legs, too, and bent them in a Cleese-like Silly Walk fashion. On the phone, her voice was both smooth and excited. Something had been going well for her. I leaned on my fists and hung on her every word. As she stood in the middle of her street, leaning on her toes, all went well. Then she began wondering if so-and-so wanted to meet her at Cipriani. I could save up for a thousand years and still not be able to afford an appetizer at Cipriani's.

(The rich, they are not like you or I.)

Do I sound bitter?

I can blame the recession for making me hate the Wall St goddesses who warrant a mass discovery by some talent agency. And I wonder if they are familiar with the crushing stress of a scattered mind and grueling stretches of unemployment. Bitterness shortens lives and gives you ulcers. I'm too damn young to get ulcers.

But it's so hard to feel good in a field of bland perfection. I saw some heart-stopping beauties that made me feel jealous in my potato-sack shirt with the turmeric stain. One of them paused in front of me long enough to finalize a rollicking Hamptons timeshare. I don't know whether or not the Hamptons is a rollicking place, but I imagine that the rich know better than to sit in front of the water all day, tanning into burnt crustaceans. She's now due for a few months on end of coked-out clubbing, on laughter and enjoyment with friends. Good friends, friends who would drive her home covered in vomit from the hard partying. I don't understand it, but for a few sick (nano)-seconds I wanted that life.

I turned to my left. At that moment, our eyes met. And I thought, woah, she looks gangbusters. Sure, gangbusters is an adjective from the fifties. It may belong with the silverfish that live between the pages of quietly rotting books. But I rescue it from obscurity from time to time, if only to myself. ("Man," I might say, as I pass by a set of thick antique world atlases or cigars or funky Tiffany lamps, "that looks gangbusters.")

Gangbusters stood in the middle of the street. My first thought: someone cast the next H. Rider Haggard heroine, and she's Asian!

She wore a pair of ripped jeans. Big holes exposed the her unabashed legs. Her boots had flat soles and laced up to her thighs. Her hair, rambunctious and not manicured, fell on her back.  To me, it was un-whispered poetry, waiting for gusts of wind to shove it straight back into her face.

All of the women who passed her on the street felt much less bright by comparison. They noticed, too. One other woman even stopped and glared at her feet.  Betches love to glare.

Gangbusters then put a phone to her ear and said something while leaning against the marble wall two feet away from a very interested security guard. She rifled through a battered Strand bag. At first I was afraid she would look for cigarettes but she took out a Nintendo DS and started swooping her forearms to accommodate a few hungry turns. I wondered if she liked to race cars. A few minutes later she put the DS back and extracted her phone. My heart exploded when I found it was not an iPhone (or an Android or a Blackberry), but an old-school dumbphone. A dumb-as-nails phone. Dumber than my own dumbphone, which I inherited from my younger brother.

After she hung up her phone, she then folded it into her palm and launched herself from the wall. And then -- you won't believe this -- she performed a ten-point el perfecto karate kick. Right in the middle of the damned sidewalk. In those jeans. Her helicopter hair stabbed her in the face like blades.

Nothing about her fit. Her hair did not fit. Her eyes, covered in dark shadow, stayed hard and open. My notions of prettiness and jealousy don't fly well in the real world. The odd heroine prevailed over the groomed masses.

She left the way she came. I turned to stretch my neck. By the time I looked back, she'd left.

It's hard to feel jealous of the glittering prosaic. Well, not hard. But it should be. Moments like these remind me of true grace.

3. Lean

“My criteria was to only write songs I couldn’t live without [...] It felt like a relief, like I could sleep for a whole day after I’d made a song.” 

-- Oh Land

I don't know if it counts as a trip, but Oh Land's music takes me outside myself. The transcendent  "Lean" features the Nightingale String Quartet, who provide rich and unusual diminished harmonies to Oh Land's ethereal voice. The cellist is incredible. I haven't heard that kind of control in years. Most songs I like tend to start quiet and then escalate. (The "start from nothing" melodies feel alchemical. And I need time to get used to a song.)

The swelling consists of a series of loud notes accompanied by insistent vibrato. The effect is electric. Just like Oland herself; she appears fragile but moves like current. 

The song begins with a series of resonant questions:

Did you really carry me when I was asleep
Did you try to defend me when I was weak
Did you pick me up that lonely night
when the lights died out
and it turned to the gray side 

Her uncertainty swells with the music. But these dark triads that resolve into tiny, major-key harmonic victories as she tells us to lean on her ("Now you're out on the bottomless sea/so it's time for you to lean on me") It's a moving plea -- statement -- command? given to a former protector.

Now that I'm out on the bottomless sea, whom can I lean on? Her music puts me out into the foam, but I'm okay as long as I can lean on the music.

But like her work, it's important to listen twice: once for the lyrics and the second for the weightless melody. For her, it's about the musicality; the words are just conduits for that effort.

 *

Jowigee1 via travelpod

I romanticize string quartets.

Last winter, my father and I snuck into a (free) performance by the Orion String Quartet at Mannes. We sat in the back, behind the bored women who liked to fidget with their bracelets and wrists. The sound of rocks and skin didn't stop throughout. It's odd how a performance can transform a stage, since I have performed on that same stage a dozen times as a child and as a teenager. Just being there frayed my nerves a little bit. My father put his foot down -- hard -- on mine, to stop the shaking.

He asked me what was wrong.

"I feel like I'll have to play," I said. My father rolled his eyes and told me that I was too old for others to force me to perform anything.

Oland is one of those rare artists who doesn't make me nervous. Her artistry is deceptively simple. I can ignore her effort because she doesn't display any. The Orion Quartet, too, had that quality. After the musicians ascended the stage, they tuned and contemplated the manic audience in silence.

I was only months away from my last disastrous performance on stage. Music hadn't been a soothing factor for me in a long while. My father hadn't realized this when he asked me to go with him. It was a casual invitation, but for me it was nervewracking. I only remember my hands, suspended in the air over a keyboard, blocked into an impossible Liszt finger-twister and unable to proceed.

"I don't get it," he said, finally, "I thought you liked concerts."

I decided to take notes. My notebook was there, anyway, denting my pelvis. My shaking hand grew confident the more I wrote. I can never throw myself fully into a performance. I am always distant, detached, intellectual. Always seeking meaning but never living it.

And this is what I wrote:

I don't need my program to tell me that the Orion String Quartet is "one of the most sought after ensembles in the United States". They're a bunch of investment bankers turned superheroes. The hero bursts from his suit the moment Orion takes out the Stradivariuses (:ii?) and what-have-yous.

For example: The violist's instrument is from 1560. 15-60. No, I can't believe it, either. Pieces like these belong in museums and not in the hands of mortals.

First, there's the Op 18 no 5 String Quartet by Beethoven. The third movement's an extended string of exquisiteness. Beethoven wrote fast sections and slow sections by turn, and though the movement is classified as Andante Cantibale it's rich and varied. The players themselves are outstanding. The whole quartet was a sheer pleasure both in terms of composition and performance. The Allegros, both beginning and end, bookend a neat sense of continuity.

I have to buy a recording of this and play the third movement at full volume, non-stop, until I sink into my figurative mattress of infinite softness and die a happy death.

Have you ever felt a sense of musical deja-vu? Of all composers I think I felt it just now, with Schoenberg. There is this violently atonal piece of his with piano/string quartet called 'the Kammersymphonie' . Its beginning is a jarring explosion of sound with a bizarre resolution to a sonorous major third. When that happened I knew I heard that very cloud of cacophony before. of course anything that came after it remains completely new to me. Schoenberg reminds me of my brother. The music has all the trappings of coherence; the music is emotional, with stirring legatos and an undeniable sense of virtuosic urgency. But the notes themselves! It's an exquisite madlib, a Eschereque descent into purgatory. Here the cello carries the melodic weight with the piano's capable pounding as accompaniment. The violins/viola serve to make the song sound one shallow step from the greatest freakshow ever. The 1st violin just had a sparring match with the piano. Now they're sailing a patchwork balloon into atonal heaven.

Even when the music was atonal, even abstract melodies and music that provides the illusion of harmony satisfy me. But it gets more difficult on a percussive instrument like the piano.

I put the notebook away and left feeling cleansed. I prefer to enjoy concerts rather than fearing performances.

*

Oh Land, short for Nanna Oland Fabricius, is a Danish singer/dancer and the daughter of an opera singer and an organist. Her performances are emotional, intense and almost as captivating to watch as they are to hear. Oh Land, her self-titled album, is her second studio release.

Why I lie

There’s a reason why I lie, and I should never forget that. I lie because I’m scared for my life.

I lie for a thousand other reasons, but I never forget that one. Because that reason keeps my facades together, a kaleidoscope of lies, stories that never quite intersect. Because, though I haven’t written about them, my life has been governed by these experiences that I can never quite share.

2. The Kingdom of Secaucus

flickr via badadam

On my way home from the city, I took the wrong train.

By accident, though I am the kind of person who would exchange the tree canopies and scraggy power-plant exhaust chimneys for the beach and acres of fresh wood, on purpose. After a transcendent evening with my good friend Chin, I left Wall Street at 9:10, and my subway ride just made the connecting 9:37 from Penn Station. Or so I thought.

When I raced to my track and bolted into the train, I felt triumph and a burning sensation that erupted in my throat. The pain was worth it until I realized my mistake. The helpful conductor recommended I leave at Secaucus to wait for the later train I hoped I didn't have to take.

*

The Secaucus train station is a series of four isolated platforms that rise above the Turnpike and the Meadowlands. From the Meadowlands-facing side, I can see the Empire State Building. That skyscraper is made visible by its fluorescent green crown, tall among the sea of lazy weeds. But the roar of the Turnpike below dominates the aural scene and the entire universe.

And that entire universe consists of just me and the friendly lampposts, kept yards apart. They just illuminate the emptiness. I am cold. So I take out my headphones and clamp them onto my ears. The opening sitar descent from Thunderball's Road to Benares tears through the velvety night.

*

I have an intense fear of heights. I can't stand near the edge of a balcony. When Beetle brought me to her breathtaking Herald Square terrace I fought to keep from either falling or choking on my own vomit. My fear of heights is less an objective concern than it is my self-awareness: given insufficient restraint, I would fling myself over high railings and throw my life away for the simple -- drastic -- fall.

When I was sixteen, I asked my not-as-yet boyfriend to take me to a high place. I visited his sprawling Hyderabadi house. We spoke together in an damp upstairs bedroom. He used the computer by the window while I leaned into the river of luxurious bedcovers.

And though I loved talking to him, I felt sick. When I went home I knew I'd have to face my grades. My grades weren't just bad. These were why-on-Earth-haven't-you-dropped-out-yet bad, so terrible my friends felt pity for me even when I lied about my grades to make them more palatable. I lived it, that weightlessness. I doubted myself until my mind bled. And I hated the fact that I never did homework no matter how much I tried or how diligently I reminded myself to do it.

I just wanted to step out from my conscious and live the deep beats and melodies that sang into the sky and Earth. I felt so distant from the bed, the room. Him. I wanted to reach out, mention the colossal weight on my ribs, and hope for some reassurance.

The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them:

"Can we go somewhere?" I asked. "High? Far away from here?"

Before, we had been talking about the places and people in our lives. That was the worst. All I had done, had ever wanted, was to get away from most of them. My feet rested on the invisible ledge and the pristine world remained, tranquil and pleasant, waiting for me below.

He nodded, getting up from his chair. Together we went downstairs, grabbed the keys from his father. We went, along with his sister, to Birla Mandir.

Birla Mandir is a temple and one of Hyderabad's tallest structures. It took ten years to shape and carve it from powerful Rajasthani marble. Its views are stunning and offer a glimpse of both Hyderabad and Secunderabad, sprawling twin cities that squat about a gigantic manmade tank. Future Boyfriend pushed me by the small of the back up the wide stone steps while his sister lingered by the deities. She may have felt prayerful. I just yearned to savor those few seconds of charged fear and excitement between stability and the fall.

My legs hurt from the strain but I reached. I reached and saw the two cities spread below me, waiting for me to jump. I let my feet cross the impossible threshold for a second. Nothing held me back. No crushing gravitational pull. Both Future Boyfriend and his sister stood further away, watching a street procession while rapt with discussion. I could fall and they would never know.

I could be the last woman on Earth.
Its only hope.
Its only future.

A moment later, a familiar, debilitating panic clawed me away from the ledge. As I moved back I panted so hard my chest burst. I clutched myself, waiting for the others to finish watching and turn back.

Later my boyfriend told me he thought I was ill. I told him I thought I was dying.

Later he told me he understood my question. He loves high places and deceives himself less. His deepest fantasy involves being let out alone deep into the ocean, on a sailboat.

*

At Secaucus, I counduct a solo symphony. The weeds respond to every minute flick of my arms. The brash streetlights ruin every shot I try to take with my awful cellphone camera. And then I reach the end of the platform. My platform is a little longer than the other three.

Here, at the end, there remains nothing but the dark and gravel and the highway below. One misstep and I could careen onto the highway. I push my toes past the gate, as far as I dare to take them. The world is dark and quiet and I might fall.

But I don't.

The self-preserving monster pulls me back from the edge. The music stops and I remember myself. I turn off my iPod and stop the seduction. I watch the traffic beneath me in the silence while fighting the nausea. Five minutes later, the train whistle rips the fragile air.

As I get on the train, the Kingdom of Secaucus waits. We have a secret, it and I.

I close my eyes. When I open them again, I am far, far, away.

Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.
 
Ryszard Kapuscinski