This morning there are gulls in the neighborhood, loudly screeching, flying low over the garbage bags lined up on the sidewalk, spreading their impressive wings. We are nowhere near the water. I mentioned it to the man at the corner store and he, too, had heard them and remarked on the strangeness of it.

The cat the landlady keeps in the hall scratched at the floor all night and mewed incessantly. The landlady opened the cellar door abruptly before dawn to yell,"WHAAAT?!!" (All three of us knew what, but no one ventured anything.) It gave me an unpleasant start and caused me to picture my father. The cat, who may be a boy or a girl but is currently too small to properly be either, fell silent.

Mr. Stewart who lived across the street, hasn't returned. His laundromat at the corner only opens once or twice a week now, under the auspices of his assistant, a shrunken blue-haired lady with sharp eyes. Mr. Stewart and his adopted grandson Robert had to be removed from their place two months ago because of a carbon monoxide leak from the furnace. We don't know who called the police. The firemen knocked out most of the windows in Mr. Stewart's apartment building, which is how we discovered the reason for his absence. A lone police car stood vigil for the better part of a day. After another couple of days his son came from no-one-knows-where to board up the first floor windows.

The police car gave the landlady cause to spread the rumor that Mr. Stewart had been charged with homicide, even though the neighbors who were waked by the lights and sounds of broken glass on the night in question, spoke to Robert and Mr. Stewart before they were wheeled away. "The cops never stay unless they're investigating a crime. Wouldn't be here unless they'd suspected a murder or someting like that," she repeated with an ominous pleasure. She thinks Mr. Stewart deserved what happened. According to her (and to everyone, really) the place has fairly fallen in on itself since Mr. Stewart's wife died. "They shoulda knock'd a hole in the roof let that gas out; they can do that you know," says the landlady.

Prospective roommates/landlords. Please chose one.
1. Asks about the timing of your meals and preferred cooking method.
2. Requires you to name your prescribed medications.
3. Insists that you join their food co-op. ("It's really not up to me," they say, shrugging their shoulders in a cutesy way. "It's in the bylaws.")*
4. Requests that you self-identify according to Myers-Briggs typology.
5. Asks you to discuss your application with their spouse at an international exchange.


*It actually is in the co-op's legalese (emphasis mine): "People who have the above living arrangements [co-habitation] must always join the Coop as households whether or not they intend to share Coop products." Children are exempt.

W. Hodding Carter

I helped prepare this interview with Hodding Carter. I expected it to be a fairly straightforward selling of the blog that Carter is writing for Gourmet's website on the subject of Extreme Frugality. Carter is a writer and adventurer. The feats he has accomplished include retracing the expedition of Lewis and Clark, sailing from Greenland to North America in a replica of an ancient ship⎯a six-year odyssey⎯and training for the Olympics as a swimmer at age 45. The interview turned out to be refreshingly candid and personal. That a man so manifestly quixotic finds himself preoccupied with the means of his and his family's sustenance is affecting. That the audacity of his undertakings is balanced by an obvious humility even more so.

Atlantic City

A woman is shepherding her child, a young girl wearing a jacket stamped with gold foil medallions, along the platform. She closes tight the girl's zippers and straightens her belt while the girl wobbles patiently with her arms outstretched and makes small, unformed sounds. “Oooh. Oh.”

She cleans the child’s nostrils one at a time. She lets the platform know that “it's a hard crust!" she's dealing with. She instructs the girl to wipe her mouth and “Lick it. Li-ick it.”

Turning her attention to herself, she exclaims with disgust that her boots are dirty again though she just got through cleaning them before they left the house. The girl bends and brushes her mother's calf-suede toes with a mittened hand.

It is Monday, around 10:30AM. We are waiting for the A Train at Utica, hoping for an express.

“Two pairs of jeans,” the woman says. "Two. A hat and some gloves. Not like these," she bats the child's woolen cap. "A scarf. Then I’ll take you to Chanel’s.” A Santa Claus list recited in April. The girl, distracted, accepts the long strand of promises with a soft "yeah."

"You got change, coins?" The child produces three quarters.

"Gone take the A to 42nd. Then we get the bus." the mother says. Her speech is a rich stew of vowels. "LanihCidee," she says.

She is wearing her wallet around her neck, on top of her coat with her ID card displayed behind a piece of clear plastic. She has a moist cough and gets up to expectorate in the garbage can.

By the time she returns, the girl has produced a cell phone. Spotting it, the mother demands the time, which the girl gives automatically in a voice I can't hear.

"What you pay for your phone," the mother asks. "Fifty dollars? You jest put twenty on it?"

"They take the phone you in school," she warns. "Teacher know you got a phone, you... better put it someplace she don't find it."

The child is busy now, punching letters into the device. Unwilling to be ignored, her mother pokes her.

"What you say to Shardea?"
"You say, 'Hey man,' say 'Hey man.'"
The child nods slightly, but continues working the phone's buttons.

"You say, 'Yo!'
"Say 'Hey, yo man.'" The girl remains silent.
The mother goes on in the singsong cantor you use to teach babies to talk, "Hey man."
"Hey, yo man."

On the train I lean way over to catch sight of the two of them sitting on the other side of the doors. The mother is reading a string of numbers from a piece of folded white paper. The girl has her head inclined toward her mother's shoulder and is looking straight ahead.

Mickey Rourke Inteview

Charlie Rose's interview with Mickey Rourke is surprisingly successful given Rose's unfortunate habit of getting in the way of his guests, pre-empting their responses and answering his own questions. Rose is all too frequently excited rather than engaged by his guests, particularly actors. When he's excited, Rose is especially giddy, shallow and interruptive.

However, he appears genuinely fascinated by Rourke, where fascination implies stillness, silence and grave attention. Rourke, for his part, is less self-conscious than one might expect and less guarded. Perhaps he does not reveal himself completely, but he certainly invites Rose in and offers him a drink.

The feeling that we are eavesdropping on two fellahs at a bar evaporates when Rose neglects the intimacy that's developing by referring to other published interviews, and to his unfortunate preoccuption: celebrity ("You're back with a vengeance!")

Rourke describes feeling crushed some years ago when patrons at the 7-Eleven recognized him as someone who used to be famous. Rose strangely misreads the emphasis, pressing Rourke as to whether or not the incident really took place at the 7-Eleven.

Naturally, as Rourke confides, this was merely the first or most vivid instance of something that happened over and over again during the years he was not acting (of course not just at the 7-Eleven). The question begged is how Rourke dealt with it. Did he avoid going out in public? Did he disguise himself? Did these encounters enhance the shame that thematized his life until recently? Did these "has-been" moments cause him to wallow in the feeling that he'd never return to acting or did they spur him to try to get back in the game?

Rourke says that working on The Wrestler was hard, but focuses mainly on the issue of not being paid for the role. What else was hard about it? What was the experience like emotionally? Rose tries to get at this by asking whether or not Rourke's acting skills were like disused muscles waiting to be flexed, and then... says no to Rourke's cigarette.

It's unaccountable why Rose denies Rourke the cigarette he wants. They talk about Sean Penn's having smoked in the studio. Rose is, therefore, guilty of bad manners as well as a strategic mistake. By not allowing Rourke to partake of what he feels he needs to address the question, Rose closes off the possibility of a deeper camaraderie and a more searching response. (I've been in that studio, so I happen to know there is an ashtray sitting on one of the unidentifiable pieces of painted black, particle-board furniture that line its edges. The ashtray was full when I saw it; perhaps they are saving Penn's butts for some reason.)

It would also have been really interesting to understand how Rourke got by financially during the last decade...after he sold his Harleys and, presumably, the Mini-Cooper. The few films he mentions having appeared in don't seem to account for it, unless he, like his character, lived in a trailor.

And, when Rourke mentions that some part of him is still liable and even eager to destroy the success he has now, I wish Rose had followed up. What form would the catastrophe take? And how does Rourke experience the temptation to provoke it (does he hear a voice, picture himself doing it)?

Other loose ends that might have been gathered include Rourke's comment about not being ready to pursue a relationship. Has he been single since the failed marriage? What was the working relationship with Marissa Tomei? Rourke never mentions her.

The most obvious omission (and there may have been a really good reason not to ask this) concerns Rourke's altered visage. Rose could have introduced this when Rourke confided that making his body into a suit of armor was a way to stave off shame and banish fear. Were the plastic surgeries an extension of this? Rourke's surgery is regarded as a failure because it has changed his appearance radically. But based on what he says, he may not have been striving to look younger; he may have simply wanted to look like someone else.

This could have led to what might be an even more delicate question: Does Rourke imagine and can he accept the idea that, as in Animal Factory and now the Wrestler, the roles he's offered in the future may be limited to those which demand a peculiar (i.e. damaged, unnatural) appearance?



Weird coda: Surprised to find this on the CR website. I guess Rourke did get to smoke...furtively, in the john.

Sense-Certainty

I am ashamed to admit that I enjoy novels and films merely sensually as a cow may her cud. My analytical faculties are awakened only when a work's failure appears so abject as to strain credulity and so beg comparison. (Just now it occurs to me that my unwilingness to examine its strengths and weaknesses critically may preclude me from fairly judging any work a failure.)

In any case, my laziness secures me a pleasure that is uncomplicated and (perhaps for that reason) intense but also fleeting so that I recall little of what I've read or seen afterward. This makes it challenging to recommend the works I admire (admiration already implying much more than mere enjoyment can give rise to) with any success, since I am unable to describe them. I attempt to make up for my lack of authority by praising them in the most grandiose terms imaginable.

Although I savor these experiences unthinkingly, I'm no sybarite. I don't seek to indulge in luxurious display or description, a sanguine outlook or satisfying conclusion. On the contrary, my enjoyment is keenest when a work's "style" is hard to identify, and when its subject either is or demands of its audience a measure of suffering.