Mixing Memory And Desire

I have little time to post today, but with this month nearly over, I of course found myself thinking about The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Spring seems to be the time I make fateful choices - four years ago, for instance, having decided to move back to New York, I was on a fabulous farewell tour of California. In other Aprils I have lost and found loves, jobs, a child and perfect spring shoes.

It stands out as perhaps not the cruelest month for me, but one of the most eventful. But Eliot ended his poem with "Shantih shantih shantih," the peace that passes understanding, and perhaps some April I will achieve that. (I was amused to see just now Time's dismissive 1923 appraisal of this rich work.)

Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White

If you are anywhere within 20 miles of Central Park, there is a stand of cherry blossoms at their peak right now on the west side of the reservoir at around 86th Street, underneath which the Central Park Conservancy has thoughtfully placed a winding mulched path, and I would encourage you to get there as soon as you can.

Walking or running that path under a canopy of low branches laden with hot-pink blooms, with the reservoir shimmering nearby and the buildings of Fifth Avenue and Central Park West visible not far away is a quasi-religious experience, an exercise in appreciation of nature's bounty and humans' creativity.

Also, the sight of any big flowering tree always makes me want to linger there, kissing someone. As there were no human volunteers this morning, my canine companion had to do.

Because I no longer have a garden, I rely on Central Park for my flora. And I like to let those who tend them and the rest of the park know how thankful I am for their work. You should too - the city pays for only a small percentage of this magnificent public amenity's upkeep and improvements.

Of course, the topic made me think of the laudably cheesy mambo that gives this post its title, and in looking for it I came across this laudably cheesy pink-and-white slideshow.

You Say It's Your Birthday

Today is a holiday for many worldwide, and at 4:20 this afternoon the pungent smoke of burning flowers will form a cloud over many college campuses. But I will always remember this date as the birthday of a certain tall, funny Canadian.

I am a bit obsessed with birthdays, especially my own, and I make a habit of remembering them and calling or sending a note - though I do owe many Pisceans an apology this year.

Sometimes, I keep that up long after there is any point in doing so, and remember the occasion even when my other memories of the person in question have become hazy. It is thus that I am close to romantic-interest birthday "bingo" with the second of each month (I'd imagine an astrologer would have something to say about that, though I'd be unlikely to take it seriously) and that I can still easily recall the birthday of my eighth-grade crush, even though I was not invited to his bar mitzvah.

Of course, an electronic calendar with "every year" checked helps. And many of those on my birthday list don't always bother to acknowledge the most important day of the year. But they seem oddly touched when I do. I can't be sure if that's because they're truly appreciative, or because they're amused by my geeky foolishness. But either way, I'll take the connection.

There Ain't No Cure For Love

I’m guessing that you, like me, know at least one woman who has had cancer. In my case, that group includes my mother and stepmother. And you’d probably like to help fund treatment and support of those with women’s cancers and research into finding a cure on behalf of all the mothers, daughters and sisters we know.

Here’s a suggestion: join me in the New York Run/Walk for Women on May 2nd, or participate in the LA Run/Walk on May 9th. It’s 5K – just 3.2 miles, starting in Times Square and going through Central Park – and couldn’t we all use a little more exercise? Find out more about it here.

I've been running in these events since they started - it's fun and easy, the park is at its most beautiful then, you get a swell goodie bag and you spot lots of famous people (if you care about that) - once I was side by side with Pierce Brosnan, who is quite handsome in person, and a fast walker.

If you aren't near either of those cities or can't get there, please consider a donation.

And if you know someone who’s gotten a cancer diagnosis and needs help figuring out what to do next, have him or her visit Third Opinion, run by a survivor and "helping professional" who’s been making a huge difference in the lives of cancer patients for many years. I’m doing this in her honor.

What A Swell Party This Is

I have been spending increasing amounts of time on Twitter, probably to my detriment, and I'm finding that my approach to it is very different from that of many Tweeple. I see it as a fun way to communicate creatively and largely inconsequentially, and restricting myself to haiku format keeps it interesting for me and, I hope, for those reading my tweets.

I follow those who interest me because of their wit, their charm or their accomplishments, and as a matter of etiquette I follow back those who follow me unless they appear to be spammers or if it's clear that I'll feel pain every time I see one of their pronouncements (the term #tcot is usually a dead giveaway). But as much as I enjoy having followers (nearly 300 as of this writing, of whom I know fewer than 25 or so in real life), I'm not obsessed with getting more.

Twitter seems like a big party to me: you chat with amusing people, you listen to their observations, and you find some you'd like to spend more time with. Yes, it's networking, but it's not work - I have LinkedIn for that, and trading marketing tips all day is not my idea of a good time. Especially if they're self-referential - most of the "helpful hints" I see are about how to make yourself more popular on Twitter!

It's like going to a book party and finding that the only authors there are Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I met Robbins once in the green room at QVC and he radiates confidence (and has an enormous head), and I have a first edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People that I got for 25 cents at a tag sale - but it's not my idea of a really good time.

An elegant bash is, of course. And when I came up with the title of this post, I was thinking of the classic version of the Cole Porter song by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby from High Society.

But in looking for the video, I stumbled across this incredible gem, a companion to the very first Red Hot & Blue AIDS fundraiser album. (The latest installment in the Red Hot series is the highly recommended Dark Is The Night.) While Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry's rendition doesn't have Frank and Bing's panache, the video, directed by Alex Cox of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy fame, is the perfect combination of star quality and punk nihilism.

And its stars, besides being two of my favorite performers, are really fun at a party, as I know from personal experience.

My Life in 1909

My father's father arrived at Ellis Island in 1906, when he was three years old, and his family moved to the Lower East Side. I do not know exactly where they lived, but whenever I find myself in that neighborhood, which is often over the past few years, I wonder what it must have been like to live there 100 years ago.

When I was a teenager, I read Henry Roth's magnificent Call It Sleep, which gave me a feeling for the teeming ethnicity of the area, and the Tenement Museum has preserved a reasonable facsimile of the crowded apartments there.

I was thrilled yesterday to discover TimesTraveler, a window into the events of a century ago via the pages of the New York Times, and to read about an Easter parade on Grand Street, "the Fifth Avenue of the Lower East Side," in which dresses with hundreds of buttons and green shoes prevailed, and the most dashing headgear was "a cross between a vegetable garden and a fruit salad."

I imagined my grandfather as a little boy, eyes wide, taking it all in. And I wondered who I would have been then - at my age, almost certainly a grandmother, perhaps a shop owner or part of a theatrical family, like the great star Molly Picon. I think I would have been a contemporary of my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side, whose family had lived in Connecticut since the 1860s.

My options in the 20th and 21st centuries have been much vaster than I'd guess hers were. Working-class women like her worked, but in general they didn't have careers; they raised children and cleaned and cooked and sewed, and read the newspapers to keep up with the doings of Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV, who, as it happens, was a party to a scandalous divorce in 1909. (Mr. Astor thereafter married an 18-year-old and then perished on the Titanic, leaving all his money to his son, who eventually married the late Brooke Astor.)

Back then, if they were at all attractive, women were certainly not single, which I have been, at least nominally, for far more of my adult life than not. However, I am glad to have had that choice, and the luxury of worrying about things like Amazon rank rather than where I can find a pushcart vendor who will give me a potato on credit to make soup for my large and hungry family.

(Hester Street in 1901, from New York Architecture.)

On The Avenue, Fifth Avenue

I'm not all that big on eggs, unless they're by Fabergé. As I've explained, I don't have that many. Bunnies? Delicious. The Resurrection? My people don't go for that. But the Easter Parade? Sign me up.

For one thing, it's all about hats. For another, I love walking on Fifth Avenue rather than just next to it. And finally, it means I get to post a Judy Garland video. Proving once again that, despite my lack of any kind of Y chromosome, I may really be a gay man in drag.

I love that the song was written by my fellow wandering Jew Irving Berlin, who also wrote "White Christmas." And the "Fifth Avenue" at the end? Recognizably the Warner Bros. lot, with St. Patrick's rather crudely matted in.

The Passover Journey

Passover is my favorite holiday, because it's about spring, and family, and because there's so much poetry in it, including the Song of Songs. Here's one of my favorites, which I'll be reading later today:

The Journey
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

It was my very first post on this blog.

Death-Defying Stunts

Yesterday, I took my seven-year-old niece to The Greatest Show On Earth. The Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus was at Madison Square Garden, and it was mightily entertaining. It offered trained animals of all sizes, from bichons frisés to elephants, including one ring of trained black, white and black-and-white horses next to another of trained zebras.

Later on, there was the net-enclosed spectacle of 12 tigers rolling over, dancing on their hind legs and leaping over their trainer - remarkable compared to most house cats I've met, who seem oblivious to all commands. (After the show, tediously earnest people were passing out flyers about animal abuse, which struck me as odd considering that those animals are surely better fed and cared for than many of the children on this planet.)

There were also many acts that defied gravity, flying and swooping and tumbling in improbable ways, including two brothers on what looked like matching hamster wheels, what appeared to be a family of airborne acrobats flipping in mid-air, and a high-wire act that at one point had four people seemingly balanced on a unicycle. I particularly liked the upside-down couple - wearing, it appeared, magnetic shoes - who conducted an adorable pantomime from the ceiling.

The clowns were terrific, as was the ringmaster, and there was a live band who kept things moving along nicely. I, of course, kept wondering how differently my life would have turned out if I had made the final cut in the Ringling Brothers showgirl auditions I went to at a midtown hotel all those years ago. At least my picture was in the Post, all wide smile and long legs.

While the First Niece enjoyed her shaved ice in its light-up commemorative mug, and her stuffed baby elephant, I may have actually have had more fun than she did - that's amortality for you. It truly was magical, for children of all ages. Inevitably, I found myself thinking about one of my favorite films, Wings of Desire, about mortality and performance and a circus, for which the trailer is unexpectedly terrible:

A Person Can Develop A Cold

I always feel blessed to have an extraordinarily strong immune system, but occasionally it decides that anyone over 25 who thinks that getting up early to work out combines well with staying up late to party with rock stars on an ongoing basis should have another think coming. Thus it is that I find myself on the verge of taking a sick day so I can cough and sneeze all over my keyboard at home rather than doing the same at my office.

I am not very good at being sick, mostly because I am not good at doing nothing. In theory, some of the trappings are appealing, like a frilly bed jacket, meals on a tray and monogrammed handkerchiefs, but in reality it's very hard to make crumpled tissues look attractive and I have not yet figured out how to get Ollie's to deliver noodle soup in anything but a paper bag.

Also, I am afraid that I will get hooked on watching daytime TV and have to subscribe to Soap Opera Digest to feed my addiction, though this has never actually happened. (I do find the regular combination of television and sunshine to be indicative of a serious character flaw, which has occasionally provoked indignation from the depressed and/or unemployed, so if this is a habit of yours that you consider meritorious, please educate me.)

However, I have certain food cravings that signal illness, traceable what my mom used to bring me in bed when I was sick: weak tea (I lose all taste for coffee), buttered toast, soft-boiled eggs and the aforementioned noodle soup, the penicillin of my people.

This post's title is, of course, taken from Guys & Dolls' memorable"Adelaide's Lament." But waiting for that little band of gold is not what's landing me in a prone position, for three reasons:

1. The long-term results to date of the presence on my finger of any such band have not been all that good;
2. I prefer platinum; and
3. Supine suits me better.

RT @solomon: The Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is one of my favorite spring poems, and, like the venerable Guardian, has now been Twitterized. Here's a sample:

@Beloved: Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Weather report: The winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of ♫ http://tinysong.com/Fz9 is heard in our land

@bittman: The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

RT @god: Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for swee…

Take us the foxes, the little foxes http://tinyurl.com/c98zpp, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Pls RT

Happy April!