August: Osage County (why I’ll try theatre again)

2/26/2008 4:07 AM

I got an email from Sunil Vyas while I was at work yesterday and he just responded again. It seems I’ll see him on Monday the 3rd for dinner. How exciting. I am up on time and ready to go, but I want to write a little here first.
I keep thinking of the play that I went to see with Chandler. “August: Osage County” was a great play and in spite of the fact that I usually do not enjoy big c culture events I loved this one. I think I’d like to write a brief post about it for the Blog. I should start with the fact that I often, peremptorily, prejudicially and without cause, don’t like going to plays and being around the theatre crowd. This goes double for opera, classical music and experimental theatre. The last play I went to was the one about Buckminster Fuller with my dad (which has its own special load of fraught freight). I remember that it was in a warehouse-type theatre with lots of really engaged people, not a few of whom were old hippies like my dad. As I went into the big space with bleachers built to face the stage I enjoyed the “archive of Buckminster Fuller” and the “world games” that filled the space like some experimental museum. But I was not comfortable.
In spite of the fact that is was like a trip to my childhood, with buckyball globes (tetrahedrons cut out of postcards) made of cardboard and other oddities of the subject of the play, I felt disease. It is the same feeling I get when I go to the opera in SF, or Philly or (strangely to a lesser extent) in New York. I got crabby and judgmental, spending as much time assessing the clothes, styles, class and culture of my fellow theatre goers as I did watching the play, theatre, opera or anything else.
When I go to big-C-cultural events I inevitably start to compare instead of identifying. I begin to reach a point where I note every difference between myself and the other people attending the same production. I’ve noted before that I don’t get this way when I’m in an art museum, so this alienation and judgment is particular to the theatre-arts big-C-cultural events. I just don’t know why. I suppose I could go to a few years of therapy and figure it out, but I like sitting in my grouch-can complaining too much.
“August: Osage County” was a great play and a big-C-cultural event that I truly enjoyed. This leads me to believe that the real issue is the quality or my engagement with the productions I’ve seen. I know that I did actually enjoy the St. Petersburg production of Pushkin’s “The Fiery Angel,” but it had massive full frontal nudity and catholic bashing (fifty nuns stripped down and climbed all over the set nude: it was spectacular). But, I also enjoyed “August: Osage County” and it had no nudity. It was a human drama full of real people and actual emotions covered in very funny humor, which is how I try to avoid my feelings.
From the moment the play began I stopped taking inventory of my fellow theatre-goers and did not notice a thing besides Chandler’s tired head on my shoulders until it was over. I wasn’t even bothered by the people pushing passed my seat to get oiled at intermission. The guy behind me who was so drunk that his breath was making me tipsy barely bothered me as I watched the drama unfold.
It was like watching the most dysfunctional family reunion or chistmas dinner ever, in the tawdriest trailer park in the south. Yet I had no judgment of the people on stage at all (in spite of the bashing that the description I just gave suggests). I was immediately struck by the humanity of the characters, the reality of the actors’ performances and the use of humor to deflect the horror of a domestic tragedy.
I loved the experience of this play and look forward to going to more drama, if it is this good. This one play rescued three genres of big-C-culture for me in one felled swoop.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Physical Therapy and Abu Ghraib

So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:

As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments

I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains

That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched

Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent

Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures

Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)

In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs

Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”

At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of

As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum

Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires

He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate

Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet

There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

Black History Poem: Obama/Obama Prime

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In times past
There were giants
Walking the Black earth
Delaney, Douglass, Garvey, King and X

We know that now because we can see
Their tremendous silhouettes
Against the horizon of history

But the little people who followed them
Could not see them against dawn or dusk
They looked up @ them, with faith

In their righteousness, the justness
Of their causes. Minding not
The hot glare of midday white disapproval

They relaxed in the cool shade
Of righteous goliaths
Stretching from the dawn of history
To the dark dusk of hope

Happy New You

 

12/31/07 05:35:55 AM

Where has the year gone? Has it gone into the trash heap or the archives; I’m not sure which. Into the archives is another beautiful year with a wonderful family. We’ve just moved into an apartment which seems to fit us better. We, for the first time, are in a home big enough for all of us (the second bathroom is key).

Here is an outline of the biggies I can think of this minute:

New House

We love our new house and are looking forward to finishing moving in. Three bedrooms and two baths is the right fit for us. Mason has his own room and it is big enough to send him to. Chandler and Lennox are working out the wrinkles in their new quasi-cohabitation. Generally permission is granted to cross the armistice line; especially since Lenna got her princess netting and pink rug. It is strange to be in a modern building and the view, as I look over the BQE and east into Woodside and Rego Park and watch the sun rise as I write this the sky and the contours of the land are enthralling to me. I love watching when the LIRR rolls out of Woodside on the way to Jamaica: a long silvery snake a half a mile on.

Family

 

I am still so in Love With Linda that it scares me. She is the model for everything beautiful and desirable in my life. I wish I could be with her more and, paradoxically, more like her. I am blessed to be chosen by her to spend these days together with her.

Chandler continues to thrive at the TAG school she’s in. She has a lot of homework and does it without complaint, though she looks at the confections of Cable TV as the just and right compensation for her work. At least is is mostly Disnified Pre-Tween Confections, though she will be a teenager on February 23^rd.

Mason and I survived the soccer season (he’s quite good) with me as coach, though he declined to play winter league indoors. Mason’s way with words continues to amaze Linda and I mostly because he is not the squeaky wheel. Out of -or out from under- the hubbub of the family Mason will make a wry comment that puts everything that we are all elbowing to the front to try and frame just so into context. He does so uproariously and seemingly without effort.

Lennox is growing up so fast in so many ways. Just like with her sister we are often fooled into thinking that she’s older because she’s so damned verbal. She is also sassy in a way Chandler can only dream of (and rue). So when she puts her hand on her splayed hip and rolls her eyes as she wipes stray locks out of her eyes explaining “whatever, duh!” we lose track of her age (5) and size (just right). We start trying to reason with the sarcastic teenager that she apes rather than the Kindergartener that she is. Needless to say we miss having Kindergarten across the street, but we’ll see how this move will effect our lives (passive aggressively I think the earlier wake-up and travel will be good for the family).

School Year

I loved my Fall 1 Classes and I am really enjoying the Lit Elective classes I am teaching. The Contemporary African American Fiction and the Black Lit Survey have been soul-expanding (as much as teaching a class can be). I love the students at LaGuardia CC. Teaching them is a dream come true. In many of their faces and papers I see myself struggling intellectually to come into my own. It is a humbling flashback when I see the same misunderstandings that I made in someone else’s paper. It is a merciful reminder of my current domestic bliss when I see the sturm und drang of youthful courting around campus. I look forward to working on my own intellectual and academic development this next year.

Amir’s Murder

The horror of Amir Hassan Reed’s murder this year has put a lot of things into perspective. I am so grateful to be alive, which I generally take for granted. I take life, mine and my beautiful family’s to be a given that shall continue along, but it “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I had taken it for granted that I would wake up to the same cast that I went to sleep with. It is rare that such a Cause Célèbre visits our lives, and I had often wished that my life would intersect with drama and fame. Sigh, I wish that I had marked my door with blood so this angel never came. What I found most annoying and titillating was the comments left on the SFGate site articles: people who knew the least seemed to make the strongest comments. This puts all of my “Willie-Neckbone-Expertise” into perspective: the more I think I know, the less I know.

48 Years

I turned 48 this December. I remember in 1974 thinking that it would be the year 2000 when I was 40. It seemed so abstract and distant (and of course I took it for granted that I would live that long). Well until this year I’ve held up well. During the spring my Achilles tendons started to act up (and I didn’t go to the doctor). In the Fall, playing soccer with Mason I tore up my ankle (and I didn’t go to the doctor). This December my ankle got infected and I went to the doctor. I will go to physical therapy soon because I really miss my morning runs through Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth and Long Island City. I’m feeling trapped by my infirmity in spite of the fact that I did go for a bike ride yesterday. Linda is sick this morning so I don’t think I’ll have that luxury.

Dreams

I still haven’t written the great American novel, but I have been working on a story. I haven’t published my dissertation, but I hope to. I want to do more original scholarship rather than just “willie-neckbone” out opinions on things I know little about. So I will continue to do as the Sanskrit Proverb suggests:

Look to this day
For it is life
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power –

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy New YOU, Love Stafford.

Prophet Housing

12/18/07 04:56:38 AM

So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46^th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.

I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.¹ This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)

The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.

(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)

Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:

Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.²

Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)

Santa’s in Rehab

Santa’s in Rehab

Reindeer out in the paddock:
Every elf is laid off,
Cookies, milk, curdle and pile up.
The kids’ll all feel this loss.

The toy-stores are failing,
Some jewelers close too,
The churches sell meaning
But Kris Kringle is blue

Locked in a rehab
And shut away tight
Santa is kicking
Those years he was high

The kids understand, some.
The can forgive him this once.
Adults have all screwed up
Once, some a couple of twice

Fluids, a blanket and headache:
The shades are all drawn tight.
Years of jollity: all faked.
Mrs. Clause visited twice.

In therapy and the day room
Counselors light jittery smokes
In slippers and paper robes
“Wonderful Life” is a joke

Twenty-eight days later
The elves are called back
The red suit is much looser
But hope is starting to stack

He ramps up the production,
He trains the old reindeer,
Twelve hours off then twelve hours on
Milk and cookies replace beer

The North Pole is humming
Shiny-cuddly toys pile up
Rudolf does wind sprints
While elves fill up trucks (what can brown do for you?)

Year in, year out, it was a job:
Presents all over the globe
Duck La Migra and NoRAD
It all seemed such a job

The new true love is all back
It had been flushed by the hooch
The dreamer dreams new dream tracks
This lover loves life’s simple gift.

Santa skipped one Christmas
Was it oh-two or oh-four?
Rehab was god’s best new gift
Santa wasn’t happy before

Now the gifts all come again
Shrink-wrapped like a glove
And though Santa’s a bit thin
The new gifts are plain-old-love.

The season has meaning
The gift of rebirth’s back
The days all get longer
And fill up like Santa’s sack

Paella Risotto

With all of the turmoil that reminds me of Cali I remember the yummy meals we all used to share. I wish I could have Julie’s Albondigas for Dia De Los Muertos or Javier’s Tortilla
Española (always cooked to perfection) or Sean and Naemi’s Japanese Cole Slaw and Potato salad, or just another day with everyone.

Paella Risotto ala Stafford

2 Cups Rice

6-8 Cups Simmering Broth

Sausage (Not Much)

2 Cups Chicken boned and cubed

Onion

Garlic

Red Pepper

Vegetable (Asparagus, or Green Beans, or Okra, or whatever)

Shrimp (or Fish)

 

Prep (chop, wash and thaw) all vegetables, meat, shrimp (& fish) and anything else you want to add. Have them ready in separate bowls because once you start you have to keep stirring until the dish is done.

 

Sauté Sausage and remove (I put the sausage on a paper towel to remove the extra grease)

 

Sauté Onions, garlic and Red (& Green) Peppers in sausage fat

 

Mix in two cups of rice and sauté on low for a few minutes (not long)

 

Either add enough broth and start sautéing or cut off the heat until all the ingredients are prepped

 

Once you start to sauté you must keep mixing the rice, onions, pepper and garlic.

Keep stirring

Slowly continue to add broth as the rice absorbs it

Keep stirring

As the rice plumps up keep tasting it

Keep stirring

Add the chicken after about five minutes

Keep stirring

When it is close to cooked, (keep tasting) add the shrimp (&/or fish)

Keep stirring

When it is closer to cooked, (keep tasting) add the veggies and sausages

Keep stirring

In the three to five minutes that it takes to cook the shrimp and veggies get everyone to the table and ask the kids to wash their hands.

Serve hot.

 

I like to serve it with some onion and garlic relish. When I have beans, I garnish it with them too.

 

 

More Missing Amir Hassan

Chandler, the youthful scribe of our broken hearts, wrote another letter that I discovered in her room. I found it when we were looking for Halloween Costumes lost since we bought them: the confusing luxury of living life. Though the kids aren’t speaking about the tragedy much, there continue to be silent signs of Amir’s passing. Mason’s weekly essay (which he covered with his arms when I asked about it) is about Amir. Lennox alone is undamaged in our house in Sunnyside.

Here are some youtubes of our lost prince: Amir in a revival of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Stick with it, these flickering images are all we have left outside of our hearts and dreams.

When I watch this Recorder Recital at Emerson I am reminded of my lack of patience at the kids’ performances and recitals. I am going to try and treasure them from now on. Even the kids who don’t die untimely deaths are only children for a few years. I am going to try and stop rushing Chandler, Mason and Lennox through their childhood and savor our todays.

Today is October 21, 2007; Thank you GOD.

Chandler’s Letter to Amir

I found this dry-erase letter in Chandler’s Room when I was up there.  I think that its medium, its very impermanence, says as much as Cha-Cha’s eloquent  words.