Anna, Sincerely
It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m gazing down on Times Square, looking back over the year.
Coupla’ post scripts before it ends:
I had a brainstorm the other afternoon. I want to release a double CD in 2004: AM/PM. See, for some reason I write most of my songs in the morning. Probably because my frontal lobe (the logical part of the brain) hasn’t woken up. And I’m closer to dreams. So, I thought it’d be cool to put the mellow morning songs on one CD, and the more up tempo rock stuff on another. Of course, it’s ambitious and ridiculous considering that, even with the well-received Livingroom Tour, total demand for Almost Home is about 300 units, but what the heck. We’ll see how the year goes.
I had a two song morning on Monday morning. A new one came right after I blogged about the one I’d just written, “Untitled No. 2.” The other new one’s called “Anna, Sincerely.” It took about eight minutes. And it’s a keeper (whereas I’ll probably never release “Untitled No. 2″). You may recall that I have a song called “Anna’s Lost Her Mind” on Out of Your Head, so it’s kinda’ funny or weird or whatever to write another Anna song. But it’s great to sing — all vowels — and it fit. So there it is. Oh, and it’s a massively earnest song — they just get more and more so, huh?
Anna, sincerely, I love you completely
Anna, sincerely, I know you can hear me
Anna, sincerely, believe me when I say
Anna, sincerely, I won’t go away
Man, it’s really liberating when you stop worrying about being cool.
So, heck, it’s been quite a year, huh? It started in L.A., lost for the music. I wrote some songs. I released a CD. I hit eight states in fourteen days. I ran the marathon. I met all kinds of great and interesting new people. And I loved my friends and family as best I could. And one year later, I’m found, firmly in New York City. Thanks for making the trip with me. We’ve got some miles left in us. As Dan Wilson of Semisonic sings:
You tell yourself
What you want to hear
Cause you have to believe
This will be my year
Down The Rabbit Hole
Ho. Lee. Shit. Last night was one for the record books. I mean, it’s Tuesday afternoon and I’m barely moving…
It started innocently enough. I stopped into work for a minute, ate a salad in Bryant Park in the sunshine, then went to Lord of the Rings (very very long). My brother came over after work for a guitar lesson, beers and pizza. And then they descended, like locusts. Well-dressed, well coiffed locusts.
My buddy James — he of the Kauai wedding last summer — was in town from L.A. He came over around ten over with his wife and some friends (including an 18-year-old nephew), had a few martinis, then it was my duty to give them a Big New York City Night. I mean, you know me: I don’t really do Big New York City Nights. So I took ‘em to the local vaguely hip watering hole, Fusion, where we continued to get sloppy. At some point, we fell down the rabbit hole…
James got his head split open when his wife kicked in the bathroom door. We met a baker named Bruce. The bartender was hammered. There was flashing. Surreal.
And that was all before someone said, “Let’s go to Scores!”
Now, you gotta’ know: I have never been to a strip club. It just seems sad, not to mention some pretty f*cked up gender politics. But I was wasted, swept up in the moment, and game for an adventure. So I went.
For fifteen minutes.
I said no thanks to the table up front. I figured women would be shakin’ stuff at me, and I was not about to let that happen. So I retreated to the darkest corner of the bar, and ordered four drinks. “That’ll be $70 please,” the bartender (so not wasted) said. And I actually laughed out loud. Then the woman next to me, a brunette in some strappy little number, said, “Hi ya’ handsome.” And I was like, “I’m outa’ here.”
And I was. I didn’t even say good-bye to anyone. I just stumbled out, poured myself into a blurry yellow cab, slurred my address, and chalked one up to poor judgment. Guess that’s how we learn.
But I’m pretty sure the 18-year-old nephew had the night of his life.
Untitled No. 2
I’m home in New York following a 24 hour sojourn to my hometown of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I have the week off. It’s my first full week off in New York City since I moved here in 1995. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, as spending it at The Dead Poet is kinda’ out of the question.
I took the train to Philly Saturday morning, and spent the afternoon wandering Valley Forge Park with a friend from high school, talking mostly about love, and growing up. I wanted to do a bit of a photo essay for you since I write about the park so much on these pages, and intend to do so once I can extract the images from the camera.
It was staggeringly beautiful there, as always, bathed in the golden winter half-light (I love half-light, though I love full-on light more). I’ve never seen more deer there; hundreds upon hundreds of them dining in the tall grass, back lit by sunset. Our parents find the deer infestation to be quite the nuisance (I swear, they were all talking about it), but we city folk find it kinda’ nice.
After the requisite Wawa hoagie dinner (turkey, Swiss, extra pickle), I made my way to my friend (and long-ago girlfriend) Kir’s annual Christmas part which promised a full roster of high school chums (we used to call ourselves The Ferris Bueller Crew — lame, I know). Everyone was there, and for the first time, many of ‘em had kids en tow. Kir had rented a photo booth, which provided hours of seminude fun. By 3am, the babies had gone to bed, the spouses had all passed out, and the remaining dozen or so of my closest friends — my God, I’ve known many of them nearly twenty years — were left carrying on conversations that began with “Remember when…?”
I seem to be largely remembered for being drunk, or stoned, or both, most of the time. For doing things like snapping the banister at our senior week house, then vehemently denying it. And for dating, or hooking up with, most all of the ladies in the group. I’m still doing damage control at 32-years-old, though increasingly the defense of my behavior sounds something like, “Um, I was sixteen!” Which I think is explanation enough.
It is an odd phenomena, really, to sit with these friends of so many years. Somehow, despite it all, we all accept and love — cherish, really — one another, warts and all. There’s a great deal of empathy and understanding among us. It’s pretty neat.
Of course, it all leaves me a bit melancholy. But what doesn’t? That seems to be the prevailing emotion (is it an emotion?) in my quieter moments these days…
Like this morning. I walked home from the West Village. It was a beautiful sunrise, despite (or perhaps because) everything was just a touch out of focus (my contacts dried up so I threw ‘em out). Anyway, I try and save something for myself here in The Daily Journal, but suffice to say, I wrote a new song on the walk home (“Untitled No. 2″) that goes a little something like this…
For the first sixty blocks, the sidewalk was bleeding
If the concrete could talk, it would say it was fleeting
If the buildings could move, they would stand up and walk out on you
And the larger the leap, then the further the fall
And the more you can keep, and the less that is lost to your hands
Try and understand, try and understand
It’s not you, it’s just the bridge you must cross
Try and understand, try and understand
It’s not you, it’s just that admission has costs
Another song about transition, I guess. And loss, or something. Like Leonard Cohen says, “Every artist has one song he writes over and over again. And the beautiful thing about this endeavor is that you don’t realize you’re writing the same song repeatedly, but in fact, it keeps returning to you wearing the original blue gown.” Well, I think the blue gown was more of a floral slip, but whatever. I’m confident that the answer comes with waiting.
Good Morning, Future
I woke from the most excellent dream this morning (and not the one where I narrowly escaped a French Communist assassin’s bullet, appeared on CNN, then had beers with Frank Sinatra)…
It was the future. The world was a construct of The Company, an oppressive technocracy that synthesized and mediated everything. Nothing was real, but instead a construct of The Company. My brother and I worked for the Rogue Agency, tolerated, nay, sanctioned to operate on the fringes.
The Company was building a massive energy generator in the mountains near The Rogue Headquarters. Huge cooling towers reached for the sky. And the surrounding hills were paved in a synthetic glaze that The Company had not yet licensed us to operate on. And so our boots — like electric snow shoes or skis — could not tread there.
So we broke into The Company, and Chris hacked our way in, altering the very fabric of reality so they we could move forward. We got ourselves to The Headquarters, gathered our team, and moved out to rescue our comrades who were stuck elsewhere in the technosphere. Some of our teammates commented on my gear: I was wearing unsanctioned “old school” equipment: a fedora and aviator sunglasses — far to retro for The Company.
Later that night, as the tears in the fabric of The Company crackled and spit blue sparks, I climbed out of our basement Headquarters to find that The Company had again altered our synthetic world, paving everything in an unpassable white glaze. A note was taped to the door that said I could not pass. I reached for a small matter transforming gun — a glue gun, really — and started firing at the perfect white glaze, melting and crackling the very fabric of reality in small places. Then broke out.
But I saw Her there in the molten, torn fabric of time. I saw Her in the future. And hence, disrupted the very fabric of the space/time continuum. And so it was all over the news. Everything in the future was changed: world leaders were falling, news bulletins were breaking into network programming to announce the aberration I had created. Everything was altered.
I began to disappear.
Somehow, my brother hacked into the future, and reversed everything.
I woke this morning to this image: I was walking out of the inky-black, star-filled sky, with Her. And I woke this morning singing:
Everything is illuminated
I ruminated all night long
Good morning, future.
Punch Drunk
So this is Christmas… And what have you done? Another year over. A new one just begun…
Last night, I dreamt in slow motion. I moved like I was on the moon, floating weightless through a florescent-lit grocery store, bouncing and gliding effortlessly through the aisles.
I woke up and began cleaning a month’s-worth of clutter from my apartment: dirty clothes, half-wrapped gifts, newspapers and unpaid bills all scattered on the floor.
When the phone rang, it was my brother, readying himself and Ethan for a Christmas morning run through Central Park. The sun was just rising over the East side. The City was empty. And we ran, so Earthbound, so grounded in gravity.
I thought of Miami, of driving the narrow causeways to Key West, top down, stereo blasting, singing along. And I thought of coffee: warm, sweet, delicious coffee.
Last night, I had Christmas Eve dinner with my mother on the Upper West, then walked down Broadway, now deserted of shoppers, to Tower Records. I bumped into Chris Rock, twice, then purchased my favorite film of 2002, ‘Punch Drunk Love.’ Back home, a bowl of Breyer’s Cookies-n-Cream in my lap, I watched, and giggled, and smiled.
“I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.”
What Hope Looks Like
I saw Santa crossing Eighth Avenue yesterday afternoon. Then again on 23d & Park last night. That dude is everywhere.
I spent last night in the fine company of Kevin Anthony recording my annual Christmas single: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” We had a ball throwing back the ‘nog and working out harmonies. And while it may not rival Ronnie Spector of even U2′s version, it sure seems to fit in nicely with the ‘Almost Home’ ouvre.
In fact, it fits perfectly. My most distinct holiday memory — and the subject of the only original Christmas song I’ve ever written/recorded — is of Christmas 1980 (also the title of the song). I was seated on the cold vinyl back seat of my father’s red and white ‘Starsky & Hutch’ look-a-like vehicle. Dad was driving. Chris was in the front seat. It was dusk. The bleached Iowa countryside whizzed past. No one was talking. I had my new Capsuela set, and that silky disco shirt I wanted from Marshall Fields. But I don’t remember feeling full, or contented, or even remotely happy.
My father was driving us to a midway point between his parent’s in Waterloo, Iowa, and my mother’ sister’s house in Cedar Rapids. My parents were in the middle of a messy divorce. It was the winter of ‘That Winter’s Planets.’ It was the coldest on record, ever, and since.
We pulled over in Vinton (‘Popcorn Capital of the World’) and made a wordless exchange. And I never lived with my father again.
At my Aunt Bev’s, Chris and I got an Atari 2600, and whatever else it was we wanted. But it didn’t really matter. The house was choked with cigarette smoke and worry. Bodies were slouched on the sofa. Drinks were deep and plentiful. It was a sad time.
So here’s the happy ending: for the first time since 1980, my mom, dad, Chris and me — plus my dad’s wife (of over 20 years) Madonna, my brother’s wife Jen, and their gorgeous new baby Ethan — are having Christmas. Together.
Twenty-four years later, it all comes around. Baby comes home.
If that’s not healing, then I don’t know what healing feels like. And if that’s not hope, well, then I don’t know what hope looks like.
My Life So Far
It took me just under three hours this morning to tire of New York at Christmas: the music, the tourists, the traffic, the lines. Still, I spent the past 24 hours exactly as I’d dreamed of all those hours in the Rent-a-Taurus: movies and sleep.
Plus I got a cool pair of $20 sneakers.
I saw ‘Big Fish’ last night, and loved it. It’s a deep and simple story about storytelling. It left me walking home through Manhattan smiling, which is all I can ever ask of a film.
Tonight I saw ‘The Fog Of War,’ a far less smile-inducing film that sees Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara looking back at his life, and life choices. McNamara’s sense of regret and sadness is palpable, if irreversible. It is a terrific documentary, chilling in its account of one man’s bearing on history.
It occurs to me as I type that both films — randomly selected by my unconscious, no doubt — tell of old men looking back on their respective lives. I am reminded of the epilogue to ‘Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind’ in which Chuck Barris says
“I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It’s called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns on stage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn’t blow his brains out. He wins a refrigerator.”
I often catch myself assessing my life so far, and imagine what I’ll leave behind. While I intellectually tell myself that a legacy of friends and family is all that any man or woman can really leave, I always crave more: To make a difference. To leave lasting art.
Well, toss one more bit of artistic endeavor onto the funeral pyre: “Beholden.” I wrote the title track to my next (planned) record, ‘The Catcher In The Rye,’ last night. I know, it’s not really the title track, but it plays around with the book’s main character’s name (duh, Holden Caulfield). And it makes the sentimentality of “Stay” seem like “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
I’ll be Holden for you
If you’ll just hold on to me too
I mean, sincere… right!?! Oh well. If I learned anything from college, it’s trust intuition. And if I learned anything from Mister Rogers, it’s trust your heart. So it’ll make it to you one of these days…
Meanwhile, Christmas draws nearer and I’m 98% done with the whole gift thing. I have two big ones left: yours, and someone else’s. I’m making yours Monday night, and I’ll give you a hint: you can sing a long to it. The other one? Well, let’s just say I’ll be visiting a certain street it Midtown. And it ain’t frankincense.
This Fever-Dream Illness
I choked down a teaspoon of Promethazine, one Miraphen, two Advil, and a One-A-Day For Men, washed it all down with a Gray Goose, tonic and lime, then raced out the door, down the steps, and onto the street.
My breath slipped over my shoulder, behind me, and up into the night. It was the Thursday before Christmas. My head was spinning. My heart was full. All was uncertain.
My cell phone vibrated: a message.
“Dude, I guess it’s a little pathetic of me,” the voice said, “But you haven’t updated your Daily Journal in, like, two days. I’m a little concerned about this fever-dream illness of yours. Are you allright?”
I smiled, and walked on.
I’m all right.
Bethesda, Angel Of The Waters
In my fever-dreams, I keep returning to her: Bethesda, the Angel of the Waters.
She is one of my first memories of New York. I was about 13-years-old. It was a perfect fall day: half-sun, changing leaves. I was walking through Central Park with friends, wide-eyed that such beauty could exist in the middle of such a crazed, noisy city.
Years later, my brother and I drove down from Saratoga Springs to see “Angels In America” with my mother. I don’t remember a lot about the play, but I remember being blown away by the seamless transition between fantasy and reality, between waking and sleeping lives. And I remember nearly levitating out of my seat when the angel descended and said, “Millennium approaches!”
The next morning, I struck out with my guitar. It was my first time alone in the city. It was so overwhelming to me then: so big, so fast, so loud. I never felt safe, and I always felt lost. But I was immediately drawn to Bethesda fountain, where I sat and watched the waters fall below her feet for what seemed like hours.
In the spring of my first year as a New Yorker, I spent countless unemployed afternoons sitting on the hill above her, strumming, singing, and thinking.
These days, she is an integral part of my daily run. She is my gateway to the wilds of Central Park. I always approach from the south, where a wide staircase descends the Literary Walk, and frames her in the arches under 72d Street. It is such a magnificent bit of poetic symmetry, that I had to include it in my ‘New York’ music video.
And only recently have I come to understand why she’s there, and what she means. And it strikes me as so synchronous, so meaningful.
According to the Rick Burns’ “New York” documentary, the statue was dedicates in the late 1800s to commemorate Civil War naval dead. Because Central Park was so far uptown, it was out of reach for the proletariat. And the rich, apparently, didn’t care for her. She was too chubby, they said, too common. Both of which, of course, make her more beautiful and meaningful.
I started a song a few weeks ago called “Bethesda,” one I hope to finish for the next CD. It came to me while running:
And she waits by the water
And she waits for her father
And she always waits alone
And she’s always almost home
It is only recently, after watching “Angels In America” in the deep fever of my bronchitis, that I learned who Bethesda is, and how integral she was to the playwright, Tony Kushner, and his work.
Kushner wrote much of “Angels” on the benches around Bethesda Fountain, and ends his two-part play at her feet. The “Angel of the Waters” comes from Chapter five of the Gospel of Saint John. The story tells of an angel who bestows healing powers on the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem.
She is a healer.
And so I can only marvel at the resonance she has with me, with me being here in New York, with my calling New York home. “An angel is a belief,” Hanna (Maryl Streep in “Angels”) says. “With wings and arms that can carry you.”
See, I’m a sucker for symbolism. I especially love when symbols reveal their meaning over time. And so that Bethesda would make her story known to me slowly over all these years is pretty magical.
I came to New York for healing. In so much as healing is a reckoning with one’s past, and an ownership of one’s present. I’ve done that here. “Almost Home” speaks to it. And Bethesda showed me the way, as she apparently has other before me. She ushered me through the process.
She led me home.
Bronchitis, My Doctor Tells Me
It was inevitable: I’m sick. I have a bone-rattling cough, fever-dream night-sweats, the sorest of throats, and lungs that feel as though they’ve been scraped with a rusty fork.
Some may say I deserve it for all the good fortune of late. I say: please kill me.
This illness — bronchitis, my doctor tells me — struck with swift and merciless zeal on Saturday afternoon. My plans began to crumble one by one under the weight of my delirium. ‘Big Fish’? Scratch. Heather and Jen karaoke? Scratch. Ocean’s DUMBO party? Scratch. Martha’s birthday party? Scratch. Soon, it was midnight, and I had only sweat-soaked sheets to show for myself.
And so I whiled away my weekend with my West Village sickmate, watching good Ali G and bad Cinemax in equal turn. Only HBO’s ‘Angels In America’ distracted me from my pain and self pity. Though my sickmate helped.
36-hours later, then, I am fresh from the Duane Reade, stocked up on decongestants, cough suppressants, antibiotics, and the like. It had better kick in quickly, though. I have no tolerance for this. I promise: I’ll be better and more grateful next time. Just let me feel human again, please!?!
