sorry for the rant...

There aren’t very many things in this world that I actively hate. I don’t like complaining about the small things because, well – what’s the point. The cliché is cliché for a reason – because it’s true: life is too short. I’d rather spend the time and energy doing something I enjoy. And I firmly believe that all things, in time, will pass - and tomorrow will come if you let it, and if you need to start over then to hell with the world, start over. The sad – but if you think about it, liberating – truth is that ultimately, when all is said and done, the world and time will not care what most of us do with our respective lives. Such is the nature of a grain of sand in a world of beaches.

So I choose to live for myself – and for the ones I love – in pursuit of happiness. In pursuit of bettering myself, and leaving the people I meet on this adventure warm and smiling. And so my world view does not have much room for hatred.

But there is one thing that I absolutely loathe – that I detest, that I… yes, I’ll say it: that I hate. That one thing is disrespect. Disrespect, specifically, for art.

I have been to a dozen or so museums on this trip so far – and I’m proud to say that the majority of people treat art with an almost saint-like reverence. They respect, and admire, and keep their distance, and let the works move them to whatever emotional end they settle on without demanding attention in return.

But oh – there are some… some people… some… boy, it gets to me. We were in Rome, not thirty days after the first ever opening of the House of Augustus, a beautifully unearthed grouping of rooms in the Palatine with pristinely preserved frescoes spreading from wall to the ceiling, of such rich and vibrant color you would have sworn the paint was still drying. And right there, in front of the attendant, this guy reaches out and rubs the wall. Rubs the wall! I was livid. And at the Louvre – the people reaching out to touch paintings, hanging on and molesting the sculptures, pointing and laughing. You know they ask you not to use your flash for a reason – they don’t just like saying it.

And then there are people like the guy who sledge-hammered Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican. Livid… livid. I hope they sledge-hammered him, Misery-style.

So if I see someone rubbing their hands on a statue, or howling like a hyena at some wonderful piece of history, or talking loudly in a theater on their cell phone to their friend who wants to go drinking or maybe bowling – well then, that person will get the sharpest, most pointed, barbed and jagged look I can launch. And I hope it strikes him in the eye with Queequegian accuracy, and sticks in him like a ten-foot harpoon.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

sunday morning passing

It is hard, at times, to remember the day while traveling – you can’t read the paper, or understand the blur of words spoken on tv or on the radio. Several times what I thought was a Tuesday was, in fact, a Wednesday – and once what I thought was Wednesday morning was actually Friday afternoon.

And the only way I knew today was Sunday was because a soft, gossamer hymn unfolded from the open doors of Notre Dame like some lyrical, curved finger – beckoning, beckoning.

So I sat in on early mass – empty as it was, the words echoing throughout those vast and delicate halls. It was serene, like how I imagine sitting in a Vermeer painting might feel. And I wished – to some very small degree, as I had in the Vatican – that I felt something for religion. That I could appreciate the moment on more than two dimensions. The words meant nothing to me – the statues were just statues; the robes just pieces of cloth. But they were words sung beautifully, and statues carved with skill, and robes draped and stitched by an attentive hand. And to me, it made a nice picture.

But then again, isn’t that – in part – what religion is all about? Finding the greater beauty in things. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in religion – religion for personal edification, for personal bolstering. Religion for personal meaning.

I may not accept it all, but I feel it at times – and I take from it what I can, and give in return my appreciation and respect. And while I may be heathen at heart, I hope I am at least reverent in mind – and can sit in mass, and smile.

Because oh she sang so much like an angel.

vivre sa vie

Of white wine born and butter bred are you, dear lovely Paris. You are beautiful; so cultured and so very debonair. You are a magnificent thing to behold. And in my heart you compete only with New York City – though I think I have room enough for two.

I walk your tree lined Seine half in a daze – walking, as if, through a perfumerie, washed over by scent after subtle scent. And when I breathe in deeply my every vacancy is housed with the thought that here, on these streets, I could live and love – here in Paris I could finally understand poetry, as I clearly never understood it before.

There is a quiet, collected calm about you. If New York City is the adolescent charged with a static energy, blinded by idealism, hounded by hormone and fleeting identity – if NYC is the confused, the maturing boy then Paris is the man, sipping bourbon in a leather armchair, surrounded by the things he knows and loves. Closing his eyes and looking back on those exciting days when he didn’t know for sure, but glad to be where he is at long last.

I would like to know both men well.

And if I had my life to live, care-free and without consequence, then I would spend the afternoon of it in New York, while I have the energy and the drive – but the evening… the evening I would spend on the wide, the wonderful streets of Paris.

'cause it's gonna be hot in my big silver pot!

Then again, maybe Nice wasn’t the existential vortex of self-doubt that I initially thought. Maybe it just reminded me of something familiar – something that felt, in a distant way, like home.

The wonderful thing about foreign travel is that it – through sudden immersion – forces you to reflect upon your own culture and comforts, and the things that keep you afloat – the things that keep you dry and smiling, though you be at times in a dark and drifting sea. But it also makes you painfully aware of how distant these things now are.

It has been almost a month-and-a-half since I’ve seen a movie. I shake at night – or after a long, exhausting day. I am, at times, nonsensical. And it doesn’t help that I’ve gone from Italy now to France - the land of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard; of Renoir, Besson and Tati. Some of my favorite films of all time – My Life to Live, Breathless, Day For Night – are French, as are some of my favorite characters in film – the French chef, anyone? I miss throwing on a movie whenever, or going over and sharing my comfort with friends.

But I also miss the reliability of food, and my own language. I miss showers with curtains, and not doing laundry in a sink, and having something other than CNN to watch. I miss driving, and sitting at my coffee shop writing and staring at nothing. I miss not having to use a power adapter. I miss not carrying a backpack.

So maybe it was that Nice reminded me of California, which reminded me of the states and what I’ve grown familiar with these past four years in Houston. Or maybe my previous assessment still holds, and I’m just trying to justify it all. I don’t know.

One thing is certain: when I get back, I’m having a burger and watching a movie. And speaking English – a lot of English.

all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey

With only one day to explore Nice, I decided to go for a run – it seemed like the cheap, efficient thing to do. And the best way to burn off some of that gelato that seemed to linger well past its due.

So I ran. Around the hotel, and through some side streets. I ran down to the beach, and along the boardwalk, and did my sidestep around the dogs and the power-walkers. I ran with the sun to my back and a soft breeze ahead, and it was so calming that I ran, at times, with my eyes closed. And before long, and without knowing, I had run into a large, stinking, putrid pile of self-doubt. And no matter how hard I stepped or how quickly I ran, I could not shake it off.

The fact of the matter was this: I liked Nice. I liked the beachfront, the wide expansive boardwalk, the palm trees. I liked the sun and the sunbathers. I liked the people running with their dogs. I liked the ocean calm and collected. And the old men searching, head bent, for pearls among the pebbles.

And I sat there and thought to myself at the end of it all “well, that was unexpected.” This from someone who finds no appeal in California – for whom there is only one coast, rocky and industrial. For whom the beach life is nothing more than sand and fake plastic trees.

Maybe I'm growing, huh? Changing.

Or maybe I’m starting to realize that I don’t know myself as well as I thought. What if there really is a beach bum buried beneath these layers of Broadway? What a frightening thought. And even more so, this: what if, through a series of different turns, I could have ended up elsewhere – even happier, perhaps, than I am now – tanning my skin a rough and leathered brown?

Herbert, you old dog – you had it wrong: self doubt is the mind-killer. We can all overcome fear. Fear is nothing. Sit in therapy and have yourself de-conditioned. Self doubt hides in the shadow behind the curtain, whispering in your ear until you grow flushed and flustered and forget your lines. And when you run backstage there is nothing there. Then the review comes out in the Times the next morning and that’s that. Self doubt can haunt you forever.

I doubt myself all the time, yes. I have questioned my talent as an artist, my intelligence, my potential as a physician/boyfriend/future husband/parent. But I think doubt and confusion can be good things – after all, who grows if never questioned; if never forced to ponder his own decisions and limitations? When these build up and fortify we call it strength: when they break down and cripple we call it weakness. I think I may sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. But I also have a certain come-what-may attitude with regard to things, which seems to help at times.

So for now I’ll be keeping my distance from both coasts. And I’ll continue to cling to what I feel is right, and not look back, and just keep running against the wind. After all, what other way do I know… what other way is there – to go?

when i was younger

Before I left on this trip I blindly copied almost everything I had written onto a flash drive, and stuck the thing in my coat pocket with the hope of perhaps writing something new in these two months, or at least reflecting on what I’d done. It has been almost ten years – ten years! – since I’ve touched these things, a decade since I’ve set eyes on these few and scattered pages.

Sitting now in this cold room in Cinque Terre I read the plays that I started and never finished, the poems that I penned in part and tossed aside – discouraged perhaps by my self consciousness, or my perceived immaturity (but what, in all honesty, seems mature or consequential when you have read Albee, Williams and O’Neill – Tennyson and Keats?). And I feel now a returning warmth of a sudden; a familiar comfort, like smelling on a passing wind some childhood scent, wrapped serpentine around a distant memory.

I read the words I wrote when I was younger, more impressionable perhaps and innocent, and I think about the thoughts I had then – swirling and molten in the burning flows of my adolescent mind – and I wonder in which direction those thoughts were moving, and where they would have led. Because now, ten years later – still young, but so much older – I have trouble remembering what I thought at the time.

Ambassadors To An End – my high school graduation project. A short, one-act play I had written about a wealthy and curious man determined to better understand the human mind, to unlock the secrets of our mortal thought process. I remember enlisting three of my classmates to play the three characters. I remember going with my dad to Home Depot to buy the door frame and the potted plant – the only props in the play – and I remember after-school rehearsals with my advisor, and my naïve attempts at stage direction. Look up slowly, pensively. Look into the distance. Gasp for breath, and writhe! I remember the auditorium and the stage – so vast and daunting; so intimidating to my seventeen years.

But it was so much fun – my first, and to date, only – stage production. And I do remember the applause, courteous and brief, and standing at the podium answering questions from my classmates. How long did it take to write? What kind of things inspire you? Is this something you want to do for a living?

And I remember thinking at the time, and answering “yes – yes, it is.”

And it still is, though perhaps now I’ve matured and realized some of my limitations as a person, and as an artist. And I’ve shed most of my innocence, for sure – and graduated, to a degree, in mind. But still the longing and desire remain.

I am hesitant now to finish what I started, so seemingly long ago. There is no doubt some truth to the thought that an artist’s work should never be revised – that creation in the moment is a reflection of the artist in the moment, and that as the artist grows so too will his work evolve. Perhaps then I will keep the originals, and file them away in memory – and work into something new the fundamentals therein.

And maybe, many more years in the future, I will return again to these various incarnations and reflect upon my mind at seventeen and twenty-six, and smile – and think to myself: “how far you’ve traveled, these years between. How different now your voice, hoarse and weathered by these decades of expression!”

It is a conclusion, and an end, which I think I will enjoy – and until that time, I’ll look forward to its coming.

looking back on Moby Dick

I sat down this afternoon with a bottle of wine and my ocean view and finished, at long last, Moby-Dick.

What a remarkable work of fiction – truly, and without doubt, one of the greatest American novels to date. There is nothing I have found remotely comparable in scope and breadth – nothing as encyclopedic in nature; nothing as purely, beautifully and strikingly allegorical.

The book itself is like the sea – calm and docile at times, with occasional gusts of wind that kick the waves to frenzy, but always on the horizon the potential for a devastating storm. And when this potential is realized in the final chapters – when the pace quickens and the chase is on, when the winds pick up and the pages turn through your fingers like a weather vane in a tornado – you feel as if you are riding the Pequod, holding fast the rigging line, a slave to Ahab’s maniacal modus operandi.

And the symbol of the great white whale, and one man’s crazed quest to conquer that beast – what more perfect allegory exists in literature for the struggle between man and his desire than this? Because I am, at this stage in my life, concerned with finding love – especially as the intensity of residency looms ahead – and concerned with my own expectations and needs as an aspiring artist, I have taken Moby Dick to represent the seemingly unattainable and potentially destructive things I seek. But such is the fundamental simplicity of the whale as a symbol that it represents so much more – infinitely more. Human avarice and greed, for example; temptation, time and the end of time, a purity which the darkest of dark cannot and will not taint. Religion and faith. The naturalist’s credo; the inability of man to change something ultimately greater and far superior to himself. Inspiration, and the fleeting nature of.

And Melville surely, at some point in his life, aspired to be a pathologist. He dissects his subjects with such surgical precision and attention to detail – his chapters on whale cetology, on the minutiae of the inner workings of the ship – that he, at times, seems to chart the anatomy of his own fiction. And the novel is so delicately paced that the 650 odd pages seem to flow by effortlessly – and when the final chapters unfold you feel as if: “yes, this is how it must be. There is no other way.”

Reading these pages I could not help but wonder if it was all by design. Did Melville intend for the whale to represent so much? Or did he simply set out to write a book about whaling and a mad Nantucketer, and mean no allegory by this? Did he just happen to pick a subject with so much endless potential for interpretation? Or have we the readers – as with so much of artistic interpretation – ascribed more meaning to the work than the artist originally intended?

The answer is, of course, moot in point: art has no more meaning than that which the viewer feels in viewing. Such is the infinite beauty of art – as there are billions of people on this planet so too are there as many possible interpretations of one man’s art. And what is beautiful or meaningful to one person may seem trite and plain to another.

But I – I have been moved by this artist’s work. And if you feel the same, then please –we have so very much to talk about.