I read Sunset Park (or, How to Differentiate Between Real Brooklyn vs Fictional Brooklyn)

Never Done: I read Sunset Park (by Paul Auster)

I adore Paul Auster's writing. I first came upon him in a rare instance in which I was introduced to an author through a screenplay that he penned, Smoke -- long before I dreamed that I would someday live in Brooklyn. I've since then seen the other independent film he wrote and co-directed, Blue in the Face, and listened to him read his own novel -- The Brooklyn Follies. (If you like audio books, then I recommend this recording with twenty five stars -- I find Auster to be not only a brilliant writer, but a brilliant reader.)

When his latest novel, Sunset Park, came out last November, I put it on a list, and then didn't get to it until this week. When I inhaled it. Gulped it down. Read from the moment the subway doors closed til the opened again, and again and again til I had read the whole story of Miles Heller and the concentric and disconnected circles that newly form -- and have always formed -- around him. I don't want to give a synopsis of the novel -- you can go find one online if you want that -- but instead to talk about what it means to read a novel set 20 blocks down the way from where I live, how I feel more like a part of fictional Brooklyn than I do real Brooklyn.

In fictional Brooklyn, I imagine the heat and the cold and the smells and the traffic, but in real Brooklyn I sweat and I shiver and I cover my nose to keep them all out. In fictional Brooklyn, I know people just like that, but in real Brooklyn I know those people. So why do I feel more of an affinity for fictional Brooklyn than real Brooklyn? Is there still a left-over romanticism left over from when I didn't yet live here, but I'd heard my friends' stories? Is it just always easier to project myself into someone else's story rather to create my own? I think this is one of those blog posts that won't resolve completely -- but will just end with these questions. Not unlike Sunset Park itself.

I had an all-Kushner day

Never Done: I spent the morning co-writing a petition to get CUNY to reverse its decision to deny Tony Kushner an honorary doctorate, and then I saw Tony, and then I saw Tony's new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures

So CUNY decided to give Tony Kushner an honorary doctorate, but then Jeffrey Weisenfeld, one of the CUNY trustees with a history of extreme anti-Arab racism, attacked Kushner with unfounded "information" about Kushner's supposed views on Israel and convinced the board to reverse its decision, and then lots of people rallied to Kushner's defense -- and to the defense of free and open debate -- including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Say No!, Jews against Islamophobia, The Shalom Center, and many others (I co-wrote the petition as a representative of the board of JFREJ) and then one of the trustees contacted Kushner, not exactly to apologize, but to open a discussion about reversing the decision.

And just after we all signed off on the petition, I had to go deliver some hard drives to my friend and colleague Brett in Crown Heights, and since it was really really nice out, I decided to stop off to stick my nose in the apple and lilac blossoms at the Botanic Garden for an hour, which I wait for all winter, and then I wait for all early Spring, and then it comes so suddenly, and it stays such a short time -- but it feels longer if you live in the country, because you don't have to go somewhere to find them, you just get to be with them every time you go outside. And just as I was taking in the heady fragrance of some particularly beautiful lilacs, I got a call from someone I had been working with in the morning that now I had to read over and sign off on a press release on the same topic, and so the world of fighting against anti-Arab racists who are willing to shame and blame fellow Jews for more progressive political beliefs collided with the world of Angel White and Beauty of Moscow and Congo and Maiden's Blush and President Grevy and President Lincoln and Primrose and Sensation and Tinkerbelle, which are all, as you already probably guessed, lilac varieties.

It so happened that my tickets (which I bought months ago) to see iHo, as Kushner calls his play, were for that same night -- a coincidence that I would have an all-Kushner day, to mirror the Signature Theatre's all-Kushner season. And it just so happened that Tony was in the lobby when I was, dropping off copies of the Communist Manifesto for his cast, and then not staying to watch -- which he was probably happy about, since his play opened the night before. So we had a quick hello, and then I went into the theater, with greater anticipation than I've had in years for a new play.

I don't want to review it here, and I don't want to give anything away, but really, if you can, you should go. It's like an Arthur Miller dialectic sitcom -- a really long sitcom, or maybe you're sick in bed and watch 8 half-hour episodes in a row. It's completely rooted in at least three worlds that I'm completely rooted in (gay/lez, labor, and Brooklyn) and it's all about people trying to balance out their commitment to their principles with their commitment to their community (family, friends, lovers.) It's messy, it's funny, it's brilliant. It's as heady as the lilacs, but much louder. It's a masterful exploration of personal vs political ethics, and if you do go see it, please talk with me afterwards.

I watched Breaking Bad

Never Done: I watched Breaking Bad

I recently read an interview in which Tony Kushner said he thinks that some of the best dramatic writing being done now is for cable TV dramas, and The Wire and Breaking Bad were his primary examples. Apparently, when Tony Kushner tells me to watch something, I put it on my Netflix queue and get around to it a few months later. The problem is, I am a monogamous TV viewer, and I am currently seeing Battlestar Gallactica. (And I am quite happy in our relationship. We usually see each other late at night, in bed.)

But after friend after friend told me how good Breaking Bad is, I finally gave it a look. I like that there's a character with cerebral palsy, and I like that it gets underneath a mundane working/middle class life and shows us a world of seedy underbelly possibilities. In case you don't know, it's about a meek high school chemistry teacher who is struggling financially -- so much so that he has a second job at a car wash -- and is diagnosed in the Season One Premiere with inoperable lung cancer. Hoping he can secure his family's financial future, he teams up with a former student turned fuck-up, and cooks the kind of pure methamphetamine that only a meek high school chemistry teacher can cook. It turns out, he's a crystal meth artist.

At its essence, Breaking Bad is about a middle-aged man reinventing himself. A meek man who at the start of the episode can't get a hard-on (granted, his wife was paying more attention to her laptop than she was to the hand job) rediscovers his virility after he creates a mobile meth lab, knocks off a couple drug dealers, wields a hand gun, and flees from the authorities in his skivvies. Also, after he kicks and humiliates a trio of immature high school thugs who are mocking his son (the one with cerebral palsy.) In essence, cancer gives him a new lease on life.

I wonder if Breaking Bad will follow in the tradition of misdiagnosis literature (the loftiest that I can think of being Soul Mountain) -- in which the main character thinks their life is nearing its end, and so they change everything, only to find that there was a mistake, and that, as the saying goes, life goes on. But now that bridges are burned, priorities clarified, old patterns shed, and hard-ons regained, they get a brand new life. I can't say for sure, but it's my guess. (I was right when after the Battlestar pilot I guessed that BSG is an Earth creation myth.) I'll have to watch to find out. But first, I have a hot date with another two seasons of Battlestar.

Wrestling with Angels

Never Done: Saw Angels in America: Part Two: Perestroika

And was transported. If you'll remember, I felt distanced from Part One: Millennium Approaches. It felt small and un-epic. But from the moment the world's oldest living Bolshevik took the podium in Part Two: Perestroika, I was drawn in. I don't know what the difference was. It could have been that I was sitting further back in the house, and had more perspective on the set. Or that the new cast had a week to solidify. Or that I had already re-entered the emotional lives of the characters (even though I tend to carry those emotional lives with me the way I carry the lives of other great literary characters, like Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, or Celie from The Color Purple) and the emotional reality of the mid-80's.

There is so much more to say about this, but I am afraid I have to set this aside for now and come back to expand on it later. I have too much work to do, and got too little sleep, and Josh is quite sick, and I am a little sick (turns out that's why I wasn't up for video games on Sunday) and although I want to write about what it means to stay still, and to refuse a prophecy, and who are the Angels in America now, and how much Lynne McCollough's portrayal of Hannah Pitt, once she had become a smart-dressing New York lady, reminded me of my aunt Julie, who also comes from a Mormon family, and was mostly raised near New York, and is a very smart dresser, and how close this association made me feel to Hannah, who is not usually the character I feel closest to in Angels in America and how part of that closeness might also be that I am now nearer to Hanna's age than to any of the other characters in the play .... but instead of writing about all that, I must get to work.

Angels in America

Never Done: Saw a stage production of Angels in America (Part 1: Millennium Approaches)

Angels in America was first performed twenty years ago - just after I moved to Portland, but before I was paying attention to theater, aside from what I had done as a kid or the political street theater I had done in college. At the time, I was absorbed in everything that would have made me and Angels a natural fit: didactic left wing activism, getting close for the first time to people with HIV/AIDS, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, my first forays into Jewish community, and although I had come out some years earlier, my first long-term romance with a woman. I wouldn't encounter Angels for another five years, but when I did, I was riveted.

By now I have read Angels in America probably ten times -- perused it even. (OK, this is a total distraction; Ellen Langford just taught me that the word "peruse" means to read or study carefully and at length, not to read quickly, or glance through, as I have always thought.) So I have perused Angels, studied it scene by scene, broken it down, and yes, seen the filmed HBO version. But until now, had never seen it on stage. But my mental images of how it lives on stage have been strong -- I guess from people's stories of the angel breaking through the ceiling of the Walter Kerr theater. After all these years, and all that build up, I guess it was inevitable that the Signature Theater production after the cast change would be a disappointment. First of all, it is almost unbearable to me that after waiting four and a half months to see it, I saw the first performance without Zachary Quinto in the role of Louis. (Adam Driver stepped into the role.) But mostly, it felt .... safe in a way that is out of place with what the characters are living through. I wanted the play to transport me, shake to my core like it did every time I read it -- and even the way the HBO production did. But instead, I felt like I was sitting around with the actors on soft couches, and reading the play aloud together. Which is not a terrible thing. It's a comfortable thing, in fact. But transporting it's not.

I guess it's like when they make The Hobbit into a movie. You have such strong images of Bilbo Baggins and the Shire that anyone else's images might pale in comparison. Or even just match yours in intensity, which might feel like paling, if you had high expectations.

So what's the lesson? Don't read great books ten times? Don't form expectations? Don't go to the theater? I don't think so. I think the message is more that when life gives you a comfortable evening with wonderful actors, pour a cup of tea, lean back on a pillow, and start turning your well-worn pages.

What Stephen Sondheim taught me about blogging

Never Done: Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner in conversation
Tshuve: Paperwhite narcissus are blooming and fragrant on the kitchen table

I had been looking forward to it for weeks. Months, actually. My favorite playwright talking with one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Produced by the Public Theater. It was one of those events I live in New York for. Until it happened. Sure, Kushner was charming and funny. And Sondheim was honest and obliging. But it was not, as it was billed, two masters of the theater talking about their craft. It was ... dare I say this about these two heroes of mine? ... actually quite banal.

I have head Tony Kushner speak many times, and have met him many times as well. I think he is brilliant, insightful, and warm, with an uncanny ability to be as brilliant as he is without making other people feel less so. I adore that trait in people, and know very few who embody it. I have never seen Stephen Sondheim speak, and I have never met him, so I really didn't know what to expect out of him. Except that I did expect something, because the billing and the introduction both indicated that the two men would be discussing their craft.

Instead, Tony interviewed Stephen about his book. Sondheim recently released his book called Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes. Kushner had read it, and prompted Sondheim to tell anecdotes from the book, which while sometimes entertaining, are ... in the book. Which we can read. Which wasn't what I went there to hear.

When I start a new blog post, I often don't know where I'm headed. Today I find myself in the middle, feeling strange that I am criticizing this conversation between two artists I respect so deeply, and unclear about what I want to say about it. I just remembered that I wrote some things down during the Kushner-Sondheim conversation, which means that there must have been something I found interesting enough to write down. So I went to get the paper where I took notes, and amazingly, perfectly ... what I wrote down was that Sondheim did give one piece of technique advice. He said that since song form is so short, your job as a lyricist is to be surprising, but not too dense -- because people have to get it the first (and often only) time they hear it. He then went on to say that he usually writes the last thought -- or line -- of the song he is writing at the bottom of the page, so he can see where he is heading.

I should just end there, right? And make it seem like I planned it.