in some ways I think we are doomed

It was a splendid weekend out there in East Hampton, a glimpse of how the top miniscule percent live. The cars ... oh my, big, black, fuck-off cars, SUVS, oh so shiny ... the slickest ferrari I've ever seen, a khaki green with the yellow ferrari logo, shining bright. Beautiful. I couldn't help but gasp... it looked so cool. And then the stores, the designer names, Malandrino, Vavartos, the a/c billowing out like the cold air blowing from a freezer. So cold on the sidewalks in the blazing heat.

And me, because I can't help but think it, thinking, what the blady hell. Does it have to be so cold in your store that I need to bring a sweater? Are these, the top miniscule percentile, who've got to be smart to get where they got, ever going to wake up to the fact that big fuck-off engines will rise the sea to take the planet?

How can I blame them though. It must be fun. It is our addiction this. Fast cars. Cold stores. (Real. Imagined). Not just the top miniscule percentile. I would do it too ... ride in a beautiful khaki green ferrari if the passenger door was open. (yes. for sure, no question, how could I resist). Maybe they should be relegated to amusement parks, but hell, that would be no fun. Just race tracks then?

Only thoughts though, sitting on the train riding back in to Brooklyn, body soaked in sun and sand and cold, crisp atlantic ocean. Hoodie on. The train is cold too.

Mourning Michael Jackson

For one whole week now Michael Jackson’s music has been playing in my head. My own personal, intimate, inner cranium iPod. You might have seen me, bobbing down the street, “rock with you” playing in my inner ear, no headphones in sight. Mainly it’s songs like that – Rock with You, Billie Jean, Bad (who’s bad?!), The doggawn girl is mine, and off the wall, (oh tonight, we're gonna put the 9 to 5 up on the shelf ... life ain't so bad at all"), all songs I remember from my early teenage years, crowded in to the tv room at the all girls’ boarding school I was subjected to, watching MTV, the meaning of the lyrics going completely over my innocent catholic school girl head, but the rhythm of the music and the dance and the beauty that was Michael Jackson taking me in completely.

I have been mourning Michael Jackson’s passing … selectively.

I turned on AC 360 the other night only to hear Anderson (who I like actually, an awful lot) say something a long the lines of “nothing but the facts here,” as he led straight in to an interview with the wonderful Sanjay Gupta in which they did nothing but speculate about the types of drug concoctions that might have killed Michael Jackson.

I've steered clear of the television machine ever since. Truth be told it's hard to watch the same people who preyed on his vulnerabilities now laud him in his death.

Instead I've been drawing on friends, primarily, believe it or not, through that other news aggregator: facebook.

Friends linked to videos, like this one which I watched on the night of his death and it just blew me away. Bloody hell. So young, so talented.

Another, a booker for WNYC’s The Takeaway forwarded on an interview with Chuck D. You can check that out here. A beautiful tribute from the brilliant poet, writer, Carl Hancock Rux, which you can read* here absolutely nailed the way I felt, and this, I thought was lovely from the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America’s Don Gomez.

There is also this lovely piece from Kelefa Sannah in the New Yorker.

I loved Michael Jackson. I loved the way he danced, the way he turned, the way he looked. I thought he was beautiful. I choose to remember him that way.


NOTE: you have to be on Facebook to read Carl Hancock Rux' tribute, so just in case you are not, here it is:

For MJ

It wasn't
a man who died
It was
a room

of twirling disks
and posters
of oily palms
shaping hair
into a black sun

a first love
we learned
and lost

a dance we
tried to do
so many
summers
ago

a new leather
jacket
set aside
and covered

that surge of light
from a TV screen

a boy's
soft soprano pitch
and
perfect pirouette

a regret
for everything
that distorted
a face
God made
so perfectly
the first time...