Thomas Cave's Tattoo

Dahlia Information

2009-08-27T20:01:00.006-04:00

Last spring, after I left the New York Times, I got it into my mind that I would investigate an interest in landscape architecture. I'd recently seen an excellent show at Yale on Gerald Murphy, the painter and 1920s bon vivant who was a friend of Scott Fitzgerald's and a model for Dick Diver in "Tender is the Night." Murphy was interested in landscape design, which is what took him, with his wife, Sara, to Europe, and the rest is history. Being on Long Island - kind of exactly in the middle of Gatsby country, with what's left of the North Shore's "Gold Coast" - big, big 20th century estates, from an era when Long Island was basically country and the North Shore was home to monumental weekend houses and gentleman farms - I decided to make a tour of what remained. It's a tour de force of landscaping - ambition writ large, aka, employing nature, as though it were a clerk.

Walking around one stupendous property on a brilliant unemployed day, deep in the gardens of the service buildings, I came across a modest, precise garden that turned out to be a dahlia garden, planted and maintained by a local dahlia society. There was a white post box to the side of the garden, which had leaflets and contact information in it, and which read "Dahlia Information" on the side.

Well, there it is. Somewhere in the world is a post box with dahlia information inside it. This struck me as the obscurest, and yet, the most common, exchange, point of contact, service, stake in the ground, I could imagine. It actually reassured me about the civilization I share, with so many many many others. It's not a blog. It's not a window with a thick plastic guard. It's not really something I need, I thought. But - I opened it and took a sheet of what was in there.

And knowing what I now know about dahlias, I feel like I've fallen down the rabbit hole. More about that later.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

If I Woke Up Tomorrow, Would You Love Me?

2009-07-19T21:13:00.003-04:00

The great lost work.

When I was a reporter at the New York Times, I did a story about a couple who moved to an island off the coast of Maine, and lived there together - and alone - for most of their married lives. No one's gotten to the bottom of it, but I believe, despite issues that might one day bedevil it, that it is one of the great love stories of its time. It came to my attention through a photographer, David Graham, who had photographed the island after its inhabitants, the Kellams, had died. (The article was used as a preface to a book of those photographs, "Alone Together.")

One of the local residents - a long-standing summer lady named Kippy Stroud - invited me to participate in an arts colony in that neck of the (Maine) woods that she sponsored, and so I did for two summers. Mostly an art crowd, that showed art for the colony to discuss after community dinners, I produced a fragment of a novel, as I was one of the lone writers there. I wrote every morning in my spare bedroom in the house I was lent, looking out over Northeast Harbor.

The crowd enjoyed the serialization, I think. I read two long bits, on two evenings, and read aloud, I imagine it was a bit of a page turner.

Back in New York, the novel did two things for me quickly: it failed to get me into the MacDowell Colony, the oldest arts colony in the U.S., and it failed to interest my literary agent, David McCormick (an excellent and otherwise efficient fellow), who was reluctant to discuss it with me. Out of the wild, well-moneyed woods of Maine, the thought, 'deep end,' as in, 'went off the,' occurred to me. But, guys, when I reread it, I still think it's kind of good.

The novel, which was to be based on the interior life of Teri Schiavo, the young woman in a coma that the forces of contemporary Western civilization tried - and succeeded - in making a working definition of quality of life, and life as we know it, and life as we refuse to imagine it, is/was called "If I Woke Up Tomorrow, Would You Love Me?"

Curtain up. And thank you for listening, ma'am.

A fucking asshole, is what he was. She grabbed the wheel of the car hard, twisting it to the left until it whinnied, then she spun out the back wheels, shooting gravel out behind her like she is under attack and defending herself, against what. The car ding ding ding ding dings quickly, recognizing a small domestic crisis – she hasn’t strapped on the seat belt harness, but she is already barreling through the night, drilling a hole through the driveway’s brush like a bullet.

I want the top down, but she fumbles the switch, but, it’s here, it’s just above my head and I want air. I want sky. Big and black and beautiful, that lets you sail up into it when you look. It doesn’t give a shit if you’re drunk, because you swim in it, it swims with you as you stare, not wanting to be here, below, where things are stuck in place, and fucked.

The convertible’s top starts to lift, her finger has touched the button and pushed and the canvas roof arcs into the sky ceremoniously, like a portal being opened, but she is out on the highway now, doing great speed, and the ribbed top catches the wind shooting off the front of the car, streaming up the hood like a rocket, as though the wind is fire, and bursts the roof, inflating it like an emergency device. The car swerves hard to the right, leaving the black road and hitting rocks again, spraying them in a wild shower to the side of the car, by the empty passenger’s seat, as though she is cutting through water, or she’s hit steel and is scrapping it, smashed, in a shower of sparks.

But the sparks are stars in the sky, above the black trees, and she hangs on the wheel to regain the road. She loses the trees in the white sights of the headlights and the blacktop is speeding beneath her again, rushing away like something leaving a wake behind the car on an uncharted part of the ocean, where there are no lights and no markers and nothing is familiar but the sky.

The seat beside her is empty, as she stops looking right, and focuses on going forward. Fuck him. Fuck him forever, and into the past, deep as a grave. He can stay there. Who else does she need but her foot in the sandal, jams on the lever beneath it like she can leave the moment, leave the thought, leave him, by pushing down, grinding her bare toes like teeth, making it happen and getting the fuck out.

The car’s speed grabs her throat as she lurches backward, and her hair sails high. Nice ride, someone said today at the docks, and it is. The car is new, metallic and green, like a bird you’d see on t.v. because it was about to become extinct, or green and alive like chemical waste they can’t kill.

Or a dragonfly, with its spherical eyes and luminous wings, hovering now over the road, and then darting ahead into a curve of black. It is a beautiful ride, chilled, with no pain, none, the asshole, and it is a ride to hell without him, as fast as she can make it. Her foot jams forward. What a terrific car, a fucking flying insect, you look and you’re there, quicker than sight. The faster you go, the colder it gets, cool then cold then ice on her face, hot and red and flushed from drinking, and fighting, and drinking, then fighting with her hands and legs, trying to kill the asshole, I will fucking hurt you, I will hurt you like you’ve never been hurt. With the nails on my hand. They are metallic and green, like the ride, dragonflies swarming the wheel against the whipping streamer that the black road has become, flying between the trees and sailing up and diving down as the hills try to toss her like a lurching boat.

“Blow me,” Billy said, when he got tired of fighting. “On second thought, blow somebody else,” and he walked away. The words keep rushing at her face, blinding her like headlights.

Where is the music coming from? The night is full of music, coming at her from both sides, from beneath her, from behind her. The CD player leapt on with the car, when she drove away from the party, the house on the harbor, the lights and the voices and the yelling receeding like the last swinging buoys as she sailed out onto the road, cutting up the road like water.

Love songs. It’s a love song. She can hear it now.Why is the world so fucking full of love songs. She used to love this song. Now she can’t believe what an incredible offense it is. Who’s fucking great idea was it to write love songs. What the fuck was there to shout shout shout about. She’s listening hard, letting the music make her loose, like the drinking and the speed on the road, and the sky swimming above, the stars like the notes of the song flying away, trembling strings and guitars and big rumbling bass wheeling out into space and revolving like a great sightful chorus, of what. No fucking way, no fucking way this will ever end well, one loud note, all shouting, then an echo, a little gasp of infinity that they do in the studio, like you’re supposed to start living the song the minute it stops playing.

It’s making her cry. She feels tears at her eyes, pulled hard across the tops of her cheeks by the speed of the wind circling the car. But she’s crying harder now, and the car can’t dry the tears. Her eyes are wet, then they blur, the headlights coming at her blur like they’ve been dropped in water, she’s underwater, when a minute, a minute before, the water was before her, bright like the sky, the same sky glittering up from black water reflecting, flat and endless as a mirror.

She’s lost the road again. But who wants a road, who needs a fucking road, what good is a road, where does it go that you’ve never been before. If somebody put it there, there’s nothing at the end that hasn’t been seen. She’s seen every road on this island, she’s driven it to work, she’s driven it to parties, she’s driven it to his house, when he calls her up and says he wants to see her, or tells her to go home, when he wants to get back together, and when she goes looking for him, because she doesn’t know where he is, and she is lost like a dog until she finds him, frightened and hysterical enough to kill. She wants to go someplace, for once in her life, that somebody else hasn’t gotten to, and that’s not a place you get to on a road.

The car leaves the ground, as though it is headed towards the stars, where she watches the music and lets herself cry, her tears as full of notes as the sky, black and sparkling and heavenly. And deep. So deep, you could leap up and never land. You would twirl, like a big diamond ring on an astronaut’s hand, without weight, no up or down, or good or bad, you would lose the weight of decision, the gravity that pulls you back into your name, into your job, into your body, into your lousy, lousy life, into his arms, with the zodiac tattoos, his birth sign on the right, a bull, her birth sign on the left, a scorpion with a sleeping tail.

She takes her hands off the wheel, green nails disarmed, the dragonflies disperse, as they do, in an instant, because she knows, her tears pulling at an odd part of her face because the car is heeling over as it sails, that nothing is in her hands anymore. Not since she met him, and let herself die. She is hanging by her legs above water, the view as tilted and thrilling as a ride. Her eyes are wide and clear, and dry. And her hair is whipping the sky, like the road that lashed the car off the bridge. She loses a sandal.

Then something explodes above her, white like pictures of God, punching the side of her head in a kind of fierce blossom as she slams her nose on the console between the seats and the gear shift rips her blouse open below her neck and cuts into her breast. The car explodes like parachutes, white and taut in a huge billow, and she thinks, with quick joy, a reprieve - a cloud of grace, white like a bride, and she feels a happiness as sharp as pain, but the parachutes are inverted and inflating the wrong way. They are not cupping her fall, but pushing at her like a pillow that would stop her breathing. She hears herself start to scream, it is the pillow waking her up, then her back slams the water, a wet hard slap like getting a new baby to breath and her eyes fill again with salt and water, like tears, floating away from her, that have no bottom.

When she was a little girl, waking up in the morning and there was fog on the harbor, she would walk down through the house while her parents and her brother slept, and walk out across the wet grass to the dock, walk out on the damp wood to the very end, where the square dock floated, and stand on the square dock in the middle of the fog, hidden and lost and alone, removed. The fog was white, bright as light, blind but you could see too, far into the fog, where there was everything and nothing at the same time. A white boat, moored close by, but it was the ghost of a boat, and a voice trailing by beyond the edge of the fog, but it was the ghost of a voice. White breakers breaking in a ghost on a shore that was a ghost.

“She’s dead,” she thinks she hears someone say, and it sounds like her mother, and she sees her mother in the fog, a short woman with a tough looking haircut and a sweatshirt nicely laundered and her hand crooked to her face with a cigarette, her unhappy face dissolved in smoke, but she doesn’t see her from the dock.

The sea swells in tall ribbons rolling towards her, and the platform beneath her rocks up and then down, like a balancing game you would play as a child.

“No, she’s not,” she hears another voice say, and it is her father’s, firm and flattened like a board by the local accent. She only knows this from going away to school, where people spoke with a different polish from the gray wood of her father’s voice, like the planks of the dock, the polish of the summer people her father worked for. Her father’s voice could be beautiful because it was plain, when he said “Franny,” or “Franky,” or “Francesca,” to her, and the honesty of it, with no tricks, told her he loved her to the heart.

And she hears crying, crying in pain, out over the water, wheeling low, that sounds like a gull, the painful cry that gulls make, and it sounds like a voice she knows, not speaking. It sounds like Billy McCabe, a boy she fights with, but the fighting helps her get to know him, and she decides, now that she sees boys become men, as she loses the security of being her father’s girl, that she wants to know Billy McCabe. His gull’s cry passes the dock, shrouded in fog, but she can’t be sure it’s Billy, because she has never heard him cry before.

The swells come and go, and she feels like the water beneath her is her body now, rising and falling, rolling in and back out, with a weight that isn’t a weight because it never rests, and it is only really fog distilled. Her body feels like it condenses and evaporates.

The dock begins to dry, and she is clearing too like a fog, where the mist nests in the far harbor, but the trees that form a silhouette before it are crisp and distinct, like the masts of the big sailing boats that rock like birds in the water. She hears a scatter of noise close at hand, like someone working quietly with equipment, the patient and routine sounds a nurse might make with a variety of small tasks for a patient, a knock and a chunk and a clop, shy steady industry, unobserved.

But when she looks back through what remains of the fog by the water, it is only a deer on the rocky beach, its hooves striking rock as it walks, picking its way tenuously, like its legs are healing from a break.

The sun breaks out, and it is a voice too.

“Holy mother of God Frank, how long are you going to wait for a miracle; you’ve been waiting your whole goddamn life and it hasn’t happened yet. Why do you think it’s going to happen for Franky? Don’t ask me to wait again. Don’t make her do this. Don’t let your love make excuses, Frank, that hurt, Frank, that hurt. She doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, let it go, she’s dead. Maybe she drew a lucky card. Let her leave the table.”

Now, two gulls circle and cry, then fly off, and the sky blues. A voice from out of the sky says, “and in other news,” and later in the day, “for five thousand dollars” and once in the afternoon, “Melissa had the baby, John,” and in the evening, as the blue of the sky becomes the blue of the sea before the dock, and the tone of the light seems to soothe the skin, so gentle and soft, and tender a blue, a breeze that seems to sweep down from heaven, and touch her cheek like a loving hand, a rough hand made smooth by her own sleeping skin.

“I’m sorry baby,” it says, close to her ear, curling around the voice like a shell curling around the sound of the sea, a wet and salty whisper. “I’m so so sorry.”

“I want you.”

“Shut up,” she says, then “Why?” She wears gold for him that night, her dark hair pulled back, and gold at her ears, gold on her fingers and gold at her neck. The jersey of her top pulls across her breasts and cups them, and across the bib of brown skin above, brown from the sun on her father’s boat, is a gold chain with a shower of gold hanging from it, like a sky rocket exploding at her throat and falling across her dark skin towards her breasts. When she pulls her hair back tightly, and exposes her face, her face looks like the prow of something, unafraid to explore, afraid of no water.

“Let me have you. Come back with me.” Her hands, dark like her throat, and ringed in gold, hold his arm, the wire of brown hair on his forearm, that she holds like the bar on a car of a roller coaster, a risk, a ride, two hands ready to tighten, like a cat willing to be close by the stretch of its legs and the light touch of its paws. Billy’s arm rests on the yellow varnish of the tavern booth’s table, a beer coaster with a bottle of beer on it to the side, and her handbag, that looks like a child’s knapsack, next to a beaded g and t. The noise of the tavern roars above them, over the booth where they huddle into the center of the scarred tables, like a storm shrieking overhead. Find safe harbor by mooring deep.

“No,” she says, thinking about what yes would mean. He is new, in ways she hasn’t figured out yet, in ways she has never seen, in ways she doesn’t expect, even though she knows, she wants, things to be there.

“So when did you become a virgin?” he says, half joking, half throat-husky frustration, his voice telling her that he has to come, and he wants to come with her, but she isn’t necessary yet. If she takes the joke, she might take him. “Tell me about the last time,” he says, in a “tell me about the first time” kind of tone, mocking the idea that they might be in love, when all bets are on, and all bets are off, though she holds his arm, and even that stiffens him.

On the television at the end of the bar, above the roaring heads, like a silent film, fourteen soldiers die in a helicopter in the sand. The black rusk smokes like a toaster with toast stuck in it. A boy scout who was missing for a week is found dead, picked clean in a fourth of July feast by animals in a national park, and a girl scout is found at the bottom of a well in an exurban county, raped and beaten with none of an animal’s fastidiousness – why do we call them animals? - equal time for crimes against nature.

A car shoots across the screen with quick commercial speed, a metallic green that looks like a dragonfly, and she thinks about all that cash in the bank, two jobs and stacking up like gold coins.

“I’ll tell you about the next time instead,” she says, matching his bet, and looking him in the eye, letting his arm go and putting one hand on her bag to check her keys and the other hand tipping her drink up to her mouth. A drop of sweat from the glass, sharp as ice, slides off the glass and plunges to her throat, stabbing it in a prick, then warms like blood as it slides towards her breasts.

“Billy, you fuck load,” a man calls from the bar, the storm above their heads diving down into their booth and blowing it apart like a shack. “Don’t you fucking try to dock your sick cock in my sister,” he says, with big boozy glee, his face burning like a sailor’s red sky.

That’s when she tells Billy she will go with him, and she finds his hand and locks it in her fingers, the gold rings on her hand, threading his rough knuckles, like keys to the lock.

“She’s the one who left us,” says Grace Utani, Francesca’s mother, to the doctor in the patients’ sitting room, a room they call a solarium. There is a photographic mural of a thick garden on the four walls. One wall has a photograph of a pair of French doors, that you are meant to think you can walk through to get to the garden that you are seeing in the mural. There are pots of plastic palms in the corners of the room, and plastic wicker garden furniture painted a durable green, so much paint applied to make it withstand the years of sorrowful use that the plastic rattan of the wicker is clogged until the surfaces are solid and not woven. The allusion is gone out of it. The mural depicts the garden in bright sun, which catches the glow from the one window in the room, which boosts the artificial effect enough to make the room habitable to the half-aware, the half-dead, the recovering.

“Children leave,” the doctor says, trying to be sympathetic and also unexpectedly wise, and yet wary, in the way that doctors have, to not say anything that would weigh the balance or stick. The doctor, a woman in her fifties, the same age as Grace, wears her hair short, to the ears, dyed a glamorous white blond that would have been fashionable with young women of her mother’s era – the society blonds and Hollywood blonds of the 1930s and 40s, and perhaps this glamorous gesture, improbable on a professional woman of her age, is a gesture towards her mother, a conciliation that has followed her through life. She wears a tight strand of pearls on her neck too, good ones, with the yellowed nacre that suggests they are real, and implicates her as a woman from a priviledged background.

Grace notices all this, but she doesn’t, for once, resent it. She needs all the understanding she can cadge, and would force it from a stranger, even this doctor. Her daughter is dead, but she is still alive somehow, they explain, and now they are asking her to kill her, but not really, just let the living part go, because it is not really life.

But how could that be true, and if she says no, what does that mean? Wasn’t Franky asleep? Doesn’t her body rise and fall, a small puff in and puff out, like when she was a baby, here in the same off-island hospital, and you had to look very closely to see her breathing, a look of peace so complete on her face that it was the safest, most secure sight possible, something you could reassure your own life with, that things would be okay, despite Frank, despite the women, despite the money, despite the drinking. Franky was a small piece of dough, elastic with life.

Does the doctor have children, Grace wonders, too confused to be combative. Would she ask her to give up her own if she did? She was asking Grace to allow them to let Franky die. Shut off all the machines, and let her go.

But where would she go? Would she leave? Would Grace see that? How would she know?

Grace put an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and let it hang there like a thermometer, something she did when she was in a place where she couldn’t smoke. Franky had already left, she was already gone, left the island to go to New York, to go to school, to study and leave her life here, be better and be different. She already was different. She was only here to deal with Billy McCabe. What to do with the other half, when you’ve stepped outside your love to let yourself live for a minute, like stepping out of the house for air, or quiet, or the smart stinging spice of a smoke, you and the solitary signal it sends up, showing you the direction of the next decision, sharing it in self-realization or anger. Who would she be if she left Frank?

Billy McCabe wanted Franky to die, said she wouldn’t want to live like this. But what would her life have been like with him, married and children when the engagement wasn’t even working. Stubborn and poor when Franky had broken away and studied to succeed. What do you share when only one of you is swimming to the surface. Or can you rise together, if you stop fighting, and let love buoy you to the top? Billy was in Franky’s room, with Frank and Tommy, the men gathered around her bed like a boat crew that had failed to save her.

Maybe letting her go was a way of letting her have her better life, though Grace had fought her move away to New York. Maybe this was giving her what she wanted, that Grace had never given her, releasing her to the light at the top of the water, where there was sun and hope.

Grace starts to cry, and the hate digs in more.

“Okay,” she says, and the doctor grabs her hands gently and squeezes them once between her own like they are two women in the same boat. But they aren’t, Grace thinks bitterly as the tears slide down her creased face until she tastes salt. Not even remotely. The doctor leads her down the hall, hung with children’s drawings of their own efforts to survive this world – cancer, chemo, congenital whatever – and into Franky’s room. Grace looks at Frank and Frank looks at the doctor, to complete the circle of decision.

Tucked under Franky’s arm is a stuffed toy, a polar bear that she has driven up from New York with, white like no bear in the Maine woods, as though its lack of color is her daughter’s way of saying, I’m not yours, I’m not from around here anymore, I’m gone, I’m part of a world you will never know.

“Alright, when we stop the respirator, she is going to continue to breath for a few minutes,” the blond lady doctor says, a male nurse at the machine by the bed nodding as thought they are demonstrating a car. “It will be about five or ten minutes, so, uh, please don’t be alarmed. If you’d like to take a minute alone, take all the time you’d like, and you can call us. We’ll be outside and someone can call us. We’ll need to stay, once we begin.”

“No,” Tommy says, standing by his sister like a dog guarding a body. “Start now.”

The male nurse makes a checklist of the faces in the room, and then turns a dial and flips a switch on the machine.

Above the bed, lines crossing screens move and rear and peak and descend in a repeating pattern like a series of waves rolling towards a shore. Over and over, the waves dip and rise, as steadily as a heart, as they move from left to right, rolling towards the beach, breaking on the rocks and starting again, at the left, rolling from the dark well of the deepest ocean to the shallow fringe, delicate with a small crest of purest white, where people tease their toes, or wash their hands after a picnic, or pull their boats up, their journeys over.

In thirty minutes, in the silence of the room, as the waves beat strongly on the screen, undiminished, and Francesca’s chest rises and falls, beneath a sheet, in a dim echo of the electronic scribble above her bed, no one speaks. Tommy leaves the room, after Frank says it is okay, and Grace holds the doctor’s hand, as though she is glued to her in a procedure she has consented to without understanding it, until the doctor releases her hand to walk to the bed and examine Franky’s face and mouth and wrist and chest, her breasts harboring a small gold crucifix that Billy has never seen before.

The doctor touchs Franky like she is dead, but she isn’t. She is pulling at the air like a boat pulling at the wind, sailing. And the water races across the screens above the bed in swells that travel smoothly, charting her motion.

The doctor smiles back at Grace with a flicker of what looks to Grace like fear, as if to say, this is wrong and the hardest part has begun, the part that will kill us all for as long as she lives.

One morning, standing at her kitchen window, waiting for the coffee to percolate, spitting the last of the scalding water into the pot, Grace realizes what she understands about Franky’s relationship to Billy McCabe. Neighbors’ voices come in through the screen, like a breeze with the sounds of bugs in it – fresh, with minor irritations – Mom, a child’s demand lost in the short woods between the houses, calls, and cocked, unseen, at a different angle, a girl’s voice commands “Red light,” then “Green light,” then “Red light.”

Grace finds, in the corner of her eye, figures out on the rocky point that divides her stone beach from the beach of the house next door, rented to vacationers. The figures, from small to medium in size like a chart of man’s progress, freeze then advance then freeze on the rocks, as a girl at the point stops and starts them, her hand held out like a wand. Slowness will catch someone out, in this idle summer amusement, something that Grace believes like a fateful fact of birth. Things with a game’s rules aren’t always games, she knows, especially when you have to fight to keep from losing, and it’s never a clean win.

Franky thinks she controls Billy McCabe, controls the situation, thinks she’s the one saying yes or no, stop or start, red or green. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, when Grace couldn’t find Franky at home, in her apartment in town, because she was with Billy, or out looking for him, the taverns, the docks, the one-stops, the long fast drives, back and forth, between harbors at night, the lights of the boats at rest out on the black water like the lights of small sleeping villages as she raced over the roads like she was back on a bicycle, tearing between Grace’s house and her father’s. Four years after the separation she had her learner’s permit. Frank taught her to drive, and Grace passed along her old Mazda to her. Dull with color, like a hard cranberry.

Then Billy fell in love with her. Grace watched it happen. He wanted her by his side, when he went out with his friends. He wanted to know where she was, when she wasn’t there. He called Grace, when Franky wasn’t with Frank, or in her apartment. He called Grace when Franky was on the phone, to find out if she was talking to her. Tommy would tell Grace about seeing them at the Tom Cat, buying cigarettes before bed, when he stopped by to work on the house the next day.

All Billy’s distrust of the world, all his lordship of his own self-center, all his impulse to be something in life, leaking steadily like something you learn to bail, the dutiful condition of being out in your own boat, was invested in Franky now. She was in the boat with him.

Grace realized, standing at the screen, children’s voices playing like gnats at her ear, children that would grow and grow until you couldn’t contain them, and one year they would be here, renting the house, with their own children, that though Franky thought she had control of Billy, Billy thought he owned her, and that was much much stronger, more powerful than direction or control. It touched every corner of the globe, stronger than a compass. It was a map you could fold into sharp quadrants and tuck away into your head and your heart, like your heart was a pocket on a shirt.

The air still and quiet now at the screen, Grace lights a cigarette, as though she can burn this realization away like a tick on the skin, but its fear has already bitten her, and she can feel herself beginning to scratch at the idea like she is scratching at her own blood.

Billy McCabe is sitting in the library in Southwest Harbor, in the big manor-like front room, looking through newspapers at the listings for work. He checks the local papers, but he checks the Boston and the Providence and the New York papers too, to see what kinds of work people do there, and who might be looking for what. Franny is gone to New York, two months ago, to study to be a lawyer, what the fuck, but Billy stops the reflex to condemn the move with a curse now, and wonders instead if Franny is meeting the people who are moving to New York to take the jobs he sees posted in the newspaper. In the papers’ advertisements, men wear driving moccasins – shoes you don’t lace, with no heels or soles – and women rub phones against their cheeks like puppies or kittens.

Kitchen help. He could do that. He worked in the kitchen of one of the big wooden hotels in Bar Harbor one summer, carrying the aluminum vats with the lunch-special chowder in them, catching a glimpse through the portholes of the swinging doors into the dining room of the young girls with their parents, wearing the brand new t-shirts over their brand new breasts, developing like small local berries as June summered into July then matured into August.

Mechanic. He could do that. He knew boats. He knew trucks. He knew his black F 250 like his cock in his hand. Two months without Franny. Trucks. He could do that.

The woman sitting across the table from him gets up and leaves. Billy sees she is pregnant, and she stands in a kind of rising squat from the table, like someone lifting a vat of chowder. She is dressed in a belly-stretching jersey with broad blue and white stripes across it that make her belly look even more expanded than it is. Her hair hangs down like the ears on a stuffed animal, loose and distracted, while her eyes are bright and antic, not lulled like her body. In her big body stripes, she looks like a cartoon in a Dr. Seuss book. Billy sees the book on Franny’s shelf in her childhood bedroom, when she sneaks him in one night before she got the apartment in Northeast Harbor. The Batch in the Snatch, Billy thinks with a cynicism that restores him like prowess, losing interest in the newspapers, as the pregnant woman departs.

The woman has left the book she was looking at behind on the table, and Billy spins it around like a bar coaster to see. The book is called “The Secret Houses of the Sky, Their Twelve Signs and What They Mean For Your Baby.”

It is a book on astrology, the science of the stars that he sees Franny reading the columns about in magazines for women – magazines that publish celebrities’ birthdays when the month is right. Julia, 36; Cameron, 34; Angelina, 29. He knows more about them, from lying next to Franny in bed, than he does about his own mother.

Billy looks up his birthday first – May 21st. He is the sign of the bull, Taurus, his element is earth, and his motto is I have, the book says.

“Taureans show a great interest in all physical matters, from sex to food to sports,” Billy reads, and he smirks, like girls are talking about him again at school. “Taureans may be accused of selfishness; fair enough, they will protect their own interests first. But ultimately they have the best interests of those around them at heart as well.” Billy thinks about the job he got Tommy Utani at the boatyard in Manset, when he quit, scrapping, painting with high powered guns, stocking sports shirts with fancy logos on them if he had to.

The book concludes of Taurus, “They live for the people they love.”

And Billy thinks of Franny, with a hot rush of blood to his face, and a swell at his eyes. The library room is empty, built high like a boathouse, and he swipes his wiry arm above his nose quickly somebody pocketing something in a store.

He looks up Franny. October 23rd. Scorpio, the scorpion. Her element is water; her motto is I control.

“Scorpios have an intimate connection with the world of the unconscious,” Billy reads, looking at the picture of a creature which seems truly otherworldly, not like a bull, but a creature created in dark space, from the gases or the rivers or the seas and deserts of another world, armored and intricate and fragile and hard at the same time. And lethal, in a self-defensive way.

“Furthermore, the themes of death and rebirth play a dynamic part in their lives,” the book says of Scorpio. “Many Scorpios undergo an ardous, agonized process of transformation and metamorphosis.”

Billy sits up in the stiff backed library chair as though he has touched something sharp in a place where he could put his hand but couldn’t see into, stung by what might be true about the science in the stars, and the woman who has slept curled at his back, her arms around his chest, playing with his nipples with her fingers, like tiny pincers teaching themselves not to hurt too hard. Just play.

Franny is this thing, like a figment from a deadly Dr. Seuss, that the book says Billy is attracted to, that he cannot escape, that Taurus lays down its gory horns for, in a garland of stars, a barbed wire of stars that herds the dark sky above his future.

Each prick in his skin is a star, a drop of white turned blue and black as space, as the tattooist works. Each prick a piece of the constellation, as a bull appears on Billy’s right forearm, shaved and pale, ending like a cuff at his wrist, and then, two beers later, a scorpion on his left, ending in deadly punctures, angry and red. When he finishes, the tattooist smears them with petroleum jelly, submerging them in a shallow sheen of grease.

Billy’s head feels warm from the beers, like he’s been bitten, or has a fever. Later, at the tavern, he runs into Tommy.

“What the fuck,” Tommy says, taken by surprise and turned on by the tattoos, the things that now live by Billy’s side, that form his sight when he rests his arms on the bar.

“You’re a marked man,” Tommy says loudly, to be clever, but he doesn’t know yet what he’s said.

She misses the Maine woods, so she goes one day to the zoo in Central Park. What a strange thought, that there would be something like a zoo, but there it is, down in a leafy glen, people strolling through an arcade of sidewalk artists, who catch them characteristically – a scratch on the surface; the most anyone dares for – with a piece of charcoal and a pad of paper. A collection of some types of creatures walking, children in hand, looking at a collection of other types of creatures, their young also trapped. You don’t live together, as you do in Maine, people and animals precariously crossing each others highways. You visit, by appointment, for a small admission fee.

There are seals on a mount of rocks, in the center of a pool of water, as Francesca sees them off shore when her father heads his boat out to open sea. But here in the zoo, they are framed in heroic silhouette by paving stones and tall shade trees and the monumental buildings on Fifth Avenue with their old-money virtues, like a natural landscape frozen in a posture of grandeur by an imposing frame. Even the ranger with the plastic pail of fish and the microphone, standing to the left like a magi, looks like a predetermination of art.

Francesca wanders into a tunnel, dank with the smell of shit, and cold with wet, its rock walls chill with the natural refrigeration of the dark.

But the tunnel is lighted blue on one wall – it is a wall of glass, which is underwater on the other side, a wall with a blank, wavering view, shadows and brightnesses and blank, like a television with nothing on, or a poor signal. It throws the rock tunnel into a kind of hypnosis, as though it too is underwater, a little less firm underfoot, and echoing cavernously with stripes of light, echoing blue and water white. It is almost like sleeping, or the dreams you have about being asleep, when you are asleep, when you don’t know, again and again, whether you’ve succeeded in waking yourself or not.

Then something lunges into the water from the top, huge and white, on its broad back and twirling with weight, descending across the screen in front of Francesca like the wreck of something, balletic and heavy, in a blurring freefall, sparkling with mass.

She remembers the car hitting the water, the momentary boat, then the rushing chaos of being sucked to the bottom, her head above black water, then her ears popping and her head clearing in an instant as though she is on a plane descending, and the air funneling above her blackly into a tightening tornado of breathing, twisting into a screw that leaves her mouth and leaps back up above her to the surface, its dervish point a rotor of aerated life. Headlights are flashing wildly like teenagers lost in the woods as the car careers with soft speed towards the black hole beneath her.

She is caught like an anchor by one leg, and her hair is closing over her face like seaweed, pushed from the back of her head, seaweed alive with scurrying bivalved creatures that release a string of bright bubbles, perfect as pearls, that flutter up and away like helium balloons that an excited child forgot to hold onto.

Then something snaps in the top of her leg, and she bellows in a great roar of air, a jellyfish of light tangled in her hair, that escapes and dissolves before she can grab it. She tries to reach it, close her hand around it, as though she has spilled something precious, but she is underwater, she is dreaming, she is too slow, it is out of reach as things in dreams are. You try to scream but you can’t. You try to wake, but you never know if you have. Is she remembering this plunge into blackness, or is she there? Or is she there over and over again, or is she remembering something that is now only a memory, and years from being a fact, released like a break in the leg from whatever rests on the bottom.

In the flickering blue and white tunnel, agitated by the silent splash from the top, the huge white shape slows as the water pulls on it, and it blossoms with white fur, starting to turn onto its belly, adrift and delicate as a white hanky, its four paws spread out like parachutes, taking a stroke or two as it takes in the water.

It is a polar bear, who has taken a plunge off his rock, and Francesca is in the tunnel below his pond at the zoo, watching him play. With a stroke, he looms large and white at her face, his nose black as the nose of a submarine. Francesca’s eyes reflect his glittering realm like glass. Then, with a great rolling glide, he ascends, stately and huge, a shipwreck in reverse, sleek and self-possessed. The water is now empty and ghosted with blue and white.

Then a lunge again, like a thing exploding, showered in pearls of air, and he is there with her again, huge and white, like a sonar of consciousness, something she is seeing as though she is sensing it unseen, heading to the bottom as though it is the top, descending on his back as though he likes watching the world of men disappear above his massive head, his paws pulling at the thickness of the water. When he moves, it is an enormous movement, like a vast reach of time turning in an endless, weightless tilt, pulling the sky and the water together into an unbelievable somersault with his roll of white fur.

She feels her body being revolved on a sheet, a clean white sheet, and she feels her life being rolled by water as if it is a team of hands, as though it no longer has any weight – all the heavy parts are gone. Life was a huge thing become graceful at last, like a white bear tumbling in play. Hardship, relationships, pain, the dull daily dress of consciousness, like wet clothing she has struggled against, are a trail of bubbles from the nose, circling the universe like small silver fish that flit away in schools when you paw at them.

Francesca rests her eyes on the bear, happy and huge and weightlessly white.

“She’s crying,” someone shouts in the tunnel, a hard richochet. “Oh my fucking God.”

And slowly, with a stillness that looks like peace when you see it on the water, not a molecule moving for miles, the small silver fish, shy and curious, reappear at the corners of her eyes.

Networking 2

2009-07-03T09:41:00.019-04:00

I don't want to sound crass here, but one of the oddest things about poverty is that it's put me back in touch with a lot of people. I don't mean to hit them up for money or anything, but when you find yourself in a truly dark cave, you call out, to try and find the back of it. The wall you can't see. And sometimes a voice calls back, and a face appears out of the dark - the dark of the deep past.

Social networking - the new-media kind - is supposed to obliviate all of this, all the dropped connections, by never letting you not be in touch with other people. Everyone you know, or think you know, in fact. It's like having a party strapped to your head. But in the bad old days, five, ten years ago, you just lost touch. No one can explain it - I couldn't.

I had a drink last night with an old friend. She is the woman who prompted my guilt to begin this blog again, by the simple act of admiring what I do. (see below.) Why does it take such dirty fuel, like shame or guilt or anger, to drive the engines of personal progress?

I hadn't spoken to Jennifer in perhaps twenty five years. Stories I would tell about her always involved her young children, who are now adults living in Brooklyn. Jennifer and I met through a close friend to each of us, who later died, and at some point, after marriage and family and the rest, our friendship became a memory too, like our dead friend.

Then, because in my freelancing/unemployment I decided one day that I needed all the new apparatus of social networking - the technological tenacles that would secure me, like strong suction to a rock, to the wide new world of possibility being built by social networking businesses - I opened a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, etc.

That unlosed a whirling torrent of souls, like the unresolved dead in Dante. People who had apparently spent several purgatorial millenia wondering if we were friends, what I had done since high school, whatever had happened to Chris and Mike, did I know 'I have a show up in' wherever. It was a real advertisement for losing touch with people - the old-school way. You just forget to ever speak to them again.

But a month or two later, after the vortex of ghosts flew back into the sky, a message appeared from Jennifer, asking if I was me, the person she had known twenty five years ago.

And I realized that I was still here. And that Jennifer and I were still friends.

We talked for three hours last night, at a bar, over drinks - lovely, old-fashioned social networking. A translucent parasol of pleasure, not a satellite dish. At some point it involved the man sitting next to us, who worked for a big liquor company, which moved him to New York, where he was making the rounds of the places that matter to big liquor companies: the right watering holes with the right vegetation and night-life; select oases of young people who spend money on going out, in nice clothes, to see their friends, and form enviable aggregates of lifestyle that big liquor companies can flay like pickled frogs in order to invent new products to sell to young people when they go out in nice clothes and spend money. The man next to us was wearing a pork-pie hat and a figured black shirt (bar-scene spy gear) and talked about his stills (he makes his own liquor, improbably, given the fact that a big liquor company picks up his tab), his fifty-odd acres in Wyoming (his trust fund paid for it), and his plan to sub-divide and built yurts on it ($18,000 each) for back-to-the-land Boomer-hippies. A world-famous energy consultant who dated his mom is going to help him with a zero-footprint wind turbine plan. She's buying horses for him - land has to have horses. The big liquor company hadn't provided him with business cards because they don't want him to be traceable to them, for tax reasons, or lifestyle espionage reasons, I can't remember. I was on my second cilantro jalapeno margarita. Maybe he was never there.

Jennifer paid for my drinks - the employed vs. unemployed rule, as she put it, as though it were a page in Emily Post. She works for a nineteenth-century photography dealer.

We hugged; we went home, she to the south, me to the north, stepping back out of the boat that had sat, rocking and empty, for twenty five years, waiting for us to step into it and float us down-river for a few hours, talking and lightly trailing our hands in the depths of each other's lives.

Networking

2009-07-01T12:53:00.022-04:00

It will be two months in three days.

To the faithful - or to those who are happening upon us for the first time - welcome, or welcome back. And my apologies. We'll try harder. I promise?

I was pushed to guilt - and self-recrimination - by a recent article in the New York Times about how most people who start blogs don't keep them up. Reluctant to be a slumlord, or part of yet another New York Times trend - record unemployment, lack of health insurance, wearing business suits to bicycle in, etc. - I decided the most effective path of least resistance was to get back on the stick, and write. And the reappearance of an old friend, Jennifer, who wrote, via Facebook, to tell me how much she was enjoying the blog. Woops. Obligations to readers - a mixed blessing, but sweet misery. Thank you Jennifer.

A few random notes. I was 'on hold' the other day - in the world of freelance/unemployment, this telephonic standing-in-line is a kind of enforced-suffering, forced-acceptance soup kitchen kind of experience - with an HMO, who is administering an extended-benefits package to me, with the most cheerful reluctance you can imagine. Put out your bowl. How can we help you? Dental - no. Mental health - ixnay. Doctors you have any desire, confidence or interest in seeing and entrusting your mind, body and soul too? I'll take a pass on that. Why are the doctors you used to see never on these lists? Don't they want to network? It's quite the thing in the media - see 'death of Michael Jackson,' 'crack-down in Iran.' (I recall visiting a friend in the hospital a year or two ago, and taking the opportunity to speak with his doctor, who had come into the room during the dinner hour on his nightly round. I asked after my friend's health, which was precarious, unresolved and in motion. 'Have you visited my website?' was the doctor's reply; that's where I would find the information. Today, he might well have asked me to follow his tweets. 'friend punked, TOTAL medical mystery, what do we do now, what would U do?')

The HMO rep on the phone told me she had to contact another distant corner of the vast information empire I had by the tail when my 'estimated waiting time' suddenly ended - a Mozart piano concerto froze mid-bar - and a Midwestern voice appeared (she was in Kansas; I was in Oz, as far as my sense of reasonable expectations for a solution were concerned). I had asked the wrong person the wrong question. She put me 'on hold,' and made her internal call.

Twenty minutes later - we got through a frighteningly good portion of that concerto - she reappeared. The other end of the empire had made her wait, before answering her call, and then put her 'on hold' while they looked up the answer to her question. (Or, presumably, quickly invented an answer which would hopefully frustrate and defeat their ability to help the client.)

My rep - let's call her Dorothy, from Kansas - was pissed about being made to wait and by being put 'on hold.' (Hello.) In fact, she couldn't believe it. Twenty minutes gone from her life, without retrieval. She will probably be fired for not fulfilling her answered-call quotas for that period of time by the 800 number agency that employs her. She shared her disbelief with me, before returning to my case and my question. She was stunned, like she'd momentarily left the atmosphere and seen deep space with stars.

I couldn't help myself.

"Now you know how the rest of us feel," I said. I didn't think the comment needed much dramatic inflection; I said this with deadness, like someone who'd spent a lot - a lot - of time 'on hold' recently. And I think I have opened someone's eyes. God moves in mysterious ways. Dorothy is a changed woman. Welcome to Oz.

In other news. It's official. I'm flea-bitten. I visited the doctor yesterday - thanks to my phone marathons - and pointed out what I thought was a rash under my arm. "It's a bite," she said. I told her I had a new cat - the infamous Lucy, profiled here - and my doctor asked if she had fleas. She pointed to three consecutive bites on the inside of my arm.

"We call it 'breakfast, lunch and dinner," she said. How do you rid a cat safely of fleas? Any information, please send it in.

Social networking. We have been reading of little else recently, especially in the media that stands to be slain by it. They love to discuss the fact. Go figure. Is that a way to get readers? The New York Times has a new social-networking editor, Jennifer Preston, who was apparently tweeting about Iran, or some such teenage nonsense, when Michael Jackson died, which went unreported in the Times for two hours - that's longer than a Miley Cyrus/ Hanna Montana concert, both halves - before appearing on its website. They say, as did the Washington Post, that they were verifying it was true, which I take to mean something other than getting Brooks Barnes in close enough to the body to get a mirror under its nose.

But it raises the issue - like the restless dead - of what we want our news to be, who we want to hear it from, what we understand now by news, and what news actually is - is it 'news' by virtue of the fact that you've never heard it before, or because the New York Times tells you it's news, or 100,000 people tweet it, and essentially vote that it's important - at which point it becomes news because public attention has architected the wave and its crest. And if it's news - and everyone accepts that - then, who do you believe, when it's being generated by active social networkers? Who are they - dissidents? ten year olds? cranks? Jennifer Preston? What forms the consensus on what's going on? Editors, or the numbers of people who agree on what's going on?

I think this paradigm shift in the media - despite the desperate, slap-happy, social-network initiatives being embraced as solutions to aging and death by companies like the New York Times, or think-tanks like the Knight Foundation - is going to be a lot rougher than the high seas tossing the boats right now. A lot of boats are going to break up, into pieces that are going to be hard to stand on. It may be that everyone loses, until we re-recognize the value of leaders, as we have with government. Who will the next leaders be? And will they be new? Now that your paper boy's got a router, not a route, will he be a press baron in two years? Citizen-journalism Kane?

The lines are open. Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Relish

2009-05-04T12:46:00.022-04:00

I don't quite know how to put this, but my life was changed yesterday, by a sandwich. My good friend Rick Fox served me a fried bologna sandwich - a piece of his childhood, a family tradition, his mother made them, etc. - and as I told him shortly after taking the first bite, I've never had anything better. It had the hallmark of cuisine: you take a couple of things, put them together, and they become something else. You do this as simply as possible. A fried bologna sandwich meets every criteria. It is the definition of a dish. The recipe is below.

This came hard on the heels of a few other things. Current sandwich voguishness. Mark Bittman, the food writer, with a big piece in May's Men's Health on the sandwich as a kind of quintessential cooking tool for men. An on-the-plate version of the standard men's magazine be-good-in-bed, she'll-toss-herself-like-a-salad-if-you-try-this type story. They usually involve 'listening' and 'foreplay,' two things men will never - ever - be interested in, not even the ones who spend big money on clothes. Lots of photos of sandwiches lined up, like a dress-for-success shoes feature. There's a sushi sandwich; there's a roast pork sandwich ... zzzzz.

Sandwich cookbooks, spilling out of the gate. The chef Tom Colicchio's "wichcraft," and others. 'Craft a sandwich into a meal - and a meal into a sandwich.' Tom's got a yellow beets with avocado, grapefruit, and radish sprouts sandwich. Boy am I going to make a lot of money with bologna. Please keep reading.

Brooklyn. Don't get me started. If you have been reading the New York Times Dining section recently, or New York magazine, the blogs and others, you now understand, as their editors do, that people in Brooklyn - young people - invented food. Somewhere in an emerging neighborhood somewhere. Sometime in the last couple of years, months, whatever. Cobble Gardens, Park Hook, Prospect Hill, Red Heights. Pickle-makers and chocolate-crafters and coffee-negociants and pizza-preneurs and bakers, bakers, bakers. Handeverythinged, homemaded, PCed and recycled, local, handsomely packaged, premium-priced, and all with an entrepreneurial sincerity that puts a thumbs-forward chokehold on you before you get a chance to swallow a sample of the ****ing product. It's like they've stumbled off-line into the third dimension, where everything is new: soap, knives, meat, bottles with labels. It's 'The Whole Earth Catalogue,' all over again.

The big killing fields for this, I discovered on Saturday, is the Brooklyn flea market in Fort Greene, or the 'Brooklyn Flea.' (hey, it wouldn't be Brooklyn if it wasn't twee.) I went there to check out the possibility of selling my earthly goods - like the chair I'm sitting in as I post - to bring some money in, in the face of continuing unemployment. Somehow I don't think I'm going to recoup the money I spent at the armories over the years in a schoolyard, though Lucky magazine was there on Saturday, photographing away with a bizillion dollar camera that had the hipsters in a cold faint. Guy Trebay of the New York Times walked by, narrow nose to the wet wind, in a perfect short raincoat, his Guy-ger counter set on high.

But the main event was the food people. Did you know food was invented in Brooklyn? Sandwiched - sorry - between the rag pickers and the schlock crockery, the gay jewelry designers and the Guatemalan hightop sneakers were the artisans of eating, the iPaesans of Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens/Prospect Park. Ten dollar gherkins, three dollar slivered salami, it-takes-a-village-to-market-a-cup-of-coffee beans in we-are-the-world bags, designed on Dreamweaver. And people lining up like the homeless at a soup kitchen, crisp ATM twentys in hand, like government coupons, for Gowanus Canal Gourmet Garage-band. In fairness, they looked homeless, from the neck down; all the four-figure eyewear was above.

Why am I upset? Who knows. Do I want a piece of this? Yes. I now have my weapon.

Enter the fried bologna sandwich. Authentic. Insulting. Enjoyable. Invincible. A Trojan Pig. (by-products.) How to invade and affront the Brooklyn food world simultaneously, at the Flea? Put down my money and start slicing up the market. Look for me there soon.

Serves one, to stupefication:

You need a Portuguese sandwich roll, from the supermarket. Eight slices of bologna. A few slices of Swiss cheese, and mayonnaise from a jar.

Fry six bologna slices in a skillet with a little olive oil or butter. When it's gotten kind of unctuous and oily and floppy, greasy and wet and grilled, but not browned, crisped or dry, stack it on the side of the skillet, with slices of Swiss cheese between each two slices of bologna, and fry the remaining two slices of bologna. Toast the Portuguese roll, sliced in half, cut side up, in a Toaster Oven until it's warm and soft, remove and spread mayonnaise on it, put a slice of frying bologna on one half of it, then the stack of bologna and cheese on top, then the remaining bologna slice on top of that. Put the top of the roll on top of that, and eat the sandwich right away.

Serving suggestions, strongly suggested. TCT's test kitchen found that high-quality flavored potato chips - the ones that you've never let yourself buy, because they sound disgusting, or you're confident they taste bad, or nothing like what they say they taste like, or you're sure they're full of chemicals, or you're afraid your children will get hold of them and ruin all your good work, or you're worried you'll start buying them alongside the milk and juice, or instead of milk and juice - Buffalo Bleu, Cheddar Cheese Herb, Honey Dijon, Sweet Onion, Barbecue Jalapeno Lime, etc. - they're an excellent accompaniment to fried bologna sandwiches. Much better than the classic stuff you allow yourself occasionally, like Salt & Vinegar, or Russet Rough-cut, or Cape Cod. Cape Cod? Explain that one to me.

And, a Claussen's Kosher Dill pickle half. Or a similar supermarket kosher dill pickle.

For those prepared to sneer, this is not slumming. This is good food: one of the most delicious things you will ever eat. It goes without saying that this is also excellent Great Recession era food, given the price of the ingredients. But, as the New York Times has reported a few weeks ago on the escalating cost of 'cheap cuts' once they become fashionable - pork belly, skirt steak, etc. - be mindful of fluctuations in the price of bologna in the stores. And don't be tempted to try mortadella - it doesn't translate. Use bologna.

A last word on bologna. Shortly after September 11, 2001, I was sent to a small town in Pennsylvania during the Thanksgiving holiday to do a newspaper story about a family whose two sons had been, respectively, at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon during the airplane attacks. Both sons had escaped harm. And of course, the family had much to be thankful for that year, more than most. I stayed at a motel on the highway - there was nothing 'better' in town, which was depressed and coal-based. And there was nowhere to eat, except fast food. So I shopped for a picnic meal in the supermarket down the road.

At the deli counter, a couple was having a quiet discussion about whether they could afford to buy bologna for dinner. I think it was about four dollars a pound. That will always remain for me what it means to be poor.

Relish your sandwiches. And thank you for listening, ma'am.

Sales, Facts and Greed

2009-04-24T09:35:00.003-04:00

Good morning and welcome. I'm posting a piece written, impromptu, by a Swedish artist of my acquaintance. Please pay attention in particular to the last line.

Sales, Facts and Greed

Not long ago I got a sales position at an insurance company. My first goal was to learn about the products. It did not take many days until my manager told me that this was not what I needed to do. Sales are emotions you do not need facts.

The other day I called my credit card company. I was told my card was enrolled in an extra cash-back program and I had so far accumulated 1200 dollar, a reasonable amount. I went to the web site to learn how they could be used. I called costumer service to ask a few questions. I was excited to learn I could among other things fly internationally. I arranged a trip with friends and went back onto the web site to purchase the ticket, 510 dollars. Neither the web site nor customer service told me that the extra cash-back program is a discount program. Buying the ticket would add another 51 dollars to my cash-back amount but I could only use 12. It is a trap; the more I try to reduce, the more it will grow.
I called customer service this time to inquire about a new card and different benefit programs. I got all the information on how to acquire cash-back or points however there were no information on how to use them. The woman I was talking to let me know that she was only allowed to say what was posted on her screen. She might have known the answer but she was not allowed to tell me.

Well, if sales are about emotions. Madoff used just this. His costumer did not ask for facts they were satisfied with emotions.
A capitalistic system relies on the market/customers. We consumer need to be well informed to do healthy and accurate decisions for our own benefit or the system will in the long term deteriorate.
America would look very different if sales were to serve people to get what they want in a long-term perspective. As long as greed rules we need regulations. What about using bailout money to build new institutions with other goals than greed?

By Ragna Berlin, Brooklyn, April 18, 2009

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

A Sow's Ear

2009-03-27T12:27:00.011-04:00

In this the era of the New Depression, one of contemporary life's largest luxury goods - art - seems headed towards the door more quickly than last year's handbag. Auction houses, galleries, magazines, parties - the great shiny objects that were the fun, irresponsibility and success of the contemporary art market are all hobbled and limping, like they're trying to work an opening on a broken (stiletto) heel.

So it was with some interest that I attended a public symposium last night on "Recessional Aesthetics: New Publics or Business as Usual," a discussion chaired by two crown princes of the contemporary art world, Hal Foster, a near-name-brand critic who holds court at Princeton and David Joselit, who holds court at Yale. The event was held in the old Dia Foundation space on West 22nd Street in Chelsea - Dia decamped several years ago to Beacon, a failing ex-industrial town upstate, where real estate was cheap. 'Ex-Dia' in Chelsea is for the year, in the absence of the new building owner's ability to do anything else with the property in this climate, a temporary art center called "X."

Well, who do you think won? New Publics or Business as Usual? In what could have been an evening of hard truths, fact-facing, frightening discourse, adventurous risk-taking, and the brilliant, combustive explosions of original thought that you would have imagined a room full of a hundred-plus accomplished art-types to be uniquely qualified to foster (sorry Hal), we got an evening that was as self-obsessed, beautifully stupid, self-consciously and uncomplicatedly entitled as a supermodel. Prince Hal (sorry Foster) and Prince David made the last few French Louises look like New Jersey turnpike tollbooth attendants, when it comes to being in touch with the public. But then, their public has been academe and the art world - and real estate agents in Hudson and Mattituck (and now possibly Beacon) - for so long that it's not absolutely necessary to talk to the rest of us. Tenure took care of that.

And, to give credit where credit is due, they're really good, as are their followers, at doing what they do. To be an important, celebrated, 'cool,' art ... thinker ... who ... thinks ... about art ... because ... art ... is really ... about ... everything ... (and ... anything) ... when you think about it ... you need to be soft-spoken (microphones do the work here), gently ironic (humor is such a human touch), you have to be able to talk in circles - really big ones - without pausing or looking down, but you also need to be flesh-eating, impatient and generally superior. You need to pretend you understand what people who don't speak your language are saying, but, only up to a point. Then you have to be decisively dismissive - in a soft, gentle, but rich and regal way. Kind of a 'Gandhi Wears Prada' thing. (Streep did it in the movie: low, powdery hate that you had to listen really hard for.)

Which is sad. Because I got the feeling, as I left the event - after an hour, they were still quietly mired in the third of ten save-the-art-world questions the panel-pair intended to address - that nobody was learning anything from the pain of the present Depression. At least, not yet. The saving graces for the common, wounded soul are probably to be found elsewhere right now, and not in the arms of contemporary art.

You can't turn a purse into a sow's ear, I realized.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

That Was Then; This Is Now

2009-03-19T20:36:00.006-04:00

The New York Times has been running video features on its website, pairing the situation 'now' with the situation 'then,' which happens to be the Great Depression. People who lived through 'that,' who have relatives living through 'this.' A kind of Gen X meets Then X - unemployed young people whose grandmothers when young lived through the big D, and now - god bless 'em - provide interesting relief to the plight of those living through the New - don't say it - D. D2. Remember - it's the Great Recession, as per the media christening.

Watch the videos, though. You'll learn a lot, and be entertained, by what's - not going on. FYI, if the government taxes the executive bonuses at 90 percent, as per today's news, that 10 percent is still probably about fourteen times what you'll make this year. Before taxes. Happy almost April. How do you like your coffee? In a cup, fool.

Also in the paper of record, a sterling article on all the people who've decided - or realized - that employment just isn't the way to go these days. People are going into business for themselves, in the absence of employers. A great popular uprising of entrepreneurship. This sounds like the best news yet: an awakening, and optimism at last.

Put out the shingle. Main Street's back in town. (We would appreciate any and all stories of businesses you've opened - we promise to post each and every one of them.)

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

This just in. The Obamas are planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during World War II. Do you have any doubt that Depression-era homesteading is a style, about to become a trend? Or, that the right publicity will get your electric car farther down the road than a battery? (the other Obama story: Barack on Leno. A kind of late-night State of the Union. Or, the President Twittering on TV.)

Shaken and Stirred

2009-03-06T20:32:00.009-05:00

It's been brought to my attention that I published a book on cocktails, "Shaken and Stirred" (HarperCollins; 2004), which is a collection of columns, on the new golden age of cocktail culture, for the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. I stopped drinking professionally when the cement seemed set on the trend - who wants to try leaving their historical mark on a dry sidewalk? The Times apparently. And then - the Pink Slip would be an excellent idea for a cocktail. I call on the bartenders of New York to expedite the idea. Audrey Saunders, Jason and Dushan, Dale DeGroff in particular. Maybe you'll see it here one day soon.

I drank vodka gimlets in the day. These days I drink dirty martinis. Life's gotten a little dirtier, and a little less sweet, all around.

For one drink, and another: six ounces gin, 2 TB white French vermouth, one TB olive brine. I like olives stuffed with jalapeno pepper. Shake it or stir it: frankly, I don't give a damn. And then, as the Times says, serve.

I brought to my own attention, with a slow backward flip through "Raising the Bar" by Nick Mautone, the fact that FDR drank dirty martinis. He popularized them, if Mr. Mautone is to be believed. He served one to Stalin?

The New Deal? The Raw Deal? The Real Deal?

Which, iced drink in hand, brings me to my point. The Great American Depression served one excellent purpose: it ended Prohibition.

Where would we be as a nation without our great great gift for mistakes?

Thank you for listening, ma'am. And cheers.

Marvelous and Ridiculous.

2009-03-06T19:53:00.006-05:00

A steady Depression diet might likely make it easier for navel-gazers to find their navel. Such would seem the case with Alexandra Peers' article in New York magazine, "Arte Povera: Why Recession Isn't Good for Art."

Ms. Peer's characterizes the low-water marks of the high-tide of contemporary art as, "marvelous and ridiculous." And this in defense. I'll take three. Have them sent to my refrigerator box, second from the end under the elevated bridge at 125th St.

Would someone step forward with the notion that art can save us, by making great art? There is no cynicism in that.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Roll Up the Rug

2009-03-06T19:16:00.011-05:00

Breaking news. Real people showed up at Thomas Cave's Tattoo today, and broke up the party. An ex-colleague from the Times, who followed an escaping balloon to Miami, and chased it around the city until it was out of air, wrote me today out of the blue (blue skies of Miami).

"Here’s a picture of my father in the 1930s."

"He graduated from high school in 1929. No work. So he and his brothers formed a little orchestra, and drove around North and South Dakota. Just like O Brother, Where Art Thou. They would spy a radio station (tall tower), drive toward it. Knock on the door. Perform for 30 minutes. Tell people to come to the grange hall, or a barn, that night. People would pay whatever they had, whether it was a chicken (admits four), or some bread, a little money or even a gallon of gas.

Then the Lee brothers would perform: Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue; Little Grass Shack; etc. Lots of foxtrots. My dad was a strings guy: guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo.

That’s how he spent the Depression.

My mother’s people had it even worse. They arrived from Norway to Minnesota (in the 1850s) in time to live in a sod hut (the original green building style, you know) and to go through Indian raids (some settlers and relatives were killed), blizzards (including the big one in 1888), a prairie fire that killed more of my relatives; swarms of locusts (1865, 66, 67, 68), financial panics of 1857, 1869 (with Depression), 1873 (with Depression), and another one in 1893. And a couple of flu epidemics.

I’m attaching another photo, of my great, great grandmother, in front of the family house in 1867 in Belmont, Minnesota.

When I feel sorry for myself (house in Miami close to foreclosure, no job, can’t find a job, been looking for almost two years, etc.), son having his first child… on Medicaid … when I feel sorry for myself, I look at those ancestors, and figure I really don’t have it too bad."

Thank you Linda, and, thank you for listening, ma'am.

To see the foxtrot in action, visit "Foxtrot Videos." And roll up the rug.

The Bandwagon

2009-03-06T16:02:00.013-05:00

We are not alone.

An 'Editorial Observer' piece by Adam Cohen in yesterday's New York Times details the new popularity of 'recession' blogs. Well, they almost got it right. What starts with a D?

Mentioned are 'Above the Law's "Notes From the Breadline" feature, written by an out-of-work lawyer. (That's pretty hard to do, actually, to be an out-of-work lawyer.) There's 'recessionwire.com' (two biz-mag ex-editors: their tag is 'The Upside of the Downturn'), 'Pink Slips Are the New Black,' the 405 Club (maximum weekly unemployment benefits figure), and a blog by a 93 year-old on Depression cooking, greatdepressioncooking.com.

The gist - everything from advice on your first five minutes of being laid-off to tips on DIY frugality to recipes involving hot dogs. (Hey, I gave you guys brisket. See Friday, Feb. 27.)

Here, for example, is the 405 Club's 'Affiliates' list:

Check them out. Who knew there'd be job insecurity in unemployment. The bandwagon's getting crowded, and people are starting to push.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

FYI, the 1953 film "The Band Wagon," illustrated at top, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and directed by Vicente Minnelli, is a send-up of show-biz's 'putting on a show' theme, and features "Dancing in the Dark."

Trash To Treasure

2009-02-27T12:16:00.005-05:00

A friend alerted me to superforest.org, a site with a wealth of interest, good intention, healing attitude, and utility. Very much in the spirit of what we are trying to do here, but with an enviable professionalism too. Please visit it.

Among the recent posts, an item on a 12 year old inventor, Max Wallack, and his "Home Dome."

Max seems to understand the idea that he could be living in a Depression. He is the 2008 winner of the Trash to Treasure competition, sponsored by Intel and featured on "Design Squad," a PBS kids show on design/build on WGBH.

Trash to treasure is a powerful tool, in the right hands. Mr. Obama - give this gentleman a job. Infrastructure czar? Emergency housing authority? Wallack's budget was literally peanuts: packing peanuts.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Park Avenue Brisket

2009-02-27T12:01:00.001-05:00

As promised, "Park Avenue Brisket," from "Mrs. Smith." (See Wed., Jan. 28, for the circumstances by which I came to be served it.)

1 first cut brisket aprox 4 lb , trimmed
5 carrots, each peeled and cut in 3
1 large potatoe, unpeeled and cut in 8

sauce
14 oz can organic diced tomatoes
1/2 c red wine (on the sweeter side)
18 oz heintz ketchup
18 oz water
1 packet lipton recipe secrets onion soup mix (put through a sieve and discard solid onions pieces)

~preheat oven to 350F
~in large bowl combine sauce ingredients
~place flameproof casserole pan oven over high heat, and lightly brown brisket on both sides
~add carrots and potatoes to pan around meat and then pour sauce over
~cover and bring sauce to a boil
~move covered pan into oven and leave for 3 hours, or until meat is very tender
~remove pan and let cool
~slice meet against the grain and put back into pan
~if cooking liquids have become too thick add with water before putting meat back in
~place covered pan in oven for another 20 minutes
~at the last minute, remove lid and broil to crisp fat on top

My gut feeling - some pun intended - is that you should only serve this to close friends, because you will make a pig of yourself - as I did - eating it.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"Playful, Elegant"

2009-02-23T13:21:00.001-05:00

Looking for historical information on hobos and companion animals, I came across Shannon Moriarty's blog post on the homeless and their pets at change.org - and why shelter (people not animal) policies help keep the homeless and their pets on the street.

I've seen them; you have too. Read about it - and relief efforts several cities have mounted - and the readers' comments, including homeless with pets.

I would still appreciate leads on historical information on Great Depression- era hobos and their companion animals.

What got me started? I adopted a kitten between lay-offs last year, the first animal I've ever taken in. And the first cat I've ever lived with - I grew up with dogs. I'm assuming it was myself I was feeling sorry for, but, for whatever reason, it seemed to make sense. I don't believe I acted irresponsibly, though life at home is more precarious now than it was then.

Her name is Lucy, which was my mother's middle name. I felt in need of some of my mother's spirit when I adopted her, I think. She's a classic American tabby.

Lucy is also what vets call a "CH cat." I didn't know this when I lofted her out of a cage and up onto my shoulder at the North Shore Animal League in Port Washington, NY on a busy Sunday of adoptions last August, wearing her red kitten's collar with the scarred adoption-ID tag. I just thought she was good-looking. She is.

CH, or cerebellar hypoplasia, is a result of a mother cat's exposure to feline infectious enteritis, or distemper, while pregnant. Kittens are born with damage to the cerebellum, which controls coordination and balance. Though the damage is permanent, it is not degenerative and CH cats have a normal life expectancy.

Lucy wobbles and wags when she walks up to you, all expectation, like an excited little kitty. Part of that is CH. She races and plays, and chases and crouches and prances away when she wants to be hunted. She falls down stairs and hits the sides of beds when she tries sailing up onto them, and lands on her back when she leaps.

It's Depression-era comedy, but now as then, there's a Big Message involved.

She is the happiest creature I know. It's daunting. No ambivalence about anything; no fear; no sadness; no doubt that she's loved, an optimism, as each day begins, that it will be full of all the things that she likes the most. And that everything and everyone around her will be instrumental and supportive in her enjoying them.

The parallels to my attitudes to adversity - or lack of them - are pretty obvious. It's no wonder you'd want something like that around if you lived on the street, one of life's travelers.

Lucy's spoiled, as rotten as I can make her. When I was last employed, this meant weekly new toys from a pet store on Madison Avenue, the best money could buy, up to about five dollars: wicker ping-pong balls with tail feathers sticking out the back, velour monkeys on bungee cords that you dangle from window locks, sausage-like tummy pillows upholstered in a leopard print, ethically queasily and realistic baby mice - anything American entrepreneurs and Chinese factory workers could hold hands across the ocean about, and make for 10 cents and sell for five dollars. The store had McCain and Obama look-a-like dog toys during the campaigns, the message being, I'm guessing, that you buy your opponent and feed it to the dogs. Cute. The smaller and whiter the dog, in certain Manhattan zip codes, let's say, the funnier the joke got. Or pit bulls in the Bronx.

Which brings me to my point. I don't buy animal toys anymore. There's the $. And the fact that I don't walk down Madison Avenue on a daily basis.

What does Lucy do? I hear mobilizing animal-lovers ask. Stop right there.

Now, I make them.

Exhibit A:

This is the white plastic foam rings that safe-package a cylinder of blank DVDs when you buy them, tied together with a piece of butcher's twine.

It makes Lucy beserk. In a good way. (Well, what do we know?) Is it as good as - or as educational - as a wicker ping-pong ball with tail feathers sticking out the back? Readers?

It reminded me, the minute I made it, of the great Anni Albers' jewelry, constructed from hardware-store hardware.

To quote New York's Museum of Modern Art museum store website, which is selling the Anni Albers' design, paper clips and a sink drainer, above, in a 'studio jewelry kit' -

"During World War II, when materials were in short supply, Albers invented ways to create playful, elegant jewelry using simple components usually found in hardware shops and stationary stores."

I don't think Lucy would have a problem with that.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

FYI, please check the wealth of 'junk jewelry' sites - like Junk Jewelry - which take the everyday and attempt to transform it. We could only hope to claim this aim as our own.

The 787

2009-02-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

The $787 billion stimulus package is history. Signed, sealed, and no one knows what's going to be delivered, or where it will deliver us.

It calls to mind America's other 787: Boeing's 'Dreamliner.' The first major airliner to use composite materials for most of its construction, according to its manufacturer. In other words, we don't really know what it's made of, we're just going to get in it and hope it goes up. Four production delays: we're still waiting. But we want it to fly. See you in 2010.

Meanwhile, we're out on the tarmac in President Obama's Dreamliner. Nothing could be more aptly named, given the expectations. If the economy takes off, will everyone grab hands and cheer, like they do on flights that hit turbulence and pull above it? Or just order drinks.

Hawaii or bust!

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Musical Chairs

2009-02-18T19:07:00.001-05:00

I wanted comfort food this evening, but I didn't want comfort food from my corner of the world - which is feeling a little tight these days - so I'm making Vietnamese beef and carrot stew, from the excellent Corinne Trang's "Authentic Vietnamese Cooking: Food from a Family Table." As Ms. Trang explains, it's a Vietnamese dish based on the classic French boeuf aux carottes.

The ingredients are a litany of tastes one might find satisfying in an Asian stew: five-spice powder, coconut, lemongrass, chilies, ginger, etc. Ms. Trang calls for de-fatting it, but I always enjoy eating the first round of Asian stew just the way it usually is: fatty. It turns rice into a major chow.

I worked up a hunger at New York City's Department of Finance in Jamaica, Queens. I went to appeal a parking ticket. Two things I learned that I'll pass along to the other hardened criminals in the room: if you are standing next to your car, and your car is double-parked, you're double-parked. And can be ticketed by an industrious traffic officer, holding back the relentless tide of decivilizing forces loose in the world today. Two: if you have a valid registration, but it's not stuck to the inside corner of your windshield, you are in violation of not properly displaying a valid registration.

Ka-ching. Another blow against my amoral empire. There are automatic payment kiosks at the Finance Department, which operate like ATMs, though I don't know if you can actually deposit money against future violations. You're lawless - there are bound to be more. And there is a large maze of 'hearing rooms' where you go to appeal, like fluorescently-lit confessionals. You sit across a desk from an unattractive hologram that smells - I mean, a city official - and robotically discuss the terms of your debt to society. You get an instant discount for just having showed up - they knock off some money - but in exchange, you're guilty without argument, and if you argue, they take your discount away and increase the original fine. If you ask to see a judge, they tell you a judge is going to make it even worse.

Ain't life grand. Add a little five-spice to it.

My favorite part of the exchange: the Department will arrange financing with you, if you can't pay the fine in full. But, if you can't pay the fine because you're unemployed, for example, and the $143 fine would be half of what the other government agency - the unemployment bureau - sends you every week, Finance can't finance you because you have to have a job to be eligible for financing. In case you don't pay the financing - they can put a lean on your salary. The other way to pay - if you're unemployed, for example, and don't have the money, period - is to forfeit your vehicle. Easy! You can always search for jobs on-line. Who needs a car?

This exquisite construct brought to mind the bail-out now being pushed through the Great Bowel of bureaucracy - our national government - and my realization on the drive home that if the government works similarly on all levels (I'm confident it does), then trillions of dollars are being made available for what, and who is eligible, and how and why? My lasting image of the Department of Finance was the seating arrangement by which we were made to wait outside the hearing rooms. A line of chairs against one wall, the chair at the top of the line being the chair that the next person being seen occupied. When he or she stood up to go in, the guard in the waiting room made everyone stand up and advance one chair and sit down again, like a game of musical chairs. There were about forty people involved, including mothers with babies and the lame. And it happened about once a minute.

This, I thought, is our great nation - patient, lawless, obedient, trusting, shortchanged of common sense - participating in the government's game of citizenship. Start the music.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Yes! We Have No Bananas

2009-02-18T16:49:00.000-05:00

Breaking news on the head-in-the-sand front. The New York Times, in a small editorial piece by Eduardo Porter in Tuesday's paper, discussed the D-word head-on, and posed the question, "Are we in a Depression?"

Well, God bless the New York Times. We are or we aren't, it decided, kinda, or we aren't, but we are, sorta, woulda. It's all a question of what you call what we're in.

It's semantics "Dance With The Stars." This quick left-to-right, right-to-left tango after Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain dropped the D-word inadvertently (so matter of factly, in fact, that you'd swear there's a Depression on) in a talk about fiscal stimulus. Aides called it a 'slip of the tongue,' as though he'd stepped on a banana peel with his mouth. Then there's the International Monetary Fund's Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who said the first-world was already in a Depression. What'does she know? And on and on. It's entertaining, depressing - as in the other well-known sense of the word - and here at "Thomas Cave's Tattoo," we believe, validating.

It's a Depression. Let's get on with it; call some friends over; smoke some bananas, get out the sewing kits and patch some jeans. Look good walking past the restaurants you used to go into.

The best bit in Mr. Porter's piece is President Jimmy Carter heavy-hoodooing his inflation expert, Albert Kahn, about using the word "depression" in speeches in 1978 on soaring inflation. Mr. Kahn routinely replaced it with "banana," which no one blinked at.

Yes! We Have No Bananas. We Have No Bananas Today.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

FYI, "Yes! We Have No Bananas" is a song by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn from the 1922 Broadway revue, "Make It Snappy." It was sung by Eddie Cantor. Benny Goodman and Spike Jones also covered the song.

For a recorded excerpt, click here for The Authentic History Center's clip.

Preservation Road

2009-02-09T13:54:00.001-05:00

It's deja vu all over again, as those greater than me have said. The WPA housing projects from the first Great American Depression are now being threatened with destruction, or razed, just as the New Great American Depression is getting underway - with housing projects. Read Tracie Rozhon's New York Times article, "New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer." As Ms. Rozhon, a former colleague, quotes Robert A. Caro as saying, "It’s ironic to be tearing them down just when America is going through tough times again." Caro wrote about the W.P.A. in “The Power Broker,” his book about the builder Robert Moses. “We should be preserving them and honoring them. They serve as monuments to the fact that it is possible to combine infrastructure with beauty.”

What goes around comes around, etc. There are dozens of sturdy sayings for situations like this.

Should we be preserving this stuff? Your call - call in please. Or, should we be concentrating on the beautiful, contemporary flower of the New Great Depression, and what it could / will produce? Are preservationists marching down the right road? Or do we need a next generation of preservationists who are prepared to preserve us - and not the buildings coming down around us. Priorities please: and your comments.

Is this a New Great Depression? It's certainly beginning to smell that way, even if the press won't come out and call it that. What would you call this?

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Learn To Sew

2009-02-06T11:51:00.000-05:00

You might have missed this. If so, it makes pretty eye-opening reading.

"It looked as if the bad times had finally caught up to Ruth Taube, after she had managed, for 42 years, to float above temporary cutbacks, dwindling resources and unfortunate turns of events at her place of employment."

Read on.

And this: novelist and artist Douglas Coupland's observation on consumerism and the new economy (aka the New Great Depression) on the New York Times op-ed page, that "On the one hand, a big drop in consumption sounds like the advent of a new utopia where people stay at home to eat, play board games with neighbors and discover life's simpler pleasures. On the other, it might mean a social disaster to rival the fall of the Aztecs."

The 'economy' shed 598,000 jobs in January. And the market's up. It's like a vodka and Bull.

Below, Mr. Coupland's "Corporate Safety Blanket No. 1. The bailout in cotton with a silk trim, in an edition of ten.

Or, contact Ms. Taube about a reasonable facsimile. She copied her daughter's wedding dress from a dress at Bergdorf Goodman.

Or, learn to sew. It's going to come in handy.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

The New WPA

2009-02-05T13:34:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the New WPA. I promised you a treasury of American drinking songs. I don't know if this constitutes a public-works project, but, so it begins. This was performed for me in the comfort of someone else's living room, by one of the surf-mama Courages of San Diego. The lady will remain anonymous, out of propriety 'from another age,' but suffice it to say, she goes by the name "Nolans Mom" in some circles. She adopted a full sailor's tilt in her stance when she prepared her audience to hear her rendition. For the musical, I'm trying to get you a recording too. In an e-mail message, Nolans Mom explained that her great uncle taught her the song in the '80s, when he was in his 80s. And her father claims he learned it in med school in the '40s.

Attention Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress: The Drinking Song Archive. "T'was a night in late September"

T'was a night in late September,
and a night that I'll remember,
when to bed to walk to home I vainly tried..
As my feet began to stutter,
and I lay down in the gutter,
a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Oh we talked of stormy weather as when two friends get together,
and a lady passing by was heard to say:
"You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses,
and the pig got up and slowly walked away....he walked away

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Project!

2009-02-05T12:58:00.000-05:00

Duh. It dawned on me that the last Great American Depression was full of projects - the WPA, the TVA, illustrated here with Watts Bar Dam, etc. That's what everybody remembers and that's what everybody's excited about now - the prospect of projects. After we decide to admit that it's a New Great American Depression.

As Cher Horowitz says in Amy Heckerling's pre-New Great Depression classic "Clueless," - "Project!"

Obviously, there will be some serious stuff. Infrastructure - the word in and of itself is serious. But there's also stuff like John Morefield's architectural booth (see below), or the drinking-song archive (see above). Serious two.

Readers. At last, we need your help. Give us your ideas for projects. The great public works - big and small, bigger and smaller - of the New Great American Depression. The New WPA. What has to be done? Who stands to do it?

To borrow a nickel from Mr. Morefield, give us your 5 cents worth of advice.

Thank you for listening ma'am.

FYI, an excellent new book on the TVA, "The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion."

Are You Polite When You're Wrong?

2009-02-05T12:15:00.000-05:00

I applied for a journalism fellowship this week, which involved a lot - of a lot - of paperwork, in quadruplicate. It's a long shot; let's hope for the best.

I also applied for a job at a large national bookstore chain, seeking minimum-wage employment to pay the bills. You apply on-line, and it involves a lot - of a lot - of virtual paperwork, at least as much as applying for a major fellowship as one of journalism's nascent geniuses. Somehow I didn't expect the one to have much to do with the other, but, it did.

The bookstore application is roughly 40 pages (count 'em) long. For a job that will pay you 12 dollars an hour, at tops. It involves dozens of pages of questions that try psychologically sheep-herding you into buzzing shears, like, do you get angry often, do you smile, do you get on well with others, are you polite when you're wrong, are you always right (yes), do you go into sleep mode if no one gives you something to do, are you a born leader. My favorite question - much more upfront - are you a convicted felon? Nothing subtle there, except, the application assures you parenthetically that your answer will have no bearing on your potential employment. Uh, huh. Yes, I'm a convicted felon. Book theft. What can I say? I love to read. And I'm too poor to buy books. That's why I'm applying for a minimum-wage job.

The application also asks for as many references as the fellowship did. Well, let's see, Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. Ask for Reverend Dave.

My Greek landlord Bobby in Astoria once gave me an invaluable piece of advice. "Billy" he said. "Always write your own check." By this he meant, don't expect anyone else to be able to employ you as well as you can employ yourself.

So how did we get into this mess?

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Lemons

2009-02-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

If life gives you lemons, design a lemonade stand.

Seattle architect John Morefield has set up a booth at the Ballard farmers' market, where he gives design advice for five cents a pop, into a can. He told a local reporter he was inspired in part by Lucy's psychiatric advice booth in the comic strip "Peanuts."

Morefield was laid off twice this past year, he says. On Sunday, he made 35 cents, reported komonews.com, and he continues to make a lot of press. (Trapezoidal titanium masters, be forewarned. The New World may well want a lot more of Mr. Morefield, and a lot less of lemon luxury goods that leak.)

The nickels go to a food bank; the press Mr. Morefield keeps to network with.

This is New Great Depression resourcefulness at its best. Way to go Mr. Morefield. I'm joining the line for a word with you, and happy to pay the nickel. Hope we can have you here.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

The Living and the Dead

2009-02-03T19:27:00.001-05:00

The snow. It's snowing here on Little Neck bay, where I live. Do you remember, Joyce's wondrous line, about the snow falling on the living and the dead.

I put on an LP, now that night is here, and was struck by my gesture. That's how the indigent affluent spend their evenings - with fine stereos, turntables, not CDs. It gets worse. The LP I put on is a recording of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier," sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. A collectible recording? We'll find out when I try selling it, along with much of what I own, in the weeks ahead.

This recording was given to me by a friend on his deathbed. How's that for opera? He knew he was sick and dying, so he cleared up the broader points of the business of being alive, settled into his (borrowed) house, saw a short list of friends, and drank the hemlock. It was actually a weak tea with a stupefying dose of drugs in it. A generous and humane agency in New York helped it happen.

I left with his LPs. Music that I hope he took with him somehow. Including Ms. Schwarzkopf, as the unhappy Marschallin. How to avoid the pain of age, even with money? Die youngish.

Money's not my problem right now. As in, I haven't got any. I have the scratchy voices of the past, on vinyl, like memories that relied on available technology. That's what memories do as you get older. At a certain point, they start popping and skipping. And drifting, on to the living and the dead, like -

Recently on CD, and on-line: "Lookbook," with Grant Cutler and Maggie Morrison.

Completely addictive.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Breadlines & Champagne

2009-02-02T18:30:00.000-05:00

If it takes a Depression to bring back the Depression, then, so be it.

You couldn't ask for a greater gift than the "Breadlines & Champagne" Depression-era movie series just opened at the Film Forum in New York. Fifty films from back in the day. Capra, Sturges, La Cava, Wyler, Hawks, and more movies, and as the New York Times points out, they're "filthy with stars" - Lombard, Harlow, Tracy, Colbert, Stanwyck, Gable, Bogart, et al. This is the creme de la creme soup kitchen soup of Hollywood film-making. You could stand a spoon in it. If you don't live in New York, check out the list, and rent, rent, rent.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Hunger Moon

2009-02-02T18:05:00.000-05:00

I went for a run this evening, at the bluest part of the evening, just an hour after sunset, just half an hour left before night. Deep deep twilight, but everything still visible. Beautiful.

What I would wish of a new austerity: fewer lights, less noise. The Cross Island parkway and the Whitestone bridge light up brilliantly at night, across Little Neck bay from where I live, and the traffic is a pleasant rush in the air, like surf, but that deep blue of twilight - like a hush - puts invention to shame.

According to the Indian moons, February is the 'hunger moon.'

This from another book recommendation to make, "Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking," by Joseph E. Dabney. Dabney is a retired newspaperman who has also written a history of corn whiskey, "Mountain Spirits."

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Is Everybody Happy?

2009-01-30T10:24:00.000-05:00

I was reminded this morning of a favorite recent book, "The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino" by Alec Wilkinson, and out this month in paperback. Neutrino is a nearly indigent person Wilkinson has written a curious life and times account of. The proposition that his subject is the happiest man in the world - without root and in pursuit of his dreams - remains the book's beautifully-written debate until the very last word. If hard times are often unhappy, happiness, Wilkinson shows us of Neutrino, can often be difficult too.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

This Land

2009-01-30T09:51:00.000-05:00

Anne Guiney has a good editorial in the 1.21.09 issue of The Architect's Newspaper, on the new public works, or the infrastructure projects promised by the Obama administration which could transform large parts of the country while employing people, much the way projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority did in the 1930s.

"For architects, engineers, planners, developers, mass-transit advocates, and anyone with an interest in smart growth, that means it's time to speak up and join the discussion about funds from the federal stimulus package, and to advocate that they be used in ways that are truly sustainable and forward-looking."

Elsewhere in that issue, an article on new buildings for the D.C. Public Library system. The architect, David Adjaye, is quoted: "It's not just about making libraries, but about making centers of excellence for the community."

Note to the Obama administration - the national library system is our intellectual and educational infrastructure, and needs the large-scale imagination and infusion of project funds that bridges and highways are likely to get. The mind travels too. Provide for its adventures.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Success/ Dress

2009-01-29T20:33:00.000-05:00

Okay. The important things. Fashion. If the economy's failed, do you still need to dress for success?

Or, do you:

1.) Spend all day in your pajamas.

2.) Spend all day in your exercise clothes.

3.) Go stark naked because you're going stark raving mad.

4.) Re-gift the clothes.

Let's talk about 4.)

There's Career Gear.

Very very very good cause. I gave them clothing a few weeks ago. Let someone else have a crack at cracking the nut. Here's two suits, one jacket, four trousers and whatever I forgot to take out of the pockets.

And, there's Derick Melander. He's an artist who makes art out of second-hand clothing. The New Great Depression. I promised you art.

Melander has work in "Queens International 4" at the Queens Museum of Art (yes, there is), a kind of 'biennale' concept for Queens. Like - brick-oven pizza.

Derick explains that he's collaborating with Goodwill, who are donating (that gives me the kind of vertigo that makes me want to black out) a bin outside the museum where you can donate clothing which Derick takes inside and folds neatly and makes an art piece out of, and furthers his career (with gear), and then donates the 'piece' of clothing back to Goodwill.

Will the circle be unbroken? Apparently - not.

FYI, Goodwill now runs an e-Bay-like online auction on its site, and as of tonight, there was a 'Kate Spade floral purse' up for grabs.

$42.11 US, at last look. Brother, can you spare a thousand dollars?

It might go nicely with a dress for success.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Tragedy is Good

2009-01-28T17:03:00.000-05:00

This also from dinner last night. My hosts know a little boy - he's seven? - who understands from hearing it everywhere and all the time that 'the economy is bad.'

"The comedy is bad," he tells people, gravely.

Bright little kid.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Eight Nights A Week

2009-01-28T14:01:00.000-05:00

I couldn't resist. Visit "Dating A Banker Anonymous." I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm assuming that's the point. In either order.

"Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time - we started a blog."

The founders' resume experience: "going out eight nights a week."

DABA's tip (1) for the New Great Depression seems to be: get dressed up and go out and buy yourself a drink with your friends. Not half bad. As they say, you go girl. And take that, Tucker Max.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"Let's Ketchup!"

2009-01-28T11:25:00.001-05:00

I had a brisket dinner on Park Avenue last night. I don't know what to make of that - part hard times, part great times? A year ago that might have been a 'hobo blackface' charity event.

But this was straight from the heart. My hostess decided to make something comforting because even though she and her husband and their two daughters are pretty well off, people are scared. You might be sitting at a marble countertop in an apartment on the 18th floor on Park Avenue, sipping a good red and catching up, but the shadows are all around you. Some of them walk in the door as your guests.

After-dinner talk was kids disappearing from private schools because their parents can't pay their tuitions anymore. And then, as my host pointed out, it's only a few skips and skids into 'no health insurance,' 'no food,' 'no home.'

This from the 18th floor, where the views are good. I'm going to get us that brisket recipe, which involved a lot of ketchup. Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Smith - you are excellent people and beautiful friends.

In the midst of appetizers and discussion, their youngest daughter, age thirteen, announced - unprompted - that she thought we should call the current situation a Depression, and get on with it. Look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Start thinking constructively good instead of dwelling unproductively bad. If it's going to suck, let's make it a Really Great Depression. It will involve a lot of ketchup.

Out of the mouths of babes (in electric-blue jeans.) She could put me out of a job. I am going to try to get her to write for me here. You need to hear this.

I also joined Facebook several days ago, because I thought it would be good to 'network,' which seems useful to the unemployed in theory anyway. You certainly have the time for it. I got immediate contacts, responses, 'hey how are you,'s friend requests, voices from the deep past (now a shallow grave), etc., but there was something about it that felt like we were all people on a long line waiting for a bowl of soup, talking to each other while we waited. My host last night suggested that a truly clever entrepreneur could now launch "Inyourface," which would deal with the basic attack of being in instantaneous and unavoidable touch with everyone you've ever met. I'm guessing there would be 'enemy requests' and the rest.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

FYI, Heinz's website has a ketchup widget, and social networking features, "squeeze a message," and "splat a friend." You send friends a message that says, "Let's ketchup!"

Chocolate Gravy

2009-01-26T19:20:00.000-05:00

If you've got a favorite recipe for biscuits, don't forget the chocolate gravy. Have a look at "brother, can you spare a thousand dollars." And thanks to the people of Hartsthorne, Oklahoma. Hard times can indeed be a festival.

I use Edna Lewis' "Biscuits for Two or Three," from her "In Pursuit of Flavor."

"I used to make biscuits for at least 5 or 6 people," Ms. Lewis writes, "but since I have been living alone, I have altered my biscuit recipe to make 8 or 10 large biscuits that are just the way I want them."

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Ms. Lewis' portrait is by John T. Hill

Sleepless In Seattle

2009-01-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

Furniture Today reports that mattress sales plunged 41% domestically, and domestic mattress units were down 39%. This is news to lose sleep over. Where, might I ask, are you going to keep your money when all the banks fail?

People - Rest In Peace. Take one child out of private school (let them draw straws: bendable-cuppy ones), but, in the words of the country song, don't use a stone for a pillow.

On a positive note, Mint, the personal money management website, has posted a story, "7 Financial Tips From The Great Depression," which is very much in the spirit of "Thomas Cave's Tattoo." Read and enjoy it.

What, you might well be wondering, is the spirit of "Thomas Cave's Tattoo"?

Hopefully, time will reveal it to be a home, for the constructive virtues of being in a bad situation and making the very best of it. Great Depression virtues of handiness, thrift and invention. And instruction and help with the New Great Depression household in everything from cooking to sewing to singing while you're drinking (or not), keeping mind and body together, and entertaining life's larger thoughts as you watch the campfire and they fly out the top, sparks towards the stars. Let's grasp their meaning before they go black.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

(FYI, the painting above, "Unemployed in Jungles Outside Seattle, Wash., Cooking Up a Mulligan from Meat and Vegetables Gathered from Nearby Farms, is a watercolor and ink in the collection of the Washington State Historical Society.)

"For Duty and Humanity!"

2009-01-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

In what parallel universe would thinking about a Depression be more comforting than thinking about a recession?

The universe in which we now live now, I would propose. Six of one, half dozen of the other, as they say. The "recession" - also a term to which the pundits and their public were dragged kicking and screaming, struggling like puppies in a bag on its way to the river - just keeps bleeding away. It's recession, it's deepening recession, it's deep recession.

It's deep everybody-knows-what, is what it is. And no one is blaming the puppy.

Next up for admitting, now that the "recession" is about as deep as it can get (well, it could get deeper, until you're eating Chinese, if your self-denial is shoveling really hard ... ) is that it might - might - be wading, falling, lurching, stumbling, wandering, backing, sliding, tumbling, skidding, limping into Depression territory. The New Land. Not the bottom of the barrel, but the heavenly afterworld of recession. You are no longer sick, and struggling. You are in A Whole New Place, ready to prospect and stake a claim.

Doesn't that feel better than bleeding to death? Especially in a roomful of doctors? (How much anesthesia will you need to keep you knocked out for the next two years, while they pass the knives back and forth across your chest?)

For an excellent view of the semantics of "Depression" vs. "Recession," visit Jeffrey Hill's satisfyingly literate blog and watch the CNN video. Mr. Hill is an English teacher living in Le Havre, France.

FYI, the Three Stooges production still above is taken from "Men in Black," a 1934 short film in which the Stooges play med students on their first day of work at a hospital. (Their med school credentials: they have the highest temperatures in their class.) "For Duty and Humanity!" is the Stooges' repeated line in the short. "Men in Black" is the only Stooges film to be nominated for an Academy Award, as best Short Subject (Comedy). It was intended as a spoof on "Men in White," a Clark Gable and Myrna Loy film released the same year.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo

2009-01-23T22:54:00.000-05:00

At the New York Times, we (reporters) were not allowed by the copy desk to use the word "irony." In ironical situations. As in, "ironically, ..." The copy editors encouraged us to say, "paradoxically" instead. In a pinch.

What to do? It was just a rule. Some of the best bars in New York have rules. If you want to drink in them, you abide by them. At some point in the history of American journalism, the New York Times was a very great bar. And I don't mean that ironically.

What to do about Mr. Cave's tattoo, though. The gentleman in the photograph who graces this home page. He had his social security number tattooed on his arm. Was this a defiant gesture? He looks defiant, as only the handsome and smart can look defiant, in Dorothea Lange's beautiful portrait of him, with his wife. Was this the defiance of confidence? Or high intelligence? Or the defiance of honesty - that at this moment in time, nothing could have put the cards on the table like branding yourself with the government's number for you. For better or worse. That it was little to lose - your name, your identity, the broad expanse of your bicep - if you had the confidence of your life and the love of your wife behind you?

Was it expediency? Was this man tired of being asked, by the swarming worker-bee bureacracies, as he followed work. Foremen, agencies, photographers, press corps. The Great Depression, for better or worse, became, thanks to the government, a media event. Perhaps one of the first, best, and well-orchestrated, of the twentieth century.

I'm reminded of a more recent generation that made popular the idea of having bar codes tattooed to the backs of their necks, as if to say, we are not persons, we are products to scan. To sell, or sell to.

I admire Mr. Cave's impulse more. It seems cleaner, more like real irony. He wears it seriously, but lightly. He's put himself up for full exchange, with the confidence of winning. Maybe that's what the Times feared we had lost of the gift of doing. For everyone who can do it, do it.

Thanks for listening, ma'am.

Good Times

2009-01-23T22:05:00.001-05:00

I promised you good times ("And where are they?!" I can hear everyone shout.)

Let's let Mr. Obama do the worrying tonight. I think about him and his family being in a new house. And being in a new house is in itself exciting. Especially for kids.

Malia and Sasha - go for every window.

I have a friend in southern California who likes to cook beans. She and her husband inaugurated an informal tradition recently of cooking beans one night a week - Bean Night. Part austerity, part comfort. He's a chef at a five star hotel. She's a 'lady from Texas.' They agree on beans; she provides the Mexican bean pots and the cornbread; he provides the rigorous innovation.

They eat Very Well. On Dirt.

On a December visit, we talked about Bean Night, and the idea that something as lowly as a bean - uh, I mean, 'noble peasant,' etc. - could make haute cuisine. And still be considered a 'bean-counting' bill of fare. If you had to upscale a bean, did that mean shaving truffles on it, lobster claws, whatever.

I came back home and invented 'bean gras.' It's basically force-feeding beans, as though they were geese. Food people will tell you there are no new recipes, but here is a recipe for bean gras.

You take a piece of pork belly, about two pounds. You roast it, slowly, in a slow oven, about 300 degrees for a couple of hours, rubbed in salt and pepper. You eat that, for a meal of your own design. But you let the fat from it congeal, and you scrap that into a bean pot with a bag of beans. Standard supermarket bag - I don't know the weight. Use navy beans, or small white Northern beans. Add some water to cover the beans and give them an inch or two of water above. Then bake that for a couple of hours. Watch your water, and don't let the beans dry out, or let them stay too wet. You could do this over a campfire, if you were Mr. and Mrs. Cave. Just let them simmer. Until they are bean gras.

If you use a Very Good Bean, this is like beans that have been raised on pig butter.

Thank you for listening ma'am.

Next up: drinking songs from the surf mama Courages of San Diego.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself

2009-01-23T21:26:00.000-05:00

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today."

This from Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in 1933. I think we're talking about the "D" word.

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president.”

This from the New York Times account of a "polite but pointed exchange" between Mr. Obama and the No. 2 House Republican, Eric Cantor of Virginia." The President took note of the parties’ fundamental differences on tax policy toward low-wage workers, and insisted that his view would prevail.

Inauguration.

Check.

One week down, and counting.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Poverty, But Were Afraid To Ask

2009-01-18T16:38:00.001-05:00

People jumping out of windows, shooting themselves through the head, poisoning their children because they can't afford them - it's the stuff of great cinema, but do we really want to live this way?

Let's be calm.

"We are setting out a clear road map to restore profitability and enable us to focus on maximizing the Value of Citi," it said in a statement with the earnings.

Sounds pretty cut-and-dry, huh? Road maps.

What Citi needs, apparently, is a belt-clip GPS - not something that's awkward to open and impossible to fold. But then, maybe that's why they couldn't see the road - the map was in their faces.

The earnings: "Citigroup capped a devastating 2008 by announcing Friday that it would split into two entities and that it had posted an $8.29 billion loss for the fourth quarter," reported the New York Times in the same story. Uh, this in fact, was the news, not, the uh, road map.

"Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank in London, said the decision to split the the financial giant was 'an indication that the era of big financials is at an end for now."

Hey Ma! Come to the radio! The era of big financials is at an end! For now!

Mr. Dixon would make a knock-down grim reaper. "My presence at your door is an indication that the era of you and all you've known is at an end for now." Have hope. It's for now.

Unfortunately, this stuff is getting easier to find. Corporate-release dessication devices like 'road maps' and 'indications' aren't keeping up with the juice that keeps bursting out of the bodies. Nurse, sponge. Bigger sponge - elsewhere in the article, Merrill Lynch loses $15.3 billion in the same quarter.

My recommendation is that we put the guy who landed the Airbus in the Hudson River in charge of the economy. He's got demonstrable skills at high altitudes, when you're double-birded and your engines go quiet.

I'm sure Mr. Sullenberger III uses road maps for toilet paper - after he's memorized them. Obama, make the call. The financial services sector can't park company jets in open fields. Readers, the lines are open.

A friend is facing cancer. He's been told by the doctors that it's beat, but, he's looked out that same window that Mr. Sullenberger III's passengers did, and listened to the wind whistle as the Bronx glided towards them. My friend's gainfully employed - no worries there - but in an understandable and perverse twist of perspective, he has no patience for his job. The little things, the 'mini-crises' as he calls them, that constitute people's and professions' sense of importance on a daily basis. As I understand it, it's basically b*llsh*t when you're sick from the cure, and it's too soon to be happy you're alive.

I thought to myself, would I rather be facing unemployment or cancer? Was that as easy to answer as it appeared? Cancer - your life is being taken away from you. Unemployment, your life is yours to lose. You look at family and friends like you've put them on the wrong flight.

My apologies to my friend. After this short callow moment, my prayers go out to him, and his wife and daughter. I am happy for their new health.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

What Depression?

2009-01-14T16:36:00.000-05:00

Funnily, people are allowing themselves to discuss the New Great Depression without actually coming out and calling it that. "Doctor, I've got this friend..."

Michael Cannell, a designer writer and founder of "The Design Vote," dissects the state of American design, and possibilities rent by austerity during the Depression (then) and the not-Depression (now) in a New York Times piece, "Design Loves A Depression."

We have only good things to look forward to in American design, if history is a guide - if only we will accept the fact that this is a new Depression. Mr. Cannell very adroitly sums up some of the more preposterous seating arrangements of the old prosperity. Vis a vis "The Design Vote," populism=Depression=patriotism. Perhaps the government can start issuing books of stamps for the purchase of elegant folding bicycles and contemporary pendant lighting.

People love a party, and parties love a brawl. Murray Moss, a Manhattan shopkeeper whose shop, Moss, has for many years meant to be a self-appointed Mecca for all things well-designed, responds to Mr. Cannell in a post on Design Observer, "Design Hates A Depression." Note the D word again. The items Mr. Moss is getting bothered about are, of course, for sale in his shop.

Full disclosure: I was once asked by a Moss shop assistant - you can tell by the improbably expensive clothing - to stop taking notes in the shop while I was looking at the tchochkes and recording my thoughts for an article in the New York Times. He had no idea I was a reporter. On whose authority was I prohibited from making notes while walking through the shop? It was Mr. Moss's policy, the assistant told me.

"We have a 'no-note-taking' policy," he said. The fear, a publicist for Mr. Moss explained in a follow-up call on 'the policy,' was shopkeepers' espionage, not reporters. God bless.

In a stone thrown from across the puddle, architecture and design critic Stephen Bayley addresses design and challenge in The Observer. The great economic collapse will take place in an Italian bakery in Soho, like a feathery chocolate souffle cake falling. Pudding!

The recession will actually be a repression, typically of the English.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Due to an unusually high volume of calls

2009-01-12T20:00:00.000-05:00

I called the New York Department of Labor's unemployment insurance line, to register, and got this message: "Due to an unusually high volume of calls, wait times may be exceptionally long."

Uh oh.

Thanks for listening, ma'am.

"Every feeling waits upon its gesture"

2009-01-12T18:51:00.000-05:00

News from all over. An artist friend applies for food stamps in San Francisco. Writer Eudora Welty's Depression-era photographs go on view in New York.

"Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s" continues at the Museum of the City of New York through February 16.

"It was the same Depression we were feeling here in Mississippi, but evident in such another way in the city: lines of people waiting for food and people selling apples and sitting there in Union Square, all reading the daily paper's want ads." What will people read when newspapers disappear? Or will the hungry gather with their Apples in the city's hot-spots, waiting for their batteries to die?

The New York Times, in reviewing the exhibit, quotes Welty's memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings" in which she writes, "Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture..."

My San Francisco friend's roommate's father was so incensed by the two boys' gesture in applying for food stamps that he bought his son a laptop: a more culturally appropriate social raft for middle class scions set adrift.

The two boys went on a spree with the stamps in a supermarket, like Finn and Sawyer in a melon patch.

Every feeling.

As of Oct. 1, 2008, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the new name for the federal Food Stamp Program. Coming to a town near you.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Destroy Debt

2009-01-10T18:11:00.001-05:00

For those who've asked, the bit on rolling loose change with your kids referred to in my last post appears in a January 12, 2009 New Yorker magazine "Talk of the Town" item called "Family Jewels." The piece is on Bernard L. Madoff, old prosperity's latest scourge, and the briskening business in jewelry-selling among the frightened rich. Rolling change is mentioned as one of "20 Inexpensive Ways to Entertain Your Kids in the Winter," being posted on destroydebt.com, a website devoted to, in their words, "understanding, managing and getting rid of debt, with a special focus on community and expert advice."

Where's Godfrey when you need him? "Bobos" - New York Times columnist David Brooks' coinage for the morally self-correcting, though heartily consumerist next-generation of "yuppies" - are becoming hobos.

More on bobos, Brooks, and William Powell tomorrow. Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Spare Change

2009-01-09T10:53:00.001-05:00

I sat down on my bed and started sorting and rolling coins last night. Quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. For the past year, I'd been emptying my mid-town office pockets into a ceramic dish in a bureau drawer. Now it was time to make it money. If this isn't a Depression evening's entertainment, I don't know what is. A friend caught me doing it and told me that the New Yorker magazine had published a "Talk of the Town" bit recently about rolling coins being a fun thing to do with your children. I wonder if it went on to say that it might become a good way of feeding them too, in the not too distant future.

My friend also told me that a local bank had a machine that would do the sorting and counting automatically. Sorry kids, dad needs the money - now. I took my bag down the road and got in line at the "Penny Arcade" at the TD Bank. TD Bank used to be a Commerce bank about ten minutes ago. TD calls itself "America's Most Convenient Bank." Does that mean there will be no wait if there's a run on it? We'll see.

There were two people on line in front of me at the Penny Arcade.

The man before me spilled his bag of change into the whirling discs that sort and count it, watched the digital sweepstakes read-out, and then accused Penny Arcade of short-changing him. The Southeast Asian woman in the TD bank hostess blazer smiled and commiserated, while explaining that Penny Arcade is just a machine and doesn't make mistakes.

The man left with a scowl. I'm confident he'll be back, with a bandana on his face.

I was up next at TD's gaming table. When banks start to feel like Vegas, you know you're in trouble. In went the grocery-bag-full of coins. They spilled and sprayed and tumbled into the wheeling discs like people being spun on an amusement park ride.

$149.98. That was yesterday's take. Not exactly work, but, hey, it got me out of the house.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave

2009-01-08T10:34:00.000-05:00

A note about Thomas Cave and his tattoo. Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture. He has the look of confidence in the future - that bumps in the road only bounce you higher - that I wanted to capture in this blog.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Welcome to the New Great Depression

2009-01-08T09:24:00.000-05:00

The New York Times set me out on my great journey.

I was laid off in May, one of 15. I had been a reporter for ten years, a journalist, elsewhere, for many more. News was bad. Late in 2008, news got very bad. The country was in trouble, like me. Then the world was in trouble. People talked about recession, a word which still had a whiff of barbers' antiseptic, stringent but healthy. An economic term, used by professionals who knew what they were talking about. Nothing good, but nothing worse than a sharp pair of scissors. A haircut that would hurt, but. The shop - that friendly, familiar neighborhood institution - was still open for business.

No one - very few - were using the "D" word. The news talked about stimulus. Then more stimulus. And more. Friends in the know - financial types, real estate developers, investors - all took me aside and told me, "it's going to get much much worse in the next few years." Hopes rose, on the strength of a newly elected president. Economies fell, replaced with an edifice of dust that had not been seen since September 11th.

But, you know this.

Welcome to the New Great Depression. We're going to use the "D" word, and let it set us free. Over the Christmas break - break from what? I thought, and what a great Depression holiday, from Steinbeck to Sturges - I realized with a shock that i was not unemployed. I was an expert - on the New Great Depression. Or, well-placed to become one, if I worked hard.

I'm able-bodied. I 'write good.' A friend suggested a blog. Newspapers are dying. Why not give yourself the gift of life?

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo" is that. We're going to look it all in the eye, hopefully have some fun along the way, meet people, see the world, learn and teach, survive, and thrive. I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone.

As was true of the Great Depression, this could well be a time for great works - public, private, patriotic, personal. If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, community, and other untold intelligent riches, I want to be a part of it.

Stay with us. We're beginners but we're fast studies.

And thank you for listening, ma'am.