balletic

Last night, I played solo trumpet accompaniment for a duet danced in the Merce Cunningham choreography showcase. I left, not only relieved that the piece had gone well, but with a renewed love of both dance and of dancers themselves. Throughout the showcase, I was captivated by the men and women both, drawn in by their static poise and flowing agility, the effortlessness of their motion, their lithe, powerful bodies.

I suppose one might easily write off the fascination as displacedly Oedipal (my mother being a dancer) or delayedly narcissistic (having, loathe as I often am to admit it, danced myself until the age of 12). But I instead contend it stems from an appreciation of grace. A quality dancers, above all others, possess.

Following the showcase, I hit the bars with a small crowd of Cunningham and Alvin Ailey girls, almost all international – French, German, Iranian. The whole time, part of me was thinking, I should really find a way to date a dancer. The whole time, another part of me was thinking, I should really find a way to become one myself.

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triple fail-safe

Apparently in high demand for the purpose, I’ve not only pinky-sworn into a backup marriage at 35, but also another with a different girl (assuming the first backup falls through) at 40.

Yesterday evening, asked to serve as a backup for yet another female friend, I informed her that, sadly, I was already twice taken. So, in response, she proposed we agree to wed should we both marry other people, yet have our respective future spouses both kick the proverbial bucket.

As I always say, It never hurts to have a backup. Or three. Just in case.

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harassment

A few friends have recently emailed to ask my thoughts, as a Yale alum, on the emerging Naomi Wolff / Harold Bloom sexual harassment scandal.

So, first, let’s outline the accusations, in slightly less vivid prose than Wolff employs in her article:

  1. Wolff invites Bloom over for dinner.
  2. After dinner, Wolff places her manuscript on the table.
  3. Bloom say “You have the aura of election upon you.”
  4. Bloom touches her leg.
  5. Wolff staggers off and pukes in the sink.
  6. Bloom finds his coat, says “You are a deeply troubled girl” and gets the hell out.

In Wolff’s own words: “Is that all? Yes – that’s all.”

So, for the sake of charity, let’s assume Wolff’s twenty year-old retelling of an event apparently experienced drunk enough to involve tossing her cookies is accurate. The question, then: is what occurred clearly sexual harassment?

Oddly, a few days back, I had a very similar conversation with one of my roommates; a female friend had touched his leg while they were talking, and he wondered whether that necessarily implied flirtation, sexual attraction. After a bit of contemplation, we concluded: not necessarily. We both could easily site female friends of varying ages who use touch in an almost maternal way – a pat to the arm or leg to imply support, understanding. Interpreting my roommate’s friend’s minor touch as sexual advance, we realized, might be reading waaay too much into the situation.

And, frankly, I think that assessment still stands in Bloom’s case. From the tone of his classes or his recent books (such as How to Read and Why), it’s immensely clear that the man sees himself as raining pearls of wisdom upon any of the undistinguished masses clever enough to recognize his undisputed genius. By Wolff’s own account, Bloom often “called students, male and female both, ‘my dear’ and ‘my child’.” In other words, Bloom is clearly a rather paternal individual given to consistently displaying non-sexual affection towards the acolytes gathered at his feet.

Certainly, I don’t blame Wolff for seeing otherwise, considering the context of the events. Invite your professor over for dinner and drinks in a darkened, candle-lit room, and even odd pronouncements like “you have the aura of election upon you” might be construed as overture to sex. Yet, by candle or classroom overhead lights, it’s the same Bloom. In other words, I don’t think Bloom was hitting on Wolff, I think he was just being his odd, paternal, vaguely affectionate self.

[For anyone looking for similar arguments, though perhaps voiced less kindly towards Wolff and her position, I’d suggest these three pieces.]

Addendum: In re-reading, I realize this post sounds vastly more “harassed, huh? oh, just suck it up” than I intended. In fact, whatever happened between her and Harold Bloom, I’m mainly upset with Naomi Wolff’s disingenous approach to the matter. She uses Yale’s poor response to her twenty year-old case to unfairly paint the university’s current strongly enforced policies against sexual harassment. She implies that Yale’s ignoring of her complaint is indicative of similar treatment of current students; from friends’ direct experience, I know that’s not the case. Certainly, if Wolff’s agenda was positive change at the school, rather than simply time for herself in the spotlight, perhaps she could have taken the time to actually research (or at least mention the existence of) the current policy and approach to dealing with new incidences of harassment, then propose suggestied changes. But, then, odds are the university would have actually listened to her proposals, and perhaps even implemented them. And where’s the New York cover story in that?

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archetyping

This past weekend, watching the last Sex & the City, part of me was thinking: “Thank god this thing is ending; the show’s gone so far downhill this is basically a mercy killing. And clearly Carrie’s ending up with Big. I could have called that from the first episode.” Yet, another part of me was thinking: “Thank god Carrie’s ending up with Big, because if she doesn’t, I’m utterly fucked.”

Truth be told, from that first episode, I identified with Mr. Big. Or, rather, I identified with his archetype, the broader class of Bigs who show up in film after film: Jack Nicholson’s Harry Sanborn in Something’s Gotta Give; Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown in the remade Thomas Crown Affair; any of cinematic history’s laundry list of men who too late discover the same traits that made them moguls led them, in their personal life, to push people away, to end promising relationships abruptly, to bounce from fling to fling with no apparent end destination in mind, finding increasingly little joy in each.

While I may only be starting out on the route to mogul, I’m already well seasoned in ending good relationships for bad reasons. Which is why I’m always secretly thrilled by the redemptive endings Hollywood inevitably lays out for these characters. It’s an odd relief to find one somehow changing his spots, reconciling his romantic streak with his inability to actually sustain that romance. The happily ever afters let me tell myself: if that’s the path I’m heading down, at least it ends up somewhere good.

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kitchen science

Who says biology isn’t handy? Keep this in mind the next time you’re slicing or dicing an onion:

Onions contain sulfur, which turns into sulfuric acid when it hits the water in your eyes. Obviously, getting acid in your eyes burns like hell. (Side note: subsequently rubbing your eyes with your hands simply gets the sulfur from your hands into your eyes as well, and makes things worse. If you need to rub, use the inside of your elbow.)

But science doesn’t just provide explanations, it provides solutions:

First, pop the onion in your freezer for a few minutes before cutting, as the cold decreases the speed of the chemical reactions.

Second, as the vast majority of the sulfur is in the root of the onion (the weird hairy bottom part, for those not agriculturally inclined), don’t cut that part. The area near the root is also the least sweet, juicy section, so you’re both saving your eyes and pleasing your palate by simply not using the bottom 10% of the onion.

And, honestly, not bawling like an idiot is well worth the five minutes of freezer time and the five cents of tossed onion bottom.

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blue movies

I’m in a meeting this afternoon with the investment bankers helping us put together Cyan’s film investment fund. After months of crunching numbers, drafting investment memorandums, putting together an extensive investor intranet, today we’re finally ready to move ahead, finally ready for the ibank to start heading out to their investor base.

“One last thing, though,” says one of the managing partners. “Is there anything we need to know, anything that might come up in due diligence about you as individuals or about Cyan as a company?”

We shake our heads.

“If there is, we just need to know in advance, to be ready with a response,” he continues.

I shake my head again. Yoav shakes his head again.

“Well,” says Colin, “there’s the porn.”

Our banker laughs nervously.

“No, seriously,” says Colin, before launching into an explanation, me occasionally chiming in to add detail. That, while seniors at Yale, he and I and two of our other friends started a fake secret society as a prank. That the prank quickly rose to national media attention. That the prank even culminated in our story becoming a movie for Comedy Central.

The rub being, the fake secret society, like the movie born from it, was entitled “Porn n’ Chicken”.

We weren’t actually pornographers we explain, we just convinced the media that we were. But, if you Google up our names collectively, you’ll likely stumble across something about it. So we talk a bit more about the prank, the motivation behind it, why it wasn’t really a big deal.

By the end, our bankers look significantly relieved.

“Still,” one of them asks, “porn and chicken?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” he concludes, “when I’m watching porn, fried chicken is usually the last thing on my mind.”

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fiction

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up the Gotham Writers’ Workshop guide, Writing Fiction. Having fallen too far off the fiction writing bandwagon, having slowly inched myself back towards it through the lesser demands of screenwriting, I hoped the book might push me the last few steps to once again cranking our short stories (or, god forbid, longer fiction forms).

A central aspect of the book are the multiple ‘your turn’ segments, chances for the reader to leap into action and ply ideas on (digital) paper. As I’m exceedingly lazy, I’ve realized I can likely recycle some of these exercises by posting them here. So, to that end, I give you my (completely unedited) five minute free-write, beginning with the supplied phrase ‘Sam wasn

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and all that jazz

At most of the jazz gigs I play, the audience is predominated by late-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white couples, the sort who golf clap after each solo, chortling “oh, I say, wasn’t that delightful!”

Every so often, I’m lucky enough to play a bebop gig up in the heart of Harlem, where I’m the token white kid in a band otherwise comprised of wizened black guys in their 70’s, guys who wear bowler hats and say “hep”, “cat” and “like, dig.” There, the audience is little old black couples, who shout “mm hm!! mm hm!!” or “yeah! come on!” while we’re playing.

Nowhere I play, however, do I see many young people. Sure, there are a handful of twenty and thirty year-olds at any gig, but they’re almost invariably musicians themselves. I’m not sure why my peers have never discovered jazz, though in part I suppose it’s the fault of jazz musicians ourselves, who somehow let music once synonymous with defiant, up-yours cool become instead synonymous with soothing elevator rides.

Still, I don’t think today’s musicians hold all the blame – even while the Brittney Spears of the world dominate popular radio, for example, people in their twenties and thirties continue to dig back into rock of the ’60’s and ’70’s. For some reason, however, almost none of them are digging into (or simply digging) that era’s jazz.

But, in many ways, jazz was far enough ahead of it’s time to have less in common with rock of the time, and more with today’s indie rock. Lo-fi? Miles Davis practically invented it. Ironic hipster cool? Check the unimpeachably wonderful names of Charles Mingus compositions, like “The Shoes Of The Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.” Or perhaps more in common with today’s hip hop – Herbie Hancock’s thirty year-old releases, which fathered both funk and fusion jazz, are some of the most used sources of samples, hooks and beats.

So perhaps there’s hope for jazz after all. Perhaps the fact that jazz now lives relegated to Starbucks sampler CDs and Sophomore year faux-sophisticated hook-up music playlists represents the darkest hour just before dawn. After all, at several points in jazz’s century-long history, the art has been prematurely autopsied, declared DOA just before some new innovators lifted it back up to new heights and new public recognition.

If any music is about comebacks, about the quintessentially American-ness of rising, Phoenix-like, from one’s own ashes, jazz is it. So I have hope. Or, at least, faith. Faith that, even without people looking for it, jazz good enough to revive the medium would find listeners. Find people who may not know exactly what they’re waiting for, but will know it when they hear. People who will, for the first time, understand Louis Armstrong’s timeless description of what makes jazz: “Brother, if you have to ask, then you’ll never know.”

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cautionary tale

The problem with starting drinking at 4:00 in the afternoon is that you wake up the next day at noon, with the words “slow deth” scrawled in sharpie across your knuckles, also fairly sure you walked a drunk blonde home, helped her put sheets on her bed, and left without even kissing her goodnight.

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