Disturbing attack on a Muslim cabdriver

Given the environment in New York these days, sadly, this should come as no surprise, but there it is.

On a related note, Bloomberg made another good speech on religious freedom and the Cordoba House development.

Liz in China

My godsister, childhood friend Liz is heading out for a semester in Beijing. Jane and I are so in awe of her. She has started a blog and which I have added to the blogroll (which, I note, is sorely in need of some refreshing.)

The Moviegoer

Last night I was speaking with Jane and made a reference to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.

Jane: (long silence) Is that the horse movie?

Me: The horse movie? No, I don't remember a horse in it.

Jane: Oh no wait, that is National Velvet.

Me: Right, not the Liz Taylor movie. Blue Velvet was David Lynch's creepy masterpiece showing the dark side of small town America. With Dennis Hopper and Isabelle Rossellini. David Lynch made all these groundbreaking movies in the eighties like Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Do you remember the TV show Twin Peaks?

Jane: Yes

Me: Well, that guy.

(Full disclosure: I might not have been quite that cogent last night. I did some homework on IMDB for this post.)

I am still geting used to being with someone with minimal interest in film. In fact, I am still assimilating the idea that there are intelligent, sophisticated people with interest in cultural and world affairs who simply have little to no use for movies. Jane reads Shakespeare and Salman Rushdie and the Economist on the subway. She is no intellectual lightweight, but this curiosity does not extend to film. She sees blockbusters every couple months and on occasion will see an arty film or classic that she really enjoys (O Brother Where Art Thou is on this list, and I think Chinatown, although she might have just been humoring me.) She has movies that she watches periodically and counts among her favorites (I will let her share that list with you herself.) But spending a free evening in the cinema, talking about movies, referring to movies as points of reference for something going on in her life (things I do ad nauseum), not so much.

We are getting better at dealing with it. (Read: I am getting better at dealing with it.) If I go to a movie by myself and call her afterwards, launching into a long-winded discursive commentary on it, I have gotten used to stopping in the middle to see if she is still interested. It's a learning experience.

Like that Date Skit on Saturday Night Live from the 80's.

It is quite disagreeable to hear your dentist say, "You have to have a root canal."

It turns out to be even more disagreeable to hear him say, “I am not able complete this root canal and am putting in a temporary filling in order to send you to a specialist.”

Two interesting things that make NY living a lot easier

1. Trader Joe's is not that crowded at 9 pm.
2. You can buy one=week old New Yorkers at the kiosk in the 14th Street A, C, E station for $2.

Ghosts

Last night I arrived home to find a letter in my mailbox from my mother, mailed on February 9. This was strange since she passed away last summer. The strangeness increased when I opened the letter find a Valentine signed by her and my father. "You are our Valentine" was written in her inimitable handwriting.

At the same time, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world to receive a letter from her, like something I had been waiting for but never doubted would come. My Mom passed away while I was out of the country scrambling to get home. The fact that I missed her death left me for months with the feeling that it hadn't really happened, and that somehow, if I could just get back into the other place, the place where I didn't go on vacation knowing she was sick, that she would be alive, and everything would be as it was. Realizing "yes this actually has happened" and adjusting to all the changes that emerged from it was something of a process. Getting a card that, if everything hadn't changed and if she were alive, plausibly could have been sent by my parents six weeks ago, probably didn't help with this.

Close examination of the envelope revealed that it had been mailed on February 9, 2009 or six months before her death, and had spent over thirteen months in delivery between North Carolina and New York. (The only apparent reason for the delay was the fact that she addressed it to apartment H3 instead of 3H.)

There is a scene in Almodovar's movie, Volver where one of the character opens the trunk of her car to find her deceased mother stowed away there and prepared to come home and live with her. I saw that scene on cable shortly after my mother passed and liked the idea of a ghost who shows up because she needs a place to live. For this reason, the movie's end, in which all supernatural elements are rationally explained, disappointed me.

The idea that a loved one is communicating with you from wherever they are now is comforting and seductive. Of course there is a rational explanation for the card and its delay. (It was most likely forgotten in a mail bin that was recently found.) I can't help but indulge in the wistful idea that I am accessible to my mom and that she was trying to remind me of her. As Meghan O'Rourke said in a recent article on grieving that ran in the New Yorker, grief has been explained less as bereavement and more as searching:

"In the nineteen-seventies, Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research, argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes, drawing on work by John Bowlby, an early theorist of how human beings form attachments, noted that in both cases—acute grief and children’s separation anxiety—we feel alarm because we no longer have a support system we relied on. Parkes speculated that we continue to “search” illogically (and in great distress) for a loved one after a death. After failing again and again to find the lost person, we slowly create a new “assumptive world,” in the therapist’s jargon, the old one having been invalidated by death. Searching, or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief."

This idea of yearning, was one of the most comforting things I read during my mourning process.

Most. Resourceful. Girfriend. Ever.

Jane and I are going to Mexico this summer. I was saying how cool it would be to see Julieta Venegas if she were playing while we were there. And that it would be even cooler if she ever played in a show in New York to see it. And she got all ambitious and figure out that Julieta Venegas is playing at Latin Quarter in New York on April 22. And so we are going.

Mad props.

A book for grieving

"Then the shadow was upon us and within us and was as bad as he said it would be. I don't know how many eternities we suffered there, my father and I, but they were motionless with despair. Yet the shadow lightened a little at last; the windows went quiet with the predawn light. We knew the final thing my grandmother said or thought was, Farewell, daughter it is Jesus at last and that final thing my mother said or thought was, Don't leave me alone in this world without you. And then there was enough light in out front room to read the clocks. My grandfather's watch in his case read 12:12 and the other three said 5:11. Time had started up again but I could tell my father was right: It would be a different kind of time we had to live in now; it would not be steady in the least and the winds would be cold in our faces against us all the way."

Fred Chappell
Farewell I'm Bound to Leave You