Public grief

I had some plan-free time last Monday evening so I turned on the television. I didn’t want to watch the local news so, since it was almost 5:30, I tuned in to ABC. I know I bitch too much about the clowns who host the network programs, but even NPR – NPR! – routinely trashes Diane Sawyer. I’ve only witnessed her particular brand of maudlin once, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. As I said, I had a bit of time on my hands.

It turned out she was off for the evening, so I watched a few minutes of George Stephenopolus attempting to put sense to the world. I didn’t get past the first story.

Which is that the leader, dictator, czar – whatever he is, or was – of North Korea has died. The first words out of George’s mouth weren’t that Kim etc. etc. had died, which I already knew, but that thousands (28,000 was the figure, I believe) of “American troops” stationed in South Korea are now within less than 100 miles of North Korea’s nuclear might.

I have a few questions. First and foremost, why are so many military personnel from this country doing in South Korea? Advising? Consulting? Waiting? Provoking?

That issue was not addressed, or even mentioned. I’m also curious to know if the death of the country’s dictator put the troops closer to the arsenal that waits across the border separating north from south than they were before his death. When he died over the weekend, was the launching equipment moved, or did the troops move, or both, or neither?

This question was partially answered by one of the correspondent’s, who expressed the nervousness over Kim etc. etc.’s successor, who is his youngest son. He’s still in his twenties, so the story goes, so nobody is certain whether or not he’ll feel obligated to prove himself. I guess the next logical step in that uncertainty would be to volley a few nukes toward the concentration of U.S. citizens that is, for some reason, stationed less than 100 miles away. And I suppose we should all be alarmed. And nervous.

The best part, though –and by that I mean the most offensive – was yet to come. In addition to providing many opportunities to hear an sh inserted into the word peninsula, the quick montage of footage used as a setup for the first correspondent’s report would lead you to believe that everyone in North Korea was so devastated by the passing of the leader that speaking coherently and clearly was impossible. Here’s a news anchor, weeping her way through the announcement of his sudden and unexpected passing. Here are thousands of people on the streets, crying, shrieking, mourning in the most public way imaginable. And here’s a woman holding up a newspaper and wailing that she’s not sure how she’s going to endure this loss “because he loved us all so much.”

The correspondent summed it up beautifully. This is a forced display of public grief, she proclaimed in the most openly mocking tone I’ve ever heard on a program that presents itself as the news. I know nothing of the people or culture of North Korea. I think their military march style looks nutty, not to mention overtly hostile and vaguely creepy, which I’d guess is exactly how it’s intended. But at least when they cry in public it’s over a politician, someone who for better or worse actually matters to the country. Back home, of course, we reserve that sort of thing for people like Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods.

Winter colors

It’s been an unusual December in Portland. While I love the atmospherics around here, I’m sorry to admit that the last two winters have been a bit much for me. When I say I like the winter rains, what I mean is that I like the constantly shifting sky, the dazzling ballet of light in response to gigantic cloud banks coasting across the horizon, the mist, the drizzle, the shimmering silver air of winter mornings. I do not mean downpours that last for days. I do not mean the seemingly relentless winds that cause my entire house to shake and groan.

So this December has been a gift of sorts. The week of Thanksgiving it poured, and poured, and poured some more. One day a record was broken and reset. And I thought, I am not entirely convinced that I have what it takes to endure five, six, seven, eight months of this. The morning after Thanksgiving I bolted out of here and caught a bus to a credit union branch that’s not too far from my house and where I have deposit privileges, only to find that the place was closed that day. My irritation lasted only a second or two. It was clear and cold. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. I went back to the corner to wait for the next bus for downtown, where I had some business to tend to, and thought: I’ll gladly wait here all morning. I even smiled and waved at a few vehicles as they sped past, roaring toward the mall named in honor of an interstate highway.

Sometimes when I blink my eyes I see little shooting, comet-shaped slivers for an instant afterward. Sometimes I enjoy this so much that I blink more rapidly than usual. Usually these slivers are sort of gold, or silver with a heavy dose of tan, or beige, or cream. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I sat down on my couch to read one afternoon. Two of the windows in my living room face south, and the sunlight pouring in as I sat there, the brilliance of the blue sky punctuated only by the black bare branches that announce winter like nothing else, all of it made me feel I might just be in another time zone. I blinked my eyes and what was left behind in my vision – the residue, I suppose you could call it – was not silver or gold but the most pleasant shade of blue I’ve ever experienced. It was blue with a very precise dosage of green. It wasn’t what I’d call light blue, but it had a lightness to it. Sign number one of a brain tumor taking hold, I thought. Or perhaps a holiday greeting from my long-gone grandmother. It was from her that I inherited my love of blue, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been searching for her blue dishes for decades now, and I’ve yet to find them.

The fig tree out in my side yard is doing weird things this year. This past summer, and the summer before, the fruit appeared in the spring, as it always does, but then the late-season cold and wet threw it off course. I think the people who come by in the fall with baskets and pick figs must have kept going this year because what they picked the year before was probably not good. At any rate, the leaves fell. Hundreds are composting beautifully in the yard and hundreds more have gone with the breeze. The branches are bare of leaves but the figs remain. They remind me Brussels sprouts display at the grocery store, still on their stalks.

I decided to attempt hanging lights outside this year not long ago, early on a bright and sunny December afternoon. There are electrical considerations – as there always are in this house – but I was on the enclosed porch out back, doing my business, and out of the corner of my eye, through the south-facing window, the sun was striking a bead of moisture on top of one of the figs, which wasn’t swaying in the breeze exactly, but was moving just enough to cause the sun-captured droplet to appear to be spinning. And it was a bright, bright shade of green, almost piercing. Emerald, I suppose you would call it. For what felt like many minutes I just stared out the window, and by the time I came inside, the inclination toward bright lights this time of year made perfect sense to me. Natural, you might even say.

Holiday mating

One night last week I fired up the candles in the bathroom, turned on the hot water and headed out to the little enclosed back porch right off my kitchen for a smoke. I took one drag, blew out a few smoke rings and that’s when I heard the rustling.

The area behind my house is a treacherous mishap of ill-advised fences, decaying trees, a little pond and bowls of cat food (next door), a roof that slopes down quite low, an overhang that I swear is one day going to hang so precariously that it will simply fall off the house, a shed that’s built onto the side of the house and, like many things that are a part of this structure that has my name on it, is just off enough to render the call of should it stay or should it go impossible to make. It does prevent people from creeping from the front of my house to the back, which is a mixed blessing. At the same time, the underside of it is completely open – I’ll be damned if I know why – so animals, particularly possums, have not only a nice route away from the light and danger of the street but a protected resting area as well. And the roof of the shed slopes upward in such a way that if you were a creature blessed with the ability to leap, it’s a nice springboard to the roof of the house. Best of all, it’s not quite wide of enough to at least serve the one purpose I’d like it to. To put the lawn mower away or take it out requires lifting the entire thing and turning it to the side and then squeezing through the door. I know I dramatize and overreact to almost everything, but each and every time I’ve hoisted the lawn mower in and out my thoughts have carried me back to the afternoon I signed the stack of papers for this house, and in my mind I picture myself quietly and wordlessly taking my cigarette lighter out of my front pocket and burning each and every one of them. I’d be happy to pay the fines.

The other night, there was more rustling, then a pause, followed by more. It was not a possum. Possums have the most impressive size-to-sound ratio of any creature I’ve encountered thus far. Perhaps a cat, I thought hopefully. Then I pressed my face to the door and there, peering around the corner of the house as it perched on the top of the shed, was a big furry shadow and two little bright eyes. Get the fuck out of here, I yelled, making enough of an impression that the animal withdrew its head and scampered on up to the corrugated metal that extends a few feet behind the house. And from there, to the roof.

I turned on every light in the house and turned the water off. Then I went out the front door and stood in the street for a better look. And there, along the fence behind the house next door was another moving mass of fur and behind that, in a lit window, the guy who lives in the house behind me walking back and forth, oblivious to the terror.

My neighbor, a friend of his and I ended up standing in the street just beyond the driveway we share, where we watched the two raccoons roll and shimmy up and down the western slope of my roof. “Ahhh,” my neighbor’s friend cooed, “they’re mating.” A few minutes later they jumped into the car and drove off to a holiday gathering – the loving had not lasted long, and once it was over the raccoons ambled off to tend to whatever business it is raccoons tend to. And I came back inside and resumed the running of the bath and enjoyed the remainder of the blessedly quiet and peaceful evening.

Love letters

Last Wednesday evening I watched the last episode in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, which I’ve been hearing about and meaning to watch since the early 1990s. I don’t usually go in for painfully detailed ponderings of and on battle strategies and troop movement and intricate maps with the names of generals and arrows and tiny triangles that I believe indicate hills.

There was plenty of that, to be sure, but there was plenty more as well. For starters, I cannot make up my mind about Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation seems to have been put forth out of convenience more than anything you might call moral or ethical. What’s interesting though is that the northern folks – they were the enlightened side, as we all know – objected to the proclamation strenuously when they realized that it had become the war’s centerpiece. So much so that there was quite a movement in support of pulling out of the war unless he cancelled it, to which Abraham Lincoln said, no. I’m not sure if I consider that heroic. I suppose it is decent, though.

That’s my anti-North slam. On the anti-South side, here’s a good one. Many Southerners who happened to be in New York City protested because, according to them, the war was hurting the south far more than it was hurting the north. And I thought that causing problems – such as basing an economy on the right to own other human beings – and then racing for and clenching the victim medal was something more of our era.

I was completely entranced in a way that even I found alarming by the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Walt Whitman wrote during the war that Lincoln’s face was so complex that it beckoned the talent of the portrait artists from two or three centuries before, but Lee’s face, man, someone nailed that one. And nicely. The care with which the surrender and the dignity on display from both sides was orchestrated and recorded was intriguing to me. There was something inherently civil about it, not the least of which was that Robert E. Lee, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, dressed for the occasion.

All of this, though, falls flat alongside what I thought were the stars of the show: The letters. They were so beautifully written and recalled a language that existed in a state of grace I’ve never known but have certainly dreamed of. I hit rewind many times so I that I could listen again, and in a couple of instances I listened three or four times.

I didn’t live in the era, of course, but from what I could tell the Civil War was debated and considered and reported in vivid detail in the newspapers. This may be due to geographical immediacy and the fact that there was more at stake. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that even though there were no computers or cell phones, it seems to me that people knew more of the world in which they lived. The number of dead that comes to mind is 800,000, a figure that – and pardon me for saying this – puts another, more recent national calamity into its proper perspective, and by that I mean makes it a shadow at best. And speaking of perspective, as coincidence would have it, I finished the series on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the CBS Evening News reported that the war in Iraq – the price tag of which is well over $800 billion – is indeed over. But it was the third story of the newscast, preceded by some new bipartisan come-to-Jesus monkey business about Medicare and word that the governor of Iowa isn’t sure that Newt Gingrich is suited for the presidency.

Bashing the balls

The other day my regularly scheduled meetings got cancelled. One, as usual, was cancelled moments before it was to begin; the other, a few hours in advance. I have a few projects going at the moment, and while there were many things I could have done to move each of them forward a tad, there was nothing pressing. And that’s my biggest shortcoming in this business: If I have six “urgent” things to do, I’ll do all six of them. If, on the other hand, I have two or three or four do-it-when-you-can tasks before me, I’ll drag those out as long as possible. I guess my confession here is that even though I routinely ridicule people who slather every interaction and project with a false sense of importance, I apparently abide.

Anyhow, since it was a very cold but very sunny morning, I decided to go do a little shopping. I was going to run out to Mall 205, which is a nice walk from my house, but I hate that place. I suppose I hate all malls, but this one, starting with the sad fact that it’s named after a highway, is especially nasty in my opinion. For those of you who have never been, it’s several acres of fat, mostly white people who channel their apparent anger into the way they command their oversized vehicles. If you are walking into or out of Mall 205 or, worse, riding a bicycle, get your ass out of the way.

So as I put the key into the door as I was leaving, standing there on my front porch it occurred to me that since I had no emergencies to tend to, why not take the train out to the Target store that sits on the edge of a big shopping spread close to the airport?

The mountains were out on full display. A jet with the word Continental painted on its tail sailed overhead, and I thought, Houston. The train glided almost silently along the tracks. Out the window, slightly below it, cars crawled along and they too were blessedly silent. My visit to Target began as it almost always does. I ordered nachos with cheese and jalapenos and sat on a stool, stuffing my mouth with garbage and looking out across the parking lot, where thousands of cars caught and gave back the rays of sunlight.

After the nachos, I wandered around a bit. I looked at the cloth-covered boxes for storing things and I looked at the selection of fancy skillets and I spent a while looking at the lights. Then, I wandered over to the men’s section to look for the main item I was shopping for – long underwear. The underwear section makes me horny. That’s really all there is to it. All that flesh, all those nice curves and hidden treasures, photographed. I’ve wondered, since a very young age, what goes through the minds of those holding the cameras and what goes through the minds of those holding onto other commodities. It’s a question I never tire of pondering.

And, as it always has, visits to the underwear section have something of a lasting impact. For a certain period of time, every male being I encounter after leaving that particular section is exactly the person I’ve dreamed of for decades. It’s the oddest thing, but it’s kind of fun, being flooded by fantasies that drove me to distraction as a hormone-addled teenager and that drive me to distraction still even though I have perhaps arrived in a demographic one could maybe label “dirty old man.” I loved crotch shots then and I love them now.

Which brings me to the checkout line. I placed my items on the belt. The attractive checker (everyone is attractive by that point) removed each of the two packages containing the long underwear, the shaving cream and razors and the strand of lights and looked at each, it seemed to me, with careful consideration. Then another attractive man (everyone is attractive by that point) came up behind me. I’d say he was 38 or so, really short hair, smoky eyes that were either deep green or brown, sweatshirt, jacket, jeans. He had a cart overflowing with shit, it being the season and all, and the first thing he put on the belt was a rectangular box, the top of which was a cellophane window. And the words, in big letters, on the side that was facing me: The Electronic Ball Basher. A toy, to be sure, I thought, and I thanked the clerk and he handed me my bag and I left.

Dysfunction

I became familiar with Barney Frank back in what I now think of as the Newsweek days. A magazine used to arrive in the mail, weekly, and in it there was news. This was before the innernets took over, before updates were posted on the so-called news sites every hour whether there was any new news or not, before every story included a link to a video, or a link to anything for that matter. I got to know Barney Frank through words that had been printed on paper, and I thought he was grand. An openly gay congressman. Holy shit.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my opinion of him has gone down steadily over the years. One of the reasons for this is that I thought his indignation over the financial crisis was not only absurd but insulting as well. Wasn’t he in charge of the committee that was supposed to be minding the nation’s piggy bank? But the main reason I’ve grown less fond of Barney Frank rather than more is that I do not like the way he comes across. When a reporter thanks him for his time at the beginning of an interview or thanks him for his time at the interview’s conclusion, Barney Frank all but grunts. He’s yappy, I think, but in a way that somehow incorporates the worst of smug. It’s a deadly combo, I think.

But man, he does have a certain flair for saying things that I’d imagine will end up in a collection of quotations at some point. There was the exchange at one of the town hall meetings on healthcare, when he responded to one attendee’s blathering by saying she appeared to have all the intelligence of a piece of furniture – a dining room table, I believe. And my personal favorite – responding to a right winger’s lame taunt that he needed to take an HIV test and share the results by saying that he’d be happy to do that once she shared the results of her IQ test. I loved that.

Last week was pretty good, too. On a sort of schmaltzy interview on the Newshour, Barney Frank was asked if he thought Congress was really dysfunctional. Rather than screw around with qualifiers, his response was to ask the interviewer – Judy Woodruff – how she supposed the people who are members of Congress got there. They didn’t parachute down through the dome on the Capitol building and take their seats as if by magic, he said. The U.S. voters elected one party in 2008, and two years later they elected another. So who, exactly, is dysfunctional? While that sort of response shouldn’t be noteworthy, unfortunately it is.

Mirrors and movies

Without really meaning to, I recently read two novels with Middle Eastern themes, settings and characters. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is an almost unbearably harsh tale of endurance as experienced through the eyes of two women whose lives are forced to adapt to the ever-shifting political and religious landscape in Afghanistan. Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam, paints an equally harsh picture of what it means to leave Pakistan but only in the physical sense. In both books, there are references – quite a few of them – to the wonders of Iranian cinema. Going to see an Iranian movie, I read over and over, was a vestige of sorts, a reprieve.

Which reminded me of the fondness for those films that struck my mother toward the end of her life. It was the strangest thing, hearing about aspects of my parents’ lives together, their habits and their preferences, that took hold after their children were grown and gone. During those conversations with my mother I had to remind myself that I was one of those children, grown and gone, and that she and her husband – my father – had embarked on an adventure or two that did not include me. One of their habits made me think my parents were … dating: They liked to go to the movies, and their favorite movies, my mother told me, were Iranian. In fact, she kept close tabs on the papers to find out when a new one was scheduled to come to town. One time I asked her some questions. Was it the location of production or the subject matter that drew her in? Both, she said. And what, I asked, is it that you like about those movies? Well, she said, they’re gorgeous.

I spoke with a friend of mine on Thanksgiving whose wife died earlier this year. As it happens, her wife and my mother carried through their lives the same, understatedly beautiful name. And as it also happens, her wife and my mother shared a fondness for the Iranian cinema.

So I was out and about the day after Thanksgiving, which was beautiful here, and I found myself at the book store – the big one – and I thought, certainly there must be …

Mirrors of the Unseen, which is not only a good title for a book but could also be a good title for the lives of both my mother and my friend’s beloved, is 400 pages of Jason Elliot’s ruminations on the Iran of then and the Iran of now. The focus, though, is much more on the then, and the then, on Iran’s calendar, is so vastly endless that centuries I’ve never even heard of are referenced so casually you’d swear they’d unfolded last summer and, at the same time, last summer is discussed as if that is what we mean when we say ancient history. The whole book was wonderfully upside-down that way.

I loved the book, personally. Jason Elliot’s main obsession – and you could watch it move in and take over, as if it were a disease, and perhaps it was – is the alignment of mosques to the spaces that surround them. As seen by the naked eye, many buildings seem to be out of synch with one another but are, in fact, “singing in a chorus of geometries.” [pg. 281]. That was interesting, I thought, as were his observations on how truly ancient Persian culture is and the prevalence of its influence on the world, much of which is credited to Europeans. Here’s a good one, specific to the U.S.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Although quite a bit of that is carved into the main post office in New York, it’s straight out of the fifth century (B.C.), when those words were used to describe Persia’s Achaemenid mail couriers.

The geometry is a springboard to the country’s love – and I mean love – of adornments that could be dismissed as mere decorations but that are, in fact, more riddles of geometry. Calligraphy, tile, textiles, beadwork and, my personal favorite, the architecture. The architects of many mosques and other public buildings spent at least a decade per structure, a decade during which one of their main priorities was the incorporation of lighting, which, according to the author, they regarded as sacred and as or more critical to a building as its physical elements. All of this, of course, without computers.

What really lodged in my mind from the book, though, is this: Way, way long ago, a Persian ceramicist was accused of stealing another artist’s design. His reply: Imitation is the sincerest form of pottery. I’m not sure why that occurred to me as hysterical, but it did, and so I laughed and laughed and laughed some more.