That Old Magic Feeling

 Matt Domino ruminates on September in New York City.

I Did It My Way: A PSA on "Girls"

Everyone is obsessed with HBO's new show "Girls" and that includes Matt Domino.

Mark Madness: Class Consciousness or The Porch

Mark Jack delivers his brand of March Madness: a thoughtful meditation on the nature of porches and how we socially interact in the world.

Belated Relationships with Dr. Scales

Dr. Kerri Scales returns with an apology for her past two Wednesday absences, as well as some more of her legendary advice.

Marking Time: Crosswalk

Mark Jack returns to his normal Friday slot to offer his analysis and interpretation of another everyday object; this week its the crosswalk.

Death of an Osama

I was supposed to run an entertaining guest post today, but I had to pre-empt it due to last night's announcement of Osama bin Laden's death. Below, you will find my general thoughts on the past ten years  with Osama bin Laden prominently in our lives. I wrote this post before I found out that you can see the pictures of Osama bin Laden's face post-gun shot online. That would've gotten its own paragraph.

The post begins now, please feel free to comment me if you hated it or thought I sounded like an ignorant ass:

Death of an Osama

Matt Domino

Like most people who graduated college after 2006, there was a period of time when I lived at home with my parents.  When I was home, I worked in my dad’s warehouse. I had worked there when I was in high school, but that was mostly menial labor so that I had enough money to take girls out, pay for gas and buy beer. During my stint after college, I took on more substantive work helping my dad reorganize and restructure the warehouse as well as re-imagine the workflows for many different facets of the day-to-day operation. After a day of work, I’d chug a cup of coffee on the ride home from work and listen to music (Dion’s Born to Be With You and Feels and Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective mostly). At home, I’d eat dinner with my mom and then watch Pushing Daisies or Dancing With the Stars in order to spend time and talk with her. Then, I’d retire to my room with a high ball of whiskey and do my writing for the evening until my dad got home from work at about 11:00. Once he was home and eating the warmed up leftovers from dinner, he and I would rehash the day at work. I’d give him feedback and my ideas while he looked through the paper or watched Fox News. 

During this shared time, my father would voice his increasingly conservative viewpoints as newsworthy images flashed on the screen. He’d tell me about his distaste for Hilary Clinton, for Barack Obama and the New York State government and a whole other litany of things I didn’t wholly agree with. Now, I am no political pundit or a voracious consumer of current events—this is actually quite a fault of mine. To kill time, I would rather read part of a book I have no intention of finishing than look through a newspaper and obviously I prefer procrastinating at work by reading about sports than about world affairs. However, I do have specific beliefs and one of them is to not sound antiquated or be averse to new methods of acting or solving a problem—if that method is within reason. Much of what my father said about democrats or liberals did not fall into that category. He specifically felt that the Democrats and Obama would never take the steps necessary to protect our country from the increasing throngs of enemies at our gates (paranoia is another thing I detest). Yet, my father did repeat one adage of his that has always stuck with me:

“Matt,” he’d say in a moment of honesty. “You know all of this stuff doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, people really just want two things: to go home and to be happy. That’s all it comes down to.”

He’s said those same sentences in various ways over the years, but as I’ve come closer and closer to being an adult who should care more about the civic duties each individual carries, something about that phrase has put me at ease. Perhaps its because even though I may know so little about a current event or about the nature of trends in the stock market, I can still try to know what makes me happy and what makes others happy, and I can still try to figure out what it means to go home.

September 11, 2001 was my 16^th birthday. My main concern on that day was the fact that I didn’t feel like going to soccer practice after school. Then, the World Trade Center was attacked by planes and crashed to the ground killing thousands of innocent people as well as destroying one of the monuments to our great country and its place at the forefront of world power, technology and economy. A distant relative, not blood related, was an officer in the NYFD. He died in the initial firefight at Ground Zero. A few weeks later I went to his funeral and felt sad that he was a person who had died and thankful that he had put forth such a strong effort in caring about the actual world—a feat I could only barely imagine as a teenager with creative aspirations. That’s the closest that 9/11 ever affected me. I lived far enough away from New York City, obscured by the historical locations and wealth of my Long Island hometown, that none of the initial fallout or fear truly impacted my day-to-day life. The year after 9/11, I wrote a poem that I read in my English class reflecting on the tragedy a year later. However, that impulse was born more out of a desire and vanity to prove myself as some eccentric sage of my high school rather than out of mourning.

As years passed, people wrote novels and were on TV or in magazines telling me about the post-9/11 world. However, despite increased airport security and fear monitors, the overall world never seemed to change. Maybe I took these small changes for granted as they seeped into my existence, but overall things didn’t change. People asked me what it was like to have a birthday on 9/11, but all I could tell them was that 9/11 and the date of September 11 are two completely different objects and that one didn’t necessarily interact with other. My birthday still came every year, I tried to enjoy it and measure my accomplishments, and at the same time we memorialized 9/11, which was something entirely separate from me.

George W. Bush’s White House was able to capture Sadaam Hussein, who was one of the villains we went after along with Osama bin Laden after 9/11. We tried Sadaam Hussein in a court proceeding and then presented his execution on TV. I watched it all during one winter break from college while I sat at a bar. College passed and I graduated and then, once I was done living at home with my parents, I moved into an apartment of my own, where I have lived for three years, fallen in and out of love and other little infatuations, changed jobs, have acted selflessly and selfishly towards friends and tried to become an artist.

Last night, during a Mets vs. Phillies game I was watching on ESPN, I learned that U.S. Special Forces had killed Osama Bin Laden. I watched as the camera showed different shots of fans at the game looking at their Blackberries and iPhones to get the latest news. I was reminded of a friend who said that Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad, Super True Love Story was a scary vision of where our world was headed or might already actually be. As I watched these images at the game, I thought of the book and how it was probably a bit overrated. But I also thought of the apparats that the characters used in the novel to share information and look into the lives of others and thought that this moment more than any other seemed to validate Shteyngart’s vision. So, I silently gave him credit.

My roommate and I watched Obama give his speech and we murmured about how crazy it was that Osama was dead and that he’d sort of fallen off our radar in recent years. We joked that Ghaddafi had stolen his thunder as of late.  We held back making more jokes. Then, as Obama’s speech concluded, my roommate said.

“Well, that might have sealed the election for Obama.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I mean that was one of the things he always said. That we’d focus on Osama and Afghanistan.”

“Plus the economy is on its way back.”

The speech ended and Obama thanked God and asked for God’s blessing on America, which made me think of Shakespeare’s history plays. As CNN looped old footage of Osama, one image struck me. It was a video of Osama walking in some dark stretch of desert. His eyes are wide and he has a slight grin as he walks towards the camera and then disappears under the lens. Then in the background, some of his Al Qaida comrades walk with guns and above them, tracing rounds of light fly in multiple directions and against the darkness of the desert sky, they look like stars for a moment. That looped video made me think of the darkness of night for a U.S. soldier in the desert. And there were a lot of troops out there or in Iraq who spent nights in the desert probably scared or angry. Some of them went to my high school. And even though much of this decade of foreign affairs didn’t affect me personally on any large scale, it affected them and lots of other people in dire and visceral ways. So, maybe chanting “USA,” during a baseball game is an appropriate release. I watched the shots fly and disappear in the blackness of that looped video and then decided I would go to bed.

Before laying down, I looked quickly at Twitter and saw two great tweets from two of my go to sources for humor:

Shelbyfero: And TOMORROW we get to all meet back, when Obama announces Osama Bin Laden jokes are dead.

MrsRupertPupkin: I wonder if Osama's friends will leave his Facebook up. Creepy but kinda sweet ;)

These people are complete strangers to me; two funny girls who handle Twitter accounts that I read. Two Twitter accounts that I’m happy exist. I closed Twitter, put on a Bill Simmons podcast and drifted off to sleep.

When I remember May 1, 2011, there will be an object of May 1, 2011 that will solely be the day that Osama Bin Laden was killed, was shot in the head and then later buried at sea. A day where a Phillies vs. Mets game on ESPN featured a unified “USA” chant. A day when people gathered outside the White House in Washington D.C. and cheered from trees and stood on shoulders in some sort of unity. Not for what was to come but for some kind of closure for what happened. For the happiness that the death of one human being brought—that object is profound, thought-provoking, scary and just.

However, May 1, 2011 will also be another object. It will be a day where I woke up and bought groceries; where I made Mexican pulled chicken for the week because I knew I’d be working late; where I got a huge Italian hero from the local butcher shop and deli for lunch; where I did my laundry; where I watched the Thunder play the Grizzlies in an immensely enjoyable Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals; where my friends came over and we barbequed burgers, sausage patties and swordfish while drinking beer and watching the Heat and Celtics start what will be a classic playoff series; where two of my closest friends and I watched The Money Pit on a Netflix account routed through a Wii; where I read funny twitter messages.  I did all that on the day that Osama was killed. I didn’t do any bit of my civic duties, but I tried to be happy and make others happy and I tried to make my apartment into something that could be termed “home” for a few hours.

There’s always going to be bad guys out there and we’ll have to kill a lot of them, but at least we can figure out what makes us happy and try to get home. That’s the kind of politics I can agree with even my dad about.

Puddles of My Podcast - Episode 27

As you all know by now, tomorrow night I will be hosting the Puddles of Myself First Ever Fiction Reading.  In preparation for this event, I am presenting you with the podcast I recorded with Chandrahas Choudhury in order to introduce you to the author, his voice and his own account of his work and time as a writer.  In this Episode 27 of Puddles of My Podcast, Chandrahas and I discuss Walt Whitman, his novel Arzee the Dwarf, the enjoyment of autumn in Iowa,  the power of cities, the beauty of New York City, cricket,  Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, the process of writing, choosing stories for a fiction anthology, top five American novels and top five Indian writers and a variety of other subjects where I only sometimes make an ass of myself.  This is a very stimulating podcast and I recommend that you listen to it immediately.  I enjoyed this one very much.

Are You Afraid of the Mark?

Making his second contribution in his weekly column (he and I will have to come up with a solid name for it), Mark Jack is here again to contribute a bit of intellectual prose for all of you to read. These are moments to enjoy a break from my writing beating you over the head with an agenda and to enjoy the words of an actual articulate person.

I give you Mr. Jack.



Go Down, Hogencamp


Mark Jack

There are countless ways to construct this city.  For instance like this:

Or, like this:

A city standing despite us or even in spite of us is a foolish conceit, or rather, yet another example of our inability to credit our constant author-ity, to recognize the little Robert Moses in all of us. Still, I am surprised by the lives lived all around me, lived without any regard to me.

The other day I was walking near my friend’s apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, making abrupt turns here and there, not really caring if I retraced my steps as long as I observed some difference on my second lap--usually I am horrified by the thought of retracing my steps, like, obsessively worried by the possibility of circumambulation. I made a right turn onto Bushwick Avenue and continued toward Queens. Across from me stood a ruined white church that looked like it belonged in some post-apocalyptic New England town. The steep roof, rotted over the years, and torn recently by high winds, barely supported a grey-green steeple.  The roof and facade were "holed" more than holy and the whole building seemed...well, forlorn seems like the appropriate word, though I was hoping to avoid it.  

I continued along Bushwick, and made another right turn.  Here, along a street the name of which I am sorry to say was never noted, were a series of elegantly appointed brownstones, complete with those giant hollow hand rails and enough wide steps to fit an army of flirting teenagers. Old trees lined the way and the condition of the entire block reminded me more of Fort Greene than an area of Bushwick otherwise filled with crumbling or crumbled sidewalks, empty lots, and not even a bodega on every corner. My surprise turned quickly to the realization that here was a neighborhood that existed almost in spite of what I, and the rest of New York too obsessed with proximity to Manhattan as the ultimate marker of convenience, had forgotten about.  It is the trait that makes such a densely packed, hugely diverse city like this not only habitable but even fantastically so.  This trait occurs when the inhabitants of this or any other city remember to treat their neighborhood like a town amidst other towns that, which are all scrunched together for convenience. It is when we recognize and appreciate this trait that we then begin to live somewhere instead of just sleeping there, which is something I find immensely important. I think this is something many people in my generation should remember.

I refuse to believe that time has anything to do with it, though. I refuse to believe that growing up somewhere allows us to be part of a neighborhood and that not spending some part of our childhood years in a place permanently bars one from inclusion in a neighborhood. I reject the idea that our integration and friendly existence in a small town or large neighborhood in an even larger city has anything to do with the time spent there rather than simply our attitude toward it.

I realize that perhaps what I felt on that street in Bushwick is not exactly coming through in my writing. I also realize that I don’t completely understand what I felt. I can say that I felt apart from the lives lived there. This is not to suggest that I felt like a foreigner or like some wary tourist, stumbled into an actual, habituated section of the city where the gift shop clerks live and wear the clothes they actually wear and eat the foods they actually eat. Rather, I felt beautifully separate.  I had no clue as to what the people living on that street did for a living or if they cared about the disintegrating, waterlogged church, or, if they did, from what perspective. I felt as though I were some benign ghost, approving the lives lived simply because they were lived. Maybe this is an odd sentiment, but I don't think so.

In any case, my walking observations found me dwelling on how a community is organized. More specifically, I was dwelling about the dynamics of a community diversely populated and totally made of scrap wood, and populated by plastic dolls.

Last week, I went to the IFC Center and watched a documentary called Mawrencol.  The movie is about Mark Hogencamp a man of rather slight--given the scope of the world’s odd behaviors--peculiarities, who, after being beaten into a nine day coma, emerged severely disabled and without enough money to last very long in rehabilitation. As a way to exercise his dexterity and his anger over the attack he began to create a fictional town in inanimate 1/6th size. The town is set in his yard in upstate New York or in Belgium during WWII, depending on what story line you think is more important. The town is really just a backdrop wherein Mark, the film’s subject and town’s creator can act out his frustrations and fantasies. The town’s origin story, as Mark spins it, contains all the best elements of a boy’s horny imagination. Mark, as a WWII era American fighter pilot, is shot down in Belgium just outside a small town where the SS have dispatched all the men and left only beautiful women, which are actually Barbies. Mark, as doll, sometimes referred to as "Little Hogie," wanders into town to the women’s delight and is given some property where he sets up a bar and everyone, including Allied and Axis soldiers get along, ‘cause everyone gets to drink and have a Barbie girlfriend. Well, actually, Mark gets them all, in a way.

The documentary is very well done and, if nothing else, entertaining. I was fortunate enough to see it on the opening day and sat quietly after the movie as the audience asked, for the most part, rather intelligent questions of Mark, the director, and two other people important to both the film’s story line and Mark’s career as an artist. Mark’s artistry, however, as depicted in the film, exists tenuously.

In the documentary, we are given a glimpse of Mark Hogencamp as a gifted but alcoholic doodler who resorts, for therapy, both physical and mental, to a fictional, doll filled world that also fulfills his artistic ambitions. In the last third of the film we see Mark nervously set off for the big city where he wanders nervously about an art gallery in the Village as people judge his enlarged photos of militarily posed and clothed dolls. His photographs are reasonably well shot, with a good sense of how to force perspective, but the shots are a little too action movie-esque to excite me and the exciting bits about him as damaged outsider artist feel slightly contrived. To be fair, the photos are clearly meant to be viewed as art. The man wants to be an artist, and wants his somewhat juvenile and unfocused stories to be played out as a movie - which is how he sees it in his head - with the photos as stills.

In the end, it is an entertaining movie but I’m unsure as to how we are expected to treat the subject. Are we supposed to identify with him? Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? Does the director intend for us to treat Mark Hogencamp as a seriously talented artist?

Unfortunately, I feel as though that is exactly what the film wants us to do but can never honestly do itself. The film constantly refuses to believe its own assertions and undermines “Mark-as-artist” constantly. He is only an interesting subject if he remains outside, so he must be viewed as “uncomfortable-as-artist,” and “awkward-as-social-being.”  All that said, the movie is pretty great and you should see it.

Where this all ends up is that the movie raised some serious questions about community involvement for me that had already been stirring around in my head on my walks around the borough in which I live. What I would’ve liked to see from the movie is more of a meditation on our own constant creation of the world around us. If the film implicated us, the audience, a little I think we could have benefited more from the movie. As it is, I’m worried that the movie will provide the viewer only with a justification of our smug belief that we love difference and art and totally believe in a dynamic human spirit but in that way which is obnoxious and misguided.

You know what I mean.

-Mark

The Sanctuaries - "Queen's Gambit Declined"

Well everyone, as you know, I am still on my little mini-hiatus from regular posting, but like I mentioned here is one of the special features that is meant to fill in the absence of my beautiful writing voice on this blog.  This is the debut of the video for the Sanctuaries song "Queen's Gambit Declined."  I have covered the Sanctuaries on this website and an article I wrote about them should be appearing in Trashcan Magazine in the upcoming weeks.  "Queens Gambit Declined" is part of a single with "House of Noise," whose video will also appear on this blog in the upcoming weeks.

Without further ado, the video is below or you can view it here. Check the Sanctuaries MySpace or follow David Stern on Facebook (this guy posts legit status updates) for more information about upcoming shows and band related information.

Album Review: The Walkmen "Lisbon"

One of the rules of writing that I’ve mentioned on this blog is that you should never begin with a quote, whether its dialogue or a quote of someone else’s. One of thhe other rules of writing is that you should never repeat yourself.  Obviously there are only approximately eight themes that we can write about: love, birth, death, passion, friendship, good, evil and youth.  With those eight (questionable) items you will inevitably come to similar thematic crossroads. The key is that each time you come to the crossroad  you approach it from a different route.  Your destination, the overall shape of the theme or virtue remains the same, but it is the the way those themes and virtues are discerned and relayed that should be different each time so that nothing is repeated.  Our days should remain this way as well despite our routines and subway routes.

So, I have written about the Walkmen before and related their music to love, passion, death, birth and youth.  I have written about Bob Dylan and life in the city and the country and spoken about love, passion, birth, death and youth. I’m not going to avoid repetition by tackling good and evil (I’m not that excellent of a writer yet), but the Walkmen will be approached from a different route than I have approached them before. This is because Lisbon is a different album than the Walkmen have ever made before. They approach the same themes and tones of their musical palette repeatedly but manage to expand the scope of their statement each time they do so.  The main thing is that “Torch Song” on Lisbon is a fantastic song and makes your mind move in all the right directions.

This past weekend I took Friday off from work to take a long weekend upstate.  The summer is hot and my job is good.  I work with all kinds of women all day and am easily swayed by passion so each day I am constantly exhaused by promise.  Living in the country has always been part of my dream, like Levin as Tolstoy’s alter-ego surveying the fields surrounding his family’s estate, watching the sun change color, water dry in the reeds and marshes and purple mountain flowers sway with the breeze and insects all the while tractor wheels or ancient scythes flash in the light below the lime groves.  So, when I can leave to go to rural places I do – mostly on the hope that I might learn to enjoy something concrete about life by paying attention to the change in demeanor from the city to the country or from the feel of dirt and the difference of air. Yet, usually, I just drink beer try to get dirty.

I left work and met my friend at the apartment she was staying in on the Upper West Side.  The friend she was staying with decorates for weddings in the city and around it.  Her apartment was littered with old bottles for flowers, pieces of wood, pinwheels made of color patterns.  There was a window next to the crates of bottles that opened out to a courtyard where small stairwells descended to the center and plants and flowers sat in the evening light.  The girl apologized about how messy the apartment was and explained that she had been very busy.  I told her that I liked a place with clutter, all the bottles looked neat and cool stacked in crates near the window, it made the apartment warmer in sme way.  She laughed at that and told my friend and I that the wedding would be near our destination upstate and that we could both stop by on our way home on Sunday. My friend and I agreed that would be nice.

Then, with coffees in hand we were in the car on the way towards the Taconic.  My friend was telling me about some new people she had met that were designing different clothes among other objects and materials.  She was making contacts in the industry she wanted.  That was where we were heading – the home of the designer she worked for.  The sun was setting and yet that coolness of August away from the city wasn’t setting in as the sky turned from orange purple to the periwinkle of the gloaming.  I thought of all the people I tried to contact and of other friends I knew who contacted other people and tried to make a start in some kind of creative business.  I thought about how much talent I had, but that thought was broken by the memory of my friends and I trying to sneak on a ferry boat from New London out to Orient Point.  I thought about the heat of the day and the look on the ferry hand’s face as we drove onboard without a ticket and he pointed us away with his brown, worn finger.

We arrived at a humble Mexican restaurant in an upstate strip mall and walked in to greet my friend’s designer boss and his wife.  They treated us to margaritas and a mexican dinner.  It was a Thursday and as the Designer Boss said, “We come here every Thursday.” The wait staff all knew the Designer Boss and his wife and they brought over several dishes that we ate down greedily.  Finally the meal was over and I motioned to pay for the check, but the Designer Boss wouldn’t hear of it and paid for the check happily. As we walked out, I thanked him and looked at a tiled waterfall in the lobby of the restaurant.  Outside, my friend and I asked if we could buy any wine or liquor.  The Designer Boss’s wife said, “You couldn’t drink us dry if you wanted to.  Besides, there’s no where to get it at this time of night.”  And as I looked around at the darkened strip mall and then the hills that rose above its sad roofs, I realized she was right.  So, we got in the car and my friend tried to keep up with her Designer Boss who was speeding around the country roads and hills he knew so well.  He beat us to his home and the motion detector spread out over the gravel drive.  There were planters with purple flowers and a built up hill the stood over the driveway and led to forest.  Next to the home, a sunroom stretched over and back and my eye was drawn to a garden and dark barn.  The light gave to the darkness and I saw the vague silhouette of a straw owl. Out in the night, I felt a great sense of distance, which I have felt at various points in my life, it felt as if some great vastness of the world sat in front of me althought it was completely unseen.

“You’ll see the view tomorrow,” the Designer Boss said.

“I’m sure I will,” I responded.

He led us into his home and we set down our bags.  He showed us proudly around this home that he had built.  He complained about dried caterpilars on the floor.  He showed us exposed beams of wood that stood underneath skylights and above the loft of the second floor.  He showed us the guest room we would be staying in – the B suite, because the A suite was being occupied by his neighbor whose floors were being redone.  He showed me his library because I confessed to working for a magazine and being interested in writing. I spotted a pool out by a light in the side backyard.

“You’ll go swimming in there tomorrow,” the Designer Boss said.

I laughed. “I imagine so. It’s going to be hot I heard.”

“Beautiful weather.”

Then he led my friend and I into his kitchen and offered us tequila, which I accepted.  My friend asked for whiskey, which the Designer Boss dismissed but poured anyway, like a doting father to a daughter, which in many ways he postured himself as.  We had our drinks in hand and then the Designer Boss said he was going to have a cigar.  He asked me if I would too, but only if I didn’t puke.  I said I would too and that I wouldn’t puke.  So we both smoked cigars out in the sunroom with a fan on above us and the humidity slowly giving way to the coolness that enters a summer night in August usually around midnight, though perhaps sooner if you are further in the woods or somewhere more northern.

“I smoked a lot of cigars in the summer of 2005,” I told the Designer Boss.

“These are good cigars he said.”

My friend asked him about his son, Max, who was in New York from Africa.  They would be seing him after he went to his friend’s wedding. Perhaps he would be staying longer.  He had a crush on my friend.

“You should watch out little girl,” he said to her. “Max likes you.”

We all laughed and the Designer Boss and I puffed on cigars and I thought about how much he would have enjoyed that. “I would that it were true.”  Then, I asked the Designer Boss’ wife about where they had lived in New York and they told us about Brooklyn in the 70’s and buying in Manhattan at the turn of the 80’s on the Upper West Side.  They told us about celebrities and neighbors who masturbated in the window.  The cigars turned in our fingers and the smoke puffed out as the red craters slowly drew towards the band by the butt. Then, the Designer Boss said he would retire with his wife and they did.  My friend and I stayed up and drank another glass each of whisky in his library with the TV on mute.  I admired a book of beatnik interviews and we talked about our separate love lifes and stumbled into slight disagreements as friends will do when they are comfortable and tired and finishing their last drinks.  Then we went up to bed, where I insisted on sleeping on the floor with a white duvet wrapped around me and pillows strewn about, claiming it was good for my back.

“I knew you’d do this,” my friend said.

Then we both slept.  She woke in the morning with the remaining coolness, which Hemingway said was the best time to write. She left the room and I spread out on the bed. I woke to an empty house, I supposed they went to get breakfast.  So I washed my face and slicked my hair back, brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes.  Then I went downstairs and into the sunroom feeling very neat with my notebook and novel hooked under my arm and then stacked on the wicker white table.  I started writing as I looked out to the view of the slight mountains and hills that spread in the distance.  The house sat above a golden hill of rye.  I looked around and thought of the Designer Boss and his family and of other small lives that were lived in these hills and began to feel melancholy. So I started to write.  It wasn’t long when the car pulled back down and my friend shouted out to me from the kitchen. They had eggs and bacon and all things for breakfast, but first we would walk.

We walked and the Designer Boss led the way.  We walked along roads that were lined with corn fields, corn to feed cows.  My friend ate some corn and mooed.  We encountered actual cows and the Designer Boss’ wife and I let them suck our fingers as we pet their heads.  We looked at barns and climbed long, slow sloping hills.  I stepped on rocks to pick unripe apples that had the perfect sourness for my enjoyment. I walked along and thought of Levin and Tolstoy and Bob Dylan in 1970 surveying their respective properties.  I had a notion of happiness and I believed that it was tied to the ability to perhaps know something greater about life in general by simply taking the time to observe it.  I reminded myself not to get to close to being like a hippy.

We returned to the house feeling healthy, warm and sweaty.  The Designer Boss cooked bacon and made over hard eggs.  We ate the eggs and bacon out on the sun room. The Designer Boss ate a bagel and pickled herring from Zabar’s.  I spread their homemade strawberry and blueberry jams out on my bagel.

“Which do you like better?” the Designer Boss’ wife asked.

“Blueberry is better.” The Designer Boss said.

“I like blueberry best,” I said.

We lingered over breakfast and made jokes. I thanked the Designer Boss and his wife several times and then asked him about hiking a hill to the fire tower.  The Designer Boss got very excited and told us that he would take us there to hike while he cut some of the rye that his neighbor had missed cutting with his tractor. Then, when we were done, we could swim in the pool with him before he went golfing at 4:00.  We agreed it was a perfect plan and were soon speeding behind him through the small town to the small mountain.  We got to the mountain and he pointed out the way.  We thanked him and climbed. I forced my friend to move faster than she wanted to as we climbed to the top and found the fire tower.  As we climbed the fire tower we paused momentarily to take in the views from the various elevations until we reached the top and watched the turkey vultures and red tailed hawks circle the tops of the trees.  We read out graffiti and then looked out at the clouds that formed shadows on the hills.

“Do you like my boss?” my friend asked me.

“I do. He likes you very much.”

“You think?”

“You remind him of something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure he knows either, but its something that he can understand and it is something good.”

We were quiet after that and then made a joke about some acquaintance we both knew and decided to climb back, get back, swim and then leave.

We completed our task of swimming with the Designer Boss in his 85 degree pool (“It has to be 85 degrees”) and set off to meet our friends further upstate.  The Designer Boss was visibly sad as he helped us figure out the route to take to meet our friends.  However, he piled us on with homemade jams, zucchini bread and pesto.  As we left, the Designer Boss’ wife showed me some catnip that grew by the driveway.  We held it out to their cat, which the son had brought from Africa and watched as he curled his lip and pawed at the flower before curling up with it on the gravel.  Then I thanked her and the Designer Boss for everything and hoped I would see them soon.

“See you on Tuesday,” the Designer Boss said to my friend.

Then, we were driving up 202 N where we met our friends at my friend’s grandfather’s house.  His grandfather was an old Frenchman who did various odd jobs throughout his life but who retreated to this remote spot in the late 1970’s.  He spoke in a thick but clean French accent and seemed to wink every time he said something.  I felt something familiar when talking to him. It could have been the warmth of accumulated human experience that most grandfather’s have, or it could have been that I shared some trait of simplicity of the world with this man – the same peasant heart.  Maybe we were both just men.  I couldn’t decide.  But my friend and his wife were happy to see us and there were other friends there as well, so we cooked fresh corn and drank cold beer and cooked our dinner over a fire on an old cauldron while country music played.

The night fell in and it grew colder than it had been the night before.  We kept drinking and slowly but surely people had crawled off to bed in various spots, except myself, my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, and his friend, the Photographer.  Since it was late and we were drunk we decided to wander without purpose in the fields and forest around the house. My friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, had directions of the properties printed in his head from memory and nostalgia so we followed him.  A new barn was being built and its fresh wood seemed to glow in the night, so we climbed in one of the windows and surveyed the craftsmanship, using our cell phone light to guide us.  When that was done, my friend wanted to walk on the path that led from the neighbors’ house to his grandfather’s rabbit hutch.  He had taken the neighbor’s daughter there one time.  We walked quietly through the yard, but couldn’t find the path.  My friend got caught in the prickers and we decided to finally give up. So the three of us boys took the road back and admired the full scope of stars that had stretched up above us.  Yet, we had to make a stop at the other neighbor’s home, the Architect.  We walked up his drive and into his yard since he wasn’t home.  He had a treated pond in the backyard and we drank beers along its zen edge.  Bullfrogs honked in the darkness and before I knew it, we were asleep out there.  We all awoke minutes later and retreated to our own beds – my friend into bed with his wife.

The next morning we cooked breakfast over the fire – eggs and bacon – and then took a trip to a waterfall landing to swim in the cold water.  I drank beers on the ride over the hills to the falls and then alongside the falls.  The boys swam to the falls and talked, watching a gay couple and their dog play with a big stick among the rocks of the fall bed.  Soon, it was time to leave there, so we drove back, picking up some supplies for steak dinner.  We played lawn games in the high heat of the late afternoon and cooked different courses of mushroom, turkey burgers and other vegetables over the fire before it was time to cook steak.  We ate thick steaks as the night grew dark and we poured chimichurri on the meat alongside beat salad and other greens. Then, there was a champagne toast, for my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather and his wife had been married only recently.  We all admired their connection and union and returned to our cups and cans.  The fire roared on and some of us fell asleep as my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, relayed wild stories from his youth.  I dozed in and out, sipping cheap corn whiskey and making smores.  Finally the exhaustion set in.

“I was drinking for all of us,” my friend said.

“I was tired,” I said.

“No roaming tonight.”

“Maybe just some nights.”

We all retired to our beds.

The next morning we made another big breakfast. I felt rested and ate my eggs and bacon as well as homemade english muffins that my friends wife had prepared.  She cooked them over the fire.  I drank beers because the morning was hot. The conversation lingered and we discussed leaving.  Before we did, we took artsy photos in the woods with props at different locations.

“My parents definitely have these pictures. I’ve seen them,” one of the guests said and we all laughed at that.

Then, it was time to leave.  So my friend (the girl) and I set off in her car back to New York.  We drove smoothly back to the city and when we got to New York, the streets were clear, because it was a summer Sunday.  A  phrase that that day sounded so simple, old and beautiful to me.  The heat wasn’t terrible and there was no one on the road or on the streets and for a second, this great city seemed manageable.  I felt that I could smell salt water.

My friend dropped me off and I was dirty, tired, and exhausted from drinking beer and being in the sun.  So, I shaved, showered, made dinner and  bought cold Miller High Life bottles to drink in the evening.  I drank them next to the fan in my apartment and thought of going back to work on Monday.

This is supposed to be about  the Walkmen album Lisbon.  I’m not going to pretend to know what this fantastic new album is about.  All I am going to tell you is that it is the best album that the Walkmen have ever put out.  Wheras You & Me was all about a kind of wild passion for youth and catharsis – the pain of understanding that time is passing and that things are not as they once were, that what was may not ever be again, because your sisters are now all married – Lisbon is about what happens after that moment or era in your life.

The Walkmen started off as a loud band that had strange echoing guitars, organs and pianos (not to mention a fantastic drummer).  We fell in love with the anthem “The Rat” and moody numbers like “We’ve Been Had,” “Wake Up,” or solemn songs like “New Year’s Eve.”  Or, like me, you fell in love with the unbridled rock n’ roll of A Hundred Miles Off that made a person (especially a tortured soul) find meaning in the world.  There was something uncontrollable about their ability to go from cool and solemn to unrestrained and wild that fit someone who was making their way through their college years.  Then, when You & Me came out in my early twenties when I was learning to love New York and leave the romances and memories of my youth behind me and embrace the new strangeness and perhaps changes I would have to face in the coming years, it all made sense.  There was something poignant about that album. It was intoxicating enough with its use of horns, its ballads and its anthemic rockers that you just had to fall in love with it – there was no way not to because it represented something so strongly to life, to some kind of impalpable feeling or era that all people share.

Lisbon then one-ups that. Lisbon is the sound of a band that is completely comfortable in their skin.  Lisbon is the Walkmen. In many ways it is a superior summation of a band than Wilco (The Album) was for Wilco in its own clever way.  Lisbon has the rockers, it has the pop songs, it has the wailing anthems and it has the moody atmospheric pieces.  Yet, they never reach an extreme, they all feel natural, as though they are not one different song. Where sometimes that effect can make an album seem long or drawn out, here it never is.  The Walkmen understand the dynamics of their sound so well that they can subtly adjust from track to track without it seeming completely different, but when you pay attention you realize how different it is and you are never bored – there is always a vocal wail or hook or a tinkling piano, or a substantial throb of bass or some clever percussion that makes your head spin.  You’ve heard these songs before, but they have never been this good, they have never been this natural and you will never be able to get them out of their head. There isn’t much of a difference between “Victory,” “Angela Surf City,” “Torch Song,” “Blue as Your Blood,” and “Lisbon.”  The only difference is the subtle shift in dynamics. “Lisbon” itself is a tour de force in tone and atmosphere and is perhaps one of the best songs of the last ten years and it isn’t even the best song on the album, which would be “Torch Song.”

We often feel sad when athletes pass their prime or when musicians become older and start forming families.  The Walkmen have been around for about a decade.  They are starting to get their just due as one of the best rock bands around.  And I find it funny after the Strokes just played a legendary show at Lollapalooza to be talking about bands reaching maturity.  Lisbon, to me, is the sound of maturity.  It is concise at 11 tracks and each song, no matter what it is actually saying, says something about moving on with your life and finding a peace within your skin.  It is an album where you identify what your problem is, accept it and figure out the ways how to fix it.  The romance is over and so are the triumphant horns, now something else has inserted itself into your life, perhaps something that isn’t completely palpable, but something that feels comfortable and you can’t shake, because more than the romance it is this essence that you have always wanted – whatever it may be.

You can connect the dots for what this means about  a married couple, an old Frenchman in Upstate New York, a Designer Boss, two friends travelling, fires and drinking a beer in the coolness of the night.  I’m not sure what all those objects mean in the general context of the world other than that they exist and enter into my life from time to time as I try to make my way through time and learn to trust the things that I really want and not the things that the world suggests make me comfortable. Lisbon is that point, that city you reach when you find the balance of “what I want and what the world expects of me.”  That balance that can be explained by a Summer Sunday in New York City in a car, or by walking by a campfire with a cool beer and seeing a pool of water.  Those are the objects that may be there, that may reside in that city, but its all about how you get there and when you do, the music is sweet, it is challenging and it is good.