Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak.
He was the older brother of my high school friend Pete who had died a week before of stage 4 squamous carcinoma that had spread through his body, making chemo and radiation pointless, but his brother and I didn’t talk much about death, we let our memories drift back to high school. His family was Catholic, mine was evangelical, he was the handsomest boy in school and dated my cousin Delores briefly, remembered her beauty; his mother was a friend of my mother-in-law, two smart women devoted to the arts and other good causes; he delivered the evening paper and remembered his customers; he was a third-string football player who didn’t mind sitting on the bench. His brother was a star halfback. Both of them, to me then and still, epitomized smarts and the essence of cool. In a little farm town, they stood out.
Read MoreIf a person lives in a democracy, which thus far we do, you soon learn that politics is not an orderly business like cosmetic dentistry or carpentry, it is more like pond hockey or maybe a conclave of sociopaths or an ostrich jubilee, and the messiness can drive you crazy, like finding potatoes in your sock drawer and rutabagas in the medicine cabinet, and the alternative to despair is amusement.
So when the Alabama Supreme Court decides that an embryo is a human being and you see Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from this lest they alienate young people of voting age who were conceived in vitro, you wonder if someday sperm will be given the same protection and male masturbation will be considered child abuse.
Read MoreI was in Texas last week doing shows, which is my line of work, and was sorry to leave because, frankly, it was the most fun I can remember having while wearing a suit and tie and now I look at this sentence and am surprised to be writing it. We Minnesotans aren’t known for euphoria, we experience sexual ecstasy and we think, “Well, that wasn’t bad, a person could do worse, that’s for sure,” and on top of my northern self-restraint, I grew up fundamentalist which, even after you depart from the fold, leaves you with a lifelong allergy to pleasures of all kinds.
Fun is not our thing. We leave the party before the dancing starts. I do a show and remember what went wrong. In photographs I look like a defendant the jury has just voted unanimously to convict after ten minutes of deliberation. We are susceptible to alcoholism because we keep drinking, waiting for it to make us happy, until we lose consciousness.
Read MoreI’m an old man but not utterly clueless and as I hear music come out of the ceiling, I hear rap and hip-hop become monosyllabic, a string of shouts and macho mumbles with machinelike percussion, a sort of anti-music, and then along comes a young woman who sings actual stories in whole sentences to a real melody and you have Taylor Swift and she takes over the music business and becomes the most famous person on earth, bigger than Vladimir Putin. When Putin fills a stadium, you know it was at gunpoint. Mister Marlago fills small plazas but it’s all the same people, mostly retirees with time on their hands who love hearing that same speech over and over. Taylor draws huge paying crowds who are overjoyed from start to finish and also buy the merch and go home happy.
I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much.
Read MoreIt is Lent, the season meant for us to meditate upon our wayward ways, even us Episcopalians whom you rarely find falling down drunk in the gutter or shoplifting at Walgreens or getting into fistfights — no, for us failing to write thank-you notes is major — but still we have our shortcomings, which, I must say, are clearer to me this week when my wife the violist is away playing Beethoven for a ballet in Minneapolis. Without her here, my life goes slack, I sometimes spend all day in pajamas, my mind jumps from one lily pad to another, I can’t focus. My room is a mess, the bed is a tangle of bedclothes.
My grandma Dora always made her bed upon arising, believing it lent order to the day. She was a seamstress, schoolteacher, railroad telegrapher, farm wife, mother of eight. Her bread was light and crusty. She had firm habits: she drank Postum, ate Grape-Nuts, slept with the window open for fresh air, and she was a progressive Methodist who believed that women and persons of color were the equal of white men and that science could solve many of our problems. Compared to Grandma, I am a hopeless mess. I mean it.
Read MoreBefore it dies, I want to come out in favor of the hyperloop project in Minnesota to create underground tubes in which people would travel in capsules propelled by electromagnetic force at speeds up to 700 mph. No seat belts, no use of carbon fuel, no roaring engines or jarring bumps. They’re proposing a link between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Rochester, 85 miles, which by my calculation will take about 7 and ½ minutes, or one cup of coffee, whereas now it takes 90 some minutes, or about the length of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” if you include the search for a parking spot and the hike to where your appointment is.
Minnesota’s, of course, would only be an experiment, which, if successful, could be extended and thereby make the country smaller — three hours from Chicago to L.A. but without the pollution — and eventually you might eliminate the vast underpopulated middle, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana, which would become one huge federal agricultural reserve, run by the Department of Agriculture, tended by migrant workers, no need for towns and cities. Kansas has 105 counties, a pointless bureaucracy ruling over wheat and soybean fields. Farming is heavily subsidized by the feds anyway and in the name of efficiency, why not let them run it, allocating acreage based on nutrition, convert wasteful grazing lands to vegetable crops. Eliminating those states would reduce the U.S. Senate by 20 seats, which could only improve it, and likely send the Republican Party careening into history, which it has been seeking for some time now. And who can name the last great senator from Kansas or South Dakota?
Read MoreA splendiferous snow fell on Manhattan a few days ago, seven inches, a new bright world, school was canceled and soon neighborhood children were hauling their sleds and saucers into Central Park to go sliding.
Sliding is something an old man avoids but I remember the pleasure of lubricity — tobogganing down a steep slope and out onto the Mississippi ice where we could skate upwind and then open our jackets for a sail and go flying home. We flooded a rink in a vacant lot and played hockey and somebody’s dad hauled an old chicken coop over with a woodstove in it for a warming house. And I may be idealizing now but I do remember a spirit of chumminess and good cheer in that warm house on bitter cold days. Bad kids chose to suppress their malevolent tendencies; subzero weather made them sort of sensible.
Read MoreJoe Biden came to Manhattan for a couple fundraisers last week, which gave the NYPD a fine excuse to close off as many streets as humanly possible, which is why some people go into law enforcement — for the chance to make civilians stand behind barriers — and there I stood, looking at York Avenue, abandoned except for a few cop cars, lights flashing. I’d crossed over from the West Side in a cab driven by a cabbie who’d been at it for 39 years and who was highly irritated by the blockages, also said the economy’s tanking, shops closing, people abandoning the city, crime up, Wall Street in trouble, but at the same time, he said, “It’s Number One, the greatest city in the world.”
New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?
Read MoreMy beloved and I live in a large co-op building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I bought in 1987 and from our terrace we can look up to the apartment where Sinclair Lewis lived in his alcoholic distress before going away to die in Italy in 1951 and farther up is Faye Dunaway’s old apartment with panoramic views of the city. She resided there when she was having an affair with the Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni — Marshmallow Macaroni, we used to call him — and where she, in a fit of fury because he wouldn’t marry her, threw his clothes off the 20th-floor balcony to sail down onto the brownstone roofs. A neighbor told me about it who’d gotten the scoop from a previous resident, since departed. Faye screamed a name at him and heaved two armloads of shirts and pants and they went fluttering down like a flock of dying butterflies. “It was a good thing he wasn’t in one of the shirts at the time or she would’ve heaved him over in person,” the neighbor said. “I went out and found a couple in the ramp going down to the garage and they are just my size, one orange, one green stripes, not exactly my style but they make me feel like a Somebody.”
So from our terrace, I look up and remind myself to stay off alcohol except for Communion and avoid the sadness of Lewis’s end. He kept cranking out novels in his old age but people had had enough of him especially as he got old and out of touch with the current scene and the work got more cartoonish.
Read MoreThe great debate continues over Flaco the eagle-owl spotted recently flying around our home on New York’s Upper West Side, a year after he got loose from the Central Park Zoo: should he continue to roam the city freely, feeding on rats, or should he be put back in captivity for his own welfare?
He’s a big bird, six-foot wingspan, bright orange eyes, and he’s gained a considerable fan base, most of whom are rooting for him to be free. Some renowned owlologists, however, feel the bird is in danger, primarily from rat poison but also from vehicular birdicide, and needs to be rescued from his urban habitat.
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