December 29, 2024

Hitting The Links: 12/29/24

A tarot tattoo brings about an epiphany, a scavenger hunt draws to a close, JFK meets MF Doom, and we hear a naive melody among the signs & portents, + a bunch of great links, a little fitness craziness, and a bunch of books I'm reading

The Virtual Memories Show News

A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life

Art is Work

On Friday, I went into NYC to shoot One More Instax for my 2024 book project. I had the idea in the morning of getting out to the late Milton Glaser’s studio on E. 32nd and shooting the transom message that so whomped me when I visited him in 2019, a year before he died.

On the way, I got a DM from a past guest I’d pitched for this project, to let me know he’d be around for a little while in the afternoon, so I visited him first.

Here’s what you should know about this project of mine:

• It’ll be a book consisting of Instax photos on the left pages, and text (200-250 words) on the right pages. (Same format as the book that inspired me, Jarrett Earnest’s Valid Until Sunset, except with fewer/no dicks.)

• The photos will be from my in-person podcast sessions and drop-ins/hang-outs with past guests during 2024.

• They’ll run in chronological order.

• The pictures are not of the people themselves (mostly), but of something in the environment, some emblem of theirs, some object or the light in that very moment.

• It’ll be called GUEST/HOST.

• And what occurred to me in the middle of the year was that the book should contain 78 of these images, to comprise a personal/esoteric tarot, despite my knowing little to nothing about tarot symbolism.

I was pretty close to that magic number going into this week, and have a few that I can discard for a variety of reasons, if I wound up overachieving. But the pictures need to be taken before the end of the year, and Friday’s two opportunities — past guest + Milton’s transom — would get me to 78.

So I took a perfect photo at my guest’s place, and we talked at high-speed, jamming an hour of conversation into ~30 minutes. He understands what I’m doing, how it fits into the over-project of my life, treasures my work with the podcast, and the grand web of associations & friendships that have resulted from it all.

We talked about how my podcast conversations change both people, guest and host. I said I used to think it was vampirism, that I was just taking a little of my guests with each talk, but I’ve come to realize that we’re both transformed in the process.

I told him about the tarot concept, and the need to give myself constraints (& goals), and he agreed that it’d serve as a framework for the project, as much as anything else would.

While we waited for the elevator, he told me to thank my wife for enabling-permitting me to do All Of This: podcast, book, travel. He cited the documentary about Louis I. Kahn, MY ARCHITECT, and the moment where Kahn’s client in Brazil apologizes to Kahn’s son, saying that they got the best of his father, not realizing how little that left of Kahn to share with his family. I texted her when I got to the sidewalk.

From there, I walked across & uptown, browsing at Rizzoli Bookstore on Broadway for a bit, where among the art & photography books I came across an absolutely bewitching collection by Søren Solkær of murmurations of birds, a subject I’d just written about for one of the book’s pieces.

Then I stopped on a whim at Slate Cafe on Madison Ave., where I ordered a large black coffee. It was 2:30 and I hadn’t had anything to eat since 7:30. Caffeine was more imperative than food; the light hunger, combined with the effervescent conversation with my guest, had me productively giddy.

From the moment I got in the car that morning, I had been making all sorts of connections among my images, and ideas were cropping up for the prose pieces. It was as if my creative-self knew that this portion of the project was near its end, the scavenger hunt of 78 pictures almost complete, and had gotten a head start on the next phase, the solitary work of writing. I’d brought along a Calepino notebook and pen and jotted down ideas throughout the day.

The barista turned around to get my coffee and I saw the tattoo on his tricep: an ornate piece of The Hanged Man card of the tarot.

I asked if I could shoot it, and he pulled up the sleeve & turned around. In that giddy, elated moment, I realized that if I needed a sign that I was on the right path, I got it.

Later I related this story to a pal, who wrote

The Hanged Man is allll about the pursuit of knowledge. You could argue it is a journey of self, an extension of The Fool. But it is a patient card. Some say it signifies a sacrifice — a giving up to gain. But I think it is more waiting, then learning during that stillness. Emerging out the other side enlightened. With more. As more

I walked on to Milton’s old studio, where I had to find a way to shoot a pic of the transom. This involved hauling a baby-carriage shipping box down the street and climbing up while taking care not to collapse it. I got the shot.

And then it was another 2-mile walk across town to get to the ferry (with a stop at Jose Andres’ Little Spain Mercado for a little lunch & to pick up a Basque cheesecake for our neighbors’ NYE party). Along the way I passed a cafe with a neon sign of the very words inscribed in my wedding ring. The signs and portents didn’t have to be SO on the nose, but a little mystery & serendipity is a wonderful thing.

I was suffused with this sense of utter certainty: not just that what I’m doing with this book is the right thing, but that it’s inexorable, that everything has led me to it, that I’m where I should be in the world.

I walked along the Hudson the last few blocks to the ferry and I knew I was done with the project, that it was complete, that the writing would come in 2025 and I could bring this book into the world.

AT WHICH POINT another of my goddamned past guests finally replied to my text from the day before to say I could come by his place (in NJ) on Saturday to shoot a picture. And then on Saturday morning another goddamned past guest in NYC did the same to see about today.

Because of course nothing is complete, and nothing really ends. But as perfect as I felt on Friday, I did get an awfully good pic and a great conversation on Saturday. Now it’s time to head back to the city to find another frozen instant and see another friend (and maybe to make a side trip to get One Final Image for the book).

*

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And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

• Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: The Guest List Benjamin Swett • Ken Krimstein • Eddie Campbell • Caitlin McGurk • Frances Jetter • Roland Allen

• RIP Greg Gumbel . . . RIP Yoshio Taniguchi . . . RIP Sophie Hediger . . . RIP Richard Perry . . . RIP Richard Parsons . . . RIP Shyam Benegal . . . RIP Steven Englander . . . RIP Ruth Butler . . . RIP Hudson Meek . . . RIP OG Maco . . .

• Fantastic obit for Barry Malzberg by Jeet Heer.

• Lovely & sad piece by Katelan Foisy on the death of a neighbor.

• Darryl Pinckney wrote a GREAT essay about Harlem and James Baldwin.

• MOOD BOARD for Christopher Brown’s amazing book, A Natural History of Empty Lots!

• New poem from Christian Wiman.

• More horror stories about worker safety at NEOM.

• Here are some NYer writers on what they’re reading this winter.

• Lengthy piece about how Netflix destroyed moviemaking. TBF, I feel like that whole model wouldn’t work if people weren’t goddamned sheep who just want something-anything on as a distraction all the time.

• Not speaking of which, I watched Abel Ferrara’s TOMMASO during our flight to Louisiana (ripped the DVD, watched on my iPad, will rewatch on a bigger screen sometime), which I’ve been meaning to do since I read this Matt Zoller-Seitz review of it years ago. It’s a heck of a movie, but it can be a tough watch.

• Near the end of the movie, Willem Dafoe’s lead talks with a friend from AA about how having a child with his much younger wife has kinda wrecked their relationship, and how much rage he’s dealing with as a result of that (but we know the rage is also a result of aging, creative frustration, displacedness, masculine insecurity, even as we see all the little joys he takes in life in Rome). The friend tells him:

  “The anger occupies so much space in your life, there’s very little energy left for anything else. So if you create areas of interest for you, like empathy for people, you’re involved in their lives — energy flows there, so there is less energy for the anger.”

  “Look, we are like lost fucking souls. Your soul is hanging off the fucking tree, or it’s over there, and you have to get it back. And by becoming human, but joining with the other gods, slowly it accommodates itself in its own fucking time. And you become your own self, and you give yourself your dignity, not she. Then the co-dependency ends there.”

• BRB, making more coffee.

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Current/Recent Reading

The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

“I shrugged, uncomfortable. To say I was interested in blue sheep or snow leopards, or even in remote lamaseries, was no answer to his question, though all of that was true; to say I was making a pilgrimage seemed fatuous and vague, though in some sense that was true as well. And so I admitted that I did not know. How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?”

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

“I will be your maternal wife, your long-lost twin sister found at last. And once I am married to all your anxieties, once everything you were looking for and did not find has returned to me, then you will become lost in my mystical sub-stance, in my nonexistence, in my breast where all things founder, in my breast where all souls are extinguished, in my breast where even the gods vanish.”

I’m also keeping up with my daily chapter of The Man Without Qualities.

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

My Wed-Sun workout routine went totally kablooey. We were in Louisiana Wednesday, so no weights. Thursday I got my yoga workout in after we got home from the trip. Friday I was in NYC all day for those Instax shoots + cosmic convergence, and wasn’t up for it after getting home in the evening (I did walk 6+ miles in the city). I didn’t get my yoga workout in Saturday because of MOAR INSTAX, but hope to do weights today for the first time in a week. I’m still looking okay, but need to get back into the routine. Maybe I’ll work out Mon-Fri this week & get out for a run or two.

Here’s today’s morning (coffee) grind

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! Even though it’ll be New Year’s Day, I think I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode & some Instax pix, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.

Never for money, always for love / Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight,