in and out of noo yawk ceedeh

[this is a section of an originally longer post]

The surf on Long Beach Island is usually placid, but this week was different. I’m not sure if there was a storm off the coast or what, but the waves were enormous. One of my great pleasures in life is swimming in high surf, so I was hooked. I wound up spending almost a full week at Barnegat Light, swimming in the ocean and stealing wireless off the beach houses to update the blog. The first few days were sunny, but towards the end of the week a thick mist rolled in, blanketing the coast with white for the rest of the week. It was the very beginning of the off-season, which is apparently the deadest part of the year. All the restaurants were closed and most of the houses vacated, and I had almost the entire beach to myself. The surf, however, continued at full force throughout the week. It was a tricky sort of surf, smaller waves leading you far out only to be crushed beneath the pulverizing masses of water that crashed beyond the first breakers. Intermittently, the big ones would come in close, tricking event the more cautious swimmer. The day before I left, a woman was led from the water stunned, bleeding from the lip and sporting a big bump on the back of her neck.

Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!

...


Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.

Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.

The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.

...

Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.

running to the sea

My overall thrust was to the east; my sister had arranged for a video to one of my songs, and although my presence was entirely extraneous, I wanted to be there for the shoot in Manhattan. In the meantime, I had a week and a half to kill, so I decided to work my way through the northeast portions of Pennsylvania. This took me first to the coalmining regions where I had begun the project, and then into areas with somewhat more diversified economies, but ultimately similar stories. As I drove east, the monopoly of coal was gradually undermined by the appearance of cement factories and steel mills. Nevertheless, the towns mostly looked the same: desperate little affairs, doggedly clinging to the sides of darkly wooded hills. Many of these communities were dragged down with their crashing industries, and now lie in varying degrees of depressed isolation. A few found creative ways to survive and sometimes even reinvent themselves. The strange little town of Jim Thorpe is probably foremost amongst these.

Originally known as Mauch Chunk, Jim Thorpe was briefly home to the athlete of the same name. Thorpe got his start in Pennsylvania, attending college in Carlisle. He was one of those rare super-athletes who comes along perhaps once a century. The first intimations of his extraordinary talent came when he walked past Carlisle’s high jumpers with a 5’9” impromptu jump in plain clothes. He went on to be a star competitor in pentathlon, decathlon, American football, baseball, and basketball. He was a multi-Olympic medalist, and as a Sac and Fox Native American, he fought his whole life to overcome discrimination that threatened his career and family. Towards the end of his life, he descended into alcoholism and depression, and died more or less penniless. The town of Mauch Chunk, at a loss as to how to overcome the economic difficulties following the fall of the Lehigh Coal Company, struck a deal with his family to rename the town and set up an elaborate monument to him in order to attract tourism – even though he never actually lived in Mauch Chunk. The trick seemed to work; Jim Thorpe is today a bustling mountain community, a surreal contrast to its neighboring communities.

Passing further east, I came to Allentown. This is the old capital of the Pennsylvania steel industry, and while it went into a deep depression following the collapse of American steel, it remains the third biggest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. After immortalizing the city in a song, Billy Joel was awarded the key to the city over the protests of some residents. Driving through, I felt like I was right back in Harrisburg. I bumbled about the town trying to find the access to 495 so I could continue further south and east, and after passing promising but somewhat ramshackle public monuments and plazas, I found myself in the ghetto. The transformation was extraordinary. After traveling for weeks through the countryside of Pennsylvania and New York and seeing almost entirely white people, the population was once again entirely black. I could have convinced myself I had just stumbled into a section of Allison Hill that I had never known existed. There were the same streets with the same houses and the same trash. There was suddenly rap on the radio and on the sidewalk, children playing on the stoop, big fat ladies with hoop earrings and shorts in plastic chairs watching them from the porch, grandfathers in hats tottering over the pedestrian crosswalks with canes, and packs of young men slouching about with game in their lope and a desperate territorialism in their eyes, leaning forward to step ahead and reaching back to pull up their pants. One looked up and pierced his menacing, carefully delinquent gaze through the windshield of my van. Our eyes locked immediately in the age-old contest that grips young men together in rivalry down every generation, igniting the jealous spirit of a mountain ram within blood long-brewed for just this purpose, ripe and ready in the razor thin margin of a single glance to spur even the most pacifistic into locking horns. I made a point of holding his gaze until my van rolled off his block. It felt familiar.

The next intersection, however, led me out of the neighborhood and into a small shopping center. A middle-aged blonde woman sat on the grass beside the parking lot screaming gibberish at the passing traffic. I doubled back to try and surreptitiously record her ranting, but when I made it back around the block, she had calmed down. Immediately after, I saw signs for 495, and was once again launched into the countryside.

I arrived that night in Philadelphia, stayed with my sister and set off the next morning into New Jersey. I wanted to hit the Jersey shore in the off-season, and I had come at the right time. The highways to the coast are satisfyingly flat and uncurving, shooting straight through the heart of the garden state to meet the sea. I was about halfway there when I realized I had left a vital piece of recording equipment at my sister’s, said a very bad word and doubled back, just in time to meet the beginning rush hour into Philadelphia. I didn’t really mind, though; it felt good to be driving. I cranked up “Sweet Child of Mine” on the radio and jostled my way through the close-packed cars, singing loudly and grinning all the way. After picking up the abandoned equipment, I turned around again and retraced my steps, now catching the other end of rush hour. By the time I was back on the straight-shooting Jersey throughway, it was dusk. The length of the highway, scores of cars passed me going the other way, but I was almost alone on the east-bound side. I drove fast and smiled into the cold wind and coming headlights, enjoying my solitary speed on the eastbound track. I drove and drove, the road never seeming to alter or waver, gunning due east as the sun burned down behind me and the night grew ahead. I finally started seeing signs for the coast after dark, and navigated my way onto Long Beach island, a long, narrow lancet of earth jousting out from the mainland into the Atlantic. It was a strip of tiny seaside resort towns, now deserted at the beginning of the off-season. I zipped over their darkened streets, all the way to Barnegat Light, the last town on the island. By this time, the night air was heavy with salt, and lights were restricted to a space only a little wider than the highway, betraying the massive, black expanse of the sea beyond. I pulled onto one of the cross streets and drove a short way until it ended in a rising sand dune. Parking the car at the edge of the asphalt, I jumped out stripped down to my boxers, leaving a trail of clothes on the street. I ran up the dune, my bare feet pounding the sand and the cold wind buffeting my skin. Just a little bit further over the rise, and there it pulled into view, the ocean. Or rather, everything else disappeared, and I knew the ocean had to be there because nothing else was. A beach extended a long way forward to end in an inconceivably huger blackness, an unexplainable bulge of void stretching the length of my vision and the extent of the horizon. It swallowed everything, even the sky, with the lights of the whole nation to my back shrieking shrilly into the night and then dissipating, losing themselves in a truer black than one can see on land, a primordial black punctuated only by bright, hard stars. I was pulled the whole way from Philadelphia by that primal thrust that drives men to the sea, which challenges, draws, confounds and drowns us. It pulls us inexorably in, perhaps with some inborn memory or lightless intimation that this wet black hole is where we came from if we look back far enough, that our furthest fathers dragged their cold bodies from its depths before they had feet to walk or minds to understand their travels. And now, grains in the sands of evolution, we are driven back, again not entirely understanding why but irresistibly pulled by the enormity of millennia, by secrets whispered and roared in wild voices we could surely comprehend if we but listened. And I was completing the last few yards of this journey on foot, running at dead sprint down the long, cool beach, the shadow before me growing and extending until I could hear it, and then feel it meet my legs with a cold splash, and suddenly I was part of a new physics, the world was swirling, indistinct, and cold, and I was at the mercy of a far, alien universe that drew me in and picked me up, sent me under and thrashed me about, churning with a vast invisible power that did not know me and yet inspired everything that was its reflection within me. I felt explosions of strength and ferocity and sadness within me with every crash of cold, buffeting water, and swam out into the void until I could not feel anything beneath my feet but water, and met the extent of the secrets she was willing to share with me. Then I returned to the shore and walked back up the beach, exhausted.