SATURDAY IN NEW YORK WITH ALLISON

A cold crisp grey day. Sheila kind of weather. My friend Kate and I have discussed at length our preference for autumn as opposed to summer. While everybody else blisses out with the onset of warm sunny weather, she and I bliss out when the skies cloud over, the leaves dry up, and we bust out the sweaters. Kate puts it this way, "There's no irony in the summer." Well said.

I arrived this morning at my friend Allison's apartment in the West Village, to find her deeply engrossed in Helter Skelter, a book I have read multiple times, and with which I have a strange and sick fascination. Allison and I were trying to pinpoint why exactly it is that we are so engrossed by such a grisly terrible story. We discussed it at length, lolling about in her cozy pillow-y bed, flipping through the book for reference. I am fascinated (there's that word again) by the Manson Family for the same reasons that I am fascinated by totalitarian, autocratic, fascist, communist regimes. What is it in human beings, some human beings, that make them susceptible to such madmen? What is it like to be in someone's thrall like that?

I found Allison in a state of recent and fevered conversion to the Helter Skelter madness. We signed on, and began to search the Internet for more information. For example: where is Clem right now? Has Clem been paroled? And Bobby Beausoleil...what has he been up to? We learned that Patricia Krenwinkle has recently received a puppy, through a special prison program which allows inmates to adopt animals. How sweet...to allow a ferocious murderess to cuddle a little puppy. Squeaky Fromme still corresponds with Charlie. FREAKS. Allison and I got sucked into the strange world of Manson Web sites...going deeper and deeper and deeper. We veered a couple of times into the world of the Zodiac Killer and Jonestown.

Allison said, "If my work ever saw the search terms on my computer, they would think I had gone crazy. 'Dead bodies'...'Sharon Tate' ... 'serial killers'..."

The last time Allison and I hung out together in her apartment, we started looking things up in the dictionary. It began simply, but the game evolved. Eventually, it became a guessing game: one of us would call out a name from history, say...Madame Curie, or Theodore Roosevelt ... and we would guess whether or not said person had a PICTURE beside their definition in the dictionary. This may sound like a dry and academic game, but we ended up in complete hysterics. It occupied our time for 2 hours.

Finally, we had to shake off the pall of the Mansons and Spahn Ranch and Shorty Shea's decapitation and Susan Atkins' crazy loony smile...and how haunted we are by the children fathered by Manson....WHERE ARE THEY?? We signed off reluctantly, and rejoined the life of the West Village. We went to Chumley's and had delicious Bloody Marys, and some lunch...we accidentally set a newspaper on fire. This is in a bar run by firemen; the bartenders are firemen, the clientele are firemen...Firemen are everywhere in sight. Meanwhile, Allison and I are battling to put out the flaming New York Post, and none of the firemen around us even look up, or glance over, or even bat an eye. We were on our own.

We returned home and watched Moulin Rouge. We LIVED it. During the gun debacle at the end of the film, during the "Spectacular Spectacular" extravaganza, Allison screamed at the top of her lungs, "THE GUN!! THE GUN!!" Allison and I looked through her book of Toulouse Lautrec prints. Marvelling. Beautiful. What must it have been like...

We sat out on Allison's fire escape, trying to keep the candles lit through the wind. Sugary air from the Magnolia Bakery below floating up to us.

And now? We are basically killing time until Trading Spaces comes on at 8 p.m. A perfect Saturday night in New York.

  contact Sheila Link: 10/19/2002 07:24:00 PM

 
And the final quote of the morning:

"I have an uncanny ability to know when a blimp is in town." -- Hunter, at Dempsey's Pub on the Lower East Side, last week

  contact Sheila Link: 10/19/2002 08:39:00 AM

 
A couple of quotes to start the day:

"I never shall shine, 'til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers." - John Adams, in 1760, at the age of 25


And here's another quote:
"Wars complicate matters: there is a fascinating aspect to war which tends to drown out less inflammatory news. Conflict is a notoriously difficult thing to convey accurately. Fighting comes and goes; and modern conflicts can be peculiarly sullen and capricious beasts, moving with an unpredictable will of their own. Key battles are fought overnight and absorbed into the landscape. Even a so-called war zone is not necessarily a dangerous place; seldom is a war as all-encompassing as the majority of reports suggest. Countries and cultures do not simply draw to a halt in a period of conflict; there are the falls of shells, and there is the silence between them.

Yet there was a deeper obstacle to discovering the place: Afghanistan did not really exist. It was, more accurately, a fractured jewel, yielding a spectrum as broad or narrow as the onlooker's gaze. Even in peacetime Afghanistan had been open to outsiders for only a brief chapter in modern history, that ruined island of time from the 1960s until the catastrophe of the Soviet occupation. To outsiders it had seemed more of a fairytale than a real place: it had never been a single country but a historically improbably amalgam of races and cultures, each with its own treasures of custom, languages and visions of the world; its own saints, heroes and outlaws, an impossible place to understand as a whole.

For the generations of sandalled, bangled wanderers that made up the vanguard of travellers of the era, Afghanistan was the farthest-out place on earth, a no-rules, dirt-cheap trip of a place where you could get turned on and strung out -- permanently, if that was your thing -- on inexhaustible supplies of the world's purest hashish and opium, and nobody would seem to mind.

The effect on archaeologists was hardly less mind-boggling: the entire country was an unexplored treasure-trove. Ruined Greek cities were discovered far beyond what were formerly thought to be the limits of the Hellenized world, and hoards of garbled artefacts suggesting unlikely fusions and cross-fertilizations of culture were unearthed by the thousand. The place had no parallel. Greek, Persian, Indian and central Asian gods mingled in divine historical collusion. Even Afghanistan's Paleolithic toolmakers were described as the Michelangelos of the prehistoric age.

Across the harsh and beautiful backdrop of the land historians traced the staging-posts of the world's empire-builders and their undoers, while philologists marvelled over the abundance of arcane languages and their dialects, many undeciphered to this day.

Seekers of wisdom too, both the serious and the starry-eyed, sought the counsel of Sufi mystics or their imitators. Afghanistan was the spiritual heartland of Asia, the historical nexus of converging streams of mystical knowledge: Buddhist, Islamic, Zoroastrian and Shamanic. There was an otherworldy character to Afghanistan, reflected in the pleasant anarchy of life, the medieval civility of its people's manners and their self-consciuous but unaffected aloofness from the modern world. Its landscape was prehistoric, untamed, lit by a purifying light, a world that had escaped from time." -- Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light

  contact Sheila Link: 10/19/2002 08:38:00 AM

 
FASCINATING FASCINATING FASCINATING FASCINATING

Just re-read my last post and wonder if I could possibly use the word "fascinating" with any more frequency.

  contact Sheila Link: 10/19/2002 08:18:00 AM

 
INTRODUCING ME. SORT OF.

John Cusack, in "High Fidelity", states to the camera, rather defensively (and I'm paraphrasing), "People ARE the books they like, the movies they like, the music they like. This isn't trivial stuff." I adhere to this philosophy wholeheartedly. If someone's favorite book is Catcher in the Rye, then it means something. If someone prefers "The Empire Strikes Back" to "Star Wars", then it means something. I daresay it means everything.

So along those lines ...

Books I am reading now:
In Siberia, by Colin Thubron. A fascinating addition to his Russian trilogy. Learning about Siberia is fascinating, etc., but I believe that his The Lost Heart of Asia is the best of the series. He travels through the remote "stans"...from Turkmenistan to Tajikstan, while they were still under the yoke of the former USSR. A fantastic read.

The new biography of John Adams. Truly, this is a must-read. Even though the book will add 4 pounds to your backpack.

An Area of Darkness, by V.S. Naipaul. A travelogue through India by Naipaul, who is from Trinidad. His response to India is mixed, personal, biased, and beautifully written. I have read both his books on the world of the converts to Islam, the non-Arabs (Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia): Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. The first book, Among the Believers , was written in 1979, immediately following the Iranian revolution. The second book, written in the mid-1990s, involves Naipaul revisiting the four countries he had traveled through in the first book, trying to track down the people he had encountered the first time around, to see how Islam might have transformed in the twenty years gone by. You will not forget the stories he tells, the people you meet in his pages. Naipaul is unabashedly critical of radical Islam. As an intellectual, he abhors the lack of critical inquiry which comes along with any kind of fundamentalism. He asks very difficult questions which have yet to be answered.

In the wake of the bombings in Bali, I picked up both of these books in the past week to read Naipaul's chapters on Indonesia, which was a fascinating and chilling experience. Of course, retrospect provides such knowledge and righteousness: "Well, it was obvious what was coming there!" Naipaul is a visionary. A cynical visionary. These books are essential reading, especially right now.

I have moved away from fiction recently. The two fiction books I have read in 2002 have been Ulysses (which basically has ruined most other books for me...it just doesn't get any better than that...) and The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon. Chabon created such vivid characters that I did not want to finish the book, because I knew I would have to say goodbye to those people.

My favorite book of all time is Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley. If my soul could take a book-form, it would read like Hopeful Monsters.

To be continued...

  contact Sheila Link: 10/18/2002 08:06:00 PM