Dear Heather,

I was feeling kind of blue and isolated in Greensboro, even though it had been almost a year since I moved down here from Toronto to be with my husband. In a desperate attempt to help me, he sat me down at the registrar’s office of Guilford Technological Community College on his lunch break and told me to pick out some continuing education classes. He’d say, “Do you want to do this one? Well?” And I’d say, “I don’t know.” It was that bad.

Could I really sew? Did I want to learn finances? Did I still hate computers? Then, under the music section, there was a course called “The History of the Rolling Stones.” I couldn’t believe it! Usually, the closest thing a school would offer would be the history of jazz, something like that. I couldn’t believe it was the Stones being offered and not the Beatles. I had those kinds of feelings. I went home and marked up my calendar. For the other courses, I used stars and circles, but for the Stones class I used hearts. The Stones’ “Hot Rocks” album was the first album I ever bought. I was in grade nine. I got the money off my mom. I bought it at one of those strip mall places. I remember I didn’t like it that much the first few times I listened to it and then I loved it. I don’t know how that happens.

When the Stones came to Toronto at the Dome for the Steel Wheels tour, I called up right at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning and got four tickets. I got pretty good seats. I took my friend Mary and two of my younger brothers to “educate” them. My uncle gave us a lift down to the concert. He had gotten free tickets way up in the bleachers and was trying to emotionally blackmail me for my tickets and there was just no way. My brothers and my friend and I had McDonalds before the Stones came on. I remember stuffing the french fries into a smile. When the Stones came on, we stood on our chairs and I danced and shook my brothers from time to time. I got my period and leaked the whole time through the back of my jeans but I covered it with my lumber jacket and no one ever found out.

Who was going to show up at this Rolling Stones class? It’s been a challenge in this town to find women my age (late twenties) with no kids. My husband loves the Stones too but he wasn’t too into the idea of paying to hear about them. Going to the first class, I had that pre-concert feeling. The teacher, Rob Cassell, was in a business suit and had a briefcase and he shook my hand. He said, “I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is the class has been cancelled because there weren’t enough people and I think last time I did this class the college got some morality complaints, I don’t know. The good news is I’m going to hold it anyway in my office and you will get your money back and it will be free.”

Slowly the rest of the students piled in. They were all over forty. Three men – Mike, Bob and Scott – and a woman named Robyn. Robyn was great. She handed out big Stones tongue stickers to us right away. She even reminded me of a female version of Mick Jagger, with the layered hair and big red lips. But is this something you can say to a woman? Who were the men? It turned out that Mike leases out the storage space that my husband rents for his band studio. Bob works for one of the banks in town. All I know about Scott is that he lived for a year in Argentina in the sixties, and that’s where he heard a lot of rock music as it was coming out.

After about half an hour, we all drove over to Rob’s office on the fifth floor of an office building, which is where we still have our classes. He is a mortgage broker with baseball pictures all over the walls and he lectures us about the Stones in his leather chair behind a big wooden desk. He reads typed pages out in a very animated way. And at the end of a section, he asks us the same question, “Any questions or comments?” It’s all very familiar by now and it feels like home. I convinced my husband to come to class and he got his bandmates to come and it’s a really good time.

We’ve been going through the Stones’ history year by year for two months, and we’re only at 1969. My favourite parts are always the details, the little things. Learning that the band photo on Aftermath was achieved by smearing vaseline on the lens filter and that Aftermath was originally supposed to be called, “Could You Walk on the Water?” but that was too much for the record company. Apparently, the pool where Brian Jones died was stripped and the tiles are being sold individually to the highest bidder on eBay.

Rob went on a Rolling Stones tour in England last summer and he brought to class an album full of photos he took, including: the railway station where Mick and Keith ran into each other for the first time and bonded over the albums Mick was carrying, Brian Jones’s grave, the new Mick Jagger Center with the words “Mick Jagger Center” in bold pink and black letters taking up a third of the building, the Marquee club where the band played, Olympic Studios where they recorded “Beggar’s Banquet” and “Let It Bleed” and various houses where the band members lived at different times. The photos of Brian Jones’s house where he died all have this little white square in the top left part that none of Rob’s other photos have. We decided it is Brian’s ghost.

Last week, we had a pre-election and we all threw our votes into an empty trashcan. It was pretty close. One vote for Nader, four votes for Gore and four votes for Bush. How can a Rolling Stones fan vote for Bush? someone asked. The Stones cut across the entire spectrum, Rob assured us.

Rob has collected a lot of bootlegs over the years. For one class, he brought in the Stones doing the London pop TV show “Ready Steady Go”. In the middle of the show there was a segment with the boys doing a pantomime version of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” with the host of the show. Keith pretended to play the tuba and made funny faces while Bill and Charlie slow-danced together. It was hilarious.

When I look around that room where we meet, I’m both very present and very transported. Scott knows the answer to every question. Bob shows up even though his neck is in a brace. Bob and Scott actually take notes. Mike’s been having weird amnesia spells lately where he doesn’t know where he is and we hope he’ll be all right. Scott brings his wife Brenda now and they’ve been married twenty-five years and she bakes us brownies. Rob is going through a long drawn-out divorce which he always shakes his head and smiles about. Every time we see Mick Jagger on video, Robyn belts out, “I’m sorry but Mick Jagger can’t dance, he’s got NO rhythm.” And I like the song, “I Am Waiting.” Somehow I completely missed that song before this class.

Love,
Golda

Dear Christine,

It all started in mid-January when I took the bus to Scranton to visit Jason for a couple of days. We watched Don’t Look Now with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie that night. It wasn’t as scary as I’d thought it would be but I totally fell for the spooky-creepy-seductive totally romantic Veniceness I’d barely experienced when I was there with Nicholas in April. Nicholas got so fed up with the fact that I hated Venice. We nearly broke up there, and then again, strangely, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, six months later.

There was this one other weird Venice thing: while we were there, Nicholas and I decided to take the train to Milan one day, to go to a gallery opening our friend Sergio was having. We got fighting on the train about something or other, and I remember feeling bad afterwards, and sewing the letter “N” into his Brooks Brothers handkerchief with the needle and blue thread in my travel sewing kit. Then I took a couple of pictures of him while he glared at me, then when he fell asleep I drew him, and the old lady standing by the window.

Back in Toronto when I picked up my pictures from Loblaws I remember looking at them in the parking lot and getting a really creepy feeling when I came to one of the pictures of Nicholas glaring at me. In the background, through a glass doorway, I could make out the figure of the woman I’d drawn in my sketchbook, but beside her there was a very strange face. It looked like a profile of an old man, but the eyes were sunken and black and shiny and he had an enormous curving brow and then this really inhumanly long nose. It felt really Venetian in an eerie, religious, gnomes-and-rot-and-age-and-death bad way. It totally terrified me and I couldn’t look at it for a while.

I showed the picture to a few people and they were all freaked out by it too. Finally I brought it over to the scanning department at work and asked them if they could scan the negative and change the exposure in Photoshop. I hoped they’d brighten it and the face would turn out to be a child holding a balloon or something. Phoebe scanned it in and even on her screen, despite the brightening and tweaking, the awful face didn’t appear as anything different. Charles heard our screaming and nervous laughter and came over. He took one look at it and saw the trick: the creature’s face was actually the side of the woman’s head: the beady eye was her earring, the brow her hairline, and the nose the collar of her coat.

I still can’t look at the picture without seeing the monster though, and I wonder if there isn’t something in this trick of the eye, something about seeing only the bad that reminds me of the fights Nicholas and I used to have. It isn’t that I didn’t understand what was there, but my eyes always saw the monster before the lady.

So back to Scranton. After the movie, Jason and I really felt like making something. We decided we’d plan a hotel-room party at the Marriot Marquis later that week and we made some invitations – one of my drawings of somebody air-guitaring done on a piece of acetate printed over a picture Jason took of an empty hotel room. Jason made about twenty-five prints in the darkroom while I tried to quit my job via e-mail.

We still couldn’t go to sleep after that, so we started taking pictures of ourselves with my camera and the new flash Derek gave me for Christmas. That night we started out imitating Irving Penn shots: He was Balthus, I was Nusch Eluard; he was De Kooning, I was Dovima; etc.; full costume, full hair and makeup, but then I realized there was no film in the camera. So we abandoned that idea and decided to just dance in front of the black seamless we’d set up. We put “Can You Get To That” by Funkadelic on repeat. I found some film, loaded the camera, set it to self-timer, and we took roll after roll of ourselves dancing.

It was 7 a.m. by the time we ran out of film and we were so tired and could barely talk or smoke and so we brushed our teeth and went to sleep.

I developed the film at Loblaws when I got back to Toronto. I picked the prints up before work one morning and I started looking at them while I was driving up the Don Valley Parkway. I nearly crashed I was laughing so hard.

I decided I really wanted to see other people dancing too. We sent out a call for dancing-session participants, and we did one two-day session in Toronto and one one-night session in Brooklyn. We tried to set it up so that people would dance in total darkness except for when the flash went. It was pretty nice to see from behind the camera. Jason and I would be looking into a black void and then one of us would arbitrarily release the shutter: there’d be the satisfying loud pop of the strobe and a flash of white light. In the seconds that followed I could see the picture perfectly in the darkness.

Jason processed and contacted all of the film in Scranton one weekend and sent the stuff up to me. He’d made two copies of every sheet and we went over each of them on the phone. They came out pretty much as planned, but in the end we were a little disappointed. We had been so professional about it, and we’d spent hundreds of dollars renting equipment and buying water and KFC for everyone, but despite all of our planning, or maybe even because of it, there was something about the photos that didn’t feel very fun. Either that or we just got bored looking at them because they weren’t of us.

But there was this one other roll that Jason and I had shot in between appointments during the Toronto sessions: more self-portraits – but of course. Jason would close his eyes and snap the picture while I did whatever in front of the camera. Then we’d switch places and double-expose the film. This roll – surprise, surprise – was much more satisfying.

I miss you,

Love,

Leanne

Dear Stacy,

When the Go-Betweens got back together and recorded a new album, I entertained fantasies of writing something about it. My first thought was to pitch it to Rolling Stone. I’d written an essay for them recently, and for reasons too elaborate to go into here, I’ve lately resurrected dormant fantasies of being a “rock writer.” The truth is it’ll never happen. I’m too paralyzed by reverence, both for the musicians and for writers like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, and conscious anyway that research and interviewing aren’t really my strengths. Plus I suspect, or at least don’t understand, my own motives. But my reasons for not pitching a Go-Betweens piece weren’t only generic ones. They were strong and specific and they far outweighed the self-aggrandizing urge to announce myself in public as the Go-Betweens’ biggest fan, or to meet the band. In a sort of Dylanesque “my weariness amazes me” way I found myself compelled by my own resistance to writing or thinking about the Go-Betweens reunion – to even buying the new record – compelled to such a degree that I began to want to write about that.

Before I start, I need to say that this form is strange. I hope it’s not too soon for Open Letters to run a letter which acknowledges the existence of Open Letters. I’ve always had trouble with “sincere” first-person anyway, except in genuinely personal letters, ones with a single recipient in mind, and I don’t remotely know how to pretend this isn’t written for publication. It seems to me you’ve invented a very odd and exemplary new form, one which I find irresistible to read and consistently disingenuous: the fake private. It’s very “web-like,” I think, and if I were a better abstract thinker I’d tell you what I mean by that. Maybe it would even sustain a labored comparison to “Survivor.” All I can say for sure is that when I wrote that bit above about “self-aggrandizing urge to announce myself in public the Go-Betweens’ biggest fan,” I’d stepped into a very odd writerly space, because though unlike a Rolling Stone piece this won’t be read by teenagers stealing free reads from Borders’ magazine racks, it will be read by most everyone I know in New York.

Anyway, here’s why I can’t write about the Go-Betweens reunion.

1. The Go-Betweens are my favorite band. I listened to them in two distinct periods in my life: in the mid-eighties, when they existed and when I was living in California, and in the mid-late-nineties, when their entire messy, elusive catalog was reissued on CD for the first time. Their songs are characterized by a complexity and self-awareness I want to call literary – in fact I’ll do that. Their songs are beautiful and strange and emotional, but a lot of rock and roll is like that. The Go-Betweens are also smart and hesitant and not obvious. Not so much rock and roll is like that. There are a lot of historical facts surrounding the production of these songs: the punk context (they began in the late seventies, couldn’t play their instruments at first, etc.) and the fact that they’re from Australia but took up residence in England. I care and I don’t care. I just don’t want to shift my attention from the enduring, rewarding confusion of being the songs’ devoted listener.

2. I have notions about the people in the band which are probably false, but they matter to me. Robert Forster and Grant McClennan are the Lennon/McCartney team at the heart of the band: they both write songs, they write some together, and they both sing. The third original member was a drummer named Lindy, and she’s not on the reunion record. In my mind – and this is gleaned from reading bits of journalism about the band and from seeing them live, once, which I’ll talk about in a minute – the friendship between these three people is beautiful and complicated. In a rich, fascinating evolution over the course of the six “original” Go-Betweens records these three people welcomed four new members (and learned to play their instruments), but that triangle always felt to me like the band’s emotional and musical core.

3. Triangle, a key word. Here comes my falsely private confession: I’ve always imagined that Robert Forster and Grant McClennan were each Lindy’s boyfriend in turn, and that the difficulties and ambiguities of this long arrangement and disarrangement are the impenetrable knot at the core of the music, the mystery that keeps me coming back. I know that the rock band love-triangle is a Fleetwood Mac cliché, but glimpsed (if I’m right that I glimpsed it) through the prism of the Go-Betweens sensibility, it felt profound to me. In the eighties, when the band existed, when I saw them play live, my own life was shaped by a long, devoted love triangle – one which persisted, though it was never static. I won’t say anything more about this, except that if we three had been a band our six albums would have sounded as different from one another as the Go-Betweens’ did. And we would have been as unmistakably the same band playing.

4. In Berkeley I lived on Chestnut Street, three blocks from a homely rock club called Berkeley Square. Every poor, scraping-along act touring California would get stuck there for a night, and it was rarely a full house. For years of afternoons I’d sit at home writing with the radio tuned to KALX, the college radio station, and when they gave away tickets to shows at the Berkeley Square I’d call up and answer a trivia question and get my name on the list, then walk over a few hours later and see the show. I’m good at trivia. I saw the Proclaimers and the Violent Femmes and the Throwing Muses there, along with other bands whose names I’ve forgotten. I was once one of literally five people at Berkeley Square for a My Bloody Valentine show on a Tuesday – we stood at the lip of the stage and endured the harshest volume I’ve ever experienced. When the announcement came that the Go-Betweens – an Australian band, whose very existence seemed mythical – were coming to the Berkeley Square I don’t know whether I purchased or won my ticket, only that I wouldn’t have missed it, you know, for the world. They played to about twenty-five or thirty people, a loosely-packed herd of worshipers, but our worship couldn’t console the Go-Betweens, not this night. They were at the end of a tour that must have been some kind of disaster, and twenty-five bookstore clerks in Berkeley weren’t going to turn it around. The band had been arguing, I think, before the show even began, and Lindy, the drummer, the original Go-Between, had been drinking. Really drinking, so she was lurching and obvious and couldn’t keep time. By the fourth or fifth song Robert and Grant were both glaring at her in turn, and expressly showing her their hands on the guitars to try to dictate the tempo. The violinist, another woman, wouldn’t look at her. They were miserable. They made it through a song, argued again, and then Lindy stormed off, between the two singers, towards the bar. She weaved. At the bar she got something – another drink? Water? Carrying it she lurched back to the stage, and as she moved through the crowd she brushed me, a butt-against-lap-swipe, the kind which happens late at night at crazy parties, when intentions are blurry. I know this seems ridiculous, but it happened. She was taunting one or both of the men onstage by making physical contact with men in the audience, and in the small, loosely-populated room it was apparent that it was having an effect, though what sort I wouldn’t presume to say. The horrible intimacy, the unexpected access to the band’s unhappiness, was wrenching. It was also terribly sexy – I learned something that night about how vivid a smashed woman can be.

5. Lindy, as I said, isn’t on the new record. I bought it and took it home today, and I listened to the first three songs in the car before I started crying, for myself and who-knows-else, and took it off. “The Go-Betweens” are now Robert Forster and Grant McClennan and a bunch of names I don’t recognize (they’ve also got the help of Sleater-Kinney, a good sign, probably, in a general sense). Now, forget love triangles for a minute, there’s something I’ve always liked about Led Zeppelin’s refusal to exist for even one minute after John Bonham’s death. And I’d always felt the opposite about The Who – that they betrayed their audience by carrying on after Keith Moon. And that the saddest single fact about the Beatles’ decline was that Paul McCartney played drums on some of the tracks on the White Album. Poor Ringo. I mean, songwriters come and go, but the drummer is the band. I’ll certainly play this record, and I may come to like it, but I guess if I had to give you one reason why I’m not going to try to write about the Go-Betweens reunion, it’s that I’m carrying a torch for Lindy. Her name isn’t even in the thank yous. There’s a story there, I know there is, and the thing is, having come as far as I have with the idea of the Go-Betweens standing in for so much I’ve felt and lost, I don’t want to know it.

Best,

Jonathan

Hello Andee,

When we first moved to Chicago, in mid-August, I decided that I would avoid, at all costs, paying my rent via a job that entailed substantial alphabetizing. I’d had enough, it was time for bigger and better things. No record store job, no bookstore job, no way, no how. About a week later I found myself behind the counter at Reckless Records on Broadway, having realized that resistance was futile, consoling myself with the fact that at least I wouldn’t be wearing a name tag, having to “dress up” for work, or handling other people’s food.

I pretty much knew what I was getting into – I’ve worked at five record stores in four cities – but somehow, at Reckless, everything seems magnified. The regulars are crazier, the hipsters are hipper, the wanna-be white boy gangstas from the suburbs are more ridiculous, the cranks are crankier, and fans of everything from Insurgent Country to Experimental Psychedelia to Bubblegum Pop are even more desperate and devoted to their genre.

At Reckless I sell more records to people my parents’ age than I ever have before. I sell more records to transsexuals. I sell records to people visiting from farther away. I definitely sell more Used Heavy Metal Cassettes than I ever have before in my life, mostly to Johnny, who comes in every day to check out our used-heavy-metal-cassette new arrivals. (Johnny wears a royal blue hat with the Blistex logo on it – yes, the lip-soothing gunk – and often brings along his mother, who is about four feet tall and wears neither front teeth nor dentures. He knows everyone’s name and seems nice enough during transactions, but rumor has it he also wears a bunch of Nazi-inspired tattoos on his back.)

These days, though, it seems like all I do is sell “Kid A.”

I happened to be scheduled to work on October 3, the day Radiohead’s new record, “Kid A,” officially became available to the public. My shift started about an hour after the store opened; by the time I arrived we had already sold almost two dozen copies of “Kid A.” Five minutes after I slipped behind the counter, my first RadioheadHead approached.

“Do you have the new Radiohead?” she asked, timidly.

She didn’t strike me as someone who would be into Radiohead, if I may claim some experience intuiting these sorts of things. She looked like she was on her way down to the Loop for a power lunch with a pack of CEOs, actually. I thought maybe she was purchasing the CD for her son or daughter, but it became evident as soon as she voiced her request that it was for her.

“Do you have the new Radiohead?”

Of course we had the new Radiohead. I mean, we had hundreds of copies of the thing behind the counter, waiting to be distributed to the masses. I looked at her, prepared to join with her in a sort of shared “Ha ha, isn’t that a silly question” moment, but realized that not only was she serious, she was deathly afraid I’d tell her that we actually didn’t have it, that we’d sold out, that aliens had swung by and abducted our entire supply of “Kid A.” I reached down to the pile of CDs and picked one up and handed it to her. “That’ll be $16.30,” I said, for the first, of many, many times that day. She paid for the CD and thanked me mightily, then left in haste.

Over the next three days we sold about four hundred copies of “Kid A.” It got to the point where I could take one look at certain customers and just say “$16.30.” By the time I’d scan the bar code on the CD, twenty dollars was being held forth and a nervous, relieved grin had spread over the face of the customer who was about to be handed their very own copy of “Kid A.” And by the way, out of all of those customers, not a single person batted an eye at the exorbitant cost of this little old CD. Not a one. Instead, after receiving their change (we should have had pre-bundled piles of $3.70) and receipt, most fled from the store, clutching their newly acquired treasure in hand (“No, no bag, thank you”). I should have put a tip jar on the counter that first morning – I’d probably have funded my next month’s coffee habit from its proceeds by now.

At first I was kind of freaked out by the intensity of the hordes of loyal fans who flocked to the store. Some arrived breathless. Some arrived in what looked like their pajamas. Some bought several copies at once. One person bought six. As I rang up each purchase, I found myself thinking about capitalism, about individuality, about addiction, about lemmings…

But then somehow my perspective changed. Every single “Kid A” seeker seemed genuinely thrilled to be buying a copy. “Kid A” customers were collectively more enthusiastic about this single record than most of the people I deal with all day at the record store are about anything (except for maybe my co-workers, who actually get quite enthusiastic about where to take their lunch breaks). And it was kind of fun being the person who got to give people something they so dearly craved. I thought about how affected I’ve been by certain records in my life, (including Radiohead’s last record, “OK Computer”), and about how I much I truly appreciate the power of music to make a difference in someone’s life. And then I realized that I was being not only a shameless hypocrite but also a textbook Jaded Record Store Employee – something I’ve been trying desperately to avoid in this job, as I am only too aware of how easy a character it is to slip into.

I’m not exactly sure that “Kid A” is worthy of all of the superlatives I’ve been hearing thrown around in discussions (people are really getting carried away). But I was kind of tickled at how easy it was to make so many people happy, at least briefly, simply by taking their $16.30 and handing them a particular collection of sounds, noises, and words, all packaged with icy mountain images and angular horizons.

I mean, how couldn’t I be?

Your friend behind the counter,

Julie

Every day I am a spy for two minutes – and every day I am after a different person. Our paths will never cross again. But that time is long enough for me to sketch the person’s posture, clothing details, accessories, shoe style, bag brand. That’s all I need to create my Daily.

I first noticed the Monday girl’s reddish hair and affirmative shoes. Gradually I noticed how long she stayed in the same place, talking with visible delight to a guy with a buzz cut and a biker jacket. The fog crept over the East Village, she looked cold, but she didn’t want the conversation to end. Crowds buzzed by, funnelling from the 6 and the N and R into St. Mark’s. She seemed the happiest person on Astor Place. I took out my notepad. Then my friend Katherine materialized on her pink bicycle, almost blowing my cover: “I saw you sketching!”

“Ssshhh!” I said, hiding by the cube.

The Dailies are a project I’ve been working on, with occasional interruptions, since February 1999, a couple of months after I first arrived in New York. I was looking for a project, outside regular illustration jobs, that would allow me to respond to the strong stimulations of the city and its people. So far, I’ve drawn dozens and dozens of passersby glimpsed on the street, one a day, in postcard-sized watercolors.

On some days, during lunchtime, the block outside the First Avenue Medinah is solid yellow with double-parked empty cabs, and the Islamic temple’s lobby is flooded with pairs of shoes. But on Tuesday, this East Village believer was marching calmly on an empty sidewalk, the house key dangling behind his back. What caught my attention, other than the striking white beard, was his footgear, an improbable fusion of surfer technology and Muslim attire.

Drawing someone who won’t stop for you is never easy, especially if you’re trying not to be noticed. I’m not ready to address unknowns, explaining my project and asking for a pose they may refuse. But I’m sure taking notes on the shape of one’s shoes hardly counts as an invasion of privacy. Pretending to look somewhere else, I sketch as quickly as I can, proportions as rudimentary as they come, but with lots of notes on colors, brands, details. And I may find myself running for a block after my model, if I forgot to see what kind of collar his coat had. All this feigning to look at the traffic, or checking out my watch…a true burlesque I hope goes mostly unnoticed.

Not noticing it was him who I was drawing, this sentinel at Chelsea’s Comme des Garçons (Wednesday) asked me: “Are you sketching, or just taking notes? Sketching is not allowed in the store.” Comme des Garçons certainly knows a thing or two about pilferage, their store being a rip-off of Richard Serra sculptures. So I understood their effort to stop the chain of plagiarism. Feeling sorry for a gentleman forced to wear such an incomprehensible shirt, I said I was “taking notes.” Then I proceeded to smilingly stare at him for several minutes, memorizing every detail, while he fiddled with his Nokia.

Since the Dailies is a project I do only for myself, I don’t go out of my way searching for specific characters. (I live in the East Village, so my collection reflects a downtown slant I’m aware of; I wish I had time for more expeditions beyond my turf.) Basically, though, it’s normality that captures my attention. My instant models tend to be people I feel I’ve seen before. I go for archetypes, rather than standouts; and I try to skip obvious outsiders. Of course, exceptions occur all the time. In fact, I don’t give it too much thought: more often than not, a mere glance is enough for me to know I found my Daily.

Thursday, Paul Donald and I went to see the The Magnetic Fields at Battery Park. Ever heard them? “69 Love Songs” has been Amy’s and my favorite record this year. As pop bands go, they bring together a remarkable audience of sensitive, polite types, listening in absolute silence to every single word sung by Stephin or Claudia. The only interferences came from passing helicopters, or the ushers’ walkie-talkies: that’s how quiet and mesmerized we all were. Studying the crowd, I kept spotting types, such as the guy with a shirt, tie, and briefcase, his shoes and socks off, standing with his eyes closed. Or this girl, sporting all sorts of distinctive details: flowers tattooed down her spine, the “Free Mumia” button, the high-tech shoes, the cast. It entertained me for a while, trying to guess what happened to her arm.

Jorge

Dear Justin,

The principal at Arizona’s elementary school talked me into teaching a poetry class to a group of students. I had reservations about teaching poetry to children. I believe you have to write without inhibitions to create a beautiful poem. I wondered if this wasn’t in conflict with the school’s agenda to mold the children into considerate and well-behaved individuals who fit harmoniously with the rest of society. I asked for the oldest group of kids, the grade sixes. I figured at least they could read.

I thought they would be my size. In my memory, I attained my actual height at least by grade four. I was surprised by how small they were. I had even less of a notion of what went on in their heads.

During the first class, I decided to let them write their own poems without any suggestions or guidance from me, just to see what they wrote like. They asked if they should write about Halloween, which was coming up. I said, please, no. So they all wrote about Christmas and Hanukkah. The poems all rhymed and some had exactly the same lines. “I am proud of my heritage” was a popular one. There was nothing personal in any of the poems. You couldn’t even tell whether a boy or a girl had written it. What a waste of time, I thought. I was hoping for at least one Alphabet City poet who rapped about cockroaches in her coffee cup and her mother’s middle names. I’d read a funky, radical book about teaching poetry to inner-city New York kids, and they all wrote lines like, “It’s raining apples. How can I avoid temptation?” At twenty-five, I’m a little too young to be a mother or much of an authority figure in the first place. But the kids treated me as if I was a statue they were afraid of.

The night after my first class, I put on my flip-flops and this pin-striped suit I got modeling at some runway show in New York City when I was twenty. I walked to the video store. I was smoking a cigarette and my dog followed me in. He always does that and there’s nothing I can be bothered to do about it. The video-store clerks are used to me and it isn’t anything like an upscale neighborhood. I picked a rental I’d seen before. On the way to the cash I saw a kid named Clyde from my class.

“What movie did you pick,” he asked.

I held up the video that was under my arm, “Gummo.”

“It’s about these kids who are alienated because a tornado hit their town,” I said. “They kill cats and sell them to a Chinese restaurant.”

“Cool, should I rent it?”

“I don’t know. You might be too young for it. Not because of the sex and violence. But it might give you that creepy feeling, like when you see an older couple screaming at each other on the street.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s so cool. I never really thought about it that way,” he said, nodding. “Are you coming again next week?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Good.”

The next class I thought we’d begin by having a discussion about what poetry was. I brought in some of the most contemporary stuff I could find, spoken word rants about television shows and erotic vacuum cleaners and the like. Weird-ass stuff. I said for me a poem was like a photograph that captures a moment of beauty. “You know, like you visualize an isolated frame of time that excites you. It doesn’t have to fit the normal idea of what pretty is.”

“Like what?” asked a girl.

I decided to go for the first thing that popped into my head.

“Sometimes things that people think are ugly are really beautiful. Like children pretending to clean cans in a thrown-out sink.”

I looked at Clyde, who was sitting close to me like I was his buddy. He was wearing a black tie with a gorgeous yellow songbird on it over his T-shirt. He was already writing away. I looked down at the piece of paper in front of him. His poem was called “Love is a Black Dog in a Video Store.” I decided to go with a cinematic example since my ideas about movies were what bonded me and Clyde.

“Like in that movie ‘Taxi Driver.’ The director takes the camera down a tiny sweating hallway, and then there’s a man handing out keys to cheap rooms. He’s wearing a top hat for no reason. There’s something beautiful about that and it has nothing to do with Christmas.”

There was a silence all of a sudden, the kind that only a roomful of kids can produce. I felt a little sweaty. I took off my sweater. They all looked at the tattoo on my shoulder immediately. I felt self-conscious all of a sudden, like I was getting too familiar with them. I quickly put my sweater back on. The damage had already been done. Joseph, this kid with blond hair in his face and sunglasses hanging from the neck of his T-shirt, stood up and pointed his finger at me.

“Are you lookin’ at me?” he said.

Alex began humming “You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings,” as he started to write his poem. There were band-aids on the tips of each of his finger to stop him from biting his fingernails. He peeled one off his middle finger and started chewing happily on the nail. They had nothing to hide from me.

Whereas in the first class they didn’t look at me in the eyes, now they became talkative. Actually, they began to get out of control. They cursed and the boys started making lewd advance to the girls. One boy asked for “poetic license” to punch his best friend in the head.

Then I started reading the poems they were holding out in front of me and sliding across my desk. They had suddenly become open on the paper as well as in the classroom. One had compared feeling good to disco balls, one had written about a raving stepbrother who drank all the orange juice in the house, one had written about his dad letting him sleep out on the balcony in the summer.

Sean pulled out his toenail that he was keeping in his pocket and put it in the center of his table. The other kids scrambled away disgusted.

“Because of this toenail,” he said, “I’m now considered the sickest kid in the school.”

His poem was called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Toilet.” He compared his toilet to his mother’s arm looking through the back of the fridge for a jar of maraschino cherries.

In their writing, their desires and views of themselves were revealed. Take Joseph for instance. He was one of those kids with older brothers, who mysteriously hit puberty too early. He had a sort of Jim Morrison complex. He wrote a poem about wearing leather pants and riding a motorcycle through the desert. There were red snakes curled up on the horizon. He crashed near a motel and ended up overdosing on hashish all alone on the side of the road. Alex wrote a poem about how badly he wanted to have a queen-sized bed. He said his purest desire was to have twelve Japanese women dressed in blue lingerie singing him Britney Spears songs every night.

“Whoa,” I said. “We’re in school. I could go to jail for letting you write that stuff.”

“You said to write about anything,” Alex said.

Laurence, meanwhile, was comparing Salma Hayek’s eyes to faucets leaking grape juice, and he did it in such a simple and moving way. And there was this beautiful and sensitive child in the class named Jake, whose poems were brilliant. He was profoundly deaf and skipped a grade. All the other students seemed mildly oblivious to his existence. Here’s a line from his poem:

Getting dirty is
taking a bath backwards

Your sister,
just watching some city children writing on the wall,

Heather.

Hello, Scott, you wily old man, with your high-lighted hair and your little digital files. I finally received those audio clips, after about an hour of pacing around the attic watching my computer slowly download, waiting for the whole thing to crash. But yes, they all made it through, even the Eminem tracks, which is what I was most worried about. The only time I’m ever going to hear his album is on my computer. There’s no way I can actually walk into an HMV and buy it without feeling extremely dirty. But what would you know? You’re the one who wanted to send me that song where he’s killing his ex-wife. I can’t get past that. I’ll listen, but I won’t listen to track sixteen.

I feel like I’ve crossed some sort of Eminem threshold, though. When the first album was breaking out I had no idea who he was except for the posters on the walls of construction sites downtown. I heard the “Hi My Name Is” single at Cora’s Pizza over on Spadina once while I was ordering, but that was it. Now I’m talking about him all the time – to Sean and Bill, and even to J., who admitted she didn’t know too much about the guy and was more worried about the violence in Cypress Hill albums. I’m not holding it against her, but those guys were mild potheads with a couple bad samples, cartoony like Hammer. Any violence there was incidental. There’s something different about Em.

Did you read that little blurb about him by Ben Greenman in the New Yorker? He said that Eminem’s raps retain “a certain charm in part because of his indisputable poetic abilities and in part because his horrific imaginations seems so patently fictional.” Which is fine to say if you’re Ben Greenman, but I don’t think all of Eminem’s fan base agrees that it’s fiction. Not to say that I’m scared of everyone who listens to the disc. Greenman will probably be fine. I’m more worried about the white kid who doesn’t give a fuck, who isn’t aware of Slim Shady’s poetic meter or his place in a canon that goes back, way back, past Kool Moe Dee even. I’m not pulling a Tipper Gore and getting scared of an entire genre, but I am feeling a little wary.

The other day there was a kid on the bus that I take to work. When I got on, he was squatting down low inside his Ecko pants – the kind with the white reflective strips down the side. His headphones were like yours: those sleek, well-designed flashes of purple plastic, bent around the back of his head. To go over the top like headphones used to would mean he’d have to take off the Yankees hat. Not a black cap like the ones the clean-living pros wear, but light blue, identical to the real Slim Shady’s. He was on the bus with a friend he liked well enough to let her stand near his squat. (“Shut up, bitch” was the first thing I heard him say to her, and at that point it was so outrageously misplaced that I laughed to myself). One of his hands was holding onto the chrome bus pole while the other was busy pulling and pushing on the crotch of his pants in that loose-limbed, bored style that someone’s always using in the background of hip-hop videos.

The bus was packed. The racial breakdown was all over the map. Lots of dark skin, dark eyes. The Ecko kid and I were about the whitest: I’m pastier than usual now from working indoors all the time, and I was wearing an unfortunate blue dress shirt, untucked, and wet hair. We were all on our way to Don Mills, over the viaduct and out beyond the Jack Astor’s restaurant.

All of a sudden, as we’re passing over the Don Valley bridge, the crouching kid said, loudly, “People always trying to fuck me around,” ostensibly to the girl beside him. But he was staring at me while he said it, and then at the man next to me, and then the man next to him. “Motherfuckers always trying to fuck me around.” Someone turned the page of a paper, but no one else made a move. He lifted his face toward the two older black men who were sitting in the back seat. They both had high cheekbones and short buzz cuts, and were dressed in golf shirts, and were staring at their hands. “A nigga like me can’t get any respect,” he called out. “Ain’t nobody giving it up.” There was an absolute silence in the bus. I could hear the hydraulics of the wheels, and then the light “ting” of someone pulling the Next Stop cord, but nothing else. The two black men kept staring at their fingernails.

I have been trained, since becoming a Torontonian, to do what everyone else does in a situation like this: keep reading the free newspaper in my hands. I tried to catch a reaction from my fellow riders, especially from the other black man beside me, who was engrossed in his Sheridan College textbook. Nothing.

“What are you talking about?” said the girl standing beside Eminem. She was dressed in a light blue pull-over that matched the colour of his cap. And here’s where it got truly scary for me. He acknowledged her in a way, nodding his head as if to say, “Shut the fuck up,” and then put his two fingers together to form a gun, which he pointed at each of the passengers in the back. First at me, then at the Sheridan College man, until he had gone down the entire row. He started singing and moving to his song. It was a strange, menacing squat dance. “You don’t. Want to fuck. With Shady. Cause Shady. Will fuckin’ kill you. And you. And you.”

I didn’t know whether he was singing along to his walkman or if it was just a fitting lyric for the situation. I was probably the only one on the bus who recognized that it was Eminem – maybe not, who can say? – but it didn’t matter. The words were his, and whatever fictional context they might have had on the album had been dropped. “I’ll fucking kill you,” he continued. “You don’t. Want to fuck with Shady. Cause Shady. Will fucking kill you. And you, nigga.” The man with the Sheridan textbook closed it and rang the Next Stop bell.

I read in Spin where Eminem described his triple-threat persona. Eminem is the rapper, Marshall Mathers is the man himself, and Slim Shady is the attitude that he assumes. It’s an attitude that could just as easily be grafted on to boys in identical blue Yankees caps.

The boy and his girl spotted a McDonald’s on Pape Avenue, and that was that. He pulled out of his squat, hitched his pants up, and said to her, “Ring the fucking ringer.” She did. And when the bus stopped at the intersection and the doors swung open, the two of them stepped off.

Your brother,
in Toronto,
in the attic,

Craig

Dear Paul,

When I moved to Chicago I didn’t anticipate feeling this weird for this long. I always liked it here as a visitor from New York – the downtown skyline rearing straight up from the Lake, the Lake itself, where you can swim, just like that, without even thinking about it, the huge spacey apartments everyone seems to live in, where people have furniture, and closets you can stand in. But moving here, it was different. A year later I still have a lingering feeling that I’m outside of my real self, walking around in this weird place without pay phones.

Lately, I have been going to movies hoping to find insights, even little ones, into myself. There haven’t been very many, because of course most movies suck and are absent of insight. But then there was one I saw about a month ago that, in spite of the obvious silliness of it in many ways, kind of moved me and made me think about major things. It was “Keeping the Faith” – you know, the one with the rabbi, the priest and the girl. It’s embarrassing that this movie, with its goofy trailers and somewhat implausible premise, had anything to do with me figuring something out, but it did.

Anyway, the thing with this movie is that it was about this group of three childhood best friends who are reunited when the girl comes back to town, New York, for a temporary assignment for her job. The rabbi and the priest are still there, still best friends; the only difference is that now they are spiritual leaders, not adolescents. What’s particularly interesting about them is that they are hipster spiritual leaders, in a Hollywood sort of way – they bring in big crowds to their places of worship by making a splash and having “up-to-date” ideas. Their goal as a priest and a rabbi seems to be to bring their faiths up to date as well. It sounds so corny, and it is, but somehow, this idea really appealed to me. They are doing all these cool things: talking about funny and racy stuff during sermons, starting this interfaith community center together where Jews and Catholics and everyone else can hang out together and sing karaoke and plan community projects. It’s all about community. In fact, there’s one speech Ed Norton (who plays the priest) gives to his congregation that particularly hit me in the gut. He is talking about faith, defining it sort of, and he says that faith is this hunch we all have that there’s something larger out there, God in this case, keeping us believing that the world makes sense somehow. He says, we make sense as a community because we have this hunch in common that brings us back again and again to church to make that hunch part of something larger, a larger group. If we didn’t have faith that this hunch is based on something, we wouldn’t be here. The “we” he is referring to is his congregation, but I also felt like he was talking to the movie audience, to me.

I grew up without any religion – my parents both seem to be agnostics (at the most) – and certainly never did anything during my lifetime in an organized religious setting. My father’s a lapsed Catholic, I guess, technically, though he only practiced for about a year between the ages of eight and nine and then lapsed. My mother’s parents took her to church sometimes, I gather, at some Protestant denomination I cannot commit to memory no matter how many times I am told, but she quietly stopped going when she was old enough and no one really minded. My parents believed in surrounding yourself with people, in friendship as a high priority, in helping your community. As kids, my sister and I never went to church or celebrated religious holidays for anything except gift-giving and eating and going to the movies on Christmas. We were like a lot of New Yorkers.

I grew up knowing lots of Jewish and Catholic kids, and throughout my life, I’ve had moments of Jewish and Catholic envy. I would feel a desire to celebrate Passover, especially, because it was both fun and filled with traditions, and I’d hope to be invited to Seders. I would feel envious of getting to go to Mass, because it seemed so communal – there’s the taking of communion, for one, and the people all around you hearing the same words and saying things together. When I lived in Mexico in college and later in Nicaragua, being included in trips to Mass with families I was staying with, to these musty cool cathedrals on hot Sunday mornings, I would feel lifted up by something, well, religious. What the Catholic and Jewish people around me seemed to have was a certain cultural tradition, countless references they could make that others would understand, something concrete to accept or reject. They get to go through life with the sense that they are part of something larger, and it carries them around in their daily lives.

When I was about ten I started going to the movies. I was addicted to old black-and-white movies, starring Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard. I went to this revival house in the neighborhood where I grew up, almost every weekend, with my friend Elisabeth, or my dad, and saw a double feature. I papered my walls with 8 x 10′s of old movies – from “Ninotchka” and “East of Eden.” My ideas about men and women were informed by certain characters. I identified more with spunky actresses of the Forties, with their combination of awkwardness and grace, than with Princess Leia or Farrah Fawcett. I really did. They seemed more real to me.

But I never developed a religion. Not a regular one. Sure, I have things I believe in, moments I feel the larger forces at work. I was raised to believe that you should be good to other people, that you owe them something, that we are not operating as separate contained bubbles here. I still believe that. But there have to be places you can go alone, and just be you. That must be why now I still go to the movies feeling a little lost and looking for some moment in the dark, surrounded by other people, where I can feel like someone is telling me something I need to listen to, and I don’t have to say anything back.

Blue

Dear Paul,

Maybe the nicest thing about seeing “The Patriot” was standing in the ticket line, hearing my fellow Americans say that word. “Two for ‘The Patriot’ please.” “One for ‘The Patriot’ at 5:30.” Because no one I know uses the P word anymore. If they do, it’s an adjective—patriotic. But I seem to move in circles where even that word has been replaced by “jingoistic.” Like the other night at the Magnolia Bakery after dinner—I was with some friends and we stopped in for dessert—everyone went for the cookies or the banana cream pudding with ‘Nilla wafers except for one guy, Andy. I pointed at his cupcake with the little American flag stuck in the top and asked him, “What made you get that?”

“I was feeling jingoistic,” he said.

I enjoyed the movie. Watching a story line like that is always a relief. Of course the British must be expelled, just as the Confederates must surrender, Hitler must be crushed and yee-haw when the Red Sea swallows those slave-mongering Egyptians. At yet another recent dinner Stephen and I were arguing with Eric about the British royal family, whom Eric likes because “they make no sense.” We spent forty-five minutes yelling, “No, Eric, there shouldn’t be a monarchy!” It was the most fun I’ve had in months, taking the moral high ground on a topic free of the pitfalls of Cuban children or Palestinian statehood.

I’ve read some editorials about “The Patriot,” the kind that always accompany any historical film, written by professors who insist things nobody cares about like Salieri wasn’t that bad a sort or Roman gladiators maybe didn’t really have Australian accents. A little anachronism is part of the fun and I don’t mind if in real life General Cornwallis never lost a battle in the South, as he does rather gloriously in the film. Isn’t art supposed to improve on life?

Personally, I think there’s more than enough historical accuracy in “The Patriot” to keep the spoilsports happy. I’m part spoilsport, on my father’s side, and I felt nagged with quandaries every few minutes during the three-hour film. American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows about it, the quaggier the mire gets. If you’re paying attention during “The Patriot” and you know your history and you have a stake in that history, not to mention a conscience, the movie is not an entirely cartoonish march to glory. For example, Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, doesn’t want to fight the British at the beginning because he still feels bad about chopping up some Cherokee into little pieces during the French and Indian War. At that point, as a part-Cherokee person myself, I lost a little of the sympathy I’d stored up for Mel because he’d been underrated in “Conspiracy Theory.” And did I mention Mel’s character lives in South Carolina? So at the end of the movie, you just look at the youngest Mel junior bundled in his mother’s arms and think, Mel just risked his life so that that kid’s kids can rape their slaves and vote to be the first state to secede from the Union.

Now, I am not one of those America-first, flags-on-the-front-porch kind of patriots. I am more of a “despite” patriot, believing in the inherent truth and beauty of the nation’s founding documents despite the fact we’ve never, not even in the beginning—especially in the beginning—lived up to anything close to a more perfect union. But (A) show me somewhere better (and if you say your native Canada, Paul, I suggest you tell me why you moved to L.A.), and (B), I think I’m a better person because I have words like “more perfect union” to live up to. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens and I kept whispering under my breath “we the people, we the people” over and over again, reminding myself we’re all in this together and they had as much right—exactly as much right—as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

“The Patriot” did confirm that I owe George Washington an apology. I always liked George fine, though I dismissed him as a mere soldier. I prefer the pen to the sword, so I’ve always been more of a Jeffersonhead. The words of the Declaration of Independence are so right and true that it seems like its poetry alone would have knocked King George III in the head. Like, he would have read this beloved passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights—that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and thought the notion so just, and yet still so wonderfully whimsical, that he would have dethroned himself on the spot. But no, it took a grueling, eight-year-long war to make independence a fact.

I never think of this.

I think about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution all the time. Mainly because I watch a lot of TV. I keep my small, 95-cent copy of the two documents handy so that I can fact-check the Constitutional interpretations in the shows of David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin. In my little booklet, the Declaration and the Constitution are separated by only a blank half-page. I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A-side and B-side of the greatest single ever released, recorded in one great drunken night, but no, there’s a lot of bleeding life between them. Dead boys and dead Indians and Valley Forge.

I’m not much on war stories. I haven’t hit anyone since I was twelve years old (hi, Sherry). I prefer verbal sparring, so I like courtroom dramas and, especially, Sorkin’s “The West Wing.” It’s about the senior White House staff. It often leaves me clutching my Constitution in tears. It’s a little hokey, but that’s why I like it. Sometimes the framer-style rhetoric is so intense it sounds like an action movie. They really say things like, “Let’s get out there and raise the level of public discourse!”

I swear Aaron Sorkin is sitting around with his 95-cent copy of the Constitution, too, reading the obscure bits. He conjured one surprisingly emotional story line, for example, out of the rather dry Article I, Section 2, the mandate for the census. Sorkin has picked up on something so obvious and simple. Namely, that the Constitution is and was a bottomless pit of story ideas – a prophecy of the stories that were to come. Any of the first ten Amendments contains within it the potential energy of a million stories waiting to unfold. Freedom of the press? “Citizen Kane.” The death of Diana. “All the President’s men.” The right to bear arms? Columbine, Lee Harvey Oswald, the scene in “Hannah and her Sisters” when Woody Allen’s trying to kill himself with a shotgun but his forehead’s so sweaty, the barrel slides off his face and the bullet flies into the wall. The right to a speedy and public trial? O.J., anyone?

A couple of times, I’ve forgotten to put the little Constitution booklet back on the shelf, and friends have stopped by, noticing it resting under the remote controls. I think they find my patriotism an amusing affectation—that it’s cute and old-fashioned, the way I feel about the adorable way David’s always bringing up Oscar damn Levant. I guess because my patriotism is so sentimental, so unthreatening. No one’s ever put a bayonet in my hands to back it up. The closest I’ve come is shooting a Canadian while playing laser tag and going to Starbucks afterward: I sure miss you.

Happy Fourth of July,

Sarah

Dear Paul:

So an idea came to me yesterday morning in my ridiculously swank hotel room in Seoul, where I have come to have these ludicrous meetings with all the famous film directors of Korea to discuss…what? They want their films in my festival; if they make a really big movie, I have a better chance of getting them to my festival if I get to know them a bit. So we scrape together enough conversation to feel like we have become friends, smile a lot and fight over the check. It’s all strangely imperialistic; I know how the Dutch felt in the Spice Islands, except I am not killing everyone.

But these were not my thoughts yesterday morning. I was showering with my computer – qua de facto CD player – and Ms. Marcia Griffiths was cranking out her transcendent cover of “Don’t Bring Me Down,” a cute Beatles song that she made so so much better. It is the sweet, succulent, soulful reggae of the early 1970s, the kind that has become desperately out of fashion in these rub-a-dub-dub times. (Ms. MG, FYI, was the only truly great member of the I-Threes, fratboy pothead superstar Bob Marley’s backup singers. She had a pre- and post-Bob career, though, as opposed to his talentless usurper of a wife. Have you heard “One Draw” lately? There is so much production sweetener in that rip-off fraud; she makes Christina Aguilera look like a punk rocker.)

I asked myself why this unusually beautiful form of popular music was trashed in favor of macho homophobes and their “raps.” (What’s his name? I always forget everything about him except that white suit and those terrified-looking women in the videos.) Then, in a horrifying flash of self-hatred, I realized we are, generationally speaking, responsible for this changing of the guard. It was on our watch that Yellowman and his quirky barks were first heard in clubs, and we were way too indulgent of Rankin’ Roger’s “toasts” on those English Beat albums.

I tried to explain this cultural loss to Im Kwon Taek, the ancient and venerable master of Korean cinema who has made his name as an archivist of the great arts of Korea. His films are fantastic and totally closed to Western folk, giving them an oddly hallucinatory quality. My favorite was “Run Far Fly High Kae-Byok!”, a two-and-a-half hour narrative film about a schism in Korean Buddhism in the 16th Century. The film is all spoken in meaningful sutras, badly subtitled. Riveting.

So yesterday afternoon he got me loopy on a beer called “Hi Lite” (which is quite a bricolage of a name if you stop to think about it). His newest film, “Chun-Hyang,” tells an epic love story using the “Pansori” singing technique – imagine a cross between Pavarotti and Plant. Apparently Koreans don’t really give a shit about Pansori anymore, because the film was a huge bomb in Korea. He had never heard of Marcia Griffiths, but pretended to understand the connection I was making. On and on I went about changing fashions between generations actually acting as unwittingly destructive forces. I thought I had created a wonderful international bridge of cross-cultural criticism until Im smiled at me with his brown teeth and politely asked if I was a musician.

Later that night, I went out with some other, younger Korean directors and took up the topic again while they drunk my sorry ass under the table with a terrifying concoction known as Soju. A kind of Korean sake, it undercuts any argument one might make about clear liquors somehow being safer. I suppose my illness also had something to do with consuming the most confrontational food I have ever eaten. Waitresses in traditional Korean restaurants don’t pad around in slippers and kimono like Japanese waitresses, deferentially waiting for a break in conversation to enter the room, apologize and serve food. These girls sport gaudy eye makeup, sweaters with sequined portraits of endangered species and hearty laughs. One slapped me on the shoulder to make me pay attention. She had just brought a bowl of itty-bitty live baby squids to the table. She extracted one, picked up a stiff garlic shoot, and then, with a filthy little smile, proceeded to drive the shoot into the sea creature’s brain and wrap the tentacles around the top of the shoot. After a dip into some fiery sauce, she handed me the seafood popsicle, which proved surprisingly good. I had four.

These young people knew about reggae, though not Ms. Griffiths specifically. They thought Mr. Im’s problem in “Chun-Hyang” was that he had not re-invented the story sufficiently for a modern audience, and so they perceived it as a didactic exercise. They told me that in the Buddhist tradition, there is a firmly determined cycle of life-death-rebirth that all cultural forms need to follow. They reminded me of a little concept known as the comeback.

Hope all is well in California, where there are no comebacks, because nothing ever goes away.

Much love,

Noah