1.
I never seem to have much
trouble finding an apartment
Maybe that means I’ll never be a real New Yorker
I go look at a sublet on Eastern Parkway
The G on the building looks like a C
It has good light is a block from the
Botanical Garden and three from DB
There are meditation books on the shelves
she writes in the mornings like I do
I have my checkbook
She has one more person coming
So I sit in the plaza of the Brooklyn Museum
and think about my thoughts
The apartment is mine!
Come August
I will be living
at Cray Court
2.
Boyhood. A matinee at BAM. For the non-New Yorkers: BAM is the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Boyhood is a film Richard Linklater shot, weeks at a time, over the course of twelve years with the same group of actors. You see the actors age and the filmmaking mature, too. It’s participatory in a way unlike any other film; what you participate in is the passage of time. I was watching an interview with the lead, Ellar Coltrane, who you first see as a six-year-old and who is now nineteen. Linklater gave him a copy of the completed film and told him to watch it the first couple of times by himself. Ellar gets teary-eyed in the interview – it was very tender, he says, to see aspects of himself on the screen that he thinks nobody else notices, and to see what about him is different and the same after twelve years.
The scenes in Boyhood seem so light by many standards, together bring about a supreme heaviness. Can people really change? Can I really change? And, Is this all there is? I keep going to the word Ellar uses: tenderness. It’s not overly soft or docile. It’s open and curious. Suggests an intense interest in the pattern of things, that when you when you catch yourself reprising a bad habit or even a good one, instead of trying to stop it right away or preserve it indefinitely you can watch like you’re watching a film about your life: Oh, that again.
3.
I have fallen in love with bagels
I could eat them all the time
and at places like Fort Greene Park
where the Kickstarter banners
are on increasingly plain backgrounds
he used to be a cop in this neighborhood
now his dream has come true
the receptionist is a stand-up comedian
she swallows a lightning bug
no joke
we learn how a t-shirt is made
there are so many people
and they all want to be someone else
but Khaki King’s white guitar
just wants to be itself