November 6, 2024

Grey

The sun goes down at 5:23pm, and the temperature is an unseasonable seventy degrees. The skies feel hungover, damp and grey, which matches my mood. Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun. A few hours later, my country elected another man to do more or less the same. Again.

Materially, my life is the same as before. I trade encouraging nods with joggers as I run my morning laps around the pond. Strangers make room for each other at the supermarket. But my mind is stained with suspicion. Did you vote for him? Did you want this? This is the zone of horror: the inability to see the world as others do and vice versa.

I feel like a fool for allowing myself to hope for a few weeks, mainlining punditry from CNN and The New York Times and The Guardian, assuming we would choose consensus-driven reality over the poisonous feedback loops and silos of the internet, where the extreme left and right have driven each other into madness. But now I must accept that I’m the one who’s been living in a silo because the internet has won.

America

Notebook

Last night's view from my window.

July 5, 2021

Fireworks

Fireworks showered the nation last night, in part to commemorate the end of masking and distancing. This is cause for celebration, no question. But it seems like a sane society would pause to mourn their dead, maybe even have rethink before launching explosives and boasting about its economy. Last year I thought everything might change as I walked through an empty city, feeling anxious and ghosted but also hopeful. If a rupture must come, I thought, maybe we’ll find something better on the other side. Healthcare, at least, maybe even a sense of common cause. But if a plague couldn’t accomplish this, I shudder to think what it might take.

Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Black City Skyline

From Sunset Mission | Wonder, 2000 | Boomkat

An ode to cities. A cigarette on a rain-slicked street while neon blinks mindlessly through the night.

Notebook

America

January 30, 2015

Isadora Ain't Foolin' Me Any

They say she invented modern dance. She did not survive America.

In 1927, Isadora Duncan said “Let them come forth with great strides, leaps and bounds, with lifted forehead and far-spread arms, to dance.” They say she invented modern dance. She did not survive America.

Instead of wearing ballet slippers, Duncan danced barefoot and wrapped herself in scarves. She believed all movement originated from the solar plexus, and her explosive gestures scandalized crowds, as did her politics, which were inspired by Plato’s The Republic and the theory of evolution. These were the Red Scare days when being a Darwinist was a controversial thing, let alone being an atheist bisexual feminist Marxist. She was banned in Boston after removing her red sash while dancing. “This is red and so am I!” she shouted to the audience, baring her breasts. Life became difficult for Duncan after that. In Washington DC, a group of evangelists demanded that she be deported. Newspapers ran headlines calling her a Bolshevik. Several cities cancelled her shows.

In 1922, Duncan performed in Indianapolis. “Isadora ain’t foolin’ me any,” mayor Lew Shank told the press before she arrived. “She talks about art. Huh! I’ve seen a lot of these twisters and I know as much about art as any man in America, but I never went to see these nude dancers for art’s sake. No, sir, I’ll bet that ninety percent of men who go to see these so-called classical dancers just say they think it’s artistic to fool their wives. No, sir, these nude dancers don’t get by me. If she goes pulling off her clothes and throwin’ them in the air, as she is said to have done in Boston, there’s going to be somebody getting a ride in the wagon.”

Shank ordered several policemen to stand near the stage and monitor her performance. They had instructions to arrest her if she did anything remotely obscene. She did not. Her performance later that evening, however, is a different story. A drunken party at her hotel echoed through the night, culminating in a frightening crash early in the morning when she threw a piano over her balcony. Some say the piano was dropped on a dare. Others say Duncan threw a tantrum and threatened to give up music. Others say no piano was thrown at all, that the police made this up as an excuse to run her out of town. Either way, she was told to never return to Indianapolis.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Mayor Shank was a former clog dancer and vaudeville performer who rose to fame when he dressed up as a little girl in a golden wig, climbing a ladder to heaven. Indianapolis elected him twice.

The FBI followed Duncan. Crowds booed her, yet they flocked to her shows. The American government revoked her citizenship and she fled to Europe where she made drunken scenes in Left Bank cafés, attracting the wrong sort of attention and on one occasion affording Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald the opportunity to steal a nice pair of salt and pepper shakers. Duncan’s life was tragic: Her two children drowned in a car that plunged into the Seine river. She married a young poet who committed suicide. Another child lived only a few hours and was never named. On September 14, 1927, Duncan was driving through the south of France when her red scarf got tangled in the rear hubcap of her convertible. She died instantly. Upon hearing the news of Duncan’s death, Gertrude Stein said “Affectations can be dangerous.”

This piece appears in The Manufactured History of Indianapolis, a collection of semi-fictions published by We Are City in 2013.

America

Essays

August 30, 2013

April 10, 1965

Look at that face with the Valentine eyebrows and pin-up girl pout, her ribbon mouth blowing a plume of smoke like come here and give me a kiss. Nobody could smoke a cigarette like Linda Darnell. And here she is at forty-one, curled on a friend’s couch in a Chicago suburb, lighting up a Pall Mall while watching one of her old movies and thinking about her strange relationship with time. That’s what happens when Life magazine calls you ‘the most physically perfect girl in Hollywood.’

After twelve years of bombshell service in romance, noir, and adventure films, Twentieth Century Fox let her go, citing concerns about her weight gain and heavy drinking. “Leaving the studio was like leaving home at twenty-eight years old,” she said. “I’d been there since I was sixteen.” When she was nineteen, she eloped with the camerman. He was forty-two. Then came Mickey Rooney and Howard Hughes and a dozen scuffed-up footnotes on Hollywood and Vine. There was the screenwriter with the yacht and the powerful director with rough hands. Yet the only man she truly loved was her high school sweetheart, a quiet boy who was terrified by her fame and moved back home. She took her broken heart to Rome, did a few spaghetti westerns, and opened an orphanage. “At thirty-two, I can see tell-tale marks in the mirror,” she said, “but the ravages of time no longer terrify me. I am told that when surface beauty is gone, the real woman emerges. My only regret will be that I could not have begun it earlier, that so many years have been ruined because I was considered beautiful.”

She dozes in the warm living room, listening to her younger Star Dust self say, “Do you want to kiss me?” Maybe her Pall Mall dropped to the floor. Perhaps it landed on the script she was studying, a play at the local theater. The fire bloomed fast. Afraid to jump from the window, she tried to reach the front door. The doorknob was too hot to touch and the flames took her as she heard herself on the television saying, “Now this is romance.”