. Body Image I’ve had a certain ache and pain in …

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Body Image

I’ve had a certain ache and pain in recent weeks, and I finally had it checked out. The diagnosis seems to be “ache and pain” with a clinical name. Nothing serious, but the doctor suggested that I have an ultrasound done to make sure.

This wasn’t my usual doctor, but one of my doctor’s six partners. I’d never seen him before, but it would have been a whole month before I could see my doctor. I found out when I went to the front desk to schedule my ultrasound that they couldn’t fit me in for three weeks. I talked them down to one week—and it wasn’t pretty. I could go to the hospital clinic any time, but since it isn’t an emergency, I’d rather wait a week and have it done in my doctor’s office. But there was no way I would wait three weeks.

On the way out, I noticed a sign in the lobby with a picture of my usual doctor in scrubs next to a giant robotic surgery machine. This machine must keep him very busy if it takes a patient in pain a month to get near him.

Welcome to the age of personalized medicine. The government is already working on an electronic medical history data infrastructure that will allow fast access to our personal records throughout the vast American Healthcare System. Theoretically, it will also help physicians who have never looked at us before prescribe therapies catered to our personal genetic soufflés. Meanwhile, the doctor patient-relationship that is, as far as I’m concerned, the heart of medicine, will become as quaint as the automat (which is a bad analogy, given that automatism is part of the problem).

I recently rewrote a Verb-ops post about futurist Ray Kurzweil and submitted it to the magazine I work for as an editorial. It challenges Kurzweil’s vision of humans transcending biology via information technology and nanorobotics. The magazine I work for is a science magazine, and I wasn’t sure the editor would go for it. She actually really liked it, despite its references to the Bible, specifically to the Garden of Eden. Usually this kind of thing is verboten in Science World.

It reminded me that there is a limiting factor to our headlong plunge into a high-tech future. This limiting factor is our humanity. That’s the point of my editorial, really. We have a spiritual connection to our bodies, one that does not preclude the use of ultrasounds, micro-surgery, and biotech medicines. Curing AIDs and cancer is a good thing. Because life is good. But becoming cyborgs is not a good thing.

Life is at least temporally defined by birth and death. The aging process and death, in fact, are important parts of what gives the rest of our lives meaning. It becomes problematic when we focus our energy on achieving something like immortality. It’s foolish, to start with, and it also focuses us too much on the physically morbid aspects of life and death. Life becomes about death in a world with such a focus.

I think, though, that there is a big kickback against all this. Diet, exercise, and meditation are becoming important parts of our lives as we literally strive to keep body and soul together. I think being healthy in the future will largely be a matter of taking charge of our health with the aid of personal, rather than “personalized”, care from professionals—our doctors. We may also look to the “metaphysical” aspects of our lifes for fulfillment and enjoyment.

Meanwhile, rather than trying to transcend biology, maybe we should try a little harder to transcend the bureaucracy, politics, and greed in our healthcare system. Talk about limiting factors! Perhaps Michael Moore will make a movie about this.

Photo: Michelle V. Agnis for The New York Times

. Drive-By Honorable Daughter Number One (HDNO) w…

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Drive-By

Honorable Daughter Number One (HDNO) was asked to the prom today. By a senior. To the senior prom. (She’s a junior). Apparently, the young man did a drive-by before asking. He spotted “Mom” on the front lawn, and kept on rolling. He called it in from around the corner.

“Mom” witnessed the drive-by and, of course, eavesdropped on HDNO’s end of the call:

HDNO~ “Hello?… You sure you want to do this?”

Isn’t it romantic? Life is not unlike an episode of Roseanne.

On Tuesday, HDNO goes for her driving test. Then, next year, it’s that expensive, four-year sleepover in some place like Vermont or Maryland.

The prom. Remember the prom? It’s all a powder blue haze to me now.

Photo: Copyright Verb-Ops, 1976

. At the Show I did manage to get to Washington …

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At the Show

I did manage to get to Washington before Cézanne and Sickert left town. More importantly, I was able to hook up with my old friend Todd and his daughter Alice. I had business at The Show (the home office) on Monday, so I came in early on Sunday and met them at the National Gallery.

I worked with Todd at an institutional school for developmentally disabled children and teens—we worked with the older residents—in the early 1980s. I hadn’t seen him in ages. I’d met Alice once when she was a baby. I miss Todd–he’s a smart, funny, and incredibly big-hearted guy. He did a stint running a home for the Father Flannigan’s Boys Town oranization in Las Vegas in the late 1980s, supplementing his income by painting portraits of bike gangsters and their bikes.

And Alice is really charming. She’s an artist like her dad. We toured the Cézanne exhibit at the National Gallery and then went to the Phillips Collection, a beautiful museum in DC, to see the show with Degas, Sickert, and Toulouse Lautrec. The Cézanne show featured his landscapes of Provence, as well as portraits and still life paintings he did in his studios in the south of France. The crowd was manageable, considering it’s a blockbuster show and we went on a Sunday.

Have you ever been to the Phillips Collection? Drop everything. It’s a small museum with a lot in it near DuPont Circle. Being at least a mile from the Air and Space Museum, you won’t likely have an Airstream pull up in front and unload a family with T-shirts that say “The Wilson Family” (this is an 18-year-old quip I nicked from Todd). The Phillips, opened in 1921, is America’s first museum of Modern Art. It is housed in the 1897 Georgian Revival home of Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, collectors in that coterie, including the Cone sisters and Gertrude Stein, who introduced America to the Modern Movement. In it are touchstone pieces that we are all familiar with, as well as one or two of almost anyone’s more obscure favorites. One important picture is a pendant to Van Gogh’s The Poet’s Garden, which I saw in Chicago two weeks ago. It is another view of the same park painted in the same palette (maybe on the same day!).

The Degas et al. show is, I think, dominated by Walter Richard Sickert, a very traditional painter who straddles impressionism and expressionism–a Britton who oddly seems connected with the Ashcan School in the US. That group includes painters like John Sloan and George Bellows who painted the gritty side of New York City. Sickert’s neighborhood included the brothels and variety show theaters of Camden Town in Fin de Siècle London.

The museum also has many Bonnards. I told Alice that I could be convinced that Bonnard and Max Beckmann were the greatest painters of the 20th Century. She took my word for it.

At lunch, I glanced over at Alice and noticed that she had casually drawn an expert cartoon of a man who looked like Alfred E. Newman dancing a jig. She draws all the time–the sign of a real artist. Caricature is a specialty—she did one of the best George W’s I’ve ever seen. Very low brainpan. Little scowling mouth, like he just got hollered at. The eyebrows and the ears. I should have asked her for it. Todd sent me these samples of work he’s picked up in her wake. Alice thinks the green one looks like our friend Cliff.

It was an excellent visit. Todd says the family is planning a New Jersey excursion—if it happens, we’ll to go out, Todd, Alice, and me, and do a little landscape work. Todd’s other daughter, Dorothy, might even join us. Yes, his daughters are Dorothy and Alice!

On Monday, I went to a meeting at the Brookings Institution and then to The Show…for a photo shoot. Several of us are involved in a special issue on drugs, and they want a group shot of us for the editor’s page. We suffered through the extravagance of being photographed by a professional, standing against a lunar-gray perma-wrinkled sheet. Before that, a few of us went to lunch at a very nice restaurant where they bring out a bowl of high-end cotton candy for the table to maul with coffee. We got lime-flavored. And before any of that, I was stared-down by proto-con Daniel Webster on Massachusetts Ave.

Going to and from the city, I listened to a CD by jazz singer Nadia Ackerman, a new blog buddy from Australia. She and her combo are really great. And her story about coming to New York, which is her blog, is very interesting.

No business like Show business,
Vanx

Art Top to Bottom
Mercury Fountain, National Gallery Rotunda (Verb-ops)
Todd and Alice (Verb-ops)
Entrance to The Public Garden (Van Gogh, Phillips Collection)
Alice (Todd)
Green Cliff/Other Guy (Alice)
Daniel Webster Statue (Verb-ops)

.Lydia In ConcertPerforming "Bear on a See-saw". F…

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Lydia In Concert

Performing “Bear on a See-saw”

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Fantastique!

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Curtain Call!

. My New York City Work Neighborhoods Never get …

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My New York City
Work Neighborhoods

Never get too comfortable.

In the 20 years or so that I worked in New York City, I had several interesting work neighborhoods. My first was in Greenwich Village at Fairchild Publications on 12th street between 5th Avenue and University, a block away from Forbes Magazine in one direction and a block from The Strand bookstore in the other. Some nights, I’d walk by Forbes and see Malcolm hopping on his Harley in the loading area, ready to head home, like me, to New Jersey. Anyone in the neighborhood wearing a tie—it was the eighties, and you wore ties even on Fridays—worked for Forbes or Fairchild.

After nearly ten years, my company moved to an office on 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue. That was at about the time I became interested in painting. I worked a block form the Museum of Modern Art, and a few blocks from 57th Street, where the big art galleries were interspersed between the high-end shopping places. Hacker Art Books was on 57th Street then. I worked in the new office only a few months.

My next job was in a building overlooking Madison Square Park at 26th Street. I sat on the building’s gargoyle level—about twenty floors up–writing for a small magazine run by a dysfunctional family. My stint ended, mercifully, in less than a year. It’s a nice park, though—quite underrated, really.

I ended up back on 57th Street, where I worked for eight years with one six-month break, during which I worked across the street from Penn Station on 7th Avenue (the Penn Station area was the worst).

But 57th and 7th was the best. My office was across the street from the Art Students League of New York, and I was back within range of MoMA. In front of my building, every day, on the same square of the sidewalk, was Opera Man, a street guy who sang phony opera with a canteen around his neck and a can in his hand. Adam Sandler got the idea for his Saturday Night Live Opera Man character from this man—he even dragged him onto the Conan O’Brien Show one night in the early 1990s for a round of dueling nonsense opera. Conan, by the look on his face, realized he’d gone too far letting this happen.

I was heartbroken when, in 2000, they moved the magazine I worked for to William Street between John and Fulton Streets–way downtown, three blocks from the World Trade Center. Sure, the Wall Street area, the oldest part of the city, has a lot of character. But it wasn’t my neighborhood. I was never bothered by all the tourists and high-end shoppers on 57th street—I lived for the galleries, the art school, the book store. Central park was nearby.

I figured I’d adjust to the new work neighborhood, but that it would be tough. It was very tough.

I started commuting every day on the ferry from Hoboken to the World Financial Center, which is directly in front of the World Trade Center on the Hudson River. I had taken the ferry sometimes when I worked uptown, but that meant a twenty minute subway ride once I got into the city. Now I had a five-minute walk to the office.

One sunny morning, standing on the front deck of the ferry, I was completely soaked along with four or five other people by a wave that the boat hit at a bad angle. That day I found out that the cheap clothing stores near my new office had a rather ridiculous selection of hip-hop garb to select from. We were far from Hermès. By the end of the day, someone at Human Resources sent out a memo setting limits on our summerwear choices. I believe that was the only HR policy prompted at that company by my bad behavior or luck.

I missed my 57th street world passionately at first. Especially at lunchtime. After a while, I gave up looking for interesting places, and went with the easy choices—park benches at City Hall, the South Street Seaport, or the World Trade Center. All three were actually very nice: A great view of the Brooklyn Bridge and a walk though the twilight era of the Fulton Fish Market down by the Seaport, a sunny green space by City Hall next to J&R Music, and concerts at lunch at the plaza at the World Trade Center. Concerts in the evening there as well.

Great concerts, actually. Dave Davies of the Kinks. Janice Ian. Always something surprising. I would sit by the big globe sculpture in the center of the plaza and eat my lunch. One evening I caught a concert by Laura Cantrell, a country singer whom I knew better as a DJ at WFMU, a listener-sponsored radio station in New Jersey. She has a magnificent repertoire of old radio show tapes and a real understanding of the good stuff. She taught me country music, something I didn’t necessarily even want to learn. She made it compelling. And there she was, looking real pretty and playing real nice. It was a beautiful evening in the summer of 2001, and I was carrying folded-up empty boxes home. We—my family, that is—moved that summer from Maplewood to Caldwell (that is another story of adjustment).

Once we moved, I figured out how to take the train from nearby Little Falls instead of the bus from Caldwell so that I could keep on riding the ferry—and never have to get on a bus. I began to really love the commute, which often ended with breakfast at the marina in front of the World Financial Center once I got off the ferry. I’d get coffee and a croissant and share my crumbs with the sparrows next to Donald Trump’s yacht. One of the boats at the marina had a small helicopter perched on top of it. I’d meander toward work at about 8:45 am.

By the end of the summer, the homefront was turned upside down with the move. My comfort zone, it seemed, was my work neighborhood, which I was finally getting used to. My turf included the marina, the big glass Winter Garden at the World Financial Center (there were concerts there sometimes and a few live Don Imus broadcasts in the morning), and the spacious concrete plaza at the World Trade Center.

Near my office there was also a satellite branch of The Strand, which was soon to buy the Hacker business and move it in. Galleries were moving downtown from 57th street. Things were absolutely coming together.

Photos top to bottom:
Corner of Bleecker and McDougal, Greenwich Village
Madison Square Park
A tower on 57th*
Brooklyn Bridge, WTC**
Ferry ride
Fulton Street Fish Market**
Stage at WTC
Laura Cantrell performs
The WTC Plaza

WTC I, II, III
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* Phillip Greenspan
** John Sutton

.We Prefer the Gothic (Based on a conversation wit…

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We Prefer the Gothic

(Based on a conversation with my editor at lunch

in which I do all the talking)

Are you as deeply disturbed as we are

by this insidious “charmin’ fella” conductor movement?

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Indeed, we prefer the gothic, the antique, the conductor who must be hoisted on stage by an overwrought system of ropes, levers and pulleys.

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And then, of course, there is the “Nosferatu effect,” which we really quite admire.

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Your thoughts?
Vanx

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Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony. (photo for SF Symphony by Kristen Loken)

James Levine conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra (photo by Michael Lutch for The Washington Post)

Christopher Eschenbach conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra (photo by Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)

Ute Lemper with the Brooklyn Philharmonic (Photo by Rahav Segev for The New York Times)

. Readin’ Rapture Blues . I noticed today that all…

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Readin’ Rapture Blues
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I noticed today that all of the windows of the bookstore at Penn Station, Newark, are filled with religious books: Lunatic fringe Christian stuff, Yoga and associated Eastern mystical fare, Pope worship, the obligatory witchlore, and monographs on dangerous End Times cult heroes. There is also a new Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop.

. Springblogging My blogbuddies are having a big …

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Springblogging

My blogbuddies are having a big spring. Click on their photos and visit their sites. Said photos embellish the lyrics to a strange and fun song about the nostalgic springs of our future:

Springtime
By Donald Fagen

Here at Laughing Pines
Where the party never ends
There’s a spicy new attraction
On the Funway
You can scan yourself
For traces of old heartaches
The details of desire
Shimmering - shimmering

Yowie! - It’s Connie Lee
At the wheel of her Shark-de-Ville
We’re cruisin’ at about a thousand miles an hour
But the car is standin’ still
So good to hear that crazy laugh
To hear her whisper hold me tight
To learn to love all over again
On that warm wet April night

Swing out To Lake Nostalgia
Route 5 to Laughing Pines
Get off at Funway West
Drive into Springtime
Drive into Springtime

Easter Break - ‘66
A shack on Cape Sincere
Mad Mona bakin’ gospel candy
It was a radical year
We get a little silly
And fall into microspace

It’s even better this time around
With Coltrane on the K.L.H.

Swing out To Lake Nostalgia
Route 5 to Laughing Pines
Get off at Funway West
Drive into Springtime
Drive into Springtime

It’s you and me honey, in a crowded booth
At the Smokehouse in the Sand
I’m dragging out some bad old gag
When you touch my hand
At 4 a.m. we go out of this place
You look absurdly sweet
We hike downtown to Avenue A
Like we own the street

Swing out To Lake Nostalgia
Route 5 to Laughing Pines
Get off at Funway West
Drive into Springtime
Drive into Springtime

Yowie!

Vanx

.Pear Blossoms.This will be an "on year"For the li…

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Pear Blossoms

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This will be an “on year”

For the little tree

In the back yard

That grows the big green pears

That I am allergic to

Unless they are boiled

Or baked

Which can be arranged~,:^)

~Vanx

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. The End of Bushido Week Thank you for joining m…

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The End of Bushido Week

Thank you for joining me on my quest for spiritual sustenance this week. All tasks have been accomplished and are in the hands of my retainer.
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On the parallel parking front, there has been little action since last Sunday, and Honorable Daughter has journeyed to King Of Prussia, PA, for a Key Club meeting. On a bus. I will park only myself for the foreseeable future.
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With my ancestral spirits whipping me into a froth this week, I even managed to get down into the studio and do a little painting. I must admit that I part from “The Clan” on matters of “Arts and Crafts,” whereupon I am, by their hard standards, judged a wuss.
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Be of good cheer,
Vanx