Forty years ago today, John Lennon was killed. The next morning, 19-year-old college-sophomore-me had a radio show to do, and all the other Boston stations were playing "Give Peace a Chance" and "All You Need is Love" and "Imagine."
Well, I felt darker than that. I played "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "Run for Your Life" and "Help!"
Forty years later, I see Above Us Only Sky on Netflix, the Yoko-driven documentary about the making of the "Imagine" record at an English country house in the summer of 1971.
The proceedings are shaggy and fun, George Harrison dropping by, Phil Spector at the helm, and then suddenly this unkempt, clearly troubled Vietnam Vet named Claudio shows up and insists on meeting Lennon because he believes Lennon wrote all his songs for Claudio.
The encounter is - amazingly - on film, and Lennon patiently hears Claudio out and tries to reason with him - "How could I know you?" - and that he, like Bob Dylan, just writes things hoping people will relate.
The encounter ends - even more amazingly - with Lennon telling Claudio he looks hungry and bringing him into the house for a meal.
And when the album Imagine is released it includes the song "I don't wanna be a soldier mama/I don't wanna die."
I read up on (Carl) Claudio (here) and he worked on farms and a Ford auto plant and when it closed he bought himself an ultra-light airplane, flew it too low and slow and the plane stalled, landed in a tree and tore his aorta from his heart. Dec. 22, 1981 - dead at 33.
In light of what happened a year earlier, when another obsessed fan came with the same kind of delusional narcissistic energy and took John away from every one else -- the Claudio scene was so moving and chilling and I don't even know what.
If not the illness itself, then the whittled-down existence it has demanded?
I have a suggestion. It's been my security blanket most nights, after Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow rile me up.
But first, let's be clear - I count myself among the lucky. Compared to my friend who lost a spouse, or others who lost parents, or who have wrestled the virus for weeks, some needing oxygenation. Or the suddenly unemployed, like my haircutter of 20 years. Or kids in their 20s who were just starting out, losing jobs and internships before they begin. Or our neighbors who are not just first responders but also have two elementary schoolers "learning from home."
I've got a partner (unlike some), and we're together in lockdown (unlike some), and we actually like each other (....). I've been able to still work from home since mid-March - which is also around the last time I saw my older daughter, who lives upriver, in person. I haven't seen her sister, an off-campus college senior in Ohio, since New Year's. Her commencement that was supposed to happen on Memorial Day has been pushed till May 2021; my plan to fetch her and her stuff is a non-starter because of quarantine + immuno-compromise issues.
So we've made do with Zooms, like this one on my birthday:
But still.
We haven't fled town, like 5% of the city - or 40% of wealthy neighborhoods,, per the NYTimes.
Thankfully we do have bikes, and masks (left), and Central Park nearby - though on weekends it's too full of feckless mask-less rebels.
There are other signs of the fraying of the social contract, loss of good will and tremors that NYC could be heading to one of those unpleasant economic craters. A bike has already been stolen from our building; in Baltimore, Wire creator David Simon tweeted that his car was broken into for "small change, phone charger and some Sister Rosetta Tharpe CDs."
But all my pre-COVID palliatives for this already-fraught era (see previous post) - museums, theater, music, giving volunteer tours of the Park - are shuttered.
Books have proved impossible, partly because of how much I have to read to stay au courant for my CNN gig. The news is too dark for me to lose myself in "dark and edgy" TV dramas. Podcasts are okay, but often turn into a nap.
We did take refuge in old movies on the Criterion Channel, and relished "What Do We Need To Talk About," the new one-hour Richard Nelson play about COVID lockdown, using characters he'd already written several plays about, which streamed live via the Public Theater.
I began to seek solace in other types of entertainment: compelling music documentaries like "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "Searching for Sugarman," "Muscle Shoals," "Big Star" "Five Years" "A Great Day in Harlem" "Produced By George Martin" (and I'm looking forward to the new Beastie Boys one).
Or standup specials - like Mark Maron, Ronnie Chieng, Wanda Sykes, James Acaster, and the Dave Chapelle Mark Twain Prize special.
Or my cousin Ben's weekly silent comedy watch partywith his colleague Steve Massa, with Ben's live improvised music, for which his wife Mana is the camera operator and cheerleader.
But then I found a COVID-depression vaccine that combined elements of all of the above in one package, plus the much-needed sense of belonging to a family. I am one of 1200-1500 or so "clients," as we've been dubbed, who tune in live to the hour-long, five-nights-a-week "The Tweedy Show," broadcast on Instagram from the Chicago home of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy.
You don't have to be a Deadhead-level Wilco fanatic like myself - or, indeed, even familiar with the band's repertoire at all - to find comfort, entertainment, humor, and more in the impromptu mix of song,tummeling and family banter.
The show is literally homemade, from their living room, 10-11pm ET, on his wife Susie's Instagram page, "Stuff in Our House" whose pre-COVID function had been to chronicle the eBay-volume of kitsch lining their shelves, leading you to wonder where Jeff has room for his extensive collection of Martin guitars.
I've always been enamored of Tweedy's deadpan I-care-but-I-don't-but-maybe-I-do stage banter; I actually long ago wrote a part for him in a spec pilot, as a semi-motivational graduation speaker.
Tweedy's emphasis on family, music and fun is clear in the band's whole vibe, especially its bi-annual Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA, a fusion of bands who inspired them, bands they want fans to know about, solo projects, comedians and art.
But putting on 50 of these Instagram shows in a few months - more than most network shows produce in a season - and keeping them charming, distinct, and compelling, turns out to be a different kind of impressive production.
Especially considering it seems to have begun on something of a bored whim in mid-March, when an unkempt Jeff decided to stage a lockdown show literally from his nightly bath, and 107 of Susie's followers tripped across it and kept watching. The family couldn't believe that many were interested.
They eventually developed a nightly pattern. At first the show began with a closeup of the family jukebox playing a 45, but - after what seems to have been some music rights issues with Instagram - now it kicks off with a TV-style variety show theme song - and logo honoring the bathtub origins. (note: I updated the video using show 53's intro to include the animation and Spencer-dance).
Susie is the (iPhone) camerawoman, never seen - a la Charlie in Charlie's Angels or Carlton the Doorman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show - but very continuously heard; she curses like a sailor, and her most common utterance is "Oy Vey." If she ever coughs, she has to immediately insist to her father that she's not sick. The one time she accidentally hit the reverse button on the phone and wound up on camera she got so freaked out she threw the phone to the couch like a hot potato.
The cast is rounded out by their two laidback sons. Spencer, 24, an extraordinarily versatile drummer, has been playing since he was a kid -- see this Errol Morris-directed Quaker Oats ad - and made a double album with Jeff in 2014 when Susie was undergoing cancer treatment, named after her: Sukirae (right).
And Sammy, just 20, who at some point will amble out from the unseen part of the house, maybe heating up a pizza, wearing either one of Dad's old shirts or one of an endless t-shirt collection, only to quietly steal the show with his plaintive vocals as he reads lyrics off his iPhone. Here he is singing Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You in the End."
I recently attended the workshop production of three one-act plays. Only one was good, despite some stellar actors, but that's not unexpected. It's similar to the success batting average of the much more fully produced plays I see around town.
But as I took my folding chair in the first cramped studio, I was totally distracted - by the sight of one of my fellow audience members.
She was tall and striking-looking, but also very familiar, in a way that instantly engendered feelings of sympathy, almost sadness. But why? From where?
I knew this much: she was an actress, and that whatever I had seen her in, she had been new to me, which is always cool, when you can just accept a performance on face value without the baggage of having seen them in something else.
But it also means it might take a while for me to remember from where, even longer to recall a name. (Thank God for IMDB and IBDB; I see so many plays, movies, and TV shows it can take me a couple of different performances for even the face to stick.)
Met Museumgoer looking at Felix Vallotton's 'The White and the Black" (1913)
How do we keep it together during times of chaos? A friend recently posted on Facebook:
"Happy to say I'm taking some time off to get my head/body together (right now they're in different time zones) but I had to cancel my plans for a walk-on-deserted-beaches sojourn because of family responsibilities...I wonder if I could run a few possibilities by you wonderful people?"
His ideas ran the gamut from Meditation and Psychedelics, to Electroshock and Gastric Bypass, to Public Service. (Already attempted: lying in bed all day with the shades down reading a long book about targeted killings by the Mossad.) He asked if we had any other suggestions. It was half-kidding, but, in days like these, half-not. Many of my friends and I feel worried about the sky falling. (Indeed, tragically, just before Christmas a woman was killed by a piece of a building near Times Square.)
Reading my friend's post, I realized I hadn't written on this blog in more than a year - since before the midterms! The last one I felt compelled to register had been about the bomb scare at work.
So what have I been doing since? Immersing myself in what I'm learning to think of as the Culture Cure.
First and foremost, I continued writing (and rewriting) a play - my first - about George McGovern, Thomas Eagleton, and McGovern's daughter, around the issue of mental health, the Presidency, and the conflict between public and private lives.
Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt's stellar cast: (Lucy Consagra, stage directions) Susannah Perkins, Juliana Canfield, Greg Hildreth, Zoe Winters, Greg Keller, CJ Wilson, Susie Pourfar, Peter Grosz, James Udom, Adam Harrington
Audible sponsored a developmental reading at the Minetta Lane Theater with an amazing director and cast that helped my next revise. And also continued my hard-won wisdom on the realities of the theater marketplace. Meanwhile,
