Signs of the Night

Tonight's walk:

Last summer's swimming pool, alabaster, empty, silent, bathed in light. Not one echo of August's rowdy, tense crowd simmering in a cauldron of raw longing, restlessness, and a dash of suspicion. Black elongated crosses demarcate depths and diving areas at the far end. A black wrought-iron fence guards the perimeter of the pool. The empty pool strikes a monumental pose. It looks like some kind of shrine with its radiance and stillness. A shrine to what? Snowflakes aimlessly fly about in the brisk wind. What if the pool were a sacred shrine, a local Taj Mahal? What if someone proclaimed The Burnet Park Pool as a tourist venue, designed by, say, Frank Gehry or Frank Lloyd Wright? Just saying so, people would think about it differently. But I don't need such proclamations. It is luminous and miraculous, just as it is.

Walking back home, the "clean, well-lighted place" (Hemingway's phrase) behind me, I see graffiti on a small concrete-block building housing electrical equipment. (Ever since my trips to Berlin, Germany, I'm more open-minded about graffiti.) The tag is:


L I F E


in urban blocky font, in black spray paint.

The "i" is not dotted.

Where the dot on the "i" would be, is a small x.

Which makes me wonder, yet again.

Putting the Pop in Boston Pops

You may have heard about the fisticuffs in the balcony last night at the Boston Pops. It was opening night. This must've been the undercard. Maybe it was part of the fireworks accompanying "The 1812 Overture." Maybe it was all a stunt for a night of movie themes ("Fight Club" or "Rocky").

Why am I so amused by this? It could easily have been me. It has almost happened, once in New York and most recently in Berlin, Germany, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, on Easter Sunday no less. From what I understand, the reasons for the real brawl and my would-be brawl are similar: talking.

Well, it's no shock that any blogger would be a talker. Certainly no shock to anyone who knows me. (Sorry to disappoint anyone whom I had fooled into thinking I had any sense of refinement or decorum.) But my excuse is personal. Our hushed murmurs (not hushed enough for some) typically consist of these excited words in reference to my daughter on stage as a ballerina:

"There she is. Where? No, there. Oh, yes. I see her. Now. There. Wait. Third from the left. Right in front. Shhhh. I see her. Wait; I lost her. There. Cool."

All of which sounds like a Samuel Beckett play, which would be perfectly apt, because the Berlin ballet we saw was a portion of Richard Wagner's "The Ring" ("Ring um den Ring" in German if you must know) as choreographed by Maurice Bejart. It might just as well have been by Beckett, in German, for all the comprehension I was able to conjure up. The shushing disdain from the well-dressed gent on my right was palpable, splendidly Teutonic, and dripping with condescension that hung like lead in the atmosphere, until I silently announced to myself, "Screw it, get over it, Horst." I still wanted to kick his ass, though. As if I could.

So it could easily have been me banging it out in Berlin instead of brawling in Beantown. And because these two fellas really went at it, instead of politely dancing around it, I have a certain existential "Fight Club" admiration of their pure rage. For them, it wasn't "What would Kierkegaard do?" [WWKD?] but "What would Hemingway do?" [WWHD?]

I sent a link for the news story about this to a colleague, formerly of Boston. She emailed back to say, "Just because you can afford the symphony doesn't mean you don't have 'Southie' in you." Something like that.

As if I'd know. As if my housing-project past couldn't erupt from me like the alien coming out of the chest in "Alien," the 1979 sci-fi thriller.



Sometimes I wish it would. Maybe things would've been a tad less frustrating at work today.

Mr. Wind-up Bird

Haruki Murakami's book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle features a "wind-up bird" as a significant character. It's a bird that makes a strange screech that sounds as if it were winding up the world. . . .whatever the heck that means.

The real-life Mr. Wind-up Bird is Barry Zito. He's the pitcher who shows up at spring training with a new team, a new $126-million contract, and, um, a completely new wind-up.

This is unsettling to Giants fans such as myself (since 1955, the year AFTER they won the World Series, which they have not won since). Mr. Wind-up Bird says it's because he wants to improve. Fine. But I must add he is a pitcher who's never missed a start in seven years, a pitcher who has won the Cy Young Award as recently as 2002. He says he's been working on this for last month and a half, unbeknownst of course to his new employers. Zito compares it to the fabulously successful Tiger Woods's adjustment of his fabulously successful swing in 1997. (Notice how I inserted that traditional [trad] apostrophe S, unlike most journalists.)

Maybe it will work out fine for Mr. Wind-up Bird. Maybe not.

It's akin to Ernest Hemingway switching to a new publisher and submitting a draft of James Joycean prose straight out of the likes of Finnegans Wake.

Or The Meloncutter changing stores and presenting himself as a meatpacker! (There's a word to mull over.)

Or a pole-dance teacher showing up to give instructions on trout fishing.

Or a failed entrepreneur-fratboy-politician trying his hand at U.S. president.