EDITORIAL
Dilemma: What to do with this space. In the god-is-it-almost-a-year that I've been writing in this space, The Twin has become kind of a diary-cum-etude, keeping me honest or at least busy when my mind might have been screaming to just screw off and disappear (which is exactly what's been happening the last couple of weeks, to varying degrees, if you're wondering).

I could keep doing what I've been doing, ruminating and kvetching about the world, most of which centers around the details of my personal life and the characters I hang with. Yeah, I could do that, I guess.

I could get a bit more linky. Even in this downtime, I've been getting lots of cool links to various things that I wouldn't mind celebrating (or at least be able to find without further cluttering up my bookmarks file), like the new peripheral or how I found that since I've started calling myself Tony I've apparently had a predilection for fluid buildup disorders, or this cool new snail mail community whose name I almost share, but giving such link love seems not quite right for my life. I mean, as before, I'll do some of that, I guess. But I'm not steady with it, so phlthpht.

You could soon be reading a chronicle for the downtown songwriter scene (You know, like Antimatters was before it ran itself out, although in its place is the occasionally-truly-bustling message board Who The Fuck Cares What You Think, not to mention a few other weblogs (Like Jon's two, Peter's two, Eric Rosenfield's and Kate's, for starters). I know a lot of people who would really like that. But I've been way too unselfish already, giving shouts to my peeps and basically spreading the love around so thick I ain't got none left at the end of the day for my own bad self. This, actually, is the root of the problem. So turning this place into full-on East Side Indie report central is probly out. Although show reports and pics will probably keep showing up every once in a while.

I could turn this space into straight advertising for my band and my writing. I'm getting used to the idea that I'm pretty good at what I do, and I did originally move down here to promote myself, not the "scene" or anyone else in it. If that happens, if I can help someone else (especially someone I would really be happy for if they succeeded), then more to the good. But that's not why I'm here. I'm still selfish, and only gonna get selfisher. Sorry.

That might happen a bit more, but I hope it's not going to completely take everything over. I'm proud of my work and my abilities, such as they are, but I will occasionally experiment in here with other things, rant and yell, go on about all manner of esoterica, and very occasionally even make sense. (Setting the bar high, eh?)

That being said, I'm going to take the rest of this month (okay, through the weekend) and get my head together, and figure out where this space (and oh right, I keep forgetting, my life) is going. Answers surround my head like gnats, all harmless but annoyingly uncatchable.

So happy Labor Day, see you next Tuesday (at the latest). Until then, check out the other links or, y'know, go outside and read a book. That's what I'm doing. It ain't gonna be nice outside forever, eh?

BOILED IN A VAT OF RITA HAYWORTH
It's hot. Hot hot hot. Arms-away-from-your-body hot. Laminatin' yobadself after 15 seconds in the great sludgy outdoors hot. Open your front door just a crack and let the sticky gooey pissvomitcarexhausty oatmeal air rush in and sensurround you like a big ole hair dryer in an outhouse hot. Cover yourself in glue and stick yourself to the side of a building with a dozen eggs frying in a puddle of city-grease at your feet while sadistic firefighters spray boiling sewage at your immobile self hot. We're talking urinary tract infection hot, wasabi and habanero vindaloo hot, maybe even Rita Hayworth in Gilda hot. (Although I gotta admit, Rita did set the heat bar pretty high.)

Boy, do I love this weather. I wanna be outside with the sweat dripping off my nose, sitting in a park (or better yet, a stoop) with a book that gets wet everywhere I'm in contact with it (I'm in the middle of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn right now, and it's not bad, although after reading a couple of his short stories and an interview or two I'll admit I was expecting to have been blown away), a big ole cup of coffee over ice at my side, and a bunch of people moving slowly like they're gonna combust if they go. Any. Faster.

But no, I'm at work, typing and indexing jobs piled up bunker-high on my little desk, my co-workers' whiny arguments swirling around like darts in my neck, with the AC working just enough to make me clammy.

And all I can do is complain to you and carry on like the wayward son I've become.

THE PROBLEM WITH GOING THROUGH STRESSFUL TIMES IS I WRITE VOLUMES OF CRUD LIKE THIS
She looks so sad, so very sad, all the time. Her mouth turns down as if it never had turned up, the sunniness of her makeup highlighting the downward turns of her face, like she has never smiled before. Maybe she just can't remember.

Is she just used to not smiling? Does she somehow think that there is no way, no possible way that she can exist and be happy? Has she maybe been told that the only people who get attention are the sad ones? The happy ones, the perky cheerleader-cum-school-president-cum-motivational speaker types, they all peak in high school, get knocked up and wind up working the night shift at the Mobil station just to keep their kids in Pampers and cable. Either that or they breeze through college, stay enviously focused on their lives and become high-profile guests on other people's talk shows.

But the sad ones, oh, the sad ones are the ones everyone remembers. They stay pristine in their fortresses, unapproachable, unpleasable, impenetrable in their vanity, staring out into the objectless void, wondering if perhaps there is happiness for them somewhere, out in the vast unknowable.

And of course, there isn't. But that quixotic hope is what makes the regular tragedy into something truly special. The sad ones have the glory of innocent hopelessness, of being disappointed day after relentless day, of staring into the empty mailbox and walking through the blizzard of their snow-white discontent back to their mildewed dungeons, alone, ever alone.

= = =

My weeks of supreme stress are continuing. I've got a lot of friends for whom I've dropped off the face of the earth. I hate my job now, and it's getting worse, not better. I'm sick of the flux. It makes everything melodramatic in my head, and I feel like I'm writing with a paint roller these days.

I'm not asking for help, and I'm not going on 'hiatus' from this space (If I did, I'd be afraid I'd never come back), but understand, and I'm aware that I'm telling myself this, that I've been writing a lot of crap like the above, and and while the lot part is encouraging, it doesn't really mean anything.

I'm done whining.

THE SEAGULL
Last night I went out to see a free production of The Seagull in Central Park, and while they do Anton Chekhov anywhere and everywhere these days (Shakespeare companies, Shaw Festivals, public access television, high schools, abandoned gas stations, outside Irish pubs at 4:30 am), actually anywhere they might actually get an audience at all, this was the kind of experience that could only have happened in a place like New York. The entire cast and production crew consisted of people who have been above the title in major Hollywood productions (or soon will be, except for maybe Philip Seymour Hoffmann), and by my count there were a almost a dozen Oscars on or near the stage (Mike Nichols with four, Tom Stoppard with two, Meryl Streep with two, Christopher Walken, Kevin Kline and Marcia Gay Harden with one each. Am I forgetting anyone?). The New York Public Theater has decked this one out in strictly A-List colors all the way, baby. The stench of greatness filled the amphitheater like perfume off a lake.

Kline all but carried the play as Trigorin, the semi-famous writer who sort of falls for enthusiastic-but-inexperienced Nina (Natalie Portman, whom I get the feeling is still new to Chekhov, but she's good enough, clearly, and she'll get the hang of the role). Streep's job was to come in, mock her son (the guy from Angels In America, you know the guy, right? That guy. He was real good, all angsty and desperate), act like she was acting like she was falling for Trigorin, throw herself at someone's feet, and then leave in a huff, and she's plenty good at that, though for sheer scenery-chewing audience-winking fun, she couldn't outvamp Mr. Walken.

These last two weeks, I have been completely submerged in a hectic bunch of work, but still everywhere I turn, and everything I do, Walken's name seems to pop up somewhere. It's eerie, and not necessarily bad. But still. Watching him flop around, every halting, oddly... phrased line out of his mouth so incredibly ... Walkenesque, every single thing he said or did getting a laugh, even in the serious parts, he never dissolved into the character. Neither did John Goodman, but his role was more of a buffoonish one anyway, and if anything, he played it with too much nuance. There were some laughs he should have gotten that he didn't get. Walken, though, was a treat. Not a great acting job, but Grade-A Walken, which here worked fine.

But more than the stars, or Nichols' directing (I can't tell yet what's good direction and what's just good teamwork within a cast, but there was clearly some one-upmanship going on, especially between Streep, Goodman and Walken), the one thing I kept going back to was how great a play it is. I mean, yeah, I studied it in high school, and Chekhov is, well, Chekhov, one of the great playwrights of his or any time, but I found myself identifying a little too much with the two writers in the play. The urge to write is sometimes unbearable, especially when I'm somewhere where writing is not possible (I'm clandestinely banging this piece out at work, where things have been mad stressful, too stressful for what amounts to a temp job that pays mumblemumble an hour, which after bills leaves nothing), the urge to write is eternal and immense, and in those months when I do have the time, it is impossible to avoid ripping out the flowers of my life and stepping on the roots, I find myself shooting the gull from the sky because I have nothing better to do, and some days, many days, I have nothing but whatever I've managed to write and the remains of my ever-more-neglected life to show for it.

I chose writing (or it chose me, or we got fixed up, or all of those) when I was too young to know better. Now, for better or worse, it is what I do, what I am. I forget for a while, but it always reminds me before too long.

I question my talent, my strength, my other attributes that I might need to become successful, to keep writing. I alienate my friends, I find it so hard to explain sometimes. And how much of that is pointless angst, the rantings and self-flagellations of a soul in torture, in eternal flux? Probably most of it. I do escape it, too, for months at a time. I believe it is possible to be simultaneously happy and a working, occasionally blocked, active, accomplished writer. I've seen it.

I think maybe I shall disappear to Coney Island for the day tomorrow. The days these last few weeks have been alarmingly full, and the pile of things I have to work out doesn't seem to be getting any smaller.