“Romance never does go out of fashion. It’s radical.” – Bob Dylan, AARP Magazine For Monica Murphy, a New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance writer living in the foothills of California’s…
Storychord.com: ISSUE #76: Elisabeth Donnelly, Fabio Sassi, No Other →
“Sex hung in the air at meditation camp.” I have a story up on this week’s storychord, and it includes excellent music by Maria!
I’m officially living in the New York metro area (and, er, starting to look for an apartment in Brooklyn or so, wish me luck! Share secrets!) and it’s been very good so far and feels like an exciting and productive move on my end. In some ways, I didn’t choose to live in upstate New York (thanks, love) and I never liked the Albany area much, despite the two wonderful friends I had there, genuine love and appreciation for the works of William Kennedy and William Kennedy himself, and the New York State Writers Institute, which is a goddamm treasure. (Here is a challenge: try making friends when you work at home and are too old for college stuff but too young for baby stuff and hate jam bands, very sensitive folk music by Woodstock natives, 90s bands - Spin Doctors, 311, Third Eye Blind, they live! - and 90s cover bands and live upstate. It is hard. The friends I had I mostly had met before moving.) I mostly liked its proximity to other places in New York and Massachusetts: Saratoga, Williamstown, Great Barrington, Hudson, Northampton if I felt ambitious.
Honestly, the smartest thing I did while living upstate was choosing to move 40 minutes south to Catskill, New York, which was in the upper corner of the Hudson Valley, with the Catskill Mountains (yes, kind of confusing) fifteen minutes away on one side and across the river, the fairly touristified Hudson, New York, which is its own strange ecosystem thanks to the presence of Manhattanites with country homes and proximity to Bard and Great Barrington/Berkshires stuff.
In Catskill, we lived down the street from where Thomas Cole lived. He was one of the leaders of the Hudson River School movement in painting. He painted the Catskills, Kaaterskill Falls, and the view from my house:
The sunsets in Catskill are amazing. There’s a valley between the mountains and the river. The moisture in the sky creates a lot of clouds most nights, and each sunset is a slow-mo reflection of light bending into impossible shades of orange and purple before hiding behind the hills. There’s a quality of light there that’s very difficult to capture well with just one photo: to get the real colors of the sunset, the land needs to be blacked out and in shadow, or vice versa. That’s why it was nice to look at Hudson River School paintings to say, wow, that’s where I lived! I don’t know much about painting but I think the act of underpainting made a difference in replicating the sunsets, prepping the canvas with a color like a strong blue or golden-tinged white so that bit of color could come through in the end product. (All I know about underpainting I learned from an insane BBC documentary on cinematographer Christopher Doyle, where he went to Hong Kong and watched women apply makeup and compared that all to an underpainting.)
We were in this beautiful, picture-perfect postcard of an area - on one hand, on the other hand the main street in Catskill is basically abandoned - but it was hard to replicate it through photographs or art, and I think it was an accident of the light. I’ve driven through Big Sur, an area so gorgeous that it makes the most committed amateur photographer appear to be Ansel Adams 2, and Catskill - and the Hudson Valley as a whole - is just as beautiful, but impossible to photograph well. A funny state of being. I miss being around that sort of reckless beauty, but I know what I’m getting in return is rich as well.
This was a fairly long intro to what I wanted to talk about, which was running in Catskill. I had thought that I hated running. It is a terrifically boring sport, and it does nothing for my psyche on a daily basis. But it is cheap and keeps me fit so I have to do it.
Running in Catskill was magical.
We had two routes: one across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, a 1.5 KM bridge that spanned the Hudson River, with views of Olana on one side and the Catskills on the other. When we would run by it early in the morning, the fog would still be on the river, spinning light through the farms and trees. We saw deer and foxes on our run. Birds chirped.
The other route was down a road that ran alongside the Hudson River. There would be abandoned haunted houses on the way, gorgeous mansions from the 1800s now chopped up into sad upstate apartments and in elegant disarray, houses topped off with Widow’s Walks, giant mansions with views of the river and mysterious tour buses parked in the driveway (our theory was that it was Natalie Merchant), and a house behind a large brick fence that had elaborate gates with the family crest painted on it and lions topping each corner - for the last, of course, when we ran by there the first time we made tasteless jokes about how this house could’ve been an inspiration for Stieg Larsson. Each time we ran it was like running in a V, with a steep downslope and a satisfying upslope, the sort of path that leaves your calves aching and your thighs burning and it’s a wonderful feeling.
I don’t have those kind of paths to run right now. I have the Original Suburbs of America, the sort of landscape that renders running into something joyless and monotonous, passing the same charmless houses, the same erratic sidewalks, the same springy outdoor tracks at high schools, always an impossible quarter of a mile. The sort of route that argues for music (if you have any better-than-The Fall running music recommendations, I am all ears!) or a running buddy. In Catskill, I could wander.
But then again, I was also running across a bridge named after a fictional character who, running away from his nag of a wife, fell asleep for twenty years thanks to drink and missed the war; a good, sturdy metaphor for what it’s like to live in the country, sometimes.
I wrote about some state capitals for The Awl. Somebody on twitter said “I got Sacramento about right,” which is all I want, really, after spending time in the bus station there.
Watching Mad Men With My Mother →
Check out this week’s Lives column in the New York Times Magazine. I wrote it. It’s about my relationship with my mother, dresses, and Mad Men. Funny enough, it’s one of the most personal things I’ve written!
Bonus fun facts: my mom is addicted to Mad Men now, but it literally took “watching each episode twice, to get through the bad feelings.” She even considered getting cable to watch this season. For this piece, she had to get fact checked by the New York Times Magazine. She also called me at one point to point out some typos in a draft. She’s really great.
“To walk the road of peace, sometimes we must be ready to climb the mountain of conflict.”
Didn’t realize that In the Loop’s Simon Foster was the camp assassin in Hanna, which I wrote about for This Recording.
Dating Jared Leto
There was a point in time where Jared Leto was dating a whole slew of twenty something actresses, and it made no sense. He was in his has-been phase, or he was pursuing his band or whatever (and they are inexplicably big, I believe). But seeing him squiring the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Lindsay Lohan confirmed one thing: the myth of Jordan Catalano lives on. These actresses are all younger than me, and my guess is they saw My So-Called Life in a tender, vulnerable time in their lives - and getting older, and hotter, they got to actually date Jordan Catalano and live the dream. Getting the chance to date Jared Leto must’ve been, for them, a moment in time where they were Angela Chase in the boiler room.
I saw Temple Grandin last year, kind of by accident, one of those movies that you settle on when you’re at a friend’s house and they have 500 channels on cable. If Temple Grandin had been released theatrically, mark my words, Claire Danes would’ve won the Oscar for best actress. Easily. (Which in itself is funny, because I bet she and Natalie Portman have been competing for parts since they were luminous teen actresses.) The movie was good, and it felt, somewhat, like a movie that would’ve been released theatrically even five years ago, as a passion project. Was Harvey Weinstein asleep at the wheel? It’s great that HBO put it out, but it would’ve been nice for the total media saturation that you would’ve gotten with a movie. Claire Danes won awards the whole season long, fifteen years after I thought that she was the best teenage actress I had ever seen.
I suppose Glee is filling the same role for kids that My So-Called Life did for me. I saw My So-Called Life when I was in seventh grade. It was aspirational. I looked up to Angela Chase as a friend and I knew that I would be her, in some form or fashion, in the future. My best friend dyed her hair kool-aid red and it washed out in a day. I’ve been rewatching the show with my boo recently; he never saw it, and letting him in on it feels like letting him in on secret teenage me. I wonder how Glee is affecting seventh graders these days. It has to be, in some ways, a really resonant time to be a gay teenager and to see some version of your life reflected in TV these days - and that’s what I think is important about Glee, which is just spottily entertaining - but ultimately, when it comes to realistic, well-written characters that you care about, it really can’t hold much of a candle up to My So-Called Life. It’s the rare show that gets that deeply inside someone’s specific human experience. But the echoes are kind of interesting.
I wrote about post-collegiate anxiety for This Recording. Hopefully it is a little funny and maybe a little melancholy. I love the Sol Lewitt photos illustrating it - for me, seeing Sol Lewitt at Mass MoCA inspired such a visceral reaction that I could feel in my bones. His work is disorienting.
PSA: The Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders is a great research institution.