A few years ago, shortly
after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, I was visiting an old law school
friend at his apartment in Manhattan on the second floor of a small building
located near the always atmospheric, folk music history-rich corner of Macdougal and
Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village. We were chatting about an
entertainment project he wanted to develop and sell – a compact disc compendium
of well and lesser known performances of a very popular American gospel
song. It was a pretty good, “what if?”, idea whose ultimate success would
depend on a great many variables, including especially the parlous state of the
music business, but it was an enjoyable conversation with many side avenues.
Midway through the afternoon, his current girlfriend (the term sounds funny for guys of our age and, come to think of it, the girlfriend’s age, but so be it), dropped by. She was very nice and voluble in conversation. She seemed quite intelligent and was clearly “connected” in the New York literary world because of some past editorial positions and a former marriage.
At one point, out of the blue, she said to me that my friend had advised her that I was politically (in his view) quite conservative, something she and he certainly were not.
Based on that description, she said that she was surprised that I smiled so much and laughed so frequently because it was her impression that political conservatives didn’t do things like that.
Her remarks surprised me a lot. She was deadly serious and there wasn’t even a trace of irony or hidden mischief in what she said. She didn’t try to draw me out about my views or anything else for that matter and I wasn’t inclined to explain myself because that seemed tedious and, in truth, irrelevant.
She didn’t even ask me whether I was smiling and laughing because I was happy.
Lou Reed: New York Telephone Conversation (link)
Fred Neil: Everybody's Talkin' (link)
Linnea -- And every word of it literally true. Thanks for listening. Curtis
ReplyDeleteUncomfortable. Superficial. Rude. I doubt I could have mustered a smile or a laugh.
ReplyDeleteOf course she was rude. Rudeness today is the lingua franca. But in the long run, it provided grist for the mill. She and my friend "broke up" not long after that and the record, unfortunately, never got made. He told me the break-up story, which was colorful, about six months later over an al fresco breakfast at around 7 am one sunny LA morning on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City. My friend is a past master at breaking up, at this point an Old Master. He leads a far more exciting and sensually charged life than I do and he seems to take these things in stride. I'm past ever wanting to go through that sort of turmoil again. Curtis
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