FURY

I’ll admit, I’m confused by it.

Everybody agrees that it’s not healthy.

A guy can take a course to help manage it.

Talking about it is supposed to be the best approach.

I spend a lot of time talking to myself

but that only seems to make it worse.

Remembering to breathe is also helpful, 

yet far more complicated than it sounds.

Most agree that men are more often 

afflicted by it then women, 

however I think we suffer it in equal measure

but simply express it differently.

To lash out with it can result in violence, 

to internalize it may cause cancer.

It can look like a madman thrashing up the street

or a sullen creature chewing her nails to the nub.

The experts speak of it as something than can be displaced,

which makes me think of a constellation

in the night sky that’s suddenly gone missing.

Some people consider it an irrational act of nature.

Others rack it up with the emotions

as if it were a blameless abstraction.

I’m here to hold it responsible.

I like to blame it on other people’s stupidity and neglect

since I’ve learned how to disassociate from my own.

Or blame it on the fact that so much 

that I’ve expected and deserved has not materialized.

Sometimes I like to test it,

to put on a freshly laundered white shirt

and see how quickly the fury soils it.

It’s strange to aim at the present. The only way I could see it was pictorially, broad strokes leaking toward cartoon. But that’s not so different from the way we live our lives, disembodied from the news of the day, but still reliant on it. So much of the news involves the manipulation of it. Obama and Paris Hilton. Inspired cartooning. News is a rated production. I enjoyed thinking ahead of events a number of months, but the news kept changing. At first, as McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, each won one of the first three primaries, I imagined a brokered Republican convention in which the fictive guv of of Minnesota stole the presidential nomination after delighting the evangelicals and firming up his conservative bone fides speaking at the capitol birth-in. I scratched the presidential nomination heist after McCain locked up the nomination. My guv now has to be content with the vice nomination. It occurred to me that what I was writing was the first cousin of Philip Roth’s “alternative fiction,” as practiced in The Plot Against America. Mine was “alternative present.”

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, my former wife Patricia and I packed everything we owned in a Ryder truck and left San Francisco for a new life in Minnesota. I’d tired of San Francisco, hard as that was for anyone to imagine. Patricia was more reluctant to give up the City, she’d come from the Midwest and had “earned” S. F. I’d only been born there. I had a wee fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis and we decided to give the Twins cities a shot. We had an exciting drive, detouring south through Nebraska to visit Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud. I remember going past signs near Red Cloud that touted a tourist attraction called Pioneer Village: “In 1865, 145 covered wagons passed here. we noted that we were traveling the opposite way, thus becoming pioneers in reverse.Now, after twenty-five years in St. Paul, I’m reversing myself and returning to Northern California, where I’ll settle in Sonoma. My son is making the cross-country drive with me in my well-packed Saab. Yesterday, Anton and three of his friends helped me move fifty boxes (mostly books), some sticks of furniture, and other crates of minutia, into 10 leased linear feet of a massive semi. The truck, which barely fit onto my street, sheared overhanging tree branches where it passed. The driver, a seventy-five-year old gent named Dave, told me he was on the road almost all the time. What a fate, I thought, as large an albatross as a man could attach to himself. 

 Last Saturday I picked up one of the last tickets for the Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. The preferred local theater, for both its sound quality and stadium seating, was a cineplex in a god-forsaken suburb of Minneapolis, where the folks are really into god. I ended up with a small bucket of popcorn and a seat in the the middle of the front row. Once I tilted back and beheld a high-definition version of soprano Renee Fleming, the beautiful, if slightly vapid, backstage host, on the massive screen, I knew I was going to give myself to the experience. La Fille du Regiment is a playful bit of fluff with a handful of fine arias, especially for the tenor, sung winningly by the boyish, bright-eyed Peruvian, Juan Diego-Florez. But the real glory of the production belongs to La Fille, Marie, with the French coloratura Natalie Dessay turning in a performance of great charm. The screen’s pores-eye view keyed in on the muscularity of Dessay’s performance as a young woman raised by a regiment of French soldiers. Dessay’s rich voice was just fine, though it seemed almost ancillary to the marvel of her acting. which ranged from vein-popping physical to playful, with a wry sense of the absurd. Renee Fleming grabbed the principals after the first act, as they came backstage panting, and both Diego-Florez and Dessay, without skipping a beat, gave warm and self-effacing accounts of the challenges of their roles. There was a palpable sigh from the theater audience as everybody’s voyeuristic desires were satisfied. With this production, the Met completed its second season of simulcast operas beamed by satellite to hundreds of movie theaters across the United States, and Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan. As my first experience of the enterprise, I have to laud it as a bit of cultural and technical genius. To make opera of this quality accessible to a vast audience almost makes a skeptical character like me believe that there is some form of god.

On my way out of San Francisco the other day, I spent an hour going through “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,” at the Legion of Honor. The show, originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum, ends its cross-country run in San Francisco on May 25. As I stood in front of an oval-office shot of George W. and his war cabinet, a tall socialite, who looked as if she’d been chauffered over from her pad in Pacific Heights, sidled up beside me and said, “Wouldn’t you like to choke each of them to death?” Then she gave me a second look and said, “Only in San Francisco, would I assume that a total stranger shares my political views.” I nodded toward Donald Rumsfeld, clenched my hands in a choke hold, and told her that I imagined that the same conversation had taken place in Brooklyn. One of the surprises of the Leibovitz show is the way it gets people who don’t know each other talking. Leibovitz’s gift is similiar to that of the great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who excels at allowing his subjects to present (and incriminate) themselves, with little commentary. Add to this the extraordinary access Leibovitz has had to the political leaders and cultural luminaries of our time, through assignments from Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, and the result is a portfolio of iconic images, whose subjects we immediately recognize. It’s this collective shock of recognition that has strangers nodding to each other. There’s Nicole Kidman, ravishing in silvery gown and wash of spotlights; painter and film director Julian Schnabal, lounging in his paint-flecked striped pajamas; skeletal William Burroughs hung beside an anonymous Venetian who looks like his first cousin; Cindy Crawford, naked to the waist, adorned with her pet python; Generals Schwartzkopf and Powell, in full regalia, looking like a pair of grown-up boys playing dress-up. A woman in her thirties stood enraptured in front of a 1992 portrait of Daniel Day Lewis. The actor’s long, elegant fingers were ready to leap out of the frame. “The hands,” I said, and the woman sighed, “Yes,” as she imagined herself being touched by them.

Finally, after the wind ripped through me and my winter coat, I headed over to Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in St. Paul, not far from where I live. Garrison’s good store is referenced in the book a couple of times. Augie had noted a bit of the owner’s self promotion, saying: “Garrison had a desk down there withe a sign pinned to it that named the books he’d written on it and the various typewriters he used. It was almost as good as being at the John Steinbeck museum in Salinas. I took a photo of the sign. So there I was, in the midst of my self promotion, capturing his. It’s self promotion as a hall of mirrors.