So I still don’t know what to say or do about… that, you know... THAT. That thing that happened, this ongoing, seemingly unending... what? Revenge play? Fiasco? Triumph des Willens? It feels frankly like a terrifying reenactment of my worst nightmares from Junior High: Revenge of the Jerks? Anyway, I doubt you know quite what to do about this either. And even if you do, I'm sorry, I don't want to hear it just now. Nope. I don’t want to hear you out. You may be right. I may never know. Trust me, it's not you, it's me. I absolutely do not want to talk about any of this. I don't want to commiserate, or consider our options going forward. I do not need to process. Honestly, I don't want to hear about any of it. I don't want to read about it. I definitely do not want to even think about it. No. I don't want to watch it happen. I don't want to know if or how it does.
Now, I don’t know about you, but for me that’s new. I've never felt quite this way before.
Of course, this is not my first political or cultural setback, by no means my first ass-whuppin'. Unsurprisingly at my age, I have been disappointed before. I lived through being a little sissy in the sixties and then hair-styles and unbuttoned shirt-fronts of our fathers in the seventies, and then the Reagans and AIDS in the eighties! And how many Supreme Courts? And how many protests of how many wars? And, yes the first round of this thing and a pandemic! And yet this somehow feels almost worse, does it not? I've never been quite this brim full o' existential dread. I've never been this personally immobilized.
It's not disinterest on my part, you understand. I didn't wake up the day after and not care. And it's not that I'm defeated -- I mean obviously we were, all of us and potentially our children's children and the planet, etc., etc. Nope. I just don't want to. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, "I would prefer not to." So this is just... What is this? This is the ellipses in which we find ourselves at the moment. The ellipses in which I've decided to rest awhile. Dot dot dot. Get it? What comes after? No idea.
In his novel, Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence says, "That's the place to get to -- nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere."
Well, yes.
So I decided for the time being to not even try to see past the end of my nose and so I haven’t, much. Decided to do... nothing. And still not doing anything much, roughly a month later. Now that’s new. That is not and has never been my M.O. So, if I'm not doing anything to counteract the horror, what on earth am I to do instead? I mean, if we are not going to address the elephant in the room -- or aaaaall the elephants soon to be stomping and trumpeting and shitting aaaaall over the place, well, what then?
And I thought, “Maybe just listen to music?”
So, on my commute I decided to listen to Bill Evans, not news. Do you know the great Bill Evans? Pianist. Jazz great. Love him. So Bill Evans, not news.
That phrase, "not news," now I come to say it aloud, that's rich. Obviously I meant I won’t listen to "The News" anymore, so I've stopped tuning the radio to NPR's Morning Edition et al. I’ve stopped reading most of the newspaper too. I can’t look at CNN or any of the morning shows or anything that might bring it all up again. For fear I'll hear him, you know? That voice. But not even that, just the mention of. I can't. Doesn't much matter the purveyor or the medium; print, digital, broadcast. Unbearable. Anything but that. So "not news." Anything but news. No news.
And now I think about it, "not news" is also true in the sense that my confession is not exactly "news." I am evidently not alone in my paralytic incapacity, not the only one staying in the ellipses, now am I? Seems I'm actually on trend for once.
And then there's yet another suggestion wedged into those two little words! If you know me, if you so much as look at me, it can't be unexpected that I would choose to listen to jazz rather than pop or country or sports radio. So that's "not news" either. I mean, I wear a beard and blocked hats and clogs. I still say things are “cool” and “not cool." I’m the gay who didn’t really care about Ga Ga until she sang with Tony Bennett. Come on. Jazz makes sense for me.
Though to be honest, I'm usually more of a "Basin Street East Proudly Presents Miss Peggy Lee" kind of jazz aficionado. You know, gay. I like a lady who sings with the band, preferably a cool chick in elbow-length gloves and a chignon. I like a chanteuse, a Miss Dakota Staton armed with a cigarette, and a sly wink, mic'd, minked, marvelous. I like a lady who knows her way around a double entendre and a double bass. I like sass and snap and swing, and if we're going to have two cigarettes in an ashtray, I like a vocalist who's heart may be broken but who's voice never breaks. Never really been a fan of ruins of Billy Holiday, I'm more a let's listen to Sassy swing some Gershwin, daddy.
So when I went on my news hunger strike, I pulled out a whole raft of my favorite female vocalists. And that -- was a mistake. Why? It was all those goddamned torch songs. In the car, driving to work on the freeway and Carol Sloane sings “For All We Know” and I’m in tears. Embarrassing -- and frankly a little dangerous. Try another record. Carmen McRae does "Please Be Kind", of all things, and I'm gone again. Floods, blinding floods. It was a problem.
In the end I couldn't even listen to cool, cheery June Christy or even dear, baby-voiced Blossom Deary for fear they'd do a slow ballad and sing about the one that got away, or their disappointed dreams, or go into I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry. Can't. I was afraid I'd tear up and maybe smash into the divider or drive off the bridge.
So no singers. So instrumentals? So Bill Evans.
Not that Bill Evans couldn't make me cry, as it turns out. As I mentioned, great pianist/composer and fully capable of that tendresse douloureuse that catches the throat without so much as a word said. So his instrumental of “My Foolish Heart” shouldn’t but it did. Heartbreaking. Reminding me of other heartbreaking things, moments, results. Which is how I ruined even Bill Evans. (And by the way, Bill Evans playing with Tony Bennett on say, Some Other Time?! Definitely on my go-to-tears list.)
Here I was thinking I was safe with Bill Evans at Town Hall, 1966, and Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1968, that sort of thing. Swinging. Brilliant. Abstract enough to keep my mind off the other, but not so abstract as to prevent me following the tune, so Bill Evans. Maybe Stan Getz? Maybe Miles. Maybe even Monk (which is about as far as I go.)
Instrumental jazz, no later than Be Bop because I'm hip but not so hip as all that, I thought. Have you heard Miles Davis play “It Never Entered My Mind”?! Fuck. Gone.
So maybe not jazz.
This may all make me sound cooler than I am, by the way, all this jazz talk. (Does it? No? Well, it used to when it wasn't age appropriate, when I was an unlikely eighties kid who preferred Dinah Washington to The Clash. That was charmingly eccentric. Now, as I said, I not only look like that guy, I am.)
I am still not cool though. Never have been cool even when I briefly affected smoking jackets and a cigarette holder. I tried, but no. Too emotional, frankly. Highs, lows, no cool. Way too late now to take it up even if I could. So I am the uncool jazz fan; not quite a square, but not so hip as all that. I can’t read a note of music or talk intelligently about Evans’ chord structures or his use of “rhythmic displacement.” Just an enthusiast, just a listener. Obviously a sentimental listener. Though I hasten to add that I'm not one of those Glenn Miller reactionaries who only likes swing because bald guys slow dance to it and the girls still wear really red lipstick. Ick.
And before anyone suggests string quartets or heaven forbid Yo Yo Ma playing Bach cello suites, the classical catalogue proved me weirdly wet-eyed too. I'll spare you the details as I am even less qualified to talk about Debussy than Ellington, but it was rough. So... silence then, at least in car, for eleven miles each way.
And at home? I believe this is called a helpless shrug?
What, for example am I reading?!
Well, Middlemarch. Not just Middlemarch though. Never just Middlemarch.
When it happened, I happened to have started reading a big new book about the Queen. Seriously, The Queen of Bloody England. Nothing so utterly remote from reality as a Windsor. Nothing less like current events than a Saxe-Coburg Gotha, baby! (That was their name you know, because of Albert, before his grandson with the pointy mustaches and the withered arm set the world ablaze in 1914 and changed the royal sauerkraut into victory cabbage and the Sax-Coburg and Gothas into those dear ol' tweedy Berkshire county folk, the Windsors. Hashtag TikTok history, hashtag fun facts about the dull rich.)
The Windsors! If you don't know, they're just like Game of Thrones but without dragons, or ash-blondes, or sex, or engaging personalities, or magic, or looks — except by marriage and when those boys still had all their hair and weren't fight over their wives. Most importantly the current royal family is without politics or even any interest of themselves. That’s the job. I'll concede the occasional touching anecdote and gesture, the great writing and acting in The Crown, but the reality Elizabeth Windsor? Nothing further from strong emotion than Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand and the Cook Islands, Lord of the Isle of Mann, etc. She was in fact the studied, practiced, all but perfected embodiment of keeping well out of it, the serene, high muckety-muck of staying above the fray, sovereign of the static smile and the neutral chat, the matchy-matchy hat and purse lady, dear, only just dead Lilibet of the Coins, Stamps, and Pounds.
So Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, by Craig Brown, author of the equally and unexpectedly delightful Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Excellent reading. Good distraction. Hardly a tear to be shed. Okay, maybe one or two for ol' Liz. (Margaret on the other hand was an absolute monster! Wonderfully rude, snobbish, stylish, thick, selfish. Ghastly woman.)
So safe, neutral reading.
And then something about ol' Lizzie, of all people, really piqued my interest. Are you familiar with The Queen's Christmas Message? I guess it's The King's now, but I'm not obligated as an American to think about the present monarch at all and I don’t. So, not to give the whole history of this very modern British tradition, but basically the late Queen's late Pa and even later Grandpap used to do this on "the wireless" and then she kept it going, on the television since 1957, and then on The Socials. That's where I watched a bunch of these things. And I read a bunch on the internet too, trying to crack the code.
Basically everything British stops cold at 3PM on Christmas Day and the monarch appears virtually 'round the isles and whatever's left of the Commonwealth (aka the former Empire) and there's a wee speech. It's a pretty unique speech even as monarchal speeches go. Basically, it is just Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the ol' Sax-Coburg Gotha Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluksburgs and it makes the Opening of Parliament sound like Valerie Solanas' Scum Manifesto. I mean. This thing is hypnotically predicable. Honest. Watch one. Watch her first one, Elizabeth, from 1957.
It is odd. First there's that voice: "It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you."
Indeed.
Everything about The Christmas Message is ever so slightly weird, at least to an American: the completely predictable repetition of festive cliche, the artificiality, the frank absence of any discernible talent for — I don’t know, public speaking? BUT (big but,) it is also kind of charming. It's sweet. It feels both harmless and heartfelt. From the obvious presence of a film crew to the set up in The Queen’s what? Living room, is it? Back parlor? Home office? From the setting then to the lady’s rather awkward but very real attempt at what I'm guessing is... warmth? Anyway, an argument could be made for The Queen’s Christmas Message being the first reality tv.
Watched her last one again. Opens with a band, closes with a choir. In between, there the old girl is, bless 'er, Christmas pin, same hair since -- ever, same message, same monotone delivery. The Queen.
And it's perfect of it's kind. Don't ask me if I cried because that seems where this was heading, doesn't it? But no, I did not.
What did it make me think about? What did it change? What did she give me personally, by way of a message?
Christmas.
Shut up. It did not seem that obvious a month ago, even a week ago, at least to me.
I decided to think about Christmas, about tonight actually, about this part of my Christmas, my tradition, our thing we do together you and me and anybody else who might be watching or listening along. This is where we step back out of the ellipses.
Because, I probably will cry tonight. Almost always do, don't I? And so do some of you and nobody's died of it yet that I know of, and the world doesn't end. There are people who should be here and they aren't, and people I wish I was with and I'm not, but this will absolutely do. Every year I read a classic American short story aloud and hopefully we are all of us moved at least a little and distracted from everything happening out there and we get to think instead about kindness, and childhood, and memory, and friendship. We get to remember and be if not in love, then again in communion, which for now is near enough.
I will not tell you that any of this; the cookies, the story, the company, my rather rickety voice, the bookstore itself as both an idea and an institution and my other home for better than two decades, I cannot tell you that any of this either answers... that or that any or all of whatever this is still constitutes a bulwark against the encroaching dark, the very real dark, out there. I don't know that that is true. I don't know if or how I might still believe that.
But for tonight, I want to. So here is my small music. Here is our little joy. This is the gift. Hopefully nobody dies tonight that we don't already anticipate! We will instead think just about... this.
