I have had to turn my Vanity Fair cover down, so I don't have to see who's on it. Much as I love some people who work on and guide that fine magazine, I cannot bear to see what's on the cover, it offends me so. Even to write the name of the person on it catches in my craw. The emptiness of the eyes, the total nothingness of the persona, makes me sad for what's happened to the world, that someone like that could actually capture what is left of the world's attention. Even to write his name catches in my spiritual craw, it is so repellent.
I am reminded of the death of a great and tragic woman singer not that long ago when he actually volunteered comments to the press even though he didn't know her, because he imagined he mattered. It is like watching the marathon of Homeland, a program that actually seemed smart and well cast till you looked at those people over and over and over again and longed for Claire Danes when she was young, being Juliet, and would stop holding her eyes so wide open, and Mandy Patinkin when he was singing. What has the world come to that along with maniacs who shoot people for not even particularly insane reasons,--just to shoot-- we have the talentless, pointless, and mindless making their way into and onto one of the few great publications that seems to be surviving? It was hard to deal with the fact that the great Mike Nichols' farewell from almost everybody that mattered had to be in a publication with a boob on the cover.
Is it just that I've gotten old? The most brilliant woman I knew at the inarguably great woman's college I went to, just saw Hamilton and didn't like it, so I am afraid to go. Not that I have to worry, as I can't get a ticket. But I saw In the Heights, the writer-composer's last highly lauded show, and thought it over-rated. So I am afraid that even when I might be able to go, I might be disappointed. The second smartest woman I know heard from her smartest friends that it wasn't that good, so I am no longer engaged in a struggle to see it, especially as I was offended at the very rich woman who controlled ticket sales making it hard even for those who had stood on long lines and had money, so apparently arrogant that she didn't even bother to list it.
When I arrived here, it was the end of summer, and my air conditioner broke. I was full of fear. My building is one of the last of the Greaties, New York being taken over by all these too tall, unlovely, excessive things that Bloomberg let start to happen, probably because he has a hand in the cost of their construction. The building where Marlon Brando lived when he was beautiful, as it was, has been obscured by cheesy, overbuilt things that you cannot even say have a facade, because that would have the double meaning that they were pretentious, which they don't even bother to be. I was worried, because of how incredibly expensive I guessed the air conditioner would be to replace.
Then, overnight, the weather changed! It grew cold and rainy, and air conditioners were over for the year-- outre! And I thought: could it be that God loves me? First the Pope comes and everybody is nice, with the exception of course of Putin, and then the weather changes!
So even if I can't get a ticket to the hot show, I am comfortable in my own skin. Sadly of course when I look out my terrace window-- I am calling it a terrace though what it really is is a little metal balcony that anyone in their right mind would be afraid to step onto-- what I see are girders and ladders and ropes and metal constructs and everything that dangles and obscures. But on one of the buildings that is mirrored, I can see a reflection of the sky.
And from one of the girders in the near distance hangs a head that looks like Mickey Mouse's. Or maybe that's just someone committing suicide.
