He Knew All The Words

As a sometime sufferer of stress-related insomnia, I’ve been enjoying the New York Times op-ed series called All-Nighters. It’s written by a host of interesting writers and artists who’ve given all kinds of weird and wonderful perspective on the inability to sleep. I was particularly taken with this illustration sequence by Christoph Niemann called Good Night and Tough Luck. But really if you flip through the whole thing you’ll see lots of fascinating entries, like Siri Hustvedt’s rumination on the metaphors of sleep, Failing to Fall.

Of course for me, the larger factor in not getting enough sleep is not insomnia, but a lack of desire to sleep, which results in staying up much later than I should, despite needing to get up much earlier than I will. Years ago I wrote a poem about that, dedicated to myself and all those like me who feel like sleep is such a waste of time, called Lullaby for Reluctant Sleepers.

Listen here:

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As everyone knows, spring is a drag. But these are some recent things I’ve sniffed out that have made grinning and bearing it possible:

Shostakovich’s The Nose at The Metropolitan Opera. Last year Mark and Elizabeth birthday-gifted me the promise of a night at the opera of my choosing. I chose The Nose. I was not familiar with the music, but I love Shostakovich and this was a new production by William Kentridge, a South African artist I’ve long-admired. Here’s his preview:

The opera itself has a very strange, frenetic energy to it. And despite feeling it was overly busy at points, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s a strange tale — based on a Gogol story — about a man who awakes to find his nose has disappeared. He spends the opera chasing it around town trying to get it back. When he finally does, there’s a scene toward the end where he’s trying to reattach the nose to his face and it won’t stay on. This was so musically affecting it felt like a waking nightmare. The sheer frustration of this character was captured perfectly by Shostakovich’s tense score and the emotive singing of Paulo Szot.

Mark felt that the production — which is a cacophony of projected video and clever sets — had a bit too much Kentridge in it, that he’d put too much extraneous imagery throughout it. I agree to a point, but it bothered me far less than it did Mark. I think Anthony Tommasini got it just about right in his review in the NY Times.

Speaking of William Kentridge, his retrospective at MoMA opened last month and continues to mid-May. It’s wonderful. He makes wonderful drawings, then he turns those into single-frame animations. His films balance artistic and political concerns, juggle absurdities and beauties, and are as disquieting as they are stunningly hypnotic. It’s a dense crowded show. Go twice.

Also at MoMA, I loved the Marina Abramović show. Here is someone who took a few steps out into the weird body-based realm of performance art and never looked back. The show features video and documentation of her works, but also recreations of them by assistants who are performing in the galleries. It also features a new performance by Abramović herself. The show is called The Artist is Present, and she makes it a reality — for every day of the run of the show she will be in the second floor atrium, sitting at a table, looking into the face of someone sitting across from her. Any museum-goer can sign-up to sit in on the piece. It’s unnerving to watch. And you can join in the fun as MoMA is doing a live video stream of the event here (during museum hours).

Another intense experience of late came in the form of reading Louise Glück’s latest book, A Village Life. A powerful exploration of life in a rural village, the poems are written in a multitude of voices, and reflect and refract one another in deeply affecting ways. Glück has the ability to seduce the reader with one simple thought. Then she puts the knife in you slowly, gently, no smile, then she turns it and when she takes it out the hole closes up, perfectly healed on the outside, but her art is still festering inside you. It’s a beautiful and devastating book I highly recommend.

Less intense, but as important to my daily life, are a handful of new albums that I’m loving to bits. Fellow Brooklynites Yeasayer have taken hold of my heart with Odd Blood, their second album. Here’s one:

Also big in my daily mix is the new album from Hot Chip, but I can’t embed a video because the major label they’re on won’t allow it. That’s stupid, so screw ‘em. Also, Surfer Blood, Phoenix, and last but not least, the new album by Spoon. Take it away boys:

Just went to the NY Times website to see what was going on in the world and I thought for a second I had been transported to some alternate liberal universe.

Student loans to be paid directly to students instead of to students through banks as a free money giveaway to banks? Yowsah!

Senate passes reconciliation bill to fix some of the biggest problems in its own health care law? Wowsah!

The military is going to (for the most part) stop enforcement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell while waiting for the law to be repealed? Zonkers!

If passing Health Reform is going to give the Dems some spine to actually start doing some of the things they’ve promised, I may faint. I’ll faint happy, but faint nonetheless. The cynic in me says this will be short-lived, but at least for today I can be stunned and happy to see three such bits of news right at the top of the paper.

Despite my deeply held feelings that single-payer is the only way to get true, affordable, universal, quality health care to every single American, and despite my serious annoyance that to pass what they passed the Dems gave up on a public option, gave way too much to the insurance and drug industries, and caved on women’s rights, I cannot see the signing of this bill as anything but a very large net gain. And I’m speaking as a small-business owner who basically doesn’t see this bill affecting my own bottom line in any significant way (best I can hope for, I think, is a gradual slow-down of premium increases).

I’d like to focus my positive remarks on a couple of specifics: 1. Nancy Pelosi; and 2. the best changes that this new law brings.

For the last two years of G.W. Bush’s presidency I thought Nancy Pelosi was wimpy and ineffectual. But boy did she find her feet under the new Democratic Whitehouse. She has moved a ton of good legislation through the House — including 290 bills that have gone nowhere in the do-nothing Senate. And I previously sang her praises when she declared the House health bill would have a public option or it wouldn’t be passed. (She did accomplish that, too, though of course the bill that became law was the public-option-less Senate bill). And in the days after the special Massachusetts Senate election, when everyone was declaring health reform dead, she relentlessly insisted it would get done. If you do a search of this very blog, you’ll also find that unlike the leader of the Senate, I have never called Nancy Pelosi an asshole. Plus, the Republicans absolutely detest her and have called for her head after this great Democratic victory. If they hate her that much, I love her all the more. Kudos, Madame Speaker, you’ve done a great job so far this Congress. Please keep pushing.

And now, let’s just assume that we all agree that there are many areas in which we need to continue to reform health care. Some great people in Congress are working on that. And let’s assume the Reconciliation bill passes the Senate and the President signs that into law shortly. And let’s turn away from the crappy parts of the new law, and take a look at some basic major changes that this reform accomplishes.

First of all, in the pie-charts of how health coverage is divided among the American people, the uninsured go from being the second-largest group (after those insured by their employers) to the second-to-last biggest group, as outlined in this excellent article by Ezra Klein. As Klein compares where we’ll be coverage-wise in 10 years compared to where we would have been without the reform, that alone seems to be argument enough to applaud this new law.

I’ve found this easy-to-navigate interactive feature in The New York Times very helpful. It shows what the current law does, and what the Reconciliation bill will do to change it. Just take a look at some of those figures: expands Medicaid to 16 million more poor people, eventually closes the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, creates the marketplace “exchanges” where individuals can buy insurance as part of a large group, regulates insurance companies as to minimum benefits, forces insurance companies to accept everyone, reduces the federal deficit by $138 billion. As Vice-President Biden said today at the signing, and I quote, “This is a big fuckin’ deal!”

And two more quick shout-outs.

First of all, knowing that a few of you who read this blog were big Clinton supporters in the primary, a nod of thanks does go to her. First of all, she worked hard to do this in the 1990s. She failed, but she provided mistakes for Obama and the current Congress to learn from. And actually, the plan that has passed is actually a bit closer to her campaign proposal than to Obama’s, though to be fair, there wasn’t that much difference between them.

And finally, well, come on — I’ve been hard on the guy, and I’m still pissed he didn’t force a public option into this thing — but he’s done something that other presidents have been trying to do for about a century. Pretty sweet. Thanks, Mr. President. A year and three months into this, I’m still delighted that the adults are in control again!

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