And the award for best engagement announcement video goes to...

Ned and Emily (and Ned's sister Joan) made this video for Ned's parents, who were out of the country at engagement time. We open with Joan and Ned talking about the wedding site, where Joan and her husband Lou got married a couple of years ago. I think Lou's running the camera.

No, wait. Emily and Joan never appear in the frame together. So I bet it's Emily doing the two-shot of Ned and Joan. Then Joan takes the camera and puts it on Emily and Ned.

Apparently the sound was no good up there on the windy cliff; hence, the subtitles. But when Emily delivers her great goofy line, I hear her voice anyway.



The whole thing makes me ridiculously happy.

My daughling darter's getting married

Here's my firstborn, Emily, with her fiance, Ned.

The photo's from their trip to India last summer. Emily's lovelier than that, but I still dig the photo. It suggests standing before the vista of the future and turning back for a moment to commemorate togetherness and include others. A metaphor for a wedding...

which will take place next summer in western Colorado on the edge of a cliff. Can't wait. Pen and I are thrilled. We'd hoped Ned might be The One ever since we first met him.

Imagine, if you will, that your kid grew up into one of the finest human beings on earth, and then fell in love with another utterly splendid person, and then they decided to get married. And you thought about it and realized that you couldn't wish for anyone or anything better to happen to your beloved child. Imagine how your heart might vault out of your chest and go skipping around the room. That's how this feels.

Just knowing such a great couple--even if one of them weren't my daughter--would be a good, positive thing. But Emily IS my daughter. And knowing her past, the pain of divorce that was a big part of her childhood, and some of the struggles and fears she's worked through as an adult, this happy news feels hugely redemptive. It's indescribable, really. Because of Emily and Ned, I have this enormous, irrational hope for the whole wide world.

Love wins after all.

I'd Rather Be At Burning Man

Monday was day one at Burning Man 2007 in Black Rock, Nevada. My son Oliver’s out there for his third year, this time with a group of San Francisco hippie-hop musicians. Maybe next year I’ll pack up Jonah and some survival supplies . . . we’ll have to determine what we’re contributing to the scene, though. It’s not a spectator sport.

If you don’t know about Burning Man, it’s hard to sum up in a single sentence. Call it a temporary community of tens of thousands (40,000+ this year) stranding themselves in the desert for a week to interact on the basis of artistic and ritual self-expression rather than economic and ritual self-interest. Art created for the festival focuses on a particular theme every year. And every year, at the end of the week, an enormous sculpture of a human figure goes up in flames.

This just in: In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, somebody apparently set premature fire to the Man. A guy was arrested, and a big crew set about the two-day task of rebuilding the effigy and its support structure.

Further update: A young man apparently committed suicide on the last day of the festival. Stories vary, and given the circumstances, I'm not even sure how they determined that it wasn't an accident, but the guy (20-25 years old, thin build, light brown hair--yikes--I know it's not Ollie, but if it were, that's probably how they'd describe him) was found hanging from the poles supporting the top of a two-story tent.

Life and death on the playa. It's not the first casualty ever at Burning Man--given what goes on there, it's surprising how seldom anything goes seriously wrong. Still, it gives one pause. But pause, too, has always been part of the deal.

Over the past few years, a post-burn ceremony has developed in which about a quarter of the population sits and meditates as the theme temple is destroyed. Oliver says this is the most moving event of all. I don't have any photos of that, but the idea of 10,000 people kneeling and crying in the desert is fairly clear and awfully compelling to my pagan mind.

It’s just a big, wild party for some.

For others, it's a place to perform.

Put your genius on display.

And your bod. (I'd post more bods, but you can go to the Burning Man site and ogle for yourself.)

Push for change, advance the social contract.

Simply connect.

For many, it’s a religious retreat, a profound spiritual experience, charging the batteries of hope in a world that generally feels hopeless. A chance to turn the fear trap into the hope flower.


The lengths to which people go in order to create this countercultural aesthetic are extraordinary. The stuff they haul there, the stuff they build, the stuff they wear, how much energy and time they give to it.

You can’t just drive a car around this vast yet teeming desert space. If you’re driving, you're in an art car registered with the Burning Man DMV.






Otherwise, you’re on a bicycle...

or on foot.

If you were making this stuff up for a movie, how would you pitch it? It's The Wicker Man meets Dr. Seuss. No, it's the Old Testament translated by William Gibson. No, it's Julie Taymor's Tibetan Book of the Dead, a musical starring Timothy Leary and one of those egg-pod things from Aliens, except when it opens, it spits flames.
One thing it isn't...
is carbon-neutral.
Not yet, anyway.

They've recently developed a carbon offsets program. This year’s theme, The Green Man, is the first environmental theme I’m aware of in the 20-or-so-year history of Burming Man. Many themes have touched on ecological concerns indirectly, though, and there’s certainly a contingent of green thinkers on the playa every year. Someone apparently has figured out how to run engines on fuel made from port-a-potty sludge, and then to trap the exhaust from that engine and use it to grow blue-green algae. Nice loop if you can get it.

Participants commit to leave behind no trace of the week’s worth of creation and destruction, not even a cigarette butt--which is more than you can say about hippie circuses like the Rainbow Gathering. But it was never just a hippie circus, never just one countercultural flavor. It’s got a big gearhead constituency, a lot of pyromania, and enough mechanical ingenuity to make Buckminster Fuller sit up from his grave and take notice.
A ship of magnificent fools.

Can't wait to hear from Oliver. He’ll have some tales to tell.

Day 1, Grade 1

What ever happened to summer? Jonah started school on August 16th. Something has gone terribly wrong.

On the other hand, the kid looked swell, sporting his Lego backpack with Darth Vader and Chewbacca zipper pulls. Penny took the picture in the front yard. The maple tree that died this summer is back there behind him, the day before it got taken down. What a beautiful tree it was, a big ball of gold every fall, with a spherical crown oversized for its slim trunk. It had personality. And now its absence feels ever-present. I was surprised at how emotional we all got about it, the day it went down.

Two arborists tell me that the pecan tree in the back needs to come down, too, that it's rotting from inside. It's probably 60 feet tall. Bids have ranged from $1000 to $1900. I want to go back in time.

back to when August was summer,
back to when fall was aflame
with a mapley syrupy cloud of gold light
where no two leaves were the same

i want to retreat to the cave of the past
where the wall-shadows look pretty good
they may not be perfect, but that is deliberate
the way i'd go live in the wood

i want to go forward, but just in reverse
so a tree comes to be from a log
and the days are for dogs and summertime frogs
and my verse doesn't bog down my blog

Just as I wrapped up that stanza, there was a huge clap of thunder and it began to rain. The doggerel days of summer be magic.

Vacations we have squandered

The creature from the lagoon is Jonah, who vacations like a champ. He really knows how to have a good time. The lake is in upstate New York, in the middle of nowhere. There's a movie star on the dock back there, but Jonah can upstage even the bigs. We were there on a day when thunderstorms came and went, as did snakes in the water. In memory, the day has a slow feel, even with a six-year-old in the mix. We also had a Jack Russell terrier who went crazy for the snakes. Later, he threw up a frog.

In the main, however, it was an unrestful vacation. I planned the trip around three locations with three different groups of family and friends, driving from Boston to Maine, down to New York near the Pennsylvania line, and back up to Boston. My darling does not suffer road trips gladly. Plus, the middle stretch was work-related, so my brother and I disappeared into a basement for days, with breaks to eat and deal with various crises. The last such was the losing of the rental car key.

I advise against losing rental car keys while in the country, especially these new keys with microchip remotes that occasion the reprogramming of the car's ignition system as well as getting a new key made. The brave new world is unkind to bucolic key losers.


But the bucolic world is kind to young readers. Here's Jonah in the hammock on the farm, midway through "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." The kid reads like a vacationing champ and doesn't care that he's four books behind the times.


And here's Jonah with his best friend, Gabriel, who just moved to Maine. The beach was at Reid State Park, south of Portland. We also went to Popham State Park in the same area--beautiful spots, where the tide goes out thousands of feet and leaves you with a beach you can walk to nearby islands on. We built sand castles, which are heavily metaphorical.

In Boston, we saw a Shakespeare in the Park production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It was marvelous and inventive, and somewhere near the beginning of Act III, Jonah said, "I don't like this play." But later, he remembered some funny bit of action that Bottom performed during the play-within-a-play.

We also saw a beautiful film about Jane Goodall, and Jonah now sleeps with a chimp (stuffed). At the Science Museum, he also got to put a baggie on his hand and squeeze the heart and lungs of a sheep (dead).

Boston is Joytown to me, my sis having lived there for some time. She and her partner, Pam, have been married a couple of years now and have three lovely daughters. Joy and Pam are exceptional hosts, the most human of Boston baked beings.

Re: their being married... at the penguin exhibit in the New England Aquarium, I asked about same-sex pairs. The guy wading around in the big penguin enclosure said he'd heard of same-sex pairs nesting and tending eggs, but that these particular penguins seemed to confine their same-sex pairings to grooming, preening, and crapping on rocks together--in other words, he hadn't observed any actual homosexual mating--"even though this is Massachusetts." That got a good laugh from the crowd. Massachusetts is hip.


Here's Jonah, with Joy's daughter Grace, and a couple of dixie-cup frozen pop thingies at the end of a long day. Grace is ten, taller than Penny, and a sports nut, just as my sister was in her youth. I think this was the last night before flying back home on Tuesday.

Anyway, upon my return, I note the absence of beaches in Kansas City. And I note that midsummer is gone, that school starts in exactly two weeks, that a vacation is but a play-within-a-play. Our castles are crumbling. Lord, what fools we mortals be.

Fan Letter Campaign

The few fan letters I’ve received as a writer have meant a lot to me. I’ve always enjoyed writing letters myself. And I admire so many people for their creativity, originality, and integrity. Why have I been so reticent to send them fan letters?

Why didn’t I send Beverly Sills anything like what was in that last post? And did I ever tell Ruth Gordon what Harold & Maude did to me at age 16? No. Did I write to Marlon Brando? Peter Sellers? Frank Zappa Janis Joplin Jimi Hendrix John Lennon Dizzy Gillespie? John Ford Robert Altman Francois Truffaut? Nestor Almendros? Gordon Parks? Eugene G. Smith? Saul Steinberg? Spalding Gray? No. And now they’re gone.

I didn’t even write to Stanley Kubrick, who actually let me infiltrate a scene in “Full Metal Jacket.” I never wrote to Samuel Barber to thank him for the sublime “Adagio for Strings,” which I’ve probably listened to more often than any other single piece of music—unless it might be the entire “Kind of Blue” album, for which I never thanked Miles Davis.

I did write to William Stafford, and got a lovely letter back. See? A good fan letter gets results.

So. I think it’s time for a campaign of correspondo. Many of the people I’d write to already get scads of fan mail, so if my letters are to cut through the pile and mean something instead of simply pre-empting my own imagined regret, they need to be good. I think it’s about offering specific context and being entertaining about it.

First, I’ll write the ones who are getting on in years--if I’m going to do it, I should do it now. My starter list:

Bob Dylan: I’ll be seeing him in concert on Monday, so maybe that’ll inspire the letter.

Paul Simon

Paul Newman

Clint Eastwood: Mostly for Unforgiven

Robert Duvall: I’ll tell about channeling him when I wrote my favorite speech in Big Bad Love—which Michael Parks kind of screwed up, so I wish Duvall had been available.

Sidney Poitier: Without whom there’d be no Morgan Freeman.

Morgan Freeman: He really is God.

Bernardo Bertolucci: Stealing Beauty, for one. The Sheltering Sky for another.

Woody Allen: Almost impossible to imagine my teens and twenties without him.

Jean-Luc Godard

Sir Ridley Scott

Sir (Lord?) Richard Attenborough: He put my daughter into a scene in “Shadowlands.” It got cut. Hmmm, maybe this isn't a fan letter...

William Goldman

Tom Wolfe

Norman Mailer

Robert Bly: Not just for the poems, but for Iron John. The guy changed my life. I met him once and was too tongue-tied by hero worship to say anything coherent.

Mark Strand: His poem “The Tunnel” made me want to be a poet.

Charles Simic: He’ll be 70 next year. Still writes like a wunderkind.

Ned Rorem: In college, the choir I sang in did his amazing settings of Shakespeare, Dryden, Blake, and Edmund Waller. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Elliott Carter: Ditto, except it was Dickinson, Spenser, and Stephen Vincent Benet.

Oscar Peterson: 1977, that double album with Joe Pass. Unbelievable.

Bill Cosby: My dad used to plug a reel-to-reel into the cigarette lighter of our car and we’d laugh at Why Is There Air? and Wonderfulness all the way across the country.

James Hillman: Thanks for the greatest insights into the human psyche since Jung.

Marie Louise von Franz: Ditto. I wonder if she's dead already. Update: My God, she died in 1998, the year after I went to the Jung Institute in Switzerland.

George McGovern: My first political hero, my first political rally. I think my fan letter will mention that I felt up my girlfriend while we were standing there in the crowd at Union Station, listening to soft-spoken George denounce the Vietnam war and Nixon’s corruption. Where is today’s McGovern? I want to feel that again (the hope, not the girlfriend...well, mostly the hope...).

A rather male list. My second wave of letters will go out to slightly younger cultural heroes:

Joni Mitchell: Wait, she should be on the first list. Her lungs aren’t likely to last another decade.
Stephen Stills: Ditto his liver and heart. Maybe I’ll send him my blog write-up of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” to display my keen sense of the obvious.
Sir Paul McCartney
Springsteen! (Thanks, Molly...)
Patti Smith
Laurie Anderson
Tom Waits: Thanks for writing two great songs for Big Bad Love. I’ll have to restrain myself to stay on message.
Nicolas Reyes: What do you say to the world’s most soulful singer?
Paco de Lucia: What do you say to the world’s greatest guitar player?
Mark Knopfler: Ditto?
Sting: What do you say that you didn’t already try and fail to say when you actually met the guy?
Peter Gabriel: We have a mutual friend, if he’s still friends with Rosanna A. He appeared in her music documentary, but he didn’t look happy about it. Might not be able to play that card.
Christopher Alexander: One of my top ten books is “A Pattern Language.”
Robert Redford
Katherine Ross
Warren Beatty: I won’t go on and on about his artistic integrity.
Julie Christie
Robert Downey, Jr.: Younger than me, but seems to have a good chance of not getting old.
Roberto Begnini
Robert Parker: Thanks for making a wino out of me.
Terrence Malick: He need never have made a movie besides “Days of Heaven” to be my fave writer/director of all time.
Jonathan Demme
Ang Lee
Scorcese
Spielberg
Pacino
Ian McEwan: Thanks for three of my favorite novels
Mark Leyner: Thanks for "Smelling Esther Williams"
David Mitchell: Just to ask him how in the world he wrote “Cloud Atlas”
Campbell McGrath: Ditto, “Road Atlas.” I think he’s only in his forties. It can wait.
David Sedaris: Have I ever laughed harder? I don’t think so.
Camille Paglia: I did write her once, when she had that advice column in Spy magazine. It got published, but that's so impersonal. Even though it was about sex.
Annie Liebowitz
Al Gore
Bill Bradley
Steve Jobs

I'm sure the list will grow. A lot. I'll try to post a few photos to make all this text less tedious. Meanwhile, who do you truly admire? If you came home and found a letter in your mailbox from somebody you'd written a fan letter to, who's the person you'd most like it to be?

Beverly Sills, Higher Than Ever.

Beverly Sills died last night. She was 78, and besides Tony and Carmela, the only soprano who ever really moved me. I’m vowing today to stop letting chances go by to tell people I admire how much their work has meant to me.

I had nearly 30 years to tell Beverly Sills how she blew my mind one night, back when I was a 21-year-old college dropout whose favorite singer was Tom Waits and who mostly listened to Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, and The Beatles. And I never sent her that letter. I wonder what it would have said? Before I played the aria for a group of Hallmark word people at our annual coffeehouse last year, with a backdrop of a huge outer space photo--stars, galaxies, nebulae--this is part of what I read:

This song you’re going to hear is a silver arrow that hit me, pierced me, left me slain, in the rain of my own tears, in my bachelor pad, in a towel, just out of the shower, which was just a bathtub where I dumped water from a plastic bucket over my head — and now this music pouring down on me like light. Was it an arrow, or was it light? Or was I just so young and vulnerable, an open groove for the needle to slip into, record turning, world turning, needle of diamond, stars of dust wheeling above me, who will love me, 21, in a towel on the third floor of a big red house, dumbstruck, starstruck, gooseflesh rising, eyes blurring, everything I had ever lost returned to me, everything I would ever love already leaving, all that was impossible made suddenly real by this unreal voice.

How does a human voice become a willow tree and the bird in it by day, the stars in it by night? Both dark and light, particle and ray, longing and longed-for, everything and void. How can a voice waver on either side of a note but hold the note so true? And isn’t light that same vibration, too? How does music do this to you? What place inside does the bird find to light, the star to flutter and flicker its way to us? I don’t have a clue.

I confess that for years I used this piece of music as a litmus test of soul. If I played it and it didn’t move you, you were dead inside. It was alright if at first you laughed or fidgeted, because almost all of us come armored against the full-throated blast of old-time art-as-religion that is opera. But if by the end the music had not broken through your defenses, broken you down, opened you up at least a little, you were less than human.

I was young and stupid. I didn’t yet know that there are no litmus tests, no absolutes, no one true faith or song or voice or love. Coleman Barks had yet to translate Rumi, so I hadn’t heard of the hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. I adored Tom Waits, but had yet to hear his anecdote about the first time someone played him the aria “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot. He said, “It was like giving a cigar to a five-year-old. I turned blue and I cried.” I hadn't heard much of anything, really. I certainly hadn't heard anything like this, a song debuted ten days before the day that I was born. It had been there, my whole life, and I had not known. I wept like a willow in my bachelor pad, the first place I called my own.

So that scene is set.

The scene for the aria is this: Leadville, Colorado. 1880. Elizabeth “Baby” Doe, “the miner’s sweetheart,” first woman ever to work in a U.S. silver mine, has her eye on silver magnate Horace Tabor. Both married to other people. Can't end well. Doesn’t matter. It’s destiny, and when she picks her moment, sits at a piano and sings where she knows he will overhear her, the song does to him pretty much what it did to me. If he’d been wearing a towel, it would have dropped right there. Or maybe she’d have torn it off him after his beautiful baritone reply. Anyway, it’s love at first song for Horace Tabor. And so it was for me.

Ladies and gentlemen, the “Willow” aria from The Ballad of Baby Doe, by Douglas Moore and John Latouche, sung by the stratospheric Beverly Sills...

Then there was a little coda I'd written to wrap up with, but after I played the music, there was no point in reading it.

If I knew how to load the iTune on here so you could just listen, I would. That old footage isn't great. But who can deny the power of that big D (I think it's a D) she hits shortly after the video does that skippy little flutter? It still takes the top of my head off. I could tell that a few Hallmark people were knocked out, too, when I forced them to listen to it. But it's opera, man. Hardly anybody wants to kneel at that altar.

Why did I never send her a thank-you note for cracking me open enough to let a little light in? I still don't care for most operatic voices (can't stand Wagnerian opera, which seems preposterously self-important and repetitive to me), but every so often, I’ll hear something that gets through, thanks to Douglas Moore, John Latouche, and this amazing woman who put the color in coloratura.

She had a deaf daughter, an autistic son, and she finally saw her husband through the last stages of Alzheimer's last year. Through it all, she radiated joy, served her art, and took humanity higher, literally.

I just listened to the final aria, sung right before Baby Doe dies. Beverly Sills holds a note at the end that seems impossible. It’s still going. It will never stop.

Getting a little misty here. I'm just glad I got through that without calling her "Bubbles."

Next post: a list of people who are going to get gushy, big-ass fan letters from yours truly...