Op-Eds:
"The Potential Costs of Tom Price as HHS Secretary." -- The Conversation
"Good Luck Getting Healthcare in Donald Trump's America." -- The Guardian
"The US Could Be Vastly Different A Year From Now. Here's How." -- The Guardian
"States With more Planned Parenthood Clinics Have Fewer Teen Births and Sexually Transmitted Diseases." -- The Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
"In Some States, Coronavirus Measures are Effectively Banning Abortion." -- The Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
"The Fifth Circuit Halted Biden's Vaccine Mandate. Here's What the Lawsuits Are Arguing." -- The Washignton Post (Monkey Cage)
Music Reviews:
"Springsteen Serenades NYC Metro for Four Hours"
“Let’s go for a road trip,” Bruce says with a smile, guitar in hand, between “Working on the Highway” and “Darlington County” (alas, absent the Nils-sized hat accompaniment). And indeed, that comment is quite apt for a concert by Bruce Springsteen, whose fans are known to take planes, trains, and automobiles to attend his shows, even crossing oceans to experience Boss Time in all its glory. For those who do not know the love for his music, it is strange to invest so much time, money, and energy into a concert. For those who are his devoted followers, happily spending a day in a New Jersey Meadowlands parking lot during sound checks to hopefully fare well in the general admission pit lottery, it is more than a concert. It is a religion. It is faith. It is spirit. It is “getting gotten” by 60,000 strangers who for that four hours are sharing a spiritual experience in which redemption and hope are fair game as sparks fly on E Street. (Click here for the rest).
"Springsteen Proves It All Night, Takes Saint Louis Down to the River"
"Do you have any energy left?" is a question that might appropriately be posed by the fans to this sixty-six year-old artist for whom age is clearly merely a number as he delivers a show that clocks in at approximately three hours and twenty minutes without break. Instead, he asks the audience at the conclusion of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" whether they have in them the energy for one more song ("Shout"). They are. Indeed, as he is known for doing, Springsteen delivered his all and showed St. Louis who is boss, with St. Louis revealing over the course of the night that it "ooh ooh has a crush on Bruuuuce" as he performed start-to-finish his self-described "coming of age" 1980 album The River. (Click here for the rest).
"Springsteen Rocks the House at his 63rd Birthday Party"
It’s more than three hours past the scheduled start time, which means that it’s more than two hours after the true fans know that Bruce and his E-Street Band are scheduled to roll on to the stage of MetLife Stadium. Rain continues to trickle town and form small puddles on the tarp that has been laid out for the general admission and other floor ticket holders. Many arrived as early as 7am in anticipation of the lottery to determine the order of entry on to the floor, though the hours of waiting – and inevitably, drinking – induced a dose of disarray into the typically orderly system adhered to in each of his many shows across the nation. What’s more, given Bruce’s legendary show lengths and the concert’s scheduling on September 22nd, it is becoming apparent to all that the concert will stretch into September 23rd, Bruce’s birthday. It has not yet truly begun, and yet all know as the lightning subsides and the tension builds, this will be a night to remember. As anyone who has spent their last paycheck on a ticket to his show, or conveniently scheduled “work” and “family” travels around his tour schedule knows, at a Bruce concert, anything can happen.
And so in the darkness and mist, Bruce emerges, walking to the mic with great purpose, the sounds of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” booming through the stadium, and says, “I think I just invited 55,000 people to my birthday party!” before launching into the familiar (yes, perhaps too familiar) and classic “Out in the Streets,” which has been featured among the first few songs in many shows on his recent tours. Thirty-two years after its release on The River, the 1980 album filled with classic songs of yearning and sadness, along with a number of hits and entertaining numbers (“Cadillac Ranch,” “Ramrod,” etc.) that often find themselves sprinkled through his legendary concerts, “Out in the Streets” holds up as well as ever as Bruce and the band rock the stage, leaving room for wonder whether sparks will actually fly given the heat of the music and the rain still trickling on the stage as it booms to Max’s drumbeat. (Click here for the rest.)
"Springsteen Entertains Crowd with Seeger Classics at Sleep Train Pavilion" -- June 6, 2006
Even at the age of fifty-six, Bruce Springsteen never ceases to amaze. His three-hour long show at the Sleep Train Pavilion in Concord, which in classic Springsteen fashion began an hour late (but then again, he is the Boss), included the majority of the album We Shall Overcome, covers of other appropriate songs – among them, “Rag Mama Rag” and “Bring Them Home” – and some good old Springsteen classics.
Bruce’s humor shined through in his willingness to talk to the crowd between songs. After playing his opening song, “John Henry,” Springsteen turned to the audience, saying, “So, I’ve got to ask y’all a question. Where the fuck are we? I mean, San Francisco’s practically another state. Here it’s hills, hills, hills…” Bruce conceded before playing “Jesse James” that “The details are right, but the rest is bullshit,” and he cited his enjoyment of “Erie Canal” as being because it’s one of the only love songs to a mule. He noted that following the release of “Erie Canal” were several songs including mules, and they eventually killed what he called “the mule genre.” (Click here for the rest.)
"Springsteen Poignant at Oakland's Paramount Theater" -- May 5, 2005
The scene outside the Paramount Theater – an art deco beauty in the heart of downtown Oakland – was truly surreal, with at least a hundred Boss die-hards hoping desperately that fate would work in their favor on this occasion, his only tour stop in the San Francisco Bay Area on the Devils and Dust tour (so far). As the lottery number was drawn, the fans – some excited, some dismayed – lined up against the theater wall in order according to ticket number, about to begin the long wait to find out how many of us would get tickets. Was it a hundred tickets being released? Was it two? No one seemed to know, and so, accepting that we were all entirely clueless, like acknowledging that we were living in Plato’s cave, we began to relax and become acquainted with one another.
Springsteen fans have a unique way of bonding at shows, and by the start of the concert we felt as though we were long-time friends rather than having a relationship that extended only a few hours. Approaching the ticket office, presenting our lottery ticket and wristband, we realized that we were going to get lucky that night, that we were getting into the concert. The woman handed us our tickets and I, still in a daze, could hardly believe my eyes when I saw our seats – dead center, orchestra row CC. Not just seats, but VIP seats. Incredible. We took our spot next to the fans with whom I had stood in line, all of us ecstatic over our good fortune. The lights dimmed, the crowd roared, and Bruce Springsteen walked onstage, commanding the attention of all of the Paramount’s attendees who were clapping, screaming, and “Bruuuuuuce”-ing wildly for him. The night promised to be spectacular, and it delivered. (Click here for the rest.)
Creative Non-Fiction/Musings:
"On The ICU"
When surrounded by fluorescent lights and large crucifixes and lines of Scripture after chasing several fistfuls of pills with mediocre bourbon, my first thought was whether I’d been wrong all this time to be a born-again atheist. My family is Catholic on one side and Jewish on the other (though emphasis on the “ish’), so I’ve got guilt on both sides but heathenism resonated most with me. Indeed, the one church service I attended was merely in an effort to see the inside of Westminster Abbey on a Sunday morning, and my taking of communion despite never being baptized convinced my mother that I’d surely be sent to a hell in which neither of us genuinely believed. You see, I’d always scoffed at religion, often in front of and to the discomfort of my religious friends and relatives. (Wasn’t that at least half of the point?)
I always figured that if I were going to hell because of my atheism, casual sex, drinking, and smoking weed, well, the company there would probably be better there than heaven anyway. Perhaps I’d be living it up with (okay, maybe not living it up with…) my fellow heathens from the comedy and concert worlds as Mick and Keith played “Sympathy for the Devil.” I could make that sacrifice.
It wasn’t that I never tried the religion thing. It was more that the one time I prayed was the night before the 2004 election, and since America voted the wrong way that year, I stopped trying to pray altogether, just to err on the safe side. (Click here for the rest).
"On Woody Allen"
When I was seven, I watched Sleeper for the first time (at my mother's suggestion) and called her eagerly on the phone while she was at work to report to her how funny it was.
“I know, honey, I’ve seen it,” she replied.
“But you’ll really get it this time,” I said with the certainty of one who felt some strange need to experience things for the first time with those around me. If I hadn’t gotten a joke before, no one had. If I knew something to be funny, others would come around. Perhaps it was my early introduction to Harold and Maude, and my immediate desire to become Maude, who upon being told by a priest that he didn’t appreciate her painting the church statutes, replied supportively, “Don’t be too discouraged. For aesthetic appreciation, always a little time."
But back to Woody Allen. His films often feel like love letters to all the things I care most about in this world. I realized with the first "la di da" that I was raised by Annie Hall. I love e.e. cummings and Manhattan and Van Gogh, and if I could disappear into any “golden age,” it would be Paris in the 1920s, amid the masculine genius of Ernest Hemingway, who taught me grace under pressure and who, in a world guaranteed to break our hearts twelve ways to Sunday, reminds us that "the world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong at the broken places." Love and Death may not have initiated my teenage existential angst, but it certainly perpetuated it as I went on to read Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, no doubt a strong influence of the philosophical debates in which he and Diane Keaton engage – the subjectivity of immorality, the objectivity of subjectivity, in the thing itself, of the thing itself, the rational scheme of perception. It fascinated me, consumed me. (Now in my late twenties and rewatching Sleeper, my main remaining question is mankind's failure to invent the orb).
He is not without controversy, and yet my affection for his genius is unabashed, perhaps because of its raw honesty about the neurosis of the human condition and the desire to escape to a Cole Porter performance or the pages of Madame Bovary, while still being able to master the silliness of such lines as, "Don't get me wrong, I love him like a brother, just not one of mine." Click here for the rest.
"On Baseball"
Baseball is without a doubt America’s most romantic sport, a nine-or-more-inning world in which anything is possible. In full disclosure, it is the only sport that I have ever followed. During a year living in Maine and to the horror of the Boston sports fans by whom I was surrounded, I declined an invitation to Celtics game on the grounds that I didn’t like football, and where sports were concerned, my years as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley could be better classified in the “tragedy” than the “romance” sections.
Baseball season means for me an inordinate number of happy hours resulting in my nails being bitten down to the quick as I second-guess the umpire over pitches that seemed outside in a tied game. A full count. A diving, close-call catch. A walk-off homer in the ninth. Bliss. If you are as lucky as I, you have spent a number of afternoons with overpriced garlic fries and a panoramic bay views with the sailboats out in McCovey Cove, the scent of freshly mowed grass in the air as the sun beams through bits of fog and the sounds of “We Will Rock You” booming through the stadium. It is three hours of picturesque Americana. When I was young and wanted to become an actress, I religiously watched "Inside the Actor's Studio," at the end of which they ask the guests a number of questions, among them their favorite sound. For me, it is the sound a home run. Because it has a sound, very distinct. Ball meets bat, a crack with a massive weight behind it, and you know it's in the seats. They don't even need to confirm before jogging along the bases.
My baseball-related advice began at an early age: while I need not like the A’s or the Giants, I was prohibited from supporting the Dodgers or the Yankees. My present Columbia affiliation notwithstanding, I have more or less adhered to that “guideline” (I treated it as a guideline, they as a mandate). Amid economic downturn and political polarization, disease and despair, there remains the promise that comes with a tied score at the bottom of the ninth inning, the crowd rising to their feet with purpose as the counts of balls and strikes rise, full of hope that to allude to the great Bruce Springsteen, faith will be rewarded.
"On Living in (and Leaving) New York City"
Like many New Yorkers, I have a love-hate relationship with this city. Sometimes when I reflect on this city, I imagine it in black and white with Gershwin a la Manhattan. "[S]he was as tough and romantic as the city [s]he loved... New York was [her] town, and it always would be." One of my favorite contemporary writers, Michael Chabon, wrote a stunning homage to my hometown of Berkeley and I feel, for no particular reason, compelled to do the same for this city in which I have loved and lost, and perhaps most importantly defined my career and thus the decades ahead as an academic nestled comfortably in the ivory tower.
This is not an easy place to live, if for no other reason than certain Kafkaesque qualities that need not be elaborated, or the bang for buck (or lack thereof) living in the city, leading my favorite comedian, the late Bill Hicks, to report the exchange, ``Hey, you're living in New York City. You get mugged yet?'' to which he replies, ``As a matter of fact, the first of every month. They've got it systematized. Apparently it's legal." Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area reduced the shock of cramming my 1,200 books into a single over-priced room. My first apartment here was a fourth-floor walk-up above a 24-hour bodega, across from a liquor store, next door to a less-than-stellar psychiatric institution outside of which stood its quirky-though-sometimes-excessively-kvetching inhabitants,, across the street from a housing project, and with a bedroom facing the above-ground subway. And did I mention that there was no laundry, let alone the postal workers' propensity to not deliver packages or specify later delivery times, but rather to write on the paper slip the word, ``other,'' leaving much to the imagination in that neighborhood? I did not renew that lease.
There was, of course, one perk about that location, which was that despite the apartment's lack of thermostat, the local homeless man's degree of nudity served quite well as a makeshift thermostat as he lay slumped against the liquor store gripping his pint of Wild Turkey. Full frontal, and I could safely spend the day in a skirt and halter. Pants draped loosely across his body but his bulging chest still bare, and it was a jeans and t-shirt sort of day. Fully-clothed, and it was time to bundle up. So there were some advantages. Click here for the rest.
"On Bob Dylan"
In 1993, when I was just shy of seven (yes, I'm dating myself), I had the glorious opportunity to see Santana and Bob Dylan perform at what was formerly known as the Concord Pavilion in the San Francisco Bay Area but which, as with many venues, has since been renamed after a corporation, in this case Sleep Train. My six year-old self was acutely aware of the seductive nature of Santana's guitar solos, but concluded that Dylan's voice was ``not very beautiful." When clarified by my mother that most people come to hear what Dylan said rather than how exactly he sounded, I remarked that I couldn't make out the words either (due in large part to the combination of his well-known rasp and affection for alcohol).
Admittedly, when seeing Dylan with my then-boyfriend at Jones Beach Theater in the thriving metropolis of Wantaugh, New York -- along with Wilco, Ryan Bingham, and Beck -- little had changed. It took until the muffled words ``...but I was born to late" to realize that we had in fact been listening all that time to an old favorite, ``Simple Twist of Fate," the second track on one of the greatest break-up albums of all time, Blood on the Tracks. And yet there was something comforting and familiar about knowing that we were in the presence of Bob Dylan, to whose tribute marked our third date at Webster Hall on Manhattan's lower east side ("Dylan fest"), and whose music, along with that of the Beatles and of course Bruce, comprised the soundtrack of my life. (Click here for more.)
"Tribute to Warren Zevon"
If you’re anything like me, music is not music so much as a soundtrack to your life, evoking in you the emotions that you yourself cannot in the moment express, or providing that magical disappearance into the foggy ruins of time, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow when you need it most. A song’s return on the radio or playlist reminds you of your first kiss in the backseat of a car, or your first heartbreak, or the concert you were at when you knew that that artist got you. Most of my memories have Springsteen and Dylan associations, though Petty’s “Breakdown” is not without its reminders of my five year-old self rocking out to it in a Janis Joplin-esque voice that made me sound as though I had been raised on a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, and I cannot listen to “Harvest Moon” or to Justin Townes Earle without thinking of my last relationship. I can without question recite my top five artists of all time, no questions asked: Springsteen, the Beatles, Dylan, Peter Gabriel, and Joni Mitchell, in that order. Done. Simple. Yet there is someone else to whom I formed an attachment somewhat later in my life, and to whom I have felt a special bond despite his death shortly before my discovery of his music. That artist is Warren Zevon.
I will always remember the day I first listened to his music (knowingly). It was March 4, 2011, and my mother had just had a heart attack, with bypass surgery to follow the next morning. I was at her apartment to feed the cats, and I needed to listen to something that would capture the emotional turmoil that had defined that day. Flipping through her CD collection, I came across an album titled Life’ll Kill Ya, and I put it on. Immediately, I was sold. (Click here for the rest.)
"Something about Berkeley"
There is something about Berkeley. The scent of eucalyptus laced with pot that soothes the senses as one looks up to the cathedral-like canopy of trees through which the sun shimmers. The endearing honesty of adolescents panhandling not for money per se. Its status as welcome respite from the collar-popping sort who use "summer" as a verb. The faithful following of music lovers still hell bent on buying CDs and vintage vinyl records on whose B-side there is that one single that plagues their mind as they – insomniacs that they are – write at 3 a.m. Telegraph Avenue is a land of proud misfits, people who seem to embrace the adage about not wanting to belong to clubs that would want them as a member, instead offering $10 henna tattoos and palm readings and leading one’s mother to fret over her daughter’s purportedly short life line.
I buy books when I am in the mood to read. Very distinct from buying books when I am actually going to read. Number of times I am in the mood to read: infinite. Number of times per month I have time to read for pleasure: infinitesimal. And yet in my twice a year ventures “home” to Berkeley, past fixtures old and new and with a certain sadness that the current cohorts of Berkeley students will not remember Cody’s or Intermezzo, in spite of maddening work hours for marginal returns, I find myself at Moe’s Books, my safe haven and respite from the daily stressors. Here, I peruse the shelves and regain acquaintance with old friends – Wordsworth, Emerson, Kundera, and others – brushing my fingers across the slightly dusty covers and thumbing through pages of those that look particularly intriguing. Here, between the covers of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen can set the world right, each character being delivered with perfection her poetic justice.
Fiction:
"A New Normal" (novel excerpt)
It's the day after the 2012 presidential election and Zoey sits scrunched in the back corner of a bus, eyes weary from a late night of playing Nate Silver with precinct-level analysis from Pennsylvania over large quantities of Yuengling and grilled stickies, her phone filled with excited text messages from fellow Democrats basking in the glory of the results. She rubbed her eyes, beneath which there were dark circles from exhaustion, though the joyful sounds of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered" were still going through her mind as she checked the status of local, narrow races that had yet to be called. Hours later, she and her newly-made friends toasted to the losses of those who had waged the war on women, jokingly declaring their resounding defeats to be “God's will."
The region still drenched from Hurricane Sandy, the weather gods mercilessly induce a cold snap and sleet as the traffic slows to a near halt on Highway 80, on which Zoey had been stuck for countless hours on the left coast. Some things never change. Arriving in Chelsea on 7th Avenue, the ground is slick and six inches deep in slush, the kind that lands you on your ass if you're not careful, and Zoey is a notorious klutz, her piano career ended with the accidental though smooth slicing of a cat food can lid through the inside of her hand and across a major nerve to an extent that necessitated two surgeries. She plods her feet forward with purpose, centering her weight to the ground as she schleps her suitcase behind her, the wheels catching themselves in the grit and grime of the street and remainders of now gray and brown ice that have been swept to the side by plows.
Down the steps to the subway, the sounds of the 1 train screech and cry as she runs to the platform before the doors shut close with a ding behind her. Her hand-made Obama-Biden button is still displayed proudly on her jacket and the strangers around her look and smile, or give nodding looks of approval and relief. (She retains in her wool coat pocket the “Pins for Obama" button made in jest in the wee hours of the morning after hours of reorganizing door hangers by State College precinct). 96th, 125th, finally 137th arrives and she gets off, shielding with her free hand her face from the wind and sleet but enjoying the comfort of being almost home again, or at least what constituted home to her now. She collapses face down on her bed, allowing herself to be enveloped in the warm embrace of her crumpled pillows and blankets after too many sleepless nights spent scrunched on strangers' couches, her body remembering all too late that it is no longer only twenty years old.
And then she arrives at the bar, the familiar scene in which two weeks earlier she had celebrated the World Series victory of her San Francisco Giants, adorned in orange and black and cheering with joy as rain swept across AT&T Park and she watched the players jump with glee in the sopping wet and glistening grass. Sergio Romo was on the big screen, smiling widely as raindrops fall in slow motion on the television screen. Back to celebrate the election, she makes small-talk with the bartender, who adorns his familiar Brooklyn Nets hat and an air of disdain for all things related to America's two-party system. Yuengling is poured liberally as she basks in her home turf over the glory achieved (admittedly not single-handedly) across state lines, and the declaration of the Florida victory serving as icing on the proverbial cake. (Click here for a sample chapter).
(Feel free to request more.)
"A Writer's Frustration"
It has been months, maybe a year of waiting for your imagination to shed its indolence, for those magical words locked up in your mind to come to fruition as you finally begin to put pen to paper. You lie in a bed of scribbled-on post-its on which you have taken note of quirky lines of dialogue from conversations on which you have eavesdropped – no, overheard, much more pleasant a term, not burdened with a flurry of negative connotations. Your nails have taken a beating during your latest wholehearted, albeit spectacularly failed attempt at producing polished prose, a surprisingly difficult feat at the present moment. Your hair is askew, your nail-bitten fingers roaming their way through it, leaving a fine dramatic touch to your appearance, always somewhat unkempt, the look of a quintessential mad scientist. Your glasses are ill-fitting, with Woody Allen-esque frames and a shape that never quite feels right so that you must push them up about a half inch every couple of minutes with your ink-stained (the curse of being left-handed!), nail-bitten finger. You will get a new pair as soon as you have income… whenever that is. The scent of day-old coffee wafts into the room from the kitchen, permeating the air, the remains of your foolishness in taking the time to brew it and your subsequent slothfulness in not caring to retrieve it once it is ready.
You write an opening line – elation! Euphoria! This could be it! The grand soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize winner about which you have only fantasized of writing! You are the next William Shakespeare – but better! No, no, not quite so brilliant as you at once mistakenly believe. These illusions of literary genius will never be more than ephemeral. You scratch it out with a brute force built up from a year’s worth of tension and frustration, the sheet now slightly lacerated, streaks of ink blackening out those deeply flawed words and bleeding through the page onto the lovely unfinished wood of your desk. Fuck. You go to the kitchen and tear off a paper towel and turn on the sink faucet, water running out slowly, steadily, drip-drop, drip-drop, so cold. You dampen the towel and walk briskly back to your desk, rubbing fiercely at the stain that you have just created in your anger. It is now gone. Thank God. No harm done.
Ask me for more of my fiction prose and you shall receive.
"The Potential Costs of Tom Price as HHS Secretary." -- The Conversation
"Good Luck Getting Healthcare in Donald Trump's America." -- The Guardian
"The US Could Be Vastly Different A Year From Now. Here's How." -- The Guardian
"States With more Planned Parenthood Clinics Have Fewer Teen Births and Sexually Transmitted Diseases." -- The Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
"In Some States, Coronavirus Measures are Effectively Banning Abortion." -- The Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
"The Fifth Circuit Halted Biden's Vaccine Mandate. Here's What the Lawsuits Are Arguing." -- The Washignton Post (Monkey Cage)
Music Reviews:
"Springsteen Serenades NYC Metro for Four Hours"
“Let’s go for a road trip,” Bruce says with a smile, guitar in hand, between “Working on the Highway” and “Darlington County” (alas, absent the Nils-sized hat accompaniment). And indeed, that comment is quite apt for a concert by Bruce Springsteen, whose fans are known to take planes, trains, and automobiles to attend his shows, even crossing oceans to experience Boss Time in all its glory. For those who do not know the love for his music, it is strange to invest so much time, money, and energy into a concert. For those who are his devoted followers, happily spending a day in a New Jersey Meadowlands parking lot during sound checks to hopefully fare well in the general admission pit lottery, it is more than a concert. It is a religion. It is faith. It is spirit. It is “getting gotten” by 60,000 strangers who for that four hours are sharing a spiritual experience in which redemption and hope are fair game as sparks fly on E Street. (Click here for the rest).
"Springsteen Proves It All Night, Takes Saint Louis Down to the River"
"Do you have any energy left?" is a question that might appropriately be posed by the fans to this sixty-six year-old artist for whom age is clearly merely a number as he delivers a show that clocks in at approximately three hours and twenty minutes without break. Instead, he asks the audience at the conclusion of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" whether they have in them the energy for one more song ("Shout"). They are. Indeed, as he is known for doing, Springsteen delivered his all and showed St. Louis who is boss, with St. Louis revealing over the course of the night that it "ooh ooh has a crush on Bruuuuce" as he performed start-to-finish his self-described "coming of age" 1980 album The River. (Click here for the rest).
"Springsteen Rocks the House at his 63rd Birthday Party"
It’s more than three hours past the scheduled start time, which means that it’s more than two hours after the true fans know that Bruce and his E-Street Band are scheduled to roll on to the stage of MetLife Stadium. Rain continues to trickle town and form small puddles on the tarp that has been laid out for the general admission and other floor ticket holders. Many arrived as early as 7am in anticipation of the lottery to determine the order of entry on to the floor, though the hours of waiting – and inevitably, drinking – induced a dose of disarray into the typically orderly system adhered to in each of his many shows across the nation. What’s more, given Bruce’s legendary show lengths and the concert’s scheduling on September 22nd, it is becoming apparent to all that the concert will stretch into September 23rd, Bruce’s birthday. It has not yet truly begun, and yet all know as the lightning subsides and the tension builds, this will be a night to remember. As anyone who has spent their last paycheck on a ticket to his show, or conveniently scheduled “work” and “family” travels around his tour schedule knows, at a Bruce concert, anything can happen.
And so in the darkness and mist, Bruce emerges, walking to the mic with great purpose, the sounds of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” booming through the stadium, and says, “I think I just invited 55,000 people to my birthday party!” before launching into the familiar (yes, perhaps too familiar) and classic “Out in the Streets,” which has been featured among the first few songs in many shows on his recent tours. Thirty-two years after its release on The River, the 1980 album filled with classic songs of yearning and sadness, along with a number of hits and entertaining numbers (“Cadillac Ranch,” “Ramrod,” etc.) that often find themselves sprinkled through his legendary concerts, “Out in the Streets” holds up as well as ever as Bruce and the band rock the stage, leaving room for wonder whether sparks will actually fly given the heat of the music and the rain still trickling on the stage as it booms to Max’s drumbeat. (Click here for the rest.)
"Springsteen Entertains Crowd with Seeger Classics at Sleep Train Pavilion" -- June 6, 2006
Even at the age of fifty-six, Bruce Springsteen never ceases to amaze. His three-hour long show at the Sleep Train Pavilion in Concord, which in classic Springsteen fashion began an hour late (but then again, he is the Boss), included the majority of the album We Shall Overcome, covers of other appropriate songs – among them, “Rag Mama Rag” and “Bring Them Home” – and some good old Springsteen classics.
Bruce’s humor shined through in his willingness to talk to the crowd between songs. After playing his opening song, “John Henry,” Springsteen turned to the audience, saying, “So, I’ve got to ask y’all a question. Where the fuck are we? I mean, San Francisco’s practically another state. Here it’s hills, hills, hills…” Bruce conceded before playing “Jesse James” that “The details are right, but the rest is bullshit,” and he cited his enjoyment of “Erie Canal” as being because it’s one of the only love songs to a mule. He noted that following the release of “Erie Canal” were several songs including mules, and they eventually killed what he called “the mule genre.” (Click here for the rest.)
"Springsteen Poignant at Oakland's Paramount Theater" -- May 5, 2005
The scene outside the Paramount Theater – an art deco beauty in the heart of downtown Oakland – was truly surreal, with at least a hundred Boss die-hards hoping desperately that fate would work in their favor on this occasion, his only tour stop in the San Francisco Bay Area on the Devils and Dust tour (so far). As the lottery number was drawn, the fans – some excited, some dismayed – lined up against the theater wall in order according to ticket number, about to begin the long wait to find out how many of us would get tickets. Was it a hundred tickets being released? Was it two? No one seemed to know, and so, accepting that we were all entirely clueless, like acknowledging that we were living in Plato’s cave, we began to relax and become acquainted with one another.
Springsteen fans have a unique way of bonding at shows, and by the start of the concert we felt as though we were long-time friends rather than having a relationship that extended only a few hours. Approaching the ticket office, presenting our lottery ticket and wristband, we realized that we were going to get lucky that night, that we were getting into the concert. The woman handed us our tickets and I, still in a daze, could hardly believe my eyes when I saw our seats – dead center, orchestra row CC. Not just seats, but VIP seats. Incredible. We took our spot next to the fans with whom I had stood in line, all of us ecstatic over our good fortune. The lights dimmed, the crowd roared, and Bruce Springsteen walked onstage, commanding the attention of all of the Paramount’s attendees who were clapping, screaming, and “Bruuuuuuce”-ing wildly for him. The night promised to be spectacular, and it delivered. (Click here for the rest.)
Creative Non-Fiction/Musings:
"On The ICU"
When surrounded by fluorescent lights and large crucifixes and lines of Scripture after chasing several fistfuls of pills with mediocre bourbon, my first thought was whether I’d been wrong all this time to be a born-again atheist. My family is Catholic on one side and Jewish on the other (though emphasis on the “ish’), so I’ve got guilt on both sides but heathenism resonated most with me. Indeed, the one church service I attended was merely in an effort to see the inside of Westminster Abbey on a Sunday morning, and my taking of communion despite never being baptized convinced my mother that I’d surely be sent to a hell in which neither of us genuinely believed. You see, I’d always scoffed at religion, often in front of and to the discomfort of my religious friends and relatives. (Wasn’t that at least half of the point?)
I always figured that if I were going to hell because of my atheism, casual sex, drinking, and smoking weed, well, the company there would probably be better there than heaven anyway. Perhaps I’d be living it up with (okay, maybe not living it up with…) my fellow heathens from the comedy and concert worlds as Mick and Keith played “Sympathy for the Devil.” I could make that sacrifice.
It wasn’t that I never tried the religion thing. It was more that the one time I prayed was the night before the 2004 election, and since America voted the wrong way that year, I stopped trying to pray altogether, just to err on the safe side. (Click here for the rest).
"On Woody Allen"
When I was seven, I watched Sleeper for the first time (at my mother's suggestion) and called her eagerly on the phone while she was at work to report to her how funny it was.
“I know, honey, I’ve seen it,” she replied.
“But you’ll really get it this time,” I said with the certainty of one who felt some strange need to experience things for the first time with those around me. If I hadn’t gotten a joke before, no one had. If I knew something to be funny, others would come around. Perhaps it was my early introduction to Harold and Maude, and my immediate desire to become Maude, who upon being told by a priest that he didn’t appreciate her painting the church statutes, replied supportively, “Don’t be too discouraged. For aesthetic appreciation, always a little time."
But back to Woody Allen. His films often feel like love letters to all the things I care most about in this world. I realized with the first "la di da" that I was raised by Annie Hall. I love e.e. cummings and Manhattan and Van Gogh, and if I could disappear into any “golden age,” it would be Paris in the 1920s, amid the masculine genius of Ernest Hemingway, who taught me grace under pressure and who, in a world guaranteed to break our hearts twelve ways to Sunday, reminds us that "the world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong at the broken places." Love and Death may not have initiated my teenage existential angst, but it certainly perpetuated it as I went on to read Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, no doubt a strong influence of the philosophical debates in which he and Diane Keaton engage – the subjectivity of immorality, the objectivity of subjectivity, in the thing itself, of the thing itself, the rational scheme of perception. It fascinated me, consumed me. (Now in my late twenties and rewatching Sleeper, my main remaining question is mankind's failure to invent the orb).
He is not without controversy, and yet my affection for his genius is unabashed, perhaps because of its raw honesty about the neurosis of the human condition and the desire to escape to a Cole Porter performance or the pages of Madame Bovary, while still being able to master the silliness of such lines as, "Don't get me wrong, I love him like a brother, just not one of mine." Click here for the rest.
"On Baseball"
Baseball is without a doubt America’s most romantic sport, a nine-or-more-inning world in which anything is possible. In full disclosure, it is the only sport that I have ever followed. During a year living in Maine and to the horror of the Boston sports fans by whom I was surrounded, I declined an invitation to Celtics game on the grounds that I didn’t like football, and where sports were concerned, my years as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley could be better classified in the “tragedy” than the “romance” sections.
Baseball season means for me an inordinate number of happy hours resulting in my nails being bitten down to the quick as I second-guess the umpire over pitches that seemed outside in a tied game. A full count. A diving, close-call catch. A walk-off homer in the ninth. Bliss. If you are as lucky as I, you have spent a number of afternoons with overpriced garlic fries and a panoramic bay views with the sailboats out in McCovey Cove, the scent of freshly mowed grass in the air as the sun beams through bits of fog and the sounds of “We Will Rock You” booming through the stadium. It is three hours of picturesque Americana. When I was young and wanted to become an actress, I religiously watched "Inside the Actor's Studio," at the end of which they ask the guests a number of questions, among them their favorite sound. For me, it is the sound a home run. Because it has a sound, very distinct. Ball meets bat, a crack with a massive weight behind it, and you know it's in the seats. They don't even need to confirm before jogging along the bases.
My baseball-related advice began at an early age: while I need not like the A’s or the Giants, I was prohibited from supporting the Dodgers or the Yankees. My present Columbia affiliation notwithstanding, I have more or less adhered to that “guideline” (I treated it as a guideline, they as a mandate). Amid economic downturn and political polarization, disease and despair, there remains the promise that comes with a tied score at the bottom of the ninth inning, the crowd rising to their feet with purpose as the counts of balls and strikes rise, full of hope that to allude to the great Bruce Springsteen, faith will be rewarded.
"On Living in (and Leaving) New York City"
Like many New Yorkers, I have a love-hate relationship with this city. Sometimes when I reflect on this city, I imagine it in black and white with Gershwin a la Manhattan. "[S]he was as tough and romantic as the city [s]he loved... New York was [her] town, and it always would be." One of my favorite contemporary writers, Michael Chabon, wrote a stunning homage to my hometown of Berkeley and I feel, for no particular reason, compelled to do the same for this city in which I have loved and lost, and perhaps most importantly defined my career and thus the decades ahead as an academic nestled comfortably in the ivory tower.
This is not an easy place to live, if for no other reason than certain Kafkaesque qualities that need not be elaborated, or the bang for buck (or lack thereof) living in the city, leading my favorite comedian, the late Bill Hicks, to report the exchange, ``Hey, you're living in New York City. You get mugged yet?'' to which he replies, ``As a matter of fact, the first of every month. They've got it systematized. Apparently it's legal." Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area reduced the shock of cramming my 1,200 books into a single over-priced room. My first apartment here was a fourth-floor walk-up above a 24-hour bodega, across from a liquor store, next door to a less-than-stellar psychiatric institution outside of which stood its quirky-though-sometimes-excessively-kvetching inhabitants,, across the street from a housing project, and with a bedroom facing the above-ground subway. And did I mention that there was no laundry, let alone the postal workers' propensity to not deliver packages or specify later delivery times, but rather to write on the paper slip the word, ``other,'' leaving much to the imagination in that neighborhood? I did not renew that lease.
There was, of course, one perk about that location, which was that despite the apartment's lack of thermostat, the local homeless man's degree of nudity served quite well as a makeshift thermostat as he lay slumped against the liquor store gripping his pint of Wild Turkey. Full frontal, and I could safely spend the day in a skirt and halter. Pants draped loosely across his body but his bulging chest still bare, and it was a jeans and t-shirt sort of day. Fully-clothed, and it was time to bundle up. So there were some advantages. Click here for the rest.
"On Bob Dylan"
In 1993, when I was just shy of seven (yes, I'm dating myself), I had the glorious opportunity to see Santana and Bob Dylan perform at what was formerly known as the Concord Pavilion in the San Francisco Bay Area but which, as with many venues, has since been renamed after a corporation, in this case Sleep Train. My six year-old self was acutely aware of the seductive nature of Santana's guitar solos, but concluded that Dylan's voice was ``not very beautiful." When clarified by my mother that most people come to hear what Dylan said rather than how exactly he sounded, I remarked that I couldn't make out the words either (due in large part to the combination of his well-known rasp and affection for alcohol).
Admittedly, when seeing Dylan with my then-boyfriend at Jones Beach Theater in the thriving metropolis of Wantaugh, New York -- along with Wilco, Ryan Bingham, and Beck -- little had changed. It took until the muffled words ``...but I was born to late" to realize that we had in fact been listening all that time to an old favorite, ``Simple Twist of Fate," the second track on one of the greatest break-up albums of all time, Blood on the Tracks. And yet there was something comforting and familiar about knowing that we were in the presence of Bob Dylan, to whose tribute marked our third date at Webster Hall on Manhattan's lower east side ("Dylan fest"), and whose music, along with that of the Beatles and of course Bruce, comprised the soundtrack of my life. (Click here for more.)
"Tribute to Warren Zevon"
If you’re anything like me, music is not music so much as a soundtrack to your life, evoking in you the emotions that you yourself cannot in the moment express, or providing that magical disappearance into the foggy ruins of time, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow when you need it most. A song’s return on the radio or playlist reminds you of your first kiss in the backseat of a car, or your first heartbreak, or the concert you were at when you knew that that artist got you. Most of my memories have Springsteen and Dylan associations, though Petty’s “Breakdown” is not without its reminders of my five year-old self rocking out to it in a Janis Joplin-esque voice that made me sound as though I had been raised on a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, and I cannot listen to “Harvest Moon” or to Justin Townes Earle without thinking of my last relationship. I can without question recite my top five artists of all time, no questions asked: Springsteen, the Beatles, Dylan, Peter Gabriel, and Joni Mitchell, in that order. Done. Simple. Yet there is someone else to whom I formed an attachment somewhat later in my life, and to whom I have felt a special bond despite his death shortly before my discovery of his music. That artist is Warren Zevon.
I will always remember the day I first listened to his music (knowingly). It was March 4, 2011, and my mother had just had a heart attack, with bypass surgery to follow the next morning. I was at her apartment to feed the cats, and I needed to listen to something that would capture the emotional turmoil that had defined that day. Flipping through her CD collection, I came across an album titled Life’ll Kill Ya, and I put it on. Immediately, I was sold. (Click here for the rest.)
"Something about Berkeley"
There is something about Berkeley. The scent of eucalyptus laced with pot that soothes the senses as one looks up to the cathedral-like canopy of trees through which the sun shimmers. The endearing honesty of adolescents panhandling not for money per se. Its status as welcome respite from the collar-popping sort who use "summer" as a verb. The faithful following of music lovers still hell bent on buying CDs and vintage vinyl records on whose B-side there is that one single that plagues their mind as they – insomniacs that they are – write at 3 a.m. Telegraph Avenue is a land of proud misfits, people who seem to embrace the adage about not wanting to belong to clubs that would want them as a member, instead offering $10 henna tattoos and palm readings and leading one’s mother to fret over her daughter’s purportedly short life line.
I buy books when I am in the mood to read. Very distinct from buying books when I am actually going to read. Number of times I am in the mood to read: infinite. Number of times per month I have time to read for pleasure: infinitesimal. And yet in my twice a year ventures “home” to Berkeley, past fixtures old and new and with a certain sadness that the current cohorts of Berkeley students will not remember Cody’s or Intermezzo, in spite of maddening work hours for marginal returns, I find myself at Moe’s Books, my safe haven and respite from the daily stressors. Here, I peruse the shelves and regain acquaintance with old friends – Wordsworth, Emerson, Kundera, and others – brushing my fingers across the slightly dusty covers and thumbing through pages of those that look particularly intriguing. Here, between the covers of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen can set the world right, each character being delivered with perfection her poetic justice.
Fiction:
"A New Normal" (novel excerpt)
It's the day after the 2012 presidential election and Zoey sits scrunched in the back corner of a bus, eyes weary from a late night of playing Nate Silver with precinct-level analysis from Pennsylvania over large quantities of Yuengling and grilled stickies, her phone filled with excited text messages from fellow Democrats basking in the glory of the results. She rubbed her eyes, beneath which there were dark circles from exhaustion, though the joyful sounds of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered" were still going through her mind as she checked the status of local, narrow races that had yet to be called. Hours later, she and her newly-made friends toasted to the losses of those who had waged the war on women, jokingly declaring their resounding defeats to be “God's will."
The region still drenched from Hurricane Sandy, the weather gods mercilessly induce a cold snap and sleet as the traffic slows to a near halt on Highway 80, on which Zoey had been stuck for countless hours on the left coast. Some things never change. Arriving in Chelsea on 7th Avenue, the ground is slick and six inches deep in slush, the kind that lands you on your ass if you're not careful, and Zoey is a notorious klutz, her piano career ended with the accidental though smooth slicing of a cat food can lid through the inside of her hand and across a major nerve to an extent that necessitated two surgeries. She plods her feet forward with purpose, centering her weight to the ground as she schleps her suitcase behind her, the wheels catching themselves in the grit and grime of the street and remainders of now gray and brown ice that have been swept to the side by plows.
Down the steps to the subway, the sounds of the 1 train screech and cry as she runs to the platform before the doors shut close with a ding behind her. Her hand-made Obama-Biden button is still displayed proudly on her jacket and the strangers around her look and smile, or give nodding looks of approval and relief. (She retains in her wool coat pocket the “Pins for Obama" button made in jest in the wee hours of the morning after hours of reorganizing door hangers by State College precinct). 96th, 125th, finally 137th arrives and she gets off, shielding with her free hand her face from the wind and sleet but enjoying the comfort of being almost home again, or at least what constituted home to her now. She collapses face down on her bed, allowing herself to be enveloped in the warm embrace of her crumpled pillows and blankets after too many sleepless nights spent scrunched on strangers' couches, her body remembering all too late that it is no longer only twenty years old.
And then she arrives at the bar, the familiar scene in which two weeks earlier she had celebrated the World Series victory of her San Francisco Giants, adorned in orange and black and cheering with joy as rain swept across AT&T Park and she watched the players jump with glee in the sopping wet and glistening grass. Sergio Romo was on the big screen, smiling widely as raindrops fall in slow motion on the television screen. Back to celebrate the election, she makes small-talk with the bartender, who adorns his familiar Brooklyn Nets hat and an air of disdain for all things related to America's two-party system. Yuengling is poured liberally as she basks in her home turf over the glory achieved (admittedly not single-handedly) across state lines, and the declaration of the Florida victory serving as icing on the proverbial cake. (Click here for a sample chapter).
(Feel free to request more.)
"A Writer's Frustration"
It has been months, maybe a year of waiting for your imagination to shed its indolence, for those magical words locked up in your mind to come to fruition as you finally begin to put pen to paper. You lie in a bed of scribbled-on post-its on which you have taken note of quirky lines of dialogue from conversations on which you have eavesdropped – no, overheard, much more pleasant a term, not burdened with a flurry of negative connotations. Your nails have taken a beating during your latest wholehearted, albeit spectacularly failed attempt at producing polished prose, a surprisingly difficult feat at the present moment. Your hair is askew, your nail-bitten fingers roaming their way through it, leaving a fine dramatic touch to your appearance, always somewhat unkempt, the look of a quintessential mad scientist. Your glasses are ill-fitting, with Woody Allen-esque frames and a shape that never quite feels right so that you must push them up about a half inch every couple of minutes with your ink-stained (the curse of being left-handed!), nail-bitten finger. You will get a new pair as soon as you have income… whenever that is. The scent of day-old coffee wafts into the room from the kitchen, permeating the air, the remains of your foolishness in taking the time to brew it and your subsequent slothfulness in not caring to retrieve it once it is ready.
You write an opening line – elation! Euphoria! This could be it! The grand soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize winner about which you have only fantasized of writing! You are the next William Shakespeare – but better! No, no, not quite so brilliant as you at once mistakenly believe. These illusions of literary genius will never be more than ephemeral. You scratch it out with a brute force built up from a year’s worth of tension and frustration, the sheet now slightly lacerated, streaks of ink blackening out those deeply flawed words and bleeding through the page onto the lovely unfinished wood of your desk. Fuck. You go to the kitchen and tear off a paper towel and turn on the sink faucet, water running out slowly, steadily, drip-drop, drip-drop, so cold. You dampen the towel and walk briskly back to your desk, rubbing fiercely at the stain that you have just created in your anger. It is now gone. Thank God. No harm done.
Ask me for more of my fiction prose and you shall receive.