Last Sunday night, the day before the holiday Monday, Kip and I went to Talde in Park Slope, which is Dale Talde’s new casual-Chinese place.  If you watch Top Chef, which I do, you’ll know that he’s a badass chef, and also he’s smokin’ hot sexy.  I knew it would be a madhouse, so we went early, 5:30, and already there was a 45-minute wait, which we expected, so we sat at the bar.  I had a couple of “Brooklyn Slings” which is gin, cherry liquor, pineapple, and bitters.  It was superb, even if we did have to wait a while to be served — or even acknowledged.  Dear Bartenders Everywhere: We can see that you are slammed, but a little eye contact goes a long way.  Kip had a couple of Hitachino Red Rice Ales.  I don’t generally like beer, but I very much like Hitachino.

Since we were only two, we sat at the “chef’s counter” in the back, which faces the open kitchen — I like to watch people cook, and I like to see the orchestration that goes on to make a kitchen run smoothly.  We started with the Perilla Leaf appetizer — with toasted shrimp, coconut, bacon-tamarind caramel, peanuts — which was a bit over-sold by the waiter, but we were there to spend money and eat well, so we leapt at it, no grudges.  It was a fantastic little plate of single bites — every flavor at once, showing off what sort of places you expect to go with the coming meal.  Some people on Yelp seem to think that this should be served as an amuse, not a $5 appetizer, well, it’s a casual Park Slope joint, so hey everybody relax.

foto by Tom Carpenter

Then we had the Saigon Crepes, which is crunchy and light, not like a soft crepe that you might be thinking of, and, holy crap it was good — maybe it was the best thing we ate all night, with smoked shrimp, Chinese bacon, mint, and I think I recall bean sprouts, cilantro, and basil.  If you go, have this.  It’s killer.  Also have the Pretzel Pork and Chive Dumplings, which are like your traditional pork and chive dumpling punched up with crunchy pretzel salt and a darker, doughier wrapper.

Who wants salad or soup when you can have pretzel dumplings and fried crepes with bacon?

We shared the BBQ Smoked Pork Shoulder, which has a miso-mustard sauce on top, and a fresh pear…hash?…as garnish.  This is my only complaint, a very minor, snobby, needy complaint: Give us some more pear, jesus, it’s a pear, I’ve got a huge slab of perfectly cooked, shoulder that’s been under the broiler getting more and more fabulous, I need more of that fruit to cut the fat.  But damn, the shoulder was delicious.  The market vegetable that night was a Chinese green, I didn’t catch the name when the waiter mentioned it, and we had it stir-fried with edamame — superb.

We also had the Black Pepper Toast, which was nice along with the pork and the greens.  What is this new toast moment we’re having in restaurants?  It’s a thing, right?  I think it has something to do with the current comfort food trend, seems like everyone is serving a toast dish as a side, or maybe they’ve figured out a way to get us to pay $3 for a slice of hot bread cut into triangles.

I suppose at some point they’ll have a real pastry chef — they only opened about 5 weeks ago — but for now there is only the one dessert: Halo Halo with Original Cap’n Crunch and the usual additions — coconut, evaporated milk, jelly-tapioca-maybe things.  Don’t freak out, just get it.

So, in a word: go.

I’m not a religious person.  I’m barely even spiritual.  Though I do, actually, now that I think about it and am forced to articulate it, believe in a few things:

• The ability of energy as expressed in actions and words to initiate other actions and words.
• The coming-back-around of previous energy movement choices.
• The souls of lost loved ones acting as guiding arcs of light.

I love these signs.  To me they are a promise that the spring is coming, that the earth is, indeed, orbiting, and that everyone living life around me is connected to their rituals.  I’d like them to go on all year, actually.  I’m wondering if they will, or if this is some period of time in which the Torah stipulates that you post photocopies of sundown times in the window of the knife-sharpening place.

Tuesday, Feb 21 - 7:30pm
Dixon Place – 161A Chrystie Street, NYC
with Jess Arndt and Cheryl Boyce Taylor
More info.

In the true vein of post-modernism, where nothing is ever original, the images that the audience will bring with them to the theater are surely from Brian DePalma’s 1976 film version of Stephen King’s 1974 novel, which stars Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, both in Academy Award-nominated performances.  Molly Ranson, as Carrie, you’ll be happy to know, brings something else to the role — fresh, bright, likeable, honest — and after only a week of performances, she seems already at home in the character.  (The show opens officially on March 1.)  She is heartbreaking as the “nice” Carrie, and perhaps as the run goes on, she will be able to bring out the “bad” Carrie more forcefully.  Her voice is strong and clear.

An acting teacher I once had used to give us movies to watch, “Do it exactly like that,” she would tell us — not that we would create an imitation, but because the images, and perhaps style, would give us a place to start, some idea of what we could choose to do with the role, because we were teenagers and had little else to go on, save for images.  Perhaps it’s unfair to ask Ms. Ranson to channel Ms. Spacek, and she is already an accomplished actor, not a teenager, but she is still very fragile even as Carrie is locking the doors and burning the school to the ground, and I wanted her to transform more — to embrace the monster that she is.

Whether you see Carrie as a monster, however, depends on which lens you choose to view her through.  Is she a victim of her mother’s religious rage against the man who raped her and made her pregnant?  Or is she the hero of a story in which the high school status quo is destroyed in a furious rage of fire and destruction?  And if that, then why does she have to die?  Whether she is hero or victim is, for me, a problem all the way back to the source material.

See, I want Carrie to be the hero.  I want her to win — and in a way, she does.  But it’s not a typical hero story: no series of tasks, no mentor, no real clear accepting of the challenge set before her.  And as it stands, the moral of the story is “If you want to be free from pain and loneliness, you have to die.”  Or, in the case of Sue Snell, “If you want to live, you have to feel guilt for the rest of your life.”  But King’s novels have never been easily categorized.  Perhaps my taste is narrow — but shouldn’t Carrie kill her mother, then go to the prom and then destroy the whole town?  Or perhaps this is what I want from my own post X-Men childhood, when the tortured outsider embraces her inborn talent to become more powerful than the society that betrays her.

Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The question when turning some other existing thing into a musical becomes: What story are you trying to tell?  The musical doesn’t seem sure.  Carrie’s telekinetic powers — a major force in the novel — in this version acts as a teaser, a plot-pushing device, and it’s never really explored to the fullest, or revealed to be a reason for Carrie’s sense of outsider-ness.  (There are some fantastic tricks and surprises with chairs and lights and statues.)

Being a longstanding Disciple of Bernadette, Marin was a revelation for me, and she gives a masterclass in musical theater with “When There’s No One.”  It’s rare that you hear a singer with such vocal power, a strong physical presence, and fierce acting chops fall apart so…interestingly.  She completely loses herself to the forward momentum of Carrie’s journey, but without any regret.  She is spectacular.  What Ms. Mazzie’s Margaret isn’t is batshit crazy, as Ms. Laurie played it, but that seems okay, except that the stakes between Carrie and her mother thus seem lower.

There will surely be a cast album in the future, but for the moment, you can hear a bootleg of Ms. Mazzie on YouTube from the 2009 reading.  However, this song — gorgeous, meaningful, beautiful — wants to be the big 11 o’clock number, and last night’s audience went totally bonkers when Ms. Mazzie finished, screaming and hollering.  But it isn’t the big number, it’s the slow moment right before the big destructive finish.  Of course we all know what happens at the prom, and after the big bucket-of-blood-moment, Carrie has a song which sorta fucks with the pace.  There is no race to the finish.

The MCC production avoids camp completely — which is probably a good thing, ultimately.  Though, one misses it.  A bit.  The mostly gay audience found a few places to laugh at the played-straight moments.

The rest of the cast busies themselves doing a lot of small acting in the background of scenes, which manages to always be bigger than it needs to be, and ultimately feels unneeded.  The chorus of actors playing the high school kids seem very excited to hit their marks, be “real” in the scene, and fill the spaces with their own characters, but in this way the focus can be everywhere.

What happens if we don’t love our children?  Or love our children to much, or in the wrong ways?  What happens when our children have telekinetic powers and, covered in pig’s blood, destroy the whole town?  This revival doesn’t clearly answer any of these questions, but that’s what’s so great about it.  You’ll have a lot to talk about.

I went up to Rosendale last night, to visit my friends Matt & Andrea, who have a lovely little house and a (mostly) lovely little dog, and who, somewhere about April 1, are going to have a baby.  Andrea also plays her own music with another friend in a band called The Raw Milk, which is right up there, I think, with the best band names ever.  The gig at the local bar was nice — dark, cheap drinks, good music, appreciative audience, this really great songwriter Mike Amari — and I had forgotten how great low-key live music can be.  The kind where you just walk into the bar and hang out.  I was glad to get to be in the room.

Matt cooked a fabulous pre-show dinner dinner — Karen Weinberg’s perfect lamb, mashed blue potatoes, micro salad, crusty bread — a bottle of Rioja that the wine merchant described as “okay.”  What a treat to sit down to a dinner cooked by someone else!  For breakfast, Andrea made buttermilk biscuits with duck bacon and Beth’s apricot preserves.  There was also a kiwi jam a friend had made from “hearty kiwi,” which I guess can grow in Upstate New York.  Who knew?

So, I’m making some reading lists over the next several months based on various themes.  Say you like books about “Women on the Verge” or maybe you like “Food Porn Fiction” or “New York Shitty.”  This way, you can find a theme that interests you, trot off to your favorite independent bookstore, make a pot of tea, and settle in.

Each of these books look at what it means to keep secrets — between spouses, parents & children, communities and their inhabitants, lovers — as well as the repercussions once the secrets are revealed, or discovered.  Or, in some cases, not revealed.  How the secret can become your whole life.

• Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones
• The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt
• The Keep, by Jennifer Egan
• Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee
• Before & After, by Rosellen Brown
• Oyster, by Janette Turner Hospital
• Boys of Life, by Paul Russell
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

But that waivers.  I have quit the whole business ten times in the last twelve months.  Or threatened to.  The only reason that I haven’t hung up the whole towel is my friends haven’t let me.  I swear this is the truth.  I’m lucky that way, and I recognize that, too.  I’ve tried talking to people about how miserable this second novel is making me.  And only recently, have I come to realize that you cannot tell people this.  You can’t say “I hate it.”  You can’t say “I hate every second of it.”  You can’t say “I’m ready to quit the business.”  They don’t or won’t believe you.  And they sometimes — sometimes — talk you out of that feeling, making you believe that you can do it.  And then you spend a while thinking it.  And then you don’t.  And you do again.  On like that.  It’s the way it is.

You can see the conflict.

This morning one of the notes in my inbox was about the Brooklyn Fiction Class taught by Rachel Sherman.  It went into my brain and then out.  I felt like blogging, pushing some energy out into the universe — which is really how I see it — and I felt good about living up to my 2012 promise.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling blocked, I steal from my friend Ariel, who usually titles her blog posts: “Today, I am thinking about: _____.”

Usually, the blank comes quickly.  I am a person who generally knows what he is thinking about.  Or, at least, I know how to write myself through not understanding what I am thinking about until it is outside of me, in words and paragraphs.  If I don’t steal from Ariel, or somewhere else, I steal from my inbox.  (This is a terrible, terrible habit for writers, so don’t ever, ever do this.)  Sometimes I say, “Okay, write the post, the chapter, the poem, whatever.  Then go back and fill in the blank.”  You don’t always have to know the beginning.  Sometimes what you know is the end, and you work your way backwards, to where something begins.  You can do this in writing, and you can do it in life.  Unless, of course, there’s a fire.

The email started: “Opportunity walks softly and carries a big stick.”  My friend Clare Dolan sent photos of her house covered, swallowed, by fire.  Walls and door frames made thin black lines in the bright orange.

How could this be?  I was just there, in August.  I drove out past the pond, like she told me, “You can’t miss it,” she said.  I knocked on the door, but learned she was out on a walk, so I promised myself that I’d come back.  I strolled through her yard, her garden, exploding with chard, broccoli, kale.  Flowers rolling along the hills until the treeline.  There’s even a bed for sunny summertime naps and dark quiet stargazing.  Last August seems like years ago — since then, there have been babies and hurricanes, there has been the particular wavering uncertainty, an honest stab at doing better, more and more things.

“In the early morning of Jan 4th, 2012, all humans and animals escaped injury,” is what she wrote next.  After reading the entire email, staring at the difficult pictures, and after I called my friend Laura — to verify, to talk, to wonder and worry — I had to go to the post office, the most horrible post office in the history of history, and send an envelope to Singapore.  I looked at the map of the world, looked at Vermont and looked at Singapore.  How can that be?  How can this envelope go from South Williamsburg to Singapore?  How can Clare’s house be…gone?  There were people in the line — 45 minutes, I waited — screaming at the workers behind the thick glass, who couldn’t find this package, or that package; everyone was furious.  I just stood there and cried.

Clare is an incredible artist, friend, person, woman, nurse, puppeteer, curator, painter, singer, accordionist.  Incredible.  I’m so sad for her loss.  I’m so very, very sad.  She wrote: “Even as the goodbye is melancholy, it carries with it the enormous and singular chance to begin something entirely new. It’s time for adventure.”  So I signed up for the Brooklyn Fiction class.

I want to write more.  I want to write better.  I used to say ‘I want to finish this novel’ but I would even settle lately for ‘I want to get over this weird unpleasant hump’ that I’ve been trying to get over for months.  I have this sinking, horrible, very frightening feeling that what I’m working on is wonderful and vital and meaningful.  I’m going to figure this out, I thought.  Go ahead, I thought.  Leap.

Today I am thinking about: adventure and novels and fear and fire.  And Clare.

After, there was my mother’s sweet potato pie, and my gay uncle Foster’s red velvet cake, along with his world-famous cheesecake.  He’s not really my uncle, at least by blood.  Foster was originally my dad’s roommate in college, and he has been a friend of my family ever since — actually, he is part of our family.  I think of him as my uncle more than I do my actual uncles.  His red velvet cake is nearly Paula Deen’s recipe, though he changed it a bit so as to “not have to admit that I made anything that came from that woman.”  Is what he said.  His cheesecake is, hands-down, the best in the whole world.  He’s famous for it.  I don’t know whose recipe he’s using, or what he does that makes it so fucking beautiful and perfect, but it’s like that every time and it’s marvelous.  I didn’t get a picture of it — it vanished quickly.

Later we went on a walk through the woods.  Behind the new Volkswagon plant in Chattanooga, they have created the Enterprise South Nature Park, which used to be part of the Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant, and is now about 2,800 acres of trails and trees, for bikes, horses, people and so forth.  My nephews were perplexed by a sign that said “Stop for Wildlife” at the beginning of the trail, thinking that meant they should stop and look for the wildlife that was certainly visible from that point, at that moment.  On the preserve, there are 100 concrete magazines, which, at the time, housed TNT.  They are scattered in a roundabout, suburb-like pattern, and look at bit like something out of Lost.  We only made it to Number 1, before the boys got a bit bored and tired and were itching to move on to something else.  Here’s a cool map of the park.

The flight home was speedy, almost effortless.  It’s amazing how smoothly things can go when things go smoothly.  You can be in Atlanta (after driving there from Chattanooga) at 2:00pm and be home on the couch with your cats at 5:30pm.  The lady checking my bag and going through those motions started out with “Who told you my lane was open?”  It was supposed to be a joke, and me, thinking I had done the wrong thing, apologized, and then she felt bad — at least I think this is how the interaction went — and gave me a coupon for a free cocktail.  I asked the flight attendant what was good, she said “The Woodford is good.”  So that’s what I had.

I picked live tracks that are either soundboard recordings, or almost as good, because, hey, sure you want to hear that one time she played Callous live, but do you really want to listen to all that hiss and talking?  Except for the last two songs, which are not great recordings, but the songs are so lovely that I still want you to hear them.

Here’s the track list:

• No Reason to Come Home – from the Answering Machine Tapes
• Fire Door (banjo version) – from Render
• One More Night – 1992, Rochester
• Hell Yeah – 1994, Charlottesville
• Independence Day – 1997, Ann Arbor
• Glass House – 1997, Bremen, Germany
• Do Re Me – 1997, Chicago
• As Is – 1998, Holland Radio
• Not a Pretty Girl – 1999, Stockholm
• If He Tries Anything – 1999, Falcon Ridge
• Out of Habit – 1999, Copenhagen
• Willing to Fight / Pulse – 1999, Copenhagen
• Phase – 2002, Falcon Ridge
• Cradle & All – 2003, Melbourne, Australia
• Animal – 2003, The Mountain Stage
• In the Margins – 2005, Austin Radio
• I Know This Bar – 2008, Amsterdam
• Mariachi – 2009, Turin, Italy
• Hearse – 2010, Emeryville

Click here to download the folder.