"Hysterical Sensationalism is the Poorest Weapon Wherewith to Fight for Righteousness." -Roosevelt

The only lesson I remember from American History 101 had to do with muckrakers. Mostly, Roosevelt's 1906 speech about what they can do:

"We should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake."

I decided I should try and be one. Life is short and probably pointless. Causing a bunch of weird and annoying people to pout and maybe, try raking away some muck too, makes me kind of happy.

http://gawker.com/comment/28580416/

"Let Me Entertain You, Let Me Make You Smile. And If You're Real Good, We'll Have A Real Good Time." ~Gypsy

(Josh Safdie, Ben Safdie, biting Ariel Schulman's arm)

I first met Josh and Ben Safdie in an Upper West Side studio, decorated with piles of foreign passports, Jerzy Kosinski books, and at least eight different table lamps placed on shelves, closet floors and the balcony (anywhere but tables).

I was 21 and it was the summer of 2005. The studio belonged to recent Sundance star and Catfish director Ariel Schulman. I’d met Ariel (and his brother Nev, the on-camera Catfish star) just weeks before, on a different kind of balcony at a spring gala for the NYC Ballet. Ariel grew up with the Safdies in Manhattan and, due to similarly chaotic yet creatively inspiring childhood narratives, created Red Bucket Films together. That summer five years ago, RBF was still in its own chaotic childhood; their website featured a dozen or so very short films they’d shot in the city using the same kind of video cameras my technologically-challenged mother would be able to “figure out.”

(Josh, Ben, me)

Also there that night was Casey Neistat, one half of yet another filmmaking brother duo known as the Neistat Brothers. Unlike the RBF crew, Casey and his brother Van were, aside from older and wiser, successfully building the beginnings of a real career. Their short, “iPod's Dirty Secret” began as a YouTube blockbuster hit in 2003, eventually noticed by the chattering classes in the media.

(Casey Neistat, me, Nev Schulman)

We listened to confusing music I’d never heard before but made sure to download as soon as I got home, passing a joint around, and sitting on the floor using gigantic markers to fill in cardboard bubble letter props. Well, the boys did the drawing while I babysat the joint. After gazing in awe at a new double-ended marker Ariel presented as though it were a blood diamond, the lamps were all turned off, Casey put an unmarked DVD into the TV and we all stopped to gather in a city night-lit circle to watch.

Having been the designated pot chaperone, I don’t remember specifics. I do remember the general concept: a recreation of Jurassic Park using only Claymation. And re-told as a comedy; the dinosaurs spoke English and wanted off the island. Hints of Maurice Sendak’s mythology, Michel Gondry’s cinematography and Wes Anderson’s glib dialogue were all apparent in only three colorful minutes.

(Ariel teaching me to ride a Vespa)

Today, I remember this night the way my dad must remember his first encounter with Al Pacino in the late 1960s (Pacino was a little-known off-Broadway actor auditioning for my dad’s never-made musical version of A Mother's Kisses; apparently he sang “Luck Be A Lady” and the producers were not impressed.) This week I wrote a piece for Interview about the Safdies’ Sundance hit Daddy Longlegs; the Neistats have signed a series deal with HBO; Ariel and Nev will achieve “wide-release” status once Catfish opens this fall.

Stars, before they are born, were always stars. I highly suggest falling in love with them before the rest of the world does. Not for bragging rights or VIP groupie status, but for the same reason everyone should fall in love: once they eventually get what they want, you realize you’ve always wanted them to. Their dreams coming true means a few of yours do too.

"A Day Without Sunshine Is Like, You Know, Night." ~Steve Martin

I first met Jim Signorelli when my mom wore a maternity wedding dress in the backyard of our first house in Water Mill. He was the best man, and the maid of honor. (There were only five people present, including me).

I grew up hearing initially frightening Saturday Night Live tales involving my parents (at 11, do you really want to know that John Belushi once carried your mom home drunk from the Odeon?), then anecdotes now firmly included in my own personal Friedman family folklore. When my mom first invited my dad over to the apartment she shared with Gilda Radner on Bank Street, she hid any signs of messiness in Gilda’s room, a room she told my dad was “just the closet, no need to look in there…”

I don’t have an official “godfather” despite all the rampant genetic tendencies towards familial outsourcing running through my blood: my father’s Jewish side nearly suffocating me with reminders of “who I am,” and my mother’s Irish Catholic side overflowing with new cousins, brothers-in-law, third and sixth cousins, even mysterious cousins so distant I still don’t know for sure whether or not I’m actually related to, popping up every month. But Jim, the sole Italian influence in our clan, has acted as a substitute godfather since my parents' wedding when he gave both my mom and me away.

Skipping over the more sentimental attachments I have towards Giacomo Due, my most recent visit to SNL this weekend reminded me that I too have participated in my family's nostalgic history of the show thanks to Jim. I doubt I’ll be able to one day re-enact the day my dad showed up at my brother Drew’s first New York apartment on East 6^th street with Dan Akyroyd in tow, sending Drew (the brother with whom I share what my dad calls “the Smirk,” a too-cool expression Drew used whenever he somehow caught a fly ball in middle school; the apparent nickname I earned among private school admissions officers after prep school interviews) into uncharacteristic hysteria. The closest I came was at age 9 when Steve Martin called our house, asking for my dad. I skipped over to his office/cottage underneath the apple tree that would eventually collapse on top of it during Hurricane Andrew, and announced the caller. My dad had expected me to be a bit impressed, but apparently I turned on my imaginary heels and sniffed, “well it’s not like it’s Jim Carrey…”

But ever since the first time I walked past a very long line on the 9^th floor on a Saturday night around 10:30pm, glancing at the black-and-white photos guiding my way towards the dusty set of sets and endless array of lighting fixtures that crowd Studio 8H, I finally feel at home surrounded by the blinding bulbs and whizzing acrobatic directors’ chairs. One of which, for the past thirty years, has held my very non-acrobatic godfather Jim.

A look back:

April 12, 1997: Rob Lowe / The Spice Girls
At 13, I still hadn’t given up my grunge-y tomboy wardrobe, the first real sartorial aesthetic I’d fully embraced after receiving In Utero as my first CD. But the Spice Girls released “Wannabe” and it was so goddamn catchy. Plus the sporty one wore pants. I told everyone my favorite was Ginger Spice, showing early signs of rebellion (she was always creeping up towards video cameras as though she wanted to eat both them and the men behind them, wasn’t she?). So my first visit was with my mom, and I made the strange decision to wear a big white t-shirt and even bigger Adidas breakaway warm-up pants. Jim greeted us and said, “Well Molly! You’re dressed just like a Spice Girl, huh?” I went back to school adhering more properly to the preppy dress code, and gave up the grunge for good. Side note: This Rob Lowe-hosted episode is the “one where Norm MacDonald cursed,” getting him fired. I remember watching him say the f-word during Weekend Update, and my mom joining the rest of the audience in “ooooohhh…”s. I didn’t get it. I thought the Players were the only kids on TV allowed to, well, play. But apparently, they were now Ready for Prime Time.

October 4, 1997: Matthew Perry / Oasis
Later that year, I used Oasis’ upcoming appearance as an excuse to see my childhood best friend Simone again. I’d just started high school up in Connecticut with new friends and a closet full of J. Crew button-downs, and Simone was still back in Southampton going to school with all the kids we’d known since our parents used to sit us next to each other in booster seats at Bobby Van’s. Simone and I had been obsessed with Liam Gallagher since the Wonderwall video, to the point where we dragged our moms to their Jones Beach concert to sit 34 miles away from their hairy faces in beach chairs. So Jim gave us the same seats, front row and directly in front of the band’s stage. I’d since become less enamored with the grisly Gallaghers and was more of a David Duchovny fanatic. But watching Simone’s epic cheekbones nearly bust through her cheeks sitting just 34 feet away from Liam was more the point.

November 6, 1999: Dylan McDermott / The Foo Fighters
The summer after my sophomore year, I went to sailing camp for four weeks. Pretentious, for sure, but I didn’t know that. I just knew it was what the cool kids at my school did and I wasn’t cool and wanted to be. The only truly cool thing about my trip, aside from being assigned Navigator on the only day our boat would eventually wind up in the middle of the Caribbean with no land in sight, was meeting a boy named Graham from Nantucket. First he was hot, then he was my friend because thanks to the Smirk, boys in high school thought I thought was too-cool. But he actually was too cool, so we spent those four weeks being very popular kids at camp. But! As it turned out, he was transferring to my high school that fall. So then he was a big gigantic crush. The kind who plays the guitar in the band room and sings “Everlong” to you. And is tall and gorgeous and all of those typical things. Sadly, my attempt to make the crush mutual by taking him to see the Foo Fighters at SNL backfired, after we left the show and bought an enormous bottle of Captain Morgan’s. I’d never drank before, so I gulped it down like water. We were 15 and waltzing around the West Village at 1:30am, so of course we would inhale rum for the first time. Then I blacked out, somehow purchased an excellent fake ID, and do not remember this picture being taken. We remained…friends.

October 12, 2002: Sarah Michelle Gellar / Faith Hill
In college I met my first actual boyfriend. We met during Freshman Orientation and fell in that real kind of old-people-disguised-as-young people love only Diamonds commercials and Michel Gondry movies accurately portray. So we went, just because being in love in college, though great, makes college life very boring. The only memorable moment of this show has to do with watching Faith Hill sing “Cry” and finally realizing just how wildly talented SNL’s music production staffers are when they can make watching a country singer belting out a forgettable ballad feel like watching Cream at MSG.



March 6, 2010: Zach Galifainakis / Vampire Weekend
After eight years, I asked Jim for tickets days before last week’s show. As usual, he obliged. I’d stopped asking Jim for trips to SNL over the years, instead asking him for more Godfather-type favors. Career advice, boy advice, and use of his summer house in Springs (leading to a very Jim kind of email: “Whose underwear did you leave in my freezer!” I told him that’s where I assumed one puts Jay McInerney’s underwear after he hands them to you in the middle of a book party.) But Kelley was turning 26 that night, and it was time to revisit 8H and sit down in those snobby friend-of-the-director seats with nothing between us and the stage but dust and bulbs.

"It's A Short Walk From The Hallelujah To The Hoot." ~Nabokov

"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
~William Faulkner

One of my dad's favorite anecdotes has to do with one of the first times he had writer's block. The real kind. The kind that allegedly forced John Cheever to attach a metal chain from his ankle to his writing desk, give his wife the key, and make her promise never to use it until he finished what he needed to finish. So my dad went to an attractive female therapist his friend had promised would, if not solve his problem, at least provide Kathryn Grayson-style arousement. He explained the writer's block. Ten minutes into the session, she said to him,

"What you do is very hard."

My dad pursed his lips, stood up, handed her a check, and walked out. That sentence is now scribbled on a decades-old yellow Post-It taped to his laptop.

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."
~William Styron, 1958

"I Love Beautiful Things That Break My Heart."

I first read about An Education in an early Sundance review on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter. For over a year, the LA trade known mostly by New Yorkers as The One That's Not Variety, mysteriously shows up outside our door before 7am daily. We aren't subscribers, and quietly wonder whether THR selected an elite group of East Coast Academy members to receive the daily (right outside their apartments, even), or too many circulation staffers were let go and the whole thing is a mail room mishap. Sometimes I flip through it quickly on the subway, sometimes a neighbor steals it, and very rarely do I finish a feature. On January 22nd, I finished a feature.

THR began their review by saying An Education had "taken Sundance by storm." Peter Saarsgard. 1960s London. Nick Hornby. I kept reading. Then the description of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, whose "ambition is to wear black, smoke cigarettes, read books and try anything new." I found the trailer and watched it seven consecutive times at work. Ten months later, our screener arrived. Yesterday, I watched it.



Another rarity for me is to jump out of bed to pause a movie so I can scribble down pieces of dialogue. In fact, last night was the first time I ever did.

"I'm going to talk to people who know lots about lots."

"You have no idea how boring everything was until I met you."

"Action is character. If we don't do anything, we won't be anyone."

"My choice is to do something hard and boring for the rest of my life or to go to Paris and have fun!"

"It's a funny world you people live in."

"I feel old. But not very wise."

When I was 16, I also wanted to finish high school and begin wearing all black, speak French, go to Paris with someone I loved, and have fun. By 21, I'd done all of the above. And like Jenny, was swiftly given an education on what happens after all that fun. Black ensembles were burnt by cigarettes, my French was charming but useless, a romantic weekend in Montmartre ended with a croissant thrown at my boyfriend's face and tears on mine, and every fun adventure always ended. Either at the end of a party, the end of a motorcycle ride to to the Cloisters, the ends of too many relationships, and the end of an education I wanted so desperately, and learned too quickly.

When it comes to film critics, I've spent enough years reading David Denby to trust his often-cynical, borderline-over-analyses of movies I'm curious about. He explains Jenny's initial decision to fall down a rabbit hole far more seductive than Alice's. This rabbit is Peter Saarsgard (more of a hare), and this mysterious guide "introduce[s] her to answers all the romantic dreams she has of life’s possibilities...a heightened eagerness for pleasure of any kind, and Jenny is caught." As was Alice, and as was I.

Alice, caught in a nonsense trial, escapes by waking up from what was just a dream. Jenny, caught in between reality and fantasy, escapes by feeling her heart break for the first time. As for me, I'm still waiting to see if I'll soon wake up from what could plausibly be a long night of nightmares and gorgeous dreams, or throw out all those cigarette-stained black dresses, feel my heart break a few more times, and continue this education for the rest of my nightmarishly gorgeous life.

"He knows immediately she is who he has been searching for. This is not a love story."

Maybe my limbs are made mostly for decoration.
You can’t really eat them, but I remember you trying.

If you grab my soft skin with your fist, it will feel funny.
Like you’ve been here before and uncomfortable.

Like you’d rather squish it between your teeth impatiently,
before spitting the soft parts back up to linger on the tongue like burnt sugar or guilt.

It was all an accident. We cut the right branch and the light grew dark and needy.

Think crucial hanging.

Think crayon orange.

There is one low, leaning heart-shaped globe left.

And dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

------------------

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything hard.
So I brought Johnnie Walker Red along with some resentment.

Which was not helped by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables, or by talk that promised to be nothing if not small.

But I’d consented to come. I knew what part of the house
the animals would be sequestered, whose company I loved.

What else can I say, except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown— he brought himself along too.

I was out to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me, but did not ask about my soul.
Which was when I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red to find the right kind of glass, and pour.

I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall, then walked past a group of women dressed to be seen.

Before long I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But you animals said, No, don’t do that. Calm down.

After a while they open the door and let you out, they pet your head.
And everything you might have held against him is gone.

"We’re good friends again," I lied.
"Stay," he lied.

"I Felt Like a Wild Thing, Ready To Mess Up The Party. I Toasted the Wall."

New York may never sleep, but I'm pretty sure it's taking a disco nap. A few signs the city's little siesta has gone on long enough:

April, 2009: R.I.B.
At this point lamenting the absence of Beatrice was a popular ice breaker when bumping into another regular at whatever replacement bar we vigilantly sat in, pretending to enjoy. We'd shout over lousy loud playlists, "Oh, it's definitely re-opening." Or, "Yeah, we'll go on Tuesday - it's in Page Six and stuff."

But those mythical Tuesdays kept passing, and our collective grief went from Denial to Depression. The Free Bea parties seemed like such a sweet kind of reassurance, a subtle winking promise that they'd be back soon. If we wore our Free Bea t-shirts often enough, we'd be just like those plucky prohibition fighters and Stonewall schismatics. Revolution would be ours.

And now? I highly recommend the double Jameson at Avenue. It's only $56, and it did help me move on from Depression to one of the more fun stages of grief: Bargaining!

Spring 2009: New York Nightlife Better than Ever, Insist Journalists
We read in the Post, the only reliable source for anything hip, trendy, edgy or sexxxy, that debauchery after dark lives on. A two-page spread on private, exclusive "underground" bars introduces us to places like Greenhouse, where people known as "high-rollers" are involved in something called "bottle service." And a club known as 1Oak apparently serves "alcoholic beverages" and features "sexy cocktail waitresses." Alas, these hot spots are tougher to get into than Harvard.

Luckily, New York Magazine came to the rescue with a list of the top five best new bars in town. An East Village lounge with jello shots, the latest Unlisted Phone Number bar where, if you're awesome enough to get it, you'll find posters of Aerosmith and even a smoking patio. Also, some place in Flatbush and a dungeon in Queens that sounds suspiciously like a Medieval Nights restaurant. But with quesadillas.

July 2009: The Day the Disco Cried
I agreed to accompany my boyfriend to his friend's birthday party at Bungalow 8. Vague memories of sharing a joint with 50 Cent on the balcony, watching Mary-Kate Olsen's friends turn a bedsheet into a trampoline for her to jump on wearing nothing but a Hanes t-shirt, losing at least 5 credit cards and 3 winter coats floated through my head. Four years later, I walked inside high on memories, and quickly felt those come-down shakes after seeing what's become of the bunghole. But then I spotted Him. Disco hugged me hard. I asked him what he was still doing there, and he said, "I'm the last one standing." Then the gentle dreadlocked giant actually teared up, like a Wild Thing crying "Oh please don't go, we'll eat you up! We love you so!" The fairy tale was over. No one knows where the wild things are.

August 2009: Requiem For That Dream
A few recent quotes from friends:

"Going out is boring the hell out of me."

"I miss Bea. Even the bathroom line."

"I've reached the point where I just don't WANT to be 'on the list.'"

"I've been at this party before. I've made out with that girl before. I've fallen asleep in that bar before. I've...done all of this before."

"When I went to a party upstate and wasn't shoved, pushed, or had wine spilled on my shoes ONCE the whole night, I wondered if I was actually at a party at all."

September 2009: Fashion Weak
Little Shop of Horrors composer Alan Menken called New York "Skid Row." Bob Dylan called it "Desolation Row." The Stones? "Heartbreaker."

An old friend I'd always considered the most optimistic, glass-half-full guy in my life (from California naturally), someone whose eyes I never thought could stop sparkling, told me how fashion week was going:

"A bit like hell. Quasi-suicidal actually."

My personal solution?

Follow in my parents' footsteps once they tired of ol' New York back in 1979. Their paradise island started to disintegrate post-Studio 54, eerily similar to today's post-Beatrice collapse. So they left their Bank Street townhouses and Upper East Side penthouses for the sticks. Got hitched in their backyard, my mother in a white linen maternity wedding dress. Had me. Planted vegetables. Shoved snow. Rode horses, watched me in the local Nutcracker, hosted lawn parties, and insisted they'd left New York for all the right reasons.

I may just do that. And, just like my parents, finally miss this messy fantasy camp so much that I inevitably move back within ten years. The city may be sleeping now, but as soon as it wakes up, I'll personally destroy its snooze button.

"Easy-Peasy, Quickly Over, Fun And Games"

A friend recently showed me this photograph of Mick Jagger and Bianca on their wedding day in 1971. I'm an art world dunce when it comes to recognizing iconic images like this one (despite sharing genes with the most talented contemporary artist living today). But as soon as I saw this Patrick Lichfield classic, I couldn't stop staring at it. The phallic champagne bottle in between Mick's scrawny legs, the possibility that he might actually be singing (and singing what?), one hand decorated with a cigarette, the other with a ring. Bianca's asymmetrical cleavage, her veil still on, the way St. Tropez sunlight somehow manages to add color to a black and white photo.

But most importantly, Bianca's smile. In Lichfield's UK Times obituary, this image is described as "a glimpse...capturing a moment of rock ‘n roll frivolity." And Joanna Lumley (an icon herself for we cultish Ab Fab fans on Team Patsy) described Lichfield as "a light going on, or a champagne cork popping." Bianca the newlywed was not posing. She isn't looking at the camera and, after seeing other photos of her the same night, something about this smile is purely frivolous, the way a face lights up when champagne corks pop.

I have a bad habit, inherited from my father, of relating everyone else's stories and epic anecdotes "back to me," as Dad would put it. I opened my MFPhotos folder and tried to figure out if I'd ever been part of a moment like Mick and Bianca's, if anyone had ever flashed their lens just when I'd briefly stumbled into just the right room, with just the right company, feeling just...right.

A few moments in my life that come close:

December 2006: We wore what we felt like wearing, ignoring freezing weather. We still smoked in bars without fear. One of us wore bright red lipstick, one wore endless black leather bracelets, and one wore blue silk. That's when a Polaroid camera appeared.

October 2008: The first night I met my then-boyfriend, I asked for a pair of shorts (my dress, which he described as a "cupcake", was uncomfortable). He pulled out a pair of corduroys, then a pair of scissors, and tore them apart. I was comfortable. So much so, that I began running around his dining room table just as he changed his digital camera's tint to a shade of blue I'd only seen before after staring for a dangerously long time at the sun.

Spring 1988: I grew up as an only child in a big house with lots of closets. Only children learn pretty quickly how to entertain themselves. I pulled a garden chair out of one closet, a ladies-who-lunch hat from another, and perched myself atop our leather couch next to (who else?) my dad. Just as I was trying to figure out how to hug my father gracefully without breaking a window or our lab's ear, my mother appeared with a camera.

June 2008: Bea, RIP.

October 2006: Didn't we almost have it all? My dream job, my at-the-time perfect boyfriend, a comped week-long trip through the South, and a hotel room with a desk like this one.

March 2009: The worst best tattoo given to me by the worst best person I know.

January 2008: I spent my last night in Israel on a Tel-Aviv beach. Drunk on ice water and joy, I'd lost my tights and shoes hours ago. The first and last time I've ever smiled so hard my face nearly morphed into diadem fireworks.

"Everybody's Youth Is A Dream."

For the last three years, I've hosted a party at my parents' apartment when they go on their annual vacation. As an embarrassingly obsessive linguistic freak, I've always enjoyed the word "party." Like the words "entertainment," "family," or "sex," they instantly catch your attention, encompassing infinite meanings (Entertainment: a Danielle Steel novel v. a Lenny Bruce act; Family: a cancer-stricken father v. the moment "I Do" means the love of your life is now family; Sex: Juliette Lewis dancing in her jail cell at the end of Natural Born Killers v. Juliette Lewis dancing with Mickey in the bar in the opening scene.)

All of us hear words like these and instinctively, engage in a mental Rorschach test. I hear "entertainment" and a Broadway stage appears in my head. I hear "family" and see David Hockney's eerie, enormous "Parade" my parents have hung on each of our houses' most prominent wall. I hear "sex" and the last time I had it is reenacted in my mind. Then there is that funny little word "party." Without fail, I imagine Gatsby's lawn in the wrong Egg.

Each of the three parties I've thrown here at Casa Friedman have varied so wildly, looked so different, and sent me to bed dreaming of fantasies vastly unrelated to those dreamed of the year before. Gatsby obviously threw parties far more often than me. But he and I had one party habit in common: we both end these evenings staring at the sky, drink in hand, wearing an ensemble colored only in unstained shades of black and white, alone. Alone, of course, despite knowing the love-of-life-at-that-time was sleeping on one side of a gigantic and comfortable bed inside, waiting for us to join them in satiated, anxiety-free sleep on the other side.

Last week...

...there were bookshelf-decorated rooms filled with people either brilliant or beautiful, or both.

There were women smoking cigarettes...












...on rooftop floors.

And there were moments captured on film like these, moments when we followed Fitzgerald's advice:

"His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

Or living out a line from Gatsby about the meaningless of knowing who your party guests are, and how little knowing them means...

"...The air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

Finally, there is the reason why both he and I would end the night looking at stars alone:

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness, and felt it in others too...wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

However many jovial smiles you see lunging towards you, handsome acquaintances turning into summer flings, champagne glasses smashed, or profound talks with distant friends you finally discover are somewhat interesting...every party ends. Weeks later, it doesn't matter whether you (maybe?) imagined the whole thing like so many Lit professors theorize Nick Carroway imagined Gatsby himself, or if the evening was just as lively as you remember. Until someone dives into a pool with no intention of climbing out, a party can be as enchanting or dull as possible: it, as the Jewish saying goes, "too, shall pass."

So what's the point? To improve upon the negatively designated spin assigned to post-millenial "parties" in Manhattan, I'll borrow an admittedly cliché quote from Hemingway, a man I imagine could have convinced even Gatsby that glasses are never half-full: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Maybe I dreamed the whole thing, maybe I did wind up alone on my roof contemplating the night's many meanings, maybe the night existed and everyone's lives went on without affect. I like to think, prettily so, that the city's lights shined slightly brighter that night than on other nights. Guests smiled without that familiar need to force it.

I looked up at those non-existent city stars from my rooftop, and decided not to dive off.


Sometimes, it's prettier to know so.

"There Is A Near-Hysterical New Beat In The Air"

This afternoon, I was looking for a story collection called Nelson Algren's Book of Lonesome Monsters: 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor. My dad suggested I look at our anthology bookcase. (Yes, our bookcases are full, genre-designated, and replace what are known in other people's apartments as "walls.") I grew up walking past the bookcase dedicated solely to my dad's books and plays every day, meaning a) I only recently learned God does not live in a steambath off-broadway, and b) I wound up asking my father, Daddy, what's a "dick?" at age 5. But there was just one mysterious book on those BJF shelves that I never once inquired about: Black Humor, a collection of essays by Joe Heller, Nabokov, Edward Albee, and Thomas Pynchon (among others) he edited in 1965. Recently, whenever I'm working on my book, the title keeps haunting me. Judging by these excerpts from my dad's introduction, I now know why:

"There is a new mutative style of behavior afoot, one that can only be dealt with by a new, one-foot-in-the-asylum style of fiction."

"If you are doing anything as high-minded as examining society, the very best way to go about it is by examining first its throwaways, the ones who can't or won't keep in step...Perhaps 'bad' behavior of a certain kind is better than 'good' behavior."

"The novel is the proper place to open every door, to ask the final questions, turn over the last rock, to take a preposterous world by the throat and say okay, be preposterous, but also make damned sure you explain yourself."

"If you are alive today, and stick your head out of doors now and then, you know that there is a nervousness, a tempo, a near-hysterical new beat in the air, a punishing isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind."

"The Black Humorist is a kind of literary Paul Revere, a fellow who unfreezes his mind, if only for a moment, and says, 'For Christ's sake, what in hell is going on here?'"

"There is a fading line between fantasy and reality, a very fading line, a goddamned, almost invisible line."

BJF wrote this in the 60s–over forty years ago. But somehow this "near-hysterical beat in the air," the need to confront a preposterous world, and rising prominence of "society's throwaways" is eerily relevant today. Despite lacing his definition of the then-emerging genre with such ominous, esoteric themes, he ultimately noted that "the effective social critics are working through humor." And then I had a kicker for my book's elevator pitch: a black humor renaissance.

"There is an awful lot of questioning these days, some of it despairing, bleary-eyed, bedazzled, some of it young, vigorous, outrageous. And a group of novelists, very often working obliquely, coming at you from somewhere in left field, throwing you some laughs to get you to lower your guard [will] follow every labyrinthian corridor to its source."
~Dad, 1965

Somewhat related is the fact that, while eye-ing our anthologies, I spotted a tiny red paperback called The Rascal's Guide: Naughty Women and How to Tame Them, with my father's name barefaced in bold-face on the spine. This odd collection was his very first Editor credit, published in 1959, making him just four years older than me at the time. Among the story titles:

"What to Do When the Lady Is a Tease"
"How to Be Unfaithful"
"Southern Girls–Lousy Lovers?"
"Secrets of a New York Free-Loader"
"The Grande Olde Sport of Girl-Tickling"
"How to Lush It Up and Influence People"
"Making It on Madison Avenue"
"A Tip for Rogues: The Wildest Party in the World"
"How to Be a Damned Fool at a Convention"

Then I remembered the time my dad disliked one ex-boyfriend because he used the word "awesome" twice over dinner. When he disliked another because he had never "shown much interest" in my dad's books. Another because he "just seemed too calm."

The point? My elevator pitch may fail. My first manuscript may wind up in several recycling bins, stained several times by several manicured D-girls' red polish. Ideally, Knopf will publish it, commission a glossy Chip Kidd-designed cover, and feature it prominently in every Barnes & Noble across the country. But someone like my father was first published in the form of a 35¢ cringe-inducing cad's guide, earning the most laughs not from a reader, but fifty years later when his daughter recites its chapter titles back to him. But then? He went ahead and canonized Black Humor, instantly earning himself a spot in every index of every book dedicated to the genre written after his own.

I'd love the Kidd/Knopf treatment, for Sam Tanenhaus to deem me a post-millenial McInerney detached from D words, a movie option sale pre-publication from Weinstein...the works. But knowing I could pull a Rascal on the first at-bat, then "obliquely" hit a Black Humor on the next swing? These last forty pages I've bent my brainstorm-heavy head over suddenly feel less like labor, and more like that last rock my dad insisted should be turned over without fear.