We All Fall Down

(Artwork by Joel Cruz, 8 years old)

He climbs up to where I am. pretty fast. fast as he can. He sure loses his shyness pretty quick. I think we're going to fall for sure. but I hold on. hold on to him and he holds on to me. and just before I close my eyes, I see three lights spark to life in the Twin Towers, like stars just for me. my mind is made up. there really is no choice after that. I've settled on which buildings are my favorite, once and for all. ---(from the draft of my book Tomorrow, Maybe)

This is how the original version of the last paragraph on page 55 of Tomorrow, Maybe was written in the spring of 2001. This book was meant to be an abstracted story of my first few years of living in New York City. In those years, I found New York to be a terribly lonely place at times, but always a beautiful one. The way the skyline changes as you walk is certainly a part of that. When I was kid, I loved the romantic nature of the Empire State Building, but the longer I lived there, I grew to appreciate the Twin Towers even more. Having worked in an office with a magnificent view of them, I got to see them come to life with light everyday. This was the feeling I was writing about in the above passage.

The great thing about the view was that there were no buildings in the line of sight despite the twenty or so blocks between where I was and where they were. Of course, the very same wonderful view that I loved so much also proved to have consequences. On this morning, ten years ago, I was standing outside on the patio of the top floor of that building watching smoke billowing into the sky. I stood with friends and we watched in confusion, wondering, like everyone else, what was going on and why helicopters weren't landing to attempt a rescue of the people on the top floors. Then the first tower fell before our eyes and everyone screamed.

There was a rush to evacuate the building after that. On the stairs, someone who had been in their office asked me what was happening. All I could say was 'it's gone.' Minutes later I was lost in the wild stampede of frightened people running north on Broadway. Just two days before, I had been driving into the city through the Holland Tunnel and I remember expressing my amazement at the two buildings with the person in the car with me. I had been saying, as I often did, that sometime in the distant future, civilizations were going to marvel at those buildings the same way we do at the pyramids in Egypt.

In the final version of Tomorrow, Maybe, we changed it to read the Empire State Building. This wasn't out of any 'sensitivity' that was rewriting history at that time. It was merely because we didn't want to date the action in the story of the book to a certain time. But the original version was the honest version. My favorite buildings disappeared ten years ago along with thousands of fellow New Yorkers. But as horrible as it was, on that day and the days and weeks after, no one in New York felt lonely...we all hurt and healed as one.

(Artwork by Melanie Cohn, age 8)

Weekend Music Roundup (Get in the Ring...Edition)

There are only a handful of bands that I could really call life-changing. These are bands whose music guides things beyond the course of just what music I'm really digging at the moment. Something about these bands shifts the way you dress, your attitude toward the world and in some ways redefines your dreams for the future. The first band that really had this kind of impact on me (and a lot of boys my age) was Guns N' Roses, the greatest american rock band to ever stroll the strip, back when I was 11 years old. They are still one of my favorite bands and I still listen to their music a lot. Recently, I've been in an Axl mood and have picked up a few good bootlegs and a nice collection '45 vinyl to go with my already exploding GNR shelf. But their a good bootleg band because their live shows are always so unpredictable and typically amazing. Today I'm sharing some of those for the other gunners out there.

Guns N' Roses - Since I Don't Have You: The only single released from the criminally ignored Spaghetti Incident, this is actually one of the weaker songs from that album of great punk covers. Though I do enjoy an Axl ballad, and this certainly is that, it shouldn't be a measure of the album. Neither should the Johnny Thunder's cover on the B-side which is okay, but nothing as great as the UK Subs, Stooges, or many of the other covers on the album.

Guns N' Roses - "Civil War" (Vol. 4): This bootleg captures the band's Use Your Illusion tour stop in Chicago 1992 and it could be the best bootleg from that tour that I've heard yet. There's a lot of special moments, the intro to "You Could Be Mine" is pretty awesome. Axl sings "Bad Time" acapella as an intro to "Sweet Child of Mine" and the version of "Civil War" is spectacular. The only annoying thing is that this is only HALF the concert. Released by this terrible Australian bootleg label, they often broke up concerts into two bootlegs, trying to rip the fans off even more. Unfortunately, I have yet to find Volume One, but I'll keep looking. This concert is too good not to.

Guns N' Roses - Civil War / You Could Be Mine: For me, this is one of the definitive singles from the Illusion albums (along with Estranged). Civil War is one of my favorite GNR songs, and much more epic than November Rain in my opinion. "You Could Be Mine" is the band's most progressive song from the era too. I love the attitude in it and always loved how the rhyme from the Appetite sleeve was used in the song. The pairing of these to makes for a fantastic '45 single.

Guns N' Roses - Secret Gig N.Y. Ritz '91: My favorite GNR recording is the secret gig they did at CBGB's a few years before this, so when I saw this existed, I had to find it. Axl loves playing NYC and figured this had to be good. It's the tune up show for their as of yet upcoming Illusion tour (which Axl tells the crowd is a 'summer tour', little knowing the tour would last two years and practically destroy the band). This show is stellar. It's the first time playing many of the Illusion songs live and the songs feel more alive than they do on the over-produced albums. The highlight is definitely Slash playing Band of Gypsies "Machine Gun" as an intro to "Civil War". The only downfall, as with a lot of bootlegs, is terrible recording quality.

Guns N' Roses - Paradise City / Move to the City: Two of the band's most blistering songs from their early period combine for a raging '45. Paradise City was one of those songs that really changed my opinion on the world. I remember reading the lyrics when I was 11 and seeing the part "The surgeon general says it's hazardous to breathe, but I'll have another cigarette because I can't see...tell me who you gonna believe" and I remember thinking, I believe Axl over that weird bearded guy that's always with Reagan. Then there's the B-Side, "Move to the City" which is one of my favorite GNR songs and one of the main inspiritions for my novel Tomorrow, Maybe.

Guns N' Roses - Rock in Rio II: A massive concert, and one of the band's landmark concerts for pure spectacle of size and excess. By this point the Illusion tour had been rolling on for a while, so there were no surprises in the setlist. It features the standard hits. But for all it's hugeness, the band actually seems to shrink on this bootleg for me. I know GNR played giant shows by this point, but from my listening, they play best in smaller venues.

Guns N' Roses - Nightrain / Reckless Life: The best rock single of all time? Quite possibly. I'd be hard-pressed to find to more explosive songs on vinyl than these two. These are probably the two rawest, roughest, seediest GNR songs and show of the band's glam punk roots. Simply fantastic...and with that cover...best rock '45 of all time.

Guns N' Roses - Don't Cry: I remember when the Illusion albums came out and being intrigued by the two versions of "Don't Cry" and thinking it was quite clever. It reminds me of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My" in that sense, a song that works as book ends. It's a very good Axl ballad that can only make one remember Middle School dances and first fumblings with first loves while wearing lots of flannel and bad skin. But that's what makes it endearing for me. Not my favorite song of theirs, but its associated with a lot of real memories.

Monday Morning Glory

One of the things I love about writing is the way it can be looked at from under a microscope or through the lens of a telescope because there so many elements that make up really great writing. So far in this series, I've looked at perfect phrases, sentences, stanzas, but there's also the paragraph. Sometimes a complete thought needs several sentences to shine (and sometimes a whole book). Here is a paragraph that never fails to move me:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

— Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This works on every level. A compact, clearly expressed journalistic point of view on a time and culture told in breathtaking prose. The imagery is intense. The overwhelming sense of defeat and sadness is tangible. And that final metaphor is simply brilliant.

Without a doubt, this is a paragraph that has had a strong influence on my own writing, not just stylistically, but also grammatically. I think its influence is easiest seen in my first two novels Pure Sunshine and Tomorrow, Maybe. One of the reasons this quote meant so much to me was that during the writing of both of those books, the W. era in the nation and Giuliani era in my city, I was feeling quite similar to Hunter in that passage. In the '90s counter-culture, there was also that feeling that we were doing something, changing things simply by the way we chose to live. We had decided not to live by the rules that had been set up for us by people we didn't think understood us.

Strides had been made, or I believed they had, and I was watching them all being rolled away like the last big wave. I kept thinking about Hunter S. Thompson's quote and couldn't help but think history had repeated itself in a way. But I didn't believe in giving up and turning Yuppie like previous generation had (many have though, a great many). I believed we could still chose to ignore and disobey what we knew to be unjust. This idea of rejecting those forces is very strong in both of my early novels...the idea of discovering your own morality and defining a more fair world for ourselves.