THE MEANING OF LIFE

Hardly a day goes by that someone who knows me says “You need to write a book about your life.” Some say it would need to be written as fiction as if written as non-fiction that I would be labeled as…

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Dear David

Dear David,

Midway through the journey of my life, without you, I find myself lost.

I can’t go on, David. I must go on.

Walking up Chapel Street in New Haven, I see a branch with a few leaves still clinging to it reflected in the dark glass of Louis Kahn’s British Art Center.

“Those leaves, that branch,” I think to myself, “exist in a world without you.”

Without you, David, the world seems to me empty.

Yale British Art Center: facade with reflections.

Taking the measure of your loss is difficult.

When I heard the news of your passing, I thought about how people must have felt upon hearing of the burning of the library at Alexandria.

It’s not just the knowledge: it’s the connections and the choices you made, your exact way of curating and caring about culture.

Who but you, David, could have made the exact connections you made?

No one but you, David.

You yourself foresaw this loss of his way of reading culture.

It was June of 1991. Do you remember?

You looked around and saw only gay men in their 50’s and 60’s. We two were the only 20-somethings there.

“How in the future will young people learn to watch these movies in this way?” you asked me. Do you remember?

(I sometimes see David’s work of curation in this light: as a way of teaching a specific way of consuming culture, intellectual and passionate, affectionate and critical, all in equal measures.)

One of David’s great strengths was the joy he took in consuming stories, in being an audience.

Remembering David, I can recall the series of faces and postures he went through as I’d tell him about some social or professional disaster.

First, there was a look of horror: his eyes wide, his mouth open. Frozen in fear.

Then he’d erupt in uncontrollable giggling, covering his mouth as he did.

Then he’d quickly identify with the madness being described and naturalize it. “Of course,” he’d say, and then explain the irrational reasoning at work — as if it were his own.

Then he’d slouch into his chair and collapse into despair. All was lost, nothing to be done. I can’t go on.

Finally, he’d rouse himself and rally — “oh well” — and he’d get ready to do whatever needed to be done. I must go on.

(It must be remembered that David studied acting at UCLA: the same program that produced Carol Burnett and Jim Morrison — David perhaps representing the exact midpoint between the two.)

David was the most perfect balance of scholar and fan, of critique and empathy

Whenever I’d express a judgment, he’d immediately come back with something stronger, harsher even, only then to turn around and support the opposite point of view, to empathize with what he himself was critiquing.

“Or maybe,” he’d say, justifying the very thing he’d just critiqued.

Ending with: “I don’t know.”

Thinking about you, David, I can’t help but remember the movies we watched and records we listened to — together.

In THE MAN I LOVE, Ida Lupino plays a tough but tender-hearted nightclub singer who visits her siblings in Long Beach for the holidays.

Lupino spends the rest of the film fending off the advances of her lecherous gangster boss, trying to help her sister, whose husband is hospitalized with shell shock, and to help her little brother, who’s fallen in with the gangster boss, as well as the neighbor, whose wife is stepping out on him.

You know: as so often happens.

Classic Raoul Walsh/Warner Brothers — in the vein of MANPOWER. Plot elements smashed together: a musical, melodrama, crime hybrid.

David and I loved that movie.

It takes a special sort of courage to choose to love something that crazy.

Of all friends, there’s a special kind of friend which is someone who listened to the same records as you did in high school.

David was that for me.

In fact, our very common way of spending time together was what we used to call a record party.

For those of you under 30, this is when people sit around in the same room and take turns playing music for each other.

I had just met David when he stayed at my apartment in Santa Monica, and we listened to our favorite female monologists: Lily Tomlin and Ruth Draper. He was particularly fond of Draper’s “The Italian Lesson,” in which a middle-aged socialite studies Italian based on Dante’s Inferno:

“Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

But the socialite so busy with planning a party and arranging a rendez-vous with her lover that she never gets past the first line of the poem.

Our last record listening party together was also a video watching party.

I played David my favorite live TV performances of one of our favorite singers: Dusty Springfield. Dusty was also a kind of critical lodestar for us.

Also on the panel was a fantasia upon the theme of Liz Taylor — and that was one of David’s inspirations for his essay “My Mother, the Cinema.”

At the end of THE MAN I LOVE, Ida Lupino has to give up the man she loves: he’s a hybrid jazz-classical pianist who’s still stuck on a socialite girlfriend whom we never see.

Lupino walks the pianist to the docks where he’ll ship out as a merchant seaman. Shades of Eugene O’Neill.

Lupino’s face is the center of the scene. We see mostly her, just a couple of shots the titular man she loves.

Her gaze controls the scene: she keeps looking to the gate to the gangplank, where the man she loves will disappear.

Her gaze scours his face, as if trying to absorb it and commit it to memory in preparation for his long absence.

The camera stays with her as he walks away, and in shot-reverse shot, she watches him climb the gangplank, turn and wave.

She waves with delight, and then her smile falls, and there’s a remarkable shot from her point-of-view of the empty space where the man she loves used to be.

Lupino turns and walks away, the camera staying on her face as it moves passing through all the infinite shades from loss and despair to love and hope.

It’s a bit like the end of HIGH SIERRA where Lupino goes into a kind of ecstasy when her gangster-lover is shot, and she approaches the camera, reminiscent of the way Griffiths treated Lillian Gish in BROKEN BLOSSOMS.

And of course one can’t help but wonder if Fellini didn’t pay hommage to THE MAN I LOVE with his ending of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA.

Walking up Chapel Street, I think about you, David.

I remember what my therapist in Los Angeles told me after my boyfriend Jesus died. “You didn’t choose for this to happen to you, but you get to choose what it means.”

I’m not sure I am ready yet to choose what to make of the empty space where David was.

Maybe if David were here, he could help me.

But he’s not.

And so all else above, I’m thinking of the man I love.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Dear David

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