(Above: Grace Jones photographed by Greg Gorman. Greg and I talked about some of his other portraits and the women in them down below.)

When I was in London earlier this year, I wrote a profile of photographer Platon for Coldwell Magazine. When I was in Berlin recently, I wrote one on photographer Greg Gorman for Coldwell. It was published a few weeks ago. I will link to it when it is linkable but I got permission yesterday from the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Richard Pérez-Feria, to go ahead and use it for a SES/SUMS IT UP column. I will link to it in the coming weeks on social media as well when it “goes up.”

I have known Greg for around 40 years. We first met when I was working at Interview - or maybe it was through our mutual friend David Hockney even before that. We also did the first cover story for POZ where Richard was the founding Editor-in- Chief. It was a magazine for the HIV/AIDS community and those who were its allies. Sean Strub was its publisher. It was a brave and important publication and I was honoured to be assigned its first cover story on Ty Ross and a subsequent one on Elizabeth Taylor who did so much brave and important work herself for the community.

Barry Goldwater was Ty’s grandfather and Ty, too, was doing something brave and important by coming out as an HIV positive gay man 32 years ago. I wasn’t yet HIV positive myself at that point. The story caused a bit of a sensation and spurred debates about journalistic ethics because I wrote about our having sex which I told Ty that, if we did, I’d have to write about it because it would not be ethical to keep it a secret. Lots of people preferred I had.

I’ve been told the story is now taught in journalism classes in colleges so students can debate it. I hope they also discuss that divisive time in America when HIV was so scary and those who had contracted the virus were ostracised in lots of different ways. I subsequently became one of them, a them that then became an us. But part of my sleeping with Ty as my being then an HIV negative man was to embody the divide within our own community and to try to bridge it. I have mixed feelings today about the objectification of him in order to make that point but I was clear to him about my intentions. Moreover, I was deeply attracted to him so that part was honest even as I also saw the narrative value playing out in my head. But that value was in no way devaluing Ty.

I just always see the narrative.

It’s my way of navigating the world.

This is the narrative I saw when I was talking with Greg back in Berlin over Zoom when he was at his place down in Palm Springs from his home in LA preparing for his own European sojourn this summer.

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe,” wrote Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It, his novella about family and fishing and how we cast about in each in an attempt to find a way to define ourselves before we end up at redemption. “To him all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

Photographer Greg Gorman is such a master of his craft that he can make the art of it look easy but finding the grace to define himself professionally and personally within his midwestern upbringing wasn’t quite so easy for him. That took a craftiness and guile, the hallmarks of any professional career carved out of the geography of hype that long ago formed Hollywood itself, that just didn’t come naturally to someone with his lanky likability. It is limned, that likability, with a deeper oft noted decency that doesn’t brook the brusque unkindness that can pass for power in show business but needlessly masks instead the neediness of the insecurity of those who think of themselves as the guardians of its gaudy order.

The key to Gorman’s own ordered art is, in fact, its lack of gaudiness even as it luxuriates not only in his knowledge of light - he got his Master of Fine Arts degree in cinematography at USC - but also light’s knowledge of him. He talks about his goal of creating “connected portraits” in our adjacent conversation about these iconic ones editorially curated here in the pages of Coldwell. He meant the term as one that encompasses his subjects and himself. But I suspect it goes deeper than that. It is about how he and the light are connected as well.

There is a technical expertise that the most successful photographers pair with their visual instincts, but the greatest of them have a spiritual bond with light in which they have found, yes, a kind of redemption which in turn redeems their photography from “a [predatory] medium in which works of art are made” according to Susan Sontag, displaying the joyless jut of her academic jaw in On Photography. Helmut Newton, Gorman’s mentor and great friend with whom he shared duo-exhibitions (the anti-intellectual Helmut shared nothing in common with the brainy Sontag except a taste for women that they each found to be transgressive in themselves and each other) put it this way: “Practically any light, somehow or other, I can deal with … Any light that God sends me is different. This keeps me interested: ‘quick, quick, quick, something is happening!’”

But it was a slow-slow-slow-something-is-happening moment Gorman remembers as the one in which he himself decided to become a photographer. “There was a buddy of mine I used to go huntin’n’fishin’ with back in Kansas where I grew up,” he says, always better at dropping his g’s than dropping names. “My buddy was a photography buff. I had third row centre seats to see Jimi Hendrix in Kansas City so I asked him if I could borrow his camera. I shot some pictures during the concert and went over to his house the next day. With his help, I started to develop the film in his dark room. I began seeing this picture gradually emerge on this white piece of paper and I went, ‘Fuck .. this is pretty amazing …’ I decided to enroll in photo journalism school at the University of Kansas since that’s all they offered then. I just loved that moment in that dark room. The pictures themselves were shit. They were awful. I might have been too stoned when I was taking them. But it was that image coming out of nothing on that piece of white paper: that was the decisive moment.”

“It lit your creative spark,” I say. “It spoke to your longing to be a conjurer of some sort even if you couldn’t quite cope yet with the idea of being an artist.”

“Very much. I felt the magic of it,” Gorman agrees. “Then I went out to USC. Got my degree there. And stayed in LA,” he says. He spends much of his time now more than fifty years later - he’s 77 - passing on his knowledge and experience by teaching students around the world eager to garner some of his wisdom not only as a photographer but also as a gentleman who managed to navigate Hollywood with his gentleness intact. “I didn’t end up being a cinematographer though because I am too much of a control freak,” he says, that regret, if it ever was one, no longer a narrative wrinkle to be faced after setting its story in such a place where narratives are sold for their wrinkles but faces lose their currency for having a few too many. “Directors will ultimately go for the best acting take over the best camera take,” he tells me. “And I wanted to make the better visual choice. I wanted that control.”

But there’s another way of looking at it because there’s always another way (the photographer’s mantra) of looking at something, which is that Greg Gorman won’t let anyone assert control over him, not even himself. He insists to me that he enters a photo shoot with no prior judgment about a subject. It is as if he were the white piece of paper through which the image will emerge once it is discovered in the real-time juncture of a photo shoot.

Sontag insisted that any art that does emerge from photography is happenstance, a more grudging than happy one. “Photographs owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine,” she wrote, “which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.” Helmut Newton, who knew more about the subject in his shutter finger than any cortex capable of contextualisation, referred to being open to such unplanned moments as capturing the “divine mistake.” Or, as Maclean wrote in his book about family and fishing not knowing he was also writing about photography when the mystery of the unseen is somehow captured not with the equipment needed - sorry, Susan - but the artistry of the person handling it: “All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

###

Which brings us to Thomas Hart Benton.

President Harry S. Truman.

And Greg Gorman’s daddy.

Gorman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and still goes back each year to hang out with lifelong friends for Thanksgiving. “I was a premie. My mom slipped and fell and broke her water. I came out two months early and was in an incubator for another two months in 1949. That was pretty serious back then so I’m lucky to be alive. I was born over in the Missouri part of Kansas City but we lived over in Kansas for most of my life. … I went to a private boys school, Pembroke Country Day - Pem Day we called it - and one of my best friends growing up lived next door to Thomas Hart Benton and his wife, Rita. I was probably around 10 or 11 and went over to his house one day and sat for him for a couple of things. He used one of my hands and one of my feet for that huge mural in the Truman Library. It’s called Independence and the Opening of the West. I’m going to have to check it out next time I’m there and try to figure out where parts of me are.”

As Gorman continues to talk about his midwestern upbringing - he’s had a lifelong love of fishing and football “and all the things you’re not supposed to love if you’re a gay guy” - I kept thinking about that Maclean quote about seeing something noticeable which leads one to seeing something that isn’t even visible and his story about being in that mural but not being in it, which is a good way of describing any gay child’s boyhood. His mother knew he was gay but he never came out to his father. “Although I’m sure he knew,” says Gorman. “We just never discussed it.”

“My theory is that we don’t come out to our parents, but we confirm what they already know,” I posit, a bit shocked actually that he never told his father. “They made us. We are their flesh and their blood. They have a knowledge about us before we have it about ourselves. We are the white paper they stand over watching the image that is slowly emerging that they’ve already created. We’re their Jimi Hendrix.”

“I think you’re right,” says Gorman. “My dad was in the furniture business like all the Gormans before him. He wanted me to go into the business, too. When I told him I was going to be a photographer, he said, ‘What? Ya’gonna be a bum ya’whole life?’ I told him what I wasn’t going to do is wear a coat and tie and kiss ass and hurry down the freeway to sell a bunch of furniture. He did live long enough to see me become successful, my Jewish furniture salesman father. My first big job was shooting a Life magazine cover in the 1980s. It was about the five most powerful women in Hollywood at the time - Jessica Lange, Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Sally Field, and Jane Fonda. When I told him about it, his first question was, ‘How much did you get paid?’”

So how much did he get paid?

“A thousand dollars.”

###

Greg Gorman has always felt comfortable as an outsider, not only being that gay kid growing up in the midwest in the 1950s and 1960s, even if he was one who loved fishin’ and football and knew how to hold a huntin’ rifle, but also within the modern pantheon of portraiture photographers. Art critics, those rationers of respect, have never quite known what to make of him and his work, a man who personally presents as the most informal of people who has the educated eye and sculptural photographic skills of a formalist. But dichotomy is what delineates the work - and the man. It gives depth to each. He loves, for example, the camp it takes to imitate the voices of many of the divas he’s photographed - check those out in the adjacent conversations - as much as he does camping along the rivers in Wyoming where he settles in to fly fish for trout. He’s kind of like Gary Cooper, but the Bea Arthur version.

Cooking is another of his passions and Gorman has become known for his dinner parties and their guest lists which often include his best friends, fellow outsiders John Waters, Heidi Fleiss, and Patty Hearst. I’m sure he’d still like to be be able to invite two other dear friends, Paul Reubens and David Bowie along with Helmut. When I ask him to name a couple of others he’d put on the now-dead Dinner Party Guest List he surprises me. “Brigitte Bardot,” he says. “And Gorbachev.”

Another feature of Gorman’s life for many years now has been a long line of French bulldogs. Cyrill, his seventh, sits on his lap during our Zoom call for this story. Siegfried and Roy were the ones who convinced him originally to get a Frenchie. Patty Hearst fell in love with that first one and not only got one herself but also began to breed them. Each subsequent pet French bulldog has come from one of her litters. “I always get the one that nobody else wants,” he says, cupping Cyrill’s jowls in his hands. “But look at that face,” he tells me which is what his photographs tell us to do as well.

As for those other parts of himself, he’s still looking for them in his way, this midwestern boy who became a Los Angeles legend because he never went out there searching for fame but allowed it instead to find him where he waited in the light to understand its shadows. His heart? As he approaches 80, he has found a way to quiet its own quivering needs with the flutter of the fly he flicks out into a Wyoming river’s rushing depths to hook a trout instead of the click of a camera’s shutter to capture the latest bit of fame fluttering about him. In each case though trust is needed; he, stalwart, is that element. Standing in the light of a river or in the light of photo studio, Greg Gorman, the straddler of worlds, never strays from what gives his work the mark of art: that trust. He inspires it in others because he has it for himself.

“What do you get from fishing?” I finally ask. “Is is a spiritual practice?

“Yes. It is. I get peace and solace from it. I don’t meditate. I’m a real people person. I’m hardly ever alone. I don’t do the fishing exactly alone because I’m usually with a good friend and a guide. But I go up to the middle of nowhere outside Saratoga, Wyoming, and trout fish on those rivers. It’s so gorgeous. It’s breathtaking. You don’t see another soul. I put all the fish back. I don’t kill’em or anything. But I just love fishin’. It is as close to meditation as I get.”

Maclean tried in A River Runs Throught It to explain to the rest of us what it is like for Gorman and others to stand in such rivers amidst nature’s grandeur and think that they are as close to meditation as they can get but aren’t, not really. Because it is not they who are meditating. They are, in fact, the meditation. “I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched…” wrote Maclean. “Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”

These photographs are Greg Gorman’s river.

###

KS: “Diana Ross titled her memoir Secrets of the Sparrow. There is an element of bird watching to what you do, Greg, when shooting these rarea aves. You do have to have the patience of a birder to spot a rare moment when it alights.”

GG: “Well, patience, would be a big factor, Kevin, of what happened on that shoot.

“I rented a daylight studio up in the the Hollywood Hills. I had built all these sets for Miss Ross, as she had to be addressed. I had three or four different sets because the whole place faced southwest and it got beautiful light. I had all these incredible shots set up.

“Well, she was five hours late. So there was no fucking light. Thank God I had the right lights with me to light those sets . If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had any light.

“But you have to be able to harness your energy in; you can’t let something like that get to you. I read that Platon listens to Miles Davis to stay focused when you did that profile on him for this magazine. I love Miles, too. But I also listen to Chet Baker to stay calm, to stay focused.

“Anyway, I couldn’t have this hostility toward her even though, of course, I had it inside me after those five hours waiting for her to show up. I had to pull it together just as though we were beginning the day on-time”

KS: “Bette Davis once said that an actor has to have two things: discipline and detachment. ‘Without discipline and detachment, an actor is an emotional slob, spilling his insides out,’ she claimed. ‘This abandonment is having an unfortunate vogue. It is tasteless, formless, absurd. Without containment there is no art. All this vomiting and wheezing and bursting at the seams is no more great acting than the convulsions of raving maniacs.’

“Are discipline and detachment the two things that a photographer needs as well? And did you need those two things to photograph her specifically?”

GG: “I think you definitely need discipline. But detachment, I would say no. Because I usually try to attach myself one way or another. In my style of photography, I try to come up or down to a person’s level to get a basic common bond so I can win their trust and confidence. I can then get a connected portrait. At the end of the day, that is what I want: a connected portrait. So detachment would definitely not be a part of my practice.

“The first time I photographed Bette, I got a call from her friend, Claude Deloffre, asking if I wanted to do it. I said absolutely.

“So I went to meet her and she was wearing a short skirt that barely covered her. She was sort of perched on a chair at her apartment. She showed me her place and I suggested a spot next to the mantel to use in the photograph and she said, oh, no, we couldn’t shoot there because it wasn’t a yankee fireplace. She really was kind of a character. She was very funny. Claude came over and was present for the shoot. Bette didn’t like women that much. She even made Claude wait in the other room.

“We developed quite a friendship and I shot her many times over the years.

“But that first time, after she rejected the fireplace, I suggested a room where she kept her Oscars. She said I couldn’t shoot there either because there were too many reflections in the glass all about the room. She knew her stuff. After later shoots, when we’d become friends, I’d go over to her house and she’d put the Lightbox on her lap and she’d check them off. ‘No, no, no, no …. Terrific! …” he says, diving down into a lower but firmly female register to mimic Davis.

“I later photographed her for Life magazine with James Woods and she just hated him. He once was a friend of mine and had a sense of humour but he’s a big Trumper now.

“I once photographed Bette at the St. James’s Club. It’s now the Tower Bar and Grill. I shot her on that staircase they had. They wanted a big print of her for a wall. She said she was happy for me to give them one but she insisted it be on the wall where the Mary Astor painting was. They said fine and put it there.

“Cut to about a month later and my phone rings but the answering service picks up. They contacted me to tell me that someone says that she’s Bette Davis on your phone. I tell them it probably is, so they put her through. ‘Greg! Bette Davis!’” he says again down in that lower register but with those exclamations points that were built into Davis’s delivery. “‘I had dinner last night at the St. James’s Club and they moved the goddamn picture! Tell them if they don’t put it back they can’t fucking have it!’ And the she just hangs up. Classic.

“About ten days before she passed away, I called her because I wanted to do an l.a.Eyeworks ad with her. She was at the San Sebastián Film festival in Spain. She called and left a couple of messages to tell me she was out of town but she was going to call me when she got back. But she never got back. She got very sick there and was flown to a hospital in France where she died She was a remarkable woman. One of the real legends of all time.”

KS: “I interviewed Sophia Loren for her 90th birthday. It was for Grazia magazine. One of the things we discussed was how she dealt with being objectified as a sex symbol, and did such objectification morph and alter over time as she aged. She once said, ‘You have to be born a sex symbol. You don’t become one. If you’re born with it, you’ll have it even when you’re 100 years old.’

I also asked her if she liked being photographed since objectification is embedded in the process. ‘It depends on the day,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Being photographed is exactly the opposite of acting. When you act, your job is to react to everything around you, every moment calls for a different emotional colour. Being a model is to hone in on the colour the photographer is seeking and when you find it, freeze in that moment until the photographer tells you to shift. So really, being a model and being an actor are two opposite things.’

GG: “I love that. I love her. There was once a magazine called Detour. They knew I’d always wanted to shoot Sophia so they called me to tell me that they had booked her but they couldn’t pay any of my expenses. This was when I was working a lot so I flew myself and my assistant First Class to Rome. I was so excited to get to work with her. She called me before I left and I asked her if there was anything I could bring her.”

Now it’s Loren’s turn to settle into Greg Gorman’s larynx which is just a bit too butch to be mimicking all these ladies. This one comes out sounding more like Magnani marinaded in a marinara of Mastroianni. “ ‘Oh … you know … It would-a be a-very nice if I could a-have a short a-wig,’ she said.

“I said, okay, I’ll see what I can do. I called my makeup and wig guy who made a short little wig. So I took it to her. I felt like one of those hairdressers flitting through airports with one of those styrofoam heads with that fucking wig pinned to it.

“But she was great. She didn’t have an entourage. She came with her sister. She did her own makeup. She was fantastic. I just fell in love with her.

“This was about 30 years ago. So over lunch she said,” he starts up again, getting the marinara ready for the marinade. “‘Oh, you a-know, Greg, I’m a-not really a-60. I’m a-three times a-20 .’ I thought that was great.

“I was working back then with a strobe and could shoot without stopping. And she went, ‘Oh … oh … oh …’” he goes, the marinara really bubbling now “‘… paparazzi …’”

KS: “Jamie Lee Curtis is known for being early. One of her daughters says she’s ‘aggressively early.’ She’s also anti lots of things. Anti-drugs. Anti-transphobia. Anti-plastic surgery. Anti-bullshit. Anti-agist. She is, in fact, pro-aging. Almost an activist about it.”

GG: “I’ve known her forever. We did this portrait for Flaunt magazine . Jamie came in and was in a great mood. She even wanted to do a nude with me for just us. But they had one designer that they were using for that whole issue and she was not happy with the clothes which looked weird on her.

“So she ended up not wanting to do the nude and I was excited to do that nude with her. I mean, it was her idea. But she got so pissed off about the clothes that it put her in a kind of a funk. We got some great pictures though finally.

“I’ve known Jamie since the early days. She’s in my very first book. She’s incredibly sexy. She probably has one of the wildest senses of humour of anybody I know. I always had a crush on her before I realised I was gay. Well, I always realised I was gay. I just wasn’t buying off on it 100%.

“I’ve been shooting her since the late 1970s at the very, very beginning of my career. She’s always been a beauty. The kind of girl I’ve always been attracted to are tomboy girls, and she’s kind of that type. She’s a very special person and involved in the things that are important to be involved in.”

###

To view Greg’s additional portraits of Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, and Meryl Streep which also run with the story, click on that link to Coldwell magazine. He also talks about them - as well as his dear friend Grace Jones.

(Above: A cicada in the midst of singing. Photograph by Mike Powell.)

The First Lines of

“Canto Two,” from

Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from m…

Read more

1.

The painting above, Arab Coffeehouse, is by Henri Matisse. It is one of the many works he created during the 7 months he spent here in Tangier in 1912 and 1913. He came to sulk amidst the souks because of feeling strategically cut out of the Cubist crowd before he, thirty years later, turned to his own cut-outs to crowd his canvases with sculptural strategies. He had become an artist when he was 20 years old and still a law student after having suffered a severe bout of appendicitis. Making art became part of his physical convalescence in 1889. And it became a part of his convalescing emotionally when he was in Tangier because he confessed he had been “suicidal” in one of his letters written from here when he, finished with Fauvism but not yet having found another way forward, was feeling beastly but could no longer conjure that wildness that could well within his person and thus his palette. He had lost his trust in saturation, in himself. He even wondered if Basket of Oranges (Nature morte aux oranges), which he was composing at the time he was writing the letter, would be his last work. The still life’s provenance proved to be so ironic that it called for a kind of Cubism itself to manifest its many angles after Picasso bought Basket of Oranges in 1944 to add to his personal collection which he directed to be donated later to the Louvre. Matisse is said to have broken down in tears when told of Picasso’s purchase and each subsequent New Year’s Day sent Picasso a gift: a box of oranges.

The painting above was one of Matisse’s first “goldfish” works. But it also reminds me of Charles Hawthorne’s “mudhead” paintings In 1899, Hawthorne founded the Cape Cod School of Art for summering artists in Provincetown but he wintered in Paris so it could have been possible that he and Matisse crossed paths at some point during those early years of the 20th Century. I was mediating on that as I lingered over the mudhead portraits in the link I provided. I once owned a couple of mudheads myself but they too are now gone along with almost everything else I once owned. I’ve been meditating on that as well this week, the different forms that saturation takes. I am no longer saturated with possessions and thus am strategically sculpting a new kind of life with the lack of them. It is a Fauvism of fewer strokes muddied no more by the need for more. I am a beast unburdened except for solitude. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude,” wrote Aristotle, whose teachings influenced medieval Christian and Islamic philosophies, “is either a wild beast or a god.” A god, I am not.

The light here has been described as magical. Delacroix diplomatically layered his 1832 landscapes with it when he arrived in Tangier as part of an exploratory mission commissioned by the French government. I think Matisse found it medicinal but I am uncertain if that is more than magical, or less so. Try as Tangier might to shed its reputation during its later more reprobate freewheeling International Zone years from 1923 to 1956 by layering in more traditional Moroccan mores ever since so that the societal calibration can take on a calculated self-colonisation, the place remains a bit of a trickster. I find a well-mannered undercurrent of menace still mincing about in all this light that never denied the city’s darkness and indeed took up the dare to dance with it. The menace now mimics that dance which is a way to deny it without really doing so. But that is all of a piece with Tangier’s this-but-that allure which is hidden in plain sight, seen-not-seen, sensual, scented, sensed. It is embodied by the outlined ones of both sexes used to signal its presence because even though robed in the ways the rise of religious culture here instructs them to do so, it - and those signifying bodies - have no choice but to live within the wastrel strut of winds that blow up off the Strait of Gibraltar. They can feel at times, these crosswinds of crosscurrents, like exalted exhalations coming from somewhere on high and sighing at what must be beheld of us below in our hives of behaviour. Robes are caught up in the crosscurrents. Cloth in such crosswinds cling to such bodies. All that outlining is there to be deciphered with disgust or desire. It can be dizzying to make such a decision. But one thing is clear. Carnality cannot be disaffirmed by decree. The harrumphing world won’t have it. Tangier is its harrumph within its sigh.

2.

Henri Matisse, so filled with harrumphing sighs himself, had just turned 42 on December 31st, 1911, when he arrived here in January of 1912. He stayed until April. He then returned in October and remained until February of 1913. He turned 43 here on that New Year’s Eve. It was the second birthday he acknowledged that year for The Prophet Mohammad’s birthday - a national holiday known as Mawlid - fell on March 2nd of 1912.

Mawlid in 2026 fell on August 25th. The first words I spoke that morning were “Mawlid al-Nabi Mubarak” to the waiter at Cinema Rif’s cafe who was bringing me an Americana. He put his hand over his heart and thanked me. “Shukran,” he said. The next morning - the birthday seemed to have been acknowledged over the 26th as well - my first spoken words were “Mawlid Murbarak,” to the concierge at my building. He too thanked me. He too placed his hand over his heart.

Each is a greeting one offers to Muslims on Mawlid. I offered it to a few more. The first of the two days was the one that most people seemed to take as a work holiday. But I wanted to understand a bit more about it all so I engaged with some young Tanjawa friends with whom I talk about myriad subjects in an effort to comprehend better the culture and to honour it without compromising my own values. I was made to understand that even an acknowledgement of a birthday - especially The Prophet’s - can be considered a bit controversial because to some it is a religious “innovation” not truly based on The Prophet’s teachings since Mohammad didn’t celebrate his own birth.

I’m realising therefore that I might have offered those two greetings the last couple of days to some people who don’t think it is proper to celebrate such a birthday - especially by such an outsider deigning to appropriate it even with an honourable intent that has a result that can’t be described in the same way. It’s all a balancing act. I often feel as if I’m unsuccessfully teetering in the midst of it and it is I who is perceived as the menace.

It is because of having felt that perception - have even felt paranoid about it - that I have also begun reading the Koran and some essays about Islam as it relates to subjects that matter to me. I will write more about that once I’ve read more and sat in contemplation about what I’ve been reading. To say I have been surprised by the parallels with Christianity is an understatement. So much of the Christian narrative - the virgin birth, Christ himself, those miracles that weren’t manmade, the Second Coming of Christ - is embedded in the narrative of Islam. They are there in the Koran. We’re all finally, I guess, just living different threads in the same story. All religions are offering up a plot for those who have lost it.

King Mohammad VI did preside over a Mawlid ceremony at the Royal Palace in Rabat. It was attended by his son Crown Prince Moulay El Hassan and others. He also issued 634 pardons in conjunction with it.

I kept the King and Crown Prince’s photo up there from an earlier Mawlid ceremony a couple of years ago in the first section of this latest LETTER because I liked its juxtaposition with the Matisse painting. That is what all royal families offer in all countries that have them: a juxtaposition. They too offer up a plot for those who need one to focus on outside their own lives.

3.

I have always been fascinated by artists who are so good at other vocations - like Matisse who after getting his degree was a law clerk and court administrator before devoting himself to his art. My brother, Dr. J. Kim Sessums, is an obstetrician-gynecologist but also a renowned sculptor and artist himself. He is often awarded public commissions for large-scale works. His latest is from the University of Mississippi. This is the clay bust portion of the much larger sculpture he’s doing of the school’s great quarterback, Archie Manning, who played for Ole Miss for three seasons from 1968-1970. I have known about this for a while but it was only recently announced. So I can now publicly be a proud big brother.

When I was in my 20s and working at Paramount Pictures, my boss there was Buffy Shutt who went on to become a macher of movie marketing with other executive roles at Columbia, TriStar, Universal, and Participant Media. She has published a couple of novels, but in her retirement she has turned to poetry and her work is remarkable. Her latest chapbook, Annunciations, is being published by Rockwood Press. “Many-layered, like an artist’s canvas painted over again and again, Annunciations provokes a sense of wonder and deep mystery, no matter how many times it is read,” writes poet Luiza Flynn-Goodlett . You can order Annunications here.

4.

Last week, 15 LGBTQ Moroccans were arrested in Fez to remind us all that being gay or transgender here is officially against the law. I stand with my brothers and sisters who were arrested there. I thought of them when I walked by this wall the other day here in Tangier. I “behave” here and deny myself the dignity of an equal sexual life in order to honour the culture in which I’m living. But to honour my own values - my own worth as a human being - I put my gay hand over my gay heart at this Tangier wall for the LGBTQ citizens arrested in Fez. I felt a sigh from on high. It was its silent sound of solidarity.

5.

I have posted on social media platforms my Vanity Fair cover story on Dolly Parton from 35 years ago. But I hadn’t cried about her death until I watched this clip of her singing with her mama and her daddy. It’s hard to think of a world without her in it.

Andy Cohen adored her. She adored Andy. We both knew her through her manager and close friend, Sandy Gallin, who died in 2017. He too was a dear-hearted person. I once went to a star-filled Christmas party at Sandy’s house in LA - Madonna came with Michael Jackson as her date, that kind of party - and Dolly sang a couple of Christmas songs on his stairwell with a Black gospel choir.

Andy has a version of the Warhol portrait of her above. He wrote in a social media post that his son looked at the portrait once and asked him, “Daddy, is that God?”

Matisse identified with Buddhism but wasn’t really religious. He was once asked, in fact, if he believed in God. “Yes, when I am working,” he answered.

I’ve always loved that photo of Dolly that Herb Ritts, another dear-hearted person now departed, took for Interview magazine. It looks like she’s being told upon her arrival this past week that God believes in her. “You were some of my best work,” she’s hearing.

My sister-in-law, Lisa - below, with my sister, Karole and me - grew up down the road a piece from Dolly in Gatlinburg, a different kind of holler in the Smoky Mountains than Dolly's Sevierville. Karole and Lisa got married in those Smokies and that’s us a day or two before their wedding with the sculpture of Dolly at the Sevier County Courthouse Square in Sevierville.

Aristotle: “It is a mark of superiority to confer a kindness.”

The Trio album that Dolly made with Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt remains one of my favourites. I’ve been playing it a lot these last few days. Below the three of them are singing Dolly's mama’s favourite song. And that’s Dolly in her early days on The Porter Wagoner Show singing the hymn that was later sung at her daddy’s funeral and which she said she’d like sung at her own.

Parton was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song for “Travelin’ Thru” back in 2006 which she wrote for Transamerica. The film was about a transgender woman taking a cross-country trip with her son. Dolly always stood with the LGBTQ community.

She wrote in her lyrics:

“ … Like a poor wayfarin' stranger that they speak about in song
I'm just a weary pilgrim tryin' to find what feels like home
Where that is, no one can tell me, am I doomed to ever roam?
I'm just travelin', travelin', travelin', I'm just travelin' on …”

Dolly Parton connected us all to each other.

Thank you for traveling through our lives, Dolly.

Now travel on, dear one.

Travel on.

Onward …

When I was a young actor in New York, having dropped out of the Juilliard School’s Drama Division, I made it down to the last few boys to play Alan Strang in Equus opposite Richard Burton when he took over the role of Dr. Dysart on Broadway from Tony Perkins. There were lots of auditions. Lots of callbacks. I began to believe my life was about to change and I was going to get the role.

John Dexter was the play’s director. I was invited to have lunch with him out at his home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and a few nights later to have a dinner with him at Sardi’s at which he made it clear if I slept with him the part was mine. I don’t know what he did with the other two or three boys, how he behaved with them. Keith McDermott who got the part was brilliant in it and, in fact, became a friend of mine. I only know of my own experience.

I chose to “play dumb” at the Sardi’s dinner and Dexter’s exasperation began to match my disgust at his putting me in that position. We even began to spar conversationally a bit. I may not have gotten the part but I learned how to hold my own at such a table with such a man - he was 51, I was still 19 - who was not just demanding of my body what I was not willing to give him but also making demands on my mind that was surprising us both by its proving to be up to the task. That was the part I remember becoming kind of fun as I turned the tables and began to toy with him.

I have been cat sitting the last few weeks here in Tangier and the other day I watched the two cats not exactly torturing the bee they were fiddling with as they passed it back and forth with their paws but being playfully indifferent to how they were making the confused bug feel, stung itself for not being seen as a bee, as their mischief replaced any fear of what the thing could do to them. Watching those two cats acting like a couple of strikers pouncing on that one stunned bee as if it were the ball they were attacking on the pitch, I thought of John Dexter and that dinner at Sardi’s and how my life had almost taken another turn here on this field of play where I am still grateful to find myself.

In many ways I ceased to be an actor at that Sardi’s table but I became a person who could bat some banter back and forth, stand my ground while staying seated, calmly dissect a discussion, deflect, comprehend, hold my space within the space other more celebrated artists command as their own. I became that night the person who doesn’t just interview celebrities but converses with them. Challenges them when needed. I became a writer that night sitting there at Sardi’s who is unintimidated by fame. I indeed became even more deeply just that, this, a writer, as I watched Dexter decide dessert wasn’t worth ordering. Because once again I was paying witness to a situation’s narrative heft, its subtexts and contours, which I had already begun to employ as a coping mechanism - a separating device - for the depths of my grief as an orphaned child only eleven years before.

I almost wrote “a decade before” but part of paying writerly witness is getting the details right not just the honing of an ability to realise a bee can be considered both a sentient being and ball-like bug by two cats whose sentience is measured not in expressive mews but an indifference even to that sound they make because they innately know it’s just part of their being used metaphorically yet again by one who expressly mews in other ways, mannered, semasiological, in a manipulation of sentience.

Several years ago I was invited to have a lunch with Daniel Radcliffe at the Algonquin Hotel. He wanted to know all about Dexter since he was then starring in his own production of Equus on Broadway which co-starred Richard Griffiths as Dr. Dysart and was directed by Thea Sharrock. As a side note, the highest priced “premium” ticket to that production in 2008 was $251.50. In 1976, legendary producer Kermit Bloomgarden caught flak for raising the price of the best orchestra seats for Equus when Burton took over the role of Dysart from $13.50 to $15.00. He did keep the ticket price of the 58 onstage seats at $4.00. “It's not a matter of being greedy; it's because our operating cost has gone up,” Bloomgarden told The New York Times. A whole chapter in my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, is dedicated to the many facets of that lunch that day with Daniel. It was a lunch at the Algonquin, like a dinner at Sardi’s, that also changed my life in many ways. It was more than just a side note.

The chapter’s title in the book is “The Role-Player.”

Here is an edited excerpt from the chapter that deals with Daniel and me discussing Dexter:

“I hear you once played the role of Alan in Equus, too,” Daniel said. “That must have been back in the 1970s when it was originally done on Broadway?”

“I played it with Tony Perkins in a production down in Philadelphia and on a tour or two,” I said. “I almost got the part on Broadway when Richard Burton took over the role of the psychiatrist but my experience with the show’s director John Dexter wasn’t the best.”

“What was Dexter like?” Radcliffe asked.

“Well, I was never directed by him except at my callbacks. I auditioned for him several times but finally had to deal with the ‘dirty old man’ side of him,” I said.

....

Radcliffe and I began to talk about our different experiences in having played the boy in Equus, whose sexuality had been warped by the rigors of fundamentalist religion. He raved about Richard Griffiths who was playing Dysart opposite him, an actor so entombed in flesh that an elegiac carnality was his appeal in the role because Dysart, as written, is stuck in a sexless marriage.

“That’s what I think is sort of fantastic about Richard as a piece of casting,” Radcliffe told me. “If you see someone like Richard Burton or Tony Perkins in that part - if they weren’t fucking their wife, if they had gotten to that point in their marriage - you’d have a hard time believing that they wouldn’t leave to find somebody else to fuck like a secretary or a nurse or whomever.” He paused. “But you almost got cast to play the part with Burton? What happened?”

“Keith McDermott, who did play the part, was amazing in it. I don’t know what his experience with Dexter was. I can only speak of mine,” I said, sipping at the ginger ale that had just arrived. “Dexter asked me to come out to his home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, one Saturday for a lunch, with a couple of other boys. Keith wasn’t a part of that threesome for some reason. We were picked up at the stage door of what was then the Plymouth Theatre where Equus was playing. Dexter had sent his tall Black male secretary to drive us out to Atlantic Highlands but we got stuck in traffic.” I now paused. “Do you really want to hear all this?” I asked.

“Yes. Please. Carry on,” said Radcliffe, seemingly relieved not to have to keep up his part of the conversation just yet.

“Well, we were almost an hour late for lunch,” I said. “Dexter’s first words when we entered the house were, ‘You’re late, you black cunt!’ You Brits say ‘cunt’ more than we do over here, I take it.”

Radcliffe laughed. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, there were three huge goblets of red wine poured at-the-ready and, after a bit of conversation, Dexter asked me if I would be the first to accompany him into his study. He locked the door behind him and told me to strip because he said he needed see if I could pass for a naked seventeen-year-old boy. I was going to be 20 in a couple of months but I wanted the part more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life up to that point. So I took off my clothes. Stood there in my underwear. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I must see everything. You have to be comfortable being nude because you must be nude in the play. Do it.’

“I did it. Then watched him take a big gulp from his freshly poured goblet of Burgundy as he took me in. Blushing a color close to that Burgundy, I stared down at his desk. Atop it were the blueprints for the stage design of Leontyne Price’s upcoming production of Aida at the Met, which Dexter was also directing. I had placed my own goblet of wine next to the blueprints. I reached for it to take a few needed gulps myself. ‘No, no,’ he said again. ‘First turn around for me. Let’s see how hairy your bum is.’

“I did as I was told but, as I turned, my hand glanced my goblet spilling the wine all over the blueprints for Aida. I grabbed my underwear and was about to mop it up ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dexter, waving me away, though he was obviously pissed. ‘Whatever the wine blotted out, I wasn’t supposed to see. I’ll just pretend I didn’t approve these plans and demand the designer draw up a revised set.’

“I don’t know what happened when the other two went in there. But we had a mostly silent lunch.” I paused to take a breath. “This one sure isn’t, huh” I said. “You told me to carry on and I got carried away.”

“No. I loved all that,” said Radcliffe, laughing again. “Nothing like that ever happens to me. You should put that story in the sequel you’re writing to Mississippi Sissy,” he offered.

“I will,” I told him.

###

There’s Richard Burton down there below in a black turtleneck talking to Kenneth Tynan in 1967 about theatre directors in general. The complete interview taped for Acting in the 60s is here. One of my favourite books to dip into late at night as I was falling asleep back when I had a library before I donated it all to Time & Space in Hudson, New York, was The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan edited by John Lahr.

In another bit of everything connecting … when I was the Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, I attended a dinner out in Los Angeles. I think its purpose was to welcome our new Editor in Chief, Shelley Wanger, and was thrown by our West Coast Editor, Lisa Love, after I had run the place for a few issues between Shelley’s tenure and that of Gael Love. I also think it coincided with the February 1988 issue I had put out with Divine on the cover after I had put Anjelica Huston on the December 1987 one and Michael J. Fox on the first one in 1988. Hal Rubenstein interviewed Divine and Joan Juliet Buck had a conversation with Anjelica. They both now have columns here at Substack - check them out. I talked to Michael myself. Eamonn J. McCabe photographed Divine. Anjelica was photographed by Matthew Rolston. Michael was shot by Philip Dixon.

I just Googled Shelley’s name to see when she began her time at Interview because I was trying to get that detail correct and for the first time saw that my own tenure heading up the magazine had been documented at Wikipedia. Kind of shocked me honestly. I had no idea there was this list. Honoured to be on it.

After the Divine issue, I put a college football player on the cover - because I could. Remember the Oklahoma Sooners’s Brian Bosworth? Few do. He certainly had a moment that I helped him have. I even gave him a dinner at Odeon. Dixon photographed him and I did the story.

Shelley’s time as Editor in Chief began with the April issue in 1988. She put Isabella Rossellini on her first cover. Peter Stone interviewed Rossellini and Rolston did the photographs. Shelley brought an exacting sense of class and a clarifying intellect to her pages that cleared the content of its vulgar cobwebs and muted the Warholian wow - Andy had died the year before - which a reader could still hear being muttered, flattening the tone between the lines, somehow both jaded and jejune, while trying to finish yet another article fixated on fame.

I did a few more big stories.

One on Yoko Ono.

Another on Sam Shepard.

And a transcribed conversation I had with Brigid Berlin led off an issue honouring Andy’s memory. Andy Warhol was on that cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview.

I then moved on to my years at Vanity Fair.

Ahh … the good old days …

Kathleen Tynan, Kenneth Tynan’s widow, was in that February issue with Divine on the cover. She was interviewed by John Heilpern - Joan Juliet Buck’s first husband - to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of Kathleen’s biography about Kenneth who had died in 1980 from emphysema. She was then dating the film director Barbet Schroeder whose film Barfly had made quite a splash around that time. I later wrote a cover story on its star Mickey Rourke for Vanity Fair. In fact, the dinner might have initially been for Barbet as well as for Shelley and he decided he didn’t want to come at the last minute. Or something like that. It’s all a bit hazy in my everything-connecting synapses. Somehow I ended up at Kathleen’s side for most of the evening - or maybe even as her enlisted date. We had an instant rapport that felt more like an innate bond. I also had an inscrutable crush on her which somehow originated - okay, I’ll confess it - somewhere down there in my scrotum. I remember saying to her that if I had not been gay that I would have attempted to tempt her to cheat on Barbet that very night. She said that she was known to give in to temptation and not just to furnish it. It was one of the few times I regretted not being straight.

Kathleen died of cancer in 1995. Joan Juliet Buck wrote her obituary in The Independent. In it, she described her as “one of the most seductive women of the 20th Century …. She was a romantic with a classic mind who lived for the strongest feelings and then tried to knit a logic out of her emotions.”

That’s Kathleen above with Lord Snowdon and Katharine Hepburn in Nice on the set of The Madwoman of Chaillot. The photo, from 1968, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. She and Snowdon were doing a story for American Vogue about “The Great Kate” which ran in the April 1969 issue. Kathleen was freelancing at this point having quit her full-time job writing for The Sunday Times after marrying Tynan in 1967.

Elizabeth Taylor was twice Richard Burton’s wife. I wrote in a previous column about my time spent with her in Bel Air at her home and even embedded some recordings of excerpts of our conversation so you could hear them. Burton was in the last throes of that second marriage with her when he was appearing in Equus on Broadway and about to marry his next wife, Susan, who had left her husband, the race car driver, James Hunt, for him. They ended up divorcing in 1982 and Suzy settled for a time right here in Tangier. There was even a story in The Sunday Times about it. Kathleen didn’t write it.

But back to her. Heilpern wrote in his 1988 Interview piece that he had met her at a book party when the hardback edition of her book about Kenneth was published. The party had been given for her by my future boss, Vanity Fair’s then Editor in Chief Tina Brown. The guest list had included Joan Didion, Diane Sawyer, and Susan Sontag. “I have to tell you, I was the only person there whose name I didn’t know,” Heilpern told her in the story. Kathleen: “It was impressive. My friend Phyllis Newman said that as she walked in, a stranger came up to her, thrust out his hand and said, ‘May I introduce myself. I’m Donald Trump.’ She said later, ‘I knew then he was running for office.’ ”

In her follow-up obituary in The Independent - Kathleen Tynan was the kind of woman whose life required two obits - Allegra Huston wrote about her time helping Kathleen edit Kenneth’s letters as she was dying. "After we had worked together for about a year, and when the final selection of letters was complete, I learnt that Kathleen was ill,” wrote Huston. “She swore me to secrecy. She had only agreed to tell me in order to explain why our work was behind schedule - she disliked unprofessionalism of any kind. Despite the pain, the frequent visits to hospital, she worked as if nothing were wrong, with an army of helpers to track down every mysterious reference. I don't know how many notes there are in the Kenneth Tynan Letters, but they must number in the thousands. Kathleen was determined that the book should be a model of its kind. Through a forest of Post-It notes we tracked down flagpole-sitters, ‘Walter Winchell, a nun,’ the early career of Tony Blair's father, the stripper Gypsy del Rio, and the great cricketers of the 1940s. Once, when we were defeated by a line which the 16-year-old Ken attributed to Marlowe - which was very definitely not to be found in the works of Christopher Marlowe - Kathleen smiled at me and sighed, ‘How I hate clever young men.’”

Here are Burton, 42, and Tynan, 40. Still cleverly finding ways to sound like the young men they always longed to be.

“A diamond set in lead,” Marlowe did write, “his worth retains.”

[TO READ AND VIEW THE REMAINING RUBRICS THIS WEEKEND, PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. AFTER 40 YEARS, THIS IS NOW MY MAIN JOB AS A WRITER. SO YOUR SUPPORT FOR THIS WORK MEANS A LOT. THANK YOU.]

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(Above: An aspect of Marie-Antoinette's silken bed chamber at Versailles and some fading hydrangeas.)

Spent

by Mark Doty

Late August morning I go out to cut
spent and faded hydrangeas—washed
greens, russets, troubled little auras

of sky as if these were the very silks
of Versailles, mottled by rain and ruin
then half-restored, after all this time …

When I come …

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(Above and below: Photos taken of me in 1975 when I was 19 by a friend, Carl Davis, about 30 miles or so outside Jackson, Mississippi, in the burnt-out ruins of the now legendary Alison’s Wells, an arts community and spa that was destroyed by fire in 1963.)

1. *

Fifty-one years ago today on August 19, 1975, I drove through the Holland Tunnel as a nineteen-year-old boy from Mississippi in a rented Ryder truck to attend The Juilliard School’s Drama Division and begin my life in New York City. In many ways, I measure my life by this date even more than I do my birthday for it was on this day that my life really began. My friend Ted Hannah – who later died of AIDS – drove up with me. He already lived in New York back then but had been visiting his mother in our hometown of Forest and was taking some of her antiques back to his apartment in Murray Hill where he kindly let me sleep on his sofa for a few weeks until I found my first apartment on 78th Street and Broadway.

Ted and I didn’t know such a thing as AIDS was on the horizon as we drove out of the tunnel and marveled at the urban one before us, the tall twin towers of the World Trade Center hovering over this place that had always beckoned me because I sensed it was where I would finally feel welcome in a way that Mississippi could never conceive of doing. And yet Mississippi conceived Ted and me – we were southerners to our core – just as such states conceive so many boys like us, ones who are lost and not accepted and set off for New York City to find both ourselves and that acceptance through the discovery of accepting finally who we mostly are. By teaching me to accept most of myself, the city also taught me how to say “Fuck you” and “Fuck off” for the first time and, fearing neither the word as part of such imprecations nor the action it alone denotes as an impartation of identity, truly mean it, feel it, own every bit of it if still not quite all that was myself. New York taught me the importance of difference even within the concept of “we’re all the same.” It taught me, moreover, that such conundrums and contradictions are what make life a bit less dreary. I learned the importance of irony in New York. I learned empathy.

The towers of the World Trade Center are no longer with us. So many Teds are not. I have lost many friends over the intervening years to AIDS and addiction and other illnesses, that steady, rocky toll of life’s wearing itself away, the smoothing of its pebbles. But many of those friends I made in my first few years in New York are still around. I cherish them as a bridge to that time, to that nineteen-year-old boy brave enough to set off that summer of 1975. It is a setting off that still continues more than half a century later. And more than this half a century later, I think of that boy on this day and feel such tenderness for his tenacity because I, now 70, tenaciously hold on to whatever tenderness is left in me there in the part of me I’m still trying to understand and get to know.

I often think of my maternal grandparents, Mom and Pop, on this date each year and how much love it took for them to let me go at such a young age, how brave they too were. I guess they knew they couldn’t stop me. I had been planning to make the move since I was eight years old and my parents had died consecutive deaths which had led my younger brother and sister and me to that little modernist country tan-bricked, flat-roofed house where Mom and Pop Iived and to its gravel drive on which they, crying and waving and clutching each other, stood that day Ted and I backed that Ryder truck out of it to head to New York City, all of us listening to the growl of gravel, those first rough pebbles in my life that needed smoothing. That growl - the sound I came to give to my garbled grief as much as to what it actually was, our driveway’s drift of rocks driven over by the wheels of the latest Plymouth Pop had purchased - was what I heard each time I pulled into that drive during my life lived on that Mississippi country road and there it was again sending me off as I pulled away and toward another kind of life and all the grief yet to come for a gay man in New York City, and all the hope, too. I felt hope for the first time that day I left for New York. It is a hope lately I’ve been trying once more to find.

During my early years in New York, I had two important mentors, Henry Geldzahler and Howard Moss, men much younger than I am now, who would reflect on New York’s past and tell me I should have been there in the 1950s when New York was really New York, grittier, cheaper, artsier, truer to itself. I hear myself now telling young people they should have been in New York back in the 1970s when it was, you know, grittier, cheaper, artsier, truer to itself. What Henry and Howard were telling me back then and what I am telling others now is that they should have been there when we were young. It is our youth we miss as much as any earlier version of the city.

When I awoke here in Tangier this morning on this August 19th, my first thought was of that nineteen-year-old Mississippi boy in that Ryder truck, that earlier version of myself. I wondered what he would make of me now, a “me” who sets off daily to live a life in recovery, a journey that also started in some profound way on that August 19th in 1975 when I drove into New York City, detoured through addiction, and found, through lots of growling, through lots of grace, a road to this daily setting off that has not been as smooth as I had hoped it would be but one that is paved instead with that gravelled grief of my youth. I hope that boy still full of grit would tell me to “Fuck off” when I get sentimental about “him” and “me” – about us – and our recovery together and my use of graveled metaphors for grace and grief. But I also trust he would feel empathy for this sentimental old coot who has earned the right to feel sentimental about these last 51 years.

2.

I have told people that one of the reasons that I set off to live life as a pilgrim mostly outside of America is because I was beginning to feel like that little boy again living in Mississippi during the 1960s and wanting to set off to live a life in New York City when the state was erupting from the Civil Rights movement and the white racists had such agency still to arrest and even murder Civil Rights workers. America with the ascendancy of Trump was beginning to feel like 1960s Mississippi writ large. The conflation of “anti-Woke” rhetoric and the demonisation of DEI by the MAGA crowd and those who not only sympathise with it but attempt to co-opt it by co-opting its ideas in nicer packaging as they are the ones alas being co-opted has reminded me of the racists with agency around whom I grew up and those who went along with them to get along. We had another word for such folks back then: segregationists. I consider the anti-Woke, anti-DEI crowd now nothing but Neo-segregationists. The result of their policies is certainly the same: white power. The retrenchment of it.

At the rally that Trump held on Long Island this past week he looked back at the rabid almost entirely white, almost entirely male throng of police officers behind him and told them that he had essentially killed DEI and that they looked like they were a crowd that certainly hadn’t liked it and they all looked like they were no fans of it. They screamed “No!” on cue like white supremacists at the political rallies of my youth screamed it about integration over in neighbouring Neshoba County where the three Civil Rights workers Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner were murdered and buried in an earthen dam.

To prove my bona fides about knowing racists when I see racists, I had a great uncle who lived over in Neshoba or Lauderdale County who bragged he knew where the bodies of those Civil Rights workers were and it was debated between his bother, my grandfather who raised me, and his sister who lived down that country road from us, quietly in our kitchen one night whether they should report such knowledge to the police. They decided not to do it and a few days later the bodies were found exactly where my uncle said they were. He ended up shooting himself some time later while lying in his bathtub. He wasn’t buried in an earthen dam.

The second photo up there was taken by Bill Reed. It is of Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and Sheriff Lawrence Rainey during their arraignment in Mississippi as two of the 21 men implicated in the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Neither was charged with the murder. Rainey, there with the chewing tobacco, never served a day in prison. Price, who was a member of the KKK and who turned the three young men over to the Klan to be murdered after having arrested them, only served 4 1/2 years of a six-year sentence for violating their Civil Rights. There is no doubt in my mind that Price and Rainey, if they had lived long enough, would be two of Trump’s biggest MAGA supporters because their political descendants are. A lot for them are there in that first photograph and residing uniformly on Long Island.

My whole life has been lived as a kind of political amends for growing up in such a racist place. It too has been a pilgrimage.

3.

Some of us have been thinking a lot about Homer’s The Odyssey and Odysseus this summer along with the I Am Christopher Nolan IMAX version. The usual, yes, chorus - more Groyper than Greek - has complained about the film being too woke in its casting - i.e. not uniformly white enough - but in their predictable and tiresome bigotries they missed a larger aesthetic and even philosophical point I sensed in what Nolan was up to in his purposefully miscasting every role so that a kind of narrative friction caught traction regarding the ancient text that told us the timeless tale that is itself all about “post-ness,” to use the Greek scholar Daniel Mendelsohn’s term for the story’s essence. He has stated that maybe the story is “not just postwar, but maybe post-ideological. It’s about a world in which all the old certainties have crumbled.” That “post-ness” of The Odyssey is, he says, “not just that the Trojan war is over, but that everything everyone counted on during the war, including the model of heroism that made the war possible, is now over.”

Daniel in an interview with New York Review of Books: “It’s obviously a postwar poem, but it’s also a sort of post-everything poem.

“The old order has disappeared. The gods have receded. They’re almost not present at all, except in a couple of crucial moments, and certainly not in the way they’re present in the Iliad, where they’re all over the action and fighting in the battles. You feel the gods have withdrawn.

“Odysseus is a lone guy in a strange world with no familiar landmarks. The whole poem is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can. That may be what’s speaking to people.

“One of the things the Odyssey is about is time, and how people change over time. I mean, that’s the whole problem, right? When he gets home to Ithaca, he has to somehow prove he’s the same guy who left. The whole plot hangs on that question. And yet, how could you be the same person after twenty years?”

And after fifty-one of them. So much of living life at this stage of it is all about how one navigates a post-ness, especially if one is also living it as only a navigation, a pilgrimage. I mentioned that I mostly accepted myself once I arrived in New York on this date in 1975. It is now only in the post-ness of both my youth and middle-age as I enter this older Odysseus-like phase that I have become grateful for that part of me that is unknowable.

What I am now looking for is all that is not me.

And yet it is not so much a selflessness I seek but the wholeness of the One Self that cannot be summoned or sought or seen.

I travel within it, my stops way stations within that within.

It exists.

This pilgrimage is my being a part of its existence, not mine.

“I am Nobody,” said Odysseus.

4.

I read the Koran for the first time on Tuesday in my dentist’s office. I have been having lots of dental work done - six root canals, four crowns, a bridge put in, some rebonding. So I have been spending lots of time in her office but I had never seen copies of the Koran there before. She had an English and a French translation on a coffee table in the waiting room this week upon my arrival. I opened the one above to a random page and saw that it was the narrative about Moses. I had no idea it was contained in the Koran.

I mentioned it to her when I sat down in the chair. Before she began my sixth root canal we talked about the Sufi interpretation of that story. She told me she prefers the mystical meaning it offers rather than the literal one. According to her, in Sufism the Pharaoh represents the ego and Moses one’s spiritual heart, a more divine truth, an inner guide.

As I waited for the Novocain and swelling to go down when I got back to my apartment in the Kasbah, I read up a bit more on Sufism. It seems instead of the One Self, it contains Seven of them.

And then there are the many visitors cited by the Sufi poet Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi, their odysseys, their setting off daily, coming to us.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

5.

(Above: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam.)

When I saw Nolan’s take on The Odyssey earlier this summer at Cinema Rif here in Tangier, I remembered one of the most romantic mornings of my life in New York City and thought of another poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” I once met a longhaired, dashingly handsome, deeply poetic soul at the Spike, a gay bar over by the Westside Highway back-in-the-day around 20th Street. I invited him to my loft where we had amazing sex. The next morning I awoke to find him sitting by me naked on my bed and looking through Volume 2 of the Norton Anthology of English Literature I had left on the nightstand. It was from my college days. In those years before streaming and computers came into our lives, I would still dip into it as I was falling off to sleep.

“This is my favourite poem,” he said looking down at the Tennyson and then began to read “Ulysses” but put the book down only a few lines in and recited the rest of the poem from memory. By the time he got to the words “and not to yield,” I had fallen in love with him. But I wasn’t evolved enough to understand how to feel such love. I’m still not, or I don’t think I am. I’m working daily still however on understanding how surrendering is a way not to yield, the only way forward.

Tennyson wrote the poem when he was 24 and deep in grief after the sudden death of his close friend and Cambridge classmate, the poet Arthur Henry Hallam, at the age of 22. Hallam was known as the jeune homme fatal - "deadly seductive young man" - of his generation. Perhaps this poem was a way for Tennyson to try to understand the love he felt for Hallam and the growl of grief that overwhelmed him because of it.

Below the poem, is a recording of my reciting an edited version of it. I skipped a word here or there, transposed a couple, but I refused to stop and carried on because I wanted to do it in one take and for the special man who sat naked on my bed and recited to it to an unready me so long ago. He later wrote me a letter telling me he had only honourable intentions toward me and quoted Jane Austen in doing so. He is, yes, the one who got away, he and his honourable intent.

ULYSSES

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

#

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

#

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Everything connects.

Onward …

*Each year on this date, I post a version of this first section

(Above: “Madame Pierre Gautreau (the Louisiana-born Virginie Amélie Avegno; 1859–1915) was known in Paris for her artful appearance. Sargent hoped to enhance his reputation by painting and exhibiting her portrait. Working without a commission but with his sitter’s complicity, he emphasized her daring personal style, showing the right strap of her gown …

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1.

“The Angel,” above, arrived this week and “He Who is More Deva Than Diva,” below, departed.

In my LETTER FROM TANGIER back on July 11th, I wrote in its penultimate section about how I had written about “The Angel” in the first chapter of my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain. In that July LETTER, I told you that “The Angel” was moving here the next month to work at a school in Tangier.

The next month has now arrived, and so has he. I cooked him a welcome-to-Tangier dinner on Monday night and then walked him home giving him his first tour of the medina and kasbah as I took him on a secretly lovely route to the place where he’s staying until his permanent place is ready. We stopped to pose at the doors here of the Kasbah Palace which was built in the early 1800s for the Sultan on his visits to Tangier. Around 1922 it became the Kasbah Museum for Mediterranean Cultures.

Below, I was saying goodbye last Friday to my buddy, Johnny Rozsa, who was heading home to New York City. He’s been here in Tangier for almost two months staying with Veere Greeney at Veer’e glorious mountain estate, Gazebo. They’ve been friends since they were whippersnappers whipping what was left of swinging 1960s London into shape back in the 1970s, or a shape more aesthetically pleasing to their exacting eyes. Rozsa had the premiere vintage clothing emporium for a time back then in London’s Covent Garden before turning to photography and now to painting. Greeney, dropping out of college in his native New Zealand, set out to travel the “hippie trail” of Southeast Asia and Nepal and India and Afghanistan and, yes, Morocco, but veered off once he finally arrived in London himself into manifesting his manifold talents into a design firm and became one of the world’s most revered and successful practitioner of the trade which he has furnished with a singular artistry. Johnny, also an expat, was born and brought up south of here in Nairobi where his Jewish Hungarian-Czech parents settled to escape the Nazis. The grandmother who ultimately helped to raise him, Selma Leibschutz, was, in fact, a survivor of Auschwitz and Terezin. In the 1960s, he boarded and studied at the Repton School in England. His portraits of celebrities are themselves celebrated and have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times and i-D Magazine, as well as in the collection of The National Portrait Gallery in London. One of his subjects, Tina Turner, nudged him through their friendship to become interested in Nichiren Buddhism which is now a central tenet of his life; he too is an artist who is a practitioner. His work can be seen in Tangier at Gallery Kent.

That’s Veere with Johnny above. Veere had to depart as well for some business in the The States and then in London this past week. So they missed viewing the eclipse on Wednesday night from Gazebo’s remarkable perch over the Strait of Gibraltar. “My home – Gazebo in Tangier – I think is the acme of my creative powers and the culmination of a life’s work in the business of understanding, knowing and making beauty,” Veere wrote in his book, Seeking Beauty. “At dawn, at dusk, in the brilliant midday glare of high summer, and in the cooler months of winter, my garden at Gazebo never fails to amaze me. Here is a realm of perfect geometry, subtle detail, flamboyant flourishes of beauty, and sensory delight.”

I witnessed the eclipse above with Tom Sykes who invited me to view it with his family and friends and him at the deeply lived-in enchantment of Le Foolk and its Chapelle, the two-home Tangier residence and grounds of the late Christopher Gibbs, another practitioner of design - he dealt antiques too, fashioned menswear - who swung artistically about in 1960s London giving it some needed swag and whose hedonism headed here to North Africa to calm down a bit, a collector who collected himself atop Tangier’s mountaintop where such homes are themselves grounded - Gazebo neighbours it as does Villa Josephine and others - like grand ladies of a certain bohemian ilk gathering their flowing skirts about themselves while behind their gates skirting tradition altogether, their transgressive natures, wily, idyllic, rooted in the once-wild , having become, after generations, embedded in the overgrown, lusher landscape nature allows before it is manicured by manners and those who labour over such things. The house once belonged to James and Marguerite McBey, so the place already had its own artistic bones and bent about it before Gibbs, who died here in Tangier at the age of 79 in 2018 after having moved full-time to Le Foolk a dozen years earlier and is buried at St. Andrews Church Tangiers, filled it all with gobs of marvellous stuff. There is a divine perfectly placed dishevelment that includes shelves of books and oddly shaped embroidered and hand-painted sofas and mementoes and camp and whatever struck his fancy that wasn’t finally all that fancy. It’s an amalgam of a life being assembled, not a semblance of one designed to be seen. It’s there to be examined, nosed about, acknowledged. There are narratives nestled all about nearby his own which itself still hovers among them all.

I was so grateful to Tom for inviting me over to view the eclipse and experience the place brimming with boho history. Check out Tom’s Substack column, The Royalist, one of the most successful on here, as well as his podcast of the same name produced by The Daily Beast. He’s one of the bad-boy good guys, a balance that takes talent and tenacity and even some of that kindness he showed to his other guests and friends and to me the other night. He’s also got a great family. I loved seeing him in father-mode.

Gibbs: “I'm not interested in creating a dazzling impression of richness. We can make do with surprisingly little in life … As life goes by, that's what I admire. Objects and people that are unmonkeyed with, that are themselves, not trying to be something else.”

2.

Above: My homage to photographer Tina Barney. Tom and his wife, the remarkable artist Sasha Sykes, and one of their children, Johnny, checking out the beginning of the eclipse at Le Foolk.

Below: I cooked dinner the other night and served it here on my terrace above the Petit Socco for Jane Stubbs, who heads up the library at the American Legation, and Yassine Rais El Fenni and his wife, Hanna Soussi Temli, who own the Kasbah Collective, one of the coolest boutiques in town. Yassine and Hanna were instrumental in helping me find the apartment so this was also a thank-you dinner for them. I adore them all.

Below: It was Johnny’s 77th birthday last Friday and Veere gave him a lovely and delicious lunch at Gazebo. From left to right, Hamish Bowles, Veere, me, Johnny, Shaun Woodward, Luke Redgrave, and David Kleinberg.

3.

On Sunday, the VACAYA cruise ship full of LGBTQ passengers docked here in Tangier. Earlier in the summer other gay cruises were denied entries into Turkey and Egypt. So, thank you, Morocco, for welcoming this ship for the day. A couple of years ago, I met Paul J. Williams there on the right when he was sitting in the row in front of me at the Broadway production of Appropriate and had recognised me. We struck up a conversation and carried it over to social media once he got home to Dallas. His character Sister Helen Holy is part of the entertainment onboard.

I saw David Sexton, there in the middle, walking by us where we were having a coffee at Gran Café Central in the Petit Socco and called out his name. He’s the Production Manger for the ship’s many shows. David is from Miami and we met when I had a pied-à-terre there at the turn of the century.

I also called out Marti Cumming’s name when they walked by but I had to delete our photo because the image made this column too long for Substack’s standards. Marti is also a performer who serves as the ship’s cruise director. Last year, they were the Grand Marshal for the LGBTQ Pride Parade in NYC. And many years ago now they were part of a group of my people I met in Provincetown when I was at my lowest ebb who helped save my life and led me into the tenets of recovery. I am still that kind of practitioner even if I haven’t always been too artful about it.

But it is those tenets - to use the term in the way Auden used it in his poem “September 1, 1939” - which are my own “furniture of home.”

Everything connects.

Onward …

(Above: Girl with the Red Hat by Johannes Vermeer, 1669. National Gallery of Art’s Andrew W. Mellon Collection)

I Remember

by Anne Sexton

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color—no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and th…

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1.

It is Wednesday morning. I took the photo above yesterday afternoon walking back to the Casablanca Voyageurs train station after having arrived there around noon from here in Tangier on one of Morocco’s sleekly magnificent fast trains - if only they had Wi-Fi but its lack of it forces you to read or to nap or, in my case, to meditate on living the second half of 2026, all six months of it, in Morocco.

I became aware of this little abandoned tin-sided shack last year on a couple of trips to Casa, as so many Moroccans call the city. So I stopped next to the Arab League Park in its Gauthier neighbourhood where the shack is located to take the picture yesterday. I now know Casablanca well enough in certain areas to hew to walking routes where I won't get lost and which within that Not Getting Lost reconfirm how I see myself, in turn, within the context of being seen, performing my role within each touristy staying-the-course task at hand, each interloper errand which yesterday was the ur-one of picking up my new passport at the new US consulate. The deserted tin-sided sepia-toned shack, this snack bar or newsstand or whatever the purpose for which this kiosk was once put to use by a Casablanca purveyor, was put to use by me as a reminder of Mississippi, a place where I, at around 6 or 7, began to feel at sixes and sevens because I also felt like an interloper even then, an outsider, the oddness that nearly did me in neither named yet nor designated by desire. I was becoming an orphan - my father was killed in an automobile accident when I was 7, my mother would die of cancer the next year - and once that completely unfolded, firmed up, the factual thud of it fell rather smoothly into place. I was the right casting for that initial role so rooted in grief. I was unlucky to lose my parents when I was a child - they were my world at that point, my whole world - but part of the tragedy of it was that grief felt like such a good fit. It gave me a vessel in which to decant my difference, the oddness that was there already. That was existential. It still is. It’s still here. It’s free-floating and much of my life now is decanting that as well into a pilgrimage in a world I am still having to remake, a daily endeavour, decades and decades of it, after mine was obliterated by the fate that befell it.

“I feel oddly at home in Tangier,” I’ve often insisted when asked why I keep returning. “Emphasis on the ‘oddly.’” Being an oddment - feeling the familiarity and ultimately the comfort of it - is essential to the patchwork of being an itinerant, a vagabond, a wayfarer, this pilgrim yet again amidst so many in this Muslim kingdom who themselves have been hajis who are required to detach themselves from their worldly possessions and pursuits and compulsions, their cranky need to impress and be acknowledged, the solitary sensuality of the sole. And yet at some point upon reaching Mecca and making their way into the sole-less, soul-seeking, white-robed mass, the throng, the throb of it, more than a few of them have had to have wanted just to be back home before realising that they also had, in that very moment, arrived spiritually at such a place because detaching themselves from that designated desire - homesickness - was the final detachment that allowed them existentially to exist, to become, to come to be.

Facades of tin and fading Coca-Cola signs were markers of my childhood in Mississippi, its sepia memories now seeping even into my life in Morocco. That’s an example down there below from up in the Mississippi Delta, a cursive corrosion that carried over to an August summer moment in Casa on Tuesday when everything felt as if it were melding and melting together until I looked at the photo on my iPhone and saw the faceless woman captured walking by making sure I faced my circa 70 self. None of us ever loses our longing for home or, for me, trying to find a home for which I can long, another designation for desire not only leading me to distant lands but also right back smagdab in the middle of Mississippi. Yeah. I know. You can’t go home again. I’ve read Thomas Wolfe and listened to Chet Baker. But we really don’t need to. Because we carry home with us no matter where we are in all our worlds we’ve remade from the manner and matter of our childhoods, the tragedies we trade for the trust that happiness can also befall us, the faceless women who walk by in photographs that suddenly can frame a life, mine lived in the Mississippi of Morocco where the delta of grief I too carry with me muddies its dusty soil, takes root, recoils, relaxes, the seeded thud of it falling into place like another fact, a shoot taking its shot, the latest hint that home happens if we stop for just a moment. Set it down. And we - going on, unburdened, connecting to detachment - let it go. *

2.

It is Wednesday morning. I woke up hobbled. When I went to Casablanca a few weeks ago to fill out the forms at the new US Consulate there to get another US Passport to replace my Emergency one that replaced the one that was stolen in London in March which I had only gotten a year ago here in Morocco, I booked a hotel room and spent the night there to give myself some time to rest up and break up the long walks I had built into the trip. Being “circa 70” and having been HIV positive for over 20 years, I like to prove I can handle such walks. It’s good for my heart and my brain and not only my spirits but also my spirituality because I learned the importance of the kind of meditation that can overtake me when walking when I completed the 500-mile pilgrimage of the Camino back in my 50’s. It’s where I began meditatively, in fact, to define myself as a pilgrim. I won’t go into the routes taken in Casablanca to which I hewed and alluded at the beginning of the column but they, along with walking to and from the train station here in Tangier, added up to a bit over 18 miles.

I didn’t book a hotel room yesterday when I went back to Casa to pick up the new passport that had arrived. I walked all those 18 miles once more, but this time in a 12 hour period with about five of those hours spent thankfully on the roundtrip train ride. The rest were spent mostly walking without a break, bottles of water in hand in the Moroccan heat. To say I was exhausted is the only understatement so far in this whole column, its own meditative meander. But being able to complete such a day means something to me because of my age. It’s a bit crazy but less crazy than the things I’ve done to myself through addiction and its designating desire as destructive - like, you know, converting to HIV.

So, yeah, I’m creaky today.

But fuck it.

I sure feel alive.

3.

It is Wednesday morning. I woke up awaiting the news for the Michigan Senate race to be called. I had been pulling for Abdul El-Sayed and was happy when it was called for him but one of the things about ceasing to post so incessantly about politics on Facebook and other social media sites as I once did is that I’ve learned my opinion about politics in places where I don’t live - that aren’t my home, that word again, that concept - has the empty ring of arrogance about it. Moreover, remaining silent is just easier even if a kind of cowardice. Because no matter what one says about any of this when, as in this case, Israel becomes the crux of the lone political argument that for many surpasses all others and thus the conduit for both the ugliness and danger of anti-Semitism and the wrongful accusations of anti-Semitism as a way to shut down any argument and shunt aside the need to acknowledge that there is no hierarchy in the deaths of children, one feels bullied by one side or the other for not being sufficiently supportive or opposed regarding who and what each supports and opposes.

But there are other issues at play here that maybe sitting at my desk in Morocco, a Muslim kingdom allied for better or worse with America and Israel, gives me a perspective to address as a child of 1960s Mississippi.

I detest racism.

I detest anti-Semitism.

I detest Islamophobia.

I detest homophobia.

I detest transphobia.

I detest xenophobia.

I detest misogyny.

I detest all bigotries, and find it especially disheartening when anyone from any of those groups is bigoted toward anyone from another one. There is a psychological layer to that as well as a political one because it reminds me of the viciously ugly cyclic phenomenon of abused children who grow up to abuse their own children, the victims becoming the victimisers so they can feel less like victims.

There is alas a strand of bigotry that itself has the empty ring of arrogance about it and has manifested in those who traffic in racism to fight anti-Semitism and ally themselves for better or worse with those who have perfected the politics of bigotry in doing so. People on the left who themselves traffic in anti-Semitism should rightly be called out. I do it now. Right here. But there is a parallelism of those who use that to call out anyone who agrees with the left’s condemnation of Netanyahu and his policies in Israel pertaining to Gaza and the West Bank as anti-Semitic - call it the anti-Semitism of proximity - and then themselves align with right-wingers who are either anti-Semites or their allies and give themselves a proximate pass for doing so. It’s a knotted knee-jerk-ism that tends to tie-up other issues that need to be addressed in the process.

I was formed by my childhood in 1960s Mississippi. My parents died in that viciously ugly span of one year in that state in 1963 and 1964. It was like being in a war zone and behind enemy lines. Being an orphan imbued with grief was not the only defining element of my life; being surrounded by self-righteous racists and white supremacists was as well. I was up to my little Mississippi neck with them. The result all these years later is that I am able to spot a racist and a supremacist 18 miles away or 4000, the average distance between Morocco and America.

Some of the opposition to Abdul El-Sayed is about differing centre vs. left policy solutions and, to me, the misplaced fear of electability (which is so often a stand-in excuse for something that can’t be expressed publicly in starker terms) but so much of it is also racist and so many of the racists who oppose him do so as all racists do with an assertion of supremacy based on ethnicity that surpasses reason. That said, just as I can spot racism because of my upbringing around racists, those who are Jewish can spot anti-Semitism in a way that I can’t just as I can’t spot racism from the point of view of a person of color. Perspectives matter. I get that. But so do objective facts and not just subjectivity, the feel that something has because of how it makes one feel. But feelings aren’t facts - even as I can understand and empathise and, yes, feel how for some fellow Americans who are Jewish that standing with such forceful forthrightness against Israeli policies repeatedly pulverising Gaza into rubble for almost three years now and slaughtering tens of thousands of children in the process after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and its slaughter of more than 1200 Israelis, including hundreds of young people who were in the midst of joy at a music festival, and the taking of so many others as hostages can feel like stigmatisation, hostility, hypocrisy, and thus turn to accusations of anti-Semitism both to explain it and shield them from the demands to justify mirroring barbarity in such a massive way that it breaks the metaphor of the mirror.

In El-Sayed’s case there is an underlying issue of his being equivocal about Israel’s right to exist. That does bother me. He hasn’t said it doesn’t have the right to exist but he hasn’t said it does. I want him to be more forthright and forceful about that, Israel’s right to exist as a country. But I want to be forthright and forceful about this: it doesn’t have the right to exist outside the rules that exist for all other countries and to flaunt its brutality with abandon knowing it won’t be held to account. The proximity of history doesn’t give it a proximate pass. And those who complain about those of us who condemn Israel’s actions ring hollow because we don't condemn other countries for their atrocities are missing two salient points. One: Israel is using American weapons and billions in aid to carry out its brutal policies. Two: equating Israel’s actions with other heinous regimes is not the argument they think they’re making but they are.

There is also because of that historical proximity a debate about the use of the term genocide. El-Sayed and others - including experts and historians much more knowledgeable about the subject than I - have used the word to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. But because the term was created in 1944 by Zionist Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to put a legal bracketing around the evil of the Holocaust to hold those who perpetrated it to account, many find it offensive and an affront to its historical Shoah context to use the term to describe Israel’s actions. So I offer Lemkin’s own words: “Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."

Each year, T’Ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights honours someone at its gala dinner with the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award. This year it was presented to Gili Getz who after October 7th co-founded Israelis for Peace. which advocates for the freedom, safety, and dignity of both Israelis and Palestinians. He also serves as President of American Friends of Combatants for Peace, a binational Palestinian-Israeli movement committed to joint nonviolent resistance, reconciliation and collective liberation and as Vice President of Partners for Progressive Israel.

These are Getz’s own words spoken last August at a Jews Say No More rally in New York City: “This war is no longer about security. It’s not even about revenge. It’s about annihilation, genocide (as named by Amiram Levin, a former major general in the Israeli army and deputy chief of Mossad) and the formation of a dictatorship from the river to the sea, the destruction of democratic structures and oppression of all Palestinians and Israeli Jews who oppose the regime … Both Israeli hostages and soldiers as well as eighteen thousand Palestinians children are paying with their lives for this dark vision that will keep no one safe or free … The mass dehumanization of an entire population is a direct assault on our Jewish values, our shared humanity, and on the memory of the Holocaust. We are witnessing the collapse of the very institutions that were built after the Holocaust to prevent genocide. As a Jew, I know where mass dehumanization leads. I know it led to the Holocaust. I know it led to October 7th when Hamas butchered our people. I know it’s now being used to justify the genocide of the people of Gaza and murdering of my friends in the West Bank and of the soldiers being sacrificed for Netanyahu … I know hasbara culture is demanding we deny, minimise, and justify atrocities done in the name of Jewish safety. It’s exploiting the fear of rising anti-Semitism and the trauma of October 7th in order to convince us to give up part of our own humanity; to shame, intimidate and bully so we are forced to desecrate our most cherished values of betzelem Elohim, to betray Hashem. But to end the atrocities we need you to speak up. We need an overwhelming campaign of pressure to save those who can still be saved. And to save our souls … We need you to say, ‘No More.’ To refuse. Refuse to be silent to normalize and justify and take part in these crimes and destruction, in the Netanyahu-made famine that will haunt us for generations to come. … We must act: Now. Anywhere we are – in any way we can … It doesn’t have to be this way. There is another way. Another world is possible. Where from the river to the sea everyone is safe equal and free: in Israel/Palestine, here in New York City, and across the world.”

It is all so complicated and filled with political cross currents, but I have been saddened yet no longer shocked by those who oppose Abdul El-Sayed because of his name and jump so easily to accusing him and so many who support him of being anti-Semitic even after he has repeatedly said he not only opposes giving military aid to Israel but also to Egypt, where his parents are from, and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and other countries in the region who have violated human rights. Today at his press conference he reiterated standing with Jewish citizens. “One of the most indelible memories of this campaign, my Jewish sisters and brothers, will have been the opportunity to break bread with you at seder, to worship with you at shul, to embrace and be embraced by you,” he said. “Listening to sisters and brothers who said I want to join this campaign and this movement because AIPAC doesn’t speak for me, because I understand that self-determination for one people does not require the quenching of self determination for another people. Unless all of us are free, none of us are free. I want to tell you the great gift you have given me. And to all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith or other faiths or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Because if there is one question of a political philosophy that ought to animate us all is what would we build, what would we do, if we treated all of our kids like they were all of our kids?”

But he can never say enough for some to be convinced he’s not anti-Semitic. Because to them one fact matters. One fact remains. He’s Muslim.

If he and John Ossoff win their senate seats in November, my political fantasy is an Ossoff/El-Sayed Democratic ticket for president. Talk about a quandary for anti-Semites and Islamophobes and racists. It would be a kind of control study as well as a dream ticket to test the character of voters and America’s national one. But maybe it would be a pathway to empathy and healing, too, another kind of unity ticket.

But I also want to live to see a female president. I was convinced the country was ready not only to elect one last time but one of color. How wrong I was. The country instead chose to install again in the Oval Office a fool and a fascist and a corrupt sociopath, a vulgarian and gangster, a con and an adjudicated sexual predator, a worthless white man instead of a worthy Black woman. It broke my heart. And it sent me out even farther into the larger world to live my life as a pilgrim. So I’ll keep taking my long walks here where I find myself in this wider world and hope my broken heart and my brain hold out for a couple of decades more so within that time frame a woman will be sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval.

I seldom write about politics in these columns because I always lose a few subscribers for doing so. I’m sure I’ll lose some for writing this section of this column but maybe I’ll gain some too. That - worrying about subscriptions even as I am so deeply grateful for each singular subscriber - can’t be the controlling reason for what I write. And yet a bit of that worry has stopped me from writing about this even though so much of it has been weighing on me ever since I lived in Germany surrounded by its history for two months and now am here in Morocco for six more surrounded by Muslim culture. On my long meditative walks though the forests and parks of Berlin and Leipzig and Weimar and Potsdam and up and down these hills and along the beaches of Tangier and the boulevards of Casablanca, I have thought a lot about the dangerous depravity of anti-Semitism and the weaponisation of accusing others of it contextually but not factually.

On these Moroccan rambles I do honestly find the calls to prayer that fill the air so often here during them too aggressive - like those church bells banging on back in Germany.

I don’t like any religion imposed upon me.

Lord … listen … there’s the morning adhan now.

The muezzin in the nearby minaret is letting loose with the plaint he plies, that layer it is presumed Allah likes between an ululation and a lilt.

I don’t feel called to pray.

But I did - Silence = Death - feel called to speak up.

I’ll sit here now and go back to listening.

4.

(Above: His Royal Highness Crown Prince Moulay El Hassan taking a selfie a couple of years ago in Paris with his father, His Majesty King Mohammed VI, and his sister, Her Royal Highness Princess Lalla Khadija.)

It is Wednesday morning. I also stirred awake thinking about my mixed feelings about Morocco’s own politics as well as some personal experiences here lately that have been a kind of cultural adjunct to that. I have felt troubled by much of it, then saddened. The personal experiences I’ll keep private but the public news of late is cause for concern and thus comment.

The influx of Moroccan youth who surged into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta located on a boarder of Morocco here in Africa made world headlines unlike the youth uprising within the country last September and its crackdown that basically was ignored by those same media outlets. Spain has claimed its right to Ceuta since 1580 but Morocco has never officially recognised its possession of it and often refers to Ceuta as occupied territory. It was estimated that 60,000 - 70,000 swarmed the city in a mashup of swimming across the channel and crossing the border after being waved through by Moroccan guards. It is also estimated that somewhere around 100 drowned in that channel. That count continues because so many more are still missing. My heart, broken already by America, broke even more for those young people longing for a better life who were used as pawns in a chess game they nor any of us really understand. What I did recognise, however, was the utter cynicism and amoral lack of concern for their safety as human beings or the innate hope that can still spark their lives.

There were many narratives - some conspiratorial - that flooded my social media feeds the couple of days that followed in a mirroring of the flooding of that Spanish/Moroccan border. That too seemed cynical and guided by some invisible powerful hand because that social media flood of stories had then dispersed after those two days and gone back to wherever it came from just like those young people who have mostly come back to Morocco after the political point of their unleashing was made.

But what was the point? And who unleashed them to make it?

I have really no idea. I am only left with theories, suppositions. I always look to see who is helped by such ginned-up geopolitical occurrences and in this case it was the far right in Europe who never miss an opportunity to bash immigrants, especially dark-skinned Muslim ones. Those young people only seeking a better life for themselves and their families after reading what flooded their own social media feeds with instructions on when and how to head for Ceuta on a specific day were used as the fodder to feed the fear about them. It disgusted me.

Some suggested it was all a hoax perpetrated by human traffickers and mafia types - but to what end? There was no money to be made - those kids had no need to pay to be smuggled into a Spanish territory if they could do it in broad daylight unencumbered - unless the traffickers were paid by more powerful forces for the hoax itself in order to amass the influx of the invasion.

Others theorized on my feeds that Morocco was angry with Spain after its Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, made a trip to Algeria, Morocco’s neighbour with which it is not neighbourly. One of the reasons for that is, in a bit of geopolitical irony, Algeria considers Morocco an occupier in Western Sahara and sides with the region’s independence movement. The unleashing of the flood of bodies into Ceuta was a warning from Morocco to both Spain and Algeria: don’t mess with us, back off.

Spain and Prime Minister Sánchez have also stood steadfastly against Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza as well as Trump and his fascistic ones in America and throughout the world. The Ceuta story did highlight the transactional alliances among Morocco and America and Israel. One of the conspiracy theories was that Morocco was doing Trump and Netanyahu a favour - their bidding - by toying with Spain in such a terrible way. It certainly had the feel of something that Trump and Netanyahu, exemplars of the rot at the core of the authoritarian right, would have suggested be done as they sat back and gleefully watched the chaos, more of it, they had wrought, chaos always being their ploy, their play.

BlueBird Aero Systems, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, is indeed now producing SpyX suicide drones at a facility in Morocco, the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa outside of Israel. The first construction project in Gaza to be built by the Peace Board created by Trump - a kind of real estate conglomerate pieced together with protection money demanded by Trump with the smarmy arrogance of his gangster mode - is a military outpost to house Moroccan troops to be sent there as a security force. “The Kingdom of Morocco is fully committed to supporting the Board of Peace’s efforts in Gaza,” reads a statement on the Kingdom’s US Embassy page, “notably in the areas of security, health, and the promotion of tolerance and coexistence.” Netanyahu’s main political rival in his upcoming reelection campaign is former Israeli military chief, Gadi Eisenkot, the son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants. He is considered a centrist from the newly created Yashar Party, which means “Straight.” Maybe the Kingdom of Morocco is playing a longer game hoping that Israel’s next Prime Minister will be of Moroccan heritage. Now that would be a photo op, the first meeting of the country’s two leaders shaking their Moroccan hands.

Trump and America recognised Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara in 2020 during his first administration once Morocco, according to the BBC, agreed to normalise relations with Israel, that diplomatic handshake contextualised in documentation. The Kingdom of Morocco has now named a superhighway cutting through the Western Sahara for Trump who announced it in a social media post which was then followed by the release of a letter from the king to him in which he described the naming of the highway as a "a personal expression of my high regard.”

I personally have a higher regard for King Mohammed VI than I do for Trump and prefer in this present moment to live a part of my life in the Muslim kingdom of Morocco rather than a crypto-fascist America. I am grateful to be able to do so. But I am not a royalist - I’m too deeply an American of the pre-and-post fascist sort for that - and yet I do see the royal family here giving the country a sophisticated though watchful air in its own deep regard for its people. I also think the king balances the respect for the ancient truths of the Muslim faith with a mix of modernity that moves Morocco forward and sets it apart in this region. There is a mindfulness to King Mohammed VI’s rule but he is a ruler nonetheless, and I tend to look at people as citizens not as subjects. But, hey, this old queen ain’t a king. In England where I also live and they understand such camp, the royal family is basically the tease that gets tourists to part with more of their money and furnishes the Brits a costumed narrative of pomposity passed off as service but one with just enough of that critical sense of camp that, though crippled, keeps it going. Its king too has had to butter up and flatter Trump for larger geopolitical reasons. But it’s not a good look - not even camp can excuse it.

And, I’m sorry, but the naming of that highway for Trump left me deeply sad and disappointed about all that it signalled to me and then all that followed in its wake.

No, I take that back.

I’m not sorry.

Sadness and disappointment have rightly surfaced.

No apology is needed.

But a different set of navigating tools is, a different sense of navigation itself because of a different sense of this country.

As a pilgrim, I have learned to respect each culture in which I find myself within each country where I have come to live in order to enrich my life with new experiences.

I also continue learning to respect my truest self, however, in the ways I navigate the new - especially when there is something ancient necessary to what is new to me but is at odds with the oddness that is indelible to my own identity.

It’s a balance.

But finding balance is the daily discovery that buttresses all the other parts of this life of mine that I have come to call a pilgrimage because it first called out to me. Not from a minaret. Not from a belfry. No shofar was needed. No chimes. I heard it in my broken healing heart beating a path to me. It is that path I follow.

Everything connects.

Onward …

###

*Happy birthday to my Buddhist friend, Johnny Rozsa

(Above: Portrait of Herman Melville by Fabrizio Lautir.)

I found Melville’s photographic portraits were all rather stern with a stony countenance cut ironically into the handsome seafaring author’s face (nautical lexicon already homonymously landing back there nine words in) when I went looking for a photo of him caught off-guard with perhaps a lopsided grin which he might have described as broad-on-the-bow, green-lit, employing such lexicon himself inside his sense of language as something to be unfurled, that flapped, ahoo, then there, ahead, not aft, not nine-words-in, not back toward comprehension but continuing on toward something submerged, a plot, where narrative revelations in his beloved natural realm of men and all that aren’t convince any deeper authorial confession to remain muted in its own bloody mammal warmth. Like all of life before all that isn’t befalls us, it is bluster in the service of silence.

Moby-Dick’s discursive - at times, for me, unfathomable - brilliance does make room for some declarative joy. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing,” Melville famously wrote within its pages. And this: “However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”

His follow-up novel to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was the even more critically disdained at the time, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Unlike Ishmael and Queequeg, who had a quite fathomable homosexual attraction and relationship in Moby-Dick that didn’t just border on the shipboard but landed them in bed together in dockside scenes, the title character in that next novel matched the sexual ambiguity of its author’s own. Maybe this line from that book is why it’s so hard to find a smiling photo of Melville: “A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.” The sexually ambiguous usually … well … let’s face it … aren’t. Not really. I was once on a New York City bus eavesdropping on two elderly ladies. “I’m worried about Ira,” said one to the other. “He doesn’t like girls and he doesn’t like boys.” The other replied, patting her friend’s knee: “Hmm … he doesn’t like girls and he doesn’t like boys. He likes boys, dear.”

Scholars and historians have debated that same worry they’ve had about Melville because of the epistolary trail he left concerning his regard for Nathaniel Hawthorne for whom he moved upstate so he could be nearby him and more than neighbourly. Although Melville was married for over 40 years and Hawthorne for over 20, many have considered Hawthorne the great love of his life. That regard for his fellow writer did have the male musk of romance about it. Melville’s fictional work is certainly filled with homoeroticism; it is indeed redolent of it, that musk, its maleness. It seemed to have revved him up, the homoerotic, to embark on those sentences that sail forth with that particular angle, that needed slant upwind of it.

Bruce LaBruce at his Facebook page cited in a post a few revved-up sentences Melville wrote about Hawthorne and to him which are filled with a visceral overwrought abandon that has the mad kind of joy of someone a bit too mindful of their manner and the matter at hand. “A man of a deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion,” he wrote in a journal entry. “The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams. . . . But already I feel that Hawthorne had dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.”

And these are excerpts from letters he wrote to him:

“If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert, – then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us … The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the bigger? A foolish question – they are One.”

I love doing these deep dives of research that are part of my finding the three rungs on a RUBRICS ladder when I post one of the columns in this series. I was deep in the blissful research dive for this one when I happened upon the entry below in a blog which is based on another epistolary trail, this one left by a father, Don Dickson, in his weekly letters over a 29-year span to his children. They were discovered boxed and stored away by a son, John, who edited them into a collection called Have a Great Week, Love!, which was how his father signed all those letters over the years. Below is an excerpt that captures both the joy of Don, who was a Melville aficionado, as well as that of the 19th century American author himself. This entry is titled “Summer with Herman Melville.”

The excerpt:

“August 14

“When Herman Met Nathaniel

“Not exactly Harry and Sally, but a milestone in American literary history. And, it might make an even more compelling film; not a comedy, but quite possibly a romance.

“August 5, 1850. In the Berkshires, on his summer retreat, Herman Melville accepted the invitation from a New York lawyer by the name of David Dudley Field to join a group of writers for a hike up Monument Mountain. Melville was just 31 and had 4 popularly acclaimed books published, each recounting different adventures at sea, in the Polynesian Islands, in the North Atlantic, on a naval vessel. He had a draft of a fifth book with him, about a whale.

“Field had invited another recent arrival in the Berkshires, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fifteen years older than Melville, Hawthorne had moved to a cottage in Lenox, to escape the fallout in his hometown of his new book, The Scarlet Letter. As happens on hikes like this, people who don’t know each other end up talking with the hikers on either side of them. Hikers re-group after breaks and find themselves next to different people, and strike up a new conversation, perhaps even a new friendship.

“This is what we did when a group of 25 of us walked in the footsteps up Monument Mountain on the anniversary of the hike, and as part of an annual commemoration of Melville’s August 1 birthplace organized each year by the Berkshire Historical Society. It is also, undoubtedly, how Herman met Nathaniel.

“Various accounts of the hike corroborate that Melville captured everyone’s attention. In a state of high exuberance, Melville ran to the edge of the cliffs in the middle of a storm, demonstrating with flinging arms how he would handle at sea the fierce winds atop the rigging of the masts. The one word which repeatedly comes up in describing Hawthorne is reticent, so Melville’s antics must have registered. Given the fast friendship which developed, they did not have the reverse effect of alienating Hawthorne. He must have seen an intellect and a sense for drama which attracted him.

“The speed with which a friendship developed was reflected in Melville’s spontaneous decision to move to the area. By September he bought the house he called Arrowhead, which offered him inspiring views that reminded him of being at sea, and an inspiring proximity to Hawthorne. Over the next few months, the two would spend much time together, huddled in deep, extended conversations about writing, about philosophy and life’s meaning, and what comes after life.

“The discussions changed Melville’s approach to his book on the whale, which he re-wrote in his first year at Arrowhead. Melville said he decided to write the way he wanted, instead of what he knew his audience and his editors wanted. Hawthorne brought out the darkness, the conflict, the narrative of what would become perhaps most well-known (but not well or easily read) conflict in American literature, between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. Hawthorne’s influence on Moby Dick is acknowledged in Melville’s dedicating the epic novel to him.

“The language of the letters Melville and Hawthorne exchanged has left some to conclude that this might have been more than just two writers discussing their work. Melville expresses his attachment to his mentor in words of love, and probably not just by our current century’s sensibilities:

“‘your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. . . . Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine.’

“Our guide on the day of the hike this year noted that he had often thought of writing a screenplay about the meeting and the subsequent relationship, but added ‘that it might have to be X-rated.’

“Our hike on August 3, 2013 inevitably was not a strict re-enactment. We arrived in automobiles at the foot of Monument Mountain, and while we also carried champagne to the summit and read the poem by William Cullen Bryant about the monument to the Indian maiden who leapt from the mountain, we had a clear day to see across to New York and possibly past Mt. Greylock to Vermont.

“Our companions whom we got to know included several Melville scholars and members of the 600-person strong Melville Society, but also historians and writers and even a young man about to leave to start his career as a Hollywood stunt artist. We didn’t think of asking him to go out on a ledge and how to haul in a sail in the middle of a storm.”

[TO VIEW AND READ ABOUT THE REMAINING RUBRICS THIS WEEKEND, JOIN OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. IT MEANS A LOT. THANK YOU.]

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(Above: Jacobus Theodorus - c. 1525–90 - was born in Germany in what is now referred to as the Rhineland-Palatinate region in the south west. He would become better known by the moniker Tabernaemontanus, a condensed version of the Latinised name of his home town Bergzabern—Tabernae Montanae, or “taverns of the mountains.” A physician by profession, he …

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1.

I was heading to see my dentist (not one of the ones in these two offices in this photo above) when I crossed the street to get some cash from a bank machine since my dentist only accepts cash and her assistant/bookkeeper pencils the amount you give her into a ledger much like my maternal grandfather must have kept in the 1940s when he owned the general store in a segregated small cotton mill town in Mississippi where both my mother and father were born and raised. I am now a pilgrim who is always aborning, always attempting to rise above that southern station by continuing to raise myself in the wider world even if, at the age of 70, I am no longer seeking wealth but only a welcome that won’t wilt away like magnolias in a shaded mason jar next to some sweet iced tea in a sweating tumbler of it atop a kitchen table or the mint in a different kind of sweetened tea, hot and held just so, they take to in these sidewalk-cafe-table parts which is sipped by a shady character with a one-eyed squint under a dusty awning in the Petit Socco by whom I stroll most mornings - he strangely reminds me of someone I can’t quite place - when I walk through the Socco to get to where I’m going.

I take such a route because I am living right around a corner from the pulsing, peopled heart of Tangier’s Petit Socco in this can’t-quite-place place, this something like a city in Morocco, a Muslim kingdom that Africa itself wears as its crown. Now in my third annual months-long residency here I have come to think of Tangier as tantamount to a city without really being such a thing, unless that is what you want it to be. Because in its port-town bones which it’s always used structurally to posture, it can manifest in any manner that is needed by those who inhabit it, so many of those bones broken then patched up then broken yet again over the centuries it has sat perched here on its rocky bluffs overlooking the water where we who are broken are taken in by its brokenness, its ability perpetually to be on the mend.

There will always be an essence of espionage about this dogged, cat-weary town where spies once set up shop and Matisse stripped the light down to its own essence then made way for Francis Bacon to muss it up again while visiting his lover Peter Lacy who lived here. That’s who, come to think of it, the squinting one-eyed Socco tea-sipper looks like: Bacon’s Pope which he finished painting here in 1958. But it’s the transgressive writers who snaked about only slightly detected like a few florid sentences sneaked into the flow of a potboiler’s blunt drive or a column’s inability to come to terms with curt, with whom I identify as I fling some floridity about and try my damnedest to be transgressive without feeling damned. It’s alas a lonelier endeavour than it was when Bowles and Burroughs and that lot were lurking around these same corners in the Petit Socco and looking for ways to define longing as desire and to divine the dare that deviancy kept whispering to them from the shadows. They were not certain if those shadows were part of the Socco’s darkness or their own as they took on the mantel of spies themselves but the kind who were sussing out who they were in the deepest reaches of those selves, their recesses, such surveillance resulting in an existence that could feel as if maybe they had infiltrated the enemy and were living behind its lines before realising the lines they had crossed were their own.

Living can sometimes be a furtive business but writing seems always to be one, especially here in Tangier where I so oft espy my loneliness, the recesses of it, its reaches. I entered it into my own ledger the other day as “solitary” which feels right but is finally a fudge that must be confessed in the context of such a Pope having been painted here. “I always think of myself not so much as a painter,” Bacon pushed back, “but as a medium for accident and chance.” Tangier is that, too. Always has been. But not the loneliness I can feel here. It is not accidental nor is it something I have come upon by chance. Tangier is its latest setting, not its cause. Loneliness is the company I have come again to keep. It whispers its own dare from these crowded streets where the light and the heat are shoved about then shoved together along with the shopkeepers who shout their entreaties and the beggars who bank on trust and the sandal-wearing women whose feet won’t strut, can’t. An accompanied loneliness is but a paltry part of the cauldron here, the tagine. And yet: my tell.

(Above: Pope by Francis Bacon, circa 1958. Executed in Tangier, Morocco. Oil on canvas. 78 1/8 x 56 in / 198.5 x 142. cm)

Tangier is tethered to duality, subtext, subterfuge, with the this-but-that which infuses it, underlies it all. When I crossed the street the other day to get that cash, I spotted the couple in the opening photograph. They embodied the duality of this ancient place threaded with tradition and throbbing with mosques yet always attempting to outfit itself in either modernity or an acceptance of it. Even the couple’s checking a mapping app on a cellphone mirrored not only how such opposing forces navigate each other’s company while together inhabiting the same streets and neighbourhoods but also how Tangier itself, such a tangible presence, has always had to navigate around those who live here, the natives and the newly arrived, an amalgam that doesn’t quite mesh but wouldn’t mind being woven together if it, you know, happened on its own. That’s what looms: the mindful indifference that can so easily meld into the watchful, the one-eyed squint as one passes by or passes through. A thread is pulled. The mosques begin their call to prayer, their throb. A photo is taken of such a couple trying to find their way in the midst of you, such as you are, trying to find yours.

2.

Another duality here are the two main beach areas and waterfronts. There is a wide white expanse of sand in front of the high-rises and fancy hotels and late-night clubs that make the Corniche look a lot like Miami or a Nice that’s not quite so naughty. I much prefer this promontory that the prominent here shun but those who aren’t sure don’t. In the evenings you can stroll down to it - it neighbours the touristy and legendary Cafe Hafa which I finally visited myself the other day - and sit with all these lovely families and stare too over at Spain and either ache silently to set sail there or whisper an “Alhamdulillah … ” in one’s Du’a that one has instead this point of view to, yes, spy such a faraway place that is so very close, yet another this-but-that, a duality that even redefines what distance is by a denial of it.

To the left around that curve of highway way down there below the promontory is Merkala Beach which is filled with locals. I took this photo the other evening around 7 p.m. and kept walking along a pathway cut into the foot of the mountain that overlooks it until I reached an outcrop of rocks where youths were yelling whatever the young yell at each other here before diving into such a sea then climbing out of it and back up onto these rocks that resemble gigantic fossils because maybe that’s what they are. I felt rather fossil-like myself because maybe that’s what I am, too, at this point in my life even though I still dive into each new day. My pilgrimage is built on stepping off such a contemplative precipice and into what awaits that catches not my fancy but all that no longer is.

During the 40 or so minutes it took to walk out there to these rocks, I certainly stood out. My loneliness and I didn’t feel threatened so much as experiencing an even deeper dive into our difference. We became the watchful ones, the old man with the one-eyed squint and his curious companion staring past the setting sun into the freedom that all young people feel in their youth, a place almost geographic in its boundless lack of boundaries.

I texted a friend that photo of the youths having dived and getting ready to do it again. I wrote to him that I was feeling a bit like Sebastian during my saunter out there.

In Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, a play he wrote in the same year that Bacon painted that Pope, Sebastian’s mother says of him and all the metaphors from which Williams made him, “You see, strictly speaking, his life was his occupation. Sebastian was a poet. That’s what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet and - vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet, I mean you can’t separate them, I mean … well, for instance, a salesman’s work is one thing and his life is another … or can be … But a poet’s life is his work and his work is his life.”

But as I walked back to my place, I thought of another line from another Tennessee Williams play, Camino Real, which he wrote while living for a spell in Tangier and sitting under an awning in the Petit Socco: “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

3.

An “Englesh” pub I happened upon along with these ladies loving their ice creams. It made me long for London but didn’t. Yep: duality.

4.

I saw The Odyssey here the other day. It felt like watching Maria Callas singing The Beach Boys catalogue. I might write more about it in my LETTER FROM TANGIER next week along with my thoughts about Disclosure Day and another film I saw here that I liked more than either of those two.

[TO SEE A FEW MORE IMAGES AND READ ABOUT THEM IN THIS WEEK’S GALLERY - INCLUDING THE TWO CATS I’M CAT-SITTING UNTIL SEPTEMBER NAMED SNOW AND MOTHER OF SNOW - JOIN OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. AFTER 40 YEARS AS A WRITER, THIS IS NOW MY MAIN JOB. I LOVE WRITING THIS COLUMN AND I HOPE YOU LIKE READING IT. YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS MEAN A LOT. THANK YOU.]

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(Above: Penelope by Carlo Carrà. Oil on canvas. 1917)

An Ancient Gesture

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

Penelope did this too.

And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day

And undoing it all through the night;

Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;

And along towards morning, when …

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First I want to apologise to Kathryn. I saw her brilliant one-person show, The Unexpected 3rd, at New York Theatre Workshop when I was in New York last month. The Voice Memos recording app on my iPhone and I then had lunch with her so I could write a column about her but I am just now getting around to publishing it.

There are several reasons for that.

One of them is my late-life aversion to transcription that is part of the process of conjuring something like this. The act of transcribing can be drudgery. I have come to dread it. And yet, once I am ensconced in the aural cocoon of it, I can fall back into what my training after all these decades has taught me and still settle into the trance-like trudge that typing up a transcription demands. I only once, over thirty years ago when I was working on two or three stories at one time at Vanity Fair while concentrating too on my job back then as its Fanfair Editor and putting together that monthly section, allowed my own editor there to convince me to let a transcription service hand over what someone in its office had heard on a tape. I was appalled by the slapdash job that was done, the misunderstood passages, other important remembered ones left out, etc. I also realised that my hearing the conversation played back was an integral part of my process when getting to the next stage of writing a profile or mapping a Q & A from an interlocutory flow - the lapping to and fro, the lulls, the froth of laughter - since I never “conduct interviews” but instead engage in conversations.

I compare the way I write to composing - rhythms and sounds mean as much to me as meaning and expository posturing - so the chordal cordiality of a conversational mound of clay is the beginning of my musical sculpting when engaged in the genre that calls for such an approach. For all my love of run-on sentences because of the crescendos and diminuendos I can embed in them as they loop and lope and rope-a-dope brassily stringing readers along confusing them by how they - you - are able somehow to comprehend the mannered amalgam that’s maybe ending but then doesn’t before it finally does, it is also the cutting away at the clay of those conversations - the lessening - that fascinates me as I write in the negative space that is here along with the words you are reading. Reading is the activated space of the sculptural undertaking that writing is to me. I am grateful for your sharing in the shaping of it. Our different silences become somehow the same silence here in the sculpted sound of a sentence. There is more than incongruity to that. More than irony. There is alchemy. Writing is work. There is a dizzying exhaustion to it. That drudgery. But I keep coming back for the alchemic.

Another reason for the delay in getting this column done was the job I needed to honour in Provincetown which centred around the three onstage conversations I conducted there for the Provincetown Arts Society at its Mary Heaton Vorse House. That entailed a lot of rolling research and reading and preparation and focus during those three weeks last month.

Then there was my journey here to Tangier and the settling in on all the levels that takes when I’m arriving in another country located on another continent. This sort of settling in is more emotionally time-consuming than others might know who’ve never lived this kind of pilgrim’s life, one that involves different cultures that count on you inculcating yourself within them with some determined modicum of grace and discernment.

Determined grace and discernment were, in fact, the hallmarks of Kathryn Grody’s work onstage that night I saw her - so funny, so eloquent, so effortlessly elegant - in The Unexpected 3rd. This is, in fact, her third one-person show, all directed by her artistic collaborator, Timothy Near. The first, A Mom’s Life, was produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre 36 years ago. Her second, Falling Apart …. Together, was a coproduction with the Public and had its run at the Classic Stage Company in 2015. That second one was about navigating her later family life when her two sons, Isaac and Gideon, got older and her husband, fellow actor Mandy Patinkin, continued to work more than she did after her off-Broadway and other theatre successes as well as her film work in Reds and The Bodyguard and The Lemon Sisters. She has won two Obies as well for her performances in the off-Broadway productions of Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. A couple of decades ago, Charles Isherwood in The New York Times wrote about her performance in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, “Kathryn Grody's Nell is nicely tinged with a light pathos.” She got Nell. He got her.

Grody is now 79 and The Unexpected 3rd is a roundelay of reassessing what it means to approach 80 when you’ve been married since nineteen80 and had to create a life for yourself that included having seen yourself as a feminist who was and is rather radical in lots of realms of your life. Indeed, the ramble - a verbal gambol that pays off - is a rumination about redefining what being radical means in 2026 from the perspective of a singular woman who was approaching 20 in 1966 and dreamed of a different world and life unfolding before her. It is filled with rueful wit and a wisdom rendered from loss and the perplexity of pain and the longing that can still stir within you - she’s sexier than ever at 79 - even when 80 is no longer hovering out there on the horizon but here almost. There is grief in it. But there is proof that we are capable of real emotional growth even when we let the grey grow out, that time in life when we come to a couple of realisations: we never really heal but we never stop hoping that we might.

The Unexpected 3rd is a looping loping rope-a-doping run-on sentence itself filled with crescendos and diminuendos. It’s brassy. Knowledgable. Pulls knowingly on your heartstrings. There is, yes, an alchemy to it. But there is a deeper grit that underlies it all. And then there is that grace. It is finally more than determined. It is determinative, Kathryn Grody’s defining characteristic because I sense she senses herself that she is its vessel and not its owner. Grace has always guided her and it serves as our own guide into this wondrous work of art she continues to conjure in real time almost. She is grace’s stand-in. An artist, Kathryn Grody is a conduit - a nesting doll of nuance, the human matryoshka made of matter - it has chosen.

Most important to me, Kathryn has long used the word “onward” as the way she signs off when writing her emails. “Onward” has also become the one-word mission statement for this show. The Unexpected 3rd begins with its proclamation. In some way it is her mantra, as it is mine.

Talk about everything connecting.

The next production of The Unexpected 3rd, which is subtitled A Radical, Rollicking Rumination on the Optimism of Staying Alive, is scheduled from October 16th to November 1st at the George Street Playhouse’s Arthur Laurents Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. If you’re around those parts, trust me: get a ticket. Do not miss it. I’m going to repost this column closer to that date to remind you about it.

I’m sure you’ll get reminders also on Mandy’s Instagram page which he shares with Kathryn and where in videos directed by their son, Gideon, they gained a huge following and a new kind of stay-at-home stardom during the COVID lockdown. They now can be seen as well on their YouTube podcast Don’t Listen to Us.

Below is some of the conversation Kathryn and I had during our long, lovely lunch on the Upper West Side in Manhattan at one of her favourite neighbourhood spots. Both that overarching grace and her underlying grit were present at the table with us. I began by telling her about my life as a pilgrim in the world and how I was headed here to Morocco after my time in New York City and Provincetown.

KATHRYN GRODY

I’m drooling. You have the freedom to have adventures. I mean it: drooling.

KEVIN SESSUMS

But you’re not lonely. Well … you could be …

It’s worse to be lonely with people than without. But, no, that’s true. When I come into my [big rambling Upper West Side] apartment and there’s nobody there, I can feel it a bit.

I live in a compound now upstate as well with my older son and his wife and two kids. It’s a town with a name but I don’t even consider it really a town. We’ve had the place forever. My husband is midwestern and when we had a kid he was like, yep, we have to own something and all we have is a rent stabilised apartment. He said we had to have a backyard. And I went, "Central Park. That’s a good one.”

So we got an upstate shack and over the years when we could we always improved it. But it was never predictable. We were those Jewish theatricals. And let me tell’ya, we were not welcomed with open arms back then up there. It’s hard to make community but that’s also on us because we are not predictable in our stays there.

You’re also “New York famous” so people probably don’t want to bother you.

It’s odd though because people just assume you don’t want to meet people I was like, “Please meet us.” Especially when the kids were little. “Oh, you’re the person down the road with all those kids. Please come be with us and be friends with us.”

Then the pandemic happened and that’s when we really went up there and stayed and we were like, oh, no, we’ve been here for 40 years and we really don’t know anybody up here.

I love incongruity. And the pandemic both constricted your life but because of the videos you made it expanded your life as well.

It did. It really did. My younger son is incongruous - both urban and rural - and deals with them both really well. My older son - you’d never guess he was raised in New York City. He is a nature person. Nature speaks to him. It thrills and excites him. If you want to hurt him, bring him to a Broadway show.

Your own show, The Unexpected 3rd, was amazing, Kathryn. So good. I didn’t know … well … what to expect. Either you’re a really good jazz singer or you’re a really great actress because it all seemed spontaneous and “improvised off the notes.” It seemed to be happening in real time. It felt like you were just riffing.

I write in a discursive way myself. I, too, like to ramble and find the everything that connects. This show has a through line like that, an energy. I like to plant something along the narrative way. I know when it’s happened because it feels different, that seeding of the narrative. It feels as if I’m planting something but not yet sure what it is until it sprouts, grows, appears.

I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m so glad you picked up on that. Part of what I was afraid of cutting out too much was my way of jumping from topic to topic. It sometimes drives my kids crazy. Once Isaac asked me if we could go look at the cherry blossoms after they bloomed in Brooklyn.

And I went, “Absolutely but don’t ever get in a sweat lodge unless everybody knows what they’re doing because I just read about somebody dying in one.”

Isaac said, “Okay Mom. But how did you get from cherry blossoms to that?”

“Well because it’s spring and it’s warm and it’s moist out and that reminded me of sweat lodges.”

They used to do it on purpose to me -prompting me to watch me make my connections. They’d play this game: “How Can We Get Mom to Go Off on the Furthest Tangent.”

But I’m glad you saw that in the play and liked it. Because sometimes I worry that’s it’s not linear enough and it’s too connective.

I don’t like linear - not even temporally. I have two mantras. I even have one tattooed on one shoulder and the other on the other shoulder. One is “Everything Connects.” And the other one is “Onward.”

Oh my God.

When you began your evening with “Onward!” I actually gasped. People who read my column - people I don’t even know personally - have come up to me on the street to say to me “Onward!”

On my God. I sooooo love that. I so love these kind of connections.

Yep: Everything Connects.

I had such a thrilling experience the other night. Do you know who Amy Goodman is?

Yes, the journalist. The host of Democracy Now! She was at your show the night I was there.

I’m just remembering a note from my son about a section of the play that I have to work on.

I’m beginning to understand the “Tangent” game Isaac and Gideon play with you.

Yes. Well, you know, Amy Goodman is a hero of mine. I get this email the other day from Mandy telling me that Amy had asked him to moderate a discussion after a screening of the documentary about her, Steal This Story, Please! and he said I’m going to ask her if she’d like you to do it because I’m up in Vancouver filming. I told him, “Mandy that’s so embarrassing. Don't do that. She doesn’t have any fucking idea who I am. Don’t do that. I do not want you to do that.”

He doesn’t listen to me. Writes to her anyway. And she writes back, Fantastic. I went, “Are you kidding me? Amy Goodman knows who I am?” Kevin, it was so shocking to me.

On February 14th I was at this weird gathering at The New York Times. I thought it was an intimate office party Mandy and I had been invited to. But it was this big thing with 150 people, everybody who’s important who works for The New York Times. I’m standing at the food thing and I go, oh-my-god. It was M. Gessen!

I know M. Gessen. They’re an acquaintance.

Are you kidding me? Would you invite them to my play, Kevin? I went, “M. Gessen! Oh, my, god. Thank you for educating me and terrifying me and being on this journey with me.” And M. Gessen says to me, “Thank me? Thank you. My wife is going to be so upset that she didn’t come tonight so she could have met you.”

Kevin, I was like: what the fuck … I was blown away. I kept thinking how do you with your big brain have time to know who I am? Tell M. that I want to meet them again. Give them my email info. Oh, Kevin, this is bashert. Do you know what that means?

No.

It’s yiddish for “meant to be.” I’ve been on this kick to get M. Gessen to see my show. I’m such an admirer of theirs. I would really, really, really love for them to see it.

I sometimes get confused with the verb that goes with “them” and “they” when we are talking about a single person.

I do, too. Once I was railing about an aspect of this to Gideon and he calmly said, “Not your fight, Mom.”

Exactly. Good for Gideon. I don’t know why people get so worked up about fucking pronouns. It doesn’t affect their lives. It certainly doesn’t affect mine. I just want to get the grammar right.

But I do have some problems with some of the millennial rigidity. Gideon once told me that maybe I might want to think about asking someone if you can hug them before you hug them. I thought about that and I said, no. I’m human. I don’t hug everybody. But if I feel the urge to, I’m gonna hug’em. And they get to go, as a human, “Kathryn, you know, I’m not comfortable with that.” And I get to say, “Thank you for telling me that and I will remember that next time.” That’s a human exchange. I’m not going to presume that that person is something that I don’t know.

Two friends of mine - husbands - have a daughter who is now 11. But when she was around 18 months, I went to give her a big Aunt CrayCray hug - she calls me her Aunt CrayCray - and she stopped me and said, “Ask.” It changed my whole attitude about being a hugger. I hear her voice in my head now. And I ask.

I tell’ya, Kevin, I’d rather have the other exchange because it emphasises the human option and component. I bet that little girl’s family has read a book that I periodically hide. It’s one of those cardboard books for Under-2’s. “Some babies are born boys. Some babies are born girls. Some babies are born both. And you get to choose …”. Now this is what I feel. It’s probably the most conservative aspect of me.

You’re an M. Gessen fan and admirer, so be careful here.

And, yes, I love M. Gessen. But this is what I say. When you’re an infant and you’re trying to figure out what being human means - just human - you don’t know yet. I would rather have somebody figure that out and have it come from them instead of its being imposed from a political point of view.

If I listen to a little 4-year-old kid from The Middle-of-Nowhere, America, saying, “Why did God put me in the wrong body?” and he doesn’t have any pressure to ask that, I do hear that. I feel that. I believe that. But some of these aggressive types think they are so cool. They see a little boy playing with a doll and they start calling him Isabel instead of Isaac.

Now I’m thinking: am I going to get in trouble for what I’m going to say here, but the whole point of feminism to me - and that is why this bothers me - is that your gender doesn’t matter. Males can be sensitive. Girls can be strong. There’s no limitation.

But that’s a different issue. You’re not arguing, I don’t think, what you think you’re arguing. I agree with what you’re saying but you're conflating that with the issue of one’s intrinsic gender. I just keep coming back to this: if it doesn’t affect me personally why should I get so upset about something that is so personal to those to whom it matters.

Also people such as J.K. Rowling and Andrew Sullivan who are transphobic - the former couches it in a feminist stance and the latter in the .. ah … the concern-for-children loose change he finds behind the cushions on the bigoted sofa where he sits to pontificate - are also smart enough to know that they are running interference for some really awful people. So you have to be careful and be cognisant for whom you’re running interference, even if inadvertently.

Yes. I see that.

It is so complicated, being human right now. And it is why I feel sometimes “The Machine” might win out. We are having such trouble just loving the species and trouble with creativity and with inventiveness so that it’s easier just to be a part of “The Machine.” Do you remember that movie WALL-E?

And the film Her. To bring it back to pronouns.

I loved Her. Her is one of my favourite movies ever.

I think we’re the same person, Kathryn, except, you know, for the gender thing. Oh … oh .. oh .. you mention string-theorist Brian Greene in your play because of all the connectivity within the narrative and in your life and you go into this little treatise about the energy all around us that is parallel to us.

Yes.

Okay. Hold on. My former loft in Hudson was positioned, I believe, in a kind of vortex that kept revealing to me the possibility and then the reality of a parallel universe, a parallel reality. It was becoming overwhelming to me actually. At first I felt chosen and then I felt haunted and then I felt crazy. But it never didn’t feel real.

You talk of humanity a lot and how important being human is to you, but the parallel energy that forms this parallel reality - the unseen seen world - is deeply not human. Its systemic. It’s energy in another form or maybe a truer one. It has no interest in philosophy or religion or morality. It just is. The Great It Is instead of the Great I Am, though maybe it’s the same thing.

Some people believe in a sky God. I came to believe in this parallel energy because it seemed to believe in me in some way. It chose me to come to grips with it. I’m sure it’s chosen others. I know it has. I think scientists and physicists and mathematicians, in fact, deal with it in the form that belief takes in their fields of practice.

I know they do.

Here’s how I know.

When I was leaving my loft to set out to live this pilgrims’s life, I had a to-do list. Lots of mundane stuff - canceling accounts, donating my library of books, etc. One of those things was to get out of my lease. The building had just sold so I had a new landlord. One morning I woke up early to go down the list but the night before the energy in the loft - a guy who stayed there to watch my cats once called it the underground railroad for the spirit world - had been off the charts. I felt the need to write about it in some way on Facebook when I was still posting there but knew I couldn’t write about it metaphysically - people have trouble with that, it freaks them out - but maybe I could post something if there were a scientific way into it. So I googled “Parallel realities science.” The first thing that came up was an interview with the foremost world authority on the subject, Brian Greene, who was my new landlord. He was right there on my to-do list. I had no idea. None. Until that moment.

Oh my god. Oh my god, Kevin.

You can’t make this shit up.

I was recently at a lecture - a kind of conversation - between Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind. They are both the main characters of string theory. Susskind is known as a theoretical physicist, I think. A lot of quantum stuff. Brian Greene has a beautiful son who’s also quite an actor.

I know. He was with him when Brian first came to look at the building and visited my loft which I assume was the first time he sensed the energy there vibrating beside us.

Oh my god. This is kind of overwhelming. You’re right. Amazing.

I went to that lecture/conversation between Brian and Susskind because I was feeling, in fact, a little self-conscious about my attempt to talk about that aspect of energy in The Unexpected 3rd. I explained a bit of my understanding and asked Brian if it were okay as a lay person’s comprehension of it. I asked if it were acceptable and he said absolutely.

I sent him the Facebook post I wrote that morning and he wrote back that it was a beautiful way of describing how a parallel reality exists and can manifest.

Oh my god. You want any of my salad?

No, I’m fine. I think we’re each other’s parallel universe, Kathryn.

I want to make something very clear about the gender thing though, Kevin. I want people to find out who they are from the inside out as opposed to its being encouraged or their being preached to from assumptions made by others. Whether a boy plays with a babydoll or a girl plays with a football, I don’t want people to go: oh, therefore … I have some very, very butch lesbian friends who are beginning to feel like they are dinosaurs. There is this sort of movement to make you choose, which one are you. They, my butch friends, go, “I chose this. I chose to be a male-identified dyke, that’s who I am. Don’t push me to do or be something else.”

It’s like “Ring of Keys,” the song from Fun Home .

Yeah, yeah. And also, that’s never been my issue. I've had millions of others. But I am empathetic to finding out what someone’s full human self is.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and was very involved with it. I was accepted to Carnegie Tech and was shocked to find out my parents couldn’t afford to send me. I got a work/fellowship for the following year but agreed to go to San Francisco State until then. I am so grateful that happened because sometimes I think who would I have been if in 1968 I had been in Pittsburgh at Carnegie, a cut-throat professional theatre school, instead of smack-dab in the middle of San Francisco with the Vietnam War raging and Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements happening. It formed me.

Was that a form of indoctrination though like little kids being preached to in political pre-K books?

I don’t think so. It was about a broader idea of humanity. It wasn’t about restricting the idea of it.

Look, I’m the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. My dad landed on D-Day in Normandy. He was one of the founders of Common Cause which was an answer to the John Birch Society. And, get this, Kevin. My dad had a 30-year real-life correspondence and a kind of friendship with California Senator Alan Cranston. And my dad didn’t have money. That’s the big difference with today and who gets to have these relationships with senators.

I moderated that screening of Amy Goodman’s documentary last night. I asked her, “How do you keep going? Where’s the hope?” She said it’s in people’s movements. She said we make four steps forward and then get pushed three back but you can’t take back all the four we make forward.

Look at those people who took to the streets in Minneapolis and took their city back from ICE. Look. At. Those. People.

There is devastating book by Jesmyn Ward called On Witness and Respair. Do you know her work? She’s from Mississippi like you. It’s all about racial justice and how she writes toward what hurts. But there is also joy intermingled in that hurt and all the injustices of racism.

As a Jew, I also find it essential also to talk about Palestinian rights. Because I am a Jew. Tikkun olam. We do not do harm in the world; we bring repair. “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man.” If you want to argue about that not being Jewish, then go ahead.

In the old ACT UP days there was a slogan: Silence = Death. Too often I find myself choosing silence re: the Palestinian issue because I feel bullied and attacked from both sides. I will say this. I detest both racism and antisemitism, and it appalls me that so many people I know have chosen to traffic in racism to fight antisemitism.

It’s crazy. We need to be the top victim we cannot allow for any other suffering - that’s the attitude. But I’m sorry, suffering is suffering.

Last night, a young woman came up to me and thanked me as a fellow Jewish person for my speaking out on this issue and making her feel not alone in calling out the heinousness of this violence.

Have you seen the film The Voice of Hind Rajab? Oh, Kevin. I wasn’t going to see it but a friend asked me to see it. Let me tell you, it’s an extraordinary film. It’s an obligation for every single person to see this film. If the mother of Hind could have that film made, then I have an obligation to honour it.

Are you an elder activist?

Hmm. Am I an elder activist? I don’t guess from this play I am in the sense that elder could be used to dismiss or diminish. I don’t want to be thought of as irrelevant because I’m this age.

I think you’re sexier now than you’ve ever been.

Oh, bless you, Kevin. I’m going to do the show tonight with that attitude: Kevin thinks I’m sexy!

Well, you are. Own it. You have a great sense of style too. And it’s hard to know how to dress the older we get, how to present ourselves to the world with sensuality and dignity. I know that I personally have such internalised ageism. I can’t believe anyone would want to fuck me now that I’m 70.

So many of us have internalised that. I find you an extremely attractive human.

I don’t want to fuck another 70 year old. So maybe that’s the problem.

Well, yeah. That’s a problem.

I used to go out of the house when I was in my 50s - this used to be in the play but now I’ve cut it out - having put on some leggings and a big’ole man’s shirt or t-shirt and I'd feel fine. Now I know it’s going to take me around 30 or 40 minutes for me to prepare myself to go out because I have to think: where I’m going, who am I going to see, do I have the right makeup here with me, it’s 90 degrees so let’s see what I can wear. I don’t throw on the same clothes I once did without even thinking about it.

I was recently here at this restaurant sitting in a window with an 86-year-old friend of mine - a woman - who is elegant always. A woman walked by the window. Let’s just say she was askew. I was rather horrified. I told my friend that if I ever start to leave the house like that she has to tell me and put a stop to it. She said to me that I would never leave the house like that because that woman has decided to no longer be taken seriously by the world. When you are older you have to show the world that you see yourself whether it wants to see you or not. My kids have said to me sometimes that I can be snobby about it. But I think it is about self-respect. There is so much going on that is going to make people not see me that I do make that effort to see myself and to feel good about myself.

It’s so hard to be seen at a certain age. But all your three plays have been about the human need to be seen at different stages of your life.

I want people to take that away at the end of this latest play, I want that so much: you matter.

What was the initial impulse to write this piece? Was it the creative impulse of the artist? Was it an act of activism? Or was it on some basic level a way not to give up?

All of them. All of that. That is how I write, Kevin. I write about things I feel coming out of the zeitgeist.

But I do have a real issue with what happens to the human body. I’ve always had it. I don’t think I’ve worn a sleeveless shirt since I was 14 years old.

I don't feel comfortable wearing shorts as a man of certain age.

I have a rather conservative aesthetic. I think, why expose that. I get very Victorian. I like some mystery. When I was young and considered myself out of this world, I’d go to Mandy, Okay, eyes in or out? Meaning did he have his contact lenses in. If they were out, I'd go here I am, all of me. If they were in, forget it. Everybody has their own vanity issues.

I used to think why did the other person want the lights off when I’d have sex. Well, now I know - if, that is, I even have sex anymore. It barely happens now.

I think the emphasis on sex in this country - the over obsession with it - is exhausting and very defeating which is why I do that “touch … touch … touch …” part of my play.

I found affirmation in having lots of sex but now I have to try to find it somewhere else.

Wherever you find your affirmation has to come from the inside, it can’t come from the outside because that’s the kiss of death.

For me my public recognition came from being a celebrated off-Broadway and Public Theatre actress. Then for decades I was known as Best Friend of Diane Keaton and Wife of Mandy Patinkin. Fine. Neither Diane nor Mandy had what I wanted and what I wanted was my little off-Broadway theatre thing. I love them both and that friendship and this marriage were and are kind of lovely insider invitations to other kinds of life.

But now to be 79 and walk down the street and have somebody say to me, “Thank you for getting me through the pandemic,” is mind-boggling to me. Because when somebody stops me I always still think maybe I went to high school with them or they’re some relative I don’t remember.

Look, I already know who I am even though the unfinished idea of me appeals to me because I want more adventures. I want to surprise myself. I think I want to learn Spanish even though I’ve been saying that for a decade.

Part of your doing the play alone on the stage with all that line load is a way, I would think, to keep your mental acumen sharpened. I am scared of losing the functional abilities of two things - my knees and my mind.

Oh, I’m terrified of the latter even though the play itself in all its intricacies has become a metaphor for the mind. I've been working on this since I did a workshop of it at Berkeley Rep in 2022.

One of the most touching moments in the play is when your father dies. Do you think your connection with Mandy is that you both lost your fathers when you were young?

Very much so. You know our first date, Kevin, was very strange. First of all, I had no interest whatsoever of going out with an actor. And I never did. Ever. Maybe an older writer.

Which is now who you are. You could have dated this version of yourself.

Yeah. You’re right.

The play Mandy and I were doing ended and he gave me a gift. I could feel by the package that it was something soft. I thought, “Oh, this kid …” Because I really did think of him as a kid. I was six years older. A very big difference. I mean, the 1960s formed me and he missed it. He was doing milk commercials in Chicago as barely a teenager.

When we were in rehearsals for that Michael Weller play The Split at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Michael came up to me and asked me what I thought of Mandy. I told him I thought he was great and I had always wanted to work with him. And then it dawned on me that he meant for me personally. I said, “Michael, he’s a baby. He’s an actor. And he’s a little bit crazy. No, no, no. The next person I’m with is going to be the father of my children and he’s not it.” So: wrong there.

Mandy gives me this thing and I open the card which I still have because I'm a grotesque packrat. I’m trying to get a hold of that before I depart so my kids don't have to deal with all the shit. There was a card that said “to my hopes my dreams my wishes my fears my everything.” I had not even had coffee with the guy.

I got back to my little apartment and I opened the gift. I told him that I loved, loved, loved the shawl and I liked the blouse.

He gave you clothes?

Uh-huh.. He said, “Oh, you hated the blouse. I’ve never bought clothes for a woman before. I wasn’t sure about the blouse.”

That just sort of broke my heart so we met up and we talked for several hours. I even shared this very angry feminist poem by Marge Piercy, “Burying Blues for Janis.” Recited it. I still think it’s providential that he made it through that because knowing him now as who he was then I can only think there was some spiritual thing at work between us.

He told me, “ Oh, I have a poem, too.” He owned one book of poems by Wendell Berry called The Country of Marriage. He recited its title poem to me.

I had to tell him how to get to the Village where I lived. He never went below 72nd Street. That’s when he locked in, that very first date,. He even brought a camera with him and I have a picture of it. He took my photo after he told me he was going to marry me right there on that first date.

And get this. When I was home from college once, I remember seeing that milk commercial he made. He was playing a greaser in it from the 1950s. I noticed him and told my brother that the kid in it was really good.

Are you from Chicago, too?

No. Sherman Oaks, California. But when I finally arrived in New York, I went: home.

Me too. I tell you, we’re the parallel version of each other. I came up to go to Juilliard’s Drama Division - like Mandy. I talked to him for this column when he was in London doing his own one-person show on the West End.

He left Julliard after two years.

I left after one.

I think that shows a healthy sense of self.

He told me that he did Edmund’s “Thou, Nature, art my goddess …” speech from King Lear as his classical audition piece to get into Juilliard. In the first year you did “The Test” production - a Michel Saint-Denis pedagogic ploy - as the first thing you are thrown into as new students and ours in Group VIII in 1975 was King Lear. I was cast as Edmund and can still recite most of that “Thou, Nature …” speech. Everything yet again connects.

I think these heightened things - this connectivity, this energy, this parallelism - happens to everyone but only some are aware of it. That’s the gift: awareness.

Or not being afraid of it.

Or trying to control it - or anything for that matter. I once thought of myself as a pilgrim in search of something. I had already given up almost all my possessions but once I gave that up - the search - I began to be guided. Surrendering control was the cue for guidance to enter my life.

Your brother was a Buddhist monk.

Before his death, he resided in a monastery close to you in upstate New York.

Yes. Michael Choke Yukon Grody.

He died in 2024. It’s never going to be okay. His ashes are interred at the monastery. He died of brain cancer. I never want to get over the connection I had with him. I ask in the play, “Would you rather have a broken heart or an unused one?”

What does Choke mean?

“Spirit of serenity …”

And Yukon?

“Playful perseverance …”

That sounds as if you’re describing The Unexpected 3rd, Kathryn. It’s playful. It’s about persevering.

What was Choke Yukon’s role at the monastery?

He fulfilled a few of them during his over 30 years there but he was finally for many, many years its gardener. Gardening became his ministry in many ways.

“Thou, Nature, art my goddess ...”

Everything connects.

Onward.

Christopher Lane photographed Lynda Benglis, above, in 2015 for The Times. I have been reading about her and looking at her work the past week or so after Jonathan Anderson used his couture collection at Dior - dresses that appeared not sewn so much as sculpturally poured upon the body, accessories sculpted in the same flowing flopping mannered plop, the shrug, the curve, the tug, the knot, the bow, the gesture just frozen, the moment of it - as an homage to her and her art which sent me in my contemplation to other female sculptors who, like Benglis, live so much of their lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe - “The City Different” - is a place that has always acknowledged the presence of an iconoclastic class of folk who cast themselves as artists as they cast about in the light there that casts its eye on them in its own acknowledgement.

I, a neighbouring southerner, have always been predisposed to Benglis and her work. She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, like Tony Kushner did. I had some non-Cajun cousins down the road a piece in DeRidder over in Beauregard Parish. Benglis, conversely, had people in Mississippi. Like her, I was fascinated by the formation of crawdad holes, the mounds the crawdads made in the muddy ditches of my childhood. Hell, unlike her, I’d even call the private parts of my female playmates back then “crawdad holes.” That’s how mounded in Mississippi I am. She’s mounded, too, in that muddiness of her southern childhood lived in the part of America that always felt like it, America, had ditched down there.

Anderson’s Dior show the other week led me back through its Benglis-like shapes to the childhood that shaped me where I felt ditched myself as I tried to find some artistic way out of it. Benglis, now 84, more bountifully creative than I, more viscerally visual, has been finding her way out of what made her all her resculpted life - that Louisiana mud, the watery murk of maleness, the mama-madness that took a crafty turn toward creativity, the overlapping looming landing of it, the spillage that became her art before its spoilage could. “I had a boat,” she told Sasha Weiss for a 2022 New York Times profile in its T Magazine when it put her on the cover as one of “The Greats” featured in that issue. “We had crawfish lines strung with a piece of bread.” Weiss then described how crawfish build those muddy, bulbous mounds to protect themselves and their young. “They look like my textures,” Benglis said. “I was born with the sense of building textures. We’re born with patterns. “

Above: 1. Untitled (1970), one of a number of sculptures made with poured polyurethane foam. 2. One of the 66 looks from Anderson’s Dior show. 3. Cloak-Wave Pedmarks (1998), bronze with black patina. 4. Kissel (1985), bronze wire, nickel, chrome plated. 5. Another Anderson look at Dior. 6. A plopped moment - a shrug, a tug, a bow - on the runway.)

(Above: Left, Lynda Benglis’s Toyopet Crown (1989), stainless steel wire mesh, sprayed zinc, and aluminum. Right, transformed by Jonathan Anderson for his Fall/Winter Haute Couture show in Paris on July 6th at the Musée Rodin.)

[TO VIEW AND READ ABOUT THE REMAINING TWO RUBRICS THIS WEEKEND WHICH FEATURE TWO MORE SCULPTORS, JOIN OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. AFTER 40 YEARS AS A WRITER AND JOURNALIST AND MEMOIRIST, THIS IS NOW MY MAIN JOB. MY WORK. MY OWN ART. SO YOUR READERSHIP AND SUPPORT MEAN A LOT. I AM GRATEFUL.]

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I read a lot of Andrea Gibson’s poetry this past week because of the anniversary of their death on July 14th. They were 49 when they died of ovarian cancer last year. I am working on my next WEEKEND RUBRICS to post later today and it centres on female sculptors from Santa Fe. Gibson loved Santa Fe and often read at Unity. I post this A POEM FOR A SU…

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1.

The Dames at Sea one-night-only production here in Tangier on July 4th which starred Darren Criss had a nautically themed dress code for those of us who attended it. Here I am wearing the first sentences of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the afterparty with Darren and his wife, writer/producer/director Mia Swier. The production was staged on the Shangi-La-like grounds of Veere Grenney’s estate, Gazebo. The afterparty was thrown by William Holloway and Jean-Louis Deniot in the gardens of their own Valhalla-like home down the mountain lane from Veere. In other words, it was all rather heavenly - but gated. And as I’ve always sensed I might feel if I ever were to make it to whatever awaits in another realm - as we are told in mythically different religious narratives - as a real estate reward for living a worthy earthly life, I was feeling mighty grateful just to have gotten through the gates without too many questions being asked. Indeed, the local religious narrative here tells of a place called Jannatul Firdaus which is a paradisiacal garden of the highest order but I can’t imagine its being any more beautiful than Veere’s and William and Jean-Louis’s. I hope that doesn’t sound culturally offensive and constitutes a mark against my entering that final gate when I appear before it.

The production is the annual charity event produced by landscape designer Madison Cox, whose own way with a garden is world-renowned. I’m sure his late husband, Pierre Bergé, has even spread the word further afield where Pierre and his earlier partner, Yves Saint Laurent, now float about neither above nor below but rooted differently in this same realm so we don’t realise they, no longer garden-variety humans, are still hovering about, especially here in their beloved Morocco where the air itself feels spiced, a melange of jinns and cumin-coloured sunsets, a frolic of fragrances, saffron, cinnamon, sin, salting the air even more as it wafts in from its journey over water from Gibraltar then collecting themselves within it in the casbah before moving on down into the medina in whirls of instinct and entreaties and transactions that pass themselves off as trust and desire and something deeper than knowledge so that there is no need to attempt to comprehend anything, say, scientific, even, God knows (thus man), how atoms can be spliced, a frisson of otherness always present around here instead of a fission that obliterates us all into the sameness of nothing, the nothingness of the same. At least, that’s the narrative I breezily tell myself when confronted with priests and the Bible, mullahs and the Koran, rabbis and the Torah, monks and the Tripitaka, all those earthly guardians of theological gardens, the keepers of the gates.

But I’ve run on ahead of myself.

Back to lives lived worthily.

Madison is the President of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh as well as President of the Fondation Pierre Bergé/Yves Saint Laurent which oversees the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. He also has a home in Tangier and the evening benefits the city’s American Legation and two important local organisations, an orphanage and HIV/AIDS clinic.

The night of the performance I was seated in the audience next to Mia and four-year-old Bluesy, the big sister to two-year-old László who Darren and Mia thought wasn’t quite ready to witness his daddy do what his daddy does from the vantage point of an audience member in addition to being a family one. Bluesy had already seen him, however, in his Tony-winning role as the retired obsolete helperbot, Oliver, in Maybe Happy Ending. Bluesy, Mia, and I were sitting ensconced in the middle of a bench in front of the wall in the back of the chairs that made up the “stalls.” The wall supported the promontory that became the “dress circle” for the evening. Our perch there was at the starting point for the centre aisle through which many entrances were staged by the evening’s director, Rob Ashford, who, with his husband Kevin Ryan, has a home here, Villa Léon l’Africain, which once belonged to antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs who then sold it to Bergé before Ashford and Ryan purchased it. When Darren made his first entrance through that centre aisle, he added a peck on Bluesy’s cheek as he glided by in his sailor costume ready to cut a rug and regale us with songs. “That’s my daddy,” she whispered to me, her lovely little face registering such … well, okay, there’s only one word for it ... glee.

I fell completely for Bluesy in that moment. I can also vouch that she inherited her daddy’s innate sense of rhythm because her little right foot next to me as she sat on her mama’s lap kept time with all the singing and music as she gently poked my leg with it. It were as if she also knew innately to turn what could have been an annoyance into the loveliest tap-tap-tap that kept time with all the tap-tap-tap dancing going on there before us. In intermittent moments when she stopped, I missed those little jabs of joy I was getting from her. She somehow knew I missed them - more inherited innateness there in the knowing innocence that actors keep, yep, on tap in order to play in the way they creatively do - so she’d begin her tap-tap-tapping again against my leg and look over at me and give me a smile infused with that infectious innocence she was just beginning to know how to wield without quite yet slipping into slyness because it still had its sense of wonder intact.

As Bluesy was tapping out her Morse Code of my-daddy-my-daddy-my-daddy there on my leg, I was not only getting that message but also the one reminding me that Criss had made his Broadway debut as Daniel Radcliffe’s replacement as J. Pierrepont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a role that Robert Morse originated. Ashford had even directed and choreographed that revival with his trademark panache. The man sure knows how to shake a tail feather and shower an audience with showmanship. Criss went into How to Succeed back in 2012 with only two weeks rehearsal and Rob somehow whipped him and the rest of his cast for Dames into showtime-shape in a matter of five or six days. The male chorus members in the ensemble were in another kind of showtime shape as the number below attests. The stage was erected over Veere’s pool and Rob utilised that for this stripped-down number below.

Dames is a loving parody of a Busby Berkeley musical about how theatre can prove to be a kind of saving grace and resilience can be a kind of redemption all its own when a tincture of talent is added to it. Ashford even took the parody a meta step further and reimagined “Singapore Sue,” the show’s production number inside a production number, as “Tangerine Tess.” The plot revolves around a sailor/songwriter named Dick and Ruby, the little gal with a lot of gumption he falls for from Utah who arrives in New York “with nothing but tap shoes in her suitcase and a prayer in her heart.” Criss comes equipped with Gene Kelly’s disciplined jauntiness in his performing genes and it was on full dashing display that night in his performance as Dick. Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster played his sidekick, Lucky, like a bulgier Ray Bolger. I also loved Summer Strallen as Joan , the blonde Blondell-like character. and Paula Leggett Chase as Mona Kent, the deadpan diva to whom she gave a kicky Kay Thompson flair.

Criss’s leading lady was Julianne Hough who played Ruby, a role which made Bernadette Peters a star off-Broadway back in the 1960s. Peters got branded with her singular perky Kewpie doll allure in that role and heralded her own arrival on the scene with the adenoidal way she could deliver her high notes with a catch in her throat that then caught audiences off-guard in a very good way. Hough though - who, like Ruby, is actually from Utah - is all sinew, her voice a bit reedier; she reads more as a ballerina toeing the leading-lady line. But she also has her own singular appeal, a likability that longs to be more than liked and it is in that longing where we begin to fall for her in the way audiences discover they love a performer and sometimes a performance. She’s Liza with less vibrato and better legs - or maybe Ann-Margret, who played the role in a 1971 television production of Dames, mimicking Gwen Verdon. But that’s all too droll, too glib - and it’s Hough’s utter lack of glibness that is finally her charm as a performer. More than any other person on the makeshift stage that night she possessed that knowing innocence with which Bluesy was already genetically blessed. I adored her.

It is the knowingness and innocence at the heart of the musical itself that makes it so appealing, each of which Ashford and his cast and creative team found within themselves to conjure such a lovely evening. Kudos to musical director David Chase. musicians Tom Hutch and Paul Mutzabaugh, stage manager Ruby Isaacs, costume and set and graphics designer Jamal Odedra, lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli, associate director Kate Tydman, and associate choreographer Michaeljon Slinger. Kevin Ryan, who oversees Madison Cox’s office and served as associate producer, was instrumental in making everything run smoothly.

Seeing the production upon my arrival here in Tangier, and acknowledging the causes it benefited as well as the love and care that went into making it all happen from so many dedicated people also deeply reminded me of why the communal ritual which theatre relies upon can feel so spiritual to me. I often say that theatres are my temples, even when - especially when - I am sitting under a Moroccan sky in a heavenly garden. That night might not have had the mythic dimensions demanded of all sorts of religions that both serve to sort us and sort us out. It was honestly more welcoming than that, more accepting, more wondrous in its worldly reach because it is an outstretched hand that theatre offers to so many of us who grow up feeling like outcasts instead of the judgmental back of one that religionists so impulsively raise in our presence. To paraphrase some other characters from another musical - Sheila and Maggie and Bebe from A Chorus Line - Dames at Sea that night wasn’t finally, okay, paradise but it was home.

2.

A tale of two lunches. Above: Hamish Bowles, Veere Grenney, David Kuhn, Johnny Rozsa and I above at Veere’s. Below: Lily Isaacs, Saf (sorry, Saf, I can’t recall your last name so you’ll have to be just Saf - like just Cher or just Madonna), Jane Stubbs, Jason Isaacs, Emma Hewitt, and I at San Remo restaurant.

3.

One afternoon when I was in Provincetown last month, my sister and her wife and their friends and I were roaming store to store on Commercial Street. When we went into Womencrafts, the feminist bookstore and gift shop, the lovely owner Michelle Axelson remembered me from my time over a decade ago now when I was living in Ptown during my first winter of trying to get sober. I was so scared and felt so alone. I had no money. I was both broke and broken.

Michelle and I were volunteers together at the soup kitchen at the Methodist Church. I actually volunteered there to cook those meals in the church’s kitchen so I could then eat them with all the other folks who needed to eat our meals at a soup kitchen. It’s hard to describe what it meant to me to run into Michelle that afternoon and be reminded of the pilgrimage that began back in that soup kitchen that winter and not just a few years ago when I set out to live this life I now am living.

Michelle does so much service in the community.

She is an inspiration.

That soup kitchen saves many lives.

It saved mine.

4.

I loved this video that Ken Fulk put up on his Instagram page of another kind of kitchen, this one at the Mary Heaton Vorse House where I stayed for three weeks in June as an artist-in-residence under the auspices of the Provincetown Arts Society and its director Gene Tartaglia. I cooked my dinner of sautéed salmon in olive oil with garlic and broccolini and asparagus and spinach on this stove in this kitchen every night but two while living there. When I copied the video to post here, Ken’s voice was muted as was the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra which was accompanying it as he explained and described the design of the kitchen. But the captions are still informative.

5.

A couple of triptychs. Above: photographer and artist Johnny Rozsa, filmmaker Quentin McCarron, and I at Johnny’s July 1st opening at Gallery Kent here in Tangier. Photo by Assaoud. Below: One of my oldest friends, film costume designer Michael Kaplan, one of my newest friends, actor Jason Isaacs, and I at a cocktail party at the American Legation on July 3rd to celebrate the production of Dames at Sea the next night.

6.

Jane Stubbs, above, was my first dinner guest on my terrace at my new place here in Tangier. She, like me, is from Mississippi by way of New York City, so I thought it only appropriate we christen the table here with some shared southern sensibilities. Jane now lives here most of the year and oversees the American Legation’s library.

The sky reminded me of a later chapter in Moby-Dick, the 37th, which Melville titled “Sunset." In it, he wrote: “Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. … Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!”

Old one-footed Ahab and his polished-jawbone blues.

I’ll stick with Bluesy and her one little foot filled with joy.

And Starbuck, too, Ahab’s First Mate. I’ll stick with him. His Quakerism and its Inward Light has a lesser need for the heightened halting of another day, the horizon and the metaphors it heaves forth for us to fathom. There is Starbuck’s anchoring stillness in the midst of the churn of Melville’s sentences, and now right here as he winds up in the churn of mine as I’m finally winding down.

I find my paradise in the paradox of the silence in which I sit as these words sail forth from me. That’s my nautical attire, I guess. They are. Another paradox: I anchor myself in the setting sail of words.

7.

I conjured this gazpacho the other night for Jane and me. Once I put it on the table, I realised it sort of matched the sunset. So I called it “Sort of Sunset Soup.” It’s quite chill. Like a dinner on a Tangier terrace with a lovely lady from Natchez, natch.

Everything connects.

Onward …

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(Above: Merrill around maybe his latter Lawrenceville School days or at Amherst College where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and wrote his senior thesis on Marcel Proust. But I rather think it just might be from that one year he taught at Bard after graduating from Amherst in 1947 since he’s got that go-to goatee that the whiskered you…

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1.

I just got back from Casablanca where I went to apply for an official passport to replace my emergency passport that replaced the passport that was stolen in London in March. I had booked an Airbnb close to what I thought was still the US consulate in Casablanca but which I found out is no longer in the Gauthier neighbourhood where I went last year at this same point in July to get the new passport that ended up being stolen.

I always walk places in Morocco because I have developed Taxi Driver Panic which is a close cousin to Apple Store Panic. I prefer to walk for an hour or two instead of dealing with Moroccan taxis and the two-tier system I can’t decipher and the being rejected for rides and the price gouging about which I’m paranoid when on the rare occasions I am allowed onto a crowded backseat or even more rarely an empty one. After walking the hour to the train station in Tangier from my place in the Petit Socco and the two-hour train ride to Casablanca, I disembarked and headed to the consulate’s neighborhood but sensed I had taken a wrong turn so put the consulate into my Google Maps. I remembered its being about an hour’s walk from the train station but as the route became less and less familiar and longer and longer I wondered if the mapping were incorrect.

It wasn’t.

The walk was almost two and a half hours into Casablanca’s Anfa Park/Finance City neighbourhood of modern skyscrapers where the new gleaming $282 million consulate is located. I had no idea that a new one had opened. I then realised alas I had to walk back a bit over another hour to retrace my steps to the Airbnb I had booked thinking it was around the corner from the consulate which had been headquartered in the now deserted yet still dumpy building in Gauthier. I left Tangier on Wednesday morning and had my appointment on Thursday morning at the consulate and arrived back here Thursday afternoon. I added up all the walking I did in the Moroccan heat. Nine hours out of the back-and-forth 36. 32 kilometres, or 19.8 miles.

I learned when I walked the Camino a dozen or so years ago the meditative aspects of walking not just the aerobic ones, that stillness one can find in forward motion. Those who walk the Camino are known as pilgrims. I had never thought of myself as such a thing until I set out from France and climbed over the Pyrenees to walk those 500 miles across Spain which other pilgrims had walked for thousands of years. My mantra of “onward” also began back then as I developed the stoicism of that forward stillness. This column is a culling of the thoughts I had during those most recent miles I walked that day and a half in Casablanca and Tangier, a distillation of the stillness and the stamina that such stoicism demands.

So …

Let’s start with this photo above of me in the kitchen when I was living in Berlin for two months at another Airbnb since all the reconnoitring of the one in Casablanca brought back memories of this one which I was so careful ultimately not to write about when I was residing there and counting the days until I could be released from how horrific it was to deal with its host. It is also a photo of my trying on a woman’s linen shift for the first time which I bought at the Japan-based Muji store’s Berlin outpost in hopes that I could pass it off as a man’s djellaba here in Tangier but then point out when anyone said they liked it - which they have now since I wore it to a cocktail party the other weekend at the American Legation - that it is a woman’s linen shift I had bought at the Muji store in Berlin. It is therefore also a photo of transgressively trying to fit in.

There is indeed an element of my spending so much time in the past three years here in Tangier of upholding the now rather lonely tradition of transgressive queer writers - Burroughs, Orton, Williams, Capote, Vidal, Ginsberg, Highsmith, a Bowles of each sort - choosing to give the place a chance and finding out they were finally giving themselves one without the cultural need to claw, to cloy. Their presence back where they came from back then embodied a kind of poetical heightened performative irony that didn’t so much camouflage their sexuality as costume it for the cultural acceptance they too felt the need to wear - like, say, a bit of linen Nipponese nonsense nudging aside the more appropriate Moroccan attire in an attempt not to offend but then maybe doing so, after all, because of overplaying one’s own ironic innateness.

Those earlier queer writers seemed no longer to feel the need to embody irony while here; they instead bedded when not embedding it. I like to think of them as pilgrims themselves, the badass Bedouin of the bookish set. Even the women among them had a bad-boy allure to their sapphic loping about in souks and the slender weave of side streets where those who beckoned knew to back the fuck up a bit when such wily females willowed by in the aroma of ratcheted up wilfulness, a whiff of stolen moments having made their way to the post-coital perfumed further perhaps with a purloined splash of aftershave. Tallulah Bankhead’s sister, Eugenia, once owned a bar close to where I live now called, you guessed it, Sister’s. Bankhead, when visiting, could be found slinging liquor and slyly bellowing behind her sister’s Sister’s bar. “Old Spice,” come to think of it, would have been a great nickname for Tallulah, a follow-up to her childhood one, “Dutch.” Truman Capote even gave Eugenia a mention in the Petit Socco paragraphs in the “Unspoiled Monsters” section of his Answered Prayers. He described her as being “as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor.”

Capote went on even more than I just did about the American women queering the quaintness back then in Tangier, a town he had his first-person stand-in, P.B. Jones, call “a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a mountainside facing the Bay of Gibraltar … Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the essential risks have been removed.”

Wearing this Muji jibba the other night to that cocktail party felt like an essential risk I had to take in becoming a more finely attired, if not attuned, Tangerine myself. Last year I had asked some of my young Tanjawa friends if my wearing a robe-like garment such as this would be considered an act of appropriation - well, it is a considered one - because I wanted to know if donning it would be taken by them as an insult or a compliment. I was told repeatedly that it would be closer to the latter than the former just as wearing such a thing here in my Moroccan life for the next six months will be closer to my latter self, now 70, than the former one that has formed me but who I no longer am.

The who I am no longer.

There is a transit there, a fluidity, even a gendered one, but gentlemanly - which brings us full circle back to all those making such a purloined splash down there in the heart of the old city where Tennessee Williams would sit sipping his mint tea and writing Camino Real at Café Central and Café Tingis, both still there, a play he set in that plaza that buzzed before him and does now below me. I’ve often stated that after 50, no matter our genders, no matter our sexualities, we’re all just a bunch of lesbians loping about which is about the loveliest way I can think of to grow ever older. Even old Tenn gave in to his Tallulah tendencies there toward the end.

Bankhead had another nickname, “Der Donner,” which is German for “The Thunder” and which, closing yet another loop, brings us back to Berlin and my Airbnb host whom I began to think of as “Der Heraufziehende Sturm” since it felt like a front blowing through whenever the storm of her approached even if she were in the fair-weather-friend phase of her personality. She could change from moment-to-moment. It was disorienting and could disorder one’s days with the emotional malignancy of a maelstrom.

The photo above is also a he said/she said one - not only stylistically but, for me, mnemonically because that Airbnb experience in Berlin came down to two very different narratives but both awful and trying and troubling. My host and I did not see eye to eye, let’s finally just put it that way. She thought I was a bad guest and I thought she was a problematic host who, when not reporting me to Airbnb, resorted to gaslighting - a nicer narcissistic term for lying - and demanding I help her clean the whole place in spite of my having paid a cleaning fee built into my monthly rent. I was treated as if I were her employee and not her client. I have been staying in Airbnb’s for years and have never run into anything like it. She was one of the most difficult people with whom I’ve ever dealt and my whole trip to Berlin was affected negatively by having to tiptoe around her moods which could abruptly swing from being seductively and overly solicitous to downright mean and threatening. You know the type if you’ve ever head to deal with them yourselves, the constant vigilance one has to employ as one keeps watch over someone else’s moods which must be manoeuvred around. Thank all the gods and goddesses she didn’t live in the apartment.

She also insisted she had a chronic physical condition that she used to try and manipulate tense situations she caused by her own behavioural demands. In addition, I was accused of being disrespectful to the German cultural way of doing things - i.e. she had a strict rule that if you were a man you had to sit down to pee. I love wearing a woman’s linen shift but that shift in urination habits did throw me a bit. The second month of my stay there, I had as my flatmate a sweet 19-year-old French boy who was working at a tech firm as part of his second semester at university. It was his first time away from home and he missed his girlfriend and French buddies so very much. His homesickness was palatable but we bridged our age and sexuality and language differences and bonded over how perplexingly difficult the host was. My first flatmate my first month there was a German woman whom I mistakenly thought liked me - or at least I was led to believe it was a mistake to think so by the host - but the less said about that first flatmate I’ve discovered the better. Because that was another aspect of the stay there. The host demanded that I not write about the apartment nor take photos of it - although she ran many images of the place at Airbnb as well as what appeared to be AI generated ones of the neighbourhood that were a kind of visual gaslighting. I was also told I couldn’t write about my flatmates even though I thought the first one gave me permission to do so and the French boy certainly did and loved what I wrote about him. That too resulted in my being reported to Airbnb. A host had never before attempted to censor me as a writer.

The French boy and I were policed about our sitting down to pee. We obeyed. But when I left he had another month to go on his Airbnb lease. He found me on Instagram and told me that after I left she became even more unhinged in her demands and policing. She threw him out and refused to refund his money so he not only had quickly to find another place at added expense but also had to appeal to Airbnb for a refund from her. I volunteered to vouch for him if he needed it. I put all the tenets I learned in recovery into practice to get through my experience with her - said the Serenity Prayer a lot during that stay - and counted the days until I could escape from her presence. But when I found out she took advantage of that sweet kid - basically a child - I was enraged. He later texted that Airbnb did intervene to get him his money back that she was trying to keep. I’m still pissed off though that she treated him that way after I left.

If you’re going to Berlin, contact me. I’ll make sure you steer clear of this place. Indeed, it was such a bad experience I am steering clear of Berlin itself for a while. Even posting this photo made me feel the vestiges of PTSD. It was that troubling. I had to put all the stamina of my stoicism to work to get through it.

2.

After that awful Berlin Airbnb experience, I had such a great place to stay in Provincetown at the Mary Heaton Vorse House under the welcoming hospitable auspices of the Provincetown Arts Society and the kindness and support of its director, Gene Tartaglia. While in Ptown, I bought this 19th century linen men’s French sleeping shirt at John Derian’s shop located behind his house on a side street off Commercial. I am wearing it here on the terrace of my new apartment above the Petit Socco in Tangier. It’s part of my Moroccan wardrobe. To travel from that awful Berlin experience to the great one in Ptown to this lovely one now in Tangier has been a blessing. Check out John Derian’s recent Ptown guide here at AirMail.

3.

While taking those long walks in Casablanca, I thought a lot about the whole Platner narrative playing out in Maine. Up until now, I have made a point of staying out of it all because I’m not a Mainer and the man won in an historic landslide. I respect voters if not the candidate. Also, because I’m basically only on Substack these days the whole social media phenomenon of weighing in politically in races that have nothing to do with where I vote hits differently. It doesn’t ring hollow so much as it sounds like just a bunch of hollering and ranting by holier-than-thous who think their my-shit-don’t-stink opinions matter. Sometimes humility is found in the true aroma of one’s fecal matter. I’ve mostly been taking a long silent whiff regarding mine and thus political ones because I tended for years to rant and shout but I no longer feel holier than thou. I’m still not whole because of it, but I’m more so because I’m … well .. less so. To some that will make sense and to others it won’t. But if you know, you know.

I have read about the Platner narrative from the perspective yet again of recovery, as well as that of someone who has been both sexually molested when I was a boy and raped when I was an active drug addict - or, more precisely, have come to think of it as rape-adjacent since I put myself in the situation with a sex worker who also dealt me the drugs. I wrote about it in my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, and have talked about it “in the rooms.”

I have also talked about it with others who have been molested and raped and, although each situation is unique, what many of us deal with is the feeling of complicity we have about it all and how difficult it is to forgive ourselves for “allowing” it to happen. That lack of forgivingness plays out in lots of different ways - addiction, blame, PTSD, the curdling that comes into being as one’s own disordered malignant narcissism that mirrors that of the person who assaulted you. That experience of sexual assault in my own life and the awful things I myself have done while under the influence of drugs make me not only empathetic to anyone who is raped or sexually assaulted, but also to anyone who is a good person who has done a bad thing but seeks redemption because of it.

Redemption itself can come in lots of forms - spirituality, religion, sobriety, service, politics. The making of amends is a first step - well, more specifically, the 8th and 9th - toward that redemptive need in one’s life. I guess we’ll never know if Platner’s politics of making amends for his past actions would have served the country since I think he’s still not ready to make some personal ones. And yet, I’m not his sponsor nor am I looking to be his friend. I’m just a political observer downwind of my own shit. I just hope that the way this is playing out won’t result in Susan Collins’s corrupt politics expressed as “concern” being rewarded with six more years of harm. Platner might not be ready to be sober politically or personally but I do think his campaign was a form of harm reduction.

I am using those terms of recovery because what I have read about the accusations against him seem to be about alcohol problems and blackouts associated with them. The man obviously has demons with which he’s still dealing. I hope he deals with them more successfully moving forward. But since I continue to deal with my own, I’m not going to go on the attack against him. It’s too easy. So many of those who do so have their own disordered lives and are putting their own narcissism on display. They are certainly entitled to their opinions - we all are - but I am shocked by the lack of acknowledgment of their own entitlement as they go on the attack against his toxic kind that has taken on the stench of a certain sort of masculinity.

I am tempted to call him an “unspoiled monster” to tie this in with the earlier Capote allusion but that also is not only too easy but also incorrect. I think he is instead quite spoiled but that does not make him monstrous.

Some other thoughts:

• The accusations are credible, not factual. I have also been shocked by the term “rapist” thrown around as if they are the latter. If the accuser is certain of her accusations then move forward and press charges and put the guy on trial.

• Democrats seem to think it is enough to be good people living in a bad country. Goodness is a trade-off for power. Sometimes the ruthless are rewarded with power. Do good with it instead of being good without it.

• Too many of us are still living in a political paradigm when the Republicans have moved on to supporting a new fascistic one. Fascism is a system of government that utilises politics to empower itself. Fascists weaponise the need to be good against those whose goodness makes them oppose fascism. I’m not sure how to solve this. Hungary has begun to do so. Will America?

• Platner has taken up too much space in all our narratives when other names should be given more notice: Nolan Wells, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Mohammad al-Waheidi.

• Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer should stay the fuck out of Maine.

• Corporatists are having a conniption.

• And if you live in Manhattan, Kansas, or the Manhattan in New York, shut up about Michigan. Michigan belongs to Michiganders.

4.

I have written a lot about clothes in this column. But sometimes clothes really do make the man. As I was doing all that contemplative walking in Casablanca this week, it dawned on me that my life was there on my back and in my hands. So I took this photo once I got to my suite at The Casa Edition Hotel in the Gauthier neighbourdhood.

The t-shirt I’m wearing is from the Telluride Film Festival and was given to me by my downstairs neighbour, Patrick, when I lived in Hudson, New York, after he returned from a visit home to Colorado. The watch I’m wearing was one I bought 36 years ago when I returned to NYC from the Cannes Film Festival where I was doing a cover story on Sly Stallone for Vanity Fair along with Helmut Newton and VF’s then Creative Style Director, Marina Schiano. Helmut and Marina - both gone now - each were wearing a TAG Heuer stainless steel scuba diving watch that I admired. Helmut even took his off and offered it to me but I told him I’d get my own once I returned home to the city. Marina told me to go across the street from the old Conde Nast headquarters on Madison Avenue where we then had our offices to the watch store where she bought hers. I did the week I got back. I’ve only replaced its battery two or three times in these 36 years I’ve had it. My sneakers are from a Zara in Lisbon. My backpack from one in London. The black overnight bag is from one in Berlin. My glasses are from Ace & Tate in London. My jeans are from the Levi’s store on Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris. My belt is from Santa Fe. My socks are from Prague. I bought the underwear I had on in Porto.

And just to prove that not only do I move mindfully, stoically onward but also everything connects, here is a photo below of my little fold out table in my kitchen which also serves as my desk. Above it is a poster I bought at the Newton Foundation in Berlin which is a museum dedicated to Helmut’s work. That’s his wife June behind her own lens. I loved them. In fact, I have put up several posters from Berlin here in my little Tangier apartment because I was determined to redefine that Berlin experience. I have not only reclaimed its narrative but also turned it into but the decorative details of my larger life.

5.

The first chapter of I Left It on the Mountain ends with two narrative strands. In one, I am sitting in a Starbucks reading Shirley MacLaine’s book about her having walked the Camino. It was a month or so before I was to embark on the beginning of my own pilgrimage. Suddenly I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder and a beautiful young man was standing there, the light hitting his curly head of hair as if there were a halo hovering there. I referred to him as The Angel in my book. He asked if I were about to walk the Camino because he had just done it and warned me it was harder than I could imagine. He said he’d blown out a knee during his own journey across Spain. We talked some more about what the Camino had meant to him and what I had hoped it would mean to me. And then I went back to reading what it had meant to Shirley.

In the second narrative strand, I was having lunch with Hugh Jackman and told him about all that because he is into a thrice-a-day meditative practice and is rather MacLaine-like himself in his spiritual explorations. We talked more about some of those and why I was choosing to set out on such a pilgrimage.

Hugh then told me he was going to ask me a question and that he wasn’t being glib nor was he being facetious. He was being quite serious. “Have you fucked The Angel?” he asked.

And with that, he summed up the pilgrimage I have been on my whole life it seems. How do I combine the carnal with the spiritual? But is it about fucking The Angel or is it about learning to love The Devil? That’s the conundrum that still engages me.

I have kept up with The Angel a bit on social media over the years and the other day at his Instagram account he wrote that he was shaking up his life. After working as an elementary school teacher for many years in the New York City public school system, he has taken a job in a school here in Morocco. I contacted him at his account to find out where in Morocco he’d be moving. He arrives in Tangier next month.

Shirley MacLaine, bless her, has earned another pair of wings.

6.

I ceased to be a Christian on the Camino. I became a theist instead. I pulled that “a” from that “t” and have lived ever since in that infinite little space, in the mystery of it.

I learned how to pray anew on the Camino which led me, I know now, to say the Serenity Prayer later during my long walks which are a continuation of those 500 miles I walked on that path across Spain.

At other times, I say a truncated version of the much longer prayer I have come to say during most days. .

In Casablanca, I kept repeating silently the truncated one over and over.

“Thank you,” I prayed. “Forgive me. Let me be a conduit for kindness and not its receptacle.”

That would have actually been a better speech for Platner to have made the other day.

Just that.

Everything connects.

Onward …