Little sweetheart, the fifth edition of our show for France’s CAMP Radio aired yesterday and is now up, archived, on their MixCloud page. The link is here.
As ever, it’s a monthly hour of experimental and ambient music, field recordings and otherness. And also, as ever - it’s all for you!
With all my love…
Little sweetheart, I had to replace our DVD player. It was doing something weird where the audio connection was a making a loud hum the moment you selected it as a input on the tv. I tried switching out the cables but it still made that hum. It would get a little quieter once a movie was running but then grow louder in a quiet scene. Gah!
Anyway, they’re not super expensive these days, so I got a new one, just to see if the sound improved and it did instantly.
Tonight, I thought I’d use it for the first time. I had a whole queue of DVDs I had been thinking about watching around my birthday but you may be surprised that I didn’t choose a Bergman film or Eric Rohmer or something arty like usual. I chose that old Steve McQueen movie, “Bullitt”.
Your dad really likes it. We talked about it not long ago when it was on TCM. But I think I wanted too see San Francisco, honestly, little sweetheart.
I think that’s what was calling me. There’s the whole famous car chase - the first of its kind - through the streets and across the bridge, but the parts I like the most are when he’s just walking along in his neighborhood - his apartment’s at Taylor and Clay - stopping by the corner grocery and picking up a few things along with a half dozen frozen tv dinners.
It reminds me so much our time in the Inner Sunset. The movie came out in 1968 and you and I were there thirty years later but its look is blessedly unchanged. Just iconic.
I just needed to see it. And think of you…
Little sweetheart, today, of course, is my birthday.
I’ve already mentioned one of things that distinguishes it and posted something but I’d also like to remember how you gave me the best birthday of my life when you took a few days off and decamped with my to the lovely house in Davis.
You surprised me with tickets to see one of our favorite bands - DCfC - in Sacramento over the long weekend and made the most exquisite, and exquisitely complicated, giant chocolate cupcakes to celebrate. We had the loveliest time alone together in beautiful Davis, which will always be sacred and so very special to me.
I’m so very grateful for you, my little sweetheart. With all my love forever.
It’s my birthday, little sweetheart, twinned forever with you for a multitude of reasons but certainly very much so because your memorial was held on the day.
You and I were meant to be together here in New York working on my play My Before and After, which I’d written so very much with you mind - a big role unimaginable for anyone but yourself. And we had tickets to go see Low in Philadelphia the day itself, on my birthday night.
Instead, I was speaking at your memorial in San Francisco.
When we made the Sometimes in Dreams double-album, I revisited, with a couple of edits and additions, what I said that day for you, composed underscoring and putting it together as the centerpiece of that album - The Choral Text Passage. I’m posting a link to it here .
I’m so grateful for you, my little sweetheart. How I love you! Forever! Forever!
Little sweetheart, today is Easter Sunday.
Sunday service is really nice but honestly, it’s the ones leading up to it that are the most meaningful to me. Maybe because I don’t remember observing any of them as a child - just Easter Sunday itself. And mostly, I think, for the reasons I’ve told you here - how the great gift of your love so changed and saved me.
I do have on our album, our 5th - Electric Hymnal - which I’ve often described as a sonic prayer for you. It was very much inspired by my experiences at West End and I had wanted to write and record something to express that - how it helped my mindfulness and listening for your celestial, guiding presence. It kind of marks, too, the beginnings of our using spoken word in our work. I think it holds up pretty good - it came out in June 2016 - and it takes me to you immediately.
Happy Easter, my little sweetheart!
Little sweetheart, today is Holy Saturday and, tonight, the Great Vigil of Easter.
After Good Friday service, when again, everyone leaves the sanctuary in silence in the early afternoon, the church is closed until this evening service. Sometimes, very dramatically, it doesn’t begin until after 11pm, so that the second half begins at midnight and is Sunday morning. Some begin even later, just before Sunday dawn.
Again, the sanctuary is in near darkness, illuminated this time by a fire, the Easter Fire, and a single candle, the Paschal candle, that is kindled from it. Eventually, parishioners each holding their own candle, light them from the Paschal one and when the service reaches its second half, lights fully illumine the sanctuary and bells peal. It’s really rather wonderful, little sweetheart.
Tonight, again, I watched the Grace Church service, which is held a bit earlier, closer to 8pm. Now that I think of it, it’s not unlike Advent which also observes a kind of waiting for the light to return, darkness to light. And this is why this whole week is so resonant to me, I think, little sweetheart.
In my grief and longing for you, it helps remind me that you are closer than I can imagine and just to have faith and listen for your guiding presence. I will be with you again, soon and forever.
With all my love.
Little sweetheart, I had a plan to dye some Easter eggs tonight.
I did a half dozen last year all in a sort of shade of robin’s egg blue. Your mom gave me that lovely deviled eggs dish with the two little bunnies in the center, and I thought I’d place them there and later make the deviled eggs.
I had a dozen this time but the colors came out all wrong. The dye looked fine. I mean, they come in little tablets according to the different colors. I dissolved the blue one - you dissolve them in a mixture of water and white vinegar - and the liquid itself looked fine but the eggs kept coming up shades of green, not blue. If I left them in a few minutes longer they still weren’t right but I tried to convince myself they were getting closer to something resembling blue. I even tried a few of the other different tablets to see how those colors came out - the red one, the one that was supposed to be green, the yellow one - and they were a bit closer to the right colors but still really kind of darker and off.
It wasn’t until I’d used the entire dozen that I realized, remembered - these were all brown eggs to begin with! Not white! You need white to get the colors right! It was so ridiculous of me!
I just know you’d be laughing and laughing and not only at me but with me because it’s exactly the kind of thing we would do together! Don’t you think? Like both of completely baffled, mystified, no idea of why things were going so wrong until… we finally figured it out!
I told your mom right away, she loved it! Then I went out and got half a dozen more eggs - white this time. I saved the cup full of blue dye. We’ll try this again tomorrow!
With all my love.
Little sweetheart, one of the most resonant readings in the Good Friday service I watched this afternoon from Grace Church was an excerpt from something called “God’s Daring Plan” - from a book called “Bread of Angels” by Barbara Brown Taylor. The passage was incredibly original and intensely moving and I went looking for more information about its author soon after.
The author was an Episcopal priest and her stories began as a collection of some of her absolutely breathtaking sermons. “Bread of Angels” weaves its way through the stories of the Bible with insightful scholarship, humor and directness, using language both conversationally and brilliantly.
The excerpt read last night from a chapter highly regarded as the very center of the book itself is called, as I said above, little sweetheart, “God’s Daring Plan”. The full passage takes one from creation and Eden all the way up to there Incarnation. It’s absolutely wonderful. I didn’t get to read it in full until just now. Last night there was just this short bit, that even reading aloud now, makes me start to cry. It reads thus:
“He had made them, it was true, and he knew how fragile they were, but their very breakability made them more touching to him, somehow. It was not long before God found himself falling in love with them. He liked being with them better than any of the other creatures he had made, and he especially liked walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It almost broke God’s heart when they got together behind his back, did the one thing he had asked them not to do and then hid from him – from him! – while he searched the garden until way past dark, calling their names over and over again. Things were different after that. God still loved the human creatures best of all, but the attraction was not mutual. Birds were crazy about God, especially ruby-throated hummingbirds. Dolphins and raccoons could not get enough of him, but human beings had other things on their minds. They were busy learning how to make things, grow things, buy things, sell things, and the more they learned to do for themselves, the less they depended on God. Night after night he threw pebbles at their windows, inviting them to go for a walk with him, but they said they were sorry, they were busy.”
There’s something in regret, little sweetheart, in remembering all my mistakes, that makes me long ever more for you and just always to do better. And I think there’s something in this passage too about thinking we have time - the Buddha’s famous caution. May I listen quietly and remember and hear you as you guide me through my days. How very much I love you. How very grateful I am. With all my love forever.
Little sweetheart, today is Good Friday. It has a special resonance to me for a variety of reasons but perhaps especially because for three years in a row I was asked to write and deliver remarks as part of West End’s service. The last of these was actually recorded, so it could be posted on the church’s website. It’s very much about you, of course, and I’m posting it here, below. With all my love forever.
Little sweetheart, today is Holy Thursday or what they sometimes call “Maundy Thursday”.
It was the day and night of The Last Supper. Sometimes yesterday’s Tenebrae service is also observed on this day (as it was at West End, when I used to go there pre-pandemic) and it’s also considered something of a day of service. You might remember that, little sweetheart, from your times at school in England because the Queen and Royal family always visit and assist homeless shelters on Holy Thursday.
Another thing about Maundy Thursday is that Christ washed the disciples’s feet and that ritual is sometimes recreated in services. I’ve never been to one that did do that but it was something I watched tonight during the service at Grace Church. In their service, anyone who wanted to, could come forward, sit at one of the chairs they’d brought out along with basins of warm water and fresh towels, and one of the clergy washed and dried their feet. Then that person would kneel and wash the next parishioner’s feet and so on.
The first I ever heard of this at all, little sweetheart, was when I was in college. Kris and I were going to different schools and I happened to call him on Maundy Thursday. He and Chas had this wonderful old apartment - I’d been up to visit them - off campus. They had a great music room set up in front with Kris’s stereo and a slew of instruments, including Chas’s Stratocaster, Kris’s Hofner bass and this vintage Vox organ (the kind with the keys colors reversed - the chromatics white and the others black) they’d bought secondhand.
When I called I could hear loud music in the background and Kris told me they were having a Maundy Thursday “party”. They’d all gathered, kind of “togo party”-like, dressed in bed sheets and sandals, and had washed one another’s feet with great ceremony, drinking wine and listening to the original album (“The Brown Album”) recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you that story before, little sweetheart. I do remember that you met Ted Neeley, who was the first Jesus in the Broadway production (and in the film) and still playing role in a national tour when you saw the production as a teenager almost twenty years later. Tonight, after the service, I didn’t have wine or dress in a bed sheet but I did play the Brown Album… loud. My thoughts, as ever, of you.
With all my love.
Today is Holy Wednesday, little sweetheart, and the service - Tenebrae - that some observe today and others tomorrow - is one of the most fascinating and moving of them all.
I’d never attended a Tenebrae service or even known of it until about ten years ago when I went to the one at St Thomas. St Thomas is rather High Episcopal and kind of grand, not in a bad way, but my whole experience there was more observational than participatory. When I discovered West End the following year, it was a good deal more intimate and I felt more engaged than just spectating, if that makes sense.
In both services, indeed in all Tenebrae services, I think, the sanctuary is almost solely illuminated by candlelight. A big candelabra is usually center and as the service progresses through readings and song, the candles are extinguished one by one. After the very last reading, when the final candle is blown out, a tremendous cry goes up! The organ plays loud and discordantly, the choir bang their hymnals on the railings - until one sole candle returns, usually from on high, where it had been hidden. Then, in silence, all depart.
Like all the services this week, little sweetheart, and as it’s been since the pandemic began, I’m not able to attend but instead am watching remotely. Grace Church, way downtown near Battery Park, has lovely services and film them so beautifully it’s almost as if one is there. I watched tonight and read along from here at my desk. It was very moving and, as ever, I feel brings me ever closer to you.
With all my love forever.
Little sweetheart, Holy Week - the seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday - begins today. I remember that even when you were here, it was of interest to me. I think my curiosity was first piqued when Kris and I were wandering around a particularly deserted part of London one Christmastime looking for something to do and discovering that St Paul’s had organ recitals.
The music first brought me in. Then later, I’d just go as soon as I arrived. Typically, I’d fly in late night, so the first things I’d do when I woke up in North London was to go for a run on Hampstead Heath, and then take the tube down to Embankment, walking along the Thames on the South Bank side before crossing over the Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s.
One time when I visited, I found the cathedral thick with incense and didn’t put two and two together until I remembered that is was a Wednesday - Ash Wednesday.
Anyway, I began to look for services like those at St Paul’s, here in New York, once I got back. For some time I found them at St Thomas and then later at the little church - West End Collegiate - that I told you about up at W77th Street. I was already inclined to a kind of quiet contemplation even before the tragic events but the observation of holy days became ever more important to me, little sweetheart, in your absence.
For within these quiet moments I am helped to find your presence - your celestial, encouraging, presence helping to comfort and guide me. Mid week is when these days are most resonant, little sweetheart, and I’ll observe them and tell you of it all, okay?
With all my love forever.
I’ll admit, little sweetheart, that I begin to get more than a bit impatient for the weather to turn nicer once we get to April. A kind of frosty air more identified with February than the first days of spring often seems to keep us in its grip periodically all the way to May 1st! And it was still a bit on the chilly side today as I went for a long walk, taking a day off running because my knee is acting up. If you weren’t in the sun and the wind kicked up, it wasn’t very springlike.
But as I was walking through the leafy courtyard that adjoins four tall apartment buildings around W68th Street between West End and Amsterdam - a little space I affectionately call “The Quad” - I saw a cardinal alight before me!
He was a really small little guy. It’s too soon for babies, I think he was just petite- ha! And he kept flying back and forth between trees and branches and singing. Cardinals are incredibly songful, I’ve discovered.
Of course the thing I like most is that legend has it that when one sees a cardinal, it signals the spirit of a beloved calling to and visiting us from the other side. I always stay and watch, linger and listen, and say a little prayer. My thoughts, my heart, filled with you. Thank you, my love.
These days ahead, little sweetheart, while not quite as dark as those of March, also have a kind of bitter memory to them. They are the days between my returning to New York after your tragic passing and my return to San Francisco for your memorial - held, incredibly on my birthday.
There was a something about flying back to New York that held a kind of magical hope that I would find you here. Joan Didion speaks of how she kept her husband’s clothes after his own tragic passing, very consciously thinking that he would need them when he came back. This place, of course, our little apartment here, is very much filled with your things to this day and pictures of you on every wall and surface surround me. But even then, I felt somehow I would find you here when I got back. I’d been gone two months and the landlord had to get into the apartment to fix a couple of things. They’d been waiting until I got home. They were very kind and empathetic, knowing of your loss, so they didn’t bother me for a few days but they did finally have to repair a radiator that had been leaking - my neighbor had let them in weeks before so they could shut it off - and all the stove/ovens in the building had been replace except for mine while I’d been gone. They went from gas to electric, I think because there’d been some problems with the gas lines - remember when you were here and you thought you noticed a funny smell, like gas escaping? Remember, I called them and they were quite unusually prompt, arriving within the hour.
I was here alone for that first week and then Sean and Meg asked if I’d like to come out Rye Brook and stay with them and their two little girls (they’re both very big girls, high school and college, now). It was enormously helpful, actually, little sweetheart to be with them. They knew you, of course, and were unfailingly kind. You and I were supposed to have visited them on Cape Cod that summer. It was nice to be around their family, having dinner and playing with the dog, going for walks, hearing about the girls’s day at school and staying up talking with Sean and Meg. I told Sean at one point that I didn’t know how I was going to do this (like keep going on) and he said, very kindly “you’re doing it”. It was way too soon to start working on the album you and he and I had begun, again, but the thought did occur that I would do. I wrote my speech for you for your memorial and spent my days out there with our lovely friends until it was time to fly back to SFO.
I rented a car and got lost trying to get in from the airport. I’d only ever traveled to and from SFO with you and I wound up way over on the other side of town, near the stadium just as a Giants game was getting out. I was, literally, lost without you.
These days, these three weeks in April always give me such pause, little sweetheart. I know they will again this year. In a way, they fold somewhat neatly into Holy Week, which begins on Sunday. My thoughts, as ever, of you. With all my love.
Little sweetheart, it's April 4th. As the month turns from March to April, I always have this day in mind somehow, intuiting its approach.
April 4 was the day my return flight to NYC was scheduled after you and I had gotten the "Blackbird" production together. Closing was meant to be a few days prior, so that you and I could decamp to Davis and have a lovely weekend together before I flew back east. Already, we knew you would be following just a few weeks later. My birthday was the 25th and we had tickets to see Low at that really special church venue in Philadelphia. We thought we might either take the train down or even rent a car and drive, because you were going to be here also for the workshop of my play My Before and After. We'd arranged to have the day off so we could make the trip.
Instead, tragically, none of that came to be. I did fly on April 4th, heartbroken, ruined, alone.
This day haunts me, little sweetheart, so I must do everything I can to be mindful, to listen quietly for your presence and to heed your call, your guidance. And simply to have faith - faith that you are closer than I can even imagine and that I need to keep my heart open, do our work and know that you will one day soon call me home.
With all my love forever.
