For me (and thousands of others), it’s not always easy being a Jets fan. Week in and week out, it’s virtually impossible to predict how they will perform. While this can make for exciting, come-from-behind wins, it can also be devastating. This unpredictability, plus the melancholy of being a Jets fan far from home probably explains why I’ve been thinking about Steve Almond’s quest for a sports bar in which to watch his beloved, and often unsuccessful, Oakland Raiders every Sunday. Now that I’m living in Massachusetts, I find myself doing the same thing: slouching on hard wooden stools, trying to keep my outbursts to a whisper because, for the most part, everyone around me hates—I mean, hates—the Jets. They may wonder why the one TV in the corner even has a game on that isn’t the Patriots. This is New England, after all.
Essays
Homesickness for “The Philadelphia Story” and Other Fictions
October 25, 2012
Essays
If it weren’t for its title, you’d be hard pressed to pin down the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story to a location. True to the traditions of theatre and the Hollywood Golden Age, the film’s sets are few and mainly interior. Socialite Tracy Lord teeters on the brink of remarriage, with a catty-charming ex-husband, populist tabloid reporter, and absentee father descending on her parents’ mansion for the occasion. The beloved characters, expertly played by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart, hardly venture beyond their manicured lawns. They speak in their famous transatlantic voices, the fine-bred, trained accents of no town and no country. It sometimes seems that the film may as well have been set on the moon as in Pennsylvania—as long as there could still be fine drawing rooms and elegant patios, of course, for class conflicts play a much more vocal role in the film than regional color. The Philadelphia Story treats place much the way Tracy herself does: when Macaulay Connor asks, “Say, this is beautiful country around here. What is it all, anyway?” Tracy replies flippantly, “Oh, part of our place.” And on the story moves, as dismissive as Tracy herself.
The Views
October 23, 2012
Essays
Above all else, as a writer, I need a view. And it doesn’t have to be a view of anything particularly striking. If I think back to all the rooms I have worked in as a writer, and all the different views that each of those rooms looked out on, then certainly there have been no rolling hills or mist-swept vistas. Quite the opposite.
Elsewhere, in Istanbul
In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II ordered some changes to the city’s eastern Orthodox cathedral, the Hagia Sophia: the altar was swapped out for a minbar, the platform from which the imam addresses the congregation; and four slender minarets were added, among other things. For nearly 500 years the Hagia Sophia was a mosque, becoming, in 1931, a secular museum that enchantingly reveals layers of religious history, art, and architecture. Today the purple porphyry marble from Egypt glows richly; the Byzantine golden dome displays Islamic geometric adornments; and mosaics of the Virgin Mary sparkle up high. To better show off its wonders, the museum’s upper gallery hosts a permanent exhibition of images by Turkish architectural photographer Ahmet Ertug. In these carefully lit photos, the tiny tiles of the Virgin’s face and robes can be easily discerned. A museum within the museum.
Even Here
October 18, 2012
Essays
The wrinkled Brazilian landscape passes below me, brownish green through the haze. Every so often the disordered mountain ridges grow crisp and straight, in parallel, like ribs.
Then the land flattens, consumed by endless trees to the horizon. As jungle overtakes the soil, no variety strikes the eye except for rivers: one, two, three, four, five veins of muddy brown lifeblood, traversing the sleeping green chest of the Amazon.
Beside me sits my traveling companion, my mother, who was born and raised in Brazil. For the first time in many years we’ve managed to match our schedules to travel here together from the U.S. She’s eager to show me parts of Brazil I’ve never known.
Above this seemingly interminable forest, who would believe the rate of Brazil’s growth – skyscrapers sprouting, small villages exploding into cities, cars crowding the highways – into the 6th largest economy of the world?
Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood
Click here to read more about “Annals of Mobility,” a monthly column here at The Common.
Of Wes Anderson and his latest film Moonrise Kingdom, Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the New York Review of Books:
To make a world where everything looks newly made is part of the great adventurousness of his work […] It is perhaps the only setting in which Sam and Suzy could begin to articulate their goal: ‘to go on adventures and not get stuck in one place.’
From the 17th Floor: To the Abraj and Back
October 12, 2012
Essays
I’d had grander plans for the day, of course, plans that involved walking through Bur Dubai, the old city, and the souks in Deira and visiting the beautiful Jumeirah Mosque, but the mosque tour was early, at 9:45, and nearly a 40 minute cab ride away… and then there was the heat. Even sitting in the shade in early morning, I was sweating.
No, we would not be setting foot on city sidewalks today. This was a blow to my touristic romanticism, my plan to experience the places where some semblance remained of the daily life that had characterized Dubai before the race to the top. Before the spectacular towers, malls, and hotels upon which superlatives are pinned.
From the Stone House: On Belonging
October 11, 2012
Essays
As the crow flies, Montereggio is perhaps a dozen kilometers from Castiglione del Terziere, my Italian home for a year. But Lunigiana—this northern part of Tuscany, between the Emilian plain and the Mediterranean Sea—is so hilly that I never know how many dizzying switchbacks a road might boast, thus how long it’ll take to get from A to B. (Or how many times en route our car will have to edge past another coming at it. Sometimes both vehicles must fold in their side-mirrors like wings so as to squeeze by.)
Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders
I don’t think I understood the idea of a “love-hate relationship” until I moved to New York City. Over the years I have become one of those obnoxious people who talk constantly of leaving New York while at the same time shutting down all possible escape routes. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that this flavor of self-delusion is not unique to New York City, but perhaps it happens in greater numbers here, simply because New York is host to so many outsiders — outsiders who eventually become insiders.
Abu Musa
October 4, 2012
Essays
I last spoke to Abu Musa in March 2003, the week the Iraq war began. It was late afternoon, Syria time, when I called from my apartment in Washington, DC. I waited several minutes while the shopkeeper across the hall—the only resident in Abu Musa’s building with a telephone—summoned my former music teacher from his apartment.
I might have caught Abu Musa in the midst of a nap; he made me repeat my name three times.
At last, he laughed. “It can’t be,” he said. His voice, low-pitched, buoyant, was thick with cigarettes and fatigue. “Where are you? Are you still in America?”
When I said I was, I felt him smiling in disbelief. “You could be next door,” he said. “You could be down the street.”
