CLON

A couple of videos by CLON, a Korean duo of the 90s. They were especially famous for their dancing, and their career came to a screeching halt when one of them, Kang Won Rae, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. This much I'd learned from Korean Pop: Riding the Wave (Global Orient, 2006), edited by Keith Howard. According to a commenter on "Come to Me", after years of therapy he returned to make a fifth album, Victory, with his partner Koo Jun Yup, which included a song for a project which "highlighted the struggle for disabled rights in South Korea. For both of the videos and for the limited live performances done for the album, Gu and Gang developed dance routines incorporating wheelchairs." If I find the videos, I'll add them to this post. But "Come to Me" really impressed me -- the female lead singer is magnificent -- as well as filling me with nostalgia for the days when I loved to dance.





The articles in Korean Pop introduced me to a number of Korean pop acts I hadn't heard of before, and I'll be writing about them in the near future.

P.S. I haven't found the wheelchair routines yet, but I did stumble on this TV performance by Ku Yun Jup of Clon and Rain, the young Korean singer/dancer who's been trying to break through to a US audience. The song is called "Nan," Korean for "I." Rain seems abstracted, and Ku exudes an authority and confidence that's very, um, appealing. Notice the double-headed male symbol in the Clon logo, though; I guess it expresses their testosterone-pumped dancing pretty well, but still.

Poetry Friday - If I neglect ...

If I neglect, in these my recollections,
the more pleasant side of our relations,
if I leave out the moments of affection,
of respect, of warmth, in my narration,
if all too often it appears the bad
outweighs the good in my account of you,
if I forget the good times we have had,
it's just because they were so bloody few!
And anyhow I'd rather not profane
those good times, since they were so rare, by mention;
but lest I seem to be so wracked by pain
that they have never come to my attention,
it may, therefore, be timely to proclaim:
though years go by, the Muse remains the same.

May 22, 1979

And still does, thirty years later.

Celebritize Me

The trailer for Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is now online, and it occurs to me that the teabaggers, the birthers, and the town hall clowns should be asked what they think about Michael Moore now. Hasn't he been saying all along what they are now saying -- that corporate America feeds like a vampire on the mass of the American people, and that the government enables them with billions in taxpayer money? That it's time to stand up and put a stop to the madness? Where have they been for the twenty years since Roger and Me was released? Why, complaining (or jeering) that Michael Moore is fat, of course.

Granted, it will be very difficult to get them to speak coherently about such things. As Roy Edroso writes,

It could be that these folks haven't thought any more deeply about it than their comments reveal. Maybe AP didn't talk to them long enough to find out what's really driving them. Or maybe message discipline has something to do with it: When the anti-Obama "tea party" movement held its first New York event back in February, many people stepped up to the bullhorn to denounce the socialism, Shariah law, and Hitlerism of the Obama administration. At the next, much larger, New York event, the few citizen-speakers who made it to the stage were carefully guided by the organizers; the more professional speakers who dominated put the ix-nay on the ocialism-say, and focused on "entrepreneurship," "out-of-control" spending, and the like.

That's my problem. I'm sympathetic to people who are critical of Big Gummint, but when all they've got to fill out their critique is the lies we've been hearing -- Kenya, Hitler, Ayatollah Obama, and death panels -- with a serene refusal to recognize just how much they love all kinds of Big Gummint programs -- not just Social Security and Medicare, but public schools, public highways, public libraries and public space in which to hold their teabag rallies -- and without much in the way of substantial criticism to balance the lies, then I'm not inclined to join their party. The people Hitler appealed to, after all, had their own good reasons for being dissatisfied; even better reasons, very possibly, like hyperinflation and unemployment rates that far outrun anything the US has to face ... yet. Still, they preferred to blame the Jews and the Communists for their problems. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

I'm pleased to notice that Glenn Greenwald seems to be less worried than he used to be about being on the margins. Now that Tom Ridge has said aloud that the Bush administration manipulated terror alerts to keep the populace scared, nice mainstream journalists are floundering, just as they have been about the War on Terror generally. It turns out that the fringe leftist hippie conspiracy theorists were right all along, so they must have been right for the wrong reasons. Greenwald cites Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, who

acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.

Ambinder has retracted the "gut hatred" bit, but left the rest of his claim intact. As Greenwald points out, "gut hatred" isn't really the problem. The trouble is Ambinder's admission that, "living as we do in a Democratic [sic] system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit". In other words, despite having had their faces rubbed in government lies, most journalists are going to keep coming back for more. So, apparently, will the people who read or watch these journalists.

My only complaint about Greenwald's discussion is that he harks back to a day when "Distrusting the statements and actions of government leaders was once the central value of our political system and of basic journalism." There was not ever such a day, as far as I know. Greenwald mentions I. F. Stone and his dictum that all governments lie, forgetting that Stone was a pariah among respectable journalists -- the exception, not the rule.

Still, Greenwald is making progress. Today's post starts from a Paul Krugman column. Greenwald says:

More than any betrayal on a specific issue, it is Obama's seeming eagerness to serve the interests of those who have "run Washington for far too long" -- not as a result of what he has failed to accomplish, but as a result of what he has affirmatively embraced -- that is causing what Krugman today describes as a loss of trust in Obama from those who once trusted him most. This approach is not only producing heinous outcomes, but is politically self-destructive as well. In a superb post the other day, Digby recounted what fueled the Naderite movement in 2000 and warns, presciently I think, that the willingness of Obama/Emanuel so blatantly to disappoint those to whom they promised so much (especially young and first-time voters who were most vulnerable to Obama's transformative fairy dust) will lead them either to support a third party or turn off from politics altogether:

Rahm Emanuel believes that the key to Democratic success is a coalition in which Blue Dogs and corporate lackeys mitigate progressive change on behalf of the moneyed interests which he believes the political system must serve. Regardless of his malevolent view of how the political system should work, on a political level, I think he's living in the past. . . .

But on a political level, the left has been betrayed over and over again on the things that matter to us the most. The village is pleased, I'm sure. But the Democratic party only needs to look back eight short years to see just how destructive it is to constantly tell their left flank to go fuck themselves. . . .

At the time [in 2000] nobody believed that an incumbent Vice President in a roaring economy would have a race so close that the Republicans could steal it. But we know differently now don't we? And you would think that the Democratic establishment would also know that because of that, it may not be a good idea to alienate the left to the point where they become apathetic or even well... you know. It can happen. It did happen. Why the Democrats persist in believing that it can't happen again is beyond me. . .

Obama mobilized a whole lot of young people who have great expectations and disappointing them could lead to all sorts of unpleasant results. Success is about more than simply buying off some congressional liberals or pleasing the village. It's worth remembering that a third party run from the left is what created the conditions for eight long years of Republican governance that pretty much wrecked this country.

After 2000, what is it going to take for the Democrats to realize that constantly using their base as a doormat is not a good idea? It only takes a few defections or enough people staying home to make a difference. And there are people on the left who have proven they're willing to do it. The Democrats are playing with fire if they think they don't have to deliver anything at all to their liberal base --- and abandoning the public option, particularly in light of what we already know about the bailouts and the side deals, may be what breaks the bond.

It's really not too much to ask that they deliver at least one thing the left demands, it really isn't. And it's not going to take much more of this before their young base starts looking around for someone to deliver the hope and change they were promised.

Of course, what Greenwald and Digby are describing here is simply the Democratic Leadership Council's program to win power from the Republicans by appropriating their policies. This program gave us Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the other Democratic Presidential candidates of the past twenty years. From a strictly Realpolitik point of view, it's unexceptionable; from the point of view of the great majority of Americans, it's totally objectionable. Someone needs to find a way to break the hold the DLC has over the Democratic Party. But national politics is a very expensive business, and the DLC's partnership with the corporate bloc means that they will be able to outspend any foreseeable challengers. Obama had gone over to the Dark Side by the time he ran for the Senate, which is why we dirty hippie leftist conspiracy theorists have not been surprised by his conduct as President. He raised a lot of money from the netroots, but he couldn't have won the election if he hadn't gotten the support of the national party and its corporate donors. Which brings me to Greenwald's other important point:

Indeed, as I've written many times, "trust" is appropriate for one's friends, loved ones, family members and the like -- but not for politicians. That's what John Adams meant when he said: "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." "All" means "all" and "none" means "none."

But that's not how our political culture works generally. Our politics have become entirely celebretized. Political discussions typically resemble junior high chatter about one's most adored and despised actors: filled with adolescent declarations of whether someone "likes" and "trusts" this politician or "dislikes" that one. "I trust Obama" has long been a common refrain among his most loyal supporters. The fact that, as Krugman says, that is much less true now is quite significant, even if "trust" is an inappropriate emotion in the first place to feel towards any political official.

Here too Greenwald can't keep from appealing to an American lost innocence that never was. American politics has always been "celebritized," with politicians running on image more than substance. George Washington, the Father of His Country; Abe Lincoln the Rail Splitter from Illinois. But the main point, that trust is not appropriate for politicians, is gold. It's easy to entertain a healthy skepticism toward guys from the other team; what's hard, but utterly necessary, is to be just as skeptical about one's own candidate.

A Match Made in Los Angeles

Finally! I just finished watching Chris and Don: a Love Story, Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s documentary about the three-decade relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and it was just about what I’d hoped it would be.

For those who have no idea whose these guys are: the English-born Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a novelist, best known for his stories about Berlin in the 1930s which eventually were adapted for the musical Cabaret. He was close and sometimes intimate friends with some notable names in Brit Lit from the first half of the 20th century: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, E. M. Forster. Much of his fiction is semi-autobiographical at least, and for me he didn't really hit his stride until he switched to straight memoir, especially Christopher and His Kind (1976). But it has been thirty years since I've read his novels, so it may be time to go back and reread them. A Single Man (1964), especially, was a remarkable work for its time, and it has held up well, maybe even looking better in the post-Stonewall era.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, he and Auden moved to the US. Auden stayed in New York, but Isherwood moved to and settled in California.

I must have heard about Isherwood first in the early 1970s, around the time he came out in his memoir of his parents, Kathleen and Frank (1971). I learned about Bachardy a little later. Probably it was in The Advocate or The Body Politic that I first saw the now-iconic photograph of the two of them shortly after they became involved: Bachardy in a white t-shirt and chinos, grinning his gap-toothed grin, looking about sixteen years old; and Isherwood in a casual suit, crewcut, looking more like father and son than a couple. (The only copies of that photo I could find online were incorporated into the poster for Chris and Don, like the one above.)

Many times since then I’ve read about how Bachardy and Isherwood met when they were eighteen and forty-eight respectively; how Isherwood’s friend, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker, nervously threw them out of the garden house where Isherwood had been living; how Bachardy became a distinguished artist; and so on until Isherwood’s death of cancer in 1986. But between that iconic photo shoot and the later photographs I saw of Bachardy with silver hair, I knew very little about they got from the beginning to the end. Granted, that's not my business, but even now that I'm a confirmed bachelor, as they say, I'm still curious about how good relationships work.

In particular I recall an interview Isherwood and Bachardy gave to Armistead Maupin for the Village Voice in 1985, as the first time I learned how they got along as a couple, how they negotiated conflicts -- for example:

Chris, why do you lie in the back seat when Don is driving?
CI: Because I believe I'm the only person who's fit to be on the road at all; therefore, I prefer to just miss it when other people drive.
DB: For years, it was one of the real bones between us, Chris's objection to my driving. Years ago we used to have to drive our own cars to the same destination to avoid the fights. I can't even remember now whose idea it was, but one of us decided that Chris should not only sit in the back seat, but that he should lie down so he couldn't see what I was doing. And once we discovered that, it was bliss.

There was also this very sharp remark about AIDS by Isherwood, which I'd almost forgotten until now:

But these younger men who find they have it-some absolutely awful pressures begin to assert themselves. They're told by their relatives that it's a sort of punishment, that it's dreadful and it's God's will and all that kind of thing. And I think they have to get very tough with themselves and really decide which side they're on. You know, fuck God's will. God's will must be circumvented, if that's what it is.

And it was gratifying to encounter this closing line in the interview:

Do you and Chris sleep in the same bed?
DB: We always have. And not only in the same bed, but really, you know, intertwined.

So one of the great pleasures of Chris and Don is the home-movie footage of the two, and the many photographs of Bachardy in his late 20s and early 30s. Evidently most of these bits were taken by Isherwood and Bachardy themselves, taking turns with an 8mm camera. The two of them at home; Don standing on the beach as Chris pans the camera upwards from his feet in the sand to his beaming face; on an ocean liner leaving New York harbor for on their first voyage to Europe; in Key West for the filming of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo. The image quality of these clips is surprisingly good, in full color, and gives an eerie sense of you-are-there-ness. The movies and still photos provide Bachardy aging gracefully from the pretty boy of 1953 to a very distinguished-looking man. (Photo below from here.)

Aside from the obvious English accent that Bachardy had picked up from Isherwood, he now sounds (and occasionally looks) like Katherine Hepburn at times. I was shocked when what I thought was Bachardy’s high-pitched voice on the soundtrack turned out to be Isherwood’s, from a BBC interview in 1972. I can see why some people thought that Isherwood had cloned himself in Bachardy.

How things have changed since the 1950s! A documentary like Chris and Don, about the love between two men, could never have been made then. It's important to have these documents, and Chris and Don is an immensely satisfying one.

And Another Thing!

Let me go back and quote again this bit I found on Facebook:

Republican ... Democrat ... Independent .... Liberal .... why don't our elected Congressmen and Senators listen to us and do what we voted them to do ...... we want structured, accountable change, backed by meaningful fiscal responsibility ...... do we have to have an American Revolution to get our point across.

So, who's "we"? It is not at all clear to me what We Americans want. I'd begin any such discussion, I hope, by acknowledging that different Americans want different things, and proceed to ask which Americans want what.

I don't believe that this writer was speaking for most Americans. In the most general terms, you could make a case: most of us probably feel that our elected officials don't do what we want them to, but different we's want them to do different things. Most American voters voted for Barack Hussein Obama last November, and he won the election decisively. It's not clear what Obama voters thought they were voting for, and again, I wouldn't assume that they all hoped for the same things. I think that many of them were voting against the Republican Party as much as they were voting for Obama, but that in itself would tell you a lot. If many people who voted for Obama are disappointed in him now, it's probably not because he's not acting enough like Bush, but rather because he's acting too much like him. As Avedon Carol wrote right after the election:

You know, we were told over and over that Obama was "the most liberal member of the Senate" (not true, but I'm sure lots of people believed he was really liberal), and the Republicans even insisted that Obama was a socialist - and yet the people elected him! So Obama has a mandate to be at least a screaming liberal, or even a socialist, right?

I've pointed this out to various nice, sensitive, well-educated Obama supporters I know, and it seems to make them uncomfortable. They're very concerned that Obama shouldn't appear to be an angry, screaming radical, because it would hurt him somehow. I wonder. It seems to me that his careful, cautious, moderate act -- almost certainly dictated by concern about how he'll look to the public -- is hurting him too, and is going to hurt him more as time goes on. Forthrightly accepting his socialist mandate would hurt him among the right-wing Democrats who run the Party, the corporate donors who funded his campaign and expect his deference, and that could be a problem. But it would make him look so much better to the mass of people who actually voted for him. The far right, the Teabaggers, the birthers, and so on, would continue to rave, but they're raving already; they were already raving during the campaign. They want him dead, frankly. They will never like him no matter what he does, just as they hated Bill Clinton no matter how many of their pet policies he enacted, so Obama should stop trying to appease them.

I use the word appease very deliberately. The people who are attacking Obama now most visibly -- and the corporate media are giving them a lot of visibility -- don't seem to be people who voted for him anyway. Obama, like other elected officials, is obliged to represent and serve those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him, but that doesn't mean he has to put his neck in a noose for them. It's clear from the Limbaugh Right's antics that they expect nothing less. They have no constructive proposals, and are only interested in smashing up as much as they can. (Yes, there's an echo there of complaints about the New Left in the 60s. To the extent that it has any validity, it's far more valid about the spectacles we're seeing now.)

We who aren't elected officials, of course, are under no such obligation. Back to the guy from Facebook, complaining that his elected representatives don't listen to them and do what they voted them do. This guy didn't vote for Obama to do anything, so he can't very well complain that Obama's not doing what he voted for him to do. "We want structured, accountable change, backed by meaningful fiscal responsibility." That's nice and vague, but this guy doesn't speak for the majority of Americans, or even for the majority of November 2008 voters: as far as I can tell, "we" in his complaint means the hard core of Republicans who cheered Bush on for eight years, through tax cuts for the rich, the tightening of control on civil liberties, and two crushingly expensive wars, heedless of the skyrocketing deficit and the horrific human costs of the Bush regime, roughly until last fall's bank bailout. That's the group that lost the election; they're not the ones who voted Obama and the Democrats into power. The majority of the voters didn't want any more of that, and we aren't obliged to respect those who did and do.

P.S. A friend suggested in e-mail that despite the propaganda from the Republicans and the corporate media, people voted for Obama not because they thought "they were voting for Eugene Debs, but rather because they were voting against obvious demagoguery." I see his point, but I still have the impression that most people who voted for Obama believed he was a lot more liberal than he actually is. Maybe not Eugene V. Debs, but I think most Americans would be vague about the difference anyhow. And Obama's poll numbers have taken a beating for his support for Bush's bailout, not for excessive concern about ordinary citizens.

Politics Is Whatever I Don't Agree With

I had a funny conversation yesterday with a co-worker from another department. It's probably a dangerous luxury to argue politics in the workplace, but since she began the exchange, I decided to indulge for once.

She overheard me and another worker talking about the state of health care in the US. I was showing him an article with another horror story about a person who'd been denied treatment by her insurance company. The other co-worker then intervened, asking us if we thought the government should take over healthcare. I said I thought so, and we were off. The trouble is, my interlocutor was either incredibly ignorant, or pretending to be: she claimed not to know -- in fact, she denied -- that Republicans have wanted to get rid of Social Security and Medicare since those programs' inception. I reminded her of Ronald Reagan, and she conceded and brushed aside the point in one dismissive wave: so did Clinton, she said. Right, I said, so he's going along with the Republicans -- but don't you want to get rid of Medicare and Social Security, which are government programs that let Washington run our lives? She brushed that aside too, saying that Medicare and Social Security are going broke, they don't work. Social Security is not going broke, I said, and if Medicare has problems it's because Republicans keep trying to get to get rid of it by whittling away at it. (Same with Social Security: if they can't get rid of it outright, they can at least cut benefits and raise the retirement age a little at a time.) She denied that too, which brought us full circle.

I mentioned that lots of Americans apparently don't know that Social Security and Medicare are government programs, which she also denied. (As Avedon Carol wrote at The Sideshow, "You actually hear people say with a straight face that they've never taken anything from the government and never will, they get by on Social Security and they have their Medicare. I can't help but wonder where they think it comes from."

My co-worker was aware of the horror stories about the American system, but was sure that things would be worse under a government-run system -- just look at England! So what did she want, I asked. Well, if They would just set up more free clinics all over the country, then people could get treatment! Who's "They", I asked. The government, of course. But I thought she didn't want the government to take over healthcare, and it would be too expensive. But if They just set up free clinics ... I had to keep asking her who They were; I guess that such vagueness about who's doing what is inevitable when someone gets all her news from Fox, which she proudly declared she did.

Now, this woman is not what most Democrats and liberals would recognize right away as a redneck. I was stunned myself at just how narrow and ignorant she was, having exchanged pleasantries with her regularly during the past couple of years. But then, I myself am out of touch with most of America, since I avoid the corporate media generally in favor of alternatives, and most of my fellow Americans evidently think that Fox News is alternative media. The rest seem to think that President Obama's press releases and speeches are alternative media.

Lately, too, I've made the mistake of letting a friend get me onto Facebook. (One of my Korean friends, who'd posted photos there that he took during my recent trip to Korea.) Next thing I knew, I was hearing from people I'd gone to high school with forty years ago, and while most of them aren't bad people, they're mostly Republicans and conservative Christians. (Yeah, I know, so are most gay people, but that's why I don't hang around with most gay people.) The Republicans are appalling, ranting about how Obama is going against the will of most Americans. "Republican ... Democrat ... Independent .... Liberal .... why don't our elected Congressmen and Senators listen to us and do what we voted them to do," one wrote. "...... we want structured, accountable change, backed by meaningful fiscal responsibility ...... do we have to have an American Revolution to get our point across."

I teased him a bit, pointing out that most Americans want a single-payer system. (I have to balance this: If many Americans don't know that Medicare is a government program, they are probably just as vague about what a government-run health system would be like. On the other hand, the polls don't ask about "single-payer" -- they describe the program, and most Americans still want it, as they have for decades.) Most Americans voted for Obama, thinking he was, if not a socialist, then at least an extreme liberal. Most Americans still like Obama. While there's no reason why this guy has to agree with them, he should at least recognize that he's in the minority and has to start from there. Second, they have to account for their silence during the Bush years, when the deficit spiraled upwards almost from the day Clinton left office. I think that they only turned against Bush, if at all, for his bailout package last fall -- but Obama was on board for that. Did they care about Bush's wars? They've forgotten about them. Did they care about the Patriot Act? Of course not; it's only when government surveillance might affect them that they suddenly doubt the benevolence and wisdom of those who protect us against the terrorists. I mean, if they don't have something to hide, what are they worried about?

He'd also linked to the Facebook page of Representative John Boehner (R-OH), who'd opposed Obama's stimulus program too. Boehner in turn linked to something called "The Freedom Project." (Big Brother would approve -- it's not really fair to call such twisted usage Orwellian.) The Freedom Project blogger trumpeted that "Democratic Leaders Call Voters 'Un-American' for Expressing Opposition"!!! Now, Freedom Project didn't give any actual quotations to support this claim, all he really had was a quotation from Rep. Boehner, who "ripped his Democratic counterparts Monday for labeling those disrupting lawmaker town halls as 'un-American.'" The blogger might be telling the truth despite himself; but so what? All through the past several Republican administrations, Republican leaders have called voters "un-American" for expressing opposition to their policies and programs. It's stupid and dishonest, but it's one of the perks of being the party in power. If Democrats could survive the accusation, so can Republicans.

I don't mind the disruptions of the town hall meetings per se, and I certainly wouldn't call them un-American: what is more American, more down-home and traditional, than a lynch mob? The trouble lies in other areas. One, that those who are attacking Obama's health care program from the Right are lying themselves blue in the face, parroting Fox News / Limbaugh / Palin / Republican National Committee talking points without having the first idea what they're talking about. But that's nothing new. Those who are surprised by this behavior have (conveniently?) forgotten what the Right has been puking up like green pea soup ever since Obama became a viable candidate for President; those who dismissed the ranting as the last gasp of a bankrupt Republican party were fooling themselves. Sure, racist fury at the existence of a mulatto President underlies a lot of their rage; a lot also derives simply from the fact that the Republicans lost the election -- I remember similar hysteria after the inauguration of Bill Clinton ended twelve years of Republican control of the Oval Office. The fact that many of their accusations are sheer dementia doesn't make these people less dangerous.

Two, there are too many problems with Obama's program for health care reform. I wrote in February about his stimulus package that "It doesn't really matter if the bill is any good or not; if it fails to pass, Obama's credibility will take a hit, and the Republican media (by which I mean the corporate media) will swoop in like vultures to feed on his eyes while he is still alive." Obama's talking the same line now, trying to paint all opponents of his "reforms" (more Newspeak) as Republicans. One question I am grappling with now is how to deal with the Republican shock troops who see the conflict in the same either/or terms: either you support Obama, or you agree with them -- you're either for him or against him. Health care reform is just too damn important to let it turn into a football game, where you're cheering for one team or another. I oppose Obama's program, but I also oppose the frothing hordes of the Republican faithful. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

Poetry Friday -- remote transmission

remote transmission

I always realized you were done with wires
and regiments of photons in a void;
but then illusion, to succeed, requires
suspense of disbelief to be enjoyed.
I watched you like a picture on a screen,
the way teenagers moon for tv stars.
It seemed my reach could bridge the space between;
in fact, you were no less remote than Mars.
I thought where there’s an image there must be
its model somewhere, so I searched for that.
But our encounters were illusory,
You always seemed so indistinct and flat.
And I’d muse, What an interesting kid.
I’d like to meet him … But I never did.

May 21, 1979