I don’t know how often you tune into Ovation. It’s a rather creaky cable network consisting of taped symphony performances, infomercials for alternative cancer treatments and the odd musical documentary — a perfect home for Ray Davies, in other words. Last night the network presented a biopic about the king Kink entitled The World from My Window, and I dutifully sat down to watch it even though I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be much news there for me, having read and even written a fair amount about the Kinks.

What was new was the voice of the master himself, interviewed during the recording of his slightly feeble solo album, Other People’s Lives. Where interviews often capture an acerbic Davies, equally resentful of the years of neglect and the intrusions on his privacy publicity demands, here he seemed positively mellow. True, it came off at times as an elaborate piece of PR (there were no hostile questions re past drug use, sexual proclivities or even his famous battles with brother Dave) but I got the sense that Ray has finally made peace with himself.

Take “Waterloo Sunset.” I have read Ray on the subject of that pop mini-epic countless times and could scarcely imagine what new he could say about its composition — until he talked about walking across the Waterloo Bridge with his daughter, and how he related her future happiness to that of his own scattered family. For all his quirks, or kinks, Davies has a heart as big as all outdoors; that’s what puts his songwriting on a par with Lennon-McCartney’s (and a step above Jagger-Richards’): his sensitivity, his ability to see the sadness and the promise of each sun setting over whatever place you call home.

Speaking of his early influences, Ray name-checked Chuck Berry — not all that surprising in and of itself except that the song he chose to expound on was “Memphis.” That number has always made me a little squeamish; whether adroitly covered by Johnny Rivers or Geoff Muldaur you could not get away from the fact that it was about a man in love with a girl who was… six years old. Lower than Humbert Humbert, a real Short Eyes. But Ray’s take was that it was about a custody fight: a father who could not see his daughter: “We were pulled apart because her mom did not agree/She tore apart a happy home in Memphis, Tennessee.” I was struck by the generosity of Davies’ interpretation, as well as his acknowledgment that Memphis wasn’t all that far from Muswell.

There are some great bits of vanished video tucked in there, too (I particularly loved a film meant to accompany “Dead End Street” that Top of the Pops refused to air: it features the band dressed as Dickensian undertakers, carrying a coffin) and the obligatory interviews with singer-songwriters indebted to the Master. Bob Geldof says that hearing “Days” made him want to slit his wrists, knowing he would never write anything as good, while Elvis Costello (who covered it for the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ ‘Til the End of the World) confesses that the introduction of the spiritual aspect (“those endless days, those sacred days you gave me”) always made him a bit uncomfortable. He could never go there, he said. Few of us can.

Ever since I was a lad in the seventies I have turned (albeit very occasionally) to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, for inspiration in times of duress. Which are most times, at least for me. Back in the day I used three coins (hardcore hippies used actual yarrow stalks, hard to find at the corner bodega) and painstakingly mapped out each hexagram to reveal… whatever happened to be changing at that moment. For the unitiated, someone throwing the I Ching is supposed to keep a question or problem in mind while consulting the oracle. Not that the answers necessarily make that much more sense when you know what you’re wondering about. Thanks to the I Ching site — same Wilhelm translation as the Bollingen book — you don’t even need coins anymore. The site “tosses” virtual coins for you, US or Chinese.

The point-and-click manner of consulting the book makes it slightly more addictive and probably prophesies a future of carpal tunnel syndrome for me. Plagued about my book (I am halfway through the first draft of a novel and losing spirit, heart, and faith) I asked the I Ching if I should continue, just this afternoon. A short answer, ala Sam Johnson’s observation that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” probably could have saved me and others countless hours (and pages) of agony but the oracle delivered something all together different.

Number 29 is a water hexagram, aka The Abysmal (funny, that’s one editor said about my manuscript), and is one of only eight “doubling” hexagrams, repeating the trigram Kan. The Judgment seems pretty encouraging

The Abysmal repeated.
If you are sincere, you have success in your heart,
And whatever you do succeeds.

Though Richard Wilhelm, who translated the book from the Chinese into German and then into English, notes: “In man’s world Kan represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light enclosed in the dark – that is, reason. The name of the hexagram, because the trigram is doubled, has the additional meaning, ‘repetition of danger.'”

For someone who has tried publishing a novel before, only to be told it just wasn’t good enough, the notion of repeating past mistakes is alarming. Though as Wilhelm goes on to note, “Properly used, danger can have an important meaning as a protective measure. Thus heaven has its perilous height protecting it against every attempt at invasion, and earth has its mountains and bodies of water, separating countries by their dangers. Thus also rulers make use of danger to protect themselves against attacks from without and against turmoil within.” Lord knows, I’ve got plenty of inner turmoil — and my ms. has already been attacked from without. Like the long distance runner in the middle of a marathon, I realize there is nothing to do but perservere. If that doesn’t work, I can always go back to tossing coins.

Remember the Rolodex? I started cleaning mine out the other day, putting the pertinent addresses and phone numbers remaining on mine into my computer. It’s an odd sort of trip down memory lane: there were the names of old shrinks and girlfriends, sources and editors I haven’t spoken to in in years, and the odd dead person.

Both of my parents were there — Dad’s address in Barstow, Mom’s last in Petaluma — sandwiched in between my living (as of this writing) siblings, as well as a few famous folk I’d had contact with. I’ve written of Chris Whitley, the guitarist I came to know when we first moved to NY. I wrote a magazine piece about him for Vogue and then a bio of the artist for Columbia records, the kind of two-page thing the label sends out to journalists in a press package. (It was heavily edited by Columbia, as I recall, for the usual idiotic reasons: The woman in charge of publicity at the time hated Lou Reed and dropped a reference I made to him; Chris himself had talked at length about Johnny Winter, which the label thought appealed to the wrong demo, and so on. It’s still out there on the web somewhere…)

Then there was Wendy Wasserstein, who wrote a piece about the joys of the Upper West Side for a now defunkt city site called Total New York that I was in charge of for a brief period, back when they were calling the Flatiron District “Silicon Alley” and content was supposedly king. As I recall, Wendy had actually written the piece as a favor for my boss, Guy Garcia, who seemed to know everybody, though there was some nominal fee involved. Her reaction to my edit of her piece was: sure, whatever, just send me the money. I’m not sure she ever saw the site.

And then there was an ancient card for Frank Conroy, the author of Stop Time. I was working at Parenting magazine, then in SF, in the mid-eighties and had persuaded the author to write something about finding himself a new parent, with grown sons from a previous marriage, late in life. It was an elegaic little essay, as I recall, and the author was such a pro that he didn’t even object when the illustrator depicted him as balding, despite his head of Peter Graves like snowy hair. I was such an admirer of Conroy, Stop Time still being my model for a memoir, that I was amazed that he consented to write for me. I wasn’t aware that famous writers (especially “writer’s writers” as he was often labeled) needed money, too. Sometimes more than the rest of us.

There are other names on that Rolodex I’m afraid to ask about — Saul Zaentz? Elaine Steinbeck? Though I think I might have heard if they had died, providing I was paying attention.

Earlier this month I witnessed the aftermath of a motorcycle accident here in Brooklyn. It wasn’t fatal, or even that stupendous: the biker was sitting up on the pavement, his bike dumped in the street where he had swerved to avoid an oncoming truck, and a small crowd was gathering, people on cell phones dialing 911. As I hurried past with my dog (“Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving”) a homeless guy came running up to the scene of the accident, yelling: “It’s okay! He’s a trained athlete! Mick Jagger told me this would happen on 666!”

Oh, good, the biker was probably thinking. Crazy man to the rescue.

My friend Charlie Haas has suggested that the mumbling schizophrenics of New York are the best at what they do, just as the actors, con artists, waiters and brokers here are outstanding in their field. but having just spent a week in San Francisco, my old home town, I have to say that the loonies there give ours a run for their money. Maybe it’s because they are revered in a historical context (Emperor Norton still gets a lot of lip service) or because most people there are still eager to show tourists, yes, even folks from NY, that they are more tolerant than thou. The guy with the five o’clock shadow in the miniskirt waving at passersby at four pm may be amusing to the squares from elsewhere but people in SF smile at your concern or outrage, defending the right of people to go crazy in public.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s once controversial care-not-cash program (which was instituted last year and provides shelter and health care for homeless men and women, instead of the cash outlay the city used to provide) seems to have reduced the actual number of street dwellers while leaving some of the most delusional to roam around town — and visitors from Boise and Brooklyn something to talk about back home.

Walking out of my Nob Hill hotel last week I saw a man in what I assumed to be his karate clothes standing at a crosswalk, giving the air a kick. I hadn’t had my coffee and was disinclined to look too closely but when I did I realized that he was actually wearing a hotel bathrobe and nothing else and that he was young and in good shape. Stepping out into moving traffic he shouted, “The first car that runs into me explodes!”

Need I mention that the traffic all parted for him?

That’s what my favorite bumper sticker on the Big Island of Hawaii said. Surfer culture is perhaps less prevalent there than on the islands with the better waves (Maui, Oahu) and one local even suggested the saying might actually be an advertising slogan for Long Board beer (locally brewed) but the same woman said that Hapuna Beach, where we had stopped to catch the sunset one night, was unapproachable on Christmas day. Kids all bring their new boards, short and long, down for a first spin.

This was my first visit to any part of Hawaii and what I don’t know about local culture would cover the back of a green sea turtle but I honestly couldn’t see much wrong with it. The breeze was balmy, there were no bugs or snakes (the latter were taken care of by the abundant mongoose), and the people were nice. Least ways the ones we met. Since we were staying at the rather plush Mauni Lani Resort, where my wife had spoken at a conference, we were in that tourist bubble most of the time, benignly indifferent to the problems of the people who work in the hotels.

Like ice. Methamphetamine has cut a swath through island culture in the past few years, spurned in part by the need to work several jobs. The parents get addicted, we learned, and pass it on to the kids. On the local HI music station (a rather cloying mix of reggae muzak, most with pro-island messages) the members of a native band told kids to stay off ice, while someone running for local office listed it as one of the Big Island’s biggest problems (after affordable real estate). Why, other than working three jobs, you would want to be wired in that environment is beyond me.

We had ice cream one afternoon in Hawi with science writer Susan Ince and her partner, Andy. They had moved there eight years ago from New Jersey and hadn’t looked back. The biggest challenge, Susan said, was keeping up your vocabulary. They were both in a book group, and seemed keen to talk about everything. The town they lived in reminded me of a few places near SF — Bolinas, Olema, Stinson Beach. Sixties spots that time forgot, a place where you could find a good used book store, excellent ice cream and maybe a vintage Hawaiian shirt but not much else.

Come to think of it, what else is there?