Airports have been the catalyst for a lot of mawkish movie moments. The risible British flick Love, Actually was bookended by scenes of people greeting each other in slo-mo while Hugh Grant reflected warmly on getting a blow-job from a Hollywood hooker. Oh, sorry. I mean the meaning of love. All the more risible was the fact that he invoked 9/11, the mother of all airplane disaster days.

Dropping my son at JFK for his return to San Francisco I heard the whistles of the terminal traffic cops: “Hurry please, it’s time.” It is hard to avoid those intimations of mortality, not because I ever put anyone on a plane thinking it would crash (remember flight 222, on the Twilight Zone?) but because it is such a big fat obvious Hollywood metaphor. They’re leaving, you’re staying. They are going off to have adventures while you wait on the sidelines, as parents do, and wish for the best. In Adam’s case he is going back to CA to have an Outward Bound adventure in the Sierras, a trip he has been preparing for by training daily, quitting cigarettes, etc. We spent the last two days (and tons of $$ — caveat emptor) getting mountaineering gear. Our best experience was at a crowded little store near City Hall called Tents and Trails. Unlike some of the salesmen at Paragon, everyone we talked to there looked like they did a fair amount of wilderness wandering themselves. And all were impressed with the fact Adam was doing Outward Bound.

Young men need a challenge, a fire to walk through on the way to manhood. Left without some of the more traditional rites of passage (military service, walkabouts) American men are forced to invent their own. Me, I got in lots of trouble: drink, jail, drugs, more jail. It is my hope that by providing my son with a more controlled challenge (as an OB instructor said, “We haven’t lost anyone yet,” a promise the military can’t match) he will feel emboldened to take other risks. Finish school. Get a job. Clean his room. Not necessarily in that order.

He’s in the air now, lost to me for the time being. I feel at these times like I’m holding a kite string, all tangled up as it comforts and cuts me at once, back here, on the ground.

Any cause worthy of the name draws its strength from people of diverse backgrounds, who may not agree on anything save who the enemy is. Think of the forces allied against Hitler before the US got involved: communists, anarchists, loyalists, royalists. The only thing they had in common was a love of freedom and a shared sense that the Nazis were out to exterminate them all.

At a rally today for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a few diverse communities got a glimpse of each other and resolved that the common enemy — Bruce Ratner and his Cleveland-based development group, that wants to choke downtown with skyscrapers — was more important than their differences. From the beginning, Ratner and his henchmen have sought to make this a racial issue, portraying those objecting to the development as rich white homeowners (mostly in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill) while those who would benefit would be working class black families (from Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy). As blacks and whites together wised up to Ratner’s tactics — and the fact that the jobs and affordable housing he is holding out as a carrot are not, in fact, guaranteed — the front has grown more unified, even if they’re not always reading from the same hymn book.

At a Rally Against Ratner today held in Prospect Park, about 500 sweltering opponents to the Atlantic Yards project were entertained by the Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, practitioners of the sort of political theater that was the staple of most San Francisco rallies and protests: not funny enough to classify as entertainment, but not as strident as your usual rabble rouser. The Rev. Billy is a performance artist of sorts who has made a career of sorts fighting Wal Mart and other developers; though not a preacher, he does a fair impression of a third-tier Jimmy Swaggert type, getting a little epileptic as he reached his pitch. His choir, while robed, had not been picked for their voices, making them unlike any church choir I’ve heard.

He came, he camped, he left — and the following three speakers took issue with his satire. “I come from the real church community,” said Assemblyman James Brennan, and went on to imply that some of these white hipsters need to tread lightly when making fun of church. Brooklyn activist (and former Black Panther) Bob Law said much the same thing and the one real man of the cloth on the dais today, the Reverend Dennis Dillon, had his second speak for him. Was this the sign of some great divide? No, just a reminder that you best be careful when messing with Jesus.

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.