We were driving through a landscape reminiscent of ones you see in images beamed back to Earth from the Mars Rover (above) — severe, rocky, dry, empty, with no visible signs of life.  It was a part of the Mojave Desert near Spring Mountain, just past the outskirts of Las Vegas, in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

We were myself, my sister and her two kids Harry and Nora, just arrived for their annual Dream Vacation in Las Vegas.  Harry and Nora's dad, a film editor, sometimes known as the hardest working man in show business, is almost always on a job during their summer vacation, so my sister brings them here for an escape.

Rounding a bend on the twisting desert road we saw what we were looking for — a kind of mirage in the midst of the desert, Lake Las Vegas, an artificial lake at the edge of Henderson, Nevada, a Las Vegas suburb.  It is surrounded by green swards, most of which are golf courses, and by what look like cookie-cutter versions of Italian villas, most of which are condos.

We parked near a little “village” at the edge of the lake, near the MonteLago Resort.  This has shops and restaurants in a facsimile Italian lakeside town, next to a marina.  It was violently hot and we headed more or less directly to a restaurant by the water called Bernard's Bistro.  It was a genuinely charming place, somewhat upscale, and we had an exceptionally good lunch there.

This was the start of Harry and Nora's fifth summer visit to Las Vegas, and we'd wanted to see something we'd never seen before, something très Vegas, which means très weird but also weirdly amusing.

We saw it and were content.

Folks who don't live in the New York City area might not know about the High Line — a stretch of elevated railroad tracks in lower Manhattan.  It used to carry freight trains into Manhattan terminals but stood abandoned for years and attained a kind of mythical status, because it became overgrown with vegetation and constituted a bit of wilderness in the middle of the city.  It was officially inaccessible but became familiar through photographs taken of it and the stories of people who sneaked up to have a look at it themselves.

There are benches that rise up from the ground in sleek fashion.  There are big lounge chairs made of dark wood.  There's a space with auditorium seating that looks out over 10th Avenue.

The palette is modern grey and dark brown
. . . with weeds carefully placed growing in patches here and there.


Everything is very well thought out and all . . . perfect.


I walked all the way to the far end and then went back to the middle and took a seat on one of the lounge chairs.


And as I sat there . . . I became incredibly sad.

The High Line is like one of those beautiful old historic factories that is converted into a clean modern luxury loft.


The modern sleekness has cleaned all emotion from the place.  No mystery — no possibilities.


It's all too perfectly designed, too purposefully placed . . . everything —
every “haphazard” weed, every loose pebble.  Even the concrete slabs on
the ground have perfectly placed irregularities.  All of it makes it
impossible for me to make the space . . . my space.  I can't connect with
it personally.


I can't do anything in the space that the architects and designers haven't already prepared for.

Why can't something just be, age and become whatever it is it is
becoming?  What's with face lifts and boob jobs?  What's with “luxury”
condos?  What's with the High Line!  Another place for people to make
money now I suppose.  (There are bars and restaurants opening up all
over the neighborhoods near the High Line, and up on the High Line, too.)  Personally I like a really nicely aged
steak rather than a fresh cut.


It is so sad to me . . . yet another thing in New York that has come to ruin . . .

Jae has made subsequent visits to the High Line and modified his opinion of it somewhat.  New Yorkers are appropriating it and making it their own.  That's what New Yorkers always do.  When Central Park opened in 1873 one of its designers, Frederick Law Olmstead, wanted visitors to use it exactly as he imagined it being used — strolling its paths in a civilized manner, serenely admiring his vision of nature.  He didn't want bars or bandstands or ball fields — anything that might attract or appeal to the baser natures of the great unwashed.

That didn't last long.

So there's hope for the High Line, too.  Perhaps Jae will write a follow-up report on the progress of its re-incorporation . . . as a people's park.

From the 1950s, I think.  Very cool.  Paris swings, but old lady Seine . . . she just keeps rolling along.

In 1972, when I was 22 years-old, I crossed the Atlantic for the first time, to London, where my sister was living at the time.  I went with the rest of my family, including my grandmother, and my friend Cotty Chubb.  We stayed in a rented house near Hampstead Heath.

We arrived at night and first thing the next morning Cotty and I headed straight to Bunhill Fields by the Underground.  We would have taken the Edgeware-Morden line from Hampstead to the Old Street station, which is just a short walk from Bunhill Fields.  At one end of the journey or the other we found a florist and bought three yellow roses to lay on the grave of William Blake, who is buried in Bunhill Fields with other dissenters from the Church Of England orthodoxy.

In 1965 many of the grave markers in Bunhill Fields (whose name is derived from Bonehill Fields) had been removed to create a small park with a lawn — the “fields” of old have become a very small bit of enclosed space.  Blake's grave had been unmarked until 1927, when a small stone was erected over it.  In 1965 the stone, which lay within the area of the planned park, was moved to a location near the intersection of two paved pathways, which is where we found it and where it remains today, about 20 yards from Blake's actual resting place, in a once-again unmarked spot on the present lawn.  (Recently the actual gravesite was re-discovered and there are plans afoot to put a new marker there.)

We laid the roses on the pathway in front of the marker we found.  “One for me,” I said, “one for thee, and one for you know who.”  I wasn't quite sure what this meant, but it allows me to say today that I laid a rose on Blake's grave for you, whoever you are.

Cotty and I visited several other Blake sites in London, and took a train down to Felpham, on the south coast of England, to see the cottage where Blake lived for a few years and where he wrote Jerusalem.

From the train station in Felpham we took an enclosed double-decker bus to the cottage.  It was just before Christmas.  In the front seat of the second deck of the bus was a little girl of about 5 years of age, sitting with her mother.  The little girl was singing, in a sweet, piping voice, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!”

In my last post I goofed on all the conflicting stories surrounding the mystery of Governor Mark Sanford's whereabouts.  Little did I know that the truth behind the incident would prove more surreal than I could possibly have imagined.  The guy was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” down in Argentina, of all places, and having himself a good cry in the bargain.

I don't mean to be too flip about it, though.  If you watched the poor fellow's press conference you basically saw someone having a nervous breakdown on national television.  Sanford strikes me as a different sort of man from John Ensign, whose adultery and contrition over same seemed purely cynical, and which I parodied in an earlier post.  Ensign doubled his mistress's salary while they were sleeping together, then fired her when the affair was over.  His “backstreet romance” was more like transactional sex — like prostitution.

I see Ensign as one of those politicians who enjoy using the law to force their morality on others but feel no corresponding obligation to live up to that morality themselves.  This is less about hypocrisy or ordinary human frailty than about pathological arrogance.  Eliot Spitzer, on the other side of the political spectrum, seemed to suffer from the same syndrome — relentlessly prosecuting prostitution in courts of law while employing the “services” of a prostitute in private.

John Edwards, by contrast, didn't pontificate about other people's morality — his adultery seemed to proceed from narcissism of an extremely advanced variety.

Sanford's case feels more complex, and interesting.  He's clearly still in love with his Argentinian bombshell, if by love we mean the pussy-fever associated with a new and transgressive sexual relationship.  Some failing in the right-wing Christian culture he inhabits seems to have left him unprepared to deal with the power of that fever — you get a sense he was blindsided by it, and is still reeling from the blow.

Perhaps there is something about the rhetoric of his culture that minimizes the exaltation of sexual love, relating it too exclusively to law and duty, downplaying its delirious joy, leaving the members of that culture defenseless when the real thing emerges or re-emerges in their lives.

When it comes to adultery, I'm agin' it — I don't see it as a “pecadillo” but as a profound, existentially crippling moral failing . . . yet at the same time less about the sex involved than about a violation of trust that can almost literally rip the heart out of a partner.  No amount of personal pleasure or fulfillment can justify it, but you need to have a healthy appreciation of just how much personal pleasure and fulfillment it can deliver to know what you're up against when it presents itself.

I'd like to apologize to the readers of this blog for my unexplained absence between the 16th and 18th of this month, when nothing was posted here.  The truth is that I went off hiking by myself in the Red Rock National Conservation Area, just outside Las Vegas — because I needed some space to clear my head.

While in Mexico, I was able to put things back into focus, reorder my priorities and set ambitious new goals for the future.

There's just something about the pure air of the Canadian Rockies that sharpens a fellow's perspective.  Up in that high country, far above the worries of the world, I was lucky enough to run into my old friend Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina, who was having a little “time out” of his own.  We fished for trout in a sparkling brook, cooked up our catch over a crackling fire under the stars and commiserated about our crushing responsibilities.

It helped, I can tell you.  As we brought our little boat about in a brisk gale in the Bay Of Biscay and headed towards the shelter of the harbor at Santander, we felt ready to resume our burdens.

What's happening in Iran right now makes me ashamed that I didn't take to the streets in 2000, along with hundreds of thousands of other Americans, when the Supreme Court appointed George Bush President, in lieu of counting all the votes actually cast in the election — the most disgraceful act committed by that august body since the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

All Americans should have been willing to die rather than accept the selection of its leader by a small group of “wise elders” rather than the election of that leader by the votes of the people.  We lost an incalculable measure of our honor as citizens of a great republic when we failed to respond to the Supreme Court's grotesque violation of the Constitution.