Crazy Stable

As regular readers are aware, the inhabitants of the CrazyStable turn devotedly to the New York Times for guidance in matters zeitgeist-related. I am grateful to report that the Times' music critic and hip-hop specialist, Kelefa "I Love Everything" Sanneh, has provided us with a succinct—nay, eloquent—New Year's resolution for our home-improvement efforts. Stay with me, here; I want you to relish this in context.

The mournful Mr. Sanneh reports on the untimely hotel-room demise of Mr. Pimp C, half of a rap duo called UGK (short for Underground Kings), just after the release of the duo's "great" double album and "sublime" single, "Int'l. Players Anthem."  Over to you, Kelefa:

"His bereaved musical partner, Bun B, gave a handful of eloquent interviews, trying to explain what he had lost, what fans had lost.

'I appreciate the concern,' he told Vibe. 'But I wouldn’t ask anyone to stop their life, because Pimp would’ve wanted us all to keep grinding.'"

Straight-faced but misty-eyed, the critic concludes: "If you’re looking for a two-word motto for hip-hop in 2007, you could do worse than that: 'Keep grinding.'"

Rather than conjure up my usual insanely ambitious list of projects for the new year, I have decided to heed the advice of the oracular Bun B. We will keep grinding, literally and figuratively:

* We will keep stripping paint, inch by tedious inch.

* We will keep busting up cement in the "garth garden", inch by...see above.

* We will put doorknobs back on when they fall off.

* We will forge ahead with our modest plans to repaint some rooms, like Child's (which still sports its gender-neutral pre-natal paint job) and the main hallway (still flamboyant as the lamented Mr. Pimp C in its "shrimp-bisque bordello" hue).

Sometime next year, a modest windfall might or might not permit more ambitious plans, like a new roof or exterior shingling. We will not look that far ahead, however. We will keep grinding. It's what Pimp would've wanted.

Happy New Year!

My man Busta K

To distract myself from contemplating the destabilization of nuke-owning Pakistan, I dipped into the cyberpages of The New York Times' 'Home' section, and was amazed to see, like the birth of a star in a distant galaxy, the tale of a CrazyStable being born anew in the Bronx.

My heart goes out to Sherrie and Marcel Deans, who fell in love with this crumbling stone manse in the rough-and-ready East Tremont section of the Bronx, still inhabited by a little old man and his treasures and debris. They estimate a renovation cost of $200,000 but admit that they expect to go "way over budget." Yes, dears.

I was touched by the similiarities to our story:

• They were kind of scared, yet strangely compelled to buy. (Left, Sherrie ascending the stairs--boy, do we know the interior emotional state behind her expression.) 
• They have cats patrolling the property.
• They bought into an area still pre-gentrified and "edgy," and have so far found nothing but welcome (and some curiosity).
• They paid "a song" (although their song of more than $650K was a much higher song than ours--about five times higher).
• They still have weird original sconces. (Theirs have shades, ours don't.)
• They found a cool antique bottle. (Theirs was brandy, ours was beer--very apropos.)

And then there are the crucial differences:

• This lovely young couple seem to bring adequate financial resources to the challenge. As opposed to, um, no resources whatsovever except a capacity for self-delusion and frequent restorative naps.
• Their house is made of stone, not wood, so the Big Bad Wolf is less likely to blow it down.
• They have tons of original detail, much of it in pretty great shape. It includes pixie lamps--gosh, I'd kill for original pixie lamps.
• Their house is 16 rooms and 3,300 square feet; ours is 16 rooms and 2,000 square feet, which means their rooms are even larger than ours are. (Good luck heating that baby!)
• Their owner was a quaint and endearing old fellow; ours was a jerk.
• They have their original blueprints; our earliest set dates from the 1940s, by which time the house was already chopped up into its current weird configuration.
• Theirs is a landmark; ours was just an anonymous eyesore.
• And the most critical difference in these tales: The Deans are not moving in just yet. They have wisely deemed their new house 'uninhabitable.' So was ours, but we didn't have any options for doubling up on rent and mortgage payments. So we moved in anyway, and demolition started happening around us--sometimes spontaneously.

Good luck, kids. You'll need it. You'll have it.

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
I've been in love like you.
Be brave, young lovers, and follow your star,
Be brave and faithful and true,
Cling very close to each other tonight.
I've been in love like you.

--The King and I,  Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II

 Merry Christmas from "the old strange house that is our own," and thanks to a most excellent Lutheran blogger, Gene Edward Veitch of Cranach, for having posted this magnificent poem by G.K. Chesterton. In all my years as a GKC buff, I'd never come across it before. Enjoy, and come back in the New Year to say hello and tell me how it went in your strange old houses. 

The Wise Men

Step softly, under snow or rain,
    To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
    That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
    On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
    And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
    And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
    The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
    Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
    And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed...
    With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
    That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
    And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
    And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
    (... We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone...)
The Child that played with moon and sun
    Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
    The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
    And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
    And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
    That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
    To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
    Through the snow and rain.

                                     --G.K. Chesterton

Giotto, 'Adoration of the Magi'

Here is the single coolest place on earth to have been at sunrise this morning. This is Newgrange, a 5,000-year-old burial mound in County Meath, Ireland that is also a "passage tomb": A little window above the door allows light from the rising sun to reach the depths of the burial chamber at the precise time of the winter solstice.  It was only 40 years ago that the mound's brief and blazing secret was decoded, and now a lottery is held each year for the privilege of standing in the rock-hewn depths to await the distant sun's first rays as they penetrate the world of the dead.

No one knows how or why these mystical ancient engineers created this monument to the triumph of light over darkness and rebirth over death. But on this dreary winter solstice day, it's an impulse I understand. This Christmas season, our thoughts keep turning back one year to our Uncle Don's heroic struggle for freedom and joy as he approached his 94th birthday. Below is a portrait of Don in hospital weeks before his death last December. He is happy because we are with him, and have brought him a strawberry milkshake. He has made of his hospital bed a Newgrange, aligned and waiting for the light, and it has unerringly illuminated him. Happy Solstice.

S OMETIMES thou seem’st not as thyself alone,

But as the meaning of all things that are;

A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar

Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;

Whose unstirred lips are music’s visible tone;

Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,

Being of its furthest fires oracular—

The evident heart of all life sown and mown.

Even such love is; and is not thy name Love?

Yea, by thy hand the Love-god rends apart

All gathering clouds of Night’s ambiguous art;

Flings them far down, and sets thine eyes above;

And simply, as some gage of flower or glove,

Stakes with a smile the world against thy heart.

                         --Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'Heart's Compass'

After what seemed like a disproportionate amount of struggle, the CrazyStable is now festooned with one porchful of white "drip" lights, one big light-up wreath (synthetic) and one door wreath (organic). Tree is, as We Journalists used to abbreviate, "TK" (to come). It all seems a bit more daunting every year, and these fellow Brooklynites don't help matters.

Image: Joe Jordan, Brooklyn Paper

Yes, it's the annual spectacle of Dyker Heights, where tour buses and reporters converge every year to count the decibels and the megawatts generated on the lawns and McMansions of a corps of seasonally manic homeowners. We've "done the lights" when Child was small, and it was a ritual that reminded me of how a friend described Vegas: "Because you'll never believe it otherwise, you really ought to do it. Once." And, indeed, I feel no need to go back for more, although the holiday cheer was wacky and authentic in its bizarre way. These homegrown spectacle producers are a generous lot; they hire guys in Elmo suits, collect money for children's hospitals, give away popcorn and presents, all for "the kids." (Pity the poor sleep-deprived neighbor who tries to complain about living next to Santa's airstrip!)

 But every year, when Spouse and Child settle in raptly to watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas," I wonder: In the scene where Snoopy pimps out his doghouse, and Charlie Brown is horrified that even his trusty dog has succumbed to the commercialization of Christmas, do the Dyker Heights folks, er, "get it"? Or do they sit on their plastic-covered couches under their very large chandeliers and comment, "Hey, the doghouse looks better than that piece-of-crap tree, hahaha!" Just wondering how it plays in our more extravagantly decorated precincts.

Last night, Charlie-Brown-like, I flopped in a bout of depression, realizing that we would once again be hanging decorations on a House Very Much Unfinished--no transformation to tasteful pine-swagged and candle-lit Martha Stewart-land (and yes, one could debate whether that's a moral ground higher than Dyker Heights). Child and Spouse gathered around like the Peanuts gang and comforted me, Child assuring me that she liked our house much better than those fancy ones, and Spouse surprised me by having put up the magical blue lights in the kitchen. Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

Charlie Brown: I guess you were right, Linus. I shouldn't have picked this little tree. Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I really don't know what Christmas is all about. [Shouting] Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?

Linus Van Pelt:  Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.  [moves toward the center of the stage] Lights, please. (A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965)

Image: Animation cell ($495), Wonderful World of Animation Art Gallery