Si Jeunesse Savait, Si Vieillesse Pouvait...

Did a tour of magician and spiritualists’ gravesites at Green-Wood yesterday afternoon.

Thing is there really aren’t very many magician and spiritualist gravesites in Green-Wood. Plus the young woman who was leading the tour was truly awful, one of those Millennials whose overly doting parents brought her up to delight in her own incompetence as though it was some kind of selling point.

“I used to be an elementary school teacher in France,” she said, tossing her honey-colored hair back with a fingerless glove-clad hand. The fingerless glove was artfully imprinted with hand bones. “But I was very bad at it because I wouldn’t count the kids, so I was always losing them.”

She flubbed the identification of Athena – a favorite Green-Wood tomb marker of mine because she appears to be giving the Statue of Liberty a Zeig Heil salute – and read from Mollie Fancher’s Wikipedia entry. (Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, was a Fasting Girl.)

Still, any excuse for tromping around Green-Wood is delightful, and it was a gorgeous day yesterday.

The other people on the Magic Tour were all 20-somethings, straight out of the Girls B-roll, and so I experienced for the first time what I imagine will be an increasingly common experience for me, the utter invisibility of age. They were so uninterested in me that it was as though I didn’t exist. I resented this terribly even while I tried to talk myself out of it. After all, I was young – once – and old people had been just as invisible to me as I was to these young people now. That’s just the way American culture rolls.

But I didn’t like it at all.

There wasn’t even a single person who would have been receptive to my murmured aside, See that statue over there? That angel? She’s holding her hands in exactly the same position that the Magician does in the Arthur Waite Tarot!

Of course, I am old – 62 is not the new 40 unless you have the money for a facelift. I’m always shocked when people offer me seats on the subway, but I have to assume they’re reacting to visual cues.

It’s very odd, this aging process.

I never thought much about it when I was younger.

I suppose, given my upbringing, I always assumed I’d be dead by 40.

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The coffee shop I went to for my last Bad Internet Date had a Free Book shelf, where I picked up a book called Nobrow – mostly because I had a slight acquaintance with its author, John Seabrook, a million or so years ago.

Nobrow turns out to be a rather fascinating read about the rise of Tina Brown at The New Yorker and the concomitant erosion of what used to be called “taste.”

From Wordsworth to Rage Against the Machine, art created for idealistic reasons, in apparent disregard for the marketplace, was judged superior to art made to sell, Seabrook writes. He rightly identifies this as a type of class warfare. I’m inclined to agree.

Of course, Seabrook’s own writing style – quoting Kant in one sentence and Snoop Dogg in the next – is an example of that fusion between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” cultures that he dubs “nobrow” (a rather ugly term, unfortunately, that was never gonna accrue Buzz. The book was published over a decade ago, and I don’t think it sold well – in part, I’m sure, because of its unwieldy title.)

Anyway, it’s pretty interesting. I’ve been musing on it a lot as I ponder that article about gamers more.

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Also, snow is now predicted for Wednesday. RTT and I are actually flying out early Thursday morning – much cheaper tickets – when the storm is predicted to have cleared, but, of course, now I’m nervous about the whole fucking trip and wishing I could just click my heels and be magically transported to where I want to go. When will they invent that technology?