Albany Plus Lawrence of Arabia

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When I’m in one of my introvert phases, I forget how much I like road trips. In fact, my particular brand of introversion verges on agoraphobia. Why should I ever leave my pretty little room? I think. I’m safe here.

I’d never given too much conscious thought to how unsafe I was from the time my business fell apart until approximately a year ago, but, of course, I knew it. Knew how much my life depended on other people’s sufferance. Knew how close I was to that big refrigerator box under the bridge.

So now that I’m safe – or as safe as one can ever be in a world filled with hurricanes, bad drivers, random psychopaths, body cells that can start manufacturing cancers at any second, and other assorted Acts of God – it’s kind of like I don’t want to risk that safety by wandering too far away from it. Linda, the Good Witch. My cats. My games. My writing. The Maximon puppet Max sent me from Guatemala. My Fimo. My comfort zone.

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Nonetheless, over the weekend, I did a solo road trip to Albany.

I’ve become friendly with the folks who run WAMC, the public radio network we get hereabouts, which is run out of Albany. It’s an excellent public radio network because it carries a lot of local news. I continue to believe that the only news that matters, in a very real sense, is local news, globalization or no.

Of course, how you define that word, “local,” is up for grabs.

Anyway, they had a table at a little jazz festival sponsored by the city, so I volunteered to help staff it.

I had a good time.

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Albany is a very weird city, particularly if you approach it from the river. The Hudson is the heart of early European settlement of these parts. Drab little towns like Coeyman’s Landing have a number of distinctive stone buildings that date back to the 17th century. In the middle of the 19th century, Coeyman’s Landing was the place where the bricks used to make every brick structure in the northeastern part of the United States were made. These days, Coeyman’s Landing is a façade of crumbling and seemingly deserted buildings set down in what looks like the middle of a jungle.

A turn in the road and then, you’re in Albany. The bad part of Albany. South Pearl Street, where every building is a crack house. Continue driving up that hill and you find yourself among the dilapidated row houses where workers lived in the 19th century when Albany manufactured more than state government. Continue driving along the river, and you’re among the granite edifices that house the state’s similarly massive bureaucracies. Continue driving farther and farther from the river, you come across newer and newer structures. I suppose as recently as 50 years ago, this land was all apple orchards.

For me, New York City born and bred, it’s an odd strategy. I’m used to seeing buildings demolished and newer buildings constructed on older building sites. Here, they just abandon the old buildings when they erect new ones. Consequently, Albany is more like a concentric ring of cities, each occupying a different chronological strata. Kinda like Troy.



Came home and watched Lawrence of Arabia. On Netflix.

Lawrence is actually one of those rare movies that needs to be seen on the Big Screen. So much of the first half of the film is these long, panoramic shots of the desert in which what the viewer first mistakes as a mote of dust on the screen the film’s projected on finally resolves into an approaching figure. This doesn’t work at all on a TV or computer screen.

But, of course, I’ve already seen Lawrence of Arabia many, many times on the big screen. Starting when it was first released, and I was only ten years old. I developed a huge crush on the historical T.E. Lawrence – the homoerotic relationship between Lawrence and the fictional Ali (Omar Shariff), and Lawrence’s brutal misadventures at the hands of the Turks in Daraa were responsible for some of my earliest sexual stirrings. I read every Lawrence biography in the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

(My favorite was the Robert Graves bio, Lawrence and the Arabs. Lawrence and the acolyte of the White Goddess! Now, there’s a strange friendship! Although it wasn’t until years later that it struck me how strange. And these days, I’m inclined to think, Well, they were both Classicists, so maybe not so strange.)

Lawrence believed strongly in a Pan-Arab state, but he held no real power or influence with European leaders. In fact, the European leaders actively despised Lawrence for going native. He was undercut by the Sykes-Picot Pact, which divided the Middle East into Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. Places with political boundaries that made absolutely no sense to the people living in them. They did allow the creation of one pan-Arab state: Saudi Arabia. But that’s only because they didn’t realize how much oil was in the ground.

Lawrence of Arabia always reminds me of Bibbit. She was the only person I ever met who was as barmy about Lawrence as I am. When the Northgate showed a remastered cut of the film in 1980 or so, we dressed up in Bedouin costumes, took public transportation from Berkeley into the city, and stood in line for three hours for tickets, chanting, “Aqaba! Aqaba! Aqaba!”

Ah, Bibbit! I have tried and tried to find you. But you are lost.