On Anderson Cooper's NewYear's Eve -- 2018

　


　

　

　

　

I’ve never liked the forced hilarity of New Year’s Eve. The festivities always seem more than a bit panicked and hysterical to me. Unlike most holidays, New Year’s Eve is efficiently simple-minded and stark: it’s about the passage of time and nothing else, and, as we grow older, time is the one thing that we realize that we will never have enough of. It’s like checking your fuel gage to learn that you are almost out of gas.

And 2018 was not particularly pleasant for me – my youngest son remains unwell, my wife is sad, my brother died, the old keep getting older and more frail and the future of the young seems to me increasingly clouded. The government is shut down and the country is afflicted by terrible spasms of rage and cruelty. The darkness seems to be gathering. So there doesn’t seem to be much worth celebrating on that arbitrary night at the beginning of the long winter when media and, even, our friends demand that we celebrate.

I made nachos for supper with crackers and crab dip and shrimp. We ate a salad that I garnished with strips of red pepper, mushrooms, olives, and some green onions. I cooked posole in the crockpot and had a tureen of the soup at midnight on the East Coast, eleven o’clock Central Standard Time and, then, I went to bed cold sober. An awful stench in our house has been tormenting my wife (I can’t smell it) and, so, she sleeps with the window cracked open and, as I lay amidst the cool sheets and covers, I could hear the village outside celebrating in its customary way –loud drunken laughter in the alley, fistfights under the streetlights, music throbbing from cars, sirens. The cold air hovered over my face and, when I closed my eyes, there was eidetic imagery – a short circuit of retinal neurons arcing to make sparks that gradually coalesced into a jovial giant, half-naked, a grand muscular fellow with a wreath around his brow above his ruddy face. The jovial giant grinned at me and tried to hand me a proclamation of some kind written on parchment but I couldn’t accept the document. The giant existed in one sphere and I was in another. And in the place in which I was sleeping, I had eyes and consciousness but no arms, no hands, no corporeal body at all and so I had nothing with which to reach out to take the parchment proffered by the laughing giant.

Earlier in the evening, my son and I began watching Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of the Wooden Clogs. When the movie was new, it played for many, many weeks during the cold winter of 1978 into 1979 at the University Film Society. At that time, I was finishing my last year of law school and, of course, I was very apprehensive about the bar exam and my prospects for employment. I had a girlfriend at that time, Tarin H–, and, one Sunday afternoon, we walked across the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University to see Olmi’s movie. The movie is very long and slow-paced and, I suppose, it was selfish of me to ask Tarin to attend a film of this kind. She liked Hollywood melodramas about young women who had to suffer for love. I recall seeing The Other Side of Midnight with her in Hopkins, the suburb where she lived in an old house occupied, on its first floor, by her grandma – a house that was at the edge of the Twin Cities as it existed in those days, poised against swamp and stony fields where raspberries were grown. She also liked comedies in which perky young women overcame obstacles to win the love of handsome young men. I was reasonably certain that she wouldn’t like The Tree of the Wooden Clogs but the local newspaper, the Star and Tribune said that the movie was perfect holiday-fare, emotionally satisfying and profound, and, therefore, mandatory viewing.

Things didn’t go well at the screening of the movie. Tarin was raised on an impoverished truck farm and, although her family had become very wealthy from selling its fields to real estate developers, her childhood involved much hard work raising vegetables. I think the movie’s representations of peasant life were, perhaps, too close to her past – or, more prosaically, she didn’t care to watch farm people butchering hogs and geese and tromping through snow and mud. She punched me a couple times in the shoulder and, then, went outside to stand in the lobby, enraged that I had made her sit through forty minutes of this stuff. Of course, I was very angry with her and we quarreled. It was a cold dark day and we walked back across the gloomy bridge – this was the place where people on campus committed suicide by throwing themselves into the icy Mississippi (a few years before the poet John Berryman had killed himself in that way.) On the bridge, there is a heated causeway. Tarin walked in the causeway but I walked outside along the rail overlooking the black water below. We met at the far end of the bridge and she refused to come to my apartment – instead, we walked to her car, arguing all the way, and, then, she drove alone back to Hopkins.

Because of that quarrel, I didn’t really have much interest in the movie. I bought a DVD of Olmi’s film six or seven years ago, but never watched it. After all, the picture is 177 minutes long. But Olmi had died this last year and, since 1978, I had grown to appreciate his other work, and so I thought that my son and I could watch the movie together on New Year’s Eve.

After about forty minutes, my son said that he didn’t have sufficient attention to watch the movie and that it was annoying to him. He left and walked back home. I watched about two hours of the film and, then, at ten o’clock switched channels to CNN to watch the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square with Anderson Cooper and the comedian Andy Cohen.

Anderson Cooper is quite literally square. He has a strangely box-like white head and his neck has always seemed to me abnormal, webbed or something. Cooper holds his head up very straight, as if his spinal vertebrae have been fused. He has piercing eyes and, I think, he’s a pretty good newscaster – when he interviews someone, half of the time he asks the obvious follow-up question that has occurred to the viewer and, then, might follow-up again with another cogent question. (For a TV newscaster, this equates to brilliance.) Cooper is gay although he doesn’t make that much about it. His sidekick in Times Square, Andy Cohen, also is gay. (He riffs more on his sexual preference than the stoic, and reticent Anderson Cooper.) It was pouring in Times Square and both Cooper and Cohen seemed to be drenched. Earlier, security guards had confiscated their umbrellas as potential weapons – this is life in post 9-11 America. Something was wrong with the sound, perhaps, the more sophisticated broadcasting systems had been shorted by the deluge. Both men seemed to be speaking to the audience through an antiquated telephone system and their voices seemed squawky and far away.

On public TV, there was black-and-white film of an old concert featuring Roy Orbison, a devilishly handsome and young Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits playing keyboard and looking very puzzled. The concert was pretty good and I turned to it during commercials on the CNN broadcast. My wife, Julie had gone to bed an hour before and the dog was sleeping in the corner of the couch. My daughter Angelica had gone out with her friend Keesha. The ball dropped in Times Square. People who looked like half-drowned water rats kissed one another. Anderson Cooper hugged Andy Cohen. Out of nowhere, the dapper Richard Quest, another CNN pundit had appeared – he was wearing a tuxedo and his glasses were fogged with raindrops and his hair slicked down on top of his head. The camera operators tilted their rigs to show sodden-looking fireworks reflected in big puddles of rain-dimpled water.

I went to the crockpot and got a tureen of posole – midnight in NYC, 11:00 in Austin. Angelica came inside from outdoors. She was very angry. Keesha’s adopted father was alone at the family house – his wife and daughters had gone to Tennessee for some reason, presumably, I suppose, to visit family. The father, who works as a butcher at a grocery store, was getting very drunk. He had sent out some texts that alarmed his wife and she had deputized Keesha to check on him. The man was dangerously intoxicated and, when Keesha went inside to speak with him, there was some kind of fight. Angelica sat in the car parked outside the house for an hour waiting for things to calm down. But things didn’t calm down. So Keesha brought her home.

Angelica said: "This is not how I wanted to spend my New Year’s Eve."

I ate my posole.

The TV flashed to a crowded bar in New Orleans where CNN anchors Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon were holding several dogs on their laps and getting drunk on champagne and tequila shots. This was CNN’s central standard time New Year’s s Eve. Don Lemon is also gay. The chemistry between the glamorous Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon was not good. In fact, it was awful to see.

CNN cut back to Andy Cohen, Cooper, and the drenched but stalwart Richard Quest. Cooper seemed a little drunk. Then, he said this: "I remember one New Year’s Eve a few years ago. It was just after my Dad had died and I was having a bad time." Cooper said that he had been very lonely on that New Year’s Eve and that, of course, he was not alone although he had felt that way. Then, he said that there were probably many people watching the show who were sad and lonely. "This is not always the best time of the year," he said. "But I want you to know that we’re here for you and things will be better."

Of course, Anderson Cooper was acknowledging something very obvious. The mere fact that the viewer was watching him in Times Square on New Year’s Eve was telling. Don’t you, my dear viewer, have some place else to go? Shouldn’t you be surrounded by your own friends and family? Why are you alone in a darkened room watching TV? Of course, you are sad and lonely – this is shown by the fact that you are celebrating New Year’s Eve by watching a CNN news commentator standing in a downpour in Times Square.

January 1, 2019