the eagle has landed

I am back in the United States for the first time in little over a year, the longest I have ever been out of the country. Yesterday, while I was having sushi at Nana on 5th Avenue in Park Slope with S. and A. and her new girlfriend, I saw a woman walking out wearing a T-Shirt that said, "Free Katie." I asked who Katie was, and they laughed: "Katie Holmes, as in free her from Tom Cruise."

I suppose it will take some time for me to be less fatally out of it. I arrived stateside in Boston where I spent a little less than 9 hours before taking the train down to New Haven. I stayed in a friend's apartment in Cambridge while she herself is in Paris this month. I was immediately disoriented by hearing so many American accents, especially the special cadences generated by people just shy of 20 on cell phones. And I realized that everyone wears flip-flops here and that they make a rather disgusting sound I never noticed before. When I emerged from the T stop at Harvard Square I got a whiff of that inexplicable smell of shit that seems to waft over the area in the summer, and I was glad I was moving on pretty quickly.

Prior to this visit I have only been to New Haven three times in the last 10 years. It certainly looks well for the wear, and after a breathtaking tour of the Yale University Art Gallery and some work at the positively palatial Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I found time to wander around the Yale campus a little. My jet lag contributed to my feeling under water, but it was an uncanny experience passing by Louis Lunch, Anchor Bar, Naples Pizza, the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, the Yale Women's Center, Book Trader, the Yankee Doodle, even Toad's Place (where, during two of my three previous visits this past decade, I saw Built to Spill and Guided by Voices perform). Everything looked fixed up and pretty, and anything that wasn't was under renovation to get there.



The only moment when I recalled how depression was my daily sustenance when I lived in New Haven came when I went to visit the York Square Cinema. When S. and I first became friends, we saw Hight Art and Buffalo 66 there together. That movie house was, without a doubt, the birthplace of my cinephilia. And now it is closed. I stood there silently, stunned but not surprised; the last thing to play there was apparently The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, whose poster hung, faded to nothing but its blue tones, in the front display case.

But on the whole, America - more specifically, all the sites of my America - has been a pleasant surprise. At dinner last night, I don't think I have laughed so hard all year. Prompted by my bewilderment at the "Free Katie" T-Shirt, S. and I were in tears as we recounted our viewing of the Cate Blanchett/Katie Holmes vehicle The Gift at least six years agao, and at A.'s apartment, we laughed our guts sore listening to a recording of the "fiasco" episode of This American Life (link to right). It completely escaped me that one could download that program online, which I resolve to do the moment I return to Europe.