What’s The Buzz ?
Corner of E 22nd and Broadway, NYC, November 26, 2012
Posted on November 26, 2012
I meet up with Kalypso near the Flatiron building which is where I was standing that monday afternoon when I was early and we had not yet spoken about her pilgrimage to Disneyland. As I stood looking up at the 8th wonder of this world a cop walks past me, slows down, looks up, and then turns to me and says, “I thought someone was about to jump.” We chuckle a little nervously and I tell him that I never actually took the time to study at the building and he stands with me for a moment and strains his neck and says something like, “You’re right, there are details there, in the stone, that I never saw before.” We shake hands, and I turn to catch the eye of the Empire State building that I am saving for later, as I remember asking B. what it was like to go right up to the top and he said, “It’s high.” Another one of his Haikus for something that I play pretend to understand. We sit, Kalypso and I in a restaurant nearby afterwards and we speak about the time she saw Barbara’s last concert in Paris and when everyone started to sing after she left the stage, “Dis, quand reviendras-tu?” as we shiver in the presence of what Robert would summarise thus: alors ça, c’est du serieux.
Read more from Miriam Aziz – The Artist is at Large http://miriamaziz.wordpress.com/
We’re gathered here today to commemorate the time I went to 
Rendez vous at the Hôtel Amour in the 9th for a working breakfast that passes without incident but for the fact that I confuse Chile with Argentina as we speak about the rule of law as games of hide and seek. P. just in from Buenos Aires talks about a law paper that I am feigning interest in as ever since he mentioned the tango performance he saw, my attention is a disordered disarray of trade deficits. All work and what’s with the no-play date that this week turned out to be? Paris? City of Lights and Je ne regrette rien? I start to stifle a giggle that I disguise as a yawn, hoping that even though I have been here for a week, I can still get away with that wonderful excuse called jet lag or décalage horaire. P. starts to explain how to get to Charles de Gaulle airport and I could not care less as I am thinking, maybe I’ll just get a cab…you know, just stride out onto the street and stick my arm out as the understudy to the Empress of the Upper East Side. P. looks terrified and says that I will be ruined if I get caught up in les embouteillages and so I follow his precise instructions and somewhere in some metro station between here and there, I come across a group of garulous Russian musicians, all 20 of them, playing music that try as I might, I could never live up to. But gladly would I face that music and dance, only too happy to oblige. But that was before Sasha, that hiatus time of intransigent insouciance before the brutal before my first coffee awakening one monday morning weeks later when he picked me up to take me to a dental appointment to remind me of how a man must – not may – accompany a woman. As Sasha drives off, abandoning me to the sorry state of affairs that will compose the rest of my life après Sasha at the corner of Park and 57th Street, I realise, that we will never always have Paris, this Russian cab driver and I. And you can look that story up by author, title, genre, whatever it takes, it’s all the same: Tragedy. 
