TIGHTEN UP

I've been thinking about the past year but I can't remember it. It seems like the year before, continued the next page (like the second sheet of a pad that still holds the impressions of the message written on the sheet above, now torn off and stuffed into the purse of the woman gone off to meet the man who's been threatening her over the phone while the detective rushes in to read the near invisible traces she didn't know she'd left). Looking through my notebook, the first thing I have written in 1971 is from one of Jill Johnston�s Dance Journal columns: �Deja vu is the form of any utopia. The global village would be a beautiful bore of the already seen. Until then we must enter the keyholes and commit lurid and brilliant crimes without leaving a trace. Bergman�s Magician. Parsifal�s Lohengrin. Post Toasties� Lone Ranger. Surrealists� Fantomas. I have to refine my techniques. My timing is off. I�m tempted to wait and watch the effects. The perfect criminal is off the premises before he becomes a victim of his own gag.� The temptation of. course is to return to the scene of the crime again and again and if you haven�t left a clue, a fingerprint, to create one. Leaving traces is compulsive; if Jill�s perfect crime is one spectacular gesture, what if no one noticed it? It�s no good to do it again so you drop a few clues maybe even recreate it again in another form. I confess. In my notebooks I�ve recorded other people�s gestures obsessively (Wednesday July 14: �B. pokes at me with his finger sweetly on the street and makes me think about him.�) but seem to erase myself as I go along. But the notebook exists; that�s a clue. This is a clue. Where�s the detective?

What I was trying to remember before I started researching my life (August 5: �Go over to Jimmy�s and watch Willie as a perfect statue, Egyptian but warm, half smiling.�), what I was trying to remember while I was watching Lee Remick and Lawrence Harvey on tv in Spain thinking they are being pursued for insurance fraud — clues and counter-clues — was very simply what records have come out this past year and which of them will fit comfortably into a ten best list. At first I couldn�t find more than four that I cared about, then it seemed impossible to narrow the list down to ten. It remains a mess of scribbles in two different inks but it�ll probably come out pretty much like this: