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What is it about death? What is it about dying young? Beauty, brilliance, and promise cut short, gone way too soon? Why does the loss throw us into a confounding sadness and endless questions? Banal, existential to the just plain tabloid. The whys and the what ifs.

He was blond and built yet defied cliched stardom routes. His portrayal of the cinematic square-jawed, mono-drawling Western hero embodied every celebrated big-screen tradition then threw it out the window unto the faces of Rev. Phelps and his ilk and our own closeted biases in HD-colored heartbreak. The fact that he was chosen to play the Joker, a role immortalized in stone by Nicholson speaks volumes on his gifts. Many people were enamored by him as the golden boy in 10 Things or A Knight's Tale but I chose to remember him on the silver screen as the tragic Southern boy, the loving and unloved son in Monster's Ball. Or far better as just him as the head of one beautiful young family running errands on the streets of New York caught for posterity by nosey paparazzi lenses.

For most of us he might be the last person we expected to be in the six o'clock news rolled out in a gurney, wrapped in a body bag so early into a new year, a blooming career, parenthood. Just early on in general.

Heath Ledger, actor, leading man, lover, artist, son and father is dead. To paraphrase a quote about another loss of another golden Wunderkind (this time from music), we have barely begun to grasp how much he shall be missed.

one early blustery new york morning

Towards the corner of 41st and 5th, a few paces from the New York Public Library and a block away from fashionable Bryant Park, in a huff of feminine emergency to look for the nearest drug store, I literally stumble on this metal and concrete revelation. And this is just one of the thousand reasons I am helplessly, irrevocably in-love with New York. 

Click on the title or image to get the big picture.

from my table at the reading room

from my table
Originally uploaded by cjbando

The hotel is littered by white folk with the air of entitlement of the upper middle class.

The elegant middle-eastern concierge and the chic, skinny black girl at the desk do not seem to question my being there. But a lone girl checking into a Midtown NY literate-hipster hotel for a night can pique curiosity anywhere one goes be it Cauayan or Manhattan.

Concierge guy goes on to instruct me in all his cosmopolitan metrosexual conciergerie discretion about the rules of the hotel: no smoking... something about me AND my guest... Ooh-la-lah! How very clandestine. He proceeds to ask me wether I am there to shop and I say just to get away. That's not a bad reason at all he says.

I glanced to my left. Two tables away I see Elijah Wood in all-black and a faux hawk sipping espresso like the rest of us civilians. For a minute I thought he has fallen off one of the Tolkiens like an errant bookmark. Trust the fates who take delight in my constant punked state to set my token celebrity sighting in an NYC hotel called the Library Hotel to be Frodo Baggins.

The well-dressed white folks do not appear to wonder about my presence among them or are just good in hiding it like they always do. Perhaps it's due to the buggy eyes of my '07 fall-winter Miss Marc hobo or the DKNY bubble of polar bear and squirrel-- a welcome reject I have snagged from some red-neck outlet store but sshh, don't tell. Sometimes one need not dress to kill, just armed and camouflaged for survival. Natural selection.

A cute staffer of gay-boyfriend material approaches to inform me that my room is finally ready. I stuff my iBook into my backpack, grabbed my annoyingly necessary winter garb. Genetics is destiny and ones claim to the midoclorians, I thought as I flash him my Melki smile.