What Can B Sd: NYC: Remembrance of Things Not So Past

This blog—very intermittent though it may be—usually deals with irritants in the verbal gristmill. The present post, however, concerns a recent trip to New York that MM and I took, and the blog happens to provide a means of memorializing an enjoyable experience.

April 11, 2012
Let’s just briefly touch on how we were (just maybe) scammed by the ground transportation operators at LaGuardia. Once the van had crossed into Manhattan via the Queensboro Bridge, the driver snarkily commented that our paid invoice was from a different transport company, and, by the way, we’d have to pay him a larger fare for being taken to our destination.

The Dylan Hotel, on E. 41st St. between Madison and Park, is around the corner from Grand Central and a block and a half directly east of the main entrance to the New York Public Library. A somewhat pricey place worth the comfort and the convenience it afforded. Whether by bus up Madison and down Fifth or across town on 42nd St. or by subway on the no. 6 train running the length of the East Side, we settled for public transportation throughout our visit—a relative bargain in a borough now catering mainly, it seems, to the “1 percent.”

The hotel and the subway held a surprise. Never have I cottoned to the rudeness that many a New Yorker has seemed to regard as an urbanite’s normal behavior. But the members of the hotel staff were genial, expressing a genuine desire to be of help. And subway riders, especially ones in their teens and twenties, often exhibited a courtesy as unexpected as it was welcome.

Something else about the subway: it was clean. At least where we traveled, the subway cars weren’t festooned with graffiti; the stations didn’t have grimy scatterings of dropped papers and drink cups. Compared with the Paris métro or the U-Bahn in Berlin, though, the subway system in Manhattan is frumpy. The art deco tiling in most of the stations we went through is chipped and age-stained; the stairways look as the dank as they always have; many of the gloomy platforms are too narrow for the throngs debarking from and jostling onto the trains.

After more than a decade of not having visited the city, I was seeing it in something of a new light. I don’t want to credit Giuliani or even Bloomberg with noble impulses, but, for whatever reason, during their mayoralties Gotham has evidently evolved into a less gothic place. But I have to wonder what happened to the cardboard-box camps that haunted Midtown in the late nineties. It’s not as if the homeless can have been gentrified in the last several years.

****

For our first night’s entertainment, we went to the Frank Gehry-designed Signature Theater on W. 42nd St., between 10th and 11th Aves., to see a production of Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque. The play bombed when it was first staged in the 1980s. Perhaps Albee polished and tightened the script over the years, but it’s not hard to see why the play failed back then and didn’t now.

The setting is the living room of a suburban home where three couples regularly gather to drink heavily and banter acidly. The inauspicious start has the host insistently asking, “Who am I?,” in an attempt to coerce the guests and his wife to engage in a game of 20 Questions. The improbable answer to Sam’s existential question (“Who am I?”) is “Romulus and Remus.” The rationale for getting to this problem of identity emerges as Sam’s wife, Jo, talks with sardonic humor, at moments directly to the audience, about the helplessness and isolation she is experiencing as a victim of cancer now very near death, solaced only by morphine and drink. Though anxious despair and surges of pain shadow everything she says, her quick tongue is as benign as a scorpion's sting. Before her husband has to help her desperately to bed, she thoroughly humiliates one of the two other women.

After much noise and anger, quiet reigns. Enter the lady from Dubuque and her aide-de-camp, Oscar. The audience began to applaud at the sight of Jane Alexander, who, as the lady, put her index finger to her lips to silence the scene. A cool gesture made completely in character. End of Act I.

The next morning, the question of identity is insistently played up again as Sam angrily and repeatedly asks the strangers, “Who are you?” The lady from Dubuque, who calls herself Elizabeth, purports to be Jo’s mother, here to be with her daughter in her final hours, but this is transparently a fiction. Elizabeth is Death the comforter. Oscar, as played by Peter Francis James, is a tall, lithe, very light-complected black man whose crisp wit and smiling combativeness serve as a foil to the dark, almost leaden repartee that makes up most of the dialogue. Jo is indeed eased into quietly expiring; Sam is left in anguished limbo.

What transports the play is the acting, with Laila Robins, as Jo, all too lifelike in her dying.

****

The next day (4/12), we went to the Museum of Modern Art in its redesigned, rebuilt quarters, which we hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure why at the time of its opening feelings were so mixed about the new interior; it’s not striking in any way except that MoMA looks much larger than it was. And considering the hordes of people bumping up against each other in the central halls, on the stairs and escalators, and in the different exhibition areas, extra space is in fact needed. But it’s a challenge to take a contemplative view of art amid a Times Square bustle.

As I was standing in front of a painting by Kasimir Malevich called Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack, a gamin of a girl—pencil-thin legs in skin-tight jeans, pink fluffy vest, frizzy auburn hair—pointed at it and exclaimed, to no one in particular, “J’aime ce tableau!”

Even though MoMA remains a wonderful repository of art from the first half of the twentieth century, what it currently has on exhibit thins dramatically from midcentury onward. Among the missing were de Kooning and Diebenkorn, which made MoMA seem a mausoleum of an avant-garde receding into the hoary past.

What we (or at least I) most liked about MoMA was looking in or out at architectural spaces and shapes. I had never before paid much attention to what surrounds the museum.

****

The evening of the 12th, we traveled south to Bleecker St. to visit a place in some respects the opposite in spirit to MoMA: Le Poisson Rouge. For the last several years, I’ve repeatedly read in the NY Times amazing accounts of musical performances at LPR, which opened in 2008. Almost nothing appears to be out of bounds here: classical (from far in the past to the very present), indy rock, hip-hop, folk, jazz, hybrid genres . . . The stage can’t accommodate a large number of performers, so nothing orchestral will likely be presented.

You go down a flight of stairs into a dark, intimate space with lighting bathing the stage in softly psychedelic red and blue. People can sit right by the edge of the stage at picnic tables with eight chairs apiece. There are smaller tables in the middle of the space, and a softly lit bar runs the length of the back wall. Besides traditional bar eats, the menu offers fusion cuisine. I had chicken satay with an excellent peanut sauce and shared MM’s large plate of nachos and melted cheese with several dips. The serving of food and drinks went on through the whole performance—with hardly any audible clatter or clink.

The evening was a celebration of the composer David del Tredici’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had chosen to buy tickets for this occasion only as a way of experiencing Le Poisson Rouge, having not heard any of del Tredici’s music and knowing basically that he was daring enough to be a writer of tonal music at a time (the 1970s) when serious composers were determined serialists. The pieces were the “Felix Variations,” played by del Tredici’s nephew Felix on trombone; del Tredici’s Second String Quartet; and his “Field Manual,” a cycle of songs performed by a soprano and a baritone backed by a compact group of six instrumentalists. The lyrics to the songs were poems by Edward Field, who along with the composer was gleefully on hand. At least a couple of the songs underscored one other thing I knew about del Tredici: that as a gay man he’s no shrinking violet. One could surmise that a fair number of the audience members were gay; del Tredici’s companion was a tall young man sporting a spiked dog collar to which a leash was attached.

Though the music was engaging, each piece could have made a stronger impression at a shorter length. The performers clearly enjoyed themselves—even the violinist of the Orion Quartet who twice couldn’t suppress a burst of coughing as he fiddled. The soprano, Courtenay Budd, had a clarion voice, and the percussionist, who drummed, tapped, pushed, pressed, triggered, buffeted, plunked, malleted, stroked, fingered, fumbled, and percussed a dozen different devices, was nothing less than a prestidigitator.

****

On Friday the 13th, we first walked down Madison to visit the Morgan Library. The best of what was on exhibit was a collection of art and artifacts portraying animals, from Roman times to the near present. Nothing stuffy about this stuff, especially the sketches and book illustrations of bears and elephants, rabbits and frogs, fish and fowl. Another exhibit area was devoted to Dutch prints and etchings from the age of Rembrandt; a bit stuffy, that. And the third exhibition had on display drawings by Dan Flavin, a sculptor specializing in colored fluorescent light; two puzzled viewers concluded that the sketches must have meant a lot to the artist.

We ate lunch in the library’s atrium café and were entertained by members of our species.

Then we traveled up Madison to the Whitney to see its Biennial 2012 show, which had been enthusiastically reviewed in both the Times and the New Yorker. The whole of the museum was given over to specially selected art of the last eight to ten years, much of it multimedia in nature. Little of it, though, seemed inspired. Big on concept, short on execution. Back when, Marcel Duchamp may have been coy about sophisticated art jokes, but even his sleek urinal suggests he cared about the materials he worked with. At the Whitney, it was hard to suppose that the physical substance of their art means much to the chosen biennalists: the message was the medium.

Marcel Breuer’s bunker-like design of the Whitney feels sadly tired forty-some years after I first encountered it. As a college freshman assigned to write on the experience of visiting the Guggenheim and the Whitney, I thought Breuer’s building made art transcendent whereas Wright’s made art secondary to what housed it. I had especially liked the Whitney’s wedge-shaped windows as a discreet way of opening the museum to the outer world and making the city part of the art. On the occasion of the Biennial 2012, I still enjoyed the framed glimpses outside and took to making pictures of the surrounding buildings. In one room, though, a guard stopped me, warning me that, as I pointed the camera outside, I couldn't photograph inside.

For dinner on the 13th, we walked from the hotel to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. The noneater of seafood settled for a roasted half chicken and the endless fascination of watching people eat, drink, and be merry. The other member of our party was easily persuaded to try a platter of four kinds of oysters, with three of each. She was wholly absorbed in the comparative exercise and liked the largest best.

****

On Saturday the 14th, a brilliant, mild day, we visited another place developed in the years since I had last been in Manhattan: the High Line. Stretching from Gansevoort St. to 30th St. along the West Side, the High Line is a park built on an elevated spur where the New York Central Railroad long ago ran.

Transforming a railway path high above street level into a carefully landscaped and cultivated setting for plants and a slightly winding walkway has to have been an inspired feat. On the day we were there, ambling crowds made it a bit congested, but the mood was as bright as the sky. The park provided another perspective on Manhattan’s architectural facets, with a view of curious angles and twists that from the street would no doubt have gone unnoticed.

****

That evening, we went to the only fine-dining restaurant on our itinerary: Degustation, located on E. 5th St. It’s a tiny place that serves “small plates.” Most, if not all, of the seating is at a counter that surrounds the pocket-size area for cooking and finishing the dishes. You can see almost every step that goes into preparing what you are about to eat. Good theater. For us, though, the problem was that we were on our way to an actual theater and couldn’t linger for the full pleasure of dining there. MM had a filet of what dim memory tells me was sea trout; I had a delectable salad of several kinds of greens, the ingredients of which tasted as if just picked, followed by a tender morsel of boneless lamb chop surrounded by “spring vegetables.” We shared a rich crème brûlée-style dessert. Too soon, we had to rush on. A place to return to.

At the Classic Stage Company on 13th Street, we were in another compact space, about as small a professional theater as I’ve ever been in. The show was a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring actors we—who lead sheltered lives—had never heard of, including Bebe Neuwirth and Christina Ricci (known to practically everyone I’ve spoken to since). Surrounding the ground-level performance area were maybe eight rows of seats at stage right and stage left. We sat in the fourth row of the central seating area, with perhaps ten rows behind us. There was no stage set, just a tall, inward-leaning backdrop of paneled mirrors, black fibrous leaflike things strewn across the floor (perhaps to suggest leaves underfoot in a forest), and simple folding chairs. The eclectic costuming ranged from contemporary clothing to Shakespearean-era outfits. For an hour and a half, the action went apace without a break and held the audience’s rapt attention. At one point, when Oberon and Puck sit back to watch the victims of their tricks engage in a sort of play within the play, a stagehand opens from behind one of the mirror-panels and hands the King of the Fairies and his henchman drink cups with straws and boxes of popcorn. At another moment, when Puck is lulling the lovelorn couples whose lives he has mystified, he points to a member of the audience in the first row of stage left and asks her to carefully reach under her seat to pull out an instrument case, remove from it a ukulele, and walk over to him to hand him the uke. It was done with aplomb--and no suggestion of having been staged. The action reaches such an air of closure as Oberon and Titania poetically reflect on what has occurred that when the lights went up, we assumed the performance was over. Several people left, and we were about to do so ourselves when we heard the stage manager say to people near the entrance that the show would resume in five minutes. Of course, we hadn’t yet seen the famous play within the play, the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, which the mechanicals pull off with artfully staged clumsy earnestness and good humor. Even though the second act (which was actually Act V) came across as largely an epilogue, the performance as a whole was satisfying. Shakespeare was alive in Lower Manhattan.

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The last day of our visit, 4/15, we spent a good part of the time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The most special of the exhibits there was made up of relics from the earliest recorded period of Egyptian art: wonderful scraps of animal shapes and female figurations. After we had an excellent pair of salads in one of the cafés (exemplifying how often we had eaten well in the city throughout the week), we moved on to an underpublicized and undervisited part of the showcase: the Met’s own collection of art from the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Some fine pieces by de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombley, Liechtenstein, and Kiefer. And beyond the 1900s, marvelous miniatures by Amy Jennings (too small to be photographed with my point-and-shoot) and a stunning wall-size portrait by Jenny Saville.