Review: The Gift of Stones

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Waiting for Applause

        When Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin walked on stage at the start of a production of “Waiting for Godot” by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the crowd burst into applause. Later, when John Goodman and John Glover entered as the comic duo Pozzo and Lucky, the crowd similarly gushed. But when Matthew Schechter, the boy playing the aptly named role of Boy, entered, the crowd watched silently.
        I suspect the crowd didn't know what to do, and so it listened.
        “Waiting for Godot,” like other mid-century plays by Becket and others, is frustratingly untethered to what we know. Dialog is intellectual trackwork for a train that has left recognizable human experiences somewhere offstage. Familiarity has disappeared. It is nearly impossible, therefore, to make sense of the play in one sitting, and so, to engage the crowd, the actors must entertain.
        The result is that drama dies behind the disappearing chug of intellectual experimentation; acting turns to camp, and the play becomes a parade. Poignancy mostly vanishes, and we mostly fail to recognize the helplessness of Estragon and Vladimir’s situation because Gogo and Didi are flailing around so much—and isn’t Nathan Lane so funny when he makes that wounded pouty face?
        In my memory, Lane, Irwin, Goodman, and Glover risked no emotional vulnerability in their roles. They were alternately loud, caustic, risible, lonely, cowed, selfish, voluble, mocking, and more—and their performances offered easy recognition instead of depth. Even the loneliness, most of the time, seemed to evoke chuckles rather than sympathy. This makes for good fun, surely--and I enjoyed watching--but it misses the point of the play. It makes parody of satire.
        And so, we were taken for a joy ride. We give ourselves to the actors, because they are stars and we love them, and they make us laugh, even if we never completely understand their wandering and bickering. It reminds me of a passage from Don DeLillo’s 1992 novel “Mao II” in which Yasser Arafat meets with the press and public:

There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overgesturing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

The audience at “Waiting for Godot” was predisposed to enjoy the four main actors. Perhaps, like the crowd above, we even sought to please the performers. We cheered at the actors' arrival, laughed easily at their prancing, and swelled at their curtain calls.
        The boy, however, received no such treatment, and yet his performance generated the most genuine drama of the show—even if it was drama of different kind. The crowd hushed when he spoke. We craned our necks to see and hear him. Young as he was, the boy might have forgotten a line or grown anxious before the crowd. His small voice seemed a whisper next to Goodman’s booming baritone and Lane’s piercing tenor. We held our breath as he tread onstage next to the stars of our day, and we smiled for him when he departed without having missed a beat. Then we leaned back into our seats, our pulses returning to normal, and we waited for the next crack of Pozzo’s whip or whimper from poor old Didi so we could cheer the great figures performing a work whose title we still mispronounce and whose subject matter may be ripe for study but whose production, in order for it to be engaging, breezed over the very stuff that makes it rich.

Going Green

Heading back to places
Where folks hold you in good graces
And countryside of green
Keeps your lungs and spirit clean
Beats living in a town
Where the walls and weather keep you down.

On Helicopter Tours

        Don’t let network fear squads keep you down: helicopter tours are safe and fun!
        As part of an Adieu-to-New York City weekend back in June, I took a tour with Liberty Helicopters (yes, the same company involved in the midair collision), and it was spectacular. From liftoff (the transition from being drawn down by gravity to being borne up by suction) to cruising (gently vibrating around Manhattan—1,000 feet in the air!) to sharp turning (centrifugal force and non-horizontal horizons) to landing (the mundane return to friction-filled footfalls), the experience was enlightening.
        I only wish I had taken the camera away from my eyes and simply enjoyed the sensation a little more. As it was, I took many pictures. Here is a brief pictorial tour:

Liftoff!

Non-horizontal horizons

Cruising over downtown/Wall Street

Cruising past the 20s

A view through Times Square

George Washington Bridge and all points North

Yankee Stadiums, old and new

George Washington Bridge and all points West

Lady Liberty through the ceiling window of a heavily banking helicopter

Governors Island and Lower Manhattan, on the return to landing

Bartlett Falls

(photo source: http://www.northeastwaterfalls.com/)

        Just outside of Bristol, VT, the New Haven River has carved out a stone pool as clean as any quarry. The result is a perfect swimming hole. In college, we knew it as Bristol Falls, and it sports a fifteen-foot waterfall and several dozen cliff-jumping points. Earlier this summer, my wife and I visited, leapt from various heights, swam in the frigid (but crystal clear) waters, and settled on a rock atop the falls for a picnic lunch.
        By the time we had put down the macaroni salad, several dozen young local visitors had arrived and begun launching themselves from every horizontal surface surrounding the falls. They leapt from the twenty foot high ledge just next to the rushing cascade, they threw themselves from the ridges on either side of the swimming hole, they did back flips and swan dives, some climbed to a point at least forty feet above the water and, with running leaps, cast themselves into the air, splashing down full seconds after jumping.


        Populated primarily by boys ranging in age from five to the early twenties, the swimming hole offered a glimpse of growing up in rural Vermont. There was the group of devil-may-care senior boys who brazenly vaulted from any ledge at any speed and in any direction—frontwards or backwards. They took physically demanding leaps and executed them with deliberateness and sometimes, to our surprise, with a grace and choreography that suggested an appreciation of the beauty in a jump. Once, four of them performed simultaneous backward swan dives from four different points.
        There were also the freshmen-looking boys, just into their adolescence, exploring and assessing the different jumping points. They conferred with each other before leaping, sharing jokes to offset their awkwardness and sometimes cautiously talking themselves down off of ledges that the seniors, while affecting an air of nonchalance, seemed to pirouette from quite seriously.


        There were also the girls, anxiously stopping and starting, giggling and shrieking, looking for support from their friends and attention from their peers. They huddled together and then took off bravely, one by one.
        There were the overweight boys, too, three or four in number. They interacted little with the others. They swam more in the water and jumped occasionally, but more often they worked their way behind the falls and dove in, bobbing under the crashing cascade to resurface a few feet past the foam. A younger one with goggles like a carpenter’s mask sat in pools on one side, splashing around, watching the jumpers, clapping and encouraging anyone who felt intimidated by the height.


        Slightly further away, families coerced their young, single-digit aged children to leap from precipices low and high. Little boys with swimming trunks nearly half their own height catapulted themselves fearfully at first and then with vigor later on. Some parents jumped in as well, including an older man with spandex shoes, and a larger woman who took a handful of leaps from one side.
        The groups interacted little with each other, but there remained a safe, communal feel to the place. Divers from every point seemed aware of who was in the water where and when. Swimmers communicated between groups about imminent dives. Boys and girls waited patiently while one or another debated hurling him or herself from a ledge. Some shouted kind encouragement. Everyone stopped to watch and applaud particularly bold leaps. No one was rushed or jeered.
        I imagine this to be typical of hot days in Addison County: find the nearest swimming hole, test the limits of your bravery, and admire the daring of others. Every time we gaped at the launching point of the next jumper and shook our heads, we would say to each other, "No way!" and the leaper, likely as interested in the attention as the art, would catch our eyes and say, crisply and with a confident grin, "Oh yeah"--then fly over the falls like a leaf catching the breeze before floating downstream.

There and Back Again

• New York City (four years), New England Boarding School
• The Jury Box (two and a half weeks), Working Life
• The Altar (perfect day!), The Home
• New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (two weeks), The US of A
• Truck Rental Companies (250+ miles), Snowball
• Pullouts and Couches (two months), Our Own Abode
• Blog Absenteeism (too long), Blogger

Wedding Planning

Oy. It's been over a month. It may be over another month until the next one. I'm in full wedding planning mode... apologies for the radio silence!

Review: Better

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6896

Review: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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Inside Outsider Art

Morgan Monceaux, "John F. Kennedy" Source: New York Times

        Morgan Monceaux is a 63-year-old visual artist in Baltimore. He studied music in college, went to Vietnam, returned, battled depression and homelessness, worked at occasional jobs, and for a period lived by rooting through dumpsters. In 1990, he was struck by the idea of painting. Later that year, while living in a migrant shack by a rail yard in Southampton, near where he had found a job as a janitor at a bar, he walked past a gallery showing primitive American art. After looking in, he declared to the gallery owner, “I can do this,” and procured 40 paintings that he had recently, with no training, completed. Now, Monceaux has three works in the National Portrait Gallery, he has painted every president, and while he wasn’t able to purchase a furnace for his home until 2007, he appears to have found his groove. He has been profiled in the New Yorker, he has patrons in the art world, and he was featured in today’s New York Times.
        This is a great story. But is it about great art?
        This past January, I visited the Outsider Art Fair, hosted by Sanford Smith at 7 W New York. Outsider Art is like the long-lost child of the art world. It grew up on its own accord outside of the official avenues of culture: the schools, the galleries, the museums and institutions. It is art created for emotional, psychological, or other personal reasons (as opposed to commercial reasons), and inevitably, as with Mr. Monceaux, it brings with it a story; the term “Outsider Art” itself, a translation of the French term “Art Brut,” comes from French artist Jean Dubuffet’s exposure to art by inmates of insane asylums.
        As this might suggest, Outsider artists are unschooled, if not totally untrained. Some, like Monceaux, sprang to life when a pencil or paintbrush first reached their hands in their adult lives. Others, like Achilles Rizzoli, an architectural draftsman, transferred skills from alternate careers. And so, the aesthetic quality of Outsider Art is enormously subjective and varied, and the artists’ command of technique is often questionable. Nonetheless, the works are almost uniformly visually arresting: the images are frequently hallucinatory, their subject matter often dyspeptic. And yet the works typically demonstrate a great sensitivity to life—in concept, if not in execution. My best attempt at a visual summary is this: works by Outsider Artists appear to have been composed either without the use of a ruler at all, or solely with one. And the lack of any kind of straight line, or the overabundance of them, may also be a good indicator of the nature of the artists themselves. The compositions are fodder for dizzying psychological hypothesizing.

Arthur Klein, "Dog with Blue Legs" Source: www.echo.nl
        Great art, in my mind, has two elements: aesthetic appeal and intellectual content; it is pleasurable to the senses and it stretches the brain. (Note: This does not necessarily mean that it is happy; a tragic story can be beautifully told. Nor does it mean that it is esoteric; fundamental understandings, like why we laugh, can be the most enlightening.) Satisfying the senses and mind, great art compels us to engage and examine the human experience. Good but not great art aspires to this, but succeeds only in varying degrees. Other categories of art break down easily along these lines: cloying or commercial art most often gluttonously (or greedily) aspires to providing (or selling) only emotional animation or pleasure, academic art most often stimulates only the brain, and other self-righteous or self-indulgent art typically satisfies only one element or the other, but usually not both. Art with the highest cultural value is that which most engages our minds and our senses so that we better understand ourselves—our experiences, our emotions, our thoughts.
        Outsider Art, however, is not great art. Simply looking at it is frequently discomfiting; the execution of the work often reveals poor skill at composition or technique so that the artist’s intention is lost—like a man who hears a melody in his head and tries to play it on a guitar, even though he has never played before. The result is a clumsy mess of sound. Sometimes, however, the artist, through dogged persistence, puts so much time and energy into the work that it becomes remarkable simply because of the time it took. But even this, when looking at a canvass covered in scribbles, does not run very deep.
        What salvages Outsider Art is that the shadow of what is trying to be expressed is, for some consumers, not the subject of a work. Instead, it is the story of the artist. Henry Darger, for example, was orphaned and institutionalized as a child, and in his solitary adult life he produced hundreds of images and a 15,000 page single-spaced story. Stephen J M Palmer, prominently displayed by several dealers at the Outsider Art Fair, was a farmer in the Midwest who suffered a spinal injury and then produced hundreds of works from his bed during the remaining decades of his life. Achilles Rizzoli, mentioned above, lived alone with his mother. His meticulous works were only found after his death. The cultural value of these works lies in the stories of their creators. The works are reasons for telling their stories as much as, if not more than, they are meant as standalone objects. They are a pivot point for our consideration of the lives that devised them.
        But this confuses the role of art. Or, at the least, it mismatches mediums. If the story of a depressed laborer who finds solace in painting reveals something about introspection and artistic catharsis, then the story is best told through a narrative. The painting is a complement to the story, but not the story itself. Dealers are trading in the by-product--the paintings--which, by themselves, are often unpleasant. And so, historical context and biography, instead of enhancing works of art, are intended to excuse them. While compelling narratives certainly deserve their due respect, one has to decide whether or not they redeem a repellent painting.

Mose Tolliver, "George Washington" Source: Ginger Young Gallery
        But all is not scribbles and splash in Outsider Art. While between form and content it is form that is most often lacking, there are masterpieces of both. Still, among the great remainder of lesser works, there lingers a raw urgency and insistence. It is something visceral and untempered. While it hasn’t been refined by training, neither has it been confused by it. And if examination of human nature is the ultimate aim of art, then Outsider Art succeeds, if in a brutal way. Its creators often come from the margins of our society, and it is generally through contemplation of these extremes that we are best able to understand the middle.

Achilles Rizzoli, "Mr. & Mrs. Harold Healy Symbolically Sketched" Source: The Ames Gallery

Visiting New York; Visiting the Waldorf-Astoria

        I first began visiting New York when I was in college. I had rarely more than driven through the city, and so it had the allure of a foreign land—like a blank space on a map. During these early visits—visiting family friends for long weekends most often—I would inevitably at some point find myself somewhere in midtown with a few hours to kill. So, I would walk up or down Madison or Park or Fifth and just stop at whatever seemed interesting. I’d ride any unguarded elevators, open any unlocked doors, walk up or down any available stairwells, and talk to strangers and shopkeepers whenever it seemed reasonable. Once I found myself in a rare bookstore, and 45 minutes later I was flipping through a 1667 first edition Paradise Lost. Another time, I bumped into a gentleman on the street, and ended up, several hours later, sharing conversation with folks in a sitting room at the Knickerbocker Club. This could only happen in New York, and I’m convinced that to experience the broadest range of this city, we have to just go outside and walk around.
        A few days ago, I went out like this for the first time in a long time.
        Walking down Park Ave, I took a moment in front of the Racquet and Tennis Club and admired the Seagram Building across the way. It was early evening, and the white, rectangular ceiling lights lit up the insides of the skyscraper’s lower floors like a swimming pool with underwater lamps. The office day had just ended, and only a few men in white shirts and dark ties walked around reading stapled packets of paper. The illuminated offices bounded by the sleek, black building made its contents look like a series of stacked dioramas. For all of its perfect proportion and modernist aesthetic, the building always seems smaller in person than it looms in my mind.
        I was drawn to St. Bart’s church next. It was two blocks down, but as I approached, I noticed a tall Art Deco building behind it. It boasted ornate carvings and a tall, narrow body. I hoped for an observation deck, but was disappointed when the guard at the front desk said that there was none. Undeterred, I browsed the building’s directory, found a welcoming-sounding company (the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce), and asked if I could visit them. The guard called up and said, “There’s a man here who wants to speak to someone from Sweden” (which didn’t do my conversational work justice), and grudgingly directed me to an elevator. At the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, which is across the elevator bay from a Volvo office, there wasn’t much of a view outside, but I learned a great deal about how to purchase Swedish companies, how to interact with America’s Federal Reserve Bank, what professional development and networking opportunities there are in New York for Swedish businesspeople, and the names of a few tasty Swedish restaurants. (I had been to most of them already.)
        Next door, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel was more varied.
        A multipurpose destination like the Waldorf-Astoria is a treasure trove of space and activity. The ground floor, with its expensive gift shops and hotel check-in and concierge desks, offers prime people watching. Floors two through four boast ballrooms, conference rooms and other social spaces—all accessible by stairwell and winding corridors. Men and women roam the halls, some dressed in tuxedos and others in casual attire. A bagpiper echoed through one annex. Caterers and other employees in cummerbunds popped in and out of kitchens and closets. Three children crept through the hallways, too, and I saw them several times as they seemed on a similar discovery mission, though they occasionally walked quietly against the walls with wide eyes, and other times shrieked and ran through crowds of party-goers on their way to one of a half dozen elevator bays scattered on each floor.
        Hotel rooms make up most of the rest of the building, except for the 18th floor, which hosts another dozen or so conference and function spaces. At one end of the one snaking hallway that connects end to end on this level are the smaller meeting rooms for groups of fifteen or so, and on the other end are the large terrace spaces and function halls like the Starlight Roof. Unlike the lower levels, this floor is quiet and secluded. There are no busy corridors or hard floors, only plush carpeting, muted decoration, and a few modest chairs and couches to relax on. In one larger conference hall, copies of the day’s presentation booklet were left scattered about the room. They detailed a Canadian energy company’s land holdings in Alberta and British Company and invited investors to capitalize retrieval of natural gas reserves buried under the Canadian shale. The company framed it as a cash-generation oil alternative that will be ripe for a recovering economy. Flipping through the catalog, I realized that these are the rooms in which markets are moved and landscapes are scheduled for development.
        I took the elevator back to the lower levels after passing through several bands of staff members setting up other halls, and I began to think that landmarks like the Waldorf-Astoria are like small cities in themselves; they contain overlapping communities that turnover numerous interior spaces. And people passing through represent wildly differing constituencies: staff members, tourists, residents, businessfolk, and children and grownups who are just out to explore the hallways. The spaces within are public and private, commercial and residential, meant for gathering and meant for passing through. It’s a miracle that all the systems working within the one building don’t collide or collapse, but instead coexist, possibly and presumably with one or a few people overseeing and directing them all, but most likely because the refining efforts of a thousand people over the decades have continuously carved out little niches of activity that no one person could fully grasp at any one time.

Eyes to the Sky

        At 94th and Broadway, a hunched and hatted old man crossing the street was cut off by a young woman walking uptown. He scowled up at her back while she, unknowing, continued on away from him.
        Grumpy, he sneered and muttered to himself as he returned his face to the earth. Like many New Yorkers, it was as if he sneered and muttered every day of his life.
        A moment later, though, his tired scowl relented. He stopped walking, and his gaze blankly and wearily rose to level to scan the every day way before him. A UPS truck. Some cars. Trees rustling in the breeze.
        And then, several shuffled steps later, when a beam of sun opened upon his wearied figure, he stopped, turned his eyes to the sky, smiled, straightened, and washed himself in the light.

Review: The Watchmen

Review of the graphic novel:

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Day Labor

        Heading west, towards New York, just before the Stamford train station, the MetroNorth train passes over a small bridge, and before the bridge, on a road parallel to the tracks, Hispanic men stand scattered along a thousand feet of sidewalk in groups of two to five. They spread across the road in some places and laugh lightheartedly, bundled against the cold in jeans and puffy jackets. The weather is warmer today, and some wear windbreakers and jackets from high school sports teams.
        On the approach to the bridge, where the road parallel to the tracks hits a cross street, a sign on a telephone pole reads: “Day Labor Pickup 1000ft →”. It points in the direction of the men. At one moment, a Subaru Forester turns off the cross street and onto the parallel road, and a few of the men near the intersection gravitate towards it, as if pulled by its relative weight in their universe. Their attention is locked onto it, but the car has another destination and rides off down the road in the direction of the highway.

        I just saw a short movie the other day on YouTube called “The Job,” in which businessmen and women stand in clumps outside an office building until a Hispanic man drives up in a pickup truck. He calls out his needs—“Chief Financial Officer!” “Media Consultant!” etc.—and selects a few of the eager people in suits. They pile into the back of his truck, he closes the gate, and they drive away.
        I understood the movie, but I didn’t fully get it until just now.