Hot Time, Summer in the City

Installment Eighteen

July 1, 2010

“… the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.”
- Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, Volume One

Okay, call me a romantic. Yeah, again. It’s true, hopelessly. And I just don’t want to stop.

I flew to Taos about six weeks ago to work and stay with my friend Carolyn, and to work and stay with my friend Maureen. It was my first visit “home”. And I realized that “You can’t go home again.” I spent my first full day there wandering around the plaza, just walking, looking around, watching the tourists, and I realized that I was the tourist. I felt like a tourist. I didn’t really live there anymore.

It was a sad and sobering realization, and one that needed to be happen. I just wasn’t aware that it was my turn.

I had a lovely time in Taos. I visited many friends and acquaintances; people I hadn’t seen since I left last August, people who truly missed me, and people who didn’t know I’d left.

I stopped first at Plaza de Retiro, a retirement community, to see A and D. We share a very intimate story. D was very ill more than a year ago and I came in to help. I was working and volunteering for the hospice program in Taos and preparations were being made. I stayed with D on a number of occasions, helping as best I could, giving A some time away. He and I made a wonderful bond. D is a writer and philosopher and he shared his insight into the human condition with me in ways no one has ever done before. I appreciated his patience and his tolerance of my sometimes ignorant questions. He never faltered in sharing love, tolerance, quiet understanding, and a palpable sense of serenity. A man truly at peace with himself and the world. Admiration is not a strong enough word.

I knocked at their door and D answered, as spry and clear-eyed as when I had met him several years ago, long before the illness set in. He had made an amazing recovery, a miracle. We hugged. He said A was working in her studio and that she would be thrilled to see me, so we walked, something D had not been able to do unaided last year, to her studio out back. She was thrilled, and so was I. We sat and visited and I got to share with them my own journey through my father’s death. I got to start grieving my Dad with someone who had been in hospice care. Quite a beginning to the journey.

I think I had at least four cups of tea with at least seven friends in several different settings that day. I called Chris, my retired nun friend and got her to drive into town and visit with me. We talked and talked and talked some more. She’s also a writer who seems to be taking a hiatus from writing. Pity, because she can tell a story. Hint, hint, Chris. Get back to it! We’re all waiting for The Rest of It. Chris was first our friend Aja’s friend. Aja recommended Chris to me quite a while ago when Chris first moved to Taos and purchased a house. Chris called me one afternoon and asked if I would help her hang some artwork. Sure!, I said, and we made a date. Several months later we had totaling transformed her bland little two bedroom house into a stunning and colorful home. No more mauve! We became fast friends. We shared that sad day when Aja suffered the stroke that took her from us. Many tears.

My second day (it gets better, I just can’t think of a way to continue the story creatively except by using “My second day…”) I got picked up like the gigolo that I am by Carolyn who escorted me to a hotel (hers) to walk (wink, wink) the rooms. We have worked together for about ten years now, turning a quaint southwestern hotel into a charming jewel of a boutique hotel that happens to be in downtown Taos.

We have re-designed and re-decorated 34 of the 44 rooms there, building and decorating 8 new rooms four years ago. I started at the hotel as a waiter, graduated to front desk clerk and eventually became a manager-on-duty before I finally retired into interior design full time.

I was pleasantly surprised after nine months of intense graduate school to walk through the physical evidence of design decisions made nine and ten years ago to find that the decisions have held up nicely. Many of you know, and if you don’t here it comes, that I have a degree in fine art not in interior design. I like to believe that I have an eye for design and color and I’m not being very humble when I say that. Somebody’s got to toot the horn. Graduate school has a way, and maybe it’s on purpose, of helping one re-define ones’ sense of knowing, especially during the first semester. I believe some call it separating the men from the boys. It can also be called ego-deflation. It’s a good thing. The armed forces use this technique to stamp out the individuality, to make a fighting machine out of a group of folks who otherwise might, well, I’m taking that analogy way too far…

So, as I started to say, I was really happy to find good design in the rooms we had decorated nine and ten years ago, and the design has held up through my more scrutinizing eyes, the eyes that have had an initial training in what really good design is supposed to be. Is this political enough? Should I just stop right here and now and tell the story. It’s pretty thick, huh?

July 21, 2010

Long time no write. Shoot me. It’s too hot and humid to write anything except how hot and humid it is so I didn’t want to bore you.

I got an email a week or so ago from my friend Katherine, who I met through Madeline last summer. She’s a twinkling sprite of a lady, a writer, and a person who takes yoga very seriously. She is also very fond of the arts, an aficionada if you will. She wrote to invite me to an opera that was performed last evening. I am so glad I went! The opera, entitled La Porta della Legge was staged at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, a venue of which I was not familiar. I’m still a newbie to New York so I made sure I had plenty of time to get there before the performance, which means I am usually radically early. I like to walk, so I take these early moments to wander and walk and explore. Every trip becomes an adventure. I took the A train to 59th Street/Columbus Circle, a neighborhood I may have mentioned recently having gone to see the exhibition “Dead or Alive” at 2 Columbus Circle in the Museum of Art and Design (if you’re in New York, or coming soon DO NOT MISS this show). John Jay College is on 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th Street so I had some blocks to walk. I wandered, marveling at the skyscrapers and the variety of people walking, strolling, walking their dogs, enjoying an early evening. I walked north on 10th Avenue because I had never walked there before and came upon the back side of Lincoln Center. It’s lovely, coming in the back, seeing the service entrances and whatnot. Lots of people sitting and enjoying the evening. Walked north to the new, as yet unfinished café designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, with its sloping green grass roof that doubles as a park space for lounging. But the first highlight of the evening was watching the new fountain in the plaza at Lincoln Center. It is stunning. A company called Wet designed the new fountain. They are known for their large scale water designs in Las Vegas, outside Bellagio and many other casinos, like the Pirates of the Caribbean display. The water becomes alive in beautiful ways, shooting from unseen cannons to more than sixty feet in the air. The smiles and applause of the folks watching and taking pictures was charming. A beautiful shared experience of water in an utterly urban landscape.

The libretto and lyrics for the opera are based on Frank Kafka’s story “Before the Law”, which was written in 1914 and is part of the 1925 novel “The Trial”, which was published posthumously. Salvatore Sciarrino has based “La porta della Legge” on this part of the longer work.

I would tell you the entire story here, as it is not a long tale, but rather I will tell you the short version and some of the emotions I felt during this magical evening of theater. Three singers, a baritone (man 1), a counter-tenor (man 2), and a bass (the gatekeeper), enact the saga of “man versus bureaucracy”, and the futility of that pursuit, at least in Kafka’s eyes. Man 1 attempts, during the course of his lifetime, to gain entrance into the “law”, as is made real by the gatekeeper and the passage through which he seeks entrance. The gatekeeper repeatedly says, “No, not yet”. The slow and steady pace of the action of the opera keeps one hoping against hope that this little man will gain entrance. Alas, it is not to be. In one final vain attempt to ask the right question the little man asks, “Why after all these years, has no one else tried to gain entrance here?” To which the gatekeeper replies, “Because this gate was made especially for you. And now I am closing it.” And the little man dies. The action is made even more painful by the slow and very deliberate physical action, almost stop-action quality of the actors. Each has the ability to strike a pose which exemplifies their status and emotional state. The gatekeeper stands erect momentarily in a fur-collared overcoat, and then slumps his shoulders back, throwing his abdomen radically forward while looking out from under his bushy black eyebrows. It is a posture of total and overbearing dominance. The little man cowers, holding his crumpled fedora in claw-like hands, unable to stand up for his life.

While the actors sing incredibly difficult, microtonal verse against an accompaniment of lush atonal sounds from the Wuppertal Orchestra from Germany, the set pieces move in a slow and methodical way. There are two large panels that almost meet center stage, with a third panel suspended over and behind the two, creating a doorway or gate. The panels are painted a muddy brown with the slightest traces of windows or rectangles made by simple splatters of paint, as if someone laid a piece of cardboard over the panel and splattered a slightly darker paint only at the edges and then removed the cardboard, leaving just a hint that some opening was there that might have been bricked up. Beyond the gate, upstage, is what appears to be a scrim, a vaporous fabric through which is seen a horizontal band of bright white light, as if the horizon had extended to infinity right there on the stage. Incredible light, and a masterful lighting designer named Sebastian Ahrens. The panels very slowly, almost imperceptibly, retract, leaving the horizon to be more and more open and exposed, making the space feel vulnerable and raw, surreal. This movement of the panels is so slow that it encompasses the entirety of the first scene, maybe twenty some minutes. The horizontal field of light that stretched across what appears to be the back of the stage has slowly, imperceptibly shifted. It is now dark although I don’t recall seeing this happen. Like watching the moon crawl across the sky. You can watch and watch and watch and never see the movement, but when you look away for a moment, the moon has moved. Like that, so slowly that you can’t see it but you know it’s happening because the mood is shifting from hope and possibility to despair and angst.

And then MORE magic happens.

The dead little man lies center stage and the gatekeeper is stage left, which is the right side of the stage from the audience perspective. The gatekeeper stands erect and motionless, as if on guard, waiting for some next action. Behind the gatekeeper a small motion is witnessed and a hat appears, presumably on the head of another man behind the gatekeeper. While this small motion is happening the first man lying center stage disappears. INTO THIN AIR. I never saw him go. I could find no trace of a trapdoor through which he might have slipped. I saw no movement of the scrim. I was transported into another dimension by the deus ex machine of the theater. I am still amazed two days later.

Scene One has ended and Scene Two begins without break or interruption as the gatekeeper steps further stage left and there appears another little man (man 2). The action of the play repeats, almost verbatim, except that the opera is sung in Italian and I do not speak the language. It is also difficult to tell what is being sung because the tonality and rhythm of the language and text are made to sound like animals, or birds, or the echoing of groans inside caves. It is amazing and I am mesmerized. As the second little man and the gatekeeper repeat the lines sung in the first scene the light again begins to shift from dark gray and bleak to lighter. The stage is slowly transforming again. The panels left and right slowly move toward center and the panel above begins dropping, but everything happens at a pace that stops time. The actors, the two men, the second little man and the gatekeeper, continue their chant-like staccato intonations of syllables, interspersed with groaning tones, hollow and mournful. The gatekeeper continues in stop-action poses, not caricatures of poses but real movements in space that stop, leaving one to think something might just be about ready to happen that never really does. The second little man frets, groans, moans, gibbers and then looks questioningly at the gatekeeper, hoping that this might now be the time to gain entrance. And the little man grows old, and the gatekeeper persists, “No, Not yet.”

The panels left, right and top have by now closed into the shape of a door, similar to the beginning of the first scene. There is a difference now, and it is just now becoming apparent to me. The action has shifted subtly and unobtrusively. The first scene was acted outside the gate, the actors looking in and upstage. The lighting in the second scene is all upstage, leaving the panels close to the audience downstage dark and foreboding. The director has created a reversal. It is not conclusive because we have no real evidence but it appears that we, the audience, are now inside the law, we are the bureaucracy, we are within and the gatekeeper and the second little man are outside looking in. It is an uneasy feeling. The little man has slumped to the ground, aging and dying. We witness him horizontally, within the frame of the door-like opening created by the moving panels. The panels continue slowly closing. We see the man is a skewed scene. Are we sideways or is he? Are we right side up or is he? Disconcerting imagery. Very effective stagecraft. Incredible lighting design. The gatekeeper appears, horizontally also but from stage right now, bending over the reclining figure of the second little man, pointing his finger in reprimand. “No, Not yet.”

The panels continue closing until just the resting head of the little man is visible, extremely well lit, and dead. And the panels close to black.

Scene three begins with both little men on stage standing behind the scrim, barely lit and barely visible. A projection of each man appears on the scrim in front of each. The men are individually enclosed in red box-like (coffin?) structures. It is not readily apparent that this is a projection until one of the images begins to move upward and a second image, almost a duplicate of the first appears, and then another, a fourth, a fifth, more. The other man’s image also moves, downward this time. Several other images appear on various other parts of the scrim. All are moving vertically in space, each image is making a slightly different action. Each image is in a slightly smaller scale than the one next to it, creating a distortion of space and time that leaves me breathless and confused. The singing, the chirping birds, the groaning in caves, the staccato gibberish continues as one by one the video images disappear and the stage is again black. The orchestra has stopped.

Thunderous applause. Amazement and dismay.

Oh, and sweet Katherine had brought me delicious plums (most of which I ate before the curtain was up) and lovely yellow squashes from the co-op she belongs to. Fresh and organic and delicious! Thank You Katherine!
Sunday night I’m seeing a play written by Amy and David Sedaris called “The Book of Liz”, about Elizabeth Donderstock, whose claim to fame are her amazing cheeseballs. They are so good, in fact, that they provide the livelihood for her entire community, the Amish-esque town of Squeamish. I can’t imagine what fun it’ll be. The Old Stone House is in Park Slope and they do this stuff for free in an outdoor amphitheatre! How neat is that?

Later. That’s enough, isn’t it?

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right. ~Maya Angelou

Advertisement