9 posts tagged “new york city”
mmmmm .... bacon....
Went to see Shakespeare in the Park tonight at the Delacorte; the theater for those who don't know, is in the middle of Central Park. Tickets are free, you just have to line up for a long time -- or get invited to the gala, which is what happened to me.
Didn't care much for the performance; they actually made it kind of sarcastic/jokey in places, and the Hamlet was overwrought and kept reminding me of Joachim Phoenix (who I like but this was second rate), and Sam Waterston, I'm fairly sure, tripped up on his lines at one point.
No matter, after an hour and 45 minutes they recessed for intermission and my friend Kelly and I decided to take our leave. We headed off through the East Side of the park.
Now, I'm not one to stroll in Central Park after dark, although there were plenty of folks and their dogs who did. But it's safe enough that you can, should you want to; we didn't see anyone dodgy. Instead, here's what we did see: amateur astronomists with enormous, and enormously expensive, telescoping equipment taking in the night skies. The first guy invited us over to check out the luminous full moon, which didn't look a whole lot different than it did hanging up in the sky like, um, a pizza pie, or what have you.
But another guy had his set up to focus on something else entirely: Saturn. He called us over to check it out. And there it bloody well was! Looked like a little sticker he'd put on the telescope to fool people, just a tiny ringed yellow speck, but quite clearly what Saturn is supposed to look like. And you can look at every well-developed photo in the world of the planet, but there is truly something different about seeing it through a telescope. It's just another star in the night sky without it, so this was something you couldn't just do on your own without the right equipment.
We thanked them profusely and headed out to Fifth Avenue.
Stellar!
From this morning: Our first snowfall of the year:
So we went to brunch:
There are many consequences of Getting Older, and I have refused to whine about most of them.
It is boring to talk about gray hairs. (Being blonde and a dyer this isn't an issue yet.) About not moving as fast as you once did. About having to buy creams to cover things that never needed covering. To talk about how odd it is that you now are older than most of the folks you work with (and sometimes for). I mean, it happens. Everyone's fingerprints are different and fascinating and maybe that's why we have blogs, to talk about whorls and loops and such, but: It. Is. Boring.
Then there are the exceptions.
So I went to see Duran Duran play on Broadway on Friday night, having done a nice little article on the shows (they're doing ten of them to promote their new album, "Red Carpet Massacre") for work, a version of which will appear in Billboard later this week. That is the sort of sentence which, when I was 15, I'd have literally wet myself to imagine I'd be saying some 27 years later. If I could have imagined 27 years later. And there still is a 15 year old in the upper left side of my brain going "holy shit! holy fucking shit!"
Because of this article, I got to get a very nice fourth row ticket to the show. And because of this article I got to go to an after-party in a hotel private balcony. (Not private enough, there were about 100 or so of other special people in there, too.)
As to the ticket and the show, I'd like to bring out the adolescent and say, "Holy Crap! I mean, oh my fucking God."
Not the kind of nutcase who throws bras on the stage but a really bad dancer who acts out the songs. I am Elaine. Yes, that's me. And proud of it.
After the show I headed over to the after-event. I'm not a huge fan of these, because after you've been to 37, you've been to them all. They're packed and loud and it's hard to get even near anybody who matters, and if you're not someone who matters they will determinedly not see you even if you stand there for a half hour, so really -- who cares? I go for the view and a drink and maybe a nosh and try to do the job, but it's not something I stay and end up with a lampshade on my head at. I leave that to Mary-Kate.
But at this one, I had an accommodating PR woman who made sure to pull Nick over my way. So we could talk for the second article. So there I am and there he is. We have met before, once at another after-event and had a lovely conversation. He's definitely the brains of the outfit. So we talked and he's sincere and I'm absorbing about eight things at once while this is happening: a) we're talking b) he's really quite short c) yes, Lori is right he is combing over d) he has delicate white makeup and careful eyeliner e) It's Nick Fucking Rhodes aaaaah! f) etc. Also, after a moment or two John becomes available and so we are cut loose and then John Taylor, who I've met and never had more than a moment's conversation with is there and All Mine. The best cheekbones in the business are there and we start talking about the show. I can slip into some of the same questions because I'm now concentrating on about ten things at once here, including a) boy, he's tall b) why does he lean forward when he talks to you and contract his face in a pinched way like that? That was what gave me this disconcerting image of what John Taylor will be like when he's a crotchety old man. It was that kind of a stance. Then c) I became aware of how we were being observed by about 8 other women who had no idea why he was giving me the time of day, including d) a very large shiny woman who sat behind me at the show and was insisting on being heard now.
Midsentence, we were done, and off to the next lot. And that's when I cottoned: I was going to talk to each of them. Individually. My adolescent's head had now exploded. And I began to remember I had a camera with me, so just how goony was I going to let myself be?
So then I was talking to Simon. Always my favorite. Had to be: Fellow Scorpio, fellow struggler with weight. He was standing next to his model wife Yasmine, who was in a fur coat and had her back to me (as it should be). And if I was focusing on 8 things with Nick and 10 things with John the Crotchety talker, I've got about 23 going on with Simon but the main thing is this: We have nothing to talk about. I mean, yeah, fine, talk about the show. Talk about the show in London getting cancelled and the video for "Falling Down" getting banned over there. And there was one Major Moment when he put his hand on my shoulder (I can hear Lynda squeeing, "He's touching you!") and saying, "We'll have to stand closer to talk" (of course there's a BUT) "because I have to protect my voice." But as with the others ... once you're done with the basics, you're done.
And that's the thing about getting older that nobody tells you. Should you get older, old enough not to wet yourself in front of these people you used to wallpaper your room with, who you wrote fan fiction about, and to the stage where that 15 year old can sit in the back of your head and tap her feet quietly -- should you get to that age and meet them, there's nothing to say. Well, there is: You can blither about their band and be like every other gooberhead fan (of which I am, naturally), and you can stretch out the business-related questions a bit more, but after that -- it's not as though they're going to ask how work's going, or is mom all right, or about those cupcakes you were making. These people are not your friends. They're not going to be. And not that you really thought they would be, but -- the meeting of them serves only to show the lines and the creases and the in-betweens. They aren't who you think they are. They're just people.
So the No. 23 thing I was thinking as I disengaged from Simon and told him thanks and didn't get a picture was this: This is not someone I would have gone out with. This is not someone who, were he just a regular normal guy I met, that I would have ever, ever had a relationship with. He's like air, it's like talking to someone who really isn't even there. And he's going to be 50 next year and up close ... ah well. I know this sounds completely ridiculous: Who do you think you are? And yet that's not the point.
There is a certain level of every fantasy that says were the circumstances correct, you could go through with that fantasy. Even if you had to do it on another dimension. Making some element of it happen in real life makes you realize that there is no dimension on which the full fantasy could possibly happen. At all. And that's ... okay. Really. It's just one of those things I hadn't considered before.
So, I didn't get a picture with Simon. We moved on to Roger. And as I did before at the other event, I had a lovely conversation with him; he's probably the most personable and least ... air-like. Also the one who occupies the least amount of space in that fantastical dimension, which gives him more space to exist in the here and now. So I felt perfectly fine about pulling out the camera and getting a photo. At which the PR woman told him, "She's spoken to every one tonight, and you're the only one she asked to get a photo with!"
So here we are, the aging fan and the aging rock star drummer (with the air-like Simon behind him). We have both Gotten Older, and somehow did it together.
Make of that what you will.
Well, John. What to say. When you:
- start 15 minutes late and come out on stage to collectively inform the fans that they're now going to hear selected tracks from your new album and then leave the stage for 20 minutes while bad Timbaland/Justin Timberlake produced distorted something or other takes up the aural space while the stage stands empty, it ain't an auspicious start. You don't make fans pay for a listening party, and the "VIPs" in that front row (not me! really!) forked over $350 for that privilege. If you're not going to use the pre-show waiting time to play those tracks, if you're going to open the stage and tease us like that, you'd better stick around and do handstands or something. For the record, most bands like to play their new tracks out live first. (We got two of those later.)
- again, since that was windy: You needed a 15 minute delay to set up pre-recorded tracks?
- also to qualify: This is after a wait outside in line for approximately 2.5 hours on my part because everything was general admission, and another hour wait after the doors opened. So yes, I frickin' begrudge fifteen minutes.
- also have a singer who forgets the lyrics to one of your best-known songs ("Planet Earth!" a whole verse!), from your first album and then completely bolloxes up what could be an exciting all-Duran version of Power Station's "Some Like it Hot" (I think the only words he got right were the choruses; the rest was just Simon staring blankly at John and, in a great show of restraint, John not clubbing him with the bass)
- furthermore more or less sleepwalk your way through most of the rest of the set, with some fairly good exceptions, but with most arrangements directly cribbed from your "Astronaut" tour last year
- omit "Careless Memories"
(All of that whinging said, the fact is that bad Duran Duran is like bad ice cream. It's still ice cream. And I'll take bad over nothing. Bad is kind of amusing. This particular ice cream, though, tasted like an orange foot.)
****
In unrelated news, for reasons that have nothing to do with Duran Duran -- alas -- MSNBC wants me back again today. So if you've really got nothing better to do, I'll be on just before 2pm and right around 3pm. ET, again. If only they'd ask me how the concert went!
A lovely, perfect day on the isle of Manhattan.
A lovely, perfect day that was a wee bit windy, so all the seed pouches flew from the trees making beige-colored snow against the blue, blue sky.
Here's what's great about good things coming together at once:
I left my cell phone at home. Since I was meeting up with Mike and we usually have reason to touch base with said phone, I wasn't sure if this was going to be a disaster. Fortunately, we were meeting up outside the big deity-like glass box on 5th Avenue known as the Apple store. You can almost hear the angels weep when you go inside: It's clean, it's functional, it's friendly and it has the best computers known to man all over the insides. And they're on. And they're hooked up to the Net. There are even low benches with soft seats for children to hook up. It is just marvelous.
(My Dell computer is frowning at me with all the bytes it can muster. Yes, there is cognitive dissonance here.)
Anyway: I get on the Net and check my address book on Earthlink. Nope, didn't save his number there. No point in sending an email, as he's probably on his way. I need to text the man, and I need to do it without having his number or a cell phone. What to do?
Head over to his LiveJournal account, that's what. Because you can text people now by just typing in the message and hitting "send."
The Internets+AppleStore+LiveJournal = A lovely future on a lovely day.
The downside -- it took two hours for the text to arrive, long after it was necessary. But it is nice to know that it's there if needed, if a little slow.
The rest of this very lovely day included: amazing gelato (and it had better be amazing if you wait in line for an hour for it) at the new Grom; the view off of the top of Belvedere Castle; petting another cairn terrier (this one also chunky, named Sam); seeing a woman with orange-and-yellow-and-red curly dreads; and lots and lots of cheese at a new restaurant I'd never heard of and whose name now escapes (oh, wait, it's Casellula, which I'm told means "cheese hut" or something approximate -- it was marvelous, and it has a dish called "Pig's Ass," which makes me love it lots). And, of course, lots of hand-holding and nice things of that order. Squee!
Oh! And the NBC folks renewed "Law & Order," which is officially hanging by its fingernails. But I care not, the show, it goes on. You can't kill the machine.
Must go. Dog is whining. Not from being hungry. From being too lame to fetch her own ball, which has rolled behind a cabinet door.
Dog: WOE.
Me: You are very lame. But I will help.
Dog: I love you. Ballballballballballball.....
For a moment, I was back in the 19th Century.
Just sitting at the computer, checking mail, this morning. No traffic sounds, no people sounds, just a nice quiet Queens morning. (For those who don't visit Queens, I promise, it happens.)
And then ... the distinct sound of clop-clop, clop-clop. A pleasant, easy sound ... clopping. Horses!
I got up and looked outside my window. And there they were, two mounted policemen, their two horses casually walking the wrong way down the one-way side street past my building.
It only took a moment and they were gone, along with the sound, but for a minute I could imagine needing to get into my hoop skirts and bustle this morning, rather than jeans and a T-shirt.
I don't think -- whatever form of transportation comes after cars -- anyone will ever feel warmly nostalgic towards the sound of the combustible engine internal combustion engine.
Mom got me a membership to the Museum of Modern Art for my birthday. Which was spot-on of her, because I'd asked for it. She actually called back to check to make sure I hadn't said the Metropolitan, rather than MoMA, because she knows darn well I'm not a modern art fan. I'm more of a casual loather of most modernist attempts at anything art or architectural, and she knows it. To me, modern art (and architecture) conjures up Mondrians and useless canvases with one singular color and ugly, showoffy buildings and really, I'd much rather look at big expansive paintings that are capturing an historical moment, or telling a story, or in some way firing up rather than massaging my brain.
To each his own, of course.
But the MoMA is newly rebuilt, and the cafeterias have classy food, and it's really, really easy to get to, whereas the Met is more of a pain in the rear and you're more likely to run into screaming rugrats no matter what day of the week you go. (Can we get a day of the week when museums do not admit children under the age of 16? Does asking that make me a curmudgeon?)
I digress. So I was feeling a little low, spiritually and emotionally and creatively and decided to finally give my card a workout. (To make it pay for itself I need to get there at least 4 times.) I had heard that going to museums and just looking around helps get the creative juices going again, and whether or not that was true I really wanted to be out and about but doing something soothing, rather than watching more stuff blow up on a small or big screen, or having to surf to the next interesting story. I wanted a brain massage. And so: MoMA was perfect.
It was also delightfully surprising. I knew there would be big canvases of nothing but monotone color being trumpeted as works of "genius" with startling uses of "light," and the Brice Marden exhibit on the top floor, where I started off, took care of that right away. I mean, call me a complete pedant but I am never, never, going to find single-color enormo canvases interesting. Fortunately Marden also had somewhat amusing canvases of swirling lines that resembled something a very patient 5 year old might have put together, and in this case size did make the difference. I stood looking at one wall-sized thing for quite a while, enjoying the sheer blankness of the point, and got to where I felt I could almost fall into it. There was a strange disorientation I felt, ignoring the rest of the wall and the people around me, and it almost gained a three-dimensional effect. My grandmother used to have a painting on the wall near her apartment door; often when it was taking ages to leave her apartment I'd sit near it and wait for mom and my brother to be ready to go, and I'd end up looking at it. It wasn't of anything exactly, just a lot of colorful blobs and swirls and pockmarks in comforting green-and-blue-and-white hues. But what I did like about it is when I was bored and waiting for something else more interesting to happen I could stare at it and find shapes and images and start thinking about other things, almost like when you stare at clouds. The final piece of Marden's artwork before you left the gallery on the 6th floor was unlike any of his others -- but was like the one in my grandmother's living room. (And no, I don't think she had a rare Marden.) I liked it because of that.
But when I got down another floor or so it was like going to a party expecting to see a few D-list celebrities and instead running into Brad Pitt: I had no idea MoMA was the current home of so many Cezanne, Seurat and Picasso works. Nor did I know it housed "Starry Night," which I had never seen in person. Stunning, with all those swirls and loops and rounded edges -- yet the paint is stiff and standing up from the canvas in a raw, rough way. Later on I came across "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth and that was another total surprise, just tucked away on a side wall there it is and for a few minutes I had it all to myself because everyone else was interested in the Hopper across the wall. It's an amazing picture (I nearly typed photo there) because you look at it and the longer you do the more questions you have. What is he trying to say? For a long while I always thought it was of a young woman who had perhaps fallen asleep in the grass and woke up and saw her home; then I looked again and she's clearly not old, she has gray hairs; her pink dress is faded and worn, and her hands almost seem to have gloves on them. Her elbows are knotty. The whole picture has a worn, desolate look to it and the fact that she's wearing a pink dress amidst all of the goldenrod and gray makes it sadder. (An article on the Interweb indicates that Christina was a real person and she was, in fact, crippled, but that has never come through to me in the work. It's as though she's just down for a moment, rather than a lifetime.)
Also on hand was Dali's "Persistence of Memory," one of my favorite titles for a painting. (I'm usually disappointed that so many go untitled; it feels like a failure of imagination for a painter to not put a name on a work, or to be so dull as to call it "Number" something or other.) Anyway, it's much smaller than I had realized; I thought "Persistence" would be a big wall-sized thing, but it's not. It was hard to get close because of that; too many people in the museum tended to forget they make a better door than a window and would stand practically making moisture marks on the glass coverings, they were so close.
(By the way, they say no pictures but digital cameras are rampant; mostly they seem to prefer no flash, and these were all taken with the camera phone so I'm safe there.)
Anyhow, there were the obligatory dull Mondrians, and of course a few things that made me laugh -- one art teacher got some friends and students to chew up and spit out pages of an art theory book he'd checked out of the library; another piece looked flat as I rounded a far corner and began walking the distance toward it, and then it became clearly three-dimensional, a leather spiral jutting out from the wall with a hole in the center and that made me smile because it was a trompe l'oeil that truly tromped me. I don't mind modern art so much if it engages me, or makes me think: One room had a large beige canvas filled with just a few short sentences, a quote from someone or from another art theory book, asking us to consider how in any piece of artwork all of the elements come together to form the art, and how words cannot ever express art's meaning. This kind of had me smiling because it presented a theory which then twisted back upon itself, as the contradiction of what words could not do for art -- became the piece of artwork. So that's not so bad.
Whether or not the juices are recharged, I don't know. I do know I've had a thorough brain massage and feel better for it. And what better birthday present can you get than that?
So, an update to the post below: You have about 5 minutes to get your television on and watch the hero -- whose name is Wesley Autrey -- on David Letterman.
He's gotten more than just a TV appearance, too: He got that medal. According to this story from the AP:
Autrey, whose knitted cap was brushed with grease and dirt from the train passing overhead, played down his daring act as he accepted the Bronze Medallion -- for exceptional citizenship and outstanding achievement -- from Mayor Michael Bloomberg....
While Bloomberg called Autrey a "true hero" and the New York Post newspaper dubbed him the "Subway Superman," the construction worker -- who went to work as normal after the incident -- said the real heroes were U.S. troops in Iraq.
Along with the civic award, Autrey was also given a year's worth of free rides on New York's subway and buses, then met with real-estate mogul Donald Trump, who gave him a $10,000 cheque, along with two other cheques from undisclosed donors.
The Walt Disney Co. gave Autrey and his family a one-week fully paid trip to the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida, and tickets to the Broadway smash hit musical "The Lion King."
The New York Film Academy, where Hollopeter studies, said it had given Autrey $5,000 and offered scholarships to his daughters, while The New York Daily News reported Autrey had been offered a television show apartment make-over.
Autrey -- whose boss didn't believe his excuse for being late to work until he saw on the Internet what Autrey had done -- is also scheduled to appear on both "The Late Show With David Letterman" and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."
"Good things happen when you do good," Autrey said. "What better way to start a new year than saving a life?"
Indeed!
