New York New York

October 29, 2010

Nineteenth floor of the Paramount Hotel, with its teensy spaceship rooms. To my joy, my window looks down onto 8th Avenue, and most directly onto the Playwright Pub and Restaurant. All the scurrying shapes. . . all the yellow taxis. The water pressure ir minimal, but I guess if I were water I wouldn’t want to haul myself up 19 floors either. Flight uneventful (though, of course, delayed). The bus from Newark got tangled in a wilderness of its kind at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow everybody got through.

Caught first preview of Neat LaButte’s The Break of Noon at the Lucille Lortel in Christopher Street. The play was not very good. Indeed it was kept from being seen-it-coming-a-long-way-off crap only by LaButte’s skill at dialogue, which makes you think, for a while, that something might actually be happening. A sensational premise (a guy survives an office massacre and becomes a prophet) wasted. But it must be said that David Duchovny puts in a thoroughly believable, nuanced, affecting, even majestic performance. His TV work has been concealing a truly fine actor. The acting in general was quite good. The producer joked that last night’s performance would differ from all others because it was the first premiere and changes would be made. Unfortunately, the things that can be changed need not be changed. The thing that needs to be, probably cannot.

Muscular Hispanic boys were doing gymnastics on a scaffold. My cabbie got honked at as he took pictures with his cell phone.

The play was not only disappointing but quite short, and I went to the brink of drunkenness in a bar next door, which was either gay or African American, maybe both. They dude next to me related how Bedford Stuyvesant is now a quiet and safe place to live. The free hors d’oeuvres were magnificent.

At midnight I was at one of those little tables on Times Square, eating my tuna fish salad. I was happy.

Meeting with my director in a café on Broadway and 86th. I took the train early because I’ve had so little time to explore the Upper West Side. Lovely, stately, quiet as New York counts that quality, an old Jewish neighborhood where the kids were screaming and laughing at recess at the Yeshiva. Spectacular (if eclectic-to-the-point-of-hideous) memorial to the Union dead of the Civil War. Standing there I received inspiration for the third part of my Lincoln trilogy. The trip was worth it if only that should happen. The golden leaves of the locusts gave all the scene royalty. A sprig of kudzu flourished in the little rose garden against Riverside Drive. I wonder if anyone in authority knows that?

I didn’t want the meeting with SB to be too business-like, but he did steer the conversation immediately to The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. What can I say? I expected him to say that they had dropped the project, but he was horrified at the thought. It seems to be in a suspension zone, not as near to realization as I had hoped, much nearer than I had feared. Much uncertainty comes from their determination for find a “star” to play Lincoln. “We’ve sent it to two people so far and they LOVED it.” What does that mean in ordinary speech? If they loved it then why– well, anyway, I came from the meeting neither elated nor distressed, so I suppose that is well enough. I hoped the meeting would be like someone kicking a stone at the top of a hill, which ends up in a landslide, but we’ll see. SB has done a lot of work on the script, and made suggestions that are actually useful.

On to MOMA, where there is now an important exhibit of Abstract Expressionism. I came away muttering to myself, “that Jackson Pollock is just not a good painter.” Compared to people in the room with him, Pousset-Dart, Klein, de Kooning, etc, he is their inferior in every measure but reputation. There’s no denying the power of the drip paintings, but whatever excuse we make for them, they APPEAR to have been made by simply throwing paint around, an accusation made by the public against most modern painting, and a perception modern painting seems to want to canonize by accepting Pollock as its god. It’s a kind of counter-Reformation which says, “we are going to make our orthodoxy that which you despise most, and we are doing so BECAUSE you despise it.” One might interpret this another way, as “We hate the tradition of our art so much that we will apotheosize someone who seems not to have profited from one lesson of its thousand years of striving.” It is an odd fact that no one has ever revolutionized an art form by intending to. The A-Es simply tried to hard, and though some of the work stirs my soul, the school is–even now– a moment in history only, not the paths ages, or even decades, will tread.