New York 2

August 9, 2014

My body protested pretty hard by the end of the day the day’s activities, but it bore me through. Made first for a special destination, the coffee kiosk at the edge of Columbus circle, where during each sojourn here I sit in the leafy dapple and write and observe the passing show. The coffee kiosk is now an information booth for Central Park, but I did sit at the metal table, keeping it from careering about by setting my foot under one of the legs, and write. The little brown sparrows– all female, it is to be noted-- fluffed through the dust and begged from the Scandinavian family beside me, who had brought their own enormous muffins. Toddled to Lincoln Center and bought a ticket to Handel’s Acis and Galatea, which has been turned into opera-ballet by Mark Morris and Company. Wandered about, then staggered back to the hotel and slept for a good three hours while the slant and brick-reflected light shone gray on my window. It was a perfect day. I could feel that even in my sleep.

Gave myself plenty of time to get to Lincoln Center in the evening. Part of the peregrination was to MOMA to see if it was open. It was, and teeming with young people. I suppose it’s a Friday evening thing to do. It made me happy to see, to be amid. Drawn as if by enchantment to the café, where I had a salad I didn’t eat and a couple of drinks, and sat at the window beside a girl who was being fiercely harassed by the old man sitting on the other side. She was up for the night from Hoboken. She was a target because she was Chinese-American and the man was himself of Asian extraction and had been to China in the 60's on a bicycle trip, every detail of which he remembered. He asked for her number. She wrote down a number, but I hope to God it was a fake one. He sang her a little song. He invited her to come swing dancing with him. All the while, she was just trying to eat and read her Kindle book. She was very, very patient. The man asked what she was reading, and she said it was a book about Scientology. There was a young lady at the crossroads.

My seat for the ballet was among the gods, the 4th circle, and it was not easy to get there on my ravaged legs, nor would it be easy to get down. The elevator was full of old people and frustratingly slow, and I willed to do the stairs. The building is beautiful. That high up (and that cheap) attracts eccentrics, so I was surrounded by old women dressed like schoolgirls and old men with tiny lights they could train on the libretto– forgetting, perhaps, the superscripts over the stage–and old women with their day’s shopping strewn around them. I took the seat I had because it was on an aisle where I could stretch my left leg a little. The music was Handel at what I suppose was his most crowd-pleasing, messed with by Mozart who replaced oboes with clarinets and recorders with flutes, both mistakes. The choreography was oddly literal, very pastoral, as called for by the libretto, everybody in flowing green skirts and the men bare chested, to a nice effect. It was not abstract, but rather illustrative. One doesn’t expect that, but it enabled the funny parts to be funnier. What could people have been thinking when the first watched this centuries ago? The libretto is idiotic, but that, of course, was the point, to deliver a version of love nobody in the house had ever experienced, to allow them to think there was some purity of love, some poetry of love still undiscovered and, by their likes, undiscoverable. Is this not the use of pastoral? The tenor Acis was tubby and unheroic (his voice was lovely) and when the strapping baritone Polyphemus strode on, bragging about being huge and godly, one wondered what woman in her right mind wouldn’t prefer him. Perhaps this was a twist Handel didn’t anticipate; perhaps it wasn’t. In response to his challenge, Polyphemus kisses Acis on the mouth (one assumes he is used to people adoring him and he hasn’t been listening, so he assumes that’s what Acis wants), and Polyphemus is made to have equal interest in the nymphs and swains. In this production–since there were bodies but no props– Polyphemus kills Acis by throwing a girl at him. The chorus of nymphs and swains have to remind Galatea that she can bring Acis back from the dead. Was she thinking “Well, he was sweet, but the rich weightlifter wants me bad enough to kill for me–“ and in the most unconvincing passage in theater, she brings Acis in an instant back from the dead, his white sash indicating he is now a god. Polyphemus disappears, I suppose to get the house cleaned up in time for Odysseus. I loved it.

The walk back home, through physically grueling, was a sensual delight. Tout le monde. Drinks at the hotel bar cured–or convinced me they had cured–what ailed me. Instant dead sleep. Before morning dreamed of being part of a crew who had to set up an immense factory. I was an artist, and my painting was somehow part of what the factory made.