November 7, 2013

Furnace kicking into life amid the cool. Hung the winter bird feeders yesterday. The porch looks like a booth in some Oriental bazaar. Oddly disengaged throughout the day– not a bad feeling, just a remote one. My nerves are ready to travel, but there is no travel for a while. Huge headache after choir, which I mention because headaches are few for me. Rum and aspirin.

November 6, 2013

The most protracted of all chores is the putting away of laundry. This time, though, I get to remember California or New York with the folding of each garment.

Today the hummingbird feeders come down, the frozen plants cut back to the ground. Today I decide Lawrence the fish’s fate, to come in for the winter, to go to Beaver Lake, or to be left in his little pond to survive the sleeping season. I would do one for certain if I knew what the certain good was.

November 5, 2013

Trying to re-integrate, trying to catch up, trying just to sit for a while.

I do love being in New York. I feel empty and a little frightened today, as though I’ve lost track of what I was supposed to do with my life.

Two appointments with the tech guy at school missed, not by me but by him, and when we finally manage to connect I hear me apologizing for being a nuisance. O and I were to meet at her place in the wilds of Fairview to read through a script. Appointed hour comes and passes, and I think, “I should learn the lesson. If they’re not here, they’re not coming, and I could spend– as I spent already once today–an hour waiting for someone who is cavalierly off doing something else.” I’m half way home when she calls to say she had gone to walk the dog and was “only a few minutes late.” I fight the urge to blame myself, if I had only waited a little longer, though in fact I left only when the rage was becoming ungovernable. She suffered because I already had faced that particular provocation today

Aunt Marian is dead. I would like to stop her spirit on its way home to ask what she thought of the life she lived. An outsider would find it squalid and futile, a failure in every measurable way. But I bet– I sincerely hope–she would say, “ I did everything I wanted to do and not a damn thing I didn’t.” In her youth she must have been a big, loud, happy girl. Her household was as grotesque as anything Faulkner or O’Connor dreamed up, but it lacked both the memory and the delusion of greatness, which are necessary for the generation of fiction. Her mother was one of the most elegant and cultured women I ever met. She had not cleaned house, or thrown anything away, in forty years.  I may find myself missing her.

November 4, 2013

Walked off the last hours in New York. Discovered the underground city at Rockefeller Center, and went to the Top of the Rock–far and justly famed–for the first time. If I thought I was going to have some quiet time at my favorite outdoor café at Columbus Circle, I had not taken the new York Marathon into my reckoning, for the leaders were finishing just as I arrived, their heads bobbing between the heads of the crowd. A mighty crowd it was, too, with two bands blowing their amplifiers out, and NYPD helicopters roaring overhead. Some runners must have been inspired to turn and run the other way. At some points the crowd was absolutely unmoving, one stream heading east, one west through the narrow passage the police had made (for no obvious reason) just before Broadway. Finally the cops moved the barriers out a tiny bit, and the throng was allowed to dissipate. Other ages will remember this one for prizing control over reason. Long, long road home, but arrived before midnight to find most things well.

New York 3

November 3, 2013

The time change makes it earlier morning than it seems. Since I am not going to the meeting all this journey was about, the issue today is filling the hours (eleven, now) until my flight. The one day I needed an extra hour least. All is well.

Spiderman: Turn off the Night last night. The first thing to say is that watching men flying around in the theater above your head is fun. Unfortunately, that’s the limit of the fun. The rest resolves into one of those cases where you assume the flat-footedness and just plain badness is a tease or a bit of camp and the real material is about to begin any minute, but it doesn’t. It’s just plan awful. Awfulness so easy to fix that you assume someone wanted it to be as awful as possible, to test the gullibility of the audience. It is what would happen if you gave a class of not very talented eleventh graders ten million dollars and said “make a show.”  The staging is too big for the stage, the effects doled out like candy at Halloween, so the result is not pleasure but satiety, and the only bit of class is a fragment of dance which still shows the spirit of the original director, Julie Taymor, who was fired, one assumes now, because she couldn’t be bad enough. The miked sound was cranked up almost to the point of pain, the theory being, I suppose, that if the music itself is without character the one thing that can be memorable is the volume. The boy playing Spiderman didn’t fly very much, and when he did he was visibly panic-stricken. The other boys were a joy to watch, but you could get the same thing for free by visiting the local gymnastics school. They were of widely different body types, the various Spidermen, so there was never the illusion that THE Spiderman was achieving it all. None of this would matter had there been a script, or had the lyrics not come out of a blender into which all the blandest theater cliches had been poured and mixed around a little. The songs fit neither the characters nor, except in the case of the Green Goblin’s monster-creating anthem, the situation. I wanted to say to the sweet and eager usher who kept trying to keep people from taking photographs, “I could write a better show in one week, lyrics and all; give me another week and you’d have the music.” I probably didn’t need to.

Bob Cuccioli played the Green Goblin, and I watched him carefully through the night because he played my Lincoln, too, when we did the reading last spring. He had to drop out of my production so he could do Spiderman, which is a bit of theater trivia than only six or seven people in the world know, and on its own is such a system of wild contrasts as to be almost imponderable. In that little room in the Abingdon he was a fine, modulated, dignified, tiny bit fussy actor. On stage last night he was an icon, an action figure, at once bigger and less than life. He was clearly the only one with–or allowed to show–any acting skills. I wanted to go back and see him, but I was a afraid I’d say, “What were you thinking?”

What keeps people coming, and paying high (but not very high, surprisingly) ticket prices? Why did I go even when I anticipated disappointment? A lesson of modern and all times is that spectacle sells, and people will come to see the spectacle even if there’s nothing holding it up. I did. I kept thinking, what if all these resources were lavished on a really good, or even a decent, show? I suppose the answer is a really good or even decent show wouldn’t need them.

Met a former student Trevor in the lobby, in a red jacket, checking my ticket. We didn't have time to reconnect. He said "What are YOU doing here?" I wondered how many choices there were.

My seat was excellent.

Cider at Smith’s and then at the Iron Bar. Came home happy.

New York 2

November 2, 2013

City-walk began with breakfast (what an odd thing for me!) At Junior’s, watching a dainty French girl hound the waiter over details and put away a stack of pancakes. Went to MOMA, where I saw the Magrittes early, because I am a member. Some of the Magrittes are profound or evocative. Some are merely wilful. Thanked the chambermaid for having finished with my room just as I arrived, then took a truly heroic nap. I think I am wearier from my travels than I know. Met with Matthew at the Playwrights Irish pub on the next block up– where I had to sweet-talk the Irish waitress into giving us the table I wanted-- and where we had a delightful reunion. He looks radiant and prosperous. He told me of his adventures in theater in Chicago–they put Ragnarok onstage– and for a while it seemed he was on the cutting edge. He’s happier here, though–clearly happy; you can see it in his eyes–piecing a life together with a cluster of teaching gigs. Afterwards to the Booth to see The Glass Menagerie. It was not the best of all possible renditions of this work. I put the blame on direction. The production and the acting were oddly mannered, as if someone wanted to underline the elements of the grotesque a little more than they needed to be. There were strange passages of pantomime, and gestures from the actors which could not quite be read. Tom and Laura both would come to the edge of the stage and jerk as if they meant to throw themselves off, but the hint was weak and never followed up. The Victrola, though often mentioned, was never played. Godot the Victrola. Certain random gestures, such as the lacing of Tom’s boots, and what was I guess the setting of the table with invisible dishes, were given excruciating time and spotlight. The production did one wonderful thing, though, which was to make the sniping  between Tom and Amanda funny and familiar, with real affection behind it. That was refreshing. Cherry Jones had received much praise for this, and indeed her character seemed realer –if, oddly, stupider--than most actresses make that gargoyle. Zachary Quinto, the movie star brought in for Tom, was as good, I think, as his direction would allow. His mannerisms I put down to direction, and he certainly was very handsome. I got to touch him when we exited, putting money in the red buckets the stars hold for AIDS donations. In the seat beside me was a school girl from near DC, who had never seen the play and who had refrained from reading it (though her friend had) so it would be a surprise. She laughed and gasped in all the right places, and said she loved it, so that’s a better triumph for the production than if it had won me completely over.

Francine Trevens, whose apartment is a ten minute walk away, is dead. Who will love all those cabinets of dolls now?

Evening. It has been a perfect day, and it is not over. People talk about my lucky life, and I–knowing better–scoff bitterly, but I recognize what they mean. This morning I thought, “I want to have coffee in Bryant Park,” and a little later I was having coffee in Bryant Park. Sparrows perched on the opposite chair and looked at me accusingly, so I bought one croissant for them and one for the homeless lady at the next table. The woman said “Thank you” without looking at me. The birds gazed at me steadily, and took bits of the croissant from my hand. Among them was a male hooded warbler, no shyer than the sparrows, and I took that as immeasurable blessing. A hooded warbler has touched my fingers with its wings amid the stone canyons. It did not eat the bread, but it looked like it wanted to, I looked up, and the homeless lady was feeding bits of her croissant to the birds too. I come to New York City and maybe the dearest memory will be feeding the birds in Bryant Park. Madison Avenue was closed for a colossal street sale. I toured the great cave of Grand Central Terminal, writing a little on my Magritte play. I happened to look at my Joyce ticket in time to see that it was for the matinee. I had, therefore, tonight free, so I bought a ticket–of all unlikely things– to Spiderman. Things were wrong at the Joyce–not with the dance, but with me, with the moment. I was seated beside a sprawling fat woman, who did none of the things that one can to limit one’s sprawl. It was as though it had not occurred to her that there would be other people in the theater. Normally I can ignore that, but this time I could not, and my discomfort turned to repugnance. Also, I’d inadvertently bought a ticket to the “Family Matinee,” and the dancing was a little more chipper and family-friendly than I was in the mood for. I thought how hard it must be for choreographers, there being just so many gestures a body can make, just so many moods conveyable from the stage. In a certain mood, everything looks derivative. Left at intermission, and, in one of those temporal anomalies, got back to the hotel about ten times faster than I had traversed the same space getting to the theater. I say I wouldn’t want to live in New York, but I was early to the Joyce, and wandered a little down 19th Street, thinking it wouldn’t be much different living there than where I do now, leafy and quiet.

New York

November 1, 2013

My semi-hideous room on the 9th floor of the Milford. The check-in lady says there are more than a thousand marathon runners staying here, waiting for the New York Marathon, which is going to affect my home-going on Sunday in ways not yet to be known. A week ago I was in my atmospheric retreat at the wild sea’s rim. The Milford thinks that painting a couple of accent walls scarlet/flamingo will keep a dungeon room from looking like a dungeon room, and perhaps they are right, a little. I can look into an air shaft at fellow guests naked or sleeping in their rooms.

The question of whether I should go through with this trip–though muddled by delays at the airport, was answered in a ringing affirmative as soon as I hit the street. Times Square on Halloween was exactly what one would expect, though merrier, somehow, the fun more innocent. Went to the Iron Bar, because it is just across the street and it was raining. Was consumed immediately by my customary desire to make each new place my local, to return again and again and know the bartenders and call the other patrons by name. Moved on to my old favorite the Rum Bar, where I had one drink before being driven away by a woman who kept groping me. Whether she was a prostitute or really interested was difficult to tell.