the last balloon

I had contributed something like a hundred or so inflated balloons to Man Bartlett's "24h #class action" the day before, but when I arrived at Winkleman Gallery Thursday afternoon around 4:15, almost 24 hours later, it was too late to add to my score. The artist however had been going strong all that day and throughout the night before. I managed to capture one of the last long, narrow balloons he tossed onto the sculpture from the cubby he had created behind it.

Thousands of inflatables were about to disappear at the stroke of a pin, without ever having achieved a single polished mirror finish.

It was picture time.

the sculptor and his tools

final group intervention commences

the attack underway

last pops/wheezes

empty packaging, sadly showing suggested Koonsian applications

I passed the stand set up on the corner of 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. It was late last evening, windy and bitterly cold. The two vendors were selling New Year's Eve party hats, light wands, and noise makers. I had already passed them by when I stopped to think about checking out the merchandise. My arms however were already juggling several heavy bags of food, so I decided I'd go back today to pick up something for a occasion to whose observance I've never been indifferent.

I've saved stuff from past years when I thought something was a little more special than most of the ephemera manufactured for this ancient holiday; I could recycle the old tin horns and such, but I probably needed some fresh party streamers. Then I asked myself, should I also get two pairs of 2010 spectacles? I'd never worn the silly things before, but this just might be the very last year for that classic template.

Aside from satisfying my needs, or encouraging last-minute buying impulses, I was looking forward to seeing what I expected would be a colorful array of merchandise (bring the camera!). It hadn't occurred to me that the market experience, the bargaining between customer and seller would itself have been a powerful draw.

I didn't see any streamers, and I didn't spring for the glasses, but Serigne gave me a good price on two outrageous tinsel "wigs" (I might have some work in persuading Barry to wear his). I had already asked Serigne if I might take a few pictures of his table display, and he was kind enough to ascent - even without the condition that I make a purchase, although he encouraged me to do so. I heard him talking to the woman he was with, who later told me he was her son, and I was mesmerized by the cadences of their speech. I asked what language they were speaking, and they told me it was Wolof, that they were Wolof, from Senegal.

Serigne suggested I take a picture of his hat. It was one of the many models arrayed accross the table, but I doubt it could ever look as good as it does on his own handsome head.

The beauty created by a heavy snowfall is even more exceptional for its certain evanescence - although a camera can still try to keep it from vanishing.

This afternoon, 24 hours or so after the snow had ended here, I took all three of these images in the central garden of our building, but the pair which appear below really want to be together.

I couldn't stand looking at it any more, even if it shows a tweaked image of the Whole Foods logo, one which now serves as the symbol of a national boycott. I'm referring to my last, melancholy post, "Whole Foods' John Mackey wants us unwholesome". So, thinking I might not be the only one so depressed, I decided to upload a picture of some flowers I snapped up on the High Line at around 4 o'clock on this warm, sleepy afternoon. I was walking back from Buon Italia in Chelsea Market, a really, really, wonderful sort-of-smallish, genuine food emporium for anyone interested in Italian food, now destined to become an even more important part of my food shopping rounds.

Then, remembering how few people I saw up there today, I thought about how the beautiful slim park, which has quickly become the site of a documented neighborhood passeggiata, manages to look very different at various hours and on various days of the week. Here are a couple images showing just how popular it is on weekends. Both of them were taken on the first of August, a Saturday.

These pictures remind me of why I decided years ago that I had to move to New York permanently: Weekends here seemed to have been arranged mostly for visitors, and they still are, although back in the early 80's I was thinking of Downtown music, theater, dance bars and performance, which were always much more interesting on school nights.

take a number



but it can look like a commercial travel brochure

backstage at 6 pm: the battleships await their crews

Duke Riley's rich, seriously-ambitious, aggressively-unprecious but still whimsically-theatrical large-scale piece of interactive art, "Those About to Die Salute You", unfolded across the plains and the seas of Flushing Meadows on Thursday night, managing to exceed all expectations, probably including those of the artist himself.

The Queens Museum of Art commissioned the work from Riley earlier this year and this resourceful, heterodox (and genuinely-communal institution) got just about exactly what we saw described in the event's press release:

Those About to Die Salute You, a battle on water wielded with baguette swords and watermelon cannon balls by New York's art dignitaries, will take place on Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 6 pm in a flooded World's Fair-era reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, just outside of the Queens Museum of Art. Various types of vessels have been designed and constructed by artist provocateur Duke Riley and his collaborators: the galleons, some made of reeds harvested in the park, will be used to stage a citywide battle of the art museums in which representatives from the Queens Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio will battle before a toga-clad crowd of frenzied onlookers.

And the people came.

No words can do more than begin to describe what they saw - and what they contributed themselves. There are already enough images posted around the blogosphere to make anyone who wasn't there feel a bit like what now seems to have been the handful of people who didn't get to Woodstock forty years ago. I missed Bethel myself, but, especially since I had been following Riley's projects for several years, I wasn't about to miss Corona Park, only one transfer away on the subway. Besides, as a student of the classics, I just couldn't, and if I had given it a pass, when could I expect another invitation to a Naumachia?

Barry and I got there a bit before 6, as all the announcements had suggested, but after we had checked out the boat yards at one end of the flooded "lake", we learned that the sea battle itself wouldn't begin until after 8 o'clock.

Populi entertained by Hell-Bent Hooker, including band-engineered special effects

We headed for the Museum, where an artist friend, one of Duke's "herohelpers", invited us to visit the now-nearly-empty and very dusty 40,000 sq. ft. "studio" where the battleships had been constructed. We stood next to an incongruously-shiny large black motorcycle with a box of cookies balanced on its seat: "Take some cookies; a nice Italian lady with her kids left these for us," offered a long-haired gentleman with a deep, froggy voice just before he headed off to the other end of the space. I later recognized him as the lead in the metal band which was the evening's early entertainment. We took two cookies, and they were the best: delicate, chewy macaroons.

La-Vein Hooker (Hell-Bent Hooker vocals) and affectionate Roman fan

I guess we spent too much time mingling with all the Romans eating and imbibing in and around the Queens Museum and enjoying a bit of the evening serenades offered by Hell-Bent Hooker, so it was already twilight when we finally headed back to the site of the featured event (so featured that there was a box to one side, designated ESPN, where the faux anchorman for the proceedings was ensconced). There we found another huge crowd, and unfortunately all the spaces close to the water and the powerful spotlights had already been taken. In the end, while our late arrival meant I couldn't capture any decent documentary images, it also meant that I saved my camera from encounters with water balloons, ripe tomatoes and rotten melons.

Duke-emperor, artist and prime mover, observing from the darkened wings

I've included a few of the pictures I took with available light while holding the camera high above my head. They're pretty "impressionistic", but the blurriness may convey a small bit of the excitement of the spectacle.

Queens Museum battleship and crew, later to be declared the victors

I'm not sure what's going on in the next image (the camera saw much more than I did, and it can't talk to me), but it looks a bit like a victory celebration.

Neptune's rowdy crew?

That whoopee came just after the sinking or withdrawal of the last manned and womanned battleships, and just before a reed-and-paper-constructed Queen Mary 2 slowly glided toward the head of the lake. Riley and the Queen have a history: When the artist tried to maneuver his one-man submarine near that vessel while it was docked in Red Hook he was arrested and his own ship was temporarily seized. Two nights ago Riley oversaw the replica go up in flames amid spectacular fireworks - turn over, and sink.

The crowd, which for several minutes seemed to be somewhat in shock and awe as they saw and heard the Roman candles going off, then went wild.

but no one's suggesting actual sorcery is involved

Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate 2004-2006 polished stainless steel 33' x 66' x 42' [detail of installation]

I think I expected to be charmed by Anish Kapoor's sculpture in Millenium Park, but when Barry and I encountered "Cloud Gate" on the first full day of our visit to the city two weeks ago I thought it was even better than the reviews had reported - and even more fun than its billings.

But it's also an incredible photo opportunity, and this was one of those rare times I totally went with it. The underside of what Chicagoans had early on dubbed "the Bean" is described as an omphalos, or navel, a complex, curving indentation whose mirrored surface multiplies anything found beneath it, but in the other images I snapped the same afternoon I concentrated entirely on the first of the foreshortened Barrys I spotted above me.

low down on the High Line

Barry and I visited the newly-opened first stretch of the High Line last Thursday, in spite of a light mist which probably reduced the crowds of the curious that afternoon. The experience was more lovely than I had dared to expect. My favorite things are its physical position (three stories above the street snaking around and through some other interesting structures, often within view of the Hudson), the handsome naturalistic plantings, and the fact that it's only a few blocks from our apartment.

It's a really, really wonderful thing. Its delights start even before you climb (or "elevate") to the height of the old freight railway, with the breathtaking sight of smiling, happy people out in the open air beyond an old railing thirty feet above you, and it never stops. Actually, I think we're both still high a week later, just thinking about it.

But I do have quibbles about some of the fancy details. I think that certain features introduced by the design team, led by landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations with architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, seem a bit too fussy, and their design may not age well. I'm thinking of the concrete-and-stone composite seat supports and "fingers" stretching from the path into the crushed-stone planted areas. I assume there's a practical reason for their being there, if not in their precise configuration, and in any case nature may soon disguise or soften a lot of what now seems too much like an affectation.

The monstrous commercial Chelsea Piers operation robbed Chelsea of the kind of access to the Hudson River enjoyed by most of the communities north and south of us when the designs for Hudson River Park were approved. Chelsea is only now getting its first real park.

I've included only one photo here, an aesthetic and historically-referenced impression of the new High Line. It's a detail describing some of the materials used in its construction, including the edge of the pavement, a very low steel railing, a segment of the original freight rails, and a look at the beautiful ornamental grass. I decided to hold back on any images documenting the park more thoroughly (they're available all over the internet anyway), in order to make it easier for the reader to experience the environment visually unprejudiced.

the flat

the caf

Barry and I both love Mark-Anthony Turnage's work, and we love our fifteen-year-old CD of his 1988 opera, "Greek", in which he reinvents the Oedipus myth in London's East End during the plague years of 1980's Thatcherian England, using a 1984 play by Steven Berkoff as a base. I don't think we ever expected to see a production of this exciting piece in the U.S., especially here in New York, where opera programmers and patrons haven't even begun to acknowledge the music of the last one hundred years.

We had already made arrangements for a trip to Chicago (from which we returned late last night) when we first learned that Chicago Opera Vanguard, a spunky young opera company, was staging "Greek" somewhere on the edge of downtown while we were going to be there. We would probably have traveled west just to see this work live but it appears that the ancient gods aren't dead yet and had secretly made the arrangements for us.

As it turns out, not only was the pleasure we got for our short trip out to Wicker Park Saturday night all out of proportion to the small effort we had expended, we would even have considered it worth the 1500 round-trip miles if we had made a special trip just for this particular "Greek".

No, there were no supertitles, so in the planned-chaos and fantastic mix of this thrilling staging some of the dialogue may have been lost, but the extraordinary beauty, intelligence, creativity and sheer exuberance of everything and everyone involved in the production made it one of the most exciting operatic performances I've seen. It doesn't hurt that the setting also summons the devils of our own contemporary plague years. And, yes, it really is opera.

The production was carved out of a somewhat eccentric late nineteenth-century "defrocked" (very appropriate, that) church, now the St. Paul Arts Center, with a wonderful and oddly-anachronistic avant-garde theater seating plan.

We arrived early to pick up our tickets and when I peeked through the doors to the theater space from the foyer where the "box office" was located I saw what appeared to be a set still in the making (scaffolding, buckets and sheets and such). Minutes later I saw instead that what I was looking at was actually a detail of the most thoroughly-broadcast set decoration operation I'd ever seen. The entire church was the stage for the opera, as we learned the moment it began, and that included the balcony above us, where music director/conductor Christopher Ramaekers and the nineteen members of the excellent orchestra were installed.

I took the images at the top, of two sections of John Sundling's wonderful set in this theater-kind-a-in-the-round, a few minutes before the performance began.

There were four excellent singers (and real actors!), and their moves (choreographed by Erica Reid) were augmented by a fleet and nimble crew of supernumeraries/stage assistants which managed to be everywhere doing just about everything an actor, dancer, properties person or technician could be asked to do. Philip Dawkins's costumes were spot on. I was enchanted by the kind of special effects (generally pretty low-tech) which might have intrigued a small eighteenth-century theater director, and the improvised magic lantern stuff was a terrific "stocking stuffer".

The cast:

Justin Neal Adair (Eddy), Ashlee Hardgrave (Mum/Woman/Waitress/Sphinx), Brad Jungwirth (Dad/Police Chief/Manager), Caitlin McKechney (Doreen/Woman/Waitress/Wife/Sphinx)

Sean Eweert, Dwight Sora, Cassie Vlahos, Kelly Yacono (in various roles)

Chicago Opera Vanguard appears to be basically the creation of its amazing composer/director, Eric Reda. The COV site describes the company's laudable mission:

Chicago Opera Vanguard is dedicated to exploring the delicate balance needed between performance, music, words, design and technology in order to make a truly immersive and transformative experience.

COV is commited to creating accessible and exciting theatrical experiences, both concretely and virtually, by producing new works, giving a second voice to important or overlooked modern pieces, and completely reimagining the standard repertoire.

There shouldn't be an empty seat in the house for something this good. Now that the work has received some awesome reviews, tickets may be hard to find for the last three performances, this Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

For those who can't make it, I just found a listing for a DVD of a television production.

We definitely want to go back to Chicago, since we had such a great time and thought the people were great, but another COV production will definitely do it for us.

It seems to me like it's been around forever, but today is actually the seventh anniversary of this blog.

For those of us who follow these things, this is also the anniversary of what turned out to be the most important event in my life, the night Barry and I met, eighteen years ago.

And, making the day even more perfect, . . . it's also Paddy Johnson's birthday!

I just checked on what I had written one year ago. Today I may be more upbeat about the world outside the circle of our friends, but only a bit.

[the image is of one the three metal street numbers mounted on a metal service door belonging to a building down the street from our own]

I hope this image doesn't look too sentimental, especially coming after my last post (a picture of some yellow spring flowers in front of a blue wall), but today, or some other day close to it, is a big holiday for a lot of people - for many different reasons, some of them even related.

Easter was one of my favorite holidays growing up. We were observing Catholics, but my obsession with the holiday was more about the return, finally, after another interminable Lent, of lots of smells and bells: colorful church vestments (including pink!), fresh flowers everywhere, lots of music, and candy of course (even before church).

The ancient Germans, who seem to be behind all of our biggest holidays, revered a fertility goddess called Ôstarâ, who was associated with the rising sun and spring, but who was also a friend to all children. She had a pet bird which for some reason she had to change into a rabbit to produce brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the children as gifts.

None of this makes sense to me now, and I'm referring to the yarns spun by both Catholic and pagan cults, so the fact that once every year at this time I pull out of the cupboard an opaque nineteenth-century glass egg (made for darning socks?) which has sat forever on some dry grasses inside a two-inch-round antique splint basket from the same era would seem to represent as much nonsense as its inspirations. Maybe it's my way of freely rendering an astronomical calendar, but I do know it makes me feel good.

We have another very old basket which I also set out early this morning, this one in the living room. It's a bit larger. Inside its ancient woven splints rest three hollowed-out and brightly-decorated real eggs. The eggs have grown old themselves since the day they were purchased at a Ukrainian holiday fair decades ago, although they don't look like they've changed a bit. Although These curios are real, and they definitely have color, I think I've always preferred their glass replica, and it's the one I'm looking at now as I type these lines.

Happy spring!