Archives for July 2006

This made me laugh out loud.

Except for a noontime visit to Antonio Prieto Salon, which is far from my beaten path, my niece and I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary today. We brunched at Good Enough to Eat, visited the Metropolitan Museum, dined at Bright Food Shop, and saw Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater. Just another Wednesday in New York, in other words–except that this time around I saw Pilobolus and Times Square and Central Park and John Twachtman’s Arques-la-Bataille through Lauren’s eyes.
which made them as new to me as they were to her.

I was especially pleased by Pilobolus. Not only has it been a couple of years since I last saw them, but outside of a single performance
by the Mark Morris Dance Group in March, I haven’t seen any dance since my unexpected trip to the hospital seven months ago. It was a nice way to slip back into the swing of things, and what made it nicer still was that Lauren and I ran into Jonathan Wolken and Robby Barnett, two of the troupe’s founders, in the lobby. I hadn’t spoken to either one of them since I took part in the filming of Last Dance, Mirra Bank’s 2001 Pilobolus documentary, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

Now I’m sitting at my desk, eavesdropping as Lauren chatters away on her cell phone in the next room. She’s telling a friend in Smalltown, U.S.A., all about Pilobolus’ Day Two, the hot, steamy fertility rite set to the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno that ended tonight’s program with a bang (and a splash). She sounds thoroughly impressed. So was I–not merely with Pilobolus, but also with the miraculous good fortune that makes it possible for me to take days like this for granted, even though I rarely do. May I never forget how lucky I am.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

– The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

– Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

CLOSING NEXT SUNDAY:

– Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

“It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert’s face.

“Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard.”

Louis L’Amour, Hondo

The only thing I don’t like about my beautiful white iPod is the crappy little set of earbuds that came with it. Now that I’m spending so much time in the air, I decided the time had finally come to spring for a better set of headphones. After much research and careful consideration, I ordered a set of Ultimate Ears super.fi 3 in-ear monitors. They arrived in today’s mail, and so far I’m blissfully happy with them. To be sure, I may feel differently once I’ve subjected them to the acid test of listening to Morph the Cat at 30,000 feet, but I have a feeling that they’re keepers.

My niece’s timing was off: a power failure at LaGuardia caused her afternoon flight from St. Louis to be cancelled. Fortunately, American Airlines was able to book her onto a later flight, and she appeared on my doorstep a mere three hours behind schedule, minutes ahead of a thunderstorm. The weather in New York is still sickeningly hot. Nevertheless, we mean to have a good time or die trying.

I don’t expect to check in again until Thursday, but you never can tell. Anyway, later.

“Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Edward Hopper (quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper)

By the way, all of the summer nominees for the Lit Blog Co-op are being introduced this week, including my nomination of Edie Meidav’s daring and brilliant novel Crawl Space. Here’s a bit of what I say:

Some antiheroes are more anti than others. Emile Poulquet, the antihero of Crawl Space, is a Vichy war criminal and an absolute of his kind. Poulquet is a man divided along seemingly a hundred internal fault lines, and so too will be the reader of Edie Meidav’s rich and troubling novel, a searching inquest into the banality of evil. A provincial bureaucrat during the French Occupation, Poulquet was complicit in the deportation of thousands to Nazi death camps. Now, decades later, his face surgically altered, his conscience rattled but intact, he is on the run from the authorities and drawn like a moth to a flame to his old prefecture of Finier.

Poulquet is not clearly remorseful; if guilt dogs him at all, it manifests itself in self-pity and what he calls a cousin to guilt, the desire for vindication. “What did that mean, anyway, ashamed,” he asks. “Shame depends wholly on others. Who cared if I toted shame around like some battered private trophy, proof of my inner good, my bewildered soul? Wasn’t it more heroic to wander the world lacking an audience, the society of brothers and sisters which shame and its absolutions automatically offer the renegade?” Indeed, his crimes are so great and his name so despised that it’s hard to imagine anyone in his position could own them directly and fully. Poulquet’s relationship to personal agency is so troubled that he carries around a small pendulum to decide everyday questions such as where to go and what to eat. His relationship to his hated name is similarly fraught; as the novel proceeds, he increasingly refers to himself in the third person and scrambles to remove instances of “I” from the last will and testament he carries around with him. Meidav depicts with authority–with virtuosity and unlikely beauty–the gnarled consciousness and wizened moral sense of this unrepentant war criminal, who loathes himself and his pursuers in equal measures but in different modes. It’s a thoroughly haunting portrait.

There will be a week of discussion of Meidav’s novel at the LBC site next week, including author and nominator podcasts. The group’s Summer selection is Michael Martone’s inventive Michael Martone.