Urban Frenzy

I’ve been in New York for less than a week, and already the entire pace of my life has changed. When we’re in Berkeley, my husband and I spend at least five nights a week at home, watching movies or TV shows on Netflix. In New York, we’re often out five nights a week. What I see on these outings is not uniformly great, but searching out the great stuff is always a fun process, and the results are rewarding enough to keep me at it.

I arrived last Saturday night and spent Sunday seeing friends and relations. So the cultural schedule didn’t really kick in until Monday, when I attended my first event of the season:  Johnny Gandelsman playing solo violin at Le Poisson Rouge, one of my favorite intimate places to hear music. Gandelsman plays with Brooklyn Rider and The Knights, so I had heard him before, but it was a special pleasure to see and hear him alone onstage, performing pieces that ranged from Biber and Bach to Stravinsky and Philip Glass.  Another part of the pleasure was to be out so late:  the concert started at 10:30 p.m. and didn’t end until about midnight.

Tuesday was the opening of William Kentridge’s new show at the Marian Goodman Gallery.  (Kentridge had also come to town to oversee the revival of his marvelous version of Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met; I’ll be going to that in another couple of weeks, and it will be my third time seeing this production.) The new exhibit is called Second Hand Reading, and it takes off from—though in a rather indirect and not clearly traceable way—the terrific series of Norton Lectures Kentridge gave at Harvard last spring. The primary focus of the show is images painted or drawn on the pages of a book, or images of trees with words coming out of them (as words do come out of trees, when they are made into paper). The stress is on the book as a physical object, the page as something you can hold in your hand, though there is also a video that reproduces the qualities of a flipbook, flashing through images to the rhythm of accompanying music. Included as well are some wonderful non-book-related sculptures, the kind of moving gadgets that Kentridge excels at. These mechanical devices have various functions, but my favorite ones are composed of Singer sewing machines that play madrigal-like African songs when you turn the crank.  (Singer: get it?  It took me hours.)

Wednesday was a day off, in the sense that no live art event was on the schedule. I took my friend Arthur for drinks to celebrate his birthday at a West Village bar where he and I always have Negronis; then I met my husband at our good local vegetarian restaurant, Gobo. As I was consuming my lettuce-wrap pine-nut medley, who should be seated at the  adjoining table but Sarah Deming, one of my Threepenny writers!  (And she doesn’t even live in my neighborhood:  she had come all the way over from Brooklyn to meet a photographer friend who is working with her on some articles about women’s boxing, a subject Sarah knows intimately because she was once a Golden Gloves champion.) Sarah immediately mentioned that she knew I was in town because a mutual friend had seen me at the Johnny Gandelsman concert. At moments like this, New York can feel like a small village.

Thursday was a double-header: the final dress rehearsal of Eugene Onegin at the Met in the afternoon, and then the New York City Ballet gala at night. I’m not supposed to write a review of the opera because it was just a dress rehearsal, so I will only say: with Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien in the starring roles, Gergiev conducting the orchestra, a libretto partly written by Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky at his musical best, how bad can it be?  There was much to delight in, especially since my free seat happened to be located in one of the central boxes, the perfect angle from which to view any opera.  In the grand tier above me were lots of student groups, including a whole unit (or whatever they call themselves) of military cadets, suitably attired in uniforms and short haircuts.  When I asked one of them at the first intermission how they came to be there, he said, “We’re in the Russian language program at West Point, so our teachers thought it would be good for us to see this, ma’am.”  I hope and trust it was.

The New York City Ballet gala was ridiculous, but then galas almost always are. In this case it was not the dancing that was ridiculous (the dancers were all very good, and the choreography in the three premieres, while never outstanding, was never terrible either). What appalled me was that the whole evening had been designed as a fashion display: its main purpose, it appeared, was to show off the attending ladies’ designer finery, and even the program itself emphasized costumes over dance. Before each of the three premieres, we were treated to a short video about how the costume designer arrived at the clothing worn by the dancers, and the three choreographers—Justin Peck, Benjamin Millepied, and Angelin Preljocaj—were interviewed essentially as adjuncts to these designers. This approach proved so distracting (to me, at least) that I could barely watch anything but the costumes when the live dances started.  And in case you think I am exaggerating, let me point out to you that the gala was actually called “Fashion Returns to New York City Ballet.” What role can satire play when reality so exceeds it?

Friday I had lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities and listened to Peter Maas tell us all about how the government is tracking us everywhere through our cellphones. (No doubt this is true, but if they are tracking all of us, how are they ever going to find any of us in that morass of information?) And then Friday night I saw the new Nicole Holofcener movie, Enough Said, about which enough said.

Whew!  Tonight my husband and I are going to stay home and watch Rectify (an excellent and vastly underrated TV show) on Netflix.