40 Years

Smell and taste are the memory senses. I was walking yesterday along 79th and passing a young Hispanic, Indian features like the Altiplano. Maybe him, maybe his clothes, maybe just some quirk from a nearby building, but suddenly and for only an instant I was back in the Chilean campo, entering invited the mud and thatch home of a Mapuche family, from the cold and damp outdoors to the smoke and scent of humans in layers of clothes in a very small space, a smell of stinging sweetness. All there again yesterday, after forty years and then it was passed and the museum was ahead.

Performances

Autumn sends us back to theaters and we've been to three performances in October. Bianca plays the Brazilian maid Matilde in the Sarah Ruehl play The Clean House, at Lincoln Center a couple years ago and now, in her production, in Richmond to enthusiastic reviews and audiences. I don't worry anymore about her onstage. I sit back, like the rest of the audience, expecting to be entertained, even transported, and when that happens -- as it always does -- I get this charge of pride and amazement, "that's my kid," the one I first saw with all that dark hair on her little head years ago in Pretoria.

Two operas as well, Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, wonderful productions both at the Met. I put Giovanni in the top level of my favorites, along with Otello, Macbeth, Barber, Iphigenie en Tauride. Giovanni, an unrepentant piece of work as a man, shares with Macbeth the willingness to accept the consequences of his despciable actions. Amazing to the opera neophyte I remain is that Don Giovanni has no fewer than seven very major singing roles. The Uruguayan Ervin Schrott as the Don and Susan Graham as Dona Elvira were first rate -- particularly Schroot whose lust was in his acting as well as his singing --, but I thought the singers who did Ottavio and Donna Anna were even more powerful. Also, like Verdi in Otello, Mozart wasted no time in introductory niceties, throwing the audience headfirst into the music and the action with an attempted rape and a murder in the first ten minutes of the opera. Butterfly is obviously (even to me) a vehicle for the soprano singing the title role and, by that standard, this lavishly designed production by the late director Anthony Minghella excelled thanks to Patricia Racette. But I learned while watching it that while I can appreciate star vehicle operas (Norma is another) I prefer the Giovanni types, those with more ongoing engagement and dramatic conflict between and among characters. Think, besides Giovanni, Otello with major singing roles for Otello, Desdemona, Iago and Cassio.

Anyway, it's great to be in another season at the Met. Next up is Faust. Butterfly has been performed more than 800 times at the Met. A nice feature of the Playbill you get at each performance is that it states the exact number of the performance you are seeing and gives an overview of the opera's presentations at the Met.

Philippe de Montebello

Philippe de Montebello has been director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty years and he is retiring at the end of 2008. Although we have lived in New York for only a bit over three years, it is hard to fathom the Met without him. IMHO he has created a 21st century museum, a place of light, open space and splendid exhibition halls, and at the same time enhanced immeasurably the collections that fill those spaces. The Met is a world museum. It draws from all the arts, from all the centuries, and from all continents -- OK, maybe not Antarctica. To visit there is to be inspired and close to awed by the endless ways man can pursue and has pursued beauty in art, even when the forms of that art depict anything but beauty.

de Montebello could not have done this alone, of course, as he freely acknowledges. So in a wonderful symbiosis, the Met is now opening an exhibition that his curators wished to do -- a collection of some of the finest works -- selected by the curators -- the Met has added to its collections in de Montebello's thirty years. That the curators wanted to honor de Montebello with this exhibition underscores what, to this total outsider's eye, seems to be his greatest strength -- while a man of strong opinions and tastes, he nonetheless put great faith in his curators and their estimation of valuable works the Met should pursue. In other words, he surrounded himself with very talented people and let that talent run to its full extent. My personal definition of an outstanding leader.

So last night we dressed up and went to the Sustaining Members preview reception of the exhibition. I write this before reading today's NYT review, but it seems safe to say that this is the one exhibition not to be missed in New York this year. The extent of its amazing range is evident from the anteroom, where Lucien Freud's in-your-face Naked Man Back View is kitty-corner to a 2nd century Roman rose-colored carved support for a water basin. It includes, three of my personal faves (they will change the next time I am there), Andres Segovia's performance guitar, an inch-high gold pointer, and a carved gold-handled knife from Turkey.

What takes the exhibit to an unprecedented level, however, is the accompanying audio tour. Always helpful for any exhibition, in this one, the audio guide has de Montebello discussing with his curators how a number of the works were acquired. None of this is written on the exhibition notes next to each displayed piece. In the discussions, de Montebello evinces no need to seem the all-knowing expert. The pointer, when first brought to him by the area curator, he misidentifies as a thimble. He freely admits to biases, not being fond of Tibetan paintings for one. But in the one he approved for Met purchase that is in the show he -- right on the tape -- asks the curator "and what do those tongues at the feet of some of the characters mean?" And she replies, "well, uh, those are actually lotus blossoms." Or, the curator of American textiles on her first meeting with the director and wondering what was in store for her when he asked wearily, "are there any American textiles except quilts?"

I rarely get carried away -- but today I'm carried away, by the man as a leader and visionary and by this extraordinary exhibition that makes those qualities so very, very clear.

A Miracle?

For more than two weeks now my wife and I have been using the same flattened Colgate Total 6.3 oz tube of gel toothpaste. Each time we press at any point along its length, somewhere, somehow, another bit of gel blurts out to be spread on the toothbrush. I'm starting to think this Colgate tube is like one of those incandescent lightbulbs, the one in ten gazillion that glows year after year, eight hours a day or more, a freak of nature or science. Or, like the more-or-less annual miracle tortilla in Mexico, is that the face of Jesus that I see forming on it in the white space between the "e" of "Colgate" and the "Total"?

Amy Rigby

Riding down from Riverdale in the Bronx after a hospice visit, under-dressed for the coming night and cold, by the Irish bars, by the Dominican bodegas, through the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and lol nearly all the way to the sublime and comic Amy Rigby on repeat play on the iPod.

"What ever happened to Babe and Stud/Too much KFC and Bud"

Or, "Come here baby and scratch my itch/Or I'll show you one mean ass bitch"

Or, "Not now, hon, the eggs are fryin'/But you get extra points for tryin'"

In a just music world, Ms. Rigby would get everything she wanted, starting with the subject song of those lyrics.

And then, further on, just about to the Riverside Drive building where Ralph Ellison lived for years, on comes a song high up in the Personal Lifetime Top Ten, the Wicked Pickett and The Midnight Hour. One of those rare songs, like Time after Time, that's bulletproof against any cover versions; they all sound good, but none approaches Wilson.

Where the Bookies Dine?

Walking to the Museum along 79th Street, we pass a restaurant where the posted menu offers a "Pre Fix" dinner. Maybe Arnold Rothstein dined there while putting together his 1919 World Series masterpiece? And, speaking of the WS, could we possibly get rid of the Red Sox tomorrow night? At least the Dodgers are gone.

David Byrne, Biker

Turns out that David Byrne, who long ago left behind Talking Heads for many other artistic pursuits, but I'll always figure his reputation was already secured with Once in a Lifetime and Psycho Killer and Uh, Uh Love Comes to Town and And She Was, and Road to Nowhere and the list goes on for a good while, is a biker. And like most us who ride in NYC has had his share of narrow escapes. But he is also is a designer of bike racks and struck a deal with the city to add to the too small stock of racks in Manhattan with specially designed racks made of the same metal tubing as on all the others. They'll be on the streets for a year and then sold through his gallery. Mudflap Tammy, the truckers' goddess, is at 44th and 7th Ave. I've seen the abstract outside the MOMA and the dog in Greenwich Village and lashed my bike briefly to The Coffee Cup, outside a pastry shop across Amsterdam from St. John the Divine. There are half a dozen or so more. Thanks, David, for bringing a little flair and humor to a scarce necesity, always welcome here and everywhere.

The Guggenheim Reaches Out With Such a Deal

We got a letter yesterday from the Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim. He said he took "great pleasure in extending to (us) a personal invitation to increase (our) membership support of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum." (Emphasis his.) Lucky us! I felt all warm and fuzzy -- an officer of a great institution reaching out to me to give me the chance to spend more. That sure doesn't happen every day. We'd probably get rid of the federal deficit in one year if the government would just send out such warm personal invitations to taxpayers to pony up more dollars.

The only thing that would have touched me more would have been if I had been addressed by name in the "personal invitation" instead of as Dear Member.

The Debate

Right, the focus last night was on the economy and what did the candidates have to offer two weeks after the first "foreign policy" debate with Jim Lehrer spent about half its running time on the economy? Two weeks later and, oh, let's say, a trillion dollars less in retirement account values later? Nothing, nada, rien new. Good jobs, middle-class Americans, he's going to raise your taxes, he wants to give the richest 5 percent a tax cut they aren't even asking for, etc., etc. You know the talking points, you could give them yourselves. And why nothing new? Because the two of them are like everybody else in these panic-whipped and uncharted waters -- nobody has a clue how to stop the downward spiral. It will stop when, to use the old fire-in-the-theater analogy, the fire burns itself out, somebody discovers that the fire was a few guys smoking big cigars illegally in the building (and doubtless causing some collateral, but not permanent, damage), or the theater burns to the ground. And nobody has the least idea which it will be, but none of the firefighting tools -- including today's rate cut -- have worked yet.

You could almost hear the relief from both of them when Brokaw and questions turned to foreign policy -- ah, here's a subject I don't know much about, but at least my talking points aren't being rendered irrelevant on a daily basis by the stock market.

Since incumbents pay of course, the whirlwind is playing out in Obama's favor and this election is for all intents and purposes over. Gives him about 100 days to figure out what he and everybody else -- including of course me -- remain clueless about.

Autumn

We get up early to walk Sam and the last two mornings have been autumn, misty, cold, mostly empty streets, and gray wherever we looked. Both days have brightened, but the weeks ahead are in those dawnings. The days are starting to catch up with the calendar.