Central Park After the Storm

Walked across Central Park last Thursday morning, before bus service got restored after the 'teen-some inches that fell the night before and took these pictures.

We Spend Another Night with Joe Green

Simon Boccanegra this time, and, in keeping with the cold January we are having, there was much coughing in the hall, one loud whisper from above and to our right during one act's overture "Do you want a cough drop?", and the man next to Dana Dee sleeping through much of the prologue and Act I, then roused by the beginning of applause after an aria to enthusiastic applause and "bravo"'s himself. We've had him before beside us, must be a season subscriber as well. Dana Dee figures he'd just come from work; I -- drawing on my own occasional snooze for a few seconds -- figure in the warm hall it's a rare opera-goer who doesn't nod off at some point in the early going.

My own confusion last night came from not reading the synopsis before the curtain rises (always, always! read the synopsis), so I didn't realize that 25 years had gone by between the Prologue and Act I, and therefore thought that Simon was still the upstart pirate allowing himself to be part of a plot against the doge -- as he was in the prologue -- rather than the doge being plotted against as he is in Act I and for the rest of the opera. And, from our seats in the nose bleed section (bad visuals, but best sound, I'm told by people who know)it's hard to tell two singers with similar bodyshape apart, so I had to spend a few minutes disgusted at my erroneous idea that Simon was kissing his unknown-to-him daughter. Incest at the Met, stranger things have happened.

Fortunately, a read of the Playbill got me straightened out at intermission and everybody stayed awake -- and coughing decreased -- for Acts 2 and 3 as the interwoven plots of Italian national identity, jealousy, double identities, and Simon's own personal history of first being a rebel against authority and then the authority, get sorted out to some excellent male singing, especially Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the baritone who sings Simon, and Ramon Vargas as Gabriele who has a showstopping (for me at least) aria in Act II. Only disappointment in the night was that James Levine, who was supposed to conduct and -- so I read -- has a special enthusiasm for this opera, was indisposed with a cold and did not conduct. This did not sit well initially with the coughing audience, which did warm to the work of Levine's substitue.

Yes, As a Matter of Fact, My Purse Is Occupying This Seat

The East Side is like the past and a foreign country -- they do things differently there.

Tonight we got on the M3 bus, to ride near home from a curator tour of the Whitney's "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time", only to find the front aisle of the bus jammed and all seats filled except for the three person bench seat, the one where you must give up your place should a handicapped person board, directly behind the driver. Two women, apparently not acquainted, sat at either end of the bench, and between them, occupying the third space, sat their two fat purses. Despite the numerous standees, neither made any move to set the purses on their respective laps and there the matter rested for two stops until one of them got up, taking her purse and, at the same time, revealing the cause of the congestion in the aisle -- she had a midsized suitcase on wheels whose pull handle she had fully extended into the aisle, so that the suitcase blocked all access to the rear of the bus. Call her Woman Number One. She got off and, with my wife now sitting on the facing bench, I sat in Woman Number One's place. As I did, I saw a small laminated card, like a club or museum membership card, where she had been plopped. I picked it up and immediately Woman Number Two ordered, "Give me that." Too surprised to do anything but comply, I handed it over and, after examining it front and back, she dropped it into the purse, which did now rest on her lap. I guess I looked like I wanted nothing more than to snatch it.

The curator tour was excellent, how pictures were selected for the exhibition, how they were prepped, and shipped to Europe for two museum runs before opening at Hopper's home museum, how Hopper lived for the last 50 years of his life until his death at 86 in a small fourth floor walkup apartment in the village.

I love Hopper, but I have always thought that the critics have his work completely wrong. He is the artist of isolation and alienation only if you consider the often solitary people in his paintings to be the primary subject of them. Instead, Hopper is, I think, about something else, saying again and again in his work that man is part and only part of something much bigger, the buildings of the modern city and, even more, the openness of small towns and the fields beyond and about them.

Dubious Words to Live By

As another winter night closes in and we head for temps in the low teens before dawn tomorrow, I heard this casual bit of misogyny walking past the General Grant Houses on my way back to the apartment after buying a bottle of wine, "You can lose money takin' bitches, but you can't lose bitches takin' money."

An Unfortunate Business Name

I was walking on W. 86th this morning, heading for the dentist -- where, thankfully, the novocaine shot didn't hurt a bit and it did its job and I dodged the root canal bullet again. Anyway, a van turning off Amsterdam onto 86th had one of the more unfortunate business names I've seen -- Cobra Kitchen Ventilation. Excuse me, if the choice is venting my kitchen or letting a cobra in through the new ventilation, I'll stay with the stale old food odors, thanks!