Category Archives: nyc

Soho Poetry Reading and its After-effects

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Standing on a stool with papers in hand, the young poet declaims visions. The crowded back room of the Soho bar softly stirs fruit around sangria glasses, as he heaps polysyllabic words on their ears. The warmth and the crowd dull the senses a bit.

This was my night last nigh; a quick bike ride in the suddenly descended chill, and then crammed into a small barrel of a room to be shot at by local wordsmiths.

I didn’t catch much. With all three of the readings I heard, the imagery obscured the train of thought, as if they ambitiously wished to express everything, rather than one thing. ‘Poetry reading’ sounds stuffy. On the contrary, it was familiar and relaxed, even if the deluge of verbal images stirred the heart without reaching the intellect. The energy of the live performance was a treat that somehow left me tracing the words of other poets around the inside of my head.

Is this the best way to experience poetry? Poetry takes one another life when it is read aloud and its musical quality predominates. Yet one–or I, at least–can’t understand it as well as I can by sitting in silence with a poem and reading it again and again.

Yet I was reminded of a favorite poet of mine, who I’ve not read in many months, Edna St. Vincent Millay. The tone of her structured, explosive sonnets number her among my favorites (if I could do such a thing as pick favorites). Please allow me to present, for your reading pleasure, Ms. Millays’ sonnet XLI in Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree (1923), and allow me to fantasize she is reading it aloud at a Greenwich village speakeasy:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, – let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Attempted review of a most excellent Chekhov’s The Seagull

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A new production of Chekhov’s play The Seagull has-

{So why is it called The Seagull?}
{Excuse me! Who are you?! And what are you doing in my theater review?}
{Just trying to help you get to the point. I hate those wordy, loud-mouthed reviewers.}
{I hadn’t even started yet!}
{And already prevaricating and going on about yourself…}
{Hrrumph. Apparently there are seagulls on the lakes in Russia,-}
{Ooooh, who knew?}
{-where the play is set , and Nina is compared to a seagull by Constantin and Tragorin, and the play ends with a stuffed seagull being placed on stage. Now may I begin?}
{You may. Start with the characters; Chekhov’s people always remind me of my neighbors.}

Irina Arkadina, a famous but aging actress, brings her lover, the successful writer Trigorin, to the country estate where her retired brother and her son live. Her son, Constantin, wants to be writer, and has a tempestuous relationship with his difficult, attention-seeking mother. Constantin loves the naive Nina, who wants to be a famous actress. The rest of the characters circle around the story of these four in this family comic-tragedy. Let’s just say things begin to unwind in a downward spiral when Nina runs off to Moscow and becomes Trigorin’s lover rather than an actress, and this light family comedy takes on tragic tones that have to be avoided in drawing room conversation.

{Little social-climbling slut!}
{Not really, more naive than anything. Now if you’ll please keep quiet!}

The Seagull is the first of Chekhov’s 4 major plays prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1904. When it was first staged in 1896, the audience booed so loudly that the actress playing Nina lost her voice from fear. It had the typical Chekhovian cast of fully-developed, ordinary characters who keep most of the action offstage, and interact trivially while talking around more serious matters. For instance, a certain writer blows his brains out offstage and we hear no formal discussion, just a whisper to get Irina away. Subtext of this type was an innovation, and helped bring theatrical convention away from melodrama and into the realms of realism.

The version being played at the Walter Kerr theater in New York city, through December 21st, was written by Christopher Hampton, who says “Chekhov used to be thought of as a lyrical, melancholy kind of writer, and he isn’t. He’s a very muscular, energetic, clear, lucid writer” in this interview with NPR. The strength of the dialogue really comes out in the exchanges, often heated, between Irina (Kristin Scott Thomas of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient fame) and Constantin (Mackenzie Crook, who is in the BBC version of The Office). Their relationship mirrors that of Hamlet and his mother, as Constantin hates his mother’s lover and vies for her respect and attention. This production actually took 9 of the original cast from the British Royal Court’s production, although Kristin Scott Thomas was a new and welcome addition.

{Yes, yes, that is all very well, but how was it? what did you think of the performance?}
{Oh, you mean this performance? the Ian Rickson production that I just saw?}
{Oh, go on then. That one, yes of course!}

I really enjoyed it.

{That’s it??? You got to say more than that.}

This highly-enjoyable production held my attention from the moment it subtly started, with a character walking out before the lights went down and the audience hushing itself. The different love-longings and sadness and disappointments of the characters was interspersed with laughter throughout, and kept this tragedy in content light in context. It was perfectly staged, with great sound and lighting. The actors were on the top of their game. Kristin Scott Thomas might have been over that top, but then the character Irina is meant to be over the top to some degree and it worked within the play. I really felt drawn into a different world, and was genuinely troubled by the appearance of Nina in the last act.

I think it was an excellent production of an excellent play. A perfect play, really, as it felt like a perfectly harmonious whole and the end was satisfying even while tragic. The characters were true to life throughout, and distinctive as people you live next to and see every day. I thought it was moving in the way life often is, with significance understood rather than outspoken. The New York Times also praised the production, in case you’re interested. It was beautiful to watch, especially as things went from light to dark in the end.

{Well, I’ll go see it then.}
{Please do, and go away…bothersome old thing!}
{What was that last bit?}
{Nothing!}

City Aesthetics: New York

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My window looks onto a grey stuccoed plane rising until out of sight, punctuated by windows with air conditioning units. I can’t see the sun. The sun, when I’m on the street, if often curtained off by the buildings rising on either side of me. Grey is prominent in the city, mostly because of the grime and asphalt. Light comes down in shafts, as if even the sun had been mastered by the skyscrapers.

Apartments with exposed brick walls are cool because they have the unfinished look of factories. Lofts, the epitome of cool, are bare, industrial spaces. The Domino sugar factory, whose eponymous sign has lighted the way across the Williamsburg bridge for decades, is being transformed into luxury condos.

My colleague was showing me pictures of my street from 1910, and the view of the Manhattan bridge hasn’t changed all that much. Neither had the exteriors of the buildings, or, in the case of my building, the interior. But the gaps have all been filled in, and streets paved, highways built, and horses replaced with cabs. And people, more people, everywhere.

Divided by tall buildings, you keep your gaze on street level, where you find people and cars coming at you from all angles. You pick your way around litter. Food cart smells, advertisements and lights everywhere, and general hustles as city-dwellers attempt to get where they’re going with the least amount of fuss. A walk in midtown during rush hour is a journey. And visitors wonder why New Yorkers look mean: they have to focus. Even on quieter streets of brownstones, you know you are in a city by the honking an avenue away and the hobo on the corner.

Sometimes my sense are overwhelmed and my heart starts beating faster and I realize that I hate Manhattan.

But other times, like last night when I was biking over to the New Museum, it seemed like I was the king of the playground, and I felt empowered by the lights of the Empire State building rising ahead, and the cars at my side, and the people crossing the street. Those people and I were all the living parts of Manhattan who make our lives here. Instead of feeling acutely aware of my sense, I subsumed the city into my consciousness and become one with it.

The great thing about making your life in this complex and huge hive of activity is that there’s always a new corner to turn down, a street you’ve somehow never noticed, and the same goes for the people, so many of whom you’ll never meet, and the possible experiences, so many of which you’ll never have. But you could. Manhattan is a world of visible possibilities.

Everything you’ve always dreamed of, from glamorous dining to gorgeous apartments to some gorgeous other person, is here on the streets of Manhattan. Shop windows twinkle with more than you ever dreamed of having. Ambition and the city go hand in hand. The best of the best flock here. And then you’re here too. You look at the streets, and find a direct challenge to succeed.