Culture

… has two great articles today.

What is a European, by A.S. Byatt, and Michael Kimmelman on the re-appearance of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

We braved the rain to go to a few shows today, and I strongly recommend two of them:

• Christoph Schmidberger at Nikolai Fine Art (through the end of the month)
• Ray Johnson at Feigen (also through the end of the month)

The Johnson show had me thinking about whether I could sell something to buy one. Also, go see the movie about him at the Film Forum.

This one’s for Glenn: an exhibit of amateur paintings of clowns from the collection of Robert Berman and Diane Keaton.

Speaking of Ms. Keaton, I recently watched Manhattan for the first time since I moved to NYC in 1989. It’s such a wonderful appreciation of New York. Now that I’ve lived here for years, I recognize so much, and I know where they are when they’re in that gallery building on West Broadway where Castelli, Sonnabend, etc. were located. I would not have laughed as much at the “oh, you liked that?” conversation when Diane Keaton first appears. I don’t think I knew who Diane Arbus even was when I first saw it. I still remember laughing at the angst over pronouncing “Van Gogh” when I first saw it in college.

Let’s talk about art for a bit, rather than politics. The Guardian has an amusing Web Guide to Tracey Emin, a/k/a ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’.

“Make it personal, tell the truth and then write ‘Burn this’ on the bottom.”

We saw Burn This last night, and it was awesome. I’ve been going to Signature Theatre for years, and this was not the typical crowd for one of their plays. This was much more like a Broadway audience, and believe me that’s not a compliment: plenty of scary suburban New York Magazine types. It was a gayer crowd than usual, but I suspect that was as much a function of having Ed Norton in it (who was great despite someone’s opinion of him), rather than the fact that it was a gay-themed play by a great playwright. I don’t typically see that many pretty, blank Chelsea boys at a serious play — perhaps they were brought as arm candy by more serious playgoers. I much prefer smart pretty boys.

I first saw Ed Norton in 1994, in the world premiere of Eward Albee’s “Fragments” at Signature. I still remember how he looked and talked, and not just because he was hot. Apparently this was Catherine Keener‘s stage debut, and she was excellent, with a great presence on stage. I would not have guessed that she had concentrated only on film before. I’ve only seen her in one movie, “Being John Malkovich”. Given that Mr. Malkovich played the Ed Norton role in the play’s debut, there is a nice symmetry at work here. The entire cast of four was pretty amazing.

There were a few celebrities in the crowd. The ones I spotted: Monica Lewinsky (I think I was cruised by her!), Paul Lombardi (yes Sam he’s quite hot in person too), and Paul Rudnick.

Here are some reviews.

On a happier note, there is an exhibit at the NYPL on New York City wildlife — yes there actually is some here other than the kind of people Mr. Swill meets on the subway.

I recommend going to see it. It’s free!

We went to the NYC premiere of Philip Glass’s new opera “Galileo Galilei” at BAM last night. It was very disappointing. The music wasn’t that interesting, the libretto wasn’t so hot, and the directing was terrible. It seemed like a good idea: Galileo, Philip Glass, and director/co-librettist Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses).

As James said, it was more like a masque than an opera, but it just didn’t work. The direction at times drove me crazy. At one point several people are moving in a gondola. It moves because a person at the front pulls it, but there is a gondolier there making the motions. That’s fine, but once they get to the middle of the stage and the boat isn’t actually moving, both the gondolier and the person with the rope at the front continue to move as if it is. I get the idea, but I was so distracted by the fake motion of the guy pulling the boat I couldn’t listen to the music. At another point in the opera, Galileo refuses a drink from a servant when invited to share some wine with an important cardinal in the garden of his villa. I don’t think so. Even if he didn’t drink, there’s no way he would have refused the glass.

Bad art is so depressing.

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Followup on Thurday: The NYT review. It’s one of the most non-committal things I have ever read. One good quote though:

But without wishing to disparage either Mr. Glass or “Galileo” — which is notably fresher than Mr. Glass’s last few operas — can it really be that, 20 years on, Mr. Glass is still the standard-bearer for what’s “next” in music? Isn’t the festival now an entrenched orthodoxy with a postmodernist accent?

I’m not normally awake at this hour, but I couldn’t sleep. Forgive the incoherence.

We saw “Take Me Out” — yes the gay baseball play — at the Public Theater yesterday afternoon. I didn’t it expect it to be so good. It’s a great play, and this is coming from someone who could not care less about baseball. It took me a little while to get used to the idea of baseball players with such vocabularies, but I got over it. I think Joe Mantello as the director really “nailed” the play, and the cast is excellent. The John Rocker-type character is, in a lot of ways, the most interesting character in the play. How much leeway do we give damaged people to be… awful? Yes, there’s male nudity in it, and the cast is attractive, but that’s not really the reason to see the play. If anything, it’s a bit distracting from what is a good text. I have to single out Denis O’Hare as the gay player’s money manager — he knew how to “own” the stage during his several monologues.

I really recommend it. If James, who doesn’t even know how to pronounce Derek Jeter’s last name, loved it, excusing yourself from attending because “you don’t like baseball” doesn’t make sense.

There were two women sitting next to us. One was like us — not interested in baseball, but interested in theater. (I can never decide when to use theatre vs. theater.) Her friend was a total baseball fanatic — someone who, when visiting another city, goes to visit stadiums just to see them whether there’s a game or not. One of the two women complimented James on his (slash) No War button, and he gave her one to wear. The other one said, “I would wear the opposite — nuke em’ all!” Is anyone out there surprised when I tell you that the baseball fanatic was the “nuke ’em” lady?

We separated to run errands as we walked home. I dropped by The Strand on my way home. For someone like me, who finds brains sexier than brawn, the Strand is the hottest spot in the city. So many smart, attractive men, looking at books, looking at each other, looking at books…

As I walked home up Fifth Avenue, I spotted Amanda Lepore in a torn cut-off t-shirt and shorts. Wow — I’ve never seen her in daylight before.

Once I got to Chelsea, the burning question in my mind became: Why do gay men who are kind of… lumpen feel the need to wear sunglasses that really only work on someone like David Beckham?