Gotham Diary:
Holiday Weekend
27 May 2014
As I feared, we have gone straight to summer. It is humid, in the mid-eighties, and there is no air-conditioning yet. It is going to cool down with a storm, sometime tomorrow, perhaps even tonight — although my recent experience of summers indicates that cool fronts coming to the rescue seem to ride old and tired horses. At least there are fans.
The holiday weekend, however, was lovely, from beginning to end. True, it drizzled on Friday, making our outing to the Roof Garden — Ray and Fossil, Ms NOLA and her husband (for whom I haven’t hit on a nom de blogue) — less than delightful. By dinnertime, it was pouring. The taxi driver who brought me home was wearing a turban, so I ventured to ask him if this was what monsoons were like, and he said, “Yes!” I’d never have gotten a taxi at all if it hadn’t been for the holiday weekend.
Instead of leaving town — as Kathleen did, not however for the holiday weekend but to make up for a visit to her father that was put off by flu — I went to the ballet, City Ballet finally. I saw Jewels. I regretted Kathleen’s missing it until she told me that she saw it years ago, at some point in school I should think; next time, I hope, we’ll go together. I did have a marvelous time taking our neighbor instead. This was Kathleen’s idea, and I jumped on it. Our neighbor, who was widowed last year, grew up in Franco’s Spain. She has always lived across the hall from our apartment, if you know what I mean by always — in fact, she and her husband moved in six or seven years before we did. She was thrilled to go to the ballet — she hadn’t been in years. Neither had I, not to City Ballet, more the fool I. It’s possible that my declining years will be devoted to dance. For one thing, there are no words. That makes for a welcome change from my everyday life. For another, there is almost always good music, and the orchestra at City Ballet played Fauré, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky well enough for the concert hall. A not inconsiderable point of appeal, especially for an older man, is that there are intermissions every twenty or thirty minutes. None of that “the play will be presented without intermission” horror.
Jewels is much too famous a Balanchine ballet for me to have anything interesting to say about it after having seen it just the once. I did love “Emeralds” more than the other parts, for its elegiac power, but this was a matter of degrees. “Rubies” was impossible to watch without thinking of Paul Taylor, and, given the ballet’s vintage, it would seem that the younger choreographer was the source of inspiration. (Had Jewels been created in 1957 instead of 1967, it would have been the other way round, but you don’t really have to get into the chronology.)
“Diamonds,” the most conventional of the three dances, was so richly satisfying that I hardly paid attention to it. It was everything that a grand ballet ought to be, but the score (four of the five movements of Tchaikovsky’s “Polish” Symphony) kept pulling me away from the spectacle of a stage that often seemed on the verge of being as overcrowded as a subway platform, to sad (and elegiac) thoughts about Tchaikovsky, his world, and the nasty end of both. I was about to say, a moment ago, that the good thing about a ballet is that there is something to look at while the beautiful music unspools, but during “Diamonds” I could hardly see. Tyler Angle made a very strong impression, but otherwise things were simply lovely — and doomed. That George Balanchine personally witnessed this doom made “Diamonds” unbearably authentic. I guess I did see it. Ungallant as it is to confess that I had to look her up in the program, I must say that Maria Kowroski was as regal and magnificent as her partner.
At least I got to see Jonathan Stafford dance once. He stood out for me immediately in “Emeralds,” doing nothing showy but doing it with immense authority. I didn’t know who he was until later. There is a lovely piece by Alastair Macaulay in today’s Times (the photo is from a performance given the day after I went.)
Over dinner, our neighbor and I talked about growing up, and I concluded that the difference between Franco’s Spain and Bronxville was that everybody in Bronxville was perfectly happy to live in Franco’s Spain. From what I hear, it is Franco’s Spain that has changed.
***
Before the ballet, and in the backwash of the previous day’s running around with the gang, I spent the day reading. I decided to put off Saturday’s tidying jobs for a day; the house would be bright and smiling for Kathleen’s return, as indeed it was. (But only because she so rarely visits the blue room, which still hadn’t recovered from all the library work.) Instead, I sat and read. I read Edward St Aubyn’s new novel, or satire, Lost for Words. It was sparkling and brilliant, but it was too brief to leave a trace. Too brief, that is, for a fiction with so many interesting characters. My personal favorite was Didier Leroux, the amiable but nonetheless detestable spouter of zero-gravity French insight, happily translated quite literally into English. Lost for Words is, as I say, great fun, but it has already been utterly eclipsed in my mind by a novel that I began, with some reluctance, on Sunday.
This was Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. Inspired by my strange experience with Under the Skin a month or so ago, I asked Kathleen to read this other title by the same author. She’s a great fan of Wilkie Collins, and that’s what Faber’s book sounded like, in an updated way. I was reluctant to try it myself because I loathe historical fiction. While I try to figure out why I’m excited and even thrilled, in the same way that I was by the Patrick Melrose novels, by a novel set in 1870s London, let me at least say that I’m liking the book better than Kathleen did, because Crimson Petal differs from Wilkie Collins’s works in one very important respect: it takes its time producing a character who might capture Kathleen’s fiction-reading heart. This is not a problem for me; I’m a heartless old cynic. Kathleen did come to like the book very much in its later pages, and she promises that it gets very exciting, just as one wants a “sensation” novel to do. I have a very long way to go; I’m far from a quarter of the way through. But I can well understand why Faber’s friends beg him to apply for British citizenship (he hails from Nederland), so as to be eligible for the Man Booker Prize, the award that St Aubyn came within grains of winning a few years ago. I do hope that St A wins it some day, although it certainly won’t be for Lost for Words.
Daily Blague news item: 55 Thoughts.