Weekend Update: Isostasy

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Middle Collegiate. That’s the name of the church. Just so you don’t drive yourself crazy trying to figure out where this façade is to be found: Second Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Yet another Gotham Gothic. There are more cathedrals in Manhattan than in all of Europe.

When I woke up this morning, I was the barrenness of the fertile thing that can attain no more. (That’s Wallace Stevens, “The Credences of Summer,” my favorite poem in the world, even though I have no idea what it means.) I was so out of gas that I considered begging (asking would not have been effective) Kathleen to make breakfast. Not “make breakfast,” really, but — brew a pot of coffee, maybe, and perhaps boil an egg, with a slice of Entenman’s. . . However, when I hauled myself to the desktop, there was an email that put a puff of wind in my sails, and that was all I needed to move into the kitchen.

Among the several reasons for my inanition after an especially intriguing week —  I promise not to say another word about the incredible pow! of the Valmadonna show — was the hottest evening of chamber music that I can recall. (On Friday.) Chamber music in New York is always excellent at least, but the musicians from Marlboro who played at Grace Rainey Rogers on Friday had been touched by the fire of Divine Elbow Grease. Quatorze (taking the place of Kathleen, who spent the evening at the printer) put it very well: the musicians were playing for themselves. We were allowed to listen in. In a word: jazz.

For half an hour or so before the concert, Quatorze and I looked at late Bonnards, down in the Lehman wing basement. It’s a magnificent show — Ms NOLA has already been twice — and all I could think of was David Hockney. Now, he doesn’t talk about it much, but Quatorze is a trained oil painter — and yet he put up with cascading disquisitions from me on subjects about which he was far better informed. He may even have agreed with me slightly about Villa du Bosquet, Le Cannet, le matin. I agreed with him, of course, that it’s interesting that the default color for many of Bonnard’s shadows is blue.

In any case, Louis XIV himself never had such a rich couple of days. No — he really didn’t!