Genius

"I have nothing to declare except my Genius" was Oscar Wilde's answer to a US Customs Agent.
I saw "The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" yesterday and I enjoyed it so much I may go back.  It was first performed in 1895, and is considered his best work and one of the best farcical comedies of all time.  Opening night was Wilde's greatest triumph but also the beginning of his end.
The Marquess of Queensberry had planned to disrupt the performance because of his son's involvement with Wilde.  The Marquess was stopped that night, but they all soon ended up in court.  Wilde sued Queensberry for libel because Queensberry's note was addressed to Oscar Wilde "posing as a sodomite".  Wilde won a token amount in damages.  But because of what came out at the first trial, Wilde was then tried for Gross Indecency With Men and convicted to 2 years of hard labor.   Because of the scandal the play closed after 87 performances.

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell stars in and directs the play.  Lady Bracknell is a hyper sensitive aristocrat who will not hear of any social impropriety.  She's that elderly relative some of us know who just when you're having a good time says "enough".
Lady Bracknell:
"Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon.  Only people who can't get into it do that."
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.  Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit, touch it and the bloom is gone ... Fortunately in England ... education produces no effect whatsoever."
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune: to lose two looks like carelessness."
He is remarkable in the role.  He\She says some of the funniest, farcical lines ever written and does it in perfect aristocratic seriousness.  At certain points his voice goes down several octaves in expressions of disapproval.  I would go back just to hear him say "enough", very, very low.  I was impressed by how realistic the characters were  in spite of having to act empty headed and silly while speaking some wonderful truths.  This is a classic 3 Act Play with 2 fifteen minute intermissions, almost 3 hours long, and you don't want it to end.

Santino Fontana plays Algernon, witty and fey:
" The essence of romance is uncertainty".
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"All women become like their mother.  That is their tragedy.  No man does, and that is his."  
David Furr [I last saw him in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin]  plays John Worthing.  It is the straight role and he plays it beautifully.  At times forceful with Algernon, then romantic with Gwedolen, then  solicitous with Lady Bracknell.  He has the central role, the connection between these people and he as much as anyone makes the play work.
Other lines:
"If you are not long I will wait for you all my life."
One character says about her 3 volume novel: 
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means."
Oscar Wilde never wrote another play.
He died in 1900 in Paris, destitute, at 46.  He left a wife and 2 sons who changed their names when he was incarcerated.
His epitaph is from his great poem the Ballad of Reading Goal:
"And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn."
One web site had 23 pages of Oscar Wilde quotes.  I'll end with this very long one from De Profundis:
    "When first I was put in prison some people told me to try and forget who I was.  It was ruinous advice.  It is only by realizing who I am that I have found comfort of any kind.  Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all.  I know that would be equally fatal.  It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy.  To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development.  To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life.  It is no less than a denial of the soul."

How many psychopaths can you name?

Jon Stewart on Monday's show had the author of "The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry".  He is Jon Ronson who also wrote "The Men Who Stare at Goats".  He uses the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.  It assigns a score of 0 if an item doesn't apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies.  Some of the items are: superficial charm, grandiosity, need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and manipulation, lack of remorse, callousness, poor behavior control, impulsivity, denial, and failure to accept responsibility.  Ronson has found that many political and business leaders pass the test and meet the criteria for being psychopaths.  Ronson is a witty man and I'm sure some of what he says is tongue in cheek but not all of it.  The one personal lesson he found from his research is that he could not be a psychopath; he's too anxious.  Psychopaths don't get anxious.  Housing bubble, what housing bubble?

Just down from St. Mark's

There are two buildings on 2nd Ave. between 9th Street and St. Mark's Place.  They are: The Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library and the Stuyvesant Polyclinic.
They were built by the architect William Schickel, 1850-1907, in the German round-arched neo-Romanesque style.  They were completed in 1884 using brick and terracotta.  He also built the church of St.Ignatius Loyola on Park Ave. and 84th Street and many other buildings throughout N. Y. State.  Both of these buildings are listed on the National register of Historic Places.  "The American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City" calls them "an architectural confection."

At the time of their construction there were 150,000 German immigrants in the east village also called Kleindeutschland or Little Germany.

The Library opened in 1884 and was the first branch of the NY Free Circulating Library.   It is the oldest in the NY Library system.
The Clinic provided free medical care to residents of the east village and also training for medical students.  It was originally called The German Poliklinik but had to change its name because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War.
The Library is named for Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer.
Anna Behr was born of a poor family in Germany in 1815 and immigrated to the States in 1837.  Her first husband, Jacob Uhl, purchased the "New Yorker Staats-Zeitung" in 1845, a small German language weekly.  With Anna's help it became a daily in 1852, the year Jacob died.  In 1859 Anna married her editor Oswald Ottendorfer.  She was the mother of six children with Jacob, none with Oswald.  She was the owner and publisher of The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and was very successful.  Her estate at the time of her death was $3,000,000.  In the 1870s the circulation of the paper was equal to The New York Tribune and The New York Times.
A word about The Tribune.  It was  founded by Horace Greeley in 1841, the 'go west young man' Horace Greeley, and was considered the leading newspaper in the United States.  Greeley's foreign corespondent in Europe between 1851 and 1861 was Karl Marx. That Karl Marx.
Anna on the other hand was building what she felt was needed to uplift "both the body and mind of fellow Germans in the United States".  Besides these buildings she built the Isabella Home for Aged Woman [named after her deceased daughter] a woman's wing at a city hospital, and numerous other kinds of aid to German citizens.  So much so that she received a gold medal  from Empress Augusta of Germany, and a plaque in the east village on an "architectural confection" that is landmarked for history.  When she died her funeral was the largest for any woman in New York at that time.  

House of Worship

St. Mark's in the Bowery

It is the oldest site of continuous worship in NYC and the second oldest Church in Manhattan.  It is on the National Register of Historic Places and a registered NYC Landmark.  Formally the place of Peter Stuyvesant's Chapel and cemetery it was donated by his Grandson to be used as a site for a House of Worship.  It was built in 1795 as an Episcopal Church.  Although Peter Stuyvesant was a  member of the Dutch Reformed Church, St. Mark's was for the money and propertied classes, the plutocrats of NYC.  Almost all of it's members in it's first 25 years were slave owners.

The area around the church remained in the control of the Stuyvesant family for a number of years.  By the 1840's  Second Ave. was the most desirable address in NYC with houses costing as much as $40,000.  As the city grew and immigrants increased the government was pressured to find space for industrial storage and housing.  Speculators moved in and the area became NYC's first industrialized ghetto.
Many of the immigrants were German and had been inspired by the revolution of 1848.  Fifty Countries were involved both in Europe and Latin America.  It was over by 1851 and the only real achievement was the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary. Karl Marx published his "Communist Manifesto" in 1848.

When there was an economic slump in 1874 the Cabinetmakers Union, Cigarmakers Union, the German Free Trade Association and Socialists demonstrated in Tompkins Square Park to petition the government for more public works projects.  They were jailed.  There have been many protests in the area since and many people jailed.  Revolutionary ideas and activism have been a part of the East Village and St. Mark's for over a century.