World weary

That's the title of a Noel Coward song.  It's also appropriate for today's news.

The news is bad

The headline: "Spain recoils as its hungry forage trash bins for a next meal"

Hillary Clinton says:  "One of the issues I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country ... you know I'm out of American politics but it is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money.  There are rich people everywhere.  And yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries.  They don't invest in public schools, public hospitals, in other kinds of development internally."

If class warfare comes I hope they don't burn the buildings, especially the ones on Tenth Street.

Mark Twain's Home.

 

 

Emma Lazarus's Home.

The next WTC being constructed

The day is beautiful

Rainbow in Washington Square Park

And at home: Brotherly Love

MOMA

Boetti's Mappa and Tutti

Every one of these art works are embroidered by hand, needle, thread, little stitches:

This is from his piece 'one to a hundred and back'.  I wanted to show the stitches but needed the zoom and the clarity is diminished when I zoom.

Count the dots.
I like the piece because it reminds me of a piece Frankie did of a stick figure.  It grows and changes just adding one piece at a time.  
There is so  much, but I want to point out that the Tutti piece is made up of many images:

people, glasses, corkscrew, outlines of countries

And the three graces, Euphroseyne, Agalaea, and Thalia [Beauty, Charm and Joy].  They look like they are modeled after Raphael's 'Three Graces'.  It is said to be the first time Raphael painted the female nude front and back.

Abstracts:

Time to renew my membership to MOMA.

Alighiero Boetti

That is Alighiero Boetti as himself, posed as twins.  His hair and expression are a little different in each photo.  This photo and his other works are at MOMA until the end of the month.  I liked all of his 'stuff' with one reservation-question that I will get to later.  Boetti was a member of the Italian art movement known as Arte Povera with Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto.  Boetti's and the movement's purpose was stated as making art from common objects.  They wanted to not invent but bring preexisting materiel into their work.  One of his first pieces was material such as wires and coils from a hardware store placed on paper in 2 columns.  Twins, two, duality, became a theme of his.  he changed his professional name to Alighiero e Boetti.  Two of the artists.  He has a wonderful piece of about 50 squares named 'Ordine e Disordine' - order and disorder.  Every letter is colored and each letter is the same color in one panel to be changed in another.  He uses shades of two colors throughout.  The postcard above is illustrative of another technique that he used.  He intended to not just use common objects but common institutions.  He sent postcards to family and friends at the wrong address to have them returned to sender.  He sent postcards to one friend, a fellow artist that was addressed to Boetti's last address, to show that his friend was always behind him.   The piece [19 of 25 were sent back] is titled Viaggi Postali.   In the center of the piece is a return to sender that was addressed to Marcel Duchamp. 
A number of modern exhibitions of other artists have made reference to Duchamp.  I can see the relationship between Boetti and Duchamp in their focus on duality.  Another piece: "Gli ammi della mia' is a large piece of ballpoint pen on paper.  On one end he has written the alphabet from top to bottom.  The lines of ink are of varying shades so the whole looks like a topographical map.  Along the piece are commas placed to coincide with a letter of the alphabet that spells out one of our senses.  There are six because he includes thinking as one of the senses.
The last piece I want to mention is 'Mappa', large embroidered maps of the world.  He was a world traveler [photos of him with native people of Guatemala are also good] and found that embroidery was an ancient skill and practice in Afghanistan.  They estimated that he hired over 1000 afghans to embroider Mappa.  There are 150 Mappa, all different and all very large.  The ones at the museum are about 8 feet by 10 feet.  He also has abstract embroidered pieces about 10 by 12.  When the Russians invaded Afghanistan he moved his work to Pakistan. 
He was fascinated by dates.  He said if you write 1970 on a wall it means nothing in 1970 but in 30 years it has meaning.  He focused on two dates and has them incorporated into a number of his works and a specific work titled '16 decembre 2040   11 luglio 2040'.  The second date would be his 100th birthday if he lived to be 100 but he believed he would die on the first date.  He was wrong  he died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 53 in 1994.
My issue, confusion, curiosity is why modern artists use repetition.  Warhol's soup cans, etc.  Boetti has 150 Mappa, each one just slightly different.  Order and disorder over and over again just colored differently.   Maybe when I get to reading that book I have on Marcel Duchamp I'll find the rational, but right now I'm enjoying a great novel: 'A Long Long Way' by Sebastian Barry.  I'll blog about it later and then read the one on Duchamp.     

Cock

They're not shy about using a euphemism that some may consider vulgar.  I presume as long as they use the symbol of a rooster they're cleared.  Last season it was 'The Motherf**ker with the Hat'.  There's no barnyard animal for that one so it wasn't cleared.  I mention the MF play because there are some similarities.  Most notably the mix of drama and humor.  Both are about relationships that are struggling to stay intact.  I think both are very good but I prefer the MF'er.  It was more naturalistic.  Cock has no scenery.  It takes place in the round as though the audience has come to see a cock fight.  The fight is between the male lovers John [Cory Michael Smith] and 'M' [John Butler Harner].   M is dominant in the relationship to the extent that he reminded me of Martha in 'Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf'.  He is constantly needling John.  The plot:  John meets a woman 'W' [Amanda Quaid] and decides that he wants to marry her.  M fights for their relationship and brings in his father 'F' [Cotter Smith] to back him up.  The climax comes at dinner for all the principles and ends with a very unhappy, almost catatonic, John staying with 'M'. Wonderful, witty dialogue by the author Mike Bartlett.  All the acting is terrific and I would recommend the play.  My only issue:  I can't see the woman, who is smart, divorced, and independent going to the dinner because 'M' invited her.  It seemed, as Sandra said, contrived.
After the play Sandra and I had a snack and some drinks at a very nice restaurant, Un Deux Trois.  Tom joined us later and then home to bed.

At Sheridan Square.

  

Living Abroad

Just finished "Four Seasons in Rome" by Anthony Doerr.  It's subtitled: On twins, insomnia and the biggest funeral in the world.  I've always romanticized living in a foreign country.  I lived in Germany while in the army but that's not my idea of romance.  Mr. Doerr's twins, insomnia and the millions of visitors for Pope John Paul ll's funeral is not a place I want to visit, either. 
After reading about living in Rome I wonder how much I would like it.  It appears to be like New York: loud, crowded and dirty.  Getting around Rome for me would be impossible.  Streets can change names as you cross them.  But then just when I was ready to chuck my passport, Mr. Doerr writes:
"In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences.  In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle."  It's called habitualization and we need it.  Imagine if we had snow only once a century.  The world would come to a standstill, literally.  But habit is dangerous, too.  The more entrenched an experience the more superficial our experience of it.  Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar.  Only then can routine experience-seeing a cloud, buying bread, even saying hello-become new all over again. 
"Geography is not something that can be ranked."  It has to be experienced and experienced as something totally new.  Not like any other place.

At the Flatiron Building Rebecca Riley's 'Randomland', a "continuously growing network of inverted worlds constructed from various forms of topographical maps, road maps and atlases."
The farmer's market:

on the street

     

Murnau, Borzage, and Fox

Playing in traffic on West 19th street

Fox, the founder of the Fox studio that became 20th Century Fox, was a force in movies.  In the early 20th century Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, owned all the patents to film making and showing.  He also had a small army of Pinkerton men who took care of any opposition.  The man with the patent had the monopoly.  Edison had no vision for the future of his invention and kept movies as novelties: simple one-reelers in nickelodeons.  Fox had a vision. 
Fox sued Edison and broke his monopoly.  He then hired great directors, especially Murnau and Borzage.  He invested millions in the development of sound for movies and came up with movie-tone  Of course, he patented it.  Movie-tone became 'the' device for talkies.  Now that they could talk films needed special equipment in order to be shown.  So Fox built the movie houses.  Isn't this beginning to sound like the plot of "Citizen Kane". 
He ended in court where he was accused of trying to bribe the judge = six months in jail.  With his monopoly broken, the stock market crash, and all the millions spent and loans taken on creating Movie-tone, he had to declare bankruptcy.  He ended his years [1879-1952] quietly on Long Island.
Murnau, 1888-1931, was gay and German.  I think Gay should come first for the following reason: 
He served for Germany as an pilot in the First World War.  When his lover was shot down, Murnau got 'lost' in some fog and landed in Switzerland where he stayed until the war was over. 
On the basis of his first masterpiece, Nosferatu, Fox brought him to America.  He was given free rein on his first picture for Fox: "Sunrise".  The critics loved it but the public stayed away.  It lost a great deal of money.  Fortunately for Fox he also had:
Frank Borzage [1894-1931] a roman catholic born in Salt Lake City, Utah.  People described Murnau as a paradox, half gypsy and the other half gentleman.  Borzage was considered the nicest of men, generous, dear, and sweet.  This was real early in the movie business.
At the time "Sunrise" was released "7th Heaven" by Borzage was released.  "Sunrise" won 3 Oscars at the first Academy Awards, a top award for Unique and Artistic Production.  "7th Heaven" also won 3 Oscars, including, Best Picture, but more importantly it won the audience.  The stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrel became so popular that they made quite a few more films for Fox and Borzage.
Borzage died of cancer in 1962.
Murnau died in a car crash in 1931.
Most of the Fox film archive was destroyed in a fire in New Jersey.  I will check netflix for "Sunrise" and "7th Heaven".

'Weathered Steel' by Malcolm D. MacDougall 111

and on the street:

     

John Bucchino

John Bucchino is mostly known for his broadway show 'A Catered Affair'. 
August 13, Frank and I went to the Duplex in the Village to hear him and others perform his music.  Among the performers were Adam Guettel composer of "Floyd Collins" and "The Light in the Piazza", Spencer Day and Corey Cott who is appearing in "Newsies" on Broadway.  There were about 5 other performers who I can't remember and I can't remember the songs.  Forgot to bring my notebook.   But you can find a lot of his music on you-tube.

A new apartment building in the city, about 50 floors:

and around the corner 102 floors:

Love in a Dark Time

Recently read 'Love in a Dark Time', Colm Toibin's collection of essays on Gay and lesbian writers. 
I've also just seen the HBO documentary on Vito Russo. 
Vito Russo, 7/11/46 - 11/7/90 was one of the leaders of the gay rights movement of the 1960s until his death from aids in 1990.  He was one of the founders of the Gay Activist Alliance, Act-up, and GLAAD.  He is most remembered as the author of 'The Celluloid Closet'; which is about the depiction of gays in cinema.  He loved movies and hated the stereotypical depiction of gays in movies.  He worked for years on the book and it was years before he found a publisher.  Part of the book was written in Lily Tomlin's unfinished, unheated home.  She was a friend and is the narrator of the film of 'The Celluloid Closet'.
It interests me it's all a part of me, my history, and my interests: books and movies.
Toibin [he is an out Irish catholic gay writer]
'studies how a changing world impacted on the lives of people who, on the whole, kept their homosexuality hidden, and reveals that the laws of desire changed everything for them, both in their private lives and in the spirit of their work.'  [from the back cover]
He writes about Henry James' story 'The Beast in the Jungle':
"It is, ostensibly, about a man who realizes his failure to love has been a disaster; but it is also, for readers familiar with Edel's or Kaplan's biographies of James, and readers willing to find clues in the text itself, about a gay man whose sexuality has left him frozen in the world.'  Life experienced from the outside, not from within.  Books and movies?
On his essay on Oscar Wilde he explores the inexplicable attachment of Wilde to Bosie. 
"In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfillment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment.  For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality.  But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force, and the resulting attachment, even if the physical part fizzles out, or even if the relationship makes no sense to the outside world, is likely to be fierce and enduring."
Vito Russo states that he never felt his homosexuality was wrong.  It's sex.  It's natural.  The documentary shows how close and deeply loving his relationship with his mother was.  He brought all his gay and lesbian friends and his lovers to his family's home to meet her.
The documentary makes no mention of what books Vito read but we know the movies he saw and loved.  And now I know the books Colm Toibin has read and the people he has studied: Henry James, Walt Whitman, Roger Casement, Thomas Mann, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Pedro Almodovar, Mark Doty, F. O. Matthiessen, and many others. 
Colm Toibin's last piece is titled 'Goodbye to Catholic Ireland'.  He quotes from 'The Irish Mother' by Inglis on how the Irish mother gained power:
"The way for the mother to obtain the priest's blessing and approval was to bring up her children within the limits that he [ the priest] had lain down.  In doing so she was able to call upon him as an ally in her attempts to limit what her husband and children did and said." 
That took hold in mid-nineteenth century Ireland.  Today: 
" On one Monday in November 1994, the three leading stories on RTE television were the political repercussions following the Brendan Smyth [ the priest who abused a large number of young people] case, the collapse and death of the Dublin priest in a homosexual sauna club [ as chance would have it, there were two other priests on the premises to give him the last rites] and the conviction of a Galway priest for a sexual assault on a young man." 
At one time only five groups were ranked below gays by the Irish and 22.5% of the Irish believed people with aids should be deported.  As of April this year civil partnerships are legal for same sex couples. 
Books and movies and, Toibin adds, the daily news are forces for change.  Vito would add: sometimes Mothers.
          

Rockaway Beach

If it wasn't for my Celtic skin and the sun I would live at the beach.  Rockaway was our family's summer retreat.  We rented a cottage or shared a house with friends and spent summer vacations there in the sand and sun.  What I remember is the smell of salt water, the taut skin after my body had dried from a day of swimming, and sand everywhere: bed, clothes, in-between my toes.
Can't forget the sun burn and the blisters.
So this is how I dress when I go the beach today:

But I still got into my bathing suit and swan around for awhile.  I couldn't resist.

Betty didn't go in.  She stayed on the Boardwalk.  No sand in her shoes.

Some more photos:

Oh when the sun beats down and burns the tar upon the roof
And your shoes get so hot, you wish you're tired feet were fire-proof

I should have moved that garbage can. 
& After a swim:

Margaritaville.




 

Saturday

That's me, Frank and Roger at a French restaurant in Soho, last night, Sunday.  Saturday, of today's title,  is the title of a book by Ian McEwan that I just finished reading.

Ian McEwan, 6/21/48 has written numerous novels, short stories and children's books.  He has won many prizes, the most prestigious being the Man-Booker prize for 'Amsterdam'.

Saturday "follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish" [from the back cover].  The man, Henry Perowne, is a neurosurgeon and father of a son and daughter.  The daughter is a poet and the son a blues guitarist.  So the author includes discussions of neuroscience, literature and music.  Some things that caught my eye and ear:
His daughter, Daisy, in an attempt to interest her father in her favorite writers gives him Henry James' 'What Daisy Knew'.   McEwan writes: "... poor Maisie soon vanished behind a cloud of words, and at page forty-eight, Perowne, who can be on his feet 7 hours for a difficult procedure, who has his name down for the London marathon, fell away exhausted."  
And 100 pages later:  "When this civilization falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the few luxuries to go.  The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquid they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks." 
The first is how I and a lot of us 'Tackle' the great books.  The second is how to enjoy them ... cascading streams.
".. a record Theo [Perowne's son] brought into the house years ago, Chuck Berry's old pianist, Johnnie Johnson, singing "Tanqueray", a slouching blues of reunion and friendship.
It was a long time comin',
But I knew I would see the day
When you and I could sit down,
And have a drink of Tanqueray."
And towards the end of the novel.  "...the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day.  But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre.  Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?"
The explanation if it happens will come from a great writer like Ian McEwan.

And on the street, a tile mosaic at an Eighth Ave. local stop: Spring Street in Soho: