A newly fatherless Electra (Sierra Marcks) stands spotlit and centerstage, dressed to the nines in punk-grunge garb, asking Zeus for help: “Are you there, Zeus?” she says, “It’s me, Electra.”  Thus this tragicomedic version of the Greek story of Electra, set in the mid-90’s era of Carmen Electra, written and directed by Aliza Shane, begins.

Zeus is dead.  At least, for Electra’s intents and purposes.  Not once does his lightning bolt shuffle off anyone’s mortal coil in Electra’s favor, even though she continuously requests his help in her plot to avenge the murder of her father, Agamemnon.  Her very own mother Clytemnestra (Cas Marino) had conspired with soon-to-be second husband Aegisthus (James David Larson) to kill Agamemnon.  Instead of attaining Zeus’s help in seeking justice, Electra is met with taunting unsolicited advice courtesy of her wonderfully sassy Greek chorus (Felicia Blum, Carley Colbert, Kate Dickinson, Ashley Lovell), four women who at once mock her and cheer for her, like any best frenemies would.

Greek stories are traditionally retold, updated and changed, so the premise of redoing the story of Electra isn’t new.  But this version of Electra seeks to comment on Electra’s traditionally powerless role in the story, as she waits for her long lost brother Orestes (Timothy Mele) and his friend Pylades (David Michael Brown) to come and help her do her matricidal dirty work.  This Electra eventually teams up with her sister Chrysothemis (Kerri Ford) and learns assert her own power in a horribly dysfunctional domestic situation, in a Zeus-less universe, just like any awkward tween female protagonist in a Judy Blume coming-of-age novel (i.e. Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret) might.

If you liked Clueless as an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, it’s likely you’ll love On The Fritz’s version of Electra, rife with angst and rocking with grunge era songs.  The soundtrack is impeccably chosen and perfectly timed (Green Day’s “Longview” comes in just as the seduction segment of the vengeance plan begins, and many of us remember what that song was about.)  The morning after I saw Are You There, Zeus?  It’s Me, Electra., I woke up with so much Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the Offspring, and No Doubt in my head, I nearly skipped my shower, put on an old flannel shirt and went back to middle school.

This Electra’s a tiny bit Nietzsche, a little bit Judy Blume.  It’s a little bit Greek, and a lot rock & roll.  In the end, Are You There, Zeus?  It’s Me, Electra. smells like teen spirit in the best way—delightfully overboard and self-assured.  The last performance is June 27.  Catch Electra while you still can.

~~~

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Art is hard.  If an artist wants to articulate something about boredom, he or she cannot simply write and produce a deliberately boring play.  Audience members could instead go sit in a Starbucks for an hour and save twenty bucks.  Similarly, if an artist wants to articulate something about the absurd, he or she cannot simply formulate a scatterbrained pageant of pastiche and call it existentially profound. 11 seconds of ecstasy!, created, written and directed by Roi Escudero, purports to be based in “realismo magico, transformation art, the theatre of cruelty’s awareness, and the irreverent humor of the absurd.”  But the play isn’t so much based in magical realism as it is in surrealism.  And where it further describes itself as an “eco-musical embodied in a performance art piece,” this seems to mean a collage of grotesque space aliens from a planet called Utopia, occasional attempts to retell the story of Genesis in Earth’s post-apocalyptic era, an actress in a tutu sometimes referred to as an “orgasm,” a predictable sexual reference here and there complete with thrusting into the air in case the references were unclear, and, to top it off, a mock bowel movement accompanied by the astute and subtle explication of the symbolism of this action, “I shit all over the world!”

Anyone who has ever taken a writing class has heard this bit of advice: “Show, don’t tell.”  For all the showmanship of the production, complete with masks, capes, papier-mache heads, dance numbers, show tunes, video clips, etc., there was very little of substance actually shown.  “Greed,” “money,” “war,” “oil,” “death,” and other abstractions were the go-to words in a script that was platitudinous and preachy where it attempted to be profound.  (At one point, in case we missed it, the word GREED was flatly projected in large red letters on the wall.)  The perhaps well-meaning environmental and political messages of the play were obscured by its shoddily thought-through production—often, the actor’s lines couldn’t even be heard over the music playing on the loudspeakers—and if the medium is the message, then the entire play begs the question, “Come again?”

There is a quote sometimes attributed to a letter written by Blaise Pascal, other times to one written by Mark Twain.  “I am sorry this is so long,” it says, “I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”  11 seconds of ecstasy! was about 3,589 seconds too long.

~~~

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“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a quirky Arthurian romance penned in alliterative Middle English in the 14th-century by the anonymous Pearl Poet.  Because it is one of my favorite stories, of all the Planet Connections productions I was slated to see, my hopes were highest for this adaptation of the legend, The Green Knight, written by Brian Rady and directed by Jeremy Bloom.

The legend is about a knight who–you guessed it–is entirely green: armor, horse, skin, the works.  On Christmas Day, this verdant villain rides into King Arthur’s court to challenge one of his famous knights.  Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, steps up to the challenge and embarks on a year-long journey, whose trials are infused with dark magic and temptation, to prove his chivalry and settle the score with the Green Knight.

The Green Knight sort of begins at the top of the stairs leading to 45 Bleecker’s downstairs theater, The Green Room.  The usher taking tickets at the door lapses suddenly into a brokenly scripted Arthurian diatribe before the audience is permitted to enter.  When we finally make our way down the stairwell to the theater this character breaks her soliloquy to inform us that the emergency exits lie beyond the narrow stairway by which we entered the dungeon.  For better or for worse, there is no getting out of this trial now.

As the audience settles into their seats, a gaggle of imbeciles dressed entirely in makeshift pink outfits is dancing off stage in the corner of the room to live drumming.  Audience members are offered complimentary cups of red wine, and soon, the twirling imbeciles, take their places on stage: King Arthur, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain’s horse, and members of court–the whole pink posse is there.

The imbeciles-turned-actors, as it turns out, are fantastic.  They at once mock the deliberately quirky and shoddy costumes and set design while completely enrapturing the audience in an Arthurian legend gone postmodern.  They meet the challenge of an updated, edgy and highly alliterative script and spin off these ceaselessly tongue-twisting lines with ease.

As the Green Knight interrupts the yuletide feast at King Arthur’s court, the scene succeeds in being at once engaging and funny.  We are rooting for this goofy Gawain, even as he rides off on his horse–piggy-backed on an actor wearing a horse head.  We watch as Sir Gawain becomes deterred on his journey to challenge the Green Knight at a debaucherous castle belonging to Lord and Lady Bertilak.  We watch the climactic scene, awash in green lighting, when Sir Gawain finally meets again the infamous Green Knight.  And the whole deliberately overacted and under-designed production comes together with aplomb to make a must-see whirl of wild wonderment and haughty hilarity.

The Green Knight was absolutely the most entertaining, hilarious, seamless performance I’ve seen in a long time.  My only criticism?  Lose the preface at the precipice.  We don’t need the usher’s diatribe as intro, and the language didn’t quite match the purply-pink parlance we’d be presented with during the bulk of the play; it merely felt like an unnecessary delay to seeing a play that would bring this legend to life, utterly delight us, and hardly be a dud.

Cast:

Scott Morse, Thomas Crawford, Veracity Butcher, Kareem Lucas, Amanda Bloom, Holly Chou, Laura Siszkin-Fernandez, Catherine LeFrere, Joel Sinensky, Joyce Miller, Brett Aresco

~~~

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“The Manhattan Project” was the code name for the research and development of the atomic bomb between 1942 and 1946.  The project’s early manifestations did occur in Manhattan, but the project would later expand to about 30 different locations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. and employ over 130,000 people.

One could assert that there are two kinds of people in this world:  Those of a perhaps morose disposition who know seemingly erudite specifics about the making and dropping of the atomic bomb and those who don’t.

Manhattan Project, written by Ricardo Garcia and directed and designed by Oscar A. Mendoza, would also make binary assertions:  Events are either predictable or unpredictable, mathematical or chaotic, physical or linguistic, which is to say, tangible or intangible.  Even the medium of the play is divided in two—film and theatre.

The play begins on film.  First, some actual footage brings the audience up to speed on exactly what happened in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945.  Cut to a filmed segment of the play: an interview between a male writer (Jeffery Steven Allen) and a female physicist (Barbara Mundy) who worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.  As the writer probes into the physicist’s feelings about the bomb, the writer ends up tells her about an idea he has for a story in which a man would kill a woman.  Cut to the theatre component of the play.  The lights brighten on the set to reveal a loaf of bread, a knife and a basket of fruit on a small table.  A young man and a young woman approach each other.

The writer’s story is about a married couple that worked on the final stages of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.  On the day of the atomic bomb would be tested in the desert of New Mexico, as the couple is preparing a picnic to go watch the explosion, the man, Charles (Paul Daily), accuses his wife, Margaret (Danielle Patsakos), of cheating on him with Enrico (Christopher Diaz).  He accuses.  She denies.  He accuses, again, and she denies, again.  Accusation.  Denial.  Assertion and rejection.  Male and female.  Truth and fiction.

The initial binaries established during the conversation between the writer and the physicist on film that had risked platitudinous abstractions were becoming more complex in the scenes enacted from the writer’s story-in-progress.  Interesting questions began to arise:  How can we begin to fathom war when we can barely cope with personal strife?  How much power does one person really have over his or her own life, what to speak of his or her historical context?  How do we live our daily lives in the face of global tragedy?  Is it inhuman to approach war scientifically?  How do we approach the topic of war artistically?  Why?  These questions remain, especially these days, quite relevant.

The project of Manhattan Project is perhaps to remind us that however we approach human events—analytically or creatively—the fact is that people are always lost in global conflict.  80,000 lives in Hiroshima, and 50,000 in Nagasaki a few days later—with their loves and infidelities, with their cut bread and their glasses of wine—were stopped in an instant.  And more painful deaths would follow.

Manhattan Project is a play for the morose, because they can’t look away, and for the happy-go-lucky, because they’d rather.  The interplay between film and theatre is an interesting comment on how normal civilians experience war.  The acting is, for the most part, quite engaging, and, I should mention, the music hits a perfect note and tone for the play.  Where the direction seems a little heavy-handed at times, or contrived, the provocative themes of the play make up for these relatively small shortcomings.

So, one could say that are two kinds of people in this world:  Those who know that Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, named the plane Enola Gay after his mother, and those who don’t.  And maybe these details aren’t erudite but are crucial in making our actions more real to us.  Manhattan Project is a play worth seeing; it creatively utilizes specifics to illuminate conflict on the smallest and largest scales, which, in turn, makes this nuclear age less abstract in our minds. (“Little Boy” was the name of the bomb.)

~~~

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Who would you bring to Othello? Someone you love? Someone you once loved?

Summer. Not exactly the time of year a New Yorker wants to venture into Hell’s Kitchen on a Friday night. Tourists. Bad smells. Bad-smelling tourists. Every out-of-towner at this time of year wants to get drunk, screw one another, and go to musicals. And the Friday I was slated to see Oberon Ensemble’s production of Othello, directed by Cara Reichel, was no exception.

When assessing a play like Othello, the question is not, is it good? Of course it’s good. Shakespeare is—well, you know, pretty good. Was the production fresh, or was it rotten? That is the question.

The stage is sparse. A few lanterns hang from low ropes. As the lights dim, two musicians enter, one with a violin (Whitney Kam Lee), and one with a djembe (Rene Reyes) and they assume their positions on stage. As they play, Othello (Daniel Morgan Shelley) and Desdemona (Jennifer Blood) take the stage for a brief, choreographed dance as preface to the play, as Othello begins after they’ve already fallen in love and married. This dance was a new idea, I suppose, but I could take it or leave it.

The music, however, was one of the freshest components of Oberon’s production. Admittedly, when I heard that a djembe drum was to play a role in the production, it gave me pause—I pictured a kind of horrid vaudeville of non-Western stereotyping—but the East-meets-West duet was a subtle, effective accompaniment throughout the play, and the musicians were very skilled. The violinist even moved among the actors and, at certain poignant moments, such as Desdemona’s remembrance of Barbary’s song as she readies for bed (which turns out to be her deathbed), seemed to echo the pitch of the characters’ inner states.

Jessica Blood (Desdemona) and Daniel Morgan Shelley (Othello) | photo by Ann Bartek

As the play begins, we see Stewart Walker as Iago. With the clear candor of his voice, and his cheerful demeanor, he seems more like Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing fame than the infamous Iago. I was a little worried. How could he go from Benedick to the Iago we know and hate in just a couple of hours?

Jessica Angleskhan (Emilia) and Stewart Walker (Iago) | photo by Ann Bartek

Whether the actors successfully distracted me from a pompous Neanderthal seated beside me became a kind of odometer for their performances. Othello (Shelley) was mostly successful; Desdemona was largely unsuccessful. Where she should have been Desdemona, the daughter who, unbeknownst to her father, rebels against tradition and marries Othello, she acts as fragile and gullible as Ophelia, eyes downcast and body too stiff when still and too scattily hysterical when in motion, so that when others exclaim how great she is, “the divine Desdemona,” Cassio says at one point, I’d cock my head to one side and think, “Her?” She does redeem herself right before she dies, as Blood seems to play a repressed despair quite well, but she did have the violinist and Jessica Angleskhan as Emilia, whose performance was wonderful, to help her out. Angleskhan’s Emilia and Walker’s Iago, and their interactions, diverted my attention most from the Delta Gnu doofus—at times, I almost forgot he was there. Walker’s Iago, as it turned out, did successfully transform from a Benedick at the beginning to one of the most infamous villains ever written. Even the quality of Walker’s face, paired with some great lighting design, made him almost into a different person. The audience’s experience mimicked the experience of the other characters of the play, and were you new to the plot, Iago’s metamorphosis would be utterly shocking. Simon Feil as Cassio was pretty successful, and Jane Cortney’s great performance as Bianca, though a small role, also stole the spotlight from the Trumpish twit.

Othello, as many of us know, is the story of true love’s undoing at the hand of a sociopath who manipulates tiny, seemingly insignificant things. A lost handkerchief spells the end of Othello’s trust in Desdemona. A few choice words from Iago’s lips introduce the suspicion that would kill both Desdemona and Othello by Othello’s own hand. Strange creatures we are that impart so much meaning to a few words and the loss of a small token. Strange creatures we also are that a few tiny transgressions by our fellow man can so color our own experiences of life.

The play is good. Of course, it’s good. It’s Shakespeare. This Othello is fresh, and the acting is, overall, quite compelling.

~~~

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*

*

*

*

“I’m scared.”
“Me too.”

*

“I’m confused.”
“Me too.”

*

“What just happened?”
“Liza Minnelli dance number.”
“Why?”
“….”

*

“It’s sort of like Alice in Wonderland.”
“Sort of.”
“Or the series finale of I Dream of Jeannie.”
“Sort of.”
“Or if there were an episode after the series finale.”
“Or an episode after that one.”
“A really atrocious one.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”

*

“I’m done.”
“You’re dying?”
“No, I said, ‘I’m done.’”

*

“Whose butler is that?”
“No, that’s Miranda.”

*

“There’s something called Orientalism.  Have they not heard of it?”
“Who?”
“Them.”

*

“What about the energy crisis?”

*

“That’s just wrong.”
“That’s unbelievably offensive.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Who is laughing?”

*

“Whose fault is this?”
“Is it ours?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m literally stunned.”

*

“Is she wearing a parachute?”
“She’s basically wearing a parachute.”

*

“I’m dying.”
“You’re done?”
“No, dying.  I’m dying.”

*

“Didn’t that already happen?”
“It all already happened.”

*

“Is it over yet?”
“We still have another hour and a half.”
“But is it over yet?”

*

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photo by Enrico Luttmann

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal;
bad poets deface what they take, and good poets
make it into something better, or at least something different.

T.S. Eliot

The very idea of Three Sisters Come and Go was risky to begin with.  A collaborative effort between the actors — Liza Cassidy, Claire Helene and Jackie Lowe –, the director, Orietta Crispino, and dramaturg, Marco Casazza, the play would open with Samuel Beckett’s “dramaticule,” Come and Go, and then the following scenes would be drawn from the texts of Anton Chekhov’s four major plays: Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Sea Gull, and The Three Sisters (which, to add to the complexity of the intertextuality, is a play based loosely on the three Bronte sisters), and the entirety of the play was to be governed by Structuralist philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva’s ideas about … something or other.

At this point, I stopped reading.  It was Friday evening, and my mind lagged from the workweek.  I shut down my work computer, left work, took the subway back over Manhattan Bridge, met someone for a drink, and told him I was worried about the play I was going to go see.  The intertextuality of it was making me nervous the same way fusion restaurants do.  Mixing together so many different stories could very well end up leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth.

We finished our drinks, and I went home, changed, headed back toward the subway, went back over Manhattan Bridge, disembarked at 14th Street, and walked toward TheaterLab.

As an ardent devotee of Chekhov, especially his short stories, part of me also wanted to be against Three Sisters Come and Go, out of loyalty and artistic principal, from the get-go; one simply cannot just ransack Chekhov’s plays for jewels and place them all together in one setting.

photo by Enrico Luttmann

I reached 6th Avenue, stopped for a quick espresso, and drank it in one gulp as I approached the theater.  I went upstairs, picked up my ticket, met a friend and entered a tiny dark room with spare white walls and about twenty or so white chairs arranged to face a small stage where three actors sat, motionless, expressionless, and wearing hats that covered their eyes, as the audience settled.  “Sure,” I thought, turning off my cell phone, “given the initial premise, Three Sisters Come and Go would at least be some kind of statement on art.  But,” I worried, “would it succeed in being art?”

Once everyone was seated, the audience hushed and stared at the three figures on stage, who, if not for the floppy brims of their hats, would be staring back. The tiny room was suddenly transformed into a space where the three women directed questions about each other to each other in various configurations.  This was Beckett’s Come and Go in its hypnotizing, though brief and simple, entirety—a kind of (forgive me), “Poststructuralist Gossip Girl,” I whispered to my friend after the dramaticule ended and the curtain dropped.

When the curtain opened again, three women dressed in black, holding black lace parasols stood starkly offset by the bright white of the stage and all its trimmings, complete with white lace curtains as a backdrop.  This was just one instance of the performance piece quality of the scenes that would follow, with stark black, white and red colors running through the costume and set design so that the actors became almost ornamental.

I found that, as the play continued in a variety of postmodern situations, the scenes were surprisingly emotionally resonant, despite their spliced quality, largely due to the almost seamless acting of Liza Cassidy, Claire Helene and Jackie Lowe, whose characters succeeded in being at once characters and caricatures of their characters.  One moment they’d have you sympathizing with their deepest sorrows, and the next moment they’d laugh off their own despair, and you’d laugh it off with them.

The play is composed of a number of scenes in which the characters converse with one another, as well as three solo pieces, giving each character a chance to embody a certain Chekhovian idea.  The play ends with all three characters on stage as Liza Cassidy finishes her solo that parodies melancholia while feeling its sorrow: “Just back and forth…it becomes a living thing,” Cassidy says, “So beautiful and so sad / So beautiful so sad / Isn’t that enough.”

And as it ended, a similar question occurred to me, as my friend and I put on our jackets and walked downstairs and back onto 14th Street:  Is that enough?

We paused on the sidewalk.  “I think it is enough,” my friend said.  I nodded.  We started, again, to walk.

But I had another question.  Would it be unfair to compare this Chekhov to Chekhov Chekhov?

“Yes,” she said.  “It wasn’t trying to be Chekhov Chekhov.”

That was true.  But was Three Sisters Come and Go defacing, to use T.S. Eliot’s term, the Chekhov it took, or did it succeed in making Chekhov something better than Chekhov?

“It wasn’t trying to be Chekhov,” my friend said again.

And still, I had another, larger question:  Given the spliced quality of this play’s text and scenes, could a play subsist without a story?

“There was a story,” my friend said.

“No,” I said, “There wasn’t a story.  There were themes.  Can themes constitute a story?”

We walked further.  Can a play rely only on themes and images to link its parts together the way a poem can?

I wasn’t sure.  My friend wasn’t either.  We walked further.

“We both enjoyed it, though, right?”

Crossing 3rd Avenue, we resoundingly agreed that we both really did enjoy Three Sisters Come and Go despite, or perhaps because of, its fragmented self-ironizing form.  We then located and entered a crowded bar where we were meeting a third friend and ordered three beers.

As the three of us stood at the bar, suddenly I felt that everything—the NYU students, the bartenders, the filling of glasses, the emptying of glasses—had a Poststructural theatrical quality to it.  Patrons would produce small wads of bills from their pockets, lean on the bar, shout a few words, and back over the bar would come tiny shot glasses on tiny silver trays, as if by themselves.  Bills were produced, a figure would lean, a figure would shout, and back over the bar came the silver trays.  And again: bills, lean, shout, bar, silver tray.  Bills, lean, shout, bar, silver tray.

In Act One of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Konstantine Gavrilovich Trepleff, an aspiring young playwright, and his uncle, Peter Nikolaevich Sorin, discuss the theatre:

TREPLEFF: …theatre today is nothing but routine, convention.  When the curtain goes up, and by artificial light in a room with three walls, these great geniuses, these priests of holy art, show how people eat, drink, make love, move about and wear their jackets; when they try to fish a moral out of these flat pictures and phrases, some sweet little bit anybody could understand and any fool take home; when in a thousand different dishes they serve me the same thing over and over, over and over, over and over—well, it’s then I run and run….

SORIN:  But we can’t do without the theatre.

TREPLEFF:  We must have new forms.  New forms we must have, and if we can’t get them we’d better have nothing at all.

In the end, my friend and I agreed that any artist, living or dead, would be hard pressed to make Chekhov into something better than Chekhov, as Eliot suggests mature poets must do when stealing material, but Crispino and her talented cast of Three Sisters Come and Go certainly did succeed in making Chekhov something different.

~~~

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I’m not big on the real world.  But The Real World–well, that’s a different story.  I don’t have cable.  I don’t even have a TV.  It is therefore impossible to use innocent channel-surfing as an excuse to pause on a program of eight strangers living in a mansion having their lives taped.  No.  The steps I take to satisfy my addiction are numerous.  I turn on my computer.  I type in MTV.com and press enter.  I click on The Real World, I click on the next episode, I wait for it to load.  Occasionally, when the wireless signal in my apartment wanes, I extract myself from the comfort and comforters of my bed, go into the hallway, unplug the router, count to ten like Netgear told me, and plug the router back in.  Cancun, D.C., Brooklyn.  I satisfy my addiction come hell or no signal.  And I’m starting to have an idea why.

The Real World is like the real world in that its participants are 20-somethings often seen in their pajamas during midday, lounging around, starting fights with each other, having sex with each other, and, in the increments between these diversions, occasionally wondering what they hell they should be doing with their lives on a larger scale.  The Real World is like the real world in that there is little to no guidance or instruction.  They aren’t marooned on an island with bankers and yoga instructors, taking part in a series of orchestrated survival challenges–constructing hovels, eating bugs–after which they are assessed and evaluated.  If the participants in The Real World do something with their time in a new city, they do something.  If they don’t, they don’t.  The producers don’t seem to care either way, so long as the eight strangers get sufficiently drunk or depressed, manic or hysterical to conjure footage that could be spliced into a good show.  And after the season has been shot, the producers, with the privilege of knowing how things started and how things ended, pull out the themes which then shape the stories of the episodes and the larger stories of the season–this misanthrope who’d never had a girlfriend, found love; that right-wing born-again found a best friend in a gay guy; this dancer shifts her interest toward social activism.  The Real World isn’t the real world because the stories have been extracted from raw footage, while in the real world, it is up to the artist to do this.

The Real World is not, in any sense, high art.  However, The Real World does demonstrate a certain process that can at times lead to high art.  Every writer, artist, filmmaker, musician, etc. lived in the real world.  They went about their lives, getting drunk and depressed and manic and hysterical in private.  They observed the world on their own, without instruction, and tried to figure out how they fit into it.  Their lives accrued the raw material from which they found images, ideas, sounds and language.  From this accrued experience, they shaped themes.  From these themes, they wrote stories, composed sonatas, painted paintings.  From the messy, boring, unscripted raw material of life, they spliced something together that, even though it was artifice, expressed something more true about the real world than the real world could tell about itself.

The Real World is interesting from a writer’s perspective, as it seems to recreate a stage of the creative process when he/she reads over fragments scrawled on napkins and starts arranging them in elaborate messy structures and slack story lines, attempting to organize them, attempting splice together these vestiges human experience into some kind of more perfect and taut story line about human experience.  The Real World is far from perfect; the real world is far from perfect.  Luckily, sometimes tension accrues that can’t be cut with a serrated knife, and that seems to, somehow, keep us going.

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…then wilt thou not be loth

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess

A Paradise within thee, happier far.

-John Milton

One day, a few years back, wandering confused and aimless as I often did when I first moved to New York, I found Paradise.

It was another month or so, though, before I realized I had found it because I hadn’t written it down.  All I’d written in my notebook was, “saints and angels embrace.”

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s “Paradise”

~

“Are you a saint?”

“Nah—angel.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry—this is a pretty roomy gown.”

“Oh, I see, so you just…”

“Yeah, they just fold right on in.”

“Ah, I see, I see.”

“So…you’re a saint?”

“Yep.”

“How’d you get into that field of work?”

“Oh, just, you know, like, the usual M.O.—gave away my money and stopped wearing shoes…you?”

“Oh, well, I mean, I’m—”

“Oh, right, sorry.  Angel.  God, those wings hide away real well under there, it slipped my mind!”

“Haha, That’s ok.”

“Anyway.”

“Anyway.”

[Pause]

“Well, I see another angel I’ve gotta go embrace.  Nice meeting you.”

“Yep, nice to meet you, too.”  [They embrace]

~

I don’t think I believe in God, I don’t have a Christian background, and I am not Italian, nor have I ever been to Italy.  That I tend to be moved by Italian Renaissance painting, and that I was so moved by Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s “Paradise,” was, then, surprising.  This is the advantage of getting ‘museumed,’ a process that involves at once aimlessness and faith, spontaneity and concentration—you encounter things you would never expect to like.  “Paradise,” as I found out when I returned to the Metropolitan Museum with the vague aim of finding what I had found before, is an 18 ½ x 16 inch tempera and gold painted canvas, transferred from wood.  Part of the gallery label reads, “In this vision of Paradise, filled with flowers and trees, groups of saints and angels embrace.”

Of course, what museums you may not museum someone else.  When my friend Morgan and I went to the Met’s extended hours one Friday evening, she was museumed by Egyptian scarabs, while I was museumed by portrait painter, John Singer Sargent.  We were both museumed by the vision of the Temple of Dendur in eerie dimmed spotlights, all the windows of the Sackler Wing’s great hall dark except for the distant glow of streetlamps lining paths in the park.  We also visited “Paradise,” by which I was museumed again and Morgan was not.   Afterwards, thoroughly museumed, there was nothing else for us to do but stand on the streetcorner waiting for the uptown bus, eating the macaroons we’d bought from a deli on Madison Avenue.

I’ve always been disappointed that life can never mirror the perfection sometimes achieved in works of art–paintings, poems, songs, films–but it occurred to me, waiting for the uptown bus, that what we were doing at that moment was somehow exactly what I’d always imagined life in New York to be.  Morgan agreed, and just as we finished our macaroons, up Madison Avenue came the M4.

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Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into

the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

I.

“Let’s build a stadium,” someone said.

“Let’s fill the bottom of the stadium with ice,” said another.  “And let’s fill the stands with people.”  Everyone nodded.

“We could affix metal blades to a pair of shoes,” someone said.  “We could put these shoes on a person!” another added.  “We could have them slide around on the ice wearing these bladed shoes!” added a third.  “Let’s call them ‘skaters’ and the shoes ‘skates.’”  Everyone concurred.

“Let’s name every twist and turn they make while sliding around.”  Then another asked, “Like ‘triple axel’ and ‘double lutz?’”  “Uh huh!”  “We could import people from all over the world to assign numerical scores to what this person does on the ice in this stadium.”  “We’ll add the scores together!” one proclaimed, while another piped in, “We’ll declare a winner!”  Everyone pondered.  “We’ll give them gold, bronze or silver!”  Everyone nodded and agreed.

~

Many years before, there was different conversation:

“Do ya’ll like sounds?” one asked the others, banging one rock against the cave wall.  “Yes, we like the sounds if the sounds go well together.”

“Let’s make instruments designed to emit different kinds of sounds and put those sounds together.”  “Yes,” said another.  “Ok,” said another.  “I will make the instruments.”

One went off by himself for a few hours and made the instruments.  When he came back, he distributed them to the others.  They began to play the instruments.  But when they played, the sounds didn’t go together.

One, the palest and thinnest of them, said, “Someone needs to make a plan that makes the sounds go together.”  He went off by himself for many hours, and he came back with a plan that made the sounds go together.

Then someone invented a way of recording the sounds.  Then someone invented a way of projecting the sounds.  Then it was decided that the man with ‘skates’ would perform motions like ‘triple axels’ and ‘double lutzes’ to the ‘music’ that was projected into the stadium where everyone watched him.

II.

Evgeni Plushenko of Russia (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

At the Olympic awards ceremony for the men’s free skate, Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, silver medalist winner, was announced to a stadium full of applause.  When he glided his way over to the three-tiered podium where the top three men in free skating—gold medal winner Evan Lysacek of the U.S., Plushenko of Russia, and bronze medal winner Daisuke Takahashi of Japan—would stand to receive their medals, Plushenko jokingly stepped up on the gold medal platform and got some laughs from the crowd before allowing Lysacek to claim the spot.

Behind this joke, though, lies real disagreement about who deserved the gold.  According to Reuters, the decision to award it to Lysacek was extremely controversial considering that Plushenko performed the highly demanding quad jump, the most difficult maneuver in figure skating, while Lysacek did not.  Pleshenko told Russian media, “You can’t be considered a true men’s champion without a quad.”  Plushenko was not alone in his opinion.  Vladimir Putin personally wrote to Pleshenko, “I would like to sincerely congratulate you on the wonderful Olympic performance—your silver is worth gold.”

Pleshenko was visibly upset during the ceremony as the United States’ national anthem played.  Who’s to say that he skated 1.31 points less well than Lysacek?  Can anything that humans create—the art and the methodology for assessing that art—be fair?

III.

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” writes W.B. Yeats, and, of course, we can’t. The dance cannot exist without the dancer.  The skating cannot exist without the skater.  The music cannot exist without the composer.  The writing cannot exist without the writer.  And yet, just as there is no absolute perfection in the arts, but only the idea and the hope of perfection, there is no perfect way of assessing the arts.  There isn’t an objective record there is in racing—it takes this person this amount of time to skate this distance.

Immense human effort goes into producing and accommodating certain arts and yet there is no intrinsic practical value in art.  And if there are standards applied to assessing art, they are artificial standards created by human beings, who are flawed, capricious, and often hungry for absolutes where absolutes cannot exist.

W.H. Auden writes, “Art makes nothing happen.”  Still, we create art and assess art, even though it doesn’t bring us food, doesn’t shelter us, and doesn’t bring peace.  And on Thursday, February 18, 2010, millions of people watched a few people put on skates and dance around on ice to music, something that doesn’t actually have any intrinsic value except that it can be seen and enjoyed.

Enda St. Vincent Millay writes, “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink / Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain… / I might be driven to sell your love for peace, / Or trade the memory of this night for food. / It well may be. I do not think I would.”

Art, like love, has the potential to bring us immeasurable pleasure we could never have imagined.  It’s just like Harry—of When Harry Met Sally—says: “Had my dream again where I’m making love, and the Olympic judges are watching.  I’d nailed the compulsories, so this is it, the finals.  I got a 9.8 from the Canadians, a perfect 10 from the Americans, and my mother, disguised as an East German judge, gave me a 5.6.  Must have been the dismount.”

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