It seems the proposed bailouts of GM, AIG and a host of others are not all that popular right now; many in the US feel that the law of the jungle — of the free market — should prevail no matter how big the company. If you can’t survive, then you will justifiably become extinct — repercussions be damned. If Detroit and the surrounding cities turn into a 3 million strong refugee camp (there are camps in Fresno already), then so be it — at least that’s the current vibe. (Thing is, those refugees won’t stay put in Flint, if the Dust Bowl and Katrina were any indication.)
This sink or swim attitude was reinforced when the executives of AIG gave themselves bonuses this week — $165 million (or more) in bonuses — and GM executives flew on private jets to ask Washington for taxpayer money. These guys are all unreformed bubble heads — they claim that only they know how best to run their companies, and are therefore essential to keeping them afloat... but weren’t they the ones who drove their companies to bankruptcy? (Of course they’ll blame it on the credit crisis.) Besides, some of those who received these bonuses have already left for greener pastures — so much for the argument that the bonuses are incentives to stay.
It’s human (and often animal) nature to help those in one’s group who have fallen behind — and we instinctively look after those close to us. Occasionally we allow our friends and family to fail — maybe not too frequently, but once in a while — but more often we come to their aid, at least some of the time. But somehow this seems different.
For one thing, these guys have proven that they aren’t likely to change their behavior. They’ll drive their companies right back into the ground, because that’s their modus operandi. They’ve made no serious statements about changing their ways. None have said they’re sorry, or that they were wrong. Most of us say we should get rid of the bums and let someone else try to keep these behemoths afloat — if they deserve to be kept afloat at all.
The new head of AIG says in the NY Times: “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.” [Link]
In other words, his type of executives will leave to work for the highest bidder — the implication being that they have no loyalty to either AIG or to the taxpayer. They don’t really love their work — they just love the money and perks. They’re not even accepting bonuses based on performance! These guys don’t believe their own “market forces” bullshit when it comes to their pay — they expect a bonus no matter how bad they are at doing their jobs! Can I get a job like that?
One of the AIG execs recently wrote a resignation letter, reprinted in the Times, claiming that his department didn’t lose money; his department didn’t engage in questionable creation of assets; and his group worked really hard for years and deserves their bonuses. He felt they were being unfairly lumped in with the bad apples across the hall. They’re all being forced to pay for the unscrupulous behavior of some rogue departments.
I’m tempted to agree, but that kind of behavior was tacitly encouraged in the banking world. There were no reins, and anything that made money was OK; just like at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, that reckless culture and behavior was part and parcel of the whole deal. If this guy knew a while back that others in the company were engaged in rash and risky behavior, why didn’t he blow the whistle or resign then?
Here in Europe, there will be a G20 conference in London in a couple of weeks. Like the AIG execs in Connecticut, London bankers have been warned that demonstrators may not take kindly to their strutting about in public. Therefore they might consider dressing down — in disguise, as it were — or not going out at all. It was suggested that AIG employees go out in pairs, and only in daylight hours. Bankers incognito — what a concept! That guy might look like a homeless person or a rent boy, but he’s a billionaire. The Masters of The Universe may think that going tie-less in khakis will do the job — but the internal memos also suggested that they think again and try harder, because people can still recognize a “dressed down” banker. Get your glam and punk gear out of the closet — now’s the time to sport it one last time.
I bike down past the avenue of banks here in Frankfurt, the banking capital of Germany, towards the center of town. One wonders how the guys I see moving in and out of these antiseptic lobbies are doing these days. I pass about a km of just banks, one after another, in almost identical buildings — many I’ve never heard of.
I arrive at the old town square, which, like much of this town, was bombed out — so, though it looks to be centuries old, at least in style, it’s not — it’s a re-creation. The old square was rebuilt from scratch. Nonetheless, it has some charm and the tourists throng here, and some sit outside and drink a pilsner even though it’s still chilly. In Hannover, where we’ll be in a few days, there is a town hall building that displays a huge model of the city at the end of the war.
It’s a beautiful and meticulous model; a lovingly made and maybe also a slightly peculiar memory aide; a meticulous miniature re-creation of destruction. There is no editorializing — no “Did we deserve this?” or “This is what we got for being so bad” — just the fact of the matter says plenty.
There wasn’t much left — that’s obvious. Almost every building — most of no military value — was at least partly destroyed. Therefore there are very few old buildings in the centers of these towns — though further out, a couple of kms from the center of Hannover, there are streets lined with frilly old mansions.
I find the museum, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, that I’ve been to on a previous visit. (At the time, it was presenting the results of a local archeological dig — displayed as if it were contemporary art.) Now it has a show about the effect of Darwin on art. It’s an incredible show that includes reactions to evolutionary theory at the time his books came out, and less directly obvious influences in the arts as his ideas filtered down over decades. It made me realize that curators can indeed pull together shows that tell a story, and are both surprising and emotionally engaging. I was becoming cynically resigned to thinking they were mere adjuncts to galleries and collectors — helpful in those folks’ marketing schemes, and many of them are just that — but this venue, if indeed the show originated here, seems to encourage loftier and more creative thinking.
Naturally, many found Darwin’s suggestion — that humans were descended from apes, and that the world had not been as it is since God created it — hard to swallow. Frederic Church, a Hudson River painter of majestic landscapes, was one example. His paintings of awe-inspiring landscapes — one of his massive and detailed tropical manifestoes in visual form was exhibited here — were claimed as evidence that Edens such as these couldn’t possibly have arisen out of mere chaotic forces, as Darwin proposed. His wildly popular blockbusters were viewed as proof of creationism.
Here is one (not by Church) that depicts the Divine emergence of humans from some kind of protoplasmic matter. It’s all a bit sci fi — but sci fi located in the distant past.
Further on the exhibit presents work by artists, illustrators and biologists, all as equals. Scientific illustration and fine art were both affected by Darwin’s ideas. There are some giant, sexy and dramatic paintings of imaginary caveman life: here’s one by Léon-Maxime Faivre done in 1888 called “Two Mothers.” The intruder mother is a wild beast — a dark shape near the cave entrance — and I guess the painting shows us that as rough as our ancestors might have been, their mothering instincts and sexy bods were just like ours.
Not quite Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, but seems like a similar idea at work here.
A man named František Kupka did this one, called “Antropoides,” in 1902. Here it seems we see the boyfriend of a proto-human fighting what appears to be a chimpanzee for the hand of his lady, who watches the fate of her possible future mate dispassionately, as ladies sometimes do.
Why would a chimpanzee want a woman who’s not a chimpanzee? Maybe proto-human gals were irresistible to all creatures? Anyway, caveman art seems to have been an entire genre — tastefully left out of most art history books. Too bad. Another of these caveman paintings also represents a struggle — survival of the fittest being an (inaccurate) summation of Darwin’s theory. It seems the artists began to see the world as one fast field of competition. Life as struggle. Chance and accident figure in too, as genetic mutations are sometimes random — the idea that the world arrived by chance is inspiring and frightening.
An artist named Martin Johnson Heade went to South America, inspired by Church’s example, and did a series of amazing paintings of Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds (ca. 1870-1883). There was a whole room of them here. To me, they are typical of a kind of alien eroticism that is still pretty damn seductive — as it must have been for him.
Around this time (1886) Harvard was commissioning the Blaschka brothers to do their glass versions of plants and sea creatures. Ostensibly these were made for practical, not artistic reasons — so that students could study specimens that couldn’t be easily preserved. These glass pieces, like the flower/bird paintings, consistently have a strangely erotic vibe.
Other biological drawings in the show were the famous microscopic sea creature drawings by Ernst Haeckel, which are maybe ever so slightly less erotic, but equally alien. It’s a little hard to pin down the effect these drawings have: maybe they show how amazing it is that all this peculiar stuff evolved, or maybe some of these artists were of a more creationist bent, and are in fact saying that only a strange and distant (and slightly pervy) God could have come up with such a menagerie.
Haeckel, at least, believed in evolution — though he was a Lamarckian. Unlike Darwin, he believed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” as one would have on a license plate — that organisms and their genes evolve new characteristics in their own lifetimes, and pass those traits on to their babies.
From a review in the Financial Times of the show’s catalogue (Darwin, Art and the Search for Origins):
“Haeckel was a promising zoologist whose life was devastated when his wife Anna Sethe died, leading him to abandon religion in favour of Darwinian theory. Trying to recover by the Mediterranean, he walked along the seashore and noticed a jellyfish in a tidal pool. Its delicate yellow tendrils reminded him of his wife’s braids; he sketched it, named it ‘annasethe’ after her, and begun the detailed drawings of marine life that were to revolutionise 19th-century understanding of the microcosmos.”
(One wonders how much his late wife’s hair resembled the tendrils of jellyfish?)
“It was such images, adapted and developed into monumental canvases that scandalised Vienna at the turn of the century. Klimt’s 1899 mural ‘Philosophy’, with its endless cycle of birth and decay, proposed humanity as a mere tool of nature for the mindless, unchanging purpose of reproduction.” [Link]
All these ideas spread rapidly. Very potent memes, one might say. The idea of evolution may have arisen earlier; but now, this was its moment.
People with hairy faces were seen as a living link to our remote past — weird remnants of prehistoric life that had suddenly erupted into the present:
Similarly, monkeys were now borderline human:
There was a whole genre of monkey art — monkeys as judges, as politicians, as Darwin, you name it. This painting is called “The Studio Visit”… maybe there’s a similar one of music critics?
Equally inspiring to artists was the idea that weird, fantastic creatures sprang into being to fill evolutionary niches. Work began to feature imaginary specimens, many of them mythological and surreal, and many now within the realm of possibility. Here’s a large bronze sculpture by Jean Carriès of a cross between a frog and a rabbit — why not?
Giant salamander-like creatures loom over tiny humans in a work by Alfred Kubin.
Monsters, formerly creatures of the unconscious or the id, were no longer just figments of the imagination. Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and HG Wells imagined whole worlds hidden in the jungle, undersea or deep in the Earth. Nature has produced creatures as strange as anything we can imagine, so why limit ourselves? The show takes us into the 20th century — surrealists and others are creating their own monsters and hybrid beasts. Max Ernst has a room of frottages (rubbings) with titles that imply imaginary plant life.
Lastly, the show asks, “Where are we going?” If we evolved from tiny, strange and sexy things into what we are now, then what could the world become in the future? The curators responded with some Ernst paintings of apocalyptic landscapes. Hmmm. Some of his technique does derive from random blots, smudges and smears — so along with many others, he might be saying that like genetic selection, sometimes randomness or change might be as good a generator of material as anything — and then the artist (or the environment, in the case of evolution) decides if that image or mutation is worthy.
Well, this line of reasoning might be a little convoluted, but who knows? It’s not a completely unreasonable leap. The show’s other conclusion was that for many 20th century artists, desolation might seem as likely a future as anything else — which I believe they linked to evolutionary theory and its randomness. In this case, though, that feeling might be more related to WWI and its devastating effect on optimism, at least temporarily.
I bike to the local mega contemporary art museum. There is a major Degas show, which I skip — I see dancers and tutus every day — and opt for the show of more recent work — the theme of which is Charlie Manson. Charlie Manson! Bad timing, as a young German boy has just gotten hold of a gun and massacred a bunch of his former schoolmates. Most of the work was by German and other European artists, many of them unfamiliar to me — a testament to how parochial the NY art world is. I have to admit the most riveting pieces were the ones closest to the source: the first, a hallway with some Bobby BeauSoleil paintings (which may have been collaborations with his wife Barbara), that were very cool, mythic and slightly creepy — like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw, but for real.
BeauSoleil was in the 60’s band The Grass Roots, which later became the band Love. He also did the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. The second piece was a TV playing an interview with Charlie done a number of years ago — the Devil is an old man now. Anyway, every (obvious and) pointed question aimed at Charlie was deflected — brilliantly, and often in an unexpectedly philosophical way. When asked about how it feels being in prison much of his life, Charlie responds by saying, “I’m not in prison, you are.” I’m not sure how or if he elaborates, but he obviously means that we’re all prisoners of our preconceived ideas and the limiting social worlds we’ve constructed — no one is truly free. Anyway, it goes on like that, his response to every question spun out to infinity.
At the Düsseldorf airport, an young man seeks solace and confides in a friend:
Some say Cuidad Juárez is now the most dangerous place in the world — it beats Baghdad. Most of its arms come from the US, and the US buys most of its drugs as well.
I woke up on the bus, in my bunk. Looked at my watch — it was a little after 9 — I’d gotten my 8 hours, so it was time to see what’s up and where we are. I look out the bus window and see that it’s raining, so no biking today. I change out of my pajamas. Keith is sitting in the bus lounge nursing a tea. I join him and retrieve email from the bus wi-fi. Most of the band probably bailed out — got off the bus — at 4am or so, when we rolled by the hotel last night. I slept through all that — my bag is, I imagine, already in my hotel room.
A few minutes later I’m in the venue, I’ve used the toilet, and I’ve got a Herald Tribune that’s 3 days old. I’m sitting in what will be the crew catering area as Belgian guys wheel lighting rigs and large road cases off the trucks and into the areas of the venue where they’ll be needed. An espresso machine has been plugged in, so within minutes I’m caffeinated. I have an orange that I had tossed in my backpack from Düsseldorf last night, so I am fine for the moment.
If it weren’t pissing down rain outside, I’d bike to the hotel — which is probably less than a mile away — but today I might wait for the runner who is out dropping off our dirty white laundry.
We have our own cooks (!) on this part of the European leg, which sounds luxurious but it’s actually cost-effective. We typically get charged handsomely by local venues and promoters for catering, so it really doesn’t cost us more to bring our own folks, with their stoves, grills and teacups in road cases. The smell of bacon begins to waft around the building and up to the dressing rooms, and those working on stage can probably smell it too. The crew wanders in and out of the room, grabbing a tea or a coffee and eyeing the progress of the English breakfast fixings.
Later, at the hotel, I am drawn to the window by a noisy racket issuing from a double-decker Purim-mobile cranking out disco Klezmer, as a group of kids with yarmulkes and payos gyrate on the open top. Men in Hasidic garb scoot by on bicycles — some with kids in costume in tow.
There are inviolate bike lanes everywhere. In the central square the bike routes are delineated by silver bumps with embossed bike logos.
The start of our European tour. We arrive at an ungodly hour in the morning, having only slept a few hours, at best, on the flight. Most of us sit like zombies wolfing down the amazing breakfast spread at our hotel. Some of us agree to meet at 1pm to get out and about.
There’s a Sonic Youth exhibit called “Sensational Fix” at the local museum. It’s got the expected album covers and music paraphernalia, but given that it’s Sonic Youth, the show is split between their art collections and their own work. As such it’s a taste of their world — friends, influences, connections, collaborations and accumulated collections of artwork and ephemera. (I’ve heard that Thurston and some of the others are obsessively rabid record collectors — especially obscure “out” stuff like old Sun Ra vinyl and Japanese noise bands — but that trove might have to wait for some other venue to see the light of day.)
There is work by their pals Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley and Rita Ackermann — some of which was used for record covers; work by those who inspired them — a video of John Cage on “What’s My Line?”, Ginsberg photos of his Beat pals, William Burroughs’ gunshot art; and some of their own videos, paintings, collages and installations. Here’s a lovely walk-in room that Christian Marclay did — the floor littered to a few inches thickness with old vinyl. For a record lover, the experience is a kind of sacrilege — and that’s the point.
The exhibit posits Sonic Youth more as an art/media collective than simply as a band — which is probably accurate, though most people know them through their more accessible recordings, of course. But this is closer to how they must see themselves — as the hyphenate legacy of both the Beat and performance art worlds, and the wacky fringes of pop culture — death metal, freaky cults, underground comics, vinyl junkies and the dark side of Madonna and Karen Carpenter. What’s nice about it is the thread that ties together the art world with the pop music world with the Beat poets and a million others — and it stretches through time, backwards, forwards and sideways. It’s also a world of fandom — in a way, Sonic Youth are impresarios presenting the work of others that they love.
I might be imagining it, but it seems to me that in Europe, the mixing of pop culture and high art — as evidenced in this show, put on in a big, state-run museum, as opposed to an alternative art space — is more accepted as an idea than in the US. It could explain why the show originated here, and might only reach the US after traveling elsewhere for a while. Here, it seems that Sonic Youth can be perceived as an arts collective that happens to occasionally make accessible recordings, rather than as a pop band that dabbles in art.
The venue in Düsseldorf is called Tonhalle — the sound hall. When it was built in 1926, it was a planetarium — the largest in the world. A temple to science and knowledge, on the banks of the Rhine.
About 30 years ago, it was converted into a symphony hall, and the acoustics required some modification. Invisible steel mesh was inserted inside of the dome, which helped improve the sound greatly. The steel magnate who originally commissioned the hall had some connection with or was himself a glass collector, and the décor reflects this interest, in a very unique way.
I think it’s beautiful, in a Teutonic/Brazil the movie kind of way. Under the main theater there is a maze of ramps, stairways, ductwork and futuristic arched supports. I got lost more than once, as some elevated walkways don’t connect to others.
The audience, at first a little reticent and serious — given that it’s the local symphony hall — was standing and dancing by the last 3rd of our show. I noticed some people in the audience taking pictures of the crowd — apparently a show of enthusiasm isn’t typical. After 10 days off the treadmill, we’re back in gear and it feels wonderful — we’re ecstatic. This is why we put up with the jet lag and the constant dislocation.
An accounting firm that’s been analyzing GM says that even with the $30 billion bailout they’ve requested, GM won’t stay afloat. Pragmatically, it would be sheer lunacy to throw $30 billion at GM executives — who still ride around in their town cars and fly on company jets — only to see them allocate it for their own golden parachutes before their company, and the cities of Detroit, Flint and a few others, become giant ghost towns. I have a feeling there will be a knock-on effect, and other ghost towns will arise in the wake of those Rust Belt towns’ demises.
GM’s management has made few comments re: altering their course; there has been little mention of producing green cars, or building public transportation systems or infrastructure. They talk mostly about closing plants, cutting divisions and firing workers — but not about rethinking what they make, or their role in the world. It seems they basically want to stay the course — but in a smaller boat. The passengers who can’t fit get thrown overboard. The boat is headed for Niagara Falls, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t really matter what size it is.
There are options. Workers could take over the factories and start producing stuff that suits the world as it really is. Or the factories could be nationalized, and the government could force the factory infrastructure and manpower to begin making stuff that benefits the population. Assembly lines would have to be altered, refitted and modified — but it’s either that, or sell the machines as scrap steel. Or the companies could make changes voluntarily — re-jigger themselves to build trolley cars, high-speed rail systems, and hybrids. Some of these, being public works, would probably receive a large amount of government financing — funding for work, NOT a bailout. We Live in a Virtual World
French public health officials are considering laws that would ban the promotion of eating disorders — including a requirement that magazines reveal the extent to which their images have been artificially retouched. It’s viewed as a public health issue because girls and boys (and men and women) are feeling increasingly ashamed of their bodies as they compare themselves to what they see all around them — images of bodies that are not real, that have been photoshopped, digitally airbrushed and heavily modified.
Of course, ever since the birth of the movie star early last century, their images have been cleaned up, improved and controlled. Celebrities and pin-ups have been with us for a long time, and the fairytale world of far-off Hollywood was always infinitely better than whatever small town reality you were living in. But it was just that — a fairytale kingdom that existed far away, with relatively few inhabitants.
The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy.
One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect.
Pascal Dangin, a well-known retoucher who works on a lot of the images in fashion magazines (and for some fine artists as well), naturally doesn’t see it exactly that way. He makes photos that “improve on life,” in his words. But if I can paraphrase, he might say that he makes an image more like what it wants to be — and therefore it ends up being closer to what we desire to see. That doesn’t necessarily mean perfect — he is careful to avoid airbrushing the personality out of a person — but it does mean he’s certainly not against making quite a few (what he has determined are aesthetic) improvements.
The health departments are alarmed at the effect all this is having on young people. Boys hanker for steroids, and girls, a session with the knife, in order to look more like what they see in the magazines. Unfortunately, the magazines don’t just feature physically enhanced people — they’ve been heavily retouched as well. We would have to hand out some kind of high-tech, rose colored, photoshopping glasses in order to achieve a visual simulation of the media population.
C warned me that there was a not so complimentary review in the NY Times this morning, and advised me against reading it. I don’t read all the press and reviews we get, but as I do read that paper regularly, I would have inevitably stumbled upon it. Apparently the reviewer, Jon Pareles, loves the Bush Of Ghosts album and has some kind of nostalgia for those days. We all know music snobs who like to remind everyone that they heard so and so back when they were really good. This, however, is the same reviewer who leveled charges of “cultural imperialism” against Bush Of Ghosts in his Rolling Stone review back in the early 80’s. For years afterwards, almost every interviewer asked me to respond to his charge, and many press articles quoted it. It was like the joke about “When did you stop beating your wife?” — the charge was silly and ill-informed, but one was constantly put on the defensive, and even assumed to be guilty, simply by the question being raised. It was annoying, it lasted for years, and it hurt.
Given that track record, I guess 30 years from now he’ll figure out what this show was about.
I still haven’t read the review, and don’t intend to. While taking criticism on board can be constructive, it can also be detrimental to the creative process if it’s considered while that process is still under way. It undermines one’s enthusiasm and will — which is OK, beneficial even, but only after a tour (for example) is over. This review, by all reports, wasn’t helpful criticism anyway — it seemed to be one of those reviews that comes from some psychological issues the writer has — and therefore even a belated reading is not going to help us refine what we do.
Just did our two nights at Radio City, and we’re ecstatic and exhausted. Doing shows in one’s hometown is always a thing — more thrilling when it goes over well, and there are always many, many more things and people to attend to, and more nerve-wracking aspects in general. We got back from Canada, and the very next day we went into rehearsals and cleanup mode — rehearsing the surprise ending for the Radio City shows, and cleaning up the choreography that, inevitably, gets a little loose. The 4 choreographers dropped by while we were all in the same town, which was convenient.
The cleanup was actually minor — in the course of the first sixty-some shows, we’ve internalized much of the movements, so it feels more integrated and organic… but some details still needed attending to.
While we were rehearsing, Mark Degli Antoni was at Radio City getting a crash course in the Mighty Wurlitzer. The original idea was that he’d play the giant house organ and then we’d join him on “Take Me To The River” — but as the volume level of the Wurlitzer is what it is, we couldn’t get the organ and the band to mesh. So, Mark did a short introductory piece that he wrote that highlighted some of the sounds, bells and whistles.
The surprise ending can be seen here on someone’s YouTube posting:
We learned this ending in two afternoons (and at sound check on Friday). There was one real Rockette in the bunch, who generously offered us tips on some of their typical moves. The additional dancers were all friends of our dancers and choreographers — and as Chris, Annie-B’s collaborator said, “It was like the cream of the downtown dance world all said YES to dancing on the Radio City stage.”
Somewhere in the Far East, I had enquired about the possibility of having the Radio City Rockettes join us at the end of our show. When we finally got their budget, it proved to be way too expensive — and we hadn’t even brought up the subject of rehearsals… so I asked the band and dancers what they thought about developing our own tribute to the institution. I did a quick budget, and figured we would have more fun, and more financial wiggle room, if we just did it all ourselves.
Annie-B Parson agreed to compose a short dance that would merge into the existing choreography at the end of “Burning Down The House,” and finish with the iconographic kick line. We bought 30 tutus, and asked the new dancers to wear white. When I saw it begin to come together in rehearsals, I was ecstatic — the “tidal wave” entrance alone was spectacular — but, like the rest of the show, it was all sort of downtown spectacular — homemade, not too slick, precise but not cold.
On my way home later, I witnessed a showdown for a parking space on my street. A woman, who was holding a space by standing in it, motioned to a slowing car to move on, but she was ignored. The car stopped, the woman shouted “no no” and “not available” and waved her hands around, but after a beat the car began to back into the space anyway. The woman held her ground. The last I saw, the passenger riding shotgun leaned out and said something like, “You can’t hold a parking space!” They were obviously prepared to use their car as a battering ram, and force the woman onto the sidewalk — and there’d be some unavoidable, nasty showdown when they exited the car. I sure wouldn’t want to leave my car on the street after making an enemy like that!
