NYC

“One way the company has found to serve the public at large is an annual series of free concert-opera performances in New York City parks. The first took place on June 24, 1967, at Crocheron Park, Queens, with an audience of over 35,000 seated in the grass under the stars to hear Anna Moffo as Mimi and Sandor Konya as Rodolfo in La Boheme” [Celebration: The Metropolitan Opera]

Oh dear. I’ve had quite the reality check tonight. The “Oracle Of YouTube” showed me just how vast the distance between New York and Philly, and how far my relocation journey has taken me. 3 hours by car? 1 hour by train? Not even close. [more . . . ]

Marni, not Tricia.

Little by little, though, things kept going wrong, as things will. The hardware store was out of this. That didn’t fit where I hoped it would. The pipes were too old and weren’t delivering hot water the way they should. These were just small annoyances that everyone used to New York and apartment living deals with every day.

[more . . . ]

“Unless one is in love, or satisfied, or ambition-driven, or without curiosity, or reconciled, New York is like a monumental machine restlessly devised for wasting time, devouring illusions … Where is what you were looking for? And, by the way, what are you looking for?” -Truman Capote

OK, let’s run ‘em boys

• I wasn’t in love

• I wasn’t satisfied

• I was …will never be …ambition-driven

• I am not without curiosity, and “like the cat I have nine times to die” (oops, channeling Plath again!)

• I ain’t reconciled with nothin (that’s the Irish in me!)

5 outta 5

NY1 Forecast : 100% Chance Of Illusions Devoured! Keep That Umbrella Handy!

I wish I’d seen this Capote quotation before I moved to New York? Of course, I wouldn’t have recognized the truth of the statement before I moved to New York. Even if I had, I would then have merely poo-pooed it all away. I would have smugly told myself that Mr. Capote’s experience is not my experience, nor does it have to be my experience. New York will devour no illusions of mine. It’ll be different for me. I’ll show them (see “that’s the Irish in me!” above)

One must experience Capote’s New York in order to recognize the veracity of his statement. So, that’s why the Universe sent this quotation to me today, after New York has long since come, gone, and devoured. Before .. and during … my NYC adventure, the Universe’s message would have been lost on me. Only now, after the completion of that section of life’s little journey, do I have the requisite perspective, experience, wisdom, etc to get what the Universe (and Mr. Capote, too) is trying to tell me. Wow. I get it now! Thanks, Universe! Also, this is the first time I’ve been at peace with my decision to leave New York. Reconciled, I think that’s what I is. Reconciled. Not with New York. Never with New York. With myself.

Oprah says the universe speaks to us first in a whisper, then a nudge, then ….

the childlike champagne-soaked voice of Truman Capote.

Aside: Sorry New York, but in the 21st-century, “blogging” has become the monumental machine restlessly devised for wasting time! cc Capote on that.

Gerald R. Ford

• b.1913 - d.2006

“City”

• b.1613 -

“In New York the rich or successful visitor is overwhelmed by generosity, often from strangers who throw their houses open and go out of their way to be hospitable. Even taxi drivers are liable to be aspiring opera singers who recognize one, and sometimes people in the street greet one out of sheer friendliness. But I think it must be a terrible place to arrive in poor and alone. Paris, with its tree-lined boulevards and sidewalk cafés, seems to welcome even the poorest visitor. But Paris is apt to regard the success of one season as passé the next. New York makes it friends and sticks to them” -Margot Fonteyn

Time to pull the plug on that bathtub prozac. The NYC Opera Fanatic has just discovered a vocal bon-bon sure to shake your blues away with a good old-fashioned belly-laugh.

Paola Novikova (1896 -1967), a Russian émigré who became a renowned voice teacher in New York (her most famous pupil was Nicolai Gedda so she must have been an excellent teacher) sings something called “The Laughing Song” (or “The Song Of The Laugh”) from something called The Geisha.

listen

Fun, and probably a lot more difficult than it sounds! I wish I knew what was so damn funny though — oh no, she’s laughing at me!

“I am a whore and I am paid very well for high-rise buildings.” -Philip Johnson

The NYC Opera Fanatic wasn’t born as knowledgeable as he probably seems. I arrived at it the old-fashioned way: WORK (and knowledge is about the only thing in my life that I’ve arrived at the old-fashioned way, btw). I confess this to you not to make you feel better about yourself but, rather, to explain how this post evolved.

The total sum of knowledge possessed by the NYCOF about the subject of architecture could fit into my 3rd-floor walk-up…..closet, top shelf, back right corner. So, whenever I have the chance to beef-up ye ole trivia-bank I call a brain, I do so. Surfing the Wikipedia entry about the New York State Theater, I linked over to the entry on its architect Philip Johnson. Since you’re reading about Johnson here however, it’s safe to presume that the NYC Opera Fanatic found the architect of the house that Bubbles built very fascinating — big-time blog-fodder. Big-time.

Why would American architect Philip Johnson interest the NYC Opera Fanatic?

1. He designed the State Theater, the home of the New York City Opera. Flashing my ignorance however, should I presume Johnson designed the auditorium too, or do they give those things to experts in –what would it be called —- f***ing-up (in the State Theater’s case)? Since Johnson is quoted as saying, “Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.” should I presume that he’s responsible for the State Theater’s notoriously bad acoustics or should I shift the blame to someone else in the grand American tradition?? Comment if you can enlighten me (it’s about YOU did some enlightening around here!)

2. Philip Johnson was gay. The goddess Wikipedia reveals to me, “And intensly private man when it came to his love life and personal friendships, he is survived by his male partner of 45 years.”

As I’m discovering in my pursuit of trivial knowledge, most gay men of Johnson’s generation were intensely private about their homosexuality —they HAD to be.

We pampered homosexuals of western civilization today sometimes forget how good we’ve got it. Remember, it’s been only 50 years since the John Gielgud trial –and that was in enlightened England!

We all know the herculean task required to maintain a 45 year relationship, no matter what the gender of the other party may be (18 years with a pussy-cat is evidently all the NYCOF can manage). Add to that (a) pre-Stonewall America and (b) being a public figure and then (c) color the NYC Opera Fanatic impressed. Lo and behold, some other homosexuals must be impressed with Johnson as well since he made the GLBTQ Encylopedia, where I discover that he’s designed another building I’m familiar with — Dallas’ MCC church.

Johnson designed several buildings prominent in my pre-NYC “existence”: he also designed Thanksgiving Square in Dallas, and Fort Worth’s Water Gardens and Amon Carter Museum

But what’s really fascinating is how an architect who could celebrate homosexuality by putting a giant disco ball in the State Theater — true, the ball is non-revolving but it is a disco ball all the same — and then, later, design the Crystal Cathedral for tele-evangelist Robert Schueller! I guess Philip Johnson really was a whore — a very self-aware whore perhaps, but a whore nonetheless

lest the NYCOF appear judgmental, however: there nothing wrong with whores. Some of my best friends, in fact, are whores, and I envy them immensely for possessing the common sense that I lack

A Celebration Of American Homosexuality, circa 1964

• above, the interior of the New York State Theater

To recap, Philip Johnson was an architect, a closeted homsexual, a whore…. oh, and a Nazi sympathizer. I was taken aback to read that the designer of the State Theater in the heart- ok ok, more correctly –in the lower extremities of the Upper West Side, attended the Nuremberg Rally of 1938!

1938 was not the Nuremberg Rally made infamous by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will, btw. Riefenstahl’s documentary enshrines the 1934 pow-wow. We can only imagine, thankfully, that the Nuremberg Rally 4 years later was even more triumphal, and even more willful.

“The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy….There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.-Philip Johnson

Inscribed on a postcard, perhaps? All it lacks is a “Wish You Were Here”. I wonder if Johnson had cocktails with Ali Macgraw as Natalie Jastrow (The Winds of War) while there. No, I expect not, since he willingly traveled there (but maybe he just made a wrong turn on his way the Spanish Civil War!). Here read for yourself (from Wikipedia with the caveat to remember that, being user-contributed, the entries from Wikipedia should be read with perhaps, a greater alertness of editorial bias than your May Opera News — just perhaps, or perhaps not)

One controversial aspect of Johnson’s career was his active promotion of fascism for eight years beginning in 1932. Johnson walked away from the success of his MOMA exhibition and, in a move described by the contemporary newspapers as ’surreal’, attempted to join forces with Louisiana governor Huey Long. After Long’s 1935 assassination, Johnson wrote a series of plainly anti-Semitic articles for the Detroit broadcaster Father Coughlin, ran for public office in Ohio, and tried to start an American fascist party himself. He traveled to Nuremberg for Adolf Hitler’s 1938 rally, and to Poland after Germany invaded it in 1939…

After an FBI investigation and the pending involvement of the United States in World War II, Johnson abandoned his support of Nazis in mid-1940, and returned to Harvard. Years later he renounced fascism and designed a synagogue with no fee as a form of apology. A focus on the aesthetic to the exclusion of all other concerns became a characteristic of his philosophy; in a 1973 interview, he said:

The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn’t the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius’s time and in Justinian’s time and Caesar’s time they had to have dictators. I mean I’m not interested in politics at all. I don’t see any sense to it. About Hitler—if he’d only been a good architect!

Johnson may have been a fabulous architect, but he probably wasn’t the brightest bulb in the “Nazi lamp-shade” (quoting a provocative term from Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus totally out of context, and for this, I will most likely be punished). Johnson forgets that the Nazis blazed new trails in a specific form of architecture, one they considered very important to their political agenda, one in which for them must have combined form and function perfectly. I’ll let you all figure out the rest.

True, Johnson recanted the Nazi sympathies of his youth and, to his credit, did penance rather than just paying lip-service. However Johnson’s apolitical claims sound more like a man sorry about the controversy over his actions rather than the actions themselves. Still the NYC Opera Fanatic is loathe to judge any historical figure since any motives I might ascribe them would be purely conjecture and, unlike some biographers today, I know the definition of that term as well as the thorny path down which it leads. If Johnson the error of his way and admitted such error –and refrained from similiar action in the future — what more can the NYCOF ask of him? After all, that is the standard by which I judge myself.

There are, however, others who are a little more rigorous than the NYCOF in their standard of judgment (of others, usually, but rarely of themselves). So surely there must have been a firestorm of protest over Johnson’s commission to design the State Theater. More research is definitely needed but if anyone was around back then (the NYCOF was thankfully, he just noticed, years away from even being a gleam) and can comment on the subject, please do.

To recap (the last time, I promise): Philip Johnson was a closeted gay ex-Nazi-sympathizing Texas-loving (”I like Houston. It’s the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism.”) architect / whore. Since Philip Johnson died recently -a little over a year ago, a little shy of his 100th birthday, now the NYC Opera Fanatic can’t stop wondering: who would Philip Johnson have voted for in 2004?

“My Lost City” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers.” [more . . . ]

Drat The Cat!

“The Gates for Cats” is gone before I could even blog about it!

The Gates for Cats was/is/always will be a truly brilliant satire of those other, more notorious Gates located in Central Park. Like it’s more famous sisters, the Cat Gates were merely temporary as well. Fortunately, I found a pic on the web of the Somerville Gates, aka “The Gates For Cats”. Isn’t this the true symbiosis of art and environment. Too bad there aren’t any photos of Ann Richards erecting these Gates!

Last year around this time, the NYC Opera Fanatic attended a Boris Godunov at the Met. During intermissions, opera fanatics could witness the spectacle of near-blizzard conditions from the warmth and safety of the Met’s public spaces. Bravo to whoever thought to incorporate floor-to-ceiling “Windows on the World” in the design for the new Met. Since that evening, I’ve come to the conclusion that Russian opera must be attended during snow to give maximum enjoyment. Of course, this January there is no snow and no Met. [more . . . ]