Matthew Gallaway

Caturday on the Nose

Today I woke up and after paying homage to 'Caturday' -- the internet meme on Tumblr -- then prepared to go out into the hurricane.
I had a ticket to The Nose, the 1928 opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (based on the story by Gogol), which recently opened to almost universal rave reviews at the Met. 
In a way, the turbulent weather, with sheets of rain pouring across Lincoln Plaza and swirling gusts of wind was a perfect introduction to the barely controlled mayhem of the music, which mixes atonality, folk music and fragments of lyrical passages that make you (or at least me) imagine a 19th-century opera that has been put through a shredder and pasted back together against the backdrop of the growing metropolis.
There is also an absurd, satirical element to the city in this kind of storm -- where everyone walks around with umbrellas turned inside out until casting them into the trash -- that perhaps helped to prepare me for the opera, which is about a nose that, after being cut off a Russian official, becomes its own entity, running around the streets of St. Petersburg.
After the opera, I went back out to the Plaza, where the fountain was glowing like a lighthouse.
I rode the subway uptown, where in the station at 163rd Street, I was struck by the decaying, frenetic wall space for poster advertisements, which seemed to vibrate with the same echoes of modernity I could hear fading away between my ears.

In the Shadow of a Budding Grove of Eastern White Pines

Today, which was a perfect early March day -- warm (but not too warm) and sunny -- I went for a run and stopped to admire the grove of Eastern White Pines in Fort Tryon Park.
The oldest are the most impressive, as they bend and twist upward, and then create a canopy of glowing needles through which you can see the sky.
I wondered if any of these trees would be watching the Oscar ceremonies tonight, which apparently is still a big tradition in the United States. In my own case, I can't remember the last time I saw an Oscar-nominated movie that really said very much to me about my life (to quote Morrissey, obv); this is nothing against movies per se, of course, which I love as a rule and watch via Netflix very uncritically (as long as the director is Visconti or maybe Godard, j/k!) -- but so many modern movies tend to make me feel slightly (or more than slightly) hollow after viewing them, as though I'm not a real person, or at best a srsly fucked-up one (which may be true, but there are more and less interesting ways to explore this!).
I remembered how a few years ago, in a burst of anti-anti-social behavior, I accepted an invitation to attend an Oscar party with a group of people I didn't know, having been promised that the teevee would only be on in the background and that nobody was really going to pay attention, or at most watch 'ironically.' As it turned out, this was not at all the case, and the second the show started, it became clear that everyone present was going to weigh in on everything from the dresses to the boob-size to the schmaltzy song-and-dance routines to legitimate feelings of redemption or betrayal when movies they loved or hated did or did not win awards. What was strange to me is that the irony or sarcasm (if present) struck me as being almost as manufactured as the show itself, and allowed people to engage in the show (and in the underlying movies) while feeling superior to them but nevertheless still engaging, which of course is the bottom line; it sort of presents the question of whether or not you can say, eat a Big Mac ironically. Mostly this thought process, as it occurred to me at the time, made me feel like a major a-hole, not only because I hadn't seen any of the movies and didn't particularly want to, but also because I didn't like feeling superior to these people -- who without exception struck me as charming and intelligent and witty and urbane and most of all normal in ways that I am not -- which I knew even at the time was just a defensive mechanism to prevent me from wallowing too much in my own insecurities. In the end, I watched from the back row for a respectable amount of time as I miserably nursed a few beers and vowed to myself to never again fall into such a trap. When it comes to the Oscars, I realized, I am defective goods.
I was happy to see a baby pine. There was a period in the past when I wondered what they looked like, because to that point I had only noticed the magnificent adults.
Another one was still surrounded by the last of the snow.
Feeling more reassured about my day -- and the night ahead -- I said goodbye to the trees and ran home.

The 2010 Nominees for Spruce of the Year

(pic by FromMe-ToYou Flickr)

On Friday night I was chosen to announce the 2010 'Spruce of the Year' Awards.

(pic by Tiffany Armant on Flickr)

Below are the three nominees for 2010 Spruce of the Year, based on 'sprucial excellence' in the 2009 gardening season:
Featuring some of the darkest needles of any spruce -- it has been compared to green onyx -- Picea abies 'Hillside Upright' had a stunning performance in the Washington Height garden in 2009. 
With a uniform green tone and a tight columnar growth habit, this Norway Spruce saw exquisite development in the 2009 gardening season.
The duo-toned needles of the Weeping Serbian Spruce -- a celadon green over a gray underside -- is combined with an exceedingly graceful habit that is both narrow and weeping.   

[Seriously, the pix above of me are from the 'Tumblr Reads' event on Friday night, which was a big success and a lot of fun -- click through for a really cool stop-action video of the entire night.]

The Guermantes Way

Today I finished 'The Guermantes Way,' the third volume of Proust (in the newish translation by Mark Treharne published by Penguin).
Although this could no doubt be said of any work of art (or at least any for which you feel any admiration), I think that it's probably impossible to read Proust for a second time -- in my case -- and not reflect upon the differences between your memory of the book and your present perceptions.
When I first read it, almost ten years ago, I was certainly much younger and more idealistic (and naive), so that I was awestruck not only by the usual things we read about Proust -- namely, his powers of description, his lush prose and his extensive knowledge of painting and literature -- but also his infatuation with the aristocracy, with which in this volume he becomes increasingly obsessed and then familiar after being invited to several parties. Is there anyone, I wonder, who has not moved to New York City (or any metropolis) and not been seduced by wanting to belong to a group you perceive (rightly or wrongly) as more powerful or glamorous than what you have ever known, so that you can imagine that their approval and acceptance will somehow serve to better justify your existence than if you had just spent your years alone?
What I did not remember, however -- and this again, no doubt a reflection on myself -- was the cruel hilarity in the book, not only present in the aristocrats and their narcissistic behavior, but moreover in Proust's cutting portraits of these people, so that once you scratch beneath the surface of his admiration -- one rooted mostly in a sense of nostalgia and history present in the names the upper classes possess, but in a completely unconscious manner, i.e., they wield their titles and privilege the way most people use our lungs -- you find a scathing portrait of what are really the most miserable and soulless collection of people you could imagine.
To give just one example, the book ends with the duchess the narrator has admired most -- and it is true that she displays a cunning wit and vast knowledge, so that we understand Proust's infatuation for her -- learning about the imminent death of one of her closest friends; but rather than comfort him, however, she basically ushers him out the door so that she will not be more than a few minutes late to a dinner party.
It is certainly true, as Richard Rorty pointed out, that in this work, Proust effectively takes his revenge on those who were undoubtedly snobby and cruel to him by framing them within the context of his narrative; it is also to his (eternal) credit that he doesn't portray them as simply inhuman or monstrous (although the word does appear a few times), the way we have grown accustomed to seeing say, bankers in the current era, but rather makes those who appear in his book all the more tragic by endowing them (or at least some of them) with intelligence and impeccable manners and grace, so that their ultimate failures come across as that much more tragic, i.e., as if they were people we have known and loved but who have disappointed us. Ultimately, Proust seems to tell us that in this life, we have nobody on whom we can rely except for ourselves. (He takes a particularly dim view of 'friendship.')
To read this book is to get the sense that Proust experienced the most society could offer, and at the same time is to understand why -- in the end -- he turned completely away from it with such vehemence.

Monday (Ariadne auf Naxos Final Dress)

Today I went to the final dress of Ariadne auf Naxos, the 1917 (or thereabouts) opera by Richard Strauss (libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal).
The opera takes place in 18th-century Vienna at the house of a wealthy Viennese.
The first part of the opera, called 'The Prologue' takes place in what is effectively the 'backstage' of the house, where two different companies of performers are slated to entertain the Viennese and his guests.
One is an opera company, which plans to perform a very serious interpretation of the Ariadne legend, in which Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on an island, awaits her death. The other company is a comedy troupe, filled with clowns and acrobats and puppets and led by a very pert and saucy vixen named Zerbinetta.
After some controversy about who will perform and for how long, it is eventually decreed that BOTH companies will perform at the same time. It's a hilarious set-up and one that resonates very much in the post-modern spirit of 'meta' to the extent that Ariadne is really an opera about the opera, and all of the (at times farcical even when well-intentioned) compromises made in the spirit of getting it produced. There were many times watching when I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry or (more often) a little of both. It's kind of like the 'Spinal Tap' of opera, for all you rockers, and I was also reminded of Godard's 'Contempt' and (especially) Truffaut's 'La Nuit Americaine' (both movies about making movies) and any number of other great ruminations on the comedy and tragedy of making art.
At the intermission, I walked around the opera house and admired some of the mementos from earlier eras of the Met.
There is an impressive wall of portraits dating -- as far as I could tell -- from no particular era, as if everyone in the past is an equal.
This is a picture of the old Met on Broadway, looking north toward Times Square (I think), dating from the 1880s. 
Here is a Brunnhilde who took part in a photo shoot in Central Park, something that I'm fairly certain is no longer part of the Met's standard operating procedure in the modern era.
As I walked around, I though about something Stephen had mentioned the previous night (after reading it in a blog) about how classical music records only need to sell a few hundred copies to be considered 'best sellers.' It made me wonder how long an institution like the Met could survive, and how the opera would look in ___ years.
But with its future intact for at least a few more hours, I returned for the second act, i.e., 'The Opera,' which manages to walk a miraculously fine line between the comic and the sincere, somehow managing both without ever denigrating either. The sets and costumes were surreal and beautiful (the three nymphs in particular, on rolling stilts in long pastel dresses) and both of the leads sounded (and looked!) great.
In the end, Ariadne -- despite longing for death -- is rescued by Bacchus, a young god who after proclaiming her beauty leads her through a swirl of colors to the heavens, as Zerbinetta, ever the coquette, steps around the curtain to proclaim: 'When a new god comes along, we're dumbstruck!'

Vienna Day One (Vienna Staatsoper)

After arriving at the hotel in Vienna, I looked out the window, where I was amazed to see the opera house only a few hundred yards away. This was in December of 2008, a few months after I sold my novel, much of which is set in the 'city of dreams' -- with a particular emphasis on the opera house -- but which I had never visited.
The view in the other direction, while less magnificent, was charming for different reasons -- the beautiful continuity of the buildings, despite the fact that some had obviously been rebuilt after the war, and the pinkish hue to the winter sky -- and as so often happens when I leave New York, I felt a strong desire to leave it permanently.
Although Stephen and I were tired and jet-lagged from the overnight flight, we resolved not to nap and go directly to the opera house, with a hope to get a tour of the inside.
I felt almost sick with a combination of fatigue, excitement and dislocation, most of it arising from the fact that I had literally written about this building for years and now here it was, directly in front of me. Perhaps even more amazingly, I felt not the least disappointed; to the contrary, it was everything I had imagined, both in terms of sheer heft and the ornate design. I remembered Sally Brown, the Charles Schulz character who used to talk to buildings (particularly her sad elementary school), and it was easy to imagine a similar sense of life emanating from this, and even better, I felt welcomed, as if it really was pleased that I had made a friend of it.
Even the smallest details, such as this wrought-iron grille, seemed beautifully designed and executed; I felt awash in nostalgia for the past.
Even the manhole covers left me a little dizzy and breathless.
Stephen waited for me at the end of the arcade (this probably reconstructed, or at least the tile work), while I admired the light fixtures.
I also loved the red tone of the window frames, and wondered if it was original (a question to which I still don't know the answer.)
Here's a closeup of one of those intense medallions that could be found above EVERY window on the second story.
As intoxicated as I was with the past, however, I felt grateful to have a digital camera.
We found out that a tour of the interior of the opera house would be starting in about an hour, and so decided to take a short walk to look at St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is probably Vienna's most famous monument.
The roof -- which was reconstructed after the war (not that I would have known to look) -- consisted of a gazillion tiles and had a surprisingly modern quality that reminded me of the vibrating quality all things take on when one is under the influence of a hallucinogenic such as ____.
Like many old European cities, tourism is a serious business here, as the line of carriages seemed to testify. (My nostalgia for the past did not extend into a desire to ride one of these, although I admittedly liked the sound of the wheels clacking against the cobblestones.)
On the way back to the opera house, we admired one of about a million 'hot gay statues' that can be found in Vienna, and I was filled with hate for the puritanical instincts of the United States, where the body remains largely hidden from the public discourse, even (or especially) in the realm of public art.
We waited in the lobby for the tour to begin; there were several groups, all segregated by language. Overcoming a sense of embarrassment that always clings to me when I travel abroad and self-identify as an 'American,' I reluctantly joined 'the English'; because this is the era of U.S. political hegemony, this group included many non-native speakers whose numbers did not merit having their own group.
The opera house was built between the years 1860-1869 by a pair of architects and designers named August von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll. What the tour guide did not mention is that these men, in addition to being architectural partners, were also non-heterosexual relationship partners who lived together. 
Here's the central marble staircase, leading up to the auditorium. 
Those parts of the original building that survive resonate with an obsessive quality that I suspect is familiar to many non-heterosexuals, for the simple reason that we so often turn our sexual desire into somewhat more sanctioned public activities. As Stephen and I joked as we walked around -- albeit in a state of awe -- it was obvious that this place was designed by a couple of 'serious queens.' 
No centimeter of space -- which incorporated a range of styles, none of which could be called 'restrained' -- was spared the attention of their respective eyes. 
Here is a plaque of van der Null, who was the lead designer on the project and who is also a character in my novel. 
Although I don't want to spoil the novel -- which in any case is only loosely based on historical events -- I can tell you that the opera house was not popular at the time of its construction, and was referred to by the Emperor Franz Joseph as 'the Königgrätz of architecture,' which would essentially be the equivalent of calling something today the '9/11 of architecture' or something along those lines. Distraught, van der Null committed suicide and was followed less than ten weeks later by Sicardsburg. (The statues here each represent one of the art forms -- music, singing, sculpture, painting, verse, and so on -- that can be found in opera.)
I wondered if the the public's failure to appreciate van der Null's work was rooted in a sense of homophobia (although the word had yet to be invented), a sense that this grand monument was being designed with such lavishness by those who in some fundamental way were very different from the norm, and thus to be feared and denigrated.
The roses provided no concrete answers to this question, however.
Those parts of the theater that had been rebuilt after the war -- such as the interior of the auditorium -- were not exactly ugly, but in no way held the same appeal as the rest of the building.
Outside, after the tour was over, we passed the Secession Building, built in 1898, which offered a different kind of beauty, far more modern and elegant.
Here's another Otto Wagner designed facade, which made me wish that I could do something similar to our house in Washington Heights; I probably would, except for the fact that it would cost ____ dollars.
Besides, attempts to recreate the past almost always seem doomed to fail, as if they are coated with a sheen of irrelevance. (This is an original, obv.)
The sun was setting and -- now completely exhausted -- we went to have coffee at the Cafe Museum, which was opened in ____.
After dinner, we walked back to the hotel. On the way we passed the opera house, which -- lit up in the Vienna night -- seemed to serve as both a warning and a beacon to all who hoped to live in its long shadow.

Down Under the George Washington Bridge

Happy New Year, everyone! Click through for my 'End of the 00s' piece on THE AWL, which is everything and more that I wanted to say on the subject. (Note that the 'elderberries' are, in fact, pokeberries -- my mistake! -- and the site has been a little wonky, which is why I haven't been able to leave any comments.)

Airplanes and Sunsets

Yesterday I arrived at the airport just in time to see the sun setting over the Siberian plain of the airstrip.
The planes entered and exited the scene in front of me like giant prehistoric animals. Or perhaps extraterrestrial; I thought that this is what it will be like for people in ____ years after they are living on space colonies, where they will watch the inhospitable planet beyond from behind thick sheets of glass. 
But at the same time, because I was reading 'The Guermantes Way,' the third volume of Proust, my mind was also occupied by the past.
And not just 100 years ago, or the scene at the opera described by Proust; rather, I remembered the first time I read the work, perhaps ___ years ago, and how at the exact moment when I came across this scene -- in which the narrator describes several aristocrats in the boxes behind where he sits in the orchestra as if they were immortal gods living in an underwater grotto -- I had been traveling across Pennsylvania with Stephen, en route to visit his parents in Michigan. At the time he was driving, and to both pass the time and to give him a taste of Proust (with whom I was becoming increasingly enthralled), I read the scene aloud. And as I read it again now, this time silently, I could remember how my heard beat frantically, almost reverentially with a sense of discovery as this scene unfolded, and how it seemed oddly perfect -- in the way opposites sometimes do, when they are placed one against the other -- as we sped across the most remote and uninhabited portions of Pennsylvania, in the north along Route 80.
'And when I looked over toward their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theater, which was painted with lifeless allegories, it was like seeing, thanks to some miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods contemplating the spectacle of mortals, beneath a red canopy, in a clear patch of light, between two pillars of heaven. My eyes studied this momentary apotheosis with a disquiet that was partly attenuated by the feeling that I was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchesse had certainly seen me once but could surely have retained no memory of that, and it did not disturb me that she should find herself so placed in her box that she could gaze down at the anonymous collection of madrepores in the orchestra, for I was happy to be dissolved in their midst; and then, at the moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, the blurred outline of the protozoan with no individual existence which I was must have been reflected in the impassive current of her two blue eyes, I saw them light up: the Duchesse, goddess turned woman, and for that moment a thousand times more beautiful, raised in my direction the white-gloved hand that had been resting on the edge of the box and waved it as a sign of friendship; my eyes were met by the spontaneous incandescence and the flashing eyes of the Princesse, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by the movement of looking to see whom her cousin had just greeted, and the latter, who had recognized me, showered upon me the sparkling and celestial rain of her smile.'

Shoplifting from American Apparel

Last night, I took a break from Proust to read 'Shoplifting from American Apparel,' the 2k9 novella by Tao Lin. It was slightly jarring to the extent that both works, though loosely autobiographical and by/about writers, fall at opposite ends of a certain kind of spectrum: if Proust writes about memory, emotion and the careful dissection of one's entire past in order to place it into some kind of order, Lin's work resonates with the aimless, aloof currents of a year or two of one's youth, that mostly directionless period in life when you can afford the luxury of completely surrendering to the chaos of modern life. Lin -- or 'Sam,' his alter-ego -- wanders around (both in New York City and Gainesville, usually holding an 'iced coffee'), he meets up with people who may or may not be friends, he watches bands and goes to clubs, he gets arrested for shoplifting a few times and does 'community service,' he spends time on his computer, he kisses girls but never seems too interested in sex (he seems very non-heterosexual in this respect), he spends a lot of time with his laptop. If Proust presents his entire life in the form of a seven-volume epic, Lin offers his in the flickering, washed out, kaleidoscopic images of a hallucinogenic drug trip. Stylistically, Proust's prose is -- obv -- lush and dense, whereas Lin offers short, choppy sentences that feel almost like a stream of consciousness (or perhaps, in keeping with the book, a series of blog entries).
None of this should be taken as a criticism of Lin's work (or Proust's); both seem entirely appropriate for the frames in which they are constructed. Much the way the sight of the George Washington Bridge can offer pleasure in very different kinds of weather, I found myself appreciating both writers' ability to describe small, seemingly insignificant moments with the kind of humor and detachment that had me frequently marking 'LOL' in the margins. Most intriguingly, both are obsessed with class, albeit again in very different ways: Proust is interested in the movement in and out of the French aristocracy at the start of the 20th century, whereas Lin is concerned with what might be called 'the Gawker aristocracy,' or the world of New York social media circa 2k5-2k8, in which the highest currency is internet traffic and no action is performed without implicitly asking whether or not Gawker 'will link.' With both writers, you are left with the sense that by describing these worlds, they are implicitly (or explicitly, in the case of Proust) criticizing or satirizing them, even as the writers actively participate and long for inclusion and acceptance. 
Both works resonate with a sense of melancholy that -- as Lin testifies on the inside cover -- is a function of the passage of time, and the always difficult process of growing older, no matter how much one might like to pretend otherwise.

Let's Go See Elektra!

As part of my ongoing mission with THE AWL, I participated in a 'round-table' discussion (via G-mail chat) about the opera and the performance, which you can read here.
The short version is: Elektra rules! Go see it if you ever get the chance -- there's a reason why it's survived 100 years.
<3 u, Metropolitan Opera
Miss u, 1909.