Thursday morning was bright and cold. On the way out of the apartment building, I was surprised to see a slice of light reflecting in from somewhere and creating a silhouette of the iron work of the staircase, unchanged in the 100 years since it was installed.
Outside the sun, which even at 8:00am in the morning appeared to be setting, reflected against a building to light up an otherwise shadowed block.
A garbage truck roared by and I admired the timeless elegance and modern simplicity of the 'sanitation' font.
Like a birch tree (here adorning the housing project at the end of the block), it is a font that looks great almost anywhere.
I arrived at work at 9:00am, just as the sun was setting to the west.
Time passed. I left work and made my way down 34th Street, where I paused to take a photograph of the light display in front of Macy's, the famous department store. I wondered if I would ever manage to get inside this 'eighth wonder of the world,' and doubted it.
I took the 1-train uptown and exited at 66th Street, where I again admired the mosaic figures lining the platform.
I made my way to Lincoln Center and carefully made my way up the unfinished steps, which were better marked than the last time I was here, when due the overhang I had tripped. 'These things are a lawsuit waiting to happen,' I had thought at the time, succumbing to my litigious instincts.
Because I was here early to pick up the tickets, the plaza was mostly empty. I stood around and shivered for a few minutes on the windswept plaza as I waited for a friend to arrive, wondering how it had happened that the temperature had dropped more than 100 degrees in less than 30 minutes.
I distracted myself by admiring the poster for Elektra, which I was about to see performed for the first time (not including the final dress rehearsal, which I had seen a few days earlier). It is one of my favorite operas, but seemingly one of the most difficult to pull off: as Stephen has described it, the work needs to really 'take you to another place' from start to finish, so that you are pretty much sitting on the edge of your seat the entire time, being tossed around by the furious currents and riptides that mark the music as it rages from one second to the next. On this night, I also planned to concentrate on some of the antecedents to the piece, e.g., the way you can hear the Wagner's Walkure music (at the end, when Wotan is saying goodbye to his daughter as he places her in the ring of fire, which some consider to be the saddest music ever written) echoed in Elektra's scene where she remembers her dead father Agamemnon. Or how similar at times the group of maidservants resembles the Walkures, representing that part of our unconscious that screams and wails when we are frightened and panicked. Inside a packed house buzzed with anticipation.
A slash of red on the curtain seemed to represent the fire into which we all hoped to be immersed, to be obliterated for a few minutes, to emerge burned clean by mythological songs of anger and revenge.
Comments