Didn't think so.
I hate having to always name these posts, anyway.
It's like emails and subject lines.
Why do I have to have a subject for all these things?
What if I just want to ramble aimlessly?
I give up.
So remember the Philharmonic concert in Central Park that I was so disappointed my friends had dropped out of last week? Well, I didn't end up going, alone or otherwise, because it was rained out and rescheduled for yesterday. So I went last night- with other friends :P- and it was fantastic!
We stretched out on blankets in the balmy 85-degree air and ate grapes and crackers by candlelight as the orchestra serenaded us with traditional classical music (except for the first piece: The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra, written in 1985 by John Adams, which I wasn't a big fan of).
After the concert came fireworks, and then a sudden, unbridled downpour. Having no umbrellas, we willingly submitted to the deluge that swept us from 82nd Street and Central Park West to Houston Street and First Avenue.
I love summer rain.
My evenings craving for cultural grandiosity and stimulation satisfied, I am now free to muse over my other current artistic indulgence: the theater.
Wallace Shawn (remember Vizzini from the Princess Bride? Such a great movie, by the way), who has written a number of plays, recently released a CD of his 1990 play, The Fever.
Its about a tourist from a rich country visiting a poor country, where he contracts a fever so severe that it causes him to reconsider the morality of his narrowly focused, Eurocentric life. Its written as a monologue and takes place over the space of one night, the night of his illness, and concludes with (SPOILER!) openendedness, leaving the viewer/reader/listener with more- perhaps unwelcome- questions than when they entered.
Heres a passage:
Sometimes I was fine. I remember one morning, a marvelous blue sky. I had my hair cut. Gentle hands molded my hair so that it fit over the shape of my scalp like a cap. Then I bought myself a pair of comfortable socks, and then I looked at them carefully, and I bought two more pairs, because it's not easy to find the kind of socks I like! Then I went to a sweet little restaurant and had lunch with a woman in a lemon-yellow suit whom I'd known since I was eight. But then I got into a taxi, and as I was riding across the city, that feeling, that sickness, filled me up again. It seemed to start in my stomach and move out through my legs, my chest. And my stomach was beating, it was just like a heart. A cold sweat on my forehead and neck. I wasn't me. When the taxi arrived, the person who got out of it wasn't me. I was nowhere. The person who paid the driver was actually no one.
Tomorrow night, I am going to see Martin McDonaghs new play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. McDonagh is the king of dark comedy, a genre his fellow Irishmen have had a stronghold on for some time.
Im a big fan of one of his early plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and of his last play, The Pillowman, but rumor is that The Lieutenant is his most brilliantly dark and funny work to date. I'm looking forward to it.
Ive worked up an appetite now (thats probably the first time anyone has said that in any proximity to McDonaghs name).
It's time for lunch!
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