In remembrance, 9/11/2015.

It's a lovely day here in NYC, the sun creeping lower in the sky now and casting the distinctly yellower shades of Autumn on the sidewalks, calm and fair. It is much like that morning fourteen years ago before the calm was shattered. And so my mind went reeling back to my thirties, to who I was that morning, memorizing lines of a play by an author who sadly has since passed away. Many people have since passed away, of course.

I thought I might keep quiet this September 11th, because I wondered if I now felt compelled and falsely so to plunge myself into the grief of that day by the sheer force of voices calling us to remember it. So much has happened to you and to me and to us since then. I will share that among my initial thoughts as the towers came down, beyond the horror of the unfolding chaos, was a soul-scorching realization that we were being plunged into darkness, a darkness like the Dark Ages, like the Armenian Genocide, like the Khmer Rouge, the dark cloud that roams the Earth and descends upon a population occasionally and cruelly, something perhaps like the Holocaust, dark years that stain humanity and culture and everything we know to be true and good from which, I fear, we never fully recover. I was not necessarily wrong in these feelings; the fear that gripped us is evident in the barricades we must cross every single day now to access our most public and cherished institutions, the court house, the ferry boat to Liberty, the friendly skies. But the barricades around the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square have come down I was thrilled to see the other day, and I wondered that anything I said today might fan the flames of fear that I hoped may be subsiding these fourteen years later.

But the confluence of today's anniversary and a recent discovery drives me to write to you and to join in your voices of shared community. 

In South Africa earlier this week, the remains of what may be a new species of hominid were discovered in a cave, remote and undisturbed. Smaller brained than we, its hands and feet were uniquely like ours. What made the discovery most astounding is that anthropologists may have stumbled upon the first hominid gravesite. Which begs the good question: What does it mean to be human?

Perhaps it means we are self-aware, aware of our mortality and that of others. Other species exhibit behavior that suggests this awareness as well, elephants for example. But the ritualized burial of these early hominids by their fellows indicates something more profound. Humans recognize one another's dignity and in a cruel and fearful world, work together to memorialize this journey through life's difficult days and fitful nights. "They were here," is a good cry in the dark and we can learn something from that journey if it is indeed remembered.

So I join all of you in remembering today. We all must go the way of the departed. We remember them to tell their good stories, how they survived until they didn't, how they moved the human condition forward, how their stories of light and love and laughter are more important and brave than the stories of cruelty and fear, how their destruction fails our sense of justice, how their creation fuels every good human endeavor.

A sweet Cymbeline.

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's enigmatic late plays, where the lines of comedy and tragedy blur into deeply rendered psychological layers, where the poetry of our greatest poet seems effortless by now, where the master wrights four and five and six plots together with both dizzying complexity and surprising clarity. 

In Central Park's current and free production, the set looks like an exploded theatrical trunk from which the actors seem to have scavenged their own anachronistic costumes. It is pure whimsy, but so carefully wrought that nine actors fill out the dozens of roles. And it is altogether fitting that we crown the real-life couple of Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe our reigning actors of the venue. They are accomplished artists with many splendid gifts, but more alluring to me is the way they have endeared themselves to the festival atmosphere of Shakespeare in the Park. Their gusto is utterly infectious.

The evening is at times silly and rambunctious but in its more affecting moments (and there are a remarkable number of them) it had me in tears. More seems to be at stake for these lovers than in the earlier tragedies. Or comedies for that matter. Shakespeare trods a middle ground here that punches me in my gut a little harder, because we are so off kilter throughout this play, laughing when we've been crying, only to be plunged into Imogen and Posthumus' sorrow all over again.

Underscoring much of the evening is a truly wondrous musical score that pointedly aids the complicated story line, but wisely gets out of the way when Shakespeare's images float unaided into the trees of Central Park. The funeral dirge, Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, touched me with such a sweet sadness that I never wanted it to end.

The evening is three hours long. And again, I never wanted it to end. To hear a pin drop in New York City as Imogen pleads for her death from grief is as magical as hearing thousands of people scream with laughter at Linklater's other antics in his dual role as the loutish peevish Napolean Dynamite-esque Cloten or Raul Esparza's oily and hilarious lounge-y turn as Iachimo.

I got to see the show tonight, forgoing the day-long line, thanks to my talented friend Kate DeWall who is now Master Electrician for The Public Theatre. She was an intern when I met her. She is a star. But mostly, like all the interns I've met, she is a star because she is a star of a person.

Dear friends, if anyone ever offers you the chance to see Shakespeare, go see it? I was bone-weary after a long tour today. And there is nothing like sitting in community, in the dark, while the most beautiful words in the English language parade themselves through your head. It is ennobling. It is a great grand joy.

Tower Two, 2.0

As the outrage mushrooms over the internet, let me share my initial thoughts on Bjark Ingels' design for the new Two World Trade Center.

I, too, was looking forward to Norman Foster's quadri-diamonded crystal of a tower as the most anticipated building after Santiago Calatrava's transportation hub that is easily my favorite bit of architecture going up on the site.

Foster was not scrapped for artistic reasons, but for the practical. Tower Two will host television production studios and their offices and the Dow Jones. The layout of Foster's tower did not efficiently maximize the space towards those ends. Ingels' does.

But Ingels' does more. It pushes the envelope.

We are a predictable lot when it comes to our art. I'm as guilty as the next. We hate the newest thing until it is old and shoved by proxy into the warmer parts of our heart by the next newly vilified adventure.

This design is worth our praise.

It is not so much unlike anything we've ever seen (the new cantilevered apartment building One Madison Square springs to mind) as it is unlike anything we ever expected of an office tower. It has a precariousness to it that flies in the face of corporate power and the corporate towers that precede it. In fact, it is in many ways, the reverse of a NYC skyscraper. Or, better put, the inverse.

Look at its silhouette and notice the World Financial Center at its feet. NYC is known for its setbacks, a design element that was mandated after the nearby Equitable Building cut off the sun as early as 1915, one hundred years ago.

Tower Two does the opposite, on two of its sides, filling in that negative space in the skyline, in our minds, but granting sun past its other edges simultaneously.

Some architecture is driven by narcissism. "I am here. Are you?" But this building is having a conversation with its neighboring buildings, responding to them, sharing the sky.

I love that it is unexpected, I love that it surprises with its overhangs, I love that it plays nicely with its neighbors, but mostly, I love that it dares us to catch up with it.

Christie's breaks a record.

Pablo Picasso's Les femmes d’Alger sold at auction for $179.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. While art prices have inflated for dubious reasons in the last decade with pieces often trading beyond their intrinsic artistic merit, this is indeed a masterpiece of the highest order and the culmination of a series Picasso painted, fifteen works in fact on this subject, that were a poignant expression of his love for two artists, one a predecessor, Eugene Delacroix, and one a recently deceased contemporary, Henri Matisse.

In 1834, Delacroix had painted his Women of Algiers in the bold colors that Picasso loved, in a nod to the Orient whose subject matter and aesthetic fascinated Picasso.

While Picasso's rendering here is uniquely his own, one can easily see the conversation he is having with a previous master. And too, one can see the graphic abstraction of form and shape and the sense of collage that his chief rival Matisse often employed, indeed in his own work entitled The Woman of Algiers. Picasso references these with care and affection, and in the very months after Matisse's death.

Matisse and Picasso were actually friends, but intense competitors as well, and this legendary adversarial posture was responsible for some of the greatest art in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Great artists have a sense of history and subvert their mighty egos to their place in time. Picasso does that here in a composition of such complexity that the work stands alone. But it rises to greater heights in this astounding gesture of gratitude.

New York City preserves itself.

The NYC Landmarks Law turns 50 this week. And this is the story of just one building it saved.

John Jacob Astor III and his wife Charlotte founded The New York City Cancer Hospital in 1884 in a fortress of a building at Central Park West and 106th Street, largely in response to former President Ulysses S. Grant's inoperable throat cancer. It is important to remember how much the entire nation loved Grant for his efforts to bring the North and South together again.

Cancer was thought of as a dirty disease, a disease of bad hygiene and poverty. It ruined people's lives with humiliation, let alone the deadly consequences. Grant's illness brought national attention to cancer.

This building's sumptuous design owed as much to the French gothic as it did to turn of the century advances in hospital care: round rooms to provide cleanliness and ample head space between beds and massive central ventilation shafts to clear the air of germs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose practiced nursing here.

Because cancer continued to be so deadly, however, the hospital was stigmatized by New Yorkers and even nicknamed The Bastille. It deteriorated from lack of funds. In 1955, it closed its doors as a hospital and moved its services across town to become the new Memorial Sloane-Kettering hospital for Cancer Research.

It suffered a few poor incarnations, abandoned at certain times, jerry-rigged as a nursing home at others, and falling apart as NYC did in the 70s. But fortunately, it was granted landmark status in 1976.

Many developers tried to use the building, but most certainly it would have been torn down if not for this protection. Finally in 2000, it was purchased and developed into condominiums.

After a massive restoration and repurposing which included adding a residential tower behind the original building, today the round rooms are exquisite apartments fetching upwards of seven million dollars a pop.

I'll never get near one of those apartments, but thanks to this law, I get to pass this building several times a week, and I always point out its captured glory to captive and captivated visitors.

The Met through my eyes. Monet.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse. Claude Monet. 1867.

Remembering nothing is accidental in a masterpiece, I took some time studying why Monet places us, the viewers, so far above this gathering. The vanishing point is high up on the left of the canvas, nearly off the painting.

In placing us there, he divides the canvas up into three even planes: land, sea, and air. Take the fence off the water's edge and measure for yourself. And where else do you see three even fields in the painting? It is a very French work indeed, and almost patriotic in its geometry.

It is also rather two-dimensional with plane sitting on plane, in a nod to the Japanese wood-block prints with which Monet had been recently enthralled.

Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family in Sainte-Adresse, a channel resort near Le Havre where my grandmother would be met by my grandparents some 90 years later. I love the painting for that bit of trivia. I also love the fact that clearly Monet was at odds with his father that season, placing him in the foreground but with his back to us. His cousins fare no better, featureless as they are.

But they are not the stars here. It is the light. And perhaps the light hitting that one parasol, not accidentally dead center and also in the fore, the blazing yellow-white cut off crisply by a sharp shadow, perfectly, on a perfect summer's day. I look at that, at the sunlight hitting the silk brocade of the dresses, striking the men's collars and cuffs, the glint on a shoe, a Panama hat, and I feel the afternoon sun in my soul radiating from this canvas from which Monet seems to have sucked every bit of humidity. It is dry and warm and breezy. One can hear meteorologists brag about this kind of day in one's head today, as if they were responsible for it themselves, but it is the kind of day, one perfect day, accidental perhaps, but purposefully immortalized in Monet's hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

Much of the painting is filled with smooth unnoticeable brush strokes. But most of it is dappled with Monet's signature strikes and dabs, playful and perfectly placed. He was a master manipulator of the medium and boasted in letters home that crowds would gather to watch his virtuosity before the easel.

A painting of perfect sunlight from me to you in the midsts of a blustery brutal winter.

The Met through my eyes. Hammershøi.

Moonlight, Strandgade 30. Vilhelm Hammershøi. 1906.

A few seasons back, The Met curated a show about window paintings through the ages. And that is where I first saw this Hammershøi, which is part of the permanent collection.

Windows are both portals and barriers, creating a simultaneous sense of danger and safety, community and isolation. 

While it may seem nothing is happening here, there is a tension inherent to the window, one that Hammershøi exploits even further by adding the closed door, inviting us to stay and to leave at the same time.

Bathing the entire vignette is the soft glow of moonlight, the night light of the forest, keeping elves and whatnøt away in the enchanted Danish kingdom, both frosty and warm, a chilled light, if you will, leaving everything mauve in its wake.

Hammershøi displays a masterful skill rendering all of this symbolism in this perfectly balanced painting of his very own apartment in Copenhagen, mystery and comfort dancing on a quiet tense tightrope in my mind when I encounter this work, thick with silence as it is.

The Met through my eyes. Renoir.

Eugène Murer. Auguste Renoir, 1877

Eugène Maurer was an enigma.

He owned a pastry shop at 93 Boulevard Voltaire and worked long hours at the oven to amass a bit of a fortune. He was something of a poet, a published novelist, a largely self-taught but minor painter, and he loved the company of unknown artists, names that would have elicited a laugh or two perhaps in their day, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Pissarro. He would receive his friends at his pastry shop and support them as best he could. At one point, he owned 122 Impressionist paintings, many of them the masterpieces of today's collections, particularly those found on the walls of the Musée d'Orsay. The hotel he bought in Rouen towards the turn of the century would spell his financial ruin and he died broke and nearly friendless in 1906.

But much earlier, in 1877, he sat for Renoir.

I've written before, Renoir is not the artist I run to at The Met. I find his works too pretty. But this painting's honesty is urgent, with an edge, and it catches me off guard each time it catches my eye. Murer's enigmatic stare is so deep, so full, so full of the glamour of youth and almost self-indulgent, the self-indulgence of one in love with poetry and sadness that only youth has the luxury of time for, the silly sadness of the self-possessed, and utterly forgivable, the studied pose, the poseur with his aquiline features at their height and set against the beauty of nature as if to dare the blooming flowers behind him in competition. I know him, that fellow: Wasting time, luxuriantly, unaware the bloom falls off the primrose. 

This is Renoir at his best, painting his enigmatic friend with deep affection.

Victory victorious.

The Victory Theatre opened in 1900 on the cobbled prairie known as 42nd Street as The Theatre Republic, built by Oscar Hammerstein I with a play starring John Barrymore. 

In 1902, impresario David Belasco named it for himself and opened the famous play Abie's Irish Rose, the longest running play in its day. After Belasco named another theatre for himself on 44th Street, the house was renamed simply The Republic.

From 1931 to 1941, Bill Minsky owned it as ran it as NYCs first big burlesque house called Minsky's Burlesque. Its most famous act was Gypsy Rose Lee. His most infamous act? Tearing the grand staircase off the front of the building.

!n 1941, it became a movie theatre named The Victory to support American troops in WWII.

It did a stint as a television studio!

In 1972, it became the first theatre to show pornographic films.

Times Square and 42nd Street fell into neglect, poverty, and despair.

But in the early 1990s, and you hear me say this all the time, the artists moved in. The city had taken control of The Victory and all of the the theaters along 42nd Street and invited artists to do installations in the deteriorating spaces. The marquees along the stretch were filled with poetic aphorisms that made commuters stop and look and think.

The Theatre for a New Audience staged Romeo and Juliet in the water-stained filthy shell of The New Victory. People showed up.

And people started to notice. 

(Including the Disney Corporation who struck a deal with the city to revitalize the entire block.)

The New Victory was entirely restored to its Edwardian splendor, the grand staircase was rebuilt, magnificent torchieres greeted audience members, and the New Victory now does a season of vital, well-attended, children's programming.

A beautiful important theatre, visually and historically, falls on hard times, is abandoned, and it is the artists that make us see it new again so that new life is breathed into the forgotten.