Matthew Gallaway

Caturday on the Nose

2010-03-13T19:23:35-05:00

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.

Birds of a Feather

2010-03-12T19:10:18-05:00

When I was four or five years old, one of my favorite books was an Audubon Guide to North American Birds. It was a thick book, probably close to 1000 pages long with a mauve hardback cover, the corners of which would eventually be chewed by my pet gerbils, which escaped their cages with alarming regularity and scurried out into the night.
My mother still talks about how she would be woken up by the patter of little feet running across the floor, at which point she would rush out and wake me up, and bleary-eyed we would try to chase down these rodents on the lam. It was very difficult, because they were quick and nimble and even when cornered could slip through your fingers. They also had a knack for getting into the deepest closets, where you would hear them rustling around, and perhaps catch a glimpse of their shiny reflective eyes -- perhaps even taunting you -- before you would pull everything out in the almost always fruitless attempt to capture them. Another thing my mother talks about is how, almost immediately after I got the gerbils -- a pair -- one of them had a litter, they were pink and squirmy and hairless worms, several of which the mother gerbil promptly ate. I will always remember this introduction to the more brutal side of the natural world.
At some point the gerbil population exploded and then diminished -- I gave some away, some died, some were never found and perhaps are still living in the backs of cabinets in a suburban house not far from Pittsburgh -- so that I was down to a final pair, which predictably one night escaped. These two, for reasons that will never be quite clear to me, both managed to jump into the fish bowl and drown, so that I woke up to find their floating carcasses, under which the fish swam with their usual ambivalent grace. It was not a happy day for my second-grade self.
The point of all this is that while I wouldn't have predicted thirty-five years ago that I would end up moving to the exact location on which James Audubon built his 19th-century estate, it makes a certain sense in retrospect, as does my continuing obsession with the birds of the neighborhood, who for reasons that are perhaps unknown to anyone but themselves spend hours circling madly overhead. Which is not to say this seemingly manic behavior is without beauty, such as on Sunday, when the sun reflected off their wings as the birds turned at a certain angle, and I felt breathless as I stood on the corner taking photographs, ignoring the stares and eye-rolls of the local men who spend their days clumped on the corner drinking and gambling.
We are the same, I wanted to say to them, except when we are not.

The Washington Heights Commercial Landmark Project: Olympia Florist

2010-03-11T23:05:49-05:00

I'm not usually one to feel particularly nostalgic about stores, but I always make an exception for Olympia Florist, which was featured in the 1980 John Cassavetes movie 'Gloria.' It's located on the southwest corner of Broadway and 158th, and has been there for at least a million years.
Sometimes when I walk down Broadway, it's easy to forget that there was anything besides cell-phone stores, nail salons, and 99-cent stores, and Olympia Florist is a reminder of what was once good about this strip, and so provides a little hope for what one day might come.

The George Washington Bridge Project: Beauty and Nausea

2010-03-10T22:13:55-05:00

Here's the sunset tonight.
I'm going to keep things short because I'm suffering with some kind of stomach virus/flu. (I think.)
I left work early and barfed in a garbage can in the subway at 145th Street.
In between the waves of nausea, I tried to gather inspiration from the strength of the bridge and the beauty of the orchid.

Three Shots of New York City from a Plane (And a Theory about Cats)

2010-03-09T22:17:20-05:00

Yesterday Stephen flew in from Detroit and took these amazing shots of the city from the plane.
Here's midtown. It's strange to think that when this picture was taken, I was actually in my office, right next to the Empire State Building. If you look hard enough, you can probably see me.
Here's a shot of the George Washington Bridge and the Triborough, both of which were designed by the same engineer, Othmar Ammann. The scale of the modern city is so immense that individual people have been rendered meaningless.
The corollary of this theory is that cats are poised to take over the world.

Death Culture at Sea: Books of Sirens Singing

2010-03-08T19:34:26-05:00

Listen to the latest Death Culture at Sea on tumblr or download the MP3 here (gratis!)

Death Culture at Sea/Books of Sirens Singing

I am here before you now/Will you take the time to talk about the things you left behind/It was not supposed to be that way/You brought me to my knees/I wish that I could try again/But some things can’t be changed

I was waiting for the place/We were meeting in the streets of a city that was lost, to me at least I know/It would take a life to make up for the things I never said about the things you should have known

Take your time and make a plan/It’s the way we always walked past the flowers in the park and the pine trees in the rain/I was hoping you were back to tell me what I missed/Which is not to say I’m here to bring you home again

In the Shadow of a Budding Grove of Eastern White Pines

2010-03-07T18:29:27-05:00

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 Orange Orchid: A Fable in Five Parts

2010-03-06T18:40:52-05:00

There was once a king who lived in a country situated so far up in the north that the ground was covered with snow eight months out of the year. Each spring, the snow would turn to streams of frigid water that rushed down the mountains, and this was the king's favorite time, because the sides of the ravines would bloom with close to a hundred thousand flowers -- and the king knew the exact number, for he had ordered a regiment from his army to count them, and they did -- the petals of which sparkled like tiny stars under the white sun.
The colors of these flowers crossed the entire spectrum, ranging from a red deeper than any blood (even that spilled on fresh snow) to a perfect violet that recalled the shadowed floor of a mossy forest on a moonless night during one of their brief summers. But of all the colors, the king liked the orange tone best, because he found that staring at it for just a few seconds soothed his vibrating, agitated heart in a way nothing else did, not the most delicious meal or winning ten games of chess against the smartest player in his kingdom, or even a night of passionate sex (and he had experienced quite a few of these during his twenty-eight years of life).
The problem was that these orange flowers, while beyond pure in tone, were quite tiny -- no bigger than a thumbnail -- and lasted only a few weeks, after which the king would find himself distraught and angry as he considered waiting almost an entire year before he could again expect to calm his ragged nerves. One year, however, one of his explorers returned with exciting news: thousands of miles across the sea, there were jungles filled with immense flowers -- bigger than a person's head, or even an eagle's wing span -- which grew and blossomed continually throughout the year, so that the people who lived there were never deprived of this magical color. The king wanted to know why the explorer hadn't brought one of these specimens back and the explorer apologized, saying that she had tried, but that the plant had died en route, and all she could offer was a a faded petal, which was nevertheless longer than the king's arm and contained a last remnant of orange, which like a golden ring dropped into a deep well disappeared before his very eyes.

The king, over protests of his court, his many lovers and even his subjects -- who all adored him because he had, despite taxing them quite heavily, invested the government's money in public transportation, libraries, opera houses and universal health care -- declared that he would have to travel to this fabled jungle and see the grand flowers himself, or else risk dying an unhappy man. And so it was arranged: a ship was procured and after many months at sea -- during which the crew encountered icebergs, hurricanes and attacks from giant squid -- they finally arrived at their destination. The king fell ill during a trip through the jungle, but insisted they carry him forward; he promised them he would survive, no matter how high his fever went or how delirious he became (and there were many nights when he screamed at his servants in languages that none of them could understand).
Finally, however, after eight days, they arrived at a clearing just as the sun rose over the treeline to illuminate an entire grove of the orange flowers, as brilliant as the explorer had promised. The king, in an increasingly rare moment of lucidity, wept because he knew that he had reached the end of his life, but he took the hands of two men standing next to him and pulled them down to their knees. 'It is the color of music,' he whispered, and as they raised him in the air and turned him slowly in a circle, so that his eyes were filled with nothing except that which he had longed for, he succumbed to the infinite night.

155th Street: The American Academy of Arts and Letters

2010-03-05T19:15:41-05:00

Continuing our walk on Sunday, Stephen and I turned up 155th Street, where we passed the southern facade of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
This is part of the Beaux Arts complex that somewhat miraculously occupies two blocks west of Broadway between 155th and 157th Streets; the Academy, I once read in New York Magazine while at the dentist (or so I seem to remember), was John Updike's favorite place in Manhattan. Many of the most famous artists and writers in the United States are members; I once had a friend who worked there and she showed me an auditorium where all the members had their names inscribed in the back of the chairs. (It was a little creepy, to be honest.) The Academy also has one of the most acoustically pristine theaters in the world, and is often used to record classical musicians.
The exquisite grandeur of the site is tainted by the knowledge that several of the original tenants -- the American Numismatic Society and several others -- fled the neighborhood in the post-war period, which led to a community college incongruously occupying one of the facilities. There have been rumors over the years that the founding tenant -- The Hispanic Society -- also wants to move downtown, which would be a real tragedy, given that its buildings were specifically designed to house the collection of the museum's founder. I remember living in Paris, where the government made a point to locate new cultural institutions -- theaters and libraries and so forth -- in rundown neighborhoods, with a thought to invigorate them; this would seem to be an obvious lesson, but one that has not been widely adopted in New York City, at least as far as I can tell.
But rather than fixate on such a maddening and perhaps insurmountable problem, I tried to enjoy the beauty of what remained, in this instance a pair of bronze doors by Adolf A. Weinman, dating from 1938.
'Dedicated to the Memory of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Women Writers of America'
'Unfettered as an Eagle's Flight Imagination's Mighty Sweep Transcends All Earthly Bounds'
BONUS PIC! I took this shot a few minutes ago (i.e., Friday night at around 6:15). Spring, it seems, is right around the corner.

Thursday: Views from the Past

2010-03-04T19:04:12-05:00

This morning was dull and gray, but not very cold, which I think is typical for early March.
I was relieved to see that the garbage on my block had been picked up, because last night when I arrived home from work it was still there.
At lunch I went to a business meeting on the 37th floor of a building on Sixth Avenue, which coincidentally enough is the exact same floor where I used to work. Ten years ago to this very day I had spent my time high up above midtown; the only difference was that my office faced east and the person I was meeting with occupied a southwestern corner.
I regretted that I never took any photographs from my old office -- which offered beautiful views of the Chrysler Building -- and tried to make up for it by surreptitiously snapping a few when the guy I was meeting with went to retrieve some documents from the printer. I remembered how when I worked here, the sun used to stream in from the west, and during the winter you could see the ice floes on the Hudson, which would reflect a brilliant shade of orange.
Times Square seems much less chaotic from forty floors above.
Down on the street, I took a few more pix of my old stomping grounds in midtown. Frankly this was never my favorite neighborhood -- it's very business-oriented and is PACKED with tourists much of the year -- but I did feel a certain inevitable nostalgia as I pictured myself ten years earlier, and thought about what I had and had not accomplished during the intervening period.
There were other changes to the building; most obviously was the enhanced security, which entailed a three-step check-in process to access the elevator banks, whereas when I started working there -- this pre-9/11, obv -- there had been nothing; anyone could go up to our office at the time. Although I understand the need for such security, I think it's not without a certain emotional cost in terms of a kind of heaviness that clings to the city and its inhabitants; it's one more thing to weigh us down.
On the other hand, outdoor ping-pong is a relatively new innovation -- this was in Bryant Park, which I passed through on the walk back to my office after lunch -- and one that perhaps compensates for the oppressive security. I think it's fair to say that the world would be a better place with more ping-pong table available to the general public.
Predictably a pigeon was perched on this statue's head. (I'm not even sure who it's supposed to be, although I can confirm that -- like most statues in New York (and unlike those in Europe) -- it's not very gay nor particularly hot.)
If I were a pigeon, I think Bryant Park would be a pretty good place to live. These two seemed very unconcerned by the surrounding people, and content just to chill.
Back at my office, the afternoon passed and the sun set behind the Empire State Building. Needless to say, this view has been documented much better than many others in my past.