I was in New York this past weekend, where I stayed at Sara and Zach's apartment, with their adorable new dog Oscar:
He's exactly the kind of dog I can take to immediately: totally non-aggressive, doesn't bark, doesn't enthusiastically jump on you in a manner that I always perceive as semi-threatening, loves to cuddle, soft ears...the works. I actually threw a tennis ball for him for the better part of an hour after Sara and Zach left on Sunday morning, which is saying something, because a) I find dog-drool-covered toys disgusting, and b) it freaks me out to have to get near their teeth to get the toy away from them.
Saturday night, we went with Heather to see Peter Greenaway's Last Supper project at the Park Ave Armory. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was really cool to see a digital reproduction of Leonardo's masterpiece, projected into a space that duplicated the size and scale of the actual refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie (which I'm not sure when I'll get around to visiting, if ever). Also awesome was the way Greenaway used digital rendering to turn the flat scene into something that seemed, briefly, three-dimensional; the entire scene would go dark, and then lights would play around the figures, making them seem almost to be moving and breathing in the dim light, or he would highlight just the feet, or the hands. I know part of his goal is to make the viewer look at a masterpiece in detail, instead of just absorbing it all at one go, and I felt that was successful. (There's a bit of video here, but it's really not the coolest parts.)
Once this little light show completed after 15 minutes or so and began to loop, though, it sort of lost its flavor. A NYTimes review complained that it lacked any kind of crescendo, although knowing even just a little bit of Greenaway's weirdness (we watched one of his films, The Draughtsman's Contract, during the Rome program) I'm not too surprised.
The odder thing was that despite the event being billed as his Last Supper project, they also threw in his work with Veronese's massive Wedding at Cana, which he projected onto the wall of the church of S. Giorgio in Venice, where it used to hang before Napoleon's soldiers cut it down and took it to France.
This project was much less successful than the Last Supper bit. One reason might be that it's just not as much of a hyper-familiar piece as Leonardo's, even if it is a beautiful spectacle. Greenaway seems to be fascinated by the sheer number of figures present (I forget the number, but maybe 150?) so repeatedly, he would show the scene with numbers superimposed over every single figure. That got old quickly. He also made up dialogue, mostly snarky, for many of the figures, but that veered from amusing to cheesy. Finally, there was an unnecessary voice-over at the beginning about theories that the Wedding at Cana was really Jesus' own wedding to Mary Magdalen, and that that's why Veronese showed him at the center and the married couple off to the left. Now, Veronese had already gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for painting a rowdy Last Supper that featured a bunch of unsavory characters (he wiggled out by re-naming it Supper in the House of Levi). If he'd really painted anything that could be interpreted as mildly heretical in a painting hanging in the biggest church in Venice, don't you think the Inquisition might have taken note? It was unnecessary and made me less interested in the rest of the project.
The Times review called this show, overall, a "dud," and I would almost be tempted to agree, if not for the experience of feeling like I really was standing in that refectory looking up at Leonardo's painting. That was definitely worth it.
On Sunday, I got to check out Heather's new apartment in Carroll Gardens. Her subway stop is elevated, so you get a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline in one direction, and the Statue of Liberty in the other. The apartment had a lot of light, which is not something I generally associate with urban dwellings, and the neighborhood was really cool--a bunch of (expensive) vintage and antique shops, a couple of Italian markets, a brunch place with delicious, delicious bacon (There was a lot of red meat-eating this weekend. I regret nothing.) One of the vintage stores, where Heather admired a necklace that turned out to cost $275, also sold old timey candy, which we agreed was a good way to make people feel they could come in and poke around without that awkward "I'm totally not going to buy anything" feeling you sometimes get in small shops. (Of course, it can also lead to one friend saying "I can't afford anything, I'm unemployed...maybe I'll get a Sugar Daddy," and the other friend saying "Oh, do they have those?" and then realizing that her friend meant the "wealthy older man" variety and not the candy variety. But I did come out of there with a Sugar Daddy.) Heather really seemed to light up in her new surroundings, which was great. She also just got a three-month position with MacMillan, the publishing company, another sign of new beginnings.
After New York it was off to Connecticut. My wonderful mother-in-law picked me up from the train station in New Haven and whisked me off to her house for dinner, then dropped me off with Jen at a parking lot in Rocky Hill. My sister, wearing pajamas, naturally, ordered me to drive her car. Ah, sisters. We actually shared her bed that night, which was a little weird, since we haven't done that in, oh, more than a decade? Everything was fine, though, until I woke up at 6:15 to Jen yelling "Bob, do you want my cat?" I really have no idea what her damage is. When I asked her later why she thought she had to ask me that right then, when I was sleeping, when it was 6:15 in the morning, she just shrugged and said "I dunno." On the plus side, I got to cuddle with the other cat she wasn't trying to foist onto to me, Sapphire. I'd forgotten that she purrs like a freight train.
There was quite a lot of hustle and bustle, squabbling, yelling, you name it, involved in getting Jen to Hartford for the swearing in. My sister can be insane at the best of times, and she was definitely worked up that morning. More than once I wanted to choke her. It's just a natural reaction to us being in close quarters for any length of time, I'm afraid. We were joined by her boyfriend, Vinny, with whom she was celebrating a year's anniversary, together with my aunt and cousin, our nosy former neighbor Mrs. Long, one of Jen's friends, and Monica's mom, since Monica herself couldn't be there. After the swearing-in Jen dragged us to her office to meet her coworkers, and from there we went to Dom's. My mom's picture was hanging up at the waitress station, and Joanne and the other waitresses who knew us were there. I even ran into Mrs. Caruso, the secretary from St. Gabriel's. She was really friendly, but she asked me, rather presumptuously (even if I didn't think of that until later) if I was married; obviously I could say yes, but later I wondered, "How many people at 25 would be able to say yes to that? How many people would even ask that of someone they haven't seen since they were 14?") Then she asked me if I had kids! Maybe she thought I was a lot older than I am; I don't know. I am proud of what Jen and I have accomplished, though; her road has been a lot harder than mine, and I'm really impressed by how well she's done.
The odder thing was that despite the event being billed as his Last Supper project, they also threw in his work with Veronese's massive Wedding at Cana, which he projected onto the wall of the church of S. Giorgio in Venice, where it used to hang before Napoleon's soldiers cut it down and took it to France.
This project was much less successful than the Last Supper bit. One reason might be that it's just not as much of a hyper-familiar piece as Leonardo's, even if it is a beautiful spectacle. Greenaway seems to be fascinated by the sheer number of figures present (I forget the number, but maybe 150?) so repeatedly, he would show the scene with numbers superimposed over every single figure. That got old quickly. He also made up dialogue, mostly snarky, for many of the figures, but that veered from amusing to cheesy. Finally, there was an unnecessary voice-over at the beginning about theories that the Wedding at Cana was really Jesus' own wedding to Mary Magdalen, and that that's why Veronese showed him at the center and the married couple off to the left. Now, Veronese had already gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for painting a rowdy Last Supper that featured a bunch of unsavory characters (he wiggled out by re-naming it Supper in the House of Levi). If he'd really painted anything that could be interpreted as mildly heretical in a painting hanging in the biggest church in Venice, don't you think the Inquisition might have taken note? It was unnecessary and made me less interested in the rest of the project.
The Times review called this show, overall, a "dud," and I would almost be tempted to agree, if not for the experience of feeling like I really was standing in that refectory looking up at Leonardo's painting. That was definitely worth it.
On Sunday, I got to check out Heather's new apartment in Carroll Gardens. Her subway stop is elevated, so you get a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline in one direction, and the Statue of Liberty in the other. The apartment had a lot of light, which is not something I generally associate with urban dwellings, and the neighborhood was really cool--a bunch of (expensive) vintage and antique shops, a couple of Italian markets, a brunch place with delicious, delicious bacon (There was a lot of red meat-eating this weekend. I regret nothing.) One of the vintage stores, where Heather admired a necklace that turned out to cost $275, also sold old timey candy, which we agreed was a good way to make people feel they could come in and poke around without that awkward "I'm totally not going to buy anything" feeling you sometimes get in small shops. (Of course, it can also lead to one friend saying "I can't afford anything, I'm unemployed...maybe I'll get a Sugar Daddy," and the other friend saying "Oh, do they have those?" and then realizing that her friend meant the "wealthy older man" variety and not the candy variety. But I did come out of there with a Sugar Daddy.) Heather really seemed to light up in her new surroundings, which was great. She also just got a three-month position with MacMillan, the publishing company, another sign of new beginnings.
After New York it was off to Connecticut. My wonderful mother-in-law picked me up from the train station in New Haven and whisked me off to her house for dinner, then dropped me off with Jen at a parking lot in Rocky Hill. My sister, wearing pajamas, naturally, ordered me to drive her car. Ah, sisters. We actually shared her bed that night, which was a little weird, since we haven't done that in, oh, more than a decade? Everything was fine, though, until I woke up at 6:15 to Jen yelling "Bob, do you want my cat?" I really have no idea what her damage is. When I asked her later why she thought she had to ask me that right then, when I was sleeping, when it was 6:15 in the morning, she just shrugged and said "I dunno." On the plus side, I got to cuddle with the other cat she wasn't trying to foist onto to me, Sapphire. I'd forgotten that she purrs like a freight train.
There was quite a lot of hustle and bustle, squabbling, yelling, you name it, involved in getting Jen to Hartford for the swearing in. My sister can be insane at the best of times, and she was definitely worked up that morning. More than once I wanted to choke her. It's just a natural reaction to us being in close quarters for any length of time, I'm afraid. We were joined by her boyfriend, Vinny, with whom she was celebrating a year's anniversary, together with my aunt and cousin, our nosy former neighbor Mrs. Long, one of Jen's friends, and Monica's mom, since Monica herself couldn't be there. After the swearing-in Jen dragged us to her office to meet her coworkers, and from there we went to Dom's. My mom's picture was hanging up at the waitress station, and Joanne and the other waitresses who knew us were there. I even ran into Mrs. Caruso, the secretary from St. Gabriel's. She was really friendly, but she asked me, rather presumptuously (even if I didn't think of that until later) if I was married; obviously I could say yes, but later I wondered, "How many people at 25 would be able to say yes to that? How many people would even ask that of someone they haven't seen since they were 14?") Then she asked me if I had kids! Maybe she thought I was a lot older than I am; I don't know. I am proud of what Jen and I have accomplished, though; her road has been a lot harder than mine, and I'm really impressed by how well she's done.
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