01.01.24

2024: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

i gave a french couple directions to bryant park.
i went on my mushroom club's pop-up central park walk.
i learned a difference between snail eggs and slug eggs.
i decided to order crispy pickled artichokes instead of pickled crudités.
i shaved my legs in a bubble bath.
i extended my duolingo streak.
i remembered the bottle of kombucha in my tote bag.
i opened a window in the bedroom.

12.22.22 [on the D, 6, and L trains]

i had what i hope is a solid jolt of inspiration for rounding out holiday gifts for my little nephews. i always have a lot to unload when i see them, given that i consistently shit the bed on dispatching packages out to california in a timely-for-birthdays-and-holidays manner and only see them once or twice a year, but i always want to overcompensate for the unreliability and above all to make sure everyone feels i've thought of them as often as i've thought of their sibling. not always intuitive when their interests don't dovetail with mine - like, man is it easy to shop for a friend's kid who shares my feelings about bats. anyway, i am a monster, but i found a bunch of holographic animal portraits in chinatown, and i think T will appreciate the illusion of a wolf leaping into his bedroom. (this is a kid who asked his mother for a door for christmas a few years ago.)

i filed my last piece of the year last night and am on my way up to central park in search of owls. there's a northern saw-whet somewhere (that someone managed to photograph mid-pellet), and a great horned owl, and a barred - who won't dislodge barry (RIP) in my affections but might help me heal, or something. it'd be pretty great if i spotted some mushrooms as well, given how long it's been since i've made a meaningful fungal foray. the mighty patch of wine caps up at stuyvesant park that i picked this summer, DNA sequenced at the president of the mycological society's apartment, and presented at one of the society's weekly identification meetings with an explicit "i am interested in eating these. can any of you think of any reason why i shouldn't?" (A: dogs might have peed on them, but otherwise, no) before sautéeing is long-demolished, thanks to the ongoing climate-change resilience project fucking up our bank of the east river. this is all bill de blasio's fault, is what i'm saying. "he" texted me during primary season to ask for my support and i replied that i would sell my organs on the black market to fund his rivals. he dropped out of the congressional race soon afterward; you're welcome.

speaking of jokes i tell myself, a morning newsletter from the new york times last weekend solicited personal, offbeat year's-best nominations, and i got an email yesterday asking me to confirm my name and location for my submission. will the times shitpost to america's inboxes on my behalf this saturday? we'll see.

[...]

no owls - no owls that wanted to reveal themselves to me, anyway. in making my way up to the pinetum i wandered into belvedere castle, where a docent who happened to be a birdwatcher told me the barred owl was in the ramble for a few weeks before the great horned owl came and bullied it from its branch (and eventually decamped as well). i defaulted to meandering around the park in the rain as the light drained out of the clouds, which was as goddamn delightful as it was a decade ago when i would slip out of my midtown office on my lunch break to wallk out my feelings. no mushrooms, either, but i wasn't looking very hard. maybe a couple of ancient dryad's saddles 20 feet up a tree trunk? i could have pulled out my binoculars to be sure - yeah, i brought my fancy binoculars - but i am fundamentally a lazy person. i left the park via bethesda mall and a guy in the terrace arcade was playing "can't help falling in love" on his erhu in the gloaming. way to break my heart again (again), new york city.

02.17.21

in a recent attempt to develop a substantial team lead in imaginary-zombie-related competitive step counting i headed north on the promenade along east river park this sunday and realized pretty quickly that i wanted to take a long, long walk. in fact, i wanted to walk all the way up to central park and see barry, the goddamn adorable barred owl who's been appearing around the park and charming people off and on since october. i follow a not-insubstantial number of bird enthusiasts on twitter, so barry pops up in my feed several times a week, at which point i pump my fist at my laptop and chant BA-RRY! BA-RRY!, frightening the cats. as far as i can remember i've never seen an owl in the wild, you see; we didn't really have owls in our especially-paved part of orange county when i was growing up (unless you count david bowie in labyrinth, and, okay, that's fair). to me barry is even more exciting than the unnamed(?) snowy owl folks have been seeing in the park since last month, even though she's the first snowy spotted there in 130 years — i saw a snowy up close and at length when we tended her at my bird hospital a couple of years ago.

anyway, i walked and walked (and walked and walked — per social media barry was up around the loch, which is at the north end of the park around 103rd street) and tried to leave my phone alone so that it wouldn't die before i had a chance to take shitty faraway pictures. i approached a few hikers on a random icy path in the park: have you seen...the barred owl? "there are a bunch of people back thataway who seem excited, i don't know." i passed a partial sparrow, pink and chunky. i passed a whole northern cardinal, ten feet away and puffed up like a durian. then i totally saw barry, and it was just like when joe spotted david bowie in the mezzanine at a pixies show, though barry wasn't wearing a hoodie and sneakers. respectable jareth cosplay, though.

manhattan bird alert (hush) tweeted yesterday that barry is likely a female, given the pitch of her hoots. after hearing that i dove into Bird Internet like a fox after a mouse beneath the snow and spent the next hour listening to barred owl recordings; i learned to my delight that ornithologists transliterate their calls as "who cooks for you? who cooks for you-all?" and that barred owls are also called hoot owls because their hoots are characteristic in the same way that concord grapes are definitively grape. matty and steve were reasonably tolerant of my attempts to who-cooks-for-YOU? like barry at them all night, which does sound much better than BA-RRY! BA-RRY!, i would imagine.

11.06.15

we released a red-tailed hawk from the bird hospital today—not the gigantic female we had last week, but a male who'd tumbled out of the sky with a terrible scream. raptors are territorial, and this one ended up in our care after losing a turf war. he fell right at someone's feet, R said. i heard her presentation to the donors and birdwatchers who'd assembled in the lobby for the release as i bustled around the isolation ward in a crap-spattered gown; i hadn't planned on heading out to central park myself, but one of the staffers took my gown and place and pushed me out the door after the back of the column. we headed east into the trees just north of where joe and i turn in for shakespeare every summer. a woman stood at the edge of the path with a sharpied FREE HUGS sign, and someone from our group lurched over to embrace her. "thank you," she said. "thank you."

it felt wrong to catch all the way up to R, though i didn't know anyone else; she was practicing her magic at the column's head, pointing out the birds wheeling above us (hawks, so we had to head south) and telling stories about patients. i ended up beside a woman—maybe the one from the hug?—who told me that one of her two cats died a few days ago under anesthesia for a routine dental. "he was two and a half," she said. "it was a mistake to take him in, i made a mistake, but i could tell his teeth were hurting him." i told her she'd done the right thing with the information she'd had, and we kept going south.

11.06.13

it's That Week in central park when every third pedestrian has some sort of musical instrument and it feels reasonable to rent a bike for $30 an hour. as i headed for bethesda fountain yesterday afternoon i saw a couple waltzing slowly beneath the elms. forget you, hollywood! i bet they were both in perfect health.

11.23.10: the dirty dozen, part II {i recall central park in fall}

















{05 sheep meadow, 06 blackbirds, 07 bench, 08 bethesda terrace, 09 five on the lake, 10 stairs, 11 arcade ceiling, 12 elms revisited}

08.18.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 22

SURVIVOR: tree of smoke (denis johnson)*
CHALLENGER: in the woods (tana french)

this foreign thrillers thing is getting out of hand; sensing an opening after my talk of arnaldur indriðason's icelandic excellence and acceptance of the girl with the dragon tattoo, amazon has started recommending things like the indian bride (inspector sejer mysteries) and my friend megan passed me tana french's in the woods. the latter is set in knocknaree, a blustery green corner of ireland that's especially nice to read about when new york in august wants you dead, and full of good-looking dublin homicide detectives. call it a thoughtfully embellished procedural, a cross between inspector lewis** and the second season of the wire.*** one of said detectives, the unreliably-narratin' rob ryan (fond of telling us how much he lies and doesn't notice), grew up in knocknaree and suffered a mysterious trauma in the nearby woods; when a young girl's body is found there some twenty years later, he catches the case and extremely awkward conversations with locals ensue.

it's hard to talk about in the woods at length without spoiling something - megan told me i needed to read this first novel of french's because it introduces a better novel's main character, and the act of reading this one without sniffing around its sequel (the likeness) nearly killed me - but i will say that french has something of kazuo ishiguro (never let me go)'s knack for articulating relationships' emotional temperatures, which is a pleasant surprise in a genre more concerned with suspense than regular old non-stabby interpersonal tension. in the woods's b-plot is the story of rob's relationship with his female partner; its overall arc is somewhat predictable, but it's described beautifully. the a-plot, in turn, certainly does its job: while i've been suspended like a fly in the sap that is the remainder of our october issue here at the magazine and haven't had time to read at home, i was perhaps the only ticketholder who didn't mind waiting out the rain for sunday night's capeman performance in central park. i tucked myself under an eave at the delacorte, imagined myself in ireland, and was perfectly content.

VICTOR: i'd rather have in the woods in my purse, but tree of smoke's still king of the shelf.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 wire-watchers, which was your favorite season?

02 what's your personal late-night-at-the-office record? i'm now at a quarter past midnight, but i'm stepping up for another go tonight, i think.

03 how was your weekend? i've missed you guys, what with the office eating my life.

*previous battle here.

**if you've spent time in oxford and aren't yet watching inspector lewis, incidentally, get on that.

***the best season, for my money.

06.21.10: culture blotter {the merchant of venice & the winter's tale @ shakespeare in the park}



the public's decision to cast a repertory company of actors for shakespeare in the park this year is zippy for all kind of reasons. because they're flip-flopping between shows instead of staging two uninterrupted runs, one could in theory end up in central park for the merchant of venice and the winter's tale on consecutive nights (a prospect that thrilled me and vaguely horrified joe, who likes shakespeare well enough but found the idea of giving him six hours in forty-eight a little much). because they're striking at least once a week, the set design (which is typically quite fine) need to be extra-devious. because the public's artistic director is interested in elizabethan repertory, o my brothers, the 2010 lineup is all shakespeare all the time; euripides is the man and it's mean to poke hippies, but last year's bloody bloody arty chanting and 2008's hair left much to be desired.

the first performance of the merchant of venice (featuring al pacino as shylock) last saturday was...a little intense.



weekend shows are always popular, but this was something altogether different; some dude was blending margaritas on the lawn, several scalpers were hissing their way up and down the line (ticket hijinks are an ongoing problem, but not on that scale), and chevy chase was positively underfoot (which was also the case when i went to a pacino premiere at the ziegfeld a few years ago). the stage was as clever as i'd hoped it would be: a concentric series of sliding wrought iron gates separated nineteenth-century clerks' desks from one another and orbited a magnificent victrola (the music, particularly shylock's theme, was lovely). the play itself was interesting; i'd never seen merchant staged, and i wasn't quite prepared for how jarring the word jew needs to sound when one stages it as a tragedy. full-throated shylock (which is how al pacino played him - he was all growling, flying-spittle anger) is hard to subdue, and i can see why daniel sullivan decided to stage his conversion as a torture scene; he considers himself a prisoner of war, not a civilian. that reading works for most of the play, but it doesn't leave much room for the fifth act's comedy; how are we supposed to care about misplaced wedding rings when we've essentially just watched waterboarding? that aftertaste spoils each of the play's couplings, as it must, and leaves shylock's daughter on an empty stage, hearing his theme a final time at the scene of his baptism. it's a feel-good play.

then there's the winter's tale,* which gets the bulk of its unpleasantness out of the way early. for those of you unfamiliar with the lesser romances, this one begins as something like othello without iago: king leontes of sicilia decides his wife (hermione) and best friend (polixenes) are having an affair, refuses to listen to reason and his entire court and apollo (bad move) when they tell him he's a tyrannical fool, and makes everyone's life miserable for the sixteen years it takes his daughter to grow up in exile (he thinks she's dead; in fact, she's abandoned in the aforementioned best friend's kingdom by his tiresome underling). while the misogyny in the winter's tale could be as oppressive as merchant's anti-semitism, this production has genuine lovers to buoy it: heather lind, merchant's tragic portia, is also utterly charming as winter's abandoned perdita, raised by shepherds as a living, breathing pastoral.** leontes might not deserve his queen when she's returned to him, but his queen deserves their daughter, and the sweetness of their reunion (fine, i cried) makes hermione's self-imposed exile (she too is presumed dead for sixteen years) and apparent forgiveness of her schlub husband a bit more plausible. winter's set, in turn, is probably my favorite of the seven i've now seen at the delacorte; a wall of glass panes rose and set like a sun in the background, huge altars and censers snaked smoke across the stage, and puppeteers whipped bird-kites around our heads. moths spiraling between speakers, joe's hands clasped as he leaned into the final speeches, the night's warm breath on my neck.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 is chevy chase in pacino-specific love with me?

02 have you ever seen merchant staged? how was it?

03 what provisions would you pack for a night of theatre in the park?

*we had tickets for its first night as well and were rained out; happily, we made it through the virtual line again this past saturday.

**L: "perdita looks just like...what's-her-name from gossip girl, you know, blair waldorf?" J: "leighton meester. it saddens me that i know that."

11.05.09ii

09.03.09

08.24.09: culture blotter {the bacchae @ shakespeare in the park, inglourious basterds}

there's a noble tradition of drinking one's way through classical theatre in our set. one of joe's and my first dates was the royal shakespeare company's staging of tales from ovid at the swan theatre in stratford-upon-avon (go big or go home, right?)...with a fifth of something or other (passed between many expats, not just the two of us). while tales from ovid would probably move along at a good clip without booze - it's ten punchy little numbers, and it's translated by ted "one of lauren's favorite poets" hughes - i was glad we brought wine to the bacchae in the park on friday. i know greek tragedies (like philip glass, who wrote the music for the bacchae) are good for me, but a girl can only take so much Arty Chanting (PITY...the LADY...who cut her SON'S-HEAD-OFF! ad infinitum). on a positive note, the women of the chorus were sexy and feral and frida-kahlo-by-way-of-williamsburg (and wore rompers far better than girls of that neighborhood do); they were much more pleasing to me than jonathan groff, whose pretty-boy dionysus was more of a pop star than a rock star (though the smear of red at his mouth did give him a nice look of lunacy, like heath ledger as the joker in the dark knight returns). on a sadder note, there were no baguette-stealing raccoons* at our performance (as there were at amanda's). next year?

on saturday we met up with george for inglourious basterds at the ziegfeld. it - meh. i'd like to get frothy about how the opening sequence was really promising and how tarantino really can build menace a bit like hitchcock does when he feels like it, or how the haphazard world war two backdrop should have been all slapsticky like la grande vadrouille and instead read like the unconvincing moment at the beginning of a rock concert when the lead singer tells the crowd in fill-in-the-town that he's in the greatest town in the world, but i sort of can't be bothered. tarantino knows that we know he's bright, and he uses that given as an excuse to slap everything from genius to first drafts on the screen. i thought christoph waltz as an ss officer was great, and that mike myers owes the filmgoing public a letter of apology; i think QT owes us a reservoir dogs or pulp fiction, and soon, for he's boring the hell out of me right now.

*ETA: man, even the times critic got raccoons!

06.16.09: culture blotter {twelfth night @ shakespeare in the park}

i panicked when i heard that anne hathaway had signed on for this summer's shakespeare in the park. miss devil-wears-prada-and-princess diaries* in the comedy (twelfth night) that functions as a sequel to shakespeare in love** - and, once again, we'd be in california for a week of the show's run? man, we'd never get tickets. i continue to have great luck in shitty weather, though, and we made it through the virtual line on our first try (last thursday, the night after the elvis costello concert). i grabbed umbrellas and wine from the apartment after work, met joe uptown, and boom, shakespeare for us.

as a summer-in-the-city (especially this-stormy-summer-in-the-city) show, twelfth night has much to recommend it: it's not a midsummer night's dream,*** it's heavy on the cross-dressing and the singing, and it sends you from the theater with a marvelous and memorable "hey, ho, the wind and the rain" faux downer (feste's "when that i was and a tiny little boy;" david pittu killed it as feste, and i'm now very sorry i didn't see him in stoppard's coast of utopia). anne hathaway's voice is just as lovely as it was when she sang with hugh jackman at the academy awards this year, and her physical (stage combat for laughs, a-hath: who knew you had it in you?) and vocal (not verbal, vocal; she plays the his-and-hers role well) comedy is quite good; we were seated too far away to catch many of her facial expressions, alas, so her softer moments as viola fell a bit flat. hamish linklater as sir andrew aguecheek and jay o. sanders as sir toby belch had a didi-and-gogo, rosencrantz-and-guildenstern chemistry that played wonderfully; audra "four-time-tony-winning" mcdonald was a formidable olivia and needs to stop hiding her light under the bushel basket that is abc's private practice; hem, the brooklyn folk-rock types who played the show's original score onstage, pleased me considerably more than folk-rock types generally do. of the four shows i've seen at the delacorte (midsummer in '07, hamlet and hair last year), this was easily my favorite. LMO + 12th 4ever.

*and rachel getting married, of course, but i was thinking of films that would draw non-regulars to the shakespeare lines.

**a convoluted draw, but whatever, i was feeling vulnerable.

***nothing but love for midsummer, but we need some time apart. it has grown common to me.

05.12.09

on sunday night i was too busy checking out my accidental sunburn (i have little red epaulets) to get cooking with my just-foraged goodies from central park. by last night i figured i needed to get started, though: those wee leaves and pods shrivel quickly in the refrigerator. my wild garlic bulbs from the ramble seemed like solid groundwork for a foo-foo spring recipe, and lo! the ultra-angry gordon ramsay (of hell's kitchen and umpteen british shows) provided me with one via the times online (wild garlic and parsley risotto). i liked the recipe's simplicity (and the fact that shallots completely replaced onion, which i'd never tried before), and parsley - why, that could be swapped out for the honewort i gathered! after a bit of monkeying with quantities, i came up with an adaptation:

central park risotto

- 32 oz. vegetable stock
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 8-10 wild garlic cloves, sliced
- 3 big shallots, finely chopped
- 1 1/2 cups arborio rice
- sea salt and freshly ground pepper
- 2-3 tbsp butter
- 1/4 lb. grana padano, grated rough
- heaping handful of honewort, chopped

bring the stock to a simmer in a saucepan with about a half cup of water; keep it at a simmer. heat the olive oil in a large pan and soften both the garlic and the shallots* for 2-3 minutes; stir in the rice and cook until grains are translucent and about to begin browning. add the simmering stock a ladleful at a time, stirring until liquid is almost gone before adding another ladleful. before the last few rounds, add 6-12 big twists of black pepper and a large pinch of sea salt. when the rice is al dente, remove from heat and stir in the butter and cheese (add a small handful at a time until the mixture is cohesive but not goopy). stir in the chopped honewort and plate right away; sprinkle a bit of additional cheese on each bit just before serving.

honewort is marvelous stuff; it's got a much more delicate flavor than flat leaf parsley does, and it adds both springiness and a little taste of celery to the risotto (and, of course, it sounds like something a witch would use). the foraged garlic was quite understated as well - gordon's original recipe called for 3-4 cloves, but my little guys were so mild that i decided to use all of them. result: garden- (or park-) fresh risotto with a sketchy (tasty!) mystery-weed je ne sais quoi. highly recommended! (the parsley version is probably pretty good, too.)

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever foraged for wild eats? what did you do with what you gathered?

02 would you eat this risotto? i power-washed everything, scout's honor.

03 what are your favorite spring greens?

*i probably gave these a lustier browning than they actually needed, but i wanted to be quite sure i wasn't poisoning the missus with my wild greens. i've also watched gordon ramsay freak out over bad risotto quite a few times, so...yeah.

05.11.09

at half past eleven on mother's day i was perched on a bench at the edge of central park, trying to figure out which of the people streaming past me were urban foragers. as it turns out, they're pretty easy to spot.



this is wildman steve brill, a self-taught urban forager who leads would-be weed-feasters through parks in and around new york city. amanda and i followed him around yesterday afternoon, dutifully bagging, labeling, and munching as he directed. (full disclosure: amanda did all of the labeling. she's a natural.) we were both terribly excited about the prospect of finding mushrooms (who wouldn't be, after the rain we had last week and the precedent wabes and her family set in illinois?); happily, our timing was just right for a couple of spectacular dryad's saddles, dramatic numbers that crop up on dead wood. most of the 'shrooms we spotted were the sort that kill you softly, alas, but we found plenty of luscious, wonkaesque greens (a bed of honewort that tasted like parsley and celery! diminutive tufts of sheep sorrel that tasted like lemonade!), and i think we both have enough roots and herbs to bolster our reproductive systems (everything was either fertility-enhancing, cancer-pummeling, or both, it seemed) for good.



i also have a big chunk of cattail; it wasn't especially delicious (like gloomy cucumber), but as amanda noted, it was great fun to watch unsuspecting sunbathers watch us descend on the edge of a pond and begin eating the greenery. urban hippies in the wild! s'okay, they're mostly vegetarian.

10.22.08: central park phones it in again



october lunch breaks are the worst.

08.08.08: culture blotter {hair @ shakespeare in the park}

to paraphrase julia roberts's ex-husband, i don't like hippies, and i don't like musicals, and i don't like much. that said, the delacorte is the perfect place to check out hair, ye olde american tribal love-rock musical: james rado and gerome ragni wrote it about the kids who hung out in central park's sheep meadow in the sixties, and a free show outside at dusk in the summer softens even the hardest haters. so do a picnic dinner of panini and olives from the ninth avenue vintner and an aluminum thermos of kitschy shakespeare wine.*

so did the massive summer storm that galloped across central park twenty minutes after the show started. it was big and mean, but came as no surprise: the unruffled onstage band pulled a plastic tarp around itself like a giant shower curtain and stayed put. umbrellas sprouted like mushrooms all over the theater, and we pulled out one of the hamlet ponchos we'd picked up back in june (and the shakepeare wine). we also shared an umbrella and gave our spare to the guys on our left, which i thought was very hair of us. when the cast crept back to the sponged-off stage forty minutes later, we all looked like dirty love children, the wine was gone, and i was prepared to try to appreciate counterculture via broadway.

according to artistic director oskar eustis, "hair was the last time that a stage musical became our national soundtrack; that's what gives it an unbelievable pull." the show's big stick is, for younger non-broadway types, also its biggest liability: for me, songs like "aquarius" and "let the sunshine in" recall the dance number at the end of the 40-year-old virgin, or recent commercials for retirement funds and antidepressants.** most unhelpful when one is to be thinking of flower power and/or the horrors of war. the tune i liked best - the wistful, belle & sebastian-ish "frank mills" - was unfamiliar to me, and lovely. the ones that have been knocking about in my head for the last week - "manchester england" and "hair" - are two of the most pernicious earworms i've ever heard (very disconcerting to jolt awake at three, as i did last night, singing "oh say can you see my eyes / if you can then my hair's too short"). all things considered, the songbook was pretty muscular, and the cast (led by jonathan groff, who was nominated for a tony for spring awakening) had great pipes. plot, on the other hand, was virtually nonexistent: hair is a revue that develops themes (musical and political), not characters. there's a vague draft - deployment - death - denouement at the end of the second act, but most of it happens in the last ten minutes of the show (i understand that being forced to go to war is a shock, but "because it was barely mentioned before" is disappointing). it's telling, i think, that the production's most affecting lines are shakespeare's ("what a piece of work is man" is straight outta hamlet), not rado's or ragni's.

all things considered, hair was imperfect but winning: as i learned by spending nine months in a teensy dorm room with an extremely charismatic phish enthusiast from vermont, hippies can wear you down. who needs pride?

*which turned out to be quite fine. my original plan had been to find wee boozy-school-lunch boxes of french rabbit (which is both lovely and dirt cheap), but they don't seem to be available yet; the samples that materialized at work must have been promo only.

**it's easy to see why madison ave loves hair so much - the fifty- and sixty-year-olds who danced onstage at the end of the show were so transported by nostalgia that i think they were actually weeping.

06.17.08: culture blotter {hamlet @ shakespeare in the park}



[upper west side, via cell phone]
1: just find a bar to take cover in and i'll meet you there!
2: no, YOU find a bar, i'm going to get our tickets!
1: you're fucking crazy!
2: I LOVE SHAKESPEARE!

one of the nicest things about having a website is my apparent ability to make things happen by bitching when they don't (see: getting love from mcsweeney's, winning money with a scratch-off lottery ticket, winning a trip to iceland*). i learned last week of the virtual line for shakespeare in the park (that is, you can sign up for a lottery between midnight and noon and then check back in the afternoon to see if you've gotten tickets; in previous years, you had to actually languish on the street all morning). that was the good news; the bad news was that hamlet is only running through the end of the month, and we're going to be in california for a week as of this saturday, and the number of tickets distributed through the virtual line is comparatively teensy.

it worked, though, and i was all set for my dub-shakes fix when the apocalypse kicked up at quarter to seven. i can't say for sure that little dogs on leashes were taking to the air like box kites as i scurried past the museum of natural history, but i can't say for sure that they didn't. joe said a huge tree branch came crashing down at his feet when he was en route to the box office, which is why he was yelling so loudly on the phone. i probably should have hidden somewhere, but the storm really was more excellent than scary. also, i really do love shakespeare, damn it. how often is it situationally appropriate to yell that into a cell on a street corner in the middle of a hellacious thunderstorm? we both made it to the delacorte, where it poured for about half an hour, but the theater staff assured us that the show would go on if the weather let up at all; a few nights ago, they'd played through the rain and just pushed water off of the stage between scenes(!). we bought cheap hamlet garbage bag ponchos** in case it got bad again and settled in.

the show itself was marvelous in spots and disappointing in others. sam waterston (who played the last hamlet in the park in 1975) gave polonius a single, devastating moment of dementia (in act 2, he falls silent for about twenty seconds while instructing reynaldo) that was one of the show's emotional peaks; i think that vulnerability made his death much more tragic than it usually feels. i left the theater convinced that my favorite lines in act 5, scene 2 had been mangled - i could have sworn that "there's a divinity that shapes our ends" and "the readiness is all" were part of the same speech - but apparently i give my memory more credit than it's due (see: manhattan locations of wendy's, previous post). i could also swear that the play most certainly should not end with horatio taking a bullet in the head, execution style, but i am historically resistant to hypermilitary versions of the tragedies ('99 royal shakespeare company othello, i'm looking at you). michael stuhlbarg is a fine hamlet, especially in the first few soliloquies; his soft, breathy delivery is much more interesting than that of super-manly hamlets i've seen, and it pairs nicely with the hysteria of his manic scenes later on (he reminded me of jonny lee miller as sick boy in trainspotting). lauren ambrose was meh as ophelia (she didn't have much chemistry with stuhlbarg, so her insanity wasn't very tragic), and i really don't care to see anyone other than derek jacobi as claudius, but still: i love shakespeare.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever powered through a foul-weather show? was it worth it?

02 if you could cast one of the tragedies however you liked, who would you conscript? i'm going to have to think about that one for a while, but i'm pretty sure robert loggia would be old hamlet.

03 is it ethical to make a delivery guy bring you takeout in central park in the middle of a storm? (note: i did not do this.)

*trying this one next: what the hell, iceland? where's my trip?

**still in their packages since the rain never really picked back up, but i can't wait to have an excuse to wear one: they're covered with the show's skull logo. hamlet ponchos!

06.27.06

the new view - near the cube, not from the cube (i should be so lucky). if you squint, you can see the guy at columbus circle who always, always asks me to take his tour, though i've passed him once every few days for the past two years.

04.25.06