on the strength of the music alone Friday, July 26 2002
This morning I was late in taking Sally to Prospect Park for her morning walk and by the time I got to the Vale of Cashmere, it was aswarm with mostly white highschool-aged kids given the unenviable task of cleaning the place up. They were strung out all along that wooded ridge just above Flatbush Avenue, picking up every bottlecap, cigarette butt, plastic bag, and condom using gloved hands and mechanical extension-grabbers. Some of them even wore dust masks, as if it was late September 2001 in Lower Manhattan.
I overheard one of the coordinators of the event telling a passerby what these kids were getting in exchange for their labor, and it was something trivial like a hot meal, a coke, and an item on their resume. I'm sure even a lifetime of cotton picking or boat rowing can be made to look impressive in a carefully-worded sentence.
Sally was off her leash as usual, and I thought no one would care, but then it turned out that one of the people directing the kids was a real park employee. He gave me what was actually an inaccurately liberal reading of the park dog rules, so I agreeably leashed Sally up until we made it to the untidied condom-strewn interior of the Vale wilderness. On the way there, I passed a young man forking a condom into his plastic trash bag with a look of revulsion on his face. Why should he be handling other people's condoms when he'd never even handled his own yet? He called out to some of his youthful colleagues on the ridge, "Look at this!" Then he shrugged his shoulders, caught my eye for a moment, and said, "What's so great about this place?" Either he didn't think it deserved to be cleaned up at all or he couldn't understand why anyone would come here to deploy their condoms.
In the evening Gretchen and I rode our bikes to the Prospect Park bandshell again for yet another night of Celebrate Brooklyn. Tonight's show would feature a dance performance that had been informally recommended by Art Winer (who is proving to be something of an expert on the subject of free summertime Brooklyn entertainment). On the way there we stopped to get beer at a deli on the corner of 8th Avenue and 8th Street. Just after we turned off Prospect Park West to go down 8th, someone shouted out my name. It was a familiar guy from Charlottesville named Jim. I've been away from Charlottesville so long that I couldn't really remember what the story was about him. I had the feeling that he'd spent some time on the unwritten Jessika or El!zabeth St@rk blacklist, but I couldn't be sure. It didn't help jog my memory when he said he'd once dated Amy Br!ggs from Memphis. That was probably after my time anyway. While I was in the store getting a six pack sixteen ounce Colt 45s and 12 ounce Budweisers (and being carded because the Puerto Rican cashier thought I looked 20), Jim was telling Gretchen about his deal. Apparently he's been in Brooklyn since January and is studying to take the bar exam. His preparations have been somewhat unorthodox, involving the consumption of lots of beer. Gretchen asked him if perhaps he was deliberately trying to torpedo his future as a lawyer. She has a theory that some people like to get really drunk before taking an exam so that, should they fail, they can blame the alcohol and not themselves.
Just to make sure there were no problems at the bandshell, Gretchen entered first and I handed her the beer over the fence. We soon found Art and his girlfriend Mallory near the back of the seated audience. There were two extra seats for us. I immediately cracked open a Colt 45, somewhat dismayed that every can in the six pack felt as if it had been covered with a thin layer of motor oil. At some point Art showed us a flier someone had handed him advocating that we not Celebrate Brooklyn because the stage hands being used were not union. Gretchen was immediately horrified, as if her presence was tantamount to scabdom. Her only solace was that she'd snuck in free. Last week we'd wanted to boycott Celebrate Brooklyn concessions on the erroneous information that it had killed Curtis Mayfield. Now it was being used to further the busting of unions. For shame!
Gretchen and I were talking or maybe being a little cutesy-cutesy for a moment before the show and this woman behind us interrupted us to say, "could you please keep your heads apart during the show?" We just looked at each other. Later, as the show was beginning, that same woman began screaming her ear-piercingly enthusiastic approval. She was by far the loudest screamer in our entire sector of the audience. Gretchen had to turn around and glare at her to get her to pipe down. One of the problems with New York is that guaranteed anonymity of the pedestrian crowds conditions people to routinely be assholes in the presence of strangers.
The dancers tonight were from the Mark Morris Dance Group, a somewhat (though not obnoxiously) "post modern" dance ensemble (to the extent that adjective still has any meaning in 2002). The show was divided into three parts. In the first, "Canonic 3/4 Studies," the dancers were outfitted in unisex costumes and performed a somewhat comic interpretation of a live piano waltz. The movement followed the notes of the piano extremely closely, and sort of reminded me of the kind of animation seen in movies such as Fantasia.
In the second part, "The Argument," the men dressed unisex and the women wore little black dresses as they careened around to piano and cello. This was probably the weakest performance of the night. I thought it was fine, but Gretchen was clearly unimpressed. "I am very bored right now!" she whispered at one point. She also didn't like how "het" (as in heterosexual) it was. These days she expects lots of gender bending in her entertainment, if not in her personal life.
After this part was over, Gretchen had had enough, at least of sitting in the chairs and listening to that horrible woman screaming behind us, so she went off into the grass to stretch out and just listen. I stayed behind and Art's friend Ross took Gretchen's seat. Shortly thereafter the screaming woman behind me asked Ross if he'd please consider taking off his hat when the show recommenced. Then she turned to me and asked, "What happened to your shorter friend?" "Ah, yeah, she had a sex change operation," I said. This led to some inane banter between the screaming woman and her friends as they both took credit for the dissolution of my relationship and diagnosed me as "swinging both ways." Huh, huh, hilarious.
The last part of the show was called "Gloria" and was danced to Vivaldi's Gloria in D. It is such a beautiful piece that just about any dancing wouldn't have ruined it. But I actually thought the choreography was very well done and definitely added to the experience. I don't really know what Mark Morris had in mind when he arranged the dance, but to my biologically-educated eye it seemed to carry some sort of evolutionary theme of struggling up from slime for brief glory in the sun. The dancers all started out inching their way across the stage using only the force of their arms splayed out crocodile-style. Periodically, though, one of the dancers would boil up onto his or her feet and whirl around to conclude the movement by rocking stiffly back and forth on unflexing legs. That was but a part of the dance, but it seemed to capture the spirit of the whole performance. The crowd went nuts when it was over, rising to their feet for a standing ovation. I went over into the grass to find Gretchen and found that even she had enjoyed it, on the strength of the music alone.
After we got back home, I took Sally for a bike ride all the way around the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, stopping to drink a Budweiser at a new park feature called "Dog Beach." Not to be confused with San Diego's Dog Beach, this beach is a fifty-foot stretch of freshwater shoreline on a mostly-wooded pond along the eastern edge of the Long Meadow. This shoreline had been gated and inaccessible, frequented exclusively by begging waterfowl. But recently the gates were removed and replaced with a barrier some distance out into the water, giving dogs a watery duck-free place to frolic. Sally isn't much of a water frolicer, but she did do a little wading and drinking.
Back at the house, Gretchen and I watched another installment of Donahue in which he, Ralph Nader, and Molly Ivins talked with a thousand laid off Enron employees in a Houston studio. We saw all that pissed off energy and found ourselves wondering: Why isn't that energy being better focused? How about a march on fucking Washington DC to demand corporate accountability and roll back the decades of pro-corporate legislation legalizing their shyster behavior? Gretchen, who is a former union organizer, particularly wanted to know why the AFL-CIO wasn't out in the front leading the pitchfork-carrying horde. Indeed. So I'm suggesting that you, my readership, write the AFL-CIO and urge them to organize a march on Washington. Tell them you're coming. This is a meme whose time is now.
Here's something that started bothering me tonight: is Ken Lay's mansion made of asbestos? Because it would seem that in any normal country, one populated by real human beings, a mansion like that would have burned down by now and it would have been ruled an Act of God, one of His finer moments in fact.
