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zany night of comedic musical hijinks
Saturday, December 13 2008
Not having a working gas-powered chainsaw, today I hooked up a long string of extension cords to allow me to operate an electric chainsaw at the massive fallen Red Oak approximately 70 feet behind the woodshed. At least two of those three extension cords were pretty low-grade, so the voltage drop over that distance for a 3 horsepower electric motor must have been substantial. But the saw worked, and I was able to cut up most of the branches on the fallen tree. As for the main trunk itself, at nearly 20 inches in diameter, it was the sort of job that whispers, "procrastinate!"
This evening, Gretchen and I had a little social outing that started with our two new friends, J the photographer and her busband R. We visited them at their house, what looks like a palatial mansion on the south bank of Sawkill Creek. Their home is actually a modest apartment within the mansion, and from the inside it's clear the house was built with more consideration to the needs of artists than to the wealthy (or the passive-solar-obsessed). Their living room is dominated by two things: a huge north-facing window to gather that polarized light so loved by painters and a woodstove to replace all the heat leaking away through it. Heat doesn't just vanish through the glass; it also goes through the thin, uninsulated walls.
We all drank beers in front of the glowing windows of the woodstove and then toured R's studio. Then we all went in a convoy to the Little Bear Chinese restaurant for dinner. The main thing Gretchen and I had come to Bearsville to do, after dinner with our new friends, was attending a Pεtεr Schιckεlε performance at the Bearsville Theater. He'd just attended a small dinner party at our house not a week before, so it seemed like the thing to do. But with a gut full of Chinese food, a zany night of comedic musical hijinks was about the last thing I wanted to sit through. We hadn't bought tickets, and I found myself hoping they'd sold out. But they hadn't. Seconds after buying her tickets, though, Gretchen read them and saw that Schιckεlε's performance was being billed as "seasonal." Gretchen hates seasonal entertainment nearly as much as I hate comedic musical hijinks on a gut full of vegan Chinese food, so she seriously considered getting a refund instead of proceeding into the venue. In the end, though, we went in, took our seats in the balcony, and sat through the show.
The audience was an older crowd, many of them the familiar lined white faces of the Woodstock elite. Most of these people probably knew Pεtεr Schιckεlε better than we did. My expectations were low, and Schιckεlε quickly exceeded them. He's a genuinely funny guy with an infectious curiosity about music theory and can obviously do a good show when his heart is in it. Today's show, though, was a scattershot performance of various musical scraps whose lyrical content were so bundled up in in-jokes and small office politics that they failed to provide much entertainment value. There was also the problem of Schιckεlε's voice, which isn't a particularly good one and always seems to be delivered with quotes around it. He'd brought another vocalist on stage with him (she's also his personal assistant and office manager) and she sang a beautiful song (a moment, Schιckεlε said, of "tragic relief"), but for the most part it seemed Schιckεlε was phoning it in. The biggest mercy during this phase of the performance was that none of the music made any reference to the season whatsoever.
We left before the second phase of tonight's show, which would consist of even zanier musical hijinks by one Mικhαιl Hοrοwιτz, who also serves as the homunculus at the center of the Hudson Valley literary scene. Mικhαιl's show probably would have been better than Schιckεlε's if only because he is far less famous and can't simply coast on the momentum of his powerful brand (as the Sony Vaio has also done).
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