NYCB and Me

The New York City Ballet is a special place. It’s not just a ballet company, it’s one of the most important cultural institutions in the city, perhaps in the world. If that sounds boring, you aren’t paying attention.

The first time I went doesn’t really count. A quintessential New York day in early summer, 95 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. A woman I had met at a party a few weeks earlier had an extra ticket. She was taking dance classes at a studio on Broadway, a block or two uptown from the Beacon Theater. I was to meet her there. The room wasn’t air conditioned, temperature well over a hundred. I nearly passed out from the heat as I watched the streamlined bodies, limbs and torsos glistening with sweat, men and women moving through the air in ways I couldn’t imagine as possible. 

I had never seen anything like this, another form of existence, a shocking form of existence. Many of the people there 

were professional dancers. My friend Carla wasn’t.

The performance we went to was Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had recently discovered the Mendelssohn music and enjoyed it. I remember that early on, a girl in the corps fell. It was as if I had been slapped—I had always thought that dancers couldn’t fall, that it was physically impossible, as if they had glue on their toe shoes, or were protected by some invisible net, as at the circus. This made me pay attention more closely. Afterwards, Carla, knowledgeable about dance, was relatively dismissive of the performance. This was 1977, the height of the dance boom. Balanchine was still alive, 

and most performances were sold out.

Fast forward to 1989. Balanchine has been dead six years. The company is getting highly negative press, even in Vanity Fair. It’s not clear this enterprise will continue much longer. I decide I need to go back. And I am riveted.

The piece that captured me, that made me an NYCB and Balanchine devotee for life, was Episodes, one of Balanchine’s modern, leotard ballets. Webern’s music is astringent, seemingly without a beat. I felt that if someone could choreograph to this music, the least danceable music imaginable, and make it come alive, they were indeed a genius. Balanchine could still do this, six years after his death, thanks to his dancers. When I look at the program now, which I still have, I see that the cast included Maria Calegari, Diana White, Albert Evans, and Wendy Whelan. The thing is, Episodes is more striking, more modern, than nearly anything being created in 2014.

None of this proves anything, really. Except that truly great art, art that catches the eye and captures the soul, is eternal. This is something far beyond the comprehension of those whose business is the marketing of art. There is, after all, a difference between Rembrandt and Jeff Koons.   

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be. . .

Then again, maybe it is, a mixed emotion, part fondness, part regret. Thinking about the Mudd Club, Danceteria, all the other clubs and bars I used to hang out in from the late 1970s into the 1990s, it occurs to me that we were all seeking an elusive sort of excitement. Sometimes we even found it, for a night.

If you were to ask me, would I want all that time back, all those nights spent drinking to excess and pursuing women, I would say, “Of course.” Perhaps I might have done something useful with that time, read more, written more, had fewer hangovers. But I wouldn’t want absolutely all of it back.

The places I’m talking about were for the most part in Lower Manhattan: Barnabas Rex, Puffy’s, the Mudd Club, then all the places in the East Village, Le Canapé (where we used to close the shades after 4AM and drink past the dawn), Telephone, Counterpoint. Then later, uptown there were City Grill, O’Neal’s, Josephina, the old oak bar at Café des Artistes. All gone now, my favorite drinking establishments. Maybe you really can’t go home again, at least not from the same places.

As for writing, Dark Angels may have been initially conceived in the Mudd Club, but the nightclub depicted in the novel more distinctly resembles Area and MK, two conceptual creations of the 1980s. The plot has nothing directly to do with that era, as it takes place in the near future, but there are certain parallels. Remember what Avenue C used to look like?     

Nightclubbing—in a Previous Incarnation

The other week I went to a panel discussion and reception for the current exhibition Gonightclubbing at the Fales Collection of the NYU Library. This includes a reconstruction of the Video Lounge at Danceteria, a Manhattan club that in its first incarnation existed briefly in 1980. The videos were by Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong and mainly consisted of concert footage from a range of punk bands, shot at CBGB, the Mudd Club, and Danceteria. My interest was entirely personal, for in those days I inhabited the latter two of these venues nearly every night.  

As I suspected, word had gotten around. When I arrived at the Fales Collection, I had a glimmer of that sensation which Proust describes towards the end of his novel, when he attends a reception after a long absence from society and is faced with people who both do and do not look familiar. For here was a room full of nightclub regulars, all of us thirty years or more older than when we had last seen each other, a sea of sixty-year-old eccentrics, all now shockingly gray.

The first person I recognized was Richard Boch, who appears to have weathered the intervening years quite well. Richard was always a painter, but is remembered by many of us as the doorman at the Mudd Club. He's recently finished writing a memoir of the era, 77 White, which is attracting considerable interest.     

Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales, introduced the discussion. Michael Parker, formerly of Ballistic Kisses, declaimed a poem in praise of the era’s late-night clubs and the people who worked in them. Pat Place of the Bush Tetras stood at the back of the room, as severe as she was years ago when she sang “Too Many Creeps…”  Then I spotted a dark haired woman who was a keyboard player, a slender vampiress then, a slender vampiress now, a few delicate lines in her face.

Richard Boch proceeded to interview Ivers and Armstrong, who related how they met while working at Manhattan Cable in the 1970s, how they started shooting bands like the Dead Boys, Television, and the Ramones at CBGB, then moved on to the other clubs. They reminded us that the original Danceteria was completely illegal, that they were paid in cash every night, and that the club was open until eight in the morning. They also related how delegates showed up during the week of the Democratic National Convention, name tags and ties askew.

Danceteria lasted six months before it was closed by the police. The thing was, in the middle of all this club madness, Pat and Emily were working, lugging their heavy equipment around, trying to get decent footage under difficult lighting conditions. They were working and we, the regulars, weren’t.

There are commentators who attempt to put a veil of art historical propriety over all this. This is a mistake. Those of us who went out night after night in those days were generally on the run from everyday life, in revolt against what is commonly termed “the real world.” There was nothing normal about any of this, nothing of the day, except when we stumbled from the club the next morning, pale and drained, and somehow made it home.

Shattering daylight, shattering light

How the hell did I make it through the night?

After the panel discussion, the reception provided a fitting postscript. Everyone was far friendlier than in the past, when we used to stand stony faced and hostile in these places. My wife was amused by the scene. “These are people who have never worked in an office.” Well, perhaps some of us have, in the intervening decades.

Economics and Dollar Signs

Recently, while having dinner with a friend, the issue of economics came up. My dinner companion, who is trained in both economics and philosophy, suggested that economics is modeled after the physical sciences. This struck me as somewhat strange, and I questioned him about it. His reply was that economics is based on rational mathematical calculation and is internally consistent. I replied, just a bit satirically, that so too is astrology. He said “perhaps,” and we changed the subject.

This controversy isn’t new. Later, when I did a quick search on the subject, I came upon a recent piece in The Guardian by Robert Shiller, one of the 2013 Noble Laureates in economics. His contention was that economics more closely resembled engineering than basic research in the physical sciences—and he emphasized the close relation of economics and public policy. He made a good case for economics as an applied science. However, I don’t think many physicists, chemists, or engineers would be convinced. My guess is they’d be rather scathing about this.

A skeptic is tempted to say that economics would be analogous to engineering if bridges routinely collapsed forty percent of the time. More to the point, engineers almost always come to a consensus as to why a bridge has collapsed. There is rarely such agreement among economists. To take the analogy further, a certain percentage of economists would claim there never was a bridge, or if there was one, they had nothing to do with its collapse, even if they helped design it. People in the physical sciences can’t get away with this sort of thing.

Perhaps economists more closely resemble historians in that they interpret events according to certain assumptions, but unlike historians utilize mathematics to demonstrate their point. For economics to be akin to the physical sciences, economists would have to be able to demonstrate the validity of their claims by conducting experiments and achieving consistent, replicable results.

What particularly sets my teeth on edge is the claim to “internal consistency.” Such consistency may no doubt be important, but more important is external validity—the way in which a given set of claims correlates with the world we live in. If a theoretical claim or interpretation cannot be substantiated by empirical evidence, what remains is speculation, no matter how mathematically derived.

Economics is an academic discipline. It is also a profession. For that reason, I would suggest that rather than engineering, the appropriate comparison is to the practice of law, that what economists do, particularly given the demands of public policy, is closer to what lawyers do. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it in no way constitutes a science.

As Robert Shiller points out, economics ultimately involves analyzing the vagaries of human behavior, not something that is easily predictable.

Postscript

Physics has in recent decades become increasingly speculative and ethereal, driven by forms of mathematics that few of us can hope to understand, whether used to describe the neutrino or the universe itself. There’s the danger that such increasingly recondite and convoluted theories will serve as a present day analogue to the calculations of Ptolemy, which kept the model of the earth as the center of the universe alive for centuries through the magic of mathematics. Nevertheless, physicists actively seek to devise experiments to demonstrate or refute their theoretical claims. An example is the recent work on demonstrating the existence of gravity waves.

As for economics, there is the question of whether reducing human life to a series of economic imperatives, or to data, is a form of dehumanization. My suspicion is that not many economists would recognize this to be a problem.

“Culture” and Other Matters

Reading The Two Cultures, an essay based on the lecture delivered by C.P. Snow in 1959, I experienced a series of seemingly contradictory reactions. Nevertheless, the initial premise seems obvious, that science and the humanities involve very different modes of thought.

Snow’s contention, that Cambridge dons at high table were habitually contemptuous of their scientific colleagues, rings true—I can imagine it being particularly true of a certain kind of classics don, for whom nineteenth century literature was entirely too vulgar, never mind that of the twentieth century. Snow’s most famous complaint, that his dining companions weren’t able to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics and that this form of scientific illiteracy was akin to not having read a single work of Shakespeare’s, is fair enough.

The problem is, Snow then goes on to attack Modernist literature as being antisocial and ultimately misanthropic—he cites Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, the two most acerbic and extreme proponents of a specific strain of Modernism. Neither Pound nor Lewis were representative of anything other than themselves—Lewis went so far as to attack virtually all his Modernist contemporaries in Time and Western Man. Pound formed his own problematic and self-defeating case. As for Snow, he clearly had little feel for poetry or art in any form, whether of the nineteenth, twentieth, or any other century.

Several years after the Two Cultures lecture, the crankily self-important literary critic F.R. Leavis launched a vehement ad hominem attack on Snow and all he stood for. Much of this makes for hilarious reading. Snow’s revenge was to cite a particularly grotesque and badly written piece of writing by DH Lawrence, one of Leavis’s literary heroes.

The entire controversy represents the collision of two distinct forms of intellectual snobbery, not to mention the colossal egos of two self-made men. And yet, the issue remains: Science or poetry? Technology or art? Mathematics or verbal reasoning? Data or metaphor?

What does all this have to do with the world we live in now, more than fifty years later? Everything. The divide between technological and literary practice hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s as immediate an issue now as it was in 1959. It’s just that technology is now clearly the dominant force. Literature and the humanities, these are footnotes—except to those of us who live, eat, and breathe such things.

Then again, how many of us can explain what happens when we turn on a light switch, never mind  the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

What’s Modern(ism) Anyway?

Modernism, artistic and literary, is more than a hundred years old. If so, then what place do we occupy? Postmodernism raised its head in the 1970s, though some might claim it was earlier than that. If both of these movements belong to the past, where are we now?

I’ve been rereading Edmund Wilson’s book of essays, Axel’s Castle. It was originally published in 1931. Wilson starts by examining French Symbolist poetry, Paul Valery, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. He then turns to Modernist fiction—Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein. To some extent, he’s providing an introduction to this work for the general reader, the American reader of his era. Beyond that, it’s a pleasure to come across a critic who writes clearly, incisively, and not necessarily obviously, and without descending into the morass of theory or pseudotheory. Which is to say, someone highly intelligent and sane.

Really, to what extent does Postmodern “theory” shed light on specific literary works? The name Umberto Eco comes to mind as someone who functions in the world of theory and in that of actuality. But not many others. Far too much of what has passed for literary theory is really an appropriation of texts for the critic’s self-referential and often tedious ends.  At a certain point, it all seems very dated.

And so, what is the meaning of Modernism? I’m still drawn back to Chesterton’s no doubt revanchist view that works of art don’t necessarily carry with them a packaged meaning. After all, what does “The Rite of Spring” mean? Doesn’t the experience of art, emotional and intellectual, trump any academic explanation of meaning? Wasn’t Modernism in part an attempt to circumvent established meanings and established usage? Doesn’t the art, music, and literature of 1914 carry more power than nearly anything being created today?