Cloud Surround

The reflective surfaces on recent buildings in the vicinity of the World Trade Center can make it appear as if you are surrounded by fair weather clouds.

 

I made this belated discovery after catching the Beauford Delaney exhibit in Soho, where advertisers for the new Darren Aronofsky movie (poor Austin!) ignored the "no posting" signs.

Fall is just around the corner.  I walked south on West Broadway, a route seldom taken.

"Masters of the universe" play jenga at 76 Leonard Street. 

In Tribeca, a woman watered the community garden at Finn Square.

Many of the buildings look as they have for decades.

Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City put this restaurant on the literary map in the 80s.  I wonder how much longer it can survive.

Change, baby, change.  That's what gives New York its vertical energy.

The glorious Municipal Building, designed by McKim, Mead & White as part of the City Beautiful movement, marked the consolidation of the New York City's five boroughs shortly before the turn of the 20th century.  

The weather was surprisingly cool for August.

This solid federal building--completed in 1938 and once described as "a boring limestone monolith that has trouble deciding between a heritage of stripped down neo-Classical and a new breath of Art Deco"--survived the collapse of the nearby Twin Towers.

Second millennial construction mostly looks a lot more vulnerable, although the cladding of the Perelman Center for the Performing Arts mixes things up a bit.

The novelty of the Oculus never diminishes.  Is it a stegosaurus? A porcupine?  No, it's a mall disguised as a commuter rail station.

A man relaxing with a book instead of a phone is a rare and encouraging sight, even if it does require three chairs.

The government officials, private organizations, businesses, developers and architects who re-imagined lower Manhattan after 2001 certainly had awesome, long-term vision.  It really is both breathtaking and heartbreaking, a peculiar combo to say the least.

When I visited the area in 2011 with the Mayor's Office as the World Trade Center Health Coordinator, it was still very much a construction site.  We had to wear hard hats.  Fun fact:  I'm kneeling below Scarlett Johansson's future mother-in-law!  And the young woman in the light blue dress is the niece of former Mayor Ed Koch.

Here I am with former New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley.  

Both of us were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

New buildings, new hairstyle, older face what can I say?  My work life seems ages ago.  I've been retired for more than a decade just about as long as it has taken for lower Manhattan to fully re-blossom.

The rebuilt Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church--the only house of worship to be destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks--was consecrated in July 2022.

There's an elevated plaza directly in front of it

. . . with spectacular views of the phoenix risen.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel turned 75 in May.  I have a very dim memory of driving through it with my father sometime in the late 1950s, when the toll was just 35 cents.  Today, it will cost you $11.19 without an EZ Pass to get from the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook--a distance of nearly two miles-- beneath the East River.  If Robert Moses had had his way, the two-tube tunnel would have been a bridge but the land grab required for such a structure provoked a public outcry that forecast his diminished power.

I've added a ride through it to my bucket list, if only to get a clear view of the giant working clock that adorns the lower Manhattan entrance. I'd also love to see what I assume to be lights on the top illuminated at night.

Here's what the tunnel entrance looks like from the back.  Even though it was named after former Governor Hugh Carey shortly before Hurricane Sandy flooded it for the first time, you would never know it from the engraving on the facade.

Late afternoon sunlight bathed the non-reflective Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, designed in the Beaux Arts style, on Bowling Green. A ten-minute stroll from the World Trade Center, it takes you back more than a century.

Battery Park had been my final destination under the misapprehension that it was home to the recently re-opened Wagner Park.  A ranger informed me that it's actually located in Battery Park City, a little farther uptown.  Next time--I'd seen more than enough for one day. 

More Beau

They say a rising tide lifts all boats.  That's just as true in the arts; James Baldwin may be more widely read and admired now than he was at the time of his death in 1987.  So it's probably no coincidence that the Drawing Center is honoring Beauford Delaney, Baldwin's mentor, with an exhibition of his drawings and other works, including an early portrait of a man who later became his fiercest champion. It's one of more than twenty completed by Delaney, who met Baldwin when the author of Giovanni's Room was just a teenager.  He's twenty-one here.

James Baldwin (1945)

Self Portrait (Yaddo, 1950)

Delaney, born in Tennessee and educated in Boston, had moved to New York in his late twenties, five years before Baldwin's birth and just as the Harlem Renaissance was coming to an end. The New York Public Library branch on 135th Street exhibited Delaney's early, academically influenced charcoal sketches.

"Harlem Athlete" (1929)

Delaney's development as an artist anticipates the Abstract Expressionism movement although he had no time for the macho posturing that accompanied it. Given his closeted homosexuality--apparently he had his first same sex experience with a man he met in the Boston Public Garden--I wondered if the Ramble might have inspired this colorful work.

"Central Park" (1950)

Delaney lived in a loft on Greene Street where his bohemian friends included sexually explicit author Henry Miller and artist Georgia O'Keefe, who painted his portrait.

"Greene Street" (1950)

With Baldwin's encouragement, Delaney moved to Paris in 1953, at almost the precise moment that New York City pre-empted its role as the capital of the art world.  But his distance from America only partially explains why he never became a major figure. Poverty, racism, homophobia, alcoholism and dementia all stacked the odds against him.

"Paris" (1953)

This work vividly captures the color of my first encounter with stained glass at the source of its inspiration.  We visited the iconic Gothic cathedral on a day trip from Orleans in the mid-sixties.  Delaney, whose father was a preacher, described it as "the most wonderful thing I have ever seen created by man."

 

"Chartres" (1954)

Here's what Baldwin had to say about his mentor in 1963, when alcohol and mental illness first began to take their toll:

He has been starving and working all of his life – in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris. He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and outer darkness.

Delaney returned to the U.S. only once before his death for a brief family visit, in 1969.  He must have sketched this portrait of Rosa Parks from a photo.

He can capture the soulfulness of someone's eyes even in a tiny work.

Delaney was one of ten children, only four of whom survived.  His illiterate mother Delia, born into slavery, worked as a domestic to help support her family. She particularly valued education as a buffer against racism.  This unsentimental portrait, which Delaney painted six years after her death, evokes both dignity and toughness if not warmth.

"Mother's Portrait" (aka Portrait of Delia Delaney) (1964)

Abstraction may have had a calming influence, an aesthetic approach to what is now called "self-care."  Delaney was rarely without brush in hand.  He once used an old raincoat as a canvas when he ran out of the real thing.

Untitled  (ca 1964)

Delaney painted two portraits of Henry Miller, first in New York and again two decades later in Paris.  The exhibit also includes Miller's letters to his friend, whose work he greatly admired. "The impression I carried away was being saturated in color and light," Miller once wrote. "Poor in everything but pigment. With pigment he was lavish as a millionaire."

Henry Miller (ca 1967)

These two works hang side by side, although only one is identified as a self-portrait.

Untitled Self Portrait (ca 1968)

It's hard not to interpret the absence of pigment in these paintings as a psychological diminishment of the artist, almost as if the lights had gone off in his life.

 

Untitled (ca 1968)

Untitled (1970)

Delaney began to experience the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease after he returned to Paris from America, just four years before he was committed to St. Anne's Hospital for the Insane. He remained institutionalized there until his death in 1979, not long after he turned 77.  In this late return-to-form he appears to be enjoying himself one last time even if he is working from a long-ago memory.

"Self Portrait in a Paris Bath House" (1971)

Ava: The Secret Conversations (4*)

I can't remember exactly when I saw first saw The Night of the Iguana, but it made a BIG impression on this pre-teen.  It's still my favorite film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, although when I rewatched it as a gay man, promiscuous Ava Gardner replaced prim Deborah Kerr as my favorite character, reflecting my own sexual journey.  Had I sublimated Ava's uninhibited midnight ocean revels with her bare-chested, Mexican servants as a kid? 

So when Peter Evans published Ava Gardner:  The Secret Conversations in 2013, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.  Few Tinsel Town memoirs have ever been as juicy, that's for sure.  Apparently, a little too juicy for Frank Sinatra, one of Gardner's three husbands. Although Gardner had hired Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography for financial reasons, she fired him after Ol' Blue Eyes got wind of it two years into the project; the singer, and likely love of Gardner's life (she previously had married "Andy Hardy"--Hollywood's biggest star when she got off the bus from North Carolina at 18--and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, an abusive smarty pants) had successfully sued Evans for libel.  Evans managed to secure the rights to release the book only after the death of all the principals, including Howard Hughes (Gardner was his off-and-on mistress for decades).

Is it any wonder a contemporary actress would want to play the larger-than-life Gardner on the stage? Elizabeth McGovern, who bears some physical resemblance to her and is almost exactly the right age, took the idea a step further and wrote a two-hander based on Evans's book.  Her engaging, heartfelt play imagines the complicated dynamic between the author and the actress and gives actor Aaron Costa Ganis his own star turn as he more than credibly evokes Rooney, Shaw and Sinatra.  McGovern wisely uses Gardner's alcoholism and physical debilitation (she had suffered a stroke, thus ending her "bankability" prior to her collaboration with Evans) to weave the star's bawdy memories and shrewd judgements about her lovers into a kind of gossipy Hollywood recitative. 

Less successful is McGovern's own performance due in part to the role for which she is best known:  Lady Cora in Downton Abbey, still chugging along after the end of the beloved PBS series with the imminent release of a third feature film, The Grand Finale, directed by McGovern's British husband, Simon Curtis.  It's peculiar and a little off putting to hear Lady Cora swear like a sailor; where Gardner was voluptuous and often drunk, McGovern is brittle and clearly in command which sometimes makes the transitions between the past and present less clear, as is the question of who is seducing whom. 

But McGovern is more than good enough, and the modest production is superb with a perfect set in Gardner's cozy London apartment and multi-media celebrity reminders of a mostly forgotten age although the audience the night I attended clearly didn't need them. Most people were older than I, which is a shame, because McGovern has resurrected a gorgeous star who enjoyed sex as much as men did.

"I love to laugh in bed," Gardner declares to Evans when they first meet.  Is there a better prescription for happiness in life?