Beautiful World Where Are You (5*)

I liked Sally Rooney's previous novels but this one is a cut above:  millennial navel gazing meets Marxist dialectic with characters who, like Rooney herself, have finally grown into adults.  Alice, Eileen, Simon & Felix have been forced to confront who they really are and what it means to take a seat at the adult table.  E-mails between the women comprise the bulk of the narrative which enables Alice, a successful novelist, and Eileen, the college BFF she leaves behind, to debate the meaning of life.  

Alice:

The problem with  the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth.  To confront the poverty  and misery in which millions are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the  lives  of the 'main characters' of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.  Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel's protagonists, when it's happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species?  Do the protagonists break up or stay together?  In this world, what does it matter?  So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together – if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything. 

Eileen:

And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you do so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’(!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.  Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest region you can imagine?  Because when we should have been re-organizing the distribution of the worlds resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we love each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other. 

Felix and Simon, only one of whom would be able to "work remotely," stimulate the action in between these exchanges.  I particularly love the fact that Rooney fiercely defends the non-intellectual class in an Ireland, like America, that would prefer to overlook them.  She also cleverly inoculates Felix, who enjoys brutal pornography, against revulsion through his loving care of an abandoned animal who also happens to be a proxy for Alice.

And then there's this, Rooney's most profound insight about her generation in a book that confronts faith head-on:

It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion.  Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be. 

Girl, you just keep getting better.

Solid Ivory (2*)

Fond memories of a several movies from the end of the last century (A Room with a View, Howard's End and especially Maurice) prompted my interest in these memoirs (my cover pluralizes the word more accurately).  Ivory published a lot of the more interesting material elsewhere and seems to have written originally--and tediously--here only about his childhood and young adulthood with a distasteful emphasis on the penises of his male friends.  Sure, a keen interest in his experiences as a homosexual movie director made me eager to read his book, but he offers little self reflection in that regard and doesn't even address his long-term relationship with Ismail Merchant (I truly had no idea they were lovers) until the end.  His description of how the Oscars have increased in importance made we wish he hadn't won his for adapting Call Me By Your Name, although his score settling with Luca Guadagnino is by far the tastiest new dish in the book that also includes stale impressions of Raquel Welch (!), Vanessa Redgrave and Susan Sontag.  If Ivory had had his way, Shia LaBeouf would have been  cast as Timothée Chalamet's lover not the reputed cannibal who played the part.  As for the rest, yawn.  The man is as pretentious as his worst movies and has absolutely no clue about narrative.

RIP Claes Oldenburg 1929-2022

 

Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, FL

"Giant Fagends" (1967), Whitney Museum
New York, NY

Crossroads (5*)

Does any writer alive get into the minds of his complicated characters better than Jonathan Franzen?  I was dubious, to say the least, about a novel with a church group as its fulcrum, but the travails of Hildebrandt family--with whom I have almost nothing in common other than my race and class--could not have been more deeply absorbing.  While Christianity and mental illness infuse the narrative, neither gets in the way of a story set during the early 70s as both parents and children grapple with what it means to be good and bad.   I could have gone on reading about the Hildebrandts forever but I'll just have to wait for the next two installments in a projected trilogy that no doubt will rank with similar, mull-volume examinations of the American experience by Philip Roth and John Updike, my two favorite writers of the 20th century.

In the meantime, Franzen has given this atheist plenty to chew on.

True Christian faith always burned from the edge.

It was strange self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier. 

To walk away from his house without having surrendered herself —to be bathed in God’s approval; to know for once that she deserved it—was immeasurably better than to surrender. 

Terminal Art

Want to feel like a stranger in a strange land?  Walk to an oddly calm LaGuardia and ask airport employees where to find the new public art decorating their work environment. The question flummoxes them even more than the idea that Thom and I walked from Jackson Heights just to see it, and that we planned to walk to Flushing Meadows Park next!  Still, I got a real kick out of the mosaic of the Keith Haring figures next to the escalator.  Heading downtown, of course.

More Terminal B Art:

As much as I enjoyed the mosaics, those decorating the Upper East Side extension of the New York City subway system impressed me more.  No sculpture there, however.

Terminal C

If you don't like the projections, they'll likely change by the time you check in.

I really enjoy art appreciation that increases your step count.  We exceeded 20,000 (more than eight miles) by the time I got back on the subway.  Too bad we were 24 hours early for the Queens Night Market.  

Chains (4*)

 

The Mint Theater Company proves that an old chestnut--first produced in 1909--can be superbly performed, staged and costumed without a huge budget.  A decisive man in London announces that he's leaving behind a secure job to seek his fortune "Down Under" (I can relate to that!) and all hell breaks loose in the family of couple from whom he rents a room.  That Chains was written by a woman helped me feel less guilty about the waves of sympathy I had for the intense  young husband (Jeremy Beck) who briefly thinks he can escape the prison of a dull job that affords him little more than the weekend pleasure of barely growing peas in the backyard.  Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. 

Tina-The Tina Turner Musical (4*)

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe pulls out all the stops in this high energy production even when she doesn't have to, especially when singing the hits from "Private Dancer" which I always loved most for its mellowness.  Still, the staging of Tina's happy-ending life couldn't be more fluid and when Obi-Melekwe and Skye Dakota Turner treat the audience to a couple of encores, the show becomes what everyone really wants it to be anyway:  a Tina Turner concert from back in the day.