Bach Suites in the Dark

Window details at the Dia:Beacon museum

This weekend saw us at the Goethe Institut on 3rd Street for a somewhat uncommon event. The cellist Augustin Maurs played for several hours, interleaved by small breaks here and there between couple of suites, in complete darkness. The public would enter through multi-layered black curtains, hold their hands to the wall to avoid bumping into people, the cellist, or the benches that made the length of a room of unknown size. When you bumped someone's sitting knees front of you ("sorry… no problem…") you could just sit down as well and wait to be immersed into complete auditory sensation.

The main impression is an extreme proximity with the music. As the only thing you can feel outside of your body, it permeates, infiltrates and conquers every space. The cello is probably a keenly appropriate instrument, as its vibrating tones and its clear notes combine together to fill the musical spectrum with warm, intense energy. At the same time you feel your body sitting on a bench and relaxing. The absence of a visible and observing audience allows you to relax to an extent that is usually the prerogative of your most intimate moments of quiet and calm.

After a week of appreciable, amusing and avidly ambulatory viewing, visiting, discovering, discussing, exploring, encountering, galloping and gawking through the city with Marion's family, this moment of complete egress from the present to an extemporal and remote realm of sensory gratification by a master of a beautiful instrument was a rare treat for the senses and a balm for the spirit.

The past week has been full of experiences and we will need some time to sort our impression on all we have seen and heard and learned. The Suites in the Dark were something that, in its simplicity and elegance, provided unfiltered and unfettered pleasure that can, to some extent, be described in simple terms.

Insights from the Underground

As it happens, taking the subway is part of my daily routine. In the early morning as well as in the evening subway train number one takes me faithfully from home to Columbia University and back home again. Riding the subway is a substantial part of any New York experience. First and foremost, the subway has the interesting function of softening the otherwise rather tight social boundaries that separate the city into well though invisibly demarcated neighbourhoods. With the exception of the very well off, people from all social layers take the subway to bring their kids to school, go to work, meet friends or reach out for other social activities. As subway trains cross various neighbourhoods and often head to socially underpriviledged outskirts, virtually everybody comes together in the underground world of subway tunnels and stations.

It comes therefore as no surprise that the subway warrants many insightful experiences. For instance, there are the buskers who choose to make their living within the vastness of the subway system: they are the young black guy from Brooklyn who trains his voice every day in the early morning to be ready for the morning rush hour, the a capella choir of four old black men singing gospels in the A train or the team of Harlemite boys doing acrobatics on the One train uptown, using every bit of space they have for pirouettes, somersaults and other extravagant moving patterns. The logic of competition has arrived even at the subway system - one gathers - and guarantees that (most) of the performances one observes in the realm of MTA are actually very respectable.

Then there are the the glimpses one gets into the daily life patterns of American families living in New York City. Part of their daily practice is the way to school which often passes through the underground world. It is at this point that social differences become particularly visible, as various uniforms differentiate the little boys and girls from one another. Pupils heading to private schools are dressed up in stalwart outfits, while those attending public schools can or must choose their accoutrements according to their own liking. There is variation among the private schools too, of course, which also translates into uniforms of varying degrees of sophistication. Equally interesting are the parents that accompany the kids mornings and evenings. Roles often seem quite stereotypical, as fathers usually appear dressed up in suits and ties, while mothers wear their comfortable home-sportswear. Every once in a while kids are accompanied by their nannies, which seldom share the ethnicity of the kids they foster.

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, there is the world of advertisement and public communications one affronts once entered into a subway carriage. Yet not only one learns about newest movies, tv series, computer games and all possible and impossible services offered somewhere in New York. The New York City administration itself is present and tries to educate the folks living under its jurisdiction via different poster campaigns. Official New York fights for gender equality and the self esteem of girls and young women. Black, white, Asian and Latin American young girls and teenagers smile from various posters and - under the heading - "I'm a girl" tell us that they are "clever, adventurous, outgoing, unique, smart and strong", that is "beautiful the way they are", or perhaps "funny, playful, daring, strong, curious, smart, brave, healthy, friendly and caring" - beautiful the way they are. Official New York City also cares about father-child relationships. Not only does it offer special courses for fathers to learn how to interact with their children. It also encourages fathers in big red letters to hug and kiss their kids - because words are not enough! What impresses as plain initiatives of public education in the case of the self-esteem of girls or the father-child relationship, becomes somewhat daunting when it comes to as difficult a subject as teen pregnancies. Weeping and suffering children look from the walls of subway carts to tell their parents "Got a good job? I cost thousands of dollars each year" - "I'm twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen" - "Honestly, Mom..., chances are he won't stay with you. What happens to me?" And finally, "if you finish high school, get a job and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty".

It would seem that the authorities had to rely on drastic words to reach a population as diverse, vast, and invdividualistic as the one you find in New York City and its subway system.

Living in a big city

Street corner on Riverside Drive

When you spend several days secluded in your apartment, tirelessly working your way through loose ends, missing data, unclear results, all leading up to an important deadline (in my case, finalising a study for a big client), you tend to forget where you are living. Your perception shrinks to a tunnel-vision where very few other things matter for that limited amount of time. If you've ever had to work for exams or papers or theses you know what I'm talking about.

Residential streets on the Upper West Side

Imagine my surprise this morning when, on the first day after the 2h40 of endless barrage of question from the client (they were quite happy) and subsequent feeling of elation (we were quite happy too!), I was walking around the corner on Broadway to get a few necessities from the hardware store and looking up I remembered that I'm living in New York. The place is gigantic! While the scenery is by now familiar, the dimensions have a way of sneaking up on you and reminding you that it's not something you are really used to.

Downtown and the statue of liberty

Last weekend our guide to East New York stood us up and we ended up walking through hipster Brooklyn with our visiting friend. The place feels like a kind of holiday location (as it indeed is nowadays), and watching the sunset from underneath Brooklyn Bridge is surreal. But that environment – the downtown skyline, the bridges, the lights – have been built into our own cultural imagery to the extent that they are immediately recognised but always produce a sort of anti-Verfremdungseffekt. So it was not until now that I started realising that the banal, everyday-looking streets and buildings that make up the better part of this city, are in and of themselves an awesome sight and a feat of construction prowess.

The Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges

And yes, you are entitled to tell me that I could have noticed it sooner, as all things here tend to be a couple of times larger than back home (the people, the buildings, the bills, …). But I might – and probably will – forget again, and then a short outing to get lightbulbs will remind me once again.

See the universe in a grain of sand...

Food vendor outside the MET

‎This week, in an effort to raise the brooklynity of our appearance, Marion and I got new glasses.

If you belong to that selected and illustrious class of people with visual impairments, you know that this can be a harrowing experience. I hadn't changed them in more than 6 years, and it was a long due obligation. As a result, I now see a ludicrous amount of things in the world, from the leaves in the trees to the faces on people at the end of the street. All in crisp, detailed and contrasted colours. 

Midtown, Broadway and 50th Street

Needless to say it is disorienting, and I find myself stumbling and missing my step with worrying frequency. Looking down I am mesmerised by the structure of the concrete I thread on, and I am hardly able to judge the distance between me (localised – as Marion would probably have excellent arguments to prove – between my eyes) and the tip of my feet. And while I know that this sensation is going to pass, for now I am fascinated by this new type of perception.

Amusingly, this experience also seems to render me attentive to other forms of sensory input, such as the small hums and sounds that pervade the city environment, the smell of food stalls wafting over from the other side of the street, or the harmonics of the soul a cappella group walking, singing and clapping through the subway train. So, while I wait for my brain to readjust my sight to its proper volume, I will observe, look, absorb the world around me with all the more wonder and fascination.

Architectural Heritage

Met Life building (former Pan Am building) at Grand Central

Having recently acquired a precious book edited by the Municipal Art Society, that assembles 10 architectural walks through the city of Manhattan, we have headed today to Grand Central Station, starting point for a walk that should acquaint us with the modernist architectural assemblage of world-famous Park Avenue.

Grand Central's Main Concourse

Grand Central itself was the first pearl of today's visit. Opened in 1913, it is a peculiar melange of neoclassicist and art-déco elements and greets its visitors with both impressive wide-angle vistas and magnificent decorative details that require a closer look. A mixture of three different marbles revet the station's main concourse - the hall giving access to the various subterranean train tracks - and bathe it into a warm reddish light. The main concourse also impresses with its vaulted greenish-blue ceiling showing the stellar configuration from God's point of view (that is, in reversed order when it comes to a worldly perspective). Thanks to MTA, which not only communicates plainly with its passengers, but has also launched a campaign of poetry in motion, I have recently discovered the following lines paying homage to Grand Central and capturing beautifully the spirit of this place:

The City orbits around eight million centers of the Universe.

And turns around the golden clock at the still point of this place.

Lift up your eyes from the moving hive and you will see time circling

under a vault of stars and know just when and where you are.

Billy Collins, 1941

Yet Grand Central should be but the starting point of our tour. First official subject of our walk was the former Pan Am building (today belonging to Met Life), which strangely thrones over Grand Central Station and, thus standing in the midst of Park Avenue, interrupts our view of the sky which usually remains unbroken within the north-south corridors that are Manhattan's avenues. Pan Am building's prominent location was of course not without political strength, as it underscored a particular hierarchy among the various newly available mediums for public transportation back in the 1950s.

Mies Van der Rohe's New York masterpiece:
The Seagram Building

450 Park Avenue

Despite it's soviet-style dimensions, the former Pan Am building convinces with its fair modernism (at least if one abstracts from the ugly posterior base structure). Yet the traces left by various undue architectural interventions that would transform the building into a contemporary business tower cannot be ignored. Changes have done much harm to the towers finely tuned interior hall, whose former elegance can only be vaguely evoked by the few original elements that remain. As such, the Met Life building therefore confronted us with one of the main themes of an architectural walk through Midtown Manhattan: the struggle of architectural preservation and protection in a fast moving and highly dynamic business city. The beautiful examples of International Style buildings that we came across later today have themselves replaced original Manhattan lower story brick buildings of which only few are left over in Midtown. At the same time, some of them are nowadays themselves threatened by contemporary functional architecture apparently well suited to business needs.

Among the wealth of interesting and often beautiful buildings that we have seen today, two have immediately won our favour. Unsurprisingly, one of them was Mies Van der Rohe's' Seagram Building, whose stately elegance remains one-of-a-kind and succeeds in preserving the airiness and cohesion of modernist architecture which we cherish and know from Europe. Its younger cousin, the Emery Roth & Sons 450 Park Avenue Building, came more as a surprise and enchanted us with its combination of the modernist gracefulness and the playfulness of (post) 1950s architecture.

Living at the Upper West Side, we only occasionally make our way to Manhattan's legendary skyscrapers. Today we have learned about the very beginnings of modernist business architecture in New York.

Seagram Building

The Government Shutdown in the streets of NY

The interesting thing about the latest instance of United States politics is how much it seems to be of great import in the media, and how little it seems to impact the lay man in the street. From our foreigner vantage point, we understand that almost a million people has been left without work by the US government shutdown, and that this is not a nice thing. But then again this is a nation that is so retrograde (to the eyes of any European) in terms of social welfare and service that this does not really tarnish its already bad reputation... So in a kind of apocalyptic disillusionment we observe this political SNAFU and tell ourselves that "well, this is going to pass, as most things do".

A young man with a good
heart and poor spelling

The more rationally empathic side of us then renders us attentive to the psychological state of mothers that cannot feed their children because of the state-financed infant nutrition programs that are closed until further notice, or the people who can't join their family because they can't get a passport, or the sick who cannot take part in innovative medical treatments because all testing has been postponed until the government opens again. But this happens in a country where poverty is accepted as part of the urban landscape, and tens of thousands of people die every year because they don't have health insurance (incidentally the very reason the shutdown happened). Reading the news does not help either, as they focus mostly on the political bickering and scandals more than the underlying effects on the populace, giving tidbits of information that only reinforce the image of a dysfunctional democracy.

A homeless man digs into the trash for food while New York walks by

But in the streets the status quo does not seem to have been greatly affected. The people are garrulous, exceedingly nice and helpful as usual, and our walks by the Hudson river show a relaxed population that knows how to enjoy the lingering summer sun in the early autumnal colours.

New Yorkers strolling along the Riverside Park piers

Cultural Offer

The World Room at the Columbia University Journalism School

By far, the most impressive thing about a big city of this caliber is the amount, the quality and the scope of its cultural offer. Case in point: a dialogue between a Pulitzer price winning journalist, the head of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a renowned philosopher, on the topic of Hannah Arendt and her controversial book Eichman in Jerusalem. Completely free, with complimentary fruit and cheese buffet, and with a warm welcome in American style. The event was entertaining both for its content and for the dynamics of dialogue, self representation, rebuke and boasting that could be observed. A type of debate that would hardly take place in Europe (exception made maybe for Berlin, where this specific topic would resonate particularly well with the local population), and if it were to happen, it would be at the very least publicised as a rare event. Here it is hardly mentioned on the university campus.

How much of this is due to the fact that this is a big city, and how much to this being New York, I cannot say, since we have neither back home, but the understated nonchalance with which they organise treasures-troves of intellectual exchange here is astounding. Be it a discussion on the relative merits of the two-state vs. one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or a talk on speech acts and how they relate to modern day politics, or a presentation on the future of classical music, you feel that all it is necessary to avail yourself of that offer is to step outside your house. For the inherently inert and mildly antisocial person that I am, I have never really found it this easy to get to "events".

Incidentally, this reminds me of comments from my family and friends about Paris. I might have to begrudgingly admit that Paris belongs with the other capitals of culture around the world. But despite my dislike for the french city par excellence it nevertheless underscores the advantages of living in a metropolis. Not because of the many museums and operas and theatres (although those are very much appreciated), but rather because it pushes you to take better advantage of the fantastic amount of cultural and intellectual matter that is available there.