World Trade Center

I went to see the World Trade Center site, now home to the newly opened 9/11 memorial museum.   I find the area to be very disconcerting.   There is still a huge police presence, with barbed wire and concrete security barriers everywhere. There are numerous souvenir stores, hawking NY Fire dept. memorabilia, Twin Tower trinkets, flags, t-shirts. etc.   While I was there, a fire truck was parking on the street; hundreds of cell phones were whipped out to take a picture.  Despite signs admonishing us to remember that the site is a memorial, the atmosphere is more like a carnival.   Though I think it is almost impossible to conceive of a public outdoor space that could function as a crowd-stopping memorial space.  Imagine the thousands of workers in the new buildings who descend to the open space for their lunch hour.  Are they really going to be thinking about 9/11 every day?  The two pools marking the footprint of the towers are mostly anodyne,  symbolic but hardly evocative, especially with the very strong smell of chlorine emanating from them.   And then, next to the pools, the newly built tower, bigger and taller than ever; which mostly serves to inflate the egos of those involved.

I am still intrigued, though, by the in-progress state Calatrava's transit hub, and the general architectural jumble of construction.

Some pictures:


I love the orange feeding tubes:

The World Trade Center in a nutshell:

Architectural behemoth and adjacent pool:

My ____ is bigger than yours...

Eric Comstock

We heard a wonderful show by the pianist/vocalist Eric Comstock.  Comstock, who we normally hear performing as part of the Comstock/Fasano Duo with his very talented wife Barbara as vocalist, now has a regular weekly gig at Cafe Noctambulo in the East Village. What the directors of the Cafe Noctambulo are trying to do is recreate the old fashioned supper club, with excellent food and music.  What Comstock does is perform what might be called the Great American Songbook; showtunes and popular music mostly from the first half of the twentieth century, as typified by the music of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and later by Rogers and Hart, etc.   I know very little about this music, other than the songs from musicals my parents took us to as kids.   But I love the combination of sophisticated harmony and witty lyrics, and it sometimes makes me think of the German lieder of the 19th century in its own 20th century way.    Comstock  is some kind of genius, with both an astoundingly encyclopediac knowledge of the repertoire and an evocative style of singing and piano playing.  He did a wonderful slowed-down version of Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Any More" which changed my perception of the tune entirely.   He freely moves from tune to tune, with witty and perceptive comments and anecdotes in between.   He played from 8 PM to 12:15 AM, with a couple of short breaks.  In a better world, he (and Barbara) would be very famous stars, playing at the fanciest clubs.

Here is Eric (with tie) and Vera and our friends Krin and Paula, under the colored lights of the club.

Team Lab

I saw a show at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea of animations by a group of Japanese digital artists who call themselves "Team Lab".   The animations, on large screens in darkened rooms, were fascinating.  I was especially taken with one installation, with 10 or 12 large screens in a row, all of them animating and riffing on traditional Japanese screen painting.   Each individual screen was worth watching on its own, and the some total was overwhelming.   I had just seen an exhibition of Japanese screen painting at the Met a few days before. You can see the videos on You Tube.

Youtube videos

One of the other videos unfortunately had a terrible sort of Japanese new-ageish musical soundtrack; the others, mercifully, were silent.

Some still pictures:

I really enjoy scroll paintings because they are so wide that one cannot take them all in at once,  Your eye is meant to move and explore.  I also saw at the Met a widescreen video that was wider than anything I have ever seen.  It was commissioned for a show on Chinese calligraphy, and was a black and white continuously changing drawing.   Impossible to reproduce, but here is a snapshot of part of it.