It's Art for Pete's Sake
(as opposed to Art for Art's Sake)
Hello beloved audience:
LadyTeen got her first college acceptance this week!! And yes, friends, while this is terrific news it is indeed also ridiculous! And here’s why:
It came in email — she thought it was spam and deleted it unread! The admissions offices of all the colleges that she applied to have been sending her “congratulations for applying” emails every five minutes as well as marketing drip campaigns (this is an evil, automated thing that marketing firms use to eliminate the need for anyone to write new emails, it just sends everyone on a list a series of unstoppable automatic emails on a schedule) with everything from videos to links to blogs by the college’s student body. We found it by accident while frantically searching for a vital financial aid document to sign — that also got sent to spam.
I was thrilled, but she was meh - because the school was a “safety” school. Inherently, the idea of a safety school (inflicted on her by the college office) means one that you won’t have any issues getting into. So when she did get in she just didn’t care much—the name “safety” had made the acceptance….and the college itself which is a GOOD school, irrelevant. This is a tragedy.
She hasn’t seen the campus. It is one that I had intended on touring with her but due to other things (ahem) in our personal lives, she was unable to do the grand college tour that we did for our son.
That said, I am very proud of this kid - she is by far the most ready and eager student that any college could hope for, and any school she chooses to attend will be lucky to have her.
The Arts!
Saw an opera at the Met a few days after some demonstrators broke up a performance of Tannhäuser with banners and shouting, adding an hour to a three and a half hour opera. Did you hear about this? No?
Even demonstrators can’t get heard anymore. Though it’s weird that they chose to break up the opera - which is notoriously an art form that fewer people are listening to in the first place. But I guess it’s a lot harder to break up a Taylor Swift concert. Who would hear you?
(For those of you who are curious, I saw the new Florencia en el Amazonas - billed as magic realism—evidently this is what we call it when a happy ending is abruptly interrupted by a surprise cholera outbreak which kills the diva but not before she turns into a huge butterfly—I found the opera to be a lovely score of lush music (with occasional marimba ostinato passages that made me think a cellphone was ringing) sung by an extremely talented cast with a backdrop of grad-school project set design and high-school level lighting design (who forgets to turn off the light behind the hidden door after the door is closed? we all stared at that outline, waiting!)— and the bad lighting design (there were wavy gobo lights on all the clothes and half the faces in the opening chorus number! There was ridiculous video captioning in the opening of the second act that was…funny? or trying to be poetic visually? I don’t know, but it went very nicely with the small smoking shipwreck on the stage)… anyway, the lighting design was made worse because there was a camera on a crane the night I saw the opera that kept swooping into the light and casting ghastly long shadows on the faces of the singers or up the entire length of the backdrop—while the light beam illuminated the actual crane! I was very lucky that the object wasn’t blocking my sight-line but I’ll bet a bunch of people on House Left were pretty ticked off that their box seats had a partial view.)
Next night, I took advantage of cheap seats to see Spain.
I thought it was going to be about…well…Spain. But it was about art and whether selling out is worth it to make art. The core question the play raises is “is there any art you can make that is so evil that you shouldn’t make it” — calling into question the funding for the project, the intention of the funders, the use for the finished project, the quality of the work itself as opposed to an artistic vision that you make on your own and put out into the world. The playwright asks us to consider the question of intent of the art itself over the intent of the artist. (By the way, the lighting design of this play was spectacular — great contrast to the opera. The lead actress was an understudy, however, and all three of us thought something might have been lost in the new actress’ delivery since the one she was replacing was also the playwright. We wondered how the piece would feel with a different lead, one that was much more “femme fatale” than the realistic/authentic understudy. )
The week rounded out with my accompanying LadyTeen to a student production of “Dracula: a feminist revenge fantasy”
Performing arts schools in NYC have student production quality so professional that it’s kind of bizarre. The only way you know you’re not at the Fringe Festival is that the audience is shrieking at the top of their lungs with laughter, gasping audibly, cheering wildly and the decibel levels are closer to Madison Square Garden with Taylor Swift than Broadway. (Great campy show, lots and lots of stage blood. Could have been even more stage blood and it wouldn’t have hurt the production - so fun.)
Then I got to go to the Met - I haven’t been to see art at the Met since my mother in law passed on. It was so glorious to go subsume myself in art. I saw the Degas/Manet exhibit and they were so careful not to imply that Degas & Manet were secret lovers — but can anyone view that exhibit without wondering whether they were??
Funny to see the Degas/Manet and notice how these two went through a dozen subjects and styles - desperate to be liked - Degas begged Manet to leave the “legit” salons and go to the ones that Degas was organizing, but Manet was doing just fine traditionally. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Writing News:
Well first of all, I’m laughing my head off: I got the date wrong for my Queens reading. It’s not this January It’s in January 2025!! There’s something comforting about knowing you have a reading more than a full year in advance. Like the universe is optimistic about your writing career. So, you got this? May 2024 and then January 2025? I expect to see you all in the audience. Haha!
Speaking of optimism, check out my little essay about decorating my office space for the holidays.
Oh! And I’m one of the featured readers at the next Pen Parentis Literary Salon - you can watch with an RSVP. Here’s the link to sign up. The livecast is Tuesday Dec 12 at 7pm Eastern. It runs about an hour. There is a playback on youtube.com/penparentis about a week after the live show. Audience participation (via chat) is highly encouraged during the livecast.
Random Final Thought:
GNOMES!
Gnomes make me VERY happy. I do not know why. Why on earth would gnomes make me so happy? But they do. I love gnomes. Maybe it is the silent g. It’s so irrelevant and so important. Or maybe it’s the hats.
