Life is a piece of cake
a messy, lovely, soon-to-expire, hard to make, easy to destroy Napoleon to be exact.
Greetings owners of a non-savory denticle:
I went to Brighton Beach the other day for no reason other than to listen to the ocean while I read a novel. Once the rain started, I popped into a bakery where I could neither read the signs nor communicate with the bakery staff. It was a perplexing place.
Turns out, the cakes are sold by the pound and they are serve-yourself, but you have to know where all the things are and have a good eye to guess which size clamshell will hold how many pastries. The cakes are even harder. There was a glorious twenty-layer Napoleon cake, but I was baffled by how I was supposed to cut it and therefore I came home with a lot more cake than I had planned.
But it made me think of reality. In that store I was in America and not at all in America, which was an amazing experience.
Like Russian cakes, reality is multi-layered, repeating, and patterned. (well, of course that’s where this was going. What else do you think of in a Russian bakery?)
Besides freaky moments like wandering out of your country while still in your own country, these are the layers of reality that occur every day in our lives:
Fiction: invented narratives on film/tv and even in books frequently seem more compelling than real life, and more vibrant and dramatic than reality. It is increasingly easy to “lose yourself” in a story someone else wrote.
Nonfiction: documentaries have taken what we have learned from Hollywood and created compelling drama from history and fact. Truth blurs in compelling narrative, see above, and see below.
Reality: being in a room with a stranger is now fraught with more dangers and unpredictability than comfort. The more strangers, the more fear. Therefore whatever brought you together has to be that much more compelling.
Phones: you can talk to anyone, anywhere in real time with video. You can be in two time zones at once (their breakfast is your dinner). You can stop this real and meaningful interaction at any time, like you can not in real life when sitting across the table from the same person.
Virtual Reality: your body responds to physical images as though they are real. Yes, you still have to wear something (a helmet or at the very least glasses) to see the overlay, but the virtual world can easily take precedence over the real world.
Webinars: you can play them in real time as they happen or play them afterward—there is no difference whatsoever between live and recorded—except you can fast-forward the recordings and skip things, or pause things to do other things. If you enter in the middle, there is no way to objectively tell if you are seeing something live or recorded, except by interacting with it.
Zooms: it is possible to participate live in real time in one space while also cooking or doing entirely other things with the camera off — so you literally are in two places at once.
Recorded zooms: like a webinar, you can stop time or rewind time or pause it and it is impossible to tell if you are seeing something live or recorded—or if it has been edited.
How will people navigate dementia in this sort of a space?
So this past weekend was 9/11 20th anniversary. I didn’t realize that the personal blog my husband jotted down on 9.12.01 was still up!! The fun backstory of this blog is that he was really mad at me for taking these photos as it was happening. It was before cellphones were ubiquitous. I was taking these photos with a disposable camera and he was trying to get me to run—! Here’s the whole blog if you want to have a look at what we went through. (You have to click “see earlier posts” a few times to get the whole story - I think there are a dozen of my photos total? However many are on a roll of film!)
And here’s my fictionalized version (imagined from the POV of a neighbor) as published in the Oklahoma Review on 9/11/2006, on the five year anniversary of the events.
Last weekend I read a truncated version of that story at a benefit for Pen Parentis. It was so weird to do a public event on that date, even though we did a Pen Parentis Literary Salon for the tenth anniversary. I guess it was weird because there was music and it was actually quite fun to be out with neighbors who went through their own things on that day. It was a little like an Irish wake. We accepted the pain and used it to fuel the pleasure.
That’s it for this week’s publications, but not the end of art. My weekend is so cultural that I can hardly believe it:
Friday: went to see a friend play in a band. Live on the Lower East Side. Lost voice from singing along and screaming in glee. (And trying to make self heard in a bar—did we really do this all the time?)
Saturday: went to an all-day music festival in Pelham NY. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even know where Pelham was. Now I do. There are a lot of young people that play and write music, my friends. And some of them are fourteen.
Today: going to see Sun & Sea. It won first place at the Venice Biennial - it’s at BAM. An opera that is also immersive theater. Audience stands on a balcony and below us, in tons of real sand, there are a lot of things going on and all of them are opera. You get a timed ticket to enter but can stay as long as you wish. I’m going to stay until…
Tonight: going to see a septuagenarian do a ventriloquism show in the East Village which might have Satanic possession in it. This is possibly the highlight of a spectacular weekend. If I remember, I’ll tell you about it next week.
Both of the Sunday performances are done in Lithuanian. Like the perfect topping on an ice cream concoction.
Have a great week!
the bakery sounds amazing- and where did the man get the mask?