Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-hsien's new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon gets me thinking about the original Red Balloon, childhood and how life has changed

In The Red Balloon, a short film made in 1956 by the French director Albert Lamorisse, a little boy finds a balloon tied to a lamppost. It is big, perfectly round and red as a sun-ripened tomato. Before long, the boy discovers it is also a loyal friend. When he lets go of the string, it doesn't fly off but instead follows him wherever he goes. As he and the balloon walk through the streets of Paris, people watch with amusement.

Shot under cloudy Parisian skies, The Red Balloon is a 34-minute tone poem on celluloid, one of the loveliest, most perfect little movies ever made. Using less than 10 words of dialog and paying close attention to gestures, colors and textures, Lamorisse captures the imaginative world of a small boy. This was the first movie I ever saw when I was a child, and it forever shaped my hopes about movies. It also helped shape my feelings about the world.

So last month, when I heard that the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien had made a film called The Flight of the Red Balloon, which was a sort of homage to the Lamorisse original, I was immediately enchanted and intrigued. On the one hand, how wonderful that--fifty years after its creation--another filmmaker wanted to salute the little beauty. On the other hand, considering the perfection of the original, what could another director possibly add?

In New York City, Hou Hsiao-hsien's film is currently playing at the Paris at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, one of the few single-screen theaters left in Manhattan. Just walking into its small, unpretentious lobby brings back memories of New York's cinematic heyday.

"Remember when all movie theaters were like this, without the bling?" my husband said fondly, as we stepped through the glass doors on Saturday night.

He reminisced about taking his girlfriend to the Paris to see Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1968. I recalled going to see A Man and A Woman with Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant two years earlier. The Paris Theatre, we agreed, was the perfect place for an homage to a classic French movie.

Before the opening credits roll, The Flight of the Red Balloon begins much like the original, with a little boy trying to climb up a lamp post to reach a balloon. But soon it's obvious that Hou is up to something else. While Lamorisse's film is tightly focussed on the story of the boy, Hou's moves in and out of time frames and between three characters--a boy named Simon (played by Simon Iteanu), his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), and his new Chinese nanny, Song (Song Fang).

In addition to being a nanny, Song is a film student who is making a movie inspired by Lamorisse's Red Balloon. She walks around with a video camera, filming Simon. The first images, we eventually deduce, were not scenes from Simon's real life, but scenes staged for Song's movie.

Fans of French director Eric Rohmer, who specializes in creating a slice of life ambience, will enjoy many aspects of Hou's film. Like Rohmer, Hou shoots long, slow scenes in real time and generally avoids the use of music on the soundtrack to cue our emotions. We get lots of footsteps and other ambient sound as the characters walk around the chaotic little apartment that Suzanne and Simon call home. We feel we are there, sharing the loft with them, wishing somebody would offer us a bowl of soup and pick up the papers scattered across the floor.

As Rohmer fans know, slice of life can work well when the scenes are played by fine actors and we are focussed on the engaging conflicts of their characters. Without these ingredients, real time can turn into real tedium.

At first I was charmed by the meandering pace of Hou's movie, but soon began tapping my fingers. Who are these characters? Why should I care about them? And what's Hou trying to do here, anyway? I wondered with increasing exasperation.

Lacking the open, poetic face of the little boy in the original Red Balloon, Simon Iteanu is a cipher. How does he feel about his mother, his nanny... his life? At a local cafe and at home, he plays video games, his eyes fixed with rapt attention on the screen. The black box seems to interest him more than his piano lessons, Song's video camera or the movie she is making. But it's hard to know for sure, since he doesn't express much emotion about anything.

Song, with her boyish haircut, modest clothing and polite demeanor is even more of a mystery. What does she think about the haphazard apartment and the strange Parisians she is working for? Coming from Beijing, does she think this domestic situation is just par-for-the-course in Paris or entirely off-the-wall?

At one point, after a scene in Suzanne's apartment seemed to have droned on for at least ten minutes, I became convinced that The Flight of the Red Balloon was intended as a parody of French cinema.

"How do you know a New Wave film when you see one?" I imagined one Chinese director joking to another. "When nobody notices that nothing is happening... in real time."

Not fair! I thought angrily. Lamorisse was not really a New Wave director, although he was hailed by some of them. And a lot actually happens in The Red Balloon, which is as carefully constructed as a villanelle.

After the little boy's initial delight, a gang of street toughs set their sights on the balloon. They chase the boy and his prize through the rain-slicked alleys of Menilmontant. We hear his leather-soled shoes slapping over the the cobblestones, as he dodges old ladies carrying baguettes and swerves past mangy dogs sitting on stone steps. Then comes the tattoo of their many shoes in pursuit--little rag-tag fascists on the loose. In post-war Paris, we know ominous signs when we see them.

Behind its modest exterior, there is classic conflict in The Red Balloon. Not so in Hou's movie which, like a moth, never seems to move in one direction for long. Midway through, I leaned over to whisper to my husband that it was a good thing we hadn't brought our teenage daughter. Although she is a fan of the original film, this one would have put her off foreign films for a good long time.

But then--finally--something did happen. Juliette Binoche got a chance to do some acting. And here is the beauty of shooting in real time. It is as close as any movie actor will get to the roots of their craft--the stage.

Hou does what few movie directors have the guts or maybe the funding to do these days. Instead of trying to construct his characters out of a hundred quick cuts and strategic juxtapositions, he lets his actors take the lead. You can almost see him switching on the camera, then settling back in his chair to see what transpires. In the case of amateurs Iteanu and Fang, this is probably a mistake. But with the seasoned and gifted Binoche, what transpires is spun gold.

Binoche plays a single mother, living on the edge in modern Paris. Her bleached blond hair is never quite combed, and the roots are showing. She loves her son Simon, but she has little time for him. Rushing back and forth to her job as a puppeteer, to seminars and meetings, she's in a perpetual state of stress and disarray. Her wardrobe is thrift-shop funky, and her apartment is not the usual confection dreamed up by Hollywood designers, it's for-real bohemian. There's a mess in her kitchen and an ugly plastic dumpster on the street in front of her door. Hou's got the ambience down.

None of this would matter if it weren't for Binoche, who inhabits her character with the intensity of a true artist. Suzanne veers between helplessness and determination, melancholy and glee. She has the imagination to animate the puppets in her theater, yet she can't figure out how to sheild Simon and Song from her problems. She'll pick up the phone to rage at an absent lover, never mind who's listening. But she'll also clasp Simon to her breast in a moment of motherly compassion.

Suzanne is the definition of dysfunctional. Still, we love her for her mercurial moods, her irrepressible style, and her sense of humor in the face of a world that is essentially bleak. Especially in one of the last scenes of the film, when she sits in her apartment, surrounded by the detritus of her life, chatting with a piano tuner who is working in the corner, and teasing Simon, trying to get a rise out of him, Suzanne is a Tennessee Williams character, demented but brave, soldiering ever onward. Williams' women are poetic caricatures, Daumier drawings, Don Quixotes in dresses. But Binoche's modern Suzanne is the flesh and blood reality. I have known this woman. You probably have too. You want to slap her. But you also want to give her a hug.

Hou's The Flight of the Red Balloon is confusing. Moments of inspired acting are sandwiched between eons of dead screen time. One character practically bleeds on camera, while the others are as unrevealing as the statues of Easter Island. Balloons and references to balloons appear and disappear, like misplaced quotations from a half-forgotten poem.

It's hard to know what Hou thinks he's doing. Is he deliberately using a slow movie to comment on our fast times? Perhaps he's walking the tightrope of irony, hoping to let the helium out of the Lamorisse classic and also poke fun at the New Wave generation. Or is he simply sampling styles from old movies--heedless of content--posturing as Deconstructionist D.J. of the twenty-first century cinema?

Despite the good reviews the film has provoked, I haven't yet found a critic who's convincingly made sense of this movie. But if a performance can outlive its vehicle, Binoche's Suzanne will be around for some time to come.

Meanwhile, the 1956 Red Balloon continues to bob overhead like a beacon from a bygone age. That dreamy-faced little boy, who was played by the director's son, probably couldn't exist today... at least not in Paris, New York, LA or Rome. Now children live under so much more pressure. They're expected to be smarter, faster and better than any generation before. And they are. But who has time for balloons when there are video games and MySpace sites and stacks upon stacks of homework to be done?

It's not that life was any easier for children a half a century ago. That gang of street thugs--they catch up with the boy. And the balloon meets a sorry end. When I was four, sitting in one of New York's old West Side theaters, tears stung my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as I watched the red balloon shiver, like a wounded animal, then slowly shrink to nothing.

Children suffered fifty years ago, and they suffer today, whether over the death of a balloon or the deaths of real people. But now it seems that so often we don't acknowledge our children's suffering. We are so busy, rushing from one place to the next, steering the kids from one activity to another. We've got no time to spare. No space for pain, we seem to be saying.

Like our lives today, our video games, TV shows and movies proceed at a breakneck speed, dispensing with days, years and entire lives in the space of seconds. Is this a case of art imitating life or life imitating art? I wonder.

Like so many other children I have watched, little blank-faced Simon locks onto the video games and seems to be sucked into another dimension--a place without emotion. He doesn't cry... and he doesn't laugh either. In this new reality where there is no place for suffering, can there be any place for joy?

After the street toughs have their way and the red balloon dies a terrible death, we cry... if we are children. If we are grownups, we mourn. We know this balloon isn't just an old, stretched out piece of rubber. It's something essential.

But, wait... the story isn't over. Lamorisse has a coda. There are many balloons all over Paris. And they are magical. Suddenly those balloons jump from the hands of their owners, from the hands of children, balloon men and nursemaids. They fly out of windows and chimney pots. They float, single file down the boulevards. At last the sad little boy looks up and sees. They are coming to him.

Blue balloons, yellow balloons, green, white and red balloons stream down from the sky into the empty lot where the boy is sitting. Finally, the Parisian cloud cover has broken and the sun is shining. It shines through the balloons, painting colors on the boy's smiling face. He reaches up and gathers the strings together, pulling them close to him. Then he is lifted up, up into the sky. The balloons carry him over the rooftops of Paris, and there's no stopping him now. It seems he will rise forever.

****************************************************

Coming soon: Review of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Poem in Your Pocket

You may never know what your neighbors and fellow pedestrians are carrying in their pockets... unless you ask them!

Did you have a poem in your pocket today? I didn't... until late in the afternoon. Somehow, I hadn't even heard that it was Poem in Your Pocket Day.

But sometime after lunch, I was standing in the Bank Street Bookstore, trying to choose a gift for my five-year-old niece, when I noticed a sales clerk wearing a rainbow-colored t-shirt that said, "I have a poem in my pocket!" scrawled in black letters across her chest.

"Do you really?" I asked the young woman.

"Of course I do," she said. "It's Poem in Your Pocket Day!"

I was immediately intrigued. "Really?" I said. "What poem do you have?"

"I have part of a poem by James Wright," she told me.

"Really? Can I read it?" I asked.

The woman reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a folded scrap of paper. It looked like part of a colorful page that had been ripped from a magazine. With a felt tip pen, she had scribbled some words across it. They read:

In a pine tree,

A few yards away from my window sill,

A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,

On a branch.

I laugh, as I see him abandon  himself

To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do

That the branch will not break.

With her slim figure and short, ruffled haircut, the young woman looked a bit like a blue jay herself, I thought. I could almost imagine her springing up and down on a branch in the April sun.

"That's beautiful," I told her, handing the scrap of paper back. "Thank you so much for that poem today!"

I left the bookshop, feeling elated but also somewhat sheepish that I didn't have a poem of my own to share with the world. I was determined to find one.

Back home, I emailed my husband an urgent note. "Do you have a poem in your pocket today?" I asked.

"I always have a poem in my pocket!" he emailed back. 

Knowing him, I realized that 90% of the time he actually does. Now I don't want to brag, but how many women have husbands who can say that?

Next I rifled through my poetry books, looking for just the right sort of thing. Nothing too heavy. I wanted it to be as light and feathery as the blue jay--a gust of spring breeze perhaps, to go with the balmy April day. Or a little silver fish, slipping through the shallows of a stream. Not that I was looking for a "nature poem" exactly--just something light in spirit.

I settled on the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, one of my favorite writers. Whether he is being tragic or playful, he's always both mercurial and magnetic. Somehow, he manages to turn phrases into spells.

 I chose The Little Mute Boy, translated by W.S. Merwin.

The little boy was looking for his voice.

(The king of the crickets had it.)

In a drop of water

the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;

I will make a ring of it

so that he may wear my silence

on his little finger.

In a drop of water

the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice,  far away,

put on a cricket's clothes.)

As with so many of Lorca's poems, The Little Mute Boy breaks all rules of logic--in so far as poetry can be said to work by logic.  The poem is perfectly and gorgeously unexplainable.  A few simple words, four short stanzas and we are lost in a mysterious, enchanted world, where insects can rule kingdoms and children can roam through droplets of water. 

I downloaded a copy of the poem from the internet, printing out a copy in Spanish too, in case I met any Spanish-speaking poetry lovers. Then I put The Little Mute Boy into my pocket and went out for a walk, eager to share my poem and hear the poetry of others. 

As I ambled down Broadway, I surveyed the other pedestrians carefully, looking for a tell-tale rainbow t-shirt like the one the woman in the bookstore had been wearing. But I didn't see a single one. After I'd gone ten blocks, I began to suspect that her t-shirt was unique. Perhaps she had painted it herself.

How could I ever tell which of the hundreds of people I was passing might have a poem in their pocket? I wondered. I decided I would look for neighbors and other people I knew and approach them and ask. But strangely, atypically--since I have lived in this neighborhood for over thirty years--I didn't see a single familiar face. 

Maybe they should have called this Poem in the Closet Day, I thought peevishly. What good does it do to have a poem in your pocket, if nobody knows you have it?

Before long, I found myself in front of the Barnes & Noble at 83rd street.  I decided to go in and look for potential candidates. But, even in a bookstore, how would I know a person with a poem in their pocket, if I saw one?  

First, I went up to one of the cashiers. He was wearing glasses and had an intense expression on his face. "Do you have a poem in your pocket?" I asked him. 

"No, I do not," he answered very seriously. He stared at me for a long minute and didn't crack a smile. I decided he was not a good candidate for further conversation.

Next I went upstairs and made for the poetry aisle. Perhaps the Poem in Your Pocket crowd would be congregating there. The aisle was deserted. Not a soul was even browsing. So I headed for the information desk.  

A man with a name tag that read, "Francisco" was helping a woman order a book. With a beautiful name like Francisco, he just might be a poetry lover.  I decided to wait and ask him. But Francisco would not look up. He was engrossed in his computer. 

The woman also looked promising. She had a lovely smile, and she was very patient. She must have waited there a full ten minutes, while Francisco tried one electronic source after another to locate the book she wanted.

I waited patiently too. I told myself that the longer I waited, the more likely it would be that one of these two people would have a poem in their pocket. Of course, I realized this was a case of magical thinking--pure superstition. Yet, I  couldn't help myself. And after all, calm and patience is necessary for enjoying a poem.

At last, Francisco succeeded in locating her book and placing an order for it. The woman smiled her dazzling smile at him again and was about to walk off.  I would have to act fast or lose my chance.

"Excuse me," I said. Both of them turned to look at me for the first time, although I'd been standing right in front of them for many minutes. They looked startled. 

I took a deep breath and braced myself for rejection... or worse yet, the lack of a sense of humor. "Do either of you have a poem in your pocket?"

"Why, yes I do!" said the woman, looking very pleased that I should ask. She opened her large black purse and started rummaging through it.

I was amazed. In shock. I considered throwing salt on the rug and hopping around in a circle three times to give thanks to the gods. Instead, I just held my breath and watched the woman rummage.

After what seemed like forever, she came up empty handed.  "I'm afraid I left it in my other purse," she apologized. "But I did have a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was that poem about peace, do you know it?"

I had to confess that I didn't. If she'd asked me if I knew a poem about a fly buzzing or horse-drawn carriage, I could have said yes. But things like peace have never caught my attention. They are so abstract.

"Well," I said, "I do have a poem in my pocket, and I'd be glad to give it to you. It's a poem by García Lorca."

"Oh!" laughed the woman. "I love Lorca!"

So I brought out The Little Mute Boy and handed it to her. She didn't stop to read it, but folded it up and put it in her purse.

"I wish I could return the favor," she said. 

"Do you have email?" I asked. '"Because, maybe you could email me your poem."

She agreed and I gave her my address. She told me her name was Erica, and then she was off. I was left standing there with Francisco, who was now staring at me as if I were a mad dog.

"Do you have a poem in your pocket?" I asked him. Just in case he had one, I didn't want him to feel slighted--although by then I was pretty sure he didn't.

"No, I don't," he said, evenly, then turned back to the computer.

My story about Poem in Your Pocket Day could come to an end here. But it wouldn't be very satisfying. You are probably wondering: did Erica send me the Emily Dickinson poem? I'm afraid it's too soon to say.

All evening, I've been checking my inbox but no poems have turned up yet. Erica may have forgotten or lost my email address at the bottom of her big bag. Or perhaps, after thinking it over, she's become worried that I might be a bookish stalker on the loose. Better to cut off all contact before things get out of hand! I guess I should put myself in her shoes and give her the benefit of the doubt. 

As I was returning home this evening with a bag of groceries for dinner, I did see my neighbor Joe. He seems like the sort who might be a poetry lover and he was pacing in front of the building.

"Do you have a poem in your pocket?" I asked.

He shook his head, sort of sadly, I thought. "Not unless E  Pluribus Unum counts," he answered.

Ramon, the doorman, opened the front door for me and I asked him too. 

"No," he said, shaking his head. I got the feeling that he could have offered more satisfaction if I'd asked him for baseball scores.

Ramón is not the literary doorman. Miguel, the one who loves poetry, was not on tonight. Still, Ramón is a very sweet guy, and I felt the urge to bestow something upon him.

"Well, never mind then," I told him. "I've got a present for you. I just happen to have a poem in my pocket, and it's in Spanish too!"

I handed The Little Mute Boy to him and stood around awkwardly while he read it.

"Thank you," he said at last, when he was done. And slowly a big smile spread across his face."It's a very nice poem. I like it!"

Then Ramón folded up the piece of paper and put it in his pocket, where--I am pretty sure--it stayed for the rest of the evening. But maybe late tonight, sometime after midnight, when he is getting ready for bed in his apartment in New Jersey, he will take it out and read it again. This is what it says:

El NIÑO MUDO

El niño busca su voz

(La tenía el rey do los grillos.)

En una gota de agua.

Buscaba su voz el niño.

No la quiero para hablar.

Me haré con ella un anillo

Que llevará mi silencio

En su dedo pequeñito.

En una gota de agua

Buscaba su voz el niño.

(La voz cautiva, a los lejos,

se ponía un traje de grillo.)

- Federico García Lorca

Elevator Encounter

A chance conversation gets me thinking

On my way to the post office the other morning, I met a delivery man in the elevator of the building where I live. He was a gray-haired black man who looked to be well past retirement age. But clearly he was not retired. He was bringing three neatly-pressed suits to the lawyer who lives on the third floor. Somehow, he'd overshot his stop and was now headed back down.

"Good morning," the delivery man said to me. "I can tell by that beautiful smile that you're not on your way to work this morning." 

"You're absolutely right," I agreed. "I'm going to the post office. If I were on my way to work, I probably wouldn't be smiling."

"I know all about it," he told me. "There's the people who smile in the morning and then there's the people who don't smile in the morning. And they have their reasons."

"True," I agreed. "The people on the subway are usually frowning, for instance. And when I worked in midtown, I used to frown on the subway in the mornings too."

"All those sorrowful faces," he said.

"Most people seem to scowl when they're going to work," I said. Then, thinking of an exception, I added, "Not everyone, of course. My father used to sing on his way to work. He sang Italian arias at the top of his lungs--and my father hated his job."

"I sing on the way to work, and I don't like my job," the delivery man said.

"You and my father," I said. I pictured the two of them together--two old, gray-haired men singing as they walked down the street.

My father never retired either. Never could afford to. He didn't have a pension plan, he'd changed jobs so many times.

"Never go into advertising," he used to tell me. "It's a cut-throat business."

The day he died, five days short of his seventieth birthday, he missed an important meeting about industrial ball bearings. When he didn't show up, the marketing manager waited. But he couldn't wait all day. And there were plenty of other copywriters eager for the job. My father's heart stopped beating. But the industrial ball bearings rolled on. 

The neighbors, however, noticed his absence. Because nobody walked out the door singing Di Provenza il mar at eight-thirty-five.

"Never go into advertising," my father told me. But when I was twenty-two years old and desperately looking for a job--where did I end up? In advertising.

My first week on the job I was sent to employee orientation--me and twenty-five other new hires. We were all in our early twenties. They ushered us into a sleek little theater on the forty-first floor, where we watched back-to-back TV commercials for an hour.

There were upbeat ads for Seven-Up, misty Long Lines commercials that made you want to cry, and patriotic Join-the-Army commercials that made you want to kill. Then the president of agency stood up and told us that advertising was a wonderful business and we were very lucky to be there. If we didn't feel that way, we ought to leave right now, he said.

As for him, he loved his job. He was a very happy man, he told us, furrowing his brow and banging on the podium for emphasis. And every morning, while he was getting dressed, he said, he sang those wonderful tunes our agency created--tunes like Be All That You Can Be and America is Turning Seven-Up. And all the time that he was talking I stared at his face. I hadn't seen such a pinched face, I decided, since Richard Nixon gave his stepping down speech.

The women I worked with were old timers. They'd been with the agency 15, 20 and 25 years. After starting as secretaries, they'd been promoted to research early on, where they'd languished ever since. They wore dark wool skirts and pastel shirts with Peter Pan collars. They were underpaid and overworked and everyone knew it. But no one did anything about it because they were old timers and were considered expendable.

Besides, management knew they would never quit. One was supporting her mother. Another supported her disabled husband. Another was a single mother with a teenage son. They said to each other that they were too old to start job hunting now. Why would anyone want to hire one of them when they could get a young, hiply-dressed girl right out of college?

The old timers never sang on their way to work. That much was obvious. In fact no one in our department ever smiled in the morning until after she'd finished her third cup of coffee. Only the promise of vacation kept any of us going.

I saved up my money and went to England for ten days. The others usually went to Disney World or Epcot Center. Sometimes the single mom made sojourns to Atlantic City. The rest of the year the old timers worked late, got home at night exhausted, and unwound by watching TV.

Our lunch hour conversations were divided between the soaps and company gossip. They knew about middle-management embezzlements and high-level back-stabbings before anyone else did. Theirs was a byzantine world I was never quite at home in--never quite sure when they were referring to the board of directors and when to the cast of Dallas.

The old timers liked me, though, because I kept them laughing. Once in a while I took little moral stands which they found ridiculous but endearing. There was the time I refused to work on a new business pitch for our affiliate in Chile. "Because of Pinochet," I explained. And they kidded me for months afterward.

After two years, when I finally left advertising to return to school, I felt like a prisoner on parole, leaving his fellow inmates behind. The old timers threw me a party and wished me the best of luck. I knew they were envious. I'd managed to escape but they were stuck.

The delivery man in the elevator--he was stuck too. Yet he sang on his way to work.

"All those sorrowful faces," he said, shaking his head.

How was it, I wondered,  that some people kept on singing, while other just went on--silent?

"Have a good day, ya hear?" he said as the got off at the fifth floor. As the elevator door closed, I heard him humming a bluesy tune.

Maybe he was singing for all the others--the silent ones, the old timers, I mused. And I thought of his ancestors, how they sang in the cotton fields and how they called their songs "the sorrow songs."

Saturday at Sookk

Southeast Asian street food comes to Broadway and 103rd Street

For days I'd watched the workers carting in wood and hammering away, as I passed by on Broadway in the afternoons. Finally they were hanging dozens of lacy lanterns from the ceiling, brass bells in the entraceway and covering one wall with bolts of jewel-toned silks. When the chairs and tables arrived and a sign bearing the mysterious name, "Sookk," was hoisted over the front window, I knew we had a quirky new restaurant in the neighborhood.

Good! I thought. Or... possibly good. That Saturday evening I suggested to my family that we check it out.

Around 8:00 p.m., Frank, Marina and I wandered down Broadway to 103rd Street, planning to poke our heads into the new eatery and get a bite. Instead we found a line out the door and a host announcing we'd have a 45-minute wait. Say what?

Yes, a 45-minute wait. This is on the Upper West Side, north of 96th Street, near the intersection that once made the Village Voice list of the ten worst street corners in Manhattan. This is the former neighborhood of welfare hotels, curbside hookers and nodding junkies--the neighborhood dubbed "Manhattan Valley," in the 1970s, when community self-help groups made a valiant but futile effort to spruce up its image.

Now European tourists are wheeling their luggage up Broadway to the Marrakech Hotel, where velvet ropes separate them from the neighborhood locals and bouncers in black talk into matching mouthpieces. The drop of the dollar against the euro has helped bring about the chic-ification of the neighborhood.

How times do change. But, since we are long-term neighborhood residents, forty-five minute waits at restaurants are not yet part of our mental geography. Now if you'd asked us to stand that long in a bank line or at the post office, we would have barely raised an eyebrow. But at a restaurant?

We walked out of Sookk and further down the street to Mama Mexico, where we were squeezed in immediately between beer-drinking Columbia students and hyped-up mariachis.

Talk about neighborhood success stories! Even my fifteen-year-old daughter Marina can remember back to the days when Mama Mexico was the sweet, little hole-in-the wall run by the friendly family from Puebla.

Now it has expanded three-fold and is a non-stop party place. Afraid of ending up with a $100 check to pay and possibly a platter of mole poblano on our heads, we rarely eat there anymore. But we still love to stare through its windows at the people, the murals and the brightly-colored, lamps that glow like magic talismans, hanging from the leaf-green ceiling.

Today Mama Mexico's guacamole is still made table-side and tastes as good as any we've had in the motherland. Due to their impressive square footage--and despite the hoards who are increasingly drawn there--you can still get a table pretty quickly. Thank you, Big New Mama, for the little mercies!

But the truth is, I was still cogitating about Sookk, the lanterns and the bolts of silk. On its menu, Sookk advertised Bangkok-style street food, which piqued my curiosity. There had to be some way to circumvent this 45-minute thing. Then a light bulb went off.

"I've got it. Next weekend we can make a reservation!" I exclaimed.

"Good thinking, mom," said my sarcastic daughter.

The following week we did something we have never done for any eating establishment north of 96th Street. We picked up the phone and reserved a table. That evening, we hustled down Broadway, careful to arrive at Sookk at the exact and appointed hour.

When we stepped inside, we were wowed by the romance of the place. The hanging lanterns glimmered with a soft light and on the back wall, the bolts of colored silk evoked a fabric merchant's shop. At any minute, I expected, a fortune teller would appear with a Ouija board.

"We've got a reservation for three," I told the host.

He motioned us to a tiny table right by the door, where a group of impatient patrons was hovering, waiting to be seated.

"There are three of us, not two," I clarified.

"That's your table," he said and started to turn away.

In the back, I could see, the staff was clearing a table for four.

"Could we have that table in the back?" I asked.

"No. We're going to seat two groups of two there," he told me and walked off.

Reluctantly, we settled ourselves into the chairs at the front table... or Frank and I did. Marina was given an eight-inch-wide stool to balance on.

"Let's see if we can get you a real chair," I said, glancing nervously at the crowd of customers waiting just behind her.

"Mom," said Marina, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I'm fine. Chill out, and imagine you're in Chinatown."

OK. Point taken. Some cultural flexibility was probably called for. I would henceforth imagine myself in Chinatown, or--better yet--in Yaowarat, the two-hundred-year-old Bangkok neighborhood where, according to our menu, hundreds of street food vendors converge every night to hawk an eclectic array of delicacies that meld influences from Thai, Szechuan and Cantonese cooking.

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up the scene: the outdoor stalls, lit by bare bulbs, the crowds pressing in from all directions, the cooks working over their woks, above the flicker of yellow and blue flames, meat and seafood sizzling, the smells of garlic, cumin, coconut, ginger and basil.

"So," said Frank, interrupting my revery. "Who's ready to order?"

After some negotiations, we settled on three starters--"This place should be good at finger food," I theorized--and one entree, all to share. Since they didn't have a liquor license, Frank ran across the street to the Korean deli to get bottles of Heineken. Marina ordered a tall mango iced tea.

All around us, patrons sat elbow-to-elbow at little tables, chattering in the dim light. There were some young, well-dressed Europeans, a couple of Columbia grad students, and a number of affluent-looking Asians, some in small family groups. Marina seemed to be the only one under twenty in the crowd.

The first dish to arrive was fried coconut-crusted calamari, ordered to appease Frank, who has never been known to pass up calamari on any menu, anywhere in the world.

"It's rubbery... but good," said Marina, diplomatically. "Though it's hard to taste the coconut."

I said nothing, having long ago given up on my efforts to convince my husband that there is no point in ordering calamari in America. While it may be partly the fault of our cooks that so much rubbery calamari is served on these shores, I suspect it is also the fault of our environmentally-protective fishing laws. Good for the sea creatures, perhaps, but not necessarily for the diners. At Sookk, I dipped the calamari in the sweet red chili sauce, which made it better.

Next to arrive was a patty of steamed sticky rice stuffed with soy beans, chestnuts, mushrooms and pork and folded up in bamboo leaves--the Thai version of a tamale. This was something our waiter had especially recommended, but I was not impressed. We had fun unwrapping the "package" and poking at the rice mixture with our chopsticks, but it was bland and starchy. An inauspicious start, I thought.

Marina had lobbied for golden fritters, an assortment that included chicken and shrimp dumplings, shitake spring rolls, batter-fried shrimp and sesame tofu, served with peanut-chili sauce. This turned out to be the most popular dish of the evening. I'm not usually a spring roll fan, but had to agree the shitake spring rolls had a light, crisp texture and lovely, subtle flavor. The fried tofu squares were browned on the outside and delicious, especially when dipped in the peanut-chili sauce. We devoured everything on the plate within minutes.

By now every inch of our tiny table was piled with teetering stacks of plates. Finally I managed to hand them off to the waiter. He was a cute guy with a winning smile. But Marina had to remind him three times that she wanted more water.

Although the young staff looks stunning, with their sleek, dark hair and intensely orange t-shirts, there is something seriously wrong with the service. They are disorganized and inattentive and treat the customers like an afterthought. But then again, what would you expect from a restaurant modeled on a street fair?

Our main course finally arrived: a chicken pumpkin curry, simmered in coconut milk with kaffir lime leaves and basil. I had imagined something with surprising flavors and textures. While the sauce was flavorful, the pumpkin was reminiscent of potato--dense and uninspiring.

"I'm still hungry," said Marina, as our waiter cleared away the last dish. So we perused the dessert menu and agreed to share the most exotic offering, said to be a popular wedding dish: warm, mashed taro cake topped with ginkgos, red dates and lotus seeds.

Frank and Marina pronounced it delicious and I agreed. Served in a cinnamon-spiced, coconut milk sauce, the confection was rich and sweet and presented a lovely variety of textures and flavors. It was, however, one more serving of starch than we needed on this particular night. Bad ordering on our part. Next time, we agreed, we'd choose the green tea ice cream for dessert and order the taro cake wedding delicacy as take-out.

The Asian family that had been sitting next to us paid their bill and got ready to leave. At the door, several couples looked expectantly at our tables. It was time for us to call it a night.

We were out the door--but not before laying out close to $60, including tax and tip. A bit steep for your run-of-the-mill West Side family, but not bad for those neighborhood stock and bond traders who still have their jobs intact... and a steal for dollar-mad European tourists. $60--I wonder what the street vendors in Bangkok would think of that!

"That was fun," said Marina, as we headed back up Broadway. "I'd like to eat there again, sometime."

"Sure," agreed Frank, who is always game when it comes to restaurants. "I'd be willing to give it another try."

As for me, I was lost in thought. I was developing an idea for an even newer and chic-er neighborhood restaurant. This one would be further uptown--say around 155th street.

Why not use the street fair theme and go all the way with it? We would rent space in an empty Harlem warehouse and fill it with stalls and an international assortment of street food vendors. To increase the profit margins and make it more authentic, we'd dispense with furniture all together and avoid hiring waiters. The diners could wander from one "food station" to another. We'd put burley bouncers at the door and a velvet rope outside, where people could line up. And if the line got too long, we'd just tell them to call for reservations-- three weeks in advance.

Fairway Gridlock

The contradictions of Upper West Side life

converge in one food store

You never know what you're going to find at the uptown Fairway. You might discover graffiti eggplant piled in a lovely, shiny pyramid next to the baby zucchini, or Sicilian oranges displayed on the citrus table, with their juicy red centers cut open for all to see. In the spice section, you might come upon a bewitching, smoked paprika from Spain. Then again, you might find a long-lost friend. 

On Sunday my husband Frank and I were steering our shopping cart down the condiments aisle, making for the deli department, when I spotted somebody I hadn't seen in fifteen years. He was bent over a bucket of Tunisian olives, right next to the cornichons. 

"Walter!" I shouted, in a tizzy of surprise. What was he doing here in Harlem, when he lived--or so I thought--in deepest Brooklyn?

Immediately we were hugging and talking about divorces and the magazine business and the intervening years.  All the while, I was making frantic hand signals to Frank--who was ten feet ahead with the cart--to make a U-turn.  

Reversing direction at Fairway is trickier than landing at LaGuardia airport in fog, but Frank made a valiant effort. Within seconds, we'd thrown ourselves and the surrounding shoppers into Fairway gridlock, a state--I seem to remember--that Dante described as the third circle of Hell, but an everyday event for many who shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Nobody could move backwards or forwards, left or right. I braced for the filthy tirades and the tomato-throwing to begin. But, miraculously, we were met with indulgent smiles. 

A bunch of my fellow New Yorkers were experiencing a collective moment of inexplicable niceness--something that does happen more often than you might expect, although not--generally speaking--during moments of gridlock.

For those not living in New York City, it can be hard to get a handle on this concept, but the average width of an aisle in a Manhattan grocery store is probably narrower than your arm span. In the world of New York markets, the three-lane shopping cart highway is a utopian fantasy, something we locals can only dream about.

Compared to most of the city's food stores, the aisles of Fairway are pretty decent. But they are also far more popular. Which makes the shopping experience something that can only be called Dantesque. One minute you're in Paradise, standing on tiptoe to snatch a jar of Moroccan harissa from an upper shelf, the next minute you feel the bar of a shopping cart battering your Achilles tendons and you're headed straight for Hell.

Like almost every other problem on our island, the ultimate cause of this madness is greed. The greed of landlords and real estate moguls, to be specific. I'm not going to mention names. But I will suggest that the next time you encounter a New York problem, or hear a crazy story about something in this town that doesn't make any sense, just take a breath and--as Deepthroat advised Bob Woodward--follow the money. If you do, chances are you'll find yourself nose-to-nose with one or more of the big real estate guys.

Most of the big guys, of course, don't shop at the Fairway on West 132nd Street. Most of them don't live in the neighborhood. But that doesn't stop them from buying and selling smaller and smaller pieces of the island for higher and higher prices. And the more real estate that changes hands, the narrower and more crowded the aisles of the markets become. 

Somebody could probably figure out an algorithm to predict the ultimate outcome of this relationship. But it wouldn't be me. I've never been much good at abstract reasoning.

However, I am pretty good at following the money. It was money that first brought me to Fairway, two years ago.  And--I admit it--I came to the Fairway habit very late. There are New Yorkers who've been shopping at Fairway for thirty, forty and even fifty years.  But until recently I've never walked more than six blocks in any direction for the purpose of putting food on my table. 

I have always believed in the Parisian approach to shopping.  Stroll down the block and stop into the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread. Meander across the street to the green grocer to select the ingredients for a salad. Then swing over to Amsterdam Avenue to visit the fish monger. When it was time to stock up on soap and paper products, there was always a moderately-priced supermarket nearby. Until a couple of years ago, that was my life as a shopper.

The day the first domino fell is still vivid in my memory. It was twelve years ago, when our favorite green grocer announced he was moving to Rhinebeck, New York. This was a business that had been in the neighborhood for forty years. I'd been shopping there for close to twenty. Our daughter had learned to talk as I maneuvered her through the narrow aisles in her stroller.

"That's a banana. Can you say that word?"

"Banana."

"Very good! And look over here. What's this beautiful red thing?"

"Apple." 

"Yes!  You're right!  It's an apple, a MacIntosh apple!" 

Sometimes, Marina would surreptitiously steal a lime or a fig and hide it under her blanket. We'd have to do an about face on Broadway and bring it back. 

The Indian woman at the cash register gave out cherries and grapes to all well-behaved toddlers... and even those who were not. The Nigerian guy who stocked the shelves played peek-a-boo with the babies, while their parents contemplated the artichokes.

"Why move?" I asked the Greek owner, in consternation. "Can't you just raise your prices a little bit?"

"Right now, we're just managing to pay $8,000 a month rent. The landlord's raising it to $30,000. There's no way you can raise the price of broccoli high enough to cover that," he told me.

Within weeks, the green grocer had been replaced by a charming cafe, which was soon replaced by an atmospheric restaurant and then by another and then another after that. In the intervening years, I've lost track. Nobody, it seems, has been able to cover the rent and provide good, affordable service.

In quick succession, our other neighborhood food stores followed suit, bidding farewell to customers they had served for decades and leaving their vacant spaces to Starbucks and Duane Reade. The few grocery stores and supermarkets that remained went upscale in a big way. I'm talking four-dollar loves of bread and two-dollar designer tomatoes. Plausible, perhaps, if you are a single Wall Street trader. But not for most of the rest of us.

And so it was that I turned to Frank one day, and uttered those inevitable words, "I think it's time to check out Fairway."

When shopping at the uptown store, a mate is of the utmost importance. Although it is technically possible to shop that Fairway on your own, it is not advisable--unless you are planning to purchase a very small quantity of groceries. 

First, there is the matter of brute strength. It takes muscle to navigate your heavily-laden shopping cart among the hundreds of others--not so much to get it rolling as to stop it, sometimes very suddenly, when a clueless gourmet darts across your path, heading for the chanterelles, for instance. If you don't own a car, as we don't, there is also the trip home to consider, the hailing of the taxi and the loading of the packages amidst traffic.

The secret to Fairway's success may be that it manages to be almost all things to almost all people. It offers Osetra caviar and dry-aged steaks, but also single servings of lasagna, Thai dumplings-to-go and family-packs of burgers and chicken wings. Whether they are cooking for their families, throwing soirees on West End Avenue or stocking up for barbecues for the basketball team in Riverside Park, thousands of Upper West Siders do their shopping there every week. 

On Sundays, when we usually shop at Fairway, it is a din of voices in a multitude of tongues: Italian couples critique the broccoli rape, Russian Jews argue over kosher chickens, Senegalese drummers recommend lentils to French graduate students and Mexican stock clerks try to translate the names of  vegetables they never saw before yesterday into a language that never imagined them.

The uptown Fairway's meat and seafood department, known as the cold room, is legendary.  It may be the only place in New York where you need to don a jacket, even in August, to choose the meat for your dinner. They keep the temperature in the vast room at 40 degrees. A row of black, quilted jackets hangs on pegs outside the swinging doors for the convenience of shoppers.

The good news about the cold room is there are real butchers and fish mongers you can talk to. The bad news is that it's too cold to have anything more than the briefest exchange. Sometimes I wonder if management keeps the temperature so low just to decrease the traffic jams. A typical conversation with one of the butchers goes like this:

"Good afternoon. Can you tell me if you've got any lamb sausage today?"

"Nope.  Sorry.  Next!"

Despite such moments, I have to admit that Fairway is a vital, sometimes even an exuberant place. When shoppers aren't scowling, they tend to be laughing. Where else can you find a store where socialites chat with Harlem grandmothers and fifth graders discuss bouillabaisse recipes with their dads? And, although the screeching voice of a two-year-old may sometimes drown out your conversation, if you listen carefully, the toddler is likely to be shouting something like, "pomegranate!"

On Sunday, Frank and I completed the bulk of our weekly shopping for $167, plus a tip to the bagger. A hefty grocery bill in the overall scheme of things, but not bad for Manhattan. I followed with the bags of fragile vegetables, as he wheeled the heavy cart down the ramp to 132nd street. 

If you had told me, twenty years ago, that I'd be traveling 22 blocks to shop for food, I would have thought you were crazy. But New York has changed a lot in the last two decades and--like it or not--so have I. Although I may kvetch about the uptown trek, the truth is I sort of look forward to our Sunday excursions. At Fairway, I never know when I'm going to find a strange new vegetable or a long-lost friend pondering Tunisian olives. 

 

Local Bistro

Thank our lucky stars, there's always La Ripaille!

At a time when many Manhattan restaurants have the life-spans of butterflies, La Ripaille has survived in a quiet corner of the West Village for almost 30 years. Its owner, Alain Laurent, bustles around greeting guests, waiting tables and wisecracking in French and English, his blousy white shirt, broad Gallic face and beak-like nose making him look like he stepped out of a Jean Renoir film. Classic French pop music plays softly, and one half-expects to find Serge Gainsbourg nursing a whiskey in the corner.

My husband and I stumbled on this little gem one snowy night years ago and were lured inside by its red brick walls and the candles flickering in the window. Because of the weather, we were one of only three or four parties seated that night and Alain, who had the fireplace blazing, made us feel as if we were guests in his home.

But whether it is almost empty, or entirely full--as it was on our most recent visit--La Ripaille always feels warm and intimate. The food is traditional bistro fare, cooked in the old style. Rich, slowly-simmered sauces that pay homage to butter and cream, the onion and the mushroom.

Last night, our group passed around three dishes and an appetizer. All were delicious. We started with broccoli mousse in a lemony butter sauce and sopped up every last drop of sauce with the wonderfully crusty bread that is always on the table. The service was attentive but leisurely, giving us the chance to look around and see who our fellow diners might be. They were diverse in age and included a few twenty-somethings, as well as middle-aged neighborhood people and affluent retirees dining with their grown children.

Next, came the chicken breast in brown sauce with bacon and mushrooms, prepared "facon Grand-mere"--grandmother-style--and served with baby zucchini and creamy mashed potatoes, which we thought was a fitting repaste for an early spring evening. The farfalle with salmon, tomatoes and vodka was also excellent, with its whimsical garnish of unsnipped chives. Best of all was the Catalan-style penne with sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and cream. The flavors of its buttery-soft sausage lingered in the mouth long after the last bite went down. For dessert, we shared tarte tatin (apple tart) and chocolate cake and thought the tarte, with its distinctive, caramelized flavor, had the greater character of the two.

Prices are not inexpensive. Neither are they outrageous. When you consider the quality of the food and the experience, it's a good value for the money. With its satisfying food, warm ambience and friendly service, La Ripaille offers civilized but relaxed dining. And in New York City, that's not easy to come by these days.

Merci et bonsoir, Monsieur Alain. We will be back again, as soon as our pocketbook allows it. And may your cozy bistro remain on Hudson Street for many more years to come!

La Ripaille
605 Hudson Street (btw. 12th & Bethune)
West Village, New York City, NY
212-255-4406

Nantucket Christmas, I

Part I: In which our family makes unexpected plans and sets off for Nantucket, accompanied by a harpooner named Queequeg

Lord only knows how our fifteen-year-old daughter first got the idea. I can't blame it on television, since we don't have one. And it's a stretch to blame it on genetic memory, since she is only one-eighth-Quaker. But somehow, late in the month of December last year, Marina became obsessed with the idea that we had to spend Christmas in New England. 

My husband Frank and I tried to reason with her. We pointed out that we'd already made plans to spend the holiday with the relatives in New Jersey. But Marina, who can be very persuasive, conjured up the picture of an old house with a fireplace, set in a landscape of swirling snow. And she wouldn't give up on it.

"Your image sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie," I said, as I felt my resolve weakening, several days into her New England schtick.  "Have you ever seen Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck?"  

"Connecticut isn't the real New England... at least not the New England I was picturing," Marina answered, steering us back on topic.

Frank and I exchanged glances. The truth is that our daughter, consciously or not, had hit on one of our weak spots. For many years, we have both been aficionados of small, quaint American villages of the type Thornton Wilder probably had in mind when he wrote Our Town.

After years of searching, we've come to the realization that nothing quite like Wilder's archetypal American town actually exists, and probably never did.  But, in the process of looking, we've scrutinized quite a few areas of the Northeast. And even today we don't need to drink too many glasses of wine before we are willing to fall into our George and Emily routine, parodying the characters' famous love scene just for fun.

"We're are going to spend Christmas day in New Jersey. We've already promised," said Frank, finally laying down the law. Then, as it always does, his voice softened. "But I don't see why we couldn't go to New England two days later."

And so I found myself on the internet, researching B&Bs and calculating travel times. Shortly thereafter, I heard myself saying, "If we're going to go to New England, we should really do this right and stay in the ultimate New England town, on Nantucket."

Little Nantucket island, which sits in the Atlantic, thirty miles off the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has what is probably the most beautiful and well-preserved small town in America. Its narrow, cobbled streets are lined with classic 17th, 18th and early 19th century houses that will transport anyone who's willing back to the days when whaling ships ruled the seas and some of the richest sea captains in the world built their homes on the island.

These days Nantucket is a top notch summer resort and it commands the prices to match. During the summer, its beaches are lined with browning bodies, its restaurants crowded with diners and its docks packed with yachts. But seventy-five years ago, the island was just emerging from an economic tail spin that had begun after the Civil War, when the world replaced whale oil with petroleum as the fuel of choice.

   

Like many historic towns, Nantucket's preservation began by accident. When the American whaling boom went bust in the 1860s, all building on the island stopped. With no local jobs to speak of, most residents fled to the mainland in search of work. And the town, with its archeological slice of American architecture, ranging from modest, grey-shingled Quaker houses to opulent Greek Revival mansions, remained frozen in time for almost a century.

My rundown of the economic history of Nantucket, however, did not captivate Marina.  "Can we stay someplace with a fireplace? And do you think it will snow?" was all she wanted to know. Snow was beyond my job description, I told her, but a fireplace seemed possible. 

Luckily for our budget, the day after Christmas marks the start of the discount season on Nantucket. According to the man answering the phone at the Chamber of Commerce, Christmas week is the one time of the year when even sixth generation Nantucketers tend to go off island.

"The good news is: you'll find discounts. The bad news is: most things are closed," he told me, with classic New England deadpan.

We booked three nights in a suite with a fireplace in an old house on North Water Street, not far from the center of town, and went back to wrapping Christmas presents. We would open shiny, beribboned boxes on Christmas day with the relatives. But the big gift would be Nantucket, two days later.

As a typically stressed out New Yorker, I was secretly pleased that the island would be half closed. I imagined myself in my bathrobe, spending hours in front of the fireplace, reading.  I was even looking forward to the forced confinement of the five-hour drive north and the two-hour ferry ride from Hyannis. 

In preparation for the trip, I  bought the audio book version of Moby Dick. It had been years since I'd read Herman Melville's dark tale of the crew that ships out of Nantucket, on the Pequod. I couldn't wait to listen to the novel with Frank and Marina.

This would not be my first trip to Nantucket. The island holds a special place in my memories. I vacationed there first at the age of three and returned every third or fourth summer, throughout my childhood.

From those early vacations, I remember a pocketful of summertime pictures: sand dunes and beach roses, bicycles, white picket fences entwined with morning glories. From my parents, I'd heard tales of Nantucket in the 1940s, before tourism had hit its stride: ramshackle rooming houses on the edge of town and people swimming in the bay at night, their bodies shimmering with phosphorescence. 

As an adult, I returned to the island occasionally, renting a room for $20 a night, in the days before B&Bs became chic. But all these Nantucket memories were summertime images. Nobody I knew had ever been there at Christmas.

Not knowing what to expect, we packed wool hats and snow boots, umbrellas and raincoats. At dawn on December 27th we piled our suitcases, books, laptops, tapes and CDs into the car and headed north.

Melville's seafaring narrator, Ishmael, had done it a little differently, of course.  "I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for the Cape Horn and the Pacific," he tells readers.  

Ishmael's goal was adventure on the high seas. Nantucket was only his stepping off point. Our ambitions, involving snowy, cobbled lanes, floral wallpaper and a warm fireplace, were more modest. But then, as some critics have observed, next to Melville, we are all small potatoes.

In the days leading up to our little voyage, I'd given a lot of thought to Moby Dick and how a modern teen might react to it. Compared with her peers, Marina has a high tolerance for the antique. In recent years, she has performed in six or seven Shakespeare plays and has voluntarily rented and watched numerous Jane Austin movies. 

Still, Melville does not go down like Kate Beckinsale. Even in his own time, readers found his greatest book ponderous and Melville was accused of having made, "an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact."

Hoping to ward off an instant dismissal, I forewarned Marina that Moby Dick is an adventure story that sometimes seems to progress at the speed of glacial melt. 

"This is not one of those fast-paced action books.  It's poetic, philosophical, meditative. You've got to get yourself on the slow track to appreciate it," I warned, as we sped along the Cross-Bronx Expressway. From behind the wheel, Frank shot me a baleful look.

"OK," said Marina, who was already unpacking her laptop in the back seat. I knew she was humoring me. But that was fine.  All I wanted was for her to carve out a few hours' attention for the book.

Evidently the editor of our audio tape had worried about some of the same issues that I had. Mercifully, he'd deftly abridged 536 pages into under 5 hours. There was a chance we could actually complete Moby Dick before reaching our destination, I reflected. And so we began with one of the most famous of all openings, "Call me Ishmael."

"My mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with the famous old island, which amazingly pleased me," Ishmael observes, early on. The comment elicited a cheer from the passengers in our white Chevrolet.

At first, the story moved quickly. The scene where Ishmael first meets Queequeg, the tattooed harpooner from the South Sea islands, is one of my favorites in all literature.

Our narrator Ishmael is asleep in bed at the rough-and-tumble Spouter Inn, when Queequeg, jumps under the covers with him, a tomahawk pipe between his teeth. It sounds like something that might have happened in the Wild West or even the East Village in 1968, but this the mid-nineteenth century in puritan New England.  

As Melville describes it, Ishmael is briefly terrified by his unexpected bedfellow, but Queequeg's polite demeanor soon wins him over. Before long he has an epiphany, "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than with a drunken Christian."

In our car, this line elicited appreciative howls all around. If I had forgotten why Melville, despite his slow, cogitating prose, is still mercilessly modern, I was instantly reminded.

We listened on as the Chevrolet plowed through the grey December sludge of  north-bound highways.  The elusive Captain Ahab had not yet appeared, though the arhythmic clunk of his ivory leg crossed and re-crossed the quarterdeck, drumming out premonitions of doom.

Marina, too, was overcome with premonitions... premonitions about her homework. She sat in the back seat, iBook on her lap, surrounded by stacks of rumpled papers.  "Mom," she said finally, "I've got to make a dent in this school work."

Sad to say, the great white whale never breached on our horizon. Frank obligingly popped out the cassette and drove on in silence. Yet it somehow seemed that Queequeg, with his tomahawk pipe  and harpoons, hovered just behind us, like a hitchhiker on the running board, singing chanties under his breath.

(END OF PART I) 

Drawings from the Uffizi

Last week my friend Marylou and I went to the Morgan Library and Museum to see the drawings from the Uffizi. I hadn't been inside the Morgan in a good ten years and was amazed by the architectural changes. Gone is the charming little interior patio where you could eat a quiet lunch. Gone are the sleepy galleries where you might find yourself the only art lover in sight. 

The Morgan has transformed itself into an upscale tourist attraction, complete with the requisite loft-like entrance room and lavish gift shop where you can put art on your Amex card, or at least some Murano glass jewelry. Now it is fabulous. But I have to say, at the risk of sounding like a conservative fogey, that  I miss the old Morgan--its peace and intimacy.

I went to the Uffizi show without having read any reviews. And it's a good thing I did. I don't take it well when people tell me what my eyes should think they are seeing. Unfortunately, even the curator--or the person who wrote the wall copy--couldn't resist telling us viewers what to see.  Next to Michelangelo's drawing that includes a bust of a woman, the head of an old man and the bust of a child, a sign proclaimed it one of the most "perfect" drawings he ever made.

Perfect? Not!--as my fifteen-year-old daughter would say. The bust of the woman sits there in profile, rigid as marble--and I don't mean Michelangelo's marbles, which are usually astoundingly fluid. She's got a curled, Roman upper lip and a slightly dim look on her face. Her hair is done in elaborate curls and braids and tucked neatly under an absurd helmet. Her bared breasts are pushed up and out, as if by some Fashion Week sadist.

"She looks like a man," Marylou whispered to me. And I nodded vigorously. "You know, sometimes they used male models for women in those days," she added.

"Did they all use male models or was this just one of Michelangelo's peculiarities?" I asked. But Marylou didn't know the answer. I am still wondering.

Perfect. I'm not sure I believe in the concept. But if I did, and if I were going to burden one of Michelangelo's drawings with that label, it would probably be his pen and ink Satyr's Head, which is not in the Uffizi's collection but in the Louvre's. Although Michelangelo was drawing a mythological creature, there is such beauty and humanity in that delicately-etched profile! Surely he was seeing a self-portrait of sorts in the satyr. Every time I look at that drawing, I'm astonished and awed again. Unfortunately, the Morgan show doesn't include this gorgeous piece. But you can view an electronic image on the internet.

A second Michelangelo drawing does hang in the Morgan show, a sketch of a leg. Three sketches of legs and some bones, all on one piece of paper, to be exact. And they are beautifully-drawn legs, though over-muscled. Hundreds of artists, throughout history, have sketched equally lovely legs, though. Michelangelo himself probably sketched hundreds and hundreds. There is nothing terribly special about this drawing. If you want to find the poet of Carrara, look in Rome or Florence. You will not find him in New York.

More exciting than the Michelangelo drawings is the Two Studies of Male Figures by Pontormo, one a rough sketch in black chalk, the other a more finished piece in brown, both on the same sheet of paper.  I love these studies because you can see Pontormo working away, drawing and redrawing the outline of the shoulder, the foreshortening of the knee and thigh. He's working so fast, he doesn't take time to erase. A perfect image doesn't matter to him. What counts is catching the motion, the moment in time.

One recent critic referred to the black sketch as "Futurism." But that misses the point that this was not a finished work for Pontormo. Looking at the loose black lines, I realized that, in some ways, art really hasn't changed very much in 500 years. Walk into a studio today, where students are drawing from a model, and you'll see the same kind of thing on one sketch pad after another. Stripped of its broader context, the basic stuff of so much art remains the same: the hand and the eye of the artist, a stick of charcoal, a piece of paper.

There are 79 Renaissance drawings in the Morgan show. Most are well-done but uninspired. What stuck me most was how busy these guys must have been, always working on one project or another. A wall to be painted, an altar to be designed. A benefactor to flatter with a commissioned portrait. Compared to many artists today, these guys were lucky, economically speaking. You can't picture them sitting by the telephone or the computer, waiting for a bit of work to trickle in. These Florentine craftsmen seem to have been perpetually employed. In a way, they were like carpenters and plumbers, submitting their bids, rushing to get the work in on deadline. Another day, another dollar.

We know, of course, that Michelangelo seethed under the grind of the endless busywork. In his mind, perhaps, he was one of his own unfinished slaves, forever trapped in stone. While for Romans, Florentines and future generations around the world he was the genius of Western civilization, he seems to have been a failure in his own eyes.

One day, several years ago, I was wandering through the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, when I came upon his Florentine Pieta. Nothing had prepared me for it. I had never heard of the sculpture, or seen a photo of it. Later, I would read about the work in books and study pictures of many angles of the group that includes Jesus, Mary, a servant and the hooded Nicodemus. Later, I would brood over its tragic story. But on that winter day, suddenly, there I was, all by myself, face to face with Michelangelo.

I took one look at the hooded figure--his broad cheekbones and broken nose--and knew I was staring into the soul of the artist. Michelangelo, old at the time of its sculpting, was facing his fate. It was like having a conversation with the man on his deathbed. I stood there alone with him and wept. 

Only after drying my eyes did I realize that the Pieta had been mutilated. Someone had once attacked the marble and smashed it to pieces. The Jesus was still missing a leg. Other pieces of the sculpture had been broken, then reattached. Who could have done this? What madman could possibly have committed this brutal act? 

You probably know or perhaps have guessed the answer faster than I did.  It was the artist himself. Michelangelo Buonarroti, the same passionate life force that brought David, the giant-slayer, out of a misshapen block of marble and hammered out the Titan Moses for the Pope's tomb, took his chisel against one of his own greatest works, leaving it in ruins on his studio floor. There are many stories about why he did this. Some say there was a flaw in the marble, one that was impossible to work around. Maybe. But clearly the most tragic and beautiful flaw was in Michelangelo himself. Michelangelo, the man who demanded such extraordinary, impossible brilliance from his art. Let us thank all the stars in the firmament for Michelangelo Buonarroti, who has brought so much joy to so many, but also ponder that he found little peace for himself.

Of the 79 Uffizi drawings at the Morgan, I was most captivated by a small sketch by Santi di Tito of a sleeping baby. After a long progression of carefully-drawn figures and tableaux, at last I came upon this spontaneous ray of sunshine. A small, chubby face, blissfully unconscious. It could as easily have been Provence in 1880 or Kansas in 1945. Simple, direct, unpretentious. No Popes or patrons dangling dollars over this one, it's safe to guess. Even during the hard-working Italian Renaissance, an artist could sometimes find a moment to pick up a pencil and draw a few lines just for the sheer pleasure of drawing. When it comes to art, may we always make space for those simple delights.  

Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries, Drawings from the Uffizi

Through April 20th, 2008, at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016