hammocks
i can not remember when i was last in a hammock. well, yes i can. It was a few hours ago. today is the last time i was in a hammock. but before that, i do not know. i feel like it was not that long ago but i can not place the stateless memory of feeling like grass was grabbing at my back. today i finally found the hammocks at gantry park plaza, the former bombed-out area that has been the scene of an instant community of generic high rises abutting vacant lots. the hammocks are public, and not of the most elegant stuff, but one can‘t complain. they are nice, and i hogged one for several minutes.
i also encountered a couple of the pianos that have been placed around town. i sat and played some of the chopin double-thirds etude, the arpeggio etude Op 10/1, and philip glass. then that schubert/liszt standchen. no one seemed to notice, but new yorkers are hard to impress. i remember once time in tampa, after a recital given by a new pianist in town at a piano store. the purpose of the recital was to attract new students, and sure enough as soon as the concert ended there was line of youngsters and their parents eager to sign up for lessons from this woman. i remember nothing of the concert but for what an asshole i was afterward. while the pianist was basking in adulation of her audience i sat at one of the 100 pianos and tore into the Liszt Piano Concerto #1, raising a ruckus of sound that startled everyone and which drew the crowd of young people and their parents away from the star pianist and gathering like moths around the piano at which i sat. the pianist‘s husband looked like he was having a heart attack as he somberly leaned against the piano, acutely conscious of his wife being upstaged but ultimately safe from any further intrusions, as i was no teacher and never aspired to such things.
sometimes i forget that I even play the piano. it is in my hands so innately that i almost never mention it to new friends or acquaintances. indeed, a few years ago i dated a woman for about 6 months and at the end of the line she claimed she had no idea i played a musical instrument. in her case this reflected her character more than anything, since i played for her, sometimes for lengthy periods of time, but she dismissed virtually all of my activites on account of her belief that all men are dumbasses.
it is surprising, in a way, to consider the extremes. some people seem to hunger for the company of a musician playing their instrument, while others are utterly oblivious to the activity and consider themselves courteous by waiting for a moment of silence so they can cut in with a subject-changing question or comment. my mother often complained about how my great-aunt would come by at the holidays and ask me to play piano, only to talk and carry on a full conversation as i played. she never listened, my great-aunt, but as mother grew older she adopted the same behaviour. she would sadly ask me to play for her, then seconds after i started playing she would start talking, or if the music was too loud for her sullen voice to penetrate she would knowingly wait for a cadence or a rest before intercepting the performance with her litanies. sometimes she would sit in the other room as i played and i would reach a cadence before noticing that she was talking, evidently in some cases for a few minutes, but her words vanished into the tangle of my piano playing. in time it became clear that the only way i could play so that she could listen without interrupting was via the Internet, as i broadcast my piano playing over the Sorabji.com Entertainment Network (hah) and she would tune in. she was readily influenced by anything that came to her via electronic means, but the same content presented in person vanished.
there was something nice about playing a piano on the shore of the east river, looking toward manhattan and the queensboro bridge, listening for the tiny sound of philip glass, schubert, and chopin lift off from the beat-up piano and wander into the hot breeze of this 92-degree day. these pianos have been placed all over town, but the one nearest to where i live was promptly destroyed by baseball-bat-wielding vandals. i bet you won‘t see mention of that in the press releases for this project. i don‘t know who did it but i think that the acts of these vandals could be construed as legitimate expression. any number of grants-winning artists have burned pianos on the beaches and destroyed them by some means or other. unless the current project had strictly twee rules about how the public was to express itself at these instruments then i think anything goes.
i have a foggy memory of seeing lorne hollander playing a steinway grand at columbus circle. i can‘t remember now if this was in 1986, when i was here to audition for juilliard, or in 1990, after i moved here, or even in 1988 when i spent a few hours in manhattan on a layover during an amtrak journey from oberlin to tampa (or vice-versa). or maybe i never saw this phastasm of memory but read about it enough to believe that i had seen it. whatever the case, i do not think i have seen very many pianos in public places. or hammocks. hammocks outnumber the pianos at gantry plaza.
i attempted to loll in the hot sun at the end of a pier but within a minute of lying down and baring my sexy chest my solitude was subsumed by a mass of japanese tourists, 20 of them, chuckling and joking in their language and taking pictures of every goddam thing. stereotypes old and new in action, with the old saw of the japanese camera-wielding tourists meeting the new stereotype of gantry plaza as a curiosity-seeker magnet real estate investment community of always-away foreigners. i can not seem to craft the previous sentence as i intend it. must be the heat getting to me. tomorrow it will be RFH and i might see if i can spend the day on an air-conditioned bus. i have abundant a/c at home but i love the heat. the heat here, in new york, is so much safer than in Florida. today‘s 92-degree threshold barely felt like true heat to me. it was close, though, and i may have overdone it.
