saffron closed up, after two weeks of heavy trading

Posted on by thom

elfintech posted a photo:

saffron closed up, after two weeks of heavy trading

There are just so many pictures of The Gates, that nothing I took seemed interesting to me; I couldn’t find my own voice there in the park. But this one, turned 90 degrees counter-clockwise from its original angle, reminded me of stock market graphs, or an EKG.

don’t i know you?

Posted on by thom

Before the ballet Wednesday evening, Jeff and I had dinner in the Kennedy Center cafe. While eating, I noticed a male couple sitting a few tables away, one of whom seemed very familiar to me. However, I couldn’t remember how I knew him, though I was pretty sure it was from years earlier… had he been a squaredancer, perhaps, or did I know him from the gay science-fiction club, or, even worse in the lack of recollection, might we ever have been intimate? Was it even here, in DC, or could it have been earlier, back when I lived in Boston? I couldn’t remember his name, but I could recall a quality of voice, patterns of speech, so in whatever context we knew each other, we had spoken together, certainly.

Throughout dinner, I kept looking over, unable to help myself, trying to remember. Once or twice our eyes met, but there seemed to be no overt spark of recognition in his face. However, when he and his dinner companion finished, they walked over and he spoke first, saying that he was pretty sure we knew each other, but he couldn’t recall where or how. I confessed I believed the same, but could not remember the connection either. He said, “car club”? I said, “No. Squaredancing?” He shook his head. “Do you know X?” “I know the name, but don’t know him well; do you know Y and Z?” “No.” We both shrugged. He gave me his name, I shared mine. Ah, yes, that sounded familiar… maybe it clicked. Yes? No, the connection yet remained elusive. Twenty-four hours later, it still does.

wrong of spring

Posted on by thom

Wednesday evening we went to the Kennedy Center to see the Washington Ballet present their world premiere of Trey McIntyre’s Rite of Spring, along with the Balanchine Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Christopher Wheeldon’s There Where She Loved, the latter set to music by Chopin and Kurt Weill.

We were in the first row of the balcony, to one side, with a pretty good view of the stage. The first ballet was the Balanchine piece, which seemed pretty uninspiring and left me unimpressed; I ended up zoning out during much of it. After the first intermission, though, the company returned to perform the Wheeldon selection, which was accompanied by live pianist and two sopranos, one for the Chopin segments and one for the Weill, who alternated from segment to segment. This was an intensely moving piece about love, especially failed or misgiven love–I was actually brought to tears a couple of times–that sent me into the second intermission feeling extraordinarily energized (and with a determination to explore Weill’s music in more depth).

It’s unfortunate, then, that the world premiere of McIntyre’s realization of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, while boldly provocative and with moments of great impact, as well as an intriguingly visualized setting in a (Venetian?) fancy-dress ball, overall came across as emotionless, confusing and not even particularly well-executed (with several falls and one missed entrance); moreover, the women’s costumes–most often a sort of bustle–were visually distracting and seemed to be ill-conceived, as the dancers seemed almost to fight with them, or to be uncomfortable with their displaced centers of gravity.

On the other hand, any opportunity to see as much well-toned male flesh as the openly gay McIntyre’s Rite offered can’t be considered entirely a waste of time.

Oddly, the pictures and description offered on the Washington Ballet’s web site to accompany the notice of McIntyre’s Rite are nothing at all like the piece he actually offered; I think I’d have preferred the painted “Neanderthal tribe” to the decadent Borgia-esque treatment he ended up with.