“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.”

Sometimes a demurral speaks volumes, as I discovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend.  Me and my spouse dropped in to catch Naked Before the Camera, a pocket-sized exhibition of photographic nudes culled from the Met’s own holdings.  The show is smart and informative, combining names from the arts canon (Eakins, Brassaï, Muybridge) with works whose original aims had nothing to do with art—some of the more interesting shots are those from medical textbooks, taken to educate physicians on conditions ranging from hermaphrodism to disfiguring tumors).

Seeing art in any form should be a cause for celebration, but more than a few times, a group or a couple would enter this gallery, and a member of the party would excuse themselves with something like, “I think I’m going to wait for you outside.”  Often, though, I saw people stop abruptly before entering, as if zapped by one of those electronic Sentry rays dog owners use to keep their pets in line (admittedly, the entrance’s light-bulbed signage, a girly-show come-on, sends a weird mixed signal).  I started to draw conclusions—these were Midwestern tourists, I surmised, who see the word, “naked” and get their conformist, God-fearing backs up.  Was it embarrassment that kept them from entering this brightly lit sanctum?  There was no place to hide; other patrons would be standing right next to you, looking at the same Irving Penn nude, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous shot of the kneeling Patti Smith.  No doubt viewers would have their own reactions; the fear, as my partner observed, is that they might be studying yours: caught, you’d be, a sinner looking at dirty pictures.  What an interesting reminder of shame, dressed up in a morality of the sort that made me flee Ohio, and one you’d hope the big city would give you license to shuck off; it made me think of Jane Fonda’s line to the title character in Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 film Klute: “Did we get to you, just a little bit?”  In the case of those skittish museumgoers, not enough, a fact that filled me with sadness.

No one walked out of Fort Blossom, Revisited, John Jasperse’s fine, provocative work that closed this week at New York Live Arts.  Their season, filled with revivals of works by major artists, hits a major peak with this exploration, described in the press release as “ a personal look at the body.”  In Fort Blossom, the bodies are male and female, but the traditional gaze gets reversed: the nudity on display is male (the two women in the piece are fully clothed), and their comportments are explicitly revealing (simulated anal sex occurs early in the work, and throughout, copious exposure of spread-eagled genitalia, front and back, fully lit).  The initial effect is titillation carried to the extreme, until it becomes something else—an examination of intimacy, yes (between men, dancers, audience and performer), but also of the movement possibilities inherent in basic principals of balance, extension and flexibility.  Watching the magnificent dancers Ben Asriel and Burr Johnson, you were stuck not so much by their un-self consciousness as their limbs traced patterns across each other’s bodies, leaving no crevice unexplored, but a sense that Jasperse was re-creating the species, presenting an egalitarian view of a world that retired the word “prurient” long along.  Notions of gayness, sex between men, propriety, get a do-over here; there is only the beauty of sinew, form and an choreographic imagination willing—daring—us to project beyond the narrow-minded baggage that feels particularly American, one we’ve been served since the DAR proclaimed themselves the New Order.   In art, at least, how refreshing to see cooler heads prevail to show us a self we’d not considered; the trick, of course, is to get us to step through the door.

Above, Man Ray, Male Torso (1930); Johnson and Asriel in Fort Blossom, Revisited (photo, Ian Douglas)

Finally he’s off the fence.  Obama endorses same-sex marriage–thousands cheer…history is made…and the hand-wringing (over his re-election prospects, and whether this constitutes a genuine sea change for gay rights in America) begins…

Jonathan Frid, right, with Grayson Hall in "Dark Shadows"

Is April the kindest, or the cruelest month?  The party line affirms the first: it’s the time of rebirth when saucer magnolias pop their tragic blooms, crocuses and tulips sprout, warm weather hints and Easter descends, toting tales of resurrection.

I’m not feeling it, which makes me wonder if I ever have.  Chocolate bunnies excepted, I feel only the slog of a season dangling its prospects of summer as traces of winter linger.  Broadway producers indulge their mad rush to the Tony Award deadline with shows that aren’t worth the price of a two-for, let alone the hundred-plus now being asked for premium theater seats.  All of us have too many taxes to pay; I buckle under the weight of allergy symptoms medical specialists swear I don’t have.  My introduction to the freelance world, a patchwork of jobs that range from adjunct teaching and figure modeling to voice-overs that augment a fast-expiring unemployment check, confers more exhaustion than hope.  Twenty-four years ago my father died in this month; even now I’m haunted more by the tragedy of never having felt close to him than the actual ache of missing him.  His was also a world ruled by work and money woes (how could it not, burdened with the care of 10 children?). He was a good man, or strived to be, but the connection eluded us; his insistence on respect above all else meant a childhood spent fearing him more than loving him, a fact that leaves me playing the what-if game, a pointless expenditure of regret.

Recent departures color this faux spring.  Dick Clark, that staple of dance-party Saturdays (American Bandstand) who later grew into a producing force (the Golden Globes, etc.) and a kind of Father Time who reigned over New Year’s Eve, died.  So did Jonathan Frid (as Barnabas Collins, the star of TV’s Dark Shadows—as a film remake looms, the poor guy must be rolling in his grave.) and Greg Ham, the flutist who supplied such infectious (and litigious, in the case of that pick hit, “Down Under) runs for the 80s pop group Men at Work.

No argument: Levon Helm was a rock legend, both as a member of The Band, and later on his own as a singer/songwriter and actor (that was him as Loretta Lynn’s father in the film Coal Miner’s Daughter).  But radio DJ Pete Fornatale looms larger in my mind—when I moved to NYC, WNEW-FM served me my first revelation.  He shook me out of my Motown/Stax rut by flooding the airwaves with the Clash, Suzanne Vega, the Pretenders and a ton of other cats who’ve made my life richer (or at least more fun).  Viva Two for Tuesdays!

In a few days April will be history.  Harold Arlen comes to mind:

Merry Month of May, sunny skies of blue

Clouds have rolled away and the sun peeps through,

May express happiness.

The barefoot months can’t come soon enough.

The sound of the wind was strong.  It was that, and what felt like sudden warmth that made Christina sit up, then shield her eyes from the sharp light.  She’d fallen asleep in the field.  How long had it been—an hour?  Minutes?  She yawned.  The inhalation rephrased the moment, reminded her why she’d come back to this place that was more than an hour’s walk from the town’s only inn where she’d left her watch and car.

Slowly she turned to look, first at the barn, then at the monstrous house whose current inhabitants had robbed her of her fortune, her future and whatever happiness she hoped to grab from life.  The family had not come back.  It was getting late, and she’d have to hurry.  It would not take long.  There’d be hay in the barn.  The animals.  She’d set them free—her troubles were not their fault—before setting it ablaze.

The mansion would be more work.  But the days had been dry, and the structure was old, and made of wood.  Hay from the barn could be used to kindle a flame.  The windows were low.  If she could not open them from outside, she’d have to break the glass.  Pulling a strand of hair from her face, her eyes continued her survey of the space between the barn and the house.  She decided the job would take a lot of hay.  The wind would help.

A smile crept across her face as she rose.  Her steps crunched the field grass with purpose now, mindful of the time, calculating the next steps.  Hurry.   She was almost running now, the sun’s warmth dampening her all over as she reached inside her pocket to finger the stash of matches.  Time to make them pay.

Teamwork: Previn with her former husband, composer Andre Previn

All ten year-old tragedians need a soundtrack.  Mine was the Theme from Valley of the Dolls, that heartbreaking ballad from the film that starred Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Patty Duke.  I had no idea that the song was meant to underscore the film heroine’s descent into pill addiction (I thought Parkins, Tate and Duke were the dolls). Instead, those Dory Previn lyrics tapped into a self-dislocation that was partly intuitive/real: a burgeoning sexuality that I didn’t know what to make of; the realization that my interests didn’t jibe with that of my siblings, or few other kids; my instinctive attraction to melancholia, less to do with being a genuine depressive than exhibiting a trait that was distinctly Cancerian.  Previn’s gifts made her a true queen of pain: RIP.

Dionne Warwick sings the Theme from Valley of the Dolls

I heard the news last night before bed, and forgot about it.   Then I woke up too early and, as I sat in front of the TV, the news scroll reminded me.  Still it’s vague, I’m in denial until I walk down to my building’s lobby to pick up our Sunday Times.  A tenant on the first floor, a woman not known for her warmth, is leaving our building.  She’s dressed in fur and wearing a hat (Church, I conclude).   I say good morning, ask her how she’s doing.  She replies, “I’m sad about Whitney.”

Unlike my neighbor, I kid myself that I am anything but proprietary about celebrities (that first-name familiarity—Ella, Frank, Lena, Sarah, Tony, Nat—my word).  Back in the apartment I start to read the obit, and get unreasonably angry when they reference an album title as “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (correction: it’s  “I’m Your Baby Tonight”).  Idiots, I mutter, as I ponder whether I should run to my computer and fume out an admonishing letter—the fact-checker should be fired, Jon Pareles should know better, blah, blah, blah.

That song’s melody floats into consciousness, followed by lyrics (‘whatever you want from me, whatever you need from me, I’m your baby tonight’), followed by images from the video: Whitney in triplicate, styled in long gowned Supremes-splendor, her timbre mimicking girl-group silkiness until restraint gives way to melismatic fireworks.  Other songs crowd in: the overplayed-but-undeniably-virtuosic “I Will Always Love You,” from The Bodyguard soundtrack; those stunning pop twins, “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” and practically every power ballad she ever recorded.

At my computer I see that the spouse has already pulled out some CDs (“They were buried in the 80s pile,” he said, referring to a stash buried behind a row of celebrity bios and dramatic plays in our office) and placed them next to my workstation.  By now, her music is loud inside my head; he knows the volume won’t abate until our stereo blares the real thing. RIP.

You turned on the TV on Saturday afternoon and there he was, the envy of every black boy on the block.  It was his high style and aspirational exhortations that drew us each week, mirrored more youthfully by the Soul Train dancers, whose moves we copied for use on our own dance floors: street corners, school dances and in the living room of my parent’s house.  Soul Train was a watershed for black youth; sure the term black power had been bandied for years, but Cornelius, a kind of hip godfather, took the militancy out of the equation.  He was a purveyor of soul, the kind that made hoods question whether a life of crime or profligacy was worth it.  He turned a lot of cats around.

Williams photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Our tendency to crown Marian Anderson is justified; after all, she had the weight of publicity (and the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt) to hone her mythical status.  But it was actually Camilla Williams, a recitalist like Anderson, who claims the honor of being the first Black female to ever play a major opera house.  Her 1946 achievement as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly at New York City Opera was a transcendent milestone for the daughter of a domestic and a chauffeur.  In death, we are reminded of the ground she paved for others–Kathleen Battle, Wilhelmina Wiggins-Fernandez, and Anderson herself, who wouldn’t make her opera debut–at the Met–until 1955.

Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof–mention him and our thoughts immediately conjure an image of a blue-eyed God named Paul Newman.  But that was the movie–onstage, the role was created by Ben Gazzara.  Sporting a glint in his eye and blessed with a face that could charm or pummel like a fist, this protean actor didn’t go on to have quite the career of Newman but he did alright, garnering Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for a body of work that included the TV series Run for Your Life and film collaborations with John Cassavetes, Mira Nair, Lars Von Trier and Todd Solondz. The term actor’s actor is a bit of a cliche, but Gazzara exemplified it–and audiences loved him too.  RIP, and thanks.