I took a Metro-North train from Harlem up to Westchester County early this afternoon because that was the nearest location of After Hours, which is not a gentlemen’s club but the formalwear chain my friend Joe has selected for his wedding party’s tuxedos, two-button Tommy Hilfiger models with long ties and “truffle vests.”
After a relaxing half-hour ride, I set out on foot from the White Plains station, spotted a large blue Sears sign, then walked over and entered the mall it was attached to. There was no tuxedo store to be found. After calling Joe, I learned I was in the wrong mall. Joe mapped my predicament online then relayed to me via cellphone that White Plains has a pair of malls approximately eight city blocks apart and I was in the more ghetto of the two, the Galleria.
After arriving at my correct destination, the Westchester Mall, I took in its modern architecture, carpeted floors, Apple Store, Sharper Image, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus and roving packs of Asian teens. I stood in line at After Hours with a bunch of gawky high-schoolers whose older brothers were getting married, had various body parts tape-measured and tried on two in-store “test jackets,” smelling of sweat and cigarettes, to pinpoint my size (37 long, for those keeping score at home).
I took an express train back to Grand Central because I had plans to see The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last month. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Hitchcockian The Conversation, in which a snoop (Gene Hackman) thinks he’s heard a murder in a wiretapped apartment through his headphones. To a lesser degree, I thought of 3-Iron, in which a young couple lives for moments at a time in the vacant apartments of strangers.
In Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe plays a member of East Germany’s Stasi in the Berlin Wall-divided early ‘80s. Resembling Stanley Tucci from certain angles, he’s an expert interrogator who switches to the passive end of the business when he takes on a life-consuming wiretap stakeout of a writer who’s suspected of harboring a subversive streak. The same stone-faced officer who’s patient and exacting enough to sweat the “truth” from suspects at the station has difficulty finding fault in a man whose complicated life he’s exposed to in conversations the writer has with his girlfriend and friends. The end, sappy yet satisfying, gets choppy with jumps in the timeline of multiple years at a time. But I’d recommend it.
And, yes, I still think it deserved Best Foreign Language Film over Pan’s Labyrinth. That film, while wondrous in its effects and imagination, had a predictable fairytale plot and little character development. Lives of Others is more unexpected and focuses on the nuances and complexities of human nature and expression. Katie disagrees. “I guess you don’t care about the plight of a little girl,” she snapped in disgust, as she, Andie and I briefly discussed the films afterwards. I didn’t take it further because I’m not smart enough to win an argument with her. She should consider a career in politics.
Katie and her posse visited the Pollock-Krasner House a week ago and she told me that the floor of the studio out back is still spattered with paint: a work of art in itself. (You can walk on it, but you have to wear special slippers.) If ever an artist exemplified intense external emotion best, it’s Pollock. His works are segments of chaos, almost as if that slung paint could go on forever if not for the constraints of the canvas.
I thought about this today as I toured an exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s art from the ’30s through the ’60s on display at the Katonah Museum of Art in the hamlet of Katonah, New York.
Self-contained and insular in his life and art, Cornell is the polar opposite of Pollock. His works demonstrate emotion too, of course, but of reflection or longing, via assemblages he built inside handmade wooden boxes, and more fantastically, inside pocketwatches, antique books and blue-glassed specimen boxes. He’d stock these containers with Boo Radley curios from a lifetime of collecting and hoarding at antique shops and five-and-dime stores. An automobile watchcase contains a tiny silver spoon, fork and knife, with a thin spiral of copper metal and crumbs of pyrite. In a homage to Magritte, Cornell cut uniform coaster-sized discs from photos of the sky and from the pages of a book in French, stacking them neatly in a paperboard powder box along with a lens flecked with white paint.
He spent most of his life holed up in a house in Queens with his mother, crippled brother and an encyclopedic knowledge of art, science, the cinema, ballet, literature, theatre, music and history. He admired actresses and made themed boxed artworks for them. A related work on display at the exhibit, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), is a valise box containing detritus from the life of a fictional character: dozens of postcards and photos, a prayer card and a claim ticket, maps, a calendar page from Saturday, August 17, and a tarnished penny.
After Marcel Duchamp befriended and hired him in the early 1940s, Cornell built boxes for the great dadaist’s boîte-en-valise series. One of these on display contains 69 reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works, including miniature replicas of the Large Glass, a urinal and the Mona Lisa with a moustache.
On my train ride back to Manhattan, a blind couple boarded, each led by a harnessed Labrador retriever trained for public transport. As soon as the couple found free seats, the dogs flattened their bodies and squirmed underneath. Then the man reached down and tucked in his dog’s tail and left rear leg, which were intruding into the aisle. The dogs didn’t appear comfortable with their lack of headroom and the man’s yellow Lab had the doleful look of an animal resigned to its duty. Its head poked into the footspace of the seat behind the couple and the guy there gently bonked the dog’s snout with his shoe by accident before realizing the animal was there. When the couple rose to exit at White Plains, the dogs squeezed out and it appeared as if they were being birthed from the floor of the train.
I took a train up to Greenwich, Connecticut today. The ride took 50 minutes, not including the time it took to get over to Grand Central from my office building. Then I attended a meeting that lasted maybe 25 minutes. And then I took a 50-minute train ride back into the city. What a time waster. On the positive side, I find train rides relaxing; is it because the constant gentle rocking of the traincars in motion lulls one into a rock-a-bye-baby state of drowsiness? I think so.