marathon day 2018

Cowbell: check. Bright clothes: check. Sign: check. Marathon prep for Sean M Enright complete.



Sorry you didn't see the sign, Sean, but some other guy named Sean stopped and took a picture of it!

jfrej

A week from now I will be a year older. It doesn't seem like it should work that way but I am assured it does. In any case, facebook which knows everything about me thinks I should set up a fundraiser and at first I was like "eh" but they say they'll do it free (in exchange for, you know, your info and your eyeballs but that's on you I guess). So:

I had the very good fortune recently to meet a poet and teacher named Simon Lichman. We were trapped in tiny plane seats next to each other and over the course of two hours talked about pretty much everything you can imagine, most of it about art and justice and religion; whether it's possible to be a secular Christian; his work with Palestinian and Israeli youth; his trip to Lithuania and Poland. More than anything else, what stuck with me was the idea of the "stranger in our midst," an idea that occurs again and again throughout the Old and New Testaments. In Exodus, for example: "There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you."

So with that in mind I am asking you to pledge a few bucks to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. They are on the front lines of the social justice movement, fighting for the rights of people of color and immigrants and other oppressed peoples, fighting racism and anti-Semitism and transphobia and other injustices. They are led by my brilliant and fearless friend Audrey, and they're doing the work, and they deserve your support.

So jump in with me. I'll get us started with a hundred bucks; together I'm pretty sure we can grow that to a thousand. What do you say?

Update: Oct 28

I posted this yesterday, and about an hour later I heard the terrible news. Please give if you can and share if you will.

Update: Oct 31

Last night I attended a vigil organized by JFREJ and other groups in Union Square. It was an immensely strong community - Jews, Muslims, Christians, nonbelievers and more - who came together to share their commitment to creating a just world. I feel privileged to be among them.
In my original post for this fundraiser I described my friend Audrey Sasson as "fearless." I don't know, that's the word that came to me; that's the way I think of her. But as it happens, at the vigil on Saturday she talked about feeling the fear rising and even, if I remember correctly, the fear of the fear, the fear that it will keep us from doing what we need to do.

So maybe a better word would have been "brave": not free from fear, but acting in spite of it. From the outside, though, it looks like fearlessness to me.

Anyway, here is part of what Audrey wrote the day after the vigil:

"...this is our country too. We do have a place here. We will advocate for others to be here too, and to welcome them in. Our movement is a movement for multiracial, inclusive democracy. We are building a future for each other, and a future where the promise of this country can be realized. And we know democracy will win."

in & of itself

There is much I want to say about In & Of Itself, a performance by the magician Derek DelGaudio, that I can't. Partly it's that anything I might say about the show, even really minor details, seem like they would be spoilers, and that feels wrong - it feels wrong even though very few people ever read these words, which are after all not for anybody but myself, and even though even fewer of you might go see this show before it closes in a month or so. I am not alone in that regard; Joe Posnanski, whose blog post here inspired me to go see it, says really nothing about what takes place inside the theater, and the Steven Colbert interview with DelGaudio is equally unwilling to part with any details. (This American Life spilled some of the beans, and I will not link to that.)

But I also simply can't tell you anything meaningful about the show, because - you had to be there. I mean, I could tell you this trick or that, whatever, the color of his suit or the set or the cards on the wall (there's a detail, but that's well disclosed various places, and it's pretty much the first thing that happens in the show; happens before the show starts, actually). You might react, "huh, that sounds cool" but I don't think I would be able to get you to understand: No, it was beautiful.

And I can't tell you about the show because I am still not sure what I saw.

I guess it was magic. I guess, because thinking about every "trick" that occurred - there wasn't any mystery to it, in a sense. There's an extended bit with cards, and the wonder of it is that DelGaudio was doing everything in plain sight, in front of your eyes, people six feet away from him and a camera zoomed in, you can see his hands moving in close up and he does things that simply seem impossible. And that is a lot of the show, indeed: there are things in front of your eyes that you are not seeing. There is a light offstage right illuminating him - here is something else I will tell you about the show - and he talks about that light, and the person causing it to turn on, and why she does that when she does that; he calls attention to the fact that we are in a theater and this is artifice; there is no illusion about the artifice, except he also says "I can only say these things because you won't believe me," like no matter how hard we try to pierce the artifice we insist on believing that it is artifice.  Not all these thoughts are my own, really.  But most of what he does, even - especially - the big number at the end, is not so much about what he did or how he did it as how is it possible that he could do that.

I guess that is magic. At some level though, it is craft, not art, although maybe craft taken to that level becomes art. It is an unbelievable level of craft which is indistinguishable from magic.

But this performance, as a whole, is unquestionably art, by any definition but particularly by Hammett's definition which is: work or performance wherein the audience participates in the construction of meaning.

But I cannot tell you what the meaning of In & Of Itself is because I do not know what it meant. I am still working that out; writing this is part of working that out. People will tell you it is an exploration into identity, and it is partly that. The show itself seems happy enough to promote itself as that, but then again in the business you sell what you can sell, and that's probably something the artier folks who wouldn't be caught dead at a Magic Show - me for example - can hang onto. Maybe that's what DelGaudio thinks it's about. But then again, "wherein the audience participates in the construction of meaning," so he doesn't totally get to say.

I think - this is a postulate; I may reject it later - In & Of Itself is about seeing. That's obvious, you know, like when my professor Terry Hummer described writing in his notes about a novel, "Names matter." Of course a show that uses sleight of hand is about seeing, and more importantly what you don't see. So I should fix that: In & Of Itself is about not seeing. It's about the elephant in the room.  Literally, there is an elephant in the room. Not literally, of course, it's metaphorical, but there is literally a metaphorical elephant in the room (there is something else I have told you about the show), although even for that someone on Twitter described his son saying "I see the elephant, Dad," and then seeing it himself, so I think it is possible that there was a literal elephant in the room that I missed, like that video where you are watching people passing a ball and miss the man in a gorilla suit strolling through.

I have no idea what I may not have seen that was right in front of my eyes. And maybe that's why I find the show so powerful, now.  (I am not sure I found it exactly powerful yesterday.  I found it wonderful, delightful, you know, those sorts of things - but today I am finding it powerful.)  I go through life wondering, often, How do they see that?  How do I not see that?  And I feel alone in that; I feel like everybody else has the secret power, except it's not secret, everybody has it, that tells them how to react, that enables them to see other people clearly in ways that are a complete mystery to me.  It is right in front of my face, six feet away, and everything is moving a little too quickly, with a little too much distraction, for me to notice it.  It is possible however that nobody has this power, that not seeing is just the human condition, and we are all trying to go through life looking like we see everything.  Like we have figured out the tricks when we are just guessing, and probably guessing wrong.  We cannot even see ourselves.

I'm going to leave it there.  Here is a picture of a brick.  It is just a brick, painted gold, sitting at the corner of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) and Houston Street.

derek

I wrote a while back that nearly everything I've ever written is a kind of obituary. This is a real one. Our friend Derek died yesterday. You can read Reg's remembrance here or here.

Derek was both one of the least sentimental people I have ever known, and one of the greatest lovers of the arts I have ever known. This seems an unlikely combination. He was an economist and brought an economist's skepticism and rationality to almost any subject. You would suggest something he thought fanciful (a word of his) or dubious and he'd look over his glasses and respond, "Weeeeeellllll ..." and leave you to defend yourself, or withdraw it.

He was a senior economist at JP Morgan, then JP Morgan Chase & Co, and bought his clothes at the Salvation Army and was fond of getting breakfast at what he would call "supercheap" diners, because why would you spend more? And he gave enough money to the Metropolitan Opera every year that they would give him tickets to dress rehearsals and working rehearsals and list his name in the program, which they don't do for any old donor. For a wonderful time there, when I wasn't working regular hours, I could meet him on a Monday or Tuesday afternoon - he was working regular hours but the cadence of his job meant that he could skip out for the afternoon early in the week on a pretty regular basis. We'd get to sit in the fancy boxes, and maybe we'd end up seeing the first act twice, or skip the second act, or whatever. But we'd be there in that nearly empty, silent hall - the contrast would make you realize how noisy people are even when they're being silent - and see some of the most transcendent moments you'll ever encounter in a performance.

I had thought I hated opera until Derek started us on it, first Reg and then when Reg started working regular hours, me as a poor substitute. He delighted in having converted us both.

And he was, this unsentimental person, full of delight. He was so fond of Reg, who brought out a side of him he rarely wanted to admit existed. There he was, this major donor to the Metropolitan Opera, coming to Off the Hook performances, and I'd be vaguely embarrassed at the relative quality of our work, but every now and then he'd comment afterward about how good a particular show was, and we'd know we'd nailed it.

There wouldn't be any Falconworks without him. Not much of one, anyway. He bankrolled our first real production, "Out of the Bag," during which we all learned what a money pit theater can be. But he didn't bat an eye - well, maybe he did, but he kept funding that and other shows, especially "Fixing the Album" and the big production of "Salome" that we did at the Brooklyn Lyceum that kickstarted us into being a real company. Apart from being fond of Reg, Derek saw his talent, and kept supporting it, through lean years when we were suddenly grappling with the relentless reality of payroll, and through - well, there haven't been any fat years, but if that ever deterred Derek he never let it show. The cliche that comes to mind is that he never asked questions, but that's not true at all; he always asked questions, always looked at our financials and budgets and said, "really?" But he never wavered in his support.

Apart from Falconworks - much more than Falconworks - he kept Freedom Theater afloat through an even larger number of  lean years. And in that respect it might seem wrong to call Derek unsentimental, because any sensible person would have abandoned ship years ago, and an economist knows well the notion of sunk costs. But I think his determination to make Freedom succeed wasn't some form of nostalgia about the past or his personal connections; he was determined because he thought the work was valuable and worth doing.

(The Freedom experience did, however, give him a strong antipathy toward mixing art and real estate; whenever anyone suggested that Falconworks might acquire a space of its own he would tilt his head back suddenly, roll his eyes, and say "No, no, no ....")

He liked basketball, which always seemed unlikely. He would take New Jersey Transit and then Septa all the way to Philly, a habit that used to drive me nuts but which I've since learned (in fairness, he was going to Philly a lot more than I did). He would invariably arrive at the train station or the opera with thirty seconds to spare; how he managed to do so on public transit I never understood. He had more real estate entanglements than I could keep track of, or he, nearly. He remained friends with his exes, which led to some of the real estate entanglements. He wore bowties, which he enjoyed as a kind of trademark. I'm not sure he owned an overcoat.  He took me to see Eugene Onegin, which remains one of the most moving arts experiences of my life. He used to wrap up his toast after breakfast at a supercheap diner and bring it home with him, which I've also since learned. He used to joke about how the little technology project I'd signed onto at Citibank seemed to be a guarantee of permanent employment, about which he has not yet been proven wrong.

Once, maybe a couple weeks after September 11, he said, "If you're a gay man who has lived in New York City for the past 20 years, you've seen so much death that this doesn't seem exceptional" - words to that effect, I don't remember the exact quote. That may seem cold, I suppose, but it wasn't; it was as somber and as honestly heartbroken as anything else anyone said in those sad days.

He was embarrassed by anybody making a fuss about him. When Falconworks gave him an award at our benefit a few years ago, he sort of said, "Yes, well, all right." When he accepted it he climbed to the stage and gave, ex tempore, a lovely explanation of why it was worth supporting an organization like Falconworks, and heartfelt.

He is the maybe most loyal friend I have ever had. I am far more broken up about this than I had expected to be. How I will miss him.