Category: Music

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Detroit: Put It On Your List

Detroit isn’t often a destination choice for a winter family vacation, but there are reasons it should be. The New York Times chose it as one of 52 Places to Go in 2017 and Lonely Planet put it at #2 for Top Cities to Visit in 2018. If their motive is to encourage tourists to go spend money in a city working hard to make a come back, I support that. Detroit is a great choice.

We have a couple of major Pistons fans in the family and I grew up as a Celtics fan and so did my kids. The Pistons played the Celtics at the brand new Little Caesar’s Arena in Detroit last Friday night, which coincided with Emilio’s school vacation. So Adrienne, Matt, Emilio, and Ava traveled to Detroit from New York, Sam and Mariah came from Tennessee, David and I flew out of Manchester. The three planes arrived within minutes of each other. I walked off the plane, went one gate over and waited five minutes before Emilio emerged from the jetway in his Detroit Pistons hat and Andre Drummond shirt.

The AirBnB we rented was a three-story house, once abandoned and bought by a nonprofit that hires local unemployed people to learn a skilled trade while rehabbing properties. The returning prosperity of Detroit is less evident in the North End neighborhood. The AirBnB had a boarded up house beside it and one across the street and every block had vacant, littered lots.

But there were also houses occupied by friendly people. Everyone I passed as I walked to a coffee shop with David, Emilio and Ava on Friday, or while Emilio and I ran on Saturday gave us a hearty hello. An elderly man on the porch of a big brick house on a street scarred by boarded up windows and junk-choked yards cheered Emilio and I as we passed him on our two mile running loop through blocks varying from high end to abandoned.

Adrienne had tapped into her enormous network and found a friend who knows someone who knows someone and we were met at the Arena by a tall, handsome black man in a long camel hair jacket who escorted us to center court before the game. He took our photo while Kyrie Irving and Andre Drummond drained three point shots on either side of us. The photo was in a collage on the Jumbotron several times during the game, along with a shot Adrienne posted of Matt and Emilio in Pistons gear posing outside the arena.

Detroit Industry Murals
Detroit Industry Murals
Detroit Industry Murals
Detroit Industry Murals

The Detroit Institute of Art is a first rate museum worth visiting just for the Diego Rivera “Detroit Industry Murals,” a series of frescoes that cover the walls of an interior courtyard — huge, detailed, layered and complex. But you don’t have to go to the museum to see first rate art. Murals cover the sides and fronts and center strips of buildings all over the city.

The Heidelberg Project is the most bizarre and exuberantly expressive street art I’ve ever seen — a city block of sculpture and installations constructed from recycled toys, shoes, wagons, metal, plastic, and stuffed animals, bleached and wilted from the weather. Piles of discards of every sort are a central feature. Large and small rectangles of crudely painted plywood were nailed to trees and buildings, decorated with clock hands pointing to different times.

Every where we went we had good food, good beer and a good time. People in shops and restaurants and on the street were friendly and happy to know we were visiting from out of town. There was a vibe of welcome everywhere. A Lyft driver waited for us to all to load in her car after the Pistons game, even though it got her yelled at by an overly aggressive policeman because she didn’t move as soon as he said to. She was impassive and polite, then rolled up her window and drove us back to the AirBnB.

Yesterday morning Sam, Mariah, David and I dropped off our rental car and took a shuttle to the airport. As we boarded, the driver asked where we were headed. When he started to drive, he said, “You folks from Tennessee?” Sam and Mariah both said yes, that’s us. “When you get there, I want you to find someone for me.” “Okay.” Then a bluesy jazz version of Candyman came on and the driver laughed full and happy. Everyone on the shuttle laughed.

“And you from New Hampshire? How about when you get home you find some boogie.” More loud funk and we all laughed again. I got up and danced.

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A Gift of Experience

 

Emilio at the Whitney Biennial

A week ago David and I finished the holiday gift I gave him for 2017 — a commitment to visit at least one museum and have one outdoor adventure a month. Experience gifts make sense — we already have so much stuff — and they’ve been a needed break from the dread and disgust that’s been too present for the past year if you’re paying any attention at all to what’s happening in the world. Which we are.

Early on we decided if we went someplace outdoors we’d never been before, that could count as an outdoor adventure. It didn’t have to be arduous. Just new. We also realized early on that there are a lot of museums near us. New Hampshire has a snowmobile museum, several rail depot museums, a telephone museum, a model railroad and toy museum, and a classic arcade museum that has pinball machines and electric games built no later than 1987. We didn’t go to any of those, but we did go to the NH Historical Society museum which has an old ski-doo snowmobile as an exhibit.

So what did our year of art and adventure include?

We trudged through snow up a hill in an orchard under a full moon. We camped in Evans Notch and hiked the Baldface Circle (very arduous!), slept on the front porch three times in the last month, toasty in big down bags, swam in the North Atlantic twice in September and in Long Pond during the second week of October. Wet suits are magic in cold water, but we came out a bit off balance from the cold affecting our inner ears.

 

We walked in Ireland and hiked in Zion Canyon, Kolob Canyon, Snow Canyon and Jenny’s Canyon (Utah is amazing) and lowered ourselves into lava tubes, caves hollowed out of old lava flows. We stayed in the Mitzpah Hut near the peak of Mt. Pierce and hiked to the summit of Mt. Mooselauke twice

 

Deep Cuts, Currier
Takashi Murakami

Our museum visits ranged from interesting to mind blowing. The Deep Cuts exhibit at the Currier, featuring impossibly intricate and detailed paper art, was a marvel. We took in the Whitney Biennial along with Adrienne, Emilio and Ava. We went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston twice, most recently to see a phenomenal performance of poetry read by Jane Hirshfield (her own and her translations of Japanese poetry) and music composed by Linda Chase. The three part piece was a collaboration written in response to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and was masterfully done. Stunning music along with spoken words in the best weave of the two I’ve ever heard. And that was after being enchanted by the exhibit of wild and vibrant wall-size murals by Takashi Murakami.

My favorite museum visit was to the Northwood Historical Society’s museum, open on August Saturdays from 1:00 to 3:00. The town’s artifacts are housed in the small, square, brick building that was the Northwood Narrows branch of the library when I first moved to town. It’s around the corner from my house.

David wore his short wetsuit for that visit; we stopped at the museum when we saw it was open on our way to swim. The Historical Society volunteer staffing the museum that day didn’t pay any attention to the wet suit. She was too busy watching the two helicopters circling over the fields and woods of the Narrows, looking for a fugitive batterer, a man who’d come to town after abusing his girlfriend and then ran away from the police when they found him at a house on Blake’s Hill.

They caught him. It was an exciting day in the Narrows.

Boardwalk at Coney Island

Last Friday we walked the boardwalk on Coney Island, a good choice for our last outdoor adventure of the year. Closed for the season, the arcades and amusement parks were like huge broken toys. We walked with a cold wind at our backs, then turned and walked into it, along the gray water, the winter sun low in the sky. We walked for a long time.

I’m grateful to have a life that allows me to choose experiences like this, to take breaks that refresh and energize and inspire me. I hope to keep it up next year.

 

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Small Stone #31

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Beethoven: A State of Wonder.  Amazement too, which is what I felt last night after attending the second of nine planned concerts, over 2 and 1/2 years, in which Gregg Pauley will play all 32 of  Beethoven’s piano sonatas.  I’m not a musician or well-schooled in music so I don’t fully grasp the feat it is to perform all 32 sonatas, but I’ve been told the hiking equivalent would be to climb Mt. Everest.  I don’t think there’s any writing equivalent, because writers don’t perform in the same way and don’t use their bodies with fierce intensity and focus to create a world of beauty in front of an audience.  This concert series fascinates me, this State of Wonder, exactly because of the intensity and focus that’s so evident in what Gregg Pauley has undertaken, and what he’s accomplishing.  Not only is it incredible to experience Beethoven’s sonatas, and be bathed in the brilliance of his compositions, it’s incredible to witness an artist achieving a masterpiece of performance. I’m not a performer, but I have a fierce passion for creation, and being in the presence of someone realizing a passionate ambition is thrilling.

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Report From New York

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Kevin Spacey as Richard III, in a production by the Bridge Project out of The Old Vic in London, directed by Sam Mendes, was indescribably amazing.  As both the New Yorker and the New York Times noted in their reviews, Spacey is truly over the top in his portrayal of “Richard III,” and he pulls it off.  David, Anne, Steve and I were stunned by the brilliance of the performance and the entire production.  David and I cancelled our foodie dinner reservation for last night and went to see another play instead, because we were hungrier for more live performance than we were for fancy food.

Yesterday we saw “And God Created Great Whales,” a Culture Project production of a play created, composed and written by Rinde Eckert, who also stars in the play.  Eckert plays Nathan, an aging piano tuner/composer who is losing his memory while he’s trying to complete an opera based on Moby Dick.  The play was first performed in 2000 and again in 2001, 2009, and now.  Using a tape recorder to keep himself on track, and a muse embodied in a beautiful woman named Olivia (played by Nora Cole), Nathan explores music, memory, love, the meaning of life and time and space, and how art keeps us on track.  Not simple stuff, but layered through dialogue and music in a complex weave that made David and I clear we’d made the right decision to forego foodieness for another immersion in theater.

And then there’s the visual intensity of Manhattan, certainly different from Paris, but just as compelling.  The peeling walls and old plaster of the un-refurbished interior of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater revealed lovely old patterns, the NYC subway tile work is brilliantly decorative at many stops, the long avenues unfold into long views of what looks like endless city, Cafe Grumpy’s decorative capucinno is delicious, and the walk along the Hudson River Greenway yesterday was a grand reminder of the seaport origins of this magnificent city.

This was all swirling in my head as we left the theater yesterday.  I stopped and looked at the piano where Nathan had sat, fringed with sticky notes like a shawl of memory and music and bounded by a rope to help hold in his tenuous connection to the present.  The piano grinned like a secret from the stage.