Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim is the sort of thing that tends to put me on my guard. It has the whiff of emperor’s-new-clothes about it. It’s very susceptible to the my-kid-could-paint-that school of contemporary art skepticism, and performance art is so often not my cup of tea, and there’s a lot of buzz. So I was a teeny bit surprised to find myself turning to my very erudite friend Dave halfway up the rotunda and saying something along the lines of, “You know, I think I buy it.”

In the atrium, a very beautiful couple is performing a choreographed sexual encounter: intricate, measured, looping. (It’s also pretty hot: you secretly keep expecting them to actually take off their clothes.) There is nothing on the walls. It is apparently the first time in the Guggenheim’s history this has been the case. The people you encounter as you walk upwards along the rotunda get older: the first interlocutors are children; the last are elderly people. I think we could then read the atrium-dancers as the moment of conception, but that’s not necessary. In fact, I think too much thought here as to the specifics of the intention isn’t necessary, because of how much the piece itself prioritizes your own experience and not its design. It’s high-concept, sure, but it’s not pushy—that is to say, it’s genuine in its intentions towards you. It’s in good faith, and that’s really important to me in art in general, but I think particularly important in art that actively wants to make the viewer into a participant.

For me, this piece isn’t about the quality of the interactions themselves—a lot of people with more interest in performance or interactive art than I’ve got might disagree, but I think it’s about the fact of the interactions, and about their centrality. The blank walls turn you back on yourself. So much of what we do in museums has nothing to do with the art. It has to do with bouncing off the art and into the person or people we’re with, trying to learn something about them and ourselves and what’s between by parallax; it has to do with the crowd and the low, constant noise; it has to do with people-watching and with the way you relate to yourself, other people, strangers, the broader world. Museums are social, material, and interpersonal spaces. This piece is an endorsement (one might even say a celebration) of that fact. It obviates the excuse of art objects and focuses on their functions and effects.

It’s also a really pleasurable experience. It flatters the participant, to some extent, I think: it plays to your self-regard in the way it devotes itself to approaching you and drawing you out. Still, Dave and I had only one interaction of the designated kind (it was Sunday and pretty full, or, alternately, we are terrifyingly unapproachable, or, alternately, the child to whom we talked about Hegel when he asked us about progress rather reasonably put us on some sort of do-not-call list) and I found it really enjoyable just to walk slowly upwards and figure out the schema and check in on the progress of the atrium dance (at one point, a very small blond child tottered into the performative space and got very close to the dancers and seemed overawed) and watch the people around us having conversations.

There’s sort of a paradox to the piece: it seems to me to go a long way towards emphasizing the unnecessariness of art objects themselves, but of course, there isn’t an absence of art object—the piece itself is art, just not of a static, tangible kind. The concept is the object. You’re still processing it intellectually in much the same way you would process a more compartmentalized art object—and you need to be, for it to do its job of realigning your art-experience. So this is either a sort of half-measure (that is, a gesture in a direction that the piece can’t pursue to its logical conclusion) or a reconciliation to the fact of art as a premise: a necessary jumping-off point. I’m not sure it actually much matters which one of those things this piece is, though: it still works for me.

A little while ago, I had a quick exchange on Facebook with a friend who said, in the tone of admitting something gauche, that she didn’t like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”. I responded, sort of flippantly, that it’s the best breakup poem ever. Then I thought a little bit more about my own feelings about the poem—it’s not one I like unambiguously or even particularly passionately, but it is one that somehow recurs to me in a specific set of emotional circumstances.

“One Art” isn’t a great lyrical poem. It’s no great shakes read out loud. The rhythm gets jerky, particularly in the middle lines of the stanzas and over the linebreak to the last lines. The line “so many things seem filled with the intent” is fine, but following it with eight (eight!) heavy monosyllables really takes the momentum out of the whole thing: “so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster” is really underwhelming—that line seems like it really should start with an unstressed syllable, and it gets irretrievably bogged down when you have to carefully articulate the consonants that divide “lost” and “that” and “their.” The middle-to-end of the third stanza (”places, and names, and where it was you meant/to travel”) is similarly mushy.

I also particularly hate “(Write it!),” the interjection in the last line. It’s obvious. It feels a little like being bludgeoned with the bottom line of the poem, like, yes, we get it, this is hard to admit. It serves the crucial function of setting off the final admission (that loss feels, in fact, like disaster), but there should be some more elegant way to get that point across.

The thing is, despite all of these clear-headed objections to the poem, in times of loss, I end up saying to myself in my head, “now practice losing further, losing faster.” (The line is actually “Now practice losing farther, losing faster,” but I don’t seem to be able to correct that in my memory of the poem.) I go back to this poem regularly when I’m really sad, and then the directive tone of the poem seems particularly, compellingly poignant, and the setup of the penultimate stanza, which widens the scope and begins to admit ambivalence, seems skillful and kind of perfect. And when you’re really sad, you forget that “(Write it!)” is obnoxious and just hear it as a little stutter-step before the big blow of “disaster.”

The fact is, the poem endures, and I think it endures largely because it articulates something pretty fundamental about loss. Like Dickenson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” which I actually prefer as a poem, “One Art” is about not the great catastrophic moment of loss but its aftermath, which may ultimately be worse, as the beloved object recedes from the space it (he) used to occupy. Unlike Dickenson, though, Bishop gives us the loser returned to daily life—surrounded by objects and obligations and situated in a personal history. The poem plugs gamely along for its duration, if not chipper then at least normal (it deals with keys, a watch, houses—you can picture it doing its grocery shopping, paying its bills), until, very suddenly, in the final two words, it collapses in a heap. That collapse is then read retroactively into the rest of the poem—all its mundanity becomes a staving-off of the fundamental fact.

To master the art of losing is to cease to feel the pain of loss. And “One Art” seems to me ultimately very conflicted about even that stated goal of mastery: conflicted about the final giving up, the biggest loss, what Dickinson calls “the letting go.” Your keys aren’t really gone until you stop looking for them, you know? The poem skirts disaster—fears feeling the full weight of loss, but also, I think, fears not feeling it. The art of losing can’t be mastered, because once it is, there’s no mastery involved.

So, I made a promise about writing on the internet again. This is not my best work, and obviously I shouldn’t be telling you that right at the top, but the idea is to get things going again. I’m thinking two posts a week. Haven’t picked days yet. Stay posted.

On a flight to Portland, watching This Is It on the teeny JetBlue screen. The disclaimer here is that I was never a Michael Jackson fan–I never got an impression of him uncolored by the freakshow of his public image. Last summer, while I was moving out of my apartment in Brooklyn, a girl in high-tops flung open the door of her family’s brownstone and yelled down the block, “The King of Pop is dead!” And that was the first time I’d thought about Michael Jackson for awhile, and what I thought was that it seemed to me the action of a merciful God, not to let this man live on inside a ruined body and life.

And it’s weird in light of that reaction to see that he was still comparatively able so close to his death. It’s weird to see him as anything other than a symbol of some ruinous strangeness. Because the ruinous strangeness is there, but it’s not crowded everything else out. This is not to say that he’s not nuts; he is. “Are we misunderstanding something here?” says the director, and the white-suited star says, “We’re sizzling.” Or: “Just bathe in the moonlight,” he instructs during a session on musical arrangement, “just let it simmer,” and he raises his shoulders and his hands like he’s going to lose it. This might once have sounded like the special language of a specially gifted artist, but now it sounds more like a set of hollow touchstones. He’s struggling: “I’m trying to adjust to inner ears. When you’re raised using your own aural, your own auditory ears.” The people he works with are tiptoeing around him. But he’s creatively engaged. He’s making decisions. And perhaps most importantly, he’s going through the motions. He can still make his body and his voice do those things well enough that you remember how impressive they are.

There’s something remarkable about the way he moves, something about it totally unlike the way the men around him move, all the dancers, every one carefully culled and choreographed. None of the other dancers collapse into themselves the way he does. He’s less hard-hitting than they are in his movements, and I don’t think this is just because he’s near to death. His movement seems to come from a different place in him than it comes from in the other men. Their motion seems to emanate from some essential kinetic core, while his is like an external force rippling through him. Which has sort of always been the thing about him, right? That his movement is sort of magic and inexplicable? (The obvious example here is the Moonwalk.)

Dancing isn’t a display of strength for him, and it’s not a performance of masculinity. It’s not exactly that there’s nothing sexual to the way he moves, or nothing sexy (although he’s unquestionably less sexy, in this degraded state, than he was) but there’s absolutely nothing interactive in the sexuality in his performance. When he touches a female dancer’s pulsing thigh, it might as well be her shoulder. When his movements trace hers, it’s not sexy; there’s nothing vibrating between them. His is a solitary kind of charisma.

This isn’t exactly new–I think of him in the “Thriller” video and there’s absolutely no sexual chemistry between him and the girl, whoever she is. So there’s that as something that’s constant, but there’s also something that’s been lost in comparison to the Michael Jackson of yore. The major difference, I think, is that he no longer seems to be enjoying himself. There’s a loss of a certain buoyancy. He’s less light on his feet than he used to be, of course, and less fluid, but I think the most crucial loss is of this kind of driving energy. It’s hard to tell how much that’s reinterpretation in light of hindsight, or reinterpretation in light of his public image–our sort of inability to trust the intention behind his motion, and thus to read it as authoritative.

More devoted people than I have tried to solve this problem. What I can’t figure out is whether or to what extent the charisma and the crazy are inextricable from one another. And as much as this is falling back on something really uninsightful and cheap, he’s just so interesting. What was it that he meant?

And thus it was that our heroine figured out how to install plugins via FTP her very own self. Henceforth she regains her blogging powers and will require much less tech support.

For the first time in my political life, I have had the chance to back not a compromise and not a lesser evil, but a candidate whom I support not with the desire to stave off disaster but with the hope (truly there is no better word, and I know because I have tried to find one in order to avoid sounding like a campaign poster) of something extraordinary that might result. My generation has come of intellectual and moral age in a time that has felt to many of us hopeless and surreal, like some terrible dadaist performance art, and to all of us, I think, cynical. And only because so many people have burst collectively into tears and into song have we now realized how numb we have been, and how ready we are to take this seriously, earnestly, how willing we are to change our lives if changing our lives can change the world.

President-elect Obama, you have spoken of a call to service. That call has not previously been issued in my lifetime. No one has asked us to change our lives, no one has urged us to be better than we are. But when you call, I think my generation will answer. We will work and teach and fight, we will give our time and our energy and our resources to the service of our country, which you have reminded us is ours and needs us. We will try to have civil conversations with people with whom we passionately disagree, and to take care of our friends and neighbors when they are sick and sad, and to learn humbly about others and ourselves. We will try not to lapse into believing that the arc of history is beyond our reach and that our good conduct is unnecessary. When you call us to, we will hope, and we will work.

My reviews of New York Musical Theater Festival shows are up at CurtainUp:

The Hatpin
Villa Diodati: A Mary Shelley Phantasia
Jason & Ben

Watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Bryant Park two or three summers ago, sweltering with friends before the oversize screen, and when the camera came creeping in on Paul Newman’s giant face, his enormous eyes light and luminous in black-and-white, the whole crowd, thousands of people, stopped clattering and whispering and drew breath in unison.

In addition to being a busybody, one Countess Luann de Lesseps, apparently on television, is clearly kind of semantically scrambled. From Page Six:

“Men like women to be females,” de Lesseps advised, “to not be like workaholics, as that comes off as being uptight in the bedroom and control freaks.”

Awesome. The use of “females” in reference to, you know, female humans always strikes me as kind of strange and clinical. It also, of course, elides the difference between the biological and the social, which de Lesseps abuses here to hilarious effect.

Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the Phaseoli lunati were, well, incomparable.

Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobes, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.

This is the end of a brief (four pages) essay, “Rosemary and Moon Beans,” anthologized in Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. It is extra-special great because of the leap between the two paragraphs–they’re very good on their own (Steingarten, like my other favorite food writer, Ruth Reichl, is both lyrical and witty), but juxtaposed, they mimic and convey the mysticism of good food, especially good foreign food, crafted in foreign ways, which seems to make real the possibility of living very differently. In the interstice created by the food, the conversation, like the writing style, changes: it becomes quieter, more intimate. Because this is the end of the essay, the strangeness and possibility linger the way an aroma might in the air, or a taste in the mouth.

My review of the Hypothetical Theater Company’s “There or Here” is up at CurtainUp. Short version? I did not care for the play.