Fancy people

Spotted, outside the Coliseum after the British premiere of Dr. Atomic: the stunningly androgynous Tilda Swinton, standing nearly six feet tall, in a short blonde haircut, buzzed at a sharp angle in the back and gelled into submission in the front. Wearing a well-tailored tuxedo suit with satin lapels and a plunging neckline, and very tall, fishnet-style shoe boots. She disappeared swiftly down a nearby alley, and we were left temporarily speechless.

The opera itself was good too, of course -- the production was entirely different than the one at the Lyric, less stark but also less full of awkward dance numbers. They solved the problem of getting a gigantic number of people on stage at the same time by building this massive framework of little rooms stacked on top of one another, basically a grid. Before the opera began, there was a huge periodic table of the elements projected on the scrim in front of the stage, with the radioactive elements missing. In the opening scene, this morphed into the grid full of singing scientists. At first the faces of the actual scientists were projected onto fabric in front of the grid, and then individual curtains opened to reveal the singers. Later, they all arrayed themselves in different postures, pressing their legs and arms against the walls so as to suspend themselves in different poses, and the collective effect -- you saw ten or fifteen different bodies across the whole grid -- was to give a sense of split-second frames of motion, like the pages of a flip book, or a Muybridge shot. In this production, when Oppenheimer, at the close of the first act, sings Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" -- the test site is called Trinity -- he faces away from the bomb and only turns to it at the end. "Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue," he recites, suddenly frightened at the power he is in possession of, needing, or seeming to need, to believe that there is something outside of himself that will check his actions.

The close of Dr. Atomic, which represents the explosion of the bomb followed by Japanese voices, is apocalyptic, but in the most aestheticized way. You're expecting the explosion throughout the entire opera, and though the extremely loud thrumming is terrifying, it's hardly surprising. As the volume builds, you watch the entire cast put on protective glasses and kneel down to watch the bomb, but they're facing you, and a bright light flashes that casts them into silhouette and illuminates the mountains behind them. The staging acknowledges the spectacle: they're watching you, you're watching them. Then voices, then the curtain.

On Surprise

This Saturday, I was wandering around London with my dear friend Meredith, who I've known since college. It was a stunning day, warm and sunny and preternaturally spring-like, and everybody was out, on foot, on bicycle; with children, with friends; wandering, talking, eating. We walked from Camden to Westminster Abbey via St. Pancras churchyard, where Mary Wollstonecraft is buried. I met someone here in Cambridge, an English student, who visited Wollstonecraft's grave on her first date with her boyfriend. He brought her flowers to put in front of the tomb. As she said, it's the kind of gesture that really tells you something about someone; it's definitive. I have to say, I'm not sure I'd be all that keen on graveyard dates, but maybe seeing Marx and his gigantic beard would be an exception.

We walked on to the Abbey, passing Big Ben on the way and unwittingly getting in more tourist photographs than we knew. Everyone was out and everyone was photographing each other in front of everything. Apparently there's a phone booth, one of the iconic red ones, in view of Big Ben, and tourists are constantly going into it and posing as if they're on the phone. This from a friend of Meredith's who works in an office with a view of the phone booth. There's something overwhelming about the constant stream of people taking snapshot after snapshot: seeing Big Ben of course brings Woolf to mind, because of the bit in Mrs. Dalloway where the clock striking sends discs through the air that reach the ears of Londoners all around the city; they synchronize all of the distinct consciousnesses for a moment. The idea of being brought into agreement by hearing the same thing requires as its counterpoint the bustle and dissonance of the city: everything going on constantly around you is held in suspension for an instant only, and then rushes back in.

After we heard evensong (so much gold leaf in that church!) we headed through St. James Park on the way to the National Gallery, where we had about half an hour before the guards professionally shooed us out. In one of the rooms at the National Gallery, there's an anamorphic box called a peep show: there are small eyepieces at either end, and if you look through them, you see the interior of a Dutch house with a woman (I think) reading. The side of the box is open, and if you look from that perspective, everything appears massively distorted: the chair in the corner is stretched to gigantic proportions, and the woman resembles a damaged doll. There's another anamorphic painting in the National Gallery, though I didn't see it this time -- it's a painting of ambassadors by Holbein, and there's a skull at the bottom which only comes into relief from a particular point of view.

Then to Monmouth Coffee -- where you can have something called a 'flat white,' basically a latte with less milk, which is among the best things ever -- and through Regents Park on the way to dinner in Primrose Hill. A long walk, but a nice one: walking is the best way to see cities, I think, because you happen on things you don't expect. For example, when Meredith and I were making our way through Primrose Hill, and were walking up to the hill which bears that name, we noticed a light in the sky above us that looked a bit like a floating candle. We thought it must have been some kind of homemade luminary that someone had set off from a balcony. But then Meredith spotted a whole group of people at the top of the hill lighting these miniature hot air balloons, so we walked up to get a closer look. The balloons were about three feet tall and two feet wide; after you lit one you had to hold it to let it fill with air, and then you released it into the sky. They flew fast and looked spectacular against the skyline, these flying torches making their way into the darkness. The people setting them off were drinking champagne straight from the bottle and were on their way to a fancy dress party, costumed as their favorite artists.

I was stunned to have stumbled on this, and said to Meredith as we walked on to dinner that this was one of my favorite things about cities, how they surprise you. I corrected myself to say that of course the surprise cuts in both directions; it's both good and bad -- we laughed as we remembered the guy in Italy who flashed us (from which I learned: always beware of Italians in sweatpants)! And it's not just cities that are surprising: there's a tree in the middle of the desert in Nevada, literally the only thing for miles and miles, and when you drive past it you're going so fast that you hardly notice and you have to turn back to see, but it's got hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from it, because everyone goes there to throw their shoes over the branches. But how amazing, right? To see lit hot air balloons in the middle of London, a shoe tree in Nevada, a miniature replica of Stonehenge cut from the ice on a lake in Wisconsin -- such a good kind of surprise.

Here I fear that I'm starting to sound like Alain de Botton, and in an attempt to sound less like him, I shall close by reporting that on Sunday we saw Vicky Christina Barcelona, in which Penelope Cruz plays the best jealous lover ever (that woman knows how to do crazy). The film contains an amazing exchange between Scarlett Johanssen (the sexually liberated, experimental blonde who only knows what she doesn't want, not what she does) and her foil (the engaged brunette who is secretly ambivalent about her fiance). The fiance is saying something uptight about the love triangle ScarJo's gotten herself into, and the brunette fires back, "Not another turgid argument about the categorical imperative!" Snap!

Class consciousness

Dear readers, I haven't written for a bit because I've been wanting to save you from overly-twee narratives of walking through Grantchester yet again, or being won over by poached pears. But what I've just experienced, while largely to do with food, will hardly be twee, so it seems fit to share. Tonight I went to high table for the first time and I have to say that this marks the first proper instance of culture shock I've experienced since I've arrived. As those of you who are British or have spent time in Britain (whether actually or imaginatively) will probably know, high table is a time-honored academic institution at Oxbridge where the fellows of the college, dressed in robes, sit at a collection of tables in front of the dining hoi polloi, which is to say the students. Upon entering, you await a phrase (in Latin) to sit down; then you are served a variety of relatively fancy foods that require a wide range of cutlery to eat. As the lovely and generous gentleman sitting across from me said -- a historian of science and the saving grace of the meal -- you really have to view the experience from the point of view of an anthropologist. This seemed to me to be code for at least two things: 1) use the forks I'm using! and 2) yes, we know that this is a bit silly and perhaps seems antiquated, but it's been a tradition for longer than anyone can remember and we kind of enjoy it. What was stunning to me was the visual display of tradition and authority: we proceed in, we proceed out, we say bits in Latin, which we've been doing since the thirteenth century, but we have contemporary conversation: we talk about whatever crosses the conversational screen -- Mike Davis, Freud, Woody Allen movies, Monty Python, parents, academia, Richard Posner, nicorette patches. It's not as if the conversation is limited to the kings of England and the sorts of port one likes to consume after dinner -- the conversation operates as any lively, self-respecting dinner conversation would, and is in no way anti-democratic -- but everything that surrounds the conversation, including the way that you're served, exudes privilege and custom. Perhaps even more rarefied than high table itself is the wine you consume afterwards: you retire to another room and a similarly long, rectangular table where there are posh cheeses with flags in them that report their denomination, as well as wines in crystal flasks that are hooked together, three in a train, and wheel around the table. As my conversation partner was telling me -- and bless him for talking to me -- smoking used to be permitted until recently. The winds of change: they're blowing strong!

It was counterintuitive, in a way, to hear this gentleman tell me that he objected to a presentation he'd just seen on The Order of Things which entirely neglected its historical (which is to say provoking or polemical, pre-'68) aspects while we were eating in a setting that was so pre-'68 in certain regards. How is it, that in a moment of economic crisis, in a nation where academics are worse paid and less respected than in the states, there is this kind of ceremony which constructs the very privilege it needs to delight in? If you manufacture your distinction and get tipsy on three kinds of wine on Tuesday night, what's happening, what's happened? I'm no marxist, that's for sure, but I was astonished by the fact that this seemed like business as usual. Indeed, Cambridge and Oxford have been around for longer than the states have even existed, and I'm sure there are all sorts of events with gowns and fancy wines behind closed doors at American institutions, but this is part of the fabric of the everyday life of college fellows; it's not a particularly special occasion. And perhaps academics are often guilty of saying one thing and living another -- Adorno railed against decadence but sat delicately in his swimsuit and loved his luxuries; Homi Bhabha goes on tour proclaming that theory can end (or if not end, make sense of) genocide, but spends his spare time sitting on the boards of advertising corporations rather than volunteering for the TRC -- hypocrisy's not new to the field. Perhaps the lesson here is that seeing elitism in a slightly different costume or setting can put you on the lookout for it on the home front; can make you think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Don't get me wrong: I love fancy dinners. But if the academy is indeed dedicated to critical inquiry, it needn't require being served by a silent staff dressed in bowties to do so. Perhaps I get tradition totally wrong; that may well be the case. But my anthropology, when it wasn't focussed on forks and glasses, was attentive to the various forms of discomfort I felt, and what they might have meant.

Abstract city, concrete city, new city, old city

In my hopelessly predictable way, I was looking at the Times this morning before starting my reading in earnest -- and taking a moment to procrastinate was, I think, justified, given that I was reading about the reception of Locke's theory of personal identity in a book called The Naturalization of the Soul -- and what I found delighted me. It was a collection of Lego representations of NYC life: Central Park, the Gowanus Canal, a waiter overwhelmed by a gigantic pepper grinder, a glass of beer, another of foam (when they've just changed the keg), the Verizon building, and -- my favorite -- a plastic bag hooked on a tree branch. If I had a dollar for every plastic bag that caught on a tree in the city, I'd be a rich woman. And then there's the iconic shot from American Beauty I think of whenever I see a bag in flight, the shot which makes me consider, however adolescently, the merging of waste, choreography, and chance.

The guy who made these models is a recent expat: he says that he plays Legos with his two small sons in the living room to while away the long, dark German winter. It seems rather clever to me, turning Legos into coffees rather than battleships and buildings (as I always used to do -- I seem to remember being big on houses, too) but regardless it made me think, in that slightly foggy mindspace of the morning, of cities and how we miss them, and how missing them makes us represent them to ourselves, makes us look for new patterns in our new homes. It's not that I miss New York, particularly, even though I lived there for a year five years ago, and had a life I liked very much, and all the strategies and secrets of a city dweller (the best place to stand on the subway platform; the cheapest coffee; the least crowded bar for after-work drinks). It's more that I've spent the last six months between Ithaca, London, and Chicago, and while I've built a good collection of suitcases and learned how to make my life portable, I'm particularly aware just now of how much our sense of cities is comparative and cumulative. So, for instance, a week or so ago Tom and I went to see a revival of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre. We got there early and sat on a bench along the river, eating cookies and naming all the buildings we could (not so many). London at night, from that vantage, somehow looks smaller, almost like a model. It doesn't have the dense skyline cluster of New York, or even Chicago, and every time I saw a double-decker bus drive across the bridge, the thought that this was a foreign city flickered across my brain. It doesn't take a bus, of course: going to Borough Market and seeing the pheasants and rabbits for sale, hearing the chatter of voices anywhere, shopping at Tesco, having trouble counting change, these are all reminders.

The Lego guy, who makes his living as an illustrator, did pixellated designs for the showers in his new home in Berlin. The master shower is a fancy in-joke reference to an artist who kept six kilos of butter in his studio for years (um, ew) and the kids' shower is a slightly simplified version of the NYC subway map. I think the subway map gets it right, more or less: when you pick up and move, you need to bring the necessaries with you, or find a way of keeping them a part of your days. My sine qua non isn't the MTA -- nor is it the unforgettable suitcase contents the person whose lectures on Marx and Hegel I've been attending mentioned the other day: academic gowns, German toothpaste, a copy of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text. But even so, part of learning to travel is learning how to stop worrying about where you are and start being there. That, I think, I've managed.