A Summary:
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down.
Santa is boring
This is where the drama is!
At four years old, all I wanted from Disneyland (after the Dumbo ride) was “It’s A Small World (After All)”. Which was closed for repairs. Indefinitely. I was devastated. For ten minutes or so. And then there was ice cream.
In my imagination it was a place of intricate, mechanical tininess; cogs and wheels clicking together with whispery precision. There were ropes and pulleys and tiny mailboxes. Gondolas, little working chimneys and drawbridges; all things I was obsessed with as a child. Years later, I would try to build a miniature chairlift out of the dials from one of my mother’s old microscopes and some bailing twine.
It's a world of laughter, a world of tears
It's a world of hopes, it's a world of fear
This is how this song begins. I mean, I have known this song most of my life, but in that way that when you ‘know’ something you disregard it completely, I had never really heard these words.
How utterly ominous.
Welcome to Disneyland kiddo, it's a world of fear.
………………………………………….
In the New York City subway system, the trains sing as they leave the station. They sing the same three notes each time. Three long, aching notes. The very same three notes that begin Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere (A Place For Us)" from West Side Story.
Standing on the platform, you hear the conductor’s clipped voice: “Stanclearth’doors”. Then two clinical chimes (reminiscent of the NBC theme), the doors slide closed, the brakes exhale, the train lurches into motion and you hear these three, slow notes:
There's… a … place...
The fourth note careens into a shrill departure, followed by a warbling two note vibrato that picks up it’s pace with the train and eventually thins into one high hum as the train speeds away underneath the city.
I am not the only one to have noticed this. The progression is, in fact, an exact match, the intervals following this pattern:
1, minor 7, 6. (There’s A Place) and then the warble: major 7, minor 7, major 7, minor 7… and…hum.
This open-ended phrase, like a disclaimer. This is the contract we sign every morning, each night. Every time we cross beneath the city.
There’s a place….
Uh huh, uh huh? For who? For me? For us?
Nope. There’s just a place. That’s all we’re admitting at this time.
………………………………………………..
Walking through Bryant Park, I stop to take a picture of the fountain, which has frozen solid mid-cascade. I’m trying to get a shot of these twin boys leaning on the edge, both wearing puffy, camouflage jackets without their mom noticing. I do this a lot, take pictures of other people’s children. The kids don’t care… it’s those pesky moms.
Anyway, I’m lining up a shot and this large, middle aged black man on the other side of the fountain, also in a puffy jacket, carrying a consumer grade digital SLR yells,
“No, no, no. Miss!”
I dimly suspect he may be talking to me.
“Not over there. No, no. Take it from here. Right over here.”
I come around the fountain.
“See? See.”
I do. I see from his perspective. The arc of the water and the blue glass edge of the building behind form a perfect tangent.
“See, do you see it?”
Mm. MmHmm.
“This is it.”
Aha.
“This is where all the drama is!”
……………………………………………..
At Grand Central Station in the transit museum, they put up this moderately elaborate model train every Christmas. The concept is a mini-Manhattan, with the southern portion being a somewhat literal representation of the real thing and the northern end, right around where Inwood would be, being the North Pole/ Santa's workshop.
Groups of adults huddle around this miniaturized version of their everyday world. The children are more interested in the things you can buy. They walk past Santa toward the walls with the retail displays; little train cars and ‘RR Crossing’ signals that light up. Action figures in striped conductor hats.
I am transfixed by the model. I want to take it in slowly. I try to narrow my vision and look at one tiny detail at a time so I don’t ruin the next part for myself. I also realize immediately that it’s not all that impressive and I want to fend that off. I’m not ready to be disappointed.
A woman in a blue hat hails an approaching yellow cab, a café’s open sign lights up a styrofoam snowdrift, a train stops for an exact and familiar amount of time on a raised track where the Highline Park is now, a man applies a new advertisement for Lionel Trains to a billboard, his hip hinging in an alarmingly natural way.
I lean down and realize that there is this whole other world down there, underneath. The subway is running below the city, open on one side to the plexiglass so you can see passengers waiting on the platforms and tiny subway maps on the walls, like a window to the stomach of a cow. I feel like I have been let in on some secret I will never tell. I am four years old. This is my small world, after all. and I can see my self. Myself now. Standing on the platform waiting for the train.
..........................
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all
……………………………………………………………………
Of note:
3 things that made me cry this week, cause I’m a sap:
A fucking car commercial. Yes, that’s right. A car commercial. For the new Nissan Leaf. A fully electric car. It’s not the commercial that got me. It’s how hard won this achievement has been. How long time coming, really too late, still not readily available this option has been. Just made me burst into tears…
This clip from the Olympics, the father of a Norwegian alpine skier watching him win a gold medal after an accident on this same run.
This… ahem.. You Tube video (oh god). Specifically, the moment 1:43 seconds in when the miserable looking puffy lady in fuchsia sees the crowd coming down the stairs and her pinched up little face just … expands. Her hands fly up. She is overjoyed.
Some things I saw and heard:
Ages of the Moon by Sam Shepard at the Atlantic. He is at his old tricks, Sam. Old angry drunk men isolating themselves in the desert with their whiskey... And the inevitable shotgun making it’s set-destroying appearance suddenly somewhere in the third ‘act’ . Somehow, this trope never bores me. I rely on it. And with the same old tricks, he gets to me… again. Oh, Sam. I love your toothless face.
Lauren Ambrose and her band!, The Leisure Class. By a series of misadventures, followed by more serious misadventures… Jess and I found our way to Joe’s Pub to see Lauren Ambrose (yes, the Six Feet Under girl) and her gypsy jazz band. They did some original songs (the best ones) and Lauren rocked a little ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime’ before their unexpected encore of St. Vincent’s ridiculously beautiful and catchy ‘Marry Me’ and then… ‘New York , I Love You’ (But You Are Bringing Me Down), LCD Soundsystem which almost brought me to my knees. I felt, quite literally, like I’d been punched in the mouth. (see: later misadventures…)
The Moth (Live Storytelling Performance) at City Winery. Stiffs: Stories of the Nearly and Dearly Departed. Great experience. Way more interesting than most theatre I’ve seen lately. People telling true, well crafted but not performed stories. The funeral director with the Long Island accent is my new boyfriend.
The Great One-Man Commedia Epic at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington D.C. Matt Wilson. You beast. What a fantastically silly, well structured, gleefully performed piece of theatre with which you are tearing up the town. Nice work, my friend.
Bonus! Re: Bernstein vs. the MTA:
Yes, the trains sing a Leonard Bernstein song. Now, did Bernstein get his inspiration from the trains that run underneath the 'West Side' (most of the trains that produce this tune serve the UWS of Manhattan) or did the MTA design trains to perform this daily tribute to his work?? There’s a real debate about this chicken, but the answer seems to be… it’s just a fluke, a fortuitous accident of friction. Here’s an article from The New York Times. As one MTA worker (who was once an usher for the show) put it when asked if this tribute was by design:
“Don’t talk to me about West Side Story”
Mini-Bonus #2:
A clip of a newer Disneyland commercial that uses ‘It’s A Small World’. After which, a sampling of the comments on You Tube (“Has me welling up every time it’s on!” and from ‘canadianbaconbro’, “this commercial makes me feel all wrm and fuzzy inside each time i watch. its like a true feeling of Disney”) lets me know that I may be the only one who finds this ad absolutely TERRIFYING.
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