Life/art, art/life.
Labor Day Weekend, 2007: a very good weekend, a weekend not yet over. Visits from out-of-town family, out-of-town friends; quintessential New York events packed with people, quintessential New York restaurants deserted by all the people who skipped town; gorgeous weather and time to be lazy in it. There are few pleasures in life greater than strolling through New York on a summer evening with good company after a good meal.
This past year I've been particularly in tune with all the little things about living in New York that make me happy, mostly because I soaked them up and put them into my latest musical, Ordinary Days. I had one session during my writing fellowship last year where the guest artist encouraged us to visit the Metropolitan Museum as an exercise in getting inspiration from a artistic medium totally different than the one we're working in. A few months later, feeling a bit stuck and panicked at a first-reading deadline a few too-short months away, I took a day and went to the Met, notebook in hand, and, as those of you who've seen the show will know, a good deal of the show was a direct result of this visit to the Met.
For example:
Claude Monet, "Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil"
Of people like us
Thousand of tiny specks
Huddled together
In random arrangements
That nobody expects.
And also:
Paul Cezanne, "Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses"
Ordinary Days feels to me like my most personal project to date, and not because it reveals any dark secrets of my soul, but because so many little pieces of my ordinary days found their way into it. Afternoons I've spent at the Met, the flea market on my block, the view from my bedroom window. It's as if the show is a double-decker bus tour through my life in New York, with nothing particularly major on the docket, but that somehow hits very close to home. A portrait of a life with nothing but a pencil and a favorite T-shirt on the canvas.
I suppose that's one thing that I hope Ordinary Days is about: that the smallest things, the ones we often ignore, are a lot of times the ones that are indelibly meaningful. The ones that make us human.
Humanity as a paper clip: one of those lessons you'll never learn from a social studies textbook.
This past year I've been particularly in tune with all the little things about living in New York that make me happy, mostly because I soaked them up and put them into my latest musical, Ordinary Days. I had one session during my writing fellowship last year where the guest artist encouraged us to visit the Metropolitan Museum as an exercise in getting inspiration from a artistic medium totally different than the one we're working in. A few months later, feeling a bit stuck and panicked at a first-reading deadline a few too-short months away, I took a day and went to the Met, notebook in hand, and, as those of you who've seen the show will know, a good deal of the show was a direct result of this visit to the Met.
For example:
Claude Monet, "Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil"
WARREN
This painting reminds meOf people like us
Thousand of tiny specks
Huddled together
In random arrangements
That nobody expects.
And also:
Paul Cezanne, "Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses"
WARREN
So, this is a painting of what?
DEB
It's a painting of apples.
WARREN
That's right.
That's right!
That's right!
Ordinary Days feels to me like my most personal project to date, and not because it reveals any dark secrets of my soul, but because so many little pieces of my ordinary days found their way into it. Afternoons I've spent at the Met, the flea market on my block, the view from my bedroom window. It's as if the show is a double-decker bus tour through my life in New York, with nothing particularly major on the docket, but that somehow hits very close to home. A portrait of a life with nothing but a pencil and a favorite T-shirt on the canvas.
I suppose that's one thing that I hope Ordinary Days is about: that the smallest things, the ones we often ignore, are a lot of times the ones that are indelibly meaningful. The ones that make us human.
Humanity as a paper clip: one of those lessons you'll never learn from a social studies textbook.
posted by Adam at 12:33 AM
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