Italics are mine

"Italics are mine"

My blog name is a reference to Nina Berberova's autobiography of the same title (or, in Russian, Kursiv Moi). I find it perfect for my blog because:

• I profoundly admired Berberova when I was a high school student and read all her books in the French translations published by Actes Sud.
• She wrote short novels about Russian emigrants in exile, especially in Paris, and experienced oppression and exile herself, first with her companion Vladislav Khodasevich and then alone after he died in 1939. While I can't pretend to the same personal experience, my fiction writings revolve around similar themes of people standing outside the mainstream and facing the consequences of power, especially in Paris. 
• She lived in Paris for 25 years and then in the United States, specifically she spent many years in Princeton, NJ followed by a stint in Philadelphia, where she died in 1993. Not only are there connections between our geographical paths, but we are both people who have put down roots in the United States after being born in Europe (interpreted broadly), with all the challenges that settling down in a country different from our native one presents. This of course makes the choice of our writing themes a natural one.
• Berberova only became famous after the publisher of the French press Actes Sud rediscovered her writings and systematically published them starting in the mid-1980s, when she was well into her eighties herself. The New Yorker stated in her obituary in September 1993: "her life had two bursts of glory, separated by more than 65 years. The 1st was when she was a young poet in revolutionary Russia, with"emotions fed by protest"... The second began after her retirement from an academic career that she had taken up "when my life as a woman was over". In 1985, her novellas about the half-life of Russian emigres in Paris were discovered by a French publisher named Hubert Nyssen." This speaks volumes about having the courage to stick to one's art despite the lack of public recognition.

If you enjoy some of the posts I write, or like the same books I like (most of which are included on my Goodreads page), feel free to leave me a comment below, contact me on Twitter or drop me an email at aurelie dot thiele at gmail dot com.

"Tristan und Isolde" on DVD

 Sometimes people ask me what DVD of "Tristan und Isolde" I recommend, since the opera plays such an important role in my book. It took me a while, in fact, to find a production I wanted to recommend. Although many were very good, it was important for me to get ahold of something that matched my own tastes - if you're going to buy a DVD because of me, I'd rather be thrilled about what I suggest, because even on Amazon.com we're talking about a $45 purchase.

I'm delighted that the 2009 La Scala production - with Wagnerian superstars Waltraud Meier and Ian Storey in the title roles and directed by movie great Patrice Chereau - has turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. Stunning voices that make you gasp, handsomes actors that look the part, and the sleek visual lines of a modern production that doesn't indulge into gratuitous nonsense to feel important, but instead puts the whole staging to the service of the actors. Only caveat: in the third act, the engineer over-indulged in the "fading to black" feature between camera angles. (This doesn't happen in Acts 1 and 2, though.) But if you put up with that very minor inconvenience, you'll get over four hours of pure musical and visual perfection.

No need for any other DVD after that one, and if you care to hear Storey sing Tristan in real life, he'll be in DC in September, opposite the amazing Deborah Voight for the Tristan und Isolde run at the Washington National Opera. Mark your calendars!

Background Reading: "The Shameful Peace"

I first read about Germaine Lubin - who loosely inspired the main character in my short novel "Isolde 1939" - in a book by Frederic Spotts called "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation". I got the book in hardcover - discovered it in the now-defunct B&N at Lincoln Center, if my memory is correct - and then later bought it again in paperback because I wanted to be able to carry it around to re-read some chapters.

It is a Yale University Press book, which already tells you it's going to be overpriced ($35 for hardcover and $24 for paperback) - or perhaps it is priced exactly right, since people like me, passionate about the topic, pay the price without a second thought. But the book is a bit misplaced on the YUP list, because it reads much more like a general-audience book than a scholarly one (which I mean as a compliment, having slogged through many scholarly books whose authors wasted a great topic, with the related opportunity to connect with many readers, through their turgid prose).   

I had never heard about Lubin before. The issue of the German Occupation remains a very sensitive topic in France, where I am from (I am also from Belgium and Germany, but from France most of all, and I am a French citizen) - see for instance the 2008 scandal surrounding the exhibition "Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation", showing photographs of Parisians during the Occupation in Paris - and the French have preferred to think about that period in their history as little as possible.

I remember thinking right away, when I read the few paragraphs about Lubin, that it'd make a great novel. For me it remains as important as ever to write about such individuals - not the heroes and not the monsters, but people who ended up somewhere in the middle on the white-to-black continuum of ethical (or unethical) behavior, and for whom it is still not clear whether history has been too harsh or too kind - and it may well have been too kind. It is this sort of people, nowadays, who may hesitate between looking away or taking a stand, running in the other direction or speaking up for justice, writing anonymous slander or making a difference in the world. We need to talk about them - the ones who haven't yet moved to the dark side - so that they'll recognize their dilemma when the moment of choice comes and, perhaps, they'll do what some French people didn't 70 years ago: they'll stay on the right path.

"The Woman Upstairs" by Claire Messud

A quick break from blog posts about my book "Isolde 1939" to review the latest novel by Claire Messud, "The Woman Upstairs." The book is narrated by Nora, a 42-year-old schoolteacher in Cambridge, MA whose plans to become an artist fell by the wayside. She never married, doesn't have children and refers to herself as "the woman upstairs", although she doesn't fit the spinster stereotype (that would be another teacher in her school). Nora develops an infatuation for the parents of a boy she teaches: a couple in town for only one year with the husband a visiting scholar at Harvard and the wife an artist, like Nora herself, except that the wife is actually making a career out of it.

The narrator's voice is very strong - one really feels that Nora is speaking to us. Messud's writing style (with very long sentences interspersed with "--" so that the narrator can go on and on) is very well-suited for this choice of point of view, both when 42-year-old Nora expresses her anger after realizing she's been betrayed and also when she recounts the events that happened when she was 37. It is the sort of voice that keeps pulling you into the novel and doesn't let go of you until you reach the last page.

Without giving too much away, I'll say that Nora is ultimately used and discarded by someone she admired, and because she doesn't come across as a very reliable narrator, not only might she have been used from the start by a selfish, self-centered person, but an important moment with another protagonist might turn out to have only been a small gesture - what the two did is never spelled out, and since Nora explains everything else in detail, I suspect nothing happened at all beyond perhaps a short embrace. But that's my interpretation.

I did read the last few pages in the bookstore before buying it, and I felt that knowing the ending did help me enjoy the book, because I knew it was going to end in the manner that most resonated with me.

The story struck a chord in me because I have enough experience in the world of education to see how something like that could happen - how someone might put her dreams on the backburner while she focuses on earning a paycheck, turn down marriage proposals to remain true to herself and then get caught in the empty hecticness of her daily work, while someone else (a parent in the book's case, but you could imagine other scenarios) tries to take advantage of her - probably thinking that she must be a pitiful individual, if she's childless and single well into her late 30s - while she desperately tries to make her dream of art happen. Messud has a fine eye for what slowly pushes someone to the brink. We all know that lives don't always turn out the way teenagers expected them to when they were growing up, but Messud really shows us the state of mind of someone coming to terms with that, and still young enough to do something about it.

Nora is in fact far from pitiful. When I read about her art and about the other woman's, I found that hers came across as far more original and innovative - it reminded me of the movie The Big Picture, where the character played by Romain Duris (a lawyer in crisis who enjoys photography as a hobby) kills the photojournalist neighbor who was sleeping with his wife and takes his identity. Duris ends up being far more talented as a photographer than his neighbor, although success is fleeting precisely because of what he has done. But fear not: Messud's novel is psychological in nature. It recounts Nora's emotional journey and in spite of angry Nora's ominous threats, there is no violence in it whatsoever.

47-year-old Messud, who has ties to France, Canada and the United States, came to national prominence in 2006 with her novel "The Emperor's Children", set in New York City in the months preceding, as well as in the days immediately following, September 11, 2001. While I enjoyed the book, with its richly textured descriptions and its translation into English of long-winded French sentences that reminded me of home (I'm French), Messud received a lot of flak for her writing style and, most importantly, her use of September 11 as a key plot device in a book focusing on rather shallow people.  

Much has been made of that fact that Messud was quite obscure before the publication of "The Emperor's Children", having published with small press books such as a group of novellas - the ultimate sign of a writer indifferent to commercial success, if there ever was one. When I read the description of "The Woman Upstairs" on Amazon.com, I had serious misgivings about buying the book. In particular, an early description of the novel, which has now been edited, mentioned that the young boy that enters the life of the narrator is attacked in the schoolyard by bullies who call him a "terrorist". And I remember reading that word and shaking my head. I knew Messud most likely hadn't taken part in writing the description, but she already aroused very strong negative feelings for her use of September 11, was it really necessary for her to invoke the t-word? Thankfully, this description has now been edited, and the new one gives a better idea of what the book is about.

I do feel that plot summaries don't do the book justice. Messud masterfully shows us the emotional world of Nora and attempting to summarize it by glib sentences such as "she falls in love with all three of them, the father, the mother and the child" (variants of which I have read) are enormously reductive. The novel works. It simply does.

The review in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani was on the cold side of lukewarm, with words such as "incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films... in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be." Frankly, with all respect to Kakutani, referring here to a psychological horror film is pure nonsense. Nora's fascination for the family, especially the mother-artist, is very PG-13. I'm disappointed that the famous NYT critic didn't identify Nora's (successful for a time) attempts to reconnect with her passion as an artist as her main drive, and as her redeeming feature that saves her from turning into a cardboard character from those horror films Kakutani refers to. (No stalking, no breaking-into-home, no authorized reading of emails... She looks at the woman's art in her part of the studio they share and wishes, in an admiring way, that she had her family. When she realizes she's been used she cuts the family out of her life. That's the horror? Please.) It's a pity Kakutani didn't realize that the story isn't as far-fetched, and as much a transparent commercial ploy, as what she seems to believe. A great book.

Germaine Lubin and her voice

The French soprano whose life inspired my short novel "Isolde 1939", about an opera singer who sang for the Nazis, was named Germaine Lubin (1890-1979) and before her career became irremediably tainted by her actions during the war and the German Occupation of France, she was best known for her spellbinding voice.

So, before I go into the details of her life, I wanted to share the following YouTube video, in which Germaine Lubin sings Isolde's role in Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival in 1939. It so happens that Adolf Hitler, a longtime friend of Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifried, attended the festival every year, and he had already seen Lubin sing at Bayreuth the year before, that time as Kundry in Parsifal. But Isolde is undoubtedly the role she's most remembered for.

This video was uploaded on YouTube by dantitustimshu and in it Lubin sings the Liebestod - the final, dramatic aria of the opera after Tristan has died.

"Isolde 1939"

I plan to write most of my posts this month on my short novel "Isolde 1939", about a French opera singer who sang for the Nazis. The story is loosely inspired by actual events, which I will discuss in more details in the coming days. The posts will all be tagged "Isolde 1939".

While World War II continues to receive an enormous amount of interest in the literature, there has been nothing, to the best of my knowledge, combining opera and World War II. It is, of course, always timely to ask why some people take the high road in spite of the risk of torture and death and others let themselves be drawn into the orbit of madmen, but even more timely now, since we celebrate this year - and this month - the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth. (Wagner was not only the favorite composer of Adolf Hitler himself, but the favorite composer of the real-life French soprano who inspired my book.) My story, however, is absolutely not a biography or a historical document, but a work of fiction.

I look forward to sharing these "behind-the-scene" (in more ways than one!) stories with you.

Short Tara Brach Videos

The first short-but-excellent video, by the always outstanding meditation teacher Tara Brach, is entitled "Surrender to the Monkeys". Her recent blog post of the same title contains the written version of her speech.  Her message is very valuable indeed. 

The second video - one of my all-time favorites - is entitled "This Moment Counts". If you've never watched it, you really, really should. (It's only 3-minute long.) Enjoy! And if you find Tara's teachings valuable, I can't recommend her books and meditation CDs highly enough. They've made such a difference in my life, the degree of my mindfulness, my ability to be present in the short year since I discovered her.

"Magic Flute" at Opera Philadelphia

A quick review of the Magic Flute production at Opera Philadelphia, which I saw last weekend: it was ok. Yes, that doesn't sound like enthusiastic praise, and it shouldn't. I didn't like at all the device of casting the opera as a "play within a play" set in 1791 when the opera was premiered. This completely destroyed any emotional connection between the audience and the characters - you just can't root for them if they're not even in the thick of the story.

The actors were excellent, the music superb and the set was visually appealing, but really, whatever a director does, she shouldn't decrease the connection of the audience to the story. I suspected before going that the production had had lukewarm reviews because I attended the last day as usual (Sunday matinee), and by then when a run has been warmly welcomed by the critics, I've usually received an email from the opera company gushing about rave reviews. This time, though, nothing besides the standard reminder of the forthcoming performance.

But this staging provided a useful, unexpected lesson. I'd been wondering whether I should've pushed harder to rescue the previous version of my short novel, which had a somewhat different plot back then and was narrated by one of the characters' maid to a journalist, although the maid herself only had a marginal role in the story. That was back when I was still trying to get an agent, and one of those agents had replied saying that narrative device (which she called second-voice point-of-view although it wasn't - the frequent "you" were simply part of the maid's account) didn't work at all because it cut the reader from the main characters by adding an intermediary. Initially I had doubts on her criticism because I liked the originality of the voice ("sort-of second-person POV", I guess we can call it), but this week I became convinced that she, indeed, had made an excellent point and ultimately helped me take a key decision - going back to third-person POV - in rewriting Isolde 1939 (the book's new title). And I'm grateful she bothered to explain her reasoning to me, even in one sentence.

So this was a good afternoon overall - the production is definitely better than the production of the Magic Flute I saw at the Met a few years back and held valuable lessons. I had great company too, and enjoyed an outing at the Barnes Foundation, now nearby in Center Philly, the day before, which made me even more an admirer of Cezanne and Matisse than I already was. I'll have to go back.

I'm looking forward to the 2013-14 season at Opera Philadelphia already. While The Magic Flute didn't enthrall me, it was quite good once you forgot about the silly play-in-a-play idea, and I have found the productions in Philly to be much more consistently good (and more modern, which for me is a good thing) than at the Met, at much more reasonable prices. Next year at the Academy of Vocal Arts: Nabucco, Ainadamar and Don Giovanni.

Update on Holistic Life Foundation

 Photo credit: Holistic Life Foundation. This post is really intended for HLF to follow up on a Facebook conversation, but anyone is welcome to read along and leave comments… HLF is dedicated to bringing yoga and mindfulness to inner-city youth in Baltimore, MD. Please “like” them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter! If you haven’t heard about HLF before, you might want to read my February post about the foundation.

Below I make a couple of suggestions that could perhaps help increase HLF’s funding, for whatever my suggestions are worth – HLF deserves to become wildly successful and thinking about business strategy happens to be part of my line of work.

First, you should fix the pictures on your website. When I looked at your website, not a single picture was displayed (except on the front page) – apparently they’re not in the folder where they’re supposed to be, so only the alternative text is shown instead. For instance, the “About us” page is supposed to have a “Holistic Life Foundation Portrait” picture at the following address: http://hlfinc.org/hlf_wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/about_us_1.jpg but there’s nothing there. It doesn’t give the best impression when people visit the website since all they get is a lot of words, and this is a topic that begs for pictures of smiling youth.

Also, whenever I consider donating to charities, I look them up on Charity Navigator to see if they have good ratings. You’re not rated. In fact, you’re almost never mentioned anywhere. It seems that it’s because you’re way too small. From what I understand, you’re not getting rated because HLF isn’t submitting a Form 990, and it’s not submitting a Form 990 because it has less than $50,000 in gross receipts.

Now, given the significant amounts of media exposure you’ve received in the past few years, that’s a little disappointing: there are probably many people like me who, when they learn about a charity, look it up on Charity Navigator before they make a decision, and you’re most likely losing donations because you’re so small that you’re flying under the radar. If HLF is to grow, it is going to need to get lots of donors. The website makes it sound this is really a company with three people, which just isn’t sustainable in the long term for the scale that you need to achieve in order to keep garnering media attention and fulfill attention.

So, a couple of thoughts from the top of my head:

• Provide a clear vision with measurable goals and well-defined metrics of success (that means numbers). I like the mission on the first page of the website, but it’s very vague. I have no idea how many youth you currently serve, how many you aspire at serving, and what you need from donors to help this vision become reality. To get donations, you need to give people a much clearer picture of what you want from them so that they can get enthusiastic and support you.
• Suggest donation amounts (of various sizes) on the donation page. There is no suggested amount, no list of categories, and no idea of what a gift of a certain size will help HLF achieve. At the very least you should translate a few amounts into terms related to the mission of your organization. (For instance, and I’m making the numbers up, “$50 gives weekly yoga classes to a group of 20 underprivileged kids for a month. $500 pays for weekly yoga classes for a month for all the low-income children in School XYZ.”) People want to help, but they need to feel that their donation will make a real difference. Don’t think “we’ll keep it vague because anything would help.” Be specific.
• Let’s assume one of your intermediary goals would be to grow enough to be rated by Charity Navigator (as it should be, if you want to arise the interest of most donors). You can learn from this page that you will need the following: public support of at least $500,000 and total revenue of at least $1,000,000 in the most recent fiscal year, with at least four years of Form 990. Obviously, “getting rated by Charity Navigator” isn’t going to make any donor swoon. On the other hand, perhaps you can translate a revenue of $1,000,000 in terms meaningful to HLF. (I know, it’s a stretch goal, but stretch goals inspire donors.) For instance, the data center at Kids Count indicates there were 82,000 children in single-parent families in Baltimore, MD in 2011. Assuming that you’d pay the teachers $10/hour, providing one hour of yoga/mindfulness per week for the 26 weeks of the school year for every Baltimore child living in a single-parent family – if the kids are taught in group sizes of twenty –  would cost 10*(82000/20)*26=$1,066,000. So you can translate your goal into “providing each Baltimore kid in a single-parent family one hour of yoga or mindfulness every week during the school year.” Of course you can update the numbers for a two-hour yoga class and for more low-income children, for a goal that is really meaningful for you.
• There seems to be enormous interest from developers who are re-developing part of the city, as well as from the Baltimore business community, to keep crime down and advertise Baltimore’s “renaissance”. They have a clear self-interest in your program being successful, since it could alleviate the fears of people considering a move to Baltimore by showing a positive image of the inner city. Well-documented work with a proven track record to help underprivileged youth deal with whatever is going on in their life in a more productive way will benefit them indirectly. However, they won’t have any interest in donating to your foundation if you can’t convince them you’re going to grow enough for them to care.
• Find mentors. It looks like you need people with previous nonprofit management experience to have a beer with while they tell you how their nonprofit made it out of startup status. Find local nonprofits with small-sized assets on CharityNavigator (search for Baltimore charities or charities within a certain distance of a zip code, and then on the next page you can filter search results to only see the ones with small assets. The idea is that they probably still remember how life was like when their charity was very tiny.) Pick charities that are not in your line of work so that you wouldn’t compete for donations, but ideally do something complementary so that they could mention you and you could mention them to the people you serve.  
• You don’t seem to have an advisory board. (If you had one, you’d list them on your website to make them feel valued…) If you want to grow, those are the people who will donate either money or expertise and will share the HLF story with their friends, who will also hopefully be able to make donations.
• Write a book. I’m serious. Have you noticed how many Omega speakers have books? They’re on sale at the facility bookstore. (I’ve been to Omega once before.) Some presenters require or recommend their audience to read their books beforehand. The whole idea behind writing a book is that it allows you to generate income through sales without you having to put in any effort once it’s written. To scale the HLF program, you will need to generate revenue in ways that don’t require you to attend. Business speakers like to sell their books in the back of the room after they give a talk, and this gives them a sizable stream of income because some of those people will then place large orders for their friends and associates.
• Upload a good-quality video of the foundation and its work on YouTube. This includes good sound. This way, people can share the video or embed it on their blog, to disseminate it to their friends. Make sure the graduates of the HLF program share their stories, so that the audience can connect with the message. People relate to stories and stories are more effective in video format.
• Develop a speech you could give for paid speaking gigs. You need income to sustain the foundation’s work, and transforming the HLF story into a message that can benefit for-profit organizations (the ones with the money to pay speaking gigs) can help you in that regard. I’m reading a great book by speaker Judy Carter, “The Message of You” (I don’t know her and am not making any profit on the number of copies she sells!) and it seems that you could translate what you’ve done for inner-city youth into a talk for companies and professional organizations about resilience in difficult (business) environments, even when people seem to be at a disadvantage. Former homeless kid and now author and motivational speaker Liz Murray (who wrote Breaking Night and ended up at Harvard) has been able to do just that with great success.
• Use Kickstarter for crowd-funding. HLF is very much a nonprofit start-up. It can achieve its goals through lots of small donations combined together (in contrast with much bigger organizations, where corporate sponsors become much more important.) This is well-aligned with the crowdfunding philosophy. Now, I haven’t used Kickstarter, but there seems to be enough projects having been funded in the Baltimore area that you could get in touch with people who have run successful Kickstarter funding drives and learn how they did it. Here is an example of Kickstarter project. Also check out this page.
• Low on resources? Enlist (for instance to create and edit a video, or help you with a marketing plan) local college students who may work for course credit instead of money, or simply to improve their resume if the work is related to their major.

Good luck! Let me know what you think.

(And why do I care? I come from a very poor family with grandparents who faced war and genocide, and while my parents did all the work of getting themselves into the middle class, I've also seen them become bitter, "chip on their shoulder", "the rest of the world hasn't suffered as much as we have and beside the rest of the world is just out to get us and take everything from us again the first chance they have" types. I won't even get into issues of anger management, alcohol abuse and the like. Being at the bottom and struggling to get out tends to do that to people. There has to be a better way. Yoga and meditation have grounded me and given me strength. I'd love to see more inner-city kids be given such tools. Keep up the great work.)

"The Big Knife" at the Roundabout Theatre

I got to see "The Big Knife" by Clifford Odets in a revival at the Roundabout Theatre this week, and I liked the production a lot. The reviews have been mixed, it seems, but any flaws I noticed are truly due to Odets - the cast, costumes and set are stellar.

The theme of the play can roughly be described by the famous e.e.cummings quote, "to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being and never stop fighting." It's a battle the main protagonist, Charlie Castle, an actor in Hollywood in the 1940s who've wasted his talent in B-movies but is prodded by his wife Marion to become true to himself again, ultimately loses.

I find myself agreeing the most with the Associated Press review, which singles out for praise the excellent actor Bobby Cannavale, who portrays Charlie Castle, the phenomenal actor Richard Kind as studio boss Marcus Hoff, the beautiful set of a Los Angeles home by John Lee Beaty and the swanky costumes of Catherine Zuber. I also was very impressed by actress Marin Ireland, who plays Charlie Castle's wife Marion - the AP, although overall positive, wasn't quite enthusiastic about bits of her performance, but I saw the play after the reviewer did, and I found Ireland superb.

I loved the first half (Acts 1 and 2, before intermission) - in my opinion, it struck a perfect balance in showing Castle's dilemma between living the high life as a movie actor if he renews a lucrative but unrewarding movie contract for a ridiculously long period of time and remaining true to his ideals.

The acting is spot-on in a visually pleasing environment, with sets and costumes in white, light brown, shades of red, without depicting an exaggeratedly lavish lifestyle that would repel the audience. The characters really come alive as three-dimensional people with dreams, doubts and fears and the actors establish a real connection with the audience.

Interestingly, the people who were sitting next to me had read the New York Times review, which depicts the revival as "sluggish, soulless", and enjoyed the play a lot less as a result. I didn't and had a great time, although I did like the first half better than the second. So perhaps there is a case to be made to avoid reading reviews once you've bought tickets to something.

I liked the second half too, but not as much as the first half. To explain why, I'll have to mention a couple of spoilers, so you might want to stop reading here, or accept that I'll divulge a few secrets. It becomes clear early in the play that idealistic Charlie Castle was involved in a hit-and-run accident in which he killed a child and for which a studio yes-man went to jail for in his place. Oh, and there was a woman in the car with him, and that wasn't his wife but a little movie starlet.

In the second half of the show, the studio boss plots with an acolyte to have the starlet "silenced" because she's dropping hints about the hit-and-run. This infuriates Charlie, who - after bowing to the studio boss's demands in renewing a contract Marion didn't want him to sign - finally takes a stand to save her. Well, this really, really annoyed me.

He killed a child and shows no remorse for it and in the first half when he interacts with the starlet he doesn't seem particularly fond of her, and then he does all that posturing to save her? And he supposedly loves his wife so very much? Come on, now. And the sudden outburst where he slaps the studio boss seemed gratuitous - nothing really led to that moment.

I wish we'd seen Charlie Castle raise a fist at Marcus Hoff behind his back, for instance, or shake in anger while the boss wasn't looking, or something more to bridge the distance between the parts of the play before and after intermission. Ultimately Charlie Castle comes across as a very self-centered man, so absorbed in his pseudo-idealism but indifferent to his own lack of morals, flirting with a much younger starlet, sleeping with the wife of the man who went to jail for him, getting a child killed. And perhaps that's part of Odets's message too, but I couldn't help myself feel aggravated toward the end. Also, I couldn't get why he was so despondent all of a sudden in the final scene. (And I won't tell you what happens in that last scene, because I've already said enough.) But the production is so visually satisfying and the acting is so good that I'll have to forgive Odets for the few weaknesses of his play. Rating: four stars out of five.

If you care about theatre in New York, this play is an excellent way to spend your time until June 2. Click here to buy tickets.

"Inventing Abstraction" at MoMA

 On Sunday I got to see the "Inventing Abstraction" exhibition at MoMA with my best friend M. who was visiting New York City from Boston for the weekend. The exhibition was a good way to escape the wind and use those $5 guest tickets I get as a member of MoMA. While initially I only thought of the show as something "nice to do" but not a "must", in hindsight I'm so glad we did decide to drop by.

The show has received glowing reviews from a wide range of critics, including Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker who calls it "splendid" and Roberta Smith at the New York Times who calls it "magisterial". As someone who loves art (right brain) but makes a living in engineering (left brain), I was drawn to the geometric forms used by so many artists of the time, for instance the circles of Fernand Leger or Sonia Delaunay-Terk. It is most likely connected, at least in Leger's case, to the growth in industrialization and, I think, the belief people held at the time that science and engineering were going to bring great benefits to society. It must've felt that geometry - and science, and engineering - was everyone's business, and a necessary part of artists' visual vocabulary to capture their new, modern world. I also enjoyed viewing the work of more rarely shown artists such as Theo van Doesburg and Natalia Goncharova (although Goncharova admittedly is better known than most.) The show helped me remember why I love art so much and motivated me to refocus on what brings me joy. I can't praise it enough - it is certainly one of the key exhibitions of the year in the whole country, if you care about modern art.

The exhibition closes on Monday, April 15 - make sure to go and see it if you're in town! If you can't go, buying the catalog will make for a nice replacement. But if you're still waiting for that tax refund to splurge, you can also enjoy a playlist curated by WQXR (based on the fantastic idea of creating a stand-alone room in the exhibition on the theme of "reinventing music", where you can listen to the avant-garde music of the time, including Stravinsky, Webern, Schoenberg and Debussy) or browse through the exhibition website. I'm continuously amazed by how creative and innovative museum curators continue to be in bringing top-notch, multimedia exhibitions to the public. Can't wait for "American Modern: Hopper to O'Keeffe", opening August 17.