People are emerging from their quarantines into the protests and parks and outside bars and restaurants. We’re gingerly stepping back out, but mostly are retreating back to quarantine isolation after a few hours out. The Zooms continue to be important and they’re proliferating in the offerings of art and talk and otherwise.
PareaGroove has hosted a couple art events in the past week or so, in addition to a few chat-onlies. We had a wonderful demonstration last Saturday by gourmet chocolate maker Andrea Young of Sweet Vegan Chocolate who showed us how to make amazing Belgian style chocolates in an apartment kitchen. We pined a bit that tasting wasn’t possible online. Then on Tuesday a fellow PareaGroover give us a lecture about the abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, along with slides and videos. Zoom seemed to have some new bugs from their latest update which glogged up the presentation a bit, but everyone was patient and together we waded through the screen share confusion and the co-hosting blocks. It was sort of funny. Here we thought we’d gotten this Zoom thing down, but nope, it kept us humble. The show must go on of course, and it eventually did and it was very entertaining.
Prior to the Pandemic I frequently attended art talks a friend gave in his brownstone backyard, weather permitting, and sometimes in his adjoining little apartment. Since I started PareaGroove I have been trying to encourage him to do an art talk for us, but his doctor day job was keeping him too busy and he wasn’t comfortable with the tech (yet). He first did a Skype talk for his friends. Then he ventured into Zoom. He created an event on his own, and last night, Saturday, I successfully wooed him to our PareaGroove fold, which comes with my Zoom subscription allowing a longer talk. So, last night we were treated to a well researched and detailed talk about Christo and Jeane-Claude, of The Gates fame, as they were both born on June 13. We talked about other partnered artist pairs like Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner and Marina Abramovic and her former partner Ulay who showed up at her MOMA installation twenty years after dumping her for her translator. We on the call diverged into our feelings about Ulay’s seeming ambush, and at her work place. Her work place! Yes, some of us did not respond well to her teary response to his ambush and his trouble holding her gaze.
I started the evening, prior to the art talk, with a brief review of the life and poetry of W.B. Yeats, as his birthday was June 13 as well. I was reminded, and inspired, by a wonderful Zoom event I attended the day before in honor of Yeats’ birthday and Bloomsday, honoring James Joyce which is June 16, dubbed “A Transatlantic Celebration of Yeats Day & Bloomsday with the Embassy of Ireland, DC, the Joyce Centre, Dublin & the Yeats Society, Sligo.” The ambassador of Ireland Daniel Mulhall Zoom-moderated from his home along with his wife, both wearing appropriate hats. Readings from “Ulysses” and Yeats’ poetry were Zoomed in from from all over the country and the world. As Joyce references several countries Ambassador Mulhall invited the U.S. Ambassadors from Greece, Italy, Cyprus, France and Germany to all read portions of the book, which was especially fun when Joyce wrote bits in their language, especially in French and Italian. Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” chose to read Yeats’ Second Coming, which I found highly prescient and appropriate and in that instance I was inspired to do the same for my group. Mayor Pete Buttiegieg also read a portion of “Ulysses,” one that describes a river as he lives near a river in Indiana. So, all this inspired me to do my own little art talk. I Wikipedia’d Yeats’ life, focused on some of the more interesting, maybe more provocative highlights, and read four poems, “A Young Man’s Song,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Death,” and of course “Second Coming.” Interestingly people were more interested in talking about the “brown penny” in “A Young Man’s Song” rather than the more challenging issues of rape in “Leda,” our understanding of death in “Death,” or the seeming descent into anarchy we’ve been enjoying lately of which “Second Coming” well describes.
This week I also enjoyed another Zoom theater event, again by the Theater of War production company. It was Thursday when I generally do a Zoom, but I did only an hour of it in order to get to watch the show. They did bits from “King Lear,” again, really well performed, and then afterward they had a discussion about what this brought up for people. As the moderator noted, this Zoom format, and maybe this time we’re experiencing, inspired more personal, heartfelt shares about caring for elderly, being alone as an elder, and dealing with difficult relatives as they age. One very dynamic older lady discussed how she lost several people during the pandemic, and during her life, and she finds herself alone in her quarantine, leaning on her Zoom church meetings. Another young woman talked about caring for her ninety-three year old grandmother along with you five-year old son while simultaneously working in health care. Another, a Native American woman, talked about how her culture, which traditionally honors elders, is dealing with all this, and one of the last comments came from a New Yorker talking about dealing with the aging and death of a difficult relative, and a Holocaust survivor, drawing attention to that aspect of King Lear, that he certainly didn’t make things easy on his daughters. Again, a delightful surprise, I hadn’t expected to come away with the depth of these heart openings on top of some wonderful theater.
