« TT: Where credit is due | Main | TT: Almanac »
February 5, 2004
TT: A night in the life
Our Girl and I have been holding forth about the paradoxical provincialness of New York City, so I thought it might be worth posting some fugitive reflections on the subject of why I do live here and not in, say, Washington or San Francisco, or even my beloved Chicago.Last night was a case in point. I met a writer friend for dinner in the East Village at one of the dozen-odd inexpensive Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, all on a single block and widely rumored to share a single kitchen as well. It's also said that there are no cats in that neighborhood, but we had a very good meal, after which we made our way through the wintry mix to an off-Broadway theater in the vicinity, the New York Theatre Workshop, where we saw the penultimate preview of Valhalla, Paul Rudnick's new play, which opens Thursday. (Watch this space Friday to see what I wrote about it for my theater column in The Wall Street Journal.) That's one kind of weeknight in Manhattan.
And tonight? Well, I stuck to my own neighborhood, the Upper West Side, but the evening ended up having a downtown flavor anyway: I took a singer friend to hear Dave's True Story and the Lascivious Biddies at Makor. Regular readers of this blog will recall admiring references to both groups, about whom I last wrote a couple of months ago in my Washington Post column:
I ventured down to the Village to hear two hip bands, Dave's True Story and the Lascivious Biddies, at Fez. DTS, previously praised in this space, is a volatile blend of two seemingly incompatible ingredients, the coolly kinky songs of David Cantor and the warmly engaging vocals of Kelly Flint. Hearing Flint sing about the wild side of downtown life in so comforting a voice is guaranteed to knock your dreams a bubble or two off plumb. As for the Biddies, they're a pop-jazz quartet of clever women who yoke two similarly dissimilar styles--girl-group vocals and King Cole Trio-style instrumentals--to charming effect.
Part of what makes DTS and the Biddies two of the most interesting bands in town is that they don't lend themselves to ready categorization. Both make music that is rooted in jazz but open to all manner of sounds, and both sing smart self-composed songs--often witty, sometimes wry, occasionally rueful--that float free of the up-with-love trap. (The Biddies' "Famous," for example, is a cruelly comic piece of celebrity mockery: "I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street.") They fit no pigeonholes, not even the made-in-downtown-New-York label that accurately describes the clubs where they're usually to be found.
What, I asked myself, were two such exotic groups doing north of Noho, working a room one block from Lincoln Center and a few doors away from Café des Artistes, Peter Jennings' hangout? I mean, nobody plays the Upper West Side, right? So since I'd never even heard of Makor, much less been there, I decided I ought to check out an uptown spot adventurous enough to book DTS and the Biddies--and was I ever surprised.
Makor, it turns out, is a Jewish community center, a West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y housed in what appears to have once been a fancy-schmancy townhouse on a very classy block. It still looks classy on the outside, enough so that I almost told the cabby to keep on driving. Instead, I got out, went in, had my shoulder bag searched, and headed downstairs to the least likely-looking nightclub I've ever seen. The Makor Café, I'm told, is one of the most popular Jewish singles bars in town (one patron dryly described it to me as "a kosher meat market"). What it looks like on the inside is the student union of a Midwestern land-grant university. The floors are clean, the air clear, the customers mostly fresh-faced except for a sprinkling of wannabe hipsters dressed in black berets, and all the tables are lined up in perfectly straight rows. If you were to ask a computer to generate a picture of the opposite of the Village Vanguard, this would be it. Yet the nice middle-class crowd clearly loved everything it heard, even such alarming cautionary tales of postmodern love as David Cantor's "Spasm" ("So spare me the roses the wine and the song/It all boils down to the raw protoplasm/'Cause this ain't the real thing/It's just a spasm").
As I caught another cab for the short ride home, I marveled at the sheer incongruity of my evening. Right music, wrong place, wrong night, wrong neighborhood--and nobody seemed to care, or even notice. Tomorrow I'll be returning to the immediate vicinity of Makor to watch New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine's Jewels. On Saturday I'll be taking a crosstown bus through Central Park to the National Academy of Design to see "The Artist's Eye: Wolf Kahn as Curator," a show put together by the man who made the monotype that now hangs above my mantelpiece. "Spasm" and Jewels, Paul Rudnick and Wolf Kahn: out of such daily juxtapositions is my life in Manhattan made. And while I have no doubt that you could find comparable variety in plenty of other big cities, I doubt there's anywhere else in America--perhaps in the whole world--where it's so easy to find. In New York, it comes to your front door and knocks. Loudly.
Posted February 5, 2004 12:00 PM
