Just got back from seeing Meredith Monk's "Impermanence" at BAM. Ran into Ruby Lerner, Barbara Hammer, Jane Comfort. Couldn't believe it: Ching Gonzalez was in the cast! Glad to see that there's continuity.

Clifford Geertz died; remember attending a lecture he gave at Columbia University while i was there studying anthropology. William Styron died... wish i could say that i really liked his writing, but i did find that memoir "Darkness Visible" quite moving.

At the press opening for the Albers and Moholy-Nagy show at the Whitney, Jill Krementz was talking to Larry. Turns out she had never heard of Moholy-Nagy. Where has she been? Under a rock? My answer: no, under Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe it's the same thing.

Books i ordered came in the maile, and loved "My Life as a Fake" by Peter Carey. I'm glad i decided to read his work. Finally got more of Gavin Lambert's novels, "The Slide Area" and "The Goodbye People"; i've read his books "On Cukor" and the biography of Nazimova, and i read "Inside Daisy Clover" long ago, but i'm looking forward to these.

On Monday, watched a bunch of pre-code movies on TCM: "The Lady Refuses" with Betty Compson, "Lady With a Past" with Constance Bennett, and "Their Big Moment" with Zasu Pitts and Slim Summerville. A lot of fun. Tuesday, the press preview for Albers and Moholy-Nagy, the very first art event i've been to since the summer! Today, the press screening of the Quay Brothers' "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes". I'd heard it was bad, but it was the only screening, and it's a Cinemascope movie, so i decided, why not? It just shows that what might be magical in a 10 minute short can become unbearable in a 99 minute feature. But it did have a great look.

Then went to BAM to see Meredith Monk... my first performance event in... i can't even tell how long. But i did feel an obligation. There was a moment, near the end, when Meredith did a movement... she tossed her head back and spread her arms... and it was so characteristic, and i remembered that the first time i saw her do that particular movement must have been sometime in the mid-1960s. And it was rather like that line from Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve", where Henry Fonda tries to explain how he sees Barbara Stanwyck in the mist of time. (Something like, "I see you back, and further back....") And i felt like that, as if Meredith were that post-college girl that i saw in the 1960s. The music was pretty sensational, and i must admit it was very moving.

And it reminded me of something that Trisha Brown said, in that booklet that i found when i was looking for Yvonne Rainer's books, how when she first performed (in NYC), the audiences were small, but how we grew up together. The audience was in on the developments, was part of the intellectual inquiry. I think Yvonne called it "a shared present-time" and it was, and Trisha and Yvonne and Meredith and Kenneth King and William Dunas (just as examples) were all part of my growing up.

But what is there to share now?