Artistry
Fifteen minutes before the film was supposed to start tonight, a slight trim man in a madras shirt bounded towards the front of the theater. I’d noticed the organ keyboard facing the audience before he came in, and I’d idly thought about people sitting through silent movies accompanied by virtuosos staring up at the screen. But then this guy came flying down the aisle and sat down on the bench, his back to the ten or so people scattered around the theater. It took him a long time to get the light to work above the organ - he fiddled with it patiently, and his confidence in its workings paid off when the light finally flickered on.
There must be a “swoop” stop on this particular theater organ. The first few notes he played were surprisingly tremulous (weird, wild vibrato) and replete with slides from one note to the next. Was he setting the mood for the Jane Austen movie that the ten scattered people were going to see? It was a sort of Hitchcock mood, if he was. Theremin in madras.
When I got here today it was blazing hot, and I really needed yet another pair of sunglasses in order to move around outside. The woman in the store who sold me the glasses (which I will lose in the next few days) said that what she really liked about Ann Arbor was the people and the absence of franchises.
This guy at the organ was definitely not a franchisee. He played “People Will Say We’re In Love” with tremendous religiousity, big plagal cadences. He played “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” with aplomb, and “Oklahoma” with the “swoop” setting in full flower. Big blasts of sound, starting from nothing.
It was real artistry. You could tell when he was getting to his big finish - Oklahoma blew around us, big baseball-stadium chords, and we wanted to burst into applause. That’s when the real organ-show started - he improvised with “You Must Remember This,” as the screen finally lit with images.
But it wasn’t time for the film just yet. He was improvising to the sponsors’ brands, staring up at the screen, riffing on You Must Remember This, as the Ann Arbor Improvement District (paraphrasing here, I don’t remember the sponsors’ names) expressed its silent support for this great theater that had brought us all together, in emptiness, with a guy in a madras shirt playing the organ as if his life depended on it.
He ended smoothly, the sponsors stopped rolling, and the film began. No previews. This time we were released to applaud, and he bounded back up the aisle, smiling just a little.
All the beautiful things in the world
That’s the title of a short film that plays when you visit the Morgan Library. J.P. Morgan went in search of beautiful things, and tried to buy as many as he could.
Speaking of beautiful things, here are a few more words from Walter Pater:
I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition, its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into his work somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true complexion of humanity.
So - what’s the great thing from which you are shrinking today?
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One month to go until OneWebDay: September 22. Here’s a Rocketboom segment (translated into a zillion languages, thanks to dotSUB.com), a great post from Beth Kanter about OneWebDay, and some news: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Dana Spiegel (NYCWireless), Birju Pandya (CharityFocus.org), and more will be speaking at Washington Square Park on Sept. 22, Saturday, between 3 and 4 pm.