Rigoletto

Last night, I went with Niki to see the Metropolitan Opera perform Rigoletto in Central Park. The night started off with me gritting my teeth, annoyed that I was waiting on a corner for Niki, who was 40 minutes late. But she came bearing gifts and so I couldn't stay too annoyed for long, especially when one was a guilty pleasure magazine, and the others were fancy food for a picnic. So we sat there on the Great Lawn under the night sky, drank wine, ate cavier and brie, and listed to lovely music. It was such a perfect little moment, almost unreal in how nice it felt. The people next to us were, because it is the only appropriate descriptor that we will both understand, so white trash - and totally amazing. It made me miss, in some small way, Florida, and even Virginia - that people like this, a little unmannered, a little boisterous in a very specific way, don't really live in New York, or at least they conceal it well. They were probably in their forties, were smoking cigarettes nonstop, and I am almost positive that they were on ecstasy. They had this spinning light machine that they kept putting in front of their faces. They kept rolling around on their sheets and were giggling nonstop. It was totally amazing! That, next to me, the dark sky above me, a city skyline behind me, and an opera ahead of me - oh, it was a lovely night.

I, again, have to go to work again way too shortly and so cannot say much, but just want to point out two really good sentences that I have read recently, both from last week's New Yorker. There is also an amazing article about Roger Federer that was in last Sunday's Times. It was written by David Foster Wallace and is filled with really amazing sentences and is so good, somewhat surprisingly, given my normal distaste for DFW.

"The effect, when it works, is like staying in the pause at the top of a swing, suspended between rapture and collapse."
-Justin Davidson, "Measure for Measure: Exploring the Mysteries of Conducting"

"After all, if the world is not a text because it does not have an author, then [Walter] Benjamin is not an interpreter but a poet, creating meanings rather than perceiving them. Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works are best read as fragments of a great poem--the poem of a longing that no world, and Benjamin's least of all, could possibly satisfy."
-Adam Kirsch, "The Philosopher Stoned: What Drugs Taught Walter Benjamin"