The first time I visited the Vatican, I saw a very tall, very frail old man in a wheelchair toss himself to the floor at the entrance to St. Peter’s and drag himself all the way to the altar on his elbows. He was wearing a fine pin-striped grey wool suit that must have been tailored for him years earlier, when he had been more muscular and more mobile. It was the most powerful act of religious devotion I’ve ever seen. Zosia, the Polish-American narrator of Karolina Waclawiak’s novel How to Get Into the Twin Palms, once visited the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, and can remember crawling around the icon in the church, the pebbles on the floor bruising her knees. Now Zosia lives in Los Angeles, collects unemployment, crashes motel swimming pools, plays with fire, and obsesses about getting into a nightclub near her home that’s populated by small-time Russian gangsters. Every so often she remembers the Black Madonna and the person she used to be.

The Black Madonna of Częstochowa isn’t black. She’s dark-skinned because the pigments used to paint her flesh were darkened, legend has it, during a church fire the painting miraculously survived. She has a profoundly sad, inward expression, and two disfiguring scars across her right cheek. The wounds give the portrait a tinge of violence and sadism, which might be one reason Zosia recalls it. It’s said that the scars were made by thieves during a robbery, and that they dropped the picture when it began to bleed. Twin Palms, in its setting and incantory tone, reminded me of Joan Didion’s California novels, which are narrated by women preternaturally sensitive, physically and psychologically, to their surroundings. The world rushes in and wounds them. Zosia wounds herself. She rubs her hands raw in the sand, nicks herself shaving, gets sunburn on the back of her neck, and then a rash on her arms. Everything that she experiences registers on her skin. Like the Black Madonna, she wears the scars heavily.

November 01, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I grew up in a leafy suburb about an hour outside of New York City. When I was a kid my parents sometimes brought us into the city on Saturdays, to shop Canal Street (back in the 1970’s it was an important source for appliances and gifts) or attend the seasonal movie-and-a-show spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. We would arrive early in the morning and leave after dark, driving home along the FDR Drive, with views of the Pepsi Cola sign lit up across the river in Queens to send us on our way. From the back seat of the family station wagon the city was magical, a gentle stream of noise and light. It’s precisely that dream of New York City that brought me here, and the one that’s captured at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The space, designed by Rafael Vinoly, sits on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle and faces east through an immense stretch of curtain wall. The auditorium is hi-tech. On its website Jazz claims it was “[d]esigned acoustically to be the premier jazz performance hall in the world." There are adjustable curtains, video monitors, stage platforms, and banks of seating to suit different music and performance styles. The night I was there, for a rather sedate awards ceremony, the hall was arranged in tiered, semi-circular rows that overlooked the stage and, beyond it, the southwest corner of Central Park, the statue of Christopher Columbus (which is temporarily enclosed), and West Fifty-Seventh Street. It was a spectacle that rendered the goings-on all but irrelevant. The walls, stairs and steps inside are all finished simply in blonde wood. Though the layout is pragmatic it reminded me of the auditorium at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where every seat seems to be perched on a balcony, as if there’s no main space and no main floor.During the ceremony there was a large, and largely unnecessary, video monitor hanging right in the center of the glass. The organizers could have set smaller screens at each side instead. Surely they knew we weren’t there for the ceremony, but for the view.

October 31, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I first saw the Richard Meier-designed twin glass condominium towers at 173 and 176 Perry Street one evening in 2002, just after they’d been enclosed. The lots were still filled with construction rubble. Lit gently by the sunset, the small, tall buildings had an elegant presence. It was hard to understand why West Villagers were up in arms about them. The towers became better known as a “celebrity dormitory” than starchitecture. They’ve housed, at various times, Calvin Klein, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Martha Stewart and Vincent Gallo. (Does the thought of Stewart riding the elevator with Gallo make you smile too?) Because of maintenance and administrative challenges, there’s been considerable tenant turnover. When Meier constructed a third (larger, glassier and pricier) condominium tower in 2010, just one block south at 165 Charles Street, the Perry Street buildings lost what little cachet they had left.

Now that every neighborhood in Manhattan is studded with tawdry, absurdly tall, mirror-glass condo buildings, the ten-story Perry Street towers seem terrifically restrained. And after a decade these two buildings have assumed a quiet authority on the street and in the skyline. From up close one doesn’t see expanses of glass, but a dense, gridded layering of metal and glass panels. The facades have collected a fine layer of grime, which lends them, like wrinkles and grey hair on a handsome man, a certain gravitas. Like all of Meier’s buildings, the towers have been conceived with ideal geometries and slightly stodgy volumes. And that’s what saves them – they’re solid. They sit comfortably on the ground, and feel as if they’d be comfortable to live inside of too. They’re no longer spectacles; they’re apartment buildings.

October 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I watched the first seasons of Mad Men fitfully; I was definitely not on board. The characters and their settings, though allegedly historical accurate, were chilling. And I couldn’t understand the popular fascination with this time period, the early 1960’s, when men were men and women were there for their delectation. But I watched the latest season (the fifth) breathlessly, caught up in every story line. The characters were stirring, and their unnaturally stiff composure and surroundings underscored the explosive distance between their inner and outer lives. People that had been grotesque caricatures to me (Roger Sterling, Joan Harris) were suddenly sympathetic, and I fell especially hard for Peter Campbell, the upstart ad agent and Connecticut family man, as he fell, swiftly and simply, in love with a neighbor. Their romance, played out in daytime trysts at the Roosevelt Hotel, was tremendously moving.

The show’s designers did a splendid job recreating a room from the Roosevelt. (Ironically, the real Roosevelt Hotel boasts that they’ve just remodeled all their rooms.) There’s something about this generic, tasteful midtown hotel room that’s especially forgiving. Because it’s not-home and not-work, it gives the characters a space where they can suspend their official identities and unfold their real selves. The room is simple, spacious and squarish, furnished with neo-colonial pieces that look downright dowdy compared with the ones in Don Draper’s Scandinavian-modern living room and Roger’s white-and-chrome office. There’s an arched upholstered headboard, a high full-size bed, a butler, and a desk. The space is flooded with the kind of soft white daylight found in Dutch paintings. It makes the scenes feel, at the same moment they’re unfolding, as if they’re being remembered. And we know that they’ll be remembered, just this way, forever, by Pete.

October 26, 2012 by Nalina Moses