Chapter II / In which a movie set in New York substitutes for the real thing

New York is one of my favorite cities. I've been lucky to have many friends spend time living there in recent years. Along with a few stopovers and holidays, visiting them has coloured my experience of the city with many happy memories, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of them when I move to Boston at the end of August. 

In the meantime, my time in NYC on this journey is sadly limited to two hours in Terminal 8 at JFK to change planes bound for Stockholm. There's not much to say about T8, but I did see an enjoyable film set in New York on the flight from Seattle: A Late Quartet starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, and Catherine Keener. It's a story about a very successful string quartet which is falling apart. 

The quartet was formed 20+ years earlier by three Juilliard School students and one teacher (Walken), whose diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease at the start of the film provides the narrative drive. Two of the other quartet members (Hoffmann & Keener) are married with one daughter, Alexandra, who has gone into the family business and takes violin lessons from the fourth member, Daniel (Mark Ivanir). I learned cello from age 10 to 18, and although I was a woeful student blessed with a friendly teacher tolerant of my many shortcomings (Alexandra, by contrast, is a gifted student whose teacher throws her out after 10 minutes spent mostly berating her), these 'music lesson' scenes were somewhat familiar to me. Unlike painting, writing, or composing, a musical performance is created 'live' in front of the audience, and unlike theatre, opera, or dance, it's typically only meant to engage one of your senses, which can make it more intense. I'm not sure I ever exposed my soul through the cello, but I do remember feeling very self-conscious when playing.

The action takes place over a few weeks in wintry Manhattan, and there were some striking scenes set in Central Park. If the film is to be believed, some classical musicians in New York live very well, in large comfortable-looking apartments within jogging distance of the Jackie O reservoir. I found that comforting, particularly since my first thought after discovering that one of the characters has Parkinson's Disease was 'OMG, how will the poor bastard pay for healthcare?!' I would guess this prosperity isn't true of their counterparts in Sydney or London (elsewhere in Europe I'm not so sure) and if so, that's partly because of the relative strength of the New York economy which supports the arts and allows some artists to afford to live well there without being celebrities (Nigel Kennedy/Damien Hirst/Jay-Z). In 2010 New York's GDP was 4X Sydney's and 1.5X London's, and its GDP per capita was also higher (by 50% and 20% respectively).

Overall, A Late Quartet was engaging and enjoyable - and as it turned out, its scenes of Manhattan winter nicely matched the overcast skies around JFK on this mid-summer's day.