I realise that the photograph below is a cliché and might just as well be a tourist postcard, but I still like the image of the junction of Park and 82nd. which for some reason known only to the New York authorities has a funnel releasing a thick jet of steam into the cold winter air:-

I ended the evening last night (well, not literally) in Bemelmans Bar alongside the Carlyle Hotel, which manages to escape the normal American taboo against bars, perhaps because of its long-standing association with Jackie Kennedy who helped preserve the murals and much else in Manhattan.   Of course, in the evening one cannot really appreciate them in the raucous atmosphere of 6 o’clock drinking (Americans start everything early), but in the morning I was able to snap them for the record:-

I have been intrigued on this visit, as on my last, by the appearance of a pencil-thin, tall skyscraper which has emerged in the skyline on 59th. Street, at least as high as the Empire State Building and, to my eyes, as different to the aesthetic of the classic skyscraper as the AT&T Building was in 1984.   I was struck that no-one mentions it, no-one comments, no-one looks up as they walk past on the street below.   The answer is that it is the new tallest building in the western world, designed by Rafael Viñoly, and required no planning permission because it breaches no planning laws, just rising one storey at a time for 84 stories, changing the skyline of New York forever:-

I woke myself up with a brisk – very brisk – walk in Central Park, which was covered in snow and dog walkers and where it is surprisingly easy to have the delusion of rurality, apart from the distant skyscrapers:-

On the aeroplane I was able to finish reading Giles Waterfield’s admirable and complicated new novel in proof (it’s not published till April) about a family whose daughter, Irene, marries a German (or Prussian) architect before the first world war and the effect of the first world war on all their lives, particularly on attitudes to Germany.   Like a grand social novel of the nineteenth century, it deals with a number of social issues, including
homosexuality between the wars, the politics of German design, and the social origins of Nazism.   It tells one a lot about the history of the period, is extremely well written and clever.

It’s always a pleasure to wake up in Manhattan, even when it’s icy cold and the streets are caked in snow.   The best thing in a day of meetings was sitting in a small room with work by Jasper Johns looking northwards up across Central Park and westwards towards the gothic rooftops of the skyscrapers which line Fifth Avenue:-

I spent the weekend in bed, nursing a streaming cold and reading the new-ish book by Sofka Zinovieff The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, Mt Grandmother and Me which describes the amazing ménage at Faringdon in the 1930s with dyed doves in the park, a folly designed by the Duke of Wellington, and visits from the artistic avant garde, including Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí and Gertrude Stein, presided over by Berners himself, rich, talented and saturnine in a yellow bow-tie and a skullcap knitted by the wife of J.D. Beazley, the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology.

We made a lightning dash to Brussels to attend the first night of Pierre Audi’s production of Alcina, designed by Patrick Kinmonth.   First performed some time ago in Drottningholm, revived in Amsterdam, and now renewed for La Monnaie, it has been designed and staged much more authentically than would now be normal in London, with a fine eye for eighteenth-century detail, based on the paintings of Devis (and maybe a bit of David).   The second act, in particular, was extraordinarily powerful:  beautiful music, beautifully staged and, above all, beautifully sung by Sandrine Piau as Alcina.

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