If Alexander Calder were alive to visit the kids’ department of Pottery Barn or West Elm today, he would probably feel deeply torn, which tells you a lot about America’s best-known sculptor. He might well say that the shelves of knockoff mobiles “nauseate” him, as he did when DIY mobile-making guides started proliferating among craft hobbyists in the 1950s. Gimmicky popularizing of his work pained him. Then again, he would likely take real pleasure in discovering that his greatest sculptural innovation has found new life as an enchanting crib toy.
Calder, born in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1898, came of age at a time when prominent artists and thinkers had begun to consider play a serious pastime. “Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and family jests—is play,” Vladimir Nabokov declared in 1925. By the last decade of Calder’s life—he died in 1976—the view had acquired prescriptive authority. “It is in playing and only in playing,” the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued, “that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
Last month, John Watzke was going about a normal day at his drive-in theater in Ocala, Florida, when a customer called him to share concerns about COVID-19. Watzke, who has run the outdoor business since 2011, knew he had to think fast. “I got a window from my storage building, cut a hole in the concession’s sidedoor, and put the window in,” he says. “By the time everybody got here, they could safely pick up orders.” In less than a week, he gave the 72-year-old venue a total makeover: he acquired new food packaging, cordoned off parking spots to create buffer zones, and implemented strict sanitation guidelines for employees. The two-screen venue, which was relatively quiet this past winter, is now keeping busy even on weeknights, welcoming as many as 200 cars at once.
Though Florida is currently under a stay-at-home order, the Ocala Drive-In Theater is one of several drive-ins enjoying an unexpected renaissance, and says it received permission to remain open from the governor and local police. As the coronavirus pandemic has altered millions of lives across the U.S., these old-timey facilities offer a temporary escape from reality. Because visitors enjoy films from their cars, they can still practice social distancing.
It used to hit me particularly in rental cars. “Ameripanic,” I called it: an overwhelming (for a Brit) apprehension of scale, a kind of horizontal vertigo at the vastness and possibility of this great country. I learned to drive on a smaller scale, noodling along the winding country roads of southern England. I was held in by the high hedges, nursed around corners by the dreaming verges, soothed by an occasional vision of a plowed field. But in the roaring U.S., I was out there. At large. Alone. Slewing between lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike, in vague command of (I think) a large Pontiac—pure Ameripanic. Called to be Neal Cassady, feeling like J. Alfred Prufrock.
It is a big claim but the opening chapter repays the cover price: a breathless, exhaustively reported and utterly unputdownable account of the drama, from the first confusing alarm on the screen of an inexperienced security guard to the moment a shaken Emmanuel Macron stepped up to address the nation, five hours later.
In between, we hear from many of the men and women whose actions that night helped save Notre Dame and its priceless contents from absolute destruction, including the cathedral’s general manager, Laurent Prades, and Marie-Hélène Didier, the National Heritage curator in charge of France’s religious art.
Listen to me, the poets laureate
move only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
Sunday and everything, even my hangover, seems ceremonious—
bled-pale light through blinds; the room’s faint
incense of lavender, cannabis, sex.
We stay in bed till after noon, waking and sleeping and waking,
eating eggs and avocado, spilling