LONGHOUSE RESERVE | Reopening

Who is that masked visitor behind the King? (Alice Tepper Marlin at the
Yoko Ono chess board, LongHouse Reserve. Photo by JT Marlin. 

June 20, 2020—LongHouse Reserve is the top attraction in East Hampton. It has been closed during the coronavirus scourge. 

Now it is reopening, in stages. It's now open Wednesdays and Saturdays, with limited visiting hours, reservations required and  timed visits of 75 minutes. Only half the parking spaces are being used, to allow social distancing. Masks are required.

Four of us went today to see recent changes. I described our visit there in 2014 as part of a mini-reunion in the lead-up to the 50th Reunion of the Wellesley Class of 1966. We go back pretty much every year and it's always a new experience because new sculptures are added, old ones are moved around and the landscaping is always changing.

Cross in the Pond. This is reminiscent of the 9/11 memorial pool in New York
City. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Loehr, who was with us on the visit.

The interlude when the coronavirus kept everyone away was used to good effect by bringing the landscaping to an even higher level of perfection than we have seen in earlier years.

Fly Vision, 360. Photo courtesy of
Caroline Tepper-Marlin. 

Some of the sculptures seemed to be new, but were possibly there in previous years but I overlooked them. At left is one with the photographer looking back from a pole full of convex mirrors. It gave me the feeling of looking at the eye of a fly.

My favorite sculpture was and is Yoko Ono's colorless chess set.  It's a No-Logo experience, i.e., blank battle standards, borderless territory. With no way of being sure who The Enemy is or where the borders are, the game loses its point. Which is... The point. Imagine. The Fog of Peace.

Which reminds me that Paul McCartney celebrated his 78th birthday on Thursday. Happy Birthday, Sir Paul.

BIRTH | June 18—On his 75th, McCartney Gets New Queen's Honor

Sir Paul McCartney, Companion of Honor

June 18, 2017—Sir Paul McCartney turns 75 today (three and a half months after me, but you knew that).

He got a nice birthday present yesterday from Queen Elizabeth II.

The Queen's actual 91st birthday is on Wednesday, but her official birthday was celebrated yesterday. So that's when she bestowed her semi-annual honors.

Sir Paul was knighted by the Queen two decades ago when he was 55 and she was 71. At 75 his knighthood is being topped up with a Companion of Honor award — the centennial of which is this month, by the way — for services to music, on the same day as J.K. Rowling won the award for her services to literature and philanthropy. Sir Paul said of the new royal distinction:

I'm very happy about this huge honor and with the news coming on my birthday weekend and Father's Day it makes it colossal!

Sir Paul was born in Liverpool, England. He is a big believer in magic in reviewing his life. When he was 14, his mother died of an embolism. This led to his establishing a personal relationship with John Lennon, whose mother had also died when he was a teenager.

McCartney and Lennon are responsible for most of the most popular songs on the Beatles repertoire. McCartney is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the recipient of 21 Grammys. His Beatles song "Yesterday" is one of the most covered songs in musical history, and he has written more than 30 No. 1 songs. Other top-ten hits of his include "Hey Jude" and "Let It BeCome".

In trying to explain how he came to write songs and become part of the Beatles, Sir Paul turns to the language of alchemy, invoking both magic and chemistry:

Every time I come to write a song, there's this magic little thing where I go, "Ooh, ooh, it's happening again." I just sit down at the piano and go, "Oh my God, I don't know this one," and suddenly there's a song. ... Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules, And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys.