Author: Mara L.

Just when I decided that I may get myself a racket and join Jens playing tennis in Central Park, winter is here. So we took a walk. Something about these tennis courts resonates with me, with the strange mix of pleasure and sadness that can take your mind off mundane tasks and fill you with longing for god-knows-what. Snow was falling in thick flakes. Not much in the end, but in the city every bit of it seems to count as a snow storm. Once the snow is nicely on the ground and the sun is out again, the park will be crowded with kids and parents, riding down the slopes of hills on anything that resembles a sled. Every year, that’s a happy moment in Central Park, children shrieking with pleasure. When I was new in Manhattan it made me realize that, no matter how crazy this place may be, people are really not so different from anyone else. Yesterday, everyone still home during the ’storm’, was entirely different. Without the laughter and commotion of sled-riding, the realities of the neighborhood are more present, the cracks in the walls more visible. Walking back into the streets, I saw a row of empty stores with broken windows, no one bothering to repair things. And no lovely layer of white snow covering it up.

Jens tells me he took up tennis in Central Park, though not the fancy kind where you rent a court. He’s playing where the kids play, public courts fairly high up north, close to where he lives. I’ve been out of touch for too long, working and not keeping up with friends. On the spur of a moment I decided last week I would check in. As he was just about to go to the park, I joined him there. It’s utterly charming, parents teaching their kids tennis, groups of friends playing any kind of game where you’re hitting a ball against the wall, some men practicing what looks like Tai Chi on a smallish court. In the skies and on the fences, large birds. Eagles perhaps or hawks. I wonder whether the tennis balls to them look almost like prey, though never quite. Too yellow, too round. They don’t attack, they watch. Or whether all this activity interferes with what to them is their terrain, a disturbance to be scared away. Well, that doesn’t work either. For me, it’s a New York moment, in a neighborhood that isn’t quite the rich Manhattan of the southern edge of the park, but rather affected from the various recent economic crises. Incongruent, lovely, and a bit threatening. People going about their lives caring for their families and friends, having fun and getting some exercise that doesn’t cost money. Though if you just as much as raise your head you might as well worry.

I’m not generally a friend on horror movies. Indeed, I am quite unable to watch them. That being said, I have a new favorite actor, Herr Schreck. Herr Schreck, in Elias Mehrige’s movie Shadow of the Vampire, is hired in order to play the vampire Count Orlok. Now some might argue that Herr Schreck isn’t really an actor. Why? Let me explain.

Mehrige’s film is a story about the making of Nosferatu, along the lines of “we’ll tell you what a nightmare was going on behind the scenes when the tyrannical director made Nosferatu…” Murnau, the director of the 1922 horror classic, is depicted as a monster of his own. While researching locations for his masterpiece, he presumably ran into a real vampire. He tells his crew that this creature is an actor, called Herr Schreck. Herr Schreck is hired, but eventually kills most of the crew during filming. Murnau’s ambition is to keep sufficiently many of them alive to wrap up the last scene, and as a reward promises Herr Schreck his most deeply desired bloody meal, the female lead actress.

Given my weak constitution I was almost unable to watch the movie. Only during the second run, I was able to enjoy it. I was somewhat helped by having watched a brief interview with Willem Dafoe, who plays Herr Schreck. He said, somewhat disrespectful of my horror, that you’d need to believe in vampires to believe the story. Well, true. And I certainly don’t believe in vampires. So now it turned out that the movie is one of the best comedies I ever saw. Dafoe is absolutely stunning in the way he transforms into an old, sad vampire, unhappy with his vampire life and still desirous of biting into someone’s neck.

My favorite scene is between Herr Schreck and two other crew members, who still believe that he is a particularly good actor, completely transformed into his character. The vampire tells them that he read Dracula, and they ask him what he thought. Well, he says, it was sad. Why sad? Because Dracula doesn’t have any servants. The other crew members say, oh dear, he didn’t get at all what the book is about! And then Herr Schreck speaks in his true nature as vampire who has suffered through centuries of isolation and lightless existence. I say no more, you have to watch it, completely moving.