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June 21, 2004
TT: Consumables
Lots and lots has happened since last we met, some of it in New York and some of it elsewhere.- I'll start by bragging. Harcourt e-mailed me the layout for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, my next book, and I'm still bedazzled. The design and typography couldn't be more handsome. Having already seen the dust jacket, my guess is that the finished product is going to be at least as good-looking as the Teachout Reader, if I do say so myself.
- On Wednesday and Thursday I was in Washington, D.C., where I saw Mark Lamos' revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Kennedy Center. (That's for The Wall Street Journal, so I'll keep my opinions on ice for the present.)
- In addition, I watched a performance by William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, also at the Kennedy Center. Somewhat to my surprise, I very much liked the last piece on the bill, a dance called One Flat Thing, reproduced in which the members of the company dragged twenty metal tables downstage, lined them up in five rows, and danced on top of, underneath, and in between them, accompanied by the electronic music of Thom Willems. Yes, it's a gimmick, but a brilliant one, rather like the strobe lights in David Parsons' Caught, and Dana Caspersen's program note summed up the results aptly, if a bit breathlessly:
Twenty tables, like jagged rafts of ice, fly forward and become the surface, the underground and the sky inhabited byh a ferocious flight of dancers. A pack of bodies raging with alacrity, whipping razor-like in perilous weaves, in a hurtling intelligence. The music of Thom Willems begins quietly and then blows up into a gale, hurling the dancers toward the end, their bodies howling in a voracious, detailed storm.
As you probably know, Ballett Frankfurt is disbanding any moment now, but Forsythe is starting up a new company, and I trust that One Flat Thing, reproduced will figure prominently in its repertory. I've never been a great fan of Forsythe's work, but this dance was terrific, and I want to see it again.
- Earlier that same day I paid a quick visit to the National Gallery. I looked at American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection, which contains two exquisite "minute" sketches by John Marin and a wonderful trompe l'oeil still life by John Peto, one of my favorite nineteenth-century American painters, and Drawings of Jim Dine, which contains, among other things, a profile drawing of a woman smoking a cigarette that I would have been more than happy to hang in the Teachout Museum.
- I took the train back to New York on Friday to hear Joào Gilberto give a solo concert at Carnegie Hall (it was part of the ongoing JVC Jazz Festival). Despite his usual mid-concert fit over the sound system, Gilberto sang mesmerizingly well, exhaling each song as if it were a cloud of cool mist, accompanied only by his spare acoustic guitar. Plenty of musicians were on hand, and the ones I ran into afterward were all hugging themselves with pleasure. Me, too.
If you weren't lucky enough to be there, you can hear most of the songs Gilberto sang on In Tokyo, his just-released live CD. Mmmmm.
- Over the weekend, I saw two musicals. Not only did I look in on the current cast of Hairspray, now playing ad infinitum at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, but I also traveled to New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse to catch a revival of Guys and Dolls featuring Karen Ziemba as Miss Adelaide. Both shows will likely be fodder for one or more of my Wall Street Journal theater columns, so keep an eye peeled.
- Before, during, and after this sustained burst of art-related activity, I retired to the Teachout Museum (otherwise known as my living room) to straighten pictures and watch Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day, an utterly serious movie cunningly disguised as a light comedy, and The Lodger, John Brahm's 1944 not-quite-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent-movie retelling of the tale of Jack the Ripper. For reasons not obvious to me, The Lodger is unavailable on DVD or videocassette (I harvested it from the Fox Movie Channel). Be that as it may, it sports a terrific performance by the ever-interesting Laird Cregar, about whom some adventurous buff ought to write a gossipy biography, and a first-rate score by Hugo Friedhofer, who spent most of his time orchestrating other composers' film music. He did manage to snag a few memorable movies of his own, though, including The Best Years of Our Lives, One-Eyed Jacks, Ace in the Hole, and Brahm's The Lodger. Keep an eye out for this one--it's fun.
- I also plugged a gaping hole in my cultural literacy which I'm not quite embarrassed enough to keep to myself. I bought a copy of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard many years ago, but somehow never got around to reading it. It's been on my shelf ever since, peering out at me reproachfully from time to time, and I finally popped it in my overnight bag last week and knocked it off in two ecstatic sittings, the first on the train to Washington and the second in my hotel room that same night. I loved it, of course, in much the same way that I love Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, and for most of the same reasons. I have no excuse for not having read The Leopard sooner, save for a similar "excuse" recorded by Evelyn Waugh in a diary entry where he speaks of the "vast, uncovenanted pleasure" of having saved The Wings of the Dove for his late middle age. (I'm quoting from memory--if anybody out there knows the passage in question, would you be so kind as to send me the exact quote?)
Enough? I should damn well think so, which is why I'm taking a few days off. Ars longa, vita brevis, as my therapist says.
Posted June 21, 2004 12:03 PM
