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October 16, 2006
TT: Travels with my laptop
I spent most of last week deep in the woods of Connecticut, where I worked on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. When not clicking away at the laptop, I watched In Cold Blood (about which more later in the week), Journey into Fear, The Lady from Shanghai, and Our Man in Havana, read Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans, Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt, Chester Himes' Blind Man With a Pistol, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Patrick Süskind's Perfume, and ate a bisonburger at a bikers' hangout called (incongruously) the Vanilla Bean Café where the yuppie-style food is tasty and the clientele...er, unlikely.I emerged from hiding long enough to make a side trip to Amherst College, where I gave a lecture called "The Critic as Moralist" in which I varied a few of my favorite themes:
In writing about art, I don't moralize, nor do I look with favor upon artists who do. In fact, I regard it as a major part of my job to be on the lookout for people who prefer moralizing to beauty, no matter what disguise they may happen to be wearing. Such folk are ever and always with us, perhaps never more so than at the present moment, when beauty is besieged the world over by a two-pronged army of totalitarians and utilitarians, the first of whom wish to enlist art in the service of politics and the second of whom seek to seduce its creators with the promise of profit beyond the dreams of avarice.
While at Amherst I visited the Mead Art Museum, a teaching museum whose best-known piece is Robert Henri's Salome. The permanent collection isn't all that striking, but the Mead makes the most of what it has, especially the first-class Joseph Cornell box displayed in a vitrine placed next to a floor-to-ceiling window through which you can see a slice of the Berkshire Mountains, a real-life landscape that contrasts delightfully with Cornell's imaginary world. I went there to check out George Bellows: A Ringside Seat, a smart little exhibition devoted mostly to lithographs and works on paper, though I was no less impressed by "Gifts from the Ebb Tide" and the World of Kitagawa Utamaro, which made me feel--not for the first time--that I really need to start teaching myself about Japanese art.
I would have been more than happy to spend another week in Connecticut--I never have enough time to spend on Hotter Than That in New York--but duty called, so I dutifully returned home to catch a preview of My Name Is Rachel Corrie and prepare for the coming week. This morning I'm off to the Metropolitan Museum for the press view of Americans in Paris, 1860-1900. (Will you be there, CultureGrrl? If so, peel an eye for me.) On Tuesday I'll be talking to the fellows of the NEA's third annual Arts Journalism Institute about the new media and the fine arts. On Thursday I head back up to Connecticut to poke my head into the Wadsworth Atheneum and see Hartford Stage's production of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, about which I hear very interesting buzz. On Sunday I return to New York for a press preview of Butley, Nathan Lane's new show. Whew!
That reminds me: I dreamed last Friday that I lost $214,000 playing poker with Nathan Lane, who promptly sold my marker to the mob. Go figure.
Posted October 16, 2006 12:00 PM
