Archives for July 14, 2003

Here I am, finally. I’ve been talking about starting an arts blog for the past couple of years, but I never got up the nerve to do the dirty work (i.e., the computer-geek stuff). So when artsjournal.com kindly offered to do it for me, it took me about three seconds to say yes.

If you already know my stuff, “About Last Night” will be familiar to you. It’s a daily offshoot of “Second City,” the monthly column I write for the Washington Post about the arts in New York City. (To read my last Post column, go here.) I’ll report on out-of-town events from time to time–I see a lot of things in Washington–but I plan to concentrate on New York City, the place where I live and where I spend most of my spare time going to theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and nightclubs. I can’t think of a better place in the world from which to write a blog like this, though I do get arted out every once in a while. (You’ll hear about that, too.)

“Second City” deals only with the performing and visual arts, whereas “About Last Night” will also cover books, film, and television, as well as offering commentary on what other people write about the arts. But the premise is still pretty much the same: this is the diary of a working critic who happens to cover all the arts, not just one or two.

Why a blog? I take intense pleasure from every kind of art there is–music, dance, literature, theater, paintings and sculpture, movies and TV. So can you. That’s why I’m writing “About Last Night.” I want to encourage you to follow your curiosity wherever it leads you, the same way I do. I believe deeply that all art is one, and that all the arts are accessible to everyone. I hope you’ll treat this blog as a daily opportunity to widen your horizons.

You can access this blog two ways, by going directly to my URL or visiting my host, artsjournal.com. If you came here the first way, click on the artsjournal logo at the top of the page and look at the rest of the site–I read it every morning, and so should you.

One last thing: please tell your friends about “About Last Night.” While you’re at it, tell me what you think of it. I long for your e-mail, and plan to post it regularly.

Welcome aboard.

I hear there are places to live that are almost as much fun as New York City, but I wouldn’t know–I live here, and I’m not going anywhere.

One reason why I’m sticking is that last Thursday, Luciana Souza sang with the New York Philharmonic on the Great Lawn of Central Park, just a five-minute walk from my front door, before a crowd of…oh, I don’t know, maybe two or three million. It sure looked that big from where I was sitting, anyway. (Allan Kozinn guessed 50,000 in the New York Times, but who’s counting?) In any case, Souza ought to be singing in front of multitudes, because she’s the most exciting jazz singer I’ve run across in ages. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that she isn’t really a jazz singer, or at least not quite exactly one. Souza, who now lives in New York, comes from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her style is a rich, volatile brew of Brazilian pop and American jazz, impossible to categorize and irresistible to hear.

So what in the world was she singing with the New York Philharmonic? Why, Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo, of course, a wonderfully subtle exercise in Spanish local color with a part for a mezzo-soprano with peasant blood in her veins. Most classically trained mezzos make it sound too formal, or–worse yet–like a caricature of flamenco. Not Souza. Her singing, at once coolly poised and earthy, with a chesty vibrato that grabs you by the heart and squeezes, is the voice Falla must have heard in his dreams. Yes, she uses a microphone, meaning that prissy purists will want nothing to do with her (though she couldn’t very well have sung in Central Park without one), but I’m the furthest thing from a purist, and I doubt there’s been a performance quite like this one since Argentinita recorded the piece with Antal Dorati and the Ballet Theatre Orchestra for Decca back in the Forties (and why, pray tell, has that performance never been reissued on CD?). Souza performed El amor brujo earlier this year with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, and if somebody doesn’t haul the lot of them into a studio right away, somebody is dumb.

Should Falla strike you as excessively fancy fare for an outdoor pops concert, I can only say that the New York Philharmonic has been known to pull some fast ones in Central Park. A couple of years ago, for example, Audra McDonald sang the Brecht-Weill Seven Deadly Sins outdoors with the Philharmonic (in the W.H. Auden-Chester Kallman English-language version, thank you very much). I was there, agog and then some, which gives me an excuse to mention McDonald and Souza in the same breath. Even though they don’t sound a bit alike, they still have a lot in common, for neither one of them loses any sleep worrying about labels–instead, they sing whatever they want and make you like it. To call them “crossover” artists is to trivialize their boundless curiosity and resourcefulness. I think of them as citizens of the musical world, at home wherever they go, be it concert hall or cabaret or the great outdoors.

I had my fingers crossed all afternoon, checking the weather every couple of hours and wondering when the skies would fall. Instead, the temperature fell, and by the time I got to my seat it was preposterously balmy. The gnats were out in force, flying in funnel-cloud formation with orders to kill, but they picked a new target at intermission and left the rest of us to enjoy the sunset. Stretched out at the rear of the Great Lawn was the midtown skyline, bouncing light off the low-lying clouds, with the Chrysler Building peeping between the high-rises on Central Park South like a six-year-old boy trying to push his way through a crowd of six-foot-tall grownups in order to see the passing parade a little better. The surrounding sky was grayish-purple, and the effect was so exquisite that I would have been perfectly happy to turn my folding chair around and face the wrong way all night long, except that I wouldn’t have been able to see Souza’s spectacular rust-red-to-die-for dress.

Did I mention that the Gruccis were kind enough to set off fireworks as an encore, accompanied by a parkful of oohs and aahs? I felt as if I were looking at the biggest painting in the universe. (This one, to be exact.) And all for free!

Yes, it was disgustingly humid all week long, the orchestra needed another rehearsal, and I won’t be surprised if I have a nightmare or two about those gnats…and none of it mattered one tiny bit. Nights like this are why you live in a preshrunk apartment and pay outrageous rent and grope around to make sure your wallet’s still there every time you get off a crowded subway car. Feel free to remind me the next time you catch me griping about New York.

Gerald Nachman’s Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (Pantheon) is a narrative history of the post-Catskills standup comedians of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, starting with Mort Sahl and ending with Bill Cosby. It’s a surprisingly thick book, and surprisingly serious, too, though I’m surprised that Bob Gottlieb, the normally sharp-eyed editor, didn’t give it a few more nips and tucks. The chapters on Sahl, Tom Lehrer, Shelley Berman (I’d wondered what happened to him), Woody Allen, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May are especially good. No footnotes, and Nachman sometimes lapses into uncritical enthusiasm, but it’s still a solid read, good enough to make you curious about ex-headliners you’ve never heard of, or can just barely recall from childhood memories of The Ed Sullivan Show.

I smiled to see so many of these Formerly Hip Comics complaining about the frequency with which young comedians make use of what now appears to be the most popular 12-letter word in the English language. (They don’t seem to think much of David Letterman, either.) I look forward to seeing what tasteless outrages Chris Rock is bitching about when he’s 64.

I have a friend whose messages on my answering machine invariably begin, “I guess you’re out at some nightclub.” Contrary to widespread opinion, I don’t see everything the same night it opens. In fact, I didn’t get to Playwrights Horizons’ production of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates until yesterday afternoon–the very last performance. It took me long enough, but I’m glad I finally made it.

The play itself is no great shakes, a sort of monositcom about a no-longer-young single mom who plunges back into the dating scene after long absence. What made it special was Julie White’s performance as Haley, the ditsy, doe-eyed jolie laide of a certain age whose tales of woe occupy an unchallenging but agreeable hour and a half. That’s a long time to hold an audience, especially without an intermission, but White pulled it off with breathtaking ease. In an odd sort of way, the very slightness of the material made it easier to concentrate on her acting, which was so natural and transparent that you just know she sweat blood over it. She was alive from top to toe–I could write a hundred words about the way she used her feet. Too bad you can’t go see her (though maybe you already did, and I’m the last person in town to catch up with her), but I’m sure she’ll be back on stage any minute now, and next time around I’ll catch her first night instead of her last afternoon.

I just bought a copy of John Marin’s 1921 etching “Downtown. The El,” and it’s a beauty–a nervous cubist spiderweb that captures some of the sheer excitement of this crazy city in which I insist on living. It’s already taught me a lesson, which is that the ultimate test of the quality of a work of art is whether you can look at it every day without getting bored or irritated. So far, so good.

I never thought I’d be able to afford a Marin, but this one is a fluke, reprinted in 1924 in a special edition of 500 copies as a premium for New Republic subscribers, meaning that surviving impressions are comparatively easy to find and thus a hell of a lot less expensive. I’ve been trying to imagine a modern-day counterpart of such an offer, without much success. (Perhaps O could offer its subscribers tubes of Vaseline signed by Matthew Barney?)

When I first moved to Manhattan, nearly two decades ago, I’d see etchings and small lithographs by well-known artists hanging on the walls of the apartments of older middle-class New Yorkers, and say to myself, “Gee, that is so cool.” I innocently supposed such things were simply part of the New York package, something you did when you got old enough, like drinking coffee or getting married. I’m old enough now (to put it mildly), but I notice that New Yorkers of my generation are no more likely to own inexpensive high-quality art than they are to go to the ballet. If you’re rich, you buy rich people’s art, which too often means expensive signatures; if you’re not, you don’t buy anything at all. I wonder what happened to us. Could it be it that baby boomers and Gen-Xers are less interested in art? Or do we not know that you don’t need a lot of money to own something beautiful, so long as you don’t care whether it’s trendy?

Whatever the reason, Downtown. The El now hangs on the south wall of my living room, and I look at it lovingly every time I pass by, marveling at the chain of coincidence that brought this exquisite little specimen of prewar American modernism into my home. I’m lucky to have it–and lucky to have wanted it. I hope somebody else will want it just as much, someday.

Not just yet, though.

Benny Carter was one of the last living links to the golden age of jazz. Born in 1907, he made his first records in 1928, remaining active as a performer well into the Nineties, when I heard him at Iridium in what I gather was his last nightclub gig in Manhattan. (Amazingly enough, he was still playing quite well.) Though he’s best remembered as the suavest of alto saxophonists, Carter was no less distinctive as a composer and arranger. I also loved his tasty trumpet playing, a hobby he occasionally indulged in public, if never often enough. His lucid, balanced style and self-contained personality lacked the overt charisma that brings popularity to great artists–he was too much the gentleman to impose himself on his listeners–but connoisseurs and colleagues knew him for what he was, and rejoiced in his gifts.

If Carter made a bad record, I haven’t heard it, but Further Definitions, the 1961 album that teamed him with Coleman Hawkins and Jo Jones, two of his peerless contemporaries, captures him at close to his absolute best. I listened to “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set” when I got the news of his death in Los Angeles last Saturday. It seemed a proper way to say goodbye.

“We must find out what we can about this place we’re living in–this place in time–but we’ve got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We’re finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.”

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles