Archives for July 2003

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