Not much to tell, though I only have one more crowded day before I pull up stakes and leave town for a long weekend of laptop-free rest, relaxation, and art consumption at a Secure Undisclosed Location. In the meantime, here’s my Tuesday:
– I saw a press preview of Neil LaBute’s new play, The Distance from Here, about which I’ll be writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.
– I found out that my absentee bid for a Hans Hofmann lithograph, “Composition,” was unsuccessful. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but I got creamed–somebody with money to burn wiped the floor with my pitiful little bid.) In case you’re curious, here’s what it looked like. Sigh. Arrgh. Oh, to be rich! Alas, I picked the wrong line of work….
– I’m doing Raymond Chandler in between everything else, and today I finished rereading Farewell, My Lovely, partly in the hopes of persuading a friend of mine who recently confessed to having read only The Big Sleep (shame, shame) to embark forthwith on the whole corpus, currently available in an elegant Library of America two-volume edition.
– Now playing on iTunes: “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” recorded live by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1954 and currently available on Jazz Goes to College. This do I in honor of Doug Ramsey, Paul Desmond’s biographer, who left a message last night for me to call him. (If you’re reading the blog right now, Doug, the next phone call you get will be from me.)
I’ll try to work in another post or two in before I hit the road first thing Thursday morning. I see that Our Girl has finally come in from out of the cold, so if you ask her nicely, maybe she’ll keep you company until my return on Sunday night!