Archives for February 3, 2006

It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal. (What else is new?) This week I report on a new Broadway play, Rabbit Hole, and one of the plays I saw two weekends ago in Chicago, the Court Theatre’s revival of August Wilson’s Fences:

What makes a play great? Sometimes the difference between high art and earnest mediocrity is less than obvious at first glance. Consider David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which opened last night on Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre, and August Wilson’s “Fences,” now playing at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre. Both plays are homely kitchen-sink dramas about families in crisis. Both pivot on the death of an offstage character. Both productions are well cast and well designed–yet “Rabbit Hole” is dullish and “Fences” a masterpiece.

On closer consideration, though, it isn’t so hard to see why “Rabbit Hole” fails to measure up: It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar…

The Court Theatre’s revival of “Fences” is a theatrical experience of a wholly different order. Yes, August Wilson tucked a lot of laughs into his Pulitzer-winning 1985 play about the splendors and miseries of a working-class Pittsburgh family, but he didn’t pull any punches in portraying the kind of inter-generational agony Philip Larkin had in mind when he wrote his most famous poem: “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf.”…

As usual, no link. To read the full review (which contains much more about Rabbit Hole and Fences, plus a brief but laudatory mention of Sarah Jones’ Bridge & Tunnel), pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review, along with lots of other worthy art-related coverage.

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

“Welcome to the best-kept secret in Newark!” So said the smiling woman who took my $7 and admitted me last Saturday to the Newark Museum, whose superlative collection includes such marvels as a flawlessly installed Alexander Calder mobile, one of Arthur Dove’s pioneering abstract paintings of 1919, and “Laburnum II,” a small Hans Hofmann canvas so outrageously vital that I longed to tuck it under my arm and cart it back to my Manhattan apartment. What’s more, you can admire these masterpieces in blessed silence when you go there–because there’s a good chance you’ll be all alone. I spent an hour touring the two floors of “Picturing America,” the museum’s installation of its permanent collection of American art. During that time the only other people I saw were seven kids who breezed through the second-floor gallery….

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

I’ve been listening to Erroll Garner for some inexplicable reason (not that the desire to listen to him needs explaining!). Younger readers may not recognize Garner’s name, or know him solely as the composer of “Misty,” but people of a certain age (i.e., mine) will at the very least remember his many TV appearances, if only because he was so short that he had to sit on a Manhattan phone book placed atop his piano bench in order to bear down on the keyboard with sufficient comfort.

Garner was hugely popular in the second half of his life, and because of that, many critics failed to take him seriously. I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that was intended to squelch this foolish notion:

In jazz as in the other arts, worldly success can be a decidedly mixed blessing. As the critic Max Harrison has pointed out, “People do not object to artists deserving success–only to their getting it.” The bigger the triumph, the snarkier the reaction, at least among those who mistakenly believe there is an inverse relationship between accessibility and quality. From Louis Armstrong to Diana Krall, talented musicians lucky enough to crack the code of popular taste without compromising their art in the process have invariably found themselves fending off flying brickbats. Some are flung by prissy colleagues who think jazz should be packaged in plain brown wrappers, others by critics who review reputations instead of music….

Garner was a self-taught musician who could not read music. (Asked why he never bothered to learn, he famously retorted, “Hell, man, nobody can hear you read.”) Though he worked almost exclusively with trios, his irresistibly buoyant playing had a near-orchestral feel. At medium and fast tempos, he brusquely “strummed” close-clipped chords with his left hand–four to a bar, just like the rhythm guitarist in a swing band–while his right hand, which often lagged tantalizingly behind the beat, alternated between bustling single-note lines and delectably squashy chordal riffs….

One of Garner’s albums was called The Most Happy Piano, and that sums him up very nicely. As Joseph Epstein wrote of H.L. Mencken, “He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre.” You simply cannot listen to his best recordings without breaking out in an ear-to-ear grin. What’s more, Garner was by all accounts as likable as the music he made. As George Avakian, his producer at Columbia, recalled, “He was really like a pixie or an elf. When you split with Erroll at the end of an evening you left with a happy smile and a good feeling. No worries at all. Off to bed feeling great. That’s what Erroll did for people.”

The trouble is that Garner recorded extensively and indiscriminately throughout much of his long career (he died in 1977). Many of his early records, which are now out of copyright and are constantly being reissued on fly-by-night European labels, fail to do him justice, and at least as many of the later ones are of lesser interest than the performances he recorded between 1950, when he signed with Columbia Records, and the mid-Sixties, when his distinctive style started to harden into mannerism. Alas, a comprehensive Garner-on-CD series on Columbia (now Sony) was aborted fifteen years ago after just two volumes, and the bulk of his recorded legacy has yet to be reissued systematically.

Someday–I hope–Sony will put out a carefully chosen two- or three-disc collection of Garner’s best Columbia recordings. (It damn well better include his stupendous eight-minute-long 1956 version of “The Man I Love,” which at present is available only as part of an obscure multiple-artist anthology called Gershwin Jazz that I only found out about last week.) Until then, I suggest you give a listen to Erroll Garner’s Finest Hour, a single-disc greatest-hits compilation from Verve (it contains “Misty”), and This Is Jazz: Erroll Garner, a fifteen-track Columbia sampler.

On second thought, just start with This Is Jazz, which contains the first two Garner recordings I ever heard, “It’s the Talk of the Town” and the 1951 remake of “Laura,” his first hit single. If it doesn’t ring your bell, I suggest you enter psychotherapy at once–you’re seriously depressed.

“Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift.”

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

…which is just about all I do anymore, New York Review of Books has just this morning published an essay by John Banville called “Homage to Philip Larkin.” Can’t wait to read this. Thanks to the Literary Saloon for the tip.

I know I said I was starting my weekend from blogging about 43 posts ago, but Lifson has issued the bloggy equivalent of a call for papers that you all should attend to. He also says nice stuff about us, making it impossible for me to link to his request without appearing self-serving. Oh well.

If you’ve followed Terry’s link and read the list, now follow mine and read the riff. Jenny D. kibitzes entertainingly on those 100 best first lines.

So somebody cooked me dinner. That was nice.

I drank a couple of tankards’ worth of red wine. Nice at the time, but now I’m good for nothing. So that was mixed.

But the cook also showed me a little book nicked from his parents called Poet’s Choice and, when I became wholly absorbed in the book and not quite so fascinating or, um, at all responsive a guest, urged me to bring it home with me. For the sole purpose of regaling you with its contents. And politely correcting my manners. Again: very and entirely nice.

Poet’s Choice was published in 1962 by Time-Life Books. Its editors asked more than 100 well-known poets to select one of their own works for the volume and to say something about their selection–a condition that many of them meet with reluctance, reserve, or outright obfuscation. In at least one instance, the poet compares his poems to his children, whom it would of course be unseemly to choose among. There’s a surprising amount of creative evasion in play. Some of our bards you can just envision shifting from leg to leg uncomfortably and eying the exits.

Held to the task, some disdain explication: of “In the Night Fields” W. S. Merwin says, in toto, “If I had to use one as an amulet I hope this one would serve.” Conrad Aiken answers with a fragment of a different poem.

Kingsley Amis, who chose “After Goliath,” throws cold water on our expectations and then can’t stop from hedging his bet anyway: “I wrote this poem three years ago and I can still read it without irritation (except perhaps at lines 4, 13, and 34)….”

Reed Whittemore, author of “Reflections upon a Recurrent Suggestion by Civil Defense Authorities that I Build a Bombshelter in My Backyard,” seems to have been lying in wait for just such an occasion to say: “I like this one partly out of malice toward the editors of The New Yorker, who rejected it six or seven years ago….”

George Barker’s articulate bark makes me continue to want to go back in time and somehow release Elizabeth Smart from the irresistible but corrosive spell he casts with his swaggering brain:

I don’t have any favourite poems, not even anyone else’s, let alone my own. (And I rather suspect this goes for a lot of poets–if there are a lot of poets. It’s as frivolous to have a favourite person–imagine a menagerie full of those monsters.) So that in the circumstances I would like to offer a little verse which I like for its simple sexual irony. I also favour it because it is, I hope, opposite to much of the pretentious pseudo-poetastery parading about public places now.

Glad you asked, punk?

There are more riches where these came from. But it’s late and, you know, the wine, so just one more: Philip Larkin on “Absences,” which I can’t immediately find on the information superhighway, so here’s that, too.

Absences

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

And on why this poem rose to the top:

I suppose I like “Absences” (a) because of its subject matter–I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation of a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.

Incidentally, an oceanographer wrote to me pointing out that I was confusing two kinds of wave, plunging waves and spilling waves, which seriously damaged the poem from a technical viewpoint. I am sorry about this, but do not see how to amend it now.

That one I find wholly excellent, and a fine note on which to retire. Goodnight ’til next week.