Archives for January 2012

In October I saw Pat Metheny and Larry Grenadier at the Blue Note. It was one of the most exciting musical performances I’ve heard in my life. Now Pat is en route to Winter Park, Florida, where he’ll making two public appearances at Rollins College this week under the auspices of the Winter Park Institute.
It happens that I’m in the middle of my annual stint in Winter Park, so I’m going to lead a public conversation on Wednesday in which Pat talks about his life and work. We’ll be joined by the bass guitarist Chuck Archard, who is an artist-in-residence at Rollins. Then Pat and Larry will give a concert at Rollins the following night.
I’ve known Pat for a number of years–I profiled him for Time back in 2001–and he’s one of the most interesting talkers I’ve had occasion to interview. Here’s something he said to me eleven years ago that has stuck in my mind ever since:

Metheny shuns labels for his polystylistic music–particularly fusion, a term he feels has “nothing but negative connotations”–preferring to describe it as jazz, pure and simple. “Jazz is the all-inclusive form,” he explains. “There’s room for everybody, for anything of true musical substance. Jazz guys like Duke Ellington or Miles Davis have always transformed the elements of the pop culture that surrounds us into something more sophisticated and hipper. It’s their job.”

I expect he’ll have similarly pithy things to say when we get together on Wednesday.
Wednesday’s event takes place at Tiedtke Concert Hall and starts at 7:30. For more information, go here.
Thursday’s concert takes place at the Alfond Sports Center and starts at 7:30. For more information, go here.

This week I’m posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today’s installment, Tops, was made in 1969. The score is by Elmer Bernstein:

“Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality”

I don’t care for air travel, but long experience has taught me to tolerate it, and on occasion it can be–if only for a few fleeting moments–actively pleasurable. That happened to me when I took off from LaGuardia Airport on Saturday morning, headed for Florida and Mrs. T. It was ten-thirty, the sky was cloudless, and the sun cast a brilliant raking light across the rooftops of New York City. The plane swung north, then south, and all at once I realized that we were going to fly straight down the Hudson River and that my window seat would give me an unobstructed, perfectly lit view of the island below.

We were still low enough that I had no trouble picking out the six-story apartment house where I live, a few blocks south of the Cloisters. I held my breath as the familiar landmarks slipped past me, all shrunken to the size of my thumb: Yankee Stadium, Lincoln Center, Central Park, the Empire State Building, the great gash of Ground Zero. The only thing I couldn’t see was the Statue of Liberty, which was a bit too far west to be visible from my window. Having just spent three days rushing from appointment to appointment and show to show, I found it delightful to look down from a great height on the scene of my hectic activity. It felt as though I were being airlifted out of a combat zone.

A few minutes later we were flying over the Jersey Shore, endless and anonymous save for Cape May, the island at its southern tip, whose comma-like shape is unmistakable to anyone who has spent even a day there. I thought of the happy hours that Mrs. T and I had passed on its beaches and in its theaters and restaurants, and hoped that we’d be back soon.

Between Cape May and Orlando I had no idea where I was, so I pulled down the shade and got out my book, William Maxwell’s Ancestors. I gratefully immersed myself in its bone-dry ironies and gentle, reminiscent warmth, marveling at the chain of coincidence that had put me in touch with two of the author’s friends at the very moment when I started working my way through his oeuvre for the first time in a decade.

Maxwell, like Fauré and Vuillard, is a shy master whose soft-spoken tales of small-town life are not to all tastes. If he’s your kind of writer, though, you’ll know it the moment you open one of his books for the first time, as Mrs. T did a couple of weeks ago. Within days she was reading passages out loud to me, among them this lovely paragraph from The Folded Leaf:

Accidents, misdirections, overexcitement, heat, crowds, and heartbreaking delays you must expect when you go on a journey, just as you expect to have dreams at night. Whether or not you enjoy yourself at all depends on your state of mind. The man who travels with everything he owns, books, clothes for every season, shoe trees, a dinner jacket, medicines, binoculars, magazines, and telephone numbers–the unwilling traveler–and the man who leaves each place in turn without reluctance, with no desire ever to come back, obviously cannot be making the same journey, even though their tickets are identical….And for the ambitious young man who by a too constant shifting around has lost all of his possessions, including his native accent and the ability to identify himself with a particular kind of sky or the sound, let us say, of windmills creaking; so that in New Mexico his talk reflects Bermuda, and in Bermuda it is again and again of Barbados that he is reminded, but never of Iowa or Wisconsin or Indiana, never of home.

I travel light these days, with no more than a boxful of souvenirs to remind me of the places I’ve been, and my native accent has faded like a print unwisely hung in direct sunlight. But it never takes much to remind me of Smalltown, U.S.A., my first home, and as I flew over Manhattan, my latest home, I looked down at its towers and parks and squared-off streets with a surge of love that rivaled the ever-enduring love I feel for the place where I grew up. Yes, those streets too often look best at night–or from a great height–but it is the encrustation of memory that makes a home beautiful, and a quarter-century’s worth of memories and friendships has caused me to love New York City almost in spite of myself, frustrating and aggravating though it can be.

To be sure, it’s a bumpy, awkward kind of love, and I’ll always be a small-town boy at heart. Nor would it surprise me in the least if I were to pull up stakes one day and move. But by now I’ve lived in Manhattan longer than anywhere else, and should I ever move away, I know I’ll leave a not-so-small piece of my heart behind.

* * *

Dave Frishberg sings “Do You Miss New York?”:

This week I’m posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today’s installment, House: After Five Years of Living, is a 1955 documentary about the Eames’ self-designed California home. The score is by Elmer Bernstein:

A rare film clip of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson singing the blues with Cootie Williams’ band in 1943:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“No steps backward.”
Horace, Epistles

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of Wit and the Florida premiere of The Motherf**ker with the Hat. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Margaret Edson’s “Wit” is one of a surprisingly large number of plays that managed to win a Pulitzer Prize without first making it to Broadway. Fourteen years after it opened Off Broadway, “Wit” is finally being presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club in its Broadway house. Why the delay? No doubt the release of Mike Nichols’ 2001 cable-TV version, which starred Emma Thompson, had something to do with it. The biggest roadblock, however, is that “Wit” is the story of the death of a woman suffering from late-stage ovarian cancer. The only way to get so dark a play to Broadway nowadays is to hire a big name, and it seems more than likely that this revival, directed by Lynne Meadow, would never have opened there had Cynthia Nixon not agreed to be the star.
Unfortunately, Ms. Nixon’s acting is part of what’s wrong with the production, for she plays Vivian Bearing, the austere, loveless scholar of 17th-century poetry around whose terrible plight “Wit” revolves, as though she were a precocious schoolgirl rather than a full-grown, forbiddingly chilly intellectual. Only when suffering strips away Vivian’s defenses does Ms. Nixon come into her own, and by then it’s too late for her to overcome the lightweight impression that she’s already made.
What else is wrong with this “Wit”? In 1998 it was still comparatively unusual to see a fatal illness portrayed in anything like a candid way onstage or on the screen. Nowadays, though, such portrayals are common enough that the play’s initial shock effect has been significantly diminished…
The best new play of 2011 had the worst title, which helps to explain why Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” (as it was officially billed) barely eked out a 112-performance run on Broadway. Now it belongs to the regional theaters, and GableStage, one of Florida’s top companies, has mounted a first-class production that confirms my initial impression of its excellence.
Mr. Guirgis’ play is an anti-romantic romcom about the effects of the therapeutic culture on a group of substance abusers. It’s smart, concise (95 minutes, no intermission) and full of pointed punch lines (“If you ever need money for rehab or an exorcism, let me know”). All five characters are drawn with sympathetic sharpness, meaning that the play must be cast very, very well in order to hit the bull’s-eye. Chris Rock, the star of the Broadway production, is new to the stage, and his performance, not surprisingly, was promising but far from great. By contrast, GableStage’s Ethan Henry, who has plenty of regional-theater experience, is self-assured and commanding in the same role, that of a slick, sociopathic scamster. Gladys Ramirez shines no less brightly as Veronica, the foul-mouthed working-class babe whose brass-plated charms set Mr. Guirgis’ farce-style plot in motion….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“But all the authorities, it is pleasant to know, report that the final scene, though it may be full of horror, is commonly devoid of terror. The dying man doesn’t struggle much and he isn’t much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.”
H.L. Mencken, “Exeunt Omnes”

This is the scene in my living room, where an Italian TV crew has just set up an improvised studio in which I’ll be talking about Louis Armstrong for a documentary: