“Who knows what true loneliness is–not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.”

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Excerpt from an e-mail sent to a friend in San Francisco twelve hours ago:

I’m feeling a bit, er, frazzled. I got up at six and wrote the drama column, sent it off and went to the gym at eleven to be pushed around by my trainer, came back to my desk to resume work from yesterday on my Frank Lloyd Wright piece, and am now standing by for what we call the “playback” of the drama column (i.e., the copyedited version, incorporating queries and requests for fixes). After that I have to do laundry, pick up my framed Bonnard (I hope, I hope!), book myself into a bunch of play previews, read the day’s incoming snail mail, talk to a Rounder Records publicist about the new Jelly Roll Morton reissue package, and catch the late set at the Village Vanguard tonight. In between all this mishegoss I’m (A) bidding on a restrike of a Matisse etching and (B) reading the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s wonderful Matisse biography. Tomorrow is very similar, Thursday somewhat less loony, and on Friday it’s off to Chicago. Whee! I took some time off last week, right? I forget….

Here’s the rest of the story: I just now got back from taking Bass Player, my kindred spirit, to the Vanguard (she’d never been!) to hear the Bad Plus play selections from their new CD, Suspicious Activity? Yes, they were incredible, and yes, I love New York, but I’m on the leading edge of a meltdown, and if I don’t get at least ten hours of sleep starting right now, they won’t have to cremate me to scatter my ashes–all they’ll have to do is vacuum them up from the floor of my office.

(A bad sign: I tried to take off my glasses a moment ago and discovered that they were already off.)

Later. Much later. Way later.

Oh, yes, one more thing: the Bonnard wasn’t ready. And I didn’t get the Matisse, either. (I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.) All the more reason to sleep late….

I’d hoped to put together a nice big juicy posting of links to other artblogs and art-related sites, but it just didn’t happen and won’t until tomorrow, if then. Lots of other things happened instead, nearly all of them work-related, though two were strictly private: I picked up my new Bonnard lithograph (which is now being framed) and got my hair cut, the latter a mere two weeks late! I looked soooo unkempt and uncared-for a mere twenty-four hours ago, but now I’m nice and neat again….

Anyway, I doubt I’ll have anything more for you until Wednesday, but hope springs eternal. In the meantime, go look at some of those other cool blogs listed in the right-hand column, O.K.?

– Cover price of Vol. 1, No. 1 of The New Yorker, published in 1925: 15 cents

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1.62

(Source: Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise)

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Mother Nature decided to send the citizens of New York one last heat wave before letting us take our black turtlenecks out of mothballs. Lucky me–I rubbed my nose in it Friday morning. Rarely am I absolutely required to take crowded subways, but I had a 10:30 appointment in the section of Brooklyn known to scenesters and the cognoscenti as “Dumbo” (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and unless your trusty chauffeur is waiting patiently at curbside, the only way to get there from here on a weekday morning is via subway. That’s how I did it, and I hated every second of the ride. The subway car was hot, smelly, and crowded, and the humidity at street level was so high that I felt as though I were being garrotted by a vicious odalisque in a Turkish bath.

The one good part of the trip was that I saw Middagh Street, the site of the now-legendary Brooklyn residence where W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee all kept communal house back in 1940. (Sherill Tippins wrote about it earlier this year in February House.) Alas, 7 Middagh was torn down in 1945 to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and nothing now remains of it but an unmarked spot on the sidewalk. Still, I got to stroll past that historic address on my way to St. Ann’s Warehouse, where the Builders Association is currently rehearsing its new show, Super Vision, which opens November 29 at BAM Harvey in Brooklyn.

I got interested in the Builders Association after seeing its last show, Alladeen, about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal, so when I was invited to a private runthrough of two sections of Super Vision, I jumped at the chance, heavy weather notwithstanding. It’s a multimedia documentary-fantasy-tone poem about “dataveillance” in the twenty-first century, and if that sounds a bit off the wall to you, I strongly suggest you go here and view the trailer, which will tell you more about Super Vision than I possibly can. All I’ll add for now is that having seen fifteen minutes’ worth of Super Vision, I intend to see the whole thing at least twice when it comes to BAM.

I returned to the Teachout Museum from Dumbo to discover that I’d bought a new piece of art. Specifically, I turned out to be the high bidder on a 1942 color lithograph by Pierre Bonnard called Femme assise dans sa bagnoire, one of the long, increasingly phantasmagoric series of paintings, prints, and works on paper in which Marthe, Bonnard’s mistress, is shown bathing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pick up my latest acquisition–I had to spend the rest of the afternoon at my desk–so I’ll be stopping by Swann Galleries to collect it some time today.

(Speaking of art, I spent part of Friday sifting through my accumulated snail mail of the past couple of weeks, and was thereby reminded of two gallery shows I mean to go see as soon as possible, Jules Olitski’s Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now, up at Knoedler & Company through Nov. 5, and Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition, up at Alexandre Gallery through Oct. 22. I’ll report back to you in due course, but don’t wait for me–I’d bet the rent that both shows will be well worth a visit.)

Once I wrapped up the day’s work, I caught a crosstown bus to the Upper East Side and met my friend Meg at the Metropolitan Museum, where we looked at a very important show that nearly slipped past me, Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams, His Art and His Textiles, which closes next Sunday. I can’t believe I came so close to missing this breathtaking exhibition, one of the finest of the Met’s “teaching shows,” an orgy of color that is at once highly informative and enjoyable in the extreme (unlike, say, MoMA’s recent C

A friend drew my attention over the weekend to the music of a New York-based singer-songwriter named Farah Alvin. As it happens, I’d heard Alvin before, but under the worst possible circumstances: she was part of the hard-working ensemble in The Look of Love: The Songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, a deservedly short-lived Broadway revue about which I had only brutal things to say in The Wall Street Journal back in 2003. Little did I know that as The Look of Love was going down for the count, Alvin was in the process of putting out a really exceptional debut album called Someday. You can read about it here and buy it here, and I strongly suggest you do both.

CD Baby, the Web store that specializes in independently released albums,
classifies Someday as “jazz-influenced folk-rock,” which comes pretty damn close to the mark in just four well-chosen words. All I can usefully add is that Someday is full of lots and lots of everything I like in pop music: good tunes, smart lyrics, gorgeous singing, spare and striking arrangements.

I especially like “Tragedienne,” a song about two women whose friendship is on the rocks:

It used to be you and me against the world,

A motley crew of two tenacious wits.

It used to be you and me were thick as thieves,

But now I guess you want to call it quits.

Why don’t you be the woman you used to be?

Why don’t you be my friend again?

Why not rewrite your life as a comedy,

Tragedienne?

If you’ve enjoyed the music of Erin McKeown, Jonatha Brooke, Allison Moorer, Luciana Souza, Dave’s True Story, the Lascivious Biddies, or any of the other slightly off-center singer-songwriters and pop groups championed in the past by the like-minded proprietors of this blog, my guess is that Farah Alvin will suit you right down to the ground. Check her out. (You, too, OGIC!)

I’m still soooo into Cat and Girl. Join me, won’t you?