I’ve been busy, but I’ve also had three very good days of what a friend of mine calls “arting,” so I’m not complaining:
– On Friday night I saw a press preview of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, which opens Tuesday at Circle in the Square after a successful off-Broadway run. I’ll be reviewing it in next Friday’s Journal. After the show, I went to ChikaLicious, an East Village dessert bar, accompanied by a friend whose first name happens to be (no fooling) Chika. Only in New York….
– The weather on Saturday afternoon was golden, so I strolled across Central Park to an East Side auction house, where I took a peek at a Hans Hofmann lithograph on which I’ve placed an absentee bid (the hammer falls on Tuesday). Cross your fingers–I covet this one desperately.
– From there I returned home to meet Sarah, who was in Manhattan all week to cover the Edgar Awards for “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,” her must-read crime-fiction-and-more blog. I gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum and persuaded her to help me do a bit of manual labor (one of my prints had come unmounted, so we carried it to the neighborhood framer). We dined in the immediate vicinity, then taxied down to the Village Vanguard to hear the Jim Hall Trio. It was Sarah’s first time hearing Hall, and she gave every sign of bedazzlement. As for me, I’d already heard the trio on Wednesday,
but they were even better last night. (Incidentally, the set was recorded for CD release–go here to find out how to buy a copy.)
– Back at home again, I squared off the evening by watching the first hour of Brute Force, a 1947 Popular Front-style prison-break film noir directed by Jules Dassin, scored by Mikl