I kept my promise–I shut off the iBook at eleven o’clock last night and didn’t boot up again until after breakfast. Nor will I blog a single word this coming weekend. To all those who wrote to cheer me on in my newfound resolve, many thanks.
Now, on to yesterday’s art:
• I saw The Two and Only, Jay Johnson’s one-man show about his life as a ventriloquist, which I’ll be reviewing in next week’s Wall Street Journal.
• I spent a good chunk of the afternoon looking at a pair of shows currently up at one of my favorite Upper East Side art spots, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (20 E. 79th St., through June 25). Downstairs is a delightful single-room display of early paintings by Corot. Upstairs is “Constable’s Skies,” a museum-quality exhibition consisting of two dozen cloud studies and finished paintings by John Constable, including several museum loans. Salander-O’Reilly is billing it as “the first sky studies show by John Constable in the United States,” which I think is right. In any case, it’s a dazzler. The paintings of clouds made by Constable in 1821 and 1822 rank high among his most compelling works, all the more so because so many of them seem to border on abstraction. (In fact, they’re so literally representational that Constable actually inscribed the date, time of day, and weather conditions on the backs of the canvases.)
I almost hate to blog about “Constable’s Skies,” since Our Girl is a huge Constable fan who will be royally vexed by its presence in New York, she being stuck in Chicago for the immediate future. The good news is that there’s an excellent catalogue, though so far it hasn’t yet turned up on amazon.com. When it does, I’ll post a link.
• I’m rereading Charlton Heston’s In the Arena: An Autobiography. Kindly omit boggling: In the Arena is one of the very few books by a movie star that is both intelligent and well-written. (Heston wrote it without benefit of a ghost, I might add–you can tell by the literary idiosyncrasies, including a decidedly shaky grasp of the Theory of the Parenthesis). Not only does Heston shed considerable light on the complex craft of film acting, but he was a class-A raconteur who dishes up polished anecdotes at every possible opportunity. Here’s one of my favorites, a story about Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, in which Heston played a Ringling Bros. manager:
DeMille and the circus was a marriage made in movie heaven. He picked up his Oscar for Best Picture the following spring, and I got an enormous boost in my career. When I went into his office the next morning to congratulate him, he said, “Chuck, you’ve gotten some fine personal notices for this picture, but I want to read you one that may be the best review you’ll ever get in your life.”
He then read me a letter from a man who was enchanted with the picture. DeMille had caught not only the look but the feel of the circus perfectly. The cast was wonderful, especially Jimmy Stewart as the clown. Betty Hutton had never been better, nor had Cornel Wilde. “And I was amazed,” the writer concluded, “at how well the circus manager did in there with the real actors.”
Isn’t that a wonderful story?
• Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans’ recording of Alex North’s “Love Theme from Spartacus,” a track from Conversations with Myself, the 1963 album on which Evans plays three pianos simultaneously, two of them overdubbed. (Somehow it seemed appropriate–I’m currently reading the Ben-Hur chapter of In the Arena.)
• “Love Theme from Spartacus,” by the way, was my introduction to Evans, back when I was a junior in high school, and I’ll never forget the shock of hearing the exquisitely commingled arpeggios with which it begins. This is the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, I said to myself, and though I’ve heard a lot more music since then, I doubt I’ve heard anything more beautiful.
• On which note I’m off in search of further adventures. See you Monday.