Archives for February 4, 2005

I didn’t enjoy myself at the theater last week, and my weekly drama column for The Wall Street Journal, in which two newly opened shows catch several kinds of hell, reflects that fact with alarming clarity.

First under the lash is Good Vibrations:

Harpo Marx described the famously awful, extremely popular “Abie’s Irish Rose” as “no worse than a bad cold.” Judged by that yardstick, “Good Vibrations,” the new Beach Boys musical that opened Wednesday at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, is more like a stroke–one that leaves you capable of movement but knocks 15 points off your IQ. By the time I finally staggered up the aisle, I found it hard to remember that there was once a time when even the most blatantly commercial musicals were put together with a modicum of intelligence and craftsmanship….

I’m not saying there’s nothing good about “Good Vibrations.” I liked the tall, cheery-looking blonde in the blue top, for instance. But outside of the dogged professionalism of the hard-working cast, there’s precious little else to admire outside of the undeniable fact that it never pretends to be anything other than a big dumb applause machine. Somehow I can’t see paying $100 a seat for a musical that’s unpretentiously horrible.

No less unpleasing was Brooklyn Boy:

Donald Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner With Friends,” has now written a play about a struggling young Brooklyn author who writes a best-seller about his unhappy youth and promptly discovers that all that glitters is not gold. Excuse the clich

“The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.”

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

I note with sadness the death of John Vernon. You won’t recognize his name unless you know a lot about movies, but it’s way better than even money that you’d know his face and voice in an instant. A Canadian character actor who came south to Hollywood, he specialized in playing a certain kind of villain–serious, deep-voiced, a bit prissy and creepy, almost visibly compromised–and did it with such vivid exactitude that he thereby found his way into a number of memorable films, among them Point Blank (his big-screen debut), Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Then he landed a part that allowed him to play his “natural” type for laughs, Dean Vernon Wormer of Animal House, seizing the opportunity with such self-evident relish that my generation will always remember him as the hapless stiff who put Delta House on double secret probation.

Like Strother Martin and J.T. Walsh, Vernon was that most admirable of small-part actors, a professional with flair, and I hope he gets some nice obits this weekend. (He made it into Friday’s Washington Post, but the New York Times, as is its increasingly frequent wont, dropped the ball.) He deserved them.

In this week’s Chicago Reader (no link, boo hiss), Erin Hogan has a selling review of Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master. She had a great time reading the book, though she notes that Stevens and Swan had some help from the painter in making it so readable: “De Kooning’s life story is a biographer’s dream, full of tragedy, triumph, and salacious, page-turning detail.”

But I’m more interested in the built-in limitation she points to that afflicts many artists’ biographers:

Writers apparently love to write about writing; they produce volumes about the creative process in general and their practice in particular, and there are countless books devoted to the topic of writers on their craft….Painters, however, rarely talk about their process.

After de Kooning finished the magnificent Excavation (now housed at the Art Institute), it took him three years to complete another painting. That’s not so surprising–all artists fall fallow or need time, after a major creative outburst, to recharge. What is surprising about de Kooning’s three-year disapppearance is that he was working the whole time, with the same obsessive intensity as ever. And he was working, essentially, on one painting: Woman I, the first of the infamous “Woman” series.

For de Kooning, Woman I was an endless nightmare. He grew so angry with the work that, according to Stevens and Swan, at one point he “ripped [it] off the frame and left it in the hallway by his door, with a stack of old cardboard and odds and ends of wood.” But while that might explain what happened to the physical object, bitterly rejected there at the end of the hall, we are no closer to understanding what would compel de Kooning to spend three years on one painting or why he would decide it was a hopeless failure….

Stevens and Swan heroically attempt to describe the creation of Woman I, but those three years remain elusive, as do much of the inner workings of de Kooning’s mind. All of the contextual detail, description, lyrical interpretations, lectures, articles, and chronicles of conversations marshaled by the authors–none of it quite gets to the core. The fortress of fact protects the empty throne.

I haven’t read enough artists’ biographies to have realized this about them, but Hogan’s observation especially interested me since I’m now about 80 pages into Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, a novel that is narrated by a painter and that has me completely captivated. Half the book’s spell over me is in its persuasive effort to represent the artist’s eye. The narrator, Gulley Jimson, looks at the world–the curve of a woman’s back, a coffee spill on a tablecloth–and reflexively sees possibilities for his painting. He sees so much this way–and misses so much. I’ve read novels about artists before, but never any that made this serious an attempt to minutely portray how a painter looks at the world, what he sees, and what he does with it. This is, I think, just what Hogan finds herself missing in art biographies, and it does seem more suited to the novelist’s art than that of the biographer, who is indeed limited to “the fortress of fact.”

More on the novel when I finish it someday. In the meantime, if you’re in Chicago, pick up a free Reader and check out the rest of Hogan’s review. (If you’re not, keep an eye on this guy.)

Hold the phone–I’ve got DSL! Also $50 worth of new music, a few software updates, and my pajamas still on. Let’s hope the novelty wears off soon!