Archives for November 2006

“One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

I’m off to Connecticut for a four-day Thanksgiving marathon, returning to New York on Saturday afternoon to embark on a week-long playgoing marathon. It’s all a bit too much, especially since I filed two Wall Street Journal columns yesterday. I wish I had the steam to post more extensively, but right now it’s all I can do to pack my bag. Expect the usual theater-related postings on Thursday and Friday, but otherwise I plan to lay low until next Monday. Apologies.

In the meantime, let me leave you with some pieces worth reading:

– Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post went to Atlanta to look at the High Museum‘s Morris Louis retrospective and filed this first-rate report about the declining fortunes of a once-fashionable abstractionist who is now criminally underrated. I wasn’t greatly impressed with the High Museum when I visited Atlanta last July, but Gopnik’s piece made me want to jump on the next southbound plane.

– Speaking of museums, Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal has written a tough and trenchant column
on the latest round of deaccessioning. Here’s the nut:

Just last week the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., announced that it was selling more than 200 objects from its collection to raise $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. “Deaccessioning,” as the practice is known, used to be the tool of last resort for acquiring new art. But lately it’s become the tool of first resort, with museums strip-mining their collections just to build a war chest….

What’s so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses. Because of their transcendent importance, museum objects occupy a position outside the pressures of the marketplace. Yet more and more museums are treating these objects as financial assets that they can tap at any time.

What he said.

– Out of the Mouths of Babes Dept.: Joan Didion, who has written a stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking that will open on Broadway later this season, recently talked to an interviewer about the difference between screenwriting and playwriting:

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there’s nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is….Something I’ve always known and said and thought about the screen is that if it’s anything in the world, it’s literal. It’s so literal that there’s a whole lot you can’t do because you’re stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

What she said.

That’ll have to hold you for now–I need to go to bed immediately. See you around.

P.S. Check out the new Top Fives.

P.P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

“Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I paid a visit last Thursday to a Frank Lloyd Wright house located in the suburbs of St. Louis. Known to specialists as the Kraus House, this two-bedroom, 1,900-square-foot home, completed in 1956, was painstakingly restored and opened to the public a couple of years ago. Most of Wright’s best-known houses are based on square or rectangular grids, but this one is an exception, a sly, witty study in triangles and parallelograms that fit together in unexpected, sometimes startling ways. It’s one of the few surviving Wright houses that contains all of the furnishings and fabrics that were custom-designed by the architect for the original owner. Of the smaller Wright houses I’ve visited, including the two I stayed in last year, it’s the one I like best–so far.

From St. Louis I drove south to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I spent a long weekend hanging out with my family. The Web has become so graphics-intensive that it’s now difficult to view most newspaper sites and art-related blogs and newspaper sites without a high-speed connection, so instead of treading water in the frenzied present, I’ve been lazing around in the fondly remembered past. Among other things, my mother dug up a receipt for the Wurlitzer spinet piano that my father bought for me in 1970, the instrument on which I learned to play. Back then it cost $679.50, the equivalent of $3,423.26 in 2005 dollars. I’m glad I didn’t know then how much they paid for it, but my mother assures me that they got their money’s worth, and all things considered, I’m inclined to agree.

It’s quiet in Smalltown, so much so that half-audible, half-remembered sounds are constantly catching my ear:

• The hollow, rattly clunk of the back door of my mother’s house. (Nobody ever comes in through the front door.)

• The rumble of the furnace fan each time it starts up.

• The faint ticking and buzzing of the electric clock in my bedroom.

• The lonely, distant wail of the freight-train whistle that blows at bedtime.

One alien sound that I brought along with me is the ghostly whistle emitted by the modem of my iBook as it “shakes hands” with the dialup line via which I log onto the Web. “Are you playing music back there?” my mother asked when she heard it yesterday morning.

The only work of art I’ve consumed since arriving in Smalltown (not counting my brother’s home-smoked pork loin) is Lonesome Dove, the four-part 1989 TV movie based on Larry McMurtry’s Western novel. An expansive, elegiac tribute to the hard men of the American frontier, it’s every bit as good as I’d heard, and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are, if anything, better still. I’ve also been rereading Dawn Powell’s The Locusts Have No King and drafting a column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, I’ve been taking it fairly easy, and plan to keep on doing so after I return to New York on Monday evening. It’s Thanksgiving week, and even a drama critic deserves some time off.

Starting on Saturday, I’ll be spending the next nine days seeing High Fidelity, David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, the New York premiere of David Mamet’s adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance, revivals of Company, Two Trains Running, and Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone, and performances by the Amelia Piano Trio and the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Gulp!

Details to come, but first I have to drive back to St. Louis and catch a plane to New York. Don’t expect to hear from me again until Wednesday. In the meantime, go buy a turkey.

“We had now arrived at the museum and our attention was directed to the pictures. Once more I was impressed by Elliott’s knowledge and taste. He shepherded me around the rooms as though I were a group of tourists, and no professor of art could have discoursed more instructively than he did. Making up my mind to come again by myself when I could wander at will and have a good time, I submitted; after a while he looked at his watch.

“‘Let us go,’ he said. ‘I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one’s power of appreciation persists. We will finish another day.’

“I thanked him warmly when we separated. I went my way perhaps a wiser but certainly a peevish man.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I walked through Chicago’s Midway Airport last Thursday to the sounds of the King Cole Trio’s 1944 recording of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? It’s a masterpiece, one of the most perfect jazz piano recordings ever made, and hearing it in an airport instead of Muzak was a little miracle of serendipity.

Now I’m back in Midway Airport, en route from St. Louis to New York. The airport management put up Christmas decorations over the weekend, and they’re playing Kenny G’s recording of “The First Noel.”

Sigh.

Time once again for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It’s another three-play week, and for the first time in a month, all three shows, Mary Poppins, the revival of Les Mis