March 10, 2011 Arts & Culture Foreign Idiot By Christine Smallwood On a recent Saturday afternoon, the British psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delivered a talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music titled “Acting Madness.” The event was being held in conjunction with BAM’s spring season, which features three plays about madness: David Holman’s adaptation of Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”; Macbeth; and King Lear. In a row with plenty of other seats, a young man with a wispy beard and glasses took the place directly next to mine. He was wearing, I noticed at once, a Paris Review T-shirt. My mind leaped as though a starter pistol had been fired. It was all so obvious: The Paris Review had sent this person to check up on me. In his essay “First Hates,” from On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Phillips usefully glosses paranoia as the refusal to be left out. That is, much worse than the fear that everyone is talking about you is the fear that no one is talking about you. As the gentleman in question and I waited in silence, I performed a little Phillips-inspired self-analysis. Either The Paris Review had sent this man here to stalk me, and he was announcing his intentions with his T-shirt, or he was a Phillips enthusiast and also a reader of The Paris Review—even my paranoiac fantasy had to concede this as a likely demographic crossover. Embarrassed, I meditated, very briefly, on my own unimportance. The Paris Review would survive with or without my post. This unimportance was a fact I was going to have to live with, because living without it—believing that this man had donned an official T-shirt in order to more conspicuously surveil my blogging—was crazy. Read More
March 9, 2011 On Music Nadia Sirota and Her Viola By Dawn Chan Photograph by Samantha West. “You are such a good drink, for a four o’clock drink,” Nadia Sirota tells her Campari and soda. Then, with a sort of resigned discipline, she also orders pizza so as not to turn up sloshed at her next gig in two hours. Sirota, a violist and radio host, has dark hair styled into sideways bangs, dark eyes, a tough-talking, trenchant sense of humor, and inked forearms. She explains that her tattoos—a stylized letter N and letter H, followed by brackets—are musical markings. Arnold Schoenberg used them in scores to denote what he called the Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, or the primary voice and secondary voice in a composition. Though she’s lately become an omnipresent figure in New York’s downtown music concerts, she’s probably less known than others in her circle (like her friend and frequent collaborator Nico Muhly). Perhaps it’s because creators tend to get more attention than interpreters. Or maybe it’s just because violists, to everyone’s detriment, tend to get no attention at all. Yet Sirota has collaborated with everyone from Meredith Monk to Grizzly Bear; she contributed to Arcade Fire’s recent Grammy-winning album, The Suburbs. This week alone, she goes from Webcasting a sold-out show at Le Poisson Rouge to moderating a discussion with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at WNYC to playing a recital with friends at the Ecstatic Music Festival that is tonight at Merkin Concert Hall. As with many violists, Sirota started by playing the violin as a child but soon grew frustrated with the repertoire. “The advanced-intermediate violin pieces are all these flashy stand-on-your-head études, which suck, musically. I mean, I just didn’t give a shit. And I didn’t want to put my time into learning how to do those kinds of tricks, when I didn’t feel like I was getting anything musical from it.” She adds, “I switched to viola around the same time I became an alto. Viola sounds like a man singing very high, or a woman singing very low. It has a sort of intermediate gender-weirdness thing which also I find very appealing.” She was a natural at the viola; as a Juilliard student in 2005, she won first place in the conservatory’s concerto competition. Read More
March 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Daniel Okrent, Writer and Editor By Daniel Okrent DAY ONE In just three weeks, I’ve discovered the best way to ruin Sunday morning coffee is to read the New York Times Book Review—not because I don’t like the reviews, or the reviewers, or the choice of books (although I could, on any given Sunday, kvetch about each of those). My problem is the continuing metastasis of the best-seller lists—hardcover, mass paperback, trade paperback, kids books, advice, et cetera, now joined by e-books as a separate category. Where once the lists took up a single page of the Book Review, they now spill over page after page, every inch they consume necessarily taking away space that could be devoted to … reviews. Maybe the proliferation of lists is an act of spite directed at publishers who have cut their advertising budgets so radically that the accompanying editorial space is already disappearing. My wife and I went downtown to the Mesa Grill, where I hadn’t been for fifteen years, to meet friends for lunch before a matinee performance of Three Sisters at the Classic Stage Company. Mesa is about as authentically Mexican as this production was authentically Chekhovian—which is to say, not nearly enough. Some excellent actors (especially Juliet Rylance, as Irina) nonetheless managed to triumph over a peculiar, modernizing translation that placed contemporary idioms into the mouths of turn-of-the-last-century characters. If you’re going to use modern speech rhythms and colloquialisms—which is certainly a plausible, if peculiar, option—then why put all the characters in nineteenth-century clothing, in a nineteenth-century house? Still, it was well-acted Chekhov, and that’s good enough for me. Dinner afterward in Brooklyn, at the home of poet Vijay Seshadri and his wife, Suzanne. Vijay is a spectacular talker, able to bounce from the most recondite literary subjects to Eastern theology to pot-roast recipes without pausing for a comma. The pot roast was damn good, too. Among the other guests was Mark Strand, who is much too tall and handsome for his own good. But at least he’s old. DAY TWO Picked up Michael Steinberg’s For the Love of Music, which came in the mail from my Minneapolis pen pal, Katie McCurry. A couple of years ago, Katie sent me an incredibly nice fan e-mail about a book I’d published six years earlier, and we’ve been writing to each other ever since. She’s a big music fan, and Steinberg—a past master of program notes for orchestras across the country—was one of her heroes. I see why: The opening piece, about how he fell in love with music as a child, is especially strong. The fact that it was Disney’s Fantasia that pulled him in makes me feel less dorky for having myself been seduced by the William Tell Overture. The association I made between classical music and the Lone Ranger’s gallop across the twelve-inch screen of our black-and-white Zenith was so firmly embedded in my eight-year-old skull that when my mother told me she was going to a concert featuring the Robert Shaw Chorale, I heard corral—and thought the concert would consist of an orchestra accompanying horse tricks. This week’s subway reading is The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld is better known as a Yale law professor than as a novelist, and of late even better known as the husband of Tiger Mom Amy Chua. I picked the book up because of the incredible review in the daily New York Times (“Tremendous follow-up to his 2006 novel, Interpretation of Murder … This novel is great”). I may put it down if I encounter another egregious clam like this one, on page twelve: “To their right rose up incomprehensibly tall skyscrapers. To their left, the Brooklyn Bridge soared over the Hudson.” Astonishing. Read More
March 8, 2011 Notes from a Biographer Letter from Japan By Sam Stephenson Stephenson has been blogging for The Daily about W. Eugene Smith, the subject of his forthcoming biography. Here, he writes to managing editor Nicole Rudick from Okinawa, Japan. Dear Nicole, Today is my fourteenth day in Japan. The first nine days were in Tokyo, followed by four in Minamata, and now Okinawa. In a few days I’ll leave here for Saipan, Guam, and Iwo Jima, all part of my month-long Pacific tour on Gene Smith’s trail. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith. Courtesy of Takeshi Ishikawa. Smith often said he felt like he was from Japan in a former life. His second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, was Japanese American, and he made three extended trips here: beginning as a combat photographer in World War II, then to Tokyo in the early sixties, and Minamata in the early seventies. I spent my first two weeks interviewing his former associates through my interpreter, Momoko Gill. The prevailing responses—some of them wordless, from body language to tears—were similar to what jazz pianist Freddie Redd once told me: “Gene Smith is just a sweet memory.” In New York, Smith’s appeal wore thin among those that relied on him or expected things from him—publishers, gallery owners, benefactors, people from the “official” side of things. I don’t blame them. He couldn’t finish anything he started. He wrote long, complaining letters to people he barely knew, copying paragraphs verbatim from letters he’d written to others. He’d fake injuries for sympathy. His quixotic grandiosity—linked to feverish moral imperatives, alcoholism, amphetamine addiction, and bipolar disorder—went from valiant to insufferable. But over the past two weeks, I haven’t heard anything that indicates he behaved like that in Japan. Nor did he with jazz musicians and underground characters in the New York loft. He drank heavily in both places, though. I’m left wondering about the relation, for Smith, between people in Japan and the transient loft figures. Read More
March 8, 2011 At Work Jacques d’Amboise on ‘I Was a Dancer’ By Yona Zeldis McDonough Jacques d’Amboise, born Joseph Jacques Ahearn in 1934, began his dance training at the age of seven with Madame Seda in Washington Heights. Within a year, he was hopping on the subway to the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the fledging company started by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. By the age of fifteen, he had joined the New York City Ballet, and by seventeen, he had dropped out of high school and become a soloist. For the next three decades, d’Amboise partnered with some of the most exquisite ballerinas of the day, and as Balanchine’s protégé, he had numerous ballets made specifically for him. Critics hailed him as “the definitive Apollo,” a role that he claims changed his life. He was also known for his wildly exuberant screen presence, most notably as Ephraim in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the Starlight Carnival barker in Carousel. As his dancing career was winding down, d’Amboise embarked on a spectacular second act: founding the National Dance Institute in 1976, a program that brings ballet into public schools around the country through classes, residencies, and performances—all for free. His memoir, I Was a Dancer, published this month, recalls his seven decades of dance. Although d’Amboise says he is slowing down, the evidence suggests otherwise: as we sat over cups of café au lait in SoHo, he felt compelled to rise from the table to demonstrate a particular sequence of ballet steps. The other patrons were as surprised—and delighted—as I was. Where did your mother get the idea that you should study dance? She never finished elementary school, but at home, everybody read books. Especially French books: Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Dumas. She always dreamed that she would be an actress, in drama, and that educated her: she’d dance, recite poetry, use beautiful words, speak French, and act and sing. And her dream was that all her children would be brought up that way. And it came true! It did—for three of us. In the early days of New York City Ballet Society, we were all in. My sister stopped because she married the company doctor and she was quarter ballet girl. She had a minor solo once in a while but nothing really. I think I did my solo before I was seventeen and I was doing principal roles while I was still quarter ballet. And Freddie Ashton came to the U.S. and did a ballet for me, and then I did my first movie. I turned eighteen on the set. I just did what I wanted and had everything given to me. And in a way that was why I started National Dance Institute: I never had to audition for anything; I never had to pay for a dance class. Read More
March 7, 2011 Arts & Culture R. B. Kitaj By John Ashbery In 1985, art historian and critic Marco Livingstone published one of the earliest monographs on American painter R. B. Kitaj. The volume appeared roughly midway through Kitaj’s career (he was born in 1932, and his very earliest works date from the late fifties) and offered significant documentation of a complex artist. Over the next two decades, Kitaj continued his prolific output of provocative and dense compositions—dramatic paintings informed both by a wealth of styles and by an engagement with politics, literature, contemporary poetry, and Jewish culture. Last fall brought the fourth and final edition of Livingstone’s study, updated to cover the full span of Kitaj’s half-decade of work (he died in 2007). Selections are accompanied here by passages from an essay, originally penned in 1981, by John Ashbery. R. B. Kitaj, Los Angeles No. 9, 1969–2002, oil on canvas. “Only connect,” urged E. M. Forster in Howards End; this exhortation was the theme of his novel. A decade later Yeats noted that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” while T. S. Eliot appears to be replying directly to Forster through the persona of a seduced stenographer in The Waste Land: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” By this time the dislocations tried out by other artists before the war had become real, as yet again life imitated art with disastrous results. The world itself, and not just a pictured mandolin and a bottle on a table, had become unglued. Faced with an altered reality, Eliot reacted as though in a stupor. Despite all his craft and scholarship, The Waste Land achieves its effect as a collage of hallucinatory, random fragments, “shored against my ruin.” Their contiguity is all their meaning, and it is implied that from now on meaning will take into account the randomness and discontinuity of modern experience, that indeed meaning cannot be truthfully defined as anything else. Eliot’s succeeding poetry backs away from this unpleasant discovery, or at any rate it appears to, though Four Quarters may be just as purposefully chaotic beneath its skin of deliberateness. Yet the gulf had opened up, and art with any serious aspirations toward realism still has to take into account the fact that reality escapes laws of perspective and logic, and does not naturally take the form of a sonnet or a sonata. Read More