Brushing with Greatness

REVERSALS AND REVELATIONS are the exciting stuff of drama, with playwrights struggling to outdo themselves and one another with the surprises they can cook up for their characters. John Logan’s “Red,” currently receveiving its regional premiere at Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre, is a study at the creative process as exemplified by the character of doomed Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. It’s a rarefied script that demands some familiarity not only with that art movement but also ones that preceded and followed it, and it doesn’t hurt to have read a little Nietzsche.

Kevin McGuire and David Kenner
in "Red" | Photo by Joseph Schuyler

But it’s a script ultimately crafted for a Broadway audience (it netted six Tony awards), which prefers a predictable range of controversy and emotion. In the play’s opening moments, Rothko welcomes his new assistant, Ken, with a barrage of intimidating, Mamet-esque questions that set Rothko as an irascible rascal in the Gulley Jimson tradition, but with less charm. Kevin McGuire, who has skilfully transformed himself into a resonant simulacrum of the shambling artist, holds his own well against the continual challenge of fighting the script’s predictable tropes – but the journey he’s given is that of godlike artist to godlike but further disillusioned artist as he counters the carpings of the difficult-to-believe-in Ken.

Farming the Web

From the Computer Vault Dept.: With so much information exploding across the internet, how about an irregularly published magazine with a three-month lead time to tell you where to look for stuff? For the inaugural isue of ZD Internet Life, from onetime computer-magazine publishing giant Ziff-Davis, I wrote the piece below about farming resources. Amazingly, most of the sites persist in some form some eighteen years later!

                                                                                       

FARMING IS POPULARLY SYNONYMOUS with technological ignorance, but forget that image of the fellow chewing a stem of straw. The men and women who farm today are as likely to be sitting in front of a computer as they are to be perched on a tractor. Farming is traditionally a community-wide activity that relies on the experience of others; using the Internet sites listed below, that community is as tightly-knit as it ever was but also happens to cover a lot more ground. Weather maps and agricultural news are instantly available. Illustrated how-to guides take you through a variety of projects. And all of this information can be as helpful to the weekend farmer as to the full-time professional.

THE BEST

Noah’s Ark is an organic farm based in California; its enthusiastic proprietor tends a Web site called Don’t Panic Eat Organic (http://www.rain.org/~sals/my.html). You’ll find a freewheeling mix of news and gossip and useful information, the kind of stuff you might hear at the general store (if the general store could stay in business). Start with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather link to answer the farmer’s first question, then find out why you should build a barn owl nest--and how to build it, with pictures. Read a treatise on ladybugs (or lady beetles, as they’re termed here) and learn how to identify the many varieties. Noah’s Ark grows an exotic, sweet fruit called cherimoya, and encourages you to do so, too, so you’ll find complete instructions. The lists are haphazard, and there’s little consistency to the graphic design, but this site rates high just on enthusiasm.

Companionable Pacing

From the Chamber Dept.: This afternoon the Emerson Quartet will make its final Schenectady appearance with David Finckel in the cello chair. They’ve been coming here for decades; they – and Finckel – will be returning. But it’s a taking-stock moment, so you as you breathlessly await my Metroland review of the concert, here are the most recent and the oldest Emerson reviews I’ve written.

                                                                                                 

YOU MAY HAVE THOUGHT that the award for Longest String Quartet Made Up of Slow Movements was won by Shostakovich for his final work in that form, but Haydn nabbed it two centuries earlier when he arranged his orchestral work “The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross” for that instrumentation.

The Emerson Quartet: Now

It runs nearly an hour, depending upon tempos, repeats and whether you include an Intermezzo that Haydn later wrote for a choral version. Although the Emerson Quartet omitted the Intermezzo (which is on their recording of the work) and shortened some of the other movements, it still clocked in at about 50 minutes at their performance last Sunday at Union College.

This was the ensemble’s 27th appearance in the College’s renowned concert series, itself in its 38th year, and a wonderful kickoff to the season.

Haydn wrote the piece in response to a commission circa 1786, and a year later his quartet arrangement appeared. Or maybe it wasn’t his: The voicings betray haste and/or incompetence, so the Emersons touched up the score using the original version as a guide.

She'll Probably Demand Money for This

20 April 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Live Leo

From the Vault Dept.: Leo Kottke performs tonight at a theater at Albany’s Empire State Plaza – better known as The Egg – so to whet your appetite, here is a pair of reviews I wrote about earlier visits.

                                                                               

TO SAY THAT MUSIC AND WORDS define Leo Kottke is an understatement. He gives the impression of living in a stream of words and music, constantly flowing through him and shared in snippets with whatever audience he happens to face, as if he were a radio that can be switched on and off but continues its endless programming regardless.

Leo Kottke

This is exemplified in the stories he tells. They seem to pick up in midstream, almost in mid-sentence. They tumble us over a rocky course of arcane thought and language, all the more hilarious for the sense of spontaneity that’s conveyed. They end with a laugh but you’re sure there’d be more to tell, more to listen to if Kottke chose to continue speaking.

But he’s been playing his guitar all along, highlighting the tale with strums and tunings and funny little musical quotes. And then a song bursts forth, often highlighted by a gravel-voiced vocal.

If the tune is an instrumental, you can be assured it will be highly rhythmic, demonstrating Kottke’s legendary ability to finger-pick a complicated accompanying figure even as he wreathes hairpin turns in a multi-layered melody. His opener at his recent Troy Music Hall concert was the bouncy “William Powell,” an original tune with a Samba feel (he once explained the title only by observing that he first intended to call it “Lana Turner”).

Rothko Toast

Evanescent Art Dept.: To celebrate the work of Mark Rothko – especially (but, I’m afraid, coincidentally) in light of the just-opened production of John Logan’s play “Red” at Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre – San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art is offering Rothko Toast.

Rothko Toast

Specifically, it’s offered by the museum’s rooftop coffeeshop, the Blue Bottle Coffee Bar. This is part of an Oakland-based chain, although that’s probably not the word for an enterprise that insists on offering freshly roasted coffee (it’s never more than 48 hours old) made from organic, pesticide-free beans.

The shop is named for a Viennese coffeehouse that was opened in 1683 by war hero Franz George Kolshitsky, who learned about coffee when he went undercover among the invading Turks, whose army he helped defeat.

Rothko Toast + Jams ($5) celebrates the artist’s “No. 14 1960,”by spreading apricot butter and wild blueberry jam on Acme bread.

Now You See It

Out of the Hat Dept.: Harry Blackstone Jr. carried his father’s famous name into the second half of the 20th century, but without using the routines that made the first Blackstone one of the world’s most famous magicians. The younger prestidigitator invented a slew of his own, most of which are still in use today. Below is my review of Blackstone’s 1990 Schenectady appearance, followed by a preview piece. I remember the interview well, as the magician was one of the most gracious people I’ve ever spoken with.

                                                                                                     

“HERE’S SOMETHING my father told me,” Harry Blackstone told a young admirer backstage at Proctor’s Theatre Saturday night. “Every boy between the ages of six and 16 wants to be magician. The ones who go on to do so are the ones who never grow up.” He flashed the Blackstone smile, a benevolent grin tinged with devilment.

Harry Blackstone, Jr.

It’s easy to believe that Blackstone heeded that advice. After all, during the course of his two-hour show he’d swiped a volunteer’s watch and wallet, savaged his wife with fierce-looking blades and turned a boy’s prize rabbit into a box of chocolates, insulting another area newspaper in the process (“See? There’s nothing in it!”)

Then there were the simply astonishing things he does, like causing a lightbulb to float into the house, right over the heads of the audience, and predicting randomly-chosen playing cards. He even predicted a gastronomically-awful, randomly-chosen menu.

But his most impressive power, for my money, is his ability to levitate kids out of their seats. The audience was filled with youngsters eager to take part in anything he had in mind for them: an early request for young volunteers swamped the aisles with a most unbashful assortment.

Collection Calling

From the Vault Dept.: Away back in the 1980s, before the boom times hit and we all grew wealthy, there was a phenomenon called “debt” that often left people owing more money than they could pay. Usually, I was among them. So it was a treat to get an assignment to write about collection agencies. Having so often been on the receiving end of those phone calls, I got to see what an actual collection office looked like. It looked like an office. This was one of a handful of pieces I wrote for what was then called the Capital District Business Review.

                                                                               

CLARK BRIGGS HAS ADVICE which, if followed faithfully, will put him out of business: “Pay your bills when they’re due. If you can’t pay on a given day, call them up and tell them why you’re going to be late.”

But he’s not worried about losing any work. He runs North-East Adjusters, a collection agency in Scotia, and finds that “for every one who pays attention, ten fall off the wagon. Almost every young person gets in over his head by the time he’s 25. Most of them struggle through; some go bankrupt. It’s part of the learning process.”

He doesn’t fit the image of the collection agent as a grasping, Scrooge-like ogre, but then none of the agents do. They couldn’t if they wanted to, because Federal legislation changed the face of the business a decade ago, imposing strictly-regulated guidelines to protect consumers from undue harassment or abuse.

“It was designed to protect them from us,” says Shirley Waple, CEO of Professional Adjustment Bureau in Troy. “But it still doesn’t protect us from them.”

Theater of the Absurd

Breaking Eggs Dept.: When the curtain fell on Patricia Snyder’s tenure as director of the NY State Theatre Institute in 2010, it was a sad end to what essentially was the second act of a story of a fight for children’s education. The first act ended in 1989, after a cabal put in place by then-governor Mario Cuomo unseated the theater company. As befits anything set in motion by state government, it’s a complicated story, and I was the first to break news of the controversy in the article below, from December 1987. I’ll return at the end of it with a postscript.

                                                                                   

ACCORDING TO A POPULAR STORY, Nelson Rockefeller was seated at lunch with an architect, discussing the lecture hall he wanted built on his new South Mall in Albany. “I want it to look different,” he said, and, placing a grapefruit on top of a creamer, decided, “I want it to look like this.”

Even before construction began, a cloud’s-eye view of the architect’s design showed an oval in the midst of the Mall, and when the grapefruit (slightly flattened) did go up it already had been nicknamed the Egg. You see it most clearly when approaching Albany from the east, the towers of the mall rising as you near the Hudson.

This high visibility may be at the root of a controversy threatening to remove the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts (ESIPA) from the Egg’s two theaters, which it now operates. So confusing is the hodgepodge of legislation and agreements that keeps the theaters in business that a cleverly planted wedge may begin to bust open the Egg at a meeting of a board of directors scheduled (after two postponements) for Dec. 18. It’s been whispered that ESIPA soon will be kicked out of the Egg, and, while nobody wants to take credit for the rumor, there are enough facts to suggest that a major change is imminent.

But it would be a sly change, over almost before we knew it, thriving on the confusion inherent in an administrative setup where two distinct entities sort of merged into a third. To understand what’s about to happen, you have to understand what already went on.

Minnow Pond

c. 1986 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Under the Tuscan Soil

From the Vault Dept.: With the days lengthening and the weather warming and everything in nature that grows growing, I think about escaping yard work. Here’s a pleasant recollection of one such getaway.

                                                                                         

DURING A RECENT WEEK spent traveling through and dining in a few of the cities and towns of Tuscany, I never saw a supermarket. That’s because the cuisine stays close to the fertile ground. It may be presumptuous to generalize about an area the size of Massachusetts based on mere hours spent in the environs of Florence and Siena, but it’s a common affliction among visiting American writers.

Fattoria Lavacchio
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The food is rustic, I was warned. It’s not fancy. No sauces. What I wasn’t told is that dining is an all-day affair that includes tending and harvesting the farmland, butchering and preparing the meats, making pasta, putting together a compelling ragù and, especially, producing excellent wine and olive oil.

Tuscany is the upper front thigh of Italy’s leg, bounded by the regions of Umbria and Emilia-Romagna, with the Pisa end of the province facing the Tyrrheian Sea. Despite its extensive seaside holdings, Tuscany’s cuisine is defined by its two greatest agricultural products: olive oil and Chianti. As Waverly Root observes in The Food of Italy, “Its people speak the national language in its purest form, and ... cook the most robust form of food, meat (especially beef), in the simplest manner, without fuss or frills.”

Which Way the Wind?

From the Celluloid Shelf Dept.: With Robert Redford’s movie The Company You Keep exploring the topic, I thought it was time to revisit a documentary about the Weather Undergound that was released ten years ago. Although I’d given up film reviewing a while back, Metroland asked me to write about it because, unlike so many others around the office, I was alive when the incidents described therein took place. Hope that qualification endures! This is a slightly longer version of the piece that ran in the magazine.

                                                                                       

THE VIETNAM WAR FOOTAGE is grainy and scarred by time, archetype of a look now imposed on videos to portray gritty reality. Combined with well-placed sound-effects and a brilliant musical score, the footage is distant, dreamlike, nauseous. Because a movie, with its shifting points of view and telescoped time, is a vehicle of dreams, we’re viscerally affected. We want to avenge the Vietnamese boy whose head is blown open and whose blood geysers onto the ground for long moments after the executioner-soldiers stroll away.

Other horrific actualities of bombings and bodies and point-blank murders follow, interspersed with kinescopes of TV news tallies of the soaring numbers of American dead. So we applaud (with a measure of guilt) the proposed mission of the most radical element of a radical student group, the kids who take over a fractious Students for a Democratic Society convention in 1969 and announce their intention to fight violence with violence.

The Weather Underground is a brilliant documentary that shrewdly uses documentary techniques to present an emotionally charged view of events that, 30 years later, parallel contemporary events. And that wasn’t even the intention when directors Green and Siegel began work on this film five years ago.

How Marriages are Arranged

Guest Blogger: H. L. Mencken (1880-1956). A tireless critic who larded his essays with impressive wit, Mencken wrote intelligently on a broad range of topics including politics, social issues, and the performing arts. He also wrote The American Language in 1919, producing what was then a definitive text on the way we speak, and was revised and expanded until it became three volumes by 1948. In Defense of Women, from which the extract below is drawn, first appeared in 1918 and was somewhat rewritten for its 1922 re-release. Reaction to it was mixed. According to Mencken’s biographer, Fred Hobson, “Depending on the position of the reader, he was either a great defender of women’s rights or, as a critic labeled him in 1916, ‘the greatest misogynist since Schopenhauer’,’the country’s high-priest of woman-haters.’”

                                                                                        

H. L. Mencken

I HAVE SAID THAT WOMEN are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation. The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are is itself a favorite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.

Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of mind are most clearly contrasted—to the field, to wit, of monogamous marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior competence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater self-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher power of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it is plainly to a man’s interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and as plainly to a woman’s interest to make a favorable marriage as soon as she can.

Scene of the Crime

AS A SIX-YEAR-OLD FAN of the Hardy Boys books, I was becoming trained to spot the evidence of malfeasance all around me. Frank and Joe had the uncanny ability to give a crime scene the once over and discover the clues needed to solve whatever mystery was attached. I sought to wield a similar ability.

Life in suburban New Jersey in 1962 wasn’t blessed with much crime – at least such as would be meaningful to a kid my age. No money was reported missing from my home; none of the houses on South Maple Avenue reported any burglaries, and there certainly weren’t any corpses turning up.

In a word, life was dull. It didn’t hurt that Frank and Joe Hardy’s dad, Fenton, was a private detective whose work put him in regular contact with the underworld, and they were based somewhere on Long Island, which wasn’t too far from me.

In fact, two of my grandparents and a dizzy aunt not unlike the Hardy Boys’s own Aunt Gertrude lived on the westernmost part of the island and, although their urban Astoria neighborhood bore little resemblance to the sylvan paradise of the Hardy’s Bayport, it stood to reason that people in Astoria, or at the very least in my grandparents’s apartment building, would need crimes solved.

Ramblin’ Man

From the Vault Dept.: Sad to say, I missed Tom Paxton’s performance in Schenectady last Saturday. I chose instead to attend the monthly get-together of like-minded folk that’s been going on in my community for over a decade, a pot-luck supper and songfest – although I did use the opportunity to foist a bunch of Paxton songs upon the assemblage. Here’s a review I wrote of a pair of concerts he performed in this area nearly a decade ago.

                                                                                          

FOR OVER 40 YEARS, Tom Paxton has cultivated three different songwriting identities. He has written ballads so perfect and poignant that they seem to always have been around. His topical songs crackle with wit and righteous anger. And then he can turn around and
write children’s songs just as timeless and appealing as the ballads.

All three identities were displayed at the Egg last Saturday, along with a fourth compelling aspect of his talent: Paxton’s appeal as a performer.

Eric Weissberg and Tom Paxton
Photo by Chuck Morse

For the kids, his afternoon show was an hour-long journey through realms of the child’s imagination, much of it centered around the zoo. “Goin’ to the Zoo,” of course, from his very first recording (on the Gaslight label), and portraits of animals like “Allen Gator” and the fish who live “At the ‘Quarium.” Kids are kinetic listeners, so Paxton encouraged (and choreographed) hand an arm movements to go with the songs. “The Marvelous Toy” is so much of a standard that it’s a treat to be reminded that Paxton actually wrote it (while a soldier at Fort Dix, no less).

Richard McKee (1941-2013)

In Memoriam: Richard McKee stopped by my house in Schenectady one wintry day in 1985 so that I could interview him for the piece below. We became and remained very close friends.

                                                                                    

BASS-BARITONE RICHARD MCKEE sang in a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in Amsterdam last Saturday. This Friday he’ll be a soloist with the Octavo Singers in their “Messiah” at Proctor’s Theatre.

Richard McKee

It would seem that the Christmas season would be a steady source of “Messiahs,” but, as McKee explains, that hasn’t been his experience.

“I haven’t sung that part for years because I’ve been on the road so much. But my wife and I bought a house in Amsterdam a year and a half ago and I’m having the pleasant experience of being part of a community. That’s what has brought me these Messiahs, and I’m delighted.”

McKee has an imposing presence that complements his very imposing voice. He has a repertory of over 80 operatic roles, many of them in conjunction with the New York City Opera, with whom he has performed every season since his debut there in 1974.

“I just finished up a season that included ‘Daughter of the Regiment,’ ‘The Mikado,’ in which I started as Poo-Bah and later took over the title role; ‘Love for Three Oranges’ with wonderful sets by Maurice Sendak, ‘Kismet,’ and ‘La Rondine.’

Lobster Roll

4 April 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Woodman, Don't Spare That Tree!

Guest Blogger: S. J. Perelman. He became best known for the New Yorker pieces that persisted well into his and the century’s 70s, but virtuoso wordsmith Perelman also wrote a couple of Broadway shows – and a pair of Marx Brothers movies. His style was so unique that, according to the writer himself, “Before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold.”

                                                                                               

NOT LONG AGO a landscape architect down my way was retained by a lady who, to put it bluntly, had just fallen heir to a satchelful of the stuff. Instead of the same old flowers and trees, the fair client wanted a garden plan for her country house which would express her own unique personality: something arresting, terribly audacious, yet smart; in short, identifying her unmistakably as a lady who had just fallen heir to a satchelful. The architect smacked his lips in a refined way, like a fox in a henhouse, and went to work. Employing a dozen wooden horses gleaned from a defunct amusement park, and a profusion of the rarest vines, creepers, and bulbs known to man, he created a spectacular floral carrousel that dazzled the countryside. Farmers came from miles around to lean on their manure forks and gape at the horticultural gew-gaw, but Mrs. Krebs was clearly disappointed.

“You haven’t captured my mood at all,” she pouted. “Deep down, I’m really a mystic – haunting, inscrutable. Now this,” she went on, waving toward a mournful Chirico which had set her back eleven thousand clams, “this is really me.”

The Kismet of Borodin

From the Vault Dept.: From the series of program booklets I wrote for the sadly defunct Dorian Recordings label, here’s the St. Petersburg Quartet’s Borodin. I sat in on one of the recording sessions, and the players were as astonishing in their craft as they were charming between takes.

                                                                                            

ST. PETERSBURG LONG VIED with Moscow as Russia’s most prominent city, and it carries its own wealth of distinguished history and splendor. It was founded, by Peter I the Great, in 1703, and went through a series of renamings – Petrograd in 1914,  Leningrad in 1924, St. Petersburg again in 1991. It sits at the top of the Gulf of Finland and includes some 40 delta islands, and has been vital seaway for the country’s trade. The first Russian steamship was built here in 1813; the country’s first railway opened in 1837, with a line to Moscow established in 1851.

As the hometown to both composer Alexander Borodin and the ensemble performing his works on this disc, St. Petersburg resonates throughout this recording. It was where Borodin was born, on Nov. 12, 1833, to an elderly nobleman – although not officially. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reminds us that it was the fashion of aristocrats in that time and place to keep young mistresses. When Prince Gedianov’s son was born to his 24-year-old concubine, the boy was officially registered as the scion of one of the Prince’s serfs, Porfiry Borodin.

Alexander’s mother homeschooled the boy, who grew fluent in several languages and several musical instruments, flute and cello among them. He specialized in chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy while also studying zoology, botany, anatomy, and crystallography. He received his doctorate in 1858 for a dissertation On the Analogy of Arsenical with Phosphoric Acid. He also was fond of building his own fireworks. Among scientific circles, he achieved world fame through his research on aldehydes. By 1864 he was a full professor at the Academy; at the same time, he’d joined forces with other like-minded musicians and, at their prodding, was at work on his first symphony.

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