[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: October 19.2007]
Is there no peace for pigs? Readings, art shows, drama and poetry, recently seen.
(Scroll down for Molly O'Neill, Larry Clark, Lee Krasner, Simon Armitage and the Yankees.)
Molly O'Neill's American Food Writing
To Temple Israel to hear former Times food writer Molly O'Neill read from the Library of America's massive new anthology of American Food Writing. Ms O'Neill is the main editor of these seven hundred pages which include pieces by major writers - the Hawthornes and Melvilles - as well as the usual suspects - the Childs and Fishers. Happily, I think, the editor soon got tired of reading and threw it to the audience. She seemed to enjoy batting around questions about her own food memories and about good diet (not only different from person to person, but for each person at different times of their lives).
She had less patience with the "list" questions. What are the essential five ingredients in your kitchen? Which are your favorite five restaurants in the city? Suffice to say, she likes to eat at home. She did reveal, though, that this is the only book in which she's ever been involved for which the recipes were not tested. They are there, she says, for historical interest. Good luck!
Clark and Krasner in Chelsea
Was it Peter Schjeldahl who likened visiting the Chelsea galleries to being a rat trapped in a maze looking for some cheese? Random visiting can truly be dispiriting, but I recently targeted two contrasting shows. Distressed khakis for this, and the last tee-shirt of the Indian summer.
Larry Clark has a capacity occasionally to disgust. Whatever his personal attitude to the young subjects of his photographs and movies, his aesthetic approach is intrinsically prurient. Yet I keep getting sucked back to Luhring Augustine's updates on his works in progress.
His inaugural and defining study of young midwest speedfreaks, Tulsa, is stark and disturbing documentation of real streetpunk brutality and derangement. He has pursued this vision through a series of youth milieus - sex, drugs, violence, and a really sharp eye for style, being constants. We had the New York skater-punks of Kids, the bored valley girl/Latino gang collision of Bully. Here he is back in Los Angeles, photographing ephebic Latino gang kids, on the beach, in their leathers, dropping their pants.
It's a movie, I guess, which he has yet to find the money to make. He sure has a vision.
Lee Krasner's vision was unquestionably liberated by her husband Jackson Pollock's deconstruction of certain pictorial "values", but Krasner had the gift of time to articulate a wide variety of abstract forms. The Robert Miller gallery showed an engaging selection of works on paper recently - goauaches, pastels and crayons, the odd marginal touch of collage - late 1960s to early 80s (she died in 1984).
At first glance, Krasner's grouping of the works into series with iconic names - "Seeds", "Hieroglyphs", "Water", "Earth" (and so on) seemed to impose a narrative sense. But as I walked around, I soon couldn't see why this densely earth-colored work turned out to be "water", and something very similar a version of "seeds". Forgetting these pretensions, one could enjoy the way she could, again and again, produce arrangements of shapes and color which drive your eyes excitingly and elegantly around the the ceaseslessy moving (and de-centering) activity of the work.
Electra, Stripes and Hughes
What else, my dears? German stage legend Peter Stein directed the National Theater of Greece in Electra at City Center. In Greek, but modern rather than the original text (it was Sophocles, not Euripides). Subtitles unobtrusively appeared above and beside the appropriately minimal set: a filthy, sun-drenched yard before steps leading up to a threateningly dark palace door. Hey, womb!.
Some of the staging was smart - like having the chorus form a human chariot in front of the character who delivers the famously overlong chariot race speech. Having pondered a little, I can't persuade myself that having Electra strip naked and take two baths, one on each side of the stage, was part of Sophocles' original conception. But it added to the gaiety of the evening, and took the audience's mind off the absence of an intermission. Two hours and ten minutes of unbroken Greek drama earns a bit of gratuitous nudity in my book.
British poet Simon Armitage had lost his shirt too after giving a talk at Harvard (negligence, I suspect, rather than student enthusiasm). Happily, this did not result in a topless appearance at Poet's House, as he had a short-cap sleeve tee-shirt in reserve. This actually went well with his hair styling. I am neither for nor against the pudding-basin look, but suffice to say that, even if I'd never heard of Armitage, I'd have picked the Yorkshireman in the room in a second.
Impertinence aside, he did fine justice to Ted Hughes' late collection of poetry, "Remains of Elmet"; meditations on the landscape around his birth town - the remarkably named Mytholmroyd - inspired by Fay Godwin's photographs. Playing Hughes' own recordings of the poems, Armitage explicated the cycle as an ascent from the town at the base of the valley, through ramshackle slope-clinging villages, to the clear heights above. I have never been able to attune myself to Hughes' poetry. It has always seemed a lot of dysphonic clacking about anthropomorphized wild life. Armitage made me plan to look again.
And stripes, pinstripes, farewell again to summer. The men of fall can put their feet up until spring. I must say, much as I admire Derek Jeter, he is made of Teflon. I have never seen such an invisible post-season performance from him, but the criticism just slides by and attaches to Torre, the pitchers, and of course Rodriguez, who had more post-season hits than Jeter this year.
Pink Pig predicts a new contract for Torre, possibly announced before this is published (I am writing on Thursday afternoon). It would be good to say goodbye to him properly.
Some of those rewarding Lee Krasner works right here.
Larry Clark's Los Angeles this way.
Simon Armitage and his Yorkie fringe over here.
If you can't find the web-site of the New York Yankees, you are beyond help, my darlings.
