February 27 — I don’t go to a lot of gallery shows, and contemporary visual art is the field where I feel least informed and educated. But when I heard that Adrianne Lobel was having her first show of paintings, I made it a point to go to the opening. Adrianne is a fantastic set designer for the theater. I’ve been aware of her work since the early ’80s — she did the sets for Harry Kondoleon’s The Vampires, and she worked a lot with Peter Sellars and Mark Morris over the years. Her show at the Walter Wickiser Gallery in Chelsea is called “Geometric Impressionism” — the ten or so paintings in spring colors (blazing greens and yellows) depict tree-filled rural landscapes with an occasional city skyline. And the artist was on hand wearing her favorite Betsey Johnson opening-night dress (below).
I was happy to greet and congratulate Adrianne, because I’ve always felt friendly toward her and found her dazzlingly attractive. She surprised me by letting me know immediately that she’s harbored resentment against me for giving her her first bad review in New York, for her work on the Broadway musical My One and Only — a weirdly mistaken memory on her part, because I never reviewed My One and Only but wrote a lengthy feature story about the show for the New York Times that mentioned her only once, in a neutral way. Funny how people’s memories work….
Once we got that out of the way, we caught up a bit. Somehow I never knew that she was married for 15 years to the actor Mark Linn-Baker, who (among zillions of other credits) starred in the musical version she produced of A Year with Frog and Toad, based on the famous children’s book by her father, Arnold. It turns out that Andy grew up on the Frog and Toad books and was thrilled to meet the author’s daughter. She told us that the books have a big gay following and that her father was a closeted gay guy who only came out late in life. (He died in 1987.) We also got to meet Adrianne’s mother Anita, who was wearing a hilarious brooch in the shape of a stubbed-out cigarette.
March 1 — I’m not sure how I feel about this trend of boomer generation singer-songwriters re-recording their hits and distributing the new versions on their own homegrown labels. Certainly, Carly Simon’s new album Never Been Gone is a weird case in point. Some of it sounds like it was recorded in her living room, and these new versions make it painfully clear how much her voice was embellished in the studio by her producers. I guess this is the equivalent of “Carly Simon Unplugged.” But frankly I prefer the lush original productions by Richard Perry (“You’re So Vain”) and Arif Mardin (“You Belong to Me”), among others. The new album does include a lot of casual fooling around in the studio. Carly is notorious for her stage fright (John Lahr wrote a long piece on stage fright for the New Yorker in which she revealed that she often asks to get spanked before going onstage, to help her calm her nerves). I recall seeing her onstage once long ago, at a tiny club in Boston, the Paradise. She was indeed nervous and shaky. (Somehow I remember also that she wore purple tights that showed cameltoe big-time.) James Taylor opened the show for her, he’d recently cut his hand somehow, and he’d just written a song for the Broadway musical Working called “Millworker” — that night he sang the best and angriest version of the song I’ve ever heard (Bette Midler later recorded it).
March 2 — I watched District 9, the last of the Oscar Best Picture nominees I’m going to see. (I’m pretty much boycotting The Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds. Life is too short to spend time watching movies you’re pretty sure you’re not going to like.) District 9…I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. The main character kept reminding me of Borat, and the final showdown with him in the robot machine fighting off the guy who looks like Bruce Willis was weirdly similar to the mind-numbing video-game finale of Avatar. Last week Andy and I watched a screener of The Hurt Locker at home and liked it tremendously — we were tense the whole time and can only imagine what it’s like seeing it on the big screen. I’m rooting for The Hurt Locker over Avatar in a race that seems to close to call, although my real favorite among the Best Picture nominees is Precious, for its profoundly depressing truthtelling, its astonishing performances, and the brilliantly inventive cinematic storytelling (the stuttering edits, the never-too-long flights of fantasy, the director Lee Daniels’ incredible confidence about short takes and long takes).
another eye opens 