Design Flaws
Due to circumstances beyond our control [too much wine at a benefit auction], we ended up renting a house in Maine for a week in August. Camden, Maine—the prettiest town in Maine—or so we were told. What we were not told is that US 1 runs directly through the town as it does through so many of Maine’s charming coastal villages. The “1” it would seem stands for “the ‘1’ and only road in Maine.” Without exaggeration there was more traffic on that road then on 106th St. on any given day. A perpetual flow made more pokey because in Maine if a pedestrian so much as dangles a pinky toe onto the road, all traffic must instantly stop. This means that anytime a tourist can’t decide which side of the street to stroll down, coastal Maine grinds to a halt. And there was no shortage of pedestrians. The highway was jammed with broken heroes: tow headed kids and their clenched parents sprinkled in among the heartier locals—white haired ruddy skinned men and women nearly alike to one another with their large sunglasses, high pants and low breasts. And who says WASPs don’t age well?
Here’s what else I learned about WASPs on my summer vacation:
1. They lack joie de vivre.
2. Not only do they lack joie do vivre, but to the WASP, in the cold stone sober light of day, Joie de Vivre and Bonhomie are just two more towns in France they’ll never visit unless forced to as part of an invading army.
3. They’re generally much better at golf than I.
On a less cantankerous note: Belfast is a lovely town. If you go there and choose to take a Lobstering Cruise on the Good Return, afterwards have Captain Melissa Terry direct you to her uncle, Mike Hutchings. He’s the harbor master and he sells lobster, clams and crabs from his home a little bit inland. Generally speaking, as we slowly learned, if you want to get away from the brutal triaffic and $40 lobsters, you have to go a little bit inland—it’s a whole other Maine.
http://www.belfastbaycruises.com/cruiseinformation.html
Mike Hutchings, M&L Seafood, 638 Beach Road, Lincolnville, ME 04849, 207.763.3983.
iMiracle
The other day I searched through all my 46 of my Ween songs for a particular dittie. I couldn’t remember the piece’s title but I had a sense of what it might be called. Finally despairing of finding it, I flipped on “Shuffle Songs.” The song I had been searching for popped up first: Mutherfuker by Beck not Ween. The odds of that occurring: 1 in 2587.
My erstwhile assistant told me that kind of stuff happens to her all the time. Any other icoincidences out there?
The End of the Ave
Beth and I were painting the attic floor of what was to become the boys’ bedroom of our brand new 1840’s farmhouse just up Rte. 217 from Philmont, NY. As we were spreading newspapers, Beth noticed Edward Avedesian’s NY Times obituary among them. Avedesian had died in a nursing home about ½ a mile down Rte. 217 from our brand new 1840’s farmhouse.
Back in 1994 when I was a younger art writer still happily careening about what was still a gallery packed Soho, I came across the works of Avedesian in a little storefront gallery off Sullivan St. The gallery was run by a NY city public school science teacher named Mitchell Algus. That far corner of Soho soon became my de facto home away from home, and Mitchell’s first show of Avedesian’s there blew my fucking mind.
The Avedesian show was one of the first strands of many lost threads that Algus gathered for those of us who were lucky enough to find our way to him. Many of Algus’ lost lights were brilliant and some were better left unlit, but none were as gripping or revelatory as those early Avedesians. Here were flat abstractions that were pure sight: the first glimmer of post hypnotic pop op absent any of the acid tainted automations that were to color most subsequent efforts. Avedesian left those paintings as a gift for us and continued along his path.
The rest of his path may not have been for most of us: “textured” abstractions, Birchfieldesque landscapes and Paul Cadmus redux—manly men fixing cars in the Hudson valley, but it was Edward’s path and he diligently followed it; career be damned. That’s the way an artist does it.
Gandalf’s Staff 
Some very thoughtful people made it possible for Beth and me to be in the center of the front row of the Harvey Theater for the first U.S. night of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. I’d always loved Lear and I really wanted to see Sir Ian’s stab at it. I won’t kid you: Magneto and Gandalf sealed the deal for me with Mckellan—in my book he earned his peerage just for the way he stood there when he first entered as
Gandalf the White in
Two Towers. Sir Ian did not disappoint, but Trevor Nunn and most of the RSC did.
Whereas McKellan gave it his all to lend Lear the air of verisimilitude, the rest of the company and the production mostly did everything but: we had a slow motion suicide by a poor old Gloucester who seemed, like many in the cast, to be still jet lagged. Scary to think they might all be tired given that the company will be doing double duty on
Lear and
The Seagull—sometimes in the same day. The stage fights were about as real looking as those in old Star Trek episodes, and, when the Fool was hung in plain sight on stage, he struggled about as valiantly as Paris Hilton would against a strip search.
Speaking of stripping: in a subplot that parallels Cordelia’s plight, Gloucester’s son, Edgar, is cast out and criminalized. In order to protect himself he takes on the persona of Mad Tom, strips off his clothes, rends his flesh and rolls around in the mud. In the text there are numerous references to Tom being naked, but in this production he wears a loin cloth. Even though the dude playing Tom and the rest of the cast, chose to be soft in their choices, Sir Ian refused to rest on his laurels. When the rapidly deteriorating Lear decides to emulate Mad Tom, our valiant hero [McKellan not Lear] decides to get real and truly naked in the middle of the stage. And there it was: Gandalf’s staff waving in the breeze and me and the mrs. just 10 feet away.
--You shall not pass!You bet your flat white ass we won’t—now put that thing away before you put out an eye, pal!
Even more distracting than Sir Ian’s Willy, and for reasons that I’ve yet to figure out, Trevor Nunn dressed the cast like 19th Century Russians. It did not seem as if there were any point to that choice besides his wanting to look at a different era of clothing for a change; there’s not a lot of coin to be made going after late Czarist Russia. If Nunn were looking to make political parallels why not put them in Blue Brooks Brothers suits with red ties and be done with it, or just do the friggin thing right:
Lear is a an all-out pagan bloodbath and blood rite. It starts as if it were the ending to a traditional Shakespearian comedy--as a buildup to a wedding, and then something goes horribly, horribly wrong. One old man’s folly leads to 10 of the cast killed by the entire spectrum of means [Shakespeare really emptied his kit bag out in this his last tragedy] and a war between England and France [though most anything could have caused that back then]. What we are left with after this bloodletting is no burst of wisdom or moment of clarity [or lasting democracy], but rather just
“Howl, howl, howl.”Nunn made sure we were aware of the pagan aspect of Lear’s time. When characters in the play beseeched the heavens, they did not pray to JC or his Dad, but most pointedly to pagan gods instead. Too bad Nunn didn’t also stage the play as the pre-Christian, pre-Roman primal bloodletting the damn thing was crying out to be and put the fire to his players to boot.
Howl, howl, howl…
Jerry Saltz’s Balls
Jerry Saltz has more hair on his balls than any other art critic has on his balls [or her ovaries]. Not only does he speak truth to power, but unlike the rest of us safely sniping from the sides, Saltz goes after power he undoubtedly rubs elbows with at this function or that. In an art world in which people are notorious for not putting anything at risk ever—even when there’s precious little to risk—Saltz continues to go all in. He is making the most of his new perch at New York, slowly turning it into a bully pulpit. Bully for you, Jerry. Rave on.
I do not seek affirmation in what I do very often, yet it is thrilling when on that rare occasion affirmation seeks me out. Kanishka Raja’s project touches upon so many of the themes with which I’ve been enthralled over the years:
