Lush Life
Matty's cell rang.
"Excuse me," half turning away.
"Got a pen?" It was his ex.
"Yup." Making no move to find one.
"Adirondack Trailways 4432, arriving Port Authority, four-fifteen tomorrow."
"A.m. or p.m.?"
"Guess."
"All right, whatever," glancing at Billy. Then, "Hey, Lindsay, wait." Matty lowered his voice, his head. "What's he like to eat?"
"To eat? Whatever. He's a kid, not a tropical fish."
One of the great things about Richard Price's novels, as opposed to his screenwriting for The Wire, is that you can read the dialogue slowly, savor it, if you're so inclined.
I might read this one again, to do just that. But the first time through, I was too overwhelmed. Not by the strength of the plot, which, a bit like The Wire, is barely enough to fill the vast amount of space available. And not by the three-dimensionality of the characters, either: they're all maybe a little too glib, Matty and Yolanda in the novel being rather too close to McNulty and Kima in the TV series; Keith McNally and Schiller's being a bit too obvious a center for the novel if you're going to be writing about the yuppifying Lower East Side.
No, for me it was the wealth of Lower East Side detail, everything specified down to the street corner: the number of blocks it takes to get from Broome and Pitt to Eldridge and Stanton, that kind of thing. When you're a New Yorker, and someone specifies an intersection, you can't help but bring up a mental image of that corner in your mind. And when you've lived on the Lower East Side for the best part of a decade, and you've seen all these corners hundreds of times, and the novel is set deep into the real-world geography to the point at which even I had difficulty at times distinguishing the fictional from the real, that alone can be enough to distract somewhat from the artistry of the prose.
In any case, go and read this book: if you don't know the LES quite as intimately as I do, it might be even better. On the other hand, if you do, and especially if you're any kind of a fan of The Wire, then it's simply a must-read.
You wait years for a great literary detective novel to come along, and then two arrive at once: this one, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I've read them both in the past couple of months, and there are some uncanny similarities between them. I'm not going to play favorites, but if you like your fiction noirish and realistic and dirty, go for Lush Life. If you like it a little more magical, read the Chabon. And if you like it both ways, read them both.
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Lots of problems with the felixsalmon.com RSS feeds right now. To be sure of getting all of my Market Movers posts, Portfolio's RSS feed for them is http://feeds.portfolio.com/portfolio/marketmovers?format=xml. It doesn't include any felixsalmon.com content, but given the frequency of posting here of late, that won't make a lot of difference.
How to stop websites from resizing your browser window in Firefox
I wish I'd known this years ago...
- Point your brower to about:config.
- Where it says "Filter" at the top, type in "resize". Or just scroll down to "dom.disable_window_move_resize".
- It probably says "false". Right-click on it, and select "toggle". Now it says "true".
- You're done!
This is for OS X, but I'm pretty sure it's almost identical in Windows and Linux. No more seeing your carefully-constructed desktop hijacked by evil websites insisting that you view their content in a full screen! Yay!
Poder Column
I've started writing a monthly column on art collecting for Poder, a magazine in Miami. Here are the first four. I love the art direction on them, it makes a refreshing change from the blog format.
When a Balloon Looks Like a Bubble:
727-727 vs 727
A curious postscript to the post below: both the NYT and Slate have slide shows about the Murakami show. Both of them talk about 727-727, and attempt to illustrate it, on slide 10 of the NYT slideshow, and slide 8 of the Slate sideshow. And both of them use an illustration of a different painting, 727, rather than 727-727. Both paintings are on show in Brooklyn right now, but they are definitely distinct: 727-727 is more expressive and painterly. It's not that hard to tell them apart, you'd think that a professional art critic could manage it. (See here, or below, for what 727-727 really looks like.)
Incidentally, I emailed the NYT on April 6 to inform them of their mistake, on their inform-us-of-errors email address of nytnews@nytimes.com. I got a form reply saying "your e-mail will reach the appropriate editor promptly," but so far there's been no correction. I'm trying the same thing with corrections@slate.com, we'll see if the response is different. Who knows, maybe this blog entry will prompt a correction. Probably not.
A Masterpiece from Murakami
I went to the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum last night, it's well worth seeing. For me, the highlight is the painting above, 727-727, which unfortunately just doesn't work very well in reproduction. In real life, it's enormous – each of the three panels is 3 meters high (that's 9'10", for Americans).
Now Murakami has been painting (or getting his assistants to paint) very large paintings for a very long time, and many of his installations are significantly bigger than this: the scale of this piece is nothing new. But often the size of Murakami's pieces works only to overwhelm, to bludgeon the viewer with sensory overload. In this case, Murakami creates a complex and stunningly beautiful ground of worked and reworked paint: he mounts his canvas on board, puts on a layer of acrylic paint, sands it down until there's almost nothing left, puts on another layer, sands that down, and so on and so forth until the end result ends up looking like a cross between a Gerhard Richter squeegee work and an Andy Warhol oxidation painting.
The result isn't incoherent from afar, as some Murakami paintings can be; instead, it's one of those paintings which works perfectly at any distance from far across the room all the way up to right against the astonishing surface of the canvas.
The content of the painting could easily fill a very large catalogue essay, from the DOB mascot to the flattened and stylized wave forms and the carefully-applied drips at the right-hand edge: intellectually, this is a very complex work. But it also marks the point at which Murakami starts becoming a bit less conceptualist and more of a pure painter: the colors are gorgeous, the formal structure is extremely strong, and there's a pitch-perfect interplay between the flattened areas of abstract color and the more representational elements. In short, I feel comfortable calling this a 21st Century masterpiece, maybe the first I've seen. And frankly I'm a little annoyed it's wound up in the collection of Stevie Cohen; I hope and trust he'll be lending it out a lot, since it really deserves to be on more or less permanent public view.
West Texas
On one's first trip to Marfa, the tour of Chinati is revelatory enough that you don't get too annoyed by the restrictions. On one's second trip to Marfa, the fact that you're shepherded out of Judd's masterpiece so that you can spend 15 minutes bored by Ilya Kabakov borders on the criminal.
Also, the steaks at the Gage Hotel are very good – but they're corn-fed beef from Wisconsin or thereabouts. What happens to the West Texas cattle? Where can I get me some of those steaks?
John Adams: Encore!
Last year, I extolled the virtues of listening to new-music pieces more than once. Yesterday, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the new Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams, and it was wonderful; but it was also very dense and complex, and I'd love to be able to listen to listen to it again. The problem is that it's unlikely to be either performed in NYC or recorded any time soon. Which is why I think that last night's concert constituted a large missed opportunity on the part of David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Am I saying that he should have performed the entire symphony twice? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. The symphony, you see, was "put on liposuction" (John Adams's words) since it was first performed at the Proms in August. Back then it was over 40 minutes; now it's less than 25 minutes. And as a result, David Robertson had to "scramble" (his words) to rejigger the program, which originally had the symphony taking up the entire second half. Since 24 minutes is a very short second half by anyone's standards, he inserted an 18-minute Sibelius piece after the interval and before the symphony.
Now I've got nothing against Sibelius, but the audience certainly wasn't coming to listen to Sibelius (they bought their tickets before the Finn was added to the menu), and most of them were very much coming to listen to Adams.
Given that the Adams symphony is now so trim, why not play it twice? Here's what I wrote last year, after listening to Michael Gordon's Decasia three times in a row:
Let me recommend repeat visits to any great musical experience, whether it be a contemporary symphony or a magnificently-performed opera. Too often, I think, people have the opportunity to go back and relive a wonderful performance, and don't. Many symphonies and pretty much all operas are performed more than once: take advantage of that, if you can! I remember once going to a London Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican in London, where Kent Nagano started off the program with a short piece by, as I recall, Olivier Messiaen. After playing it, he announced to the audience that new and unfamiliar music really needed to be heard more than once – so he played the whole thing a second time. I wonder if that kind of thing ever happens in New York.
Robertson himself talked admiringly of the way in which composers like Sibelius and Adams do radically new things when composing their music – even as he himself originally stuck to the standard appetizer-concerto-symphony structure which concertgoers are getting increasingly bored by. Given the necessity of shaking that up a little, he chose the safest route possible, rather than doing something much more interesting and imaginative.
Indeed, during the pre-concert talk, Robertson said that his choice was between scheduling a new piece and "playing a really long encore". He speaks fluent French, he knows exactly what "encore" means. So maybe that's what he should have done: played the Adams symphony, taken his bow, and then asked the audience if they wanted to hear it again. The ones who didn't could just have left; the vast majority would have very, very happily stayed for the repeat.
The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio
After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I've come up with what I'm calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple:
RPR=W/E
W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: take the red wines only (to make things a bit more manageable) and find the price of the wine such that 25% of the wines on the list are cheaper, and 75% of the wines on the list are more expensive.
E is simply the average price of a main course.
At the Mermaid Inn, in the East Village, the average entree is $21; its red wines range from $28 to $74, with the quarter-median wine costing $34. (Three wines are cheaper; nine wines are more expensive.) So the RPR is 1.6.
At Cafe Gray, the average entree is $37. The wine list on the website doesn't have prices, but I can tell you that the red wines range from $60 to $5,100, and my gut feeling is that the quarter-median price is somewhere around $175. In which case the RPR would be 4.7.
If you point me to restaurant wine lists online,. It should be interesting to see where the typical restaurant lies.
Update: Thanks, Eater! Here's some more datapoints:
Landmarc: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $42/ Average Entree Price $25 = 1.68 ratio
Balthazar: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $55/ Average Entree Price: $24 = 2.29 ratio
Frankies Spuntino: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $30/ Average Entree Price: $15 = 2.0 ratio
Fiamma: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $110/ Average Entree Price: $35 (estimate) = 3.14 ratio
Le Cirque: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $204 / Average Entree Price $49 = 4.16 ratio
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