Notes on this week’s issue:
1. I enjoy Mark Ulriksen’s vivid baseball covers immensely.
This week’s issue features a dandy. Titled “Strike Zone,” it’s a close-up of a scene
at home plate: a wide-open-mouthed umpire is calling a strike; a wide-open-mouthed
Red Sox batter is expressing dismay; and a wide-open-mouthed Yankee catcher,
holding the ball in his mitt, looks ecstatic.
2. “Goings On About Town: Art” says of Maureen Gallace’s
paintings, “Like the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, her work generates power from
reticence.” It’s an interesting observation. But Bishop also had a keen eye for
detail. As Bonnie Costello says in Elizabeth
Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), “Her eye delights in the particular.”
The same can’t be said for Gallace’s paintings. They efface detail. In this
regard, the analogy with Bishop’s poems seems tenuous.
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| Maureen Gallace, "Summer House / Dunes" (2009) |
3. “Goings On About Town: Night Life” says of Alan
Broadbent,
He’s played the role of the best man for years now, both as
the pianist for Quartet West—the celebrated ensemble led by the late, great
bassist Charlie Haden—and as an A-list studio arranger and conductor. But
Broadbent also deserves considerable attention for his work as a probing
stylist who deftly balances the rhapsodic and the propulsive.
I agree. Listen to him play George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” on his 2005 album ’Round Midnight. It’s the most intense,
swinging, gorgeous rendition of that great song you’ll ever hear.
4. Wei Tchow’s piece on Diamond Reef is classic “Bar Tab,” right up there with Nicolas Niarchos’s “Dutch Kills.” Both pieces mention the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), my favorite cocktail. Tchow refers to a witty Diamond Reef variation – the Penichillin: “Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine.”
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