1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Ornithology” launches the new year in fine style. It’s a miniature masterpiece worth quoting in full:
The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.
Jazz and cocktails. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ornithology sounds like my kind of bar. Thank you to Dugal for his vivid report.
2. Who is going to be The New Yorker’s new art critic? Adam Gopnik? Hilton Als? Julian Lucas? They’ve all produced “Art World” pieces recently. But for my money, the most promising candidate is Zachary Fine. His “Let It Bleed,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of MoMA’s “Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,” a show of five Frankenthaler masterpieces. Fine says of it,
It features five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler. They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel. The organizing force behind them, if you can spot it, has a wily mind and a preternatural gift for dispatching cliché from the canvas. After 1952, I don’t know if Frankenthaler could have painted a cliché if she tried.
That’s an intriguing way of seeing these paintings – “five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler.” Fine’s observation that “The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel” made me smile. The piece brims with original, perceptive comments. This one, for example, on Frankenthaler’s “Commune” (1969):
Picture a gray-green mass floating in the middle of a canvas that’s more than eighty square feet. The soupy explosions of the fifties, like “Jacob’s Ladder,” have been slurped back into a single, intelligible shape. From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball.
Fine’s writing is fresh, vivid, and illuminating. I think the magazine has found its next art critic.
3. I avidly read Justin Chang’s “Baby Blues,” a review of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new movie “Young Mothers.” I love Dardenne films. I love their matter-of-fact documentary style. Their “The Kid with a Bike” is one of my all-time favorite movies. Their new one is about several teen-age moms staying in and around a Belgian maternity ward. Chang finds it a shade too schematic. He writes,
Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.
Nevertheless, Chang likes the film. He says, “Yet ‘Young Mothers’ holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face.” It appears that “Young Mothers” is another excellent addition to the Dardenne oeuvre.
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