Pistol Annies - Interstate Gospel

Pistol Annies are a country supergroup comprising Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, and great fun with it. Favourites: "Best Years of My Life", "5 Acres of Turnips", "Leavers Lullaby", "This Too Shall Pass". There are times when the music sounds somehow familiar, but here, that isn't a bad thing.

Night Is Short, Walk On Girl

Zany, colourful, surrealist romp. The sophists' dance was a highlight, so too the big musical numbers forming part of the guerilla theatre staging. Seemingly in pursuit of fun over most anything else, and creative in story structure and animation - overall quite excellent.

(w/ Kevin, part of Japanese Film Festival)

Will Gompertz - What Are You Looking At?

Fun whisk through the history of modern art, organised chronologically by 'isms'.

Sharp Objects

Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson, southern atmosphere ('Wind Gap, Missouri'), a present-day murder investigation against a backdrop of unresolved past death and damage. Sinks its claws in from the start and doesn't let go, all the way through to the end of the closing credits of the finale. 

George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo

What an astonishing work of fiction. I bounced off Lincoln the first time I tried to read it, a few months back (even after discovering how amazing Tenth of December is), bogging down in the first 20 pages in the description of the Lincolns' party, but if I'd pressed on just a few more pages to reach the scene in which Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III meet the newly arrived Willie Lincoln, with its mixture of comedy, feeling and interesting exposition, I wouldn't have looked back. From then on, the novel - if that's the right word for it - races forward, its chamber of voices entwining in increasingly powerful and moving ways, maintaining both a simplicity of vision and construction (including in how it deals with the voices of the African American slaves) and a rewarding complexity across its many threads. Emotionally forceful, intellectually questing, morally rigorous; marvellous and humane.

Rhiannon Giddens - 'Sisters Present' @ Symphony Space, NYC, Sunday 18 November

Final show in a four-gig residency; the 'sisters' being Allison Russell (vocals, banjo), Amythyst Kiah (vocals, guitar, banjo), Toshi Reagon (guitar, electric guitar) and Lalenja Harrington (vocals and spoken word - also, Giddens's actual sister), all women of colour (notably: a large majority of the audience, however, was white) and all very proficient. A lot of the set was drawn from songs that Giddens, Russell and Kiah have written for a forthcoming Smithsonian Folkways record, and it sounds a barnstormer. The songs ranged across folk, soul, blues, gospel and rock and roll; live, Giddens is an electrifying singer and an endearingly intent-seeming musician. 

Whitney Museum, NYC

The big attraction that's just opened at the Whitney - in a cool new(ish) building no less - is "Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again", so, not so exciting for me; I've dutifully seen plenty of Warhol over the years, not least the big exhibition at the NGV a couple of years ago (indeed, twice). Still, I took a quick turn through. (Also on were a Mary Corse survey and an exhibition exploring the relationship between programming and art; neither made an impression.)

But the main event for me was the smallish selection (maybe 80 or 90 pieces) from the permanent collection, organised under the theme "Where We Are" (1900 to 1960). My previous visit to the Whitney, in early '09, I called the part of its collection then on display "smallish but exquisitely selected" and it was the same again this time - a very high standard, several times punching through even the tidal wave of great art in which I've been immersed lately.

The star of the show was Edward Hopper's "A Woman in the Sun" (1961), a painting that for me has always been mostly about the light, and which I think of often. It was mesmerising. There were a bunch of other Hoppers on view too, most notably "Early Sunday Morning" (1930).

Also on offer, an outstanding O'Keeffe ("Music, Pink and Blue No. 2", 1918) and an equally outstanding Rothko ("Four Darks in Red", 1958), both of which were sharp reminders of why I love those artists in the first place.

Other highlights:

Thomas Hart Benson - "Poker Night (From A Streetcar Named Desire)" (1948)

Archibald Motley Jr - "Gettin' Religion" (1948)

Jasper Johns - "Three Flags" (1958)

Henry Koerner - "Mirror of Life" (1946)

My Fair Lady on Broadway (Lincoln Center Theater)

It was fun to see a big bright Broadway musical, and I've always been a bit intrigued by My Fair Lady because of the Pygmalion connection, but what put it over the top for me was the prospect of seeing a grown-up Lauren Ambrose as Eliza Doolittle. So it was disappointing to learn, a couple of days before, that she's recently been replaced by someone else. It was enjoyable anyway, but in the end, nothing all that memorable.

The Ferryman on Broadway (Bernard B Jacobs Theatre)

Now this is main stage theatre done well. It's a lavish production - a cast of more than 20, half of them children, not to mention an actual baby, a live rabbit, and, particularly plot-relevant, a live goose into the bargain. Written by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes, a uniformly strong cast (including Paddy Considine and Justin Edwards, who reminded me of someone and who I've just learned was Ben on The Thick of It), a more or less single but versatile set which at times holds virtually the entirely cast (maybe even the whole cast by the climax) - the Carney family's kitchen and the staircase upstairs.

It's set in 1981, in the heart of the Troubles, and the drama and the weft of it come equally from the political and the familial tensions - tensions which are drawn out and overlaid over the play's three hours, before resolving satisfyingly explosively and quickly at its end. The 'meat' of the play would already have been enough to make it extremely good - Quinn's relationships with his wife Mary and widowed sister-in-law Caitlin, the reverberations when his brother Seamus's body is found in the bog ten years after he disappeared, the multiple layers of the IRA's influence, the subplot and counterpoint of Tom Kettle (his proposal scene was one of the most moving). But it's the mythic resonances, most obviously through the passage from Virgil's Aeneid which gives the play its name, not to mention via the role played by Aunt Maggie Far Away (and especially the monologue when she, oracle-like, tells Aunt Patricia's backstory), which make it really a bit special.

The Met, NYC

Turn of the 19th/20th century stained glass, Hudson School landscapes, John Steuart Curry's "John Brown" (1939), a scattering of Klees, "Reimagining Modernism" (1900 - 1950), a bit of contemporary, 19th century European painting, some Old Masters.

Martin Johnson Heade - "Newburyport Meadows" (1876-81)

Georgia O'Keeffe - "Corn, Dark, No. 1" (1924) ... struck anew by how great she is, which is quite something given how much of her work I've seen over the last few weeks

Edward Hopper - "Tables for Ladies" (1930) ... the composition of this one is remarkable - the diagonal lines, the whites and blacks

Edward Hopper - "From Williamsburg Bridge" (1928) ... as I now know, the view today from this spot isn't so different

Kay Sage - "Tomorrow is Never" (1955)

Anselm Kiefer - "Bohemia Lies by the Sea" (1996) ... this image completely doesn't do justice to the monumentality of the work - size, texture, colour

Vincent Van Gogh - "Wheat Field with Cypresses" (1889)

Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini - "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist" (ca 1523)

Fra Filippo Lippi - "Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement" (ca 1440)

"This Alien Nation" @ Joe's Pub, NYC

A monthly event in which Sofija Stefanovic hosts a range of people, each speaking or otherwise performing in celebration of immigration (as does Stefanovic herself). This one: Casey Legler (writer, model, and former Olympic swimmer), Xochitl Gonzalez (writer and retired wedding planner), Masha Dakic (writer and actor), Maysoon Zayid (comedian, actress, disability advocate, and tap dancer), Patricia Okoumou (activist, Statue of Liberty climber), and DJ Tikka Masala and friend. Terrific concept, strong execution - funny and real.

(w/ Nenad)

Usual Girls (Roundabout @ Black Box Theatre)

A colourful splash of vignettes from third grade through to early-mid adulthood (time: 1980s - 2018), interwoven with darkness all the way through - which turns out to be because, as it sets up in its opening scene, the play's major concern turns out to be toxic masculinity, which it builds upon and elaborates as it jumps through time and builds to its gut-punch final scenes. An extra layer is that the protagonist, Kyeoung, is a woman of colour - as is the older woman / version of her who is a character in her own right. Director: Ming Peiffer. It was very good.

Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel

Another excellent, crunchy, unforcedly meaningful record from Courtney Barnett. I like Sometimes I Sit and Think more though - that one just keeps on being great.

Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Signature Theater)

A 70 minute monologue, full of digression, bathos and other types of anti-climax; Thom Pain attempts to tell a story, with jokes and other entertainments, but can't. Its spirit reminded me of Beckett, including in its insistence on the human-ness of the entire encounter, but its existentialism is contemporary. I picked it (apart from the good reviews) because Will Eno - of Middletown and The Realistic Jones - wrote it (it was his debut), and it didn't hurt that the performer was Michael C Hall, famous because of Dexter but famous to me because of Six Feet Under.

"Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" @ Guggenheim Museum, NYC

I was thinking while walking to the Guggenheim that my tastes in art have become very defined - movements, styles, individual artists, even types of colours, motifs and so on. Having experienced a concentrated dose of af Klint's work, I wouldn't say she's exactly a category-breaker, but I did enjoy it a lot, and she does exist somewhat outside of my familiar frames.

I think I first encountered her fairly recently, at the 'Museum of Everything' exhibition at MONA, but it turns out she was a successful part of the art establishment in the early part of her year, before following a path into spiritualism which coincided with her beginning to produce a range of striking and sometimes remarkable paintings in the terrain of abstraction separately from and before the recognised canonical figures began blazing their own trails.

Part of her method was to paint in series, seemingly often around a dozen or twenty works, the pieces leading to each other in powerful ways. The Swan (1915), in particular, is amazing, and cumulatively quite intensely moving. From the exhibition notes: "the swan symbolizes the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher's stone ... after the forces embodied by the swans come into conflict and begin to combine - a process signaled by the shift from representational to abstract imagery - they ascend into higher realms, until they are ultimately unified."

Joy Williams - Ninety-Nine Stories of God

"The letter, in time, though only rumored to be, caused her children, though grown, much worry."

That's the only sentence like it across the 99 stories and I'm sure it's deliberately placed at the end of the first story. Yet I couldn't say where that conviction comes from; that's how this entirely puzzling and brilliant collection works. They're remarkably compressed and at the same time wide open, often offering up suggestive connections between their component elements without going to far as to explain. For example:

21

If there is a crash at an American airport, the wreckage is removed immediately so as not to alarm the passengers on the flights that will come after.

This is not true at Russian airports.

While at some airports in the major cities, such as Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the wreckage might be taken away quite as if nothing had occurred, small runways in Siberia are littered with failed flights, their rusting hulks simply pushed to one side.

On a recent flight from Nome to Chukotka, the woman in the seat opposite us became quite agitated as we dropped rather peremptorily through the dark skies. She began loudly praying to God for deliverance. My companion remarked that her fervent request was useless, as God had long ago turned His great back on Russia. She might just as well have prayed to the luxurious black sable coat that enveloped her from chin to ankle. We had earlier been half-hypnotized by its beauty, what my companion had dared to describe as the glimmering, endless depths in the fur of so many little animals.

COAT 

This was my second read - and first since falling deep into Williams' universe with The Visiting Privilege - and this, whatever this is, it's more and more under my skin.

(first read)

MoMA, NYC

The art binge continues ... but in the interests of time, the notes here on extemporanea are going to be shorter from now on. Of course this was amazing - and in this case a return visit, some ten years on, though I won't pretend I clearly remember every piece I saw last time (and of course what's on display will have shuffled since).

Edward Hopper's "New York Movie" (1939) and Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (1948) were in the first trio of paintings I saw when I started off, on the fifth floor (the other was a Horace Pippin).

Other collection highlights - Van Gogh (what is there to say ... such a sense of swirling motion), Cezanne, Matisse, Boccioni (not normally a particular favourite but this one was magnificent), Magritte, and many more.

Plus a Brancusi exhibition (always cool), a Bruce Nauman retrospective (I didn't engage too much with many individual pieces, instead letting it wash over me a bit, though the one - "Days", I think - in which you walk through a room installed with a dozen or a couple more speakers of people saying days of the week out of sequence was great), the usual mix of contemporary, so ho-hum, just generally great.

Wings of Desire

Been on the to-watch list for a very long time so I took the opportunity to see it on a big screen (at Film Forum). Contemplative, poetic, and overtly lusciously romantic by its end; black and white with telling shifts to colour; Nick Cave; and the reassurance of the idea that angels are among us.

New Museum, NYC

A range of good contemporary art.

Marguerite Humeau - "Birth Canal"

Sculptures invoking both Venus figures and animal brains, representing shamanic women and with names like "Venus of Frasassi, A 10-year old female human has ingested a rabbit's brain". The installation includes a polyphonic soundtrack and a scent supposedly inspired by bodily liquids associated with birth; it felt like a passage to an older time.

Marianna Simnett - "Blood in My Milk"

This was excellent! Five channels, featuring creepy children, surgical procedures, singing (multiple times), threats to make birds sing, a worm emerging from a woman's mouth, mastitis, cows' udders, a 'watchman' with a speech impediment who encourages children to take a vow of chastity, a young girl who seems to meet a doubled version of herself and so on.

Sarah Lucas - "Au Naturel"

A survey exhibition, and I enjoyed it a lot (this despite not being in a vein especially in my usual wheelhouse).

"Eugene Richards: The Run-on of Time", International Center of Photography, NYC

I didn't get that into these; thinking about the contemporary photographers who I most like, it strikes me that they all favour at least one of extensive staging and significant post-shooting manipulation.

"Enrico David: Gradations of Slow Release", Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Liked some of these a lot.

Art Institute of Chicago

A spectacular museum - the best I've visited on this trip so far.

Chagall - "America Windows" (1975-77) - the panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theatre and dance

It was a couple of days ago that I visited, and what's most endured has been the trio of Magrittes that were on display: "Time Transfixed" (1938) or, in the French, "La duree poignarder", apparently "ongoing time stabbed by a dagger" and indeed appearing like a stab in its full dimensions; the Magritte-motif remix "On the Threshold of Liberty" (1937); and a final one which was less familiar, "The Banquet" (1958), but/and which has most lingered, glaringly. In fact, surrealism in general was particularly well represented, with strong examples from all its best exponents.

Dali - "A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Caution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano" (1936)

Yves Tanguy - "Untitled" (1940)

Paul Delvaux - "The Lamps" (1937). I don't know much about Delvaux, but the couple of his on display were striking - I remember being quite captivated by one of his several years ago in Vienna too

More generally, there was a heap of good stuff by the European moderns; in addition to the above (not even mentioning a great de Chirico), there was a trio of Kandinskys, a couple of Chaim Soutine's (including another landscape at Cagnes), an interesting pointillist Klee ("Sunset", 1930), some intriguing Ernst Kirchners, sculpture and paintings by Giacometti, iconic Van Gogh, etc.

Kandinsky - "Painting with Green Center" (1913)

Giacometti - "Diego Seated in the Studio" (1950), which (a) reminded me of Bacon and (b) made me realise I'm drawn to representations of tortured human figures!

Van Gogh - "Self Portrait" (1887)

Really, the breadth and quality of what was on show was nearly overwhelming. The impressionists are very well represented too, including multiple examples of all Monet's most famous subjects - haystacks, water lilies, and bridges (and other buildings near water) ... my liking and admiration for him just keeps growing. The numerous Degas pieces are almost incidental in this setting, as good as they are.

Monet - "Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)" (1890-91)

The hits keep on coming. Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884" (1884-86) is vastly more impressive, not least because of sheer size, when seen in the actuality; Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930) to a lesser extent but still; and still more Georgia O'Keeffe, of course. A great Jackson Pollock ("Number 17A", 1948), and heading into the contemporary period, Gerhard Richter and some very charged Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman - "Untitled #87" (1981). I don't know if I've ever seen any of hers that were as sheerly erotic as the ones here.

And of course, there was a lot of remarkable stuff by artists who I'd never heard of before, though if I'm honest, in this company, it was probably harder than it otherwise would have been for them to pierce through.

Hughie Lee-Smith - "Desert Forms" (1957). Actually, I have come across him before, but only very recently, in Boston.

Charles Sheeler - "The Artist Looks at Nature" (1943)

Eric Fischl - "Slumber Party" (1983)

Amy Sherald - "A clear unspoken granted magic" (2017)

One disappointment: "Nighthawks" was on loan as part of a travelling exhibition.