Campaign Outsider

The Missus and I went to the Big Town for a few days and here’s what we caught:

* The Isabel Toledo exhibit at The Museum at FIT. The Cuban-born fashion designer is a favorite of Michelle Obama and a knockout dressmaker – her intricate designs are like origami, the Missus said. Beyond that, you know a designer is special when half the people in the exhibit are fledgling designers sketching Toledo’s dresses.

* God of Carnage, in which James Gandolfini very convincingly plays not-Tony-Soprano and Marcia Gay Harden steals the show as his wife.

* The Treasure of Ulysses Davis, a terrific exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum. Davis was, the  museum said, “a Savannah, Georgia, barber who created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity.” Actually, the show’s a lot more fun than that.

* Mary Stuart, a historical drama that features dueling tours de force from Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter. In the end, the Missus and I voted for Walter.

* The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that celebrates “models’ styles  from 1947 to 1997.” The Missus dismissed it as eye candy for teenage girls, but I think it was even less substantial than that.

* The Pictures Generation at the Met. According to New York magazine, “The Met’s ‘Pictures’ show captures a moment when borrowing became cool” – that moment being 1974-1984 when “a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction.” Loose translation: They swiped a hodgepodge of images and called it art, achieving what the New Republic’s Jed Perl called (in a review of the Met’s Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, which the Missus and I did not bother seeing) “the trick of managing to be simultaneously empty and canny.”

* The Claes Oldenburg exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which demonstrated yet again that Oldenburg is sort of a one-trick pony.

* Dan Graham: Beyond at the Whitney, which embodied Jed Perl’s complaint about the “postmodern taste for muddleheaded irony.” In one of Graham’s works, which features cubicles with TVs playing video loops, I saw a young woman checking her text messages on a cellphone. Postmodern indeed.

* An eye-popping piece in the Weekly Standard – headlined “Horn of Plenty: Prez, Trane, Sonny – and Alan Greenspan?” – that chronicled the defunct Federal Reserve czar’s short, almost-illustrious career as a jazz musician. “Greenspan was a supple and dextrous improviser on the tenor sax who possessed a silky tone reminiscent of Lester Young,” the article by Joe Queenan says. But then, at a Greenwich Village gig in 1949, he foolishly challenged John Coltrane to an onstage showdown and “Trane smoked his ass.” Greenspan then took to “playing his horn every night on the Willamsburg Bridge” until “Sonny Rollins, arriving from his own thrashing at Coltrane’s hands,” happened along and got into a shoving match with Greenspan but then Ayn Rand (!) showed up and brought Greenspan back to her apartment and told him as a sax player he was “awfully reedy at the top of the register” but maybe he should “[think] of trying something else. Economics, perhaps?” The rest, of course, is history and your 401k.

* The 2009 Carroll Family Reunion, which brought together the Sonny-and-Agnes bracket  of the Carroll clan for its biennial mashup, which was pretty much the same as always, only more so. Mad props to Sonny’s Agnes (my father, Jack, and both his brothers married women named Agnes, so there was also Jackie’s Agnes and Dan’s Agnes), who is still rockin’ at age 96. Long may she rule.