Gorgeous, Voluptuous and Only Four Hundred Years Old

October 14, 2014, 5:01 pm

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The most successful artist of his time; his gorgeous, voluptuous and very expensive artworks --often of monumental scale -- is an absolute must-have for the powerful and wealthy. No, no, no... I am not talking about Jeff Koons. Let's travel back 400 years and say hello to Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640), the Flemish painter who was the most sought after artist in Europe during the first half of the 17th century.



The new exhibition at The Getty Museum, Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucahrist, is a rare opportunity for us to see his small-scale sketches, or modelli, that Rubens executed with his trademark bravura brushstrokes. But that's only part of the deal. These sketches were used as a sort of blueprint to produce a series of gigantic, intricately woven tapestries -- executed at the most prominent workshops in Brussels.



With the wear and tear of 400 years, the tapestries have definitely faded somewhat; and still, their theatricality and vitality are simply irresistible. Nobody and nothing stands still in the universe created by Rubens. His gorgeous bodies -- draped or naked -wild animals, marble columns, garlands of flowers, everyone and everything is engaged in the most dramatic whirlwind of movement. Everything in the artist's universe is seemingly over the top, but everything in his universe is in complete control, thanks to the artist's genius.



The tapestries on display are on a rare loan from Madrid's Convent of the Barefoot Royals (Monasterio de las Decalzas Reales), while most of the small panel paintings are on loan from Prado Museum in Madrid. These panels were recently conserved in Prado with a grant from the Getty Foundation -- the collaboration that contributed to this exhibition, which was first seen in Madrid and, after Los Angeles, will travel to Houston.



I bet that many of you are familiar with the traditional staging of Swan Lake, the most famous of classical ballets, with its immortal score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovksy. Last weekend, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Australian Ballet introduced us to a very challenging, modernized and particularly emotional version of this fairytale about Prince Siegfried and his beautiful, heartbroken Odette, whom he betrays with the Baroness von Rothbart. The LA Times review was rather dismissive, but I found myself totally captivated by the beautiful dancers and inventive choreography by Graeme Murphy.



In traditional staging, Odette's heart is broken. But in this version, she is losing her mind and ends up in a mental hospital. And by watching her and the rest of the dancers, I swear I could hear every word of her tragic story conveyed through streams of rapturous, poignant movements. I wonder, if Rubens had the chance to see this illustrious performance, with its impressive stage design and costumes, would it inspire him to create another of his majestic tapestries?



And, as long as we are talking about gorgeous, sexy characters doing everything possible to seduce and abandon each other while holding us, the audience, totally captive with their shenanigans, here is another great artwork and performance not to be missed. The restored version of the Bertolucci iconic 1970 film, The Conformist, is playing through Thursday at the Nuart Theater. Every frame of the movie, shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, is worthy of being framed as a single artwork for display in a museum gallery. And forty years later, the movie's most famous scene is still very much alive and well, with stunningly beautiful Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda tangled in a deliciously sexy and provocative dance. I wonder if such movie magic could last as long as the centuries-old magic of Rubens.


To learn about Edward's Fine Art of Art Collecting Classes, please visit his website. You can also read The New York Times article about his classes here.


___________

Edward Goldman is an art critic and the host of Art Talk, a program on art and culture for NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM. To listen to the complete show and hear Edward's charming Russian accent, click here.

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Reinventing Our Downtowns

October 14, 2014, 7:20 pm

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In the next few weeks, Americans for the Arts (AFTA), with support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will be increasing their focus on art and cultural districts.

AFTA has been deeply involved in helping communities better understand the vital role of art and cultural districts to the social and economic health and vibrancy of communities. Theresa Cameron, who has been spearheading this effort for the past several years, plans a series of new initiatives including publishing a toolkit to help communities organize and accelerate such efforts.

Meanwhile, the NEA has launched "new resources to assist practitioners who are working on arts-based community development projects." Specifically, they have expanded the "Our Town" program -- which has funded over more than 60 previous "creative palcemaking" projects in cities across America -- by providing case studies, insights of lessons learned from those grants, and best practices.

These efforts by AFTA and NEA are timely, and important as cities across America are struggling with ways to meet the challenges of the new economy. an economy that demands creativity and innovation.

According to the New Cities Foundation, a new independent non-profit with offices in Geneva and Paris:

"Over the next decade, some $250 billion will be invested in the creation of new cultural districts around the globe" ... "success is not just getting an arts building or series of buildings out of the ground, it is about ensuring that they are viable and play a central role in their communities."

Not surprisingly, many cities are asking themselves what more can they do to grow a creative economy by attracting, retaining and nurturing the creative and innovative workforce vital to doing so. One way to make a difference is to encourage the development of art and culture districts, particularly downtown, which has become the "living room" for communities across the country.



They may be called art and culture districts, innovation districts, entertainment districts, or business improvement districts but their goal is the same: to create vibrant art and culture facilities, and at the same time, contribute to growing the "creative enterprises" that are essential to building the new economy.

Comparing Dallas's Art and Culture District with Detroit"s Innovation District are to look at two very different economic strategies. Yet, much can be learned by the experiences of cities that have already taken the plunge and are seeing the economic benefit of their efforts. Moreover, as more state art agencies or state art councils undertake the task of designating art and culture districts within their state, and helping in some ways for local communities take on the challenge, they too can be a valuable resource.

The idea for such districts can come from almost anywhere or anyone. It is clear that a mayor or a chamber or other leaders within the community cannot create art and culture or innovation districts, unilaterally. Although they are in a position to start the conversation, the most successful efforts only evolve if a network of creative workers, art and culture and economic organizations, developers and architects and others come together to explore their joint interests, develop a vision and a strategy for reinventing their community for the creative age.

Also critical is to recognize that the sources of funding as well as continuing financing of the district are complex and entail a mix of private and public investments in the initial funding as well as continuous financing. For example, the city or the state may provide tax waivers or incentives; a state or local designation can enable permits or help provide economic development funding from yet another government agency; private philanthropy including national organizations such as the NEA "Our Town" grants or Art Place awards might enable public funding which then ensures broad based local support. There may also be hotel and tourism taxes or admission taxes that are returned to the district. All potential sources need to be explored.

It is also important that sustainability of the enterprise is included in the plan. In some cases this may mean, as in the case of some cities, private investment each year, or tax waivers and incentives, as well as other fees generated by the district as a whole or its various parts, such as admissions from a performing arts center, art festivals, theaters or other events within the district. It is important too, that the artists who may have lived in the art and culture district not be forced to move, as the district itself becomes the fashionable and consequently, more expensive place to live and work.

While many of the districts have already evolved over time in a somewhat organic fashion, more cities are looking to art and culture districts as vehicles for transforming the entire region. Why? Because such districts have the potential, with their critical mass of art galleries, cinemas, coffee shops, restaurants, retail shops, music venues, public art, and even office and residential housing, of attracting and nurturing the creative workforce cities need to succeed in the new economy.

The new global knowledge economy depends upon a workforce with the "new thinking skills" capable of meeting the challenge of the evolving creative and innovative workplace. What we do in our schools is becoming a major topic for discussion. What we do in our communities, where most people and our kids spend the majority of their time, is just as important.



The reasons why such districts are popping up in cities around the world vary but in most cases, as mentioned, they are designed to nurture, retain and attract the talented 21st-century workforce so vital to success and survival in the global knowledge economy.

Theater: A Lost 'Found;' And Lost 'Generations' at Soho Rep

October 15, 2014, 12:08 am

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FOUND ** out of ****
GENERATIONS ** 1/2 out of ****


FOUND ** out of ****
ATLANTIC THEATER COMPANY AT LINDA GROSS THEATER


OK, so you created a fun idea for a magazine. It was Found, a zine that celebrated "found" bits of text -- notes left on cars, shopping lists dropped on the ground, letters discovered inside a second-hand book and so on. They're enigmatic, funny, sad, kind of beautiful. It becomes a public radio-ish sort of success and you do open mike nights where the magazine creatives read out the best of the best and audience members contribute and it's a lot of fun. And somewhere along the way, someone says, this should be a musical!

But what kind of musical? Just reading out random scraps of text -- even grouped by category like "love" or "money" -- would grow pretty exhausting. Should they be declaimed? Or set to music? What if you created skits that imagined what led to some of these angry, inspiring and sometimes downright bizarre missives? Or created a show about the magazine that incorporated the stuff everyone loved the most?

The answer to these questions became: all of the above. Found, with a book by Hunter Bell & the show's director Lee Overtree and music and original lyrics by Eli Bolin, does everything you can think of and more. They use the founding of Found as an excuse to tell a very familiar story about idealism crashing against reality. And toss in a lot of snippets of humor from randomly discovered bits of text along the way because that's what got 'em there. None of it works very well.



The story -- such as it is -- revolves around Davy (a bland but likable Nick Blaemire). He loses his job during a horrible, no good, very bad day that ends weirdly: by finding an amusingly angry and plaintive note on his car meant for someone else. The woman who wrote it mistook the car for her lover's, accuses him of cheating on her, declares in no uncertain and foul-mouthed terms that they are through but ends by saying he should page her later. It's very funny. And the note is unfortunately repeated about eight different times throughout the show as a prime example of what Found is about.

Davy talks with his friends Denise (Barrett Wilbert Weed) and Mikey D (Daniel Everidge) about the note and inspired by his passion and a clutch of other scraps they find along the way, the three of them turn this hobby into a zine and then into an honest-to-god paying gig, including tours that draw bigger and bigger crowds everywhere they go. They're doing something they love and having fun doing it!

We can't have that, not in a musical. So though Davy makes his interest in Denise clear and she's single and available and clearly into him, for some inexplicable reason she doesn't want to take that next step. In walks a TV producer named Kate (Betsy Morgan), who starts dating Davy, insinuates herself on the tour and convinces him to pitch Found as a TV show a la America's Funniest Home Videos. Will Davy sell out? Will he leave his friends out in the cold? Will he and Denise ever act on their feelings?

If this story sounds tiresomely familiar, it is. Happily, the show is peppered with quick snippets of notes that relate in some random way to the banal plot at hand. Some notes are set to music and while the music is never more than functional, those are far preferable to the forgettable original tunes that barely make an impression at all. More problematically, the longer and more intrusive notes -- however funny on their own -- make you feel the show is drifting away from the actual story.

Found is well over two hours in length. When the show grinds to a halt to enact lengthy sketches that imagine the story behind certain notes -- such as the drawn-out act one closer "Johnny Tremain" and the act two opener "Cats Are Cats" -- you feel impatient to get back to the actual plot. But when you get back to the actual plot, it's so uninspired you regret even that. It's the worst of both worlds.

Most everyone in the show acts like a jerk at some point: Denise behaves petulantly during their big meeting with ABC. Davy is insufferable when he wants to blow off magazine signings or tour dates just to hang with his new girlfriend or go take "meetings" in LA. Kate does a very bad job of managing expectations for Davy though she could hardly expect him to be quite this clueless. (Is he really aghast that ABC won't air a note complete with multiple F bombs in primetime? For a family show?) Mikey D...well, actually he behaves decently throughout.

While the songs are generally a bust, the music is delivered nimbly by the musicians on -- or rather under and around the stage. A definite plus is the choreography by Monica Bill Barnes which is distinctive and odd, with lots of hand movements and silly little moves. It feels like choreography for people who maybe aren't the best dancers? But it works and has a nice, quirky sensibility ideal for this show.

In the main roles, the women are better than the men, with Weed an appealing presence in particular. Since the leads must shoulder the burden of the dull central storyline, it's the ensemble that has the most fun. Danny Pudi and Christina Anthony shine in various parts, with Orville Mendoza and especially the straight-faced goof Andrew Call having a blast as well.

But the longer the show goes on, the less interest it maintains. Looking back, one doubts any of the other approaches to turning Found into a musical would have been terribly interesting either. Their appreciation for those little scraps of humanity is sweet. It just didn't need to burst into song.


GENERATIONS ** 1/2 out of ****
SOHO REP AND THE PLAY COMPANY AT SOHO REP


Context is everything. I had friends who went to see Generations based on the terrific recent track record of Soho Rep and a description of this show that mentioned it was set in a kitchen in South Africa and included a lot of singing. They're veteran theatergoers happy to tackle all sorts of shows both traditional and avant garde. But without any idea this was not a traditional play with music, they were unmoored. Forewarned, I was much better prepared to appreciate Generations for what it is. But it really does pay to know if you're in for a three hour musical, a 20 minute Brechtian howl of despair or a 90 minute farce.

So let's be clearer than the advance publicity for this intriguing if ultimately opaque work presented with care and intelligence by a talented cast. Generations is a performance piece. It lasts a brief half hour. And while quality is never linked to quantity, such a short running time is unquestionably good to know in advance. The night I attended, I stood up and began to go while most everyone else seemed a little confused: was it over? Yes, it was.



The piece by Debbie Tucker Green is an enigmatic one. But the presentation by Soho Rep and The Play Company is of the highest order. Rep's space has been turned into a township, complete with a red clay earthen floor, tin walls with colorful imagery and the suggestion of a crowded, very modest kitchen overflowing with spices and dishes and the usual implements of life. There's a wooden table, a rocking chair and in the center of the floor, a working kitchen with food already simmering as the audience comes in.

People take their admittedly rough seats (sometimes chairs, sometimes merely a milk crate with a cushion) and it's easy to spot what one imagines are cast members scattered among us. (Though the man next to me I easily spotted as a ringer, the man next to him fooled me genially beforehand by telling the actor I'd spotted that he looked familiar. "Were you in The Lion King?" he asked. I realized how funny that really was when the show began and they both stood up and started singing.)

The story begins with song, beautifully and captivatingly sung by about a dozen people scattered throughout the space. It's like being inside a choir and I can only hope my toe-tapping didn't throw off the singer next to me. Then begins a very brief acting out of the text. A young man is courting a young woman and her even younger sister disapproves. The parents of the girls look on amusedly while the grandparents offer their two cents as well. They've seen it all before. This courtship -- this innocently sexy dance -- revolves around the question of whether the young woman can cook, a word that takes on many meanings throughout the night. "I was the cooker -- she was the cookless!" intones the mother at one point.

The very modest scraps of dialogue become building blocks. The words are repeated again and again, interrupted by songs. They are playful and then sexy, then serious, then angry, then sad. Despite only a few lines each at best, the actors are impeccable and create vivid characters and shades of meaning. The implied daytime setting of the beginning turns to dusk and then nighttime. Actors slowly slip into the crowd until only the grandparents are left alone, intoning the words one last time before a burst of song lifts you up at the end. And it's over.

Knowing it was only half an hour and that the dialogue was Pinter-esque certainly helped. But I was befuddled when my friend afterward insisted they had read about a twist at the end that put the entire evening in a new light. What had we missed? It turns out that many others have seen the show as a cry from the heart about the ravages of AIDS. How one would suss that out strictly from watching the show, I've no idea. But certainly one sensed a certain sadness, though it seemed more universal than AIDS. It might have been the splintering of a family -- children do move away or find distractions that simply stop them from coming around. Or it might have been violence or war. I really didn't get the sense that the people who disappeared from the stage in this brief work had died so much as just weren't present anymore.

Perhaps knowing the lyrics of the songs would have made the purpose of the evening clearer. Were they mourning those who had died? The dialogue was in English but the original songs -- evocatively written and arranged by Bongi Duma -- were not. I'd love to hear them again. I appreciated the care and craft with which director Leah C. Gardiner and her cast and crew offered this work. But without a lot more context (or at least footnotes!), Generations seems to me too abstract to register as more than an intellectual framework of an idea. The fact that it inspired those around her to such passionate effort makes me eager to see Green's next effort. But it does not make me eager to send people to this one.


THEATER OF 2014

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother's Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler's Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
When We Were Young And Unafraid
Savion Glover's Om **
Broadway By The Year 1990-2014 ***
The Lion ***
Holler If Ya Hear Me * 1/2
The Ambassador Revue ** 1/2
Dubliners: A Quartet ***
The National High School Musical Theater Awards *** 1/2
Wayra -- Fuerza Bruta * 1/2
Strictly Dishonorable *** 1/2 out of ****
Between Riverside And Crazy ***
The Wayside Motor Inn ***
Bootycandy ***
Mighty Real ***
This Is Our Youth ***
Rock Bottom * 1/2
Almost Home * 1/2
Rococo Rouge **
Love Letters ** 1/2
The Money Shot ** 1/2
The Old Man and the Old Moon *** 1/2
You Can't Take It With You * 1/2 out of ****
Can-Can at Papermill ** 1/2
The Country House ** 1/2
Cinderella ** 1/2
Shakespeare's Sonnets at BAM (Rufus Wainwright, Robert Wilson) ***
When January Feels Like Summer ** 1/2
It's Only A Play ***
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time *** 1/2
Found **
Generations ** 1/2


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Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming website BookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.

The Fu Manchu Complex, And Today's Anxieties About China

October 15, 2014, 5:04 am

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Imagine a super-villain who operates from within an underground hideout, strikes at the heart of empire through a suicide cult of footsoldiers who see each murder as a steppingstone to paradise, revels in refined forms of torture, broadcasts his intentions to politicians in advance and has dreams of world domination.

Familiar? No, not Osama Bin Laden but Dr. Fu Manchu, the Chinese villain of a series of thirteen novels and several short stories, who made his first appearance in 1913 with The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu/The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu and his last in 1959 with Emperor Fu Manchu. Each novel takes place roughly in the present day when it was written and chronicles the never-ending struggle between Sir Denis Nayland Smith -- an ex-District Commissioner, late of Burma, now working for Scotland Yard, and often with transatlantic colleagues -- and Dr. Fu Manchu: a bit like racialised Sherlock Holmes stories.

The series begins just after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, and ends in Maoist China. The author responsible for creating the devil doctor was one Arthur Henry Ward, born into an Irish family in Birmingham, England -- much better known by his pseudonym of "Sax Rohmer," which he thought meant "freelance" in old Anglo-Saxon and certainly had an exotic ring to it.

Sax Rohmer, who incidentally had never been to China, was one of the best-selling authors of the first half of the twentieth century, with movies, radio shows, cartoons, comics, magazine serials, and even breakfast cereal packets, regularly adapted from his work. Dr. Fu Manchu was played, in movie versions, by the Irish-born Harry Agar Lyons, the Swedish-born Warner Oland, the English-born Boris Karloff, the German-born Henry Brandon, and the English-Italian Christopher Lee. Needless to say, he was never played by a Chinese actor.

Rohmer's favored actor for the part was "Basil Rathbone -- because he could be sinister even in his pajamas." As a result of this multi-media exposure, Dr. Fu Manchu lingered -- and lingers -- in the popular consciousness, more than any other twentieth century fictional bad guy, as the ultimate personification of oriental villainy, or as Rohmer put it, "the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man": inscrutable, fiendishly cunning, chillingly polite, cruel, indestructible and with a very long memory. Many of the anxieties of Chinaphobes in the West -- about Chinese ambitions overseas and Chinese communities at home -- have been distilled into one larger-than-life figure. We all like to personify our anxieties in this way, giving them a single face: it makes them easier to label and identify, less diffuse and complicated. Look at Osama Bin Laden. Or in fiction Dr. Fu Manchu. Although Sax Rohmer died -- of Asian flu would you believe? -- in 1959, his creation has long outlived him.

Shortly before the Hong Kong handover, in 1997, an article appeared in Newsweek -- by James R Lilley, CIA Station Chief in Beijing from 1973-1975, U.S. Ambassador to China 1989-1991 -- entitled "The Fu Manchu Problem: Why America and China tend to see each other as cartoonlike enemies." "Columnists and Congressmen," Lilley wrote, "portray the Chinese as rabid abortionists and iron-fisted thugs -- a gang of Fu Manchus who relish ripping out their enemies' fingernails. The hostility is very much on peoples' minds throughout the culture." The political rhetoric of China-bashing was, he added, deeply embedded in Western political life. And Fu Manchu provided an off-the-shelf piece of shorthand to express it.

His conclusion was that there was nothing to be gained by reviving old fears about the "Yellow Peril" in updated form. Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong, has confirmed that age-old stereotypes tend to get in the way of sensible dialogue -- even today. Dr. Fu Manchu made his first entrance just over a hundred years ago. Popular attitude towards China -- and Chinese people -- in the West have gone through many permutations in the meantime: friend in the Second World War, foe in the Cold War, potential rival today. China is now accessible, the sun has long since set on the British Empire, and many of the stereotypes which were acceptable yesterday have either been discredited or reclaimed by their opposites: Eve by feminists, Caliban by post-colonials, macho signifiers by gay rights. What about the Yellow Peril, personified by Dr. Fu Manchu? Has it survived the rise of China as a global superpower and the opening up of China to foreign tourists? Does the colonial, white, racist view of Chinese people persist?

Scare stories about Chinese perfidy continue to fill newspaper columns, financial pages and tabloid headlines alike. Some politicians play to Chinaphobia to gain popular approval. Strategists talk and write of the "Coming China Wars" over Taiwan or South Korea or the islands off South Japan or even Africa. Buried just beneath the surface of acceptable discourse lies the deep long history of the Yellow Peril -- like a reflex. Will Dr. Fu Manchu be reclaimed, to become a positive role model after all -- as his near contemporary Count Dracula has been reclaimed, in the era of Twilight? Only time will tell. At present, he serves a much darker purpose.

Sir Christopher Frayling is the author of The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia, just published by Thames and Hudson.

Hilary Brace: Entering a Moisture-laden Palace

October 15, 2014, 5:14 am

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"We travel with her and take the same uncertain path, entering a moisture-laden palace that twists our minds."

- Gretel Ehrlich on Hilary Brace

Artist Hilary Brace has been using an old material (charcoal) and a new one (plastic) to invent images of clouds, ice and waterfalls. Simultaneously suggesting the artist's sense of awe and her consciousness of nature's fragility in the face of global warming, Brace's recent body of work manages to seem both tangible and imagined.

I recently interviewed Brace and asked her about her background, her working methods, and her ideas.

John Seed Interviews Hilary Brace:




Hilary Brace


How did your early life shape you to be an artist?

When I was young my family lived in Europe for a couple of years and we visited a lot of museums, so very early I was introduced to the importance of art and to the idea of being an artist. I also remember being very determined and particular about my art projects, wanting badly to realize them in the way I imagined them. Later, with the opportunity to take art classes in middle school, I developed confidence about making things. So I was fortunate that a natural inclination was met with opportunities. It made my choice to become an artist feel natural and worthwhile.

Spending most of my early life in the Pacific Northwest, around such abundant natural beauty, undoubtedly had an impact on my work. I was always so moved by the grandness of the landscape and the displays of light and atmosphere. We went skiing often, and I loved being in the mountains, looking down at the landscape, and sunlight falling on snow seemed incomprehensibly beautiful. My work has had a lot to do with being moved and mystified by these things.



Untitled (June, 2013), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 7.5 x 10 inches

Have you always been a representational artist? What was your work like during your college years?

When I began studying art in college I worked abstractly but I usually began with something observed, something to do with light. My first serious paintings were equal parts abstraction and representation, with shadows handled as two-dimensional pattern in a three dimensional context, usually architectural interiors. I love the challenge of describing space, so as time went on this dichotomy between two and three-dimensional space became more representational, more integrated. I realized from making those paintings that they said something about how I perceived things in general; that reality is elusive and shifting.

For years the work was more about this kind of play of light and form in space than depicting any specific place. Once a horizon line crept into the imagery and it moved toward landscape, that part changed.



Untitled (March, 2014), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 8.25 x 13 inches

Your work balances between the real and the imagined. How do you blend and balance these two approaches?

It's really another expression of the dichotomy I was exploring in those early paintings, but more complex. I'm interested in making places that seem very tangible or believable, but I also want them to also feel elusive and mysterious, or fluid and changing, so I retain my sense of wonder about them. I work from my imagination and I don't know what I'm going to make when I set out, so I keep myself in that space as I'm developing the image: At the same time I'm working with realistic aspects of rendering an image, I'm surprising myself by discovering an unexpected world.

When people first see a drawing they often assume it's "real" because it's so fully rendered, but then they become confounded by how that could be true, given the subject matter. Those different responses have to come together finally in their experience of the work. I like that, because it mirrors my own process in making the work.



Hilary Brace's drawing setup

Tell me about your technique and how you arrive at an image.

My drawings are charcoal powder on polyester film (Mylar is a brand name). The matte polyester surface appears completely smooth, but is actually like super fine sandpaper. The charcoal moves around easily but also comes off easily. This allows for a lot of spontaneity, but also a lot of detail. On smaller pieces, I begin by covering the surface completely with charcoal, then erasing or lifting it off with Q-tips and brushes to reveal lighter areas. As an image begins to suggest itself, I slowly bring it into focus with more detail.

For larger drawings, I make a study first. I use Photoshop as a composition and drawing tool, but in many ways the process is the same because I have no preconceived idea of where I'm headed and the image develops through exploration and then slowly comes together. Even though I know what the image will be when I make a drawing from a study, I still work in a subtractive way, laying down darker values and erasing to create lighter ones, because I have more control removing darks than adding them.



Untitled (March, 2012), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 23.5 x 32 inches

Do you consider yourself a Romanticist in art?

I believe that intuition and emotion have a place in making and experiencing art and I'm inventing emotive images, but they aren't about escape or yearning for some other, ideal place. They have much more to do with my actual responses to the natural world, with making those and my psychological framework feel real. I use curiosity and my emotional responses to make choices about my imagery, so feelings are important in a variety of ways, but it's not romantic. I think of myself as an experiential artist.



Untitled (February, 2014), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 10.675 x 8.5 inches

What kinds of emotions do you want your work to evoke?

As wide a range and as complex as possible, because that's what life is like.

But that said, as a drawing begins to suggest itself, I go after a feeling that seems unique to that image. It might change as the piece develops, but it's a guide. There's a quote by Howard Hodgkin that I've always remembered: When he was asked how he knew if a painting was finished, he said, "When the original feeling comes back as a painting." I like that.




Untitled (July, 2014), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 11.75 x 9.125 inches

What about your feelings about nature and global warming? Some of your recent work depicts icy places that appear to be thawing.

I've been thinking about this a lot. I can't look at my work now without also thinking about what we are doing to the Earth. For a very long time, I've been inspired by nature as something vastly powerful and it's been a metaphor in my work for a range of forces larger than ourselves. I've been thinking about how to reconcile that view with the fact that we need to see the Earth as fragile and vulnerable if we are going to change our behavior. All the forces that have shaped the planet will always be present, even if we destroy it, but the loss and potential loss are excruciating. So my perspective is shifting and it's showing up in the work. There is plenty of reason to feel a sense of awe about the beauty that exists and it ought to motivate us, so I'm glad if my work can be a reminder. But I want it to do something more or different than that, for myself, so it seems that I may have to find a new way to see.



Untitled (May, 2014), Powdered charcoal on polyester film, 6 x 7 inches

What are your interests outside of art?

Mainly gardening. I've spent most of my free time developing my garden. I'm a plant fiend--even thinking about going to the nursery makes me salivate. Designing in the garden is a lot like painting, but you also have the elements of time and change, which is fun to think about and observe. But now that my garden is established, I'd like to expand my range and get out and explore, to see more of the changing, shifting world.


Hilary Brace: Drawings
Ann Lofquist: Urban and Pastoral
October 18 - November 22, 2014

Online Catalog: http://issuu.com/craigkrullgallery/docs/hilarybrace2014

Craig Krull Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B-3
Santa Monica, California 90404

Reception: October 18, 2014 4-6PM
Gallery Talk: November 8, 2014 10AM

Painting the Desert: Urban Artists in the Navajo Nation

October 15, 2014, 7:05 am

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It's an unusual pairing: Street artists who are accustomed to the grit and grime of deteriorating neighborhoods in the city translating their skills to the desert where the environment is outstandingly more natural than built.

In the third year of his experiment inviting artists to paint and wheat-paste in the Navajo Nation, organizer Chip Thomas, whose own street persona is Jetsonorama, appears to have hit a community service vein.

"The relationship with the community became deeper," he says as he relates the integration of some of the artists work relating directly to the history and the stories people tell in this sunbaked part of Arizona. More residency than festival, "The Painted Desert Project" began as a retreat offered to artists Thomas had met through his own association with street art festivals like Open Walls in Baltimore.


Troy Love Gates AKA OTHER. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

Invited to come for an extended stay, compared to the four or five days of a typical street art festival, these artists are encouraged to study their new environment and to fully immerse themselves before conjuring a new work. Not only does the technique avoid the often levelled charge of cultural imperialism that is associated with the big festivals around the globe, it produces work that has impact and relevance to the community who will be looking at it year round.

Even though there can be a disconnect between the art and the community occasionally, as in the case of one work by the artist Troy Lovegates that was interpreted as being out of sync with some tastes, the majority of works are so closely related to people and the life here that a sense of ownership takes hold quickly. Any cultural worker associated with larger mural projects and programs in cities will tell you corollary stories about how the public responds to the voice of the artist, and one measure of success is the level of engagement by the community.

"The project has always focused on creating art that is culturally sensitive," says Thomas of his approach to the artists and the community, and he says that this year, "I feel like the project moved to the next level."

Here are fresh images from the third installment of "The Painted Desert Project" that took place this spring and summer, along with some details about the works and their relationship to the people and places that hosted the artists.


Troy Lovegates AKA OTHER. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

Street artists Troy Lovegates and Labrona stayed for a few weeks in the Navajo nation and focused most of their work on a water tank in Rocky Ridge. While Lovegates' initial mural was buffed when it "was found to be offensive by members of the community," says Thomas, their new pieces on the tank were greatly embraced. "We were hosted in Rocky Ridge by the family of Louise Shepherd where we spent the night in a traditional hogan and ate food fresh from Louise's garden."


Labrona and Troy Lovegates AKA OTHER Detail. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


Troy Lovegates AKA OTHER and Labrona. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


Troy Lovegates AKA OTHER. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


Labrona. Detail. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


"In Beauty it is finished" by HYURO. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

Street artist Hyuro created only her second mural in the US here this summer; significant because her first one in Atlanta for Living Walls last year featured nudity that set fire to the passions of religious sensitivities in the neighborhood that were further fanned by showboaters.

For "Painted Desert" the native of Valencia, Spain looked closely at the customs of the community when conceiving her depiction of a prayer ritual, which when viewed in this simple animation, reflects the connection native people have to their agricultural customs and history. "Moved by the simplicity and beauty of the traditional Navajo morning prayer Hyuro positioned her female figure facing the rising sun," says Thomas, "and she illustrated the movements of this prayer that is performed with white corn pollen."


HYURO. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


HYURO. Local resident Sharston Woody is a storm rider on this vehicle people call a "4 track". The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


Jaz and Mata Ruda. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)



AZ. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

New to the project this year were street artists Jaz, LNY, and Mata Ruda, each known for their large scale murals that are interpretive of history and in the case of the latter two, advocacy of social and political causes. This building "was part of the old Bureau of Indian Affairs school system from the 1950s to the '70s, after which it fell into disuse." Shortly after the revival of the walls, says Thomas, the community began talking about making new plans to convert it into a youth center.

"Local food during the time Jaz, LNY, and Mata Ruda were here was catered by Mrs. Woody and her family," says Thomas.


Mata Ruda. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


Jaz . Mata Ruda. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


JAZ. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kayenta, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

Near Monument Valley in Kayenta, Arizona, the Argentinian street artist Jaz painted a mural inspired by the plight of wild horses that are starving due to overgrazed pastures, says Thomas. In the image the horses are running to escape capture, he says.


LNY. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)



LNY at work. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)


LNY. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Kaibeto, Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

This vast view of Machu Picchu at the top is a cultural gift from the artist LNY to the community. "He wanted to bridge indigenous cultures of his home in Equador with that of the Navajo nation," says Chip Thomas, the organizer of "The Painted Desert Project".


Doodles. Avant Gardner. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

In this mural the artists Doodles and Avant Gardener including important animals that are symbolic to the Navajo like the eagle and hawk, among traditional rug pattern designs, a mountain range, and a rainbow. LNY incorporated a small circle painting in black and white of a woman holding a lamb.


Monica Canilao prepping an installation. The Painted Desert Project 2014. Arizona. Navajo Nation. (photo © Jetsonorama)

Artists Doodles and Monica Canilao "turned my backyard into a fabrication shop, running chop saws and table saws late into the night," says Thomas, of their work to rebuild a roadside food stand that had burned to the ground. Having made friends with the proprietor, Mrs. Woody, during a previous edition of "Painted Desert," the two constructed the sides of the food stand and painted them behind his home.

As evidence of the bond created between residents and program participants, the artists spent 10 days doing this work, according to Thomas. The family of Mrs. Woody came to the house often during the construction and painting to assist and to bring homemade food to the artists. Since the artists departed at the end of the summer they have kept in contact with the Woodys via Facebook and Instagram.

>>>><<<>>><>><<>>>>>><<<<<>>><<<>>>>>>
Jetsonorama extends his most heartfelt gratitude to all the people who came together and help with donations of all kind to make this project possible, including to all the donors at http://www.gofundme.com/painted-desert-project


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Karen Clark on the ImageBlog

October 15, 2014, 9:15 am

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The Dam, 2013, photomontage, 18 x 12 inches, archival inkjet print. The spark for this piece came from a billboard of Bashar al-Assad and a 19th century engraving of a mountain passageway in Syria. It was in an international exhibit at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in October 2013. www.lacda.com www.karenclarkstudio.com

Happy Halloween ... From Some Bananas and a Gorilla On Segways

October 15, 2014, 9:18 am

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Happy Halloween everyone!

It's just around the corner. If you don't have a costume yet, now is the time to start brainstorming. I figured that it would also be a good time to share one of my favorite pictures (to inspire you, of course). I made this image last year on Halloween in Seattle, Washington after being tipped off to the scene via Twitter.


Tour guide David Chambers, left, leads tourists Sassy Smyth, Mandy Irby, and Rose Wilson on a tour of Seattle, Washington while riding Segways on Halloween, Thursday, October 31, 2013.

That reminds me: As a freelance photojournalist, Twitter has been an immensely useful tool for me. If you are not taking advantage of social media for story ideas and more, get to it! Feel free to ask me for tips on how to maximize the plethora of information on social media. Wading through can be a beast. The key is to be focused and intentional. If you're in Seattle, for instance, feel free to subscribe to my "Seattle & Region" Twitter list, which is geared toward journalists.

Happy Halloween and thanks for looking.

See more from Seattle photographer David Ryder on Twitter, Instagram, or at photographer-in-seattle.com.

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Artist Luke Chueh Spews and Gets "Self-Ish" in New L.A. Solo Show

October 15, 2014, 9:49 am

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("Some Trends Make Me Want To Puke" courtesy of Luke Chueh/CHG Circa Gallery)

Luke Chueh's work could initially be misconstrued as 'cute.' Cuddly animals -- sweet and innocent bears and bunnies -- are frequently at the epicenter of his work. Sure, it sounds all happy happy joy joy...in theory. Until you look a little closer. The LA based Chueh turns the nursery rhyming world of cute on its head, with his wry, introspective characters, who live in a world of sex, murder and mutilation. Many times his blood red backgrounds serve as warnings that all is not what it seems or alternatively as an emotional guide to the levels of our subconscious purgatory. Chueh talked briefly after the opening of his new show, "Self-ish" which will be on display at CHG Circa Gallery in Culver City through November 1st.

("Monkey On My Back (Sleeping Burden)" courtesy of Luke Chueh/CHG Circa Gallery)

What was the impetus for this particular round of work?

Luke Chueh: My current show, "Self-ish" is a play on the word. Most of the show is basically a self portraits where I illustrate myself physically, and also metaphorically. In it, I explore a variety of aspects of my being, from my relationship with my characters, my feeling for my artwork, my struggles with substance abuse and my love for popular culture.But asides the self portrait work, there is also a "selfish" side to the show. For that, I chose to create a body of work where I stepped away from the style that I'm best known for, and I simply let loose with the paint. The end result is a loose/frenetic take on my characters, that might also be a new direction I'll be going with my work.


("You Are What You Eat (Self)" courtesy of Luke Chueh/CHG Circa Gallery)

Can you talk about the frustrations of creating this exhibition?

Luke Chueh: I've been developing my painting style for over ten years, playing mostly the same characters and working around a simple formula of light characters and dark narratives. To be honest, I'm a little worn out, and I've been wanting to find a new avenue to explore artistically. The other half of the show (the aforementioned "selfish" half) is the answer I've been looking for. For the first time in a long time, I've been excited to create, and I plan on further exploring myself with this new technique.

Do you have a favorite piece in this show?

Luke Chueh: My favorite painting from my show is probably the painting "Some Trends Make Me Want To Puke". (See image at top of this article). In it, I have my rabbit character vomiting a colorful cubist style texture. It's a response to the new cubist style imagery I've seen popping up over the last 5 years. Though there are some artists who do it amazing well (specifically Tim Biskup), there a slews of artists out there who employ this new cubism style in a manner I simply find unpleasant. This painting is a reaction to those artists and their work.

Waking Up With Frank Lloyd Wright

October 15, 2014, 9:54 am

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I watch a lot of HGTV with my wife. It's a sort of penance for watching sports -- the yang to my NFL ying. So I'm exposed to a lot of "design." I have watched dozens of designers re-design broken homes. And while they do make those homes work better, they seem to rely on lots of slick finishes and design parlor tricks.

We live in a new era of "design." Target teams up with Jason Wu and Phillip Lim. Project Runway turns fashion design into a competition. And every celebrity from Vanilla Ice to Jennie Garth has their own HGTV show.

So much design, so little, though, that's sublime. A couple of months ago, I woke up in a house designed by a genius, and I felt the difference. It was an odd and wonderful feeling, considering where I had awakened the last 17,000 or so days -- in houses designed -- that might be too strong a word -- by ordinary schmoes. Houses like the ones almost all of us here in America wake up in every day.

I was staying in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Willoughby, Ohio just outside Cleveland. The house was built in 1952 for the Penfields, an ordinary couple, for what was then an ordinary amount of money -- $25,000. It was one of about a hundred Usonian houses Frank Lloyd Wright designed for everyday folks -- modest, small homes constructed of inexpensive materials. In fact, the Penfield House is built from concrete blocks with a cement floor and a material that was relatively new at the time -- dry wall. The house is mostly one large rectangle of living space on the first floor with no walls to divide kitchen from dining room or living room. There's a large simple stone fireplace in the middle of the room. The first floor can't be more than 600 or 700 square feet. And the second floor is a smaller rectangle divided into three small bedrooms and one small bath.

But great design transcends its materials and dimensions. The house is a marvel of symmetry. Slender, delicate lines divide the windows, dissecting the nature outside into long frames that guide your view upward. The concrete floor is divided into large squares that perfectly mirror the wooden beams that box the ceiling. It is a world of absolute linearity.

The beds are small and not particularly comfortable. In fact, none of the Frank Lloyd Wright furniture in the house is comfortable. And yet I woke up remarkably calm and refreshed. I can only attribute it to the perfect design of the house.

I always thought organic shapes were the most calming. The zen of a circle with no beginning or end point, the shape of the womb, of the earth, mother, protector. But I was wrong. It's order that calms the human soul.

The house combines the certainty of a spreadsheet with the mystical joy of a beautiful mathematical equation. I spent the weekend in a place that made perfect sense. Anything seemed possible.

And then the weekend ended, and my wife and I drove home past buildings that were rectangles without spirit and down our street of houses with haphazard angles, made of lines that meet not with joy but with a sense of resignation.

I spent the next week wondering what might have happened had Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian vision won over post World War II America. What if two generations of Americans had toddled around geometrically perfect houses, thrown their tantrums into a world of order, spilled their sippy cups onto tiled floors that mirrored the lines of the ceiling, daydreamed out of windows that ordered the world outside into manageable panes of reality? Would they be better at math? More open to great music? Would there be less violence? Fewer dysfunctional families? A smaller number of divorces? Would there be less suburban sprawl? More civility?

I know how Frank Lloyd Wright would answer that question. And maybe he'd be right. Great design may not solve all our problems, but it has the power to calm the soul and to make us want to live better, cleaner lives.

Out of the Blue

October 15, 2014, 11:47 am

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Source: Gussisaurio at Creative Commons

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded last week to Isamu Akasaki from Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano from Nagoya University and Shuji Nakamura from the University of California at Santa Barbara, three scientists who helped perfect the technology of the light-emitting diode (LED).

For us non-physicists, here's the take-home message: Blue is the new blue.

The blue-light beams they invented are crucial for making the white-light LEDs that are so much more efficient as light sources than incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The LED's light comes from a mixture of red, green, and blue.

Red and green were easy, but blue was more complicated; the three scientists, working independently, devised a way to create a semi-conductor that emits blue, thus enabling the LEDs that illuminate our phones, televisions, and computers. (Blue light, with its very short wavelength, allows information to be stored more densely than other colors, hence the blue lasers used for Blu-ray discs.) But Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura are far from the first ones to have operationalized the density and intensity of blue.

The color has more than held its own on the ROYGBIV spectrum from ancient times up to the present. The Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough actually represents a discovery of what was "always-already" (Karl Marx's term, via Kant; another way of putting it is, as the song from All That Jazz goes, "Everything old is new again.") I don't mean to diminish the import of the physicists' technological "capture" and "framing" of blue, but they provide an opportunity for us to reflect back on the cultural potency of blueness, which existed resplendently long before they engineered it in their laboratories.

In Judaism, the blue of the Mogen David on the Israeli flag is a modern incarnation of the color whose splendor dates back to biblical times: The ceremonial robes worn by high priests are described by the Hebrew word ''tekhelet," used dozens of times in the Bible to characterize the color featured on the robes of the high priests, the fringes of the tallit (prayer shawl), and the tapestries in the Tabernacle.

Both Islamic and Jewish culture use an amulet of blue (a "hamsa" in Hebrew, "khamsa" in Arabic, "nazar" in Turkish) to ward off the curse of the "evil eye." In many Middle Eastern countries, the color is thought to have a protective force, which is why doors and shutters are often painted blue.

In Christianity, the Virgin Mary is frequently depicted cloaked in blue, perhaps most gloriously in the famous Chartres Cathedral window known as "La Belle Verriere." The formula for making the blue glass used in this window has supposedly been lost to humankind, and the exact composition of tekhelet, too, has been debated for centuries, though an Israeli chemist recently claimed to have found and analyzed an original sample of the dye. The Nobel laureates are in good company as they work to create (or recreate) the color blue.

As far back as the Neolithic Age, the blue of lapis lazuli was one of the first aesthetic commodities to generate global trade, and a millennium ago, Chinese cobalt blue porcelain similarly mesmerized people around the world with its stately hues.

Picasso's blue period and the musical genre of the blues are two of many examples that illustrate how the emotional condition of depression is "inscribed" in the color blue. Picasso's paintings from 1901 to 1904 depicted tawdry subjects -- lonely, damaged, emaciated, beaten-down figures -- wrapped in a smothering, deadening haze of blue. In blues music, by contrast, while there's often an underlying resonance of suffering that emanates, fundamentally, from the indignities of slavery and its aftermath, there's also a kind of energetic musical catharsis and transcendence: turning lemons into lemonade, to use a banal (and inappropriately yellow) cliché. For Picasso, perhaps simply the fact that his blue period ended -- he finally painted his way through it and returned to a more varied palette -- represents a comparable kind of emergence.

Another depressing incarnation of blue appears in Toni Morrison's 1970 novel, The Bluest Eye, where the title image symbolizes a racist standard of beauty that oppresses, in its elusiveness, the young black protagonist Pecola Breedlove.

The color's bleak associations long predate the 20th century, though. The idea of a "blue devil" as a harmful or malignant demon that causes melancholy dates back to the 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; the blue devil induces low spirits and despondency. "Laughter is a more powerful Exorcism of those blue Devils, which too often possess our poor mortal Fabric," a writer explained in the Publick Register in 1741, "than what can be perform'd by a Conclave of Cardinals."

At the extremes of either exaltation or gloom, blue has always glowed with intensity, embodying an energy that is reaffirmed by the LED technology that was celebrated this week.

Blue skies, blue oceans, the "blue marble" photograph of Earth from Apollo 17 that changed the way we saw our planet in the universe: All these suggest how our visual and artistic sense of the color draws on its omnipresent natural majesty. No offense intended to red, orange, or violet, which are all lovely colors and may someday generate their own Nobel-worthy discoveries, but blue, clearly, takes the prize. In his poem "High Windows," Philip Larkin magisterially describes the ineffable vastness that this color imaginatively evokes:

"Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."

Caves, Icebergs, and Humanoid Landscapes: A Collaboration With Rebecca Chaperon

October 15, 2014, 11:52 am

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As a poet, I value and adore working with visual artists; collaborating across genre and medium often provides an instant jolt of inspiration. In my writing practice, I often write poems that have been sparked by an image. Last summer, I came across Rebecca Chaperon's work, and was stunned by its weird beauty. I wrote a poem inspired by one of her paintings, and she and I kept in touch, discussing our work. I'm thrilled to share with you a new collaboration that she and I have worked on, a pairing of poems and text that will appear in her new exhibit, Eccentric Gardens.

In Chaperon's paintings, the natural world becomes supernatural, hyperalive. There are glowing trees, dark caves, disembodied arms reaching out to feel the cold air, luminous pyramids from which rainbows spill. It's a bizarre place that Chaperon paints, but it's also benevolent. Her work simultaneously reminds me of spring gardens and the northern lights -- there are pinks, yellows, and greens alongside swaths of black. Snow and pastel flowers peacefully co-exist.

I am always thinking about place when I write, which speaks to why I'm so drawn to Chaperon's work. A poem is a place in which I can speak to a reader, and in which, together, we can be attentive to the pieces of the world that usually slip past us. In my recent poems, flowers want to speak, and caves, and paintings. Any action or object produces a ghost (usually friendly, but always carrying a story).

The poem/painting pairings are included below. These will be shown (alongside other paintings, installation, and a sound studio on opening night!) in Eccentric Gardens at Initial Gallery in Vancouver, BC. The show runs from October 24 to November 15.
NOTE: These images appear with the permission of the artist.


"Helen Keller," (18" by 24", acrylic on canvas) 2014

You Were a Portal Once

Ghost of a mirror
with a nail for a brain

Now that the weight of you is gone
what I want to ask you is this

Are you free or are you missing
or have you made a home in waiting


"The Source," (18" by 24", acrylic on canvas) 2014

Figurative

Finding the figure in the painting isn't always easy.
Sometimes it's a human and others it's humanoid
and then there are others where there's a rock
with a contracting heart. Maybe no figures
at all at first look, and then the fence leaps
to life. Or the watery gray stripe that props up
the painting from within the painting, a tent pole,
wobbles. If you look and look, and see no figures,
keep looking. And if you still see no figures, you
will know that the painting is looking out
at you, the hero of this part of its story.


"Lady of the Pink Lake," (18" x 24", acrylic on canvas) 2014


If the Cave Told the Story

A place fell away
and from that space I rose
I had always been there but was freed

I became a place of shelter
an animal could come in

I became an inside

Humans dragged in fire
brought me burnable things then
burned them up

Tree pieces
burned
plant pieces
burned
bodies of animals
burned

I would become heat for them

And hold them dry or cool
if that is what they asked with their bodies

From here I can see flowers
snow

The gift I have been given
is this spilling water
from it I learn of the far perimeter

what it holds
I press back

Artist Julienne Johnson Returns to Taylor University, Indiana With Renowned Critic Peter Frank

October 15, 2014, 12:38 pm

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Fate... it is said to be the reason why people connect. However, it's not always a romantic entanglement. Often artistic alliances evolve through admiration and/or a co-envisioned passion. For internationally exhibiting artist Julienne Johnson and esteemed art critic and curator Peter Frank (Huffington Post, Fabrik Magazine), that was just the case.


At the Exhibition Opening & Book Signing of Ashes for Beauty at TAG Gallery in Santa Monica, CA; From left to right: Peter Frank, Julienne johnson, Adria Johnson, Alvin Chea (Take 6); photo by Olivier Ferrand

Frank edited and curated Johnson's book Ashes for Beauty, released in 2012. He also contributed to her second book, Touched (2013). The opportunity for the pair to work together has once again arisen. Frank has agreed to curate a solo exhibition featuring Johnson's work at the prestigious Metcalf Gallery on the campus of Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Johnson's retrospective is titled "PASSION AND STRUCTURE: JULIENNE JOHNSON, 2008 -- 2014."

The Los Angeles based artist has followed Frank's writing since 2007 and probably knows more about him than most. "Peter's critiques in the art magazines caught my attention well before we met," said Johnson. "I enjoy words and a dichotomy of ideas...particularly when platformed poetically."


PASSION AND STRUCTURE: JULIENNE JOHNSON, 2008 -- 2014; Curator/Forward: Peter Frank; Editor: Suzanne Dittenber; Publisher: Taylor University

Widely known for his illustrious career as an art critic and curator, Frank's resume is both long and impressive. In addition to writing, teaching and lecturing all over the world, he has organized exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, just to name a few. A less known fact is that he is also a published poet. The art of verse became part of Frank's life when he was just a teenager. He has been published in literary magazines and anthologies since his college days, when he was the co-editor of The Columbia Review.

To this day, he continues to write poetry and do readings. In 2013, Johnson utilized Frank's poetic prowess by putting together an evening of spoken word. Johnson's event also featured the prominent poet Jack Grapes in conjunction with an exhibition at LA Artcore in which she was participating.

Johnson has once again persuaded Frank to read some of his poetry in conjunction with "PASSION AND STRUCTURE," as part of this week's (October 14 - 18) scheduled events.


A family enjoys the art of Julienne Johnson at LA Artcore Union Center for the Arts;
Julienne Johnson, Novi Coeptus 2013, assemblage sculpture with pigment, transfers, metal, wood, glass, acrylic, silk, cotton including salvaged remnants from the Big Bear Fires in California; courtesy of artist

Since 2012, Johnson's paintings have crossed the globe and found homes in permanent collections at the Arab American National Museum, in Michigan and in Thailand, Ratchadamnoen Museum in Krabi Province, Thailand, and Thaksin University Museum in Songkhla Province, Thailand. Johnson has exhibitions scheduled abroad from 2015 - 2016 in Japan, Thailand, and India.

Johnson has traveled a different path than most artists. Having gained notoriety as a Grammy nominated songwriter, she has enjoyed a successful career in the music business. She is also a published poet herself... another artistic talent that she shares with Frank.

When Johnson was first asked to do this show, Frank was her first choice to curate the exhibition. "Peter is a curator who is miles ahead of the crowd without ever running," explained the artist. "He curates as he writes: from a unique angle. He chooses to present what most of us would not see on our own and then he defends it from every angle." Johnson went on to explain that Frank has chosen an unexpected group of works for this exhibition, but when seeing the final product, she admitted that it made perfect sense.


Julienne Johnson, Firebird 2009; Oil with mixed media, including, Asian papers, Chinese ink, metal, pigment transfers and collage on canvas, 48x72 in; courtesy of artist

Featuring mixed media paintings and assemblage sculpture, the exhibition includes eighteen artworks from four bodies of work - Ashes for Beauty, touchmetouchyou, Touched, and Kinexion. Johnson's art, Frank writes in the catalog to the show, "is an art that can be appreciated and enjoyed for its appearance, lucid and poised (if not always orderly). But it has a deeper resonance, even an urgency, that mirrors the anxieties of our times and the frailty of reason and morality."

Johnson is a dedicated artist who uses unusual techniques in order to achieve her vision. In addition to painting with her hands, she often finds herself scraping, sanding, sawing and soldering. A prolific artist, Johnson has amassed a copious body of work for a considerably short length of time since graduating from Art Center College of Design in 2009.


Julienne Johnson, Defocus 2009, oil with mixed media, transfers, collage on canvas 24 x 30 in; courtesy of artist

As serendipity would have it, Johnson attended Taylor University, so this exhibition has an extra special meaning for her. "I'm very excited to be invited to exhibit at my own alma mater with the show opening on homecoming weekend," said the artist.

"PASSION AND STRUCTURE: JULIENNE JOHNSON, 2008 -- 2014" opened on October 14, and is supported and funded by Roger and Naomi Muselman of Berne, Indiana. The exhibition runs through November 7, 2014.

Taylor University is located at 236 West Reade Avenue, Upland, IN  46989-1001; 765-998-5322. For a full list of events during the week of Oct 14-18, see Taylor University's website.

To find out more about the art of Julienne Johnson, see the artist's website.

Touring New York Arts and Culture

October 15, 2014, 1:30 pm

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It would be a mistake to view New York's arts and culture landscape in isolation, confined to geographic borders. Among the reasons -- there are many -- is that our artists and institutions tour both domestically and abroad, and in doing so act as ambassadors for our metropolitan area and participate in a critical flow of creativity and ideas. As a proud New Yorker and an internationalist, I advocate the continuous advancement of this flow.

The organization I run, Dance/NYC, publishes research on touring in nonprofit dance. Snapshot analyses, based on a Cultural Data Project sample of 87 local dance companies, show annual performances on tour at 1,380, a significant 45 percent of total performances. They also show the importance of touring as a source of growth capital, increasing as a share of companies' earned income as annual budget sizes increase, from 12 percent for the smallest companies up to 47 percent for those in $1-5 million range. Touring drops to 19 percent of earned income for those with budgets of more than $5 million, suggesting a need for developing new approaches focused on this segment.

Trend analyses over a two-year (2009-2011) period are worrying. Performances on tour declined 8 percent, and total income from touring fell 2 percent. These losses were felt unevenly across budget categories, and the smallest companies, with budgets of less than $100K, even saw a dramatic 163 percent increase in touring income. Midsize companies, in the $500-999K range, experienced the most sizable financial loss, at 32 percent.

As these data demonstrate touring need and opportunity along the continuums of organizational budget sizes and lives in dance, some, such as American Dance Abroad, are already developing solutions for New York. This new entity, cofounded by Carolelinda Dickey and Andrea Snyder three years ago, has launched Beyond Our Borders, a training and networking initiative to better prepare New York area dance companies for international exchange.

The effort complements existing American Dance Abroad projects, including Rapid Response, a quick-turnaround assistance program to support transit costs for dance artists, and American Dance Recon, a symposium for international presenters to reconnect with American dance and/or to use it as reconnaissance. This fall, Dance/NYC will for the third year cosponsor an American Dance Recon town hall, connecting New York artists to presenters participating in a local edition of this symposium.

The work of American Dance Abroad builds on Dance America: An International Strategy for American Dance, a report commissioned and published in 2010 by Dance/USA, the national service organization for professional dance, with support from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, a leader in promoting international arts engagement. The report is data driven, responding in part to survey findings from dance companies that prioritize three interconnected areas of needed service to support international exchange: access and opportunities, information and training, and financial support. The report aims to create value by taking a holistic approach, emphasizing tactics that are doable in a changeable political and economic environment, and encouraging partnerships among government agencies, institutions, and within the dance field.
 
I am using dance as my subject here, but am also sharing lessons that may be useful to New York arts and culture as a whole and the city's future as a cultural capital. Finally, in advocating touring and exchange, I am adding to my recent writing on cultural planning for the City of New York that any such planning could benefit from the inclusion of domestic and international strategy. Dance/NYC research and the work of American Dance Abroad offer helpful starting points.

Note: I began this blog at the 2014 Internationale Tanzmesse in Düsseldorf, Germany, a biennial marketplace and festival platform focused on contemporary dance. I was a part of the American Corner delegation, cosponsored by American Dance Abroad, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, and Dance/USA, a welcome example of collaboration and common messaging (Dance/NYC also works in alliance with Dance/USA).

A Mystery Solved? Art Review

October 15, 2014, 3:20 pm

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Amelia Earhart buffs might be surprised to learn that the remains of her aircraft, widely reported to have gone down off Howland Island in the South Pacific, made it all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the Santa Monica Bay, where it was only recently rediscovered and successfully raised from the ocean floor by the artist Dan Van Clapp. His evidence is currently on improbable display at Future Studio Gallery in Highland Park.



All images courtesy Future Studio Gallery

Seriously, you'll be astonished by the verisimilitude of the artist's recreation, not only of the cockpit and a large part of the fuselage of the Lockheed Electra 10 E that Earhart was flying on the final, fateful leg of her global circumnavigation attempt, but also various severed pieces of the plane and other memorabilia--headset, helmet...



... a sodden logbook, and so on. It's a tour de force of deceptive ingenuity and legerdemain. You'd swear the tire is made of actual decomposing rubber...




... the fuselage and the visible remaining engine parts of metal. No. It's all illusion, crafted with enough skill to fool both eye and mind. You go up really, really close and you still can't tell that this torn metal fragment is actually a piece of paper.

Von Clapp's installation intrigues the viewer at a variety of levels. The artist teases us optically, of course, but also challenges the obsession with mystery and celebrity that drives the unending search for Earhart's plane. He plays with questions of historical truth and our perception of reality, the way we view, and reconstruct our history, and bestow mythic stature on our heroes. In the absurdist tradition, he seamlessly blends tragedy and sly humor; we can't help but smile at his trickery. His meticulous reconstruction is also an act of love, an homage to the woman whose feisty and indomitable courage is a reminder that the spirit of adventure and the embrace of danger are not the exclusive territory of men.

It's a remarkable achievement, and one that merits the trek to a less-than-familiar part of town. We art folk tend to travel familiar paths, and too often miss what calls out to be seen. We tend to look for the familiar names, and tend to pass over the ones that are less familiar or unknown to us. Too bad. We're the losers for it.

Meantime, kudos to Dan Van Clapp for a show that shouldn't be missed. I'm only surprised that he didn't create the famous aviator's earthly remains. But perhaps that's something best left to the imagination.

---

The Threats Against Anita Sarkeesian Expose The Darkest Aspects Of Online Misogyny

October 15, 2014, 3:25 pm

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I don't know how Anita Sarkeesian gets through the day. I really don't.

The violent threats sent to the Utah organizers of one of Sarkeesian's recent speaking engagements are just the latest iteration of a torrent of abuse that drove the Canadian-American writer and media critic from her home weeks ago. Death threats have preceded some of her previous public-speaking engagements. In some of those cases, Sarkeesian notified the authorities and went ahead with well-received talks. Not this week: She canceled an event at Utah State University due to safety concerns.

Death threats, bomb threats, terrifying abuse: All because, under the banner Feminist Frequency, she created a series of YouTube videos that offer rational, reasonable critiques of the ways in which female characters are used and misused in video games. As a fellow critic, I find her work thought-provoking and valuable.

But let's review what prompted the death threats: Sarkeesian used words and images to critique a media product. That's all.

Agree or disagree with Sarkeesian's critiques all you want -- it's a free country. Except it isn't for Sarkeesian, who can't go home and who's frequently been in touch with law enforcement as threats to her and other women have escalated over the past couple of months.

The flood of abuse directed at Sarkeesian began in 2012, when she announced a Kickstarter for her "Tropes vs. Women" video series. She got far more money than she asked for, but that was partly because of the shocking malevolence hurled at her for even coming up with the idea. She got funded, but she also had a hate mob after her.

The mob has grown, and it's gotten uglier.

Leigh Alexander, Jenn Frank, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu -- these are just a few of the writers, creators, developers and critics who have been harassed by a collection of individuals who operate under a hashtag I hate to even mention, because to invoke its name is to summon the worst of their ilk. Quinn and Wu, independent game developers, were also recently driven from their homes by individuals who published their addresses online. Since August, these women and many others have been threatened, harassed, bullied, doxxed and otherwise put through hell.

They are facing, as activist Melissa McEwan put it, terrorist misogyny.

For months, I've been unable to look away from the waves of hatred that they've had to put up with, and I've read dozens of impassioned pieces decrying the abuse that have accompanied the loose coalition known as "gamergate." Most people who work in games and play video games are quite rightly horrified by what is going on in their community, and are desperate to find ways to stop the vile behavior of some who lurk behind that banner.

There is a tiny shred of consolation in seeing so many thoughtful writers pen such eloquent, intelligent pieces about the context and the culture that has produced such behavior. After Sarkeesian canceled her talk, the community's frustrations boiled over into the #StopGamerGate2014 hashtag, which trended for hours on Oct. 14. I've come across a host of smart new people as a result of this awful state of affairs (which has occasionally led to some diverting satire).

But that's not much of a silver lining. Because any mildly positive developments are likely no comfort at all to the women being harassed by those holding torches and pitchforks.

Whatever its purported concerns about "journalistic ethics" -- and the movement's rhetoric has convinced me that its members have little understanding of either of those words -- "gamergate" is now a poisoned banner; it's a product with intensely negative brand awareness. The ferocity with which its defenders still cling to that hashtag, and their general lack of concern for actual ethical concerns enumerated by Alexander and others, tells you all you need to know about their real priorities. That some casual supporters can see what the movement stands for now in the real world and still do not denounce it tells me everything I need to know about their thought processes. (If you want to fall down a nightmarish rabbit hole, look for assertions that Sarkeesian and others have faked the death threats and everything else. Such allegations are not hard to find.)

If only these die-hards would stay inside their echo chambers, reassuring each other of the righteousness of their cause -- but they do not. They descend like a plague on anyone who disagrees with them, and they pass the buck when it comes to taking responsibility for the worst actions and most hateful speech promulgated under that banner. Like McEwan, I am sick of being told that "only a small but vocal minority" are to blame. If the large and frequently silent majority doesn't do its utmost to counter and prevent situations like this, that distinction is meaningless. And if these kinds of vitriolic attacks are truly the future of the culture wars, as a recent Deadspin piece theorizes, I fear for us all. And I'm afraid for what the next generation of boys and girls will find -- or heaven help us, are already facing -- should they end up in the murkier corners of the Internet.

I'm not suggesting there's a golden past to which we should return; as someone who first logged on to the Internet in the early '90s, I'm not that naive about human nature, online or off. I know a certain subset of Internet types has always waited in the wings, primed to create unsafe spaces, tear down unbelievers and prompt abusive and demeaning "dialogues." For decades, it's been clear that the most shrill and hateful voices can often drown out other users on forums, message boards and in comment sections, if we let them. In the last decade, much of the focus of online interaction has shifted away from comment areas to social media. Predictably enough, the angriest and most intolerant users are still trying to take over.

Why are we letting them?

It is tremendously disheartening to suspect that the treatment of women online is getting worse, not better. We've had decades of experience dealing with those who use the Internet with the intent to cause mental or physical distress or harm. We really haven't leveled up? As individuals, communities and corporate entities, do we still lack the will, despite seeing the fruits of apathy and averted eyes?

The question that's been haunting many observers for weeks is now right out in the open in the wake of the latest threats leveled at Sarkeesian: Is someone going to have to die for things to change?

The abusive incidents against women who speak out and speak up is so demoralizing that it's hard not to want to crawl into a Wi-Fi-free cave. Developer Adria Richards went through an awful cycle of abuse a year ago. Writer and developer Kathy Sierra's story is one of the most terrifying accounts I've ever read. The response of the titans of the tech community to what Sierra had to endure -- or rather, their shrugging non-response -- did not make me optimistic for the future. If leading figures in the industry don't care much about her treatment, what are the chances that the average Silicon Valley firm will take seriously the safety of female users and customers?

Of course, convenient apathy, defensive ignorance and abusive behavior aren't limited to the gaming and tech worlds. Toxic Internet trolls can be found clinging to the underside of any topic, and if you step out of line -- an entirely arbitrary line, of course -- they will be sure to let you know it. Try writing about rape and "Game of Thrones" if you want to see what I mean.

Whether such individuals are part of a coordinated effort or not, whether their actions spring from a desire to lash out or a deeply entrenched set of objectionable beliefs, the activities of abusive individuals frequently force women to pay what activist McEwan calls "the Misogyny Tax."

It's the price women pay when they encounter abuse and have to process it intellectually and emotionally. It's the price they pay when they have to stop what they're doing and report harassment or other intimidating behavior to a website or network. It's the time and the mental energy they lose when they ponder what to write and create -- and what not to write and create -- in order to avoid living a life that is not dominated by a dread of what could be lurking around the next corner.

The women who endure this abuse daily, hourly, for months, for years: I don't know how they get through it, because the tax being levied on them and their loved ones is so high. It's too goddamn high.

I can't speak for them, but I can offer my sympathy and solidarity. And I can emphasize this point: This abuse doesn't happen "online." It happens in the real world, to a person. It happens to a human being's heart and mind and body.

The other day I tweeted a screenshot of an email I got from someone who was angry about something I'd written about the TV show "Stalker."

Just another day of being a woman on the internet. An email I just received: pic.twitter.com/HVgqoqDUov

-- Mo Ryan (@moryan) October 9, 2014

In the first few moments after reading that email, my heart raced. Blood pounded in my ears. My mind blanked. I found it hard to focus on what I'd been doing a minute before. I wondered what other thoughts lurked in this person's mind. I wondered what people who can say things like that are capable of doing in the real world.

These questions do not stay "online." These doubts and fears take root in your head and your gut, and get between you and the goals you want to accomplish. These questions coalesce into a monster whose breath you can feel on your shoulder.

I did not tweet that screenshot to gain sympathy -- though dozens of people were kind to me after seeing it, and I truly appreciate that -- but to reaffirm a sad truth: This regularly happens to women on the Internet. This kind of stuff isn't rare. The response of many women to that tweet? "Yep, that's run of the mill."

I took that screenshot on the day I also reported an abusive account that had been tweeting at me. Two small taxes paid. And that's nothing compared to what some women go through. Friends, colleagues and women I don't know but admire from afar have endured worse. Much worse. Like many women, I often minimize and downplay what comes at me. When I get vile emails or tweets, often one my first thoughts is, "Well, I don't have it as bad as [insert the name of activist/writer/critic/author/ creator/artist here]."

I'm not a fantasist: I know large websites and social media networks will never be able to rid themselves of all abusive behavior, whether it arrives on a hashtag or not. But there are at least a dozen commonsense things Twitter could do to make this abuse far less pervasive. Many, many people have come up with lists of straightforward tools to reduce abuse, but the company has yet to do so in response to a toxicity that's right out in the open.

As thorough, excellent articles from Wired and The Atlantic have pointed out, making social media less hostile and abusive environment is an eminently reachable goal --- for companies and sites that care to expend the effort, that is.

Women aren't the only ones who have to deal with online jerks or who get hate mail, I understand that. Men with online profiles have unpleasant online interactions, too -- but how many of those interactions are disturbingly focused on their gender? How many of those messages attempt to argue how rape isn't really so bad? How much of this communication is intended to feel threatening? How much of it is intended to make them fear for their physical safety? Women who write online are targeted. The authorities and many companies don't do enough about it. And it has a cost.

I haven't spoken up before because, frankly, I was afraid. A decade ago, at a previous employer, security called to warn me not to walk to my car alone because of scary communications they'd received about me. That was the worst incident, but I periodically get emails -- and now tweets -- that gross me out or anger me or make me anxious. (One thing I'll never do again: Write about a sitting president.)

The tidal wave of abuse I've seen online lately has awakened the old fears, a palpable and recurrent anxiety that exists in the real world, not online. What if the mob comes after me? But bomb threats? Screeds about a "massacre"? Are you kidding?

I'm done being afraid. I'm angry.

I'm furious about the essays, games, books, videos, films, TV shows and art we won't get because some women are targeted for having ideas and sharing them with the world.

I want those things. And I'm angry because I know we're not getting them. Because women have been silenced -- are being silenced -- through fear. Sarkeesian has vowed to keep going, and she has my eternal admiration for that. But what about the women who have been quietly but quite effectively intimidated into silence? What about the contributions they'll never make?

So many brilliant, smart, provocative and innovative women are working in so many different creative realms right now. I probably won't like every single thing they produce, and neither will you. But we might love some of it. On some level the quality of that work (and your opinion of it) are entirely beside the point. No matter what, I want them to be able to create. I want women to have the mental resources to do work that matters to them. I want them to be able to work without fear of harm to their bodies or minds. I want women to be able to write and to speak and to make things and to shout sometimes.

We can all do better. We must do better. The Internet is a home we all share. I don't want to see one more woman driven from it.

Ukrainian Band Lyudska Padova Talks Patriarchy, Sexualities and Trojan Horses

October 15, 2014, 3:29 pm

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Portrait by Daniel Jack Lyons

While civil unrest continues to pervade the east of Ukraine, a new generation of artists and musicians in Kiev are creating wide spectrum of sounds and spectacles. At the forefront of this burgeoning scene is Lyudska Padova (Human Shape), a band devoted to shattering cultural ideals of patriarchy and pushing the boundaries of identity politics through a range of human emotion and experimental electro pop fantasies. I had the pleasure of interviewing Gosha and Anatoly of Lyudska Padova on a grassy hill in the Baikov Cemetary, one that dates back as far as 1833. While the black smoke of a crematorium rose above us, they described to me the origins of the band, the importance of community, and their ambition to use experimental pop music as Trojan horse.

D - Daniel, G - Gosha, A - Anatoly

D: Can you guys tell me how you came together as a band?

G: I had an idea to create music and wanted to find a quality singer. I collaborated with some singers before, but had to basically explain to them how to sing. I told my friend that I was looking for a singer, he introduced me to Anatoly at the I love Kiev festival. After the festival we met several times, and then we made the "Human Shape" song, and I suggested to use this name for the band. And then Tolik (short name for Anatoly) invited Iana to the band, and I invited our percussionist Sasha.

D: Anatoly, you were working on something else before Lyudska Padova, is that right?

A: Yeah, I have been working in visual arts since 2004. It was while working with a performance group, that I accidentally figured out that I could sing. That group was called "Penoplast" (Styrofoam). It was a performance group, which contained various types of people. Eventually the group disbanded, but my wish to sing and work in music only grew. I found these musicians - actually, we found each other, some guys that that were interested in experimental electronic music. It was more about music, experimental music. But in some time the band decided that they didn't need a singer. And I just started to have vocal classes too!


D: With songs like Transexual and lyrics like, "my lover is not a kisser, he's got a girl and principals", sexuality seems to play a part in the music that you create. How much would you say that sexuality informs your creative process?

A: Of course my sexuality and my art are connected. Stories in my lyrics are the stories from my life, my impressions on what happens around me, some are happy moments and others are failures. I created two illustrated porn novels, titled: "The Most Pornographic Books in the World", which contain both text and drawings. In the first book there is only one song lyric, which has become a Human Shape song. The second book was all comprised of lyrics. And both songs and lyrics are connected with my life and sexuality. I don't distinguish between art and life.


Portrait by Daniel Jack Lyons

D: Have you met any resistance, or homophobic response in Ukraine to either the music or the books?

A: Ukraine is a homophobe country, and this is really a problem. And there were cases when the art gallery was burnt because there was a film screening and discussion of the problem of homophobia. After this I created artwork, which I performed on the streets. It was called "Homophobia today - Genocide tomorrow". For me the issue of sexuality in general is extremely important, and diverse sexualities in particular. I attempt to discuss the issue of diverse sexualities in a very simple and accessible way so that my thoughts and ideas might be heard not only in galleries or small and closed creative communities, but by the most possible number of people.

D: And this is true in work with Human Shape as well?

A: Yes pop-music is a great tool for this. I consider the music of Human Shape to be something like a Trojan horse. We are invited to play shows and festivals because we are an electro pop band that is fun to dance to, thanks to the good mood that we create through performance. But the lyrics are full of nuanced complexities about sexuality. And if we can get people to dance first, we may actually be able to change their perceptions once the lyrics hit them. Through provocative song lyrics we are hoping to promote discussion, because through discussion people often find answers to questions that they didn't even know they had. Basically, Ukraine is homophobe, and patriarchal. Its Patriarchal social model has a significant impact on its population. People are raised with some traditions and rules, and the music helps to shatter those rules, and gives good reasons for discussions.

G: As for me, our art is not only about sexuality or homosexuality. The accent is more on humanity in general and all the different forms of expression, including sexuality and others. We were developing our manifest, and was the sentiment that every human has a right to make mistakes, as long as a mistake is a way for learning and developing. That is at the core of Human Shape.

D: What's next for Human Shape?

G: We plan to release an album soon. We plan to do it in the next 2 months or so. As well, we plan to have more people who listen our music with our lyrics. We want to increase our audience for this type of music and for such content. For now our audience is limited. On our performances I see the same people, I even know what songs they like the most, and to which ones they prefer to dance. I want our audience to grow.

A: Regarding the album, we have enough material not for one, but for 2 albums. We met in 2012, and since than have been creating new material quite consistently. Now we are looking for the sound producer. We had different options, but had no time to work on this. But I hope that it will happen soon. Yet we perform at different events, this week we participate in the festival in Kyiv, we were invited to the queer festival in Saint-Petersburg in September and also a queer festival in Minsk.


Portrait by Daniel Jack Lyons

A Long Life in the Cherry Lane Theatre

October 15, 2014, 8:10 pm

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In 1962, when Estelle Parsons made her Cherry Lane Theatre debut in Mrs. Dally Has a Lover, a strip club was in business next door, and the thump-thump-thumping of music could be heard through the thin, shared wall during performances. On the evening of Oct. 6, 2014 -- and on that same stage -- Parsons enjoyed recounting this and other morsels, as well as replaying a scene from that first show, during the theater's 90th anniversary celebration.

Parsons, who, later in the evening, would receive Cherry Lane's Visionary Award, also recalled leaving a five-year stint as a personality on The Today Show to make $32 a week for the part of Mrs. Dally, a 39-year-old adulteress. Parsons mused that she was only 35 and thought at the time that playing a character four years older was "a real challenge."

Before the performances began -- quick scenes from some of the seminal plays that had been staged here over the last 10 decades -- Judith Ivey, Richard Kind, Tyne Daly and others graced the small lobby's short but triumphant red carpet while Bill Pullman searched for the green room.

Inside the smaller studio theater, where the strip club had been, a few dozen guests mingled and drank wine. Andy Sandberg, a writer, director and Tony Award-winning producer, cited the need these days for either "a venue, money or cast" to even hope to get a show produced, while his former Yale classmate Jen Jamula, a co-founder of Blogologues, the comedy troupe that performs blog posts -- verbatim -- nodded in resigned agreement.

At show time, ushers led guests inside the 179-seat main theater. As Parsons was ferried through, she glanced around. "This place has been all redone," she said, mostly to herself.

To start, Ivey and Marin Ireland performed a scene from the 1924 play The Way of the World, by William Congreve. Then Israel Horovitz introduced Lynn Cohen, who appeared as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, which in 1961 had its world premiere at Cherry Lane. But first, Cohen moved a music stand out of her way. "I'm a woman, so I rearrange things," she said. "If I didn't know better, I would say Beckett was a woman."

Next, Dule Hill and Pullman played a scene from Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. "If you are in an Edward Albee play," Pullman said before his performance, "you say Edward Albee is the greatest playwright of all time. ... If you're in an Israel Horovitz play, you say Israel Horovitz is the greatest playwright of all time."

Judith Light introduced Lewis Black, who had performed his show Black Humor: The Comedy of Lewis Black on the main stage in 1998. "Lewis scowls and the world scowls with him," Light said, and then, without further ado, "Back for a five-minute run at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Lewis Black!"

"It's great to be back in the theater, because the theater has been so fucking good to me," chided Black, who later recalled the time in the late '90s when Angelina Fiordellisi, then the newly ensconced (and still current) artistic director, offered him a show and he was "ecstatic."

F. Murray Abraham, wearing a satin Yankees jacket, performed with Jay O. Sanders a scene from David Mamet's Duck Variations. In the early days, he told the audience, you could see through the back courtyard to the little house belonging to one of Cherry Lane's founders, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. A woman who lived upstairs, he continued, didn't like the goings-on and stomped on her floor -- the theater's ceiling -- as a precursor to the strip club reverberations that would be felt in later years.

Before Parsons and the actor David McElwee began the last performance of the night, she told the story of Arlene Francis, who took Mrs. Dally Has a Lover to Broadway in 1965.

"She was a big star," Parsons said, and then thought better of it. "Well, she was a star." Francis' Great White Way production, however, was a flop. "People wanted to see it down here, with someone they didn't know."

Parsons then set the scene she and McElwee would perform, where Mrs. Dally and her teenage lover sit talking while she sews on the buttons she had ripped off his shirt earlier in the "heat of passion."

The 86-year-old Parsons stopped and thought for a moment about what she had said, then giggled and gave the audience a much-appreciated, happy lament: "Those were the days!"

Leonard Cohen's Triumphant Problems

October 15, 2014, 11:28 pm

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The mere release of Popular Problems, two days after Leonard Cohen's 80th birthday last month, is remarkable in and of itself. (How many 80-year-old sex symbols and style icons are there?) But it also caps a decade in which Cohen conquered troubling neuroses and fears to mount worldwide tours that were invocations, convocations and spiritual gatherings, not to mention money-makers, that returned Cohen, who'd been swindled out of his life savings, to financial security. His is one of the more amazing runs in music history.

Nomen est omen. The name determines the life. In Cohen's case, he has become the priest, and not just for a cadre of followers around the world; he is also a seeker, a pilgrim ever struggling to find satori -- in wine, drugs, women, in isolation and among the world, in words and in song.

Popular Problems finds Cohen's baritone deepened, his voice more raspy, but each word distinct, each phrase launched like an arrow at a target. The accompaniments, produced by Patrick Leonard, are spare -- piano, violin, a chorus of back-up singers, digitalized beats that are melodic in contrast to Cohen's own probing lyrics.

This may be my favorite collection since 1988's I'm Your Man. It is about optimism in the face of age, war, terrorism and the ongoing challenges of love. Cohen opens with "Slow," a sly declaration of style over age, singing "It's not because I'm old / It's not the life I led / I always like it slow / That's what my momma said."

"Slow," however, is no oldster's apologia, but rather a credo akin to slow cooking, or slow networking, an acknowledgement that slow and mindful is how to savor life -- a feat Cohen has spent a lifetime pursuing.

A decade ago, Cohen was ready to retire. He had become overwhelmed by a fear of disappointing his live audiences that he could not go on stage. Then, after becoming a victim of embezzlement forced him back to work, Cohen took up a tour so arduous -- filled with three-hour shows each night -- a tour so powerful, so joyous, so satisfying, that in just three years, Cohen earned his way back to financial stability. Popular Problems is a capstone to the artist's triumph over his own demons. In "A Street," he sings, "The party's over / But I've landed on my feet / I'll be standing on this corner / where there used to be a street."

The nine songs on Popular Problems present meditations on Jewish heritage replete with biblical imagery ("Born in Chains"), and applies that imagery to Hurricane Katrina ("Samson in New Orleans"), love and love lost ("My Oh My," "Did I Ever Love You") and war ("Almost Like the Blues") and songs that combine them all ("Nevermind"), tackled with both seriousness and self-deprecating humor. As he sings in "Almost Like the Blues," "There's torture and there's killing / There's all my bad reviews / The war, the children missing / It's almost like the blues."

One cannot read the lyrics on Popular Problems without appreciation for the zen of Cohen: His words are heavy with meaning, with counterpoints of humor, irony or cynicism; there's meter to his lines and, occasionally, a clever rhyme. His lyrics present a man at home with his past and with his cultural tradition. He sings, "My father says I'm chosen / My mother says I'm not / I listened to their story / Of the Gypsies and the Jews / It was good, it wasn't boring / It was almost like the blues." He even ends his album on a declaration of optimism as plain as it is direct, "You Got Me Singing."

"You got me singing / Even tho' the news is bad / You got me singing/ The only song I ever had ... You got me thinking / I'd like to carry on."

Rave on, Leonard Cohen. Happy birthday, and many more. Eighty is but a stepping stone in your Tower of Song.


This article originally appeared in print in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Matt Day: Gentleman And Photographer

October 16, 2014, 8:33 am

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All Images Copyright Matt Day

I found Matt Day on YouTube. Well, not literally, but I did find some great film photography videos and they were hosted by Matt. This is not what attracted me to the idea of featuring him though, for that I would become drawn in by his pure passion for photography and his utterly unpretentious approach to promoting his own work. Matt is a real photographer and a real gentleman - either makes him a great choice for a feature, and the two combined make it a no-brainer.



Michael Ernest Sweet: Matt, let's begin by talking about your new book, Friend of Mine, coming soon from Blurb. I'm exclusively a book photographer. I have literally three photographs available in print in a gallery in Paris and that's it. I love books. I guess because I'm also a writer. I also love to photograph with the "book" in mind, rather than the print. Its become part of my technique - part of the way I work. What is it that has drawn you, as a photographer, to the bookmaking process?

Matt Day: I think the idea of giving these images a home is what was so appealing to making a book. You can show any photos you want through social media but then delete them whenever you want. Putting a physical collection like this out there, you can't just delete them. There's a sense of vulnerability one feels by doing so. You have to commit to an entire body of photos. That's a strong feeling.



MES: In photography, self-publishing has a long history. Some very famous photographers of the twentieth century published their own artist books. That is, it's not like literature, for example, where self-publishing is frowned upon. Do you plan to continue on the self-publishing "artist book" path, or do you see yourself using this book as a maquette to approach traditional publishers?

MD: I wouldn't say that approaching traditional publishers is out of the question for the future, but I do plan on focusing on self-publishing for future projects. I like the idea of doing things myself. Being a skateboarder since I was 14, I've always gravitated towards the DIY mentality of things.



MES: Photographing the familiar is one of the most difficult "things" to photograph. We have to approach it with new eyes - those things we know so well. With this body of work, which is primarily your community - hometown - we see, perhaps, something different from what you see. This can make a project like this very challenging. What do you see in these photographs - the familiar and banal or, more like us, something intriguing and unknown?

MD: The idea of a book came long after I had already made the majority of these photos. I would go out and shoot around my hometown just because I love it here and I love making photos. Eventually, I started to see a consistency in the photos and realized that some of them worked really well together. The consistency, for me, is the feeling. I see the way I feel about Chillicothe in my photos. Others may view the town completely different from me and I think these photos are going to show that. They're not going to see Chillicothe as they know it when they look at my photos. That's ultimately been the goal for producing a book - to show others the way I see my town.



MES: Why film?

MD: It's where my passion in photography lies. Not just the look of film, which is inherently different (not better or worse, just different), but the process is what really draws me in. Shooting, processing, scanning, printing, all of it. It gets out of the way and makes things easier for me, while also allowing me to be so much more hands on. There's no other way for me to shoot and get the same results.



MES: I own an M6 but, quite frankly, find it too heavy to carry around. I've replaced it with a couple MJU IIs from Olympus. Leica fans will kill me for that statement. However, in all seriousness, I'd like to see people distinguish the negatives. That is when the MJU is properly exposed etc. It makes fantastic negatives. Some people could tell them apart, most could not. That aside, I do want to know what it is about the M6 which beckons you in? What has caused it to be your primary camera?

MD: I know what you mean! I have the Stylus Epic from Olympus, which is the same as the MJU II essentially, same lens and everything. That one is always in the bag. Sharp, compact, easy, and reliable. As for the M6, that's my primary camera for a number of reasons. I love rangefinders. I prefer almost everything about them over an SLR. I love that the M6 is fully manual. With each photo, it's up to me, not the camera, to properly expose things and focus. Automatic features can make you lazy. There's enough automation in the world right now. I don't want it touching my photography. I'm a fan of Leica glass, both classic and modern, so that's another advantage of an M. Last but not least, it's a Leica. If you've ever used one, you'll understand they're something special. Believe the hype!



MES: Ah, a good ole Leica boy. I'll let you get away with that for now. Back to the book, one of the most important aspects of making a good photo book is great editing. Often, we, as the photographer, get emotionally attached to the image and the time and place where we made it. This makes it difficult for us to examine our own photography with objective eyes. Perhaps this is what has lead self-publishing to suffer a bad reputation. Tell us about how you've edited this book, who was involved?

MD: Editing is tough. I have a tendency to over-analyze things. With the book and the amount of negatives to sort through, I knew it would be easy for me to let it get the best of me. My plan was to go with my gut through the entire process. In one day, I went through all of my negatives, scanned in the possible keepers, and started laying out the book from there. Overall, it was about 12 constant hours of work, but when I was done, I was done. I didn't second guess myself and I didn't leave room for changes. I stuck with what I had for the sake of my sanity. That will either pay off or bite me in the ass. We'll see when people get their hands on the book. When I had everything finished and had the book in a PDF file, I had my wife, Molly, look it over and give me her honest feedback. Molly knows me better than anyone. She knows what I'm going for and she's not afraid to voice her opinion, believe me. Some would think that's not a smart move, as if she would be biased while viewing the book, and maybe she was. But that's how I did it and I'm happy with it.



MES: Switching gears a little, I'd like to now talk to you about photographing the significant other. In your case, your wife, Molly. Again this is a process which becomes highly subjective in a hurry. How do you not only edit these images, but compose and take them also? That is, how do you work with a model which you have such a personal relationship with and see any image as less than perfect?

MD: It's funny that you mention this and ask these questions. I've honestly never even thought about how I photograph my wife so much. I assumed every photographer did this, but maybe not. I shoot photos of her literally every day. Sometimes it's a thought out and posed portrait of her whenever I find some nice light and sometimes it's when she's laying on the couch with the dogs. I photograph my life, every day of it. She's with me all of the time, so naturally I'm gonna have a lot of photos of her.



MES: Why photograph your wife?

MD: She's my best friend and she's gorgeous. Makes the answer pretty easy!

MES: Do you work with other models or just Molly and street photography?

MD: I don't work with actual models or anything like that, but I do work with other subjects, you could say. My career is in photography. I shoot portraits for a living. Everything from weddings to senior portraits to families to children, you name it. Working with people is great because you get to meet so many different people and I've made some very close friends through photographing them. Portraits are important, no matter the occasion; they live longer than we do.



MES: As you seem to do most of your work on film, how do you process and print? Is this all done by you or do you send work out?

MD: It depends on the film and what it's being used for. If it's for a client, their film gets sent out to a professional lab in Lousiville where it will be processed and scanned. If it's personal work, which is basically all black and white, I develop it at home and print myself in my darkroom. It's sad to know how many photographers there are out there that will never get to experience what it's like to use a darkroom. No matter how many prints I make, it still blows my mind every single time.



MES: How did you get into photography in the first place?

MD: It's somewhat of a long story, but I'll try to be brief. When I was 13, my older brother, who was 17 at the time, was working on a local farm and was attacked by a bull. The bull flipped him into the air and when he landed, he landed on his neck, paralyzing him from the chest down. He was in the hospital, OSU Hospital in Columbus, for a few months, in and out of intensive care. While this was going on, my mom stayed with him at the hospital and my dad was working on building a handicap accessible room onto our house with the help of our community. I was staying with friends and family at the time because school was still going on, so I would really only see my brother and my parents whenever we would drive up to see them at the hospital in Columbus. During those months, my aunt and uncle flew up from Florida to see my brother. They brought a camera with them that they had bought for me. They realized I wasn't seeing my family much at the time, so they told me to document what I was doing in that time so that I could show them the photos and keep them up to date, so to speak. They also told me to document my brother's recovery. So that's what I did and I just never stopped. Still documenting every day.

MES: That's a great and touching story. Perhaps those photographs of your brother, when the time is right, will also make a powerful book. What does the act of making photographs do for you on an inner level?

MD: Like I mentioned before, I photograph my life. The exciting and unusual days and even the days spent at home on the couch with my family. No matter the subject, making photos helps me remember how important life and our time that we have is. It reminds me that I'm in the moment and that this is nothing to take for granted. That's why photos are important - because life is.



MES: I like your film photography show on YouTube. It's honest and unpretentious and fun. How did this come about and what are your plans for the show?

MD: Thank you! I'm not the most comfortable person in front of the camera, but I'm working on that. I've always wanted to create a YouTube channel for film photography because there's a huge lack of content in that community. There are a few good channels that I'm subscribed to, but like I said, I like the DIY way of things. None of the channels were what I was looking for, so I figured I would make it myself. I knew there had to be a ton of other film photographers that were looking for this sort of content as well, so I went for it! I'm about 4 months in and I've had great response from people. I'm really thankful for the support and really glad that people seem to be enjoying it and learning from it. I have a lot of plans for this winter, which is my slow season for work. I have a lot of future episodes and topics to discuss, but some general plans mainly include interviews. I'd love to get some other photographers involved so that it's not just me on every episode.

MES: Matt, thank you very kindly for taking the time to talk with us. I wish you all the best with these projects and do stay in touch. And, congratulations on that new addition to the family - I expect we'll be seeing photos!

MD: Thank you for the opportunity! Its been an honor to talk with you.

Matt Day is a 23-year-old photographer from Chillicothe, Ohio, and he loves film. He a wife, Molly, two rad dogs, and a baby on the way! Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @MattDayPhoto or through his YouTube Channel.

Michael Ernest Sweet is an award-winning Canadian writer and photographer.