You might leave Then She Fell with more questions than answers, but that's part of the amazement. This immersive theater experience pushes you to examine the limits of reality and to free your mind to possibility. Plus, the choreography goes well beyond mere dance. Everything you witness in this madhouse is full of complexity and planning. Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, who has worked with Third Rail Projects for over a decade on top of performing in Then She Fell, is also rehearsal director for the production. She replied to my questions via email:

This show is so immersive and engaging. There's never a spare moment to catch your breath. What's it like to perform inside this madhouse? Is it a race to stay ahead at all times?

Nielsen-Pincus: The show is very non-stop for the performers. I have about two minutes in the entire two-hour show where I am not with the audience. But I wouldn't call it a race to stay ahead of time. I always know where I need to be and when I need to be there and there is actually a little bit of forgiveness within the structure that allows us adapt to what happens with any particular scene or audience member. By the end of the night I do tend to feel like I've been caught in a strange time warp along with the audience.

"Alice" is such an intriguing character, who says more with her dancing and body movements than anyone else in the cast. For me, it was her darting stares that left me most struck. What goes into the role?

Nielsen-Pincus: For me, the most important thing about being Alice is to be very present, open and in a receptive state. As Alice, there is a lot of eye contact with the audience, which is quite powerful. It's as much about looking at someone as it is taking in what you see and sharing that moment of seeing and being seen with the audience. As performers, and especially in this kind of intimate setting, we have to constantly remember to do less, otherwise we come across as caricature of ourselves.



Photo by Adam Jason Photography

Your dance with Lewis Carroll is one of the highlights of this performance. The choreography is magnificent, leaving the audience with a feeling of both love and mayhem. How did that scene come together?

Nielsen-Pincus: That's a nice way to describe it. There is very strong eye contact between Alice and Lewis Carroll that is almost unbroken throughout the entire scene. And within that eye contact, we play a lot with proximity - moving closer and farther, spiraling around each other, and up and down and over the stairway - which creates a kind of force field or tangible tension between us, so that when we finally come together its a strong moment.

But you're not the only "Alice" in this production. Seeing two Alices at times, and then together, leaves a haunting impression. Mirrors and reflection play a strong role over the course of the evening. What's the underlying message there about duality?

Nielsen-Pincus: I actually love hearing the audience's interpretation of who the 2 Alices are...good/bad, young/old, wonderland/looking glass...there are many versions and some that I never thought of. I feel like sometimes we are simply each other's reflection in a mirror and at other times we are manifestations of the opposing desires and pulls within one person, the different sides of a personality and the different direction we could go in and the decisions we make in life that send us one way or another.

The story comes together in pieces, but it doesn't feel like a detective story where you must solve the puzzle. What do you hope the audience walks away considering and wondering about?

Nielsen-Pincus: I feel like the show accumulates meaning as it goes...images and experiences layering on top of each other. We introduce a lot of ideas - love, loss, duality, this story of Lewis Carroll and Alice, and who you are as an audience member and what you connect to informs how you interpret the show. We think of it like a Rorschach test. The really interesting thing for us is not the audience figuring out what happened between Alice and Lewis Carroll, but what they connect to personally and how the show effects people on a personal level. There is something about the intimacy of Then She Fell that blurs the line between the story and the characters we are playing with and the audience's own experience and history. We pose a lot of questions. The audience can do with them what they want.

We have known for some time that public art with sculptures, statues, and murals everywhere, and buildings with their uniquely carved doorways, cornices, and columns are usually what distinguish one city from another.

But Art and Culture Districts -- with their critical mass of art galleries, cinemas, music venues, public squares for performances, restaurants, cafes and retail shops -- have the potential of attracting, and nurturing the creative workforce our cities need to succeed in the "new economy."

After an intense political process involving several agencies of the government, artists, art and culture organizations, land developers, urban planners and architects and a wary public, the city -- after more than a decade -- is now beginning in earnest to fully develop the original concept of a major Art and Culture District.

According to Bonny Wong, a Director in the CEO's Office, and Secretary of the Board of the District, "The project has been in planning stage and (they) have only just started foundation works for the Xiqu Centre, one of the first buildings on the site."



As the Hong Kong Economic Analysis and Business Facilitation Unit in the Financial Secretary's Office, put it in 2007:

"The development of the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) is an important investment in Hong Kong's arts and cultural infrastructure, a major step to promote cultural and artistic activities in Hong Kong, and a strategy that supports the long term development of Hong Kong as a creative economy and a world city. It is expected to bring about not only substantial tangible economic output and employment, but also various significant intangible benefits."

Construction only began last year after design competitions and extensive planning and agreement on financing. The early proposals were rejected by the government but returned to track in 2006, and the government established the Consultative Committees to formulate new recommendations on planning, financing and marketing.

However, this is just the first of 17 core arts and cultural venues to be opened at the West Kowloon Cultural District. When completed, assuming no more delays and amendments to the vision, it will be the envy of Asia certainly, but perhaps the world.

Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Mr. Gregory So, at a luncheon in Los Angeles recently said, "Hong Kong is not just a city of business, it is also a city of creativity and character. Business and the arts not only exist comfortably side-by-side, they complement each other."

As one of the world's leading international financial centers, it has a major capitalist service economy characterized by low taxation and free trade, with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. According to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong tops the list of the freest economies in the world.

No surprise then that this global city -- now part of Mainland China -- is becoming one of the most creative cities in the world too.

In fact, Hong Kong has spent over 60 million dollars (U.S.) in just the last few years "to support various programs that develop and promote creative industries and generate new business opportunities." Two hundred million dollars alone has gone to promote the design sector, and over 2.8 billion dollars allocated to turn part of the city near its harbor, West Kowloon, into an art and culture district stretching across 40 hectares or 99 acres. While that itself represents a large investment, Hong Kong sees the strategic importance of reinventing West Kowloon.

The city launched Art Basel Hong Kong which last year featured 245 galleries from 35 countries. Clearly, they take great pride spending resources to nurture and support "the creative class." But the Art and Cultural District is clearly their crown jewel.

The Xiqu Center is a theater for Opera, and other performing arts. Scheduled for completion in 2016, the seven-storey building will house everything from shops and restaurants to a teahouse with a performance stage-the classic setting for Chinese opera performances.

A separate main theater of contemporary design will seat 1,100 audience members. An additional 2,000-square-meters of the Centre will be dedicated to arts education and public leisure space.

The Xiqu Centre is one of 17 planned arts and cultural facilities to be built within the West Kowloon Culture District. These also include the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, a center for contemporary performance, and a music center.

According to the The Kowloon Authority, the winning design was chosen unanimously for embodying the "essence of Xiqu" (Chinese Opera) through, what they call its "four core design principles":

•The concept of gateway and pavilion is embodied in the sitting of the building. All four corners of the site are open to welcome visitors to the centre.

• The concept of courtyard is embodied in the unique building massing. Below the 1,100 seat Main Theatre is a generous weather protected public space for the citizens of Hong Kong, an urban stage for informal events and celebrations.

• The concepts of nature and urban landscape are expressed in a three-dimensional landscape treatment found throughout all levels of the complex.

• The concept of "flow" or "qi" is expressed with curvilinear planes and form. The exterior façade is curved with arched openings. Multi-level circulation paths capture the pedestrian flow from adjoining sites and the neighborhoods.

These districts are complex to be sure, and as the Hong Kong experience has shown, sometimes tricky as the history of the this initiative has shown. While the Kowloon Authority would not comment on its progress, the effort now seems to be on track to become a model for other cities around the world.

There is no doubt that these districts are the incubators of creativity itself, and as such, a vital ingredient to every city that wants to become a major force in the creative and innovative economy.

Photos courtesy of Eugene Lee; collage courtesy of Stephanie Butterworth.

Orpheus: A Junkyard Opera, directed by Mat Sweeney and Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, marks Four Larks' auspicious Los Angeles debut. It's an odyssey of love and loss portrayed, appropriately enough, as an opera, a junkyard opera, that takes place in hell. Its experience is edgy and ethereal. The costumes and set material are made from repurposed objects. The space is a fabric warehouse set in a dodgy part of town. And the original score (Sweeney, Ellen Warkentine, Jesse Rasmussen) is performed by a live orchestra.

It's theatrical but, like Cirque du Soleil, it's more than music, song, movement, choreography, and art. It doesn't limit itself to one genre, just as love doesn't limit itself to one feeling, one moment, one lifetime. It recounts the story of Orpheus's (Zachary Carlisle) attempt to resurrect his newlywed wife Eurydice (Lisa Salvo) after she's sent to hell because a snake bites her. It's a stupendous production, it's awe-inspiring, and it's incredibly moving.

Sweeney's and Peters-Lazaro's staging is spectacular. Amidst this tale of love lost and almost reclaimed is an intriguing version of hell. It's not what you'd expect. It's not fire and brimstone; it's not loud and wailing. Its denizens are tortured, eternally, but their suffering is more mental and emotional than physical.




The Four Larks' Orphic version of hell is a bureaucratic nightmare. We experience the sights, the people, and, especially, the sounds of this hell from Orpheus' point of view. His quest isn't existential, it's task-oriented. Though music graces each moment of the production, it's low-keyed, as if we're hearing only what's in meistersinger Orpheus' head. The hellbound fill their days with tasks that are pedestrian and, because they're unachievable, repetitive. The space is unsavory but it's not threatening. The Four Larks' intent is to show how, in an urbanized, ADD world, no fate can be worse than to be mindlessly unstimulated. The result is damnation by cubicle-like boredom and frustration.

The space is a brick warehouse on Central Avenue, as far in spirit if not location from Theatre Row as Venice Beach is from Venice, Italy. Winding past curtained-off spaces and down tight, narrow corridors, a night at the theatre feels like a field trip to a carpet mortuary. Our entry into the catacombs to the stage echoes Orpheus' own excursion into hell. On the sand-filled stage, suitcases serve double duty: as a metaphor for Orpheus' voyage as well as the literal slope of Sisyphus' (Max Baumgarten) mountain. A squash racket serves as the oar with which Charon (Reuben Liversidge) ferries Orpheus across the River Styx while some very clever movement portrays both the boat and the river's swells.

The show's tone is tedium sepia, not infernal red; it doesn't as much thunder with terror as visually buzz with shades of UPS brown. The music is not Wagnerian (no, gas jets don't shoot flames across the stage). To best reflect Orpheus' musical though one-track mind, it's minimal, like the work of John Adams and Philip Glass.



But it's the leitmotif of unfulfilled actions that anchors the look and action of the production. There's Sisyphus pushing that rock up that mountain of suitcases, only to have it tumble back down once it reaches the top. There are the Danaids trying to fill their buckets with river water, a task made impossible because the buckets are sieves. There's Tantalus (Caitlyn Conlin), reaching for fruit that hangs from a tree, only to have the branch jerk up at the last moment, the fruit eluding his grasp. And finally there's Orpheus, who has to negotiate all these administrative challenges, ranging from Hell's three-headed guard dog Cerebus to its royal family of Hades (Mark Skeens) and Persephone (Cassandra Ward). Heartbreakingly, he almost succeeds.

Fusing a spot-on vision of a latter-day hell with a timeless story of love lost and almost found, Orpheus is a wildly success update of the Orpheus myth. It takes you someplace new which, when you think about it, isn't that new at all. That it's both hip and classical testifies to the Four Larks' achievement here: the classics are, in the right hands, still relevant, life affirming and, most of all, fun.

If you scurry, you can get tickets for tonight's (Sunday, April 6) last show of the run. The show starts at 8:30, Tickets, including service fees, are $21.69 and $26.87. For tickets as well as information on past and future production, please visit http://www.fourlarks.com.

On the subway home from The Realistic Joneses, Will Eno's second play this season and now at the Lyceum after a 2012 Yale Repertory Theatre stay, I noticed that the woman seated across from me was also holding a Realistic Joneses playbill. I asked her opinion of what she'd just seen. She replied, "I liked the acting, but I had no idea what the play was about."

Let me tell you that if anyone wanted a spot-on one-sentence review of Eno's newest work, you couldn't do any better than what she said. But we professional assessors are expected to say more. So I will, although I'd love to let it go at the friendly woman's comment.

At the start of the work, Jennifer Jones (Toni Collette, not impersonating the famous Oscar-winning movie star of that name) and Bob Jones (Tracy Letts, not impersonating golfer Bobby Jones) are bickering in the backyard of their home in, as the program notes, "a smallish town not far from some mountains."

After some time and some tense exchanges, new-to-the-area Pony Jones (Marisa Tomei) and John Jones (Michael C. Hall) arrive with a bottle of wine wrapped in shiny silver paper and impose themselves on the first pair of Joneses, an imposition Bob clearly likes less than Jennifer.

What follows in this scene and several subsequent scenes--taking place on a David Zinn set meant to represent both Jones residences and a supermarket, et cetera--are various combinations of the Joneses talking in unrelenting non sequiturs about themselves and their relationships to one another.

When Pony (her father came up with the nickname, she reports) and John are about to leave towards the end of the first meeting, she spots a dead squirrel, which Bob disposes of in a handy trashcan. At some point during the work's intermission-less 90 minutes the information is revealed that both Bob and John are suffering from a rare malady, the medical term for which goes by so quickly I missed it.

Those events represent what could be called the action in a play that is actually brimming with non-action. At times, it appears that Bob may have some interest in Pony. At other times, it seems John has eyes, or at least hands, for Jennifer and that she may be contemplating reciprocation. But these are just vague hints cropping up during the proliferation of conversations that go nowhere, because as Jennifer, Bob, Pony and John keep jabbering, they're mostly jabbering at cross-purposes.

Occasionally, the offbeat give-and-take can be amusing. There's a moment when Bob is nagging at Jennifer, where she says, "Do not even start." Then, following a brief silence, she adds, "I'm waiting." John, who's full of left-field remarks, gets to say, "Ice cream is a dish best served cold."

Nevertheless, after, for instance, too many of John's opinions uttered, then recanted, then revised, then recanted again, it's difficult for a spectator--here I mean me--not to start wracking his brain for what in the name of illuminating entertainment playwright Eno aiming at.

There's the title, which does conjure the old phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." And here are two sets of Joneses. Is one pair trying to keep up with the other while vice versa is going on? Better yet, is Eno having his joke on the very idea of keeping up with people who by their very chatter can't be kept up with and, more pointedly, aren't worth keeping up with.

Or wait, here's another possibility. The play starts with a middle-aged couple harping at each other late-ish one night. Suddenly, a younger couple pushes through their bushes to interrupt them. She's flighty and he's makes a point of being loosely charming. Does this sound familiar, all you theater lovers? Is Eno serving himself very personal laughs by deconstructing Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And don't forget Letts was in that drama's last revival.

Maybe, just maybe Eno is intrigued by the failure of words. Maybe that's his target. There's definitely mention of the problem when communications between and among these verbose, if ultimately inarticulate, Joneses lob their words at each other and miss the mark. If so, the apercu isn't new. Its much earlier manifestation came to be called "Theater of the Absurd." Possibly Eno is indulging himself in something like Theater of the Post-Absurd and expecting the rest of us to appreciate it.

Perhaps it's a bit of all the above. Nonetheless, there's got to be more to it, or otherwise, he has only enough inspiration--if it can be called that--for a short sketch. Maybe that's not a worry to him. Only a month and a few days back, his intermission-less 80-minuter The Open House bowed at Playwrights Horizons.

In that one a dysfunctional family to beat all dysfunctional families dysfunctions for much of the allotted time. At that one I was thinking, initially, "Okay, he's sending up the all-too-common dysfunctional family play. Nice idea." But I was also thinking it's a nice idea that's only worth a 10-minute skit. Wouldn't you know, however, that Eno found a twist causing me to reconsider my conclusion? I eventually decided The Open House was worth a 20-minute skit.

Still, if I can't bring enlightenment to a discussion of The Realistic Joneses, Eno can. Here he is talking about his intentions with Playbill's Mervyn Rothstein, "I had questions about the absolute fact of death looming there that we are very happy to ignore--how does that quietly and constantly make its pressure felt in our dealings with each other, in relationships and love and things like that?"

So that's what he means to convey through his incomprehensible, although sometimes tickling, colloquies. If so, it's not working for my subway-car acquaintance, and it's not working for me, either. His premise is far too obscure.

Under Sam Gold's direction, the alphabetically billed Collette, Hall, Letts and Tomei are collectively giving it their best shot. Unfortunately their best is not good enough. The Realistic Joneses from the highly regarded (though not necessarily by me) Will Eno is an example of that wise old saying, "There's less here than meets the eye."

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness." -- Helen Keller

The concept of "Utopia" is one thrown around a lot these days. Does the possibility of achieving the perfect place in our society really exist? An ideal land or country, or even a state of mind for that matter, where economics are determined by the amount of work we perform, and not just our geography and demographics, and where as individuals we're judged solely on achievements, not status symbols, skin color and religion?

Insh'Allah.

But if there is any hope for a utopia (the word, by the way, taken from its Greek roots can mean both "no place" and "good place" depending on how we write it) today, or in our near future, that hope lies in the arts and culture. Of that, I'm sure. Film, music, poetry, literature and the visual arts have done more to unite, encourage and explain than any media outlet, diplomat or politician ever could.

It is exactly in that spirit that the second edition of Eventi Letterari Monte Verità kicks off in Ascona, Switzerland, this coming April 10th. Part of the Primavera Locarnese, a cultural event that combines literature, cinema and a youth program, this year's Eventi Letterari explores the theme of "Utopias and Demons" and runs through the 13th of April.

Monte Verità (which means "Mount of Truth") is no stranger to utopian societies and miscellaneous anarchists. Founded in the year 1900 by Henry Oedenkoven and his companion Ida Hofmann as a cooperative vegetarian colony, the atmospheric hill soon attracted the likes of Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, Otto Gross and many other anti-conformists of the Twentieth century. In 1927 a hotel in Bauhaus style was built there by German architect Emil Fahrenkamp. The Hotel Monte Verità is still open for business, was renovated in 2008 and overlooks the glistening Lake Maggiore.

The Artistic Directorate of Eventi Letterari, comprised of Irene Bignardi, Paolo Mauri (both beloved and respected Italian critics and journalists) and Joachim Sartorius -- German cultural figure extraordinaire and diplomat -- explain the ideas behind this year's theme, by offering up some provocative questions:

Utopia is the start of the future. It is born of circumstances that demand change. But what part do such demons play, given that these processes of transformation often take an ugly turn or even become ridiculous? Is there an inferno for Utopias?

The uprisings of the recent years, from Egypt to Tunisia, to the Ukraine, from various "Occupy" movements to Syria, have all given us the short-term answer. Things do get ugly, ridiculous and very dangerous, before they can better. And will they ever actually get better? Only time will tell.

Time, and perhaps some of the insightful discussions at Eventi Letterari by Nobel Prize-winning authors such as Herta Müller, Péter Nádas and Joanna Bator, poets Nora Gomringer, Durs Grünbein and Valerio Magrelli, Greens politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit and architect Mario Botta -- who designed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.



I caught up with Irene Bignardi, to ask her why this year's line-up included some of what could only be described as today's top "irreverent" cultural figures. She disclosed, "irreverent, but also non-conformist, even extravagant" then continuing, "because how interesting would it be to host litterati, philosophers and thinkers that are boring conformists? The irreverent offer surprises, leave us in awe. And one comes to a literary festival to discover new points of view and different angles on reality."

When I asked the Mayor of Ascona, Dr. Med. Luca Pissoglio, about his city, to describe it to someone who had never been he revealed it to be "a stunning village on the shores of Lake Maggiore, which enjoys a splendid microclimate. And when I say 'microclimate' I'm not only speaking of the weather, but a serene and tranquil environment, rich of cultural heritage, which we all breathe here."

They say that if all your friends agree with you, you should find new friends. Bignardi's thought-provoking answer when I asked her how she merges her cinematic and literary background proved inspirational for me, even if at the time I did not agree. She said, "all my life, now quite long, I've dealt with both cinema and -- more so -- literature. For this, I'm very grateful to my directors at La Repubblica, because they allowed me to interpret this hybrid figure, literary and film critic, at once." She continued, "on the other hand, one only needs to pick up my latest book Brevi incontri ("short meetings") to realize that I've frequented many more literary figures than cinematic ones -- and this because I can imagine a world without cinema, but not a world without books."

I've since spent days mulling her statement over and, of course, have come to realize she's absolutely right, even if I'll continue to think -- just a little bit -- my way.



For the complete program of Eventi Letterari Monte Verità, check out their website www.eventiletterari.ch. And don't forget to pack your sense of awe and delight for this year's edition of the festival. Because, as Mayor Pissoglio puts it when asked about his favorite aspect of the festival, "being here, listening to people with such amazing cultural baggage debating with each other makes me dream, allows me to see how much potential exists in a human being. " Then wraps it all up perfectly, "every moment is splendid!"

Images courtesy of Eventi Letterari, used with permission

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, "the greatest movie never made?" The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich's documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea's famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70's. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol's Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol's infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded "The Dark Side of the Moon" album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky "did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?" and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering "I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky's recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O'Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who'd worked on John Carpenter's Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing Jodorowsky's claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch's Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky's Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven's Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky's says "I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love." That's no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.

{This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture}

Greg Miller: Buena Vista
Now through April 30, 2014
Caldwell Snyder, San Francisco



About ten years ago, American painter Greg Miller admitted the truth -- that he's a Pop artist -- and it felt good to own it. And he's right; the soul of his large-scale, high-gloss, chromatically saturated work is popular culture. His is a visual language of gorgeous women, classic cars, found typography, surfboard silhouettes, blue waters, billboards, spaghetti westerns, comic books and memes of childhood. His resin-coated surfaces are as hard and sheer as ice. Even the compositions without heroically beautiful women are quite sexy as a matter of optical appeal. So then, why struggle with embracing the Pop Art moniker? Because despite the myriad visual cues, Miller's art doesn't really look like Pop. It's not industrial. It does not obscure the hand of the artist in its rendering. His aesthetic is maximalist and flurried; his process is demonstrably labor-intensive; and his graphic style is flirtatiously loose, even raw. So while it could not be other than Pop Art, Miller addresses Pop, not like a thinker, but like a painter.



At its core, Pop Art was about the qualities of its time, which was also Miller's childhood. A time of post-war optimism for a clean, well-lit future in which consumerism promised happiness and the west coast was winning the future. Thus, his work absolutely exists in dialog with artists like Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos. Except Miller's side of the conversation is happening in another dialect, the lingua franca of a new generation whose experience of culture is messy, fraught and overloaded with simultaneous information. Hence, the Boschian density of layered and enmeshed detail. But Miller's is a plague of pleasures, free of irony if not obsession. This work is joyful, exuberant and unapologetically about California. Buena Vista is a part of San Francisco where Miller's parents lived in the 1940s. He came of age in the Bay Area of the 1960s and '70s, under the influence of beatniks and poets like Wallace Berman, Wally Hedrick and George Herms. His visual style was born from that fractured aesthetic and the charisma of decay.



In L.A., Miller felt the allure of both Pop and light and space, which blended with his early influences, becoming his mature style of cumulative rendering and high-gloss surfaces. And about those surfaces -- as a formal matter, the sealing fossilizes the paintings, which are built of dozens of layers and benefit from the physical, almost sculptural cohesion. The choice to use surfboard resin instead of varnish to seal them imparts essential insight into Miller's art and to life as well. This technique creates the dazzling effects of depth, contrast and glittering movement familiar in art history, while containing wit and meaning as inherent qualities of the material. Because, always, California.



All images courtesy of Caldwell Snyder Gallery.

After an agonizingly slow ride on the local train to New York, through a string of Connecticut towns, some blighted, some not, with the detritus alongside the track piling up more and more as we approached the Big Apple, we arrived at our final destination, the Neil Simon Theater's Broadway play, All the Way, where the masses of the city's theater-going public, middle class and upper middle class, pack them in night after night in the 1,500-seat space. We had come to see my wife's nephew play George Wallace against Bryan Cranston's LBJ. Of course, Cranston was practically the whole show, displaying his traits as one of the great mimics of our time.

Bryan Cranston is from an ordinary, one might even say typical, background: California, two boys, broken family, father an actor manqué. His LBJ is a bit squiggly, as he doesn't have the president's height and mass ("Son they're all my helicopters," once famously boomed Johnson on a visit to Vietnam). However, Cranston's artificial earlobe extensions help as a match-up to LBJ. Indeed, his impersonation of Johnson is superb and manifestly a result of long research and reflection.

I have never been a fan of Texas macho (and I must admit that the feeling has been reciprocated) -- from LBJ to Charlie Wilson to George W. Bush. I don't include Bush 41 in this category, and I recall a meeting with the then VP and a major Middle East player, who remarked to me as we were leaving, "Why can't they all be like that?"

What All the Way shows is how LBJ wheedled and threatened his way to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, without which we might have had to wait another generation for significant black enfranchisement. This long and deep play covers the first year of LBJ's assumed presidency, and much of playwright Robert Schenkkan's attention is focused on black-white relationships. For me, it provides a different impression of LBJ: a difficult childhood, the Indian threat, the father's failure in business -- out of which LBJ emerges as a president who accomplished something in the service of a good cause, and in the process, as Cranston intones near the end of the play, losing the South for the Democratic Party. Hardly a display of self-interest.

Mr. Schenkkan is supposedly writing a sequel play which will cover a less happy period in Johnson's presidential life -- Vietnam -- where LBJ exhibited a different kind of motivation, as in admittedly not wanting to be the first American president to lose a war.

Interstate 94 leading into Detroit is bordered by tall walls adorned with decorative tiles patterned with stylized motifs of windswept leaves. The design is quaint, but its charm marred by peeling paint on the blue arcs representing the wind. It seems rather odd that it should be deteriorating already, for the walls appear fairly new, probably installed within the last couple of years. Entering the metropolis, these foliated walls continue, belying the surrounding city until the tops of high-rises eventually peer over the fortified highway corridor, betraying its factitiousness. One soon realizes that something might be wrong when it becomes apparent: most of these edifices are vacant, even gutted. The stark contrast between decorative foliage and urban decay becomes very disconcerting. It would be easy to stay on the relatively safe path of the highway and just pass through this place. However, Detroit was my destination.

I have traveled extensively throughout North and South America; and having seen countless cities in varying states of dilapidation, I thought I had a good idea of what to expect in Detroit. I was wrong.

Exiting the interstate was like entering another country. The sheer magnitude of decay and devastation in Detroit is overwhelming. The number of derelict buildings literally falling apart, the piles of rubble and litter all over the streets and sidewalks, the fact that there was so little police presence in some areas, or so little human presence at all, was eerily unsettling.

View down a deserted Detroit street.

Isolated populations inhabit ghost neighborhoods of deserted buildings. In some vicinities, all of the structures on entire blocks have been demolished, leaving only empty fields of weeds, grass and debris.

A street surrounded by fields, the former sites of buildings that were demolished.

In other areas, many houses still remain, but nearly all of them are in various states of decomposition, from boarded up to burned out, possibly casualties of "Devil's Night," the night before Halloween, when people burn abandoned houses for fun.

One of the many burned-out houses in Detroit.

Site of a recently razed house.

Venerable, large, many of these crumbling structures would probably have been cherished as historical homes were they not situated on land that has negative value. Driving between several blocks of row houses, one might see only five or six people. Commercial and industrial zones are even sparser. Crime and civic breakdown are so bad that businesses won't move in.

A collapsing house, apparently recently occupied.

Disquiet and amazement at the scene were swirling around in my mind when I was astounded by another phenomenon. Paintings were everywhere. To be on one of these deserted streets was to be surrounded by a singular mélange of sign paintings, graffiti, mosaics and unusual advertising posters and installations. I didn't go to Detroit to see art. I went there to see the city. Little did I know that even though I wouldn't even make it to see the famous murals by Diego Rivera, I would see more paintings in two days driving through Detroit than I could possibly see in the same amount of time at galleries in Los Angeles. It is amazing that public art flourishes in a city known for trying to sell off its art museum. Perhaps it doesn't need one. The broken down brick and mortar of the city itself has become a huge outré art gallery.

An interesting sign painting on the side of a hair salon. The floral border is done in a graffiti-esque style, as are many other signs in Detroit; many business owners are not totally opposed to graffiti.

Detroit apparently has a long tradition of commercial painting. In contrast to the prefabricated signs that seem to be the norm in most cities, nearly all of the commercial buildings I saw in Detroit were hand-painted with not only text, but also pictures illustrating the services or goods offered inside. Many of these murals were painted in highly original styles, without a trace of predictability or mass-production as one might expect. Sensitively painted images of sundries such as pizzas, fruit, or tires remain on vacant buildings, testaments to a previous occupant. Sometimes, multiple layers of paintings serve as monuments to several generations, as, whether out of respect or neglect, new businesses never removed all traces of predecessors. Now these old paintings serve as foundations for new graffiti, which in many cases, augments and draws attention to them more than it obliterates them.

A building collaged with signage and graffiti.

Strangely, though most vacant commercial buildings are covered in profusions of colorful graffiti, hardly any open businesses have been touched by it. Likewise, very little graffiti has been covered over by other tags. Looking at block after block of tagged buildings, it becomes evident that a fairly strict etiquette is in place, followed assiduously by most graffitists.

And why should there not be one? The abundance of unused buildings leaves plenty of room for everyone who wants to leave a mark. There is little reason to cover over others' work or deface businesses trying to stay afloat, except to make a negative commentary on them. This is graffiti artist paradise: Most of the city is a blank canvas.

In fact, metropolitan Detroit has recently become something of a mecca for street artists, as graffitists from around the world have been flying in to take advantage of the abundant opportunities. Some have even moved to Detroit, including "Revok," formerly from Los Angeles.

The city's international fame among graffitists might be partially due to "The Detroit Beautification Project," a joint effort started last year by a team of street artists including Revok, local galleries, and a spray paint company, who have succeeded in securing approval from building owners and city officials to paint murals in Hamtramck, a small city enclosed by Detroit.

Yet in spite of their abundant opportunities, street artists in metro Detroit face a great deal of opposition. A May 2012 post on Detroit's Metro Times blog reported that residents of Hamtramck circulated petitions calling for the removal of some of the murals; but a counter-petition in favor of them garnered over twice as many signatures. The possibility of mural removal was discussed, but ultimately dismissed, at city council meetings.

I saw a number of the Hamtramck murals. Technically admirable and conceptually prepense, they were more sophisticated than typical graffiti. Still, I was more drawn to the total inundation of graffiti and signage in Detroit itself. Detroit's polyglot accumulations of paintings seemed more vital, more representative of the world around them than Hamtramck's individual artworks. In Hamtramck, each mural seems detached, not quite connected to its surroundings. Possibly, this is because they were more planned and labored, less spontaneous. More probably, it is because they are isolated -- each one exists as a solitary unit, with little or no other painting beside it, in contrast to Detroit's unplanned cacophony of work by different artists from different time periods for different purposes. Bold, colorful painting has taken over Detroit, almost in defiance of the city's breakdown.

Some of the pieces are name tags in styles ranging from hastily scrawled to intricately detailed; some are clever epigrams; others are more overt expressions of affection or antipathy towards certain individuals. The tone of these statements ranges from comic to somber; many memorialize the dead. I even saw a few inscriptions urging people to vote for certain candidates for political offices. (I later heard that one of these candidates had painted over some such graffiti himself, fearing that it would do more harm than good to his campaign.)

Cottage industries have developed around creating custom advertisements, evinced by signs to that effect along with Photoshopped examples of their handiwork pasted amongst the graffiti. Not all of the graffiti was text; much of it was images. Enterprising taggers had even covered entire sides of high-rise buildings in abstract splotches of color.

A waterfall of spray paint.

Wandering around the city, I became more and more intrigued by my painted surroundings. I wondered why I'd never paid much attention to graffiti before. Due to its general illegal or undesirable status, it typically exists in the margins of society. In affluent neighborhoods, a graffito seems reactionary, an obtrusive tattoo on genteel surroundings; in other locales, it could serve as a territorial signal or billboard the identity of the artist, or simply convey some idea or image. Either way, conspicuous graffiti is usually covered over unless it is in an out-of-the way or hard to reach location. Instead of existing in the margins, in the wastelands of Detroit, graffiti is to the fore.

New signage, but the roof on this building is gone.

Empty walls become forums for communication, public diaries. It feels as though the city is literally writing its own history on itself. The experience of traversing one of these areas is poignant and completely engrossing.

Mural on the side of a building in Mexicantown, a Detroit neighborhood.

The more graffiti I saw, the less I noticed all the detritus. I became so absorbed in looking at the paintings that I almost forgot where I was. It's hard not to become depressed when surrounded by such squalor, but the graffiti, combined with the interesting commercial paintings, provides a more interesting and cheerful center of attention. Few people think illicit graffiti should be legal, for few would want their own property altered or defaced without their permission. Therefore, graffiti is generally considered a "bad," in economic terms; and the more noticeable, the worse. However, in the unique case of Detroit, graffiti, more prominent than ever, seems to swing more toward the status of being a "good." Here the graffiti has value because it provides a stimulating contrast to the lugubrious urban landscape.

Is this whimsical drawing graffiti or is it an authorized mural?

Not everyone in Detroit feels that way, of course. In fact, some residents are so opposed to graffiti that they have begun acting as de facto anti-graffiti squads, physically assaulting street artists and damaging their cars, knowing that graffitists won't notify the authorities because their actions are illegal as well. Vigilantes attacked more than 12 artists in the month of June, according to a June 28 article in the Motor City Muckraker webzine. Local disgruntlement is certainly understandable, given the fact that outsiders and even foreigners are coming in to Detroit to leave their mark. Considering graffiti's stigma and its territorial connotations, it's not unreasonable for locals to feel that these graffitists are marking territory that isn't theirs in an effort to take over. It also is hard to dispute that the graffitists, especially the outsiders, are taking advantage of a bad situation. They don't have to live in it. It's easy for them to sail through the murky backwaters in relative peace, unanchored by poverty or deep ties to the area; just as it was easy for me to pass through the city, enjoy its art, and now comment on it.

The graffiti might have value, but to whom? A Detroit art gallery achieved some local notoriety when they removed a mural, wall and all, by the famous professional artist Banksy, from a building without permission from the building owner. In Hamtramck, locals whitewashed an unapproved billboard by professional collective "TrustoCorp", but the collective had it removed and secured, presumably for reuse and eventual sale. According to the May 2012 Metro Times blog post, if it were restored, the billboard would fetch between $10,000 and $20,000.

I'd never had much interest in the genre of professional "street art," as seen in galleries, because its paradoxicality seems to overstretch its credibility. There are many exceptions, but often, its concepts seemed to me to be specious, its motifs derivative, and its relational aesthetics too facilely predicated on spurious disobedience to authority. Perhaps I felt that if this sort of urbane graffiti represented the pinnacle of street art quality, I wasn't interested; or maybe I just hadn't looked at enough graffiti to understand the complexity of its dynamics. At any rate, seeing the art in Detroit opened my mind toward a greater appreciation of graffiti of all kinds.

A mural in Corktown, Detroit's oldest neighborhood. Notice the rusted traffic light in the foreground.

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) website bears a brief essay titled, "Graffiti: Artistic Expression or Vandalism?" It is amazing that people are so shallow as to reduce such a complex and multifaceted issue to a simplistic either-or. To ask such a question is to equivocate a political issue with an artistic one. Art and vandalism are not mutually exclusive. If an artist paints on a canvas that isn't his, is his painting therefore not art? Unauthorized graffiti can be both art and vandalism. Artists who decide to go outside boundaries, whether legal, social or traditional, do so knowing that they might face consequences. For them, the risk is worthwhile. Even some proponents of the genre make a distinction between graffiti and "street art": in their definition, graffiti is illegal, whereas street art is legal. Ironic, considering that the definition of the word "graffiti" doesn't predicate illegality, but street art is often shown inside galleries.

The article on the MDOT website urges anyone who witnesses a graffitist at work on bridges or overpasses to alert authorities. The Michigan government doesn't want the city's problems spilling over onto state-owned highways, so it spent more than $500,000 in 2012 on graffiti removal in the Detroit metro area. Personally, I found the graffiti more interesting and appropriate to the area than the manufactured charm of the ornamental walls.

When people pit graffiti's artistic and legal characteristics against one another, what they seem to want to discuss is: is graffiti good or bad? Could its benefits possibly outweigh its detriments? Does its transgressive nature nullify its artistic value, or vice versa?

Clearly, the issue is more symbolic than functional. In the case of Detroit, the debate becomes purely theoretical, since the authorities don't do much about it anyway, nor should they. Funds are too short. The money is needed elsewhere for major services, and the city recently declared bankruptcy. Traditionally, graffiti is illegal because it undermines property owners' control over their belongings. The owners of most of Detroit's prolifically decorated buildings have long since relinquished control over them. Whether or not the graffiti looks worse than a disintegrated building is an aesthetic issue, not a true problem. Surely the graffiti is not bringing down the property values in most of these areas of Detroit, for the property value is, in many cases, already negative. The graffiti simply isn't doing any harm. Crimes much worse than illegal graffiti are being committed every day throughout the Detroit metro area; some areas are so dangerous that the police won't even enter them. In an effort to shoulder some of the responsibilities abdicated by police, residents of some areas post signs to telephone poles warning visitors that roaming thieves may steal gold jewelry right off their bodies.

The altered social and political dynamics in Detroit have transformed the graffiti dynamics. Rather than an intrusion on a civilized veneer, in Detroit, graffiti is there at every turn, on practically every street corner, reminding passers-by that no one in this city is really in control. Detroit's no-man's-land is, paradoxically, a free-for-all. Instead of sabotaging the look and principles that the city purports to stand for, these artists are working with them. They are finding freedom of expression amid political and social upheaval, creative oases in a rotten world. These artists aren't subverting the property owners, per se, but rather exploiting the oppressive environment that is their canvas, the decayed political and social structures it represents. Graffiti is a symptom of Detroit's problems, hardly a part of them. The more graffiti there is, the more political and social breakdown is symbolized. This is precisely why, in a broken, bankrupt city rampant with theft, violent crime and jailed politicians, graffiti is still such a hotly contested issue. The artists' willful acts lay bare the ineffectuality of the city's governmental infrastructure, and many do not want to admit it. They are so invested in the city that the gritty magnetism of its painted surfaces fails to appeal to them.

One empathizes with those who live in and love Detroit. It is truly regrettable that what was once one of our country's greatest, most vibrant cities has become so desolate and distressed. In this urban desert, the murals and graffiti serve as reminders that the place is still inhabited by people, ones who have feelings, ambitions and creativity. The pictures and words exist to be seen and read, acknowledging viewers passing by as much as they proclaim their creators.

The tattered, painted fabrics of Detroit burned themselves into my brain. They continue to haunt me, prompting me to think of issues that I hadn't before considered, such as the ones I've just discussed. I no longer look at cities or graffiti in the same way. Despite its problems, Detroit possesses a rare and ghastly pulchritude, well worth seeing by anyone interested in graffiti, urban decay, or Americana.



"Never Stop Dreaming/Nunca Dejes de Sonar," a mural by Jen Boyak.

The first thing you should know about The Realistic Joneses is that none of the four characters in Will Eno's play have much more than a nodding acquaintance with reality. The second is that it is quite funny and you'll probably enjoy meeting these Joneses so long as you don't have to live next door to them.

The Realistic Joneses is basically a character study of four eccentrics - two couples each of which is named Jones - who talk largely in non-sequiturs and whose topics of conversation bounce around like a pinball. This produces laughs, but if there is a point to any of it, it is evasive.

Eno is one of the bright young playwrights who first came to attention in 2005 with Thom Pain (based on nothing) and whose Middletown won the Horton Foote Award. The Realistic Joneses was first staged at Yale Rep in 2012 and landed on Broadway last night with a fine cast that can almost make sense of the Joneses' disjointed exchanges.

There are certain Beckettian qualities to parts of The Realistic Joneses, but there is little sense of direction in them. What emerges is more a series of one-liners in brief scenes rather than a play with a cohesive absurdist theme.

The lights come up on a garage-sale of a set with the first Jones couple - Jennifer and Bob - sitting on their patio talking about whatever pops into their heads. Jennifer remarks on the beautiful night and that the house needs painting. Bob, a grump, snipes at everything she says. There are hints that Bob is not well and is having trouble remembering things.

Enter Jones couple No. 2 - John and Pony - who have been hovering in the dark listening in on Jennifer's and Bob's squabbling. They've just moved into a house down the street and have brought a bottle of wine to introduce themselves. Before that first encounter is over, it will be a tossup which pair of the Joneses will end up being the neighbors from hell.

Perhaps the most interesting of Eno's characters is Pony, who is also the most scatter-brained and who is brilliantly played by Marisa Tomei. By her own admission she is a "totally unreliable person filled with terror." She wants to change her life. "Maybe I should go to medical school or get my hair done or something," she says.

Tomei is a master at delivering ditzy one-liners, and in one of the play's longest speeches, in which Pony leaps from one disconnected thought to another, she almost stops the show.

Tracy Letts, who as a playwright knows a thing or two about angry men, is acerbic as Bob, frightened at what his disease is doing to him and taking it out on whoever is at hand, but mainly on his long suffering wife Jennifer. "I'm scared," he confesses at one point. "I don't know what's going to happen. When I was little I thought I would be a good person."

Michael C. Hall is no less enigmatic as John, who is also suffering from a mysterious malady and has visions of being outside himself. He tries to connect to the others, but it's a stretch for him. "Sometimes I forget stuff," he says to the increasingly forgetful Bob, then adds, "Sometimes I remember stuff."

Toni Collette as Jennifer is the most normal of the quartet of Joneses, though she has a penchant for pouring out her innermost secrets, including the details of Bob's health problems, to strangers. Yet she is the anchor of sanity to which the other three are moored.

Not a lot happens in the course of the play, ably directed by Sam Gold. There are flirtations, possibly even consummations, between the different partners. There are confrontations and confessions. There are a couple of deaths -- a squirrel early on and, offstage, a diner in a restaurant.

But at the end, it is hard to know what Eno wants his audience to take away from The Realistic Joneses. All four characters frequently gaze at the night sky. Perhaps they are hoping to find the answer to their collective confusion up there in the stars.

I made a great big canvas. For three weeks it sat in the center of the studio like Jack's massive desk in The Shining. No matter how many "painting miles" I've earned, there's really nothing more terrifying. Of course, I have some ideas, a subject, a palette in my mind. Several in fact. But I've encircled it, ignored it, worked on smaller paintings instead. Finally, today, I took six different shades of pink. Some cadmium red light, rose and violet, and I just attacked it. It's okay, I wasn't totally committed because I knew it was just the ground of probably ten layers that will live above it. But it was a start.




Like Kubler-Ross' five stages of death--Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance--I divide the creative process into eight stages. The first two are (1) Vision and (2) Hope. I don't care who you are or what the medium, whether writer, filmmaker, musician, or lithographer or lawyer, or postman, every person goes through these two phases when they get struck by an idea. Vision tends to come in a flash. Then Hope makes the heart swoon and the mind swell around it. Being a great daydreamer helps. Everyone is an artist.

But the difference between artists who create and artists who walk around pregnant with ideas is the third stage which I call (3) Diving In. That's the scary one. That's the one I had to deal with in the studio with the pink paint. My father is a surgeon and I used to watch him operate a lot when I was a kid. I'll never forget that singular moment, in the theatre of the operating room, when he had to press the scalpel into the flesh and make the cut. That's a surgeon's "Diving In". Mine just had less blood.

The next four stages are (4) Excitement (5) Suspicion (6) Clarity and (7) Obsession. Often I bounce between Excitement and Suspicion--suspicion that perhaps my instincts are wrong; that I'm heading in the wrong direction -- (Anxiety! Despair!) Finally I move on to Clarity. Clarity, like Vision, often happens in a moment-- when the sky opens and I can hear the angels sing. Then my favorite part is the tireless consuming fever of Obsession, the life force of every artist. The entire sequence can tend to form an infinite loop. Some artists just barely or never get out of this mobius strip, like the San Francisco Female Painter (whose name I can't remember) who added paint to the same canvas her entire career with a nervous pack of cigarettes until she died. Although Schubert's Unfinished Symphony was supposedly actually finished, James Joyce apparently couldn't help but to add pages every time he edited Ulysess and it almost never made it to the publisher. Then there's the perhaps sixty percent of you, dear readers, who have an unfinished draft of the next Great American Novel rotting in your desk drawer or hard drive.


Jerry Belson
Photo credit: Los Angeles Times, Associated Press


A year ago, I attended the funeral of the well-known and beloved TV Writer Jerry Belson ("The Dick Van Dyke Show," "The Odd Couple", etc.) whose wife Jo Ann is also an artist. During the eulogy by one of his writer friends, he said that whenever he had massive writer's block he would call Jerry, exasperated. Jerry would say, "Just lay down shit, babe. Just lay down shit." What a liberating mantra! Don't worry if it sucks. Don't worry about ruining it. Just lay it down and get on with it. Making art is risky. Making art takes work. The mortar of all these stages is Discipline and Faith. Then listen, feel and see what's going on. All art works, are living organisms -- if you get out of the way they'll tell you the next move.

The last stage is (8) Resolution. Very elusive. The composer Aaron Copland said he didn't finish compositions so much as abandon them. When it's finally over, it feels like a whole relationship has ended. And then the anticipated rush of doing it all over begins again.



First Person Artist is a weekly column by painter Kimberly Brooks in which she provides commentary on art and process and showcases artists' work from around the world.

The magical girl trope -- that is, stories involving young girls with magical powers -- has been around since the 1960s. Though most commonly found fluttering around Japanese anime (cartoons) and manga (comics) series, the magical girl archetype has most certainly spread to the United States and beyond (think Powerpuff Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.) and is beloved by many.

As an ode to magical girl characters the world round, Toronto-based animator and comic artist MK Harris (@hospitalvespers on Twitter) organized an artistic collaboration (aka collab) encouraging fellow artists to choose a magical girl character, illustrate the character in their own style, and submit their illustration to MK Harris, who would assemble everyone's contribution into a big, colorful collection.



Swarms of artists scrambled to sign up for characters, and over a series of weeks, submitted their illustrations to MK Harris via Twitter using the hashtag #MagicalGirlCollab. The final poster the project yielded offers a beautiful survey not just of magical girl characters over time, but of online artists' different styles.

I caught up with MK Harris to get more background on this fun project. As this Magical Girl collab was inspired by several collabs that came before, one can hope that MK's venture will inspire a whole new slew of artistic projects in turn.



Simone Collins (SC): What, if any, art collabs had you been involved with before?

MK Harris: I've been part of the Disney Ladies collab, the Mario monsters/villains collab, the Animal Crossing New Leaf collab, and a High School AU Hobbit Collab.

SC: Why did you choose magical girls as a subject?

MKH: I chose magical girls because a friend of mine and I wanted to create a collab. It started around Christmas, and a lot of collabs were kicking off then. I wanted something that would offer a lot of variation, and enough selection that people would be able to suggest new characters if someone they wanted wasn't on the list. Because of that we got an interesting mix of classic (Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth), new (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, Daybreak Illusion), and even Western versions of magical girls (Powerpuff Girls, Jem and the Holograms, She-Ra).



SC: What magical girl did you choose to contribute to the collab, and why did you choose her?

MKH: I drew Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura! I watched Cardcaptors on TV here growing up, and then went on to watch the original show and read the manga, so it's always been a part of my life. Sakura is my favourite magical girl, by far! I just like drawing all her floofy dress outfits.

SC: Why do you think that artist collabs have grown so popular over the past couple of months?

MKH: I think it's popular because it's a fun little thing to work on while you do other stuff, and also due to people wanting to contribute to something they like. I mentioned the collabs I've been in, and they're all things I'm interested in, and I wanted to contribute my interpretation of, say, a Piranha Plant, or my favourite Villager from the new Animal Crossing game. A lot of the time it's a mad rush to get your favourite character on a list. It's also a good way to get noticed, because finished pieces are often retweeted and reblogged, and it's really just fun to see the final picture and be able to say 'I was part of this!'

SC: Could you tell me a bit more about your background as an artist?

MKH: I'm an animator in my fourth and final year of Animation at Sheridan College.

Since Deutsche Grammaphon/Universal Music released conductor André de Ridder and the Copenhagen Phil's St. Carolyn by the Sea -- a collection of orchestral compositions by both The National's Bryce Dessner and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood --on March 4, Dessner's seemingly nonstop schedule has shown no signs of slowing.

The composer and guitarist has since contributed to the Kronos Quartet's 40th Anniversary Celebration at Carnegie Hall on March 28, and a reunion with the quartet for a world premiere at Barbican Concert Hall in London is scheduled for May 13. And while his "Murder Ballades" will be performed in the states of Oregon, New York, and Ohio throughout the month of April, Dessner has a full slate of tour dates with The National through August.

In a recent interview, Dessner spoke at length about writing orchestral music, the lesson that rock music teaches, and what ultimately attracts him to contemporary classical music over pop.

Daniel J. Kushner: What influence did your orchestral song cycle "The Long Count" have on your progress as a symphonic composer and the trajectory that led you to the compositions on this new recording?

Bryce Dessner: Part of that experience really  gave me a real appetite for this music and for developing -- you know, further -- my own voice, and so, out of that, "St. Carolyn by the Sea" is in a way a much more, I think, developed composition. It uses some of the same techniques that I was using in "The Long Count," specifically the mirror, kind of canonic behavior in the guitar writing....in "The Long Count" some of the guitar behavior is more sort of riff-oriented, whereas in "St. Carolyn," the guitars are sort of treated as a section of the orchestra, so they sit timbrally like in the orchestral color, like the winds or the brass or the strings.

DJK: What relationship, if any, does the piece "St. Carolyn by the Sea" have to the concerto as a form? It doesn't feature the guitar in a conventional means for a concerto, but I'm curious if there's any correlation.

BD: I think a lot of my favorite electric guitar playing actually behaves that way, where the guitar is used as a kind of shading or a color, and less the kind of rock-driven tendency,  rock tropes. Playing pentatonic scales over orchestral music is not something I want to do or listen to. That tends to be what you think of for an electric guitar concerto, so I really didn't want to write a traditional concerto in that sense.

I think that [in] orchestral music, there's a mystery -- the communion you get of so many musicians working together, [there's] a kind of elusive energy about that that to me is one of the great human aspects of art, in the orchestral tradition. Where else in modern art do you see 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 people making something in real time? The mystery and the magic of that to me feels much more exciting than playing out my solo lines over the top of it. But I would say that doesn't mean I don't want to write a concerto, but I don't think I'd do it for the electric guitar first. --Bryce Dessner

DJK: Is there a particular  instrument that you would be keen to explore in a concerto first?

BD: I think that writing for solo violin, [there are] just so many incredible players nowadays, and young people who are doing really exciting programming, so that would probably be my first. I would say violin or cello.  I've really developed as a string writer in the last four or five years, and I think I have enough to say now with those instruments that writing something like a concerto would be a really exciting goal for me.

 

DJK: In comparing your collaboration with Kronos Quartet on the album Aheym, this new recording St. Carolyn by the Sea has that intense, mesmerizing rhythmic quality that seems characteristic of your work. But here the compositions seem to expand and take shape at a slower, perhaps more brooding pace. Is this in part a result of writing for different instrumentation, or because there are different musicians involved?

BD: The larger pieces are slightly less anxious I think, they have a little less of that driving energy about them. I'm not sure if I made a conscious decision about that or if the instrumentation led me to that. I think specifically in the case of "Lachrimae", it has to do with the musicians I was working with -- so the Amsterdam Sinfonietta commissioned that piece. You know, I often try to think about -- when I write instrumental music, the hardest thing is finding an idea. Once I have an idea, the music kind of comes. But I try to find a way into the piece, is what I always say. That may be these kind of non-musical references that I make, but more often actually, it's who I'm writing for. So in the case of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, they're a really great conductorless ensemble and sinfonietta in Amsterdam--really , really phenomenal players. Really, It's probably one of the best groups like that in Europe. And they play beautifully -- they can play Renaissance or Baroque music, but they also can play new commissions and they're just really good at both. So I think that's part of what led me to "Lachrimae," is I wanted to do something that kind of sat in between those two spaces. And so, the piece itself, being based on the John Dowland "Lachrimae"...there is something kind of peaceful about it, you know, and I think that I wanted to write a piece of music that was breathing a bit deeper in a way and less sort of hurried.

DJK: How do you feel that your music and that of Jonny Greenwood's compliment each other on this album?

BD: I think Jonny does some really inventive things with harmony, and maybe my music is sort of more centered around what's happening rhythmically...people ask me, 'Does the rock music experience benefit at all, writing these kind of longer-form, more ambitious concert pieces?' And I think that there's something you learn as a rock musician about the immediacy of sound. That doesn't mean poppiness, catchiness. It means actually just the kind of primary element of material and keeping things focused in a way, and I hear that for sure in his music, and I hope that it happens in mine.

DJK: You've been very successful at balancing your work as a composer with your very busy schedule as guitarist in the band The National. Do you think you'll have to choose at some point to focus on one more than the other? If so, does one feel closer to your heart?

BD: My life in The National is really about my relationship to my brother [guitarist Aaron Dessner]. We're twins....The National is a place that we really thrive together, and that relationship is kind of fundamental, the most fundamental thing. I'm basically a born collaborator being a twin, and if you look at pretty much all of this music you can see it in that light...I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.

That said, the reason that I do this other music....I find the kind of adventurous spirit of contemporary music -- audiences, ensembles, composers, whatever it be -- I find there's a real open-mindedness that you don't find as much in the kind of pop world or whatever. I think there's an adventurousness and a kind of  excitement about taking risks that is what draws me to it. I think ultimately, for my life, I see myself doing that forever. I can imagine myself as an old man writing music for choir or orchestra. I don't know that I'll be touring six months out of the year in a rock band when I'm 60.

For more information about composer Bryce Dessner and St. Carolyn by the Sea, visit here.

This interview is cross-posted here.

 

On April 23 to April 26, the 15th annual International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) weekend and awards will be taking place in Tampa Bay, Florida. The IIFA awards, known as "The Oscars of Bollywood" are the biggest media event that the Indian entertainment industry has, bringing around 800 million viewers every year. The award show honors the previous years films and talent, and is filled with over the top performances. The awards have previously taken place in Dubai, Toronto, London, and for the first time they are coming to the United States of America. Santiago Corrada, President and CEO of Visit Tampa Bay says, "Our entire region is enthusiastically preparing to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to our destination, and we look forward to serving as great hosts to the biggest and best International Indian Film Academy awards in history."

The IIFA weekend and awards will have various events for the Tampa Bay Region. IIFA Stomp will be the first of many IIFA events that week. It will be on April 23, and will be free and open to the public at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. IIFA Stomp will be like a traditional Indian fair with Indian food, crafts, and music by DJ Ravi Drums and DJ Akbar Sami. The organizers hope to bring a taste of India to Tampa Bay.

The awards will be hosted by two of the top Bollywood actors Shahid Kapoor and Farhan Akhtar, both who have previously hosted the award ceremonies. And just like any Bollywood movie, there will be many dance performances all choreographed by dance guru Shiamak Davar who will be opening his first dance studio in New York this fall. Shiamak says "The team at Wizcraft tirelessly puts together a scintillating show that takes Bollywood beyond the Indian shores. The creative freedom I get on the IIFA stage allows me bring my vision to reality and create something new each time. IIFA is a testimony to the fact that the world embraces Indian Cinema and it is a global phenomenon."

Already, 20,000 tickets have been sold to the event, and the organizers believe it will be sold out. The Bollywood fans in America are very excited that the awards will be taking place in the states this year. Nikhil Chothani, an aspiring Bollywood actor from New Jersey says, "He's excited to be able interact with his favorite stars, and that this will help bring more Bollywood recognition to the states."

For more information on the 15th annual IIFA weekend and awards visit www.iifa.com.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Maxwell Hearn speaks with Scarlett Zuo

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one of the largest collection of Asian art in the Western world, with over 35,000 objects that date back to the third millennium B.C. But just forty years ago, the Met barely had an Asian art presence. "In 1971, the only Chinese art on view at the Met was the ceramics around the great hall balcony, and a room of early Buddha sculptures and the big mural," recalls Maxwell "Mike" Hearn '71, the Met's Douglas Dillon Chairman of Asian Art.

Things changed when Douglas Dillon, former Secretary of the Treasury, joined the Met as president in 1970. According to Hearn, Dillon initially had no real interest in Asian art, but "he recognized that the Met could not afford to ignore Asia, and [that Asian art] was the weakest department in the museum." Dillon became personally involved with building up the Chinese galleries, hiring renowned art historian Wen Fong to recruit staff members and expanding the collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. As a result of his efforts, the Met now boasts ten curators specialized in various aspects of Asian art.

According to Hearn, the support of New York collectors was also key to the success of the Met's Asian collections. "In 1981, we opened the Astor Court, and the Dillon galleries on either side. As soon as we did that, a man named John Crawford, who had the greatest collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy in private hand, said, 'At last, a place big enough for my collection!' That situation has been replicated over and over again." This kind of response from the New York art collecting community, coupled with Dillon's intense commitment to expanding the Chinese art collection has transformed the museum.

Hearn describes how Chinese art is meaningful to the U.S. public, "I think Chinese art, like Chinese culture, offers a very different perspective on the world. To the degree that art belongs to all people, it is a way of enlarging who we are and how we understand the world."

The son of a businessman, Hearn's journey into Chinese art was serendipitous at best. Although he had taken an introduction to art history class at Yale, it was only during his sophomore summer that he visited the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City - which holds one of the world's greatest Chinese collections, and fell in love with Chinese art. "I got so moved that I ended up taking a seminar on Nan Song Shan Shui ("Southern Song Dynasty landscapes"). The teacher, Dick Barnhart, was very eloquent, and we talked a lot about Zen. He was a chain smoker, so as we looked at these misty landscapes, the room would fill up with cigarette smoke. It was very atmospheric and I was completely won over."

After graduation, Hearn had no idea what to do with his art history degree, so he started working on a friend's farm. Meanwhile, he wrote to Barnhart's teacher, Wen Fong. "When I met [Wen Fong], after thirty minutes, he said, 'Would you like to work at the Metropolitan Museum?' To which I said no, because they had no Chinese art." Wen Fong insisted that Hearn try the job because "things are going to change." After working at the Met for three years, Hearn studied Chinese language in Taiwan for two years and earned his PhD from Princeton. He then returned to the Met in 1979, where he has remained ever since.

"The very gratifying thing is that the Met now can show Chinese art at the same high level that people expect to see in American art, European art, or Greek and Roman art," says Hearn. "I feel very proud of the fact that we have works of art that are worthy of China. I hope our visitors from China will feel very proud to see their culture represented here at a high level."

Recently, Hearn curated "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China," the Met's first big contemporary Chinese show. "One of the motivations for doing the show was really to say Asian art has a future and a present. I wanted people who are really fighting the tradition, or transforming it in novel ways. But you recognize in their work that they are still Chinese artists, and that they know something about their own past and are using it."

Before we conclude, Hearn says that three sentences from Qiu Zhijie's triptych selected from 30 Letters to Qiu Jiawa in the show best summarized his vision:

"You need to go back in the past often.
But don't try to leave the present.
The future they say is just imaginary."

_____

Scarlett Zuo is a sophomore at Yale University. Contact her at tong.zuo@yale.edu.

This article also appears in China Hands.

Lila Downs was born with one foot in each of three cultures.

Her father was from Minnesota while her mother was Mexican, and Downs was brought up in both countries. In addition, her mom was very proud of her indigenous Mixtec heritage and dressed in traditional styles, which set her apart from the other mothers of Downs' Mexican schoolmates.

Now, after a career of making roots music accessible to new audiences on both sides of the Rio Grande, Downs has teamed with Nina Pastori of Spain and Soledad of Argentina for Raiz, which finds her again finding the harmonies amid three cultures.

"It was an exercise of a kind and a quite beautiful one," said Downs. "I think it worked out much more bigger than I imagined. I imagined it to be acoustic and it became much more electronic and kind of fun and exciting and danceable. It was beautiful to see that our rhythms can meld and that we really are one root."

There are no definite plans for the three to tour, but Downs, who is always thrilling to see live, will perform with her band at The Town Hall in New York City on April 19th. She will play a few of the Raiz songs and some from her upcoming album, which is due in November.

The project was brought to the singers by someone at Sony, but the women quickly warmed to the idea. After meeting each other, they went back to their home countries and listened to each other's songs, deciding which they'd like to sing. "We pretty much coincided on all the same songs, curiously," Downs said.

The next step was squaring the details: showing the proper respect for the finer points of each tradition while reshaping it in a non-traditional context.

"That part of it is very difficult when you are coming together and trying to be a democracy," Downs said. "Of course a democracy is not easy. So it's a wonderful experience that way because you realize why things get so complicated in the world -- and politics even more. But the poetry of our roots is what makes us come out of it....It's beautiful to think of origin and the reasons things became very different for our three countries."

She has begun work on a new solo album as well and, she said, may call it "Chocolate and Bullets." She will continue to explore the tangled relationship between the United States and Mexico, including the issue of immigration.

Downs' life and career has been about the bumping up of U.S. and Mexican cultures, including the overlooked and sometimes disdained Indian bloodline that courses through Mexico.

"I think our music has been kind of growing at the same time that in [Mexico] that awareness and importance of paying attention to this root," Downs said. "I think the whole nation has been in a sense in denial about its Indian root....[O]ur music has been one of the expressions that have been instrumental to the movement in a way of coming out of the closet with your Indian roots. "

After growing up in both countries, she went to college in the U.S. and, at one point, dyed her hair blonde and was a Deadhead. Always taken with Mexican music, she began performing as part of a group, and then made a couple of solo albums. Her 1999 album La Sandunga, made with her husband and musical collaborator Paul Cohen, got her critical and popular acclaim. With her powerful, versatile voice and rocked-up rootsy sound, she has received Grammys, appeared and sung in films and toured the world.

"I really love to be able to crossover through music and I don't mean that in the commercial sense," Downs said. "It opens the hearts of people and they learn something through song."

Nina Pastori, Lila Downs and Soledad singing together


Downs' big voice with minimal accompaniment


With her band on "Ojo de Culebra" and guest singer Lamari

Scott P. Harris, via beingginger.co.uk


A sweet, earnest redheaded guy from America moves to Edinburgh, Scotland. Bullied as a boy for his copper hair, he hopes and expects this will never happen in the capital of one of the countries of the world where red hair most commonly occurs.

Not to be. Scott P. Harris still suffered taunts and jibes, dumb or cruel redhead jokes, and apathy or downright rejection from women. Was he going to just put up and shut up? He decided not only not to, but to document his redheadedness, its perils and positives, pejorative comments and possibilities for red-haired men. We all, and not just kindred flame-haired spirits like myself, should be glad that he did.

Harris' movie, Being Ginger, uses the most common word for redheads in Scotland, England, and Ireland in its title. In America, the word still most commonly applies to spice, which is, of course, part of the idea behind its use as a tag for us. The word "ginger" is gaining ground here, though, for better or worse. One of the things Being Ginger does is to show how insults can be turned back on the would-be teaser, rejector, or bully, and make a space where the former victim finds creativity and even contentment.


from Being Ginger, via beingginger.co.uk


It's hard to make a movie, and harder to make a movie about yourself. When Harris and I talked about redheads on WNYC's The Takeway this past February, for Valentine's Day, he spoke of some of the difficulties and vulnerability inherent in doing a project about stereotypes and bullying in a personal context. Delightfully, and often movingly, he has succeeded.

To help him Harris enlisted two good friends, Lou McLoughlan and Ben McKinstrie. Says Harris of Lou, Being Ginger's camerawoman and director of photography, and Ben, his married (and very funny) friend to whom he logically turns for relationship advice, "I can't think of anyone who could have filled either's role in the film; I feel like I caught lightning in a bottle, and they were a huge part of that." Cat Bruce, animator and illustrator, helps capture how being a ginger felt to Harris as a child -- and still affects him, especially when he's trying to talk to, or -- perhaps more accurately -- being confronted by, women.

Being Ginger is getting attention for being about redheads -- redheaded organizations and conventions, like Holland's Redhead Day, featured in the film, love it. Harris, though, is intent on more than his fiery hair in his work. "The truth is that I wanted to make a film about the long term impact bullying has on adults who've long since left the schoolyard," he says. "I think it's easier for an audience to take in a serious message if it's wrapped in humor."

After opening in Europe and in selected U.S. locations for short runs, Being Ginger has come to New York. On April 4, The New York Times gave Being Ginger an understanding review in advance of its opening tonight in New York in the Village, at the Quad Cinema. Go and see Being Ginger while it's here, from April 4-10. Enjoy this intelligent and positive movie. And bring a redheaded date -- if you're lucky enough to get one.

Anne Margaret Daniel 2014

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with writer, director, and performer Ben Rimalower about his upcoming show at Birdland, The Lady's Got Potential, featuring Natalie Joy Johnson, Molly Pope, Alexandra Silber, Elizabeth Stanley, and Sarah Stiles. We talked about the show (Monday, April 7 at 7 p.m.), the talented women singing, Broadway divas, and what it takes to become an icon.

You based The Lady's Got Potential on an article you wrote for Playbill.com of the same name. What do you think connects all the women that are singing -- what made you choose them as up-and-coming leading ladies?

They are all women that I've seen on stage in musicals or cabarets, but they also all have this quality -- you can call it the "it factor" if you want. In musicals, there's an extra dimension that some performers have that's intangible. It's beyond how deftly they play the characters or sing the score. It's this other thing -- a charisma they exude. And the music takes it to an almost magical level. The star quality of these performers is why I think musicals are so powerful. It's certainly what excites me about anything I watch, especially for women in musical theater. The women performing Monday are the up-and-coming actresses who have something special and really do it for me.

I'm interested in how performers, especially female performers, take that "it factor" you talk about and then become icons. Do you think we live in an age where one of these women could become to future generations what Patti, Bernadette, and Barbra have become to ours? Do we have the apparatus in place for that to happen, or are we past that in the age of YouTube where everyone can be a star for five minutes?

Well, it's changed, you know. In some ways we have more of an apparatus than ever. I certainly think that something like YouTube allows for it to happen more. We live in an age of democracy of content -- you don't need somebody to invest twenty million dollars to make you a star. If you're original and interesting and tenacious enough, you can make those 15 minutes of fame something more. I think mostly it's dependent on the content. Even in an earlier time -- for Barbara Streisand to become an icon, she had to be in Funny Girl first. For Patti LuPone she had to do Evita. Having good content is key no matter what medium, and I think that's always going to be true.

So what are we going to hear Monday night -- what are are some of the songs they're singing?

Molly Pope is singing "Chicago," the Judy Garland number, which she will be fabulous at. Alexandra Silber will be singing "Tom" from Hello Again, which she did a wonderful job of in the Transport Group's revival. She might do my favorite version of anyone who's sung it -- she has such sweet voice in that range, and she belts in a really nice way. Elizabeth Stanley is doing a Sarah McLachlan-like version of "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" -- she did it in her show at 54 Below and it's really fabulous. Natalie Joy Johnson, who's currently starring in Kinky Boots on Broadway, is singing the late great Damon Intrabartolo's amazing song "A Quiet Night at Home," which she did so well on the Bare original cast recording. Sarah Stiles is doing the brilliant "I Know Things Now" that she did in Into The Woods last summer in Central Park, when she was the greatest thing ever.

She was also great in the most recent version of Dan Fishback's Material World at Joe's Pub -- which had another of your performers, Molly Pope, blowing the roof off the place.

Well that's part of that icon thing -- and that's a great example, because when you see Molly stop a show like that, it's not just what she's doing in that moment, it's the fact that it makes you recall your previous experiences of Molly stopping any number of shows she's been in. If she were to not be her best on a night, she has a way of being disappointing in a way that other performers can't be. But when Molly delivers on your expectations, let alone when she exceeds them (which she often does), there's this whole other level that's exciting to be part of.

Which really brings a double meeting to your title The Lady's Got Potential -- these women all have potential in their careers certainly, but each one also has the potential to blow us away in the moment. And that's setting up stakes for us -- we're going in knowing that there's a possibility that this night is going to be something really special.

That is so right on. And it's just not the ladies, it's also the songs and the roles that have potential as well. Going back to Sarah Stiles in Into the Woods -- you go in there knowing who Little Red is -- you've seen the video of the original production a thousand times. But then Sarah comes out and somehow eclipses the original production and does something new that's thrilling. Or like Elizabeth Stanley -- when I saw her as Gussie in the Encores! production of Merrily We Roll Along, she did something bigger and better than I had ever seen before.

I'd like to take each of the performers singing Monday and do a little word association. I'm going to say each of their names, and I want you to say the first word that comes to mind.

Haha. I can do that.

Elizabeth Stanley.

Sassy.

Alexandra Silber.

Gorgeous.

Sarah Stiles.

Hilarious.

Natalie Joy Johnson.

Show-stopper.

Molly Pope.

Thrilling.

Those are all great.

Wait can I change Natalie? Can we make her balls to the wall?

Definitely. Balls to the wall. I think that's a good preview of what's going to be happening Monday night. Thanks for talking to me about what sounds like a thrilling evening.

Thank you!

For tickets and more information, visit www.birdlandjazz.com.

*Photo Credit: Christian Coulson

Not to put too fine a point on it, director-choreographer Martha Clarke's version of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera, at the Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater, seeps across the footlights as if it were The Onepenny Opera.

There's something so plodding about the spoken and sung tempos that even though there's some nudity--bare-breasted women and bare-chested men--writhing in corners at various times while the focal characters act out Brecht's take on John Gay's 1728 Beggar's Opera--the result has the mired quality of trying to run in dreams. No matter how hard the dreamer strives, little acceleration is achieved.

The mystery is how this came about when so many worthy people are associated with the enterprise, beginning with Clarke herself. Her missing the mark has to do with the vision she has for this production. On Robert Israel's blank gray box with an upstage opening the other side of which which a Weill-ish honky-tonk seven-man band plays, Clarke looks to be going after tableaux based on George Grosz, Ernst Kirchner and Max Beckmann works. She frequently succeeds, but the whole point of tableau is that it's still.

And look at the cast she's chosen. To begin with, the much-awarded performance artist John Kelly as a street singer starts the proceedings slinking around the stage while sourly intoning "Mack the Knife." Not a bad kick-off. Immediately thereafter, F. Murray Abraham as Mr. Peachum, the nefarious lord of the beggars, raises his voice for "Morning Anthem" and almost instantly is joined by Mary Beth Peil for "Instead of Song." Whereupon their chanting raises a question about Threepenny Opera vocal demands.

Anyone who knows the Brecht-Weill catalog understands that the definitive interpreter is Lotte Lenya. No brief can be made about the pure quality of her guttural, slightly high-pitched sound. Was hers good singing by definition? Probably not, and yet, she had a presence, a commitment, a sly sardonic cast--qualities that somehow elude Abraham and Peil. Their singing is such that while they're at it, they seem to be inviting sympathy for deficiencies they can't correct.

On the other hand, when Sally Murphy as Jenny delves into "Pirate Jenny," she does so with a sweet, nicely controlled voice. But while the lyrics tell Jenny's vengeful story, somehow Murphy's dulcet delivery misses the ballad's infuriated pith.

The best combination of singer and song is a split between Laura Osnes as Polly Peachum and Lilli Cooper as Lucy Brown, the two women fighting over which is Macheath's favored wife.

Osnes, until recently Broadway's Cinderella and now playing a Cinderella of an entirely different sort, does well with "The Barbara Song," especially when she gets to the damning spoken word "sorry." (This Threepenny is Mark Blitzstein's translation.) Murphy delivers the best turn of the two-act revival with "Ballad of the Drowned Girl," imported here from the Brecht-Weill "Das Berliner Requiem."

What about Macheath? He's played by Michael Park, handsome and chisel-featured in a stylish gray pin-stripped suit. (Donna Zakowska's costumes are '20s-evocative throughout.) And when the score is examined, it's Macheath who delivers Brecht's most cynical advice about surviving in a dog-eat-dog world. Park slings the oom-pah warnings into the audience with verve but lacking Macheath's unrelenting menace. Again a strong voice is fine but not everything.

It's that lack of menace, of danger, of the fear that at any moment a knife could slash an unsuspecting throat that's the prominently missing element in Clarke's approach. Her pacing is the problem. It's one thing to decorate the stage with bawdy details, but when things move this slowly, anything and everything threatening leaks out.

Writing during the Third Reich, Brecht and Weill were responding to the undercurrent of fear running through the defeated post-Great War Germans as they appropriated Gay's tale of the amoral man--amorality being a hallmark of the time--creeping round the corners of society, even eventually brought to the gallows and escaping death.

If there is little or no edge to what Macheath is about as he cheats his way through the city, facing as an equal another larcenous competitor, befriending corrupt officials, dangling women on strings, bribing precinct police and enmeshed in other skulking activities, then it's a Threepenny Opera in a pickle.

Speaking of dogs: For Clarke's opening tableau, she has a bulldog (Romeo) licking the leg of a collapsed lady of the night. Romeo returns much later as Queen Victoria on a cart, thereby providing Clarke's best sight gag. When it struck Clarke that the English monarch and a bulldog are unmistakable lookalikes, she must have had a good laugh. (Well, the bulldog is the Great Britain mascot.) And now everyone else is in on the joke. Nevertheless, when a dog steals a show by way of a couple of four-legged walk-ons, you know something major is amiss.

We were invited to the opening of the Dr. Kevorkian art exhibit at Gallerie Sparta in West Hollywood. It was a somber event with 11 of Dr. Kevorkian's paintings on display as well as the "Thanatron," the assisted suicide machine he invented and used to help end the lives of 130 people.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian died in 2011 at the age of 83 from a blood clot, and he did not end up needing the device he had invented to help others, who were terminally ill and suffering. He wanted the nation to change its collective mind, and laws, about euthanasia and physician assisted suicide for the terminally ill and suffering. He felt it was humane, and so he forced the issue when he videotaped himself actually administering the lethal injections to a man dying of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1998. He was tried and sentenced to prison where he served eight years for second-degree murder. He was released in 2007 after promising not to help anyone else die or break any laws. In one of his most famous "60 Minutes" interviews he said, "We have lost all common sense in this country due to religious fanaticism and dogma." Largely because of Dr. Kevorkian, there are now three states in the U.S. that have legalized physician assisted suicide.

He was a pathologist, a composer and a painter. Painting mostly from l994 to l996, he had a style all his own. At the gallery are portraits of his parents, some pop-art related to music and politics, and the most intriguing paintings are of people in various stages of death, dying or diseased.


"Coma," photo courtesy Gallerie Sparta.


"Paralysis," photo courtesy Gallerie Sparta.


"Brotherhood," photo courtesy Gallerie Sparta.

Here is the Thanatron.


Photo: George Keller

It is being auctioned off with the starting bid of $25,000. It worked via an intravenous drip. Dr. Kevorkian would insert the needle and start the first two fluids. The first tube held a saline solution, the second a pain killer and these would go into the patient together. Then the patient themselves would press the button to administer the potassium that would stop the heart. It looked like it had been well used, and appeared to be kind of simple and crude in a way. It comes with the case that Dr. Kevorkian built himself.


All the paintings and the Thanatron will be on display at Gallerie Sparta through April 30th. Anything that does not sell with be donated to the Smithsonian.