Culture & Arts

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'1604 S. La Brea Avenue' 12"x 11.5"

Sometimes I'll paint the same composition at different times of the day or night and see how a place can change more in minutes or hours than it does in years.

'1605 S. La Brea Avenue 12"x 11.5"

Since I like to title the paintings with the street addresses they depict, I just added a number to the address in this case since the location was the same. Titling paintings this way allows me to tell the viewer something specific and true about what the painting shows, but doesn't emotionally color it like soundtrack music.

Earlier this month, composer Julia Wolfe was a bit jet lagged returning to New York from South Korea, where she was on tour with Bang on the Can, but is already back to work on her ambitious choral piece Anthracite Fields, having its premiere this month by the mighty Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia.

Anthracite Fields turned into a docu-oratorio about the mining industry and Pennsylvania mining community that thrived in the early 20th century. The piece was commissioned through New Music U.S.A. and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and is having its first performances during Mendelssohn's 140th anniversary season in Philadelphia. It will also be performed during the New York Philharmonic inaugural biennial in May at Avery Fisher Hall.

Mendelssohn Club artistic director-conductor, Alan Harler, piloted the project and is a leading advocate for new choral music and has piloted 48 commissions for The Mendelssohn's since 1988. Wolfe has composed works in every musical form, both contemporary and classical, including chamber works, concertos, symphonies and vocal music. Wolfe, her husband Michael Gordon and David Lang, founded Bang on the Can in the 80s. In a phone interview from New York, Wolfe talked about how she approached the subject musically.

The composer went into the project knowing that she would be writing about the mines, but hadn't formulated any content or musical framework for the piece. She was driving to Philadelphia, for research, but detoured to the former mining community, she said.

"I like to keep myself challenged. Anthracite Fields was a research project, in large part, searching down information about this area in Pennsylvania. I'm a New Yorker and I really had no idea what I would encounter when I got to this museum about coal mining... I had a vague idea of the industry and I discovered this amazing history there," she said.

"All of the curators of the mining museums are dedicated to keeping the history accurate. They are dedicated to preserving this history," Wolfe recalled. In addition to going into the actual mines, Wolfe met with many families who recounted stories of their relatives living in a mining community.

Composer Julia Wolfe (photo courtesy of Mendelssohn Club)

Community solidarity, then and now:

At the end of the 19th century until the depression years, it was the dominant industry in the area and Anthracite coal was touted as the "cleanest" coal available. But however they could pitch the product, the mining industry was the real story," Wolfe observes.

The stories of the mines deal with issues of backbreaking and hazardous working conditions for the miners and depressing living conditions for their families. But Wolfe had to pick "five story threads" she said, to bring together the life and history there. "So there were things I had to omit. One of the big turning points in the labor movement and the unions forming, because there were so many deaths, for instance, and hazards -- to get politicians to pay attention to the dangers of mining," she explained.

The tragedies though couldn't be avoided, "Yes, mining is not the safest business and many families had relatives who had died of lung disease or dealt with very serious medical issues from conditions working in the mines," Wolfe said.

"The first movement called Foundation is based on this index of a list of the entire minor who had been in accidents from 1859 to 1915 approximately and it is overwhelmingly long. So I took all of the men with the first name John and one syllable last names, John Ash, John Ayer, etc. Easy musically to work with two syllables. It almost turned into a dirge of names," Wolfe explained. "I have narration about how coal is formed- The briny seeds coming out of roots and branches, and then the names go into these beautiful, ethnic names, and multi-syllabic, Italian, Polish, Welsh names."

But Wolfe also wanted to show the whole spectrum of life around the mines and the community solidarity that would "to honor the spirit of these people, the relationship with the earth and humanism." she said.

Along with reflection on the community's "sense of solidarity," Wolfe delves into the issues of worker conditions and safety, as expressed by local mine organizers and union leader John L. Lewis, whose politically fiery speeches the composer scored. "The language in his speech is so beautiful," Wolfe quotes Lewis' humanist polemic about the toll on workers and their families, that the public "can't be detached from the lives and conditions of the miners."

Philadelphia choreographer Leah Stein will devise movement elements for the singers to dramaticize the stories and themes. Accompanying the Mendelssohn Club Chorus will be Bang on the Can All-Stars and, Wolfe says, an "amplified ensemble" of six more players with instrumentation including piano, electric guitar, cello, bass, percussion and other instruments.

Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia premieres Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields April 26-27 at The Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral 13-19 South 38th St. Philadelphia | for performance times check - www.mcchorus.org

Being gifted is not enough. The real question is whether or not you can deliver on the promise of your talent. For some people, a creative career means constantly shaping, refining, and honing one's art. For others, it may mean finding a financially rewarding comfort zone and staying there.

In the process of adapting his 1968 comedy hit, The Producers, for the musical stage, Mel Brooks created a great number for the actress playing the part of Ulla Inga tor Hansen Benson Yansen Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson Bloom. In the following clip, Uma Thurman sings "When You Got It, Flaunt It."

I had the strangest sensations while viewing Asphalt Watches, a full-length animation feature from Canada that was screened during the 2014 SFIndie Film Festival. Created by Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver (two filmmakers with a strong track record as visual artists), Asphalt Watches brings to life the storyboards they created in 2000 while hitchhiking across Canada from Vancouver to Toronto.

The film also gives the strange impression that its creators are flaunting what they can do with new technology. Although this full-length feature took eight years to complete, it was hand-drawn using Flash animation. The colors are magnificent; the creativity is often staggering (Asphalt Watches received the award for the Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival). As the filmmakers explain:

"We saw Gary Panter's Flash animation, Pink Donkey, right before leaving on our trip in 2000 and thought 'Ha ha, is this a Flash ad?' It's easy to use without fancy computers or crazy equipment. The file sizes are small, but you can export it extra-large because it's vector based. We use it for 2D digital animation made in a classical style with frames and layers."

Asphalt Watches begins as its two protagonists -- Bucktooth Cloud (a floating cloud holding an umbrella) and Skeleton Hat (a grey nebbish with part of a moustache) -- find themselves in Chilliwack, British Columbia, attempting to follow the instructions written in an outdated train-hopping manual as they try to get out of town. Before they left Vancouver, Shayne Ehman had been involved in a strange battle with some neighbors across the street. As he recalls:

"I had Christmas lights up in my room and had no curtain. One day, the children from across the street came over and said that their grandpa had hit their grandma over the head with a frying pan and it was my fault because I had Christmas lights in my room which were red and my room directly faced their house. A battle of lawn decorations ensued. It was clearly a good time to leave Vancouver."

Much of the artwork in Asphalt Watches is quite impressive. However, the experience reminded me of several screenings I attended (back in the day) when Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation offered films that were considered radically subversive and hilariously funny. Although many of the folks in the enthusiastic audiences for those screenings were half baked and quite giggly, I found that viewing Asphalt Watches without the help of drugs (or an audience high on drugs) made the film seem surprisingly boring and juvenile. Here's the trailer:

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Back around 1960, Anita Gillette was starting to make a name for herself on Broadway as a reliable understudy for ingenue roles. Her Broadway debut was as one of the Hollywood Blondes in Gypsy (she understudied the role of June). David Merrick subsequently hired her to understudy Anna Maria Alberghetti in Carnival! and, late in the show's run, she took over the role of Lili.

I first saw Gillette perform as Sarah Brown in the New York City Center's 1965 revival of Guys and Dolls and in Woody Allen's 1966 comedy, Don't Drink The Water. During the 1960s, Gillette appeared in some notable flops (All American, Mr. President, Kelly, Jimmy) as well as being one of the replacements in the role of Sally Bowles in the original production of Cabaret .

Although she gained popularity for her appearances in Neil Simon's Chapter Two, They're Playing Our Song, and Brighton Beach Memoirs and as Mona in 1987's Moonstruck, in between her stage gigs there were plenty of appearances on game shows and soap operas. More recently, she was seen as Liz Lemon's mother on 30 Rock .

Last year, when The Rrazz Room scheduled an appearance by Gillette, I was eager to hear her perform. She finally made her San Francisco cabaret debut at Feinstein's at the Nikko in late January with an extraordinarily appealing act entitled After All.

Unlike many of musical theatre's aging dames who turn to the cabaret circuit late in life, the 77-year-old Gillette's voice is still in excellent shape. On March 4th (along with Ben Vereen) she was one of the honorees at the 29th Bistro Awards (which recognize outstanding achievement in New York's cabaret, jazz, and comedy scene).

A delightful raconteur, Gillette had the audience doubled over in laughter as she described her experiences working with Broadway legends like Joshua Logan, Ray Bolger, and Nanette Fabray as well as the time she had a few too many martinis at a White House function and ended up with President Lyndon B. Johnson's hand firmly cupping her breast. Descriptions of her long friendship with Irving Berlin (and what it was like to have Ethel Merman running interference for her when she was pregnant) were balanced with disarming arrangements of Jerome Kern's haunting "Yesterdays" (which she sang at Otto Harbach's funeral) and "Shall We Dance?"

Gillette sang some delightful novelty items which I would never have expected to hear during a cabaret act. These included Bob Merrill's poignant "Mira" (from Carnival!) and Irving Berlin's "The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous" (from Mr. President). A special treat was a song by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz that had been cut from The Gay Life during its pre-Broadway tryout ("I Lost the Love of Anatol") as well as Victor Herbert's famous "Italian Street Song" from 1910's Naughty Marietta, "Cuanto le Gusta" (originally sung by Carmen Miranda in 1948's A Date With Judy), and "Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherries" from George White's Scandals of 1931.

Gillette has always been a gifted songstress with strong interpretative chops and a solid ability to belt. Her renditions of "How Deep is the Ocean?" (Irving Berlin), "He May Be Your Man" (Joe Williams), and "Are you Havin' Any Fun?" (Sammy Fain/Jack Yellen) brought down the house. In the following clip, Anita can be seen performing at a Dancers Over 40 event.

I left Gillette's performance feeling intensely fulfilled and immensely satisfied by the work of a delightful performer who chose to take some curious risks with repertoire. The last thing I expected to hear was a snippet of "Ode to a Bridge" (written by Moose Charlap and Eddie Lawrence for 1965's big Broadway flop, Kelly)!

To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape

Lou Reed is dead; long live the new King of New York: Kenyon Phillips.

When dear Lou left this mortal coil last October, a pall settled over "our" New York -- which includes the boroughs, New Jersey, Long Island and geographical pockets throughout America and around the world that are "New York" in soul, spirit, and the bard's beloved "chi" energy-force. Our rock 'n' roll poet laureate was gone. Fear not, I will refrain from adding to the host of hosannas to Lou and his importance to the silent strain of all "New Yorkers" who recognize that cool can never be co-opted at a CBGB contemporary menswear designer outlet or the like. We know who we are and what Lou meant to us. Now we have a reason to stop mourning.

I first met Kenyon Phillips in the early 21st Century, when Lou's career as a recording artist was slowing down considerably -- especially for those of us who treasure the era wherein one or two releases from rock and jazz musicians was the norm. Phillips was commandeering a band which performed under the name of Unisex Salon. They reminded me of the Velvet Underground; noisy yet melodic, sensuous but always sardonic, frightfully real yet comfortably surreal, modern but mindful of their influences, and always proud of the manner in which they portrayed the gorgeous in the grotesque. Akin to the Underground, Salon had a small but fervent following. They were outsiders in a city that was rapidly being swallowed by insiders.

Kenyon brought me on board to be band's publicist -- an easy job as they were beautiful to look at -- though brutal in their execution. Like Lou's Underground, Salon's media reviews were not always positive. Nonetheless hipsters, dilettantes, kinky Wall Street executives, porn actresses, cable TV divas, and downtown frat boys walked on the wild side to see and hear them. After much prodding from Mr. Phillips, I emerged from musical retirement to become the band's bassist. Our first gig was opening for Lou Reed and several other local luminaries of a bygone era, including Garland Jeffreys and Syl Sylvain, for a benefit at the Bowery Ballroom. Of course, we hung backstage to meet Lou. We expected the worst -- Lou's volatile personality was well documented. Not on that starry, starry night. The King of New York loved his subjects! Lou gazed at Kenyon the way people used to gaze at Lou -- with equal measures of disbelief, admiration, and fascination. When Lou jovially agreed to be in a photograph with us -- a verboten idea to begin with as Lou never, ever, ever took requests or hardly posed in pictures - I knew the torch had been passed -- or perhaps dropped -- onto Kenyon's lap -- flames notwithstanding.

After a year of gigs that were more like "happenings" ala Andy Warhol's Plastic Exploding Inevitable than musical performances - although the music was phenomenal -- I departed the Salon. They had their crack at the mainstream soon after by way of a network reality show appearance - however Kenyon and his troupe were too far ahead of their time for any American demographic. Even the show's host, Tommy Hilfiger, who has a yen for rockers, was baffled by Kenyon. Shades of Lou!

Time marched on and Kenyon's artistry evolved -- he formed another remarkable band Roma! He composed and produced songs for Amy Poehler, Joey Arias, Raven O., and Sherry Vine. You've seen Kenyon's dancing silhouette in campaigns for Apple iPod. You've heard his compositions on network and cable TV -- Showtime's Shameless, CBS Eleventh Hour,MTV's Teen Cribs, and Nickelodeon's The Mighty B! among others. Kenyon's current genre defying ensemble The Ladies In Waiting have found a home at Joe's Pub deep among the luxury condos and chic boutiques of Lower Manhattan. His debut solo EP, Fire in the Hole, sounds like nothing and everything you've heard before.

The new King's latest endeavor is The Life + Death of Kenyon Phillips -- a dreamlike autobiographical rock opera. Like most great works, its genesis was simple: a few of Phillips' artistically astute colleagues urged him to expand his patented rock cabaret format to a full-fledged piece about himself. Recalls Phillips "it struck me as narcissistic, self-indulgent, and intriguing - I loved it!"

Phillips found his template after viewing the film Lola Montes -- a 1950s release directed by Max Ophuls which portrays the romantically and politically tumultuous life of the 19th Century courtesan who bedded, according to an impressed Phillips, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, and the King of Bavaria. Her story is told by way of a series of flashbacks in which the subject assumes the guise of a circus performer -- and a ringmaster acts as narrator. In Life and Death, Phillips assumes both aforementioned roles with the ringmaster serving as Kenyon's agitated alter ego.

The opera commences with the Kenyon's accidental conception and his graphically Monty Python-esque re-enacted birth, and follows through with various childhood traumas, adolescent sexual dalliances and fantasies, therapy sessions (helmed by Michael Musto, no less), his migration to New York, 9/11, his artistic triumphs and failures, and other incidents; some true, others not so much. "My intention was to create something original -- even though there is nothing new under the sun. This project comes from a desire to take the traditional one-man show idea of 'here's my life story -- and throw a grenade at it."

The world premiere of The Life + Death of Kenyon Philips will take place at Joe's Pub in New York City on May 2, 2014. The King is dead. Long live the new King of New York.

At the turn of the twentieth century when 'Iolani graduate Sun Yat Sen, the founding father of the Republic of China was leading a revolution, German Protestant missionary Richard Wilhelm was also breaking new ground in China.

Modest and self-effacing, in 1899 Wilhelm began his own revolutionary passage to China -- single-handedly bringing the jewels of ancient Chinese wisdom to the West. By the end of his life in 1930, he had translated, among other works, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects of Confucius, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and perhaps most famously -- the I Ching.

This missionary, who never baptized a single person was to influence Western culture profoundly, in ways he could never foresee.

His translation efforts were monumental and at the time, largely unsung. His task was made doubly difficult given the tumultuous era of Chinese history he was living in. He also labored at a time when many Westerners thought of the Chinese as no better than coolies, who needed to be civilized with a heavy dose of Christianity.

Much to the chagrin of his church, Wilhelm eschewed baptizing the masses. His respect for the Chinese was too great. He said did not want to "make distinctions between Christian and Pagan so that the hypocrites would push their way in and honest hearts will be repelled."

Wilhelm's genius -- his ability to interpret faithfully the spirit of the classical Chinese philosophers -- was recognized by C. G. Jung, one of the intellectual trailblazers of the twentieth Century. Jung's 1949 forward to the English translation of Wilhelm's I Ching, is considered a classic of the Jungian canon.

Wilhelm's remarkable life is chronicled in a new documentary film, Wisdom of Changes: Richard Wilhelm & The I Ching. Written and directed by Bettina Wilhelm (his granddaughter), it was screened at a March 2014 conference held at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. A well-known feature film maker in Germany Ms. Wilhelm had no expectations that her documentary would be anything other than subjective.

Her goal was to discover her grandfather, who died more than twenty years before she was born. This undertaking took four visits to China -- two for research and two shooting the video.

Set amid the upheaval of fin du siècle China, there are really three protagonists in this story -- Richard Wilhelm, China, and the Book of Changes -- a work that is as seminal to Chinese culture as the Bible is to the West. One of the oldest of the classic Chinese texts, the I Ching provides an ancient divination system that is used to this day to gain insight into every facet and circumstance in life.

Since its first publication in 1924 in German it has inspired a plethora of art, philosophy, literature, and music outside China. It has touched artists and intellectuals ranging from Herman Hesse to George Harrison.

This was a work that Bettina Wilhelm was familiar with, even as a young child. Not surprisingly, a copy of it sat on the family bookcase. It was pulled from the shelf as a family tradition every New Year's Eve to divine the future.

The I Ching takes a lifetime to assimilate in one's weltanschauung and the video does an admirable job of providing a primer. Wisely, the director allows others to expound on the Book of Changes through interviews with some very articulate academics, Richard Smith and Henrik Jäger.

A caveat. If you haven't used the I Ching, understanding this arcane text is challenging. A viewer who has even a cursory experience with the book will be better able to appreciate the video.

If you take away nothing else from the documentary, you'll appreciate the dedication and pure grit that characterized Richard Wilhelm. Not only did he toil in obscurity at translating intellectually daunting works -- he labored sometimes in the midst of war zones.

Viewers with a Jungian bent would not be surprised that Wilhelm understood the innate intelligence of the unconscious. Shortly before finding the ultimate I Ching master who would eventually convince him to translate the Book of Changes, he had a prophetic dream that foretold their meeting -- right down to the man's name.

Wilhelm approached the world intuitively and it helped him to function on a number of levels, but particularly as a brilliant translator. His intellect, combined with his intuition, enabled him to grasp the profound and nuanced teachings of China's greatest thinkers. This task would have been challenging for an educated Chinese speaker, much less for a foreigner.

Not surprisingly, it was his intuition that landed him in trouble with German academia, which couldn't accept his nonlinear modus operandi. This wasn't a problem, however, for Carl Jung, who met him in Europe and developed a lifelong friendship and collaboration.

As the filmmaker stated, "he was an unconventional but religious man."

He was also a man of courage and great humanity. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when German troops attacked Chinese villages, he intervened as mediator, helping to avoid further bloodshed. Similarly, at great personal risk, Wilhelm agreed to remain in China as head of the Red Cross during the First World War.

Ms. Wilhelm does a stellar job of balancing Chinese history, the I Ching, and the life of her grandfather in an 87-minute film. It has been beautifully shot by Peter Indergand -- an Academy Award nominated videographer. Bettina Wilhelm has also deftly employed marvelous still photos obtained from dozens of archives.

It is not difficult to understand why it took her six years to complete this masterpiece.

My advice -- purchase the video. You will need to see it several times.

There are few operas that can be quite as much fun as La Cenerentola, Rossini's delightful version of the Cinderella story, and there are few mistreated stepdaughters and Prince Charmings who make such a perfect couple as Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena, each of whom brought a first-night audience at the Met Opera's current revival to their feet cheering.

Camarena is quite simply the most thrilling young tenor singing today. He was a knockout in the Met's revival of La Sonnambula earlier this season and he scored another one last night when he stepped in for an ailing Juan Diego Florez for the first of the three performances of La Cenerentola he is scheduled to sing.

The Mexican-born tenor has a voice that is as pure and brilliant as gold. He tosses off complicated runs and cadenzas effortlessly, then hits high notes that are as clear and ringing as bells in a campanile and that leave his listeners breathless. If there were any doubters in Met audience that Camarena is on his way to being the next tenor superstar, his second act aria "Si, ritrovarla io guiro" should have erased them.

DiDonato is a natural Rossini soprano, attractive and with a lovely lilting voice that is full of longing, especially in the aria "Una volta c'era un re," and that is also capable of soaring to great heights, as in the finale "Nacqui all'affanno." She has an amazing vocal agility that make all the trills natural and graceful, and she and Camarena create exciting chemistry onstage together.

And in a winning Met debut, the excellent Italian baritone Pietro Spagnoli sang with grand authority in a commanding voice as the Prince's servant Dandini. Fabio Luisi conducted at a lively tempo and fairly galloped the Met orchestra through the overture. It was, in short, a fairy tale night at the opera.

Rossini wrote La Cenerentola in a month and the opera had its premiere in Rome in January 1817, not quite two years after The Barber of Seville opened there in a different theater. Neither opera was an immediate success, though both grew in popularity and became mainstays of the repertory, Barber of course being one of the most popular operas of all time.

In fact, there are several echoes of Barber in La Cenerentola. There is, for example, an ensemble of "Cenerentola, here; Cenerentola there" that is reminiscent of Figaro's "Largo al factotum" in Barber. And there is a "zitti, zitti; piano, piano" passage in both operas. One of the joys of Rossini are the ensembles and La Cenerentola has quartets, quintets, sextets, even septets, incorporating repetitive phrases in fast tempos that crescendo and are as spirited as any in opera.

The main story line of La Cenerentola is pretty much the Cinderella story every child knows. Rossini, however, made some changes to make it more personal and whimsical. For starters, Cinderella has a name, Angelina, and her mean stepmother is now a mean stepfather, Don Magnifico. Her stepsisters are Clorinda and Tisbe, and are about as vain and silly as any stepsisters can be.

Even Prince Charming has a name, Ramiro, and the fairy godmother becomes Alidoro, a wise tutor to Ramiro who also sprouts wings at one point and performs some other angelic tasks, including escorting Angelina the Prince's ball. To spice up the plot and provide for some mistaken-identity humor, Ramiro changes places with his valet, Dandini, so he can witness in the guise of a servant the behavior of Don Magnifico's daughters.

The Met production, which dates to 1997, is a box set that begins in a run-down drawing room at Don Magnifico's house with cracks in the walls and the mirrors and his two daughters lounging about in hair curlers, one on a broken sofa, while Angelina polishes some shoes, though the glass slippers of the fairy tale have been changed to a bracelet.

The current staging, which will be simulcast as part of the Met's Live in HD series on May 10, with Florez scheduled back in the role of Ramiro, also boasts a fine supporting cast. The Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli is wonderfully pompous as Don Magnifico, and the Venezuelan bass Luca Pisaroni is stoically otherworldly as Alidoro. Rachelle Durkin and Patricia Risley are convincingly and amusingly grasping as Clorinda and Tisbe.

With the release of The Suspect tomorrow, I will debut as a feature film writer-director. Which is not to say the film's script is my first screenplay. I've written many others over the years, though none until now have been produced. But the story of an African American's struggle under the suspicion of small town law enforcement... something about my approach to this particular story... gave The Suspect's script a kind of momentum that surpassed that of my previous efforts.

From the moment I started writing I saw how the film wanted, needed to look. My producing partner (and wife) believed in that vision, so I "attached" myself, letting our casting people know I would be directing as they sent the script out to actors. A first-time director can often be a deal-breaker when it comes to actors, but this is where the momentum kicked in: as the script made the rounds in New York and Hollywood, we starting getting enthusiastic responses. In came the requests for meetings with me (the actors we went to were are all well beyond the auditioning phase of their careers; you cast them by having conversations to see how you get along).

It didn't take long to figure out exactly where this energy was coming from. Those actors were responding to a role they'd almost given up holding out hope to see. Without realizing it, I'd created the kind of character African-American actors rarely find: a nuanced, complicated and intelligent lead. Many incredibly talented African-American men wanted the opportunity to play this unusual and dynamic character and the notion that the fictional character I'd created slaked some deep-seated thirst for self-expression for a group of actors too often marginalized or typecast wasn't lost on me. It informed both my approach to directing and my dedication to getting the film in front of the widest possible audience. It pushed me to publish the screenplay as a way for those who have seen the film to consider character and theme on a more intimate scale.

The Suspect may feel like a message movie to some. Perhaps that's a good thing, although the very idea smacks of medicine rather than entertainment. I'd prefer that it be considered a particular kind of ride; a psychological thriller designed to entertain the audience and keep them guessing, but unlike most rides, you don't get off the same place you got on.

While it's truly painful for me to contemplate, I fully understand that the film owes its very existence to the ongoing problem of race relations in America. Like Quentin Tarantino's D'Jango Unchained, Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station, and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave, my film comes into the world at the expense -- on the backs -- of so many human beings who have suffered under the cruelty of institutionalized slavery and its long, echoing shadow; American-style racism. Racial tension is plot, is character, is environment, is theme in The Suspect.

The truth of the matter makes me feel a bit conflicted, though this conflict is nothing new, of course; tragedy of all sorts has always been the raw material for drama. As long as there has been human misery, there have been storytellers mining it. This is the unrelenting truth for any artist. The only question is, is the art we make from it of any use?

Still, of all the absurd things to tear at the fabric of society... the color of someone's skin? That pathetic, reptile-brain knee-jerk is our undoing? It's embarrassing. And yet this embarrassment is the central irony that circumscribes the problem. Those who are fundamentally opposed to racism don't want to dignify any aspect of it with discussion. So no one ends up talking about the realities of racial conflict, and in not talking we somehow feel the wounds will simply heal themselves. The fact of the matter is different: those wounds fester, and infection spreads.

For my part, I've always felt that each and every conversation about race, no matter how painful or awkward, is a stepping-stone toward some better understanding and a solution to the primal problem. Yes, it is a sensitive subject. Yes, we tend to get awfully quiet around it for fear of saying the wrong thing. But conversation, like therapy, is its own sort of "talking cure." I, for one, want to talk it out. The Suspect is a natural extension of that drive.

Before I was given the wonderful honor of co-writing with Dr. Clarence B. Jones his memoir of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1963 March on Washington (Behind The Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) I wrote a screenplay that covered his entire life story. Now, Clarence was born in 1930, so I struggled with the shifting language of the black / white issue decade-by-decade, finding the right phrase in the spectrum from "casual" racism to vehement hatred for the 30s, the 40s, the 50s and so on. The sheer breadth of the language was shocking. Every time I typed one of those words, I felt some kind of guilt by association.

I wanted to apologize to Clarence when I handed over my draft. "This isn't me," I wanted to say. "This isn't how I look at the world." I wanted to tell him I was sorry on behalf of all white people. But ever-so-slowly, I realized my hesitation was meaningless. Clarence had heard all those words before. He'd lived through my script for real. And nothing this writer -- who was only trying to put Clarence's experience into a thematic context -- could say would offend him in the slightest. He understood my intentions. In that light, those words that littered my script lost all their power to intimidate, to debase, to scar.

Understood intentions. A safe perch from which to explore the issue of race. Honest dialogue. My hope is that The Suspect - by placing racial tension, rage and misunderstanding center stage - will leverage the power of cinema to personalize and elevate the current conversation about race relations in America. My small contribution to the Movement.

Lili from Belgrade from Jasmina Tesanovic on Vimeo.

Live performance at Berlin Transmediale 2014, pacifist remake of Lili Marlene song.

I am just a girl
from outskirts of Belgrade
all my loving goes
one day it's gonna end
while I despair
of you my friend
your tender hand
your loud brass band
I m waiting in our land
your Lili from Belgrade

You march in the world
conquering all the lands
fighting like a hero
killing all your friends
I'm just a girl
from outskirts
from other times
and other worlds
your darling from Belgrade
your Lili from Belgrade

While you're in a ditch
you call all women bitch
when your soldiers rape
a bitch cannot escape
think of your girl
of outskirts
of tender words,
of sweetest booze
your darling from Belgrade
of Lili of Belgrade

Belgrade under siege
invador's uniforms
slavic girls to please
whatever comes their home
you don't protect
me here my friend
my tender bed
our loud brass band
your girl from outskirts
your Lili from Belgrade

Lovers under bombs
by the barrack gate
I am not waiting there
because you 're full of hate
t'was there I told you
come back home
to your homeland
don t be madman
because I will not wait
I'm Lili from Belgrade

The author Toni Morrison once offered the following wise advice: "If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

I have recently been in touch with the authors of three recent art books who all seem to have followed Morrison's counsel: Each of the three books presented below has been born from genuine passion and curiosity. Rather than reviewing these books -- all of which are on my bedside table in various stages of being read -- I asked their authors to tell me a bit about how and why it needed to be written.

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Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (English and Spanish Edition)
Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (2013) 348 pages

This bilingual (English and Spanish) volume offers the first comprehensive study of Grupo Antillano, an Afro-Cuban visual arts and cultural movement that thrived between 1978 and 1983 and which had has previously been erased from Cuban cultural and artistic history.

Alejandro de la Fuente on writing and editing Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba:

"I have always believed that there is no better antidote against amnesia than several pounds of printed pages: If they are illustrated, even better. Grupo Antillano was erased from the annals of Cuban, Caribbean, and African Diaspora art. Their important contributions were ignored by art historians and critics, who never made reference to Grupo Antillano when discussing the "new Cuban art" that emerged in the 1980s. This book, which is based mostly on the rich personal archives of Grupo members, is their revenge."

Manuel Couceiro, Untitled, c. 1970: Photo by Alejandro de la Fuente

2014-04-22-A.delaFuenteandDonaldRubinatThe8thFloorNY.JPG

Alejandro de la Fuente and Donald Rubin at The 8th Floor Gallery, New York

"I never thought that the book would grow to become what it is now. I wanted to write a small monograph discussing the place of Grupo Antillano in Cuban culture. But when I discovered what they had done, their level of activity, and the richness of their work, I knew that I had to do something else. I think the best moment during this whole process came when I took the first copy with me to the island and began showing it to them. I will never forget their reactions, their faces. The second best moment came when we managed to send several hundreds of copies of the book to Cuba, to be placed in libraries and art schools around the country."

Exhibition Information:

The works of Grupo Antillano can be seen in the exhibit Drapetomania: Grupo Antilano and the Art of Afro-Cuba, currently at The 8th Floor in New York City.

It will then travel to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in the fall of 2014 and will also be shown at the new Ethelbert Cooper Gallery at Harvard University in 2015.

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Van Gogh's Untold Journey
Revelations of Faith, Family, & Artistic Inspiration
by Dr. William J. Havlicek
Published by Creative Storytellers (2010) 366 pages

Largely based on Van Gogh's letters, "Van Gogh's Untold Story" provides new insight into the artist's true character nurtured by his abiding faith, the influence of family, and the tender solicitude he felt for mankind. The net profits from the sale of Van Gogh's Untold Journey are pledged to The Endangered Child Foundation.

Dr. William Havlicek on writing Van Gogh's Untold Journey:

"The book was conceived as a doctoral dissertation for a degree in philosophy using the letters of Van Gogh to illuminate late-19th century European thought. As the book evolved it became a spiritual portrait of the man Van Gogh set firmly into the context of his era which conversely overshadowed much of the early 20th century, given Vincent's impact on modern art.

All of this became deeply poignant to me as a practicing painter facing many of the same questions about the value of art that Vincent wrestled with in his own time. Several years later after completing my Ph.D. what had once been a scholarly thesis was much expanded co-edited into everyday language by a small team of copy editors who to my delight helped me transform what had been been a theoretical project into a compelling family story with artistic practice at its center."

Dr. William Havlicek

"Certainly one of the most important discoveries of the book was my proving the origin of the formal language and theme of the iconic "The Starry Night," found in a critical passage in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables". We know Vincent and Paul Gauguin were reading the book at the time painting was made. Solving the mystery of the origin of this work was a life-changing event for me, given the enormous importance of this painting. Not a single art historian has ever challenged my findings on this work, in fact I have only received support and affirmation for the discovery. An interesting anecdote is that the Pulitzer prize winning authors of "Van Gogh The Life," Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith tweeted about my book demonstrating that they had read and endorsed it.

Van Gogh's Untold Journey, has been widely praised, as can be seen on Amazon -- where it has a 5 star rating with 19 reviews -- and on reader's comments on the Creative Storytellers website. We are especially excited at how well the book has caught on in Europe in eBook and vBook form given that interior space is limited for physical books in cites like London, Florence and Berlin."

Lecture:

Dr. Havlicek will be presenting a lecture about his book at the Studio Gallery in Irvine, CA on April 26th at 7:30 PM. For more information and/or reservations please contact Studio Gallery.

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Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud
by Wayne Thiebaud, Eve Ascheim and Chris Daubert
Published by Black Square Editions (2014) 96 pages

Eve Aschheim interviewing Wayne Thiebaud, June 2010: Photo by Chris Daubert

In Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud, Eve Aschheim and Chris Daubert -- two of his former students -- interview Wayne Thiebaud in four extensive conversations recorded at the artist's studio.

Chris Daubert and Eve Ascheim on working with Wayne Thiebaud:

"Having known Wayne for so many years, and reading most of the published interviews with him, we are very pleased to have captured the tone of his voice. It is a singular, Western American, deeply erudite, but at the same time, an amazingly informal voice - stunningly knowledgeable and experienced, but at heart, the voice of a storyteller of the old school, which comes through in the book.

During the editing process we were able to study that voice and appreciate his thinking more acutely. Our various interview recordings were each transcribed differently, by a professional service, a student, or by a voice recognition program. Each time there were numerous errors to correct. For example, Barnett Newman would appear as "Barn at Noon".

Before the final edit, we again listened to the original recordings and revised the text, at times deleting phrases. For example, the text had Wayne stating de Chirico is "just like a tattoo on the mind." In fact, the voice recording had "I think he's one of the most indelible kind of painters--you know, you just can't get him out of your mind. Just like a tattoo."

The first statement would have been too hyperbolic for Wayne to make, and too harsh a metaphor. He doesn't think that way. Although he believes in caricature in painting, some form of exaggeration, in thought he is very careful, paying close attention not to overstep what can be said and still be true. In both, he balances accuracy with the strangeness of things.

Over the two years we conducted the interviews, there were many times that we found ourselves, surrounded by a museum's worth of canonical paintings, listening to the stories about the Cedar Bar and de Kooning and Diebenkorn, that we felt Art History collapsing back to its rightful place: the story of art being made by artists. Wayne's sense of time emerges as he speaks about Diebenkorn or de Kooning, often in the present tense, as if they were still alive, while referring to many other figures in the past tense.

It was a thrill to see Wayne in action, running (actually running) across the studio to answer the door, miming the relationship between a brushstroke to a tennis stroke, and many more instances of genuine laughter than could be incorporated into the book. We thought the interviews would answer all our questions about Wayne, but every time he answered, and every time we reviewed the text, several new questions emerged.

Wayne often disavows the association with the Pop Artists, but in these pages he reveals the influences of popular culture on his work -- from Krazy Kat to the theatrical lighting of Hollywood, as well as the techniques of illustration, sign painting and advertising, showing his alertness to the visual environment of his time. His ability to integrate a range of influences from all levels of culture and historical periods in art, combined with his self-consciousness -- he makes a pastel drawing of pastels, or a paints a rack of postcard reproductions of paintings-- make him postmodern by definition.

Through the interview it became clear that Thiebaud's process of openness, of letting so many influences into the work, while maintaining his changing set of ambitions, is truly inspirational."

Festival du Cannes (or Cannes International Film Festival, if you like) has its long-standing tradition of elegant and meaningful posters.

Two years ago, we could see the Great Marylin Monroe, blowing the candles for the Festival's 65th anniversary. All in harmonized film noir color palette. Then last year for the 66th edition of the biggest European cinema fete, we could see Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman ("a couple who embody the spirit of cinema like no other") in their entwined kiss.

Always "to the point", l'affiche officielle reminds all the attendees that there's much of history and a very unique atmosphere, that you could breath in and out on Boulevard Croisette.

This year for the third time I will attend this land of wonder. This is one of those places where one can actually feel the Time itself. Sipping a terroir Chablis and watching the boats, slowly swinging their eternal dance, Time just goes by. Its reflections are revealed in such way, you can almost touch them. The Past, enchanted in the flirty look of Marcello Mastroianni on the poster - it feels like we know him for ages. Modern men in their garniture are the biggest achievement of a suspended clock hand. The Future, collecting all the dreams and expectations. I don't know if I am truly capable of describing the suspense that creates the Present. It is a great challenge to be able to actually feel that way.

Source: Press materials / Festival de Cannes

In Cannes business meets pleasure night by night, when almost every beach turns into pure Fun. After a few days of the Festival it is kind of hard to hear the comforting sounds of the sea. In a rush, one can find it difficult running into a familiar face or appreciate a decent movie. Finding time for watching movies could be tricky there. Ironically that is what we are really there for. I need to control my disposition for making digressions - which movies will we find as the lucky chosen ones?

While I am writing this words, the Festival's film selection is still a mystery. It is something, every film passionate is waiting for. I can feel the fear of plentitude, I will be happy to recite here on my blog in a month or even less. I personally believe this year will be special. That's just an intuition, I really want to trust.

Dear Reader I am writing for - we can find that out together in a month. I think that Jane Campion, the Head of the Jury, will use her exquisite taste to choose the best image from the selection. The same goes for Pablo Trapero ("Un Certain Regard") and Abbas Kiarostami ("Cinéfondation" and Short Films). I couldn't think of a better choice for the Master of Festival's two most important Ceremonies than Lambert Wilson.

That's a lot to digest. I must admit that I am all curious, expecting really unforgettable time at the Festival this year. And that's not even the beginning...

I need to leave you all here for now - with that annoying Hitchcockian suspence. If you feel it, please do follow my blog for the next articles on Festival de Cannes. I will take a glass of Chablis, watch the video I've shared below and try to imagine sitting somewhere on the legendary Cote d'Azur a month from now!

See you then mes amis or even before ;)

The Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare, 1603 (Canadian Conservation Institute).

How can any of us find the words to wish a happy 450th birthday to the single most significant, elegant, funny, wise and human writer ever to use the English language? That's what I, and countless others, have thought and think of Shakespeare.

Festivities honoring his birth -- ironically celebrated on the day of his death, too -- are galloping apace this week, at The Globe and all around the globe. He was baptised at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is now buried, on April 26, 1564. Chances are the 23rd was indeed his birthday, but as it's also his deathday, and the saint's day of England's national saint, George, the popular choice to call it Shakespeare's birthday was easy. Like so much of Shakespeare's life, his birthday remains flexible, mysterious, open to interpretation as well as celebration.

Shakespeare's Globe full of birthday partiers, via Shakespeare's Globe on Twitter

The Shakespeare Schools Festival has been helping schoolchildren to stage Shakespeare's plays throughout England all year. Other organizations have been preparing for, and eagerly anticipating, the birthday itself. On Easter Monday, April 21, Shakespeare's Globe in London had an all-day birthday party for their parent and original. Built near the site of his own Globe theatre, which burned down during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII in 1613, Shakespeare's (new) Globe is a magical place to see a play -- even when one stands outdoors, exposed to the rain and audience participation in the show, as a groundling. Their free Family Open Day drew huge crowds to the south bank of the Thames, where people enjoyed scenes from Shakespeare, played Pin the Ruff on the Bard, laughed at a Punch and Judy show, and, of course, ate cake. In Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company are currently putting on 1 Henry IV. This week, they do so to the accompaniment of fireworks, workshops from stage fighting to Shakespearean speaking, and, of course, cake. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. celebrated earlier in the month with quill pen writing, Elizabethan crafts, a scavenger hunt, sonnet recitations -- and cake, cut by Queen Elizabeth I.

via folger.edu; photo by Claire Duggan

Theaters in New York are celebrating, from Elements Theatre's Shakespeare weekend to the WorkShop Theater Company's annual Will-A-Thon. In Paris, go to Shakespeare 450, where performances, film screenings, and historic tours fill the week and coming weekend. In May, the Asian Shakespeare Association holds its inaugural conference in Taipei.

See a play by Shakespeare tomorrow. That's the happiest way to celebrate -- with, as Hamlet says, words, words, words. If you're not in a town where one of his plays is on, read a scene or a sonnet. You can also enjoy one of the thousands of filmed versions of his plays, in its entirety, or choosing a scene -- or performer -- you want to see. In honor of Bardday, here are a few suggestions.

Complete films:
Laurence Olivier, Othello (1965), for the National Theatre/Warner Brothers. With Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Frank Findlay, and Joyce Redman. Full film of production (with Russian subtitles!).

Kenneth Branagh (producer), Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1988), With Frances Barber as Viola.

Twelfth Night (1969). With Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, and Joan Plowright. ATV/Midlands.

The Tempest (2010). With Helen Mirren as Prospera.

Selected scenes:
Ben Kingsley as Feste concludes the glorious Trevor Nunn film version of Twelfth Night (1996). With Toby Stephens Imogen Stubbs, Richard E. Grant, Nigel Hawthorne.

Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus, Titus (1999).

Laurence Olivier as Orlando, As You Like It (1936). With Elisabeth Bergner, Felix Aylmer and Sophie Stewart.

Laurence Olivier begins Richard III (1955).

Ian McKellen begins Richard III (1995).

Helen Mirren as Hermia, Diana Rigg as Helena, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968). Directed by Peter Hall.

Laurence Olivier, "once more unto the breach," Henry V (1944). The wartime film version of a wartime play, ending with Henry's cry of "God for Harry, England, and St. George."

Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell in Macbeth (1961). CBCTV.

Hamlet's greatest hit, Act III, Scene 1, "to be, or not to be," which may, or may not be, a soliloquy:
Laurence Olivier, Hamlet (1948). With an M. C. Escher-influenced Elsinore.

Richard Burton, Hamlet (1964), from the Broadway production directed by John Gielgud, with Linda Marsh.

Christopher Plummer, Hamlet at Elsinore (1964).

Kevin Kline, 1990. New York Shakespeare Festival/PBS.

Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet (1996). With Kate Winslet, Derek Jacobi, Richard Briers.

Colin Firth, 2010. From The King's Speech, with Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.

David Tennant, 2010. Royal Shakespeare Company/BBC Two.

A few of my personal favorites:
Peter O'Toole recites Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Venus (2006). With Jodie Whittaker.

Helen Mirren as a delighted, radiant Rosalind/Ganymede, As You Like It (1978). With Angharad Rees and James Boland.

Kenneth Branagh, the St. Crispin's Day speech, Henry V (1989).
Anne Margaret Daniel 2014

The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare, c. 1600-1610 (National Portrait Gallery, London).

Amy Marshall Photo: Lois Greenfield

1. Treat class, and your every opportunity to dance, as a gift, as a special time for you.

2. Leave your emotional baggage outside. Let class be your chance to think only about you. Let it be your therapy. Let it heal.

3. Listen to every correction given. Try to implement it, even if it wasn't given to you.

4. Take a correction to the nth degree. Your teacher can always pull you back.

5. If you don't understand the correction, ask.

6. A dance class is a lab. Experiment continually. Never do it the same way twice.

7. Even if doing so is outside your comfort zone, stand in the front sometimes. Your teacher is only human. She or he may move students around, but if it seems that you don't want to be seen, you just might not be.

8. Don't worry about her feet, her extension, how many turns he does or her natural alignment. Work with what you have. Celebrate your gifts, while working your damn-est to overcome any shortcomings.

9. There is only one you. You can't work to your fullest potential trying to be someone else.

10. Competition and knowing the strengths of other dancers is healthy, as long it is a motivating force, not a defeating one.

11. Know your history, and learn from the past. Don't dismiss the choreographers and techniques of the past as "old school." That movement was visionary for a reason, and it serves as a foundation for what interests us now.

12. While there may be a few exceptions out there, every teacher has something to offer. Never write anyone off because you don't like her build, style, attire, body decoration or manner.

13. The dance world is maybe two degrees of separation. Always be diligent and respectful. Word about bad behavior moves faster than a Balanchine petit allegro.

14. While your teacher should be respectful, she or he is not there to be your friend, but to make you a better dancer.

15. If you can find teachers whose class speaks to you, and where you are both complimented and thoughtfully corrected, you are very lucky indeed.

16. Believe that pushing through and learning something in that weird, boring or super-challenging class will pay off. In the New Dance Order of America these days, the versatile dancer -- the one with a solid understanding of several techniques -- gets the prize.

17. There will always be bad days. Do not be defined by them.

18. Push yourself. Hard. But acknowledge when you have done all you can, at least for the time being. Sometimes the epiphany, the breakthrough, comes later.

19. Immediate gratification is rare. When it happens it is the result of years of training. The fun and the joy are in the struggle.

20. Keep dance in perspective. Know that you can still be a smart, loving, fantastic person with a great life even if one day you can't buy a decent pirouette.

21. It is never too early to gain a firm grasp on somatic concepts. If you wait too long to develop this beautiful mind, your body might be an unwilling partner.

22. Feats of nature, contortion-esque flexibility, oodles of pirouettes and sky-high jumps are dazzling. But remember that dance is communication. Dance is artistry. Keep in mind the power and potential of small and simple movement.

23. Did I say to treat every chance to dance as a gift?

Now that all the prayers, celebrations, and wonderful food of last week's Passover and Easter are behind us, it's time to get back to business. And I mean the business of art. Two ambitious cultural events take place this week in LA. And, if you consider yourself to be an adventurous and curious art aficionado, these events are simply a must.

Paris Photo, the most ambitious international photographic art fair, returns to Paramount Studios for its second installment of Paris Photo Los Angeles (April 25 - 27, 2014). There are over 80 major art dealers from around the world showing a wide variety of modern and contemporary photography, and if last year was any indication, we can expect a few dealers to once again put on dramatic and theatrical presentations.

Just a few decades ago, photography was still considered the stepchild of fine art --few museums and collectors paid any attention to the medium. Today, it's quite a different story. If you are still uncertain about your feelings towards photography, let me assure you: spending a few hours on the historical sound stages of Paramount Studios --temporarily transformed into a photographic heaven --would definitely be worthy of your time. And besides, how often do we have a chance to walk through the gates of Paramount Studios and mingle with the memories and spirits of Hollywood deities? You can check out the Paris Photo LA website to learn about the variety of lectures, seminars, and events taking place during the three days of the fair.

And here is another event that simply must be on your agenda this week. The Santa Monica Museum of Art, which I like to refer to as "The Little Engine That Could," celebrates its 10th Incognito. This is an annual fundraiser that attracts an ever-growing crowd of art collectors --both experienced and novice --who pay $100 for the right to be among those who will arrive to the museum this coming Saturday well before doors open at 7 PM. Looking at the crowd standing in line, you might be surprised to notice that a lot of otherwise smartly-dressed ladies are wearing sneakers. And there is a very good reason for this: the moment that the doors open, the guests literally start to run as if they are competing in a 100-yard dash.

So what's the rush? OK. Would you like to be the lucky one that manages to grab off the shelf a small original work by a famous or up and coming artist who donated these works for this fundraiser? Among those 550 artists are John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Mark Bradford, and Laura Owens, just to name a few. But here is the gimmick: none of these artworks are labeled. You, my friends, are on your own. You simply must trust your eye and your instinct to snatch the work that instantaneously grabs you're attention.

But wait. You cannot remove the work from the shelf; instead, you are only allowed to take the white circular tag attached to the artwork and bring it up to the cashier. There, you pay $350. And only then and there do you find out the name of the artist whose work you snatched up. I remember visiting a number of LA collectors who proudly showed me their precious trophies from past Incognitos.

Yesterday, I had the chance to pop in to SMMoA's galleries and to take a few photos while the installation of the 700+ artworks was still in progress. If you don't get my Art Talk newsletter with all the photos, check out the KCRW website to get a sneak preview of this year's Incognito. Take a look at the T-shirts with the special logo designed for this event by one of LA's most interesting painters, Henry Taylor. And what about the several hundred brightly colored glasses, which bring to mind famous Venetian glass from Murano? I was pleasantly surprised to learn that these gorgeous glasses were made here in LA in partnership with the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, and involved a number of children.

So my friends, brace yourselves for the art hunting and art bumping here in LA in the days to come.

P.S. If you want to learn about Edward's Fine Art of Art Collecting Classes, please visit his website here. You can also read The New York Times article about his classes here.

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

Did you ever dream of design with a sense of Brazilian sensuality and playfulness? Meet Brazilian designer Humberto Campana from the renowned Campana brothers design team in this short video, where he shares his inspirations.

Humberto Campana explains that their projects always starts with the material: "I flirt with the material and wonder how I can play with it, and what I can make of it" he says. Aside from the playful relationship with the materials, the brothers also work with concepts to do with the very rich and varied Brazilian culture: "A creator must have a good eye to observe things others don't see. Design is more than functionality, it can be political, connect people, create emotions. We tell stories."

The Campana Brothers, Humberto (b.1953) and Fernando (b.1961) are Brazilian designers. The two brothers teamed up to make furniture in 1983, using ordinary materials including recycling products such as wood scraps, cardboard, rope, cloth, plastic tubes and aluminium wire. From 1997 some of their products including the Vermelha chair shown in this interview, began to be produced and sold in Italy. In 1998 the Campana Brothers became the first Brazilian artists to exhibit their work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Humberto Campana was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at Trapholt, Denmark, 2014.

Filmed by Ole Udengaard

Edited by Kasper Bech Dyg

Produced by Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, produced by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

photo by T. Charles Erickson

Even in this subdued and somber rendering of a pair of Chekhov stories, Mikhail Baryshnikov and his creative partners from the Big Dance Theater display a magical grace and style that transcends the bleakness of Chekhov's tales. Big Dance Theater directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, who also adapted the Chekhov stories, fuse techniques from theater, dance, music and video into a mélange performance. They employ live and surveillance video, folk dance, contemporary hunting references and lots of other odds and ends to capture a contemporary snapshot of Chekhov's worldview.

The stories are simple but powerful tales of love. The hero of Man in A Case is a schoolteacher, encased in his own lonely and regimented existence, who falls in love but discovers it can never be fulfilled. About Love is about a man who fails to act on his passion for a married woman, and is filled with regret.

While the production employs many familiar devices from avant-garde theater pioneers like Richard Foreman, it manages to create a tapestry that is arresting and complex. The ensemble is made of gifted actor/dancers, who don't get much chance to display their talents, but are able to convey a sense of style and movement to the piece. Particularly notable are Tymberly Canale, who plays the love interest in both parts, as well as Chris Giarmo and Aaron Mattocks, whose extraordinary vocal talents add much to the lovely musical score.

But it is Baryshnikov who is the heart and soul of the production. His movements - though largely restricted to his acting performance and simple choreography - are performed with such grace and precision that we are reminded of the power of movement in the hands of a genius of dance. It was once said of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and a few other great athletes that "they float six inches above the ground." The same can be said of Baryshnikov, where every gesture, even down to the smallest movement of the hands, is virtually transcendent. The experience alone of watching Baryshnikov move about the stage makes this production invaluable.

PHOTO INDEPENDENT | The first and only high-visibility platform for independent photographers premieres this weekend. An artist-only fair, PHOTO INDEPENDENT is a forum for direct exchange of ideas and contact between photographic artists, collectors and art professionals. The inaugural edition of the art fair will also feature specialized programs including panel discussions, lectures, roundtables, and docent tours.

PHOTO INDEPENDENT will kick off with an Opening Night Preview benefitting the Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA) on Friday, April 25 from 7pm-10pm at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, CA. The inaugural edition of the art fair will also feature specialized programs in partnership with the Los Angeles Art Association and Art Nerd Los Angeles including panel discussions, lectures, and docent tours.

Photo Independent opens Friday, April 25 and runs through April 27 at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, CA.

Sheree Rose: One Hundred Reasons | Beauty is pain and pain is beauty in the world of sadomasochism, a compelling paradox that pervades this group of photographs. The sheer mass of images bestows the body of work with a collective power, chronicling the aftermath of the pain willingly inflicted and endured within a dominant-submissive partnership. Individually, each serves as an intensely corporeal and intimate portrait of an anonymous subject, the bruises and lacerations like gestural marks and paint strokes on a canvas. These could be your friends, your family, your boss or your neighbor.

Sheree Rose was introduced to S&M after meeting her collaborator in love and art, Bob Flanagan, in 1980. Re-examining herself after the end of a conventional first marriage, she connected with the thrill and community of fringe culture. Always interested in sexuality, gender and the movements they gave rise to, Rose found a new forum to freely explore these ideas. Photography became increasingly important to her as a means of blurring the boundaries between the private and public spheres and to convey the erotic experience as a multi-faceted part of the human condition.

Sheree Rose: One Hundred Reasons opens April 26 at Coagula Curatorial.

Spotlight on Photography | To wrap-up the Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA), Santa Monica Auctions - an independently, owned and operated boutique auction house specializing in sourcing modern and contemporary art will present Spotlight on Photography, an auction of contemporary and classic photographs along with photo-based work.

Anchoring the catalogue is Irving Penn's Optician's Shop Window, New York, 1939 (Printed 1983) gelatin silver print, from the edition of 65, estimated at $20,000/$25,000 (pictured above).

"Made at the very beginning of Penn's career, this photograph is emblematic of his life's work. At once a still-life and a portrait, even a kind of self-portrait, this modest bit of vernacular advertising is portrayed by Penn simultaneously as a document of folk art and a work of surrealism--then at its apogee." -John Szarkowski

Spotlight on Photography raises the gavel Saturday, April 26 at 4pm at Santa Monica Auctions, Bergamot Station Arts Center.

The Brewery ArtWalk | This weekend the Brewery Artwalk features the largest contingent of pioneering artists in the Los Angeles area. Resident artists have been experimenting with 3D printing, Immersive 3D environments, LED light sculpture, high tech and high class furniture design, contemporary fashion and environmental design, new media, computer and digital art, performance art as well as painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, glass works, printmaking and street art.

Located northeast of downtown Los Angeles, off the 5 Freeway's Main Street exit, sits 16 acres packed with creative energy, artistic dreams, and a little piece of historic LA.

The Brewery ArtWalk takes place April 26 & 27, from 11am - 6pm.

Sherry Wolf: New Works | During the 1970s as a budding artist, painter Sherry Wolf was considered a bicoastal darling of the art world, dividing her time between the Studio 54 nightclub scene in New York City and Hollywood, where she ran with a crowd of creative industry elites. Her realistic, and nearly life-size self-portrait from 1974, titled Label Lady, demands a double take and can be easily mistaken for a photograph.

Tragedy struck in 2009 for Wolf with the sudden death of her 22-year-old daughter Chelsea, a promotional model for the fashion line and a University of Michigan graduate. Emotionally devastated by the loss, Wolf ceased creating the wearable artworks and stopped painting altogether. Concerned for her well-being, Weintraub introduced the talented artist to art dealer Leisa Austin -- owner of Imago Galleries. The two hit it off immediately and Sherry reentered her studio and started painting again, for the first time in nearly 4 years.

Sherry Wolf: New Works runs through May 31 at Imago Galleries, Palm Desert.

For the most comprehensive calendar of art events throughout Los Angeles go to Artweek.LA.

The Cultural & Charitable Catch-Up: April 2014

Text & Photographs © Jill Lynne, 2014

The Society for The Prevention of Cruelty to Children, The ORPHAN TRAIN, the film "Belle" , The Faberge Egg Hunt & historical documentary...

It was last week when I was a guest of Faberge at Soho House for the private screening of the fascinating feature documentary film, "FABERGE, A Life Of Its Own". Showcasing the amazing epic history of this celebrated brand. And spanning more than 100 years, it has been released at the time of Faberge's "Big Egg Hunt."

In Memoriam; Mark Shand at Faberge Event. April 2014

I was delighted to meet Mark Shard, Co-Founder and Chairman of the wonderful "Elephant Family" foundation (dedicated to preserving Asian Elephants and their habitat). Mark was also featured in the film.

Always an admirer of these marvelous mammals, I shared with him my epiphanal elephant tale.

Two decades ago, while en route to Southampton, in order to avoid traffic on the Long Island Expressway, I meandered off onto unknown roads. There in an empty field were six gorgeous elephants - surreal, a mystical mirage...

Curiously unafraid, I parked and walked towards them. A large female cautiously approached until we were only a few feet apart. She lifter her trunk in greeting and then we were eye-to-eye.

It was as though I was lost in an ocean of deep compassion, and sweetness - that special transcendence that may occur in inter-species communication.

Mark was in New York City to celebrate Faberge's Big Egg Hunt Auction at Sotheby's - and this he did last eve.

So it is with shock and great sadness that as I write this, I have learned of the untimely death of this lovely man - Mark Shand - a member of the British Royal Family and the brother of Camilla Bowles, Duchess of Cornwall - a man who dedicated his life to environmental world betterment.

RIP.

Archduke Geza von Habsburg, the renowned expert on Faberge

"FABERGE, A Life of Its Own" begins in Imperial Russia with the extraordinary art of the genius creator Peter Carl Faberge, who was to become the Court Jeweler of Saint Petersburg. Awesome are the celebrated Ester Eggs produced for the Romanovs - with impeccable tiny detailing, saturated brilliant color palettes, and surprise mechanizations revealing gorgeous hidden treasures.

The curious journey of the brand itself reflects changing times, traversing history both in Russia and worldwide, to its present incarnation highlighted by glorious bejeweled jewelry and object d'art.

Couturier Maggie Norris with her "Rosebud Corset" Egg

Maggie's Sketch for the "Rosebud Corset Egg Design"

The classic Faberge Easter Eggs - antique and new -are a wondrous reminder of the hopeful new spring season...

In the USA, there is an apparent duality in our feelings toward, and treatment of, children.

Although extraordinary funds are lavished on children - in the form of pricey gifts, posh fashion, fabulous toys and competitive super-education with regal after-school activities, the alarming incidence of child abuse - including sexual abuse - is skyrocketing!

Apropos, I recently attended the Spring Luncheon for The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC), the world's first child protection agency, at The Pierre Hotel.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and the Spring Luncheon program focused on this theme, the prevention of child sexual abuse.

The afternoon program was hosted by NBC News' National Correspondent, Kate Snow, and featured Aaron Fisher, nationally known as "Victim 1" in the incendiary Jerry Sandusky child abuse case, his mother, Dawn Hennessy, and his psychologist, Michael Gillum. Together they participated in a panel discussion with The NYSPCC Executive Director, Dr. Mary Pulido. The three panelists co-authored the book, "Silent No More, Victim 1's Fight For Justice Against Jerry Sandusky".

Aaron Fisher has become an inspiration to victims of child sexual abuse - having the courage to bear witness to the Penn State tragedy, speaking up against abuse, and urging parents to listen to their children. Now twenty years old, Aaron is dedicated to helping victims worldwide.

"Victim 1", Aaron Fisher with his Mother Dawn Hennessy

Supporters of the Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Joy Marks, Kathleen Giordano, Dr. Penny Grant, and Alexandra Fairweather

Charitable Luncheon Attendees Cynthia Maltese flanked by Guy Clark and Harrison Morgan

Titanic Waifs reunited with their families by the NYSPCC

In one famous case of the "titanic waifs" the Society reunited children in NYC with their families in Europe.

This as I am reading an interesting new book, "THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME, A Novel of The Titanic" by Hazel Gaynor. Historically-based, the story which is a close-up-and-personal of the effects of the disaster centering around the Addergoole 14 - young members of a church parish in County Mayo, Ireland, who set sail on the RMS with high hopes for a brighter future.

However, in regard to the treatment of children, it is the riveting, historically based novel The "ORPHAN TRAIN" by Christina Baker Kline, which is disturbingly haunting.

Cover, The ORPHAN TRAIN

Since my late mother, a Medical Social Worker, - with Master's Degrees from Columbia University and NYU - worked with many well-regarded NYC social welfare organizations, including The Children's Aid Society, I was shocked to learn that these horrific "trains" were organized under their aegis.

"Orphan Trains" operated - between 1859 - 1929 - arranging for and transporting over 200,000 children - who were ostensibly underserved, abandoned, homeless and/or orphaned - wee babes through teens. These children were taken from NYC to the Midwest where , unprepared, they were sent into unfamiliar surroundings and the majority forced into the equivalent of unpaid "indentured servitude".

The "orphans "were loaded onto the trains, barely fed during their arduous journeys, paraded out at train depots for bodily inspection and scrutiny - much as in slave markets.

With siblings frequently separated, the children were deprived of their family, possible contacts, personal histories, their individual culture and traditions -- much as in the infamous American Indian Schools.

This little known ignominy in American history, was until recently swept under the veritable carpet. It is important that this hidden chapter has finally been brought to light so that that the children - frequently new Irish and Italian immigrants - will be honored and remembered.

Dido Elizabeth Belle with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray

Also historically based, is "BELLE", a new film from Fox Searchlight. Centered on the story of the illegitimate, mixed-race Dido Elizabeth Belle, raised in England during the late 1700s in the aristocratic home of William Murray, 1st Lord of Mansfield, Lord Mansfield (portrayed by masterful actor, Tom Wilkinson) There she suffers a searing dichotomy of treatment - from enjoying select privileges of her class while simultaneously deprived of such common courtesies as dining with her adoptive family.

Lord Mansfield's Aristocratic Family with Lady Mansfield played by Emily Watson

This compelling tale is also set at a time of legal significance when the Zong racial massacre has become apparent. Mansfield's ruling in England's Supreme Court is of utmost legal import, with his ruling in the Supreme Court of England credited as a critical step toward ending slavery.

Easter Promise, Bank Street Stoop Decor

All Photographs (c) Jill Lynne,2014, available for Purchase.
Contact: Jill Lynne1@ mac.com www.JillLynne.com

Great stuff and lots of fun this month as Spring has sprung and really that's all that early music was meant to be about, or needs to be to earn our undying love and sympathy. And why sympathy? Because there must always be something a tiny bit sad when we take ourselves so far back in time to such idealized tunes and harmonies, and then eventually to have to return to our modern noisy world. Otherwise, no problem.

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La bella piu bella: Songs from early baroque Italy. Roberta Invernizzi, Craig Marchitelli. Glossa CD

We're hearing more about Glossa now that Naxos has added to its U.S. distribution wing. The label's new recording featuring Baroque music queen Roberta Invernizzi, who might be thought of herself as "La bella più bella," but not in her usual dazzling displays of Handel, Vivaldi and other Baroque opera composers. Instead, the Milanese singer presents the wonderful, intoxicating, life-enhancing art of the Italian song repertory from the early 17th century, a time when courtly and polyphonic expression were giving way to the "moving of the emotions" by a solo singer accompanied by a single instrument.

It sounds so ravishing in Renato Dolcini's booklet essay, like a sumptuous musical travelogue, and so does Roberta Invernizzi. She sings songs by Kapsberger's (his "Ninna nanna"), Giulio Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, as well as Luigi Rossi (whose dream-like piece provides the album with its title). Three of Claudio Monteverdi's later works conclude this recital, in which lutenist and theorbist Craig Marchitelli accompanies and also contributes a number of solo pieces by Kapsberger, Castaldi and Piccinini.

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Doulce Mémoire: Chansonnettes frisquettes, joliettes & godinettes. Zig-Zag Térritoires CD

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Doulce Mémoire, this wonderful new CD from the aptly named Zig Zag Térritoires label (named after their curiosity) allows you to hear "what people hummed in the streets, the artisans' workshops, and the houses of 16th-century France, and what women were supposed to think about their male companions and their performances, and men about the 'jolly game of push-and-shove.'" It's the free-spirited, popular, cheeky chansons of the Renaissance.

Founded in 1989 by Denis Raisin Dadre, Doulce Mémoire immediately established itself as one of the most inventive, original and creative early music ensembles with a particular genius for themed presentations and beautiful CD packaging. Their concerts, recordings and performances enable listeners and audiences to enjoy music of figures we in the early music world dream about including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rabelais and François I (some of whom, Doulce Mémoire assure us in inviting us to their annual festival, "had a profound influence on the Loire Valley and its famous Renaissance chateaux"). Their newest is one of their very best, offering Renaissance airs by Jehan Chardavoine, Clement Janequin, Pierre Certon, and more. (The "Chansonnettes" in the title refers to the encore Doulce Mémoire and Denis Raisin-Dadre play at their concerts.)

Two Francescos: Da Milano and Spinacino. Peter Croton. Carpe Diem CD

Another label that is benefitting from increased exposure and availability thanks to Naxos distribution is Carpe Diem, founded in 2008 by engineers Jonas Niederstadt and Johannes Wallbrecher. Carpe Diem records in old churches, monasteries and historic concert halls that offer ideal conditions for the instruments played and the sound being recorded. For his Carpe Diem debut the Swiss-American lute player Peter Croton plays a collection of ricercares and fantasias by the Italian lutenist-composers Francesco Spinacino and Francesco da Milano. The 15th century saw the lute emerge as a solo instrument, and the terms ricercar and fantasia were used for works created without preexisting models, improvisation being expected to drive the performance the way jazz does today. Not surprisingly Croton, who is also known for his contemporary and jazz-related musical projects, explores this beautiful musical world with the heart of a true improvisor, sparkling with creativity.

Bach: Six Partitas from the Clavier-Übung I. Rafael Puyana. Sanctus CDs

When I was in Bogotá last year for the Beethoven festival, Colombian pianist Blanca Uribe played a lovely recital and when her adoring audience demanded an encore, she responded with a kind and courageous gesture, meant to heal wounds and bring together old friends. In honor of the great Colombian harpsichordist Rafael Puyana, who had died on a month earlier in Paris, estranged from his native country, she played a sonata by his favorite composer, Domenico Scarlatti.

The moving tribute was sensed as such by the audience, even though she did not announce it as being so. Now Sanctus Recordings has released previously unpublished recordings of Puyana playing Bach's Six Partitas for Harpsichord BMW 825-830 on the unique, famed three-manual harpsichord of 1740 by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass. Besides Puyana's magisterial, inevitably anachronistic performances, the the 150-page booklet includes color pictures of the magnificent German instrument.

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Locke: The Broken Consort, Part 1: Tripla Concordia. Wayward Sisters. Naxos CD

Wayward Sisters make their considerably less than wayward debut with a lovely program of Matthew Locke, the most prominent English musician of the generation before Purcell. The Broken Consort refers to a group with mixed instruments, and Locke's pieces entertained royalty with their surprisingly incautiously ambitiously chromatic tonal language and rhythmic quirkiness. The Composer to the Private Musick, as Locke was titled, was never happier than with surprisingly angular melodies and dramatic gestures "into the theatricall way'." This recording is the début release of Wayward Sisters, winners of the 2011 Early Music America/Naxos Recording Competition.

George Stravinos, The Bather, 1977, Pencil and gouache on paper, 10.25 x 10 in. Collection of Leo Paoletti.

There are three ways to look at the work in the new show at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art: "Stroke, from Under the Mattress to the Museum Walls," a show of gay erotic art, mostly drawings, during the "Golden Age of Gay Erotica," from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s (some might even include the 1990s) before the Internet basically killed the magazines that ran, and paid for, these pictures.

The first way is as drawings, the second is as erotica, and the third is as conveyances of coded messages during that time when queer life was coming to the surface but still covert enough to be a self-enclosed world that needed ways to talk to itself. The same way that Jews invented about six "private" languages to talk to each other during the Diaspora, gays had to do the same thing. And these drawings are certainly part of that.

I was very lucky that as a young writer in my twenties during the 1970s I worked for many of the magazines that employed these artists, such as the Mavety Media Group's Mandate, Honcho, Torso, and Inches. Blueboy when it was published in Miami as "The National Magazine About Men," and became known as "the gay Playboy," edited by Bruce Fitzgerald, a genius editor who pulled the gay men's skin magazine into an arena unheard of before, tackling serious social questions as well as seriously covering the arts; and Advocate Men, which again tried to bridge the space between serious literature-and-art and pure jerk-off material. So I had come into contact with some of these artists on a fairly firsthand level: they were illustrating stories by myself and other writers who were my friends. Mel Odom, a fantastic illustrator still alive and working, was a frequent contributor to Blueboy back then. He illustrated a piece I wrote called "Do Gays Have More Class?"

This was about 1978, and the question was: Did they? Mel's piece outlasted mine, and it's still seen in collections of his work. There was an attitude then that these magazines were in the know: they were conveying the big city smarts of New York, San Francisco, and L.A. to the rest of the country. Mavety who with his wife started Mavety Publications had a "nose" for hiring talented gay men to edit and run his magazines.

They included Sam Staggs, who went on to write entertaining books about movies (All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!); Freeman Gunter who made a name for himself as a cabaret critic; and Stan Leventhal, a gay country singer turned novelist who hired other novelists to work with him. I used to describe these offices, filled with hard-working guys who could be openly gay in these protective environments, as "monasteries." There was a kind of sacredness to the calling; it took a lot of balls to say you worked for a queer magazine in those days, and there was a lot of brotherliness among us. I would go up to the offices at times simply to visit, have lunch, dish with my friends who worked there, and if I was lucky sell something or get an assignment.

What I did realize was the level of talent involved with gay erotica then. I'd felt that way about Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) in the 1970s: that he was combining an almost casual level of Renaissance drawing technique with outrageous content--like he had virtually tossed off these drawings in a masterfully effortless way. I met Tom once about 1986, through my friend the wonderful editor at FirstHand magazine, Lou Thomas. Lou started Target Studios, one of the great gay men's photo studios for erotica. One of his friends and competitors was Jim French, an utterly talented draftsman and photographer who started Colt Studios. French's drawings were superb: he had a deft sophistication of line and shading that appeared almost shocking within the hypermasculinity he wanted to convey.

To be able to pull this off was in effect a transgressive act: people expected openly queer erotic art to be . . . well, kind of funky and amateurish. Here were these two artists who could, as Picasso said, "draw like Raphael," and yet convey a molten imagery. A third artist shown in "Stroke" is George Stavrinos. Stavrinos came from the world of nosebleed high fashion--he did a series of Barney's and Bergdorf's ads in the 1970s that were epochal: they were sophisticated, wry, and still amazingly middle-finger-in-your-face queer. I knew George through the circle of writers and photographers I hung around that included Felice Picano and Arthur Tress. Picano used Stavrinos's work on the cover of his first Seahorse Press book, The Deformity Lover. One of the things I admired about George's work was the off-center, never-quite-perfect physique of his models. They were real, despite George's superb technique that elevated them to a higher level of desire and perception. They were no demi-gods, just winsome young men whose bodies always had a less-than-perfect physique. George himself was like that; he was short, his head was a little too big. He was shy and sweet. I loved running into him when I did. He died in 1990, at the age of 42: another victim of the horrors of AIDS.

Richard Rosenfeld, Untitled, 1982, Mixed media on paper, 18.75 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Two interesting ideas come through in this show. One is the fact that several of the artists came to queer erotica after a lot of classical training and commercial success either as fashion illustrators (an occupation that is now almost dodo extinct but which up to about the 1990s was a steady employer of artists) or fine artists. These include Antonio Lopez (who had worked for Karl Lagerfeld), the beautiful drawings of Richard Rosenfeld (who had worked for WWD and Vogue), James McMullan who did Lincoln Center Theater posters, and of course Odom and Stavrinos.

The other is simply about artists who bent their talent, that is shaped and worked it, because of their own intense desires and feelings. Sometimes this comes through as a little clunky, and other times it absolutely wipes you out. Like, how did Michael Breyette, who was basically self taught, have the finesse to produce the kind of images he did? His picture "Unsuitable," from 2009, looks like Jon Hamm as Don Draper, with one unmistakable exception exposing itself to us. The Swiss artist Oliver Frey, born in 1948, learned how to draw through 36 correspondence lessons from the Famous Artist School, of the back-of-matchbooks fame.

He has one fantasy-based piece in the show that is very strong, and real enough to transcend fantasy. Two of the artists, Domingo Stephen Orejudos, who went under the name "Etienne," and Quaintance (George Quaintance) go back to the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, as purveyors of the kind of art you used to see on the covers of drugstore paperbacks. These were the images that burnt through your eyelids if you were a young man feverishly hoping to find something about yourself back then. Quaintance and Etienne were both big on "cowboy" images, that is stuff that had nothing to do with Zane Gray and Frederick Remington, but with the kind of dreams gay men passed among themselves, the cowboy as furtive, transgressive lover. It was as if a young Monty Clift had climbed down off the screen from Red River and got into your bed. The cowboy, the hot cop, forbidden fun in the locker room: this was the age of "trade," of straight men offering you the power you did not have, and it comes through often in this show.

Stroke was curated by Robert W. Richards who also came out of fashion illustration and tarried in Mavety's stable and with Advocate Men. He has done a great job with this show; it is very much a part of the evolution of queer identity and information that is still, I am happy to say, going on.

The show runs until May 25 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, (212 431-2608. www.leslielohman.org.

Perry Brass's latest book is Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future, Second Edition. He has published 17 books, and can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com.

Now hear this! People should attend film festivals whenever they can, even if they are not big movie lovers (like me). Why?

The one film festival I attend every April is the wonderful celebration of French Cinema known as COL COA,* a week of French film premieres in Hollywood. I first started attending because my husband, Pascal, is French; we both love movies; and he really, really loves hanging out with his own kind once in while (they get to agree with each other about things like, "zat cheese zey are serving is not too disgusting!). Plus, it's right up the street from us at the Directors Guild of America building, so we can walk. But this year, it dawned on me that love of films might not be the only good reason for binge-watching movies -- one to three a day sometimes! -- for seven days.

Creative people possess the magical ability to harness our collective consciousness -- our thoughts, feelings, concerns -- and help us to make sense of it all through artistic mediums like literature, music, theater, dance and film. By the time you've seen movie after movie, day after day, without realizing it, you have tuned in to the issues currently being processed by all the other people who share this planet with you. By the end of the festival, you have witnessed some of humanity's prevailing problems, dissected them, digested then, and, in some cases, resolved them!

I've been very busy with work this year so didn't get to see as many films as I would have liked, but with the four films I saw in three days, I had the opportunity to meditate on our capacity for cruelty through an Algerian story called The Rooftops; on trailer park life, alcoholism, love and healing in an unexpected tale titled One of a Kind; teen exploration of sexuality through online prostitution in Young and Beautiful; and on the meaning of family, friendship and infidelity through a film called We Love You, You Bastard.

Infidelity comes up a lot in French films. Come to think of it, infidelity abounds in just about every film I've seen in recent memory. What's that about? Um, I think infidelity and its cousin, loyalty, must be on our collective minds.

In the last couple of weeks, my inbox has been flooded with emails from Ashley Madison, a dating service for married people whose tagline exhorts Life is short. Have an affair. I wrote about this company years ago after seeing their provocative tag line on a billboard day after day on my way to work. I wonder if that's why I'm getting these emails now? I wrote about it, therefore Google's expert spying engine must have told them that I'm a prime target for their services! Which gets me ruminating -- again -- about how our privacy has gone the way of the dinosaur. Although, I recently read that technology might enable scientists to recreate dinosaurs, letting them loose among us at the mall, turning shopping into such a disaster.

See what I mean? Seeing a lot of movies really gets your brain going.

If you don't get to COL COA this year, mark your calendar for April next year. Film festivals are a must!

*City of Lights, City of Angels

Taco Bell Day and Night

Mendelssohn Club Musically Digs in Anthracite Fields

Show Them Your Assets

Meet the New King of New York: Kenyon Phillips

Video Review: Wisdom of Changes: Richard Wilhelm and The I Ching, a Documentary by Bettina Wilhelm

Met Opera: DiDonato and Camarena Are a Fairy-Tale Couple in Rossini's "La Cenerentola"

Dialogue Isn't Just for Screenplays

Lili from Belgrade

New Art Books on the Art of Afro-Cuba, Vincent Van Gogh and Wayne Thiebaud

Marcello's Ogle... Cannes Is Coming!

William Shakespeare at 450

Words of Wisdom From an Older Dancer

Lights, Camera, Action: Take Two

Designer Humberto Campana: A Material Flirt

Baryshnikov at the Broad Stage

A New Fair for the Underexposed: This Artweek.LA (April 21, 2014)

Cultural & Chartable Catch-Up: April 2014

Classical Sounds: Italian, French and English Early Music + Bach

The Manly Pursuit of Desire: Heat "Stroke" at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Film Festivals: Get Your Daily Dose