Fly By Night: Believe in Stars, Believe in Love?

June 3, 2014, 11:20 am

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This week is almost all about the Tony Awards. (I know, I have to report the results of my Tony voters poll to about a dozen producers today.) But I'm already looking beyond the Tonys. You know, the glitzy benefits, the sleep and the opening of Fly By Night at Playwrights Horizons. I saw this musical very early in its preview period, so I shall not write about it in detail, but, needless to say, I liked it enough to do this piece on it.

I was particularly struck by the effectiveness of the cast, especially the three young leads. (And, while he is not featured in this story, let me also give a special shout-out to cast member Bryce Ryness, who has one of the nicest bio lines I've read in a long while: "Thank you for coming to this show, supporting the arts and helping me feed my wife and three children whom I love very, very much.") Fly By Night is about fate, love and loss. Out of those, the second topic provides for more entertaining discussions, so I emailed Allison Case, Adam Chanler-Berat and Patti Murin and asked them some questions about just that. Below is the result:

What is the craziest thing you have ever done for love?

Case: Okay, so I don't know if it classifies as crazy, but I wrote a song and used it to ask someone to prom in 11th grade. And then sang it in his class. In front of everyone.

Chanler-Berat: I once joined a gym for someone I liked. That sounds really horrible and pathetic. Let me clarify. I didn't join the gym to get in shape for him. I joined the gym because we were out of town and I knew I'd get to see him more if we went to the gym together. Is that creepy? That's creepy.

Murin: I feel like I've been doing crazy things for love my whole life! One at the top of the list was when I was in college. I was so in love with someone who was completely off limits, and he felt the same way about me. We lived about two hours away from each other, so late one night, we got in our cars and met each other halfway between our houses, at a random rest stop on the Palisades Parkway, just to see each other. We went to the Garrison train station and just sat there, talking for hours and looking at the river. We didn't even kiss each other, we just had to be together. Very Harold and Miriam, and terribly romantic.



What was your most awkward first encounter with someone you went on to date?

Case: Well we didn't go on to date, but I awkwardly went on a date that I was super excited about, not realizing the other half didn't think it was a date at all until a little more than half way through.

Chanler-Berat: I'm turning this question into a bad date answer because I have an arsenal of bad date stories that I've been dying to use. I went out with someone who didn't think it was a date and I totally did and I was so nervous that upon my exit from the bar I knocked over and shattered a wine glass with my giant backpack. Shockingly, we did not go on to date.

Murin: I don't really have any awkward first encounters with anyone I went on to date, but I have many a bad date story. I can never forget the brain surgeon who I met out at a bar when I was playing wingman for a friend of mine, who somehow weaseled his way into a Saturday night date with me. We went out to dinner, and he actually, literally, would not talk about anything else but the brain. And surgery on the brain. In graphic detail. While I was eating. Eating food. One of the only times in my life I have ever been tempted to fake an emergency and have to leave the date early.

Where did you meet your first love?

Case: My second year of college. We both got cast in a show together and started spending a lot of time together. I had no idea I was in love for a few months, I just knew I loved spending time together. And then it all made sense.

Chanler-Berat: I mean if we're talking original love... Elementary school. Soccer team.

Murin: I would have to say that my first love was my boyfriend in high school, and we met when we were in junior high. He also happened to live right next door to my cousins. He was one of my best friends, and once we decided to date, we pretty much stayed together from freshman year through senior year. Looking back on my history of love thus far, I still consider him my first love, and myself extremely lucky to have learned so much about love and relationships with him.

When did love hurt you the most?

Case: When I broke my first love's heart. I was young and felt I needed to experience more before committing to something serious. I felt haunted by it for months when we finally agreed to meet. When we did, I learned she was seeing someone new and my heart dropped to my stomach. My choice to leave, even though I was very much in love, finally became real and I was forced to deal with it.

Chanler-Berat: Love always hurts. To quote Rick Elice's Peter and the Starcatcher, 'that's how you know it meant something.'

Murin: When love hurts, boy does it hurt. It hurt me most when someone I loved very deeply seemingly gave up on our relationship without warning. Looking back it makes a lot more sense than it did at the time, but the hurt never really goes away. You just have to make sure to learn from it every single time, so at least it's worth it.





Photo credit Joan Marcus. The duo in the first picture is Adam Chanler-Berat and Patti Murin. Allison Case is featured in the lower picture to the right.

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Matthew Couper on the ImageBlog

June 3, 2014, 12:13 pm

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Matthew Couper, ''Creator, Nurturer, Lifegiver', 2010, oil on three metal panels, 41" x 107", Sir James Wallace Arts Trust Collection, Auckland, New Zealand.
Upcoming Exhibition: Matthew Couper: Recent Devotional Paintings. http://www.mattcouper.com/RCC.html

Theater Review: Just Jim Dale, a Slim and Stale Musical Memoir

June 3, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Photo credit: Joan Marcus, courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre


Roundabout's puzzling summer selection at the Laura Pels Theatre (a replacement for Bekah Brunstetter's postponed Cutie and Bear) seems to be an innocuous way to please its septuagenarian subscriber base without breaking the bank: a one-man show penned and performed by 78-year-old Broadway veteran Jim Dale. For the more discerning theatergoer, Just Jim Dale comes across as a poorly-composed sepia-toned selfie. If you want to learn more about Dale, visit his Wikipedia page; if you want to see that entry adapted into a tiresome 100-minutes with little emotion or fresh insight, see this show. Quite simply, this cabaret fare belongs in a more intimate setting where bottles of wine can impair critical judgment.

Dale claims that the acting bug bit him with his very first breath, when his mother announced "Ta-Dah" as he exited the womb. Standing on a virtually bare stage with a charmless pianist (Mark York), the showman takes us back to his childhood in Rothwell, England ("the dead center of London in every way"), where he studied dance and transformed into the Billy Elliot of his hometown. He soon works his way up to the top of the bills of the British Music Hall scene as a celebrated slapstick physical comedian. After a brief career as a pop singer in his early 20s, Dale commits to serious acting after seeing a Noel Coward play. He soon finds success playing many of Shakespeare's clowns, before moving onto leading Broadways roles in Barnum, Scapino, and a revivals of The Threepenny Opera and Candide.

Dale is also an accomplished songwriter, lending the film Georgy Girl its Oscar-nominated theme song. He's also recorded all of J.K. Rowling's seven Harry Potter audiobooks, creating original voices for each character. He shares silly stories about both projects that often strain credulity.

But beyond his resumé, who is Jim Dale? Isn't he more than the sum of his credits? In between songs, we crave moments of reflection, but he offers us very little substance. Under the direction of Richard Maltby Jr., he appears to be racing uncomfortably through a list of impersonal bullet points and monologues from his past successes (the opening of Peter Nichols' Joe Egg, for instance). When an audience member stood to leave after his presumed closing number ("The Colors of My Life" from Barnum), he shouted down from the stage "We haven't finished yet! Sit down!" At last, he was connecting with his audience.

Fortunately for Dale, to quote his character in Barnum, "there is a sucker born every minute," and plenty of them fill Off-Broadway houses.

Just Jim Dale closes August 10th, 2014 at The Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY, 10036; Ticket Services: 212.719.1300 and roundabouttheatre.org, $79.

Aisle View: Lambeth Lad Makes Good

June 3, 2014, 7:11 pm

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The Roundabout gives us just Jim Dale -- casually attired in gray trousers, gray shirt and gray hair, on an empty stage but for a baby grand piano -- in their latest offering at the Laura Pels. Dale is trim, slight, and approaching eighty, but he turns out to be more than enough to fill the stage entertainment-wise. Simply put, Just Jim Dale is unalloyed joy, starring the self-proclaimed "hosted, toasted, roasted lucky Jim."

Young Jim Smith hailed from middle-of-nowhere Rothwell, a factory town with no room for advancement nor prospects. The bright spot of his existence, he tells us, was the local music hall. At seventeen, he escaped by clowning his way into a traveling troupe of teen talent, landing his spot by lacing his act with pratfalls (billed as "Jimmy Smith, the Laff Smith"). As music hall started to die out in the late '50s, the twenty-ish Dale became a chart-topping rock 'n' roller, with his recordings produced by a pre-Beatles George Martin. Dale's song-writing career peaked with the Oscar-nominated lyrics for the title song of the 1966 film, Georgy Girl.

All of this is related in song -- songs from Dale's career, or existing songs with new lyrics by Dale -- and story. The star makes it look effortlessly simple, weaving his tales and adventures into gloriously funny set-pieces. He has made a side career as reader of the phenomenally-successful Harry Potter audiobooks; he clearly knows how to tell a tale.

Dale moves from recording studio to TV to Shakespeare to Broadway, gliding along in a seemingly low-pressure, endearing manner which leaves us defenseless. His singing is droll; his dancing is in the eccentric comedy style, a skeleton on springs with ankles turned in impossible positions; and he peppers the narrative with corny jokes of the music hall variety. (A toff in top hat walks onstage and calls into the wings "put the Rolls in the garage, James." Then adds: "I'll butter them later.")

Among the set pieces are a pas de deux by eleven-year-old Jimmy with his cousin Ruth, except she fails to appear; a nimble-tongued spiel of familiar phrases from Shakespeare; an audition of the song Georgy Girl, for two Godfather-style gangsters; a monologue from Noël Coward's play Fumed Oak; an audience participation scene from A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which Dale memorably played for the Roundabout in 1985; and a mélange of Potter voices. Dale is accompanied by pianist Mark York, on a simple but elegant set from Anna Louizos. Richard Maltby, Jr. directed the show, which was originally mounted at the Long Wharf in New Haven in 2012.

Special attention is given to Dale's Broadway appearances. He tells us how the first musical he saw as a child--a West End revival of Me and My Girl, starring Lupino Lane -- instantly made him want to be a performer, and forty years later he was himself on Broadway, "doin' the Lambeth Walk, oi!" (Dale grew up in Northamptonshire, far from the London district of Lambeth, but no matter.) Just Jim Dale also reprises three selections from Barnum, the 1980 musical for which he won a Tony Award: "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute" and "The Museum Song" showing off Dale's vocal dexterity, and "The Colors of My Life" as a salute to his wife.

Dale also pauses to mention Scapino, the 1974 treat with which the talented Englishman veritably exploded on Broadway. Those of us who saw this Dale/Frank Dunlop adaptation of Moliere's Scapin, at the Circle in the Square or Ambassador Theatre, are still marveling over Dale swinging through the air on a rope brandishing an oversized salami. It is a supreme pleasure, for at least some of us, to hear him once more sing his Neapolitan "Minestrone, Macaroni" song.



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Just Jim Dale, by Jim Dale, opened June 3, 2014 at the Laura Pels Theatre

5 Ways Libraries Cultivate Community Art

June 4, 2014, 4:51 am

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At the Library as Incubator Project, we work hard to highlight the many ways that libraries and artists can support each other, and not just because makerspaces are cool. We believe that creativity is inherent in everyone, and so we define "artist" broadly in order to communicate that point: to us, an artist is any person who uses creative tools to make new things. We think creativity -- like information --should be accessible to everyone in a community, and that the library is the perfect democratic space to make that happen.

Here are some of our favorite examples of the ways libraries cultivate community art:

1. Libraries Host Writers in Residence (and Artists and Tinkers!)

So, you're writing a children's book. How would you like $20,000 and free office space in a public library in order to help make that happen? That's exactly what The Children's Writer in Residence fellowship at Boston Public Library offers each year to an unpublished author, many of whom have relied on the library's fabulous collections to help them research and write their stories. And it's not just large, metropolitan libraries that create space and support for writers -- the Writer in Residence at Forbes Library in Northampton Massachusetts enjoys in-depth research support from talented librarians who are well-versed in local history, plus the opportunity to lead writing workshops (and cemetery tours!) for the community.


Author Susan Stinson, Writer-in-Residence, in front of Forbes Library


At libraries across the country and the world, these kinds of residencies are popping up in all sorts of incarnations, not least because they offer patrons the opportunity to meet and learn from an in-house expert. The Artist in Residence program at The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, for example, allows artists free reign over The Bubbler room, where they can work on their art, host workshops, and meet patrons who want to know more about what they do.

Artists in these spaces often do incredible things to re-imagine the library as an information-finding experience, like visual designer and artist Chris Gaul, who served as Artist in Residence at the Library of the University of Technology, Sydney, where he conceived of "Book Babble," an installation involving a re-wired a set of headphones that picked up signals from books so that patrons could listen as they wandered the stacks and zero in on something interesting.

2. Libraries collect local music and writing (& help people create it, too)

Libraries don't just open their doors to artists to use the space-- they collect what they produce, too, and it goes far beyond purchasing the latest best seller. The Iowa City Public Library Local Music Collection was one of the earliest efforts to license music from local acts -- if you have a library card and password, and live in Iowa City, you can download full albums from the ICPL Local Music Collection. And you own it forever. The Yahara Music Library at Madison Public Library is modeled on the ICPL's incredible success, and takes it a step further: in addition to licensing streaming and downloadable content in multiple file formats, Yahara also integrates band bios, social media feeds, and news on upcoming shows, essentially providing a free advertising platform for local bands that allows music lovers to discover new music for free.

And it's not just music. The IStreet Press at Sacramento Public Library not only has a suite of workshops that teach writing, editing, and marketing your work, it also leverages the library's Espresso Book machine, which prints books -- both public domain and patron-produced -- on demand, to build an impressive Local Authors Collection. When a patron decides to self-publish their work through I Street, they have the option to donate a copy to the library. The book is then catalogued, and added to the Local Authors Collection at the central library. The titles are included in the system's 28-branch catalogue as well, and are available to everyone with a library card in the area.

Similarly, Provincetown Public Press is a new digital publishing imprint launched by Provincetown Public Library. Because Provincetown is an arts colony -- one of the oldest in the nation -- it made sense for the library to support the work of local writers. Add new, user-friendly platforms for producing e-books, and a juried selection process for choosing new titles to produce and sell on both Amazon and Apple platforms, and you have a new breed of publisher that can give voice to an artistic community: the Library.


3. Libraries show new artwork outside the gallery/museum circuit -- and that's a good thing.

With their place at the center of the community and the free, democratic access people have to libraries, they make a perfect place to show art, in addition to helping artists make and distribute it. Showing work in a library is an opportunity to connect with a huge cross section of people -- little kids and seniors, the homeless and the well-to-do, students and businesspeople. Basically, everyone in the community -- including folks who might never see a modern art installation otherwise. And if the point of art is to make someone feel something, it's best to get it out there in the open where it can do it's job!

Libraries everywhere host local art shows on a regular basis, whether that means small exhibits in glass cases or hung in a reading room, or formal gallery space that can be customized, like the Art Gallery in the new Central location of the San Diego Public Library. On View at San Diego Public Library leverages this impressive new space to allow free access to the visual arts and cultural exhibitions, while promoting San Diego artists and creative community groups as part of their long-running and highly successful Visual Arts Program.


New Central Library Art Gallery at San Diego Public Library


Libraries also tend to be big -- especially in cities -- big enough to commission large installations, like The Reading Nest. Each year the Cleveland Public Library has an open call to artists to execute a temporary installation in their Eastman Reading Garden, and in 2013, artist Mark Riegelman won the commission and created The Reading Nest using discarded wooden boards. The final work stands approximately 13′ tall and 36′ wide, and was inspired by the Eastman Garden's feeling of refuge within downtown Cleveland and symbols from the natural world that we often associate with knowledge and wisdom: trees and owls. "I want visitors to be enchanted by the installation. I want them to feel like they are walking into a fairytale," Riegelman said of The Reading Nest, and we think he pulled it off: the effect of the piece is not unlike cracking open a good book!


Mark Riegelman's 'Reading Nest' at Cleveland Public Library


4. Libraries host readings and performances

In the same way that libraries can connect a huge cross section of people with new and exciting artwork, they can also open up the world of theatre and performance to folks who may not usually go to see a production. The BONK! Performance Series at Racine Public Library, for instance, started out as an independent project run by poet and librarian Nick Demske before migrating to a permanent home as under the Racine Public Library umbrella. The series aims to bring challenging poetry, art, and performance to the established local arts community in Racine -- a place you might peg as an unlikely place for an avant garde performance series to thrive. And yet, BONK! now has a huge following in the area and has garnered national attention on the American poetry scene. It regularly hosts poets and performers like Ching-In Chen, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and S.E. Smith, bringing their work to an unexpected and enthusiastic audience.

Likewise, the Page to Stage performance series at Princeton Public Library is an exercise in minimalism and creativity for theatre artist Brandon Monokian. Several years ago. Brandon and a group of theatre artists adapted readings from Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology and performed them around New York and New Jersey. The success of their performances caught Programming Librarian Janie Hermann's eye after she booked their show at the Princeton Public Library for Banned Books week, and invited him to develop more performances for the library.

They collaborated to create the Page to Stage series, which features staged readings of plays that have been adapted from or inspired by literature, including Einstein's Dreams, Grimm Women, and The Arabian Nights. Brandon never imagined that he'd be creating performances for spaces other than a theatre, but now he's sold. The spatial and technical limitations at the library not only challenge him creatively -- for one production, the play called for a river onstage, which Brandon interpreted as a collection of recycled water bottles -- but also stretches the use of the art. "Tying live theatrical entertainment to literature serves as an animated way to promote literacy,"Brandon says. He believes that doing theater in a library can be an important political statement in addition to a creative collaboration.


Page to Stage program at the Princeton Public Library. Photo by Kaitlin Overton.


5. Libraries host hands-on workshops for all ages and encourage creative collaboration

So you can see art and performance in a library, and you can use the space to help produce and promote your music and writing and artwork, but what if you're a dabbler, a hobbyist looking to try your hand at something new? Well, you're in luck, because this is the library's primary wheelhouse (in addition to books and other materials, of course). Even if your library doesn't have a fancy gallery space or an artist-in-residence, its mission to be a locus for lifelong learning, and that means it probably has a robust calendar of hands-on programs that can help you get a taste of a new skill or subject. From computer applications to coding, digital photography to embroidery, screenprinting to storytelling, libraries leverage the experts in the community to offer many free tutorials on a variety of interesting activities and skills.

When you combine these hands-on explorations with the classic library book club, you have the recipe for a unique literary exploration, which is exactly what The Book to Art Club sets out to achieve. Carrying out the Book to Art motto, "Read, Talk, Make," chapters at libraries all over the country add a creative twist to the standard book discussion that is a popular library staple. Book to Art meetings aren't just a place to discuss the narrative, characters, or style of a particular title, but also invite participants to create something new in response by riffing on themes, ideas, and settings in a text through simple art projects that can be customized for any skill level. Thinking visually in this way opens up some exciting discussions that would never come up otherwise.

The Madison, WI chapter of the Book to Art Club meets at The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, but any library is welcome to download the Book to Art Club's free templates and project suggestions for such titles as The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly, and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.


A series of drawings created as part of a Book to Art Club discussion for Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett


Erinn Batykefer is co-founder of The Library as Incubator Project along with Laura Damon-Moore. The LAIP is based in Madison Wisconsin but lives online here. Follow the team as they write about libraries + art stuff on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. And, be sure to check out their new book, The Artist's Library: a Field Guide from the Library as Incubator Project [Coffee House Press, $23.95].

Capturing the Moment Requires Vision, Patience and Luck

June 4, 2014, 5:26 am

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When making a picture of someone, there are many ways to draw attention to your subject. One common technique is to use a shallow depth of field to blur the background or foreground. Another option is what photographer Frederic Vasquez did here using a slow shutter speed to create a whir of activity around the stationary police officer.

Yet, knowing how to get the shot and having a vision of what you want is just half the battle. As with a lot of great street photography, you also need patience and a little bit of luck.

For this picture to happen, Frederic had to catch the policeman standing motionless. If the officer had turned his head during the 1/8th of a second that the shutter was open, the officer's face would have been blurred and the moment would have been ruined. But that's not all. The passengers exiting and entering the train had to be spaced out so that they didn't obstruct the view of our friendly Tokyo subway officer. Not an easy task during rush hour at Shinjuku Station, where some 3 million people pass in, out and through the station each day.

As it happened, framing the officer between two blurred commuters worked perfectly. Even better was the fact that the officer is positioned between the two subway windows, which give the neat effect of  serving as pictures within the picture.

Frederic, an amateur photographer who grew up in France but now lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, says when he arrived at Shinjuku Station, the scene could be described as organized chaos. His attention was immediately drawn to the officer, who was in the center of the madness making sure everything moved smoothly.

This is where patience comes in.

Frederic watched and took note of the patterns. Then he waited. He knew the moment would eventually come with passengers disembarking and the officer standing perfectly still. The shutter speed on his Olympus E-M10 was slow enough to get the blurred movement Frederic wanted while seemingly "freezing the guard in time." It helped that the Olympus has built-in image stabilization that made it possible to hand hold the E-M10 at such a slow shutter speed.

The resulting image is wonderful. I love the composition and the expression on the officer's face.

Frederic says the five days he spent in Tokyo were an amazing, eye-opening experience. He spent 16 to 18 hours a day wandering around taking pictures.

"My trip to Tokyo was decided at the spur of the moment -- a last-minute need to get away and shoot in a different place," Frederic says. "I looked at the map, checked with the airline, and Tokyo it was."

Several of the photos from his trip to Japan are featured on the Italian Vogue website.

When asked to describe his work, he said he considers it a mix of street photography and "social documentation." The distinction, Frederic says, being that social documentation is more about showing the human condition in a specific environment relative to a certain time period, whereas street photography is often timeless and more focused on the photograph as art.

"I really like getting close to people and showing their facial expressions -- capturing an emotional response to the camera or the mood they are in that day," Frederic says. It doesn't always go well. He's had a few people threaten him or yell at him for taking their picture. "But it makes a great story to tell and some people you meet are truly amazing."

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Image of Tokyo police officer by Frederic Vasquez. It is used here with permission. You can see more of Frederic's work here. A version of this article was posted at Cosmic Smudge.

The 27 Club in Rock Limbo via New Paradise Laboratories

June 4, 2014, 5:34 am

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(photo: Matt Saunders)

Putting deceased rock stars onstage usually means a pasty musical wrapped in creepy facsimiles of dead celebrities. New Paradise Laboratory director Whit MacLaughlin avoids such pageantry substantively and even magically in '27' which just concluded its second run, this time at the Painted Bride Arts Center.

'27' refers to the age some heavyweight rockers flamed out, so his show puts forth the question whether they are on some separate cosmic trajectory, or part of the doomed alchemy of
superstardom. In MacLaughlin's scenario, it is a template for physical theater poetry and scalding cultural humor. From a list of some 45 artists and musicians who died young, MacLaughlin picked four of the most famous of the 27 club- Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Jim Morrison.

The show opens the show with a smoky cabaret version of the Doors Crystal Ship- Before you slip into unconsciousness/I'd like to have another kiss/Another flashing chance at bliss... In this context, morbidly beautiful lyrics as the Janis, Jim, Kurt and Amy are frozen in this time warp again. The fog rolls in; the radio tower upended and looming over the stage.in Matt Saunders' eerie, punched through another dimension set & sonic a rec room purgatory..

Slowly the stars animate, dashing around the stage amok, but with fluid choreography constructed from the stars' iconic physicality and personas. Kurt floats around in a stupor, burst forth in perilous vaults on and off tables. Amy clings to the petrify of the room, clawing at a microphone just out of reach, Janis jerks her upper body or freezes in her movements singing Ball and Chain. Jim's is poetic divo at all times, moving unctuously forward or tilting his head in poetic repose

MacLaughlin builds an accumulated lexicon to examine the absurdist lives of these very famous people, trapped in fragments of images of themselves. At times, they seem like buffoons, motifs on the absurd banality of their lives, but this is also a nihilistic meditation on their lost lives. Morrison stands in from of the mega-watt bulb lit Starhole into which they get sucked into.

In one of Morrison's more coherent moments, he muses on nudity onstage being cyclical, that he doesn't like gratuitous entertainment flesh in fact, but that artists should always have the right to bare all. Cobain talks about irritable bowel syndrome, Janis about needing a man, but also as a liberated manifesto and Amy claws around can't quite get any message out.

(photo: Matt Saunders)

Jimi drops in via the scorching guitar of singer/composer Alec MacLaughlin laces his original music for the show; make this among other things the best rock shows this town has seen in a long time. Much to his credit, MacLaughlin vocally has much to bring and doesn't indulge rock classics he performs with interpretive artistry.

Throughout, MacLaughlin speeds up or slows down the movement to keep everything dreamlike and perceptions off-kilter. Suddenly the victim of an auto accident, played by Emily Krause, maybe a eternal groupie, is initiated to the club to such drastic extent. (the one false note in '27') is her painful rendition of a Joplin classic.

Kevin Meehan gives Morrison his flat-footed, torso snaky gait that completely nails the aura. Matteo Scammell's Cobain is either comatose or flying into acrobatic leaps in expressing the singer's nihilism. Allison Caw's Joplin is always locked in the performance zone, hair flying, in epileptic performance moments. And Julia Frey, with her perfect bouffant and Cleopatra-eyed, druggy desperation, gives Winehouse a harrowing, cryptic physicality. The cast is moves with the precision of a dance troupe and 27 is exemplar of NPL's refinement in concepts of physical theater

www.newparadiselaboratories.org

Mohamed Hefzy: Ismailia Film Fest Director, Film Clinic Producer & Filmmaker

June 4, 2014, 5:36 am

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Until about a year ago, I found little reason to watch modern Egyptian cinema. Besides a film like The Yacoubian Building, which offered glimpses into some well-drawn human characters, cinema from Egypt seemed like an inside joke I was forever destined to miss the meaning of.

Then I met filmmaker Mohamed Hefzy and began watching his Egyptian cinema. To Egyptian audiences he offers a new type of movie, modern and urban, while to the rest of the world a blend of wonderfully written characters and slice-of-life poetic interpretations of today's land of chaos and humanity, so often watched on the news and yet so seldom understood. Hefzy and his company Film Clinic, along with the wonderful team at MAD Solutions who first brought him and his work to my attention, have shown me a new Egyptian cinema, one I not only understand and like but can relate to as a human being.

This week, Hefzy dons another one of the various hats he so comfortably, and humbly, wears -- the one of director of the Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts. Through Sunday June 8th, under his watchful eye personal favorites like My Love Awaits Me by the Sea, Cairo Drive and The Square will be playing, along with a new documentary by Swedish documentary filmmaker Goran Olsson, the sequel to Jews of Egypt titled End of a Journey, and a series of soccer documentaries including Maradona by Serbian master filmmaker Emir Kusturica. In the case of the Oscar-nominated The Square, yet another example of Hefzy's gutsy choices, since the film was originally banned from releasing theatrically in Egypt, and Ismailia will mark its first public screening there.

During the 10th Dubai International Film Festival back in December, I caught up with Hefzy, who is at once insightful, charismatically soft-spoken and incredibly direct.

You've been in films, either as a screenwriter or producer, for around eleven years, yet you've already become the go-to filmmaker for Egyptian cinema. How did you manage that in such a short while?

Mohamed Hefzy: To be honest, time management is one thing and just being really lucky with good people around me. Having a good team around me is always helpful. In Film Clinic, I have a good team, at Ismailia Film Festival I've managed to put together a nice group of people and as a script writer, well you know, it comes at a cost. Because as a script writer I don't have a lot of time for writing scripts anymore. So I rarely exist as a script writer anymore and that's something I obviously would have loved to do something about but I don't have the time to do everything, so I'm not 100 percent successful in all those areas. I'm trying to juggle probably a bit too much.

And you find that comes easily for you?

Hefzy: No, like I said it's at a cost, because I don't have a lot of time...

I mean, finding good people to surround yourself with?

Hefzy: I've been lucky, I get people just knocking on my door that I think are really talented and really good, and they're smart and they know what they want so I've been able to use them. And I think there are a lot more. It's just a question of how do you put together a system that brings the best out of everybody for the benefit of different projects.

Three and a half years since the Arab Spring, which brought a lot of attention to Egypt. But it also changed the landscape of cinema there, completely. Because for a while everything that has come out of Egypt has been about the revolution, in one way shape or form. A blessing or a curse?

Hefzy: As I producer I've been getting all kinds of projects thrown at me and I think a lot of them have not been successful in involving the revolution, and those are obviously the ones I didn't do. I mean involving the revolution into their narrative. And I sometimes wonder about the motive for why that person is talking about the revolution. Is it political, is it just to try and get more attention to the film? I mean there are all kinds of reasons why someone would do that, and some stories are really honest, and the best ones are not involving the revolution in any direct way, but the really human stories that may have something to do with it, in a way that ties into the story...

Films like Rags and Tatters, which dealt with the revolution, in a very hands-on kind of way, but told a completely different story that we may have never know about in the West.

Hefzy: Yeah, that's what I mean, exactly. But I'm making conscious decisions to try and stay away from the revolution, in my future films because I think we've said just about everything there is to say at this moment, knowing what we know and not knowing what we don't. A film like Villa 69 was really fresh for me, to make a film and to release a film that has nothing to do with it. You don't even know if it happened before or after and how many films do you watch nowadays in Egypt or Tunisia or in countries where revolutions have happened, or are happening, where you don't know if this took place before or after? Because it's irrelevant and it could take place anytime or anyplace.


A still from Villa 69

How healthy is the film industry in Egypt right now?

Hefzy: There is an industry, it's not very strong, there are two or three companies producing a lot of films, there's three companies producing I think 70 percent of everything, and I'm not talking about Film Clinic. I'm talking about companies that make films for local demand, like the summer movies, which I don't do as much of. I would like to make more of them, but not in the same way that you see them, yet I'd like to make more commercial films. But now that TV has come into the market I think you'll see a boom in production in Egypt. Over the next year.

Also, you can tell by the revenues that some of the films make that if you try to show them outside of Egypt, people will just laugh at you. And it's not just because they're only relevant to our local urban culture but also because the quality has become so bad that I think it's going to take a long time to educate people cinematically and culturally. Because it's a cultural movement, you have to associate it with literature, theater, arts, general cultural awareness that has to grow, and return to what it was in the 60s and 70s when more people were cultured.


A still from Rags and Tatters

What I'm happy about is that we now have a chance to show more independent films where you get more really brilliant, talented ideas and new directors who just don't have a place to show their films or don't have access to TV broadcasters and theaters. And now I see all these initiatives that are being spoken about where independent films can get more financing, can get more exhibition space... Rags and Tatters was an example of an independent release that I think went well, because we released it in seven screens, for a limited amount of time but it managed to get somehow into the mainstream media, the mainstream talk, it was being written about in all the papers and it was very heavily present in social media. Now there is a demand, a small niche market that wants to see serious films, different films, there is a demand... It's a small market but I think, at least we've proven that they exist. If you can make ten thousand admissions maybe the next one will be twenty thousand, or if you manage to get more screens and more time maybe you can do even better.

And you get more films like that made, because people look at those figures and aren't afraid anymore.

Hefzy: It also gives the TV broadcasters the courage to buy them and show them. We're trying to change that perception that independent cinema is anti-public, it's so unpopular that the public just doesn't want to see it.

That independent cinema is a dirty little secret.

Hefzy: That's right, so if we can change that perception then I think we will have more space to show our films.

Speaking of perception... As a filmmaker, do you feel a responsibility to help bridge cultures? A film like Rags and Tatters went to Toronto, and it undeniably helped to bridge cultures there.

Hefzy: A festival is a good start, but I think it needs a bigger platform to really have an effect. And I think without distributors and exhibitors looking to give more space and more chances, and taking more chances on riskier films like that, I think that it's going to be limited to festival audiences... We need a wider audience. It also depends on the stories you tell, how you're telling them, and how distributors take risks for these films. A lot of distributors will only do that if they have subsidies from governments, to mitigate the risk. So there's a political responsibility, especially in the West for governments, that, like in France, can give money to screen towards foreign films. That's why there are so many foreign films being released in France, so if other countries were to do the same, I think it would help. Because it is in the best interest of governments to bridge cultures!

Do you think that a film like Villa 69 can help people understand the other side, and basically explain, without preaching, that "the Other" is just like us? I find your films help to do that, deal with the other.

Hefzy: It is something that I'm consciously aware of, and do try to go towards projects like that. In my plan for the future, and definitely a mission of mine is to try, like you said, to basically create films that help explain our differences and similarities.

All images courtesy of MAD Solutions, used with permission

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India's First Street Art Fest and the Largest Gandhi Portrait Ever

June 4, 2014, 6:40 am

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St.ART Dehli 2014 Hosts 60 Artists

As street art continues to go global here in the twenty-teens, today we bring you images showing that Dehli has become one of the latest cities to showcase it. In what is billed as India's very first street art festival the south Delhi neighborhood of Shahpur Jat hosted a collection of international and local artists this spring to paint murals while a public who is not quite acquainted with public art asked many questions.


Hendrik ECB Beikirch and ANPU take shots of their collaborative portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. / St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)

Working out of the newly rustic indoor venue "Social Space" in the trendy neighborhood of Hauz Khas Village (HKV), the St. ART Delhi effort was a combination of a gallery exhibition and a street art festival that invited 60 or so international and Indian artists earlier this year to create public works.

Overseen by co-founders Hanif Kureshi and Arjun Bahl and curated by Italian Giulia Ambrogi, the festival was possible with the help of a collection of artists, professionals, art school students, and friends who joined with the Goethe-Institut and the Italian and Polish cultural institutes in Delhi. With volunteers, supplies, and a lot of community outreach, the event organizers were able to bring the artists and help get walls for them- an effort which took about a year and a half of serious planning to bring to fruition.


Sé Cordeiro. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)

In an underdeveloped area undergoing the same gentrification found in edgy parts of large cities around the globe, the artists found that the long term residents sometimes resisted the change but eventually embraced it, if tentatively at times.

"Pondering was what we had to do for much of the day as the locals were still getting accustomed to strange folks painting their walls and generally made life a bit difficult for the artists and the crew," writes Siddhant Mehta on the blog of the festival's site when describing the cautious reaction of folks when seeing painters and scaffolding.

Some residents even requested images of religious iconography before any artworks were created, while some artists entertained requests for cartoon characters or children's games to be incorporated in their murals.


Sé Cordeiro. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)

Co-founder and typography designer Kureshi freely admits it was an easy non-controversial choice when deciding on the portrait that went up on the police building. "After two months, we finished around 75 pieces around Delhi including the tallest one on the Delhi Police Headquarters," says Mr. Bahl as he describes the tallest portrait of Mahatma Gandhi anywhere which covers 150 by 38 feet -- a collaboration between Indian painter Anpu Varkey and German street artist ECB.

Of the 60 artists who participated, many were from India, which may have contributed to a sense of cultural balance in the mural collection created in the neighborhood. Whether is was TOFU from Germany, M-City from Poland, or Alina from Denmark, many of the artists reported that small crowds gathered to watch and, with time, offered gifts such as peanuts or a cup of chai to their foreign guests.

As the global street art scene continues to open its arms wider it is promising to see that a new public art festival like this has begun in such a grand way in a brand new location. It is also heartening to see planners who take into account the preferences of the neighbors, and who act with a sense of goodwill when offering public art for arts sake.


Harsh Raman. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Okuda. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Andy Yeng and Tofu. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Tofu. Detail. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Jayant Parashar)


Tona. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Foe. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Enrico Fabian)


Foe. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Mattia Lullini. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Alina Vergnano. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Alina Vergnano. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Pranav Mahajan)


Bond. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Alias. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Alias. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Tones. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Tones. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Tones. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


Ranjit Dhaiya. St.ART Delhi 2014 (photo © Akshat Nauriyal)


BSA extends our thanks to Thanish Thomas for his diligence in getting these images to us and to Hanif Kureshi, Arjun Bahl, Giulia Ambrogiall, Mridula Garg, Akshat Nauriyal, and the entire team at St.ART Delhi 2014. Click HERE to learn more about St.ART Delhi 2014.

St.ART Delhi Street Art Festival Part I
 




St.ART Delhi Street Art Festival Part II





The Tallest Mural of India - Mahatma Gandhi at St.ART Delhi
 




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Back from the Valley: Sebastian Junger on Korengal

June 4, 2014, 8:24 am

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Sebastian Junger has made a career of documenting why some people embrace danger as a way of life. His debut book, The Perfect Storm, chronicles the deaths of a crew of Gloucester, Mass. fishermen during the Halloween Nor'easter of 1991, and his last documentary, Which Way Is the Frontline from Here, recalled the life his late friend and collaborator photojournalist Tim Hetherington who died in 2011 covering the fall of the Muamer al-Gaddafi regime in Libya.

In addition to the film, Junger founded Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) Training, which teaches war correspondents first aid skills necessary to survive covering a fire fight. One hundred forty-four people have been now been trained to deal with injuries like the one that killed Hetherington.

Junger and Hetherington had previously collaborated on the 2010 documentary Restrepo, which followed a group of soldiers throughout their 15-month deployment in the Korengal valley of Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. The two contributing editors for Vanity Fair earned Oscar nominations for the film. Hetherington also collected a book of photos from the deployment called Infidel, while Junger's book War examined the psychology of modern combat.

Both men collected enough material to make several films without repeating a single image or sequence. In fact, some of Hetherington's work during that period appeared on CNN and ABC News. Nonetheless, Junger has managed to find intriguing angles on the deployment and on the longest military commitment in U.S. history in Korengal, which opened on Friday. The new film offers some sober reflection to the visceral jolt that came with Restrepo.

When contacted by phone for this interview in a New York deli, Junger freely admits that he's never really left Afghanistan or Outpost Restrepo.

From watching Korengal, it seems like you're having the soldiers themselves tell the story of their deployment.

What Tim and I wanted to do with Restrepo was give audiences the experience of combat or as close as possible, so there's no musical score. There's no narration. There are no interviews with generals. None of those things happen in combat.

Korengal is really different. I structured it after my book War, and I really wanted to do an inquiry into what combat looks like and what the consequences are for soldiers.

What does the word "courage" mean? How does fear work? Primarily, why do soldiers miss combat? What is it that they miss?

This might sound grandiose, but what I conceived of was a film that would help soldiers understand their own experience and by extension help civilians understand what soldiers did on their behalf.

How did you and Mr. Levine structure the existing footage this time?

Basically, I teamed up with Michael Levine, who was the editor on Restrepo, and he reread my book War, and it was actually Michael who said "Listen, why don't we structure the film along the lines that War is structured, as a tripartite structure, three sections: fear, killing and love -- the three primary emotions of combat as I understood them.

So that's how we structured Korengal. We didn't call attention to it, but that's the underlying material we decided on.

From watching Korengal, it seems obvious these guys could have difficulty coming down from the adrenaline high that comes from combat.

You're in a group that's totally inter-reliant, and the consequences are life and death. You're highly trained and highly focused. It's all the things that young men love, frankly. There's a lot of neurological wiring in young men that do that and gets them to like it. It's one of the reasons that boys are so into video games and girls aren't. The same neurological wiring is responsible for both things.

There's a huge amount of adrenaline involved, too. Those two drugs, adrenaline and closeness, and being part of a highly functioning group, they are two drugs they respond to. They come back to this society, which is both very dull and very poorly connected, and they just miss it.

When I saw Restrepo in a theater, the audience all gasped when they learned that Outpost Restrepo had been abandoned, but in Korengal, you see why because it was too logistically challenging to keep it resupplied.

A lot of things were going on there. First of all, you really can't take the position of wishing we'd get out of Afghanistan and also being upset that they pulled out of Restrepo. There's a thousand Restrepos they're pulling out in order to leave the country. So that's just part of the process of war, is to take over positions because they're important this year, and then the strategy shifts, and you don't need them anymore.

It's not that they couldn't hold it. Of course, they could hold it. It's just that after a few years it wasn't serving a useful purpose. I think that's a very hard thing for civilians to understand. Civilians, understandably, look at the war in political terms. They don't really look at it in strategic terms, which is all that the generals are doing. It really is two different ways of looking at the same thing.

Absolutely. If the Taliban didn't change strategy during the war, there wouldn't need to be reconfigurations like this.

War is an exercise in mobility and agility. If you had to stay at every position you ever occupied, you'd get annihilated. You couldn't move. You would fail very quickly.

The logic behind the American positions in the Korengal wasn't that the Korengal itself was important, at all. But it was being used as a base for insurgent attacks on the Pech River valley, which was extremely important and is a huge population center.

They were building roads and medical clinics and schools and things like that. The Taliban were attacking from the Korengal, and they were stalling those projects. So the Americans just occupied it until the road was done and the clinics were done, etc. Then they pulled out. It was just a really sensible way to do it. It's just that it was quite costly.

Because you're looking at footage that you and Tim Hetherington shot back when Bush was still president, what's it like to see that footage now?

On the one hand, it seems like I was just there. That's the funny thing about memory. It seems like I was just there. But another part of me can't believe I was ever there at all. It's so extraordinary, I just watched the footage, and it was like, "Damn, that was me. That was Tim. I can't believe we were out there." So it's a funny double experience.

Since Tim died, it was also quite poignant looking at footage that he shot or footage that I shot where he was in the corner of the frame.

In the new film, you have more footage explaining why the Korengalis were hesitant to embrace American troops there because they're caught between the Taliban and the troops.

Yeah, people in high crime areas are slow to embrace the police because they don't want to have repercussions. Day after day, they have to live there. It's a very classic police problem as well.

How will the current Afghani elections and the projected 2016 draw down of American troops affect the situation in Korengal?

It's a complete backwater. I don't think it will be affected at all. The Taliban never went in there when they ran Afghanistan. The Afghan government doesn't really go in there. There's 5,000 people who live in that valley. They don't matter at all in the larger picture. It doesn't matter to Korengal.

If you broaden the question to Afghanistan, I think the President (Obama) had a tough choice. If you leave 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban will definitely not take over, but there's a real downside politically at home for the President. And in Afghanistan, they don't want us there any longer than necessary. What country would?

If you withdrawal all the troops you run the risk of the whole house of cards collapse and have the Taliban take over again, which is obviously a terrible for Afghanistan and probably for this country as well.

So, by having 9,800 troops who are not on combat patrols, that are not on combat operations, that's a pretty good compromise.

The elections, I think, were a big success. Sixty percent of the population voted, way higher than anything I've ever seen in this country. The front runner by a large margin (in the upcoming runoff) is Dr. (Abdullah) Abdullah, whom I spent two months with in 2000. He's a very dignified, educated and principled man. He's vowed a really fight against corruption, which is probably more important than fighting the Taliban.

I think the country has a real chance of rehabilitating itself now.

That said, Dr. Abdullah is still going to have a serious mess to clean up after what has happened with Hamid Karzai's regime.

Yeah, but it's the first freely-elected Afghan government. The Taliban have a huge PR problem in attacking it. They say they're attacking the infidels and their puppet regime, but it's a different thing when 60 percent of the country chose Dr. Abdullah, or however it turns out. That's a PR mess for the Taliban.

Of course, he'll have a mess to clean up. Obama had a mess to clean up when Bush left. That's just what being the leader of a country is.

But the (Afghanis) are a strong, hard-working and resourceful people and very independent and proud. He can do it. He's half Pashtun, half Tajik. He's respected by just about everybody, even by people who don't want him as president. I think if anyone can do it, he can.

The Taliban tried to stop the election with attacks, and they were almost completely blocked from doing that. It was as good as it could have been.

All photos from Korengal, © 2014 Saboteur Media. Used by permission.

Photo of Sebastian Junger by Lybarger.

Official Trailer for Korengal.

CultureZohn: Fundamentals: The 2014 Biennale Strips Down

June 4, 2014, 9:19 am

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I am staying in a Venetian hotel once the home of Alma Mahler, the woman who sent many talented hearts reeling and walking along the narrow often slightly off-fragrant Venetian streets that writer Mary McCarthy prowled when her love life was also a shambles so an invitation to write about Venice seemed the only logical thing to do.

Venice is certainly a city for lovers but it is also a city for seekers of solace even though the woman sitting next to me on the plane told me she would never come to Venice for anything other than a romantic tryst. Yet despite the map or app toting tourists on every footbridge I understand Mahler and McCarthy's quest since emotions run high here even if the acqua alta is in check.

My personal weapon against gloom is the Architecture Biennale of 2014 headed this year -- a six month long duration as opposed to the usual three -- by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas who posits that its theme "Fundamentals" is not about architects but about architecture. An initial exposure to the brilliant rumpled but chic Italian architects at MoMA's famous design show of the seventies made them seem the perfect combination of artist and businessman to a SWF seeking SWM. So this return to the basics feels totally refreshing after the long years of starchitecture (not finished quite yet). Two morning pit stops at the 16th century Scuola di San Rocca -- which posits the more majesty one can carve into a building the more important and enduring it can be -- and the Accademia -- a structure filled with magnificent art whose walls and ceilings are in grave disrepair make arriving at the main pavilion of the Giardinale where Rem's unique take on the role of building in culture uplifts in a way that these monuments do not. I'm struck by the idea that deconstructing buildings down to their very essence to see what makes them tick has a majesty all its own.


Rem Koolhaas explains his Fundamentals exhibit to the press

Rem has taken the concept of concentrating on the elements that make up a building and the built environment and threaded them with personal narrative. In each case -- a window, a door, a set of stairs, a balcony, a ceiling, a facade, heating, roofing, ramps, elevators and escalators, toilets, walls, floors are on display in original and engaging ways -- their history, their future integrated with the stories of a few men (alas not women) who did not know their own needs would push the boundaries of what a fundamental could be. Wheelchair bound veterans who needed better access and dukes who were afraid of invasion personalize the development of things we now take very much for granted.


An ornate dome and a cross section of a hung ceiling with its elements


All of a sudden then, we are able to look at the very things that surround us with new eyes. How did it happen that we ended up with corridors -- once noble and stately interior allees -- that are now narrow pathways to get us out of places. What is it about a balcony that infuses Kings and Celebrities with pomp and occasionally dubious circumstance (Michael Jackson if you recall dangled baby Prince Michael II over the edge much to the chagrin of the worldwide baby police.)

"We don't know where architecture is going" says Koolhaas who himself has been rumored to have left building behind to concentrate to these kinds of philosophical quests. "Architects don't have any authority anymore" (Though he is clearly an exception to this rule.) Though he has collaborated with Harvard and MIT on many of the projects, and was eager to be inclusive, giving his collaborators full voice and credit on the press walk, this biennale exhibition seems infused with the singular vision of an architect who was once a journalist, has always used the written and spoken word as much of an element of his architecture as anything else. A book on each subject has been written and Wolfgang Tillmans enlisted to make a film; on the whole, the entire enterprise seems both pedagogic and sly. This is a fun house of mirrors and magic made entirely by the everyday.


Why levels are important to architecture

Who ever thought a simple corridor once the magisterial egress of barons and lords could evoke all the claustrophobia of a horror film and why a hung ceiling can depress worker mood where a dome can literally lift ones spirits to the heavens. We see floors that respond to weight with sensors that record our energy and can convert it to something positive, like water over a dam. We see ornate Chinese temples reduced, somehow entirely logically, to their essence in blue foam core. We feel the experience of personal thermal bubbles that will encircle us in a harness of heat and allow us to be heated and cooled according to sensors that work with our circulation systems, energy efficient instead of heating whole rooms. (Google has just bought Nest, which is working on this technology controlled by a smart phone.) Gates, once portals to kingdoms are now layers of security that keep us from our goals. Toilets here are real "thrones," the management of daily waste lifted to an art form. We see Japanese models that automatically sense when a man will use and lift the seat cover, auto infuse with scent once flushed, and self clean, and early painted porcelain pissoirs where any duke or king would have happily laid down his royal scent. All to the audio track of continuously flushing water. You can see why Marcel Duchamp made a toilet the example of his Ready Made.


A peekaboo toilet with electronics

Of course the digital revolution is upon architecture and its elements just like every other discipline and the idea of my waste product or my hot flashes being controlled by some Orwellian sensor system feels, well, somehow, almost pornographic. I'm not sure I like my privacy invaded by body sensors any more than my credit card bouncing all over the Web.

Architecture, according to Rem, "stands with one foot in the present and one foot in the past." Here, he says as he demonstrates by spreading his legs in a kind of imitation of how people stand when they are in Greenwich, England standing over the line between two time zones. His bright blue socks and alligator shoes, thin navy pants and black knit top make his stance particularly dynamic and formidable. He towers over most of us, a virtual embodiment of the elements -- in his case, all exemplary -- that make up modern man.


Rem Koolhaas's version of a Chinese temple roof

"How do you think it works," he asks me earnestly after a rocket-speed tour. I tell him I think the exhibition is indeed very accessible, delivered by a ramp instead of a balcony from on high. "That was the idea," he says enthusiastically. He seems eager for the populist spirit to shine through, for a general public to be able to come into this exhibition and look at buildings and cities with new eyes.

More in the next days on how individuals, nations and companies have responded to his clarion call.

The Venice Architecture Biennale labiennale.org) runs through the end of the year and is well worth a visit; Mahler's quiet and charming garden-surrounded house is now Oltre I Gardini hotel in the Ca Polo district.

Veterans, the Exquisite Corpse, and Our Unquiet Dead

June 4, 2014, 9:26 am

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I like to think of it as an elegant Mad Lib, but its real title is the Exquisite Corpse -- or, this time around, the Exquisite Corpse of the Unknown Soldier, part of the "Surrealism & War" exhibit at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. The Exquisite Corpses here are horizontal triptychs, each created by three different artists who added a section of a drawing without knowing what went before. The result is a kind of visual non sequitur, at once alluring and disturbing.

The Exquisite Corpse began as a word game played by the Dadaists. Players contributed a designated part of speech -- a noun, verb, adjective, etc. -- to a piece of paper folded so that they couldn't see what words preceded it. The Surrealists got into the game in the 1920's and contributed the name, which came from the first sentence they created: "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine." Not bad for what's designed to be nonsense.

The Surrealists also adapted the idea to drawings -- one artist drew the legs; a second, the torso; and a third the head -- and the Corpse has gone through giddy permutations ever since. (I have a kind of flip book version where you can rearrange faces of the English royal family. Somehow, I doubt that's what Breton and Apollinaire had in mind.)

Now, Aaron Hughes, a veteran and the curator of "Surrealism & War," and Jennifer Dunning, an artist and professor at Northwestern University, have taken the concept to a more literal level by asking the initiating artist to choose a specific veteran. It could be anyone who served in the any military at any time, a friend, stranger, or historical figure, living or, in many of the cases, dead.



Nearly 90 artists took part. The images they chose range from the heroic to the horrific. There's John Horse, aka Juan Caballo, a mixed-race resistance fighter during the second Seminole War. Major Nidal Hasan, the army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded many others at Fort Hood. Abed Ibrhen Omran, a 2nd lieutenant who died in Syria the day the artist began her drawing; she couldn't find a picture of him, so she drew the kind of chalk outline you'd find at a homicide scene. Alex Minsky, a U.S. marine badly maimed in Afghanistan, who covered his burns with tatoos and became an underwear model.

There are grandfathers, who did or didn't talk about their wars, and an array of unknowns -- an unknown child of Kosovo, an unknown volunteer, a veteran suicide. One corpse begins with the legs of the artist's father, who earned a Bronze Star in WW II, and ends in Saddam Hussein's head.

These portraits represent real people and real fears -- for their safety, for our dread of the consequences of war. They also embody elements of chance and mystery, harking back to how separate the lives of soldiers seem to most Americans today. "The military may be in our minds but too often the individuals who serve are not," writes Dunning in an essay accompanying the exhibit. "For far too many people, veterans -- what they have gone through, what challenges they face now, even simply who they are -- truly are unknown."

We never leave one of our guys behind on the battlefield, we proclaim proudly. The president just invoked that principle in justifying the prisoner swap that freed Bowe Bergdahl, and his critics too grow teary-eyed over that pledge when it suits their purpose. (We're now getting reports that Bergdahl "walked away" from his unit in disillusionment with its activities in Afghanistan. I wonder how deeply either side of this trumped-up controversy plans to explore the implications of that story.)

The reality is that we leave our soldiers and veterans behind in all sorts of ways, yet these oh-so-exquisite drawings show vividly that they never quite leave us alone.



Should you find yourself in Chicago on 30 August, you too can create an Exquisite Corpse at a workshop accompanying the "Surrealism and War exhibit," which is up through November 1.

9 Book Recommendations Based On Your Favorite Pop Songs

June 4, 2014, 9:30 am

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There's a recipe for having the best vacation ever: perfect summer jam + perfect summer read = beach blanket bliss. This guide will help you match the song you'll be playing on repeat till Labor Day with the book you won't be able to put down.

Exclusive Interview With Andres Serrano, Photographer of 'Piss Christ'

June 4, 2014, 10:46 am

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© Irina Movmyga

1. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your likes, and your dislikes?

I like to keep busy, whether it's making art, taking pictures, gardening or antiquing. I always like to be doing something instead of standing still. I dislike travelling without a purpose. I travel for work, to do a project, for exhibitions, lectures, something. I've always fantasized about going cross-country by car, traveling from town to town to the West Coast and back. But in reality I don't have the time, money or motivation to make such a trip.

2. When did your interest in photography begin and at what point did you decide that you wanted to pursue it professionally, as a career?

I started taking pictures after attending the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where I studied painting and sculpting when I was in my teens. After I left art school, I decided I wanted to continue as an artist but I couldn't really paint or sculpt. I was living with a girl named Millie who owned a camera, so I figured I could be an artist with a camera instead of a paintbrush. I didn't make money from my work till I hit forty.

3. I read recently that you have a musical alter ego, 'Brutus Faust'. Can you tell me more about your musical interests and aspirations?

I've always loved music. I grew up in the era of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the British Invasion, Motown, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. I would have wanted to be a singer but I didn't know anyone with a band and never learned to sing. A few years ago I decided to study singing with a music teacher and later hooked up with a band called Blow Up Hollywood, and we recorded an album. Music, like art, needs to be practiced often. It's something you have to immerse yourself in completely. Sometimes, I wish I could be Brutus instead of Andres Serrano but you need to have a reason to reinvent yourself and being Andres Serrano is easier than being Brutus Faust.

4. Your photographs have incited a lot of controversy and protest, most notably because of your use of bodily fluid against the backdrop of religiously sacred pieces. Can you comment on the artistic relevance of the pieces or the message that you are trying to convey with these types of photographs?

I distrust anyone with a message. The best artistic intentions are usually cloaked in mysteries and contradictions. It wouldn't be interesting for me if the art were not "loaded" in some way. I always say my work is open for interpretation and that's why I prefer not to read many of the "interpretations" out there. Suffice it to say, the work is like a mirror, and it reveals itself in different ways, to different people.

5. One of your most controversial works yet is the 'Piss Christ', and it portrays a crucifix submerged in urine, that is alleged to be yours. Is there a 'message' that this photograph is trying to convey and how did you deal with the resulting backlash that ensued after the piece was released?

The only message is that I'm a Christian artist making a religious work of art based on my relationship with Christ and The Church. The crucifix is a symbol that has lost its true meaning; the horror of what occurred. It represents the crucifixion of a man who was tortured, humiliated and left to die on a cross for several hours. In that time, Christ not only bled to dead, he probably saw all his bodily functions and fluids come out of him. So if "Piss Christ" upsets people, maybe this is so because it is bringing the symbol closer to its original meaning. There was a time prior to the 17th century when the only important art, the only art that mattered, was religious art. After that, there were very few contemporary art pieces that were considered both art and religious, and "Piss Christ" is one of them.

6. Your art has been seen as starting a very important conversation about the tensions between freedom of religion and artistic freedom of speech and expression. Can you comment on the tensions between these two values, and a balance of these tensions, or do you see them as not existing at all in your pieces?

Freedom of religion and freedom of expression have something in common: they both have the power to polarize people. Everyone has an opinion on these freedoms and those opinions often clash. It's the result of living in a Democracy where the people don't always share the same values or opinions. That's why it's called a Democracy, because you are free to choose.

7. Another photograph of yours that I am fascinated by is the 'Cabeza de Vaca' partly because I am unsure of what you are trying to symbolize in the picture. Do you mind telling me more about the photograph?

The picture is of a cow's head on a pedestal and is called "Cabeza De Vaca" which means cow's head in Spanish. It's also the name of a 15th century Spanish explorer. I'd say I was being both literal and figurative with the title.

8. Your latest photography project, as I recently read, is a series of photographs portraying homeless people in America. Can you tell me more about the project?

It's called "Residents of New York" and they are portraits of homeless people I took on the streets in January. It's a public installation currently on display at the West 4 St. subway station and in several phone booth locations around town. More Art, an organization committed to bringing art to public spaces, sponsored it. I chose not to use the word homeless in the title, but to call them "Residents of New York" instead, in order to acknowledge them as being residents who are very much a part of the city.

9. Apart from your latest photography series, are you working on anymore photographic or musical projects?

Immediately, after shooting the 'homeless' portraits I went to Jerusalem for four weeks. The Jerusalem Foundation had invited me and the Musrara School of Photography to go to Israel to do some work there. I am currently working on a book of the body of work I did in Jerusalem. I love working in the summer, and have no projects at the moment. Maybe someone will invite me to do something.

10. What message or advice do you have for young artists, and youths in general, who are trying to pursue their dreams?

Keep your dreams no matter what. When I hit my twenties I turned my back on being an artist and became a drug addict instead. I stayed a drug addict until my late twenties when my biological clock told me that if I stayed in that life in my thirties there'd be no turning back. There are all kinds of ways of being an artist and there is no right way or wrong way, only your way.

My Love Affair With the Cannes Film Festival

June 4, 2014, 11:54 am

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The Cannes Film Festival is the best film festival in the world. It is where every director dreams of premiering his or her film one day. It is also the place where movie deals are made on a daily basis, and the place to be to sell your film or pitch your next project. What I love most about this festival is that they have the utmost respect for filmmakers. If the Oscars are all about the actors, Cannes is all about the directors. I love how you can start a conversation with a stranger as you queue to watch a movie, and discuss films and filmmaking. You can also find yourself next to a legend like Wim Wenders, as happened to me this year while I was going into a screening.

Many of the films that are shown in the Cannes competition and parallel sections are difficult and challenging to watch. This is a festival that encourages artistic freedom and there is always that one movie that will blow everyone away. It will make you realize just how much you love cinema, and that cinema matters because it can make you experience the most beautiful sensations; encouragement, empowerment and beauty. This year for me, that film was a Russian masterpiece entitled "Leviathan" by Andrey Zvyagintsev. The film is an artistic behemoth. I remember being a bit reluctant to go to the screening as the film is over 150 minutes long and it was a beautiful day outside, but minutes after it started, I was transported to the north of Russia and the world of that movie.

The only side to Cannes I dislike is the people who cannot be bothered to watch the actual films. I'm always suspicious of them. They are either the braggers or the socialites. I usually end up establishing contact with many cinephiles, whom you can meet at the screenings, while waiting in line, maybe ordering a coffee at the bar inside the Palais or by sitting next to them while watching the films. I've made many long-lasting friendships over the years with people whom I've connected with over a film.


The World's Strictest Red Carpet.Grand Théâtre Lumière Premiere



The festival is also an extremely glamorous affair. The French invented "etiquette" and if you are invited to one of the red carpet competition premières in the evening, it is mandatory for men to wear a tuxedo and for ladies to wear a formal dress. I've seen festival officials turn away people who didn't stick to the rules, including men who thought a tie would do rather than a bow tie. Unfortunately, unless you are a well-known star, you won't make it past the barrier, invitation or not.

This year I set up a few meetings with festival programmers and since I'm putting my next feature film together, I took the opportunity to pitch the script to several producers and sales agents, and to enjoy the glamorous side of Cannes. Unlike most film festivals, Cannes is an event reserved for film industry professionals and the press so you need to have an accreditation , without it, you literally cannot get anywhere. Entry to screenings, invite to the premieres or admission to official venues is strictly controlled and public access to the festival is non-existent.


No accreditation, No access. Here are mine since my film student days still in pigtails!

During the festival, Cannes is also all about the wonderful parties and the afore-mentioned evening premières but in order to attend one, you need to be invited. I was delighted to attend the première of the French film "L'homme Qu'on Aimait Trop" starring one of my screen idols, Catherine Deneuve, who graced the red carpet with her effortless beauty.


My days in Cannes were packed with screenings and meetings, and I only had 30 minutes to get ready before my car arrived on the evening that I attended this première. I got dressed in a room in the beautiful Majestic Barrière hotel and for a few hours, I felt like a star. I walked along the red carpet all the way to the top of the steps feeling like a fairytale princess. Once I took my seat in The Grand Théâtre Lumière, I experienced my favorite cinematic moment, watching the Cannes film festival trailer. They screen it before every film at the festival. This trailer shows the red carpet steps that lead all the way to the stars. The savvy audience loves this too, as they clap ferociously every time they see it. After the screening, it was time to celebrate; I was invited to a yacht party where the host stated that there were to be "strictly no photos". But even though I have no visual mementos, I have the experience of being at an unforgettable party that reminded me of Fellini's "8 ½" or "La Dolce Vita". Life is beautiful sometimes. I'm now back to my indie filmmaker reality of rewriting scripts and 5 am wake-up calls, but the fairytale I lived while in Cannes, still makes me smile. I can close my eyes, and let my memory take me back to the moments of beauty, elegance and glamour that I dreamed of as a little girl. Cannes, je t'aime!

---

"We Deserve to Die Well"

June 4, 2014, 12:36 pm

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World-renowned artist Marina Abramović walked the Great Wall of China, had a loaded gun pointed at her head and sat in silence for over 700 hours -- all to give art a new meaning. She told Max Tholl why future generations should treat her legacy like Beethoven's.


The European: Ms. Abramović, you've repeatedly said that you must establish performance as mainstream art before you die. You're one of the most popular artists of our time, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. Have you already accomplished your mission?

Abramović: No, I don't think I have. My mission is not just to make performance art popular. It's about raising people's awareness and consciousness. That's why I will open my own institute where I teach the visitors about the synthesis between art, science, technology and spirituality.

The European: Raising people's consciousness is the cornerstone of your work. Why is it so difficult to be conscious?

Abramović: The problem lies very deep and highlights what's wrong with human nature in general: We all know what is good for us and yet we all do what is bad for us. We might wake up in the morning, feeling very energetic, thinking about all the things we could accomplish during that particular day, but then we just go and waste our energy on plainly stupid things. There's an old Tibetan practice telling us that when you wake up in the morning, you should just sit on a chair for a couple of hours without doing anything. You will feel how the energy doesn't flow outwards but remains inside of you. That's how you become conscious of your activities.

The European: Performance art, especially yours, is characterized by this difficulty of doing "something that is practically nothing." How difficult is it to give value or meaning to "nothing?"

Abramović: It's very difficult but it starts to pay off. I got people's attention but it took me more than forty years. Performance art is timeless, but it is also place-bound. You have to experience it first-hand. If you miss it, you can just see it as a documentation of the act, which is not the same thing. It is also immaterial because it lives from the energy of that specific moment. So it's not like a picture or a sculpture that is displayed at a museum for decades. You can't grasp or possess performance art.

The European: It challenges our conception of art as an object ...

Abramović: Exactly. The crucial question is: How can you conserve the energy of an act? I believe that a single performance can change the mindset of many people. That is the power of an immediate form of art. But to have this effect, it has to be long durational.

"Merely looking at things is outdated"

The European: Your performances often last weeks or months. Why would a short performance not work?

Abramović: We lack the intellectual and spiritual capacities to understand and grasp art within a few seconds. Art requires concentration and time to reflect.

The European: During a workshop called "The Drill," you kept the audience compliant and taught them how to understand long durational art and - ultimately -- how to "be".

Abramović: It's not only about time. I expected the visitors of "The Drill" -- as I expect visitors of my Institute -- to stay for a couple of hours because that is necessary to get into the right state of mind. But even more important is the exchange that takes place between the artist and the audience. You have to give me something in order to get something in return. You give me your time and I give you an unforgettable experience. That's a fair exchange.

The European: Does the art world need a change of mind?

Abramović: Too often, people walk around in museums and galleries, just chatting or having a glass of wine but they are not focusing on the art that surrounds them; they are completely ignorant to it. Only if you have the audience's full attention, things can actually start to unfold and develop.

The European: Do you think that the museum with all its restrictions is the right place for long durational performance art?

Abramović: If the art is powerful, the place is of little importance. Any place is good enough. Take my performance "The Artist is Present" that took place at the MoMA: New York is one of the busiest places on earth and nobody spends more than a few seconds thinking about something. And yet masses of people queued for hours or even slept in front of the museum just to come and sit with me. To me, it shows that people want to experience new things in the museum. Merely looking at things is outdated. People want to be part of the art.

The European: You once said that the audience is even more important than the artist ...

Abramović: Absolutely! You don't perform for yourself; you perform for others. The artist can perform but the audience has to complete the work. Without the audience, there is no art.

"Who are you when you peel the potato?"

The European: The idea of incorporating the audience into the art is often associated with Joseph Beuys, who regarded society as one great piece of art. Do you share his view?

Abramović: You have to think big. The most important art is the one that seeks to incorporate society and to transform it in one way or another. That was the impetus for Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and also Joseph Beuys. Interaction fosters complexity -- which is good. Art is always complex, but every new generation of artists adds a new layer of complexity. Art isn't finished when it is displayed in a museum; it has to go beyond that.

The European: Are you not afraid that this complexity might drive people away instead of attracting them?

Abramović: No. I am the perfect example that complexity can be simple.

The European: Joseph Beuys said that even a simple and banal act -- like peeling a potato -- can be a work of art if it is a conscious act. Do you agree?

Abramović: Joseph Beuys also said that everybody can be an artist but that's not true. Context matters. You can peel a potato in the most artistic and conscious way but if you do it alone in your kitchen, you are not an artist; you are a cook. Do the same thing in a museum and it's art.

The European: But context doesn't have to be a place like a museum; just the intention can be context.

Abramović: Of course, but the most important thing is the question: "Who are you when you peel the potato?" -- to use that example. Are you a cook or are you an artist? That's the defining question. Let me give you a good example: The American theater director David Levine produced a piece called "Bauerntheater" in which he rented a potato field just outside Berlin and hired a classic Shakespeare actor to go there every day for one month in order to plant potatoes. The audience arrived with buses and watched him planting potatoes. Is that theater? Yes it is.

The European: "All the world's a stage."
Abramović: If you want it to be.

"I need the risk of failure"

The European: Performance is not only a very direct and engaging art but also a vulnerable one. You can't hide behind an object and because it is live art, it also bears the risk of imminent failure.

Abramović: That's partly the reason why it is so demanding and why you have to put all your energy into it. Many performance artists can't stand that pressure and have returned to the seclusion of the studio. But the studio is a safe place. I need the risk of failure.

The European: Why?

Abramović: You can't venture into new territories if you can't accept failure. If you only think about success, you will repeat yourself over and over again. Think about failure and the possibilities it offers you! Failure is very underrated and misunderstood.

The European: But even in that case, failure is just a means to achieve success.

Abramović: You can never plan success. That's why artists should experiment. And yet, the great tragedy of art is that many artists follow public demand and produce only the art they think will sell. Eventually they will become successful but that's not the purpose or point of art. I learn more from failure than from success.

The European: But you have more success than failure.

Abramović: I am very popular but I have a relatively low value in the art market if compared to someone like Jeff Koons, for instance. Such artists sell objects and the public wants to have these objects. But performance can never be an object and people are therefore not ready to pay as much for it -- even if the experience is probably more intensive. People collect material things; not experiences.

The European: That's why legacy is such a complicated matter in performance. It can't be conserved or passed on like other art.

Abramović: I hope that my work won't be passed on as pure documentation -- that would miss the point. I want to leave it up to future artists how to deal with it or re-enact it. There is no record of Beethoven playing his compositions; we only know them as interpretations. Every generation will have different opinions about it and that keeps it alive. It's not just a dead documentation in the history books.

"The artist is a free human being"

The European: I was quite puzzled by the theater piece "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović" that you conceived with Robert Wilson. Isn't it paradoxical for a performance artist to "stage" her own life?

Abramović: It is important for me to find out what's allowed and what's not. The artist is a free human being and can do whatever he or she wants. I hated the theater when I was young because it felt so fake. But as I said before: You have to venture into new fields. I have also been criticized for the work I did with Lady Gaga, but I wanted to revisit the world of pop music. Once you become secure in your own field, you can start to look abroad. Also, I am now in the last half of my life and the theater piece gave me the opportunity to stage and reflect on my own funeral. That was an interesting experience.

The European: Death plays an important role in your work. In your artist manifesto you wrote that the artist should "die consciously without fear."

Abramović: We should die without anger, without fear but fully conscious. Too many people are dying in anger or in fear but we deserve to die well. We have to understand that life is just a temporary thing. But we waste so much energy trying to forget or ignore that. If you realize that life is finite, you will make the most of it.

The European: Consciousness can also free us from the fear of death. A fear that is actually worse than death itself.

Abramović: You can only enjoy life if you accept that you are going to die.

Read more Interviews at: http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/interviews

Act One, Two Memories

June 4, 2014, 12:48 pm

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Towards the end of the second act of Act One at Lincoln Center Theater, I felt myself transported back to the fall of 1979. My father had just dropped me off at the corner of 110th and Amsterdam to start my freshman year at Barnard, armed with a stack of tokens, a protesting Samsonite bag in the ever-popular mustard yellow and a map of the Upper West Side he had drawn, like all our important documents, on a dinner napkin with a black ballpoint pen. He forgot to include Central Park which I discovered by mistake when I wandered east one night, only to arrive, shaken but alive, on Fifth Avenue and 103rd.

A string of jobs followed my graduation in 1983; I was Eddie Fisher's pianist one summer for a Borscht Belt tour, I glued teeny numbers to the bottom pages of textbooks for hours at a time as an "artist's assistant," I accompanied modern dance classes at the 92nd Street Y. I was desperate for a job in musical theater, whatever the hell that meant. I carried Variety under my arm, though I never read it. I knocked on doors, I worked for free, I interned at Playwrights Horizons just on the chance I would meet Stephen Sondheim. Who would ever take a chance on me, I wondered.

I finally found my George S. Kaufman in a man named Buryl Red, a towering figure from Arkansas who had studied with Elliot Carter at Yale. After hearing some of my work, he declared me "a hippie," but "blue-chip." He rolled his eyes at my love of the theater, which he described as a place where -- and here his accent got particularly thick -- "those people run around in leotards and hug each other all the time." Under his guidance, I produced hundreds of sessions in Nashville: gospel, orchestral, front-porch. I studied orchestration, analysis, Stravinsky, but also the Talking Heads and West African music. Music is music, he would say, don't judge it. Most importantly, talking about writing is not writing. He was known for his uncanny ability to work for untold hours at a time, without the need to use the bathroom or the phone.

Right before he died last April, we sat together at his writing desk, as we had for years. He could no longer hold a pencil, and he had stopped listening to music. A surprise, as he always was listening to music. My mentor. We had been together for 28 years. Years of concerts and life, a few triumphs amidst the failures.

Towards the end of Act One, Tony Shalhoub, as George S. Kaufman, stops the applause to tell the audience, both imagined and real, that the play we have just seen "is 80 percent Moss Hart." And with that, my eyes blurred with tears, sitting alone in the darkened Beaumont theater, where I had written the music for Nick Hytner's production of Twelfth Night, where my then ten-month old daughter had splashed on the set, where Buryl and I had discussed measures and measures after everyone had gone. And I thought about two bittersweet memories of two men now gone: my father dropping me off at 110th street, and my musical father who had told me I was blue-chip and I had prayed that might be true.

7 Best Book-To-TV Adaptations

June 4, 2014, 1:33 pm

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Whenever I have a novel out (The Lemon Orchard in trade paperback, May 27) my thoughts turn to casting. I can't help it. A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television--by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame--has always called my name. And after seeing True Detective can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets? Much has been written about Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson classing up the small screen, but may I just say, in my own lucky experience, great actors and TV have long been perfect together.

The bar for my casting dreams has been set high. Here are a few of the actors who have brought my novels to TV life: Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Julian Sands, Gena Rowlands, Rob Lowe, Julia Ormond, Chelsea Hobbs, Tate Donovan, Anne Heche, Max Martini, Campbell Scott, Kimberly Paisley-Williams, Alexa Vega, and the late legends Richard Kiley and Kim Hunter.

As I light candles and chant in hopes the television deities will bestow kindness and a TV deal on The Lemon Orchard--I'd like a network to pick it up as a series set in Malibu, the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, and the harsh, lunar, bone-scattered desert along the Mexican border, with eight episodes ordered--let me reflect on a few favorite made-for-television-movies-and series that started with books:

Ménage to Rock it Out at Portugal Day Events in Toronto, Montreal and New York's Central Park

June 4, 2014, 1:47 pm

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All over the world, Portuguese people will be joyfully celebrating the days around June 10, the tiny Iberian country's national holiday which is called Portugal Day. Cities like Toronto, Montreal and New York, which have strong Portuguese communities, hold festivals that are a colorful feast of aural and culinary delights.

Ménage, an award-winning and eclectic pop-rock band which features three Ferreira siblings (brothers Gabriel and Fernando, and sister Bela), is stoked to be performing in all three cities: in Toronto (June 8 and 13) and in Montreal (June 10) during their respective Portugal Week events; and then they cap it off with a "not-to-be missed performance" in Central Park on June 15 during Portugal Day NYC's festivities, organized by the Portuguese Circle.

Ménage, which works between Toronto and Los Angeles, recently won Rock Song of the Year for its aptly titled Our Time is Now at the International Portuguese Music Awards in New Bedford, Massachusetts. They are following up on their outstanding debut self-titled album, Ménage, with Ménage EP, the first of four mini-records in a row that will "each be influenced by recent experiences and will hopefully keep things fresh for our fans," explains guitarist Fernando.


Ménage's guitarist Fernando Ferreira gives a rockin' shoutout to Portugal


Fernando, who says the Ferreira siblings have deep Portuguese origins having all spent time living and performing on the Iberian peninsula, pays homage to those roots by displaying the very vibrant Portuguese flag as part of his stage guitar setup. He says it's a respectful nod to Nuno Bettencourt's Extreme music performances. To vary it up on the theme, Fernando sometimes sits an iconic Portuguese rooster on his amplifier. He explains why these various event organizations welcome Ménage, which means household, to perform at their celebrations:

I think we bring a young alternative indie rock element to Portugal Day events, that's still not very common among Portuguese communities, and organizers seem to like and support Ménage. It's also inspiring to meet and play alongside musical artists who fly in from Portugal. It makes for great conversations about Euro versus American trends and music scenes across the ocean. Although, we're not really a "Portuguese music" band, it's a big part of who we are. Personally, I think it gives us a sense of "underdog" edge -- the proud nation of Portugal is often dwarfed in size by its giant Iberian neighbor, Spain. At these events, we find we all originate from this pretty small country, and find others who have come a long way and are still in touch with their cultural influences. And we want to share this with the world.

The Ferreira siblings have learned a few things about the European music scene from touring there, especially about fans digging the live experience:

In Europe, people want to see a great live band, and maybe care less about what is going on with a band's Instagram or if they are trending on Twitter. Perhaps because of our background, we like to keep focused on the reality of what we do, which is Ménage. Who we are personally is a lot less about tweets, tabloids, scandals in magazines...and a lot more about the music.

As for being an indie band, albeit a terrifically talented one, trying to make a living in today's fractured music industry, Fernando quips:

Maybe we won't get super rich and sell millions of records and downloads. Maybe we won't have really fast cars or expensive drug habits. But I don't think there will ever be a replacement for a live rock show. So as long as Ménage makes music, we will hopefully have somewhere to play, because that's what we love to do --write music, travel, meet people, perform, and move bodies. And hopefully people continue to relate. And to that, we say, Obrigado!

Check out the Ménage EP release info and tour schedule (including upcoming Canadian and American gigs), on its Ménage band website, and on Facebook.

The 2014 Lilly Awards Burst Into Bloom

June 4, 2014, 1:54 pm

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On Monday, June 2, the fifth annual Lilly Awards Ceremony lit up Playwrights Horizons (416 West 42nd St.). The Lilly Awards, affectionately called "The Lillies," were founded in 2010 by Julia Jordan, Marsha Norman, and Teresa Rebeck to honor the work of women in the theater. The Lillies were named after Lillian Hellman, the pioneering American playwright who famously said "You need to write like the devil and sometimes act like one."

Why separate awards for women in the theater? Before the Lillies, women had been excluded from receiving major theater awards, so they made their own. Teresa Rebek had a spread sheet proving that before then, if you happened to meet a woman on a set, she was most likely a costume designer. If 70 percent of the ticket buyers are women, why the heck weren't women in theater garnering more awards?

Marsha Norman suggested that one reason was because men played on teams and women needed to as well, to coach each other, support each other, clap each other on the backs. "So play on a friggin' girls' team!" she proclaimed.

And they have. The amount of workshops, financing, and all around interest that these women take in each other and all women trying to find a voice has had ripples. This year, five women playwrights won Pulitzer prizes. But the struggle isn't over. In 2014, the Pulitzer Prize for theater went to Annie Baker for her play, The Flick. Runners up were Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron and Madeleine George for The Curious Case of The Watson Intelligence. But, as Michelle Willens wrote in The Atlantic, "All these works have two things in common. They didn't play on Broadway."

Despite the "resilience" of the glass ceiling in theater, Lillies take the time to reach out to youth here and around the globe. Writer, actress, playwright, Dominique Morisseau spoke of taking kids from the South Bronx to Broadway plays, noting how, in follow-up discussions, these kids saw themselves in the characters even though the plays had nothing to do with their background. Broadway musical director Mary Mitchell Campbell along with Juilliard students conceived of https://asteponline.org/2013/ to transform the lives of youth through the arts. ASTEP connects underserved youth with visual and performing artists to awaken their imagination and foster critical thinking to help them break free of poverty. Mary just came back from India where she helped girls ages 9-11 find their voices and created a moving song about finding one's voice.

Winnie Holzman (book writer of the Tony Award-winning Wicked) said, with a grin, that she was "much too young too receive her Lifetime Achievement Award." And it was so moving when the cast of Raisin in the Sun honored the life of the late playwright, Lorraine Hansberry. Also, Linda Mindich presented an award of $25,000 to fund a new work by a woman playwright.

The night was full of "womanisms." Billie Allen, actor, dancer, and founding member of The Women's Project and Productions and of the League of Professional Theater Woman, among other honors, told how, when she was the understudy for the original production of Raisin in the Sun, she was eight months pregnant by the time she was needed. When she confessed, the clueless director said that they had been about to ask her to lose a little weight. Kelli O'Hara, nominee for five Tony Awards, including four for best actress in a musical for her performances in South Pacific, Pajama Game, Nice Work if you can get it, and The Bridges of Madison County, and mother of a young son, said, with a tug at the front of her dress, that she accidentally left her breastfeeding paraphernalia somewhere.

Men weren't neglected. Todd London, author and artistic director of the New Dramatist, and winner of a visionary leadership award in 2009 as "an individual who has advanced theater nationally and internationally, received a Lilly for the particular help he gave to women, along with bouquet and a rhinestone tiara which he wore for the ceremony.

After the ceremony, there was a cocktail party across the street at the West Bank Café (407 W. 42nd St.) followed by a cabaret performed by honorees and some surprise guests.

Brava to all the Lilly Award winners: Kristen Anderson Lopez, Susan Bernfield, Johanna Day, Winnie Holtzman, Joyce Ketay, Mary Mitchell Campbell, Rebecca Niomi Jones, Dominique Morisseau, Kelli O'Hara, Jen Silverman, Jeanine Tesori, and Leisl Tommy.

May the Lillies continue to bloom and bloom!

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