Live and Dangerous: Firefly Music Festival 2014

June 11, 2014, 2:45 pm

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The Firefly Music Festival is a mixed-genre, down to earth music festival held yearly in the lush, wooded landscape of Dover, Delaware. Thanks to a consistently stellar lineup and drama-free reputation, Firefly has grown from a hidden gem to a one of the festival season's essential events. This year's festival will take place from June 19-22, and has expanded from three to four days with several new stages to accommodate around 80,000 attendees. Last year's Firefly made headlines with big names like Tom Petty and the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- and this year will be no exception, with major acts like Foo Fighters and Outkast confirmed to hit the stage. But we all know that the most exciting hype comes from the emerging artists -- here are three on the bill that we think everyone will be buzzing about.



WHO: Smallpools
WHEN: Saturday June 21 @ 2:45pm - Backyard Stage
WHERE: The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway - Dover, DE
WHY: Indie-pop newcomers Smallpools are having quite a breakout year. The LA based, east coast natives made headlines late last year when they became one of Snapchat's first featured artists, and have since released a flurry of high-energy singles leading up to their much anticipated debut album, which drops in July. Smallpools have an infectious energy about them, and, despite being a pretty new (and young) band, they have an effortless togetherness to their live performances that makes them well worth checking out.





WHO: Chance the Rapper
WHEN: Friday, June 20 @ 6:45pm - Lawn Stage
WHERE: The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway - Dover, DE
WHY: 21 year old Chancelor Bennett, best known by his stage name Chance the Rapper, is one of the most talked about newcomers on the scene. His 2013 album, Acid Rap, was released to critical acclaim, and incorporates an impressive combination of elements - from raps to ballads to Beirut samples. Chance's lyrics are thought-provoking and introspective, and his rhymes are confident and tight. A laid-back stage presence makes his audience instantly comfortable - and his ability to work the crowd is effortless. Don't miss Chance's set at Firefly this year.





WHO: Wild Cub
WHEN: Sunday June 22 @ 2:45pm - Porch Stage
WHERE: The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway - Dover, DE
WHY: Since the release of their 2013 debut album, Youth, Nashville based buzz band Wild Cub have slowly but surely been making a name for themselves in the industry. Their first single "Wild Cub", has been quietly climbing the charts, and a deluxe version of Youth was even released earlier this year. Live shows are characterized by infectious dancing and high energy, and feature incredibly impressive percussion (more so than one would expect after listening to their debut album). Their show at Firefly is sure to be one of the indie-pop highlights from the festival, so be sure to catch it!

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First Nighter: New Musical "Fly By Night" Doesn't Fly, Then Does

June 12, 2014, 3:14 am

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Fly By Night, the Will Connolly-Michael Mitnick-Kim Rosenstock (who also conceived the enterprise) musical at Playwrights Horizons starts off cute as can be. Depending on your tolerance for cute-as-can-be musicals, you'll immediately warm to it or almost immediately turn a cold shoulder.

Since I'm among the types almost immediately inclined to give it the old cold shoulder, I advise others like me to hang in there. The second half of the two-act tuner backs sufficiently away from preciousness to become genuinely moving and even culminates in a spectacular plot-geared lighting effect by Jeff Croiter that's worth the wait.

To get the cuteness underway, a narrator (always reliable Henry Stram, who also takes on other brief parts) steps on to the stripped-down-to-levels set by David Korins and talks about an invisible world underlying the world we know. He quickly ties his abstract preface to a romantic triangle involving Brooklyn-born-and-mired Harold "I'm a nerd, too" McClam (Adam Chanler-Berat) and sisters Daphne (Patti Murin) and Miriam (Allison Case), who hail from South Dakota and are now striving in New York City.

(It's almost as if the plucky young women have poured over Ohio native Ruth McKenney's tales of coming to the wonderful town with her sis and then decided to inaugurate their own My Sister Eileen.)

Shortly after the siblings arrive because the former wants to be an actress and the latter wants to tag along, Harold and Daphne meet cute and fall for each other. They go so far as to become engaged. Then Harold, who's begun writing songs, and Miriam meet cute where she's waitressing and instantly fall for each other when they discover they can collaborate on Harold's song in progress about a sea turtle. The complications that arise from that unexpected bonding aren't so cute for the characters. The development serves as the tuner's dramatic romance-triangle thrust.

In a span of time beginning on November 9, 1964, when Harold's mom dies, and ending on November 9, 1965, when something of a completely different significance occurs, Harold and the sisters also interact separately or together with Harold's grieving, La Traviata-loving dad, Mr. McClam (Peter Friedman), with Harold's sandwich-shop-owner/boss Crabbie (Michael McCormick) and with playwright Joey Storms (Bryce Ryness), who's endlessly rewriting and rehearsing the musical in which Daphne has been cast.

The boy-meets-girls-boy-loses-girls-boy-gets-girl-in-the-singular-but-which-one story line lopes along with at least one character declaring to another "You're cute" until the November 9, 1965 date, which Joey announces will be his show's opening night. The last quarter of the action, which starts on that special date, is when developments get sorted, though not out-and-out happily.

That's when writers Connolly, Mitnick and Rosenstock conjure the magic they've been stalking from the get-go. What the three of them are getting at with the invisible-world talk not only lands but also soars. All along, Miriam has been rhapsodizing about the stars, and the creators, all apparently recent Yale School of Drama grads, finally see that the audience also gets to see stars in the best theater-illusion way.

The music of Fly By Night? Since credits for the work don't specify who wrote book, lyrics and music, it must be safe to assume Connolly, Mitnick and Rosenstock pooled their talents for all three tasks. What they've crafted is certainly serviceable, and there's plenty of it, but how closely a ticket buyer connects with Harold's ditty about a sea turtle depends again on an individual's cute-quotient intake. Nothing really falls short of nicely done, but when Daphne's number about wanting and deserving more turns up, musical mavens may flash on Luisa's singing about wanting more in The Fantasticks and suddenly find themselves also wanting more.

There's no wanting more from director Carolyn Cantor and cast. Murin is sweet and blonde-pretty and acts the loving sister with radiance. Chanler-Berat knows how to be nerdy but not so nerdy that he eventually deflects interest. Case is earnest, appealingly coltish and sings with verve. As the lanky and lovelorn playwright, Ryness demonstrates cunning ease. Stram is genially authoritative throughout.

Okay, maybe there is wanting more from the cast. Friedman and McCormick are musical vets who always command the stage when it's their time to shine. This outing, however, they're underused. McCormick mostly gets to chant about rote sandwich making while swinging a kitchen knife. Friedman, direct from his attention-getting appearance as the dispiriting father in PH's production of Will Eno's The Open House, arrives and departs intermittently as widower McClam. Luckily, he's given the best song in the score.

At the end of the day and at the end of the play, Fly By Night comes down to wanting less of some things and more of others. Still, it can boast about enough of what counts.

'F/8 and Be There' -- as True Now as It Was in Weegee's Day

June 12, 2014, 5:28 am

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Ask any veteran street photographer and they'll likely recall with excruciating detail "the one that got away."

Can there be a worst feeling as a photographer than fumbling with your settings while watching an opportunity disappear?

Sally Ann Field, a Los Angeles art director turned photographer, had a split second to capture this image before the moment passed. She was wandering around taking pictures in Santee Alley, a popular shopping area in L.A's Fashion District, when she came across this wig shop.

"When I saw this shopkeeper's head between all of the wig heads I couldn't believe it!" she says. "I only had time to capture one frame before he saw me and disappeared from my sight."

What she got was a wonderful juxtaposition -- a scene that takes a moment to realize that one of these things is not like the others.

Sally had her Canon 5D MIII set at f/8, a setting many documentary photographers and photojournalists use as their go-to aperture. (The legendary street photographer Arthur "Weegee" Fellig is often credited with first coining the phrase "f/8 and be there.")

By setting the lens at f/8, Sally created a wide depth of field, meaning that everything from a few feet in front of her to the back of the shop was going to be "reasonably" in focus.

The margin of error that a wide depth of field (DoF) gives you is especially useful if you're using manual focus. At f/8 or above, it means you can swing your camera up quickly (or shoot from the hip) without having to worry about fiddling with the focus, as long as the subject is within the zone of your DoF. The fraction of a second it takes to hunt for focus can make all the difference in the world in candid street photography. Manual focus also avoids the frustration of your camera's autofocus latching onto the wrong element.

Sally, who used autofocus to capture this moment, concedes the picture isn't perfect -- it's not as sharp as she'd like. Her shutter speed was 1/15th of a second when she would have preferred something closer to 1/100th of a second. But the beauty of street photography is that it's less about perfection and more about capturing the moment. Besides, real, non-staged situations are rarely "perfect."

"I am fascinated by people," Sally says. "Portraiture and street photography have become my main focus and I am just beginning to shoot commercially."

It helps that she lives in L.A., a veritable street photography paradise. Though she enjoys photographing the diverse characters on Hollywood Boulevard and wandering among the downtown skyscrapers, her favorite place to shoot is around the Westlake / MacArthur Park Metro stop at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street.

She says the gritty Westlake neighborhood gives her the most honest glimpse of the city she loves.

"No tourists, no business people, just life," she says. "And the best pastrami sandwich you've ever had at Langer's Delicatessen is right there, too. Old school L.A. at it's finest."

Featured image by Sally Ann Field. It is used here with permission. You can see more of her work here. A version of this article was posted at Cosmic Smudge.

Wafaa Bilal Meditates on Liminal Spaces in "The Ashes Series"

June 12, 2014, 8:13 am

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Saddam's Bedroom, 2003-2013



The Dark Palace, 2003-2013

It takes a minute to realize Wafaa Bilal's photographs of familiar images from the aftermath of the war in Iraq are actually miniature recreations the size of dollhouses. Eerily lit, they reflect on the American media's dissemination of information from Operation Iraqi Freedom, which like Bilal's photographs, are in many ways staged and manipulated recreations.

Bilal, who was forced to flee Iraq at the age of 25, watched the war transpire through American media, displaced from his country yet connected through television, the Internet, and newspapers. "The Ashes Series," now on view at Driscoll Babcock Galleries, is a tribute to that intermediary space, and the performance piece Erasing actualizes this transition. The artist dictates to his assistants to cut out small, even squares from the photograph in the entryway, each of which are precisely documented. These squares are later transferred to a blank canvas on the other side of the gallery, where, although they attempt to create the inverted image, never turn out exactly the same, much like when a person is displaced, there are gaps missing from their previous life.

Bilal refers to his assistants as "number one" and "number two," making a comment on the stark distinction between artist and assistant, and also paralleling the impersonality prevalent in war between people of opposing forces.



Piano, 2003-2013

Saddam's Bedroom and The Dark Palace are the most haunting images in the series. Both spaces that were once magnificent now seem lifeless and drab, consumed by rubble. Bilal used the ashes and dust to emphasize the liminal space that these strange scenes inhabit, hovering between time and place, life and death. Bilal, who spent two years in a Saudi Arabian refugee camp, and whose home was destroyed and his family killed, mediates on his experiences by recreating these unsettled environments, sterilized in the clean confines of an art gallery.

"The Ashes Series" will be on view at Driscoll Babcock Galleries through June 14.

The article was first published on Whitewallmag.com. Read the full article here.

AMBI's Monika Bacardi and Andrea Iervolino: Changing the World, One Film at a Time

June 12, 2014, 8:33 am

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I'm always pleasantly surprised when I sit down to interview a powerful, beautiful, intelligent woman who is not afraid to mix her wisdom with her femininity. And even more amazed when she's accompanied by a man, a partner confident enough to be by her side.

That was the case, a refreshing case of "luck by chance" in Cannes, when I sat down with Lady Monika Bacardi and her producing partner Andrea Iervolino. Together, they form the power behind AMBI Pictures, an emerging production and distribution company in world cinema, but one already tried, tested and established for Italian movies.

Bacardi is that rare combination of brain, beauty and experience that reminds me it's OK to be a strong woman, even if people will be intimidated, friends could be jealous and men will feel threatened. Well, you know, those men, the ones we wouldn't want around anyway. But one true man, the kind feeling perfectly at ease around a powerful woman is Iervolino, who not only basks in her glow quite comfortably, but has, at his young age, more than 10 years of experience in the film world to bring to the table. Their interaction, at the AMBI office on the Croisette in Cannes, left me feeling relaxed and informed. It was a highlight of my festival.

Bacardi and Iervolino arrived to meet me midday, she in a beautiful red skirt look that enhanced her grace and long golden hair, he in a perfectly tailored suit that made him look dashing but also older, wiser than his years. As soon as we sat down, and began talking in Italian, which turned out to be the easiest way to include all in the conversation and get the full messages across, I felt at ease. I didn't want the afternoon to end and I felt as if I could ask any question, knowing I would like the answer.

Perhaps the biggest bond between the three of us was our common kind of life lived in a global world, where one is never really at home anywhere, yet feels comfortable everywhere. Bacardi said of Iervolino "he's got a lot of experience, even though he's 27, he started in this business at age 15, and he's a hard worker -- I have loads of respect for him," and Iervolino jokingly added, "I'm really young, and until a year ago, I was really just very Italian, Monika instead is an international woman, she knows all the countries in the world; I'm trying to become like that."

On June 13th, AMBI's first major international project 2047 Sights of Death premieres in Toronto, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, part of the 3rd Italian Contemporary Film Festival. The film stars personal favorite Danny Glover, along with Daryl Hannah, Rutger Hauer, Michael Madsen and Stephen Baldwin, under the direction of Alessandro Capone. While at first the film may appear to be a wondrous futuristic big screen action thriller a-la TV's Revolution, upon closer look its themes fit perfectly into the socially conscious agenda of Bacardi and Iervolino. In fact, Bacardi pointed to the fact that as human beings, "we are more and more ruled by centralized governments, and we are all a bit afraid of the future, even without entering into a detailed political discussion" -- the fictional "Confederate Central Government" is at the center of 2047 Sights of Death -- and then Iervolino poignantly added, "we try to send a positive, free message through our films, we're not trying to start a political revolution." Of course, as a cultural revolution, or rather change through education is always the better way to go.

Among some of the topics we discussed in Cannes was the new, at times baffling formula for film distribution, which Iervolino confirmed, "while in the past the classical format for a new film was a theatrical release, then the DVD, then pay-per-view and a few TV channels, which of course left little room for lesser known, yet talented filmmakers," he continued, "today, thanks to the financial crisis, which in our opinion isn't a crisis, rather a readjustment, if a film is good, it can't be stopped; because it can always end up on a TV channel, which have now multiplied and can go according to genres. And of course the internet is free, full of platforms which help the smaller companies." Bacardi wisely added, "it has positive and negative sides but the most important thing is that you adapt to this new system."

Going back to the topic of social responsibility, how cinema can help change the world for the better, Bacardi was very passionate on the subject. Most of the films in AMBI's upcoming line-up contain a conscious message, from Hope Lost which deals with the trafficking of foreign women in Italy, sold into prostitution and even snuff movies, to The Humbling, starring Al Pacino and Greta Gerwig, centering around the issues faced in a younger woman, older man relationship. Bacardi admitted that before Hope Lost she "didn't even know the 'snuff movie' industry existed, these are terrible things!" Iervolino explained further, "we pass these women every day in Rome, on the Prenestina road, and think they're there because they want to be, when instead they are threatened, their families intimidated if they don't prostitute themselves. Even their passports are taken away, so they don't have a choice." And while the movie may have enhanced the stories to make them more cinematic, Bacardi was quick to point out that "it's not exaggerated, if anything we tried to make it more soft."

The secret to their success together lies in a synchronicity which Iervolino described easily, "we can make choices in three minutes; Monika studies a screenplay, I read a story, we can have six or seven scripts on our table, but we find each other in an instant." Bacardi then adding, "we are also great friends."

At the end of this talk I didn't want to end, I asked Iervolino and Bacardi to describe one another in three words. Both couldn't condense it to just three with Iervolino going first, "Monika is a woman who is extraordinarily honest, incredibly intelligent and with a big heart." Bacardi had the last word(s) with, "Andrea is also honest, hard-working and exceptionally intelligent."

Top photo by Fabrizio Di Giulio, all images courtesy of AMBI Pictures, used with permission

Where I Get My Inspiration

June 12, 2014, 8:37 am

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"DC or Marvel?"

To many comics fans, this question is as fundamental as "Chocolate or vanilla?" "Yankees or Red Sox?" "Boxers or briefs?"

I've been creating graphic novels since 2002, and I have a dark secret to reveal: I've never read a DC or a Marvel comic book. You might say, "But how can you work in the comics industry and remain so ignorant of your forefathers?"

It might be most accurate to say that my creative forefathers (and mothers) are scattered throughout the Western Canon rather than throughout the superhero universe. My personal superheroes include Dante, who confronts evil villains in the deep circles of Hell; Athena, the goddess of wisdom, courage, and justice; Michelangelo's muscular deities and mortals. Vaster still is my canon of anti-heroes--the lonely and desperate wayfarers of Annie Proulx's stories; the ghost-faced babies and strippers of Marlene Dumas's unsettling oil paintings; the oddballs and lunatics of Werner Herzog's films. I believe that comics can and should take inspiration from every art form. I put this conviction into practice when I was working on my first graphic novel and my editor steered me toward the films of Alfred Hitchcock. I assiduously studied his camera angles and lighting choices, pausing A Touch of Evil on select frames to copy their compositions into my sketchbook. Slow Storm, a graphic novel also influenced by Japanese poetry, Sam Shepard's plays, and Mexican folk art, is better because of it.

I came to comics later in life than most enthusiasts--well after the age when many children begin filling cardboard boxes under their beds with illustrated accounts of muscle-bound, costumed vigilantes. I've always been another kind of comics nerd. From grade school through college, I was the shy geek who hadn't yet discovered comic books, but was developing a serious passion for all the things that count in comics: complex characters, witty dialogue, cultural relevance, high stakes, interesting narrative structure, and, of course, beautiful artwork.

When I went off to Yale to earn my bachelor's degree, I planned to study visual art. I began with the prerequisite drawing, gravitated toward photography, later switched to painting, and eventually returned to drawing. I loved the bare honesty of the line, the immediacy and intimacy of ink on paper. My paintings and drawings were always narrative, and my writing--short stories, mostly, written for the school journal or just for fun--were always visually descriptive. I made my first comic strip when my studio-mate in the painting major asked me to fill in for him one week at the Yale Herald. The comic I produced probably had little mass appeal--a contemplative and moody piece about loneliness, a theme (and feeling) I still grapple with today--but the act of placing images in a sequence flipped a switch in me. Why not combine my love of literature and my compulsion to draw into one unified art form? The week after I graduated, I went to the college bookstore and exchanged my used textbooks for my first graphic novel: Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware.

It took me a long time to feel comfortable with this liberal arts trajectory into the comics scene. In my early years of cartooning, I reluctantly attended comics festivals, where I would dodge light sabers and wonder, "Will I ever fit in here?" Gradually, I've found my place as a drifter between crowds--I present my artwork at concerts and on theatre posters, my graphic novels are nestled on library shelves, and I still table at the occasional Comic Con. I continue to love comics for its incredible scope of possibilities. With comics, I can tell a linear story or an atmospheric one; my images can support my text or contradict it. I can describe a scene documentary-style or evoke the mystical through ghosts and dreams and abstracted memories. My comics might look like a painting but read like a poem. I can fill a page with dialogue or invoke long moments of silence. If you ask me, "Why comics?" I'll respond that in comics, the experimental, interdisciplinary possibilities are endless.

My favorite graphic novels look to a wide range of other artistic and literary media for inspiration. Alison Bechdel's brilliant family memoirs interweave personal narrative with references to classic literature and modern psychology to describe the full range of influences, anxieties, and anxiety of influence behind her family's dysfunction. David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp draws upon Greek myth and architectural structures as the framework for its protagonist's personal odyssey and debates about form and function. For my most recent book, The Undertaking of Lily Chen, I studied Chinese brush painting techniques, Eastern folklore, Disney animation, Spaghetti Westerns, and Chinese cultural and political history. Whether subtly or overtly, many comics take instruction from the conventions of film, playwriting, and graphic design--see Frank Miller's cinematically backlit gangsters, his saucy dialogue, and the exquisite visual rhythms of his pages. I know what this means: it's time for me to read Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I hear it's pretty good (sorry, Marvel).

From Picasso to Joyce, Dylan, and Jobs

June 12, 2014, 8:49 am

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In 1923, T.S. Eliot wrote that in Ulysses, James Joyce had "arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique literary distinction: the distinction of having, not in a negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. I mean that every sentence Mr. Joyce writes is peculiarly and absolutely his own; that his work is not a pastiche; but that nevertheless, it has none of the marks by which a 'style' may be distinguished." Eliot could make this observation with considerable authority, for he had adopted the same practice in his own masterpiece: thus Louis Menand observed that both The Waste Land and Ulysses are "simultaneously fantastic pieces of verbal artifice, Rubik's Cubes of possible meanings, recursive devices that appropriate so many styles and traditions that they have no style of their own." Nor was the similarity accidental, for John Harwood contended that in writing The Waste Land, Eliot "was attempting to compete with Joyce by composing in as many different styles as he could muster."

Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait (Yo-Picasso) (1901). Image courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Curiously, literary scholars have never traced the origins of this stylistic versatility. I believe this may be a product of the intellectual blinders that constrain current humanists to ignore developments that arise outside their chosen area of study. For I suspect that the origin of stylistic versatility in poetry and prose actually comes from painting. The poet Robert Lowell made this connection, when he remarked that "Eliot and Picasso worked in one surprising style for some years, then surprised with another." A literary scholar from an earlier generation, F.O. Matthiessen, similarly wrote in 1935 that "not only Joyce and Eliot, but such other representative artists as Stravinsky and Picasso, have all felt within the past three decades a common urgency not to rest in the development of one manner, but to press on from each discovery to another."

Portrait of James Joyce, by Man Ray (1922). Image courtesy of The Getty Museum collection.

Picasso attracted attention for his stylistic promiscuity as early as 1912, when the painter Wassily Kandinsky noted that he "throws himself from one external means to another," and the critic Roger Fry observed that "he is changing with kaleidoscopic rapidity." Later in the same decade, Piet Mondrian reported from Paris to Theo van Doesberg, incredulously, that Picasso was changing styles "because he wants to be versatile!! That's right: his work can't be convincing then, can it?" The critic John Berger would write in 1965 that Picasso's use of style had no precedent: "In the life work of no other artist is each group of works so independent of those which have just gone before, or so irrelevant to those which are to follow." And at the close of the 20th century, the great critic David Sylvester reflected that Picasso's art was "a celebration of this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the practice of art."

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in 1963. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As I explained elsewhere, Picasso's approach to style was one of his distinctive reactions to the replacement of an art market based on patronage by an atomistic and competitive market for modern art. The diffusion of the practice of stylistic versatility from painting to poetry and prose remains to be documented in detail, but this should furnish excellent material for curious and ambitious doctoral students in the humanities, if there remain any individuals who fit that description. Gertrude Stein's salon might be an obvious place to look for the collision of the relevant disciplines. And the editor of The Waste Land might be a primary figure in the story, as for example Guy Davenport wrote of Ezra Pound that "Like Stravinsky and Picasso and Joyce, he had styles rather than a style."

Steve Jobs. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Stylistic versatility has penetrated one discipline after another: Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Thomas Pynchon (and Steve Jobs) are just a few of the modern giants who have practiced it. If humanists want to make a significant contribution to modern intellectual history, they should study its origins and diffusion, beginning with the greatest young genius of the twentieth century.

Art Through the Eyes of a Legend: Danny Simmons

June 12, 2014, 9:15 am

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I have no idea about the world of art. In school, I just loved colors. I tried my hand at sketching, calligraphy, photography, fashion design, dance and piano. You name it, I tried. it. I was up for anything, and just wanted to see what would stick.

My parents believed in allowing us the opportunity to explore the arts. It was never forced on us but always encouraged. And we had the general understanding that we couldn't come home without having some form of art class on our report card in any given semester. They wanted us to have a balanced view of life so we were given the freedom to try new experiences.

My father was an avid reader, a scholar even, of some sort. He loved politics and he was passionate about literature. My mother, on the other hand, was obsessed with fashion, the world of design, good taste and great manners that would allow us to one day entertain with style and grace.

Often times various musicians frequented our homes. Band members, singers, performers and music writers. My mother insisted that our home was filled with music and art as much as possible. I hated it. Let me rephrase that statement -- I lacked appreciation for what my parents were exposing me to. That is, until now.

I now find myself following in my parents' footsteps and have opened my mind, home, and contacts to various forms of art. I now value all the things my parents laid the groundwork for and wish to pass the love of the arts down to my children.

Thus the reason why interacting with Danny Simmons has become such as honor. Listening to the sort of upbringing his parents instilled in him and his brothers have let me see the similarities that most black, middle-class families have in wanting well-rounded children too. Black parents seek diversity for their children and many, like my parents, know the politics of art. They understand how the world of visual arts is the platform for great conversation. So it's surprising to me that when you look at the state of schools, the enrichment of art is not reflected in the classroom but instead at the mercy of budget cuts. Art, it seems, is always the first to go.

Somehow the world sends the message that being an artist such as a painter or musicians means you can't make a respectable living. The effect this causes makes me wonder... If we were to take away all the artists, their work that graces our homes, our work place, our streets, do away with our museums, galleries, libraries, what would we have left? What would be the condition of our society? Our cereal boxes, our clothing, our fashion, our cars... Everything is infected by the art world, whether or not this fact is apparent to us in our day-to-day hustle and bustle.

How would we be able to deal with tragedy, with hurt, with sorrow, with one another without the arts? Where would our inspirations stem from? How would we heal? And how would those who feel an artist cannot have a "real" career respond to my questions? I'm afraid to ask.

Thank goodness Danny Simmons didn't take some of those opinions to heart, because his own drive and passion for the arts has made him an advocate to the art community to ensure that the wonderful opportunities the art world has made available to him is also granted to every young person of all races who wants access to it.

The Simmons family has shown us firsthand that art, literature, music (even rap), business and politics can co-exist with the proper support system.

So for the next 28 minutes... Listen if you will to Danny Simmons, who will tell us in his own words what art means to him, community and to society as a whole.

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Eliot Saarinen on the ImageBlog

June 12, 2014, 10:25 am

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“Pareidolia”, 2012
Mason Jars, Acrylic and Wood, 55” x 64”
“Pareidolia” is meant to take away the function of the glass jars. From the blurred meaning of art, I am lead to think that anything that serves no function can then step into the realm of artwork. Starting as a joke, this idea of removing an ordinary items function became very impactful, and reinvented my inspiration to view and create artwork.

Hit the Road India: Rolling Out Loud Fun on a Rickshaw

June 12, 2014, 10:45 am

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Every once in a while, a truly fun original documentary comes along. Hit The Road: India is an adventure documentary that follows two friends, Ric Gazarian and Keith King, as they participate in the heretofore unknown Rickshaw Challenge Mumbai Xpress -- a 12-day-long, 2000 kilometer rickshaw rally across India, from Mumbai to Chennai, recognized by the Lonely Planet as one of the top ten greatest adventures in the world. It's not quite the Safary Rally or the London-Sydney Marathon but in a sense the Mumbai Xpress is more exciting. There's an element of the absurd in watching Gazarian and King -- real estate agent from Chicago and a trained chef from Canada, respectively -- putter along at 30 miles an hour in a rickshaw or tuk-tuk in the middle of monsoon season. The rain, horizontal and vertical, pours down on them. At one point, King exclaims "It's fucking cold out here." It's unclear as well exactly what they are feeding themselves with -- a mixture of dried fruit and nuts, local fish rotis and whatever else they can find in the one and two star hotels where they stop to spend the night along the way in this 10 day rickshawathon.




The rain is indeed cold and unforgiving as it batters them from side to side. The rickshaw breaks down on several occasions. There is limited technical help for the six rickshaw teams engaged in this cross-continental bid for tuk-tuk supremacy but the seven-horse motor rickshaws are little more than fancy golf carts when you get right down to it. Gazarian and King -- Rickshaw 006 -- are consistently last among the six participating rickshaws, but as they comment in the film itself, they were motivated by the sense of adventure inherent in such an undertaking. They stop in different cities such as Mangalore and Mysore and participate in a fire festival, are greeted by a pet elephant and dress up as Ernie and the Cookie Monster in order to spend time with local school children in a small Indian city. (Part of the point of the race is to work with Indian children.)



And throughout the documentary there is India, glorious green India in all her majesty: her coastal cities and long swathes of green vegetation that make the imagination soar, the rich, variegated colors and most of all her people, sometimes scowling but mostly smiling, happy to meet foreigners and rich with her millennial architecture and civilization. As expected, the men of Rickshaw 006 do not win the race but they do receive the Bonkers Award, given out to the team that is "most itself," an adult version of the school gym participation award. This lovely, fun, a bit overlong documentary of 80 minutes takes a bit of getting used to at first -- you're not quite sure you are interested in the topic or the drivers at first, but the more you watch the more you become engrossed. Expertly directed by brothers Gor and Mushegh Baghdasaryan out of Yerevan's Manana Film Studios, it may be one the best travel documentaries that I have watched. Along the Gazarian and King proudly display the Howard Stern fist -- it's a strange but oddly appropriate metaphor for this wacky, wonderful 2,000 kilometer adventure across India.

Is There One Right Way to Achieve Creativity? (Spoiler Alert: No)

June 12, 2014, 12:35 pm

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Michael Jordan's high school coach told him that there is "no I in team," to which the budding superstar replied, "Yes, but there is in win."

These two contradictory approaches to creative success are on display in two new books -- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, and Creativity: The Perfect Crime by Philippe Petit.

Ed Catmull is the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, and his fascinating book is part memoir, part business guide, seeking to explain how Pixar developed a culture of creativity that allows for outstanding work to take place even in the absence of the founding members of the team. Pixar is responsible for Toy Story, Up, Brave, and other animated films beloved by children, movie theatre owners, and toy companies.

By contrast, Philippe Petit has little regard for teams. His book reveals his own personal creative process which allowed him to dream up and then survive tightrope walks on a bridge in Sydney, Australia, the top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and most famously, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City four decades ago.

The one thing both books indicate is that important, lasting creative projects have long gestation periods. Pixar films can take four years or more from the time they're first proposed until they time they are in your local Cineplex. Philippe Petit needed six and a half years to plan his World Trade Center adventure. Similarities end there, and quite abruptly.

Pixar emphasizes the team effort, having developed a "creative culture" -- a term Catmull uses repeatedly -- culminating in high-level all hands meetings at which movies or their constituent parts are torn apart, but in a respectful manner, and then rebuilt on a higher level.

Petit would have no use for such meetings. His method of creativity is a solitary one, in which he goes through notebooks and files of articles, photos, and whatnot he has collected over the years, and from that begins to envision and develop a project. Petit actually needs a team in order to break into the public places where he does his art. But he records enormous disdain for the team members he selects, accusing them of frequently failing to show up, or showing up drunk, or committing some other act of sabotage against his brilliance.

The other main difference between what happens at Pixar and what Petit does is that Pixar is a public company, bound by law, and Petit, a rebel who hated school and all other forms of authority, constantly breaks the law. There may not have been a specific statute forbidding people to secretly fire a wire from one tower to the other of the World Trade Center and then cross it without a net. But Petit certainly broke every law in the book on his way to international fame.

At one point, Petit needed to measure the height of a loading dock at the World Trade Center site. But as he was approaching it -- illegally, of course -- a policeman suddenly hove into view, appearing from a substation Petit never knew existed. Unable to whip out his measuring tape and get the dimensions of the loading dock, Petit brilliantly threw himself against the base of the dock, the dust from which imprinted on his shirt, allowing him to get the precise data he needed.

Catmull, unlike Petit, actually enjoyed school. His dream was to become an animator for Disney, but he recognized early on that he lacked the artistic talent to do so. Instead he went into the then-nascent field of computer animation, back in the early 1970s, essentially creating the field of computer-assisted cartoons single-handedly. Actually, he had a partner, John Lasseter, a Disney-level artist with whom he founded Pixar and with whom he works to this day.

Petit had accomplices but not partners. It took a crew, however lackadaisical in their boss's opinion, to lay the framework for the various high-wire crossings in public spaces. By contrast, Catmull and Lasseter did, and you probably know his name. Steve Jobs. Early on, when Pixar was burning cash, it needed a savior, and it found one in the form of Jobs, who had just been booted out of Apple and who ended up investing more than $50 million of his own money in Pixar. Of course, the investment paid off handsomely for all involved, and ultimately won Jobs a seat on the Disney board.

Catmull takes pains to point out that the hard-driving, cruel boss, as Jobs is frequently described was only one facet of his character. He found Jobs a demanding but extremely humane investor and business partner, and he constantly marvels in the book at Jobs's negotiating prowess and ability to see business deals the way few others could. His appreciation of Jobs at the end of the book by itself is worth the price of admission.

So are some of Catmull's aphorisms, like this: "Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft." He adds, "My goal has never been to tell people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out, but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination -- it is a direction... Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won't necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn't the goal; excellence is."

Philippe Petit probably wouldn't have lasted very long at Pixar.

So who's right? The iconoclastic Petit, whose recipes for creativity may be impossible for anyone else to follow but who gave the world the never to be forgotten amazement following his Trade Center walk? Or Catmull, whose guide to corporate creativity may in fact be just as hard to follow?

The question is, of course, impossible to answer. The beautiful thing about our world is that there is room for iconoclasts and culture builders. Those interested in enhancing their own creative abilities would be well advised to read both books.

You can find both books by following the links below:

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Creativity: The Perfect Crime by Phillippe Petit

Remembering Her Ladyship: Mary Soames

June 12, 2014, 12:50 pm

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The loss of Lady Mary Soames, Winston Churchill's youngest daughter and last surviving child, who died on May 31 at the age of 91, deprives the world of its finest direct Churchillian link. For me, it also draws to a close a very sweet friendship.

I first met Lady Soames in the Chartwell Kitchen Garden, miraculously, and on my very first visit, no less. It was the summer of 1985 -- barely a year after the April 1984 opening of the tiny Churchill-centric bookshop in New York City that I'd named for Churchill's home in the Kent countryside - though I'd not yet even seen Chartwell myself. A summer book buying trip to England soon gave me the chance.

Circumnavigating the verdant Chartwell landscape and finally entering the house that Churchill had so loved was both poignant for me and electrifying. Following a giddy house tour, filled with an enveloping sense of Winston Churchill's presence, I found myself drawn to Chartwell's Kitchen Garden, where I sat quietly on a bench gazing out at the vista. In the far distance, a door back at the house opened and a solitary female figure emerged onto Chartwell's manicured lawn terrace. I observed her without thought, as she made her way... well, this way. It is a rather long walk from the main house to Chartwell's brick-walled gardens. Until she entered -- through a gateway in the brickwork that her father, the bricklayer, had once helped construct -- I really hadn't a clue who this red-coated stroller might be. Instantly, however, I recognized her: It was Mary Soames.

We acknowledged one another; after all, we were alone together in a garden. I introduced myself and she, in turn, told me most offhandedly who she was, adding that she often stopped by to look in on her childhood home (and birthplace) and visit with "Mrs. Hamblin" -- Grace Hamblin -- who had served both Winston and Clementine Churchill as private secretary, and who now watched over Chartwell as its very first administrator.

Inevitably, I asked Lady Soames if I could take her picture. She smiled, yes. Inevitably, I also told her about Chartwell Booksellers. She was immediately full of questions: Could a bookstore really survive on her father's books alone? Whatever had given me the idea? Where exactly was this extraordinary place?

Over the ensuing years, all of my re-encounters with Lady Soames seem, in my recollection, variations on our initial meeting. She always appeared unexpectedly and at a distance, visible through the store window, marching toward the shop alone and unannounced. Always, she exuded the vivacity that I like to think she inherited from her father. Ever gracious, ever curious and utterly without pretense, she signed her own books at a gallop, thumbed through anything that was new on the subject of Winston Churchill, and departed as she had come; alone.

Years later, when Lady Soames could no longer travel overseas, I came to possess a volume with a deeply personal connection to her. It was a First American edition copy of The Gathering Storm -- the initial volume in Churchill's six-volume memoir of the Second World War -- and it was inscribed in ink on the front free endpaper: "To Mary and Christopher from Papa, 1948." This was Churchill's inscription to his newlywed daughter; she had married Christopher Soames on February 11, 1947. There were, moreover, extensive notes, in Lady Soames' hand, penciled across the rear endpapers.

The moment the book arrived, I emailed her Ladyship. Was this indeed hers? Had the book nefariously gone missing somehow from her library?

At first, she was mystified. In her library, she informed me, there was The Gathering Storm inscribed to her and "Christopher" by her father, but dated "1954." The mystification lifted somewhat when I mentioned one further detail. This book had been acquired, I'd been told, together with another written by her father that was inscribed:"Nana, love Christopher and Mary."

"'Nana' was my mother's first cousin," wrote back Lady Soames, "Maryott Whyte, who looked after me very soon after my birth until the beginning of the war and who generally invigilated Chartwell in my parents' absence."

I confess I had to look up that word, "invigilated." Turns out it is something of a Britishism, meaning "to supervise candidates during an examination."

Lady Soames would later write at affectionate length in her memoir, A Daughter's Tale, about Maryott "Moppet" Whyte's powerful, positive influence on her childhood, and her very special devotion to "Nana." I wonder if Lady Soames did not at some point give her first inscribed copy of The Gathering Storm to Maryott Whyte. Sir Winston then would have replaced the book in 1954, the year that the final volume of his war memoirs was published.

I offered to return the book to Lady Soames.

"I would be very sorry to see you at a loss over it," she replied, with characteristic magnanimity. "I therefore have no objection to your selling the book."

I thanked her then, and I thank her now, one final time. She was an exquisite exponent of all that her father represented. She also was quite a lady.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

June 12, 2014, 1:19 pm

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The Grand Budapest Hotel is not so much a visual movie as a furnished movie. And what's it furnished with? Neologisms made up of Mitteleuropaische sounding words (a joke that begins to pale), bloody noses, pastry from a place called Mendl's, a supposed masterpiece called "Boy with Apple" that is replaced by a Schiele look-alike of a woman fingering her female lover and lots of antiques. The switching of the Schiele for the "Boy with Apple" is one of the most significant devices of the movie since it talks to a misconception about value that underlies the narrative, but that is never fully realized. "I think his world had vanished long before he entered it," says Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the current proprietor of the now almost defunct hotel about his mentor M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes)."But he sustained the illusion with amazing grace." One wishes the same could have been said about Wes Anderson. He certainly knows how to pack a scene with set pieces which are both cartoons and relics, but in the end they're very much like the pastries from Mendl's. There may be an art to making pastry, but pastry is not art. Sweetness rather than timelessness defines the pleasure of a Sachertorte. And what about those bloody noses? Are Anderson's concierges bloodied by history which turns a dream of elegance into a shambles? It's another strand of plot that never gets developed. But if all the décor weren't enough then you add Tilda Swinton, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, William Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum to the lineup and you have your typical Hollywood blockbuster in Austro-Hungarian clothing. Grand Hotel (1932) similarly set Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and John Barrymore in Berlin, but it was an inimitable classic. The Grand Budapest Hotel may have been inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig, whose Amazon sales are undoubtedly getting a shot in the arm, due to the movie. However, the film exudes none of the perspicacity of Zweig nor that of his confrere the novelist Joseph Roth, who wrote so tellingly about the twilight of a similar era





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

Fritz Koenig's Sphere: Michael Burke's Call to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum

June 12, 2014, 1:27 pm

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The National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation, with its new museum recently opened in Manhattan, often speaks of its "stakeholders": family members of victims, survivors, first responders, recovery workers, local residents, historic preservationists, and government officials. However, there is an additional possible "stakeholder" that could be conceived in two different ways, either as an almost 90-year-old sculptor from Landshut, Germany, or as a single piece of art, the respect for whose symbolic expression has its own weight.

Because the development of the World Trade Center, advanced by financial titan David Rockefeller, obliterated many acres of the low-rise "Radio Row" electronics district of the Lower West Side of Manhattan, architect Minoru Yamasaki had a great deal of space to work with. He fashioned the site's plaza as what he called "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." In the middle, banded by concentric radial circles, he placed a large fountain and a 25-feet-high bronze sculpture by Fritz Koenig, an accomplished German artist. (Interestingly, architect Laurie Kerr has described the World Trade Center towers as essentially "minarets" for this design, with the sculpture acting as the Kaaba and with the decorative, yet functional "tridents" of the towers derived from the "pointed arches of Islam.")



The sculpture itself, which had been popularly known as "The Sphere," quite remarkably survived the attacks, and its future has been debated since. In 2002, when the prospect of a proper memorial at "Ground Zero" was still a long way away, the sculpture was moved to Battery Park where it became a makeshift memorial with an eternal flame. Since then, however, its fate has been uncertain, although the artwork's original commissioner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, would prefer that it be returned to the Memorial Plaza. The Battery Conservancy also wants it to leave, but the September 11 Memorial foundation, led by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has refused to place it in the section of the site that it controls.

One sincere and earnest man, Michael Burke, stepped into the middle of this impasse and established "Save the Sphere," an impressive grassroots campaign arguing for the sculpture's protection and return. The "chorus" that he led even encouraged Hans Rampf, the mayor of Fritz Koenig's hometown of Landshut in Bavaria, to call for the sculpture to sit in "its rightful place." Burke's commitment to the Sphere as a piece of art, and as a symbol of community and of historical memory, is admirable, and below is an interview about his motivation and vision.

1. Your brother, Captain William F. Burke, Jr. of FDNY Engine Company 21, died on September 11, and for years now you have led a grassroots campaign to clean and care for Fritz Koenig's sculpture and to secure its return from Battery Park to the World Trade Center site. What inspired and motivated your effort? And how have other 9/11 family members offered support?

Something definite happened on September 11, 2001, and the event demands our attention. At this location, "Ground Zero," we do not have the option of not confronting it. No one has the right to edit the history or to remake the site to impose a new meaning of their choosing (for example, as "a special place of healing" as the memorial jury said).

The very first display in the new museum's exhibition is dedicated to the Sphere, with photos of it before and after 9/11. They show it gleaming in the center of the plaza between the two towers, and, in a photo dated September 27, 2001, they show it standing alone and damaged in the ruins. The Sphere is an authentic artifact, and the museum recognizes its centrality and importance. Why not return it and allow it to speak for itself?



And, independent of its survival, I find it interesting that it was crafted consciously as a symbol of world peace. In its original fragmented, disjointed shape it offered a working reality of "peace," in place of the pure ideal. Now, bashed and broken but still standing, its artistic message is validated.

It is not inevitable that such artifacts and their embedded truths survive. Someone had to make the effort to save the Gettysburg battlefield, the buildings of Auschwitz, the USS Arizona, and the dome at Hiroshima. Imagine our world today if these artifacts were lost. Therefore, I took the initiate to argue for the return of this iconic artifact that should anchor the memorial site.

Scores of 9/11 family members have signed our petitions supporting the return of the Sphere, and many others have written letters to newspapers, spoken on television, and contacted government officials on behalf of the effort. In the various meetings with foundation and other officials during the years before the design was chosen and then built, many family members repeatedly advocated its return. Much of the core support, however, comes from ordinary citizens, including many downtown residents who have specific memories of the Sphere and of 9/11 itself.

2. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which commissioned the original artwork and lost many people in the attacks itself, has affirmed your push, but the 9/11 Memorial foundation has said that including the sculpture would violate the "artistic integrity" of the memorial park. The new underground museum is filled with assorted symbolism, yet the above-ground memorial is notably devoid. In response to your efforts, has the foundation explained their definition of the memorial's "artistic integrity"? What is your theory as to why they rejected the Sphere?

In the public forums for the memorial selection process, participants overwhelmingly called for the return of the Sphere. A common refrain was incredulity. "It's just sitting down at Battery Park when it belongs at the memorial!"

During one of the 9/11 anniversary ceremonies, I told Michael Arad, the memorial architect, that we, the 9/11 families, largely wanted the Sphere returned to the site. He winced and told me, "That would be didactic." In other words, its placement on the plaza would tell people what to think about September 11.

Returning the Sphere, the last remaining intact standing structure of the World Trade Center, would not be "didactic" or "tell us what to think." This notion defies common sense. The memorial selection jury, in seeking to impose what I consider a narcissistic and esoteric experience upon visitors, clearly had Maya Lin's famous Vietnam War Memorial on the brain. Indeed, she was a member of the selection jury. However, this memorial in Washington, D.C. about a war fought on the other side of the world should not have been a viable model for what was chosen for the World Trade Center site. No battles of the Vietnam War were fought on the National Mall; the memorial did not replace any authentic artifacts of the war.

I sometimes ask: Would we replace a downed American jet fighter somewhere in Vietnam with some abstract artwork and claim it offers a better commemoration of the war?

The memorial is on the site of the event. We have to ask: What is our primary obligation here? To commemorate "absence," as in Arad's proposal? To offer prompting for abstract grieving? Or to faithfully preserve and convey the site's authentic history? I believe the jury and government officials, for various reasons including the corporate aesthetics of keeping things clean and antiseptic, wanted to simplify and sanitize the site. The powers that be, and this does not necessarily include the museum curators, wanted the Sphere off the site because they cannot control its message. They want to dictate an experience.

By restoring something of the site's authenticity, for me even its sacredness, the Sphere does violate the "artistic integrity" of the memorial. That tells us something about the memorial.

3. Although the World Trade Center towers were massive structures, the Sphere and its fountain offered a human-scale place where people could sit on surrounding benches and have lunch or socialize in the open air. What stories of people's memories of sitting near the Sphere do you find most valuable or remarkable?

For our online petition, the mother of one victim ("Matthew, age 23") wrote, "Those who perished [on] 9/11 walked by the Sphere every day. Give the rest of the world the opportunity to do so as well." Another signee wrote, "It's the first thing we saw after climbing down 90 stories [of] 2 WTC [on] 9/11. Preserve this memory."

I remember shortly after 9/11, a woman who worked at the World Trade Center called the fountain and the Sphere "our hometown." She beseeched that something of that anchor of community and socialization be preserved.

In the decades before 9/11, the Sphere was a key place to visit and to photograph. Office workers and tourists from all over the world gathered around it; families posed before it. I remember this from when I used to work downtown in the 1980s. Why would we exile these memories from the memorial, especially since they are acknowledged in the first section of the museum?

4. In light of the foundation's decision to place the unidentified human remains in the museum with its expensive ticket prices, a coalition of 9/11 family members is now proposing a sunlit, above-ground monument, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as an alternative. Do you think that this endeavor could possibly lead to new thinking or a solution for the Sphere?

Returning the Sphere to the memorial site would address the concerns about the high expense of entry for many families. It would offer an authentic artifact, at human scale unlike the World Trade Center tridents, that visitors would not have to pay to see. It would anchor the site in its actual history and provide a much needed icon for collective memory (heck, the gift shop could sell Sphere figurines rather than 9/11 cheese plates!). The Sphere would serve this purpose better than the appropriation of the "Survivor Tree," which was not a recognizable part of the World Trade Center site.

Furthermore, a flush-to-the-ground, black marble "Tomb of Unknowns," before an eternal flame and the Sphere, would provide the solemnity, for both the victims' families and for the global public, that the memorial site is currently missing.

Ultimately though, the story of the Sphere, and its contemplation as a work of art, resonates with me and many others. I think the sculpture should just stand on its own in the plaza as it did on the morning of September 11, which the world first believed to be just another beautiful late summer day. When the dust cleared and the area was bashed and torn and battered, the surrounding fountain and towers destroyed, the Sphere stayed standing.

Images obtained through Wikipedia, from FEMA and Wikipedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Ask the Art Professor: Is the Internet Necessary to be a Successful Artist?

June 12, 2014, 2:44 pm

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I've been working in a small gallery that's all about social media and using it to promote their gallery and artists. I, on the other hand, choose to have a very minimal online presence. I only recently got a Linkedin account, but I don't have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I dislike the idea that anyone can have access into my work and my life. As an artist living in the 21st century, is my reluctance towards using technology and social media hurting my art career? Has the Internet become a necessary tool in becoming successful?"

Think about it this way: if you don't use the Internet to promote your art, what would you use? Print media? Print media is so achingly slow and expensive. On top of that, I don't have any evidence that print media is any more effective than emailing an announcement. If anything, I'm convinced that people are much more likely to hang onto your information if they receive it digitally. I don't even bother with hard copy postcard mailings anymore because of the high cost of postage and printing. The only time I use print media now is when I make an exhibition catalog, which only happens every two or three years because printing is so expensive. I snail-mail hard copies of the exhibition catalog to select curators and art dealers whom I want to show my artwork. Compared to print media, the Internet is so much faster, convenient, and mostly free. When you're at the very beginning of your career and you don't have significant financial resources, these factors are huge.

I can understand your reluctance to put yourself online. Many artists worry that by promoting themselves online, their artwork will be cheapened in the process. This can be true, and I've seen artists promote themselves online in a manner that is embarrassing and even detrimental to their career. I once visited a website that had gigantic icons for all of the artist's many social networks on every single webpage. I was so distracted by the "share" icons that I couldn't see their artwork clearly. Just last week I saw an artist website that was visually crammed. Nearly every page had cheesy quotes of praise, links to three different ways to buy their artwork, links telling people to be on their email list, as well as one of the tackiest biographies I've read in a while. Their artwork seemed like an afterthought in the context of all the clutter on the website.

At the very least, you absolutely must have a website for your artwork. If you can afford it, it's worth it to hire a professional to design your website to be sure that the presentation is both tasteful and user-friendly. If you can't, there are many low cost or free options you can find online for building a website. Your website can be very simple, but you must have the core basics: curriculum vitae, biography, contact information, and your artwork. To ensure a professional look, write a narrative biography that is purely factual without any superfluous embellishments. If you accompany your artwork with text, make sure that the text is visually understated. What you choose not to share is just as important for maintaining a clean, professional presentation. On my blog, I have rules that I set for myself: I don't whine, I never post anything about my family, and I only post photographs of myself in professional contexts.

Without a website, I can guarantee that you will miss out on crucial professional opportunities. Essentially every professional interaction I've had in my career has, at some point, involved someone looking at my website. I was once interviewing someone to teach a workshop, so I asked to see their artwork. The artist told me they didn't have a website, and asked if they could just email me images. This was not only inconvenient to me, because my inbox was then flooded with images, but also did not make a positive first impression. When I was a gallery director, I was frequently looking up artists online. If I discovered that an artist didn't have a website, my professional opinion of them immediately dropped.

For me, of all of the social media outlets, Facebook has been the most effective so far. While I am also on Twitter and other sites, I have many more followers on my Facebook page. I know a lot of people hate Facebook, but it's hard to ignore how effective it is in terms of reaching a lot of people very quickly. Many of my colleagues now use Facebook instead of a traditional email list for announcements. With Facebook, there's no hassle of updating everyone's email address all the time, and many people are more likely to see the information on Facebook first. You can choose to limit your Facebook interactions to being purely professional, and not post anything remotely personal. Another option is to set your privacy settings so that any personal content you post is only viewable by your personal friends.

Ultimately, you are in control of creating an online presence for yourself. You can strictly regulate what kind of information you put online, keep your presentation professional, and only share what you're comfortable with. In this way you can stay current but also maintain your artistic integrity.

Ask the Art Professor is an advice column for visual artists. Submit your questions to clara(at)claralieu.com

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Changing the Art Movement

June 12, 2014, 2:54 pm

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Around the world, artists come together and decide to work, create, and at times even live under the same roof. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, including community-building, artistic authorship, and self-staging. Such communities at times thrive, and at other times falter, and critics have sometimes called such spaces of art production a romantic notion. Whether fanciful or not, such artist "colonies nearly always draw the attention of other artists, art fans, and art professionals.

What makes a community truly successful is a strong group of artists who agree to join together and collaborate for reasons other than real estate. They will likely do so because they believe that, as a group, they will broaden their individual artistic horizons, grow as artists, and learn from others - especially those working with a different art medium. The sculptor, for example, will learn from the painter, who in turn will have learned from the digital media artist and the photographer.

This kind of interaction is a hallmark of the living artist community, and is truly an added value to any artistic expression. One of the latest additions to the roster of artist communities is Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. By creating such a community and by adding additional components, Mana Contemporary ventured into new territory in the art world. It is a strong and modern example of how the humble artist colony can come together to collaborate and elevate the creative process, thereby bringing art to a new level.

Opened in May 2011, Mana Contemporary has quickly evolved into one of the largest and most innovative contemporary art organizations in the United States. By growing organically and sustainably, and through an integrated design, the center provides spaces, services, and programming for artists, collectors, curators, performers, students, and the greater community within a single location. At its core is the creative hub of over 100 artists working amongst one another in their bright and airy studios.



"Mana utilizes a hive concept to serve as a catalyst for the integration and exchange of ideas between artists and leaders in the art world," says Eugene Lemay, when asked about the center's mission. Eugene Lemay is Mana's president and founder. "Artists of diverse disciplines - painting, sculpture, photography, dance, theatre, film, sound and performance work alongside each other in a progressive campus environment that fosters experimentation, collaboration, and mutual inspiration," he adds.

While the concept is as old as art, what Mana has done with the artist concept is nothing short of groundbreaking. What sets the center apart is that it also offers services of all kind to artists, including a frame shop, a crate shop, a logistics center, and soon will also offer consultation from an expert in ergonomics. These in-house services are a value-added to the artists. For physical art, Mana artists are able to avoid any unnecessary movement and shipping of an art piece for framing and crating. This means that risk is minimized, and the entire process is not just safer but also faster for the artist, and the gallery or collector.

The sheer size and scope of Mana Contemporary and its community of artists attracts an equally eclectic group of visitors every day. Oftentimes such a visit establishes a dialogue and an exploration of a possible collaboration that will follow, to the benefit of the artist community. Such an out-of-the-box dialogue started when acclaimed physical therapist Dr. Andrea Lazzari, visited the center. Based, in Rome, Dr. Lazzari specializes in Global Postural Reeducation (GPR), an innovative method of posture correction. The GPR method is well known and commonly applied in Europe and South America, but is heretofore rare in the United States.

During his recent visit, Dr. Lazzari visited a number of artists in their studios and, setting his appreciation of art aside, observed them in their creative process, focusing on their movements and posture. In the resulting conversations with the artists, Dr. Lazzari learned that some of them suffer from health problems and injuries that can be linked to their profession, and the creation of their art. Documenting these injuries, he took notes and pictures, and eventually analyzed the data he had gathered from the artists.



Dr. Lazzari explains that for many artists drawing or painting can actually become painful over time. "Artists tend to underestimate the physicality of creating art. They very much depend on their bodies in the exercise of their profession," he says. The problem, more often than not, is a repetitive strain injury. Dr. Lazzari adds that a professional analysis using the European GPR method will identify when discomfort is created, and in which altered position the artist will be able to find relief. Further training with the artist himself can provide that person significant relief. This leads to a higher quality of life, better quality art, and an extended professional career.

Using this technique, Dr. Lazzari could teach artists proper posture in their repetitive movements, the value of periodic rest and stretching therapies, and preventative changes that assist with recurrent pain, such as creating an ergonomic workspace. Lazzari point out that "[w]e all should live an awareness of the centrality of elasticity of our bodies. And artists especially will understand the benefit of a heightened state of range and flexibility because it allows them to express their emotions through the enabled precision movements of their bodies."

For these artists, these suggestions were certainly a welcome byproduct of maintaining a studio at the center. Eugene Lemay adds that artists at Mana Contemporary, because of its unique set-up, are protected against the forces of gentrification, unlike other such artist colonies that had developed, and were then pushed out of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In Mana's hybrid concept, the artist community is its heart, surrounded by businesses and services benefiting them and the local world of art. The artists are the center of gravity that is complemented by the for-profit and non-profit elements, such as the exhibition spaces, the dance studio, as well as the unique and varied programming. The value of the real estate is linked intrinsically to the artists and while their presence will lift the surrounding areas this inevitable gentrification will not price them out because they are the center of the Mana Contemporary community. It is a synergetic relationship that underlies this special artist community.

For Pride Month, Daring to Be Wild and Precious in a New One-man Show

June 13, 2014, 10:13 am

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"I want to celebrate that we've come so far in my life from not having words for our experience -- 'the love that dare not speak its name' -- to being able to celebrate it." Boston psychotherapist Steve Cadwell is speaking about his new one-man show Wild and Precious, a few days after performing it on Friday evening, June 6, in the tenth-floor auditorium of Boston's Fenway Health, the largest LGBT health care and research organization in the world.

Wild and Precious traces Cadwell's life journey from sissy farm boy -- one of six brothers -- in rural Vermont, through the wild and crazy 1960s, the early gay rights movement of the seventies, the devastation of AIDS in the eighties, and his biggest role ever as an out and proud gay man married and raising a son of his own with his longtime partner -- now legally wed husband -- Joe.

Jon Vincent, director of Fenway Health's Prevention, Education, and Screening division, told me that Wild and Precious fit naturally into the organization's "Living Well" program. He said the mission of the 25-year-old program -- originally created as a holistic living program for HIV-positive people before the advent of antiretroviral therapy -- includes exploring some of the most challenging personal and social issues in the age of HIV, and reclaiming what is ours.

In opening the show, Cadwell said his personal mission includes reclaiming his own story and telling it his own way. "My story is not that unusual," he told me in a phone interview. "It's a fairly ordinary 'every boy's story.' " Yet like all noteworthy art, the particulars of one man's life become the touchstones of common experience for so many of our lives.

Through his original music, poetry, costumes, and a series of photographs projected onto a screen behind him, Cadwell told me he wants audiences to share the range of feelings he evokes in the show -- anger, sadness, joy, even some hate. "All that is channeled through it with hope that those who are engaged with me, the audience, also feel this bath of warm, engaged possibility," he said.

Although he's a white gay man, Cadwell is clear that struggling with being "different" isn't unique to gay men or other sexual minorities. He said Wild and Precious is for anyone who is oppressed, "outside and in," by any of the phobias and "isms" that people turn against one another -- and upon ourselves -- because of our differences. He aims to help others feel hope -- "whatever the difference is, whatever the minority experience is." Put a bit differently, he said the show "is about this core xenophobia that is 'different-o-phobia' out of our own internal terror about our own difference."

Cadwell doesn't shy from plumbing the depths of his own painful experience as a gay youth coming to grips with being different. One of his poems, "POEMemoir Noir: WILD Howls inside the Cage," describes his experience of being committed to a state mental institution due to his emotional breakdown triggered by his being homosexual -- considered until 1973 to be a mental illness.

Again in "AIDS Trilogy Part II: Requiem for the Boy Next Door," he mines his and so many of our heartache over the losses of friends and lovers in the dark pre-antiretroviral years:

Kiss this boy who makes me cry.
Mark my words. Tell you why:
Tender is his "might have been."
Ache to hold him...gather him in...
all these bones
and thin...thin...skin.
Rock-a-bye, baby...goodbye

But Wild and Precious is much more than a sentimental journey down a memory lane of pain and sadness. The show's final triumphant image is a great blue heron taking flight, rising slowly, majestically, off the water. It ends with Cadwell draped in the rainbow flag. His takeaway message: Inner peace comes of accepting our own differences, and a life of integrity comes from integrating all our parts.

"It's right here, under this rainbow," said Cadwell in our interview, "not over the rainbow, Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz. It's right here under the rainbow of our smiles, affirming, loving, accepting -- not the hate and pushing away." Or, as he concludes in Wild and Precious, "Dare to be different. Make a difference. Be the difference. Be wild! Stay precious! We're only as free as our least are free."

Warming Into June: Cultural ^ Charitable Catch-Up

June 13, 2014, 10:29 am

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Warming Into June; Cultural & Charitable Catch-Up

Central Parks Mini-Regatta, MFIT's Couture Council, Designer Ralph Rucci, The Lighthouse Gild's POSH Sale, Gala & Interesting History, Audra McDonald, Billie Holiday & Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, MAD Museum's "Multiple Exposures: Jewelry & Photography", Furnishings by Ilana Goor at Urban Zen, Painter Paul Heyer, and Street Art...

Text & Photographs © Jill Lynne June, 2014

Warm weather brings out the child in us. Fond memories of carefree seemingly endless days - building castles in the sand, cool dips in sparkling lakes, splashing about in ocean waves, licking sweet dripping ice cream cones...

Reminiscent of childhood times - it was a delight to begin the warmer Spring/Summer season with a Mini Regatta at Central Park's Boat Pond. Located adjacent to the wondrous bronze sculpture of Lewis Carol's Alice In Wonderland (and friends - The White Rabbit, Mad Hatter...) created by Spanish-born American Artist Jose de Breeft, as a commission by George Delacorte "a gift to the children of NYC", and a tribute to his wife Margarita - who like my Mother - read Alice to her children.



Central Park's playful Alice In Wonderland interactive sculpture



At the Mini Regatta, nautically-dressed adults played with the remote operated sailboats while sipping flutes of the new organic Prosecco Altaneve.



Model Morgan O'Connor, the 2014 Face of Ralph Lauren Polo



Double-Fluted Lady O with Her Mini-Sailboat



Gals with Parasols Dressed for the Fete


The Couture Council at NYC's Fashion Institute of Technology supports The Museum at FIT, one of the foremost museums of fashion worldwide. Through its membership fees and fundraising, the Council enables the Museum's important exhibitions - under the aegis of the ever-erudite Curator, Valerie Steele. In addition it assists in the acquisition of Fashion Object d'Arte for MFIT's permanent collection, organizes public programs, annual fashion symposiums, and develops special VIP Designer Events.

It was recently, at one of those very special events - hosted by the savvy Couture Council Member Michele Gerber Klein - that the brilliant Designer Ralph Rucci was honored. The highlight was a Visit to his Rucci's private, vast Chelsea Studios - where he personally guided guests through his fascinating collections, educating attendees about his individual fabrication and the unique techniques he has developed.

Indeed Ralph Rucci is a creative genius - an Artist, Fashion Designer and Inventor -par excellence!

The Adventure was celebrated with a fashionably delectable dinner at the beautiful Del Posto Restaurant in Chelsea.

For additional information visit www.fitnyc.edu



Clad in Vintage Rucci, MFIT Curator Valerie Steele and Couture Council Member and Hostess, Michel Gerber Klein - toast the Designer



Couture Council Board Member Nancy Shaw and Renny Pittman



Board Chairwoman Yaz Hernandez



Designer Ralph Rucci explains his Unique Fabrication Techniques



Rucci Showcases his Extraordinary Creations


Continuing with Fashion, let's focus on one of NYC's most beloved charities and Events - The Lighthouse Guild's POSH Sale and Gala.

The 40-year old POSH Fashion Sale Event features Design Collectables generously donated by such renowned Designers as Armani, Badgley Mischka, Bill Blass and Carolina Herrera - all at highly-discounted prices.

In fact, regularly enthusiasts circle the block awaiting their Posh "bargains"

For many years many NYC Ladies-of-Charity including Cynthia Maltese, Sandra Blank and Nell Yperifanos have labored long and hard to produce these events.
"Fashionable" Hats off to them!!!

Hamish Bowles, Amy Fine Collins Alex Hitz and Lorry Newhouse hosted the POSH Dinner Gala, held at the historical Metropolitan Club. Honored were Founder and CEO Jonathan Adler, Designer Thom Browne, and the very respected Sheila Nevins, President HBO Documentary Films.

Founded in 1905 by Winifred and Edith Holt, the Lighthouse quickly became a pioneer in the field of vision rehabilitation. Today it is a leading global resource in helping people overcome the challenges of vision loss.

A trip to Florence, Italy, for the two young Holt sisters provided the inspiration for their mission to serve those without sight. During a concert there, Winifred noticed a group of blind school children in the audience, enthralled by the music. Discovering that a free ticket program provided the children with access, Winifred was inspired to do the same in New York City. The Holt sisters established the Lighthouse Free Ticket Bureau in 1903.
With a borrowed $400 and only their dress allowances, Winifred and Edith Holt lit the Lighthouse lamp, founding "Lighthouse No. 1" to assist people without sight to help themselves. The visionary sisters broke down many barriers, opening their family brownstone at 44 East 78th Street to all in need.
This year the Lighthouse Guild International joined forces with the Jewish Guild Healthcare providing a broader range of services in a West Side as well as an East Side location.
To learn more go to www.lighthouse.org



Executive Vice President and COO, The Lighthouse Guild, Mark G. Ackerman, with Honorees, Designer Thom Browne, President HBO Documentary Films Sheila Nevins, and Jonathan Adler - at the POSH Gala, Metropolitan Club



Happy Fashionista Peruses the Racks at the POSH Fashion Sale


Hip, hip, Hooray!
Audra McDonald has just won her record-breaking sixth Tony Award for the Lead Performance as the legendary Billie Holiday in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill". This Tony - her first as a Lead Actress - also marks the first time a performer has won a Tony in all four categories.

Born in Berlin, raised in California, she plunged into acting to counteract her childhood diagnosis as "hyperactive". "Fortunately", she recalls, her Mother refused to medicate her, and instead applauded her move into acting.

Interestingly, I attended the play with Producer Robin Lane, who as a young star-struck fledgling theater-buff, had actually bussed down to Philadelphia to see one of Billie Holidays' last performances at the actual Emerson's.
Robin noted McDonald's authentic performance, felt as though she had time-traveled back...

Audra McDonald embodies Holiday, infused with her spirit -painfully dissipated yet brilliant in talent and voice. While the iconic music is engulfing, McDonald portrays her decline with distressing heart-wrenching accuracy. As with the real Holiday, when she was good, Audra McDonald is transporting.

If you too are haunted by the legend of the iconic Billie Holiday - musically and culturally- rush to see "Lady Day" at Circle In The Square Theater before August 10th!!!



Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill"
© Eugenia Eliseeva


The MAD Museum (The Museum of Arts & Design) has quickly grown to be one of NYC's treasured art institutions. Under the aegis of the sophisticated "eye" of Barbara Tober, the museum - located at Columbus Circle, (fittingly on the site of the old Huntington-Hartford Art Museum) - mounts unusual exhibitions showcasing contemporary makers across creative fields, presenting artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill to their work.

Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of the creative processes by which materials are transformed - from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies.

The extensive beautifully curated collection of Jewelry is a favorite.
Archived in actual pullout drawers, one feels as though they are on a treasure hunt as they open them to discover their secrets of fascinating designs.

"Multiple Exposures: Jewelry and Photography" highlights 80 renowned artists from 20 countries, Curated by MAD's Curator of Jewelry, Ursula lise-Neuman the exhibition also explores the 150-year-old history of photo-based jewelry.



MAD's Curator of Jewelry Ursula Ilse-Neuman with Artist Kiff Slemmons (wearing her Photo-Neck-Piece) and Chairwoman Emerita Barbara Tober



From MAD's extensive Jewelry Collection, 1962 Necklace by Designer Kenneth Jay Lane

Donna Karan recently hosted a celebratory cocktail soiree at her WV (West Village) Urban Zen Space, named after her late husband - the Stephen Weiss Gallery - and celebrating the opening of an exhibition by renowned Israeli Artist, Ilana Goor.

Goor, who has her own Tel Aviv-based museum, specializes in unique furniture designs - crafted in bronze and leather with decorative castings of found objects, birds and bits of nature. The furniture stands in stark contrast to mass-produced furniture, each revealing the artists special hand.



Designer Donna Karan with Artist Ilana Goor



Unique Chair and Ornamental Wall Sculpture Exhibited at Urban Zen


Beneath the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, on the very Lower East Side, (LES) - the perimeter of the ever-stretching-downtown art scene - I attended an exhibition of the young and talented Los Angeles-based painter, Paul Heyer. This, his first One-Man-Exhibition, located at Omo Valley, was minimalist in the small space - showcasing one gloriously colored, and luminous painting and one curious video. The small "pocket" gallery was crowded with youthful intelligence and enthusiasm. We look forward to more...



Artist Paul Heyer with his Luminous Painting at his First New York One Man Exhibition


One of the very many things I luv about NYC is the democracy of art - existing not only in private spaces, but accessible to all, on the very streets. Post Brunch in the MPD (meat Packing District) at the always amusing Standard Grill, we discovered this whimsical paining.



CoriAnne Posing Humorously with Street Art in the MPD

All Photographs © Jill Lynne 2014, available for Purchase Please
Contact: JillLynne1@mac.com
www.JillLynne.com

Kathleen Melian on the ImageBlog

June 13, 2014, 10:38 am

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Brimming With Excitement, 84” x 72”, Oil on Panel, 2014

On the "A" w/Souleo: Happy 80th Birthday Apollo Theater

June 13, 2014, 10:56 am

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The Apollo Theater has transformed the lives of many singers that performed on its stage such as Stevie Wonder, James Brown and Lauryn Hill. But sometimes in a transcendent moment the lives of audience members are forever changed as well. For Star Jones that is the promise and value of this legendary institution, which celebrated its 80th anniversary this past Tuesday during its annual spring gala.

"I remember seeing The Jackson 5 and classy women performing the Apollo and it changing my life. Tonight brings back a lot of memories for somebody like me from the housing projects in New Jersey," she said.


Natalie Cole performs at Apollo 80th anniversary celebration/Courtesy: Shahar Azran Photography

Looking back and moving forward was the main theme of the night. The evening's emcee Wayne Brady presided over a line-up that took the audience on a journey from jazz (Natalie Cole and Gladys Knight) to Motown (Human Nature) to soul (Joss Stone and The Isley Brothers) to hip-hop (Doug E. Fresh) to gospel (Edwin Hawkins). Along the way there was recognition of the role that comedy and dance played in the Apollo's legacy.

In recognizing that none of this would continue without passionate leaders, the benefit honored former Citigroup and Time Warner chairman, Richard D. Parsons, with the Leadership Award. For Parsons the credit is shared with numerous others on the Apollo's board. "No one in today's world accomplishes anything alone except if you're a terrorist. But if you want to build something you need compatriots," he said. "So the real credit goes to the members of the board who helped the Apollo rise like a phoenix from the ashes."

Chashama Gala Attendees Weigh In On 'Paying Artists' campaign

Every visual artist needs funding and space to create and present work. For nearly 20 years, the non-profit organization chashama has been providing the latter to New York City artists by turning over vacant real estate to artists. Their achievements were celebrated at their annual gala this past Monday where funds were also raised to further their mission. During the event attention was also given to the Paying Artists campaign in the United Kingdom that aims to mandate that artists are financially compensated to exhibit in public-funded galleries.

It is a controversial and potentially game-changing idea that chashama founder, Anita Durst hopes is successful and will lead to a similar initiative in the United States. "Art is a big commerce but most artists I know are really poor and have very little money," she said. "If we had money to give artists to show in spaces that would change the way art is perceived and how artists are treated."

Not everyone is so quick to wholeheartedly support the campaign. Jorge Daniel Veneciano, the new executive director of El Muse del Barrio, believes that while the idea has merit it shouldn't necessarily apply to all artists. "I think some artists especially emerging ones may benefit from exposure and publicity that help their career, while more advanced artists may feel some compensation is in order. So I'm hesitant to say across the board it is right but I do think it is absolutely the right question to ask and it is worth exploring," he said.

Paul Rodgers Gives Back to Memphis With New Soul Album

When rock singer-songwriter, Paul Rodgers (Bad Company, Free, The Firm, Queen + Paul Rodgers), decided to pay homage to the soulful sounds of Otis Redding, Albert King and Ann Peebles he knew exactly where to record: Memphis' historic Royal Studios. It is the home of Willie Mitchell and Hi Records where songs by Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Ike & Tina Turner were recorded. On his new release The Royal Sessions Rodgers has amassed a line-up of legendary Memphis studio musicians, many of whom backed Redding, Peebles, Isaac Hayes and numerous others. For Rodgers the decision was borne of a desire to remain respectful to the legacy of Memphis' soul music and its originators.


Musician Reverend Charles Hodges Sr. and Paul Rodgers at Royal Studios
Courtesy PaulRodgers.com

"I listened to people like Otis Redding and basically copied their style and developed my own style from that. So we wanted this to be real. The way to capture the magic is to be in the studio where it was recorded with the musicians that were around at the time," he said. "It comes from a feeling of respect and from the heart."

And if there is any doubt that his heart is all there just follow the money. All proceeds from album sales will be donated to the Stax Music Academy, which provides music education to underserved youth. Rodgers and 'The Royal Sessions' musicians will perform at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday June 19 for a rare set.

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The weekly column, On the "A" w/Souleo, covers the intersection of the arts, culture entertainment and philanthropy in Harlem and beyond and is written by Souleo, founder and president of event/media content production company, Souleo Enterprises, LLC.