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Brigitte Engler on the ImageBlog
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Theater: Much Ado About Rabe and Linklater
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING *** out of ****
PUBLIC THEATER/SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
The more often I see Much Ado, the more I really dislike most of the male characters in the play. The more often I see Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, the more I really like them. They want to do The Taming Of The Shrew and Chekhov together? Bring it on. And toss in His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib while you're at it. (Why hasn't Adam's Rib been turned into a play yet, by the way?).
Rabe and Linklater reteam after their Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice and their less interesting Broadway turn in Seminar. Naturally, they play Beatrice and Benedick, the wittily squabbling people who hate each other so much you know they're just an insult away from declaring their love. B&B are the forerunners of Tracy & Hepburn, Dave & Maddie of Moonlighting and every other romantic pairing of two adults who are smart, sexily self-confident and turned on as much by sparring as by spooning. Rabe and Linklater embody them with ease and are the prime reason to see this light, slight, handsomely produced romance.
Not every Shakespeare in the Park production can be an instant classic like Rabe's Merchant with Al Pacino or Rabe's incandescent As You Like It. Of course, with Rabe on board you can hope and expect greatness. But this is exemplary SitP: some famed actors in secondary roles, some new actors getting a shot at this storied tradition and some theater veterans like Rabe and Linklater working their way through the canon. The nice thing about not raving over the show is that tickets will be easier to get! And that's something you should always do for Shakespeare in the Park.
Has Much Ado About Nothing ever really been about the young lovers? Claudio (Jack Cutmore-Scott) has returned from the wars, a bosom buddy of Benedick and an admired protege of Don Pedro (Brian Stokes Mitchell). He falls instantly in love with Hero (Ismenia Mendes), the daughter of the governor of the town of Messina, Leonato (John Glover). Everyone is pleased with the match except the bastard -- in every sense -- Don John (Pedro Pascal). Through various machinations, he finally convinces the naive Claudio and even Don Pedro that the bride-to-be is a strumpet. Hero is brutally shamed on her wedding day and feigns death to hide her dishonor.
In stark contrast to this melodrama is the engaging sniping of Beatrice and Benedick. The two smartest people in the room, they dislike each other intensely, even though they like nothing better than to antagonize one another, crossing verbal swords at every turn. When Beatrice clumsily if sincerely turns down a proposal from the noble Don Pedro (she thinks at first he is joking), he is gracious but decides to get his "revenge" by pulling his own deception. Everyone conspires to convince each of them that the other is madly in love but wary of admitting it. So these two deceptions run parallel courses, one vicious and cruel, the other benign and ultimately salutary. All will be well -- this is one of the romance plays, after all -- though you may wonder if all deserve a happy ending.
The setting is Italy, which adds romance and an air of ease if little more to the proceedings. The scenic design by John Lee Beatty and costumes by Jane Greenwood are handsome and beguiling. I especially enjoyed the small tomato garden at the front of the stage: somehow stomping around angrily or declaring your love in a tomato garden is inherently deflating in a delightful way. Director Jack O'Brien has preserved essentially the entire play (no major cuts here) but the pacing is brisk throughout, with one scene flowing smoothly into the next. Certainly the show gains a darker edge in the second act, as it should. But this is by and large a frothy Much Ado and the tone is set from the start with an amusing prologue involving the voice-over welcoming people to the Delacorte and some nonsense involving a large gate.
As the young lovers, Cutmore-Scott and Mendes are pretty but leave little impression. I think the comic relief of Dogberry the constable has amused me all of once and the fine actor John Pankow does not break that dismal streak. Faring much better is Pedro Pascal, who made the most of his small arc on Game of Thrones and does the same here as the villainous Don John. He has stage presence to burn and is assured and forthright as a man who feels no pleasure except in thwarting that of others. Similarly Eric Sheffer Stevens makes a strong impression as Borachio, the willing conspirator of Don John and Zoe Winters (so good in An Octaroon) as his love Margaret. Glover and Stokes Mitchell are typically excellent in their supporting turns.
But Much Ado is one of Shakespeare's problem plays and O'Brien does not try to solve it. The men -- excepting Benedick -- truly behave abominably. Glover's father hears accusations against his innocent daughter and immediately bellows to the heavens that he wishes she'd never been born. Claudio and Don Pedro are deceived into thinking Hero is cheating on the lad, but surely any real man would stand up and confront her rather than skulking away. And if not, at least a gentleman would quietly call off the wedding rather than viciously condemn her in public. When the young lovers are reunited, you can't help wondering why she'd want him back. No nuance is present here to bring out these complexities.
Instead, the mood is quickly lightened and the show ends with a dance. Of course, Beatrice and Benedick have been dancing around each other the entire evening. Seeing Rabe and Linklater actually fly about is a treat. Her razor sharp mind makes Beatrice a knowing delight when sometimes Beatrice's scathing demeanor can be played too bluntly. Linklater's charming bewilderment over this enraging, delightful woman is a similar treat. When his desire has been announced and Benedick says simply, "Serve God, love me and mend," it's a declaration of devotion as moving as any you're likely to hear. Now when do we get the Chekhov?
If you're in New York City, here's the charming Jonathan Groff with tips on how to get your free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. As he says, a few hours waiting in line is really just a few hours having fun in Central Park, something you should do anyway. Still, it would be even more fun if Groff was there with you, wouldn't it?
THEATER OF 2014
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother's Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler's Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming websiteBookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.
PUBLIC THEATER/SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
The more often I see Much Ado, the more I really dislike most of the male characters in the play. The more often I see Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, the more I really like them. They want to do The Taming Of The Shrew and Chekhov together? Bring it on. And toss in His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib while you're at it. (Why hasn't Adam's Rib been turned into a play yet, by the way?).
Rabe and Linklater reteam after their Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice and their less interesting Broadway turn in Seminar. Naturally, they play Beatrice and Benedick, the wittily squabbling people who hate each other so much you know they're just an insult away from declaring their love. B&B are the forerunners of Tracy & Hepburn, Dave & Maddie of Moonlighting and every other romantic pairing of two adults who are smart, sexily self-confident and turned on as much by sparring as by spooning. Rabe and Linklater embody them with ease and are the prime reason to see this light, slight, handsomely produced romance.
Not every Shakespeare in the Park production can be an instant classic like Rabe's Merchant with Al Pacino or Rabe's incandescent As You Like It. Of course, with Rabe on board you can hope and expect greatness. But this is exemplary SitP: some famed actors in secondary roles, some new actors getting a shot at this storied tradition and some theater veterans like Rabe and Linklater working their way through the canon. The nice thing about not raving over the show is that tickets will be easier to get! And that's something you should always do for Shakespeare in the Park.
Has Much Ado About Nothing ever really been about the young lovers? Claudio (Jack Cutmore-Scott) has returned from the wars, a bosom buddy of Benedick and an admired protege of Don Pedro (Brian Stokes Mitchell). He falls instantly in love with Hero (Ismenia Mendes), the daughter of the governor of the town of Messina, Leonato (John Glover). Everyone is pleased with the match except the bastard -- in every sense -- Don John (Pedro Pascal). Through various machinations, he finally convinces the naive Claudio and even Don Pedro that the bride-to-be is a strumpet. Hero is brutally shamed on her wedding day and feigns death to hide her dishonor.
In stark contrast to this melodrama is the engaging sniping of Beatrice and Benedick. The two smartest people in the room, they dislike each other intensely, even though they like nothing better than to antagonize one another, crossing verbal swords at every turn. When Beatrice clumsily if sincerely turns down a proposal from the noble Don Pedro (she thinks at first he is joking), he is gracious but decides to get his "revenge" by pulling his own deception. Everyone conspires to convince each of them that the other is madly in love but wary of admitting it. So these two deceptions run parallel courses, one vicious and cruel, the other benign and ultimately salutary. All will be well -- this is one of the romance plays, after all -- though you may wonder if all deserve a happy ending.
The setting is Italy, which adds romance and an air of ease if little more to the proceedings. The scenic design by John Lee Beatty and costumes by Jane Greenwood are handsome and beguiling. I especially enjoyed the small tomato garden at the front of the stage: somehow stomping around angrily or declaring your love in a tomato garden is inherently deflating in a delightful way. Director Jack O'Brien has preserved essentially the entire play (no major cuts here) but the pacing is brisk throughout, with one scene flowing smoothly into the next. Certainly the show gains a darker edge in the second act, as it should. But this is by and large a frothy Much Ado and the tone is set from the start with an amusing prologue involving the voice-over welcoming people to the Delacorte and some nonsense involving a large gate.
As the young lovers, Cutmore-Scott and Mendes are pretty but leave little impression. I think the comic relief of Dogberry the constable has amused me all of once and the fine actor John Pankow does not break that dismal streak. Faring much better is Pedro Pascal, who made the most of his small arc on Game of Thrones and does the same here as the villainous Don John. He has stage presence to burn and is assured and forthright as a man who feels no pleasure except in thwarting that of others. Similarly Eric Sheffer Stevens makes a strong impression as Borachio, the willing conspirator of Don John and Zoe Winters (so good in An Octaroon) as his love Margaret. Glover and Stokes Mitchell are typically excellent in their supporting turns.
But Much Ado is one of Shakespeare's problem plays and O'Brien does not try to solve it. The men -- excepting Benedick -- truly behave abominably. Glover's father hears accusations against his innocent daughter and immediately bellows to the heavens that he wishes she'd never been born. Claudio and Don Pedro are deceived into thinking Hero is cheating on the lad, but surely any real man would stand up and confront her rather than skulking away. And if not, at least a gentleman would quietly call off the wedding rather than viciously condemn her in public. When the young lovers are reunited, you can't help wondering why she'd want him back. No nuance is present here to bring out these complexities.
Instead, the mood is quickly lightened and the show ends with a dance. Of course, Beatrice and Benedick have been dancing around each other the entire evening. Seeing Rabe and Linklater actually fly about is a treat. Her razor sharp mind makes Beatrice a knowing delight when sometimes Beatrice's scathing demeanor can be played too bluntly. Linklater's charming bewilderment over this enraging, delightful woman is a similar treat. When his desire has been announced and Benedick says simply, "Serve God, love me and mend," it's a declaration of devotion as moving as any you're likely to hear. Now when do we get the Chekhov?
If you're in New York City, here's the charming Jonathan Groff with tips on how to get your free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. As he says, a few hours waiting in line is really just a few hours having fun in Central Park, something you should do anyway. Still, it would be even more fun if Groff was there with you, wouldn't it?
THEATER OF 2014
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother's Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler's Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming websiteBookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.
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Once Hits San Francisco: The Surprising Backstory of the Tony-winning Musical
I often write about agents of change. You know, those enterprising souls whose work in the world somehow makes a positive difference. So inspired am I by the rare posse of filmmakers, authors and health advocates I come across, that I just have to learn more about them.
Enda Walsh is one of those unique humans. You may have heard of him by now. The Irish playwright nabbed a Tony Award in 2012 for crafting the stage version of Once. Known more for his dark, haunting works like Misterman and Penelope, the project became somewhat of a baffling surprise for the man, creatively speaking. Walsh came on board with musical supervisor Martin Lowe and the trick was to capture the right nuances of the tender story from the 2007 hit movie starring Glenn Hansard and Markéta Irglová.
They did a good job, obviously -- the musical garnered eight Tony Awards. It opens at San Francisco's Curran Theatre this week and runs through July 13. The plot of the stage version mirrors that of the film: A young woman takes an interest in the haunting love songs of a beleaguered Dublin street musician and their subsequent creative partnership alters their lives.
But how did a guy who typically delves into more disturbing psychological waters in his work manage to come up for some creative levity for Once. Burning questions. I learned about that and more. Read on.
Greg Archer: The musical was a big change for you wasn't it?
Enda Walsh: In terms of the content, it was a bit of a holiday from myself to work on something romantic and sweet.
Greg Archer: Yes. Well, your other works were a bit dark, right?
Enda Walsh: Yes. But we all had come from things like that. Director John Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett did this amazing film Black Watch, about the Iraq war, which was really hard to look at. It was all very very frightening for all of us to be in the room and keep our hands off of the stage version. Once was a very beautiful film. It needed shaping and a dramatic structure and a language and to be framed for the stage, but apart from that, it was such a beautiful love story. It was just bizarre, a very weird mix having the four of us do it, to be honest. But when we were all making it, we all felt as if we were in a very good place. We wanted to make it as beautiful and heartfelt as we could.
Greg Archer: What did you find most challenging?
Enda Walsh: I think it was the framing. In theater, audiences are used to handling theme, whereas in film, it's more about controlling the story, so it was unlocking and maintaining the theme. It began in a sort of communal way, these oddly shaped people, from a creative standpoint, that shouldn't be together coming together and making something beautiful. It was the most difficult thing. I mean, oftentimes, musicals feel very needy to me--"look at me; don't look there." So we had to exhibit a kind of restraint, and the audiences seem to be bringing in their own love story experience when they experience it.
Greg Archer: It continues to move people, perhaps more than anybody anticipated. Why do you think that is?
Enda Walsh: A couple of things. For one, the communal aspect of it. It's so unflashy. Audiences love the aesthetic of it. They're like, "Oh god. That's it?" And it's like, "Yeah, that's it" ... Just actors playing and singing music very well. It's very naked. They are responding to that. What theater does great, when it's done properly, is that it really allows the audience time and to meditate and to be in it. That sort of takes some confidence -- to sort of strip it back and push all the right buttons.
Greg Archer: Did you ever imagine yourself doing something like this?
Enda Walsh: No. I was so ridiculously involved in my own things and initially, I felt a bit embarrassed that I was asked to do it. I thought, "This isn't really theater!" That's how pretentious I was. It's all just storytelling. But it has taught me a lot about theater and how to make it. It was a real shot in the arm to do something that was heartbreaking and wears its heart on its sleeve. There was something really strong about that.
Greg Archer: What surprised you the most about the experience, aside from picking up a Tony perhaps?
Enda Walsh: It was very interesting to watch the mechanics of something work and go, "Jesus Christ!" And to see a part of this big business -- Broadway. I had never experienced that before. We were lucky with the people that we worked with. They were ready and supportive. I thought we were going to be killed by them; thought we were going to be turned into a commercial piece of theater, but the beautiful thing about it was that they steered it really well. Basically it was the same show. It still works and they really stood by that and allowed us to have space, so for a commercial director, I was surprised that they gave us the space; that they trusted us. And you know, none of us had made any money in our fucking lives--ever. We go on to make our living, but this was very surprising.
Greg Archer: I often ask this of writers -- why do you write?
Enda Walsh: I write for myself. I have been writing fiction since I was 13. I wrote because I wanted to be around strangers and characters--to know what it was like to walk in a different set of shoes. It is really investigating strangers. But also, I do dig, more and more, sharing something with thousands of people in the theater. And sitting there, it's terrifying, initially. But it's very strong. It's not like putting a painting on the wall. It's much more dangerous than that. And I really respond to that; that communal aspect of it.
I also remember as a boy going to mass and really loving it. And going, "Man, this is great." And then of course, giving up on God when I was 10 and going, "This is bullshit." But I do miss that communal aspect of it and theater has that-- everybody facing one direction and everybody being a part of the community.
Greg Archer: Many writers have told me that they have confidence issues. How about you? How do you cultivate and nurture something like that?
Enda Walsh: I am never am very good at disappearing and getting lost in a story and coming out the other end. Also, I know I am a work in progress. All writers are. I think it's a matter of being in the moment and staying with the work and saying, "Well, this is really the best I can do." And then going into another project and sort of learning again. I feel much more confident than I did when I was in my twenties. I have learned a lot more I suppose.
Greg Archer: Who were some of your influences early on, creative and otherwise?
Enda Walsh: All Irish people are writers. Everybody is a kind of storyteller. Although, my mom was an actress and I come from a large family and she had given up acting by the time I came around. I was the second youngest. But my dad was a salesman and he was my introduction to performance; watching him work the shop floor and change his body language and that sort of thing. That was his stage. That was my first introduction to "theater." In terms of writing, you know, I loved poetry when I was a kid. Irish poems--Yates and such. I feel really lucky that I come from a country where it's not an embarrassment to say that you're a writer. People go, "Wow, great. What?"
Greg Archer: What is some of the best advice you have been given about life?
Enda Walsh: An actor gave me great advice once. He said, "Never be afraid to punch someone. Just hit them." But that's not good advice. [Laughs] I think it's that all you really need to do is to get lost in the process; to trust the process and stay with the work and concentrate. When you look back your life, it's just short periods of time. I only worked with these people three weeks of my life. But it was three weeks of 15 years of experience and just concentrating and letting it go. Just trusting the process, listening to the characters, listening to the work and allowing it to find its way. And you carry that sort of philosophy to everything--that things will sort of find their way. You need to just allow it.
Once plays at San Francisco's Curran Theatre through July 13. Catch up on the show here. Read other entertainment stories and watch red carpet coverage from Greg Archer here.
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Drive-Thru
.![2014-06-17-10905RiversideDrive.jpg]()
'10905 Riverside Drive' 8"x 12" oil on panel
This is the first Drive-Thru window I painted, I like places that people don't go to be there as subject matter and saw this as an opportunity to explore that, and have the figures occupy more of the painting than I normally do. A painting of nowhere has a chance at being more of an experience than the actual place, as opposed to painting a destination location like the Alps, in which case the painting would function like a postcard reminding you of the greater experience.
![2014-06-17-1016VFWParkway11x16.52008.jpg]()
'1016 VFW Parkway 11" x 16" oil on panel
This painting has smaller figures than the last one- I also like the mix of the reflected light further conflating the space of the painting.
![2014-06-17-821CalledeAtocha14.75x92008.jpg]()
'821 Calle de Atocha 14.75" x 9" oil on panel
This is technically not a drive-thru, but a walk-up. This is one the only painting in this series that shows a European location, in Madrid. Although the subject matter, a Burger King, is very North American.
![2014-06-17-1742LaCienega8x102009.jpg]()
'1742 La Cienega' 8" x 10" oil on panel
This subject matter never makes me feel hemmed in, I even got to paint Shamu.
![2014-06-17-1919PicoBlvd11x172007.jpg]()
'1919 Pico Boulevard' 11" x 17" oil on panel
This is a Burger King across the street from where I teach. This painting was on the show announcement for this series of paintings and I brought it to the Burger King and nervously showed it to the woman in the painting who was working there. I explained that I'm an artist, that I paint these kind of places, and that she was in the painting. She was delighted and showed it around to the other people working and gave me a free Whopper.
![2014-06-17-2201EubankBoulevard8x10oilonpanel2013.jpg]()
"2201 Eubank Boulevard" 8" x 10" oil on panel
My friend, and excellent painter, Sean Cheetham curated a show titled 'Selfish' and asked all of the artists to submit a self-portrait. I'm working the KFC drive-thru in this painting. Sean's father asked me at the opening if I really worked there, I reassured him that I'm a tenured professor in art and have not yet worked at KFC.
'10905 Riverside Drive' 8"x 12" oil on panel
This is the first Drive-Thru window I painted, I like places that people don't go to be there as subject matter and saw this as an opportunity to explore that, and have the figures occupy more of the painting than I normally do. A painting of nowhere has a chance at being more of an experience than the actual place, as opposed to painting a destination location like the Alps, in which case the painting would function like a postcard reminding you of the greater experience.
'1016 VFW Parkway 11" x 16" oil on panel
This painting has smaller figures than the last one- I also like the mix of the reflected light further conflating the space of the painting.
'821 Calle de Atocha 14.75" x 9" oil on panel
This is technically not a drive-thru, but a walk-up. This is one the only painting in this series that shows a European location, in Madrid. Although the subject matter, a Burger King, is very North American.
'1742 La Cienega' 8" x 10" oil on panel
This subject matter never makes me feel hemmed in, I even got to paint Shamu.
'1919 Pico Boulevard' 11" x 17" oil on panel
This is a Burger King across the street from where I teach. This painting was on the show announcement for this series of paintings and I brought it to the Burger King and nervously showed it to the woman in the painting who was working there. I explained that I'm an artist, that I paint these kind of places, and that she was in the painting. She was delighted and showed it around to the other people working and gave me a free Whopper.
"2201 Eubank Boulevard" 8" x 10" oil on panel
My friend, and excellent painter, Sean Cheetham curated a show titled 'Selfish' and asked all of the artists to submit a self-portrait. I'm working the KFC drive-thru in this painting. Sean's father asked me at the opening if I really worked there, I reassured him that I'm a tenured professor in art and have not yet worked at KFC.
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The Sharing Project
Joel Tauber, Attempting To Restore Happyville (photo, 2013) from the art installation and movie, The Sharing Project.
I've been struggling for the last couple of years to understand the concept of sharing and how to teach it to our young son Zeke. We have a lot of questions. Why should we share? When should we share? How much should we share? Are we acting consistently? If sharing is a value that we should all embrace, then why is there so much poverty in our very rich country?
As we've been wrestling with these questions, I've been talking to experts in philosophy, evolutionary biology, psychology, history, anthropology, economics, politics, and education.
A conversation with the anthropologist David Graeber is one of the many that continues to resonate. He described how the Nuer in South Sudan share food and other necessities freely with members of their camp, but they never share their cattle with each other. Indeed, they will literally defend their cattle with their lives.
I was thinking about the Nuer and my conversation with David when Zeke invited his friend, Zev, over for a play-date. At the time, Zeke's prized possession was his guitar. Zev wanted to play with it, and Zeke, quite reasonably, refused. I asked Zeke to share his guitar, even though I had made it clear to both Zeke and Zev that I was not willing to share the camera that I was using to film them. Indeed, I would not even let them touch the camera, fearing that they might damage it. Zeke, probably sensing my inconsistency, clung to his guitar as if his life depended on it. Zev grabbed it too, and they spun around the room. Eventually, Zeke relented. Zeke and Zev took turns playing the guitar, and they both seemed happy. It was beautiful, but I was left feeling like a hypocrite. Why should Zeke share his most special possession when I was not willing to do the same thing?
I want to be a good man, an ethical and generous person, but I also want to make sure that our family is comfortable. I want my wife Alison and our sons Zeke and Ozzie to have easy and happy lives. How do I balance those two quite different desires?
This is not an easy question, especially if Darwin's theory of multi-level selection is correct, as Alex Rosenberg and others now believe. Group selection encourages us to share and behave altruistically, so that we will be part of stronger groups; while individual selection encourages us to behave selfishly, so that we can advance within those groups. We are fundamentally conflicted on a genetic level. We have impulses to both share and to not share.
I feel this conflict in myself, and I sense it in Zeke as well. Zeke loves his tools. They're part of his identity, as a "worker man." When Ozzie started crawling and messing with his stuff, Zeke responded by hiding his tools in secret compartments to safeguard them. A big part of him clearly does not want to share his special tools. They are too intertwined with his identity. But, Zeke also loves building things with Ozzie, and he is often willing to share even his most special tools with him so they can complete their projects.
Christian Miller talked to me about how philosophy may not be able to tell us precisely how much we should share. There are too many ethical theories, and they all may be flawed in some way. At the same time, all of the models - or at least the dominant ones adopted by Western Civilization - suggest that we aren't sharing or giving enough.
The notion that we aren't sharing enough may be the root of the anger driving all of the protests in North Carolina right now. I went to one of the protests with my camera recently, and I talked to Zeke about it afterwards. It proved to be a very confusing conversation, especially because of all of our previous conversations about sharing. How am I supposed to teach Zeke to share when I also have to explain to him that we slashed unemployment and healthcare benefits precisely at a time when there are so many people who are suffering?
There were moments in our history when we had a far more expansive view of what should be shared by everyone as part of the public domain.
I was thinking about how far we've moved from that perspective, when I stumbled upon the forgotten Socialist Jewish commune of Happyville. As a Jewish guy who recently moved from the Big City to the Carolinas, I immediately felt a lot of kinship with the 50 Russian Jews who left New York to start a Socialist commune in South Carolina between 1905 and 1908. And, it seemed quite clear to me that the Happyville pioneers could teach Zeke and I a lot about sharing. While it's too late to speak to the Happyville settlers, perhaps some of what they discovered about sharing is buried in the traces of their utopian community.
Zeke and I have been exploring the 2200 acre site of Happyville, determined to uncover those mysteries. I'm not sure how much we should be sharing or if we're capable of living like the Happyville settlers, but I'm saddened that we're so distant from the forgotten utopian past that it represents. It may be absurd to try to restore Happyville, or even the dream of Happyville, but Zeke and I are trying to do so anyway. Zeke selected his most special tools, and he offered to share them with me. Now, we're busy in Happyville, working away: probing and digging, prying and tweaking.
Joel Tauber is an artist and filmmaker who is developing the video art program at Wake Forest University. His current undertaking - The Sharing Project - will be presented as both a sculptural video installation and a feature film. http://thesharingproject.net
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For the Love of Bach ... Play On!
(c) David Newton-Dunn (2014)
This Father's Day, June 15th, at Richardson Auditorium on Princeton University's campus, two giants of J.S. Bach scholarship and dedicated ambassadors for his Cantata repertoire, in particular, were brought together by a shared passion for the genius of Bach and a vision that, over the course of several decades, has endeavored to deliver his timeless music to the hearts and souls of many around the world.
William H. Scheide and Sir John Eliot Gardiner's respective scholarly curiosities and untamable musical energies inspired each to found vocal and instrumental ensembles (decades apart) that would go on to perform at the time little-known repertoire and remain in the music-historical canon as the Bach Aria Group and Monteverdi Choir. (Maestro Gardiner would continue this frontier-opening streak by founding two more iconic ensembles following Monteverdi Choir's success: the English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.)
A little more about each. William ("Bill") Scheide--Princeton-based 100-year-young Bach scholar, philanthropist, bibliophile, and humanitarian--was born in Philadelphia. Having grown up in a household passionate about music, culture, rare books, and the well-being of humanity, Scheide went on to major in history at Princeton University (Class of 1936) as the school's music department had not yet come to formation at the time. Continuing his studies on to the graduate level at Columbia University, Scheide earned an M.A. in music in 1940 and embarked on a decades-long rediscovery of Bach through epochal concert tours with the Bach Aria Group--pairing soloists like Marian Anderson, Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker, and many others in unlikely polyphonic dialogues upon intimate college town stages and in taste-setting cultural capitals of the world, and through his groundbreaking contributions to scholarly journals--becoming the first American to publish in the Bach Jahrbuch, while initiating efforts to promote and reward Bach scholarship at academic institutions worldwide.
In a strikingly parallel development across the Atlantic, John Eliot Gardiner's initial music education was inspired by family music-making in his native Dorset, UK. He, too, having majored in history at King's College, Cambridge, ventured into the music performance arena with a larger-than-life mission to reawaken contemporary audiences' joy in internalizing early music repertoire. Having found himself under the tutelage of Thurston Dart and Nadia Boulanger, Gardiner was emboldened to take a leap of faith into the sound-world of early polyphony with a conducting debut of Monteverdi's "Vespers"--an event that would become a stepping stone on the way to one of the most prolific careers witnessed. In a pilgrimage similar in spirit to Scheide's Bach Aria Group tours, Gardiner immersed the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in an unprecedented 52-week tour of Europe and the US, ushering in the Leipzig Kantor's sacred cantatas into the 21st Century with renewed energy and spirit.
The link that enabled the two men to come together--marking Gardiner's Princeton debut--is the Bach portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (1748) with which Gardiner grew up in the UK and which is now housed in Princeton, under Scheide's watchful eye.
Scheide institutionalized Bach scholarship in the US by enabling the work of people like Arthur Mendel and Christoph Wolff, facilitating in the founding of the American Bach Society and Princeton University's Music Department, while assuming stewardship of and adding to a world-renowned collection of rare books & manuscripts from the Guttenberg Bible to the Bill of Rights and autograph scores from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven to Faure and Wagner, housed at the Scheide Library at Princeton.
Gardiner, who continues to educate and inspire through a multifaceted discography of over 250 recordings and a dizzying number of concerts throughout the world, recently published "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven" (KNOFP, 2013) and just assumed leadership of the famed Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, where Scheide he is a founding curator.
Through the decades, their work--born out of a healthy marriage of intellectual curiosity, risk-taking, and spiritual sensitivity--has stood the test of time and given rise to many an aspiring performer and scholar. Let us hope that such exemplary cross-generational, cross-continental collaborations cease not in our times and continue to shape and propel all children of culture through pioneering discoveries on to greater heights.
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The Chateau That Sugar Built: Seven Deadly Sins
Every year for the last seventeen, France's grand Chateau Chaumont celebrates several of the world's most creative gardeners and landscape designers with a monumental garden festival that aims to blend contemporary art with flowers, shrubs, herbs and sculpture--all engaged on a single theme. This year it's The Seven Deadly Sins. As the world's rich grow richer by the second and as the middle class shrivels, the garden artists have appropriately chosen to focus on greed--though they've not forgotten gluttony, lust and pride.
To start at the beginning, in the first of twenty gardens, the ground is covered by chopped up pieces of black plastic and rubber ties from which sprout...dead trees. At the center is a tempting white apple (or seat?)--all of which in the imagination of Dutch designers Arie Van Der Hout and Richard Van Den Berg address the engagement of morality and mortality in an increasingly polluted earth.
Elegance, pride and narcissism take center stage in Valentin Fayet, Pauline Legroux and Jean Pouillart's garden of Haute Culture, where visitors are encouraged to look through black masks as their companions pose on a mound behind metallic bustiers surrounded by lilies and vines.
Gluttony and greed, fragrance and color capture nearly everyone in the work of three French architects, Johan Laure, Hadrien Balalud and Guillaume Giraud in this mountain of floral desire where insatiable guests are encouraged to sit at tall chairs surrounding the feast and salivate over the delights they surround.
Gluttony of the relentless consumer variety follows a bit later as we wander through Alexandra Lehic, Victor LePage and Kevin Lemonnier's stacked alleys of canned consumer goods/degraded plants piling up in the world's ultra hyper-markets while just a few yards beyond in the parking lot hungry widows and children extend their hands in hunger.
Four American landscapers, David Seiter, Elodie Egonneau, Cecil Howell, Koung Jin Cho, combined with sculptural artist Lois Farningham, reflect on contrition in another garden that leads lost (and enchanted) souls down the path to purgatory where they are invited to confess all the mortal sins they/we have committed in our minds in the gardens we've already visited.
A little further comes Charlotte Trillaud and Lucien Puech who remind us that the plants of our addictions--and our addictive obsessions--are ever ready to imprison us in a winding labyrinth of frustration. But just as we are imprisoned within a chain-link fence, so two are the psychotropic plants (smoked, masticated or applied to the flesh) that with modest usage might help us to break through the barriers of our suffering.
These gardens of greed, rage, gluttony and the rest wander on in twenty distinct iterations, all possessed of bushes, trees and flowers that ripen and wilt with the season, curated by orchestra director (and amateur horticulturist) William Christie.
Aside from the surreal garden walk at Chateau Chaumont this year, there are, as always, the dozens of acres of outdoor sculpture--not to mention the exposition of world famous painters and photographers inside the Castle that Sugar Built. You'll find most of the contemporary art in the Chateau's upper stories, but the excessive grandeur of the main floor is also a must, an illustration of the lives of the last aristocrats to sleep there, luxuriating in an elegance extracted from the quasi-slave status under which their workers labored in Haiti's notorious sugar plantations. It's hard to think of a more perfect three-way marriage of art, elegance and exploitation than the Chateau Chaumont.
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The Cultural Landscape Architects: Thomas J. Lax
Currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem is an art exhibition that displays the rich variety of African-American visions of the South. Organized by the museum's Assistant Curator Thomas J. Lax, "When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South" sets aside conventional art world categories of insider and outsider art, and instead explores across different media and disciplines how 35 black artists in the last 50 years have made art inspired by and deeply imbued with southern cultural legacies. With religion and music as hallmarks of southern culture, it is satisfyingly fitting that the title of the exhibition comes from the chorus of a beloved African-American spiritual about the rapture and the beginning of a new dawn. This exhibition is Lax' last one at the Studio Museum, as in August he will be working at the Museum of Modern Art as an Associate Curator in the department of Media and Performance Art.
The spirit of magical power regarding change, creation, rebirth and hope (or the divine, if you will) inhabits much of the art in this exhibition, whether made by David Hammons, Beverly Buchanan, Ralph Lemon, Lonnie Holley, Trenton Doyle Hancock or Thornton Dial. It is a revelation to see how artists in far-ranging circumstances -- from upper echelons of the art world to junkyards, prisons, or home confinement -- attest to the beauty, ugliness and inspiration in their lives. And organizing such an exhibition requires a visionary mind capable of thinking outside the art world "box." In this show, Lax displays folk and outsider art alongside established fine art because doing so provides a more complete picture of visual expressions regarding an already loaded subject matter and highlights interesting, less-known qualities about these works.
Lax received an AB from Brown University and an MA in Modern Art from Columbia University. He has written artist monographs for venues throughout the U.S. and internationally, and is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts. A generalist in post-war American and international art, Lax has nevertheless gained significant experience presenting art in performance, video and other forms of new media. He has worked with some of the most exciting artists working today, and the list of exhibitions he has organized includes: "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art" (2013/14: New York curator; exhibition originally organized by Valerie Cassel-Oliver at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), Fore (2012), "Ralph Lemon: 1856 Cessna Road" (2012), "Mark Bradford: Alphabet" (2010) and "Kalup Linzy: If It Don't Fit" (2008).
As Lax began preparing for his transition to MoMA, he thoughtfully discussed with me this exhibition and his journey as an exhibition-maker.
Thomas J. Lax (Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya)
Julie Chae: Thomas, congratulations on your new job at the Museum of Modern Art and for all the excellent exhibitions you have curated at the Studio Museum, including "When Stars Begin to Fall." Let's start from the beginning -- how did you get involved in art?
Thomas J. Lax: I grew up at the heyday of the culture wars in New York immersed in a wide range of cultural experiences with my parents, from experimental theater and cabaret to history museums and contemporary art exhibitions. I have many memories of going to a variety of cultural institutions as a child -- El Museo del Barrio, the Jewish Museum, MoMA, American Folk Art Museum, and Schomburg Center -- which inevitably shaped my understanding of the functions and possibilities of libraries and museums within the broader culture world.
JC: Was there a particular point in your life when you decided you wanted to organize art exhibitions?
TJL: I had what Oprah would call my Aha! Moment in Lorna Simpson's moving retrospective at the Whitney. I was a recent college grad working with local LGBTQ youth of color organization FIERCE, looking for a job that might be relevant to what I had studied in Africana Studies and Art-Semiotics (good luck!). I had been shaped by incredible cultural critics including Anthony Bogues, Réda Bensmaïa and Saidiya Hartman, and was struggling to find a form of public engagement that responded to what felt to me to be totally urgent in the cultural politics of that moment.
The experience of seeing Lorna's work was profound, sensuous and core-shaking. Knowing that someone had orchestrated it gave me an intense sense of desire to craft that kind of experience with and for other people.
JC: You worked on an earlier show that included folk art from the Studio Museum's permanent collection and gained a real appreciation for art by so-called "untrained" artists. What does a show about the South, both real and imagined, gain by the inclusion of such outlier art? Or conversely, what would a show about the South lose by excluding art by these artists?
TJL: If you look at the iconic texts of twentieth-century American culture -- Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series (1940-41), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) to name a classic few -- the South has been positioned as at once a place of origin, exile and return within the African-American imaginary. Similarly, black intellectuals who have struggled to identify whether there was or wasn't such a thing as a "black aesthetic" have looked to the South and to practices by self-taught artists alike. While much of this debate has been structured by a polemic between narratives of authentic or essential collective black identity on the one hand and individual narratives that eschew these ideas in the name of irony or humor on the other, I was interested in seeing if I could bring these two seemingly distinct sides together.
The show is an experiment to create a context in which the presumed terms of black orthodoxy -- Southern identity, vernacular art and religion -- could be named with their full sense of experimentation, funkiness and gnarliness. At the end of the day, I don't know if there is such a thing as "black art," but perhaps we can still use it as a term. It can serve as a kind of placeholder that can be filled with various content, together examining ways of working that emerge from subjective experiences of black people and in black places, which America certainly is.
(R) Lonnie Holley , Blown Out Black Mama's Belly, 1994, Rubber inner tube, cloth and wire coat hanger, 84 × 22 × 4 in., High Museum of Art, Atlanta, T. Marshall Hahn Collection 1996.40 (Photo: Adam Reich)
JC: And what have you discovered?
TJL: What's been amazing to me about the show is the way in which contemporary artists of African descent like Kara Walker, Theaster Gates or Kerry James Marshall who we might think of as firmly within the contemporary art world, have channeled the figure of the self-taught as what I understand to be a kind of avatar for themselves. Whether through their interest in nineteenth-century history painting or in their desire to materially change the conditions of those in their communities, their identification with self-taught artists speaks to how the institutional naming of "outsider" artists as such is closely bound up in issues of representation for artists of color more generally.
TJL: One could also say that both insider black artists and self-taught artists are asked to "be real" -- display real suffering, make illustrations of that suffering, and offer the possibility of real salvation. Often, they are both denied the qualities of ambivalence, irreverence and desire for art-making that is distinct for illustration granted to other artists. The opportunity to show this group of artists together demonstrates the overlaps and differences of their artistic contexts, and hopefully points to some things that are quite visible or obvious within the art world but go unnamed.
(R) Carrie Mae Weems, Boneyard (from the "Sea Islands" series), 1992, Three gelatin silver prints, one text panel, 20 × 20 in. each, Edition of 2 (Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)
JC: It's interesting how it was your work and conversations with groundbreaking artists in performance and new media, like Ralph Lemon and Jacolby Satterwhite, that led to your conceiving a show about the Old South and folk art.
TJL: The impetus for this show came out of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with choreographer/conceptual artist/writer Ralph Lemon for his exhibition "1856 Cessna Road" at the Studio Museum in 2012. That exhibition looked at his work with Walter Carter, an octogenarian sharecropper turned gardener turned performer who lived in Little Yazoo, Mississippi. Ralph described to me the way he saw Carter's hundred-plus year history from Jim Crow to the 2000s articulated through his bodily comportment.
(R) Ralph Lemon Untitled, 2013-14, Archival pigment print, 24 × 30 in. (Courtesy the artist)
JC: I think it's this ability to create alternative, even impossible visions of our world that I admire about artists. It is incredible given the history of the Black Belt region in Alabama/Mississippi -- the cotton plantations and slavery, that Lemon and Carter created scenarios with characters like Killer Space Dog as well as B'rer Rabbit-inspired tricksters. And the other artists?
TJL: At that time, I was chatting with other artists working in performance who themselves had intimate working relationships with creative visionaries not necessarily in the contemporary art world: Geo Wyeth, Jacolby Satterwhite, Xaviera Simmons, Malik Gaines and Alex Segade of Courtesy the Artists. They were likewise recuperating cultural associations based in the South, and doing so toward fundamentally experimental, process-based ends.
(R) Patricia Satterwhite Untitled (How lovely is me being as I am), c. 2008, Graphite on paper,
11 x 8 ½ in. (Courtesy Jacolby and Patricia Satterwhite)
JC: Within your field of American and international post-war art, you've developed significant expertise in performance and multi-media art. In the different areas of art you research and present to the public, are there perhaps some underlying questions you find yourself exploring?
TJL: American artists of color, artists working throughout the global South, feminist and queer artists, as well as artists who work in performance are making some of the most exciting work right now. If I were to sum up my perspective, I would say that what motivates my work is an investigation of the ways social contexts -- be they racial, geographic or interpersonal -- are subtly embedded in how we read and interpret formal decisions artists make. Conceiving of cultural information and materials this way allows for both a sense of reverence to the place and time in which is work is made, as well as a sense of play on my part as I create new contexts as a curator.
I think I'm also motivated by a deep dissatisfaction with the concept of the "political" in contemporary art. It's a word that is often thrown around, and to be honest, it's a word that I don't use often because at this point it has little meaning. Yet, its overuse points to its importance, so if I were to try and define it, I would say that political work embraces uncertainty, contradiction and a lack of established form. In this way, it is truly contestable.
November 14, 2013 to March 9, 2014, The Studio Museum in Harlem (Photo: Adam Reich)
JC: What is it about performance that you find vital and challenging?
TJL: What I think attracts me to performance not only as a medium, but more fundamentally as a way of working, is that it is inherently intermedia; in other words, it needs other media like video, photography or sculptural props for its interpretation by an audience. This makes it dependent not only on a physical and spatial context but also on its spectators to give it cultural value. This is a microcosm of the more general phenomenon about what a museum does, which is fascinating to me. In this way, crafting a performance has some analogies to the ephemerality of exhibition-making, which informs my perspective on conceiving shows even if they are not exclusively performance-based.
JC: You've recently accepted a position as Associate Curator at MoMA in the Department of Media and Performance Art. And you've told me how fortunate you are to have been trained in the curator-as-collaborator model of exhibition-making from mentors Naomi Beckwith, Kellie Jones and Thelma Golden and to have learned from Lowery Stokes Sims, former Studio Museum director and current curator at the Museum of Art and Design, important values and insights about art world categories and relationships. I think it's wonderful you'll be bringing these values, approaches and insights with you to MoMA. What are some of the things you plan to work on there?
TJL: For the past seven years, I've loved being at the Studio Museum, where I've had the opportunity to work closely and committedly with artists whose work I believe in deeply. I am excited to bring my relationships and these experiences to MoMA, and to situate the artists, thinkers and scholars in a broad and generative way. In particular, I'm eager to consider what the increased scale of this museum means not simply in terms of visibility but in terms of audience, participation and spectatorship, which are issues artists are thinking through in their own work. I'm also excited to work closely with my new colleagues to think strategically about the specific place MoMA occupies in the incredible and robust world of performers, performing arts institutions and performance scholars here in New York. Finally, the department is the newest curatorial department at MoMA, and the status of performance in the context of museums is one that institutions around the world are actively reimagining. I'm thrilled to be able to take risks and build scholarly contexts in an institution that can influence the understanding and sense of possibility performance can offer for audiences, curators and artists throughout the city and globally in ways that are both specific and meaningful.
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Note: This is the latest in my series "The Cultural Landscape Architects," profiles of art world professionals who play a role in connecting art with the public. They decide which artworks by which artists to present, place the art in the contexts of both art history and current times, and help shape the cultural landscape.
"When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South" is on view until June 29, 2014 at The Studio Museum in Harlem: http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/when-the-stars-begin-fall-imagination-and-the-american-south
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Marcia
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Cat's Meow About Great Art
Every time I go to see a movie in which the major character happens to be a painter, I brace myself for the embarrassing moment when the actor or actress, no matter how good he or she is, stands in front of a canvas and unconvincingly --very unconvincingly --pushes paint around. Last week, when I went to see one of my favorite actresses, Juliette Binoche, in her new movie, "Words and Pictures," I prepared myself for the inevitable disappointment of seeing her character --an art teacher at a prep school --faking the process of painting. But NO! She performed so well, so convincingly...
The camera captures her every gesture and every brushstroke, and I have to admit, the resulting paintings looked damn good. In spite of all my skepticism, I was totally convinced that Juliette Binoche had somehow transformed herself into a real painter. And, you know what? I just found out that Binoche, in her real life, has been in love with painting since she was a child. She took art classes and continues to paint and exhibit her works throughout her busy and very successful career as a film actress. Good for her.
And now, let me share with you something deliciously silly. One of the listeners of my Art Talk sent me an email with very funny images, which sent me into a fit of giggles. I would describe these images as the 'cat's meow about great art.' I showed them to a few friends and their response was, "Edward, you MUST share this with your listeners." So, that is exactly what I'm doing right now. But be sure not only to hear me, but also to see these images on the KCRW website.
Svetlana inherited Zarathustra from her mother, who passed away a few years ago, and somehow, she figured out how to deal with her sense of loss by creating a series of witty images where she pays homage to great art, to her mother, and yes, to the large, fat Zarathustra. Here is The Three Graces by the great Rubens. But in this case, two of them are substituted by chunky, furry creatures.
And trust me, your love and respect for Grant Wood's American Gothic will not be diminished by seeing Zarathustra sharing the stage with the stern-looking, pitchfork-wielding farmer.
I am not sure if the great Italian Maestro Sandro Botticelli (Allegory of Spring) or Spanish virtuoso Diego Velasquez (Venus at her Mirror) would approve seeing their famous paintings invaded by cats, but I want to think that they both would have had a good sense of humor about it. Hey, good laughter is good for our health. We all know that. There is so much going on right now --here and around the world --that makes us want to pull out our hair. So, why not share a giggle or two --and not at the expense of great art, but rather as a playful and lighthearted tribute to iconic images that we've been kneeling in front of for ages.
P.S. If you want to learn about Edward's Fine Art of Art Collecting Classes, please visit his website here. You can also read The New York Times article about his classes here.
Edward Goldman is an art critic and the host of Art Talk, a program on art and culture for NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM. To listen to the complete show and hear Edward's charming Russian accent, click here.
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Theater: Cherry On Top, But Little Underneath in New Play
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND UNAFRAID ** out of ****
MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB
This new play is set at a bed and breakfast on an island off the coast of Seattle in 1972. A mother and her teenage daughter run an underground shelter for battered women, refugees from a legal system that give them few rights and even fewer ways to escape abusive husbands. It's a fascinating milieu with some potent drama on tap and yet throughout the first act I occasionally found myself thinking: sitcom! Ok, not sitcom but a TV comedy of a bold and unconventional sort.
In part, this is because the premise and setting of When We Were Young And Unafraid is rich indeed. It may also be because playwright Sarah Treem has a strong track record on television, with House of Cards on Netflix and HBO's In Treatment among her credits as writer and producer. On the down side, it's because the characters in this drama -- I almost said "show" -- feel like such types. Cherry Jones remains distinct and to a degree a bit opaque as the mother Agnes. But everyone else falls in line: Morgan Saylor is the sassy but loving daughter, Zoe Kazan is the battered woman who shares tips on dating with the teen, Patch Darragh is the nebbishy guest Paul at this B&B who is overwhelmed by the hippies invading his San Francisco, and Cherise Boothe is Hannah the wise-cracking revolutionary on the lookout for a nearby "womyn only" enclave and handy with a wrench. Think Schneider from One Day At A Time but with a raised political consciousness and a lot sexier.
This is too flippant a description, but it highlights the problems that bedevils When We Were Young And Unafraid, a show that starts strongly, leans to heavily on broad situations and then becomes thoroughly confused as it undermines what little character and plot it has developed.
The fine cast shines best at the beginning. Agnes and her daughter Penny engage in the usual parent-child teasing with an underlaying of love, though savvy theatergoers will surely suspect Penny's repeated requests for her birth certificate (she needs it for a driver's license) is a loaded gun that will go off later. They deal with guests and intruders and go about their lives when suddenly a buzzer announces a new, secret arrival and Agnes rolls back a carpet to reveal a hidden entrance from the basement.
Her home, it turns out, is a way-station for battered women who get little support from the law and must flee for their lives. Through the eyes of the wary and beat-up Mary Anne (Kazan) we see how the system works, how Agnes is firm but sensitive to the skittish survivors who wash up on her doorstep. In the evening's most powerful and memorable scene, Agnes convinces Mary Anne to let this one-time nurse sew up a wound on the woman's face with stitches. They don't have anything to numb the pain, of course. As the lights dim, Agnes is sewing away while daughter Penny holds Mary Anne's face still and distracts the patient with an enigmatic tale of a local legend. It's a haunting moment that clearly echoes many moments that have come before, simply and effectively making clear the quiet and vital work Agnes has been doing for quite a while now. The scene is promising and vivid and the show never matches it again.
That natural and effective work is soon drowned out by far more obvious plot devices. Penny is a super-smart girl but what she really wants is to go to the prom with the captain of the football team. Mary Anne, who is still recovering from her bruises and obviously still in love with the man who beat her, gives the hapless girl tips: dress up, play dumb, ask lots of questions and touch his arm. Voila! Penny has a prom date. Meanwhile, Mary Anne is courted by the guitar-toting Paul, who has escaped from San Francisco in the hopes of writing some new songs. Barging in every once in a while spouting revolutionary rhetoric is Hannah (Boothe). She does not like Paul, upbraids Mary Anne, takes a shine to Agnes and keeps sneaking in to fix things so she can justify occupying a guest room on the sly.
Though the cast is strong throughout and ably directed by Pam McKinnon, with a strong assist from an excellent set design by Scott Pask that centers us in this world with ease, When We Were Young And Unafraid does play at this superficial, laugh-heavy level.
We can also see all too easily where it's headed, even if we don't quite buy it. Paul is a nebbishy push-over, until an awkward kiss turns him into a hateful bastard, spouting out vicious insults to Mary Anne. Since she is so used to being abused, Mary Anne finally reacts to this and offers up sex to him even though Paul makes her skin crawl. (She's truly only turned on by her husband.) Now, mousy men can of course become monsters but Treem certainly didn't convince us that this particular mouse was a monster at heart.
Similarly, we don't question for a second that the dim-witted high school quarterback may not be the ideal date for Penny. And no parent would approve of a boy who encourages their daughter to skip school and run off to a Led Zeppelin concert. But this doesn't equate him with an abusive husband as the show and Agnes so clearly intend. Maybe the jock asked Penny out because she finally spoke to him? Just maybe?
And in the night's most confusing gambit, the emotional climax is clearly intended to be a scene where Agnes insists that Mary Anne spell out to her daughter Penny exactly how this woman had the crap beaten out of her. (It's meant as a pointed lesson in part to make clear why Penny should not be with the jock.) This makes no sense. As the daughter of Agnes and perhaps unwilling partner in a safe house for battered women (unwilling because what teen wants to give up her room and sleep in her mom's bed?), who would ever imagine for a second that Penny hasn't heard countless similar stories in the past? In the beginning of the show, she's consoling a woman with practiced ease as her mother stitches up brutal wounds. How could it be dramatically consistent to later insist this all-too-clued-in teen hear the "truth" about battered women? She surely knows it better than most.
Other details make no sense either, from Agnes's reaction to her daughter's disappearance (why wouldn't she call her friend the sheriff?) to major bombshells that are delivered and then practically ignored. When Mary Anne says Penny ran away because of Agnes it just doesn't ring true: they fought like any parent and child but their relationship seemed essentially loving and strong.
The only thing that does make sense is the growing bond between Agnes and Hannah. That's more to the credit of the innate likability of these two actors than any believable drama on the part of Treem. We learn Agnes was barred from nursing because she performed abortions and we also learn the great love of her life was apparently a woman (though it's unclear if that love was returned as more than friendship). But these are flashcard bits of info, not nuanced development of character. Tellingly, we learn virtually nothing about Hannah. The real heart of Agnes remains a bit unknowable and only the charm and solidity of Jones make her compelling. Still, that's enough to believe that Hannah (played well by the always appealing Boothe of Milk Like Sugar and Ruined) would find her compelling too.
Until Treem's play inspires the most unlikely TV comedy since MASH, read this recent essay in Huffington Post -- "It Could Have Been Worse" by Carol Hartsell. It helped me gain some small insight into a battered person's psychology and is unquestionably worth your time. Despite a fine cast, I cannot say the same for the play.
THEATER OF 2014
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother's Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler's Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
When We Were Young And Unafraid
_____________
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming website BookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.
MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB
This new play is set at a bed and breakfast on an island off the coast of Seattle in 1972. A mother and her teenage daughter run an underground shelter for battered women, refugees from a legal system that give them few rights and even fewer ways to escape abusive husbands. It's a fascinating milieu with some potent drama on tap and yet throughout the first act I occasionally found myself thinking: sitcom! Ok, not sitcom but a TV comedy of a bold and unconventional sort.
In part, this is because the premise and setting of When We Were Young And Unafraid is rich indeed. It may also be because playwright Sarah Treem has a strong track record on television, with House of Cards on Netflix and HBO's In Treatment among her credits as writer and producer. On the down side, it's because the characters in this drama -- I almost said "show" -- feel like such types. Cherry Jones remains distinct and to a degree a bit opaque as the mother Agnes. But everyone else falls in line: Morgan Saylor is the sassy but loving daughter, Zoe Kazan is the battered woman who shares tips on dating with the teen, Patch Darragh is the nebbishy guest Paul at this B&B who is overwhelmed by the hippies invading his San Francisco, and Cherise Boothe is Hannah the wise-cracking revolutionary on the lookout for a nearby "womyn only" enclave and handy with a wrench. Think Schneider from One Day At A Time but with a raised political consciousness and a lot sexier.
This is too flippant a description, but it highlights the problems that bedevils When We Were Young And Unafraid, a show that starts strongly, leans to heavily on broad situations and then becomes thoroughly confused as it undermines what little character and plot it has developed.
The fine cast shines best at the beginning. Agnes and her daughter Penny engage in the usual parent-child teasing with an underlaying of love, though savvy theatergoers will surely suspect Penny's repeated requests for her birth certificate (she needs it for a driver's license) is a loaded gun that will go off later. They deal with guests and intruders and go about their lives when suddenly a buzzer announces a new, secret arrival and Agnes rolls back a carpet to reveal a hidden entrance from the basement.
Her home, it turns out, is a way-station for battered women who get little support from the law and must flee for their lives. Through the eyes of the wary and beat-up Mary Anne (Kazan) we see how the system works, how Agnes is firm but sensitive to the skittish survivors who wash up on her doorstep. In the evening's most powerful and memorable scene, Agnes convinces Mary Anne to let this one-time nurse sew up a wound on the woman's face with stitches. They don't have anything to numb the pain, of course. As the lights dim, Agnes is sewing away while daughter Penny holds Mary Anne's face still and distracts the patient with an enigmatic tale of a local legend. It's a haunting moment that clearly echoes many moments that have come before, simply and effectively making clear the quiet and vital work Agnes has been doing for quite a while now. The scene is promising and vivid and the show never matches it again.
That natural and effective work is soon drowned out by far more obvious plot devices. Penny is a super-smart girl but what she really wants is to go to the prom with the captain of the football team. Mary Anne, who is still recovering from her bruises and obviously still in love with the man who beat her, gives the hapless girl tips: dress up, play dumb, ask lots of questions and touch his arm. Voila! Penny has a prom date. Meanwhile, Mary Anne is courted by the guitar-toting Paul, who has escaped from San Francisco in the hopes of writing some new songs. Barging in every once in a while spouting revolutionary rhetoric is Hannah (Boothe). She does not like Paul, upbraids Mary Anne, takes a shine to Agnes and keeps sneaking in to fix things so she can justify occupying a guest room on the sly.
Though the cast is strong throughout and ably directed by Pam McKinnon, with a strong assist from an excellent set design by Scott Pask that centers us in this world with ease, When We Were Young And Unafraid does play at this superficial, laugh-heavy level.
We can also see all too easily where it's headed, even if we don't quite buy it. Paul is a nebbishy push-over, until an awkward kiss turns him into a hateful bastard, spouting out vicious insults to Mary Anne. Since she is so used to being abused, Mary Anne finally reacts to this and offers up sex to him even though Paul makes her skin crawl. (She's truly only turned on by her husband.) Now, mousy men can of course become monsters but Treem certainly didn't convince us that this particular mouse was a monster at heart.
Similarly, we don't question for a second that the dim-witted high school quarterback may not be the ideal date for Penny. And no parent would approve of a boy who encourages their daughter to skip school and run off to a Led Zeppelin concert. But this doesn't equate him with an abusive husband as the show and Agnes so clearly intend. Maybe the jock asked Penny out because she finally spoke to him? Just maybe?
And in the night's most confusing gambit, the emotional climax is clearly intended to be a scene where Agnes insists that Mary Anne spell out to her daughter Penny exactly how this woman had the crap beaten out of her. (It's meant as a pointed lesson in part to make clear why Penny should not be with the jock.) This makes no sense. As the daughter of Agnes and perhaps unwilling partner in a safe house for battered women (unwilling because what teen wants to give up her room and sleep in her mom's bed?), who would ever imagine for a second that Penny hasn't heard countless similar stories in the past? In the beginning of the show, she's consoling a woman with practiced ease as her mother stitches up brutal wounds. How could it be dramatically consistent to later insist this all-too-clued-in teen hear the "truth" about battered women? She surely knows it better than most.
Other details make no sense either, from Agnes's reaction to her daughter's disappearance (why wouldn't she call her friend the sheriff?) to major bombshells that are delivered and then practically ignored. When Mary Anne says Penny ran away because of Agnes it just doesn't ring true: they fought like any parent and child but their relationship seemed essentially loving and strong.
The only thing that does make sense is the growing bond between Agnes and Hannah. That's more to the credit of the innate likability of these two actors than any believable drama on the part of Treem. We learn Agnes was barred from nursing because she performed abortions and we also learn the great love of her life was apparently a woman (though it's unclear if that love was returned as more than friendship). But these are flashcard bits of info, not nuanced development of character. Tellingly, we learn virtually nothing about Hannah. The real heart of Agnes remains a bit unknowable and only the charm and solidity of Jones make her compelling. Still, that's enough to believe that Hannah (played well by the always appealing Boothe of Milk Like Sugar and Ruined) would find her compelling too.
Until Treem's play inspires the most unlikely TV comedy since MASH, read this recent essay in Huffington Post -- "It Could Have Been Worse" by Carol Hartsell. It helped me gain some small insight into a battered person's psychology and is unquestionably worth your time. Despite a fine cast, I cannot say the same for the play.
THEATER OF 2014
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother's Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler's Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
When We Were Young And Unafraid
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming website BookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.
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We Want the Fame: Holler Introduces New Talent to Broadway
I love when new talent arrives on Broadway. Just like it gives me hope when I see young faces out in the audience, I always cheer particularly loud for those making their Broadway debut (only if they are good, of course). Even if a production is bad overall, I give those up on the stage a hand, because they are often doing their part. They are giving the audience the best show they can.
While Holler if Ya Hear Me, the new musical featuring the songs of Tupac Shakur, has strong performances by Broadway vets Christopher Jackson, Saycon Sengbloh, Ben Thompson and John Earl Jelks, I found the work of Broadway newbies Joshua Boone and Dyllon Burnside equally as impressive. Boone, 26, and Burnside, who prefers not to divulge his age, both play sort of gang members in training in the musical. Before the tuner opens at the new Palace Theatre (which has a reconfigured orchestra for the show) on June 19, I emailed them some questions about their first Broadway experience.
Obviously, this being a Tupac musical, I had to ask what their favorite song by the departed artist was. Burnside answered simply "Only God Can Judge Me," while Boone chose seven songs ("Brenda's Got a Baby," "Dear Mama," "Hail Mary," "Ambitionz az a Ridah," "If I die 2nite," "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted," and "Thugz Mansion"), none of which was "Only God Can Judge Me." (Boone wrote: "We're talking about Tupac, when it comes to his life and music, he spoke and wrote about so many different aspects of life that ran the gamut of emotions, and to pick one song is almost like saying this is what I care about most in life, and I can't do that.") And now for the more general Broadway questions...
Was Broadway one of your dreams growing up?
Boone:![2014-06-18-2846.jpg]()
It actually wasn't. I've loved acting and performing on stage since elementary school, but all I really wanted to do was film and tv. After graduating high school I was like, "Ma, I'm going to California!" That didn't exactly work out the way I saw it in my mind though, and it wasn't until I got to college at Virginia Commonwealth University that my love, respect, and appreciation for the theatre really grew, and now theatre is all I want to do, and hopefully when film and tv calls I'll be able to slide back and forth between the mediums because there's nothing like being on stage.
Burnside: I didn't know Broadway was an option for me as a kid. I always knew I wanted to perform so I pursued singing and acting. But I was not exposed to Broadway until later in my teenaged years. I hope this show can expose Broadway to many kids like me who didn't know a place like this existed for his/her talent to shine.
Are you getting opening night gifts for cast/crew? If so, what are they?
Boone: I got everyone hand-sculpted concrete roses. Okay, that's a lie, I've never done opening night gifts before, and I told myself that this would be the first time! I haven't gotten the gifts yet though, and opening night is pretty much here, so I better figure something out soon! I'll get gifts today.
Burnside: I will be giving an opening night gift to my castmates. I am making a special treat and card for each of them.
Who is coming with you to opening night?
Boone: My mother, father, grandmother, and one of my aunts are coming to opening. I've got to have my momma there, it's my Broadway debut! My brothers and cousins came up for the birthday show [on Tupac Shakur's birthday, June 16]... It was my brother's birthday too, so we celebrated and had a great time!
Burnside: My mom and grandparents are joining me for opening night.
What is the best thing about being on Broadway?
Boone: Broadway is "the big league," the "NBA of theatre," so to speak, and being on that stage, the best thing is that I'm blessed to say that something that wasn't initially a dream, that became a definite goal, has been achieved, and that so many people have a part in it. I, by any means, did not get here on my own accord, and there are many people, who every night, I go on stage and represent to the best of my abilities, and I love them, and I love it!
Burnside: The best part about being on Broadway is seeing so many people's hard work and dreams become a reality. The cast, crew, and creative team have all worked so hard to get here and to see the people in the audience watching intently as we deliver the final number is such a huge payoff.
Photo by Joan Marcus. Pictured (l to r): Saul Williams, Burnside (background) and Boone.
While Holler if Ya Hear Me, the new musical featuring the songs of Tupac Shakur, has strong performances by Broadway vets Christopher Jackson, Saycon Sengbloh, Ben Thompson and John Earl Jelks, I found the work of Broadway newbies Joshua Boone and Dyllon Burnside equally as impressive. Boone, 26, and Burnside, who prefers not to divulge his age, both play sort of gang members in training in the musical. Before the tuner opens at the new Palace Theatre (which has a reconfigured orchestra for the show) on June 19, I emailed them some questions about their first Broadway experience.
Obviously, this being a Tupac musical, I had to ask what their favorite song by the departed artist was. Burnside answered simply "Only God Can Judge Me," while Boone chose seven songs ("Brenda's Got a Baby," "Dear Mama," "Hail Mary," "Ambitionz az a Ridah," "If I die 2nite," "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted," and "Thugz Mansion"), none of which was "Only God Can Judge Me." (Boone wrote: "We're talking about Tupac, when it comes to his life and music, he spoke and wrote about so many different aspects of life that ran the gamut of emotions, and to pick one song is almost like saying this is what I care about most in life, and I can't do that.") And now for the more general Broadway questions...
Was Broadway one of your dreams growing up?
Boone:
It actually wasn't. I've loved acting and performing on stage since elementary school, but all I really wanted to do was film and tv. After graduating high school I was like, "Ma, I'm going to California!" That didn't exactly work out the way I saw it in my mind though, and it wasn't until I got to college at Virginia Commonwealth University that my love, respect, and appreciation for the theatre really grew, and now theatre is all I want to do, and hopefully when film and tv calls I'll be able to slide back and forth between the mediums because there's nothing like being on stage.Burnside: I didn't know Broadway was an option for me as a kid. I always knew I wanted to perform so I pursued singing and acting. But I was not exposed to Broadway until later in my teenaged years. I hope this show can expose Broadway to many kids like me who didn't know a place like this existed for his/her talent to shine.
Are you getting opening night gifts for cast/crew? If so, what are they?
Boone: I got everyone hand-sculpted concrete roses. Okay, that's a lie, I've never done opening night gifts before, and I told myself that this would be the first time! I haven't gotten the gifts yet though, and opening night is pretty much here, so I better figure something out soon! I'll get gifts today.
Burnside: I will be giving an opening night gift to my castmates. I am making a special treat and card for each of them.
Who is coming with you to opening night?
Boone: My mother, father, grandmother, and one of my aunts are coming to opening. I've got to have my momma there, it's my Broadway debut! My brothers and cousins came up for the birthday show [on Tupac Shakur's birthday, June 16]... It was my brother's birthday too, so we celebrated and had a great time!
Burnside: My mom and grandparents are joining me for opening night.
What is the best thing about being on Broadway?
Boone: Broadway is "the big league," the "NBA of theatre," so to speak, and being on that stage, the best thing is that I'm blessed to say that something that wasn't initially a dream, that became a definite goal, has been achieved, and that so many people have a part in it. I, by any means, did not get here on my own accord, and there are many people, who every night, I go on stage and represent to the best of my abilities, and I love them, and I love it!
Burnside: The best part about being on Broadway is seeing so many people's hard work and dreams become a reality. The cast, crew, and creative team have all worked so hard to get here and to see the people in the audience watching intently as we deliver the final number is such a huge payoff.
Photo by Joan Marcus. Pictured (l to r): Saul Williams, Burnside (background) and Boone.
↧
Learn How to Play Guitar by the End of the Week
In 1962, a little-known Liverpool rock act called the Beatles auditioned for a recording contract with Decca Records, but were rejected on the grounds that "guitar groups were on the way out." Besides the fact that Decca turned down the greatest rock band of all time, this anecdote has become one of the most oft-repeated in show business because of the gross musical miscalculation: five decades later, guitar groups, and guitars, are most certainly not on the way out. And countless music fans around the world harbor the ambition to play guitar.
It's easy to get discouraged when learning to play the instrument, and long-time guitarists often take for granted the complex hand mechanics involved in playing. The first time you pick up the guitar, you don't know how hard to press your fingers on the fretboard, how to transition between chords, etc. And to top it all off, the more you practice the more your fingers ache (at least until you form calluses, which help a lot).
But it doesn't have to be difficult. And there's serious good news for aspiring guitarists: with the internet and smartphones at your disposal, it's never been easier -- or faster -- to gain a level of proficiency with the world's favorite instrument.
Here's the quickest way to get good, fast:
Step 1) Learn two chords
In music, a "chord" is a set of complimentary notes played simultaneously. As an amateur guitar teacher, one of the ways I lure people into practicing is the promise that they can play a LOT of rock and pop songs with the knowledge of only a few chords. From Hank Williams to the Beatles, some of the most iconic figures in music have relied on just two or three chords to write some of their biggest hits.
If you like rock n' roll, E-major and A-major are your best starting point:
And throw in B-major and you can play the basic chord structure of just about any blues, 50's rock, or AC/DC song you can think of.
More of a country and folk fan? Meet G-major, C-major, and D-major, also known as your new best friends:
When you're first learning chords, you need to have diagrams handy for your reference. Thankfully, there is a free smartphone app that provides just this.
Another idea: I used to have a poster on my bedroom wall with just about every guitar chord diagram. I only took it down when I could play all the chords from memory. You'd be wise to do the same.
And don't forget to keep that thing in tune. Jimi Hendrix aside, there's no one who can make an out-of-tune guitar sound good...
Step 2) Get rhythm
Once you learn a few chords, you might wonder: what am I supposed to do with them?
Learning basic strumming patterns (and advancing into fingerpicking) takes time, but there's an easy method I used that more people should take advantage of. And that is: playing along.
Put on your favorite song, pick up your guitar (making sure it's in tune), and play along. Seriously -- even if you don't know what the hell you're doing, just make something up. Find one note that you can hear in the song, play along, and build from there. Try to pick out other notes, or even chords that you hear in the music. Pay attention to the rhythm, and try to mimic it.
You're not going to sound like Eric Clapton overnight (or ever, if you're like the rest of us) but soon you'll find that you can play along with some of your favorite guitarists. Fun fact: one of the most celebrated riffs in rock n' roll -- The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" -- is also probably the easiest to learn:
Playing along will help your technique and get you feeling more comfortable with your instrument.
And as long we're talking about comfort, one final thought: hang out with your guitar. Seriously, just always have it near. When you're watching television, or chatting with friends, or just sitting in your bedroom, hold it in your lap. Most musicians spend a lot of their spare time with their instrument, and you should too. Make stuff up, practice your chords, goof around, experiment. Over time you'll become more and more comfortable with the guitar, and feel more and more confident calling yourself a guitarist.
It's easy to get discouraged when learning to play the instrument, and long-time guitarists often take for granted the complex hand mechanics involved in playing. The first time you pick up the guitar, you don't know how hard to press your fingers on the fretboard, how to transition between chords, etc. And to top it all off, the more you practice the more your fingers ache (at least until you form calluses, which help a lot).
But it doesn't have to be difficult. And there's serious good news for aspiring guitarists: with the internet and smartphones at your disposal, it's never been easier -- or faster -- to gain a level of proficiency with the world's favorite instrument.
Here's the quickest way to get good, fast:
Step 1) Learn two chords
In music, a "chord" is a set of complimentary notes played simultaneously. As an amateur guitar teacher, one of the ways I lure people into practicing is the promise that they can play a LOT of rock and pop songs with the knowledge of only a few chords. From Hank Williams to the Beatles, some of the most iconic figures in music have relied on just two or three chords to write some of their biggest hits.
If you like rock n' roll, E-major and A-major are your best starting point:
And throw in B-major and you can play the basic chord structure of just about any blues, 50's rock, or AC/DC song you can think of.
More of a country and folk fan? Meet G-major, C-major, and D-major, also known as your new best friends:
When you're first learning chords, you need to have diagrams handy for your reference. Thankfully, there is a free smartphone app that provides just this.
Another idea: I used to have a poster on my bedroom wall with just about every guitar chord diagram. I only took it down when I could play all the chords from memory. You'd be wise to do the same.
And don't forget to keep that thing in tune. Jimi Hendrix aside, there's no one who can make an out-of-tune guitar sound good...
Step 2) Get rhythm
Once you learn a few chords, you might wonder: what am I supposed to do with them?
Learning basic strumming patterns (and advancing into fingerpicking) takes time, but there's an easy method I used that more people should take advantage of. And that is: playing along.
Put on your favorite song, pick up your guitar (making sure it's in tune), and play along. Seriously -- even if you don't know what the hell you're doing, just make something up. Find one note that you can hear in the song, play along, and build from there. Try to pick out other notes, or even chords that you hear in the music. Pay attention to the rhythm, and try to mimic it.
You're not going to sound like Eric Clapton overnight (or ever, if you're like the rest of us) but soon you'll find that you can play along with some of your favorite guitarists. Fun fact: one of the most celebrated riffs in rock n' roll -- The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" -- is also probably the easiest to learn:
Playing along will help your technique and get you feeling more comfortable with your instrument.
And as long we're talking about comfort, one final thought: hang out with your guitar. Seriously, just always have it near. When you're watching television, or chatting with friends, or just sitting in your bedroom, hold it in your lap. Most musicians spend a lot of their spare time with their instrument, and you should too. Make stuff up, practice your chords, goof around, experiment. Over time you'll become more and more comfortable with the guitar, and feel more and more confident calling yourself a guitarist.
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Encuentro: Get Ready to Manifest
Just before the International Jazz Festival, another global gathering takes place in Montréal as a flock of academics, artists, activists, students and enthusiasts of all kinds will come from all over to participate in the IX Encuentro.
Université Concordia will serve as the hub for this week long conference-festival hybrid that opens on Saturday, June 21st. Activities and events for registered participants will be held in various venues beyond the streets of Outremont, to the PHI Centre in the Old Port, to the Plateau cultural centers of Sala Rosa and Oboro Gallery. On June 28th, Encuentro will close with a final performance and party in the cabaret palace, the Rialto. Events that are open to the public can be found here.
Encuentro-- a bi-annual gathering of NYU's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics -- is the brainchild of the institute's director and founder, professor of Performance Studies, Diana Taylor. Usually held in different sites throughout the Western hemisphere, the program created to foster experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, typically entails a series of keynote lectures, performances, teach-ins, workshops, working groups, exhibitions, screenings, installations, roundtable and long table discussions as well as urban interventions and trasnacheo -- a nightly cabaret. In part to capture both the urgency and breadth of this particular moment, various participants were invited to deliver 5 minute manifestos throughout the week.
Previous themes and locations include the inaugural "Performance and Politics in the Americas" (2000) in Rio de Janiero; "Performing 'Heritage': Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Community-Based Practices" (2005) in Belo Horizonte; "Corpolíticas/Body Politics: Formations of Race, Class and Gender in the Americas" (2007) in Buenos Aires and "Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights" (2009) in Bogota. Last year, "Cities Bodies Action: The Politics of Passion in the Americas" was held in São Paulo.
In the 15-year history of the institute, this is only the second time that Encuentro will be held in North America. In 2003, under the thematic banner of "Spectacles of Religiosities," Hemiites gathered in New York City. The chosen theme this year, "Manifest: Choreographing Social Movements" (link) could not be more aligned with its host city given the pulse of protests and political festivities that have occurred there historically and more recently.
For Mark Sussman, Concordia's Associate Dean of Academic & Student Affairs, the Convener of ENCUENTRO 2014, hosting this meeting has multiple significance. He said "In Canadian higher education, the creative side of academic research has been gaining ground and visibility. It is an ideal moment for a gathering of artists, scholars, and researchers who work in both traditional and experimental forms of knowledge creation to come together under the banner of Performance Studies, a field more advanced in the U.S. but achieving momentum in Canada." Moreover, the theme allows for possibilities of multiple levels of exchange among those present. Paraphrasing French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who wrote of "les techniques du corps," Sussman adds the hope with this encounter is "to build together and begin disseminating an archive of shared knowledge: 'les techniques des manifs.'"
To be sure, techniques of manifestations are not only expanding across the world but continue to intensify. This sentiment was articulated by Diana Taylor who wrote, "We have only to think of movements driven by outrage against political, social, and economic injustices such as the so-called Arab Spring, the Indignant of Spain, Occupy Wall Street, student movements erupting in Chile, Mexico, Montreal, the 'Dreamers' who spearhead immigration reform in the U.S., to name a few. BASTA YA! / ENOUGH! The Zapatistas proclaim, a position shared by Idle No More and the Mapuche and other Native groups throughout the hemisphere."
Indeed, Idle No More will certainly be present at Encuentro bringing Hemiites and the broader Montréal community together for an organized flash mob round dance downtown. Karina Hodoyan (Mexicana-Xicana), Kevin O'Connor (Settler/ally) and Alex Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation), organizers in the Indigenous social and environmental justice movement that exploded on the Canadian political scene in 2012 and has since extended its reach globally, noted "Flash mob round dances as protest performances took place in shopping malls, street intersections and public/political spaces across Canada and continues to do so.
These round dances opened up space for Indigenous and settler participants to move together and create a space for questioning, discomfort and potentially reconciliation." Their aim is to use the round dance as a form of consciousness raising around "the impacts of colonialism on queerness, sexuality, gender, race, ability, and how these are interconnected to the ongoing exploitation of humans, other species, and our environment, through the transgression of space and movement of bodies." This event is scheduled for Friday June 27th at 5pm. All are welcome!
Throughout the week, there will be performances by Hemi veterans and newcomers alike such as Carmelita Tropicana, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra (U.S), Julio Pantoja, Peggy Shaw (U.S.), Aluna Theatre (Canada), Teatro Buendía de Cuba, Marie Brassard and Alexander MacSween (Infrarouge) and Spider Woman Theatre (U.S.), Bread and Puppet Theatre, Lenelle Moise (U.S./Haiti), Wura Ogunji (Nigeria/U.S.), Gabrielle Civil (U.S./Haiti) and Rosamond King (U.S./Gambia) and a slew of others. (Full disclosure, I am an active member of the institute who will also perform in my second Encuentro).
There is much productive potential in the collision that will inevitably ensue as we congregate to express ourselves, exchange ideas and concerns. This year Encuentro faces a new challenge adding French as a fourth official language in addition to English, Spanish and Portuguese. When translation is not available, as resources are rather limited, Hemi invites everyone to participate as "active interpreters" for the person standing near. A collective exercise. A sense of recognizing what it means to engage with our differences in attempts to be part of and create community.
Idle No More's Alex Wilson who will be attending her first Encuentro anticipates this assembly for this very reason. She said: "what Idle No More has done is provide a space and a place for indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples to come together. I think that Encuentro is doing that as well. It is providing a space not just to celebrate but to use our bodies to reclaim space and move forward... just by coming together, we are reconnecting and in a sense restoring our future."
Onward we go as this rasanblaj (Haitian Kreyòl for gathering) gets us ready to manifest!
Université Concordia will serve as the hub for this week long conference-festival hybrid that opens on Saturday, June 21st. Activities and events for registered participants will be held in various venues beyond the streets of Outremont, to the PHI Centre in the Old Port, to the Plateau cultural centers of Sala Rosa and Oboro Gallery. On June 28th, Encuentro will close with a final performance and party in the cabaret palace, the Rialto. Events that are open to the public can be found here.
 Photo credit: Hemispheric Institute |
Encuentro-- a bi-annual gathering of NYU's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics -- is the brainchild of the institute's director and founder, professor of Performance Studies, Diana Taylor. Usually held in different sites throughout the Western hemisphere, the program created to foster experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, typically entails a series of keynote lectures, performances, teach-ins, workshops, working groups, exhibitions, screenings, installations, roundtable and long table discussions as well as urban interventions and trasnacheo -- a nightly cabaret. In part to capture both the urgency and breadth of this particular moment, various participants were invited to deliver 5 minute manifestos throughout the week.
Previous themes and locations include the inaugural "Performance and Politics in the Americas" (2000) in Rio de Janiero; "Performing 'Heritage': Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Community-Based Practices" (2005) in Belo Horizonte; "Corpolíticas/Body Politics: Formations of Race, Class and Gender in the Americas" (2007) in Buenos Aires and "Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights" (2009) in Bogota. Last year, "Cities Bodies Action: The Politics of Passion in the Americas" was held in São Paulo.
In the 15-year history of the institute, this is only the second time that Encuentro will be held in North America. In 2003, under the thematic banner of "Spectacles of Religiosities," Hemiites gathered in New York City. The chosen theme this year, "Manifest: Choreographing Social Movements" (link) could not be more aligned with its host city given the pulse of protests and political festivities that have occurred there historically and more recently.
For Mark Sussman, Concordia's Associate Dean of Academic & Student Affairs, the Convener of ENCUENTRO 2014, hosting this meeting has multiple significance. He said "In Canadian higher education, the creative side of academic research has been gaining ground and visibility. It is an ideal moment for a gathering of artists, scholars, and researchers who work in both traditional and experimental forms of knowledge creation to come together under the banner of Performance Studies, a field more advanced in the U.S. but achieving momentum in Canada." Moreover, the theme allows for possibilities of multiple levels of exchange among those present. Paraphrasing French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who wrote of "les techniques du corps," Sussman adds the hope with this encounter is "to build together and begin disseminating an archive of shared knowledge: 'les techniques des manifs.'"
To be sure, techniques of manifestations are not only expanding across the world but continue to intensify. This sentiment was articulated by Diana Taylor who wrote, "We have only to think of movements driven by outrage against political, social, and economic injustices such as the so-called Arab Spring, the Indignant of Spain, Occupy Wall Street, student movements erupting in Chile, Mexico, Montreal, the 'Dreamers' who spearhead immigration reform in the U.S., to name a few. BASTA YA! / ENOUGH! The Zapatistas proclaim, a position shared by Idle No More and the Mapuche and other Native groups throughout the hemisphere."
Indeed, Idle No More will certainly be present at Encuentro bringing Hemiites and the broader Montréal community together for an organized flash mob round dance downtown. Karina Hodoyan (Mexicana-Xicana), Kevin O'Connor (Settler/ally) and Alex Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation), organizers in the Indigenous social and environmental justice movement that exploded on the Canadian political scene in 2012 and has since extended its reach globally, noted "Flash mob round dances as protest performances took place in shopping malls, street intersections and public/political spaces across Canada and continues to do so.
These round dances opened up space for Indigenous and settler participants to move together and create a space for questioning, discomfort and potentially reconciliation." Their aim is to use the round dance as a form of consciousness raising around "the impacts of colonialism on queerness, sexuality, gender, race, ability, and how these are interconnected to the ongoing exploitation of humans, other species, and our environment, through the transgression of space and movement of bodies." This event is scheduled for Friday June 27th at 5pm. All are welcome!
Throughout the week, there will be performances by Hemi veterans and newcomers alike such as Carmelita Tropicana, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra (U.S), Julio Pantoja, Peggy Shaw (U.S.), Aluna Theatre (Canada), Teatro Buendía de Cuba, Marie Brassard and Alexander MacSween (Infrarouge) and Spider Woman Theatre (U.S.), Bread and Puppet Theatre, Lenelle Moise (U.S./Haiti), Wura Ogunji (Nigeria/U.S.), Gabrielle Civil (U.S./Haiti) and Rosamond King (U.S./Gambia) and a slew of others. (Full disclosure, I am an active member of the institute who will also perform in my second Encuentro).
There is much productive potential in the collision that will inevitably ensue as we congregate to express ourselves, exchange ideas and concerns. This year Encuentro faces a new challenge adding French as a fourth official language in addition to English, Spanish and Portuguese. When translation is not available, as resources are rather limited, Hemi invites everyone to participate as "active interpreters" for the person standing near. A collective exercise. A sense of recognizing what it means to engage with our differences in attempts to be part of and create community.
Idle No More's Alex Wilson who will be attending her first Encuentro anticipates this assembly for this very reason. She said: "what Idle No More has done is provide a space and a place for indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples to come together. I think that Encuentro is doing that as well. It is providing a space not just to celebrate but to use our bodies to reclaim space and move forward... just by coming together, we are reconnecting and in a sense restoring our future."
Onward we go as this rasanblaj (Haitian Kreyòl for gathering) gets us ready to manifest!
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Meet the Tony Stark of Cardboard
Taiwanese student Kai-Xiang Xhong is a cardboard master. He's been slicing up old boxes and building 3D sculptures that are strikingly realistic (well, besides being obviously made of brown cardboard). His Ironman suit is a prime example. Each detail of the fully articulated suit is reproduced faithfully, right down to the glowing chest plate... and of course, it's completely recyclable. Beat that Tony Stark.
Xhong's other creations include a seriously muscular Godzilla statue (that has never skipped leg day), a number of cardboard fossils (like a T-Rex and a flying Pterosaur), and a Bearded Dragon that's so life-like people have mistaken it for a real pet. For the secrets of Xhong's creation process, it's definitely worth a trip over to his Facebook page (Hint: this "Stark" shoots glue guns).
Originally written by Benjamin Starr for VisualNews.com
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The 10 Most Crushworthy Leading Men in YA
Heat up your summer with these 10 fictional hotties! From wounded musicians (of the human and werewolf variety) to sensitive skater boys and the world's most smokin' cancer patient, there's a fictional crush guaranteed to make any YA reader swoon!
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1. Cole St. Clair, Shiver trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater: I feel like I'm constantly mentioning Cole whenever anyone asks me about my YA crushes, but he's a damaged were-rocker-wolf who also just happens to be a genius. Plus, Maggie Stiefvater is releasing a companion Shiver novel this summer that's told from Cole's POV. Um, yes please!
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2. Adam Wilde, If I Stay/Where She Went by Gayle Forman: Adam is hands down the most crushworthy guy in all of YA, in my humble opinion. He's literally a rockstar, he knows how to please his woman -- "playing" Mia like a cello, hello! -- and he's willing to wait for the girl he loves... as long as she stays. All this with no help from sparkly paranormal powers. He's the reason I'm Team Contemporary when it comes to my YA romance allegiances.
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3. Edward Cullen, The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer: A hunky vampire that needs no introduction. The day the mortal world was introduced to this sparkly gentleman who speaks as if he's from another time--'cause he technically is at a ripe 113 years old--was the dawn of a new era that forced the publishing industry to recognize a previously overlooked rabid fanbase: teen girls... and their moms.
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4. Josh Templeton, The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler: This book from the author of the seminal Thirteen Reasons Why is straight up adorable and anyone who has read it knows why Josh made my list of crushworthys. He is the '90s sensitive skater boy ideal I dreamt about when I was in high school. So many sighs for Josh.
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5. Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: This boy evokes all the feels. I don't know what else to say that the collective literate world doesn't already know because everyone has read this book and will subsequently spend June crying their eyes out in a theater for two hours straight with a hundred strangers like me. All. The. Feels, people.
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6. Kent McFuller, Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver: Kent is that nice guy who sits behind you in Econ and lets you borrow a pen when yours runs out of ink during a test. He hasn't quite grown into himself yet, so you don't notice him in that way until the 10- year class reunion when he's married to a supermodel with 2.5 perfect children, and you're left kicking yourself at the open bar.
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7. Cabel Strumheller, Wake trilogy by Lisa McMann: The connection he has with the main character, Janie, is pulse-thumping deep. It kinda makes you wish you fell into other people's screwed up dreams, too, just to catch his attention.
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8. Joe Fontaine, The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson: This book has a warm fuzzy blanket of a space in my heart. The main character, Lennie, may be torn between new guy in town Joe and her recently deceased sister's grieving boyfriend, but from the first time Joe flashes his high-beam smile, the choice was clear to me.
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9. Zen, Unremembered trilogy by Jessica Brody: Zen is in the Amazing Guys Who Will Wait For The Loves of Their Lives club with Adam Wilde. The only downside for all us Zen groupies: He only has eyes for bioengineered glamazons that were created for the sole purpose of...you'll have to read the books to find out!
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10. Etienne St. Clair, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins: No relation to the admittedly saucier St.Clair man on this list. Etienne indulges every Euro trip fantasy I've ever had that basically starts and stops with a cute boy with an accent.
Bethany Neal is the author of the new book My Last Kiss.
1. Cole St. Clair, Shiver trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater: I feel like I'm constantly mentioning Cole whenever anyone asks me about my YA crushes, but he's a damaged were-rocker-wolf who also just happens to be a genius. Plus, Maggie Stiefvater is releasing a companion Shiver novel this summer that's told from Cole's POV. Um, yes please!
2. Adam Wilde, If I Stay/Where She Went by Gayle Forman: Adam is hands down the most crushworthy guy in all of YA, in my humble opinion. He's literally a rockstar, he knows how to please his woman -- "playing" Mia like a cello, hello! -- and he's willing to wait for the girl he loves... as long as she stays. All this with no help from sparkly paranormal powers. He's the reason I'm Team Contemporary when it comes to my YA romance allegiances.
3. Edward Cullen, The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer: A hunky vampire that needs no introduction. The day the mortal world was introduced to this sparkly gentleman who speaks as if he's from another time--'cause he technically is at a ripe 113 years old--was the dawn of a new era that forced the publishing industry to recognize a previously overlooked rabid fanbase: teen girls... and their moms.
4. Josh Templeton, The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler: This book from the author of the seminal Thirteen Reasons Why is straight up adorable and anyone who has read it knows why Josh made my list of crushworthys. He is the '90s sensitive skater boy ideal I dreamt about when I was in high school. So many sighs for Josh.
5. Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: This boy evokes all the feels. I don't know what else to say that the collective literate world doesn't already know because everyone has read this book and will subsequently spend June crying their eyes out in a theater for two hours straight with a hundred strangers like me. All. The. Feels, people.
6. Kent McFuller, Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver: Kent is that nice guy who sits behind you in Econ and lets you borrow a pen when yours runs out of ink during a test. He hasn't quite grown into himself yet, so you don't notice him in that way until the 10- year class reunion when he's married to a supermodel with 2.5 perfect children, and you're left kicking yourself at the open bar.
7. Cabel Strumheller, Wake trilogy by Lisa McMann: The connection he has with the main character, Janie, is pulse-thumping deep. It kinda makes you wish you fell into other people's screwed up dreams, too, just to catch his attention.
8. Joe Fontaine, The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson: This book has a warm fuzzy blanket of a space in my heart. The main character, Lennie, may be torn between new guy in town Joe and her recently deceased sister's grieving boyfriend, but from the first time Joe flashes his high-beam smile, the choice was clear to me.
9. Zen, Unremembered trilogy by Jessica Brody: Zen is in the Amazing Guys Who Will Wait For The Loves of Their Lives club with Adam Wilde. The only downside for all us Zen groupies: He only has eyes for bioengineered glamazons that were created for the sole purpose of...you'll have to read the books to find out!
10. Etienne St. Clair, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins: No relation to the admittedly saucier St.Clair man on this list. Etienne indulges every Euro trip fantasy I've ever had that basically starts and stops with a cute boy with an accent.
Bethany Neal is the author of the new book My Last Kiss.
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In Which I Curate "Poets/Artists," an Art Magazine
I'm going to shamelessly abuse my posting privileges here to tell you about a project of mine I'm very proud of. I've spent the past few months curating an issue of the magazine Poets/Artists, and it's finally up and viewable here. The graphic at the link clicks through to a free online preview of the entire thing, as well as pages for ordering ipad or hard copies. I can best explain what this is with excerpts from my introductory essay, "Celebration."
![2014-06-17-graphic1.jpg]()
Celebration
Before anyone ever published any of my artwork, I followed Poets/Artists, because the creator-editor, Didi Menendez, was showcasing the cool, talented artists I wished I knew. This was before social media connected us all, when we still lived and worked in pockets of solitude and local association. I lobbied Didi for three years to publish my paintings, and she patiently ignored me for three years. My work wasn't good enough yet. Happily, it got better, by my lights, and hers, and ultimately she relented. I was so excited to join the ranks of those I had admired across a seemingly unbridgeable gulf.
...
For the issue she eventually invited me to curate, I decided to show as much work as possible. I assigned two pages to each artist, with no text except identification of the work, and biographical paragraphs at the back. I don't particularly like artist interviews, because I like just looking at the work and trying to hear what it has to say.
...
This space is the art world through the eyes of one artist. I am making public here the semi-hidden cosmopolitanism which characterizes many artists. It is only mine, this present strain of cosmopolitanism, with all of its flaws and omissions - and they are many, because my knowledge and taste are works in progress. There will be future installments of this project, and I hope to share with you marvelous new things.
I believe intensely in the meritocracy. I believe there is good art and bad art, and that it takes a special mix of talent, discipline, skill, and creativity to make good art. But I also believe we must be on guard against settled ideas of what good art is. I reject categorical exclusion. I believe that artists possessed of the needed virtues are making the needed work in every branch of the arts, and sometimes inventing new ones. I am always looking for these artists, and seeking to learn from their work.
In one sense, art is a useless thing. It is a luxury good and inessential to the function of the human being as an organism. In another sense, art is as essential as food. Civilizations, since the beginning, have created objects that we would call art, and they have sacrificed much in the way of scarce resources to do so. Art is essential not to our organism but to our humanity. I think of it as food in this way, and I take an approach, in sharing work, of "Whoever is hungry - let that one come and eat. I will set a broad table; there will be room enough at my table for all who wish to join in its meal. I will build a broad kitchen, and invite every chef who is passionate and excellent with regard to his or her cuisine. No cuisine is barred; no kind of food is barred; no guest is barred."
There is a real world apart from our table, in which art functions as a social and economic ecosystem. I have the good fortune to include here artists from throughout this ecosystem, from the unknown and unpublished to the legendary; from those who give away their work for next to nothing to those whose art commands stratospheric prices. That world, in all of its complexity and hierarchy, is not the world of our kitchen and our table. Here, all who are dedicated are welcome to cook, and all who are hungry may possess art in the only way it can meaningfully be owned: as the nourishment of the soul.
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So much for the essay. Ultimately, I collected work from 98 artists and 5 poets, from around the world.
![2014-06-17-graphic2.jpg]()
Several artists show work here for the first time. Carolyn Marks Blackwood debuts a haunting body of work in which she fuses photography with quasi-personal narrative. Kyle Staver and Michelle Doll share new paintings, and Graydon Parrish presents new drawings. I myself am publishing for the first time a Black Wall painting, one of an ongoing series of text-image collaborations with novelist China Miéville, one of my favorite living authors.
I could write about each piece of artwork in the magazine; I chose them all with love. But let me discuss just two, and leave you to consider the rest.
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Carey Maxon, No Horizon, oil on linen, 20"x16", 2012
This is an oil painting by Carey Maxon. I first stumbled onto Carey Maxon's work at an open studio some years ago. I experienced a sudden and unexpected shot of delight looking around her studio at work like this. And then I left, thinking that would be the end of it. Maxon's work is not, by nature, my kind of thing.
But it wouldn't leave my head. So after having it tickling the back of my mind for maybe six or seven months, I brought it forward to consider it what it was about it. I don't think I even looked at her work again, just then. I could remember it. I remembered that there were recognizable objects subsumed in the fields of irregular dots -- faces, figures. So that your eye vibrated around the cascading dots, but kept catching on the remnants of the recognizable.
Naturally I went about deducing how such an effect could be produced. I figured that she started with those submerged objects, so that in an early stage the canvas would have just an outline of the thing. And then she would begin to build up her dots from there. In fact, this is what she turns out to do -- she documents her process on her blog here. Scroll down a ways, you'll find it. What is so enticing to me about this process is that it has a kind of ecological furriness to it. Say a great old tree falls over in the woods. There it is, stark, naked, and dead. It is sharp of outline and clear of aspect. But things start to grow on it: mosses, grasses, little wild flowers, shoots of other trees. Animals nest in it and burrow into it. Worms hole it. After a while, the tree is not so sharp of outline anymore. It becomes soft and indistinct. You cannot tell where its edges lie, underneath the carpet of the wild. It will sink back into its landscape for many years, and if you squint, or know it was once there, you will still see it for a long, long time.
Maxon's work is like that. It takes on the crazed jubilation of all-reclaiming nature. She hides the traces of intent and structure in her work, and then, like toadstools and mice, partway undoes them. Her algorithm is simple, but I think not anyone could execute it with her sense of joy. One dot is not like another dot; to me her dots are hers and no one else's.
Over years of contemplation, I transformed what started with a mysterious delight and a persistent tickle into another feeling; I treasure her work.
If Maxon tackles decay from the riotous perspective of nature, which treats it as a metamorphosis, then Kouta Sasai examines it from the tragic vantage point of humanity, which sees it as an end.
![2014-06-17-graphic4.JPG]()
Kouta Sasai, Untitled, oil painting, 12.6"x7.1", 2012
This is a small oil painting of a piece of rotting fruit. A cold light comes from the left, and the deep shadows of afternoons spent indoors bloom on the right. The fruit looks like some kind of citrus or persimmon. It is at that stage in its decay when desiccation has collapsed and hardened its surface, before it turns black and splits. It is likely to have a spot or two of mold on it.
How absolutely specific this depiction is! Those reds and oranges that shade off into green and brown and black. The impasto highlights, indicating the irregular surface reflecting blue-white afternoon light. The hard folding of the shriveled skin, a stub of a stem on top. So much is evident, and yet so little is painted. It is a small painting, consisting of very few marks, and those marks are not elaborate.
This painting is like Proust's madeleine, a tiny object out of which a world unfolds. First a world of sensation emerges, and then a world of portent and meaning. Surely we know exactly what state of vegetable decay we observe here. And yet the fact of decay is subsumed in the piece overall. The composition has a geometric order, an inverted T centered on the failing sphere of the fruit. The iron discipline of the T opposes the irregular decay of the fruit; it cautions us to be disciplined. The composition disciplines us, and the cold light calms us. These things detach us from the abject quality of the rotting fruit, giving us a space to contemplate it. The painting not only brings the event of decay before our eyes, but also gives us a means to meditate on the theme of decay. In the sensuality of the painting, we indulge in the horror of the thing. But in the design of the painting, we transcend a fate we too will participate in, groping toward understanding and equanimity. This painting is a very little thing, but it is a profound still life.
---
And who the hell is Kouta Sasai? I dunno. He's some guy I met over Facebook. When I asked, it turned out he was a little younger than I am, and he lives and shows in Hiroshima. But none of that is why I follow his work. I follow his work because his work is amazing. The work represents the caliber of work I tried to establish in this magazine, but the means of finding it represents another thing I find hopeful in the project: nobody told me my artists were good. I decided for myself that I liked their work, and I was able to find their work mainly through the anarchic media of Facebook and Instagram. Social media has its problems, but I prefer them to the hierarchic structure of the great institutions any day of the week. It takes a lot of energy to find art you like, and you've got to swallow some fear to declare that you like it. But if you don't do those things, your taste isn't really yours. My taste runs to Maxon and Sasai, and I am so glad to know their art.
This is true of all 98 of the artists (and 5 poets) included here. I am humbled by their company. I urge you to follow the link and enjoy their work. The issue is dedicated to the late Melissa Carroll, whose art graces the cover.
---
Links:
Poets/Artists: http://www.poetsandartists.com/substance-curated-issue/
Carey Maxon: http://careymaxon.wordpress.com/
Kouta Sasai: http://koutasasai.carbonmade.com/
Celebration
Before anyone ever published any of my artwork, I followed Poets/Artists, because the creator-editor, Didi Menendez, was showcasing the cool, talented artists I wished I knew. This was before social media connected us all, when we still lived and worked in pockets of solitude and local association. I lobbied Didi for three years to publish my paintings, and she patiently ignored me for three years. My work wasn't good enough yet. Happily, it got better, by my lights, and hers, and ultimately she relented. I was so excited to join the ranks of those I had admired across a seemingly unbridgeable gulf.
...
For the issue she eventually invited me to curate, I decided to show as much work as possible. I assigned two pages to each artist, with no text except identification of the work, and biographical paragraphs at the back. I don't particularly like artist interviews, because I like just looking at the work and trying to hear what it has to say.
...
This space is the art world through the eyes of one artist. I am making public here the semi-hidden cosmopolitanism which characterizes many artists. It is only mine, this present strain of cosmopolitanism, with all of its flaws and omissions - and they are many, because my knowledge and taste are works in progress. There will be future installments of this project, and I hope to share with you marvelous new things.
I believe intensely in the meritocracy. I believe there is good art and bad art, and that it takes a special mix of talent, discipline, skill, and creativity to make good art. But I also believe we must be on guard against settled ideas of what good art is. I reject categorical exclusion. I believe that artists possessed of the needed virtues are making the needed work in every branch of the arts, and sometimes inventing new ones. I am always looking for these artists, and seeking to learn from their work.
In one sense, art is a useless thing. It is a luxury good and inessential to the function of the human being as an organism. In another sense, art is as essential as food. Civilizations, since the beginning, have created objects that we would call art, and they have sacrificed much in the way of scarce resources to do so. Art is essential not to our organism but to our humanity. I think of it as food in this way, and I take an approach, in sharing work, of "Whoever is hungry - let that one come and eat. I will set a broad table; there will be room enough at my table for all who wish to join in its meal. I will build a broad kitchen, and invite every chef who is passionate and excellent with regard to his or her cuisine. No cuisine is barred; no kind of food is barred; no guest is barred."
There is a real world apart from our table, in which art functions as a social and economic ecosystem. I have the good fortune to include here artists from throughout this ecosystem, from the unknown and unpublished to the legendary; from those who give away their work for next to nothing to those whose art commands stratospheric prices. That world, in all of its complexity and hierarchy, is not the world of our kitchen and our table. Here, all who are dedicated are welcome to cook, and all who are hungry may possess art in the only way it can meaningfully be owned: as the nourishment of the soul.
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So much for the essay. Ultimately, I collected work from 98 artists and 5 poets, from around the world.
Several artists show work here for the first time. Carolyn Marks Blackwood debuts a haunting body of work in which she fuses photography with quasi-personal narrative. Kyle Staver and Michelle Doll share new paintings, and Graydon Parrish presents new drawings. I myself am publishing for the first time a Black Wall painting, one of an ongoing series of text-image collaborations with novelist China Miéville, one of my favorite living authors.
I could write about each piece of artwork in the magazine; I chose them all with love. But let me discuss just two, and leave you to consider the rest.
This is an oil painting by Carey Maxon. I first stumbled onto Carey Maxon's work at an open studio some years ago. I experienced a sudden and unexpected shot of delight looking around her studio at work like this. And then I left, thinking that would be the end of it. Maxon's work is not, by nature, my kind of thing.
But it wouldn't leave my head. So after having it tickling the back of my mind for maybe six or seven months, I brought it forward to consider it what it was about it. I don't think I even looked at her work again, just then. I could remember it. I remembered that there were recognizable objects subsumed in the fields of irregular dots -- faces, figures. So that your eye vibrated around the cascading dots, but kept catching on the remnants of the recognizable.
Naturally I went about deducing how such an effect could be produced. I figured that she started with those submerged objects, so that in an early stage the canvas would have just an outline of the thing. And then she would begin to build up her dots from there. In fact, this is what she turns out to do -- she documents her process on her blog here. Scroll down a ways, you'll find it. What is so enticing to me about this process is that it has a kind of ecological furriness to it. Say a great old tree falls over in the woods. There it is, stark, naked, and dead. It is sharp of outline and clear of aspect. But things start to grow on it: mosses, grasses, little wild flowers, shoots of other trees. Animals nest in it and burrow into it. Worms hole it. After a while, the tree is not so sharp of outline anymore. It becomes soft and indistinct. You cannot tell where its edges lie, underneath the carpet of the wild. It will sink back into its landscape for many years, and if you squint, or know it was once there, you will still see it for a long, long time.
Maxon's work is like that. It takes on the crazed jubilation of all-reclaiming nature. She hides the traces of intent and structure in her work, and then, like toadstools and mice, partway undoes them. Her algorithm is simple, but I think not anyone could execute it with her sense of joy. One dot is not like another dot; to me her dots are hers and no one else's.
Over years of contemplation, I transformed what started with a mysterious delight and a persistent tickle into another feeling; I treasure her work.
If Maxon tackles decay from the riotous perspective of nature, which treats it as a metamorphosis, then Kouta Sasai examines it from the tragic vantage point of humanity, which sees it as an end.
This is a small oil painting of a piece of rotting fruit. A cold light comes from the left, and the deep shadows of afternoons spent indoors bloom on the right. The fruit looks like some kind of citrus or persimmon. It is at that stage in its decay when desiccation has collapsed and hardened its surface, before it turns black and splits. It is likely to have a spot or two of mold on it.
How absolutely specific this depiction is! Those reds and oranges that shade off into green and brown and black. The impasto highlights, indicating the irregular surface reflecting blue-white afternoon light. The hard folding of the shriveled skin, a stub of a stem on top. So much is evident, and yet so little is painted. It is a small painting, consisting of very few marks, and those marks are not elaborate.
This painting is like Proust's madeleine, a tiny object out of which a world unfolds. First a world of sensation emerges, and then a world of portent and meaning. Surely we know exactly what state of vegetable decay we observe here. And yet the fact of decay is subsumed in the piece overall. The composition has a geometric order, an inverted T centered on the failing sphere of the fruit. The iron discipline of the T opposes the irregular decay of the fruit; it cautions us to be disciplined. The composition disciplines us, and the cold light calms us. These things detach us from the abject quality of the rotting fruit, giving us a space to contemplate it. The painting not only brings the event of decay before our eyes, but also gives us a means to meditate on the theme of decay. In the sensuality of the painting, we indulge in the horror of the thing. But in the design of the painting, we transcend a fate we too will participate in, groping toward understanding and equanimity. This painting is a very little thing, but it is a profound still life.
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And who the hell is Kouta Sasai? I dunno. He's some guy I met over Facebook. When I asked, it turned out he was a little younger than I am, and he lives and shows in Hiroshima. But none of that is why I follow his work. I follow his work because his work is amazing. The work represents the caliber of work I tried to establish in this magazine, but the means of finding it represents another thing I find hopeful in the project: nobody told me my artists were good. I decided for myself that I liked their work, and I was able to find their work mainly through the anarchic media of Facebook and Instagram. Social media has its problems, but I prefer them to the hierarchic structure of the great institutions any day of the week. It takes a lot of energy to find art you like, and you've got to swallow some fear to declare that you like it. But if you don't do those things, your taste isn't really yours. My taste runs to Maxon and Sasai, and I am so glad to know their art.
This is true of all 98 of the artists (and 5 poets) included here. I am humbled by their company. I urge you to follow the link and enjoy their work. The issue is dedicated to the late Melissa Carroll, whose art graces the cover.
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Links:
Poets/Artists: http://www.poetsandartists.com/substance-curated-issue/
Carey Maxon: http://careymaxon.wordpress.com/
Kouta Sasai: http://koutasasai.carbonmade.com/
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Style Vixens of Rock and Roll
Bold, powerful women who rock hard and have the epic style to match are an integral part of rock and roll. We dug deep in our vault to present unique women who possess that out-of-this-world sartorial sensibility. Pop icons such as Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Debbie Harry represent women who have a singular and highly impactful fashion sense. Here are our top picks for women who truly epitomize style vixens of rock.
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Cyndi Lauper by Deborah Feingold
Native New Yorker and eighties pop sensation Cyndi Lauper is captivating in this photograph shot by Deborah Feingold in 1988. Lauper enchants in her thrift shop get-up and manages to combine a 'granny chic meets rockabilly' quirkiness. From her lace-up black booties, to her vintage red vanity case, and her forties style dress, she delivers in her signature bohemian look.
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Aimee Mann by Deborah Feingold
Aimee Mann, formerly of eighties new wave band 'Til Tuesday, sheds her big hair for a more sleek and refined look in this image from 1993. Deborah Feingold once again captures another mesmerizing female performer - this time swathed in regal garb. With her blond blunt cut, crushed red velvet 'Baroque' coat, and white poet blouse, Aimee Mann resembles a rock aristocrat.
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Tina Turner by Jim Britt
Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock and Roll, is photographed by Jim Britt in this seductive pose from a John Denver TV Special in 1978. The dress' plunging neckline and mesh fringe coupled with her vulnerable pose make for an unforgettable image. Turner's lithe frame, endless legs, and very provocative dress cement her as a rock and roll empress.
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Stevie Nicks by Lisa Tanner
Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, is a true vision in this dramatic black and white photograph by Lisa Tanner. Nicks' feathered blond hair, her svelte figure, and beaded sequined overlay add to her allure and bewitching charm.
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Linda Ronstadt by Chuck Pulin
Linda Ronstadt's mix of sweetness and toughness is an inherent part of her American Southwestern roots. This rock/country/jazz legend and recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, reveals those facets of herself in this Chuck Pulin photograph from 1973. A wildflower in a fur chubby and floral blouse, while strumming her guitar, you feel she is every bit the experienced woman who knows about love and heartache.
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Lita Ford by Mark Weiss
Glam metal musician Lita Ford, clearly channels her inner rock and roll vixen in this sexually-charged photograph shot by Mark Weiss in 1983. Sporting an all black patent leather ensemble complete with fishnets, thigh-high boots and a pouty pink lip- Ford embodies the decadence during the height of the hard rock/hair metal era.
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Madonna by Steve Eichner
This image of Madonna taken by Steve Eichner from her Girlie Show World Tour in 1993 fully characterizes the definition of 'vixen.' In her physical prime, she ruled the stage, personifying a host of historic women such as Marlene Dietrich and Mata Hari. Heavily influenced by the cabaret subculture in 1930s Berlin, Madonna strutted onstage in Dolce & Gabbana custom-designed corsets and headdresses, continuing to push sexual boundaries through thought-provoking performances.
![2014-06-17-5332_2.jpg]()
Debbie Harry by Gus Stewart
Blondie's frontwoman Debbie Harry beckons you with a seductive glare in this black and white photograph shot by Gus Stewart. With her signature platinum blonde hair and a black spandex catsuit, she polishes off her look with an oversized black blazer. A reigning queen of New York City downtown.
Native New Yorker and eighties pop sensation Cyndi Lauper is captivating in this photograph shot by Deborah Feingold in 1988. Lauper enchants in her thrift shop get-up and manages to combine a 'granny chic meets rockabilly' quirkiness. From her lace-up black booties, to her vintage red vanity case, and her forties style dress, she delivers in her signature bohemian look.
Aimee Mann, formerly of eighties new wave band 'Til Tuesday, sheds her big hair for a more sleek and refined look in this image from 1993. Deborah Feingold once again captures another mesmerizing female performer - this time swathed in regal garb. With her blond blunt cut, crushed red velvet 'Baroque' coat, and white poet blouse, Aimee Mann resembles a rock aristocrat.
Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock and Roll, is photographed by Jim Britt in this seductive pose from a John Denver TV Special in 1978. The dress' plunging neckline and mesh fringe coupled with her vulnerable pose make for an unforgettable image. Turner's lithe frame, endless legs, and very provocative dress cement her as a rock and roll empress.
Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, is a true vision in this dramatic black and white photograph by Lisa Tanner. Nicks' feathered blond hair, her svelte figure, and beaded sequined overlay add to her allure and bewitching charm.
Linda Ronstadt's mix of sweetness and toughness is an inherent part of her American Southwestern roots. This rock/country/jazz legend and recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, reveals those facets of herself in this Chuck Pulin photograph from 1973. A wildflower in a fur chubby and floral blouse, while strumming her guitar, you feel she is every bit the experienced woman who knows about love and heartache.
Glam metal musician Lita Ford, clearly channels her inner rock and roll vixen in this sexually-charged photograph shot by Mark Weiss in 1983. Sporting an all black patent leather ensemble complete with fishnets, thigh-high boots and a pouty pink lip- Ford embodies the decadence during the height of the hard rock/hair metal era.
This image of Madonna taken by Steve Eichner from her Girlie Show World Tour in 1993 fully characterizes the definition of 'vixen.' In her physical prime, she ruled the stage, personifying a host of historic women such as Marlene Dietrich and Mata Hari. Heavily influenced by the cabaret subculture in 1930s Berlin, Madonna strutted onstage in Dolce & Gabbana custom-designed corsets and headdresses, continuing to push sexual boundaries through thought-provoking performances.
Blondie's frontwoman Debbie Harry beckons you with a seductive glare in this black and white photograph shot by Gus Stewart. With her signature platinum blonde hair and a black spandex catsuit, she polishes off her look with an oversized black blazer. A reigning queen of New York City downtown.
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Classic Tease: Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend
Although the seeds of ballet originated in the 17th century in the court of French King Louis XIV, "Classical" ballet as we know it today incubated in the Imperial Theater of Russia in the late 19th century, and primarily under the choreographic hand of one man: Ballet master Marius Petipa's ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" is 124 years old and is widely considered the most classical work within the ballet canon. With music by Tchaikovsky, it enchants and inspires audiences to this day as a staple of many international ballet companies. The role of Aurora, the sleeping princess, tasks dancers to interpret a different incarnation of a classical ballerina, as dance critic Arlene Croce describes, "Primarily the ballet was about ballet-its flowering in the French courts of the Baroque era and its resurgence under Romanticism at the Paris Opera...Historically speaking, Aurora in Act I is the embodiment of Mlle La Fontaine, the first ballerina of the Paris Opera; in Act II, she is Taglioni, appearing to the prince as a naiad of the river of time. In the third-act mazurka, Aurora is a Petersburg ballerina."
The reason we still continue to go see "beauty" today is because its inherent classical structure allows each new generation to breathe new life into it. In ballet, classicism is a constraint to work within to push the art form forward. Classicism is not necessarily traditional or conservative; George Balanchine's choreography for the Ballet Russes and New York City Ballet solidified a neo-classical movement vocabulary, while choreographers like Anthony Tudor, John Cranko, and Sir Kenneth MacMillan pushed Petipa's story ballet format forward as a narrative artform into the 20th century. With the ever forward pacing of time, dance has evolved within the societies which support them; each generation of ballet dancers are challenged to breathe life into classical works that date back almost 200 years. Ballet in America has enjoyed steady support, which makes a well-documented study on classicism fairly straight forward.
But what about the artistic legacies of other forms of American dance? The answer to this question came into clear focus for me at the 57th annual Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend, hosted at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas, which I had the incredible privilege to attend with my good friend Eli Schmidt, a New York-based fashion photographer working on a project documenting male burlesque performers.
Burlesque and ballet, both imported from Europe, finally gained their footing in America in the 1830's. George Washington Smith, arguably the only classical American male ballet dancer of note of the 19th century, made his performance debut in Philadelphia in 1832. Around the same time, American burlesque shows began popping up as well.
The Burlesque Hall of Fame was formed in 2007 in Las Vegas, forging the legacy of Jennie Lee ("The Bazoom Girl" who started the Exotic Dancers' League in 1955 and the Exotic World Museum in Helendale, California) and Dixie Evans (the "Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque" who was committed to the history and legacy of the art form, and the founder of the Ms. Exotic World pageant.) The Hall of Fame Weekend serves as their largest annual fundraiser.
While most American audiences may know Mickey Rooney or Gyspy Rose Lee, and perhaps contemporary performers like Dita Von Teese, burlesque has never enjoyed large mainstream consumption. Yet, like in ballet, the burlesque community is highly engaged in the discussion of classicism. Both dance forms rely heavily on oral histories, with choreography, technique, steps, and "tricks" passed down from dancer to dancer. (I made the analogy to sour-dough bread in a previous article.) The conversations about classicism in burlesque and ballet were identical: How do we both preserve a historic art form while pushing it's boundaries forward?
At the classic heart of a striptease is a "tease and reveal." Contemporary burlesque takes the "tease and reveal" into wildly new directions, injecting striptease with dance, circus, magic, comedy, music, and even film to become neo-burlesque.
The opening night performance, "Movers, Shakers, and Innovators," highlighted the envelope-pushing within neo-burlesque. The most striking aspect of this permutation of burlesque was the inclusion of non-traditional body types and gender orientations. Rubenesque Burlesque, a group of four big beautiful women from Oakland, California, began their strip as fat-camp victims, who stage a coup by devouring their Barbie-esque aerobic instructor before reveling in the glory of their bodies in only pasties and g-string. The crowd responded electrically, the performance diminished any rationale for a negative body image, flipping shame into sexy empowerment for the audience. Bushwick, New York's Darlinda Just Darlinda performed a solo strip to Etta James' sultry "I've Been Loving You Too Long" in a low-backed red silk robe, which slowly fell lower and lower down her back as she straddled a chair, until a dramatic whip of her hair sent glitter showering over the entire stage, a woman in heat over the edge. Ernie Von Schmaltz, a female performer in drag, performed a Gaelic river dance strip complete with hairy ass and chest with all the comedic camp of an Asterix cartoon strip.
The following night highlighted the "Titans of Tease," an exhibition performance of many of the community's living legends, which included the 4th annual Burlesque Walk of Fame, a parade of former burlesque queens. 13 dancers performed their stripteases, some in original costumes. Their bump-and-grind muscle memory still very much intact, the Legends' strength however, was still in their charismatic performances (for the balletomanes, here is a clip of a Margot Fonteyn years after her professional retirement- On-stage personality and charisma is what makes a great dancer, whether ballet or burlesque.)
The 2014 Legend of the Year Award, presented by Perle Noire, went to the "Duke's Delight" Toni Elling, who got her name from good friend Duke Ellington when she began performing in the 1960s, who also wrote her signature song. Elling prided herself on not conforming, avoiding "savage" routines popularized by other African-American performers, opting instead to perform more classic routines. The host for the evening, World Famous Bob, delivered a dynamic performance, repeatedly emphasizing to the crowd, "If you don't know where you're coming from, where do you know where you are going?"
The main event was the 24th annual "Tournament of Tease," an annual competition showcase for the best in burlesque. London's Bonnie Fox's jazz-age Charleston won her the "Best Debut," while "Most Comedic" went to New York/Seattle-based absurdist duo Kitten n' Lou, whose larger- than-life disco groove "Last Dance" had the audience cheering. "Best Troupe" went to the precise Ruby Review from Dallas, Texas.
The category that prompted the most debate were the four dancers competing in the "Best of Boylesque" category. Boylesque is emerging as a sub-genre within neo-burlesque, inherently non-traditional because of the gender of the performers, yet fully engaged with the classicism of burlesque. Seattle's Eddie Van Glamm gave a flamboyant performance to the Village People's "Macho Man" dressed as a wrestling titan. The title of "Best Boylesque" however, was taken by New York City's Mr. Gorgeous, who playfully led the audience through a campy ice cream routine as an classically handsome soda jerk.
The two remaining performers in the boylesque category were fraternal twins Paris and Trojan Original. Their performances were by far the most thought-provoking. For his performance, Trojan entered the stage in only a towel, looking like he just emerged from a shower. His controlled balletic choreography allowed Trojan to play within a simple yet effective constraint; a single towel kept the audience captivated, hoping for a wardrobe malfunction. A classic concept with hyper-masculine yet vulnerable performance solidified Trojan as one of the best performers in Boylesque today.
His brother Paris took a slightly different approach. Paris was born to be a opulent showgirl, he certainly didn't disappoint. Transforming from blackbird to phoenix in full heels and feminine bravado, he sizzled each peel with the radiant confidence we all wish we had. Despite his incredible performance and costuming, his femme style perhaps may never win if the historic white heterosexual male gaze continues to be the aesthetic drive behind burlesque. While Paris certainly gave the contestants in the "Miss Exotic World" showcase a run for their money, the title went to Midnite Martini, who performed an elegant Queen of the Night aerial strip; she gave a classic performance with an innovative twist to dazzle a contemporary audience.
A red-eye flight back to New York prevented me from seeing the second half of the final evening's "Icon's and All-Stars," but I did manage to catch Brisbane, Australia's hula-hoop virtuoso Captain Kidd ("Best Boylesque" and "Most Dazzling 2011") in an outrageous green beaded bikini and blond wig, and New York duo Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey ("Best Duo 2006"), whose acrobatic (and hilariously consensual) beastiality were among the most captivating performances of the weekend.
My favorite memento from the weekend was a shirt given to me by Seattle-based Boylesque performer Waxie Moon, with a black and white photo of himself on it (ironically also shot by Eli). Waxie, a former Jose Limon dancer, was my spiritual guide into burlesque, and helped me define what burlesque really is: Burlesque is sharing your humanity. Burlesque is body affirmation. The burlesque stage becomes a space where there were no wrong choices, just personality and charisma. Like with any performance, every burlesque audience just wants to get to know you. And within a structure like the art form that is burlesque, classicism can and is flourishing. That is the reason why timeless dance works become classics -- the strength of the art maintains the ability to transcend time through the new creative breath of each new performer.
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78 Hours on the Los Angeles Art Scene
ANNUALLY FOR THE past four years, I've made a Los Angeles art pilgrimage in the company of prominent New York collectors Zoë and Joel Dictrow. With me piloting the car, Joel as navigator and Zoë keeping up a lively banter of good cheer in the midst of occasional wrong turns, we traverse the 502 square miles of urban sprawl in search of challenging new art in studios, galleries, museums and private residences.
Usually we've made this a fall trip, but this time we were a bit delayed and have just sneaked in at the close of the art season, with a mid-June, four-day tour that coincided with the opening of the UCLA Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2014 exhibition.
Right off the plane, our first stop was a studio visit with painter Kour Pour, who this past February enjoyed a sold-out show at Untitled NY in New York's Lower East Side. Easily mistaken for beige oriental carpets, they are in fact meticulously crafted oil paintings in the form of Persian rugs, but whose content is a minutely detailed meditation on the calligraphy of ancient history, ranging across the planet and marshaled to create non-narrative dialogues of birds and emperors, camels and warriors, goddesses and carnivores. A cosmos of refined sensuality and of passion!
- The artist Kour Pour in his studio (left); and gallerist Honor Fraser speaks about Frank Stella
Our next stop was to meet Honor Fraser and view her stunning '60s color field painting show, called Openness and Clarity and curated by Haydn Dunbar, with stand-out paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and a simply breathtaking one by Frank Stella called Ctesiphon I, from 1968. Borrowed from MoCA's permanent collection, the work's appearance in the Fraser show marks only the fourth time it has been on public view-- and it was a thrill to witness this pristine work in all its electric color.
Our next stop was to Cherry & Martin gallery, where we were greeted by sculptor Nathan Mabry who walked us through his current solo gallery show. The first room featured a Giacometti inspired green patinaed bronze that turned out to be a slow, self-contained fountain, in which a slight stream of water ran down its face. On the walls surrounding the sculpture were small-format photos of a flume of smoke circling up, as if from burning incense.
- In the studio with artists Glenn Kaino (left) and Alex Olson
I've known Glenn Kaino since 1996 and have attended many of his group and solo shows, but this was my first in his studio. The experience was a bit bewildering at first, since the studio is a laboratory where the artist has more than a dozen "experiments" going simultaneously: a giant firefly contraption takes up a swing-set zone; materials for an upcoming performance are laid out on every surface of the seating and sofa zone; fish tanks surround a computer zone and provide the staging ground for an oceanic corral project; dozens of human arm forms, cast in a Black Power salute and cast in gold, are lined up along a wall, in preparation for a huge installation in Washington, D.C. this fall; a 3-D printer is on pause as it creates Lilliputian figures for who-knows-what; and everywhere are various staging grounds of plastic models which will eventually be sprayed in gold and mounted on pins, to create Kaino's now-signature six-foot-tall, glittering gold pin drawings that suggest atomized worlds. As I absorbed and made sense of the chaos, it began to dawn on me that Kaino's studio is akin to an artistic tide pool where many life forms are spawning and growing.
Elliot Hundley is well known for his painting installations using pinned collages, and more recently he's been focusing on pure painting that jettisons the pinned format and involves a carefully choreographed waltz of abstraction of collaged imagery. I've been an unabashed fan, but this was my first studio visit, and I was unaware of and unprepared for the scale of his practice, which is based on collage scavenging and then cataloging the images by colors and themes. The walls of his 7,500 square-foot studio are literally filled with file boxes that are filled with carefully noted and labeled scraps of paper and other ephemera-- all of which forms a personal encyclopedia describing the world he knows and providing a vast catalog of micro-tools to create his canvas universes.
Alex Olson is a painter of abstractions. In the studio at present are works that seem meditations on various kinds of brushstrokes: thin brushstrokes captured in monochrome; wave-like brushstrokes captured in modeling paste like water lapping on a sea shore; and black brushstrokes arching over fluorescent bleeds. Commanding the studio is a painting with a brilliant red central element that seems to be pushing out of the picture, or receding into it. An arresting and beguiling vision currently under purchase consideration by some lucky museum!
Hyper-energetic gallerist François Ghebaly has moved from his former doll-house-sized gallery on South La Cienega to L.A.'s booming Downtown District and is currently renovating a fantastic 15,000 square-foot, former sewing factory into a multi-arts space. The space will be the home of several publishers, an artist residency program, Ghebaly's own gallery and much more, as he creates what will no doubt be a bustling hive of activity. Looking remarkably clear and focused for a dealer who has made two art fair presentations in the past month, François happily introduced us to participating artists and publishers, all of whom are setting up shop in this soaring ceilinged, wood-domed space that seems destined to become a must-see site on the Los Angeles art map.
After a bumper-to-bumper drive out of downtown along the 10 Freeway, and after a few false turns, we arrived at a dirt road alleyway that ended in a piled up collection of weather-beaten old cars, all with Kenny Scharf's signature "Jetson" faces trapped in a hookah-fog. We knew we'd arrived in Scharf's world. Not much farther, through a canopy of plastic drift garbage that the artist collects on beaches, we found Kenny, paintbrush in hand, at work on some very beautiful, principally black monochrome canvases. With cheerful instructions to look around the cast-open garage that is his studio, we discussed my hope that he'll create one of his "Cosmic Caverns" for a September exhibition I'm guest curating in the heart of São Paulo. Scharf is equal parts a master painter and clubland showman whose legendary black light installations are now finding there way into museums such as L.A.'s MoCA two years ago and (next year) New York's MoMA.
In her studio, painter Annie Lapin introduced us to three bodies of painting work: small, densely painted brooding abstractions that might harken to nighttime landscapes; large, principally rich brown jute-like murals on which black paint appears to have been shot at considerable velocity; and medium, body-sized, jewel-like landscape abstractions that employ a Frankenthaler stain technique to create suggestions of framing walls inset by almost blasted Courbet flower still-lives.
The latest iteration of the Hammer Museum's biennial Made in L.A. 2014 exhibition features works by 35 Los Angeles artists, with an emphasis on emerging and under recognized artists. Some highlights of the show are the installation rooms of Harry Dodge (sculptures and framed drawings) and Tala Madani (three stop-action films and paintings on maxi and mini scales of her now-signature boys and girls behaving badly). Also of note were the gently political works of Juan Capistrán, alluring painted and collaged abstract triangle patterning of Lecia Dole-Recio, the knitted charms of Channing Hansen and the painted bed-sheet sensuality of Max Maslansky.
The order of our Los Angeles art tour was:
On Wednesday, June 11:
1. Kour Pour, studio visit
2. Openness and Clarity: Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s, curated by Hayden Dunbar
Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, 90034
3. Nathan Mabry (the artist was present and did a walk-through of his exhibition with us)
Cherry & Martin
2712 S La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, 90034
On Thursday June 12:
4. Glenn Kaino, studio visit
5. Gabriel Kuri
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, 90038
6. Erlea Maneros Zabala (the show was being installed)
Redling Fine Art
6757 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, 90038
7. Terry Winters
Matthew Marks
1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, 90046
8. "The Motorman" group show
Richard Telles Fine Art
7380 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, 90036
9. Mary Weatherford
David Kordansky Gallery
3143 S La Cienega Blvd., Unit A, Los Angeles, 90016
10. Raffi Kalenderian and Nick Aguayo
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City, Los Angeles, 90232
11. Anya Gallaccio
Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, 90034
On Friday June 13:
12. Elliot Hundley, studio visit
13. Alex Olson, studio visit
14. Josh Mannis
Thomas Solomon Gallery
427 Bernard St., Los Angeles, 90012
15. Men in L.A.
The Box
805 Traction Ave., Los Angeles 90013
16. Christine Wang and Jo Nigoghossian; windows by Yunhee Min
Night Gallery
2276 E 16th St., Los Angeles, 90021
17. The Square (a group show was being installed)
François Ghebaly Gallery
2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, 90021
18. Kenny Scharf, studio visit
On Saturday June 14:
19. Annie Lapin, studio visit
20. Mike Kelley
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 North Central Ave., Los Angeles 90012
21. Ma Ke
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 South Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, 90212
22. Albert Oehlen
Gagosian Gallery
456 North Camden Dr., Beverly Hills, 90210
23. Made in L.A. 2014
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, 90024
FINE DINING
Last but not least, Los Angeles is a splendid gourmet town, with fresh produce and great restaurants. We had the good fortune to have the recommendations of our L.A. foodie friend Fancy Fechser, who tipped us off to these three superb restaurants:
Tar and Roses
602 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, 90401
Chef Andrew Kirschner gives a wood-fired, Italian twist to local and seasonal dining. Beautiful presentations and a fine wine list in a bustling yet intimate setting near the beach.
Info: tarandroses.com
Picca
9575 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 90035
On the edge of Beverly Hills, Peruvian chef Ricardo Zarate has created a flight menu of minimalist, Japanese tapas bar-like offerings that included transformative experiences with a baked-potato and a perfectly executed anticucho featuring small, sweet scallops that we had to try twice.
Info: piccaperu.com
Tavern
11648 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, 90049
Located in Brentwood, just minutes from the Hammer Museum and our boisterous biennial opening, Tavern's natural light-filled atrium in soothing shades of moss was the perfect, calming early dining spot. James Beard award winning chef Suzanne Goin has created an inventive menu that springs from the freshest of produce. Our dining adventure began with a salad of grilled peach with dandelion, burrata and pine nuts. Simply stunning!
Info: tavernla.com
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