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Marcia
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From the High Seas to Hollywood (Part I)
Though both borrow from French Revival architectural style, no two buildings could be further apart in significance than Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. One is where American naval officers are born, the other is where Hollywood legends go to die. Is it possible to go from one world to the other? I'm here to tell you that it's possible and, as The Last Ship premieres, I wanted to share a few thoughts on what it has been like to make the transition from Annapolis naval officer to Hollywood writer-producer.
Although The Last Ship is the fourth show that I've written on - it marks a mini-culmination of my journey because it was the first time that I had a chance to write about a world that I knew absolutely first hand. Hopefully, the first of many such occasions.
In retrospect, the transition from naval officer to producer and writer has been even tougher than I suspected it would be at the outset. Hollywood really is - as you've probably heard, a dog-eat-dog, marathon meal of crumbs just to get to the table where the real acts of creation occur.
Why did I come to Hollywood anyway? Outside of movies like Apocalypse Now, The Sand Pebbles and Lawrence of Arabia, the way Hollywood told military stories always seemed dull, cliché and horribly untrue. The entertainment machine treats the military mostly as an excuse for gunplay and explosions. I wanted to become a writer because I was ambitious to tell the sorts of stories that I always wanted to watch, but could never find. Human stories set in a Conradian world of the military where folks naturally operated in the borderlands. Certainly one with a set of ethical margins and pressures you won't find in the highlands of Pasadena. When I was living in Japan and bouncing out to sea around Southeast Asia and then living in the Sahara as a UN Peacekeeper, I started to feel the itch to write and make movies. There was scant modern literature to describe the carnival of humanity you find on a gutter tour of Asia. I wanted to try and that's why I've spent ten years producing and writing on various shows. I'm hoping that I'm learning the craft well enough and meeting the right people to enable me to bend some of this experience into art. So far, I haven't actually produced the kind of stuff I came here to make...but hey, I'm still here, belly to the table and ready to go.
How does somebody make the transition from the military to Hollywood? By the time I graduated from Annapolis, I pretty much knew that I was going to become a writer. I knew then that it would seem like a sort of impossible dream to my friends and family - but I was going to try. I told my ex-wife that there would be at least two years of rejection and poverty between leaving the military and getting my first tiny foothold as a writer. I don't think she believed that I was actually going to go through with it - leave a steady job in the Navy for a crazy pipe dream. In a way, I guess I was only able to make such a big transition because I was willing to suffer and let every other part of myself die except the desire to transform. To this day, I don't think most of my military buddies have any understanding of the financial and psychic swamp that I swam through to make it to the shore after I jumped ship. A few years into my new Hollywood life, I hit bottom. I was producing an indie film (LAURA SMILES) that had run out of money halfway through production - and so had I. I was deep in debt and down to my last five bucks. My cell phone was shut off and I didn't have the money to get it turned back on. That was truly a moment of despair. How can you be a producer of a movie when you don't even have enough money to eat or make a call? Fortunately, that low point was also the day that RKO Studio agreed to fully finance the film. I spent my last dollars on gas and cigarettes and drove into Century City to RKO's headquarters for planning meetings. I lunched on the trail mix in RKO's office kitchen until I could write myself a production check. Never been that low before or since, thank god.
Oh, the people you'll meet. I have a problem with people who say that everyone is fake in Hollywood. Actually, that may be true in "Hollywood" where you find plenty of tag-alongs and rich kids who say they are producing but are really just partying. But in the real world of making movies and TV I've found that the people who have actually given up everything to be there are hyper-real. For these people, the specter of failed dreams and psyche-death are always looming - any screw up can mean career suicide. When you are producing a movie with folks and you're all under this kind of pressure, you get a chance to see the true person - the bad and the good, the desperation and the grace. It's possible to go through life sloshing in the middle of the pool, never feeling the bottom - but not here. I've met some of the best people walking the earth in the entertainment business - happy warriors with good souls. I've also run into my share of crooks, charlatans and porn stars. Ron Jeremy did a fully-clothed "straight" cameo in the first movie that I produced and in my second movie, the director and I had to literally kidnap one of the other producers who had embezzled part of the film's budget. We grabbed the guy and told him that we were either taking him to the bank so that he could find our money or to the police so they could put him in jail.
You can't escape your past. Everyone in the entertainment industry is pegged and stereotyped. It's unavoidable for a lot of reasons that I won't go into but suffice to say that Hollywood is a stage and everyone is consigned to a role. This was initially a foreign concept to me because, as a naval officer, we were groomed to be jacks of all trades (or at least fake it). The Navy's idea is that one day they will have you driving ships and the next day they'll transfer you to work in the U.S. embassy in London. Not so in Hollywood. In fact, in some ways, Hollywood is more stove-piped than the military. One example is that it's almost impossible to go from being a drama writer to a comedy writer - you literally have to remake yourself to even try to transcend your place. If I show up to a meeting with studio executives as a "the navy guy" but am sporting a beard or shaggy hair, they tend to get confused. It's ironic but in some ways, the military is more forgiving of unorthodoxy than the creatives you meet in LA. Part of the reason for this is that folks in Hollywood are always on the edge - always wondering if they're going to keep their job this month and make their mortgage payment - and they just don't have the emotional energy to deal with aberrations from their expectations.
On Self-Promotion. One of the classic military values is humility - don't brag, demure praise. Unfortunately, this isn't something you can really do in Hollywood if you want to succeed. Shrinking violets aren't going to get the job or the money. When I took my first screenwriting class, I remember being constantly surprised and disgusted at how often the instructor worked his resume or name-drops into every conversation. But in hindsight, I forgive the poor bastard for his insecurity about folks knowing that he had value in the system. It's not like he could wear a uniform with ranks and medals to tell his story for him.
Best thing about serving in the military before coming? Besides general life experience that money can't buy, there's a long precedent of military service as an antecedent for great writing. There are some extraordinary vets creating TV shows and movies right now including Rod Lurie who created of Commander in Chief and wrote/directed The Contender. There's also Don Bellisario, who created the most watched TV show in the world right now, NCIS. There are many inspiring literary examples - Joseph Heller, James Salter, Heinlein, Pynchon, Tolstoy - and who can forget actor, writer and director, Clint Eastwood. (Bet that's the first sentence ever to include both Tolstoy and Eastwood.)
Worst thing about serving in the military before coming to Hollywood? Lost time. Because you come to the party late, there's less margin for error before aging out. You come to Hollywood without the network of friends who are producers or executives who can help you find work. And you can't just hang out and drink yourself around town when you should be honing your craft - hopefully getting good.
One of the draws of navy life is the romance - the chance to roam into the back corners of the earth under the auspice of duty and explore the tattered margins of civilization - and maybe get a glimpse of worlds about which most people know nothing. As an old British merchant seaman told me in Bermuda when I was midshipman - your job [as a young person] is to fill your boots up with life so that you have something to think about in the rocking chair when you're old. I have tried to do as the old sailor told me to do. I came back with some stories and should I get really lucky, I'll have the chance to write 'em all - and shoot some of them. Look out for shows/films about U.N. Peacekeepers in the Sahara, or expats in Asia and Europe, or sailboat racing in New England or even one about the banalities of staff work at the HQ of the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii.
I'll wrap this for now with some gratefulness. I'm glad to be here and I'm definitely one of the lucky ones who have made it to the beach. In the meantime, enjoy The Last Ship and stay tuned for future installments of High Seas to Hollywood.
Although The Last Ship is the fourth show that I've written on - it marks a mini-culmination of my journey because it was the first time that I had a chance to write about a world that I knew absolutely first hand. Hopefully, the first of many such occasions.
In retrospect, the transition from naval officer to producer and writer has been even tougher than I suspected it would be at the outset. Hollywood really is - as you've probably heard, a dog-eat-dog, marathon meal of crumbs just to get to the table where the real acts of creation occur.
Why did I come to Hollywood anyway? Outside of movies like Apocalypse Now, The Sand Pebbles and Lawrence of Arabia, the way Hollywood told military stories always seemed dull, cliché and horribly untrue. The entertainment machine treats the military mostly as an excuse for gunplay and explosions. I wanted to become a writer because I was ambitious to tell the sorts of stories that I always wanted to watch, but could never find. Human stories set in a Conradian world of the military where folks naturally operated in the borderlands. Certainly one with a set of ethical margins and pressures you won't find in the highlands of Pasadena. When I was living in Japan and bouncing out to sea around Southeast Asia and then living in the Sahara as a UN Peacekeeper, I started to feel the itch to write and make movies. There was scant modern literature to describe the carnival of humanity you find on a gutter tour of Asia. I wanted to try and that's why I've spent ten years producing and writing on various shows. I'm hoping that I'm learning the craft well enough and meeting the right people to enable me to bend some of this experience into art. So far, I haven't actually produced the kind of stuff I came here to make...but hey, I'm still here, belly to the table and ready to go.
How does somebody make the transition from the military to Hollywood? By the time I graduated from Annapolis, I pretty much knew that I was going to become a writer. I knew then that it would seem like a sort of impossible dream to my friends and family - but I was going to try. I told my ex-wife that there would be at least two years of rejection and poverty between leaving the military and getting my first tiny foothold as a writer. I don't think she believed that I was actually going to go through with it - leave a steady job in the Navy for a crazy pipe dream. In a way, I guess I was only able to make such a big transition because I was willing to suffer and let every other part of myself die except the desire to transform. To this day, I don't think most of my military buddies have any understanding of the financial and psychic swamp that I swam through to make it to the shore after I jumped ship. A few years into my new Hollywood life, I hit bottom. I was producing an indie film (LAURA SMILES) that had run out of money halfway through production - and so had I. I was deep in debt and down to my last five bucks. My cell phone was shut off and I didn't have the money to get it turned back on. That was truly a moment of despair. How can you be a producer of a movie when you don't even have enough money to eat or make a call? Fortunately, that low point was also the day that RKO Studio agreed to fully finance the film. I spent my last dollars on gas and cigarettes and drove into Century City to RKO's headquarters for planning meetings. I lunched on the trail mix in RKO's office kitchen until I could write myself a production check. Never been that low before or since, thank god.
Oh, the people you'll meet. I have a problem with people who say that everyone is fake in Hollywood. Actually, that may be true in "Hollywood" where you find plenty of tag-alongs and rich kids who say they are producing but are really just partying. But in the real world of making movies and TV I've found that the people who have actually given up everything to be there are hyper-real. For these people, the specter of failed dreams and psyche-death are always looming - any screw up can mean career suicide. When you are producing a movie with folks and you're all under this kind of pressure, you get a chance to see the true person - the bad and the good, the desperation and the grace. It's possible to go through life sloshing in the middle of the pool, never feeling the bottom - but not here. I've met some of the best people walking the earth in the entertainment business - happy warriors with good souls. I've also run into my share of crooks, charlatans and porn stars. Ron Jeremy did a fully-clothed "straight" cameo in the first movie that I produced and in my second movie, the director and I had to literally kidnap one of the other producers who had embezzled part of the film's budget. We grabbed the guy and told him that we were either taking him to the bank so that he could find our money or to the police so they could put him in jail.
You can't escape your past. Everyone in the entertainment industry is pegged and stereotyped. It's unavoidable for a lot of reasons that I won't go into but suffice to say that Hollywood is a stage and everyone is consigned to a role. This was initially a foreign concept to me because, as a naval officer, we were groomed to be jacks of all trades (or at least fake it). The Navy's idea is that one day they will have you driving ships and the next day they'll transfer you to work in the U.S. embassy in London. Not so in Hollywood. In fact, in some ways, Hollywood is more stove-piped than the military. One example is that it's almost impossible to go from being a drama writer to a comedy writer - you literally have to remake yourself to even try to transcend your place. If I show up to a meeting with studio executives as a "the navy guy" but am sporting a beard or shaggy hair, they tend to get confused. It's ironic but in some ways, the military is more forgiving of unorthodoxy than the creatives you meet in LA. Part of the reason for this is that folks in Hollywood are always on the edge - always wondering if they're going to keep their job this month and make their mortgage payment - and they just don't have the emotional energy to deal with aberrations from their expectations.
On Self-Promotion. One of the classic military values is humility - don't brag, demure praise. Unfortunately, this isn't something you can really do in Hollywood if you want to succeed. Shrinking violets aren't going to get the job or the money. When I took my first screenwriting class, I remember being constantly surprised and disgusted at how often the instructor worked his resume or name-drops into every conversation. But in hindsight, I forgive the poor bastard for his insecurity about folks knowing that he had value in the system. It's not like he could wear a uniform with ranks and medals to tell his story for him.
Best thing about serving in the military before coming? Besides general life experience that money can't buy, there's a long precedent of military service as an antecedent for great writing. There are some extraordinary vets creating TV shows and movies right now including Rod Lurie who created of Commander in Chief and wrote/directed The Contender. There's also Don Bellisario, who created the most watched TV show in the world right now, NCIS. There are many inspiring literary examples - Joseph Heller, James Salter, Heinlein, Pynchon, Tolstoy - and who can forget actor, writer and director, Clint Eastwood. (Bet that's the first sentence ever to include both Tolstoy and Eastwood.)
Worst thing about serving in the military before coming to Hollywood? Lost time. Because you come to the party late, there's less margin for error before aging out. You come to Hollywood without the network of friends who are producers or executives who can help you find work. And you can't just hang out and drink yourself around town when you should be honing your craft - hopefully getting good.
One of the draws of navy life is the romance - the chance to roam into the back corners of the earth under the auspice of duty and explore the tattered margins of civilization - and maybe get a glimpse of worlds about which most people know nothing. As an old British merchant seaman told me in Bermuda when I was midshipman - your job [as a young person] is to fill your boots up with life so that you have something to think about in the rocking chair when you're old. I have tried to do as the old sailor told me to do. I came back with some stories and should I get really lucky, I'll have the chance to write 'em all - and shoot some of them. Look out for shows/films about U.N. Peacekeepers in the Sahara, or expats in Asia and Europe, or sailboat racing in New England or even one about the banalities of staff work at the HQ of the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii.
I'll wrap this for now with some gratefulness. I'm glad to be here and I'm definitely one of the lucky ones who have made it to the beach. In the meantime, enjoy The Last Ship and stay tuned for future installments of High Seas to Hollywood.
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Zhenya Gershman Asks: What if Art Brings Our Ancestors to Life
by Zhenya Gershman, Artist & Art Historian, Co-Founder, Project AWE
What if the body is turned into a canvas?
What if a painting is made on the skin?
What if ancestors are made visible portrayed directly on their relative?
What if the portrait is animated by the movement of the body?
Skin-4, short film by Carlos Hurtado
SKIN-4 is a powerful collaboration between the renowned painter Zhenya Gershman, performance artist Annabel Simma, photographer Michele Mattei, and Oscar nominated filmmaker Carlos A. Hurtado, blurring the accepted boundary between past and present, living and dead, still and animate, 'me' and 'us'.
"Freedom of expression with a focus that can touch those who carry the song and the visual memories of immigrant ancestry."
-- M A Greenstein
image credit: Michelle Mattei Photography painted by Zhenya Gershman
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Surface to Air : Los Angeles Artists of the 60s (VIDEO)
Genevieve Day, Director of Kayne Griffin Corcoran. Photo by EMS.
On Tuesday, May 27, 2014 I had the great opportunity to film "Surface to Air: Los Angeles Artists of the '60s and the Materials that they used." The film was shot at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles with a narrative by Genevieve Day. Curated by Robert Dean, the film features the artwork in the exhibition as part of my ongoing Take 1 Art Film Series. I approached KGC because of the influence that all the artists in the exhibition have influenced many of the artists that I am documenting today throughout Southern California.
These films provide me an education as a filmmaker to better understand the materials and process that are still celebrated among the new generations of California artists, which influence has spread throughout art cultures around the world. Below is my 9-minute film, a length appropriate for the scale of this exhibition.
Surface To Air exhibition at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. Photo by EMS.
Kayne Griffin Corcoran exhibited Surface to Air: Los Angeles Artists of the '60s and the Materials that they used, curated by Robert Dean. Artists in the exhibition include Peter Alexander, Hobie Alter, Kenneth Anger, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Ron Cooper, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Ken Price, Ed Roth and Ed Ruscha. These artists shared techniques and common processes who produced art throughout the 1960s. Below are a few images of the artwork in the exhibition.
Billy Al Bengston, Busby, 1963
Oil, polymer and lacquer on masonite
80 x 60 inches
Photo Credit: Kayne Griffin Corcoran
Courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
Larry Bell, Untitled, 1962
Mirrored glass and acrylic on canvas
52 7/8 x 66 1/8 x 2 7/8 inches
Photo Credit: Brian Forrest
Courtesy of Larry Bell and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1966-67
Sprayed acrylic lacquer on shaped aluminum
Diameter: 48 inches
Photo Credit: Brian Forrest
Courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
Craig Kauffman, Untitled, 1966
Acrylic on vacuum formed colored plastic
55 1/2 x 31 x 6 inches
Photo Credit: Brian Forrest
Courtesy of the Estate of Craig Kauffman and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
John McCracken, Untitled, 1972
Polyester resin, fiberglass and wood
98 1/2 x 18 x 1 5/8 inches
Photo Credit: Brian Forrest
Courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
This article is part of an ongoing photojournalism survey of art exhibition openings in SoCal titled EMS N(art)rative. Through my lens I document a photographic essay or visual "N(art)rative" that captures the happenings, personalities, collectors, gallerists, artists, and the art itself; all elements that form the richly varied and textured fabric of the SoCal art world. This reconnaissance offers a unique view for serious art world players to obtain news and information on the current pulse of what's in the now, yet capturing timeless indelible images for posterity and legacy. Here is EMS N(art)rative Fourteen.
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Philly's Whacky Reception Groupies
If you've ever been to an event in Center City that included a reception, such as opening night at the theater or an art gallery, you know how much fun they can be. Receptions range from high to low, meaning that some are grander than others. Consider what happens at the city's art galleries on First Friday, when hundreds of people crowd the streets of Old City and go from gallery to gallery in search of free libations, edibles and a little bit of art. First Friday, of course, used to be more popular than it is today. The change occurred when art gallery owners realized that the streams of visitors were eating and drinking them out of house and home. First Friday in Old City today is only half the celebration it was five years ago. How can a struggling art gallery dispense wine to hundreds of people who visit just to get drunk?
A couple of art galleries come to mind: At the James Oliver Gallery you get all the fine wine or beer you can handle even if the food is sparse. At The Print Center on Latimer Street, guests and Print Club members are always on a perpetual fast; wine is carefully measured and poured by one designated gallery rep which often results in a long wine line that snakes around the gallery. Those intending to get tipsy or smashed had better head elsewhere. Consider yourself lucky if you find a pretzel or a chip at a Print Center reception. (This has been a point of contention among Print Center members for years).
Opening night fanfare for new plays in Center City theaters (or Fishtown theaters like Walking Fish, for that matter) has not changed much over the years. One can still see a complete play and enjoy small or large plate Hors d'oeuvres and cocktails afterwards-- at no cost. Although seeing the play should be the theater lover's primary interest, opening night receptions are a nice way to bring people together for conversation and camaraderie. (True theater lovers, however, will attend opening night with or without a reception). Still, the scope and quality of theater receptions vary. Play and Players on Delancey Street serves up fabulous food but the theater's small, crowded cash bar will keep you in waiting in line forever. If you like lines and hailing bartenders as you would hail a taxi, then you will be in your glory at Plays and Players.
The Suzanne Roberts Theater (The Theater Alliance) recently scaled back their opening night receptions. Before the change, a lavish food spread was arranged in the middle of the theater's upstairs hall, so that opening night guests could move around the Hors d'oeuvres table like goldfish swimming in circles. Unfortunately, economic cut backs necessitated getting a different caterer who then "shrunk" the size of the food table and moved it against a row of windows, a placement that prohibits "round the clock" circulation. Long reception food lines are now common at the Roberts Theater on opening nights, something that was not the case before.
At the Wilma Theater there have been no such cutbacks. Two lavish food buffet tables (hot and cold) are laid out in the lobby, and pre-poured glasses of red and white wine are arranged in long rows on a special table. Wilma receptions are a staple, like classic Coke. Or fig newtons.
There are people who frequent receptions who could care less about the play, lecture or exhibited art. These infamous but artful freeloaders cover the waterfront in terms of demographics: I was first exposed to this phenomenon years ago when I spotted old ladies at Wilma receptions opening their pocket books and packing them with napkin-covered hors d'oeuvres. You can still see this from time to time. The old ladies move fast and the tendency, I think, is for witnesses to excuse them with the thought: "The poor dears need food. They must be on fixed incomes."
Careerist freeloaders find their way into every free reception in the city. Ordinarily, receptions are for members, press, their friends, and to people who RSVP, but some folks have a genius for putting their names on lists or even slipping into events when the gatekeepers are not looking, like 40 minutes into a happening.
Recently I witnessed a freeloader hijacking after a long academic lecture on the brain and violent criminal behavior. This took place at a venerable city institution where the author of the study gave a lecture to a tidy 40 or 50 people, and ended his talk with an extensive Q and A session. Just as the Q and A was ending, I heard a commotion near the reception hall where a generous open bar and a spread of culinary delights lay waiting. Two people who did not attend the lecture, or who arrived very late for it, were already in the hall plating large helpings of sushi, steak, chicken, veggies and other delicious edibles.
The two guests were sloppily dressed, and their method of digging into the food had a frantic "pile it on fast" quality. I think I'm as compassionate as most when it comes to feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, but does this have to extend to "private" lecture receptions at venerable city institutions? The two people in question, a man and a woman, can in fact, be seen diving into reception buffets all over town. "Dive' as in a sloppy belly flop that makes a big splash.
It didn't help matters any when a friend of mine said that one of the reception hijackers has an awful habit of pouring white wine over your head if he doesn't like what you say, or if you are talking too long to somebody he really, really wants to speak to.
But it's not always uncouth people who create reception mayhem. Sometimes, educated, articulate and very nice people ignore reception etiquette when they fall prey to certain behaviors.
An acquaintance, XY, for instance, is a sort of reception groupie, but at least he attends the full play, lecture or reading in question, and even contributes something in the way of commentary if there's a Q and A. XY, unfortunately, has a problem with drinking. Rather than drinking wine one glass at a time in the manner of say, G.K. Chesterton, his habit is to stockpile drinks at his table so that anybody coming along would see four or five extra glasses of wine near his place setting. He does this, he says, because he never knows when they are going to cut off the free bar. He sees it as a kind of insurance. "Besides," he told me, "I don't like to gulp my wine or drink fast. I like to sip. And if I sip slowly with just one available glass to my name, too much time will pass before I will need another glass. I don't want to be left high and dry."
This has gotten him into trouble with reception organizers and caterers (especially bartenders). At a recent U or Arts event, I saw XY with four red wines all lined up in a row as the catering company was beginning to clean up. "Where did you get all the extra wine?" I asked him, not realizing that he had a problem with stockpiling. Although XY was able to consume his stockpile before leaving the event, I began to get worried when he began to covet a lone, open bottle of red wine on the bar. He began talking about bringing the open bottle to his table because he was sure it had been part of the free reception. "It's up for grabs," he said.
Receptions in the City of Philadelphia, then, have become their own kind of theater, with plots and plot twists, and even blatant "over your head" wine baptisms.
You have to see it to believe it.
A couple of art galleries come to mind: At the James Oliver Gallery you get all the fine wine or beer you can handle even if the food is sparse. At The Print Center on Latimer Street, guests and Print Club members are always on a perpetual fast; wine is carefully measured and poured by one designated gallery rep which often results in a long wine line that snakes around the gallery. Those intending to get tipsy or smashed had better head elsewhere. Consider yourself lucky if you find a pretzel or a chip at a Print Center reception. (This has been a point of contention among Print Center members for years).
Opening night fanfare for new plays in Center City theaters (or Fishtown theaters like Walking Fish, for that matter) has not changed much over the years. One can still see a complete play and enjoy small or large plate Hors d'oeuvres and cocktails afterwards-- at no cost. Although seeing the play should be the theater lover's primary interest, opening night receptions are a nice way to bring people together for conversation and camaraderie. (True theater lovers, however, will attend opening night with or without a reception). Still, the scope and quality of theater receptions vary. Play and Players on Delancey Street serves up fabulous food but the theater's small, crowded cash bar will keep you in waiting in line forever. If you like lines and hailing bartenders as you would hail a taxi, then you will be in your glory at Plays and Players.
The Suzanne Roberts Theater (The Theater Alliance) recently scaled back their opening night receptions. Before the change, a lavish food spread was arranged in the middle of the theater's upstairs hall, so that opening night guests could move around the Hors d'oeuvres table like goldfish swimming in circles. Unfortunately, economic cut backs necessitated getting a different caterer who then "shrunk" the size of the food table and moved it against a row of windows, a placement that prohibits "round the clock" circulation. Long reception food lines are now common at the Roberts Theater on opening nights, something that was not the case before.
At the Wilma Theater there have been no such cutbacks. Two lavish food buffet tables (hot and cold) are laid out in the lobby, and pre-poured glasses of red and white wine are arranged in long rows on a special table. Wilma receptions are a staple, like classic Coke. Or fig newtons.
There are people who frequent receptions who could care less about the play, lecture or exhibited art. These infamous but artful freeloaders cover the waterfront in terms of demographics: I was first exposed to this phenomenon years ago when I spotted old ladies at Wilma receptions opening their pocket books and packing them with napkin-covered hors d'oeuvres. You can still see this from time to time. The old ladies move fast and the tendency, I think, is for witnesses to excuse them with the thought: "The poor dears need food. They must be on fixed incomes."
Careerist freeloaders find their way into every free reception in the city. Ordinarily, receptions are for members, press, their friends, and to people who RSVP, but some folks have a genius for putting their names on lists or even slipping into events when the gatekeepers are not looking, like 40 minutes into a happening.
Recently I witnessed a freeloader hijacking after a long academic lecture on the brain and violent criminal behavior. This took place at a venerable city institution where the author of the study gave a lecture to a tidy 40 or 50 people, and ended his talk with an extensive Q and A session. Just as the Q and A was ending, I heard a commotion near the reception hall where a generous open bar and a spread of culinary delights lay waiting. Two people who did not attend the lecture, or who arrived very late for it, were already in the hall plating large helpings of sushi, steak, chicken, veggies and other delicious edibles.
The two guests were sloppily dressed, and their method of digging into the food had a frantic "pile it on fast" quality. I think I'm as compassionate as most when it comes to feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, but does this have to extend to "private" lecture receptions at venerable city institutions? The two people in question, a man and a woman, can in fact, be seen diving into reception buffets all over town. "Dive' as in a sloppy belly flop that makes a big splash.
It didn't help matters any when a friend of mine said that one of the reception hijackers has an awful habit of pouring white wine over your head if he doesn't like what you say, or if you are talking too long to somebody he really, really wants to speak to.
But it's not always uncouth people who create reception mayhem. Sometimes, educated, articulate and very nice people ignore reception etiquette when they fall prey to certain behaviors.
An acquaintance, XY, for instance, is a sort of reception groupie, but at least he attends the full play, lecture or reading in question, and even contributes something in the way of commentary if there's a Q and A. XY, unfortunately, has a problem with drinking. Rather than drinking wine one glass at a time in the manner of say, G.K. Chesterton, his habit is to stockpile drinks at his table so that anybody coming along would see four or five extra glasses of wine near his place setting. He does this, he says, because he never knows when they are going to cut off the free bar. He sees it as a kind of insurance. "Besides," he told me, "I don't like to gulp my wine or drink fast. I like to sip. And if I sip slowly with just one available glass to my name, too much time will pass before I will need another glass. I don't want to be left high and dry."
This has gotten him into trouble with reception organizers and caterers (especially bartenders). At a recent U or Arts event, I saw XY with four red wines all lined up in a row as the catering company was beginning to clean up. "Where did you get all the extra wine?" I asked him, not realizing that he had a problem with stockpiling. Although XY was able to consume his stockpile before leaving the event, I began to get worried when he began to covet a lone, open bottle of red wine on the bar. He began talking about bringing the open bottle to his table because he was sure it had been part of the free reception. "It's up for grabs," he said.
Receptions in the City of Philadelphia, then, have become their own kind of theater, with plots and plot twists, and even blatant "over your head" wine baptisms.
You have to see it to believe it.
↧
↧
From Van Gogh to Kandinsky
Last week, I was supposed to travel to Holland to pay my respects to the Girl with the Pearl Earring. This famous painting by Vermeer reclaimed its place of honor in the Mauritshuis Museum in Hague after the museum reopened following a few years of renovation. But because of the most annoying, bureaucratic reason, my trip was abruptly cancelled at the last minute. I was not allowed to board the plane because my passport, unfortunately, had an expiration date only a month and a half from my intended date of departure. However, the official rule for travel to most European countries is that passports MUST BE VALID FOR AT LEAST THREE MONTHS. So, my friends, imagine how frustrated I was. But I decided to make sense out of this by sharing my embarrassing experience with you and warning you... Please, look at your passport and make sure that it is valid for at least three months before you embark on any foreign trips.
But nevermind this misfortune. Let's talk about an amazing, groundbreaking exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at LACMA: Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky. Traditionally, Expressionism has been considered a predominantly German movement of the early 20th century, but this sprawling exhibition makes a convincing argument that Expressionism was "born from a shared advance toward modernism among French and German artists."
Dramatically installed in galleries painted in blacks and deep blues, the works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin almost leap off the walls. Even now, more than a century later, these great works retain their power to surprise, to energize, and to challenge our eye. Just imagine the effect of such Post-Impressionist paintings on German art in the early 1900's, achieved through a cosmopolitan "network of collectors, critics, and art lovers."
It's intriguing that the first serious collectors of late 19th and early 20th century French art were Germans and Russians. Looking at the early Kandinsky painting from 1913, you see him transforming the traditional landscape into an abstract composition of saturated colors and exploding shapes. At this point in his career, Kandinsky already had numerous experiences seeing works by both French and German artists.
This traveling exhibition, which started in Zürich and, after its Los Angeles run, will go to Montreal, is comprised of over 90 paintings and 45 works on paper. Most of them are on loan from major American and European museums.
My absolute favorite is the portrait of a female singer in a Paris cabaret painted by Kees van Dongen. The dangerous beauty in his painting is dressed to kill and, considering the over-saturated colors and her dramatic posture --mouth open wide and hand pressed to breast --one can almost hear a high note, close to a scream, soaring over her audience. There is no surprise that this powerful image was chosen for the cover of the exhibition catalogue.
I am very much in debt to this Dutch-born artist, whose artistic life was mostly shaped by his experience living in France. There are a couple of his early 20th century paintings in the collection at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
I remember going to the Hermitage on my own since I was about 15 or 16 years old. My favorites were galleries devoted to Greek and Roman art, and galleries full of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish paintings.
One day, going through the labyrinth of hundreds of museum galleries, I found myself in the far corner of the Winter Palace, amidst a collection of late 19th and early 20th century French paintings. To this day, I remember how shocked I was, staring at what felt like a scandalous image of a Can-can dancer with her skirt lifted up in a risqué flurry of red and orange ruffles. The brushstrokes were as rough and wild as the image itself. It was the first time in my life that I was so overwhelmed by the power of a painting. You've probably already guessed at this point that the name of the artist was Kees van Dongen. I owe him a great deal for initiating me into the rebellious, radical art of the 20th century.
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.
↧
ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW: Book Review
Nathaniel Rich has a fine sense of the apocalyptic absurd--its comical as well as its dark side. Odds Against Tomorrow sets us in the not-so-distant future, in a world where the threat of global climate change has become all too real. His hero, Mitchell Zukor, is a professional worrier, a paranoid obsessive whose mathematical genius multiplies every possible gloomy scenario to its extreme. His counterpoint is his idealized love interest, one Elsa Brunner, a young woman with a heart condition that threatens to take her life at any moment, but who dares to challenge this danger by founding a remote commune far from the reach of medical attention. The risk she takes is, for Mitchell, at once exemplary and incomprehensible...
From college, our fear-driven hero drifts with all the innocence of a Candide--I thought a lot about Voltaire's celebrated literary joust with philosophical optimism as I read this book--into the field of corporate risk management, where he soon discovers that vast profits are to be made from the exploitation of fear, and where he is valued precisely for his skill in making dire projections of disasters to come--including the one that broods over the first part of the story and comes to fruition in the second. I won't spoil it for others who read the book, but suffice it to say that Rich's descriptions of the cataclysmic results of the neglected signs of climate change are more powerfully persuasive than most of the disaster movies with which we entertain ourselves each summer. I can't help but mention that the conclusion to all this mayhem reminds me, once again, of Voltaire's final injunction in Candide: il faut cultiver son jardin--we must cultivate our garden; or, more broadly, we need to take care of our own affairs.
In this gripping, post-Hurricane Sandy parable for our times, Rich confronts us with the truly frightening prospect of what awaits us in consequence of our failure to address the issue of climate change. And yet his touch is light, essentially comedic. His nightmare scenario makes a mockery our gullibility, our ovine submission to the profit-motivated will of powerful corporate interests, our abject refusal to move beyond denial into action. At the same time, his Mitchell is an Everyman--an Every American, perhaps--a quasi-innocent duped by the dual forces of his own greed and fear into actions that inevitably plunge his world into the disaster that awaits it.
"Odds Against Tomorrow" is an excellent, entertaining romp through much that ails our present-day America.
From college, our fear-driven hero drifts with all the innocence of a Candide--I thought a lot about Voltaire's celebrated literary joust with philosophical optimism as I read this book--into the field of corporate risk management, where he soon discovers that vast profits are to be made from the exploitation of fear, and where he is valued precisely for his skill in making dire projections of disasters to come--including the one that broods over the first part of the story and comes to fruition in the second. I won't spoil it for others who read the book, but suffice it to say that Rich's descriptions of the cataclysmic results of the neglected signs of climate change are more powerfully persuasive than most of the disaster movies with which we entertain ourselves each summer. I can't help but mention that the conclusion to all this mayhem reminds me, once again, of Voltaire's final injunction in Candide: il faut cultiver son jardin--we must cultivate our garden; or, more broadly, we need to take care of our own affairs.
In this gripping, post-Hurricane Sandy parable for our times, Rich confronts us with the truly frightening prospect of what awaits us in consequence of our failure to address the issue of climate change. And yet his touch is light, essentially comedic. His nightmare scenario makes a mockery our gullibility, our ovine submission to the profit-motivated will of powerful corporate interests, our abject refusal to move beyond denial into action. At the same time, his Mitchell is an Everyman--an Every American, perhaps--a quasi-innocent duped by the dual forces of his own greed and fear into actions that inevitably plunge his world into the disaster that awaits it.
"Odds Against Tomorrow" is an excellent, entertaining romp through much that ails our present-day America.
↧
'Welling Court' 2014, A Grassroots Mural Event Turns 5 in Queens
When the revered graffiti holy place named 5Pointz in Queens, New York was buffed and slated officially for demolition last fall the collective response of the graffiti/street art fan base and community was horror and lament. Nonetheless, community persists, and art in the streets is stronger than ever in many cities, including right here in Queens which has played host to an ever growing grassroots exhibition on the walls for five years called "Welling Court."
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetarticysotwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Icy & Sot (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Imagined and produced by two advocates of creativity in the public sphere and run on a shoe-string budget, "Welling Court" is a series of 100+ walls throughout this largely working class neighborhood that feels like it perhaps has been overlooked by the rest of the city. With a mix of some of New York's newest immigrants and families, the modest residential/light manufacturing neighborhood has had a eye-jolting injection of spirit and free art every summer since 2009.
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartvengrwkwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Veng RWK (photo © Jaime Rojo)
We look forward to this annual event for a number of reasons, among them: the unpretentious spirit of community creativity at work as tens of artist straddle ladders and stepstools side by side painting walls, the friendly inquisitive neighbors who hang out and discuss the art and prepare a variety of foods to share on folding tables in the middle of the street, and the unbridled enthusiasm of the kids who race through the neighborhood on foot, bicycle, scooter, even grocery cart.
Unsponsored by brands and run by community elbow grease, "Welling Court" brings lots of Street Art / graffiti / public art enthusiasts and almost no police presence or crime for that matter. Breaking their own record this June at 127 painted walls, organizers Garrison and Alison Buxton help hook up the opportunity and artists are happy to take advantage of it. Here is just a relatively small selection of images taken by photographer Jaime Rojo at "Welling Court" 2014.
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartrhakwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Fresh from graduation and walking in front of a RHAK gate. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartjoeiuratorubinwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Joe Iurato and Rubin collaboration. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartrrobotswellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
R.Robots (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartsubwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Sub (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartkaffeinewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web1.jpg]()
Kaffeine at work. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartkaffeinewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web2.jpg]()
Kaffeine (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetarttwoflywellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Twofly (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartcernwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Cern (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartlmnopiwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
LMNOPI at work. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartmrcwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
MRC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartdenismcnettjohnahearnwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
John Ahearn temporary installation with a Dennis McNett wheat paste from last year as a background. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartjohnahearnwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web1.jpg]()
John Ahearn working on the details of the live casting he did of Roger Smith. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartjohnahearnwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web2.jpg]()
John Ahearn. More to be done with this Roger Smith piece. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartpyramidoraclewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Pyramid Oracle at work. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartgreglamarchewanetrapwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Gregg Lamarche, Wane and Trap (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartnotartwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Not Art (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartcekiswellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Cekis (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartcakeryanseslowwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Cake and Ryan Seslow collaboration. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartbishop203flyingfortresswellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Bishop203 with an old Flying Fortress in the middle gate. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartellisgabelincolnjosephmeloywellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Ellis G, Joseph Meloy and Abe Lincoln collaboration. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartestebandelvallewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Esteban Del Valle (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartalicemizrachiwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Alice Mizrachi (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartprvrtwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
PRVRT (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartgreglamarchewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Gregg Lamarche (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartdamienmitchellwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web1.jpg]()
Damien Mitchell at work. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartdamienmitchellwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web2.jpg]()
Damien Mitchell (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartchristophercardinalewellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Christopher Cardinale (photo © Jaime Rojo)
![2014-06-24-brooklynstreetartwellingcourtjaimerojo062014web.jpg]()
Fun! Fun! Fun! (photo © Jaime Rojo)
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer's name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>
This article is also posted on Brooklyn Street Art.
Read all posts by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo on The Huffington Post HERE.
See new photos and read scintillating interviews every day on BrooklynStreetArt.com
Follow us on Instagram @bkstreetart
See our TUMBLR page
Follow us on TWITTER @bkstreetart
Imagined and produced by two advocates of creativity in the public sphere and run on a shoe-string budget, "Welling Court" is a series of 100+ walls throughout this largely working class neighborhood that feels like it perhaps has been overlooked by the rest of the city. With a mix of some of New York's newest immigrants and families, the modest residential/light manufacturing neighborhood has had a eye-jolting injection of spirit and free art every summer since 2009.
We look forward to this annual event for a number of reasons, among them: the unpretentious spirit of community creativity at work as tens of artist straddle ladders and stepstools side by side painting walls, the friendly inquisitive neighbors who hang out and discuss the art and prepare a variety of foods to share on folding tables in the middle of the street, and the unbridled enthusiasm of the kids who race through the neighborhood on foot, bicycle, scooter, even grocery cart.
Unsponsored by brands and run by community elbow grease, "Welling Court" brings lots of Street Art / graffiti / public art enthusiasts and almost no police presence or crime for that matter. Breaking their own record this June at 127 painted walls, organizers Garrison and Alison Buxton help hook up the opportunity and artists are happy to take advantage of it. Here is just a relatively small selection of images taken by photographer Jaime Rojo at "Welling Court" 2014.
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer's name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><>
This article is also posted on Brooklyn Street Art.
Read all posts by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo on The Huffington Post HERE.
See new photos and read scintillating interviews every day on BrooklynStreetArt.com
Follow us on Instagram @bkstreetart
See our TUMBLR page
Follow us on TWITTER @bkstreetart
↧
Of Squats, Near-Squats and After-Squats
Pockets of Artistic Creativity in Paris
Gaspard Delanoe is a fighter -- his passion evident as he walks me through 59 Rivoli, a six-story commercial building in Paris's First Arrondissement. Empty for eight years, the derelict building was occupied by Delanoe and his artist comrades some 15 years ago when they first turned it into an illegal squat and, subsequently, convinced Paris officials to transform the building into a legal after-squat. It is a victory, Delanoe explained, that is constantly being tested by the city.
Delanoe walks me through the squat's history, round by round. "We came in the place through a broken window at night," he said, explaining how he and two comrades entered the building. He nods in a kind of self-recognition, acknowledging their bravery. Before he continues, however, he makes sure that I understand the philosophy behind his activism:
Once Credit Lyonnais, the bank which owned the building (and 100 others) went bankrupt, the State of France took it over and sued the squatters for possession. During an eight-month delay in the legal process, Delanoe won the support of Bertrand Delanoe (no relation), a left-wing candidate for mayor, who promised to save the squat if he got elected. No one thought he would win but, in an upset, he did. Delanoe was quick to take him up on the promise to save the whole project. The City of Paris agreed to buy the building from the State for 4.6 million Euros, about $6.3 million today. It was a big building but it was "in terrible condition. It was raining in everywhere and desperately in need of renovation."
Over the next three years, from 2006-2009, the city spent 4.1 million Euros ($5.6 million), almost as much as the purchase price, to renovate the building. This included installing an elevator and a second staircase. "There was lots of controversy over the expenditure," Delanoe said. "The right wingers complained, 'Why is the city spending 9 million Euros to legalize these squatters?'"
The city said that they would consider legalizing the space but only as studios and workshops. There was to be no living there. "We said why separate art from life?" There was disagreement among the 30 artists inside the group, 20 of them permanent members who could stay as long as they wanted, and 10 who had six-month residencies. "Some said, 'Let's do it. It's half but better half than nothing.' Others said, 'No, its better to be kicked out than to accept this compromise.'" In the end, the group voted, with a majority of 22 accepting the three-year lease, which ran from 2009-2012.
Before they signed their current lease (2012-2015), the city wanted them to cut the number of permanent artists from 20 to 15. The idea was to have more temporary artists with six-month residencies. "We compromised on 17," said Delanoe, who explained that they were able to do so because they still held the majority vote on the five-person committee which selected the artists -- comprised of one person from the city and four from their group.
Costs for artists are minimal, 130 Euros per month for a studio, for both permanent and visiting artists. Rue Rivoli pays for the electric, for security, and for an accountant which adds up to about 65,000 Euros per year -- a substantial sum for the after-squat.
A European paper company, Camson, came to the rescue, sponsoring an artist competition each year and generating 10,000 Euros in revenue for the collective. But, Delanoe stressed, "We don't want to be a 'space.'" The idea is to keep things modest. Artists pay 100 Euros a week to show in their gallery. Permanent artists can have at most one show a year in the gallery. "We want to remain a collective," Delanoe said.
Studios at 59 Rivoli are very small, about 10 square meters or 90 square feet, and permanent artists tend to stay for two to five years, although five of the original squatters are still there after nearly 15 years.
Aside from the tug-of-war over permanent vs. temporary artists in residence, there is also the tension over selling art in the building. The city mandates that artists cannot sell their art in the building so they don't show prices. Artists keep their own private little sheets of prices which are shown discretely to visitors. All transactions take place outside the building.
"It's total hypocrisy," Delanoe said. "They fear that if they gave us the right to sell here, we would be a commercial space, in competition with the galleries." Unlike other artist squats like Les Frigos which is open only three or four days a year, 59 Rivoli is open from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily and, according to their agreement with the city, artists are supposed to be at the studios regularly. "We are located in the heart of Paris, on the biggest metro line at the Chatelet Station," Delanoe added, stopping to greet a tourist from Florida who was visiting 59 Rivoli for the third time. She is one of many. According to a ministry of culture study, more than 40,000 visitors tour 59 Rivoli each year.
Delanoe has his eyes on Lisbon, a capital city which after its recent economic crisis has hundreds of empty buildings that are city and state owned. "We wrote and said that we would like to send a bunch of artists there but so far they have not answered."
Julien de Casabianca-Caumer is a seasoned squatter. Now occupying his second squat in a former water tower at 111 Rue St.-Honore in the First Arrondissement, a building that was built to serve the Palais Royale in 1776, he received his training in the trenches some 12 years earlier in 59 Rivoli. Within seconds of talking to him, it is apparent that Caumer is more of a diplomat than a fighter, at least these days, with his global mission for The Laboratory of Creation (Labo) of an international network of art residencies and creative venues.
Compared to 59 Rivoli, the tower building, which also served as the embassy of Honduras in the 1960s, is small, with only 15 artists occupying its six stories and basement. Caumer is positive about his relationship with the City of Paris. "The city recognized our presence from the start," he said. "They thought that we were doing a good job."
So, without hesitation, Caumer signed a contract in 2005, making the building the first illegal squat to become legal studio space. Artists, however, were not allowed to live there. When asked if artists broke the rules and lived there, Caumer said that officially they did not do so. Respecting the city's decision that the collective not just benefit a few, they rotate the artists-in-residence. On average, artists stay six months to two years.
In addition to the studios, the building contains a ground-floor gallery, where Entre les cailloux by Jean-Michel Alberola was on exhibit from May 14 to June 12. Paintings by Merce Lopez (Labo Barcelona) and Pascale Forget (Labo Paris) are currently up until June 30, to be followed by a collective exhibition of all Labo artists in July and August.
A filmmaker whose 2010 feature film Passing By was filmed in 44 cities in 22 countries in Europe, without a script or actor or staging, Caumer was just back from South Dakota where he will be collaborating with Dominique Barneaud, a well-known French producer, on a new feature film.
Caumer directs me to the Laboratory of Creation's website and to their network of spaces in Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, the French countryside, and Sicily. Like Paris, he said, "We all have the same spirit." He recently opened another Labo, one block away from the water tower at 37 Rue de Richelieu, in a monument with a sculpture in honor of Moliere, a few meters from The Comedy Francaise.
So, for example, in Sicily, two months rental of their space enables them to pay for the rest of the year for artist residencies. Artists pay only one Euro per day to be in the St.-Honore building.
Caumer praises the City of Paris and says that there are now 10 legal or ex-illegal after-squats in the city. "The problem in Paris is almost solved," he said, adding that "Ten years ago artists wanted space. Now, places need artists."
Solved for some people, but not everyone as a visit to Hangar 56, a four-month old squat reveals. When we met in May, members of the group were about to go to court for the third time. Mostly an activity and gathering place, this squat has chosen to focus on citizen organizations and nonprofits, although there are some artists in the building. Sandy (real name Henri Murden) tells me that there is a big demand for space in the area of social entrepreneurship, especially for cultural audiences. Many of the issues raised by 59 Rivoli artists are now being reviewed by newer squatters in this larger context.
The building presently includes a screening room, a stage, a gallery space for street art, an open computer repair shop occupied by a hacker, a clothing exchange, a communal kitchen, and at least one studio for a painter, Gauthier Schoonover, who "likes being a minority in the building." Schoonover said that there is a real give and take over the question of space in the squat and that things can change easily. He points to a stack of mattresses in his studio. "I moved them because they were in my way," he said, "but the next day they moved them back."
As I leave, I stop to chat with a group busy making signs for an upcoming demonstration against privatization by the radical French National Collective. One of them gives me a handmade sign, a cutout of a yellow and brown bee, writing her name Louise and phone number on the back. "We have a big enemy," she said.
All slideshow photos by Shael Shapiro.
Gaspard Delanoe is a fighter -- his passion evident as he walks me through 59 Rivoli, a six-story commercial building in Paris's First Arrondissement. Empty for eight years, the derelict building was occupied by Delanoe and his artist comrades some 15 years ago when they first turned it into an illegal squat and, subsequently, convinced Paris officials to transform the building into a legal after-squat. It is a victory, Delanoe explained, that is constantly being tested by the city.
Delanoe walks me through the squat's history, round by round. "We came in the place through a broken window at night," he said, explaining how he and two comrades entered the building. He nods in a kind of self-recognition, acknowledging their bravery. Before he continues, however, he makes sure that I understand the philosophy behind his activism:
Paris has museums and high-class galleries," he said, adding that, "We represent something that is different. Not a museum. Not a gallery. Not anything to do with money. People will see art in our workshops -- it is a third choice.
Once Credit Lyonnais, the bank which owned the building (and 100 others) went bankrupt, the State of France took it over and sued the squatters for possession. During an eight-month delay in the legal process, Delanoe won the support of Bertrand Delanoe (no relation), a left-wing candidate for mayor, who promised to save the squat if he got elected. No one thought he would win but, in an upset, he did. Delanoe was quick to take him up on the promise to save the whole project. The City of Paris agreed to buy the building from the State for 4.6 million Euros, about $6.3 million today. It was a big building but it was "in terrible condition. It was raining in everywhere and desperately in need of renovation."
Over the next three years, from 2006-2009, the city spent 4.1 million Euros ($5.6 million), almost as much as the purchase price, to renovate the building. This included installing an elevator and a second staircase. "There was lots of controversy over the expenditure," Delanoe said. "The right wingers complained, 'Why is the city spending 9 million Euros to legalize these squatters?'"
The city said that they would consider legalizing the space but only as studios and workshops. There was to be no living there. "We said why separate art from life?" There was disagreement among the 30 artists inside the group, 20 of them permanent members who could stay as long as they wanted, and 10 who had six-month residencies. "Some said, 'Let's do it. It's half but better half than nothing.' Others said, 'No, its better to be kicked out than to accept this compromise.'" In the end, the group voted, with a majority of 22 accepting the three-year lease, which ran from 2009-2012.
Before they signed their current lease (2012-2015), the city wanted them to cut the number of permanent artists from 20 to 15. The idea was to have more temporary artists with six-month residencies. "We compromised on 17," said Delanoe, who explained that they were able to do so because they still held the majority vote on the five-person committee which selected the artists -- comprised of one person from the city and four from their group.
Costs for artists are minimal, 130 Euros per month for a studio, for both permanent and visiting artists. Rue Rivoli pays for the electric, for security, and for an accountant which adds up to about 65,000 Euros per year -- a substantial sum for the after-squat.
A European paper company, Camson, came to the rescue, sponsoring an artist competition each year and generating 10,000 Euros in revenue for the collective. But, Delanoe stressed, "We don't want to be a 'space.'" The idea is to keep things modest. Artists pay 100 Euros a week to show in their gallery. Permanent artists can have at most one show a year in the gallery. "We want to remain a collective," Delanoe said.
Studios at 59 Rivoli are very small, about 10 square meters or 90 square feet, and permanent artists tend to stay for two to five years, although five of the original squatters are still there after nearly 15 years.
Aside from the tug-of-war over permanent vs. temporary artists in residence, there is also the tension over selling art in the building. The city mandates that artists cannot sell their art in the building so they don't show prices. Artists keep their own private little sheets of prices which are shown discretely to visitors. All transactions take place outside the building.
"It's total hypocrisy," Delanoe said. "They fear that if they gave us the right to sell here, we would be a commercial space, in competition with the galleries." Unlike other artist squats like Les Frigos which is open only three or four days a year, 59 Rivoli is open from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily and, according to their agreement with the city, artists are supposed to be at the studios regularly. "We are located in the heart of Paris, on the biggest metro line at the Chatelet Station," Delanoe added, stopping to greet a tourist from Florida who was visiting 59 Rivoli for the third time. She is one of many. According to a ministry of culture study, more than 40,000 visitors tour 59 Rivoli each year.
Delanoe has his eyes on Lisbon, a capital city which after its recent economic crisis has hundreds of empty buildings that are city and state owned. "We wrote and said that we would like to send a bunch of artists there but so far they have not answered."
Julien de Casabianca-Caumer is a seasoned squatter. Now occupying his second squat in a former water tower at 111 Rue St.-Honore in the First Arrondissement, a building that was built to serve the Palais Royale in 1776, he received his training in the trenches some 12 years earlier in 59 Rivoli. Within seconds of talking to him, it is apparent that Caumer is more of a diplomat than a fighter, at least these days, with his global mission for The Laboratory of Creation (Labo) of an international network of art residencies and creative venues.
Compared to 59 Rivoli, the tower building, which also served as the embassy of Honduras in the 1960s, is small, with only 15 artists occupying its six stories and basement. Caumer is positive about his relationship with the City of Paris. "The city recognized our presence from the start," he said. "They thought that we were doing a good job."
So, without hesitation, Caumer signed a contract in 2005, making the building the first illegal squat to become legal studio space. Artists, however, were not allowed to live there. When asked if artists broke the rules and lived there, Caumer said that officially they did not do so. Respecting the city's decision that the collective not just benefit a few, they rotate the artists-in-residence. On average, artists stay six months to two years.
In addition to the studios, the building contains a ground-floor gallery, where Entre les cailloux by Jean-Michel Alberola was on exhibit from May 14 to June 12. Paintings by Merce Lopez (Labo Barcelona) and Pascale Forget (Labo Paris) are currently up until June 30, to be followed by a collective exhibition of all Labo artists in July and August.
A filmmaker whose 2010 feature film Passing By was filmed in 44 cities in 22 countries in Europe, without a script or actor or staging, Caumer was just back from South Dakota where he will be collaborating with Dominique Barneaud, a well-known French producer, on a new feature film.
Caumer directs me to the Laboratory of Creation's website and to their network of spaces in Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, the French countryside, and Sicily. Like Paris, he said, "We all have the same spirit." He recently opened another Labo, one block away from the water tower at 37 Rue de Richelieu, in a monument with a sculpture in honor of Moliere, a few meters from The Comedy Francaise.
All artists are totally international. We travel all in the time, in different disciplines, all over the world. In the past, artists often traveled because of war or other crises. Now, everybody travels. The lab was born because we are brothers. A fraternity. We are trying to answer the question: What are your needs?
So, for example, in Sicily, two months rental of their space enables them to pay for the rest of the year for artist residencies. Artists pay only one Euro per day to be in the St.-Honore building.
Caumer praises the City of Paris and says that there are now 10 legal or ex-illegal after-squats in the city. "The problem in Paris is almost solved," he said, adding that "Ten years ago artists wanted space. Now, places need artists."
Solved for some people, but not everyone as a visit to Hangar 56, a four-month old squat reveals. When we met in May, members of the group were about to go to court for the third time. Mostly an activity and gathering place, this squat has chosen to focus on citizen organizations and nonprofits, although there are some artists in the building. Sandy (real name Henri Murden) tells me that there is a big demand for space in the area of social entrepreneurship, especially for cultural audiences. Many of the issues raised by 59 Rivoli artists are now being reviewed by newer squatters in this larger context.
The building presently includes a screening room, a stage, a gallery space for street art, an open computer repair shop occupied by a hacker, a clothing exchange, a communal kitchen, and at least one studio for a painter, Gauthier Schoonover, who "likes being a minority in the building." Schoonover said that there is a real give and take over the question of space in the squat and that things can change easily. He points to a stack of mattresses in his studio. "I moved them because they were in my way," he said, "but the next day they moved them back."
As I leave, I stop to chat with a group busy making signs for an upcoming demonstration against privatization by the radical French National Collective. One of them gives me a handmade sign, a cutout of a yellow and brown bee, writing her name Louise and phone number on the back. "We have a big enemy," she said.
All slideshow photos by Shael Shapiro.
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Leigh Salgado on the ImageBlog
11_Panties2; acrylic on hand-cut paper, 12 x 12 inches; Exhibited at Coagula Curatorial in 2013.
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Time-lapse Selfies and Self-regard Over the Years
Have you noticed that we've now become obsessed with how we change, or how we age, at least pictorially speaking?
Consider Boyhood, a new film from Richard Linklater, tracks a boy from the age of 5 to 18. The director filmed an actual boy and the actors who played his parents in brief periods over that time, and what we have is a real growing-up story.
The movie, which I haven't seen but which I've heard is a remarkable achievement, is perhaps a more professional or artistic example of those time-lapse photos that people take of themselves over the years, such as a father, mother and son posing for photos in roughly the same position over the course of 21 years.
Such photo compilations have become so popular that the satirical magazine The Onion, on its new Clickhole site -- a parody of Buzzfeed listicles and Upworthy-style uplifting attention-getting videos and stories -- mocked them with a story of a woman who photographed herself over the course of a week.
As the little article accompanying the photos says, "As the pictures go by, the photographer undergoes a spectacular transformation that serves as a beautiful reminder of just how profoundly we can change over the course of seven days. It's a moving testament to life's impermanence."
Yes. Isn't that profound? It's interesting that people keep an anniversary of doing this over the years and even decades. And it makes for a compelling look at how families age, or couples, or individuals.
We don't notice how we age until we see signs of it. We don't notice, perhaps, the body language of a family until we see it captured on film over the years -- the ones of the father, son and mother often seem to indicate a "let's get this over with" vibe. But beyond that, is there anything more here than the self-regard of people who want to record the passing of time with themselves as the subjects?
Well, Rembrandt painted dozens of self-portraits over the years, sometimes in costume, more often as himself, young, middle aged, older. But the self-portrait in art, especially the self-portrait of a great and profound explorer of the human psyche such as Rembrandt, gives us clues into existence and even our place in the world.
These self-portraits over time might aim to do the same. But looking at them, you tend to think -- "Wow, they've gotten old," or "Boy, they've put on weight," or "Hmm, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves." You rarely think, "Consider the implications of time on our understanding of ourselves in relation to the moral landscape."
But you might want to ask: How have I changed since then? You might not need a photo reminder to tell yourself that you shouldn't remain static in your life, your business, your emotional awareness. Others might, however. We live in an age of selfies, so it's perhaps inevitable that some people look to pictures of themselves as a way of considering the universe.
For me, though, I'd rather that my work and my outlook mature and grow, my horizons expand, rather than have a photo record of outward physical change.
Consider Boyhood, a new film from Richard Linklater, tracks a boy from the age of 5 to 18. The director filmed an actual boy and the actors who played his parents in brief periods over that time, and what we have is a real growing-up story.
The movie, which I haven't seen but which I've heard is a remarkable achievement, is perhaps a more professional or artistic example of those time-lapse photos that people take of themselves over the years, such as a father, mother and son posing for photos in roughly the same position over the course of 21 years.
Such photo compilations have become so popular that the satirical magazine The Onion, on its new Clickhole site -- a parody of Buzzfeed listicles and Upworthy-style uplifting attention-getting videos and stories -- mocked them with a story of a woman who photographed herself over the course of a week.
As the little article accompanying the photos says, "As the pictures go by, the photographer undergoes a spectacular transformation that serves as a beautiful reminder of just how profoundly we can change over the course of seven days. It's a moving testament to life's impermanence."
Yes. Isn't that profound? It's interesting that people keep an anniversary of doing this over the years and even decades. And it makes for a compelling look at how families age, or couples, or individuals.
We don't notice how we age until we see signs of it. We don't notice, perhaps, the body language of a family until we see it captured on film over the years -- the ones of the father, son and mother often seem to indicate a "let's get this over with" vibe. But beyond that, is there anything more here than the self-regard of people who want to record the passing of time with themselves as the subjects?
Well, Rembrandt painted dozens of self-portraits over the years, sometimes in costume, more often as himself, young, middle aged, older. But the self-portrait in art, especially the self-portrait of a great and profound explorer of the human psyche such as Rembrandt, gives us clues into existence and even our place in the world.
These self-portraits over time might aim to do the same. But looking at them, you tend to think -- "Wow, they've gotten old," or "Boy, they've put on weight," or "Hmm, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves." You rarely think, "Consider the implications of time on our understanding of ourselves in relation to the moral landscape."
But you might want to ask: How have I changed since then? You might not need a photo reminder to tell yourself that you shouldn't remain static in your life, your business, your emotional awareness. Others might, however. We live in an age of selfies, so it's perhaps inevitable that some people look to pictures of themselves as a way of considering the universe.
For me, though, I'd rather that my work and my outlook mature and grow, my horizons expand, rather than have a photo record of outward physical change.
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Finding the Fine Arts Dialogue in Hawai'i
Following is the text of my speech at a recent presentation, sponsored by Artillery magazine. I was proud to share the stage with speakers Josh Strickland, CEO of Hawaii Camera, and artist Troy Wong.
Hello art lovers. As everyone in this room knows, Hawai'i is a fertile land for artists. I cannot think of a better place to make art. The rampant growth and renewal parallels an equally aggressive death and decay; both unrelenting actions are inspirations that make great art. The Hawai'ian islands are home to many contemporary working artists... But where are they? If art is a conversation, why isn't anyone talking?
A Life in the Arts is a difficult road. The struggles are many and the joys are hard won. For me, the best part of a Life in the Arts is the relationships with my fellow artists, that family of kindred souls with the same goals and most especially, intrinsic sensibilities. Together, artists are no longer solitary beings; fun is a given. Everywhere I have traveled on the mainland, I can find the local artist's community in a heartbeat. Not so, here in Hawai'i. I have met many artists, but I have found no artist community. I had to ask, "Why is that?" "Why not?!" And I began to look for answers.![2014-06-22-june20.gif]()
In medium to large-sized cities across the mainland, there are active and busy communities of working artists, art collectors and art supporters. These societies revolve around a collective of art galleries with monthly openings exhibiting local contemporary artists. Each gallery generally has an aesthetic or academic identity defined by a stable of artists. Local media features critical reviews and the efforts of all are explained, championed and encouraged. A narrative evolves.
The Underserved Community and the Lay of the Islands
By terrain and circumstance, there are very few venues for an artist to exhibit their artwork in Hawai'i and therefore an identifiable community of visual artists has not evolved. There is no centrifuge, no engine, no axis from which to revolve. The small Hawai'i art gallery economy is aimed at the tourist and decorative trade. It does not provide a consistent hub of activity or endeavor to the local artist. Hawai'i media does not cover the fine arts critically, nor have they ever been compelled to do so.
Hawai'i is a second home to a large art collector base, most of whom buy their art elsewhere. This market and, more importantly, support lies fallow.
Answers cannot and should not be found in the local museum. Museums must serve the general public. Besides, museums generally have a healthy and adversarial relationship with the local arts community. And that is a good thing.
Not to be understated, Hawai'i offers a large number of community groups that celebrate the arts. These family fun events serve the general public. None of these community centers have a contemporary visual identity; they are not a part of the national and international art world dialogue. (There are exceptions. Pow Wow, for the street artist and Oahu Fringe, for the performer, are seeking an international participation.) Civic arts groups are valuable and viable, but they do not serve the contemporary working arts.
In my encounters, I have found a growling hunger among the many working contemporary artists in Hawai'i for action, an identity and expression. A collective is just waiting to be born.
To replace the electricity and conversation of an art gallery system, a new group can be organized upon the axis of an academic dialogue. These are the ideas that get us thinking, stimulating, working and talking. Organically, great things will happen.
A circle and a line are the most primitive marks of all visual expression. This notion can serve as our identity.
The Circle/Line offers the Hawai'i working artist a community and a banner under which to gather. Ideally, in this Hawai'i art climate, the Circle/Line should serve a larger institution. Open to all, the Circle/Line is focused upon the individuals who make or support art. Whatever the medium, this is the contemporary artist that is cognizant of the international scene of art fairs, academia and the arts media. Hawai'i is a bunch of islands; Hawai'i Art is universal.
The glue of the Circle/Line is a schedule of monthly lectures or panel discussions. The focus is not art appreciation or education, but how and why artists make art.
Programming and Fundraising
The Circle/Line monthly lecture replaces the gallery system as the hub of the artist's community. Speakers are artists, art writers, academics and art theorists. The focus is contemporary art of all mediums. This is our axis.
This program can offer an unprecedented stellar line-up of Blue Chip art world superstars. The generating publicity will call attention to Hawai'i and the definition of an aesthetic. Thirdly, partnerships with national institutions will be formed as the program evolves and grows.
What would Jeff Koons, curator Jeffrey Deitch or famed critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times say of Hawai'i? What about the influence of the islands upon the work of Ed Ruscha? Would John Baldessari open our minds in unusual ways? Gallerist Mat Gleason could inspire new artist strategies for this high rent land. I'd like to hear what Dave Hickey, the brilliant arts thinker, would say to us.
How can we get the best that the world has to offer here on our shores? How does one bring a worldwide scope, on a budget, to a few small islands in the Pacific? I have a novel idea but I shall save that for later.
As an organization, the Circle/Line is designed to be as edgy and fun as we are. The Bal des Quat'z Arts might be an annual bash with a nod to the Parisian Art Students romp in the Jazz Age. The Circle/Line Yearbooks can document our work, progressions and art issues. Consider an all-islands Open Studio Showcase Tour; the Hawai'ian Tourist Authority would love it. Would you attend a film series with programming for artists only? And with a laugh, I'd like to title a fundraising art show, the Circle/Line Circle Jerk. Every organization needs support and money to put stamps on the envelopes. We don't have to think conventionally.
There is much to discuss and much to grow. If we don't start talking, we are nothing more than a Koa tree falling silently in a very large forest. We stand on American soil, the closest land there is to the Far East and Japan. Next door, China and Russia are the most aggressive art markets in the world. Opportunity is everywhere. We need a Hawai'i footprint. So what are we going to do about it? Let's start talking.
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Gordy Grundy is an artist and arts writer. He has served in leadership positions with many arts organizations. His new book "Artist's Pants" is available on Amazon Books. His visual and literary work can be found at www.GordyGrundy.com.
![2011-05-10-cowboy2.gif]()
Hello art lovers. As everyone in this room knows, Hawai'i is a fertile land for artists. I cannot think of a better place to make art. The rampant growth and renewal parallels an equally aggressive death and decay; both unrelenting actions are inspirations that make great art. The Hawai'ian islands are home to many contemporary working artists... But where are they? If art is a conversation, why isn't anyone talking?
A Life in the Arts is a difficult road. The struggles are many and the joys are hard won. For me, the best part of a Life in the Arts is the relationships with my fellow artists, that family of kindred souls with the same goals and most especially, intrinsic sensibilities. Together, artists are no longer solitary beings; fun is a given. Everywhere I have traveled on the mainland, I can find the local artist's community in a heartbeat. Not so, here in Hawai'i. I have met many artists, but I have found no artist community. I had to ask, "Why is that?" "Why not?!" And I began to look for answers.
In medium to large-sized cities across the mainland, there are active and busy communities of working artists, art collectors and art supporters. These societies revolve around a collective of art galleries with monthly openings exhibiting local contemporary artists. Each gallery generally has an aesthetic or academic identity defined by a stable of artists. Local media features critical reviews and the efforts of all are explained, championed and encouraged. A narrative evolves.
The Underserved Community and the Lay of the Islands
By terrain and circumstance, there are very few venues for an artist to exhibit their artwork in Hawai'i and therefore an identifiable community of visual artists has not evolved. There is no centrifuge, no engine, no axis from which to revolve. The small Hawai'i art gallery economy is aimed at the tourist and decorative trade. It does not provide a consistent hub of activity or endeavor to the local artist. Hawai'i media does not cover the fine arts critically, nor have they ever been compelled to do so.
Hawai'i is a second home to a large art collector base, most of whom buy their art elsewhere. This market and, more importantly, support lies fallow.
Answers cannot and should not be found in the local museum. Museums must serve the general public. Besides, museums generally have a healthy and adversarial relationship with the local arts community. And that is a good thing.
Not to be understated, Hawai'i offers a large number of community groups that celebrate the arts. These family fun events serve the general public. None of these community centers have a contemporary visual identity; they are not a part of the national and international art world dialogue. (There are exceptions. Pow Wow, for the street artist and Oahu Fringe, for the performer, are seeking an international participation.) Civic arts groups are valuable and viable, but they do not serve the contemporary working arts.
In my encounters, I have found a growling hunger among the many working contemporary artists in Hawai'i for action, an identity and expression. A collective is just waiting to be born.
To replace the electricity and conversation of an art gallery system, a new group can be organized upon the axis of an academic dialogue. These are the ideas that get us thinking, stimulating, working and talking. Organically, great things will happen.
A circle and a line are the most primitive marks of all visual expression. This notion can serve as our identity.
The Circle/Line offers the Hawai'i working artist a community and a banner under which to gather. Ideally, in this Hawai'i art climate, the Circle/Line should serve a larger institution. Open to all, the Circle/Line is focused upon the individuals who make or support art. Whatever the medium, this is the contemporary artist that is cognizant of the international scene of art fairs, academia and the arts media. Hawai'i is a bunch of islands; Hawai'i Art is universal.
The glue of the Circle/Line is a schedule of monthly lectures or panel discussions. The focus is not art appreciation or education, but how and why artists make art.
Programming and Fundraising
The Circle/Line monthly lecture replaces the gallery system as the hub of the artist's community. Speakers are artists, art writers, academics and art theorists. The focus is contemporary art of all mediums. This is our axis.
This program can offer an unprecedented stellar line-up of Blue Chip art world superstars. The generating publicity will call attention to Hawai'i and the definition of an aesthetic. Thirdly, partnerships with national institutions will be formed as the program evolves and grows.
What would Jeff Koons, curator Jeffrey Deitch or famed critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times say of Hawai'i? What about the influence of the islands upon the work of Ed Ruscha? Would John Baldessari open our minds in unusual ways? Gallerist Mat Gleason could inspire new artist strategies for this high rent land. I'd like to hear what Dave Hickey, the brilliant arts thinker, would say to us.
How can we get the best that the world has to offer here on our shores? How does one bring a worldwide scope, on a budget, to a few small islands in the Pacific? I have a novel idea but I shall save that for later.
As an organization, the Circle/Line is designed to be as edgy and fun as we are. The Bal des Quat'z Arts might be an annual bash with a nod to the Parisian Art Students romp in the Jazz Age. The Circle/Line Yearbooks can document our work, progressions and art issues. Consider an all-islands Open Studio Showcase Tour; the Hawai'ian Tourist Authority would love it. Would you attend a film series with programming for artists only? And with a laugh, I'd like to title a fundraising art show, the Circle/Line Circle Jerk. Every organization needs support and money to put stamps on the envelopes. We don't have to think conventionally.
There is much to discuss and much to grow. If we don't start talking, we are nothing more than a Koa tree falling silently in a very large forest. We stand on American soil, the closest land there is to the Far East and Japan. Next door, China and Russia are the most aggressive art markets in the world. Opportunity is everywhere. We need a Hawai'i footprint. So what are we going to do about it? Let's start talking.
--
Gordy Grundy is an artist and arts writer. He has served in leadership positions with many arts organizations. His new book "Artist's Pants" is available on Amazon Books. His visual and literary work can be found at www.GordyGrundy.com.
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Purpose Can Be Something New
I quit my job almost exactly two months ago with the intention of working on Letters to Our Former Selves full-time. Very quickly though, a problem emerged. I had no structure to my days; they disappeared before I realized where they had gone. A few weeks went by and I had done very little. I made a website, so I told myself that I was being productive. The reality was that I would work for a few hours and then get distracted and play NBA2k14 or read a book or go on Reddit. My deadlines were self-imposed, and so they could be stretched without much repercussion.
Anyone I told about the project thought it was a great idea. I received invitations to speak about it, interest from literary agents, and had enough connections that I thought I could coast. I fooled myself into thinking that getting recognition for an idea was just as valuable as acting upon it. I wasn't actually doing the work. I was being an amateur.
Something else happened. People started to actually write letters. They got vulnerable, and in their vulnerability provided an opportunity for others to relate to their experience. It wasn't until this week though, when I read a particular letter, that the reality of what going this deep with one another on a large scale could look like. And feel like.
"Z" wrote to himself soon after he moved to the U.S. from China, when he was being bullied because he was foreign. I think it's great writing, so I was excited to read it to my mom when I saw her for the first time in a little while. I had obviously read it before, but as I read it aloud, a wave of emotion hit me for which I was completely unprepared.
At this point I had to give my mom the computer because I was full on crying. What's even happening right now? I haven't cried like this in years.
When she finished reading, I looked at my mom. If I was this affected by one letter, what would it look like scaled up?
"This could change thousands of lives," I said.
My mom looked at me, seriously.
"Honey, it could just change one."
So for me, that's the turning point. In encouraging people to be honest in their letters, in cerebrally understanding how important vulnerability is to what I'm trying to do, I didn't understand what it actually meant until reading a letter made me more vulnerable. More open. More willing to connect with the people around me. Thirsty for more.
For the first time in my life, I am filled with a sense of purpose. And it feels pretty great.
Anyone I told about the project thought it was a great idea. I received invitations to speak about it, interest from literary agents, and had enough connections that I thought I could coast. I fooled myself into thinking that getting recognition for an idea was just as valuable as acting upon it. I wasn't actually doing the work. I was being an amateur.
Something else happened. People started to actually write letters. They got vulnerable, and in their vulnerability provided an opportunity for others to relate to their experience. It wasn't until this week though, when I read a particular letter, that the reality of what going this deep with one another on a large scale could look like. And feel like.
"Z" wrote to himself soon after he moved to the U.S. from China, when he was being bullied because he was foreign. I think it's great writing, so I was excited to read it to my mom when I saw her for the first time in a little while. I had obviously read it before, but as I read it aloud, a wave of emotion hit me for which I was completely unprepared.
"Stop hiding your chopsticks, you're not convincing anybody by using a fork. The kid sitting next to you won't stop throwing his pencil at you if you try to act more American. They're not going to stop calling you names everyday when you walk through the door, they're not going to stop hating you if you pretend to be more like them."
At this point I had to give my mom the computer because I was full on crying. What's even happening right now? I haven't cried like this in years.
"Be strong, Z. Pick up your chopsticks, and eat your lunch. Eat it proudly, eat it with your back straight and your head held high. Because you'll live to eat lunches made by grand chefs, lunches fit for kings, and lunches in exotic lands. But they'll never taste as sweet as the lunch you ate the day you learned to take pride in yourself."
When she finished reading, I looked at my mom. If I was this affected by one letter, what would it look like scaled up?
"This could change thousands of lives," I said.
My mom looked at me, seriously.
"Honey, it could just change one."
So for me, that's the turning point. In encouraging people to be honest in their letters, in cerebrally understanding how important vulnerability is to what I'm trying to do, I didn't understand what it actually meant until reading a letter made me more vulnerable. More open. More willing to connect with the people around me. Thirsty for more.
For the first time in my life, I am filled with a sense of purpose. And it feels pretty great.
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The Manly Pursuit of Desire: Charles James at His Splendid Met Museum Show: Sick!
Models in evening gowns by Charles James, photographed by Cecil Beaton at French & Company.
One word immediately came to my mind looking at the head-turning displays of haute couture by the legendary Charles James at the Metropolitan Museum on a recent gorgeous summer Sunday in June: Sick! Not sick as in unwell, miserable, liverish, screwed up, and faint of heart. But Sick! as in something that rams so much effort into such an unexpected end that you are either appalled, disgusted, or impressed to the point of heart palpitations by it.
As in, "Girl! This is sick!"
This show did that to me: it was like being there during the opening season of George Balanchine's silvery, crystalline "Vienna Waltzes," when you are suddenly transported to a world that is so much bigger than you expected it to be, and yet so much more refined, exquisitely felt and proportioned, that you stop being yourself and become something else. This is what art is really all about -- it is, at this dizzying height, a close-to painful experience that delivers everything.
You asked for it. You got it. You couldn't quite believe it, and there it is.
Charles James was born into perfect Anglo-American snobbery in 1906 in Surrey, England, an extremely presentable part of the English countryside; his mother came from a socially prominent Chicago family, his father a British military officer. He was raised by nannies "over there" and brought up to be among the "right sort of people." He ended up in design at the age of 19, when he set himself up in Chicago as a milliner using the name "Boucheron."
Two years later, he set up a fledgling dressmaking business in New York, where one of his first commissions was to design sporting togs for Gertrude Lawrence, the British actress who defined "star" for a generation of PYP's (the Smart Set's "Pretty Young People"), and who was Noel Coward's partner in the original "Private Lives." The high point of his career was in the 1940s and 1950s when he dressed high society and café society, as well as forming alliances with major department stores. James died in 1978, living alone in rooms at the Chelsea Hotel on W. 23rd Street in New York, after several dramatic reversals of fortune -- having in several decades been on the top of the fashion world and then becoming "undiscovered," rejected, and kicked out as fashion grew more commercial, production oriented, and mass-marketed.
The show at the Met is beautifully fleshed out with typed transcripts of some of James's journals, letters, and notes to himself. You get the kind of punch-drunk feeling from these that his part in any movie should have been played by Clifton Webb.
"Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in a language. A good design should be like a well-made sentence, and it should only express one idea."
"In fashion, even what seems most fragile must be built on cement."
"My designs are not luxuries. They represent fashion research."
"Part of what could be called eccentric is my deep involvement in the SHAPE of clothes in movement . . . and conviction that what is distinguished is often a high form of eroticism."
There is a video clip of James at a retrospective showing of his work at the New York nightclub The Electric Circus in 1969: the one thing you get from his presence is that James was not at all effete -- he did not drape himself all over a room like Halston did, and although he was a perfectionist -- driving all that queer testosterone into whiplashing levels of discipline -- he did not suffer from the kind of periodic, drug-infused breakdowns that tormented Yves St. Laurent.
I got the feeling he was very much a man's man who worked in the nose-bleed-high world of very rich, powerful women: his clients. I could go through a real class-laden list of them, but it wouldn't make a difference. Most people would have no idea who they are now, but these women lived in that period, which came to a crash by the end of the 1960s, when simply being a wealthy, socially prominent woman (meaning: being married to a very wealthy powerful man) was a complete job in itself. Just the act of getting dressed in a Charles James "creation" with its acres of fabric, seaming, boning, stitching, scalloping, smocking, faggoting (yes, there is such a word: it's a form of gathered and stitched embroidery), pillowing, and shaping was genuine work. You did not go to college, but to a Finishing School where you learned (goddamn it!) to be charming. The idea you would learn how to balance a checkbook: Never. This was a world best described by Somerset Maugham and later Truman Capote, not Jackie Collins. The only work advisable for such women was charity, which meant learning how to stay beautiful for photographers as you gracefully raised money for the less fortunate.
During his period of being in fashion bloom, James was an exquisite master of this world. One of the things that floored me looking at his work was the way the zippers were set in, always in the back of his dresses (so you needed help getting into and out of them), following all the curves of the body but always deftly concealed. There is a level of craftsmanship here that makes our modern vision of "luxury" look envious. Strangely enough, during James's heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, there was less money among the Gold Coast rich than now -- but it went a lot further. So although James's dresses and coats were not cheap, he enjoyed dressing women like Gypsy Rose Lee, described by the Met as an "entertainer," who came from backstage poverty but could aspire to class.
James jotted down a list of people "I would have liked to have dressed." It's quite formidable. He starts with Gertrude Stein, goes to Princess Margaret Rose (the British Queen's now dead younger sister), and includes Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo ("Need I say?"), Ava Gardner, Maria Callas, Katherine and Audrey Hepburn, several other of the great opera singers of his day (opera singers -- real divas -- smoked of glamour), and ended up with the boys: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Lou Reed. He said about Reed: "Perverse, charming, sings and moves like a poem." About Jagger: "Sexy bastard, can wear and/or make everything and everybody."
Strangely enough, in this list he did not include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, or her sister Lee Radziwell; or the English ballerina Margot Fonteyn, one of the most beautiful and elegant women of the 20th century. I wondered, did he ever actually dress them, or did he simply feel that with their own far more subtle mystiques, they would make his fashions look overdone?
It would be easy to compare this show to the Met's spectacularly successful Alexander McQueen show -- and frankly difficult not to. The James show is actually in two galleries in two separate locations (and floors) of the Met. The Met has done a beautiful job using robotic lighting arms and computer monitors that highlight parts of the dresses on display, providing a commentary on these specific parts and how each part either relates to the whole creation or has a separate or purely structural purpose. James was very much a sculptor in fabric. I also felt that the level of architecture he used to make these "machines of elegance" work, to make them actually float with the body, made something like the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge look easy. James did not have the wit, and, simply put, genius of McQueen, which is probably the reason why James lasted longer than McQueen did, who tragically took his own life at the age of 41.
When I went to the McQueen show I had the feeling that McQueen had it in him to be an artist in a much larger field than fashion; he was ruthlessly trapped in the world of style. But I felt about James that he had actually found his real self in fashion and then expanded to fit the larger world that he either discovered through it -- a place filled with artists like Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali who became his friends -- or he was prepared to take part in because of it. What I think drives people through the James show with a feeling of constant wonder is that there is something unknowable in his work. Mysterious. Enchanting. It is that place where perfect artifice and reality get along beautifully.
Charles James: Beyond Fashion will be at the Metropolitan Museum at 5th Avenue and 82nd Street in New York until August 10, 2014. Hurry. Don't let this one get away.
Perry Brass's latest book is Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future, Second Edition. He has published 17 books, including the ever-popular The Manly Art of Seduction, and can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com and followed on social media.
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The Experimental Genius of Gerry Goffin
I didn't know who Gerry Goffin was when I was in junior high school, and high school, in the '60s. I listened to AM radio constantly on my new transistor radio, and I knew all the songs on KEWB's weekly Top 20 -- so well that sometimes I even called in and won Name It and Claim It. I knew who sang the songs, so of course I knew who Bob Dylan was, and the Beatles. But I didn't know writers who didn't sing, so I didn't know who Gerry Goffin and Carole King were. Of course I knew their songs: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "It Might as Well Rain Until September," "Take Good Care of My Baby," "Go Away Little Girl," "One Fine Day," "Oh No Not My Baby," "Up On The Roof," and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" were part of my life. And they still are. When these songs come on my car radio, I still sing along, and I still remember every word.
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That was a key element of Goffin and King's music. Like Burt Bacharach, and unlike Dylan and the later Lennon-McCartney, they wrote songs that not only had beautiful, catchy melodies, but lyrics that made sense, and expressed an understandable point of view, clearly and simply. Their songs were universal: as Carole King said, Gerry Goffin's words "expressed what so many people were feeling but didn't know how to say." Whether you were actually feeling them or not, you could imagine real people feeling them, and imagine feeling them yourself. No mysterious Miss Lonely, no Walrus, but real people, and familiar feelings. And in this, Goffin and King were true heirs of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the other great songwriters of the Golden Era, experimental artists who wrote universal, memorable, beautiful songs skillfully and elegantly.
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Experimental innovators tend to keep their creativity much longer than their conceptual counterparts, and this was true of Gerry Goffin. I learned who Carole King was in the '70s, when she became a superstar singer, but I think I still didn't know who Gerry Goffin was. Yet it turns out that he was still writing songs I listened to, and learned by heart. Even after he and Carole King divorced, and stopped writing songs together, Goffin continued writing lyrics, notably with the composer Michael Masser. Their hits included "Do You Know Where You're Going To," "Someone That I Used to Love," "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love," and "Miss You Like Crazy." They also wrote "Saving All My Love For You," that Whitney Houston made into a monster hit in 1985.
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Goffin's lyrics appealed not only to a broad audience, but to a large and remarkably diverse range of singers. The first Goffin-King song to reach No.1, in 1961, was recorded by the Shirelles; the second in 1962, by Little Eva; and the third, in 1963, by Steve Lawrence. Others who had hits with Goffin-King compositions in the '60s included Bobby Vee, The Chiffons, The Drifters, Herman's Hermits, The Animals, Maxine Brown, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, and the Monkees. Artists who recorded Goffin-Masser songs during the '70s and '80s included Diana Ross, Roberta Flack, Crystal Gayle, Teddy Pendergrass, Natalie Cole, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Billy Preston and Syreeta, Whitney Houston, and Barbra Streisand. Goffin's lyrics were simple without being simplistic, and often displayed a subtle sophistication. In her memoir, Carole King marveled at the images he produced, succinctly and unobtrusively: a description of an earthly paradise as trouble-proof, to rhyme with roof; a soul in the lost-and-found, saved by a lover with a claim check; the vulnerability and helplessness of being deeply in love conveyed by just three words, "chains of love."
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Decades after he'd begun writing the biggest hits on the Top 20 hit parade, and long after Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney had become little more than performers, nostalgia acts for aging baby boomers, Gerry Goffin was still an innovator, writing songs that went to No. 1, and that became a part of your life. Popular music had changed, and unlike his conceptual peers Gerry Goffin had changed with it; if teen angst was no longer the primary concern, he didn't just write silly love songs, but songs about adult relationships, including extramarital affairs. Conceptual innovators like Dylan, Lennon, and McCartney had been powerful voices of one moment, but experimental innovators like Goffin and Bacharach kept creating, and became memorable voices of more than one. In popular music, as in many other domains, conceptual and experimental innovators serve different but distinct roles. Conceptual young geniuses are shooting stars. We remember them for landmark dramatic works that remain frozen in time, so that hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Penny Lane" instantly takes us back to a specific time and place. But after those flashes, these artists effectively disappear from our lives as sources of new music. In contrast, experimental old masters accompany us throughout our lives, providing a soundtrack that continues from one year to the next, and changes as we ourselves change. Gerry Goffin was one of the greatest experimental forces in the popular music of my generation. I still don't know much about him, but I will always love his music, and I am sad that there will not be any more.
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Crushed! Cars on Their Deathbeds
LA-based photographer Pej Behdarvand's assignment for Car & Driver magazine, to record a BMW's final moments, ("Our Bimmer Gets Gutted") progressed into his brilliant series "Deathbed." Some of the absolute best work I see is made as "personal work" when the photographer takes their idea and executes it under their own steam. Successful projects like this can then boost a photographer's assignment work and gain them important exposure both inside and outside of the photography world.
![2014-06-25-Galaxy_Deathbed.jpg]()
Galaxy
Instead of shooting the cars in thegrave junk yard, Behdarvand isolated them on a black fabric backdrop, rendering them emotionally discomfiting. They are only cars, not even one you yourself have owned, yet they pull on your heartstrings and their last gasp is almost audible! Behdarvand says:
When someone on Twitter compared this series to Michael Massaia's sculptural sunbathers, it only made sense to post "Deathbed" here too. Don't get too maudlin!
![2014-06-25-Metro_Deathbed.jpg]()
Metro
![2014-06-25-Wrangler_Deathbed.jpg]()
Wrangler
![2014-06-25-Honda_Deathbed.jpg]()
Honda
![2014-06-25-Biarritz_Deathbed.jpg]()
Biarritz
![2014-06-25-Taxi_Deathbed.jpg]()
Taxi
![2014-06-25-Beetle_Deathbed.jpg]()
Beetle
Galaxy
Instead of shooting the cars in the
The vehicles in this photo series are depicted as if museum objects, yet unlike museum objects these wrecked cars are not to be physically preserved intact for posterity, but will be crushed for reuse in another form. The photo is the only document of the auto in this unique, temporary state: after its useful life, before it is reincarnated into recyclable material. What information is captured in these images? A glimpse of the nebulous phase of a manmade thing, with remnants of brand choice and societal status, with evidence of family and pride, categorized indifferently with grease-pencil marks. In Deathbed, the photo is a relic, a relic of a car relinquished to the junkyard to be held until it is no longer a car.
When someone on Twitter compared this series to Michael Massaia's sculptural sunbathers, it only made sense to post "Deathbed" here too. Don't get too maudlin!
Metro
Wrangler
Honda
Biarritz
Taxi
Beetle
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1840s Famed Teenage Séance Sisters Inspire Play
The Incredible Fox Sisters, a new play with film, presented by emerging company Live Source in the Ice Factory Festival 2014 at The New Ohio, finds it's spooky roots in 1840s Upstate New York. The play written by Jaclyn Backhaus, and directed by Tyler Mercer is based on a famed trio of teenage sisters . . . who can talk to ghosts.
The play, summarized by Live Source;
The Fox sisters have a dirty secret they're ready to share. They've been talking to the town peddler, Mr. Splitfoot...who's been murdered, dead and buried for five years. Don't believe them? Join the séance and witness for yourself their infamous spiritual powers. Based on a true story.
playwright Jaclyn Backhaus
The Incredible Fox Sisters is based on a true story, what can you tell us about that story and how were you introduced to it?
JB: I found out about the Fox Sisters during my first meeting with director Tyler Mercer. When we discovered that we had a mutual affinity for ghosts and ghosting and otherworldly things, he brought out this book Spook by Mary Roach, which touches on Lily Dale and the Spiritualism community. The Fox Sisters were the cornerstone of that entire movement--their first séances in upstate New York in the late 1840s totally swept the country, and they became these figureheads for communicating with the dead. The whole thing started by word of mouth--like neighboring farmers and apple orchard people would hear about these girls who could speak to ghosts and run and tell their neighbors, and then those neighbors would tell their neighbors, and eventually word leaked to the papers and the big cities and word got across the sea. And they were just teenagers, so there was all this angst and tension in their own lives, but they were forced into the spotlight because people were really excited and ready to engage with the supernatural. It was like the opposite of the Salem Witch Trials. It was like, Salem and Surrounding Hamlets' Fall Festival to Celebrate the Undead.
And then with a light Googling I found this picture of the Fox Sisters, which made me freak out. Like this picture could be an entire play. Look at their faces!
Have you ever held a seance? Do you have any tips? Will we see one on stage? Any advice for the audience on how to be most helpful in channeling ghosts?
JB: When I was a kid my neighbors and I would do weird stuff in Arizona, freak each other out, Now & Then- style. A lot of it is the kind of stuff you look back on and think, "Nah, no way. There 's definitely an explanation for how that happened." When you're a kid and you are riding your Huffy through the desert wash behind your house and you hear a rustling in the brush nearby, it's probably a gila monster or a chipmunk or the punky neighbor kid hiding and trying to scare you. But your mind always makes that leap. What if it was something else?
I think the key to channeling these sorts of connections is about listening, and being open, and not doubting. When you are young and the world is bigger and newer, this is easier to do. As you grow older, that ability to listen starts to fade unless you actively seek to maintain it.
And, oh yes. There will definitely be some ghosting onstage in the play. OR WILL THERE BE? Cliffhanggerrrrrrrr.
Have you spoken with ghosts?
JB: I have been in rooms where something strange is happening, where some energy is trying to coexist with mine. In Black Canyon City, a town in Arizona, this has happened. Also, upstate New York, near Oneonta, visiting my friend Stevo's puppy farm, and on a retreat last summer in Pennsylvania with my arts company, Fresh Ground Pepper. Always in the woods or the desert, I guess. There was this one time on the outskirts of Phoenix, my friend Amy and I stumbled upon a haunted carnival. Like an actual carnival with actual rides that were operating with lights flashing and music playing in the distance and when we turned a corner and drove up to it everything had turned off and all the lights and sounds were off and THERE WAS NO ONE THERE. And then a (probably also haunted) semi-truck tried to run us over. Not joking.
How do you write? Begin telling stories?
JB: I usually start from objects and little morsels of idea that exist to enrich and cultivate the world I'm trying to build. From there, the characters and the circumstances emerge. A lot of my early work (and my current work with Theater Reconstruction Ensemble) has centered around adaptation, so plot was always in place; my voice emerged as I tried to extract the little interesting bits to tell my story. That way of working has stayed with me as I've moved into original work as well. The Incredible Fox Sisters is an adaptation in its own way, too, I guess. Real girls. Real story. I'm just givin it the old Live-Source treatment!
Director Tyler Mercer, photo by Jody Christopherson
You mention the "Live Source treatment", a company which uses film and theater to tell stories. Is there film in this? Tyler, can you speak to this?
TM:Of course! Live Source has a resident filmmaker, Quinlan Orear, who is working closely with us as we continue to create original film material. For THE INCREDIBLE FOX SISTERS, we're traveling to a Spiritualist village in upstate New York, the Lily Dale Assembly. It's where a lot of the Fox sisters' legacy lives on, and very close to where Spiritualism all began. Over the course of the next year, we're going to be traveling to Lily Dale a few times to create a documentary on modern Spiritualism, which will eventually be released as a companion work to THE INCREDIBLE FOX SISTERS. But in the meantime, you're going to be seeing plenty of the B-roll footage incorporated into the show.
Tell me about the design and technology?
TM: Live Source got started in 2011, when a group of artists who were working in both the film and theatre worlds started talking about new ways to dialogue between the mediums. Personally, I always had a hard time deciding whether I wanted to create film or theatre, so luckily I can do both through Live Source.
We have a very design-centered process, and oftentimes new work emerges from larger questions that we have about theatre and film integration. Our most recent project, BOHEMIAN LIGHTS, started out as a film adaptation of a classic Spanish play Luces de Bohemia. After we wrapped the film, we almost immediately started working on a stage adaptation, and inevitably the film became incorporated into that live production (to premiere later this Fall). That integration started this visual conversation of simultaneous, contrasting points-of-view - cinematic vs. theatrical. The actors in the film became these sort of "ghosts" in the world of the stage play, and the more we thought about that, the more we became interested in exploring "hidden dimensions" through design and technology. That lead way into a lot of ghost research, which coincided with Jaclyn coming aboard (who already loved ghosts), and THE INCREDIBLE FOX SISTERS was born. If ghosts are indeed real, they're far more likely to be summoned by Jonathan Cottle, Michelle Persoff, Joanna Emmott, Janie Bullard, and Kate Freer [the FOX SISTERS design team] than any Ouija board.
Tyler, tell me about choosing the style in which to "stylize" these performances?
TM: One of the reasons I first wanted to work with Jaclyn is that all of her plays have a need for heightened performance. Her plays are either unpacking and addressing style head-on (American realism, British romanticism) or else they're set on five boats in the middle of the ocean, or in the eye of a hurricane on Coney Island, and everyone is speaking in unison. She's the resident playwright for a terrific group called Theatre Reconstruction Ensemble, and they do the wackiest, greatest work. She has an incredible talent for hooking you in with a very unique brand of humor, and then, when you least expect it, she pulls the rug out from under you. With THE INCREDIBLE FOX SISTERS, the style and comedy comes out of this 19th century showmanship (think Harry Houdini). You're set up to get just comfortable enough in that world, until everything changes, and you're thrown some creepy twists.
Live Source is a fairly young company with a fairly young staff and achieved quite a lot since its inception. Can you talk a bit about your production history and support from artmaking orgs including grantmakers and theater companies you've partnered with? Any advice for those who are just starting out?
TM: Live Source is going into our fourth season, but a lot of the company's growth has been in the last year alone. We've been fortunate to attract the support of other organizations alongside our new work development. For BOHEMIAN LIGHTS, we partnered with the Spanish Consulate in New York and the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C. to extend the reach of that piece to Spanish artists and audiences living in the United States. The next week, we were offered a development residency at Pregones Theatre, which was instrumental in shaping the work. After the performances at the end of that residency, the New Ohio started becoming interested in what we were working on next, which at the time was just Untitled Jaclyn Backhaus American Spiritualism Project. New Ohio hosted us for a staged reading of the work-in-progress in March 2014, and the next week we were offered a spot in the Ice Factory Festival.
Getting other artists and established groups involved in our work from square one has proven to be really beneficial both artistically and practically, so now we're always keeping an eye out for those kinds of partnerships.
Written by Jaclyn Backhaus, Directed by Tyler Mercer. Featuring performances by Katrina Day, Phoebe Dunn, Shannon Haddock, Andrew Hamling, Jenna Pastuszek, Evan Shaw & Hannah Vaughn. Designs by Jonathan Cottle, Michelle Persoff, Joanna Emmott, Janie Bullard & Kate Freer. Film cinematography by Quinlan Orear. Staged managed by Ryan Courtney
for more information please visit: http://Live-Source.org.
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Concert Etiquette: Get With the Program
The Venetian Theatre at Caramoor, Katonah, New York (credit: Gabe Palacio)
I'd rather hear music than the person in front of me whispering. This is what I was thinking at my last concert when, plain and simply, they wouldn't shut up.
Has etiquette gone out the window completely?
Stop kicking the seat in front of you, put down your cellphone and listen up. Let's talk.
Rudeness at live performances is disruptive not only to the performers but to the audience. A philharmonic musician I know mentioned that at one concert a colleague stopped cold in the middle of a complicated composition when a cellphone fired off in the audience. (Hello?! Don't we know by now to turn off our electronic devices before a performance? It seems obvious, but clearly some patrons of the arts have still not read the memo.)
I recently attended a senior-thesis violin recital at Juilliard, the prestigious arts conservatory in New York City. The talent before us was brilliant. The audience behavior around me was appalling.
Everything below happened during this virtuoso performance. Most of the points seem obvious, and one would think that grownups would know better, but the fact that they have good taste in music doesn't mean they have the manners to match.
So take a moment to bone up on concert etiquette. (Feel free to share this list with others.)
- Get to the venue on time. Nothing is more annoying than someone climbing over you to get to his or her seat.
- This bears repetition: Don't be the only one in the audience who disregarded the announcement requesting that you "please turn off all electronic devices for the duration of the concert."
- Take off the damn hat.
- Enjoy the music, but don't bob your head so much that it's a distraction to the person behind you.
- Do not bring children under 8 years old to concerts after 8 p.m. (Do the math.)
- If you've got to cough or sneeze, do not grasp water bottles so hard that the plastic crinkles. Experienced concertgoers try to suppress their cough or sneeze until a loud passage or quietly do it into a handkerchief.
- Please wait until a break in the performance to unwrap a throat lozenge. (At a recent performance of the Tony Award-winning show All the Way with Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad, we had orchestra seats, and someone to my left started to unwrap a throat lozenge. They thought that by unwrapping it slowly, no one would hear it. It was like water torture.) Unwrap lozenges before the performance (perhaps right after you turn off your cellphone).
- Do not talk or whisper to your neighbor. It's distracting to the performer and to people seated near you. (Again, at the Juilliard recital, a parent in front of me was bent over and whispering to her kid during the entire concert.)
- Hold your applause. Look at the program! If you see that there are numerous movements in a musical piece, don't clap until the very end. Your best bet: Just clap when the rest of the audience starts clapping.
- Take advantage of intermission. Unwrap another lozenge, take a swig of water, or go out and people-watch in the lobby.
- Holding up a lighter (or the image of a flickering candle on your iPhone) after a classical performance is just plain wrong. Save this for rock concerts.
- Speaking of which, unless you are at a rock concert and no one notices (or cares), wait until the end before getting up to leave.
At a Patti LuPone concert at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, two audience members got up toward the end of her finale. Patti abruptly stopped singing and said, "I hope you get to your car in time." The audience laughed. A spotlight shined on the couple as they slithered out of the concert tent. Brava, Patti! Love your moxie!
Yes, audiences in the 19th century may have been equally rude by throwing tomatoes, but it's 2014, people. Surely we have learned some manners in the past century.
Ladies and gentlemen (which I believe you are), behave. Sit back and enjoy the show so that others can do the same. After all, as an audience, you are collectively sharing a magical moment that will be gone forever once the last note or word is played, sung or spoken. This is the beauty of live performances. Don't wreck it with slack etiquette.
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Theater: Savion Glover Prays; Broadway, Cabaret Stars Praise
SAVION GLOVER -- OM ** out of ****
BROADWAY BY THE YEAR 1990-2014 *** out of ****
So much theater is here and then gone in the blink of an eye. Has it really been two and a half years since Newsies opened on Broadway? It closes in August and will rank as one of the few shows (just over 100) in history to run for more than 1,000 performances. And yet it seemed to arrive yesterday. That's even truer for one-time events, limited runs and those precious shows that simply don't run nearly as long as they should. Before I review a limited run of Savion Glover's latest and a one-time event that is already history, here are three events coming up.
DUBLINERS: A QUARTET -- ONLINE
Most great theater occurs in a few major cities like London and New York as well as on tour. But no matter where you are in the world, this Saturday or Sunday you can watch a free live streaming performance of the radio play Dubliners: A Quartet. Held at the Greene Space -- a downtown performance space and home for WNYC and WQXR -- it's an evening of music and song and adaptations of four short stories taken from James Joyce's classic work Dubliners. This work has already inspired a lovely stage musical and director John Houston's moving final film. And since the live performances of August Wilson's Century Cycle at the Greene Space was one of last year's theatrical highlights, you shouldn't miss this. And you don't have to. Anyone can go online and watch a live streaming of the event Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. If you miss that, they'll be releasing it as a podcast and on-demand video in July. Go here for more info and to see how you can join in this event for free.
THE AMBASSADOR REVUE AT TOWN HALL
If you're lucky enough to be in NYC this weekend, Friday night features a one-night only performance of The Ambassador Revue, the toast of Paris in 1928. Porter had a Broadway hit that same year appropriately called Paris, a show that featured "Let's Misbehave" and "Let's Do It." That success overshadowed his revue and Porter never looked back...and The Ambassador Revue never played in America till now. Bringing it to life is Tom Wopat, Jason Graae and Amy Burton among others, led by the marvelous Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, specialists in the music of the 1920s and 1930s and the band I'd choose to perform at my wedding. Let's hope someone is recording this one. Go here for ticket info.
THE NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL THEATER AWARDS
The Ambassador Revue is a rare chance to glimpse musical theater's past. If you want to glimpse musical theater's future, head to the National High School Musical Theater Awards on Monday June 30 at 7:30 pm on Broadway at the Minskoff. Winners of competitions held all across the country get to perform on a Broadway stage and compete for the big prize, nicknamed the Jimmy. I attended a recent event that was the culmination of nationwide contests where teens performed monologues by August Wilson and it was great fun. You can check out the nominees (or to be more positive, the winners of their region) right here or hear them strut their stuff on Monday night.
Now on to the reviews.
SAVION GLOVER -- OM ** out of ****
JOYCE THEATER
If the guest I brought to this performance were writing the review, it would be far less pleasant. "Savion Glover's a genius! Why should he be bothered to entertain the audience?" asked my friend scathingly. Indeed, several dozen people left during this spiritual journey called Om, which is the antithesis of the delightful, crowd-pleasing STePz, one of my favorite shows of 2013. Indeed, the show seemed intent on making this private meditation as difficult as possible for those attending.
It began late, even though the show starts with a darkened auditorium and a lowered curtain while a lengthy jazz recording (Kenny Garrett's "Calling," apparently) played for five or ten minutes. Eventually, the curtain rose to a beautiful setting: a stage filled with candles and yellow lights, scattered with photos of Glover's spiritual fathers, be they dance legends or religious figures like Gandhi. Five rectangular platforms were grouped towards the front, two roughly near each other at the center, one on stage left and two at an angle on stage right. Glover was on one of the two roughly at center and never moved from it for the entire evening. The lighting stayed dim, he tapped with his usual fluidity and grace and precision and power, and the evening progressed.
At first, we were given a few changes: more dancers arrived and took their places on the other platforms, some songs and chants were played, ranging from a spoken-word piece quoting Psalm 23 to selections from other faiths, a quick cross-cultural survey that captured the world-wide yearning for spirituality and faith. Another tune -- which I couldn't identify -- might have been a spiritual or blues (Odetta? Maybe?). For a brief passage early on, all the dancers performed in unison. But then the music focused slowly on a piece (from India, I assume) that lasted for 30 or 40 minutes. Glover's long-time collaborator Marshall Davis Jr. had more extensive work to due, especially on one concise duet but he left the stage for lengthy periods. The other dancers had literally nothing to do, posing in place, assuming spiritual or meditative poses, hitting a chime, moving briefly and then posing for minutes at a time and so on. Especially unfortunate were the disciples who came out and sat at their feet like adoring acolytes.
As the one piece of music went on and on -- Glover dancing with his usual inventive brilliance -- the static nature of the evening wore on you. It was almost rude if not self-indulgent to see so many talented dancers allowed only the most cursory moments to perform but otherwise be simply decorative. It was like a jazz combo filled with talented artists but most of the concert included only a drum solo while the other artists simply stood there and watched.
And yet I feel inclined to take Glover at his word. Perhaps this was a meditation best left in the rehearsal room or his private dance space, but surely it was sincere if misguided. He has often spoken of his increasing fascination with the percussive, rhythmic, musical nature of tap. And this evening focused on it like never before. The subdued lighting and almost entire lack of movement left you little else to focus on but the sound of his tapping. And it did indeed achieve moments of engaged, focus brilliance. I've listened to recordings of Fred Astaire with a jazz combo, singing his songs and then soloing on tap, which sounds silly. (Just listening to someone dance?) But it makes sense when it's so musical and well-thought out...and lasting for brief passages in a song that usually lasts three or four minutes at most.
Glover was surely preaching to the converted here. But the best ministers know how to vary their sermons and mix in humor and stories and wisdom with the strong stuff of salvation and sin. With Om, Glover ended up talking to himself, leaving those hoping for uplift with the awkward feeling that he's already been saved and in the Rapture and we've been left behind.
BROADWAY BY THE YEAR 1990-2014 *** out of ****
TOWN HALL
Impresario Scott Siegel caps off his celebration of Broadway By The Year with this recap of key songs from the past 25 years of musical theater. If it wasn't as great as the three earlier editions, well, surely that's because the past 25 years haven't been nearly as good as the 1930s and the 1950s and the 1970s. You can choose the best song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects Of Love or Lysistrata Jones or Miss Saigon, but they're still not going to be very good, are they? Time and again, as they worked their way from 1990 to 2014's Beautiful, you saw Siegel wisely ask a Broadway or cabaret star to tackle a tune that may have appeared in a Broadway show in the past two and a half decades, but actually originated from a much more fertile time period in the past. Hence he cleverly padded the evening with "The Acid Queen", "Fools Fall In Love," "Sing Sing Sing," "The Winner Takes It All," "Stormy Weather" and "Fever." Great songs that were born in the last 25 years? Nope. And thank goodness.
If you're not familiar with Broadway By The Year, it's an ongoing series. Traditionally, they tackle one year from Broadway and a rotating cast of Broadway greats, rising talent and cabaret stars perform some of the best gems of the year along with lesser-known fare that has unjustly slipped from view. This year, Siegel celebrated the series' ongoing vitality by tackling 100 years with 100 stars over four nights. They'll do it again next year, since of course the riches of Broadway make this an easy parlor game to play without having to scrape the barrel...at least until you hit the 1990s and noughts, apparently.
Like any evening of this sort, the evening was mixed bag, though Siegel's venture always brings out the cockeyed optimist in me. Misfires like Lucas Steele's misguided spin on ABBA's "The Winner Takes If All" from Mamma Mia and Natalie Toro's melodramatic spin on "With One Look" from Sunset Boulevard were easily outweighed by the pluses. Two dance pieces were lots of fun, though oddly they almost followed one another in the first act. Still, Mark Stuart and Mindy Wallace were fun in "Libertango" and Jimmy Sutherland was an excellent last minute replacement on "Sing Sing Sing."
Siegel always helps you make some discoveries, thanks to showcasing the talent he finds in another of his many ventures, Broadway's Rising Stars. (The next one presents the cream of the crops from the top arts programs and takes place July 14 at Town Hall.) For me, the ringer was the performer with the wonderfully absurd name of Oakley Boycott. She was a gangly, notably tall and eye-catching presence when the Broadway By The Year chorus took a spin through "Seasons Of Love" from Rent. But she really wowed when doing the comic number "He Vas My Boyfriend" from the ungainly Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein. Boycott nailed this number (easily the best in that show), milking every laugh like a seasoned pro.
When they turn Robert Altman's movie Popeye into a Broadway musical, Boycott simply must play Olive Oyl. (Speaking of casting of future shows, Jeremy Morse tackled "Santa Fe" from Newsies but I spent his entire performance thinking, this guy has to play Mickey Rooney...or at least the lead in a revival of Babe In Arms. ) Another find -- for me -- was Jenn Gambatese, who sang "You Walk With Me" from The Full Monty with a lovely voice and a direct simplicity that was disarming. She's starred in the Broadway musicals Tarzan and All Shook Up and clearly deserves better. And cabaret performer William Blake was a tonic, a truly unique voice that straddles the line between male and female. But this is no crooning, ambisexual Chet Baker; he's a wickedly forceful personality who enlivened "Fever" by daring us to laugh with him as he sashayed and powered his way through that Peggy Lee standard.
Adam Jacobs of Aladdin proved he's got the goods, giving his all to a so-so number from Miss Saigon, which remains as uninteresting to me as Les Miserables is strong. And Rory O'Malley was very funny with "I'm Not That Smart" from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But the ladies were strongest: Jeannette Bayardelle did acrobatics through "Fools Fall In Love," NaTasha Yvette Williams did indeed stop the show with the always pointed and hilarious "Stop The Show" from Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, and Terri White was a no-nonsense, astringent delight with "Stormy Weather."
But as so often happens, I'll be thinking longest about Bobby Steggert and his effortlessly charming performance of "What More Can I Say?" from Falsettos. That William Finn musical is clearly ready to be revived -- at least in concert -- and who better to tackle the role of Marvin then Steggert? If they can't get Giant to Broadway (and they should), hopefully Steggert will get a chance to shine in this show. For the lucky few who caught the latest edition of Siegel's event, they got the chance to see Steggert perform a great number from Broadway's past and perhaps, just perhaps, see a glimpse of what might be in the very near future.
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
Savion Glover's Om **
Broadway By The Year 1990-2014 ***
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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.
BROADWAY BY THE YEAR 1990-2014 *** out of ****
So much theater is here and then gone in the blink of an eye. Has it really been two and a half years since Newsies opened on Broadway? It closes in August and will rank as one of the few shows (just over 100) in history to run for more than 1,000 performances. And yet it seemed to arrive yesterday. That's even truer for one-time events, limited runs and those precious shows that simply don't run nearly as long as they should. Before I review a limited run of Savion Glover's latest and a one-time event that is already history, here are three events coming up.
DUBLINERS: A QUARTET -- ONLINE
Most great theater occurs in a few major cities like London and New York as well as on tour. But no matter where you are in the world, this Saturday or Sunday you can watch a free live streaming performance of the radio play Dubliners: A Quartet. Held at the Greene Space -- a downtown performance space and home for WNYC and WQXR -- it's an evening of music and song and adaptations of four short stories taken from James Joyce's classic work Dubliners. This work has already inspired a lovely stage musical and director John Houston's moving final film. And since the live performances of August Wilson's Century Cycle at the Greene Space was one of last year's theatrical highlights, you shouldn't miss this. And you don't have to. Anyone can go online and watch a live streaming of the event Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. If you miss that, they'll be releasing it as a podcast and on-demand video in July. Go here for more info and to see how you can join in this event for free.
THE AMBASSADOR REVUE AT TOWN HALL
If you're lucky enough to be in NYC this weekend, Friday night features a one-night only performance of The Ambassador Revue, the toast of Paris in 1928. Porter had a Broadway hit that same year appropriately called Paris, a show that featured "Let's Misbehave" and "Let's Do It." That success overshadowed his revue and Porter never looked back...and The Ambassador Revue never played in America till now. Bringing it to life is Tom Wopat, Jason Graae and Amy Burton among others, led by the marvelous Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, specialists in the music of the 1920s and 1930s and the band I'd choose to perform at my wedding. Let's hope someone is recording this one. Go here for ticket info.
THE NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL THEATER AWARDS
The Ambassador Revue is a rare chance to glimpse musical theater's past. If you want to glimpse musical theater's future, head to the National High School Musical Theater Awards on Monday June 30 at 7:30 pm on Broadway at the Minskoff. Winners of competitions held all across the country get to perform on a Broadway stage and compete for the big prize, nicknamed the Jimmy. I attended a recent event that was the culmination of nationwide contests where teens performed monologues by August Wilson and it was great fun. You can check out the nominees (or to be more positive, the winners of their region) right here or hear them strut their stuff on Monday night.
Now on to the reviews.
SAVION GLOVER -- OM ** out of ****
JOYCE THEATER
If the guest I brought to this performance were writing the review, it would be far less pleasant. "Savion Glover's a genius! Why should he be bothered to entertain the audience?" asked my friend scathingly. Indeed, several dozen people left during this spiritual journey called Om, which is the antithesis of the delightful, crowd-pleasing STePz, one of my favorite shows of 2013. Indeed, the show seemed intent on making this private meditation as difficult as possible for those attending.
It began late, even though the show starts with a darkened auditorium and a lowered curtain while a lengthy jazz recording (Kenny Garrett's "Calling," apparently) played for five or ten minutes. Eventually, the curtain rose to a beautiful setting: a stage filled with candles and yellow lights, scattered with photos of Glover's spiritual fathers, be they dance legends or religious figures like Gandhi. Five rectangular platforms were grouped towards the front, two roughly near each other at the center, one on stage left and two at an angle on stage right. Glover was on one of the two roughly at center and never moved from it for the entire evening. The lighting stayed dim, he tapped with his usual fluidity and grace and precision and power, and the evening progressed.
At first, we were given a few changes: more dancers arrived and took their places on the other platforms, some songs and chants were played, ranging from a spoken-word piece quoting Psalm 23 to selections from other faiths, a quick cross-cultural survey that captured the world-wide yearning for spirituality and faith. Another tune -- which I couldn't identify -- might have been a spiritual or blues (Odetta? Maybe?). For a brief passage early on, all the dancers performed in unison. But then the music focused slowly on a piece (from India, I assume) that lasted for 30 or 40 minutes. Glover's long-time collaborator Marshall Davis Jr. had more extensive work to due, especially on one concise duet but he left the stage for lengthy periods. The other dancers had literally nothing to do, posing in place, assuming spiritual or meditative poses, hitting a chime, moving briefly and then posing for minutes at a time and so on. Especially unfortunate were the disciples who came out and sat at their feet like adoring acolytes.
As the one piece of music went on and on -- Glover dancing with his usual inventive brilliance -- the static nature of the evening wore on you. It was almost rude if not self-indulgent to see so many talented dancers allowed only the most cursory moments to perform but otherwise be simply decorative. It was like a jazz combo filled with talented artists but most of the concert included only a drum solo while the other artists simply stood there and watched.
And yet I feel inclined to take Glover at his word. Perhaps this was a meditation best left in the rehearsal room or his private dance space, but surely it was sincere if misguided. He has often spoken of his increasing fascination with the percussive, rhythmic, musical nature of tap. And this evening focused on it like never before. The subdued lighting and almost entire lack of movement left you little else to focus on but the sound of his tapping. And it did indeed achieve moments of engaged, focus brilliance. I've listened to recordings of Fred Astaire with a jazz combo, singing his songs and then soloing on tap, which sounds silly. (Just listening to someone dance?) But it makes sense when it's so musical and well-thought out...and lasting for brief passages in a song that usually lasts three or four minutes at most.
Glover was surely preaching to the converted here. But the best ministers know how to vary their sermons and mix in humor and stories and wisdom with the strong stuff of salvation and sin. With Om, Glover ended up talking to himself, leaving those hoping for uplift with the awkward feeling that he's already been saved and in the Rapture and we've been left behind.
BROADWAY BY THE YEAR 1990-2014 *** out of ****
TOWN HALL
Impresario Scott Siegel caps off his celebration of Broadway By The Year with this recap of key songs from the past 25 years of musical theater. If it wasn't as great as the three earlier editions, well, surely that's because the past 25 years haven't been nearly as good as the 1930s and the 1950s and the 1970s. You can choose the best song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects Of Love or Lysistrata Jones or Miss Saigon, but they're still not going to be very good, are they? Time and again, as they worked their way from 1990 to 2014's Beautiful, you saw Siegel wisely ask a Broadway or cabaret star to tackle a tune that may have appeared in a Broadway show in the past two and a half decades, but actually originated from a much more fertile time period in the past. Hence he cleverly padded the evening with "The Acid Queen", "Fools Fall In Love," "Sing Sing Sing," "The Winner Takes It All," "Stormy Weather" and "Fever." Great songs that were born in the last 25 years? Nope. And thank goodness.
If you're not familiar with Broadway By The Year, it's an ongoing series. Traditionally, they tackle one year from Broadway and a rotating cast of Broadway greats, rising talent and cabaret stars perform some of the best gems of the year along with lesser-known fare that has unjustly slipped from view. This year, Siegel celebrated the series' ongoing vitality by tackling 100 years with 100 stars over four nights. They'll do it again next year, since of course the riches of Broadway make this an easy parlor game to play without having to scrape the barrel...at least until you hit the 1990s and noughts, apparently.
Like any evening of this sort, the evening was mixed bag, though Siegel's venture always brings out the cockeyed optimist in me. Misfires like Lucas Steele's misguided spin on ABBA's "The Winner Takes If All" from Mamma Mia and Natalie Toro's melodramatic spin on "With One Look" from Sunset Boulevard were easily outweighed by the pluses. Two dance pieces were lots of fun, though oddly they almost followed one another in the first act. Still, Mark Stuart and Mindy Wallace were fun in "Libertango" and Jimmy Sutherland was an excellent last minute replacement on "Sing Sing Sing."
Siegel always helps you make some discoveries, thanks to showcasing the talent he finds in another of his many ventures, Broadway's Rising Stars. (The next one presents the cream of the crops from the top arts programs and takes place July 14 at Town Hall.) For me, the ringer was the performer with the wonderfully absurd name of Oakley Boycott. She was a gangly, notably tall and eye-catching presence when the Broadway By The Year chorus took a spin through "Seasons Of Love" from Rent. But she really wowed when doing the comic number "He Vas My Boyfriend" from the ungainly Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein. Boycott nailed this number (easily the best in that show), milking every laugh like a seasoned pro.
When they turn Robert Altman's movie Popeye into a Broadway musical, Boycott simply must play Olive Oyl. (Speaking of casting of future shows, Jeremy Morse tackled "Santa Fe" from Newsies but I spent his entire performance thinking, this guy has to play Mickey Rooney...or at least the lead in a revival of Babe In Arms. ) Another find -- for me -- was Jenn Gambatese, who sang "You Walk With Me" from The Full Monty with a lovely voice and a direct simplicity that was disarming. She's starred in the Broadway musicals Tarzan and All Shook Up and clearly deserves better. And cabaret performer William Blake was a tonic, a truly unique voice that straddles the line between male and female. But this is no crooning, ambisexual Chet Baker; he's a wickedly forceful personality who enlivened "Fever" by daring us to laugh with him as he sashayed and powered his way through that Peggy Lee standard.
Adam Jacobs of Aladdin proved he's got the goods, giving his all to a so-so number from Miss Saigon, which remains as uninteresting to me as Les Miserables is strong. And Rory O'Malley was very funny with "I'm Not That Smart" from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But the ladies were strongest: Jeannette Bayardelle did acrobatics through "Fools Fall In Love," NaTasha Yvette Williams did indeed stop the show with the always pointed and hilarious "Stop The Show" from Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, and Terri White was a no-nonsense, astringent delight with "Stormy Weather."
But as so often happens, I'll be thinking longest about Bobby Steggert and his effortlessly charming performance of "What More Can I Say?" from Falsettos. That William Finn musical is clearly ready to be revived -- at least in concert -- and who better to tackle the role of Marvin then Steggert? If they can't get Giant to Broadway (and they should), hopefully Steggert will get a chance to shine in this show. For the lucky few who caught the latest edition of Siegel's event, they got the chance to see Steggert perform a great number from Broadway's past and perhaps, just perhaps, see a glimpse of what might be in the very near future.
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
Savion Glover's Om **
Broadway By The Year 1990-2014 ***
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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The Wild and Exhausting World of Brazilian Artist Ernesto Neto
Ernesto Neto is an artist comfortable in himself. So comfortable in fact, he managed to dose off during our shoot in his studio in Rio de Janeiro. We blamed it on the heat and not our company of course.
![2014-06-26-Screenshot20140417at14.39.44copy.jpg]()
When awake, the artist was lively and outspoken, and this sense of self-assuredness is not surprising given his creative success over the years.
Known for his biomorphic sculptural environments, he was originally inspired by the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement in the 1950s and 1960s which saw him develop his signature nylon sacks filled with a variety of materials including sand. His work is exhibited at Tate London and MoMA among others and he represented Brazil during the 2001 Venice Biennale.
His minimalist work is made accessible through its call for interaction. Viewers are encouraged to poke, mould and in some instances walk through the pieces.
During the sticky afternoon that we spent with Neto in his studio he told a story about watching his son take his first steps only a few feet away from where we were sitting to help bring to life his interest in gravity -- one of the prevalent themes in his work. The story also demonstrated his respect for simplicity.
His believe in keeping things simple, or perhaps subtle extends to his opinions on politics in art. In our interview Neto comments on art being too political, too in your face. Perhaps this is a hangover from the times he has lived through post-dictatorship in the late eighties and as a result of social unrest in the lead up to the World Cup over the last 18 months. Regardless, his message was clear: art is political without trying to make it political.
When awake, the artist was lively and outspoken, and this sense of self-assuredness is not surprising given his creative success over the years.
Known for his biomorphic sculptural environments, he was originally inspired by the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement in the 1950s and 1960s which saw him develop his signature nylon sacks filled with a variety of materials including sand. His work is exhibited at Tate London and MoMA among others and he represented Brazil during the 2001 Venice Biennale.
His minimalist work is made accessible through its call for interaction. Viewers are encouraged to poke, mould and in some instances walk through the pieces.
During the sticky afternoon that we spent with Neto in his studio he told a story about watching his son take his first steps only a few feet away from where we were sitting to help bring to life his interest in gravity -- one of the prevalent themes in his work. The story also demonstrated his respect for simplicity.
His believe in keeping things simple, or perhaps subtle extends to his opinions on politics in art. In our interview Neto comments on art being too political, too in your face. Perhaps this is a hangover from the times he has lived through post-dictatorship in the late eighties and as a result of social unrest in the lead up to the World Cup over the last 18 months. Regardless, his message was clear: art is political without trying to make it political.
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