September 2010 Archives

The Museum of Modern Art will open on October 3rd what director Glenn Lowry calls "the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever" of America's first homegrown major modern art movement, Abstract Expressionism. (Forget claims from Europhile art historians that taschisme--in English, "stainism" or "spotism"--was a Continental equal; it was puny and weak by comparison.) Since the 245 works in "Abstract Expressionist New York" derive entirely from MoMA's vaults, the performances, if you will, of individual artists, are skewed by what the Museum bought or was given. The scholarly but graphic-designy Robert Motherwell, for instance, seems to have been a fave of MoMA's inner circle and has six paintings in the exhibition, while the German emigré full-blast, push-pull colorist Hans Hofmann, who preferred running his own art school in Provincetown to kicking back at the Cedar Tavern with Franz, Bill, Jackson and the rest of the boys, presents but half that, and one of them is tiny. Still, this is a once-in-a-whenever opportunity to compare and contrast Gotham's AbExers while they're on the gallery walls at the same time. (You can do your own C&C all the way through April 25, 2011.) On the basis of a couple of hours spent at the press preview, here are my Paint-Slinger Power Rankings:

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Larry Blumenfeld on jazz families (The Wall Street Journal)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews playwright Young Jean Lee (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on an ambitious new theater-making partner (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on the New York Film Festival (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on the man behind the film "Marwencol" (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews Ivo van Hove's "Little Foxes" et al (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne reviews LACMA's Resnick Pavilion (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on architects and beauty (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the musical "Leap of Faith" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on Carey Mulligan (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on Christoph Eschenbach and the NSO (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews the NSO's season-opening gala (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on "Boardwalk Empire" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers reviews Neil Young's "Le Noise" (Los Angeles Times)
David Streitfeld on outsourcing public library operations (The New York Times)
Douglas Wolk interviews comics artist Dustin Nguyen (Techland)

This weekend, I may stop by the Paramount Center's Bright Family Screening Room in Boston to see a free screening of "The Sound of Music." By my calculation, I've seen the film 20 times, as a child and again as the parent of a child. It showed up in my life around the same time as other movie musicals such as "Peter Pan" and "Cinderella" that were made in the 1960s and were on TV each year when I was a kid. That was before DVDs and Netflix (and VHS), so the annual showing was a fairly exciting family event. It was also before replay buttons on remote controls, and I feel sure I watched TV with far more focus and clarity than I do these days when I'm likely to also be tweeting or texting at the same time.

 

In other words, my little mind was taking in far more information with fewer distractions, and I memorized those musicals in the same way I learned to say prayers at Mass: It was all rote, but the practice with musicals was far more challenging given that they came on once a year and Mass was once (or more) a week.

 

In any case, it was a testament to just how deeply "The Sound of Music" was embedded in my long-term memory when I recently attended Doug Elkins & Friends' production of "Fraulein Maria" running through Oct. 3 at the Paramount Center in Boston.

 

Elkins is an award-winning choreographer whose creds come from the break dancing world. For "Fraulein Maria," he combines modern dance and ballet with his street moves and the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein's soundtrack featuring a full-throated Julie Andrews. Which means that when Elkins started popping and botting and ticking as the Mother Abbess in "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," he augmented the song from an operatic pep talk about dreams to a display of just how much tutting a righteous B-Boy can achieve within about a four-foot halo of spotlight. He wore a black and white hoodie - a kind of wimple for the hood couture - and embedded the symbols of the tune (his hands do an itsy-bitsy spider-like move when the refrain is sung) and of contemporary hand jive such as basketball shots and, for lack of a better term, the pinkie-and-thumb-connecting-to-the-mouth-and-ear "call me" action. His moves and the choreography throughout the show were utterly new to me and yet they made perfect satirical sense given my familiarity with the movie.

 

Elkins is a virtuoso. And he has surrounded himself with a troupe of virtuosic dancers who suggest what it must have been like in, say, Shakespeare's time or in the early years of traveling circuses when you had to be a polymath of artistic ability to be part of the company. Many of the Elkins dancers have had conservatory training. But they are also gymnasts, martial artists, trapezists, break dancers, actors and comedians. Their previous tenures are as varied as the Flying Karamazov Brothers, Bill T. Jones, the Metropolitan Opera and "trained Chris Brown." So there was 20-year-old Gui Greene defying gravity with his airborne power moves performing an "I Am Sixteen (Going on Seventeen)" pas de deux with David Parker, who was swan-like as a corporeal, middle-aged, cross-dressing Liesl. And there's Deborah Lohse who strutted on her tiptoes to connote the high heels her stridently bitchy Baroness might wear but suggesting in elegant slapstick the way Carol Burnett might have played the role had she been cast in the movie instead of Eleanor Parker. I wasn't exactly surprised even as I still gasped during the sentimental duet "Something Good" when Jeffrey Kazin, as Von Trapp, did a full-out run at Meghan Merrill, as Maria, and leapt into her arms for a traditional, though role-reversed, ballet catch.

 

It strikes me that Elkins takes his street aesthetic to the level of "cultural remix," which his company represents: a diverse group of dancers in terms of race, age and gender roles (plus five Emerson College students who join the troupe for one number). But he also engages in a form of remix in his use of varied dance genres that equally celebrate ensemble and individual talent. From this complicated pastiche emerges an appreciation of the American musical as a form so pliable it breaks down the high-low art rules - ballet meets graffiti dance - and becomes a trope about the elasticity not only of the human body but of a work of art. In other words, "Hamlet" is still becoming "Hamlet." "The Great Gatsby" is still becoming "The Great Gatsby." And thanks to Elkins, "The Sound of Music" is still becoming "The Sound of Music."

 

And I, for one, can't wait to see the movie for the 21st time.

 

Photos: Doug Elkins as Mother Abbess by Yi-Chun Wu; troupe photo and Robert Parker as Liesl by Christopher Duggan.

 

'Twas a fateful decision. When I was an undergraduate, not so much "torn" between art classes and English classes as squeezed in trying to take as many of each as I could, there were these little, one-credit, one-hour-a-week courses in individual authors. My schedule and general preference for the modern (which is why I don't know nothin' about no DWEM canon, but that's another story) presented me with a choice between a class in Faulkner or one in Hemingway. I took Faulkner, and my prose style, such as it is, has been clotted, crenulated and Corinthian ever since. I've never seen a semicolon I didn't like and, when I first signed on as art critic at Newsweek, my editor's most frequent marginalium was an arrow pointing to a particularly long, contorted sentence, accompanied by the comment, "Chop this baby up, please!"

Naturellement, my likes in recreational fiction were inclined, over the years from youth through the seven not-quite-pillars of wisdom, toward southern novelists: Eudora Welty, William Styron, Calder Willingham, Walker Percy, Carson McCullers, and others. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that in 20th century American literature there were essentially two main themes: being Jewish in New York and being weird (and, the default position, white) in the South. Although I read my share of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth (and even slogged through Henry Roth, too), I could never quite get down with the former program. Of course, it probably had to do with my being a gentile from L.A. (which is, remember, south of the Mason-Dixon line), and the fact that in my formative years (a.k.a. high school), the only adult Jews with whom I made acquaintance were parents of fellow students, who worked in "the industry," wore Hawaiian shirts, and whose only appurtenances of religion were mezuzahs worn on chains around the neck.

Too often people who work in the less classy byways of journalism get overlooked (though a WBAI connection generally improves one's chances). So thanks to the indefatigable Ned Sublette for this NPR link. Near as I can tell, the Times isn't on this quite yet--manana, I hope and assume. From a professional and historical standpoint, the most important sentence in Felix Contreras's warm tribute is the one about how Salazar's work hasn't been archived yet. This is what academic grants are for! Get on it, my colleagues across the great divide.

I have no business writing about Rob Sheffield, but through the magic of Full Disclosure, I can. There are people you know, and then there are people who can quote a Jim Carroll review you wrote decades ago while you're discussing Patti Smith's memoir in your book group. Sheffield is in the latter category. Don't believe another thing I say about him. But be warned that your cynicism, like most cynicism, comes at a price that will resist valuation.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on Jay-Z and Eminem (Spin)
Jeanne Carstensen on a Bay Area renaissance for magazines (The New York Times)
Robert Christgau reviews four books on '50s rock and rollers (Barnes & Noble Review)
Laura Collins-Hughes asks if Inge is poised for a comeback (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner on the Dave Matthews Band at Wrigley Field (Chicago Sun-Times)
Christine Dolen reviews "Pandemonium" (The Miami Herald)
Steve Dollar interviews Pennebaker, Hegedus and their star chef (GreenCine Daily)
Steve Dollar on Justin Townes Earle (Time Out Chicago)
Michael Feingold reviews Edward Albee's "Me, Myself & I" (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Nick Cave and Grinderman (The New Yorker)
Christopher Hawthorne on the Pompidou-Metz and urbanism (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on making "The Town" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on a not-so-surprising "Top Chef" victory (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on art and commerce at TIFF (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Town" (The Washington Post)
Dennis Lim on Gaspar Noé and "Enter the Void" (The New York Times)
Dennis Lim on Allan King's "actuality dramas" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers responds to Camille Paglia's Lady Gaga screed (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers at a dress rehearsal of the new Of Montreal show (Los Angeles Times)
Mark Rozzo on the artist Gottfried Helnwein (T Magazine)
Mark Rozzo on Charles Lindbergh and the Lindbergh look (T Magazine)
Craig Seligman reviews Emma Donoghue's "Room" (Bloomberg News)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on the 20 best songs of summer (Spin)
Larry Blumenfeld on Sonny Rollins (The Village Voice)
Laura Collins-Hughes reviews Tom McCarthy's novel, "C" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes does a Q&A with puppeteer Blair Thomas (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner does a Q&A with Oval (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar on saving Coleman Mellett's music (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on the effort to restore "Style Wars" (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reflects on homosexual identity (part 2 of 2) (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on humanitarian design (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on true stories at the Telluride Film Festival (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Ben Affleck's heist movie (Los Angeles Times)
Hillel Italie on Jonathan Franzen in front of his fans (The Associated Press)
Ruth Lopez on "México en España" (The Art Newspaper)
Manuel Mendoza interviews Moses Pendleton (The Dallas Morning News)
Anne Midgette reviews WNO's "Un Ballo in Maschera" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the art of the update (The Washington Post)
Claude Peck interviews Jonathan Franzen (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Ann Powers reviews Sara Bareilles' "Kaleidoscope Heart" (Los Angeles Times)
Mark Rozzo on Stephen Dorff, starring in the new Sofia Coppola movie (T Magazine)
Mark Rozzo on channeling the Beatles in Hamburg (Details)
Craig Seligman reviews "The Twilight of the Bombs" (Bloomberg News)
Douglas Wolk on Burning Man (Techland)
Douglas Wolk on the high cost of comics (Techland)

And in print only:

Dennis Lim on the films of João Pedro Rodrigues (Artforum)

Have you ever felt the chill? You're fact-checking online like you do when you want to corroborate a cryptic fact or two, googling for a match so you don't have to change that sentence or, worse, fudge it. You click on a site you wouldn't normally visit, and then land on a sentence with a familiar ring. Then another. And another.

Wait a minute: This whole graf sounds like me, the next one too. Even the punctuation.

Turns out the entry for trombonist Glen David Andrews on the Last.fm site was stolen from a piece I did for the September 2008 issue of Jazziz. It wasn't the opening section or the closing part, just 266 words cut and pasted, hanging like a body part with no head, not to mention a byline or acknowledgement to me or to the magazine.

I'm sure many of you reading this have experienced this; I'm pretty sure more of my uncredited and stolen copy is out there in the digital clouds.

Now, I, like you, have come across uncredited quotes of my criticism, small details from my stories that were doubtful to have come from someone else punched into someone else's piece, even strings of word choices I'd agonized over, so I recognized them right off when I saw them.

I'd just never seen a sizeable piece of a story of mine, like a chunk of Gouda, up there with nothing else around it as cover, just stolen and offered up, before. Maybe I was just blind, lucky, or not that rich a source. 

If you click through lastfm.com's screens far enough to get to the "terms of use" and then scroll down enough to find the part about copyrights, you'll get all this:

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Rebecca Creskoff in HBO's "Hung" (The New Yorker)
Larry Blumenfeld takes the pulse of New Orleans (The Wall Street Journal)
Thomas Conner interviews Cee Lo Green about "Fuck You" (Chicago Sun-Times)
Thomas Conner does a Crowded House Q&A (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar on Cinema 16, reincarnated (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on the films of Miguel Gomes et al (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reflects on homosexual identity (part 1 of 2) (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on bands reviving music of the '60s and '70s (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch revisits the opera "Sophie's Choice" on DVD (Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on the Samitaur Tower (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the Telluride Film Festival (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the drama "Never Let Me Go" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Tillman Story" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The American" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein reviews "Let's Take the Long Way Home" (Los Angeles Times)
Wendy Lesser on Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity" (The Threepenny Review)
Wendy Lesser on William Kentridge's "The Nose" (The Threepenny Review)
Anne Midgette on the retirement of WNO's Heinz Fricke (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers interviews Weezer's Rivers Cuomo (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers reviews Jenny & Johnny's "I'm Having Fun Now" (Los Angeles Times)
Douglas Wolk makes the case for more weekly comics (Techland)

My wife came into my office just now to complain that I'd ruined the rest of her planned reading by encouraging her to pick up Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun. After she finished, nothing else matched up. Kapuscinski, as you may know but I did not until an ex-student recommended the spoiler in question, was a Polish journalist who died in 2007. I've read many books about Africa, but in nonfiction not even Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow, Basil Davidson's Africa in History, or Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is as powerful as Kapuscinski's casual-looking essay/reportage collection, which begins with Ghanaian independence in 1957 and ends sometime in the late '90s. Kapuscinski was clearly a swashbuckler, and I never altogether trusted his many cultural generalizations or his grim worldview. But his Communist background clarified his understanding of colonialism and its European minions. And I winced at the way one of his best chapters connects the vanity of francophonie, as the French call their ongoing campaign to maintain their language's international hegemony, to the genocide in Rwanda. On my only visit to Africa, to attend a performing arts conference in Cote d'Ivoire in 1995, a year after the worst Rwandan slaughter began, I wrote about francophonie too, including two deaths connected to the conference. But never did I suggest how much more murderous it could be, because I didn't know.