Bohemian On A Shoestring

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 01:54:00 +0000

Catch the Wave

What: Swim Shorts 3
Location: The Holiday Inn Midtown on the roof, 440 West 57th Street
Date: series 1 ran until July 29; series 2 runs until August 12
Cost: $18, plus an extra $7 for a post performance dip in the pool
Bohemian Factor: Hidden behind their sunglasses and tans
Geek Factor: Present, but potentially canceled out by the proximity of Holiday Inn tourists.

July 21, 2007

Ever since celebrity director Peter Sellars staged Antony and Cleopatra at Harvard’s Adams House swimming pool, ambitious thespians have gravitated towards aquatic settings. But one need not be an avant-garde director – or even a theatre person – to understand the appeal of swimming pools. Sure, there may be controversy over whether splashy displays of watery hi-jinks advance the plot, or even distract viewers with the gimmick. But no one can dispute the fundamental attractiveness of bringing the audience closer to an imagined seaside, especially now when the City’s air is sweltering with ozone-infested, viscous humidity, and every urbanite covets admission to one of those exclusive rooftop swimming pools.

Taking advantage of this primal urge within all of us New Yorkers, Impetuous Theater Group’s Swim Shorts 3, makes no pretense of delivering ambitious narrative, or heck, any narrative at all some of the time, in exchange for a relatively inexpensive evening sitting around the Holiday Inn pool in Hell’s Kitchen, where a post-performance dip costs a mere $7 extra. Audience members sit on deck chairs, the actors get thoroughly soaked, and entire sentences occasionally get swallowed by an acoustical black hole, but it’s OK….are we really there for dramatic complexity?

Actually, the playwrights contributing the short, almost intentionally forgettable plays that make up “Swim Shorts” do have the burden of holding our attention, without being spiritually tortured by the desire to open up that copy of “Harry Potter Book Seven” that most audience members had stowed in tell-tale Barnes and Noble handle bags (after all, I was there the weekend of Harry-mania, but feel free to substitute Thomas Pynchon, US Magazine, or whatever subway reading you stow away on a Saturday afternoon). In this regard, the writers in Series 1 who successfully achieved this task (Series 2 has already begun) were those that used the pool as a stand-in for some other quasi-dangerous natural setting. These include quicksand (with the actors moving slowly and steadily away from the shallow end), an unknown stretch of the ocean where ship passengers are stranded, and - for by far the kookiest, most plotless and shamefully entertaining bit, Brian MacInnis Smallwood’s “Der Eisbar” – the Antarctic sea, complete with foam representations of U-boats. Extra silliness points also to writer Janet Zarecor for postulating the concept of a drunken guardian angel in her short, titled “Forgiveness.”

Perhaps it is not quite a coincidence that in those plays where the pool is just that – a hotel pool – the stories resemble an NYU student’s Dramatic Writing homework, utterly subordinate to the constraints of the exercise, laden with a few heavy-handed clichés more likely to sink than swim (OK, I promise I’ll stop with the literal metaphors…it’s just too easy!)

But wait; really, what are we here for anyway? Justifiably light-hearted entertainment awaits those willing to use the power of their imagination… while everyone else can go bake their brains out as the sun sets.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 02:36:00 +0000

Post-Genre and Other Isms
Present, Future and Past (in that order!)

What: Opus 21 Concert, VOX, Wall to Wall Opera
Location: Symphony Space, The Skirball Center
Date: 4/28/2007; 5/12/07; 5/19/07
Cost: $15, Free and Free!
Bohemian Factor: medium, high, and low (once again, in that order)
Geek Factor: N/A (music geeks in full force; other kinds - too dilute to say...)

Oh, how quickly time flies!

Alas, due to lack of time and lack of space, I can only comment briefly on some of my activities the last month, nearly all of them classical music related. For those of us with yen for contemporary music, and/or opera, May was a good month!

First off was Opus 21’s concert celebrating the minimalist tradition at Symphony Space, which has been needled by the press of late (TimesSelect prevents me from putting the link here, but look for the April 27th article by Dan Wakin) for its lack of identity. But I, for one, believe the upper west side cultural venue does indeed occupy a unique niche – it fuses the quirky with the intellectual in a way that even extends even to its bar menu, which features both sliders and scallops (Plus, how many multipurpose arts centers even have a bar menu? As much as I love ya, HERE arts center, the loss of the café – loung-y area is still felt dearly.)

There’s been a lot of minimalism fanfare these days, given Steve Reich’s recent birthday bashes, but the Opus 21 event, showed that there’s still plenty of appetite for surveying the genre. Particularly for those of us who are enthusiasts but not experts in modern music, the concert was an easy mini course in the ways that the tenants of minimalism can be adhered to with draconian rigor, or – especially with some of the more recent composers- a little creative embellishment. Minimalism in its purest state generally means constant repetition of simple motifs, lots of reliance on steady rhythmic beats, and only gradual changes in harmony and tempo. As a rejection of some of the atonal music coming out of the Ivy Tower in the 60’s and 70’s, minimalism has an obvious crossover appeal to the listeners of pop music because of the prominence of rhythm. These days, composers can put more emphasis on emotional expressivity and still hang their work under the minimalist umbrella. (Composer Dennis DeSantis, whose work “One Trick Pony” premiered during the evening summed it up best when he quipped “We’re like post-genre now, but that’s cool.”)

Bill Ryan’s Rapid Assembly and Louis Andriessen’s Klokken voor Haarlem (a New York premiere), made a more persuasive case than others that multiple ideas and textures can be interwoven into the same piece without violating the basic tenants of minimalism, or turning it into its high-baroque opposite. I particularly liked Richard Adams’ “Free Fall.” The founder of Opus 21 created a melodic line that steadily accelerates, as its title suggests, that makes for a compelling listen that ultimately rises above its underlying gimmick.

But it was of course, the master himself that reminded us that there was plenty of complexity to be hand in a simple concept. Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, for one clarinet, played by Bradley Wong, riffing with multiple other clarinets on an amplified recording, was breathtaking in its virtuosity (and showed how undervalued that instrument can be – a wind instrument with sex appeal, who’d a thunk it?)

It was written in 1988, too early to be post-genre, and yet still very cool.

Later in May was City Opera’s VOX Festival, which gives opera composers the chance to hear a 15 minute excerpt of their work performed with a full orchestra and first-rate singers. I’d be a little wary of gauging the future of the art form from this roster alone. The four excerpts I caught were all engaging, but compelling musical ideas, performed in a concert staging, can be misleading when it comes to ascertaining what will work well dramatically when the context is a fully staged opera. Canadian composer Brian Current’s Airline Icarus, a sort of oratorio generated by the passengers of an airline flight, was absolutely riveting, musically speaking, but I wondered what kind of staging would keep the action – a series of interior monologues – moving along in a fully realized production. (Plus, who among us hasn’t felt a tragedy of epic proportions unfolding when relegated to coach on a delayed flight surrounded by crying children?) Similarly, The Rat Land, Gordon Beeferman’s ode to family dysfunction in suburbia (is there any other kind?) was more radical in terms of the palate of sounds, but even that looked like Mozart compared with The Endings by Jenny O. Johnson and John Zorn’s La Machine De L’Etre. The former, based on Phillip Pullman’s novels, invoked the ethereal through such devices as musicians running their fingers around the rims of bowls. Unsurprisingly, it came with a (obscure, artsy) video accompaniment, confirming my suspicions that staging such a piece with traditional theatrical devices would be impossible. But the human imagination is capable of quite a bit without the aid of any technological assistance at all, as demonstrated by soprano Kiera Duffy’s Olympian solo in the Zorn piece, which was based not on a literary or film source, but on a drawing created by theatrical revolutionary (and bad boy of the avant garde Antonin Artaud) when living in an asylum. Fans of the downtown music scene were happy to find no shortage of genre bending virtuosity and just plain weirdness, (Weirdness in a good way!). And that the otherworldly and ethereal can be generated entirely without resorting to grainy video.

Although not all the singers at Wall to Wall Opera (Yes, Symphony Space again) were top notch, it seems downright curmudgeonly to hold it against this warm fuzzy event, which smartly divided up its grab bag of arias by periods in history. I attended the middle section (1750-1950, conveniently encompassing Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, Strauss and Wagner) with a few more contemporary items thrown in. Kudos to the programmers for including, in one instance, an excerpt from the new opera “Margaret Garner” based on a Toni Morrison novel, amid a sea of chestnuts to instill some appetite for the new in an otherwise conservative crowd. The New York City Opera Orchestra Orchestra was in fine form, the audience was enthusiastic, forgiving, and ready to turn everything into a love-fest especially when one baritone (But who? How I wish I had saved the program) brought down the house with his rendition of “Largo al factotum della città” , and impresario-conductor Gerald Steichen managed to keep everything fast-paced and charming even when he had to prompt soloists for their names while introducing them. The format also made it easy to leave and come back whenever one felt like they were overdosing from the intensity. I believe it's a lot easier to make converts when opportunities for the newbies to take breaks are many... Open-house Wagner, anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:51:00 +0000

Universal Appeal
Projection screens and satellite footage give a new dimension to Holst’s “Planets”

What: Kronos + Cosmos
Location: Brooklyn Academy of Music
Date: 4/21/2007
Cost: $17 (with a discount from Science in the City)
Bohemian Factor: healthy
Geek Factor: yes, but glamorous and assimilated (This IS BAM after all)

Was it just last month that I was shooting my mouth off, cautioning against science and art being forced together under the umbrella of an artificial gimmick?

Well, it’s not the first time Arcadia gets to eat her words.

When the Brooklyn Philharmonic performed Gustave Holst’s The Planets with NASA footage of each corresponding planet in the background, I had to admit this is kind of cool.

As part of a program called “Kronos + Cosmos” featuring the Kronos Quartet, the orchestra used the second half of the program to display, on a projection screen, sweeping montages of icy canyons, volcanic mountain ranges, and deceptively-benign looking multicolored clouds. The evening’s narrator was all too game for heightening the astronomy-romantic in all of us, reciting Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and anyone else whose ever quipped a bot mot about the universe, or the very figures from Greek mythology who share their nomenclature with planets.

Following each lyrical paean to humanity, infinity, or some other poetic abstraction, the audience would be reminded that the stunning imagery on the screen was, in fact, swirling tempests of atmospheric goo that would probably kill any of us in nanoseconds after inhaling an overdose of one of the far corners of the periodic table. And even though our brains have already been pre-wired by Hollywood to see some kind of drama, or at least Captain Kirk, with space imagery, the presentation stuck strictly to the satellite footage, a wise choice.

When I did, in fact, roll my eyes, at the supertitles (e.g. “Mars: The Bringer of War”; “Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity”) I realized this was not the Brooklyn Phil’s doing; but the titles bestowed by the composer himself. (Conveniently, there are only 7 numbers, excluding earth and the Pluto, which had yet to become a planet doomed for demotion).

Constant reminders of the extreme temperatures by that too-effusive narrator (“That’s right, it looks pretty, but temperatures are actually NEGATIVE FIVE HUNDRED FARENHEIGHT this far out from the sun.”) were perhaps intended to stoke the kind of awe harbored by 8 year olds on a planetarium field trip. Furthermore, the camera work would speed up and slow down with the tempos of the music, another thing that should have set off my Code Orange cheesiness alert, but instead, turned me into a very enthusiastic 8-year-old. Clearly, I went to too many geeky Omnimax shows as a child. (Does anyone remember “Ring of Fire?”) This, I think, must be the cosmological equivalent of exoticism. If I had any musicologist friends I would ask them if there were any pentatonic scales- usually associated with the “exotic” far east in the music of Puccini - in Holst.

The menu also included a piece by Vaughn-Williams: “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,” and Julia Wolfe’s new piece, written right after 9/11: “Silent Scream” (Wolfe is one of the co-founders of the new music institution, Bang on a Can). Given that we were up in the cheap seats of BAM’s Gilman Opera house, I was impressed by how clearly each section of the orchestra could be heard so high up.

As more and more orchestras use visual imagery to reach out to a younger, hipper demographic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s offering was – in comparison to the most blatantly commercial of those efforts – a highly enjoyable, if not the most organic, synthesis of technology and old-fashioned entertainment; Holst himself may have been thinking of ancient mysteries and mythological figures when he wrote the piece – more Joseph Campbell than Gene Roddenberry- but the end result is some great PR for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 04:20:00 +0000

Sing Theory
Efforts to combine multicultural musings, pseudo-philosophy and theoretical physics into an opera leads to some unfortunate situation calculus.

What: Preview of New Operas at the Manhattan School of Music
Location: Greenfield Hall at the MSOM campus
Date: 3/18/2007
Cost: $15
Bohemian Factor: eh.
Geek Factor: Music geeks present, though rather well integrated.

I love physics. I love opera. Each of these fields attracts their own spectrum of followers in the world of geekdome. I don’t actually believe there’s any deep quality that organically binds these two interests together, although no doubt they both elicit affection from those who see intellectual inquiry and epicurean passion as two sides of the same coin… but that’s mere speculation on my part.

When the two are combined, the results can be sublime or, well, unfortunate.

As incorporating science into the performing arts becomes trendier and trendier, I find the best results take place when art showcases the grand and obsessive passions that have surrounded the most important discoveries of our time, rather than attempting to lecture an audience that can better pursue scientific pedagogy in other places.

One such performance-cum-lecture took place when the Manhattan School of Music presented “From Page to Stage,” a series of new opera previews from Encompass New Opera Theatre and American Opera Projects. The former presented several scenes from “The Theory of Everything,” apparently the brainchild of the company's artistic director and the opera’s librettist and director.

Really, I have to let this one speak for itself:

In 1987, I read an article in The New York Times about an astounding new physics theory postulating the simultaneous existence of at least ten dimensions, known as superstring theory. Pushing the envelope of the mind to embrace multiple dimensions, sister universes, and the possibility that everything from our bodies to the farthest star, is made up of vibrating strings, fascinated me.
During this time... I read metaphysical literature, Eastern philosophy, science, and poetry. Turkey was one of the places that resonated deeply within me, the ancient city of Ankara with its Hittite Museum, and Istanbul...
Upon returning home, it came to me in the middle of the night: Act I, Scene 1, a Planetarium. Thus began The Theory of Everything...A series of dramatic events catapult a scientific and metaphysical search into other dimensions and alternate universes

If you are starting to have doubts as soon as you get to the phrase "Pushing the envelope of the mind" to say nothing of Turkey, then perhaps you share my encouragement to all would-be artists who have artistic revelations “in the middle of the night” to take a good, hard look at the idea in the morning. Yes, Turkey is great, ten dimensions are dandy, but by the time Dominic Inferrera’s Brazilian professor was singing about an obscure tribe in Peru that “sees the universe as a seamless web of interconnected threads” in a freshman physics lecture, I was thinking about how nice it would be to hear that lovely voice take on Mozart’s “La Ci Darem La Mano" instead. (It also reminded me, perhaps somewhat mean-spiritedly, of a Tom Stoppard play when a character asks, "Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing `When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you." )

As our Brazilian professor explains how holograms work and gets into trouble with the school's administrators for imparting holistic gobbledygook to young minds instead of Newton’s laws (C'mon people, didn't they show “Dead Poets Society” in Brazil?) I couldn't help but root for the bad guy when someone sang back “You sound like a cult follower.”

If it makes your eyes role during the actual singing, it probably is not good subject material for an opera.

Happily, “The Summer King” and “The Golden Gate” had more promise. But while the composers and librettists are gifted, and the Manhattan School of Music’s young voices agile, lovely and game for the experiment they were taking part in, the short vignettes seemed dramatically skewed out of context. The former is about one of the first African-American baseball stars, but the character that inspired the story seemed to have no sung role, leaving the audience with only the melodic company of various narrators assuring us of his awesome gifts (Guess you had to be there). The Golden Gate, a sort of San Francisco/Generation X version of Pushkin's novel “Eugene Onegin” is entirely narrated….not really ever a good idea in opera, in which too much ironic distance can amount to ridiculousness. Good humored, overpopulated with someone’s idea of yuppie-hipsters, and sporting enough casual hook-ups to assure us of its modernity, I wasn’t convinced there was any single conflict that really deserved the audience’s emotional investment. (Not atypical of the lyrics, but a keeper nonetheless: “It’s a Waste/To be Chaste.” I'm sure it sounds more poetic in Russian)

“Well,” said the evening’s moderator, attempting to identify the key ingredient that will bring youth into the country’s opera houses. “Opera should be about fun!”

Happily, one of the artists meekly amended:

“Actually, I think opera is about passion.”

I don’t doubt what Peter Gelb would say.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:26:00 +0000

Feather-Brains & Galleristas
An outdoor pillowfight and an indoor art exhibit focusing on California offer ways to warm up from February's bitter winds.

What: NewMindSpace's Pillowfight and LA Art
Location: Union Square and the Metropolitan Pavilion
Date: 2/24/2007
Cost: Pillowfight is free; LA Art is $10
Bohemian Factor: Through the roof at the pillow fight; only the most well-to-do Bohemians at the art exhibition/sale.
Geek Factor: Ditto

Stress, travel, deadlines….and repeat! Two weeks ago, when – over the course of 14 days I had been in Istanbul, Prague, New York, Minneapolis…and back to New York again…I found myself waking one early Saturday morning on wondering exactly which time zone it was.

Vowing to make the most out of the weekend, despite jet lag and yet another deadline, I was able to take a detour at one of a squillion art exhibitions that are taking over lower Manhattan: “LA Art in New York” in the Metropolitan Pavilian, and, at an admission price of $10, one of the less expensive ones, small enough to see most of in an hour or so. (More about that to follow)

In case that wasn’t enough procrastination, however, NewMindSpace was there to save the day with another one of their Pillow Fights at Union Square. While there hasn’t exactly been a scarcity of such impulses to revert to childhood, it was nice-in contrast to last fall’s event – to let the feathers fly without any hyper-eroticized pictures of naked women or the pressure to remain poised in the presence of SoHo’s glitterati (and really, who wants to stay composed in a pillow fight, anyway?)

While the demographic was definitely a younger crowd (more NYU backpacks than one can shake a pillow at) I was greatly bemused to find that the groups on either side of me were speaking German, respectively, and Russian. If they were indeed tourists, I couldn’t help but think the event captures an aspect of NYC that is rarely accessible to visitors on their way to the more costly Manhattan circus attractions of SoHo, Empire State Building, Broadways Show, ad nauseam.

I can't begin to wonder what unknowing pedestrians might have concluded, glimpsing small tempests of feathers whirling around outside the Union Square Whole Foods for the rest of the day.

But some stories are better told visually, so:

The vendors at LA Art hadn’t traveled nearly as far, but certainly had commerce on the brain. Outside of the convenience of being able to view trendy young artists not far from me for free in the Chelsea galleries, I find the overheated art market interesting primarily because of the personality types it has tossed together in the usual Manhattan stew of hedge fund managers, dealers, hipster MFA graduates, publicists and Park Avenue old money. The influx of California art-types made the whole mélange just more interesting, and made for some interesting people-watching in addition to art viewing. (The conversations between locals looking to expand their collections, and LA gallery owners was endlessly instructive, often beginning with social niceties on east coast vs. west coast cultures, and then diving delicately into matters of the artist’s talents, their soon-to-be-soaring careers, and of course, money.)

For better or worse, I was just there to avoid getting sucked in to such transactions, with the exception of a few owners kind enough to chat about an artist and answer questions, while recognizing –without batting an eyelash – that, I did not have the look or the talk of a potential buyer. (I barely even remember what “formalism” is, truth be told) Should I ever find myself graduating from non-profiteer to a profession where I might have actual purchasing power, this is who I would keep my eye on:

Though none of her buyers may be able to pronounce her name, the “absorbent ground” technique of Iva Gueorguieva introduced translucent swirls, spatters, tendrils and waves that could be either a sea of psychological suggestions, for those who like to see abstract art as a Rorschach test, and a feast for the eye for those would rather not go there. Equally adventurous in throwing everything – literally – into the kitchen sink when it comes to color, texture and form were the loopy sculptures of Lynn Aldrich, made out of garden hoses, sponges, scrubbers and various cleaning instruments.

I’m not sure what an “archival pigment photo” is, but the haunting images of tree stumps captured by Amir Zaki gave me the willies, speaking of psychological suggestion.

Peter Rogier’s lemon-yellow “Broadway” was an attention grabber, and I could tell I was not the only one he wondered how that dancing man depicted managed to defy gravity, being made from polyester, iron and polyurethane varnish, whatever that is.

This being LA, it made sense that there was a lot of multimedia-digital-ish items, art inspired by comic strips and cartoons, and heavy use of text and lettering. Raphael Lazano-Hemmer’s “Extremities” made interesting use of security cameras; Charlie Roberts’ “Tall Tale” had even the most icily distant buyers stopping in their tracks to figure out what the story was all about, a banjo player on some kind of lusty adventure in a mythical Americana; and the work of Jorge Mendez Blake, which - though not one for aesthetics- certainly knows how to create a despairing image in the viewers mind.

The sloping letters on his work “And Over He Went” state:
“But for all his efforts
he could not get his
balance & over he went”

I know the feeling, Jorge. It’s good to know there’s angst west of the Mississippi.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:35:00 +0000

The Persistance of Revelry
Apparently, time is not of the essence when Dali, a DJ, and plenty of alcohol await.

What: The Guggenheim's First Friday
Location: The new El Greco to Picasso exhibit
Date: First Friday of the month, starting again in February of 2007
Cost: $20
Bohemian Factor: not a one to be had on 86th street
Geek Factor: occasionally found reading the biographical blurbs on the walls and taking notes

The adage that "Time is money" is particularly salient in New York, where everyone is always short on the former and wants more of the latter, and where everyone's choice of neighborhood, real estate and transportation depends on their own private interpretation of what that stale platitude really means, anyway.

For me, I discovered, it means I am willing to pay $20 and 2 hours and 45 minutes of my time to see the new Guggenheim exhibit "El Greco to Picasso," accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack and lots of good-looking sybarites checking each other out. I had this moment of revelation at 11:45 pm during last December's trendier-than-thou "First Friday" event, as an otherwise balmy day gave rise to frigidly cold winds and an excruciatingly long wait loosened the resolve of my accomplices to celebrate a friend's birthday under the cross-eyed gaze of Picasso's "Woman Ironing."

Having decided that $20 bucks was just not worth it for the sole hour of remaining exhibit viewing/partying time, my friends decided it was time to abscond for a Second Avenue bar nearby. But my feet refused to budge from the line (though long periods of time in uncomfortable shoes tend to do this to me). After slowly making progress towards the fifth avenue entrance, waiting in a long line that snaked deceitfully around Madison, the collective will had weakened. While initially intrigued by the onslaught of glammed up young things arriving by the taxi-load (and ugly-SUV-limo load) it was clear we were just plebes in the eyes of the watchful museum security, who seemed to open those coveted doors only to Guggenheim members, waiting in their own, much faster moving queue on the South side. Beware of that "members only" line- it routinely raises false hopes among first-time arrivals, who make the frequent mistake of waiting in the wrong place.

Actually there was no need to venture all the way to Second Avenue for alcohol: the high-heeled, tiny-pursed revelers and their scruffy-shaven companions had already discovered that the endless wait could be made more entertaining by sending a representative down to any Lexington avenue liquor store, and bring something back for all to covertly share. Strangely, drinking from brown paper bags in the cold didn't seem a particularly attractive birthday celebration, and I soon found myself the only one unwilling to cut my losses after already giving up 2 hours and 15 minutes. I felt that the hours I had logged, feeling crabby and windblown, were an investment I could only recoup with my promised hour of art viewing, dancing, and social anthropology.

Fortunately, S was willing to wait out that last half hour with me, literally only about ten feet from the entrance, waiting for two more people to leave. Numb, though thawed by the bright lights and a sea of wiggling bodies, we grabbed free drinks and made our way up the Guggenheim spiral. The space really is uncannily suitable for such network-y events; if one is not that interested in reading about the evolution of cubism and too shy to jump into the oxygen-less dance floor, the activity of choice seems to be leaning over the balcony, and gazing passively at the attractive faces visible from above and below. From the very highest level, the bodies of the dance floor became hypnotically abstract, dangerously reeling in the types of people who get sidetracked by their screensavers.

S and I managed to partake in all three activities, in addition to enjoying some Spanish painters I had never heard of, despite the occasional displays of PDA that occasionally obstructed the view (despite the growing numbers of those rotunda voyeurs, it were the couples and groups that that had arrived joined at the hip who firmly were in control of the evening). And apparently lingering too long, although minding our own business, near the dance floor invited some unsolicited attention. A middle-aged man shared his own thoughts as to "which guys are the cutest," and generously advised us as to whom we should be hitting on. Finding his comments mildly sketchy, we decided to chalk our remaining gallery time strictly to art appreciation; given there were only ten minutes left, we still needed to recoup our investment.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 18:30:00 +0000

A Series of Unfortunately Belated Theatrical Events
Original, uneven downtown silliness (Is there any other kind?) is reported on too late, sadly

What: Theatre of Science
The Obstruction Plays
Little Building
Location:
The Tank, Galapagos and Theatre for a New City
Date: November through Five Minutes Ago
Cost: $7 - $18
Bohemian Factor: Healthy
Geek Factor: More on stage than in the audience (particularly Theatre of Science)

It is worth reporting on several quirky theatrical events that register a '10' on the shoestring bohemian-meter…even though they all are, sadly, past. (Bad blogger, I!)

Even those immune to the most self-referential, self-indulgent, self- everything tongue in cheek-ness of downtown theatre were bound to get a chuckle out of Nick Jones "Little Building" playing at Galapagos on Friday nights in November. Given that it is impossible to live in the five boroughs and not have a real estate horror story , there is bound to be some scheudenfreude generated by the eponymous Little Building, who self-destructively harbors unrequited love for a real estate maven. The object of her affection eventually succumbs to that personality disorder so rare to his profession: megalomania. Many of Little Building's peers, encased in the garb of fellow architectural structures, warn her against such an imprudent choice of soulmate, and the dialogue takes full advantage of the goofiness of the premise ("Is that all you are? A man container?")

For more of this sort of thing, check out Jollyship the Whizbang web site, another brainchild of Jones and Raja Azar.

Requiring slightly more generosity of patience, the Slant Theatre's Five Obstruction Plays borrows Lars Von Trier's device, by challenging five playwrights to construct short one-acts based on five obstructions, decided upon by other playwrights. The issuers in this case include Lee Blessing, new MacArthur recipient Sarah Ruhl and Naomi Izuka. In contrast to the most restrictive kind of constraints found in the Von Trier movie, these are a little looser in constraints; more akin to a beginner's creative writing exercises. Given its downtown audience and the fact that writers Lisa Kron ("Well" "2.5 Minute Ride") are writing other projects while concurrently tackling their obstruction plays, this is probably a good thing. Though it was a shame that Dan O'Brien cheats a bit when informed by Izuka that his play "must take place in a drawer." Kron fares better, with a charming though feather-light piece, though Marcus Gardley is the first playwright who aspires towards some kind of profundity, despite the inevitable pathos of writing about a California hustler in search of his birth father. But as always, the best is left for last. That the nearly wordless play will be wonderfully weird and not easy to decipher is evident about reading the cast list, Man Holding Diet Coke. (It also has the unfair advantage of being directed by Steve Cosson, the Civilians ringleader) Splendid ensemble work, sexual jealousy, and Cher are all to follow. The author? Mat Smart, the event's impresario.

For more of this sort of thing, check out Slant Theatre Project web site.

Lastly, as proven once again by Sharper Image catalogs and the latest Hugh Jackman movie The Prestige, the pseudo-threatening spectacle of electric currents gone amok always holds infinite commercial appeal. Theatre of Science presenters Simon Singh, a physicist and science writer, and Richard Weisman, a magician and psychologist, have put together a sort of benign collection of parlor tricks. The grand climax are some very noisy six plus foot bolts of lightning generated by two transformer coils, with the perpetual reminders of the destructive potential of such an apparatus (threats that seemed a little melodramatic, given that this had been marketed as a family show). Some general introductions were given to Big Bang Theory, incorporating an endearing example of an incandescent pickle. The show also featured a contortionist, whose physiology-defying feats were both a marvel and an appetite suppressant, for those of us sensitive types who are used to associating the unholy stretching of limbs and joints with dismemberment and accidents (even more intriguing to me was the soundtrack used for this portion of the show, which apparently had been generated, in some way, from MRI machines). There is no effort made to make Big Bang and contortionists cohere; the greater purpose seems to be to instill an appreciation for the showmanship and sensual appeal of scientific inquiry. And it seems to be working: despite the warning's of "Don't try this at home," my companions, two science-minded Columbia grad students enthusiastically reported later that the pickle-igniting feat could be easily replicated within one's own home. Hmm, if only the NIH might begin soliciting grant requests on other matters of vegetable-based radiation…

For more of this sort of thing, check out Science in the City, the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as Simon Singh's home page.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 20:12:00 +0000

Before the Charade Passes By
Downtown Institution Still Instills Civic Pride, Bad Taste and Booty

What: Village Halloween Parade
Location: Sixth Avenue, New York
Date: October 31, 2006
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Finally! Off the Charts!
Geek Factor: This picture above should suffice.

Just like practicing Jews say "Next year in Jerusalem!" at the Passover seder, I have often found myself saying "Next year in San Francisco!" during the Halloween season. Having actually lived in the bay area during my undergrad days, I have long harbored a fantasy of the Castro's infamous All Hallow's Day revelry, the kind of ideal nourished only by one who repeatedly passed up the opportunity to go study for midterms instead. Alas.

After coming down with that particular malaise unique to New Yorkers whose morals take a nose -dive amid the perfect storm of winter weather, shlepping outside in the rain for laundry, ridiculous prices for bad produce, and taking those heavy groceries up five flights of a walk-up apartment, I was particularly vulnerable to that West Coast siren song.

Fortunately, the Village Halloween parade – and a temporary warm front – was a hearty reminder to me of the very specific camaraderie that seems permanently wedded to Sixth Avenue and Spring Street. The crowd of twenty people or so with matching sperm-shaped hats, the creative technophiles who take on such structural challenges as a gigantic cell phones, an iPod, and a box of dental floss ("Fight Plaque! Not Iraq!").

Most important, is the camaraderie that can only be forged through making catty comments with strangers about the tackiness of other marchers' choice of garb. ("Dear god. I'm seeing way to much of that man's butt cheeks!" pronounced the couple dressed as morgue undertakers next to us. That was all it took to cement the union of our two groups of marchers.)

Upon hearing about the terrible shooting that took place at this year's Castro party, it did, trigger some reflection regarding my self-pitying yearning for the left coast this time of year. There's no reason that such tragedy couldn't just as likely have taken place at New York's Village Halloween Parade, despite the vast amounts of security everywhere. But the news was all the more shocking because what the Village parade does instill, at the very least, is the illusion of civic unity born out of a shared embrace of all things loony, creative, and – occasionally - harmlessly tasteless…and if that doesn't feel like security against senseless violence, what can?

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 04:06:00 +0000

Featherweight Champions
Operation Pillowfight toys with issues of exploitation and sexuality, but discovers that downtown glamour and high-cleavage horseplay are much less of a downer.

What: Operation Pillowfight
Location: Greene Street Gallery, New York
Date: October 14, 2006
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Some high-salaried hipsters
Geek Factor: Absolutely zero, sadly

*******

Ah, what is the threshold at which art becomes commerce?

An Andy-Warhol-ish question with a very practical answer. (That's right, Dave Hickey -the highly esoteric art-and-pop culture historian -won't be staying up all night pondering the answer to this one) I think one possible answer may be when the posse of popular snark site gawker shows up.

Upon hearing that a staged pillow fight would be taking place in conjunction with an art gallery opening event at the Greene Street Gallery, I knew I had to be there. Envisioning the kind of scrappy whimsical populism that NewMindSpace traffics in, I headed to SoHo...I found myself surrounded by an exhibit featuring adolescent girls with preternaturally large breasts fighting and/or fondling one another with pillows.

Inspired by online pornography, the exhibit– like so many ventures-promises to demonstrate the commodification of sexuality. Hmm, if he's that concerned for the image of women in society, I'm not sure that he wouldn't be better off volunteering for NOW? Or an organization like this one? There seemed to be a fairly literal but vague obsession with menstrual blood, and a rather unapologetic reinforcement of the "Scantily clad chicks duking it out is HOT" motif. Given the violent allusions in some of the art on display, the relatively benign and goofy sight of art models, strategically garbed in loose pajamas meant to slip off for some serious boobage – which took place instantaneously – whapping one another all the while giggling, only brought attention to what was missing from the crowd's curious expectations: malice, either feigned or authentic. There was neither blood nor feathers drawn, and several individuals in the crowd- friends of the artist, I now suspect- willingly dove into the fray. I could just feel one of the many well-groomed post-collegiate guys bemoaning the opportunity to growl, "Rrrrarrrrr!!" they way they do when excitedly expecting a catfight for their viewing pleasure.

"It would be cooler if they were like jello-wrestling or something," opined a youngish guy behind me. Cooler, indeed, and more to the point: female on female violence is sadly perceived as erotic in this society, so why disguise where this was all heading with cuddly cushions and silk pajamas? A rather unfair judgment, perhaps, and I do suspect this pillow fight idea attracted a lot of very beautiful, very trendy looking people who wouldn't have shown up at a dive for your standard brawl in Berry Blue; and, in a City where buzz is more valuable than Google stock – I suspect that the artist might be asked to do more of this sort of thing.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 02:09:00 +0000

Objects in Space
Excursion to Dia Beacon offers life-size cubes, boxes, spheres, strings, and occasionally clunky verbiage.

Serra's Torqued Ellipses, as captured on the Dia's web site

What: Dia Beacon
Location: Beacon, New York
Date: Year round
Cost: $27 with MTA's "One Day Getaway" fare (includes transportation and museum admission) Yes, it’s over $20, BUT hey..it’s a day trip!
Bohemian Factor: Mostly concentrated near the Warhol room.
Geek Factor: Quite low.

*******

Make friends with engineers.

This seems to be the take home lesson of my excursion to Dia Beacon, the gargantuan center for contemporary sculpture in upstate New York. For those occasionally baffled by the industrial aesthetic, imposing scale and seemingly impersonal nature of contemporary art, it helps to drag along someone who traffics in the business of structure, geometry, Newton’s laws, and most importantly, embraces the tactile when surrounded by high-fallutin’ discourse.

“I want to run my finger around the rim!” announced C as we both stared up at the curving structures.

"What do you think would happen?" I asked.

She thought a moment. “It would be dusty.”

Led into spiral-like trajectories by the “torqued ellipses” of Richard Serra, I checked in with C to share thoughts about what kind of cosmic profundity resided in the design of the structures, sprawling in magisterial loopiness. The pathway in front of us suddenly became freakishly narrow, and then opened outwards into a funky angular crevice. I expected, at the very least, some dark and brooding statement on the limits of perception.

Fortunately, C was thinking about other, less esoteric things.

“This is a great echo! What do you think would happen if we sing inside one of these?”

At least I’d found an outlet for the Sondheim song stuck inside my head all morning; C was right – the echo was fantastic, although we attracted some curious looks from other visitors.

So C and I conducted a few possibly ill-informed, harmlessly silly accoustical experiments to find the locations where the soundwaves might resonate the most. The psychological impact of the structures continued to awe us, but became something felt rather than something we needed to talk about. This turns out to be a good approach to Dia.

For some New Yorkers, the end of summer signals last opportunities to head North and West; to Long Island; to the Hamptons; to their upstate cabins and enjoy the last opportunities afforded to us for pastoral escape while the green remains. For shoestring budgets, day trips are the answer, particularly when Metro North offers a package deal. The train ride up to Dia offers some pretty views of the Hudson and a chance to explore offer a quaint Main Street with boutiques and coffee shops. But who has time for antiquing when the largest works of the 20th Century avant garde visual arts world are around the corner? C and I made a bee line for the museum; given its 240,000 square feet of space (it used to be a box-factory built in the 1920’s) we correctly assumed it would take all day to explore.

The view of the Hudson from Dia, New York
We had other favorites beside the ellipses, including Serra's Union of the Torus and the Sphere, which is simply fun to walk around, regardless of one’s feelings toward geometry.

There is no need to walk around Fred Sandback’s installations of colored strings laid out into outlines of planar surfaces; you can walk right through them. “These look like the first phase of the design process.” C noted after we both stared at several of the shapes. The text accompanying Sandback’s work instructed us that his work contains both “fact and illusion. Trying to weed out one in favor of the other is dealing with an incomplete situation.” Well, perhaps more dangerous than incomplete: Running from side of the museum to the other in a hurry later on, I managed to run – literally- right into the string itself – prompting some worried gasps from onlookers and security guards.

Thankfully, museum officials, perhaps anticipating the less-than-perfect coordination of some visitors, have made close-up viewings of Michael Heizer’s “North East South West” available via appointment only, preventing, say, visitors from falling from a rather unpleasant precipice. Otherwise, they can only be observed behind barricades. Holzer's “negative sculptures,” are huge steel, subterranean structures with shapes – cubes, cones – subtracted from their interiors. While I was beginning to get lost staring down into what struck me as melancholy depths – C wrestled with the question of how they were brought in from the California desert.

Those who like a puzzle can easily get lost in comparing Donald Judd’s similar-but-not-quite plywood boxes, each one a slightly different variation on an almost absurdly simple box shape. Just when you think you’ve found two that are alike, you go back and see, no, not quite; this one is cantilevered; this one has a funky little inclined surface, and so forth.

C’s perspective was a particularly refreshing antidote to the pompous explanatory texts that accompanied each work. For fairness sake, there is more of a burden, I think, on exhibits like those at Dia. Our experience of, say, Dan Flavin’s light fixtures, diverges so much from, say, looking at one of Monet’s haystacks. That said, the descriptions often end up sounding like an angry PhD student about to retake the GRE’s.

An example:

The weightiness of this quintessentially sculptural work is embodied in an interplay between optical quiddity and physical proximity… the visual and textural figures are cadences to mine the conditions they embody in an almost tautological imbrication of text context and site.

I don’t think the literary agents are going to come a’calling. All this quiddity, imbriation, aegis and other vocabulary words are flung, in this case, at images of stacked rectangles, with black print text on the wall that matter of factly states “One slab put top to butt on another slab.”

Perhaps a refute to all this verbiage can be found in a quote from a drawing by Joseph Beuys at the gallery, acknowledging that the intellectual and the visceral experience of art do not always have to march in lockstep. The painting asks, to no one in particular “Where would I have got if I had been intelligent?”

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:15:00 +0000

With all due apologies (never underestimate the value of a functioning pancreas)

First of all, sorry for the long delays in-between entries – Miss Arcadia has had a very unpleasant bout with pancreatitis, and she does not feel that multiple trips to the NYU Tisch Hospital qualify as either artsy or cheap (and no, it was not caused by alcohol, but yes, I am sadly going to have to avoid drinks for the next few weeks. Here’s hoping I can still attend funky events at bars and confidently request cranberry juice and tea without looking like a ninny)

I shortly will be telling readers about a neat little day trip to Dia Beacon – not that the $27 Metro North pass is pocket change, but compared to a weekend in the Hamptons, it turns out to be an easy little excursion for those of us who have a hard time escaping the island of Manhattan.

In the meantime! Apparently tomorrow – Wednesday Sept 20th – is the last time Reverend Jen will have her Anti-Slam at the Lower East Side’s Cake Shop. Dear me, if the Anti-Slam is leaving the Cake Shop, what next? The Bowery Poetry Club expelled to Inwood? PS 122 heads to Sheepshead Bay? Oh, I suppose nothing should surprise me in an age when a Whole Foods appears on the Bowery. (Which reminds me, have they turned the Second Avenue Deli of yore into a Banana Republic yet?) Oh, the tyranny of New York real estate! I'd love to attend, but am not yet sure if I'll make it on time...

(I am putting the announcement below).

XXXXX WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 XXXXX

Reverend Jen's Anti-Slam Leaving Ludlow Forever

Audience members are encouraged to wear black and bring flowers to
what can only be described as a funeral for the Lower East Side.
Reverend Jen's Anti-Slam is bidding a final farewell to Ludlow
Street, sealing the neighborhood's death at the hands of real estate
developers, landlords, and non-art stars.

The Anti-Slam started over 10 years ago at Collective Unconscious on
Ludlow where it helped spawn an exciting new downtown performance
scene. But dark days soon befell the Lower East Side as invaders clad
in Manolo Blahniks and office casual stormed the gates of Houston
Street. Collective Unconscious and at least seven other art hole
theaters were then bulldozed to make more room for desperately needed
housing for the rich.

For a brief stint the show was then exiled to Tribeca before making a
triumphant return to Ludlow where it is now being forced out due to
Cake Shop's enormous Ludlow Street rent.

After today the Anti-Slam will enter into a nomadic state where it
will test out different locations until it finds a new home. Updates
on the show's whereabouts can be found on Rev. Jen's website.

The Anti-Slam has continually provided audiences with some of the
best entertainment the city has to offer. Pros and amateurs alike
share the stage, and both are given equal respect and a place to try
out new things. All performers are welcome – poets, comedians,
musicians, dancers, performance artists and people who simply need
therapy but can't afford it.

Come out to the show and support the art and artists who are part of
it. They keep the world safe from turning into one giant strip mall.
Let's leave Ludlow with fond, disturbing memories of what was.

Cake Shop
152 Ludlow Street, between Stanton and Rivington, Manhattan
7.45p performer sign-up, 8p show; $3
212 253 0036
revjen@revjen.com
http://www.revjen.com.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:18:00 +0000

Burning Down the House
Event aims to ignite New Yorker’s political idealism with ruckus, reefer, and red vinyl

What: One Night of Fire
Location: Brooklyn Bridge, F Train, Coney Island
Date July 29, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Off the charts
Geek Factor: Look no further than the guys sporting hand-shaped baubles that produce the sound of "one hand clapping." Need I say more?

“Hey, look at that,” my friend K announced coyly. “You caught a boy.”

And indeed I had. I apologized to the stranger that I’d inadvertently lassoed with orange streamers, given the wind whipping across the Brooklyn Bridge. They weren’t even my streamers, in fact – I’d been temporarily charged with holding some kind of decorated orange wand, a small favor for the marching woman on stilts (you’ve seen her, perhaps at the Halloween Parade, with the black flapper bob and an aura of athletic invincibility).

Had we been at a more sedate gathering, my accidental captive might have even noticed he was ensnared by brightly colored ribbons, but given the noise, the density of people on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the fact that there were a lot of objects more messy, tactile, and viscous once could rub against than streamers, his attention span, like everyone else's, was under siege.

Aerialists were getting ready to perform, and the bridge was crammed full of people sporting wings, hula-hoops, loudspeakers, antenna and printed exhortations that were either naughty or political. There weren’t yet any harbingers of fire at One Night of Fire, but there were fistfuls of policemen and women lining up the streets of Dumbo, waiting, not impolitely, for the crowds of hundred of neo-hippies to give way to some kind of conflagration, a la RNC-circa-2004 style civic disruption.

Complacent Nation, the organizer of the event, is a group whose actions are intended to be “an exploration of how to live with integrity and creativity in a world gone awry,” marrying an outer borough aesthetic with general rambunctiousness under the banner of political protest.

“This is so civilized,” I said to K. A humid Manhattan 90-something day was dissolving into a perfectly dry breeze, combined with a sunset view of the City skyline. The extroverted friendliness, coming from people whose hairstyles would have frightened me if they were next to me in line, say, at the Shake Shack, gave me a temporary surge of generosity towards my fellow New Yorkers.

It wasn't permanent. In portraying the event to the public, the Complacent Nation web site promises, a moment of awe, a glimpse of the impossible and the intoxication of your nightlife set free.

The moment of awe and glimpse of the impossible were over with pretty quickly, as the dissipation of the crowd gave way to glimpses of shirtless men with neon light sticks enmeshed in their hair, tiara-style, and women in red vinyl shorts over fishnet stockings (“When did that become a good idea?” demanded K, my reliable source of fashionista wisdom). After stopping at a Brooklyn public park, where participants were treated to a cultural bazaar featuring coepoeira, impressive hula-hooping with glow in the dark accessories, and the clean, floral odor of cannabis.

Civilization, meet Stunted Adolescence.

“Is it over?” I asked stupidly, as the ratio of pot smoking to martial arts became more lopsided, right before the masses began militantly marching towards the subway stop (“F Train! F Train!” the crowd was soon roaring. Don’t we all wish public transportation received such enthusiasm in other parts of the country.)

The intoxication component was right around the corner. Within an hour’s time, I’d be crammed into a Coney Island-bound train, with blaring speakers hoisted in gravity-defying positions and people pouring vodka into dixie cups. Sweat condensation was festering on the ceiling and dripping onto happily oblivious passengers, who were busy taping anime-inspired drawings onto the windows. At any stop along the way, a relatively tranquil subway car would be overwhelmed by a stampede of people dashing in from the preceding car. “Ladies and Gentleman!” yelled a tie-dyed woman gleefully into a loudspeaker. “If you see a suspicious package, don't keep it to yourself!" echoing the oft-heard anti-terror refrain usually dispensed by the subway loudspeaker. She received roars of drunken approval for this nugget of good advice. One man began to pound against the windows as if he was trying to escape asphyxiation. Never I have I felt such a pure empathy for MTA employees.

Somewhere near Avenue U, after a ride that could have been an hour-long Dial commercial, I considered just getting off the train, but was seized by an urge to stick it out. When would I have the chance to experience such aesthetic overdrive again? I felt like K and I hadn’t yet capitalized on what Complacent Nation promised us:

A tight cabal of artists, performers and miracle makers has come together to create simple moments of beauty within a massive carnival of fire. Or something like that.

The beach on Coney Island is pleasant at night, and the open asphalt invited a great deal of dancing, courtesy of the Hungry Marching Band, and contraband sparklers, harkening memories of wholesome Midwestern July 4th barbecues. (Mom and Dad, if you could see me now!) Female fire-dancers wore mysterious combinations of clothing to keep from getting burned, such as underwear and no pants, but socks.

The show, though impressive, was truncated when the police arrived, not to stop the party, or the noise, but in fact to discourage the performance, which now involved burning hula-hoops. As the crowd spread out farther and farther, a new restlessness set in, and K and I dug our toes into the sand and silently watched the intricate choreography of marching band, sparklers, and increasingly free-spirited party-goers beginning to wade in the water, described by K as “naked people I really didn’t need to see that naked.”

Good point. At that juncture, without conscious of what I was doing, I began to break out into a sprint back towards the F-train, without so much as informing K of my destination. Some clairvoyant part of my brain had registered, a half a second before my field of vision, a participant so imbued with élan that he was setting a tent on fire, inspiring hundreds of others to run towards the beach in enthusiasm, making my lone, involuntary sprint in the other direction a bit comical.

It was then nearly one in the morning, and there would be a good two hour train ride home on the local. In a world gone awry, it was time to set my nightlife free.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:22:00 +0000

A Little Night Music, A Lot of Nosh
Free opera too populist? Compensate with a million dollar picnic.

What: The Met's Opera In the Park
Location: Central Park and other locations
Date Through September 2, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Present, but counterbalanced by the midtown post-workday suit set.
Geek Factor: Many, many opera geeks; all purpose nerds are few and far in between.

For some of us, it is hard not to have a good time at Opera In the Park . Close seats go to early birds, rather than millionaire donors, you can munch down dinner while the orchestra warms up, you can lie down and try to find Orion while Mark Delevan sings an aria. You can enjoy the theater of latecomers trying to find each other with cell phone rings, balloons shaped like Sesame Street characters, and funny little dances in place. You can close your eyes and pretend you just paid $300 for your "orchestra" seat, sans comfortable chair and caption system.

Of course, whether your reasons for being there are rooted in passion for opera, free City events, or big outdoor cocktail parties, there are a couple of conditions that make things more complicated:

-Trying to meet up with anyone.

Woe to the poor soul who arrives at 7:45 pm, with a precious 15 minutes to circumnavigate a labyrinthine maze of tarps, beach chairs, Balducci’s bags, and leap frog over the most elaborately laid out picnic displays I have ever seen. At last Wednesday's performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” one group of pretty young people seems to have an entire cheese-tasting station, complete with different knives for each stinky round of Murray's laid out with cute little plastic wine glasses (goodbye to the enforcement of Central Park’s no alcohol policy), while several families are enjoying a multi-course Italian meal, complete with platters of antipasti and –dear lord – figs wrapped in prosciutto. (Come to think of it, why didn’t I think of this? I begin to feel embarrassed about the Tasti-D-Lite I slurped down while racing to the M4 bus)

Plus, there are extensive police barrier-like divisions between sections of the Lawn laid out with a geometry not unlike the borders of tiny Latin American countries. Upon standing no less than 30 feet from my companions, I am sent by police officers back to the other side of the Lawn, only to have to weave my way back through an even farther distance from the other side, on account of the pathway that has been cleared, presumably, for pedestrian traffic (which would of course, explain, why no one was allowed to traverse it). On top of this, there are picnic baskets, baby baskets, and most treacherous of all – thousands of little tea lights. It’s amazing to me that the Great Lawn is not going up in flames every time someone knocks over a bottle of sun dried tomatoes.

-Having to leave before the end, for any reason. Or even having to move.

It doesn’t matter if you have to call the babysitter, go to the bathroom, or suddenly need to go to an emergency room. The general darkness (there are only stage lights), the evil barriers mentioned above, and the ever-present threat of stepping on someone’s wine and platters, all bestow heaps of redeeming values onto those tea lights that seemed so pesky at the beginning of the evening. The inability to get back to the main paths without a hacksaw or a pair of stilts, now matter how close by, makes finding a comfortable position a do-or-die proposition. (“I enjoyed eet very much,” said a heavily accented European fellow upon thanking me for borrowing a towel, which he had to lay out in a narrow slot between two massive picnicking apparatuses. “But eet was long, too long, I theenk.”)

-You are picky about the voices.

Given all the technical considerations that are taken into consideration when architects build concert halls and opera houses, it is not really fair to expect the Great Lawn to embody accoustic majesty. The Met has set up a sort of central sound-techie headquarters not unlike mission control in Sci-Fi channel low budget series. But this is not the place to discern a subtle shift in the volume dynamics, perfect diction on multi-syllabic explanations or nuanced trills unadulterated by the unexpected crinkles of the miking system. A JFK bound flight rumbles above and someone’s cell phone is sure to start regurgitating some 80's pop song.

Did I say I love opera in the park? The City skyline glitters in the distance over the Great Lawn, and when Delevan -playing the court jester, Rigoletto - sings an agonizing cry recalling the curse he's been doomed to fulfill, you forget where you are entirely, until a plane flies overhead. Or someone steps on a plastic wineglass.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:26:00 +0000

Culture Wars

Is the NY Times's non-stop weekend of culture for the hoi polloi or the jet set?

(above) PS 1's Primordial Soup-like Outdoor Sculpture, during a Warm Up party

So, several weeks ago, the New York Times had an obnoxious but well-intentioned article entitled “All Culture; All the Time.” A journalist apparently spent $1260 for a nonstop weekend of doing all of NYC’s cultural entertainments and reported back with blow-by-blow reporting on the fabulous things he crammed into one weekend. I’m not exactly sure whether the intention is to trigger envy or revulsion or a combination of both.

On the one hand, this clearly represented a great opportunity to publicize the undiscovered gems of the five boroughs. But given the cost of the foray, and the fact that the Met Museum of Art, the American Ballet Theater, the Guggenheim, and a Broadway show “The History Boys,” don’t really need much more in the way of publicity, the article was not really for the adventurer or the deal seeker. On the other hand, even among those who could afford a weekend like this one, we are told early on that they wouldn’t want to. With a “kids say the darndest things” invocation of cuteness, our columnist shares the fact that his daughters were dreading the ballet until they became enamored of those graceful air born boy ballerinas, but maddeningly refuses to comment on whether or not, after his whirlwind tour, he has a rebuttal for his friends and family who told him that his weekend “sounds like hell.”

To be sure, he does go to some lesser known choices, such as the Francis M. Neumann Gallery, currently showcasing female Dada artists, but other attempts at cheaper or less usual choices seem half hearted: he ends up at the Neumann Gallery because the Moma’s male-centric Dada exhibit is too crowded; he gives up on the highly touted (but free!) Chelsea show "Helter Swelter" at the Oliver Kamm because it is closed on the weekends. (Though you’d think one of the New York Times editors would have tipped him off on the fact that NYC’s galleries are closed on Saturdays in the summer?) And really, any bohemian on a shoestring out there could easily beat that hefty figure and get just as much culture.

While I can’t link directly to the article (oh, you stick in the mud, Times Select!) I’m tempted to follow in the tradition of trendy health food magazines: a despondent reader provides their favorite recipe and the magazine produces its own version, replacing every ounce of lard with egg substitute, applesauce, tofu and voila! A dramatic reduction in calories, and the despairing housewife informs the readers how much it tastes just the like dear old aunt Tillie’s recipe for Fried Cheese Pudding Tarts. (Although for total transparency, I am presuming our New York Times reporter got the best available seats without resorting to discount codes, etc, in order to ring up that whopping final figure) Additionally, his costs may have also blown up on the fact he was taking along family members. At any rate, I've made the following calculations made on individual admissions.

Here are just a few alternatives...(No, I don't know why there's this annoying gap below; I shall repair when back from the midwest!)

New York Times	Price	"Shoestring" alternative	Price
Guggenheim Museum	$18	PS 1 Warm Up Party – Cheap wine, hot dogs, precocious controversial artists, funky outdoor sculpture (see above), and a diverse range of twenty and thirty-somethings	$10
American Ballet Theatre “Le Corsaire”	$160 (orchestra seats)	Summerstage (featuring “Noche Flamenca” in July) or Lincoln Center Out of Doors	Free
The Metropolitan Museum of Art	$20	The Isamu Noguchi Museum “Best of Friends: Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi”	$10
The History Boys	$105 (orchestra seats)	catching a show at The New York Fringe Festival	$15
“Keep it Quiet” screening at Lincoln Center	$10	River to River Festival’s free outdoor movie series (“Rear Window” is to be played on 8/29)	Free
Bargemusic classical music concert	$35	Sunday classical music concerts at MoMA’s sculpture garden	Free
Dale Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden	$20	Flux Factory's comic-inspired installation “Opolis”	Free (Open for most of July but – as I am writing this, sadly past- they should have another installation on view soon)
School of the Americas (LAByrinth Theater)	$50	I actually dislike diverting future audiences from an off-Broadway play, but if I must name an alternative in diatribes against violent, evil regimes, the punk version of Titus Andronicus at The Tank should do nicely.	$10
“Bodies” Exhibit at South Street Seaport Museum	$8	The “SKRAWL” exhibit of mutant animals at New York Public Library	Free
Grand Total	$486	Grand Total	$45

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Can You Hear Me Now?

Recommendations for the coming week; Unspecific Fear of the Future Invades Chelsea art scene

What: Sweet Paprika
Location: The D Lounge (near Union Square)
Date Friday’s; Check the web site
Cost: $5
Bohemian Factor: Low
Geek Factor: Just enough of us to get the obscure jokes.

What: Chelsea Art Galleries
Location: W. 25th and W. 26th Street
Date Mondays-Fridays in Summer
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: Low

It looks to be a good week ahead for the bohemian on a shoestring!

I’m excited to discover Sweet Paprika, at $5, a chance to hear some talented comics (a happy proportion of them female) in a low-key atmosphere. Not every punch line is a bull’s eye, but the freshness of the talent and lack of artifice, in addition to an intimate atmosphere, makes for a ridiculously good deal. Paprika host and comic Ophira Eisenburg was flying solo the night I came (she usually teams with Allison Castillo) but she definitely held her own. And drinks for under $10! I felt like I was in Brooklyn.

And as long as I seem to be unable to disassociate myself with robots, puppets and comics (no doubt some suitable combination of all three will show up sooner or later), I have to plug this workshop tomorrow at 6th and B Gardens in Alphabet City, where wanna-be illustrators can learn how to draw their favorite comic book characters. I do so wish I could come, just to see who shows up, but alas, I will hopefully be another event, attending my first Warm Up at PS 1, in Queens.

Tomorrow night is also The Tank’s three-year anniversary party. Their mission of providing creative, affordable public events and a creative environment for artists “engaged in the pursuit of new ideas” is admirable, and their mercurial acquisition of new locations in the hellish NYC real estate market is truly Herculean. I dropped by their Chashama digs not long ago for a little comedy and found myself singled out by the singer/comedienne at the microphone. Hey, what girl doesn’t want to be the target of a vulgar serenade?

For those who ever have weekdays free, I recommend several Chelsea art exhibits that seem to offer a great deal of whimsy, but are apparently inspired by the artists’ tempestuous premonitions of our imminent doom from commercialism, tourism, imperialism, and other evil things yuppies tacitly condone. While I confess that the connection was not always intuitive, the three shows were much more along the lines of thoughtful, provocative and silly than just plain “downer.”

I first saw Saya Woolfalk’s fuzzy, tentacled creations at the 2004 Scope Art Fair, resembling the kinds of made-up species that are used to host children’s edutainment. For the video now on display at CUE Art Foundation, she puts actual people into these costumes and then films them performing choreography that could simultaneously be warfare or uninhibited sex. Intriguingly, it’s an interracial couple, but we can only tell by their hands. The artist’s states that her work illustrates the “commoditized representations of desire,” and perhaps that’s why it’s a little creepy to project malice onto these creatures, with all their floppy body parts. They do seem vaguely familiar, either from a fabric softener commercial or an 80’s cartoon or a Stephen Spielberg movie, it is just hard to say.

The undercurrent of malice was definitely more detectable at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, where “Montezuma’s Revenge” is intended to showcase rifs on tourism and the inclination of, presumably Western society, to fetishize the exotic. According to the press release, “the longing for paradise has been transformed by manipulative industries,” and while that certainly was evident in many of the photos, I couldn’t help but fall for the enormous jellyfish hanging from the ceiling. Although the exhibition copy warned that these guys “convey an anxious tone, despite their tactile and luminescent qualities,” I couldn’t help but think that they would make a great apartment accessory for parties, if I had $20,000 to spare. Hey, here’s a great opportunity for one of those “manipulative industries” – perhaps they can talk to the artist about a licensing agreement?

I knew on my first go round that the artists participating in the James Cohen Gallery’s “A Brighter Day” exhibit had some weighty issues on their minds, although “collective anxiety” wouldn’t necessarily have been my first choice for the underlying theme. (Although, I supppose, not a bad idea to tap into everyone's doom-and-gloom, given the most recent implosion in the Middle East) The work presented is certainly cynical, but more in the smart-ass vein, than the nihilistic one, so it's not always clear whether or not these pieces are delivering an urgent admonition about a grim future or just toying with us by self-referentially dismissing their own value. (One amusing print on the wall bears the following text in multihued colors: “When I Am Happy I Will No Longer Have To Make These.”)

There is other text, including a bench made by the ubiquitous Jenny Holzer (I won’t give away the message inscribed in it) and a wall that sports “I Deserve Less” scrawled over and over again, presumably from an over-privileged adult succumbing to ennui. But my favorites were the visual pieces – a colony of mushrooms, growing more alien and menacing with each new vertical layer; a living room wall with high brow accessories showing missing pieces, as if they’ve been violently ripped apart; an untitled work that invokes a wild configuration of what could be body parts or machinery; and well, a sort of cell phone demon camouflaging in a tapestry created by two filmmakers from London. I am definitely not doing justice in my descriptions, but believe me, if my cell phone started making that kind of face at me, I’d succumb to “collective anxiety” as well.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 16:41:00 +0000

You Could Learn A Lot From a Bunny*

Chashama’s Dance Festival Presents the Finance Set With Options…(but not that kind)

*with all due respect to Vince and Larry

What: Oasis Festival 2006
Location: Chashama at 217 E. 42nd Street
Date July 10-July 21, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Performers: High; Audience: Low (This IS midtown, after all…)
Geek Factor: Low

Audiences, especially I-need-my-wireless-device-stapled-to-my-person New Yorkers, are used to getting instructions before performances. However, at Chashama, when a woman in a red dress tells her audience to turn on their cell phones, and in fact, make a phone call during the piece, nobody seems concerned.

It turns out that choreographer Erin Malley is counting on the audience to dictate what her dancers are going to do next, based on phone calls, a deck of cards, and doorbell-like buttons on the window that produce WB cartoon-like sound effects.

Of course, the fact that the MC for this event is a tall and aggressive man in a giant blue bunny costume is already a pretty good indicator that the work presented as Chashama’s Oasis 2006 Festival is going to be, say, a tad different from a night at The Joyce.

Oasis is a festival of modern dance, now in its ninth season, presenting 20-minute pieces by a roster of 40 choreographers for free between July 10 and July 21. They are performed on the stage in front of Chashama’s window onto 42nd Street, so that those already in attendance have the additional entertainment of watching not just the dances, but the evolving facial expressions and body language of briefcase-carrying midtown wheelers and dealers who stop, look up from their cell phone head sets, and become confused, revolted, excited, or all of the above, by the performance just inside the window. Many of them, wrested out the crowd by our Bunny-Man, walk in through the open door and add themselves to the audience, while others hesitate for a minute and resist the weirdness. At any rate, the decision-making moment is always fun to watch.

Did I mention there was dancing?

Malley’s piece features several dancers embodying different florescent colors (with their wigs, they could double as the Color Kids). But this is no “Choose Your Own Adventure” style improvised dance- (e.g. I wouldn’t recommend shouting “Do the Macarena!”). Each dancer has a cell phone whose ring sends them off on a mini-solo (the numbers for each are displayed on posters on the window). Movement phrases correspond to a series of large mysterious cards with words written on them, picked out by audience members/passers by. (The cards have the phrased “Play the Dance” written on them, with pictures of – mysteriously – dollar bills). This is not the place to be if you want to shun the limelight. Ms. Malley will see you trying to blend in with the crowd and thrust the deck of cards your way.

Despite the horrific humidity, at least half of the audience is persuaded by Malley to watch the piece from the Chashama’s window outside, where the four noise-making buttons have been suctioned-cupped to the windows (“Go ahead and PUSH our buttons!” she yells out authoritatively.) Some were less shy about this than others: one of the very well-groomed, youngish executive types is particularly zealous about pushing all the buttons, which we are advised not to do as it would be difficult for the dancers to follow all the "requests" simultaneously. While the theme song of Green Acres sends the Dancer Dressed in Green into motion, Bunny Man comes out and announces he needs a cigarette.

“You came outside to tell us THAT?” Malley asks in mock horror.

Later on, Malley is shadowed, inside the window, by another dancer in a similar red dress and blond wig, who tempts her with an apple. The choreographer seems to think about eating fruit a lot (a banana shows up later on), but of course, who doesn’t?

Malley’s show is just one of the 40, of what is sure to be a varied program (the preceding number featured two women locked into mortal combat; intense and intimate, though not gratuitous, it did lure a large number of male spectators inside).

What Bunny-Man has announced to potential viewers is also articulated to me by one of the dancers (in a slightly less confrontational way, of course): that the purpose is to make modern dance accessible to those who never would never consider heading to the Joyce or City Center, who view it as too esoteric. By plopping a visceral, interactive experience practically on their laps as they head to and from work, Malley’s piece and the Oasis Festival could entice those in the Charles Schwab set to slow down and push the buttons.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:16:00 +0000

Seeing Red, Part 2

Exploiting the sinister mystique of Soviet-era paranoia makes for riveting courtroom drama…and a sexy literary haven.

Location: KGB Bar
Date June 25, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Yes, But On Their Best Behavior (Hipsters do not dare act cliquish at KGB)
Geek Factor: Low

The menacing aura of Societ-era intrigue -referenced in the Keen Company's most recent play- is put to far more glamorous use at KGB, a 23-year old fixture in the East Village that is also a beloved arty enclave for rising literary talent. At the season’s conclusion of their Sunday Night Fiction series, authors Scott Snyder, Anthony Giardina and Kathryn Weber, read chapters from their recently published work, and - despite the raucous and intrusive noise of a theatre performance going on in an adjacent space, the cramped standing-room only density of bodies, and the less than stellar miking - it demonstrated once again that these readings are far and above more engaging than your standard, explicitly commercial bookstore readings. Although the Sunday Night Fiction series resumes in the fall, there are diverse literary events at KGB throughout the summer (An August 9 event offers judaica + erotica. I love New York!) Suzanne Dottino does an excellent job of curating the series: the voices presented by all three were so uniquely distinct from one another, that differences in their narrative styles were heavily pronounced. (They also recently launched their own literary magazine, as well)

Appropriately, enough the space use to be a Ukrainian Labor Home. Soviet-themed paraphernalia and all red walls reinforce the speakeasy-ish feeling, and imbues the space with an intimidating sense of history, even if feigned (it was founded two years after the USSR’s collapse in 1993). The guy sitting on my left mentioned he had come in the early 1990’s, and he was pretty sure “that the bartender is the same guy.”

Yes, the crowd is self-consciously arty – chances are the people next to you know one of the authors, and/or are writers themselves. They will ask you which one of the writers you know; but they are just as amiable if you tell them you are not.

And what beats a reading where the crowd is full of old acquaintances rather than fawning strangers? They know when to push the speaker’s buttons, whether something is truly funny or expected, and when a line of dialogue is truly surprising. Such allegiances tend to turn a rote one-way performance into a two-dialogue. Young-ish, early career writers suddenly feel the need to justify their artistic choices to their familiars, forging spontaneous moments that would clearly not be happening at your nearest Barnes & Noble. Earlier this spring, an up-and-coming young writer of a new collection of short stories paused upon a phrase he wrote to describe a self-loathing, religious gay man’s capitulation to his carnal impulses. Suddenly self-conscious, he interrupted himself about five seconds into the next passage to muse over his choice of words: “That’s a rather creepy phrase isn’t it?‘ Non-vaginal warmth.’ I don’t think I realized that until hearing it out loud.”

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:59:00 +0000

Seeing Red, Part 1

Exploiting the sinister mystique of Soviet-era paranoia makes for riveting courtroom drama…and a sexy literary haven.

What In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Location: Connelly Theater
Date June 23, 2006 (The show has completed its run, but check out the Keen Company’s web site for future productions,)
Cost: $19 (I know, I know...My next post will be about something free, I promise!)
Bohemian Factor: Low
Geek Factor: Lower Than You’d Think

The extreme conservatism of the Bush administration, combined with the opprobrium it has incited among left-leaning New Yorkers, has in fact blessed every play that addresses war, greed, civil rights or corruption into an allegory jackpot for the downtown theatre community. But so many productions have been singled out by their directors, reviewers or PR agents for their incisive allusions to today’s headlines that I fear this phenomenon is becoming a bit of an irresistible trap, especially south of 14th street, (although admittedly, even blockbuster musicals appear to want to get a piece of the partisan pie.) I fear that referencing a war already unpopular with audience members also provides some a too-convenient dramaturgical shortcut, allowing director and playwright and actor off the hook when it comes to delving any script’s specific core ideas.

It is with that caveat in mind that I went to see “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” While I hesitate before using this space as a platform to review plays, especially those that have since closed, what I experienced was such a perfect example of audience-actor chemistry, that I find myself urging thoughtful theatre-goers to check out future work performed by the Keen Company, an off-off-Broadway company, whose mission is, apparently to produce sincere plays. Given my wariness when artists of any kind renounce irony, my eyes were beginning to roll before I’d even bought my ticket.

But I could save myself the trouble (or at least, my ocular reflexes). If anyone has earned the right to invoke the most fearful predictions on where our current leaders are taking us, Carl Forsman, artistic director of Keen Company, certainly makes the case. The play was written in 1968, with the shadow of McCarthy era memories lingering not too far behind. In Heinar Kipphardt’s script, physicist Robert Oppenheimer, infamous for his role in overseeing the construction of the world’s first atomic bomb, is facing the humiliating and career-decimating circumstances of losing his security clearance at the elite Los Alamos laboratory, the same lab where his leadership brought him stardom the previous decade. While the conclusion of the US’s engagement with Japan brought the scientist stratospheric fame, the grisly comprehension of his role in the mass destruction at Hiroshima haunted Oppenheimer, understandably reticent about launching a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. During his hearing before the board of the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer, portrayed with endearing humanity by Thomas Jay Ryan, faced accusations that the US’s inability to manufacture an even more lethal hydrogen bomb with the haste desired by the Eisenhower administration was a result of his communist sympathies and other “unpatriotic” inclinations.

This play is not unique in focusing on Oppenheimer, whose multidisciplinary gifts and artist-size angst has made him a popular biography subject in every possible medium. While a three-hour courtroom drama with a minimum of action might sound like a hard sell, the monologues of testimony (and, as a courtroom drama, there are a lot of these) are a mini-roller coaster ride, teasing audiences with alternating doses of certainty, doubt and suspense as to whether the voices of reason will triumph against the draconian steps of a hawkish government. Of course, over three hours, no one would actually care about this question at all if the characters faltered in commanding our sympathies. Contemporary parallels were discreetly implied, except when zealous audience members started to clap as a character defended civil liberties or bitterly condemned the excesses of the anti-communist hysteria. The understated delivery, and the subtlety of the idea war set up by the script didn’t call for this (the applause quickly died out quickly, as it became clear that this kind of response just didn't fit into the world created by the play, in which no one loses their composure, no matter how irate- or demoralized- they become.)

May plays about science, of late, have taken on the form of raucous pastiche cabarets, and well, this is definitely not one of those. It is somber and gradual, but the able cast of actors imparted real fear, particularly the prosecution. The deeply impassioned and articulate arguments, presented by actors Rocco Sisto and Matthew Rauch were terrifying in the forcefulness of their logic. In a country in the grips of an anti-Soviet frenzy, the well-intentioned defense team, with its cohesive but self-righteous blandness, is no match for this kind of ardor, especially coming from those who genuinely believed they were fighting for freedom, democracy and of course, mom and apple pie.

But the primary reason I felt that the show is squarely in the middle of the kinds of entertainment I consider to be populist, despite its esoteric subject matter, was because of what happened during intermission: everyone in the audience turned to their neighbors, to ask them what they thought. On a Friday night, a young couple -typical of east village denizens - entered into heated but cordial dialogue with a group of theatre-goers in their 60’s, all lingering in the rain to debate the parallels to today and whether Oppenheimer has sold out on his friends. Then of course, the conversation turned to where they all had dinner reservations. Well, it is New York, still after all. And three hours is a long time to sit on an empty stomach.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:20:00 +0000

Number Five is a ...tam-tam player?

A Grand Opening for an Only-in-Brooklyn-esque Institution

Location: LemurPlex
Date June 11, 2006 (The event is past, but it looks like the LemurPlex will be hosting other activities and classes "for children and adults" in the future)
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: (Speculative) High
Geek Factor: (Speculative) High

While it is, unfortunately, a bit too late to attend the open house event at LemurPlex, which I missed this past Sunday, it sounds like the grand opening of this new headquarters was a fascinating experience for the truly romantic, old-school robotophiles among us who wait in line to get into Heddatron and still get misty-eyed at the phrase Number Five is Alive.

Not to be confused with scary prosimians that look like raccoons on steroids, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) was founded in 2000 by musician/engineer Eric Singer, and, according to their web site, “LEMUR's philosophy is to build robotic instruments that ‘play themselves.’ In LEMUR designs, the robots are the instruments.” Hmm, is this really a philosophy per se , or just promotional copy? Yet how can I bring myself to pick on a group that created, as they did this past March, custom robotics for an all-mechanical version of Antheil's Ballet mécanique, which was written for “three xylophones, four bass drums, tam-tam, two pianists, seven electric bells, a siren, three airplane propellers and sixteen synchronized player pianos"??

While only folks in D.C. were lucky enough to witness such an, um, well, complicated aural experience, New Yorkers in lower manhattan can, for free, check out Drumming on the Ceiling, an interactive installation at 45 John Street, that sounds considerably less melodic, but could nonetheless be interesting.

I shall have to visit LemurPlex in the future, but if any of you have heard their work, do send me a comment!

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 03:16:00 +0000

The Goat Ate My Homework
"The Death of Little Ibsen" combines whimsy with Nordic neurosis.

Location: Chelsea's Sanford Meisner Theatre (Running Through June 11)
Cost: $20 (A little steep for a bohemian on a shoestring, I know)
Bohemian Factor: Moderate
Geek Factor: Low

Watching a famous tortured artist writhe helplessly in ennui is much more entertaining when his inner demons harmonize in a singsong duet, rather than the boring interior monologues that the rest of us get. Such is the fate of playwright Henrik Ibsen, or rather, Little Ibsen, as he is called in Wakka Wakka Productions’ “The Death of Little Ibsen,” which is about to complete its extended run at the Sanford Meisner Theatre in Chelsea. Careening through various biographical tidbits, the puppet Ibsen (Yes, puppets again!) regretfully contemplates his career choices, his legacy as a playwright and poet, and - as some of us would like to infer from his biography- his lousiness as a boyfriend.

Wakka Wakka doesn’t hesitate to exploit a medium where realism is besides the point, opting to reject narrative for vaudeville. “Little Ibsen” condenses Ibsen Dramaturgy 101 into visual capers, surreal voiceovers and, yes, silly little songs. In the first wordless scene, Ibsen is conveniently pulled from the womb with prematurely large, white sideburns. As a precocious, brooding student, he feeds one of his first rejected manuscripts to an adorable goat, initiating what seems to be a series of tempestuous transactions with cute animals. (Perhaps there is a deeper metaphor going on here? Ibsen scholars, anyone?) When the first of a series of women declares passionate love to a less-than-ardent playwright, she wins him over by girlishly declaring “I love your hair. And you’re so smart!” (Gee, if only this tactic was as effective for the rest of us.) It also helps that she bares her puppet breasts at this juncture.

Henrik Ibsen the puppet articulates lofty goals for his art and his social beliefs, but his aspirations at the grandiose are undermined by his wide-eyed, Candide-like innocence when coping with the results of his own bad decisions, as well as his voice, which is very close in timbre to Fozzy Bear. Kirjan Waage, who designed the puppets, and the other actors/puppeteers imbue even the most minor characters with admirable characterization, as do the other actors/puppeteers while dressed appropriately in Victorian garb.

How autobiographical are Ibsen’s plays in which an artist single-mindedly pursues his craft, immersed in foreign adventures and infidelity while his loved ones are left behind? Did he regret running away from his illegitimate child? Did he agonize over whether there should be limits to the rights of the individual? Although the hour- long production brings these lofty and thoughtful questions to the table, they are not explored in depth, apparently, since they can be breezily touched upon with a sight gag, or better yet, a song, delivered by whimsical “demons” in the shape of large overstuffed sausages with carrot-stick noses.

Then again, in one hour’s time, who wants pedagogy when you can get a serenade?

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Tue, 30 May 2006 17:36:00 +0000

Snark Patrol
A punk tribute to the ubiquitous boy wizard raises the question of whether there is such a thing as too much sincerity.

Location: Williamsburg's Northsix
but Harry and the Potters will be making subsequent appearances in NYC and metropolitan areas all over the country during their current tour
Cost: $13
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: High

May 14, 2006

In The Tipping Point, literati darling Malcolm Gladwell speculates as to why longtime institution Sesame Street began to lag behinds its competitors in sustaining the fickle attention spans of today’s tots. One of the reasons he offers: irony and sly self-awareness. The effort to simultaneously speak to adults, in the form of punning, pop-culture references and other attempts to be “clever” (e.g. Me, Claudius; Waiting for Elmo; and Twin Beaks ) may have tragically afforded little Georgie or Tammy those critical nanoseconds to ditch high culture and go check out Teletubbies. At any rate, if a healthy smattering of irony jeopardizes the attention of children, is the converse true? That an overkill of earnestness and sincerity imperils the attention of adults?

I came to the conclusion this may well be the case at Williamsburg’s Northsix, during a concert featuring two bands whose unstoppable joie de vivre seems to stem from the incessant repetition of simple ideas and catchy musical hooks. The main attraction? Harry and the Potters: a band made up of two brothers, Paul and Joe DeGeorge, whose unruly black hair and commitment to taking the words of J.K. Rowling’s hallowed series very, very literally make them, apparently, perfectly suited to dressing up as Harry Potter and producing a sort of teen-angst fueled musical homage. Because they both claim to portray the same fictional character, Paul and Joe sport the additional quirk of singing and speaking in the second personal plural, as in: “We wrote this song on the day we found out we were a wizard.” The logic of this, as they explain it, can be accounted for through the magic of time travel, as George portrays Harry in the (yet unpublished) book seven, while Joe portrays Harry in book four. Of course.

Suffice to say, it was the first concert I have witnessed where 8-year-olds, their parents, teenagers and twenty-somethings all waved their hands in the air during the anthem “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock." The commercial potential of this broad demographic is indeed harnessed: as we walk in, my friends and I have the option of getting in line to buy keepsakes, such as toothbrushes that instruct their owners to “Rock the Plaque Off!”

Before they began, however, my companions and I wait patiently as Jason Anderson, a.k.a. Wolf Colonel, performs the warm-up act. While Wolf Colonel’s relentless energy and puppy-like eagerness for audience involvement leave much to be admired, my worries regarding the Lack or Irony Problem were elevated as their repertoire quickly blurred into endless permutations of “Whoa whoa” “yeah” “oh oh oh” and “sha la la.”

“CAN I GET A ‘YEAH?’” the band requests; successfully rousing a segment of Northsix’s audience into a sort of frenzy that reminded me of a junior high “Battle of the Bands,” while the rest of us sip Coronas, inert with apathy. Wolf Colonel apparently specializes in witty wordplay, such as rhyming “Jason” with “Are you still waitin’” and “night” with “mosquito bite.” They offered insightful advice like “Don’t forget to live!” and - my personal favorite- a tribute to Texas that, if I heard correctly, pleads for the day when there will be “clouds instead of guns and robots and fascists." (“El Paso is a lot of things,” noted my friend Sarah, a former Texan, “but fascist isn’t really one of them.”)

It’s not particularly fair for me to pick on Wolf Colonel, which clearly is not aiming to be the Silver Jews. I am succumbing to a growing fear that I will be stuck in a room full of unmitigated saccharine earnestness for another two hours. The weight of expectations continues to mount; I spot a young woman wearing a T-shirt which bears the words “My Wizard Scar Still Burns For You.” Could the much ballyhooed Harry and the Potters, who boast such straightforward lyrics as “We’ve got to save Ginny Weasley from the basilisk!” possibly entertain for more than ten minutes, without some inkling of snark?

Fortunately, as they say, “It’s not what you do; it’s the way that you do it,” (Ah, yes, how dare I accuse artists of invoking clichés when bloggers can be just as trite? How I love hypocrisy.)

“Our songs are about sticking it to the man” they announce, “the man” being Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort, who is also the enemy of, apparently, “pizza, babies and rock music,” conveniently equating the series’ villain with every authoritative parent who unjustly denies our right to junk food, innocence and well, partying in general. Having instilled the children present with a healthy sense of rebellion before they reach their ninth birthday, they proceed to buoyantly run in and out of the audience, and expound, ballad-like, upon the various adolescent plights our Hero is subjected to, in painstaking detail: alienation, the desire to be like everyone else, the pain of rejection, the yearning to make out with a hot girl.

Paul and Joe steer clear of cynicism and emanate nothing but reverence for the Harry Potter series so revered by their young fans. Wearing the attire of prep school nightmares, baggy gray sweaters over neckties, they are savvy enough to reserve the mockery for themselves. 18-year-old Joe is particularly impressive, pounding histrionically on the keyboards and channeling a kind of charming Woody Allen-esque nebbish-ness. He banters in meandering soliloquies about the profundity of their mission, feigning sheepish awkwardness, as in “Music comes straight from your heart because...um, that where the most rockin’ things are forged.” The acknowledgment of the inherent nerdiness of their agenda becomes, well, cool, and they both seem to know it. (As a random aside, the elder Potter is a PhD candidate in chemical engineering.) Although they have told MTV that their aim, in part, is to promote reading, which I do not doubt, they do not seem to have any trouble picking up girls.

After their encore, they’ve even made a few converts. “I’m going to buy one of those toothbrushes!” my friend announces, and we head back to the souvenir stand, because that, apparently, is where the most rockin' things are forged.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 28 May 2006 04:10:00 +0000

Manhattanhenge:
Not Exactly Artsy But Cheap

Druid Convention

Location: Somewhere in Upstate New York
Cost: Unknown
Bohemian Factor: I can only begin to speculate.
Geek Factor: Unknown

Manhattanhenge

Location: Manhattan, Everywhere north of 14th Street
Time: May 28, 2006; 8:16 pm
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor:n/a
Geek Factor: n/a

May 29, 2006

And here I thought the Comics Convention was a good exercise in modern cultural anthropology, but clearly that was merely the tip of the iceberg. Recently, All Things Considered revealed a fabulous tidbit of information in passing (god bless NPR). This weekend, a group of committed pagans are coming to upstate New York for a Druid convention. A perfunctory internet search was not very fruitful, although I suspect anyone a tad industrious about plugging in various permutations of “pagan” “May 2006” and “upstate New York” into Google will be more successful than I was in tracking down when and where these neo-Celtics will converge.

The convention, sadly, lies enshrouded in mystery, which I find truly unfortunate, as I think it would be fabulous to see what kinds of activities are on the agenda. Are Druid conventions like a social networking occasion for an otherwise underserved minority? (And here we thought everyone just used JDate …) Is it more like an academic conference, where people present papers: Iolo Morganwg and Eisteddfod: Was the Disintegration of Celtic Culture a Result of Proper Nouns that No One Could Easily Pronounce? Or, most curiously, are they all about ritual, like the end of Norma, where everything just deteriorates into a conflagration of self-immolation and redemption on the funeral pyre? (Although, come to think of it, an Italian opera about a homicidal high priestess is probably closer to Days of our Lives than actual druid theology)

The “Arch Druid” interviewed for the story on his cell phone was rather mild-mannered, with a voice that was more suited to being someone’s accountant than sacrificial rites. He’s probably a number cruncher at Morgan Stanley who just happens to lead a double life as a Arch Druid on the weekends.

His testimony was not, in fact, about the covert activities of a Druid convention, which he happened to be en route to, but rather on what NPR calls a “cosmic coincidence” more accessible to New Yorkers. On Sunday night, May 28, the rays of the setting sun “align perfectly with the cross-streets of Manhattan,” allowing any of us privileged enough to be looking westward a view that illuminates both the North and South sides of the street equally, with no shadows.

While this is not necessarily an artsy event per se, watching the sunset is in fact, free, and apparently there is deep cultural and spiritual signficance, if you have any druidic inclination. It might be worthwhile to make the effort to head north of 14th Street during the next one, on July 13. I was in the West Village during the hour of reckoning, so I’ll have to settle for this:

Of course, every City with an East-West grid of streets will have a similar opportunity twice a year, though not at the same dates. Although the NPR guy did note that “’Manhattanhenge’ may be a little more catchy to us New York-centrics than, say, ‘Salt Lake Cityhenge.’”

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Mon, 22 May 2006 15:06:00 +0000

The Object of My Affection

PUNCH Puppet Slam
Location: Galapagos Art Space
Cost: $5
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: Low to Moderate

April 26, 2006

“You can do it!” yells a female audience member encouragingly, as if to an athlete about to attempt a double axel. The object of her attention, Bolzo, is attempting to leap over progressively taller wooden planks in a sort of side show with a Germanic theme. Was her exhortation in vein, given that Bolzo is a red rubber ball?

Yes, that’s right. Controlled by a single string, Bolzo (which sounds, to my American ears, suspiciously like Bozo), is a marriage of marionette and minimalism, like what we might see if the artist who created “White Square” and “Black Circle” delved into puppets. (Sorry to be obscure, I had to look this guy up; I was hoping it was something with more instant recognition like “Van Gogh”). Bolzo, I should add, also has an inner life that can be inferred from his voice, a sort of baritone Swedish chef, that becomes more of an alto when anxious or exerting himself (himself? Should I use a pronoun? Oh the grammatical dilemmas presented by such rubbery androgyny). This is clearly the kind of vulnerability that earns many female, soft-hearted sympathizers for Bolzo.

Bolzo is one of several personalities to make their debut at PUNCH, a monthly "puppet slam" where artists experiment and try out their latest "puppet-flavored fare,” according to its curator, Gretchen Van Lente. PUNCH is held on the last Tuesday of every month at Galapagos Art Space. Van Lente's company Drama of Works had impressed me a few years ago with its innovative take on the Shakespearean gore-fest Titus Andronicus, and I was eager to find out what kind of work she was bringing to the series.

The voice in fact, comes from Bolzo’s maker, Nate Wilson, who is either making a clever statement on how little technical wizardry is needed to project humanity onto, well, rubber balls, or else…he is simply having a good time. The beauty of events like PUNCH is the fact we might as well give him credit for both. Admission is $5 at Galapagos, and no one need differentiate, at these early stages, on whether the puppeteers strutting their wares have exhausted the limits of their innovation within a ten-minute sketch, or whether they are on the verge of a three hour gesamkunstwerk.

Other performers on tonight's performance (April 25) are two contributions from Sarah Frechette that rely on music: a feisty marionette lip-sync and a lazy husband who is a spud, both literally and figuratively (entitled “Warning: To All Things Potatoe"). The program also includes a bit of shadow puppetry by Wilson and an excerpt from Die Hard, the Puppet Musical that seems to belong to the same oeuvre as fringe festival productions like Silence! The Musical and SUV The Musical.

One piece already on its way to an more fruitful afterlife is an excerpt from the upcoming Bride, created by Kevin Augustine and his company, Lone Wolf Tribe. Lone Wolf Tribe was the source behind the haunting 2003 production Animal, an invective against the future of gene therapy and the country’s obsession with antidepressants. It looks like we can expect more moral and spiritual messiness in Bride, billed as a riff on the Frankenstein legend. The teasingly brief excerpt forecasts the return of Augustine’s impressive anatomical virtuosity, as he mobilizes his creations with toes, legs and elbows. The presence of a much-bandaged and immobilized central character signals we can also expect more beautiful, sensitive, big-eyed foam puppets prone to injury, illness and other paths to harm's way.

Pathos, thy name is puppet.

If the sample from Bride plants more questions than it answers, than PUNCH is at least succeeding in whetting the audience’s appetite. Faster and looser than HERE’s Puppet Parlor (in which almost everything will be expanded upon into a larger show, whether it has the robustness to do so or not) PUNCH’s freewheeling cabaret aims to provide a "safe place for performers to experiment and play," according to Van Lente. The brainchild of Galapagos' artistic director Travis Chamberlain, PUNCH was inaugurated a year-and-a-half ago to fill a void, given the paucity of regular puppet cabarets in the New York City area. Although puppet theatre is the ideal medium to present flights of fancy that are too absurd, too fantastical or too perverse for naturalistic theatre, it requires a good deal of upfront investment, and the cabaret format provides a convenient intermediate stop between raw concept and finished product.

So Bolzo here is not one of the gesamkunstwerks. But the crowd has bought into the sheer ridiculousness, and the artist uses this fact to his advantage. As Bolzo balks at his seemingly Sisyphean task, his operator diagnoses the source of our hero’s lapsed performance in a Germanic accent: “Ladies and Gentleman; every night I give Bolzo a massage. But tonight I forget.”

I don’t really think I need to tell you what it looks like when a grown man gives a rubber ball a massage.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Sun, 14 May 2006 20:47:00 +0000

Defying Convention: Magma Demons and Renegade Produce

New York Comics Convention
Location: Javits Center
Cost: A friend with an Industry Pass (Sorry, I know this is rather undemocratic for this blog)
Bohemian Factor: Moderate
Geek Factor: Very High

February 26, 2006

Fashion week may be over, but for fetish-hungry New Yorkers of a different breed, the opportunity for crowds to ogle over unnatural bodies, covet limited number of admissions tickets, pay homage to over-the-top spectacle and wear ridiculous costumes comes in quite a different form.

I am referring of course, to the New York Comics Convention which took place this past February at the Javits Center, attracting thousands of New Yorkers who, while spoiled with access to many of the most avant-garde international arts groups and the world’s highest density of gourmet grocery stores, have, until now, been deprived of the pilgrimage known as ComiCon. Entire families and couples dress up in carefully coordinated costumes from Farscape and other obscure mythologies. Wheelers and dealers negotiate over rare issues of The Incredible Hulk. Obscure tongue-in-cheek superheroes come out of the woodwork, from the benign to the phallic (e.g. “The Giant Flaming Carrot Man and his Baloney Gun”)

Once beyond the Javits doors, I couldn’t entirely deny the existence of the oily-skinned, Dungeons & Dragons playing, wiccan-loving stereotype. Yet many of us know that this is not necessarily the norm. Friends who are otherwise rational professionals care passionately which character in “X-men: Evolution” has the power to teleport, feverishly argue about with whom Buffy should be hooking up with, and can identify the series that hosted the first interracial kiss on television without batting an eyelash. And of course, some of us ARE those friends.

Although I have long harbored a soft spot for the Japanese anime series Robotech and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi/Western series Firefly, I was clearly a novice compared to the multitudes of fan-fiction reading, cape-wearing, quote-spewing fellow convention-goers, all of whom seem seemed much more practiced at the whole idée fixe thing.

Or was I just being a snob, denying that I might, in fact, be one of them?

Of course, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I soon found myself a potential consumer of contact lenses that would transform me into one of the mutant-like, man-eating bad guys from certain blockbuster fantasy movies, and their brethren from much more low budget entertainments, at least from the nose up.

Deliberating between "Magma Demon“ and "Black Orc Death Dealer," I ultimately opted to tell the vendor I'd be going for a custom made pair. As I began describing an elaborate color-scheme for my impending conversion to Klingon-hood, I realized, that I should, as a doctor’s daughter, be asking if there might be any adverse medical ramifications after turning my eyeballs into glowing red and yellow orbs.

“Of course not! Just don’t wear them for more than two hours a time, dear.”

Narrowly escaping a brush with Demon Makeup-induced Blindness Syndrome, I found the perfect distraction in a beloved female Joss Whedon character immortalized in impressive charcoal print several booths over (granted, with a drastic increase in cup size). Finally! Something I recognized.

Upon complementing the illustrator on his taste, I found myself engaged in a conversation on what shade of blue my eyes were. Now, here, I must issue the warning that if you are a girl, and you are not a sixteen year old Goth Chick, and you lack any obvious limb deformities, going to ComiCon is like going to Hooters. I mean it. Concerned about where this was all heading, I lied, “These aren’t real, actually. I just was at that booth over there” (pointing to the space-alien eyeball woman) “and I’m trying on a pair of ‘Sea Nymph Phantasm.’ Do you think I should buy them? I think ‘Death Dealer’ is more my speed.”

Suffice to say, our fine illustrator realized he was being toyed with after a few minutes of this, and diffidently broke away to interest a group of teenage boys in a sexed-up waif-like elf woman from “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Next up: a booth selling all manner of computer games, where a bearded vendor patiently explained to a picky eleven year old boy the intricate rules of a role-playing simulation full of buxom, gun-toting female sidekicks (are we detecting a theme, here?) and egregious bloodletting. With a furrowed brow, the boy asked for ornate details, contemplating whether or not this was a wise purchase, like a tester for “Consumer Reports.” Waiting out this exchange, I discovered my personal favorite. At first I thought I had misread “Dark Tower," but, in fact, no.

“Each character is assigned a specific obsession, and to win the game, you have to collect as many items as you can relating to that obsession!” explained the bearded man.

“I can’t imagine anyone here ever being able to relate to characters like THAT,” I noted with sufficient snottiness, watching convention-goers fill up shopping bags with artwork, vintage editions, dolls, board games, and graphic “On the Making Of…” coffee table books. The man, to his credit, laughed.

After two hours of this, I fell victim of that specific kind of crankiness most often channeled by four year olds who spend ten minutes too long at the mall. I kept circling back to the same booth with the Buffy dolls. The Marvel Comics illustrator who’d secured my pass had disappeared. And everyone I singled out for directions to the exit kept speaking to me only in character. A very flirtatious man in a giant faceless banana costume and a cape -perhaps a cousin to the Carrot Man?- tried to be helpful, but only ended up frightening me (Where’s a Baloney Gun when you need one?) I ran in an arbitrary direction, happily stumbling upon the exit. But not before stopping to buy three Firefly comic books, relieved by the certification that Joss Whedon himself had penned them.

After all, I had my own obsessions to feed.

noreply@blogger.com (Arcadia) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 02:26:00 +0000

Geek Love

“Science and the Arts” series at CUNY
Location: City University of New York Graduate Center
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Low
Geek Factor: High

February 14, 2006

“If you have some lubing to do,” sings Lynda Williams, striking a sultry pose and tossing a mane of flame-red hair over her shoulder, “then graphite is the allotrope for you.” On Valentine’s Day, there are a multitude of venues in New York City that offer a taste of the obscene, spanning from PS 122’s Worst Sex Ever to the Bluestockings’ Erotica Readings. City University of New York’s Graduate Center, at least tonight, is not one of those places.

Williams, aka The Physics Chanteuse, is a professor at Santa Rosa college who is making a rare East Coast appearance as part of CUNY’s Science Valentine. Williams injects musical standards from the popular canon with lessons on the physical sciences, ranging from Newtonian laws to Superstring theory, all the while swaying her hips and spinning off puns with awe-inspiring fearlessness. The lyrics above are an except from “Carbon is a Girl’s Best Friend,”which, I think, explains itself. Even though the word “orgasm” floats by in an ode to neurotransmitters, Williams’ benign edutainment is far closer to Schoolhouse Rock than Jessica Rabbit.

As she launchers into a Gershwin parody about the “it” phenomenon of the moment, string theory, (“S’wonderful! Supersymmetry!”) I am disappointed to note that the audience demographic is sadly homogenous, since, well, things this unselfconsciously nerdy requires a flagrant disregard for coolness. Of everyone in attendance, there seem to be about ten of us under 50. Sure, there are a few apple-cheeked young couples with toddlers; there are foreign graduate students who are rightfully baffled by this holiday in general, and a large number of earthy academics with rebellious grey pony tails.

To take a quote I love from Terry Zwigoff’s fabulous film Ghost World and completely bastardize it:

This atmosphere is so dorky that it’s gone past hip to back to dorky again.

Tragically, Ms. Williams pitch-perfect eye contact, gamine posing and clever (if occasionally eye-rolling) word play is greeted by this audience with passive, blank, silent bemusement. And alas, performances, at least in the “cheap and artsy” category, are only as good as the audience reaction they elicit. In the late 90’s, I viewed, upon it’s re-release, “The Empire Strikes Back,” with the inebriated brotherhood of an MIT fraternity. Now in general, I avoid drunken nineteen year old tech nerds like the plague. Nonetheless, the shared, cacophonous glee following every reference to beloved characters and oft-quoted dialogue, technology, or sci-fi rhetoric, temporarily forged a community of, well, puerile drunkenness, but it was a community nonetheless.

Williams’ lyrics are clearly most entertaining when the listener recognizes what concept she is parodying, where gluons are as happily familiar and beloved as R2D2 was to those frat boys. Given that many of her songs, at least at this concert, address popular, accessible concepts such as the Big Bang, I became annoyed by the wan politeness of attendees. (You’ve got to hand it to the Graduate Center, however – they’re doing a whole series of events regarding science and art this spring semester; some of us nerd-loving gals never lose hope... count me in for the Robot Dance Contest)

I suspect that the right kind of audience does exist for Williams’ cosmic cabaret act. Somewhere, at an academic conference, a group of physicists are loosening up their lab coats, kicking back and raucously providing the fanfare that the Physics Chanteuse deserves, possibly with the aid of a few beers, speaking of “some lubing to do.”