Shows and Events

Fine Art in Las Vegas: What are the odds?

2011-08-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

If you live in Arizona, as I do, and drive north, you will find that eventually the road is blocked by the Grand Canyon. You have to go around. I went west, to Las Vegas, so I could continue from there, up north into Utah. Las Vegas was the last outpost of so-called civilization in that region so I stayed overnight and half a day, to rest up. Got a room in a major casino hotel for under $50. I don’t gamble, so I felt pretty smug that I had beat that pricing system.

But they did get me for $25 for admission to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. It’s a small space, showing perhaps three dozen paintings at the most. The show I saw was called “A Sense of Place: Landscapes from Monet to Hockney." It had numerous artists from widely varying times and places, but all the pictures addressed the show’s theme. Pieces were on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

How could that work? You might wonder what 19th century impressionism has in common with 20th century abstraction and precise representationalism. The answer is curation. This show is all heavily influenced by the skill and sensibility of the gallery’s curator who was not identified, but could have been Tarissa Tiberti, the gallery’s director.

Monet’s 1885 Haystacks at Giverney, for example are hung next to photographer Skeet McAuley’s 2001 image of golf course greens, and you notice that both scenes are quiet, sun-drenched, and both convey a strong sense of open space, and above all, a sense of place. The juxtaposition gives brilliant insight into both works.

My favorite juxtaposition was David Hockney’s intensely colorful "Garrowby Hill" (1998), hung next Torben Giehler’s 1999 "Boogie Woogie," a Mondrianesque abstract gridwork. And again, the juxtaposition makes you see both works in a new light, in this case, as aerial views of landscapes, and again you appreciate the sense of place conveyed by both.

Other artists in the show were Marc Chagall, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Robert Rauchenberg, Lichtenstein, Millet, Christo,Vik Muniz, and many others unknown to me before this show.

I spent over an hour in the small gallery going around and around the tight circuit, learning more each time. Each piece is a beautiful masterwork in its own right, but their creative and playful juxtapositions added a surprising new level of understanding.

This was not the sort of thing I expected to discover in Sin City. But I’m glad I paused there long enough to see it. See http://www.bellagio.com/files/exhibition-brochure.pdf. The show runs through January, 2012.
(Sisely on the right here)

Tucson Glass Festival

2011-04-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Tucson Glass Festival was held from April 8-10, 2011 to celebrate art in glass. Originally the show was planned to be national but too many participants canceled after Arizona passed its racist anti-immigration law earlier in the year, so the organizers soldiered on with a local festival, and it was intimate and successful (from the point of view of a consumer of it, anyway).

There were tours of the Sonoran Glass Art Academy, which included demonstrations and instruction, with plenty of “product” for sale in the galleries, and likewise at the Philabaum glass studio and gallery, and other galleries around town.

A special highlight was a demonstration of technique by the brothers de la Torre, Einar and Jamex, originally of Guadalajara, now living and working in Esenada, Mexico and San Diego. They worked at Tom Philabaum’s studio in Tucson to produce a fantastic, life-sized glass head in their signature style of cartoonish, colorful, ironic, and witty construction that the three of them had designed the night before in the Ethiopian restaurant across the street from the studio.

The brothers were assisted by Tom Philabaum and a team of experienced glassworkers. The two-hour project was fascinating and almost medieval in its exercise of techniques that go back many centuries. I asked Tom Philabaum about the absence of safety equipment. All those bare arms and legs look awfully vulnerable moving around glass at fourteen hundred degrees, I said. But he replied, "I would rather work naked. You have to be able to feel the heat from the glass to know what it is doing." The man is clearly one with his material!

The glass bust that emerged was grotesquely beautiful, pinkish, as if its scalp had been removed, and decorated with something like a crown of laurels, except they were prickly pear pads, and topped with a sort of Mohawk haircut that made the whole thing reminiscent of a conquistador. It’s gaping mouth displayed the words “Baja Rizona.” Why not “Baja Arizona?” someone asked. Because, Jamex said, the two middle “A’s” are combined to one, and then it sounds like somebody is laughing, “Ha-ha, Rizona!” That is the kind of weird, eccentric humor the de la Torre brothers are known for.

The brothers have a major show now at the Tucson Museum of Art, called Borderlandia. It is a show that has traveled through the west, perhaps elsewhere. It presents a wide range of colorful glass pieces, some free-standing, some wall mounted, some animated by electric motors and videos; all of them baroquely elaborate, immensely intricate, and stuffed full of “found” trinkets and souvenirs culled from dollar stores. Some of their iconography is serious, tragicomically cultural, religious, and bitingly political, and some of it is just plain goofy fun.

The work highlights, overall, ethnic commonalities and differences among people living along the southwest border. They use images from Mexico, American pop culture, the Mayas and the Aztecs, and even some pre-Columbian images. Juxtaposition is their preferred method for making narrative comments, such as by filling a traditional religious altar with pop-culture icons and images of politicians. The show is overflowing with political and cultural meaning, but it is also a huge dose of eye-candy and a magnificent display of the glass artist’s craft.

The bizarre bust that the brothers made for the Glass Festival demonstration ended up looking something like a Spanish Conquistador who plays in a punk rock band in a Day of the Dead celebration. It was hastily stuffed into the annealing oven before it could be thoroughly appreciated, but even so, the artists asked the small crowd of observers if there were any early bids for it. The bidding stalled out at $2,000, but at least it was an open.

I’m not sure when the formal bidding for it is, but they said they would not be surprised to see $7,000. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit Sonoran Glass Art Academy’s Youth Development Program.

Viva el vidrio!

T.S. Monk On Monk

2011-03-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

T.S. Monk, drummer and bandleader, is the son of renowned pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk. I think T.S. also stands for Thelonious Sphere, same as his father but anyway, Monk the younger goes by T.S. He founded the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, dedicated to honoring (promoting) the music of his father and educating and nurturing new jazz talent.

T.S. tours the world performing his father’s ensemble music. In Tucson recently, he presented a show for which he is known, called “Monk on Monk” with a brass and piano sextet. It was quickly expanded to ten players with the addition of a tuba and bass sax, and some other horns, for a smoothly blended “Monk’s Mood.” The sound was good overall, and of course anyone who loves Monk’s music can’t get enough of it. Nevertheless, individual performances seemed lackluster. Nothing sparkled except the instruments.

T.S.’s drumming tends to the musical, which I like. He is 60 years old now, so one cannot expect fireworks. The different drums are tuned over a wide pitch range (I don’t know proper drum terminology) and he uses that variability to produce some melodious solos instead of the usual whap-bang theatrics. The playlist was not tremendously satisfying. It emphasized lesser-known works, such as Little Rootie-Tootie, Boo-Boo’s Birthday, and Crepuscule with Nellie, tunes that he explained were dedicated by his father to the family. I suspect there are still copyright issues with the “big” tunes, like ‘Round Midnight and Epistrophy, that prevent them from being featured. Still, it was good music, if lackluster.

T.S. put out a disc in 1997, also called T.S. Monk on Monk, which included just about the same playlist as this show, but had in the band such luminaries as Roy Hargrove, Dave Holland, Christian McBride, Wayne Shorter, and many others. Now, that music pops, so I conclude that the Tucson concert was not lukewarm because of the playlist but because of the players. Or maybe it’s something about Tucson itself that makes performers sleepy.

Joshua Redman

2011-02-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

I saw a great performance on an improbable Sunday afternoon by Joshua Redman’s quartet at Portland, Oregon’s Performing Arts Center. It was near the end of the 2011 PDX Jazz Festival and I was only in town for the weekend, and there were only a few tickets left, so I was forced to spring for high-dollar seats, in the second row orchestra section, sitting right behind Joe Lovano, as it happened.

Online it said that Redman would have Aaron Parks as his piano player, and I have been following Parks since I “discovered” him, playing for tips in a Tully’s café in Seattle some fifteen years ago. Alas, it was not to be. On piano was Aaron Goldberg, who is fully competent but not as exciting as the other Aaron. Redman did play a Parks-written tune, and acknowledged him as a good friend. Matt Penman was on drums and Eric Harland on Bass.

I have enjoyed saxophonist Redman (and his father, Dewey Redman), since the early ‘90’s, when he still had hair. His 1993 album, “Wish,” recorded with Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, is still a favorite. He has come a long way since then and now is a major star. In his mid forties, I would guess, he is an interesting-looking fellow, tall and lean, with long, slender fingers, and a head that runs diagonally from the crown of his shiny pate to the tip of his huge jaw and protruding lips. But none of that affects his great music. He plays straight ahead jazz, hot and complicated but without the squeaks, blats and whinnying horse sounds that many players (including Lovano) often resort to. But he also does a fine, lyrical ballad with real feeling.

Redman seems a very gentle soul, with a soft voice, utterly authentic. It is somewhat surprising that when getting ready to play, he has a genuinely worried look on his face, as if he were wondering if he would be up to it, if it would be good. I have no doubt he is worried about that, for his playing is alive and spontaneous. Nothing about it is rehearsed. He does not know what's going to happen, so he really is venturing into the void every time he plays. When his piece is finished and he raises his head from the saxophone, he looks completely disoriented. He glances around in a panic, trying to remember where he is and what is going on, as if he were emerging from a dream. And that is probably exactly what is happening in his head. He is a modern day shaman who guides us into another world.

Blues with Grace

2011-01-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Abounding Grace Sanctuary, a Lutheran Church in Tucson, hosts local and regional music performances almost every week. Churches give me the creeps, and this one was no different, but I took a deep breath and went to see Joe Bourne, Arthur Migliazza, and Tom Walbank. The last two are local stars. Walbank is a guitar and harp (harmonica) wizard often found at Tucson’s 17th Street Market. Migliazza is a stride piano and boogie-woogie master, formerly of Tucson, but who now lives in New York. Tom and Arthur are old friends and often appear together in Tucson (not often enough). Joe Bourne is a jazz singer from Cambridge, MA.

Migliazza led off with his signature version of Yancy’s Blues, a genuine foot stomper. Bourne then sang several tunes with piano accompaniment. The accompaniment was great. I especially liked a rendition of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” because Arthur really slammed the downbeat note on the left hand in each bar. Plus I am just wild about any tune in 4/4 time over a 6/8 rhythm. I don’t know why. Arthur also did a version of Pinetop Blues that had people in the audience literally gasping in astonishment, interrupting often with applause.

Bourne sang many jazz standards competently, but he was not my favorite. He just did not swing, and that is death for blues. He hit every note dead center, exactly as written, but that’s not enough. To swing, you have to use rubato, play with the music, interpret it. Bobby Darin had swing. Bourne doesn’t. Also, his accent was uninteresting. In “Georgia On My Mind,” he actually said “Georger” at one point (Boston area accent). However, he did do “Motherless Child,” an old slave song from the late 1800’s and he did it a capella, as a Negro spiritual, not as a blues tune, and it was very heartfelt and moving, and really showed off his voice well. That’s obviously his forte, not jazz singing.

Tom Walbank came in at the second hour and knocked everybody’s socks off with his dazzling harmonica work, which is unbelievable. He has a composite piece of pre-World War I tunes that he has put together that is astonishing. He is hooting and barking and yelling and singing into the harmonica even as he plays it , creating his own rhythm section as he goes. It’s just amazing, seemingly impossible.

The show was $15 per person, ran about 90 minutes and was attended by about 150 people, mostly members of the church, I would guess, and mostly fifty years and older. I saw nobody under forty, which is a shame. The kids wouldn’t know who Count Basie is, true, but nobody can resist a hot boogie-woogie piano or a wailing blues harmonica -- nobody. I left early because of the growing lack of oxygen and the increasing smell of humanity in the windowless, airless room. But I was well pleased to enjoy Arthur and Tom again, individually and together.

The Ruins at Casa Grande

2011-01-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

This is not really a performing arts event, or if it is, it is one that occurred at least six hundred years ago. The Hohokam Indians of southern Arizona had a prosperous civilization between Phoenix and Tucson between A.D. 1200 and 1450, at which time they disappeared. I took an archaeological tour of the remains of their civilization, sponsored by The Archaeological Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that acquires and preserves endangered archeological sites across America (www.americanarchaelology.org). The guide for our group of eight was Allen Dart, M.A., a professional archaeologist and Executive Director of the Old Pueblo Archaeology Center in Tucson (www.oldpueblo.org).

We began with the ruins of the “Great House” at Casa Grande, AZ. “Casa Grande” means “great house.” The town is named after the ruins. The great house was four-story public building, probably a meeting place and a center of government, built around 1300. It is made of adobe-like bricks, which essentially “melt” in the rains, so it is badly decayed. It has survived seven centuries mainly because the bricks are cut from the rock-hard caliche soil of southern Arizona. That is soil saturated with calcium compounds, the bane of gardeners today. There isn’t much rain in southern Arizona (only about 12 inches a year today – no telling what it was 700 years ago), so the building has stood up surprisingly well, considering the technology. The Park Service put a protective roof over the ruins in 1932, to slow down its rate of decay. Since the 1800’s, the Park Service has also added several structural supports to keep the remaining walls from collapsing.

The great house is interesting architecturally. Its exterior walls are not straight on the vertical dimension, but curved inward toward the top, giving the whole structure a graceful look, like a piece of pottery. This design supposedly added greater strength to the overall structure when the wooden roof beams tied the top of the walls together. At least that is what our archaeologist said, but that doesn’t fit with my intuition of how the forces would work. In any case, it would have been a beautiful building when new in 1300 or so.

The interior rooms are small. Even the large ones are only about 10 x 14, although ceilings are 20 feet high. Interior doorways are so low that you would have to be about five feet tall to use them, or bow to pass through. They are so narrow that you have to turn sideways to use most of them. I don’t know the average height of the Hohokams, but I suspect that the shape of the openings in the structure are due to a combination of temperature management and structural necessity (there are no arches or non-adobe lintels).

The rooms are now derelict, full of bird droppings and rodent holes, with the walls sporting carved graffiti from the 1800’s. The graffiti is itself interesting sometimes. Travelers apparently stopped here for shelter in the 19th century. “Carlos 1889,” carved his name about 12 feet up a wall, so there might have been a wooden floor part way up at one time, or else Carlos stood on some wooden structure, now lost, or else Carlos was a giant. Thanks, Carlos. You could have left us a little more detail.

There is some speculation that the great house was used for astronomical observations. There are a couple of interesting holes in the south façade that archaeologists say provide a line of sight with the sun at summer and winter solstices. That seems plausible, but I doubt that the entire compound would have been devoted to that single purpose.

Around the great house, on a flat site about four acres, there are low adobe walls, remnants of outbuildings, which are thought to have been used for storage of grains, or possibly as animal pens. There is no archeological evidence that anyone ever lived at the great house or its outbuildings (i.e., no fireplaces found), so it was probably strictly a government compound and a general meeting place. If the outbuildings were indeed used for food storage, that implies that they had a system of taxation, and if so, you wonder what public services the taxes supported. Probably religious ceremonies, but who knows. I guess we still have the same question today about how our taxes are used!

The Hohokams had no written language so we don’t know much about them, or even why they disappeared. One prominent theory, endorsed by archaeologist Dart, is that a long period of drought dropped the water level of the nearby Gila River so low that it could not fill the irrigation canals any more. So the crops died and the civilization collapsed. Another theory is that there was some sort of a political revolution when the rulers became tyrannical (as rulers are wont to do), leading to destruction of the social order. The revolution theory and the drought theory are not incompatible. My favorite speculation is that the Hohokam people did not disappear, but just dispersed. Their descendants are, by Native American oral tradition, the Tohono O’odham Indians around Tucson today.

One more interesting feature of the ruins site is the ancient ball court near the great house. The court is much smaller than I had imagined, only an oval depression in the soil about fifty yards long. There is some archaeological evidence that such structures were used for a kind of team ballgame, and there is some documentary evidence associated with similar sites in Central America. The speculation is that the Hohokam would have used a stone ball wrapped in leather, or possibly a ball made of a hard, plastic-like substance composed of hardened tree resin and an unidentified waxy material. What the game was like or how it was played, or why, is unknown. Was it just for fun? Was there betting? Or were they not really “games” at all, but deadly serious theater symbolically representing cosmic forces, or even contests among competing tribes? Archaeologist Dart suggested that the ballgames were discontinued in the 1300’s, so the culture must have evolved. The so-called ball courts could have been used also for theater or for speeches, as the acoustics are very good around the rim, for someone speaking in the center, as Mr. Dart demonstrated. Normally, the public is not allowed into the environmentally and archaeologically sensitive area where the ball court is found, but we were special because we had a card-carrying archaeologist with us. (The whole group was closely shadowed by a Park Service ranger the whole time anyway).

After a picnic lunch, the group drove off to visit several other archaeological sites in the area, including the “Grewe” site to the north, where the Hohokam first settled. For reasons unknown, the center of their civilization gradually migrated south to the Casa Grande site. The Grewe site is largely unexcavated, so there is nothing to see but some large, fenced-off, open fields of brush and cactus, and a large Wal-Mart. Dart told us that ancient artifacts were discovered when they dug up the area for the construction of the Wal-Mart, and to their credit, the Wal-Mart people stopped, and changed the whole plan of the store and its parking, to leave the ancient underground artifacts as little disturbed as possible.

We visited a few other sites in the area that only an archaeologist would be able to recognize as ancient ruins, and saw some building foundations and some depressions in the ground that were clearly ball courts, if you knew what you were looking at. It was interesting to realize that all around these small towns like Florence and Coolidge were ancient Indian ruins. You would have to have a trained eye to see it though.

Finally we visited a site called the Poston Butte Ruin, which I think was actually private property for which Dart had been granted access. There we walked over a featureless desert of rolling hills. Except Dart told us they were not “natural” rolling hills but ancient Indian garbage mounds. Once we knew what to look for, it was easy to see five and six-hundred year old pottery shards everywhere, some of them quite beautiful. As the rains fall, the dirt of the trash piles gradually erodes, exposing the piles of broken pots and other artifacts. I found a six-hundred year-old stone scraper tool. It was a thrill to hold it in my hand and wonder about the person who had made it so many centuries ago. Mr. Dart, with his special “archaeologist’s eyes” found a tiny bone carving of a coyote, only an inch long. I could have looked right at that fragment a dozen times and never seen it, but after it was identified, we could see it was a beautiful and detailed work of art. I don’t see how such a carving could have been made with stone-age technology, but there it was.

Naturally, we put all artifacts back on the ground exactly where we had found them. It is pointless to collect such artifacts, and illegal at most sites (i.e, in National Parks), and an anti-scientific vandalism, and a cultural desecration. As we were told. Repeatedly. See http://www.oldpueblo.org/collecting.html for the full speech/sermon.

After a long day of hiking, I got accustomed to walking with my eyes on the ground, alert to the many artifacts that are in this area. I started to develop “archaeologist’s eyes,” maybe a little, and at least, got a good feel for what archaeologists do and what ancient Indian archaeology is like in this part of Arizona.

Gary Snyder, Zen Poet

2010-10-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

American poet Gary Snyder studied oriental languages in the mid ‘50’s at Berkeley, where he hung out with Beat writers such as Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. Though he is still often grouped with the Beats of the fifties, he actually missed that movement in American literary history because he moved to Japan in 1956 to study Buddhism and write. He won a Pulitzer in 1975 for his poetry. He said, "I don't want to be known as a Beat poet. I was there and I knew Alan and Jack and the others but they went a different direction. That was not me."

Snyder recently graced the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center with his presence and read some of his classic and recent work. He is now 85 years old, one of the last survivors of the generation that shaped the literary scene in the 50’s and ‘60s. Picture is from treehugger.com – G. Moretti.

His poetry blends a love of nature he acquired growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with the insights of Zen Buddhism. He uses short, simple words, nearly all observational. A metaphor is rare in a Snyder poem. Yet somehow he manages to straddle the impossible gap between particularity and universality. Example: “Earth Verse”: Wide enough to keep you looking / Open enough to keep you moving / dry enough to keep you honest / Prickly enough to make you tough / Green enough to go on living / Old enough to give you dreams. Longer works are equally thoughtful, moving, humorous and insightful.

At the U of A Poetry Workshop I gained a new respect for him and his poems. I had read and long forgotten some of his work in the 1970’s and he is not a poet I would actively seek out today, but this opportunity got me to sit down and direct my attention to his work and I was well pleased. (He said: "I never say that I am a poet. That is really bad. I say I write some poetry. That is OK.) I am impressed at how keenly observed, well-selected observational statements can invoke themes of universal cosmology, with rarely an abstract noun in the text. It makes me appreciate that abstraction is much easier to write than good sensory observation.

Nevertheless, there is a sour note permeating his work. It is what the Zen literature calls “the stink of Zen,” the parading of one’s superior insight under the pretension of humility. It is subtle, for there is no obvious self-aggrandizement in Snyder’s work. Yet there is more going on than mere admiration of nature and observation of life. There is an implicit pretension that the poem is simply direct description of life keenly observed, but I also see the outline of a large ego badly hidden behind the ostensible impersonality of objective description. That conflict of intentions is what I find distracting in his work. It pretends to be egoless description but isn’t, really, and how could it be? No decent literary work can be written without strong conveyance of its writer but Snyder seems to pretend otherwise. This is a minor annoyance that does not negate the real enjoyment that his poetry brings.

His well-known collections include Riprap ( 1959), and Cold Mountain Poems (1965) and Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965).

Native American Art in Santa Fe

2010-08-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts recently had its grand re-opening in Santa Fe after a six month renovation. What I saw there was real cutting edge visual arts, nothing like the beaded-moccasin-and-turquoise-bracelet type of show I half expected.

Among several excellent exhibits in the beautiful new galleries, two really stood out. Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin had two groups of works, both stunning, in an exhibit called "Oblique Drift." One group was “The Imaginary Indian” series. In these, traditional Tlingit masks are attached to a background of French toile, a wallpaper or curtain pattern showing a repetitive monochromatic drawing of a pastoral scene, such as a group of (white, European) people having a lovely picnic under a tree. In some cases the Indian mask is behind the fabric, smothered by it, visible only in bulging outline. In other examples, the mask is attached to the front of the canvas, but disturbingly, the toile pattern extends over the mask, as if the oblivious picnicking youth in the drawing have infected and spread over the Indian tradition like a fungus (which it did, of course). The effect is very powerful.

Another series from this same artist is called “The Curtis Legacy,” referring to 19^th century photographer Edward Curtis who photographed Indians to illustrate the noble savage. Galanin’s pieces are large, almost life-sized color photographs of naked women, many full frontal, bending over backward and literally “in your face” with it, but always covering her own face with a colorful traditional Indian mask; but not even a genuine Tlingit mask, the artist notes on the card. These are manufactured commodity masks from Malaysia, mere tourist souvenirs. (I could find only one cropped sliver of an image from this group on the web, and no photography was allowed in the show). (http://redwillow.wordpress.com)

The effect of these photographs is a startling and moving objection to the mainstream culture’s objectification of the human body in general, and the Native image in particular, and its desacralizing of Native Americans' own sacred images. The pictures are also a commentary on the globalization of cultures, to the loss of some. While these images are ostensibly humorous and ironic, there is also a great deal of anger in them. I could almost hear in these pictures the artist shouting vulgar, witty epithets to Curtis and the larger white society on the topic of the so-called Noble Savage, curses that would make you cry instead of laugh.

Another artist also showed powerfully evocative works in video, in an exhibit called "Round Up." Torry Mendoza presented a series of a half dozen or so short video works of less than 10 minutes each, in which he confronts, analyzes and excoriates the “The Hollywood Indian,” and the feelings and attitudes that have seeped into the mainstream collective consciousness as a result. In “Kemosabe Version 1.0” he remixes conversational snippets between the Lone Ranger and Tonto (from the television series), against a driving techno beat background. As the catalog says, “He scrutinizes the duo’s relationship by remixing a conversation between the two, revealing a master and servant disposition similar to the disparate relationships assumed by the nation-state with Native nations.”

In “Stupid Fucking White Men” he ridicules Kevin Costner’s wannabe Indian persona in the film, Dances With Wolves, by remixing short clips from Costner’s pseudo-Indian dance around a bonfire. The result is hilarious, but as with Galanin’s work, also deeply, bitterly angry. In Red Man and Savages, Mendoza concatenates short clips from Hollywood films in which white men and women played caricatures of Indian parts, stars such as Charles Bronson, Jack Palance, Burt Lancaster, Lee Van Cleef. The stereotypes are patently ridiculous now, but they weren’t then. A couple of the shorts were less impressionistic and more documentary in style, but all aimed to illustrate Hollywood’s history of degrading stereotypes and outright hostility toward Native Americans (think John Wayne in The Searchers). It was a compelling and moving series of short films that I sat through twice.

There were several other exhibitions of outstanding work but these are the ones that captured my imagination most. I was not able to determine if these exhibits are traveling or permanent, and if traveling (most likely) how long they might be expected to remain at the MoCNA. But anyone who has a feeling for contemporary Native Art should pop over to Santa Fe before it is too late. (You can fly direct into Albuquerque and drive to Santa Fe in an hour).

Sunday on the Mountain

2010-07-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

Temperatures in Tucson are over 100 degrees F. for most of June, July, and August, so one hardly needs an excuse to visit Mt. Lemmon in the nearby Catalina Mountains. At 9,000 feet, the weather is a refreshing 75 degrees and the ecology is Ponderosa pine, a nice change from saguaro and prickly pear.

At least it used to be pine forest up there. A terrible fire ripped through the top of the mountain in 2003, destroying much of the ski village of Summerhaven. Homes there now are nearly all new, rebuilt since the fire, and while the ground is still bare, seedlings have been planted and some growth is coming back. It takes about 90 minutes to get there from my end of town, and above 5000 feet you can turn off the air conditioning.

My excuse to visit the reconstructed Summerhaven was a free outdoor music concert on a Sunday afternoon featuring Black Leather Zydeco (see and hear at http://members.cox.net/katnsteve1/blzindex.html ). The concert was part of a summertime series put on by Live Acoustic Venue Association (LAVA), a non-profit promoter of live music in Tucson (see /www.lavamusic.org ).

I am crazy about Zydeco and I am sorry it has fallen out of favor so it was nice to hear Black Leather Zydeco, a charming group of old guys who have also obviously fallen out of favor, but are happy to still perform that magic music. Their style is classical, Cajun Zydeco, a genuine folk music from southwestern Louisiana, and that was nice to hear. They sing it in Cajun French patois, which is cool. However I confess I prefer the commercial, “black” Zydeco of the type made popular by artists such as Clifton Chenier and Buckwheat Zydeco. I know, it is not pure, but that’s what I like.

Still, Black Leather Zydeco did a respectable job on genuine instruments (the concertina and washboard vest, for example) and they were lively enough to get my foot stomping. The bass was way overmiked, the speakers were fuzzed out, and the vocals were, shall we say, lacking in diction. But hey, it was good music and the price was right.

The concert grounds (where a pre-fire building obviously stood once) offered hot dogs, caramel corn, beer and T-shirts but for lunch I walked down the narrow highway past the pizza place, the only traditional restaurant in the “downtown”, to a small metal trailer selling crepes. The place is called “Planet of the Crepes.”

This place is so obscure, it does not even have an address and TripAdvisor has never heard of it so I couldn’t review it there. Needless to say, no phone or web site either. But it looks like enough capital equipment to be permanent for the summer months anyway. It must be hauled somewhere during the winter. But the food is terrific. An attractive young woman working alone fries up a crepe (a very thin pancake) in less than 10 minutes and wraps meat and vegetables into it, serving it in an inverted cardboard cone. You munch down on it from the top. It’s sort of like a tortilla wrap but not really. You sit on a picnic table stacked with old issues of the Economist magazine while you wait. (I got the sense that the proprietor probably has an advanced college degree).

What makes these crepes worth having is the creative and tasty ingredients. I had one wrapped around tomato, raw spinach, goat cheese, mushrooms and basil pesto. It was fantastic, and a lot of fresh food for $5.50. My wife had a more breakfasty bacon and egg number, but we were both tempted by the special, the “Figtastic” for $7, made of brown butter figs with sage, prosciutto, and brie.

Other offerings include a breast of smoked duck with havarti and arugula. There is a “sweet” crepe column for those wanting more of a dessert thing, for example one with fresh strawberries, Nutella, milk chocolate, and whipped cream. I think it is worth a trip to the top of Mt. Lemmon just to get one of these crepes, even if there is no free concert! (Although I don’t know if she is there every day, or only when there is a concert. Next time I will ask.)

Juneteenth at Arcosanti

2010-06-20T18:57:00.001-07:00

June 19 celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves, specifically, the slaves in Galveston, Texas, whose owners “did not get the memo” until 1865, two full years after Lincoln’s proclamation (and at the end of the Civil War). But finally all the slaves were free in the U.S., on a date somewhere around June 19th, now known as Juneteenth.

The twelfth annual Juneteenth “Celebration of Freedom” was held at Arcosanti, a large property held by a private foundation near Prescott, AZ. I checked out the festival and had a pretty good time.

Arcosanti is the name of a 4,000 acre desert preserve on which Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri built, in the 1970’s, a few concrete buildings to illustrate his vision of urban living for the future. This is somewhat ironic since the buildings are in the middle of absolutely nowhere, hardly urban. But there are some living quarters there and the plan is to someday be able to house 5,000 people in a model community. The principles of the project include an emphasis on self-sufficiency, reliance on solar power, recycling of resources, and in general “good vibes.”

pics.jaredwilliam.com/Arizona_2007

Apparently a few dozen volunteers and architecture students do live there and there are a few accommodations for guests. See www.arcosanti.org .

As for a vision of an urban future, I remain skeptical. Soleri was clearly fond of poured concrete and the buildings, while not exactly like military bunkers, are far from aesthetic. And the whole place is in serious disrepair, so the unpainted concrete structures are pocked and cracked, chipped and patched, discolored by weather; and painted surfaces are faded, cracked, and stained by leaching. Some new construction was evident, even if maintenance was not. The living quarters I glimpsed could only be described as squalor, but then I guess it is basically a neo-hippie commune right now, so maybe the place is not at its best. They have a foundry there where they manufacture bronze windchime bells that are apparently widely appreciated. Sales of those (in the $100’s and the multi-$1000’s each), support much of the operations. The bells do sound beautiful, complex, beautifully resonant and are as well-tuned as they are well-priced. There is also a ceramics center where they make clay chimes for those of us not willing to spring for the bronze. I saw one greenhouse, surely not enough to feed even the volunteers, although the “vision” posters and architectural models show a community rife with acres of greenhouses and people living like bees in a hive.

I took the guided tour, or half of it anyway, and observed an extremely strong sense of founder-worship that was cultish, information-free, and so off-putting, I slipped away. It is possible to be respectful of a founder without being reverent. A little background research on Soleri reveals that he is a serious architect and urban planner (still alive, I believe, although he would be in his 90’s) who would be appalled at such worship.

The setting out in the desert is stunningly beautiful. I stayed in one of the guest rooms, which was a 10 x 14 box made of concrete on five sides, and glass on the sixth. It was austere, to say the least, with no heat or air conditioning, no TV, no telephone, but electricity, clean towels and running water and a tiny bathroom where you could actually take a shower while sitting on the toilet. Still, the room was quiet and reasonably comfortable, and it was wonderful to be awakened at dawn by the sun lighting up the basalt cliffs across the dry river bed.

The Juneteenth celebration was enjoyable. Apparently it is organized and run by Milton Canon, a saxophonist and president of the Prescott Jazz society, with help from his son, the Rev. Michael, and his lovely wife, who poured at the wine and cheese reception. There was no printed schedule of events so it was always a mystery what was going on at any time, but I did enjoy several good acts in the concrete amphitheater. The featured group was Henry Turner Jr. and Flavor, a sort of Blues-Funk-Reggae dance band. (www.henryturnerjr.com free mp3 samples at www.myspace.com/henryturnerjrandflavor .

Turner rapped about music, black history, and the meaning of Juneteenth, and played lead acoustic guitar. He knows how to lay down a hypnotic groove, although I should say that inhaling some of the second-hand smoke in the air probably enhanced my appreciation. The stage was flanked by large black and white portraits of Robert F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. These were never mentioned or explained, perhaps because the meanings were self-evident. The crowd was disappointingly sparse, maybe half black and half white, but only a hundred or so total. Around the outside of the concrete steps on the top level were booths selling everything from kettle corn and “cowboy dogs” to masks, dashikis and “ethnic” crafts. The whole vibe was very friendly and I was surprised the place was not jammed with people.

Around 8 pm there was a dance under the Arcosanti (concrete) arches. Turner and his group kept continuous hypnotic dance grooves going for hours, including some memorable original reggae tunes, such as “Rastaman in the White House.” Lots of people danced while children ran and played among the forest of legs, eating popcorn and generally having a good time, as I did.

The Church of Beethoven

2010-05-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

I went to church last Sunday for the first time in fifty years. I was tempted by the Church of Beethoven, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Slogan: “Church minus the religion!”).

Founded in 2007 by cellist Felix Wurman, the idea of the church is to “celebrate the ecstasy of music” in a church where “music is the principle element, not an afterthought.” “Wurman recruited musicians from the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and they began playing Sunday concerts in an abandoned gas station off old Route 66. Wurman called the Sunday concerts the Church of Beethoven. Wurman said he founded the church to help people "find spirituality through culture. “ (Wikipedia). Wurman died of cancer in 2009.

The Sunday “services” are currently held in an abandoned warehouse and loading dock in downtown Albuquerque (1715 5th St., NW) and start at 10:30 am, for one hour. I was fortunate to catch a Schubert piece, “Rondo in A major for solo violin and strings.” A standard string quartet was supplemented with a bass (which simply doubled the cello part) plus of course the soloist, in this case, David Felberg, violinist with the New Mexico Symphony and also co-director of the Church since Wurman’s death. It was a lovely, rousing piece with lots of delightful folk elements, which Felberg played entirely from memory. The rest of crew kept a close eye on him and did manage to keep up.

(Felix Wurman)

There were perhaps 150 people there, mostly aged over 40 (perhaps because there is a $15 admission charge). You can get one cup of espresso coffee free and attendees bring home made cookies and other nibbles. It is a very warm, friendly crowd. The other side of the warehouse (which I snuck into) is divided into stalls which are apparently rented out as artist studios and there is a small art gallery as well. The entrance to the warehouse has quirky artistic sculptures around it which warns you that you are entering a light, playful zone.

After the Schubert, poet Richard Vargas read a new composition, which I think was titled “Shenandoah.” Vargas is at the forefront of contemporary Latino poetry and has published several books of verse. See http://www.mainstreetrag.com/R_Vargas.html for a sample of his work. I thought the poem he read, about immigrants from the south, was musical, rhythmic, and extremely heartfelt, but it did not achieve much separation of tone and mood, so the overall effect was something like a jeremiad. Still, the content was edgy and it was courageous to present it to an all-white, middle class, middle-aged audience. It was quite well received by the crowd.

After the poetry reading there were two minutes of silence. Then the duo of Stephanie Bettman (voice and fiddle) and Luke Halpin (voice, guitar and mandolin) played a selection of traditional tunes and their own compositions. The duo bills itself as a “bluegrass duo” and while their instruments and style of playing have a bluegrassy sound, their compositions do not. Instead I would characterize the performance as sappy, sentimental, brain-dead folk music, which was a real disappointment because it is obvious that these players have considerable talent. (Check http://www.stephaniebettman.com/). However, maybe they knew their audience much better than I, for their performance was warmly appreciated.

I forgot to mention that there was also a video artist there, someone who was not on the program, who projected some very creative video shorts onto a sheet while the crowd was gathering before the start of the morning’s performance. He was introduced and said a few words about how the video images were triggered or paced in some way to the sounds of the crowd noises. Too bad he was not better documented for the audience, and remains anonymous.

Overall, this was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. The Church of Beethoven is unique as far as I know, but I don’t see why it should be. If every city had a similar organization, the country would be a better place. (See http://www.churchofbeethoven.org/).

Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour

2010-04-30T10:01:00.001-07:00

Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour

The University of Arizona presents an arts program each year consisting of classical music, jazz, ballet, and other fine arts. This April, they brought to town a group called The Monterey Jazz Festival, featuring Regina Carter, Kenny Barron, Russell Malone, and Kurt Elling.

Each year since 1958, the Monterey Jazz Festival is a three day festival, with educational clinics and workshops, performances of course, food, celebration, and all the rest. (This year’s festival is September 17-19 and will feature Dianne Reeves). Then festival performers go “on the road” to bring high quality jazz performances to the rest of the country. It is not clear how these performers are selected each year, but right now it is the group described above.

I attended this performance because of Regina Carter, who I think is the best jazz violinist in the world right now. It was a thrill to see and hear her perform. The only CD she was selling that night was “I’ll be seeing you: A sentimental journey (2006),” not her latest one, “Reverse thread” (2010). The sentimental journey disc is dreadful, full of popular tunes from the 30’s and ‘40s. She adds her unique pizzazz to them, but the disc is obviously designed for a general audience and is not any kind of adventure. I bought it anyway, just so I could say hello to her after the show while getting her autograph, and tell her how much I admired her work. She is a quiet, gentle, and modest person, younger than I thought. And she has a beautiful face. When I raved on about her 2001 CD, Freefall, she said only (“I’m always grateful to work with Kenny”).

Anyway, that CD signing ritual thing is cruelty to performers but I guess it is part of the job. I’m sure they are not capable of hearing anything said to them after their exhausting performance. Malone was actually yawning with fatigue. I complimented him anyway on his performance and told him I enjoyed his disc with Benny Green (Jazz at the Bistro). Barron, who must be at least in his mid-70’s, did not show up for the signing. Bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and Drummer Johnathan Blake were also absent. I shook hands with Kurt Elling and left.

The playlist was tame, unfortunately. Tucson has a lot of retirees. I was one of the youngest people in the concert hall. So the group apparently geared the performance so as not to frighten anyone. That was a disappointment. Also, there is not a lot of money in Tucson. With tickets running $30 to $75, there were not too many young people. I estimated an audience of about 1000, so the concert was a success. It’s pretty amazing that many people turned out on a Tuesday night in a place that must seem like the absolute ends of the Earth for these performers. Tucson, AZ? I venture to guess their show is entirely different in San Francisco or New York. I had a cheap seat way back in row FF, but with a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars I felt like I was in the front row. Acoustics in the old, restored Centennial Hall are not excellent but quite adequate.

The group opened with a lively piece by McCoy Tyner that featured scat singing by vocalist Elling. Then Carter soloed on a selection originally performed by Stuff Smith, and amazingly, she made it sound exactly like Stuff Smith was playing. That was cool. Barron did a featured piece called New York Attitude, followed by Malone with an emotional ballad from the film, “an Affair to Remember.” Elling sang Horace Silver’s humorous number, “Soul Food.” I admit I am not a huge fan of jazz vocals. I love Johnny Hart and Mel Torme, and a few others of that caliber, but in general, I find that the singer’s ego gets in the way of the music and spoils it for me. Elling is a huge star, but I did not immediately take to his style or to his very limited vocal range. I realize scat singing is hard to do, but I can only take it for about a minute or two then it becomes boring. I thought Elling did more shouting than singing. Also, he doesn’t move well, so his performance seems stiff. The audience seemed to appreciate him quite well, so I guess he just does not appeal to my taste.

Kenny Barron played his own composition, “Calypso” which had good Caribbean rhythms and even sounded like steel drums in places, but the highlight was a wonderful drum solo by Blake. While he was very fast and flashy with the sticks, it was his feet that made the solo great. He kept a hypnotic dance rhythm going underneath the brilliant work on top. It was very Caribbean, very driving, and yet complex, and I thought I could be dancing around a bonfire on the beach and by the end of it I was disoriented. It was a pretty spectacular drum solo. There were plenty of other interesting offerings, including a Monk tune (which I can hum, but cannot name right now) that devolved into scat singing. Regina and Kenny played a soul-stirring duet of Georgia on My Mind, in which she demonstrated again why she is the master of her craft. Astonishingly, the tune somehow morphed into Amazing Grace by the end. There was also a very uptempo rendition of Nature Boy, which involved pizzicato on the violin, a drum solo, and lyrics by Elling.

In all, it was an enjoyable concert, but slightly disappointing. Compared to her work on the “Freefall” album, Regina was sedated. The whole group seemed tired or somehow just not into it as much as they could have been. So the concert was a crowd-pleaser, but what do you expect for Tucson, AZ? I’m just grateful they were here at all.

Toward a Science of Consciousness

2010-04-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

Toward a Science of Consciousness
April 12-17 Tucson, AZ

The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona held its ninth biennial conference in the Tucson Convention Center, as it does every even numbered year. In the odd years, the conference is held overseas. The 2011 conference will be in Tel-Aviv. According to the catalog, “The Tucson conferences are the major world gatherings on a broad spectrum of approaches to the fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe. An estimated 700 scientists, philosophers, psychologists, experientialists, artists and others from 43 countries on 6 continents … participate[d] in 400 presentations…”

This is the fourth or fifth one I have attended since the series began in 1994. It was not as well attended as some previous ones, possibly because of the worldwide recession, but it was still deeply fascinating. These are among the most profound questions human beings face. I presented a paper at this one, “Avoiding the Perceptual Model of Introspection,” available online at http://sites.google.com/site/billadamsphd/publications (scroll down 10% or so to find it). It seemed well-received and the Q&A session after was lively. My point was (is) that introspection is not a passive inspection of mental contents but necessarily involves active conceptualization, which is itself subject to the biases of language and culture. It is a tiny contribution, I hope, on the road to development of a full “scientific” method of introspection that would allow us to examine the mind directly in a way that could produce broad consensus.

The conference opened with three interesting talks about William James, founder of experimental psychology in America with his laboratory at Harvard in 1875. His writings are much admired even today by virtually all scholars working in the field of consciousness studies. Eugene Taylor talked about James’ “Radical Empiricism,” the idea that no aspect of human experience should be excluded from scientific study, and that includes consciousness. That was a radical idea then, and it still is today, because consciousness, whatever it is, is not physical, and therefore not amenable to the scientific method. A hundred and twenty five years ago, the scientific method was not as well-defined as it is today and James could get away with such a proposal. Today, the best we can hope for is to study of the brain, and from that, make unverifiable inferences about the mind. Taylor recognized this dilemma, but seemed resigned to it, as there is little appetite in the scientific community for reform of the method.

Bernard Baars, a well-known member of the inner circle at TSC (he teaches the WebCourse on Consciousness for the Center (see http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/WebCourseAnnounS2010.htm ), gave a talk blaming James for behaviorism. The reasoning is that James “glorified” the mind-body problem, according to Baars, and argued for the reality of mind in that dichotomy. By focusing on on that dichotomy, James gave the behaviorists an opportunity to declare material monism and end the confusion. Compounding his sins, James also put a great deal of emphasis on the problem of reconciling religion and science. Again, the behaviorists ended that dilemma in a stroke by declaring religious questions unscientific. That is an oversimplified history of psychology, although not entirely wrong. Baars himself favors a materialist, neurologically based explanation of consciousness, so it is understandable that he would present history this way.

After the opening plenary speeches, there are multiple, smaller break-out groups run in parallel on such topics as neurobiology and consciousness, the nature of representation, unconscious processes, artificial intelligence, perception and art, altered states of consciousness, and so on. There are about five speakers at each of these mini-conferences, and if one is fleet of foot and lucky with the timing, it is possible to dash among the conference rooms to catch the most interesting talks within several groups, but it is always frustrating that choices must be made. In the evening of the opening day there was a reception in the Hotel Arizona (a very dreary place that used to be a Holiday Inn until it became too run down even for that company). Tucson is sorely lacking in decent hotels to support the convention center.

There was an interesting plenary talk by Marcus Raichle, one of the “discoverers” of so-called Brain Dark Energy. I use ironic quotes because I am not convinced that anything significant actually has been discovered there. Raichle and others have documented the well known fact that the brain is always active, even when the mind is at rest, even during sleep. This fact was noted in 1929 by the inventor of the electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, that measures “brain waves”. What Raichle and others have done is map the intensity and extent of this background brain activity and correlate some aspects of it to other, better known brain functions. He has also indulged in wild speculation about what the background noise might be “for.” (And of course, he had the good fortune to be the first one to call it “Dark Energy.” Woo-woo!). You can get a quick summary of his work in the March, 2010 issue of Scientific American. I think it is interesting stuff, but grossly overinterpreted.

The afternoon and evening were again absorbed by the dozens of concurrent sessions on topics such as Introspection (in which I read my paper), panpsychism (the idea that everything in the world is conscious), phenomenology, dreaming, quantum physics (which some people think is related to consciousness), and spiritual and religious approaches. Alas, when one is giving a paper at one of these concurrent sessions, it is impolite to leave for a different session, so I was obliged to attend exclusively to matters of introspection.

The evening poster sessions were not as numerous as in past conferences, but there were several dozen. I didn’t see a whole lot that was new and exciting there. A lot of the familiar old arguments were re-hashed with some new twist: Can computers think? Are philosophical zombies really conceivable? Is a science of consciousness even possible? The Neural basis of decision-making, What are feelings? What is Shamanism? Each author is supposed to be standing by his or her poster to engage in discussion of it, although many were not. A lot of the posters were little more than the pages of a typed paper tacked to the board – too much to read on a fly-by. Apparently, many people have difficulty summarizing their work. Despite its extreme unevenness, the poster session is usually where one can get a glimpse of the hot new ideas of tomorrow, and a sense of what the young researchers are thinking.

On Thursday, David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, former director of the Tucson Center for Consciousness studies, and well-loved consciousness rock-star, gave a rare paper of his own on “the Singularity.” This hare-brained idea taken from science fiction, supposes that as soon as we have computers (robots) with intelligence equal to that of humans (right around the corner according to some people), then those robots will be able to build other robots with even greater intelligence. Extrapolate that line of thinking and you see a curve of exponentially increasing robotic intelligence, until at some point a super-intelligence is reached and human beings become irrelevant. Chalmers suggests therefore, that we should program into our artificial intelligence systems basic human values, including a high value on human life. Or even better, as soon as we have a complete map of the brain, we should “upload” a copy of a person’s mind to one of these supercomputers, so we could be part of the superintelligence revolution and not be left behind. But, Chalmers cautions, there are problems. Would the uploaded consciousness be the same person as the biological person it was taken from? Or would it be two persons (Bio-Dave and Digi-Dave)? How could it be the same person, if there are two distinct copies of the consciousness? Additional philosophical perplexities of that nature were brought forth and considered.

The talk was delivered mostly with a straight face, but it is hard for me to believe that Chalmers took it very seriously. I think he was just trying to liven up the discussion. If he was serious, I am surprised, shocked, really, at his naivety. I choose to believe he was pulling our collective leg.

On Friday was one of the most interesting talks of the entire conference. A Buddhist monk, Za Choeje Rinpoche, spoke. In 1984 the Dalai Lama named him the sixth reincarnation of ZaChoeje Rinpoche, one of the highest Buddhist Lamas of Eastern Tibet. At the age of 16, Rinpoche entered a Tibetan monastery for 10 years of studies. He came to the U.S. 1998 to lead the Mystical Arts of Tibet tour. Afterwards, he lectured on Tibetan culture and philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta. He told his tale with self-deprecating humor. He said that as an ordinary 16-year old boy in southern India, he was completely surprised to be identified as the reincarnation of a Tibetan saint. “If I was the reincarnation,” he asked, “how come I didn’t know about it?” It took him several years to “become the person everybody said I was.” He talked about Buddhism and becoming enlightened, which he described as “ceasing to struggle against the struggles of life.” (Which is not the same as ceasing to struggle). When someone asked him what was the nature of enlightenment, he referred to the big screen, on which every other speaker had shown a PowerPoint. But the screen was completely blank. The crowd was delighted. He did say that when you finally burrow down to the bottom human experience, what you find is laughter. And then he giggled. After his talk, which was enthusiastically received by the audience, he was swamped with additional questioners. It was impossible to get to him. I would have liked to ask him two questions: 1. What is mental illness? And 2. When you were in that monastery all those years, learning all the Buddhist prayers, to what or whom were you praying?

A Buddhist Lama is a hard act to follow but Neurophysiologists Antonio Damasio gave a nice presentation on “the Neural Self” accompanied by interesting slides. As he has already done in his numerous bestselling books, he defined several levels of self, including a “protoself” that constitutes one's feeling of existing and living, and arises from the processes in the brainstem that regulate the automatic life functions, such as breathing. Beyond that there is a “core self,” a secondary self that rises to consciousness whenever the primary protoself is modified. A tertiary self is the autobiographical self based on large scale integration of memories and experience.

There was nothing new, as all this has been covered in his books, but it was nice to have it all spelled out in one summary talk. I don’t buy the theory myself, because it presupposes identity of mind and brain, which I find unintelligible, and at the same time presupposes mind-body dualism. Damasio says such things as “The brainstem delivers conscious experience.” What? I defy him to cut open a brainstem and point out the “consciousness” there. The brain is very complicated, but it is just a piece of meat. It does not have “consciousness” lurking within it. And again, the brainstem delivers consciousness? To what or whom does it deliver, we must wonder. The little man in the head, or homunculus, no doubt. I grant that it is nearly impossible to talk about the mind-body problem without getting tangled up in such linguistic absurdities, but I expected better from a world-famous scientist giving a talk with this title.

There were many more plenary talks, and dozens more concurrent sessions and dozens of new posters in the second poster session. There were also after-hours presentations of “Art and Media” where one could marvel, for example at beautiful, colorful magnifications of biological processes captured on film.

After hours on Friday night there was everybody’s favorite, the Consciousness Poetry Slam and the Zombie Blues. At the poetry slam, volunteer conference-attendees read or otherwise perform an original poem on a consciousness related theme. There is quite a diversity, as you can imagine. The hit piece this year was surely one by a young man (didn’t get the name) who played a decent electronic keyboard and sang original lyrics to the Beatles’ tune, “Hey Jude.” Only in this case, it was “Hey Stu,” referring to Stuart Hameroff, the conference director. It didn’t take long before the whole auditorium was screaming, Na, Na, Na, Na-na-na Na, Hey Stu.

(image: logbase2.blogspot.com)

Following the poems, attendees can offer one or more verses of the Zombie Blues (which I think was originally written by Dave Chalmers), to a very forgiving band that is expert at helping non-experts sing their lines. Chalmers

always starts it off singing the original lyrics: “I act like you act, I do what you do, But I don’t know what it’s like to be you. What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue, I got the Zombie blues.” While not as rich and varied this time as in past conferences, the zombie blues session is still a highlight.

There were too many other fascinating speeches and papers read to be summarized here, but I filled up half a notebook with ideas to follow up on, so that in itself makes the whole thing worth the exhausting effort. I’ll be back next time.

Rethinking Andy Warhol

2010-03-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

I recently saw an exhibition of Andy Warhol prints at the Tucson Museum of Art (www.tucsonarts.com) that runs through July 3, 2010. Warhol prints are vastly overexposed in popular culture, so even though I have admired the Marilyns and the Elvises and the Campbell’s Soup before, I had low expectations. But I guess I was not as familiar with his work as I thought, and the diversity of work in this exhibit gave me a new respect for the artist.

No photography was allowed so I can barely remember what I saw. Most, or maybe all of the works were from the Bank of America Collection, one of the largest corporate collections in the world. All ten of the Campbell’s soups were there, and I think one Marilyn.

Somehow I had never been aware of the wildflowers, a set of about a dozen prints of four wildflowers at macro range. The color combinations were an essay in human consciousness. It was impossible to pick a favorite.

Then there was a series of prints of Muhammed Ali that I had never seen. They were thoughtful and intimate. There was an odd group of prints that seemed to be a riff on the work of Keith Haring, on the theme of commercial art and the commercialization of society. I didn’t quite get that bunch.

A set of ten large prints called “Endangered Species” was a knockout. Photographs of the ten chosen animals were enhanced with line drawing and color, color, color. Again it was the colors that knocked me out. The representations of the animals are standard and not that interesting, but the color enhancements were the star. Unlike someone like J.M.W. Turner, also a colorist, Warhol doesn’t just show color for the sake of color, he articulates it in contrasts and complements. I just don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to explain what he was doing, but the result is stunning.

There was also a series of images about well-known cultural icons, such as Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Santa Clause. These, I felt, were not only exercises in composition and color, but also carried sociological and political meaning. For example, Mickey Mouse had a glitter background. Superman had a comic-book, line-drawing shadow, and Aunt Jemima was imaginatively done in black on black. This was my favorite series of the show.

There was a biographical video showing which was worthwhile in setting the personal and historical context for Warhol’s work.

Warhol was prolific, and this collection represents only a tiny fraction of his print output, but even so it is diverse enough to give an entirely new perspective.

The Capitol Steps

2009-12-11T12:28:00.001-08:00

I caught the Capitol Steps comedy troupe in Scottsdale, AZ, around Thanksgiving. The group was formed by staff members for lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. Today there are still members who were former staffers, but the act has become professionalized. See their info at http://www.capsteps.com/ .

The show I saw was 90 solid minutes of parody in songs, many laugh-out-loud funny. Much of the material is sophomoric – weak jokes that you would expect from a college skit. The quality was uneven. Some of it was deliciously wicked however and those are the moments that justify the ticket price ($50).

There were several jokes set to Beatles tunes. A healthcare parody went well with “When I’m 64.” And Paul McCartney’s “Let it Be” is a natural for ribbing erstwhile presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Those phrases were made for each other. The quality of the singing was remarkably good, enjoyable in its own right. The piano accompaniment (actually leadership) was a driving force.

Of course nearly all the jokes were political, which is the whole point of the show, but there were a few fat and diet jokes that didn’t really fit in, and weren’t too funny either, but they probably realized they were playing to an older audience and couldn’t go wrong there.

Most of the material was surprisingly outdated. There was a number on Sarah Palin promoting her new book, and that was about as recent as they got. Otherwise, there were allusions to old news stories and scandals going back a year or two. Perhaps they choose material that is already well established in the public consciousness, otherwise the allusions would not be funny. The main source of their humor is to flatter the audience with allusions that only the moderately well-informed would understand, so they have to be careful to skirt obscurity. But making fun of Kim Jong Il is really old hat. Cartoon characters do that now.

The material goes by so fast and it is all a collection of non-sequiturs anyway, so it is difficult to remember what was presented. There were the obvious and well-worn Joe Biden and Nancy Peolosi jokes, plenty on health care. Very few on Obama, and what they did have was not very funny. Maybe he is still too new to satirize well. There was a rousing parody of the Beach Boys’ tune, “Help Me Rhonda” but the diction was not very good on that one and I wasn’t sure what it was about. It might have been “Help me ‘Bama” but I’m not sure. There was a very nice piece based on Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina (exceptionally well-sung, too), that substituted Appalachia for Argentina and parodied a recent sex scandal involving a senator.

Anyway, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes, so I was satisfied. The material was not that sharp overall, but there were enough zingers to keep it lively.

The Last Call Girls

2009-08-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

This rousing bluegrass/honky-tonk/country band was playing at the 17th Street Market in Tucson, a mainly Asian grocery market and a very unlikely venue for live music, especially of this type.

Only two of the crew are girls, sisters Lisa (left) and Nancy McCallion. Both are lead singers, while Lisa plays electric bass and Nancy guitar. They are joined by Kevin Schramm (right) on guitar and accordion, Tom Rhodes (left), fiddle and mandolin, and Michael Joyal, drums. These guys must be very gender-secure to bill themselves as members of the Last Call Girls, a delightfully ambiguous name.

The set I caught covered a wide range, from Lisa’s heartfelt rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” to some real foot-stompin’ country rock. Nancy has a higher, more delicate voice and she lets a Celtic influence show through from time to time. For some reason Tom Rhodes was dressed to look like Fidel Castro, but his fiddling was good, mainly in comp mode. I wanted him to break out but he never did.

This is the kind of band that you could enjoy all night at any downtown bar. I picked up their latest CD, “It’s never too late to get lucky.” Sample their music at http://www.thelastcallgirls.com/music.html .

What is Art?

2009-06-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

The Seattle Art Museum has a thought provoking show called Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78, running now through September 7, 2009. There are 70 pieces, mostly painting on canvas but including some videos and uncategorizable pieces, all of which illustrate how a group of artists worldwide rejected the conventional idea of painting, after World War II. Traditionally, from the cave paintings of Lascaux 30,000 years ago, right up until 1945, painting was about representing visual reality. Pictures were supposed to look like the thing depicted. How they managed to do so remains a philosophical mystery to this day, but that was the game. A picture of a horse was expected to look like a horse.

After the upheaval of WWII traditional values were obviously worthless and nothing could be relied on any more. Reacting against traditional dogmas about painting, many artists around the world challenged just about every convention and preconception. Canvases were cut and slashed. Pictures were displayed facing the wall so you could only see the back of the canvas. Painting began to abandon literalism with the impressionists, who only painted their impressions of light and color without trying to render a literal depiction of a scene. Then the expressionists painted what they felt, not necessarily what was there. The action painters like Jackson Pollock spread paint on canvas with great movements, without a thought for making a picture "of" anything. Representation was out. Words and numbers appeared in pictures and instead of pictures. White was painted on white and it was called a picture. Knives and drills were stuck into canvas and it was called a picture. Forget about the canvas. Paint on people. Couldn't that be art? Why not just paint floors and walls? I painted a bookcase last week. Am I an artist? This exhibit clearly demolishes every preconception you might have held about what is a legitimate painting. No reassuring sunsets and kittens are found here.

It is a lot of fun. It challenged even some of my assumptions, and I believed I had thought this problem through already. It made me laugh out loud. It made me shake my head in despair. That’s a good show.

Jasper Johns’ targets found a path between abstract expressionism and traditional representationalism by exploiting symbolism. His numbers paintings did that also. It’s a tweak of the nose to the dogma of expressionism at the time (1950’s). Rauschenberg did the same with his cartoony, manufactured rendition of an expressionist spontaneous gesture. Yoko Ono had a small panel of painted wood mounted on the wall, and a hammer on a string, and a basket of nails, and the viewer was invited to pound a nail into the wall. Is that art? I thought it was stupid, until later, in the next gallery, I could hear the occasional bam, bam, bam of someone pounding, and then I realized what she had done: dissed the whole museum-going experience of reverent silence. Got me! It was a slick piece of meta-art.

Yet at the same time, it is small-minded, very inside-baseball, artists talking to each other about the minutia of ideas. It is like a huge game of one-upmanship or gotcha, rather than a serious exploration into the nature of visual perception and its representation, as so many artists have self-consciously tried to do, from Picasso to Cezanne and many others. And it ignores pioneers and forebears, such as Duchamp, Magritte, Malevich, and others.

Still, all this leads directly to Art Danto’s theory of what art is. In his book, The Madonna of the Future, he defines it as a conversation. I think he is completely correct. Art is a conversation among artists in an established context of artistic production. Yes, I have myself pounded nails into painted wood in my life, but that does not make me an artist, because I did not do it in the right context. My intentionality was not artistic communication. Painting is not what that hangs on museum walls. It is about the ongoing conversation among artists, their critics and viewers, trying to understand the relationship between humanity and the rest of the world. This has been true since the cave paintings at Lascaux. If you thought art was about pretty pictures, you need to see this show.

Titus Kaphar

2009-05-31T10:31:00.001-07:00

Titus Kaphar is a young, upcoming artist with works on display at the Seattle Art Museum in an exhibition called “History in the Making.” See http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=15647

Kaphar finds European and American portrait paintings from the 1700’s and 1800’s and repaints them, with a twist, to emphasize, especially, slavery and the history of black people in general. For example, he takes the famous picture of George Washington Crossing the Delaware and turns George upside-down, with a new, brown-faced head, so that the composite resembles a giant playing card. The intent is to comment on George Washington’s ambivalence about slavery (he was a slave-owner), as if to say, George, what kind of a game were you playing?

I especially like Kaphar’s technique of cutting out images from his paintings, and either leaving the cutout completely blank, or letting the cut-out canvas image droop to the floor. It is a startling result.

Kaphar is the first recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, awarded by SAM to nurture black artists showing great early promise. The award is named after Seattle residents and artists Knight and Lawrence.

Kaphar’s work is at the SAM through September 6, 2009.

Seattle Mystery Bookshop

2009-05-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, this doesn’t really count as an arts review, but it counts as a significant “event” whenever I visit the Seattle Mystery Bookshop at First and Cherry. (Slogan: “ for mystery lovers who know what they want and for those who haven't a clue...”)

The shop was founded by Bill Farley in 1990. According to the web site (www.seattlemystery.com), Farley has been reading mysteries since childhood, beginning with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. He was a bookstore owner in Philadelphia, and moved to Seattle to start Seattle Mystery Bookshop. He sold the store in 1999 to employee J. B. Dickey but remained as a part-time staffer, usually working weekends. I caught him there on a Monday afternoon while I was killing some time before the next ferry. He is a bright and witty fellow with a sparkle in his eye. He was keen to point out a framed embalming certificate on the wall, issued to his grandfather in 1903, but, he said, “Since he had the same name as me, I thought it was okay to hang it up here. Anything you need embalmed, bring it in!”

The store is chockablock with all kinds of mysteries and thrillers. As with any self-respecting independent bookstore, there are so many books, there is barely space to turn around. There are separate sections for the various genres, such as, police procedural, noir, thriller, spies, British cozy (Agatha Christie gets her own shelf),

(Your humble blogger perusing the mysteries of life).

and a large section dedicated to Northwest writers and Northwest locales. The store has book signing parties by noted authors just about every weekend.

Perhaps because I am a psychologist, my preference runs to stories that focus on betrayal, revenge, and paranoia. I require that they be well-written, and I always hope for psychological realism and not too many loopholes in the story. I enjoy astute observation and insightful phenomenology. I am a huge fan of Le Carre and I have not yet found his equal.

(Bill Farley and owner J.B. Dickey. Seattlest.com)

I generally do not care for most of the best-selling authors who take up acres of shelf space in most stores, so it is a challenge to find an author I can stick with for a while. At SMB, my strategy is to go to the shelf of titles recommended by staffer Janine Wilson, who suggests some authors I know and seems to share some of my interests (ignoring her vampire streak). That’s one way I find new authors. (You can see synopses of interesting books I have read recently at my web site, https://sites.google.com/site/billadamsphd/. Click on Book Notes).

You can expect to pay top dollar for your books at SMB. No discount prices, although they do sell some used books. This trip I controlled myself and spent only $63 on five new paperbacks. I could have saved $15 buying these books on Amazon or at Barnes and Ignoble, but then I wouldn’t have had a delightful experience and I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Farley. I don’t mind paying a bit of a premium to keep this store, and stores like it, from the jaws of mediocrity.

There’s a good mystery bookshop also in Portland, OR, Murder By the Book, across the Burnside bridge from downtown, in a suburb, but for ambience, Seattle Mystery Bookshop, right in Pioneer Square, deserves to be a local favorite and should be a destination for every visitor to Seattle.

117 Cherry Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 587-5737 or staff@seattlemystery.com
Open Every Day:
Mon - Sat 10-5 and Sun 12-5

PDX Jazz 09

2009-02-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

The Portland, Oregon jazz festival (www.pdxjazz.com/home) was Feb. 13-22, but it almost didn’t happen at all. Just a few months ago it was bankrupt due to lack of sponsors. The whole town and jazz fans everywhere were devastated. Then at the eleventh hour, Alaska Airlines came through with a major sponsorship and some others followed. The festival is now officially called the Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air – Portland Jazz Festival. Fly Alaska!

I attended a few events over the long President’s Day weekend, and from what I experienced, the festival was as great as ever, even though crowds were thinner. Most venues looked to be only 2/3 full. The theme this year was a celebration of Blue Note Records’ 70th year of producing jazz music (25 years since its resurrection). All the festival artists were Blue Note performers.

The opening headliner was pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. I have appreciated this Havana-born artist since the “The Blessing,” (1991), still one of my favorite albums. His quintet included trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. He teased with the occasional Latin rhythm but mostly stuck to simpler rhythms in favor of complex melody. Instead of a sequence of notes, the melody was comprised of a repeating finger pattern moving around the keyboard. Each gesture was like an individual note in a regular melody. There were few chords. The tunes were mostly minor key, sounding plaintive or angry, but always contained like a pressure cooker within two octaves of middle C. Even a piece that started out light and humorous turned dark and anxious. One wonders what goes on in his head.

Legendary trumpeter Terence Blanchard came on with an orchestra. My first reaction was, “Oh boy, here we go. This never works.” Because despite a composer’s desire for complexity, subtlety and nuance, an orchestra is not a jazz instrument. The sounds blend into the mediocre “orchestra” sound as it tries to express jazz ideas. This kit included a tuba, 3 French horns, 2 trombones, and an enormous bass drum (maybe5 feet tall) in the back row; then a row of 2 flutes and 3 clarinets; then a healthy string section of 6 violins, 4 violas, and 2 cellos. All this was fronted by a piano, bass, sax and drum quartet, plus a conductor for the orchestra, then finally, Blanchard squeezed into a space so tight he could hardly turn around.

But my fears were unfounded and I was happily surprised by what Blanchard did with all this resource. He played from his new album, A Tale of God’s Will: A Requiem for Katrina. He and the orchestra plumbed the depths of emotion surrounding the 2005 tragedy of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Blanchard’s home town. If I understood him correctly, the album is the sound track, or derived from the sound track of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary. Blanchard has scored numerous Spike Lee films.

The music was soulful, spiritual, expressive, and emotional, but also representational, evoking cries of despair and soulful laments along with the relentless forces of nature and the disorganization of the community. All this had a New Orleans flavor: simple, bluesy, well punctuated, and accessible. And the orchestra, instead of fusing into one voice, played discrete layers of sound and meaning so that although it was not a concerto structure, the exchanges with the jazz quintet were chatty (except for one piece, featuring electric guitar, in which the orchestra devolved into “just an orchestra.”). It was a masterpiece of composition, orchestration, and performance; a highlight of the festival.

By Saturday the “Joe Lovano Festival” had begun. The ubiquitous saxophonist headlined with his group, “Us5” but also walked on to jam with John Scofield’s trio, accompanied singer Judi Silvano, and featured with McCoy Tyner. That’s not a complaint; I love the guy, but he was clearly doing his best to support the festival this year. His own show with “Us5” was introduced by his wife, Judi Silvano, but her gushing, over the top praise for him seemed way off base and was embarrassing. She sang a number or two with him where she was able to match her voice closely to the tone and timbre of the sax, making some interesting effects. Still, I was relieved when she stepped away from the mike. The paradox of Lovano is that his sound is hot but he is cool. The music is complex, evolves very quickly and organically, making it exciting and original, but he doesn’t personally get bent out of shape. He rarely resorts to horse whinnies and squeaky balloons as clichés for “emotion.” He lets the music speak for itself, and it’s very good music, albeit somewhat intellectual.

Jacky Terrasson and his trio opened for Lovano. This talented pianist was a winner of the Thelonious Monk competition and that was evident in his music. I enjoyed his rendition of “Caravan.” You would not think there is anything left to say with that song, but he gave it a makeover. Overall, however, I thought his sound was Jarrettesque and although pleasant, undistinguished.

Jazz singer Diane Reeves appeared with the full Portland Symphony Orchestra, 100 pieces or more. She served up an array of standards and other material, interspersed with reminiscences and humorous anecdotes. Those were more than just filler, for they revealed her personality, which is charming, and added value to her singing. She referred several times to her high school days, and “the girl I used to be,” so one wonders if she is going through a period of self-examination just now. I was impressed by her precise diction, in speaking and singing. For some reason I was put off by her interpretations of songs like Fascinatin’ Rhythm and Lullaby of Birdland. They were reworked to seem “creative” but came across only as manufactured. This was a regularly scheduled performance of the Portland Orchestra that had obviously been grafted to the Jazz Festival for cost-saving synergy, but it didn’t really work. Symphony goers are a different population than jazz lovers. Loud, overweight, middle-aged physicians in dark suits were accompanied by over-perfumed, bejeweled wives. Reeves’ playlist was probably designed for that audience. The orchestra was competent but sounded like an orchestra, nothing more. They did not swing.

Guitarist John Scofield has been in the limelight for a long time and his performance at the festival proved again why that should be so. He has played with Miles Davis, Charles, Mingus, Herbie Hancock, and many others. Joe Lovano was a member of his original quartet in the early ‘90’s. I appreciate Scofield’s diversity of styles from traditional to funk, rock and even a heavy metal sound (“The Low Road” performed with Lovano). After a beautiful, soulful rendition of the Tennessee Waltz, he launched an amazing avant-garde piece involving a full array of special effect floor pedals. He was verbing and looping his own licks right there in real time, essentially doing engineering work as we watched, to produce a completely bizarre output. The group also did a tremendously energetic rendition of “Satisfaction.” It is amazing what can grow out of those first 10 notes of the bass line. And it is worth noting that the bass was well miked so you could actually hear it, something that is surprisingly overlooked in many jazz performances. Drummer Bill Stewart, a legend in his own right, treated us with several spectacular solos.

Singer Judi Silvano, wife of Joe Lovano, is a well-known jazz vocalist and has one Blue Note record to her credit. I think she calls herself a vocalist rather than a singer because she does not actually sing recognizable songs, but produces sequences of vocal effects to scat lyrics. It was hard to follow. There were lots of staccato jumps across octaves, but nothing in familiar tropes. It also seemed repetitive and artificial to me, rather than organic, although that could just be my ignorance of her music. I could not get a grip on what her musical ideas were. It seemed she was most intent on demonstrating her impressive vocal range, and it was a large range, especially for a 58 year old, because she can fluidly slip into a falsetto. But it is not the same kind of a range you heard in young Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, for example. She used her voice as an arbitrary musical instrument rather than as means of personal expressiveness, but then accompanied it with gestures designed to look meaningful, as if to suggest that what she was singing had some human meaning, rather than being contrived. Pseudo-beatific smiling and knowing nods were gratingly inauthentic. She did not move well. Her personal stage presence was thus in conflict with the sound of her performance. I appreciated her skilled vocal control after I closed my eyes. I never thought I would say this, but her presentation of “Love in Outer Space” by Sun Ra was a familiar port in stormy seas. Joe Lovano did what he could to support her.

Lionel Loueke’s Trio was a perfect way to end my jazz weekend. This young guitarist from Benin, in west Africa, is a graduate of Berklee College and the Thelonious Monk Institute. He has played with both Terence Blanchard and John Scofield. The Scofield influence really shows. But Loueke is his own man, much more romantic and self-expressive than Sco. He has a beautiful voice, and sings African songs as he plays, often using the complex click patterns characteristic of African languages such as Xhosa, but using them in a way to create a mini-rhythm section in his voice. On most tunes he sings along with himself even when he is away from the microphone. The guitar is very hot, and he can get an amazing diversity of sound from it. One tune had it sounding very much like a steel drum, and in another, he put a tissue between the frets and the strings to make a sound like a large African hand drum. His drummer, a Hungarian named Frank Nemeth was the most subtle drummer I have ever heard. “Subtle” is not a word you normally associate with drums but this guy excelled in leaving out beats at key moments, not pounding them in. Sometimes in the middle of a fast run the stick would come down but curve away, missing the head, producing a kind of syncopated effect. I could have watched him all night. Bassist Massimo Ducat was also outstanding in his own way. It is a strong trio and they played creatively off each other with good communication. A noticeable characteristic of Loueke’s compositions and the trio’s performance was abrupt changes in tempo. One composition, which Loueke explained had 17 beats to a measure, went far beyond Monk’s wildest dream.

As always, I hated to leave with so much talent yet unsampled. It is a huge festival for being such a small festival. If it returns next year, so will I.

Indian Mini-Film Festival

2009-01-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Art Museum put on a two day mini festival of recent films by and about Northwest Native Americans. This was part of an exhibit of arts and culture of the Salish people of Washington State which includes at least 39 recognized tribes.

Fry Bread Babes
Fry Bread Babes was a series of interviews with six Native women about their self image, especially their body concept, today, and as they were growing up. Uniformly, the women said that in their youth they aspired to the mainstream, white ideal presented by mass media, but with age came to various degrees of self-acceptance. It is the same tragedy of female socialization we see in mainstream culture, except there are proportionally more overweight Native women, due to the modern diet and lifestyle. In a way, it might be easier for them to find self-acceptance within the Native culture. This accounts for the title. A fry bread babe, it was explained, is a “round” woman, and I got the sense that it is not entirely pejorative.

Some interesting things: I noticed nearly all the women laughed when they were embarrassed, and it was not the nervous, embarrassed laugh you see in Asia, but a genuine giggle that conveys hilarity, but nevertheless was designed to cover up embarrassment. Then afterward they would say “Excuse me.” I did not know that was a cultural trait.

Another interesting point was that none of the women seemed overly concerned about skin color. It was discussed, but it did not seem a critical issue, as it is among African Americans, for example. Hair quality seemed almost more important to them than skin color. The women were generally not aware of Indian stereotypes until adolescence or later. As with all children, they did not think of themselves as “Indian” until they were identified in school. They were vaguely aware of “Cowboys and Indians” movies and short clips were shown from old movies. But these women did not seem deeply affected by the stereotype, perhaps because Indian women were seldom shown in those movies. They were much more affected by prejudice in school.

This film gave some great insight into Northwest Native culture, from a woman’s point of view, and it is pretty impressive how honest and open the women were, a tribute to the filmmakers’ skills. It would be interesting to do the same project with much younger women and girls.

Directed by Steffany Suttle. color, 30 min. See http://www.aifisf.com/aiff/2008/?fMenu=film&q=&fContent=film&id=124

Princess Angeline
Princess Angeline was the daughter of Chief Seattle. Even after the Chief died, she continued to live downtown, selling clams and baskets on street corners until her death in 1896. It was an ignominious end for a princess of any kind. The early white settlers drove the Duwamish tribe out of their homeland, which included the whole Seattle area. Houses were burned, people were murdered, and the Duwamish river, which enters Puget Sound at the heart of the city, was re-engineered for ships, killing the Salmon runs and destroying tributary rivers. This movie gives an honest historical account of the Duwamish tribe’s ordeal, including the treaty that Chief Seattle signed with the territorial governor that essentially gave the Seattle area to the settlers. It is a fascinating and sorrowful history. Princess Angeline refused to leave town, staying in her wooden shack on the waterfront at the base of Pike street until her death.

The Duwamish tribe has never been recognized by the federal government because they can’t prove that they have been a coherent culture through history. As several professors and lawyers pointed out, that is not surprising, since they were willfully dispersed and destroyed as a people by the early settlers. Today the Duwamish have an association with over 500 surviving members but they are still not officially recognized and have no reservation, rights, or government support. Beside the history lesson then, the film is an advocacy piece for formal recognition of the tribe. They did gain recognition at the end of the Clinton administration, but that was immediately reversed by GW Bush.

I enjoyed the historical photographs, especially the old pictures of Seattle, my home town. Actually, Chief Seattle is buried in Suquamish, a small town next to mine, and my house sits where the Chief himself surely trod at one time. The film made me aware of my historical moment. Had I been born 150 years ago, or 150 years hence, I would have very different attitudes and values about the Duwamish and their plight.

One criticism of the film is that it failed to address the significance of getting government recognition for the Duwamish. The people in the film said it was important for their individual and cultural self-esteem, but that begs the question, why? Nobody doubts that the Duwamish are a people. Why do they specifically need the blessing of the federal government to shore up their self-esteem? I think a partial answer was given in a scene showing a group of descendants of the pioneers, all prominent, well-dressed, rich white people, handing over a check to fund a Duwamish tribal center in Seattle. At the ceremony, a bejeweled and sequined woman said, as sincerely as she could manage, something like “On behalf of the pioneers, we are sorry for what we did.” I think that probably goes a long way in helping self-esteem, and maybe that is all the Duwamish want to hear from the feds. But I don’t think that is the whole story.

It is probably more about land, money, and natural resources. If the Duwamish were federally recognized, would that mean they could exercise land claims to most of the Seattle Area? There surely would be legal and financial consequences of federal recognition, but the film focused only on the need for cultural self-esteem. I thought that was disingenuous. I realize a short documentary must have boundaries, but it was just not believable that the only, or main thing the Duwamish would like from the federal government is an apology. I sensed a hidden agenda and was disappointed it remained hidden.

Directed by Sandra Osawa. color, 42 min. See http://upstreamvideos.com/wp/videos/princess-angeline/

Where I’m From
This was a short piece created by students in a workshop by Longhouse Media, a youth program that supports the expression of Native youth through movie making. If I understood correctly, this group of about 10 teenagers designed and produced this film in five days, which is pretty amazing.

The film was nominally designed to address the question, where is home? The question was addressed mainly in voice-over and printed titles. There wasn’t much coherence to the visuals: a girl doing tai chi or some such, interspersed with shots of seagulls, for example. That juxtaposition itself was actually interesting, and even though it did not seem to mean anything, it hinted at a style of visual nonsequitur that could be something new and interesting in the field of editing. Other pictures were of the Pike Place Market and the district there around First Avenue. I think only two of the students were in front of the camera, the rest behind the scenes.

Sadly, the projectionist was tuned out and did not realize that the aspect ratio was wrong for this showing. What a shame for such a sincere effort to not be seen under ideal conditions. It was a respectable effort and I was pretty impressed by what can be done, with expert guidance, in such a short time. They should have had a second crew film “the making of” and tacked that on the end! See http://www.swinomish.org/departments/native_lens/about_native_lens.html

March Point
This feature-length documentary followed three boys, aged about 15 to 17, from the Swinomish Tribe, which is located on Fidalgo Island, north of Seattle, as they learned how to make a video documentary. They interviewed each other about their difficult past, how they got involved with drugs and drinking, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in rehab. During treatment they found the opportunity to learn how to make videos. They took it up with disinterest at first but then became committed to their work.

Their work was to document the circumstances of the Shell Oil refinery on March Point, a peninsula that according to an 1850 treaty, belongs to the Swinomish. The executive they interviewed at the refinery explained that Shell bought the property in the 1950s from the legal, registered owners. It’s an interesting situation in which the land was stolen, but since the thieves’ society is the one that writes the laws, they had legal ownership and Shell’s purchase of it was therefore perfectly legitimate. So the Swinomish claim to the land, while valid, is hopelessly doomed.

Alongside that theme, the film documents the lifestyle of the Swinomish people, whose reservation is right next to the refinery. They are, and always have been a fishing people. They still live on a diet almost exclusively of seafood, including clams, crabs, salmon, and so on. But the water around their reservation has become so polluted that all the fish are seriously contaminated. Yet as a tribal elder says, we can’t stop eating it. We can’t stop fishing. It has been our way of life for a thousand years.

The boys film all this and I felt that I got a rare glimpse of the inside of everyday tribal life on the reservation. It’s one thing to appreciate the art and culture of Native people through museum exhibits and quite another to understand the everyday life. The view this film gave was not idealized or trying to make any political statement about tribal life. Although a lot of it was heart-rending, it was not intended to be. I think only young people could have made this film Any adults would have been far too self conscious.

The boys mount a fruitless letter writing campaign to the governor, about the status of March Point and they travel to the state capitol to interview her, unsuccessfully. Eventually, they do find an audience with Washington State Senator Patty Murray and their representative in congress. They spend a week or so in D.C. with their camera. On a park bench on the Capitol Mall, they agree that they “didn’t fit in,” mainly because they didn’t have suits like everybody else. Upon returning home, one of the boys comments, “When we got back, everything was the same, but we had changed.”

It’s an interesting, competent and inspirational film that speaks volumes about the quality of the support the project had from the Native Lens organization. Of course the boys believe the project was about March Point, unable to see that the real story is their own socialization into responsible adult life, and their journey from hopeless despair to caring about the future.
Color, 60 min. See http://www.marchpointmovie.com/

None of these movies is easily available. I could not find any of them on IMBD, Netflix or Amazon. If you are interested in documentary films about native issues, your best bet is probably to keep an eye on the American Indian Film Institute, which sponsors an annual film festival. See http://www.aifisf.com/aiff/2008/?fMenu=film&q=&fContent=film&id=124

Hopper at SAM

2008-11-29T17:43:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Art Museum has a small but rewarding exhibition of Edward Hopper paintings on show November 13, 2008–March 1, 2009. It is called “Edward Hopper’s Women,” but it’s really not about women. Hopper often did feature women in his compositions but that doesn’t mean they are “about” women. The works are about spaces, inner and outer. I think curators make up such titles as marketing gimmicks.

The SAM show features only ten paintings, most of them familiar, as a lot of Hopper’s work is now. There are also a few etchings, maybe half a dozen or fewer, and some photographs he made early on.

I will need to go back to the exhibition to absorb it better. The day I was there the gallery was crowded, far too hot, and heavy with the smell of humanity. I could only take a quick look before my eyes dried out but what I saw reminded me that I still find Hopper mysterious.

The standard description of his work as sad, alienated, depressing, existential, etc., is overplayed. Often the pictures do show people alone, but I don’t think that makes them sad pictures. They don’t make me sad to look at them, and I don’t think the people portrayed are sad. They are simply alone with their private thoughts, in solitary psychological space, surrounded by a public physical space. Perhaps you can’t be literally alone in a public space, but you can be psychologically alone, and that’s what Hopper depicts.

(Automat)

Many of Hopper’s works have been described as voyeuristic, but I think that aspect has been over-interpreted. It is not a Manet picnic kind of voyeurism, but something more pragmatic. In Compartment C, Car 293, for example, we are not peeping. As the viewer of the scene, we have to be located somewhere.

Anytime you see a person taking a moment alone, in real life or in a picture, you are automatically a voyeur, because that person by definition, believes he or she is alone. If you were to walk up to the woman her countenance would change and she would engage you in some polite way. We are voyeurs of necessity, defined by the mechanics of portraying a person alone with their thoughts. It is a paradoxical voyeurism.
(Compartment C, Car 293)

That’s why Hopper often puts us at an odd viewing angle, to emphasize our psychological distance and benign intention.

Another recurring theme with Hopper is windows, looking into or out of them. Again I think that theme is commonly misinterpreted, either as straightforward voyeurism (looking in), or forlorn existential yearning (looking out).

Instead, the windows separate psychological spaces, not just physical spaces. On the subject’s side of the window is “here,” where the body is located. It is personal space, private space. On the other side of the window is public space, subjectivity's not-me alterity, the big world "out there."

Hopper is always careful to show us ingress and egress to the subject’s interiority. There is always a doorway, a stairway, a window; a route by which the subject arrived at his or her present location. The non-personal public space is often only implied, as it is by the roadway in Bicycle Rider, but a route is always there, even in Hopper’s later architectural and landscape works, because there is always a connection between private and public space.

(Bicycle Rider)

There is no representation or suggestion of sound in Hopper paintings, as there is, for example in Lautrec or Degas. Hopper paintings just seem silent. That’s because psychological space is as silent as the inside of your head.

In the Evening Wind etching, we are part of the woman’s physical space, actually in her bedroom, but we are not part of her mental space. We do not exist as far as she is concerned. We could even imagine that the dark bedroom is the inside of her skull, her naked body a homunculus peering out through the windows of her eyes to the public world.

(Evening Wind)

Even though we are in her bedroom, we are not part of the scene. If she were clothed and seated like the woman in Automat, looking out the bedroom window, we might feel we were having tea with her. But because she is so vulnerable, we know we are not really there with her. That isolates her and therefore it is her private mental space that is portrayed, not merely the physical space her body is in.

In Compartment C, Car 293, the window between mental privacy the the public world is the book. Through it, the woman experiences whatever world she reads about. She is psychologically not present in the same train compartment as us. Mentally, she is elsewhere. Compartment C was done in the 1930's, a decade later than most of the other ones. Maybe it took Hopper a while to realize that a psychological window did not have to be made of glass.

(Chop Suey)

Chop Suey is a beautiful picture for color and composition, but thematically, it is another variation. The women are immersed in the world of their conversation. They are mentally, not present in the physical restaurant.

(New York Movie)

I will have to go back to the exhibit to validate this insight about Hopper. He never said anything like this about his work, as far as I know, but artists often do not know from what wellspring their work arises.

But even if this idea is just me tripping, this is the kind of insight that makes me feel deeply connected to the artist, and by implication, to the rest of humanity.

Arvel Bird

2008-10-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

Native American fiddler and flautist Arvel Bird presents a blend of new age, country, and folk music, interspersed with plentiful advice to follow your dream, live healthy, never give up, walk the walk, save the environment, and so on. I could have used a lot less homily and a lot more music, for he really is quite talented both on violin and flute (actually, the instruments looked like wooden recorders.

He uses prerecorded accompaniment, swelling and swooning strings, to “augment” his sound, which is totally unnecessary. He is plenty good enough to play straight folk and Native music, but he apparently knows what works best for him. Bird is well-recognized, having released a dozen CDs and was named Native American artist of the year in 2007. He has toured with Glen Campbell, Loretta Lynn, Louise Mandrell, and others. This picture is from his web site, http://www.arvelbird.com, where you can also sample his sound. He was wearing some kind of weird gypsy outfit when I saw him.

I caught him at Javalina’s coffee shop in Tucson, a mecca for regional talent. He performed with Grammy nominee Will Clipman, a gifted percussionist, who we did not hear enough from. Bird kept him strictly in the background. Bird’s act emphasizes the kind of Native American music that practically defines new age; dreamy glissandi and multi-octave phrasing. This is not hard core “Hey-ya, hey-ya” ceremonial music. We are encouraged to imagine a red hawk soaring, rather than to appreciate the music on its own merits, a disservice to both the hawk and the music. His style is at its best when blended with rhythmic country and even jazz riffs, but there wasn’t much of that. I’m afraid I do not appreciate new age music, but I was aware of Bird’s (and Clipman’s) considerable talents and wished I could have heard them cut loose. Still, Bird’s is a high-energy act worth looking for.

Javalinas' performance calendar is http://www.javalinas.com/calendar.html .

PDX Jazz Revenant

2008-10-07T06:58:00.000-07:00

PDX Jazz has risen from the dead, thanks to Alaska Airlines, which stepped into the breach with a multi-year sponsorship. Thanks, ALK! (that's their stock symbol). Qwest will resume its major sponsorship too. Apparently, the city of Portland, OR was innundated by messages from shocked and bereaved jazz fans after the announcement of the annual festival's demise early last month.

The city council and a consortium of Portland indivduals and businesses came up with their own contributions to complement the major sponsors. Contributors include The Oregonian, the Portland Trail Blazers, Rogue Ales, Music Millennium, Azumano Travel, Amtrak, NW Natural, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and others. I know I will direct my travel dollars their way when I can.

The PDX Jazz announcement says, "The corporate and organizational support ensures that the 6th Annual Alaska Airlines Portland Jazz Festival presented by The Oregonian A&E will take place, as scheduled, February 13-22, 2009. As previously announced, the festival will be dedicated to the 70 anniversary of Blue Note Records."

I'll be there! (See pdxjazz.com.)

Port Townsend Film Festival '08

2008-09-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the Port Townsend (WA) film festival last weekend, even though I waited too long to book a hotel and had to settle for what was possibly the last room within a 50 mile radius, in a low end place that just barely met my wife’s minimum standards. PT is a charming Victorian seaport on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, fifty miles northwest of Seattle.

The four PTFF founders were veteran attendees of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, which served as their model. The Port Townsend festival showcases new work and emerging filmmakers, and offers a variety of film education programs, symposia, and training offerings, including a film camp for kids. The Festival organization also maintains a film and book library in Port Townsend, available to members. See www.ptfilmfest.com/participate

The highlight of the festival for me was the first film I saw on Friday night, The Exiles, a 1961 documentary drama by writer and director Kent MacKenzie. It tells, or rather shows, the lives of some working class Native Americans in downtown Los Angeles, over one long Friday night in 1960. The hybrid film is part interview, as the characters soliloquize over gritty black and white scenes of themselves, and part documentary, as the camera just follows them around home and town, and part dramatization, as the characters play out little scenes in bars, on the highway, in their apartments.

The film was shown at the 1961 Venice Festival then immediately fell into obscurity. It was recently restored at UCLA and re-released, and it looks good. There is no story or character development. Rather, the almost nameless characters just hang out, existing for the sake of existing. The men drink beer in a bar, smoke and play cards. Two of them go searching for a poker game. Two others pick up girls and go for a joyride. One of the men’s pregnant wife goes window shopping and then stays overnight at a friend’s house.

The air is saturated with dead, heavy time. All the characters endure it without hope or ambition. One of the men says that he can “do time” in prison or out. It makes no difference to him. Relationships among the men are caring, but without adequate modes of expression become ritualistic. Women are not taken seriously at all. Yvonne, the pregnant wife, talks about how she used to pray every night for some change in her life, but after years of disappointment, stopped praying and going to church.

The film was introduced by Native American author (and recent National Book Award winner) Sherman Alexie, who also provided Q&A afterward. I asked him to comment on the sense of time portrayed in the film. On the reservation, he said, time is poetically cyclical. You live with the land and the seasons. There is always a sense of renewal. But in the city, the cycles of time are just crushing repetition. And poverty is boring. “I was poor,” he said, “and when you’re poor, it is the same shit every day. The same fears and worries and problems. It’s like being in prison.” I was stunned by the honesty, force, and depth of his answer.

He also pointed out examples in the film of androgyny among Indian men. “Indian guys are androgynous,” he insisted. “We are the ones who wear the red feathers and sing. And we cry a lot. It offers a choice for women. What do you prefer, a white guy grinding diamonds in his ass or a drunk Indian crying?”

You could see Alexie authentically struggle with his identity, a process obviously painful for him, but he seems to realize that struggle is also the source of his power and wit. He referred to an earlier time in his life when he could go places without “having to answer questions about Indians.” Now, he appears at festivals like this one, as “The Indian.”

I met him again the following morning and thanked him for his honesty, and asked him this time about the lack of ambition portrayed in the film. I told him I could not get inside it. “Don’t forget,” he said, "to have ambition means to accept the world of the people who destroyed you. In a way, lack of ambition, even drug addiction and suicide, are acts of rebellion.” “Are people really thinking that way,” I asked? “Subconsciously,” he answered. Again I was thrown into silence by the depth of his remarks. My wife came to the rescue and told him how she had read and enjoyed all his books. “Well, thanks,” he said with a smile. “You are helping pay for my car and put my children through college.” But what was on his subconscious mind, I wondered?

We shook his hand and let him be, and we talked about what he had said for hours.

Fix (2008) is another fictionalized docudrama, this time the story of a young man (Tao Ruspoli) and his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde), who try to get his wild, drug addicted brother (Shawn Andrews) into rehab before a court ordered deadline, to avoid a prison term. They also must raise $5,000 to pay for the rehab. The three of them buzz around Los Angeles trying to raise the cash, stopping to hit up acquaintances at Beverly Hills mansions, East LA, and in the Watts projects.

Throughout, the protagonist (Ruspoli) runs a video camera, recording their adventures. The filmmaking is good, individual scenes interesting, editing excellent, and acting more or less convincing. Unfortunately, all the characters encountered are stereotypes, even the three main characters, and little is revealed about them. I never did believe that the brothers were brothers or even that the videographer’s girlfriend was really his girlfriend. The whole thing was emotionally flat, just scenery.

There was a thin theme about helplessness. The younger brother is helpless to change his drug habit; the older brother helpless to control his brother; the girl helpless to affect anything. There is a transient segment about an urban farm in downtown LA that was once lush with food and greenery but is now desolate because of legal maneuvering: helplessness on a community scale. It is a good theme, but since the characters have no inner life, the theme seems didactic rather than organic to the characters’ experience.

There might have been a very subtle commentary about making documentaries, as if the story device of a character carrying a hand-held was the only way you would ever see “the truth” about the inside of a chop shop, an authentic Vietnamese restaurant, a marijuana purchase, or a heroin shooting gallery. But that seemed more an epiphenomenon than a conscious theme. Overall, the film is visually strong and technically solid, intellectually interesting and worth seeing, but not emotionally engaging. As a zero-budget indie, I don’t know how you could see it anyway, but I think it is good enough to eventually find some kind of commercial release.

Petals: Journey Into Self-Discovery, was yet another documentary, this time about the book, “Petals” by photographer Nick Karras (www.nickkarras.com). The “petals” are the inner and outer labia of female genitalia. Karras photographed over a hundred women to get the pictures in order to demonstrate the beauty of the female body (at least that part of it). Most of filmmaker Beck Peacock's documentary is given to reactions of women, and clips of various sex educators, such as Betty Dodson. The photographs find a line between pornography and medicine that could be construed as art.

The film itself is the mildly interesting story of the book’s creation, but its main point seems to be simply desensitization. All the slang words for the female genitals are discussed and women talk frankly about their sex education and early sexual experience. The film is thus like the Vagina Monologues in desensitizing a taboo part of the body. However, unlike the Monologues, the desensitization is not directed to the audience. Instead it shows other people being desensitized, one step removed. Consequently, I thought the whole project was a weak effort. However, in line for another film later, I heard a woman behind me describing “Petals” to her friends in enthusiastic terms. “It made me want to rush home and get a mirror,” she exclaimed. “I have no idea what I look like, and everyone is so different!” So, maybe my evaluation of the film is not correct – maybe it is powerfully cathartic for women viewers. What do I know?

A longish, 35-minute “short” film was Al’s Beef, a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spaghetti western by writer and director Dennis Hauck. Shot in Arizona, it successfully captured the colors, the heat, and the dry open spaces of the spaghettis. A taciturn and mysterious woman (Persephone Apostolou) rides into town and after belting back her drink, pays for a hooker. She immediately throws the hooker out of the room so she can get some sleep. Later, in the bar, she shoots a guy who hassles her, but it turns out she really just wanted his boots. She is searching for somebody and through a series of flashbacks, we learn why. There is the mandatory showdown gunfight.

The film captures the spaghetti idiom to a large extent, although the acting is too obviously comic. Unlike Eastwood’s nameless stranger, the woman seems more goofy than menacing. A lot of that is because most scenes were subtly off tempo. The camera lingered too long on the wrong scenes, and not long enough on others, and was too jumpy overall, so we did not get a sense of the woman’s emotional slow burn.

Toward the end, the narrative moved from a droll but mainly realistic style, to surreal farce. The woman takes five bullets in the chest and the result is only that it makes her limp a bit. The sheriff (Dean Stockwell) empties his pistol into the preacher, lifting him off the ground, soaring backward in slow motion. These elements refer broadly to the spaghetti style, but in parody. The sound of the gunshots was not right, although the music, consisting mainly of a tom-tom, was a fair approximation to Marricone’s austere style.

I ran into writer-director Hauck later that evening in one of Port Townsend’s charming bars and talked to him about the film. In contrast to my conversations with Sherman Alexie, I was unable to communicate with Hauck. After complimenting him on the film, I asked him if the timing was difficult in spaghetti scenes. His reply was about how tough it was to edit the film down to 35 minutes. I asked what was next for him; if he was he committed to westerns. He answered by talking about all the film festivals he had been attending to promote Al’s Beef. I asked him about the transition from realism to farce in the film. He said he thought there was a lot of humor in the spaghettis. I complemented him on the strong story idea, and he replied that it was inspired by Eastwood’s (1985) Pale Rider (an influence only microscopically evident).

It was a strange conversation. I was not anybody who could do anything for him so I guess I did not warrant a genuine conversation. He is from LA, after all. I did learn that he would like to make Al’s Beef into a full length feature, which I don’t think is a good idea, although I said nothing. I suggested he take a look at The Legend of God’s Gun, another recent spaghetti homage, but he said he never heard of it and expressed no interest. The guy is only late 20’s, early 30’s and I give him credit for gumption and a pretty good start to his career with this short film. I wish him well.

Off Off Broadway is a scathing satire of avant-garde theater production and a parody of Waiting for Guffman (1996). I never saw Guffman, so I took “Off-Off” on its own terms, as a satirical comedy, and it was successful. The aspiring but clueless and egomaniacal director hires a cast of naïve New York acting students to stage his 6-hour long play, which has only pre-recorded voices while the actors move about the high contrast stage in crypto-meaningful gestures, expressing the director’s commitment to “specific conceptualism”. The result is so far beyond bad, it is hilarious, perfectly skewering so-called “avant-garde” performances I have endured. Off stage the actors, crew, and director squabble and strut while the pretentious “making-of” video camera rolls. The humor is subtle and for that reason deeply tickling. Audience members, many of them obviously filmmakers, squealed in delight at the subtlest of inside jokes. The writer-producer is Jeff Huston. I think this one should find commercial release at least as an art house film.

Fashion Victims is a German project (subtitled) released in 2007. A middle aged salesman of “classic” women’s clothing is threatened by competition from a younger salesman who has a younger line of clothing that the older man disparages as “cheap fabric from North Korea” that no woman would ever wear. But in fact he is being out-sold. He cannot accept that times are changing, as he adopts a Death of A Salesman combination of bewilderment and denial. As the pressure mounts, he is mean to his wife and cancels his son’s vacation abroad to make him be his driver on the sales rounds. Meanwhile, the son falls in love with a slightly older man, who turns out to be the father’s competitor. The comedy develops as a blend of Marx Brothers and Keystone Cops as the “misadventures” continue. Secrets and rivalries are separated only by coincidental doors closing in time, crossed paths, and overheard conversations, conventions too hackneyed to be funny, although some audience members were hooting, so maybe I am out of touch. The gay romance between the two young men is also a well-worn theme, no longer the least bit shocking, but at least it is handled respectfully and is well-woven into the story. Strong acting and directing lift the film above mediocrity and the Blake Edwards-Peter Sellars kind of storytelling buffoonery will amuse many people. Co-writer and director is Ingo Rasper.

I also enjoyed the “2880” event at the festival. That’s the number of minutes in 48 hours, which is how much time the filmmakers are given to create a 10-minute short film after the constraints are announced. This year the constraints were that the film had to use the phrase, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings;” the required prop was a live animal, and the theme was “trust.” The top 6 entries were shown and although they were highly variable in quality, the scope of creativity was astonishing. They were remarkably well produced for such a short time frame, although they all seemed strained and contrived, which they were, of course. I thought that was because the three constraints were incommensurate. But I guess having them be utterly random can promote creativity as well as contrivance. It was a lot of fun to be in the audience with the screaming, whistling, and hooting crews who made the six shorts.

Well, that’s enough. I saw and heard other things too numerous to describe. Overall, I was impressed with the quality and scope of PTFF. It was awfully long on documentaries and docudramas, and short on feature length, fictional, dramatic work (compared to Seattle’s SIFF, for example). Still, the small town atmosphere is a lot more fun and the offerings well worth the effort. I’m sure I’ll go next year to the 10th annual, September 25-27.

PDX Jazz RIP

2008-09-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

The annual Portland, OR Jazz Festival (PDX Jazz) has closed down, due to, what else, not enough money. In its five year history it brought to town such notables as Cecil Taylor, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Ravi Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and many others.

Besides the loss of the music, it is sad to see the loss of the educational emphasis the Festival embodied. A lot of young people were involved. And of course, there is the economic loss to the city of 36,000 absent fans. The Portland Jazz Festival was nominated as one of the top five jazz events by the Jazz Journalists Association last year.

Is Jazz dying out in America? It is a hotly debated topic. Much depends on how you define “Jazz.” Still, I think it is indisputable that jazz is not as accessible as pop music. You have to train your ears or you can’t hear jazz. Few people are willing to put in the time to learn, pleasurable though that learning is. For anyone who wants to learn jazz, rent, borrow or buy the Smithsonian collection of classical jazz, 5 CD’s that go from the dawn of recording through the mid-60’s. If you don’t find a few items there that turn you on, there’s something wrong with you.

The 2009 PDX festival was supposed to be a tribute to Blue Note Records. But sponsors (many of them in the past were banks) did not step up this year. Ticket sales are never enough. So it’s over. I’ll miss it.

Barn Music

2008-09-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

This was the 25th year for the Olympic Music Festival in Quilcene, Washington, out in the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle. All summer, there are multiple programs of chamber music presented in a large barn on a rustic dairy farm. The audience sits on bales of hay or wooden benches, or sprawled on the grass outside the barn doors. There are about 250 people in the barn, including up in the hay loft. CD’s, souvenirs, coffee, and wine are sold in the adjacent milking shed, as are carrots for feeding the nearby herd of donkeys, which mostly stays quiet for the performance.

The festival has been the labor of love of violist Alan Iglitzin, who for years toured with the Philadelphia String Quartet, which eventually took up residence at the University of Washington. In 1984, Iglitzin acquired the 55-acre farm and created the performance space in the barn. Performances in the barn are recorded for later broadcast on the Seattle classical radio station, KING-FM.

I attended three concerts this season. The first, in June, was “Beethoven – the Last Sonatas.” Pianist Paul Hersh, from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, played the last three piano sonatas, Opus 109 through 111. I am nuts about Opus 111 in C-minor and have several recordings of it. Hersh’s rendition was as good as any of them. But hearing the three sonatas grouped like this added a whole new dimension to my appreciation, especially from realizing how Beethoven “stole” or “borrowed” ideas from the earlier ones to populate the last one. I also understood for the first time why Opus 111 was his last piano sonata. Beethoven clearly said everything he could possibly say on piano, and needed more complex instrumentation to continue his breakout from classical tradition.

In July, I enjoyed a program of music featuring the cello, one of my favorite instruments. Amy Sue Barston, a widely traveled cellist on the faculty at Julliard, played with sister Elisa Barston, Principal Second Violinist for the Seattle Symphony. The Barston sisters began with Halvorsen’s update of Handel’s Passacaglia Duo for Violin and Cello, which was sublime. That was followed by Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7, which was a little wilder. It reminded me a lot of the Kronos Quartet sound, because they play a lot of Kodaly (at least on the recordings I have). Even though this was just a duo, not a quartet it was a big sound that filled that old barn.

Finally, with Alan Iglitzin joining them on Viola, the trio played the Mozart String Trio K. 563. It is heresy, but I am just not a huge Mozart fan. I like certain works a lot, like the Jupiter symphony and some piano sonatas and chamber pieces, but most of his work seems formulaic to me. That is probably just my ignorance talking. Nevertheless, I am not complaining about a beautiful summer day in the country listening to world-class Mozart.

Scheduling problems kept me away from the “All Dvorak Festival” and “Quartet Masterworks” and many other temptations, but I did manage to catch “The Amazing Clarinet” on the last weekend in August. The program began without the clarinet, with Iglitzin introducing the Hayden String Quartet, “Sunrise,” Op. 76, No. 4. He was joined by Michi Wiancko and Alisa Rose on Violins and Paul Wiancko on Cello, in what turned out to be, for my money, the best performance of the afternoon.

Then Teddy Abrams, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, and currently a student of conducting, came out. He gave an informative, but inadvertently humorous introduction to the Weber Clarinet Quintet Op. 34. His enthusiastic but academic and self-important introduction made Iglitzin unable to suppress a world-weary smile and the audience chuckled, to the bewilderment of the young Abrams. But his clarinet performance was no laughing matter. The performance by the whole quartet was extremely enjoyable, with Michi Wiancko and Alisa Rose, violins and Paul Wiancko, cello, joining Iglitzen and Abrams. The Wiancko siblings have both performed with Yo-Yo Ma. Michi is a member of the east-coast based Los Angeles Piano Quartet, and is also a singer and songwriter. Brother Paul is principal cellist of the Colburn Orchestra in Los Angeles. Rose performs widely in classical, jazz, bluegrass, and new music festivals and runs a conservatory of music outreach for disadvantaged violinists.

The Weber piece highlighted the sound of the clarinet and sounded surprisingly modern. I kept wanting it to break out to Rhapsody in Blue but it would take another 125 years for that to happen. The piece was showy rather than sophisticated, but was a good introduction to what a clarinet could do in a chamber setting. The program was topped by the Mozart Clarinet Quintet A Major, K. 581. It was not one of my Mozart favorites, although I recognize that Mozart is unquestionably a crowd-pleaser.

Next weekend is the season finale, with a Beethoven, Ravel and Brahms program and I regret that I will not be able to attend. Tickets to most concerts are only $27 to sit in the barn on a bale of hay, or on a wooden chair around and behind the performers. It costs less to take your chances with the weather on the grass outside. The Olympic Music Festival is a real Northwest Gem.

PT Blues

2008-08-12T08:24:00.001-07:00

Early in August I attended the annual Blues Festival in Port Townsend, WA. The festival took place in a WW II balloon hangar on an old military base, now a beautiful state park.

To my surprise, but not disappointment, all of the eight acts offered “traditional” acoustic blues from the deep south, and a selection of piedmont blues, a mid-Atlantic east coast style from the early 20th century that mixed black African and white styles. There were no amped-up Chicago sounds, no Kansas City crooners, no R&B, no rock or funk crossovers. I might have seen only one electric guitar all afternoon. Instead it was acoustic guitar, harmonica, piano, and the odd gospel singer. The festival was advertised as “country blues” and maybe I didn’t know what that meant, but the selection was excellent nevertheless.

Rick Franklin strummed a modern looking Dobro steel guitar (it looked like it was made of pewter or even hi-tech composites) and sang humorous country songs from traveling shows in the piedmont region in the early part of the 20th century. It was a good way to warm up the crowd with laughter, and his guitar picking was subtle, sophisticated and impressive. Sample his work at http://www.hokumblues.com/.

The reverend John Wilkins sang spiritual blues and used a steel slide. I love slide and was disappointed there was so little of it in this festival. Wilkins did have one of the rare electrics of the day but it was way over amped, losing much of the music’s definition. The sound engineer got that fixed about halfway through but then the harmonica was fuzzed out, so overall, there wasn’t much to recommend this show. There were two performers in the festival titled “Reverend,” and while both gave heartfelt performances, I thought they were more focused on singing to Jesus than on the music for its own sake, to the detriment of the music. Prayer and gospel singing is a part of the genuine blues heritage, of course, but I was there for music.

Mike Dowling played some very precise ragtime tunes on a mirror-finish, modern-looking steel guitar with sound holes in a mathematical grid up near the neck. The music was not so much foot-stompin’ but very professional and accomplished. Sample him at http://www.mikedowling.com/music/index.html

Jerron “J-Dog” Paxton (aka “Blind Boy Paxton”), got a huge sound to come out of a tiny guitar. He might have been using steel picks on all his right hand fingers. His picking was excellent and his songs light hearted. One I remember was “Po’k Chops Is Best!” an authentic snapshot of a certain way of life. His presentation was intimate, as if he were in a small bar instead of a thousand-seat auditorium. The audience was amazed when he put the guitar on the floor, turned around on the piano bench and played a very hot boogie rendition of “Exactly Like You.” Afterward, he remarked, “You should try that with your eyes closed!”

Ari Eisinger played some hot licks on acoustic and treated the audience to one Leadbelly number on a huge 12-string. His voice was a bit high and nasal, but that worked well for his renditions of several Blind Blake tunes. He also covered Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 version of Frankie and Johnnie, and it was interesting to hear it as a natural folk song. For example, “He done me wrong” is all sung on the same tonic note. Eisinger clearly knows the blues literature.

The Reverend Robert Jones opened with a very moving gospel song that kept the audience in a hush. The rest of the act, full of bible stories and prayers, “Lawd! Deliver me from the flood” kind of stuff, did not live up to that opening promise, despite Jones’ remarkable vocal range and a voice that reminded me of Lou Rawls. He did one brief harmonica number, a train song with lots of lonesome whistles. I am a sucker for those. He was joined by “Sister Bernice” who sang some gospel tunes that didn’t do a thing for me.

Cephas and Wiggins are a killer act. That’s John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, who have been playing Piedmont style together since 1977. Cephas has a deep but clear voice that he uses methodically, like an engine plowing through some terrific old blues numbers. His expression of emotion is subtle, but perfect, with well-placed grunts and moans that remind me of John Lee Hooker. Against that backdrop of barely restrained feeling, the Wiggins harp bursts out like a flock of escaping birds. The overall result is so expressive it makes you crazy. Sample some of this amazing sound at the bottom of the screen at:
http://facstaff.unca.edu/sinclair/piedmontblues/cephasandwiggins.html
Wiggins is also the artistic director of the festival, this being the final of his five year tenure, so we have him to thank for this fine selection of music.

Ending on a high note were Arthur Migliaza and Daryl Davis, two boogie piano players, who do not normally work together as an act, as far as I could tell. Migliaza electrified the crowd with a fast tempo rendition of the classic, Clarence’s Blues. Bowing off the stage, the young, thin, delicate frame of Migliaza was replaced by the hulking Davis who bounced into some wild and woolly boogie tunes, even resorting to the Jerry Lee Lewis style of slapping the keyboard now and then. Sample his work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmpgxPqh_m0 . After a couple of alternations between these two artists, they did a four-hand duet, fooling around as if they were fighting over the keyboard. It was great showmanship, great music, and the audience left the festival dancing on tiptoes

MOMA

2008-07-22T08:23:00.001-07:00

The last time I visited the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, it was in Queens while the downtown space was being remodeled. The remodeled MOMA seems larger (I don’t know if it is), is much easier to get around in, and it shows more of the permanent collection. I spent one whole day there recently, which is only enough time to cruise the galleries, nodding to familiar old friends. But I did stop to think about a few items.

One was a gallery of Picasso’s sculpture. He is better known for his painting but this collection of sculptures highlighted his versatility, wit, and radical ideas about sculpture.

“Bull” (1958) is made of plywood, a tree branch, nails, and screws. It’s a great image from the front, but what makes it a radical sculpture is that it is almost flat. The whole point of sculpture is that you can walk around it to appreciate different points of view, and you can do that here, too, but what you discover is disorienting because it is a flat, anti-sculpture.

By contrast, “Guitar” (1914) is a sheet metal work hung on the wall, and from a distance it looks like a cubist painting. When you walk up to it, you realize it is not a flat painting but a wall sculpture. Curation at the MOMA is itself a work of art. You can’t help but notice the guitar high on a nearby wall as you walk around the flat bull in the center of the room, while the comparison boggles your mind.

On the topic of sculpture, I also paused at Giacometti’s “The Chariot” (1950) which I have admired for years. (An early prototype Segway?) The ancient-seeming bronze woman stands on a primitive cart balanced on wooden blocks. It should be unstable but I don’t get that feeling. She is compressed into a stick by the palpably massive air surrounding her. Or is she dessicated by time rather than crushed by air? I puzzled over the wooden blocks. Perhaps without them the feeling would be forward motion. On blocks, she is not going anywhere, the still air holding her eternally in place.

I was repeatedly amazed at the way works of art are displayed at MOMA. How they are shown can add entirely new dimensions of appreciation. For example, These two pieces by Malevich are positioned in a way that echoes the abstract theme of the works, a very nice touch.

Another work of Malevich, before he flipped out into that abstract suprematist thing, was positioned right next to a piece by Ferdinand Leger. It was a shock to realize how similar they were. Who knew?

I also had to pause and consider the relationship between Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Both are abstract expressionists, but from different planets. Pollock’s energetic, whole-body activity is recorded on his huge canvas, while Rothko’s works are serene, quiet, far away, even though you know he had to work just as hard to create them. Pollock is the body and Rothko is the mind? I especially appreciated what I call “the evil Rothko”, which was displayed in the center of a large wall, between two particularly “easy” works in harmonious pastels. The “evil” one is in harsh, angry colors and has a huge scratch through the center of it, suggesting fingernails ripping the paint off in a fit of rage. So Rothko had his moods.

Similarly, a collection of works by Rauschenberg made me reconceptualize what I thought of him. There were some drawings I never would have associated with him, and I was looking around for a welded pile of crumpled car parts when I saw “First Landing Jump” (1961), a typical Rauschenbergian collage of objects but which were arranged in an almost formal way that suggested a portrait of a 1940’s automobile garage. The colors, textures, composition, and especially the little light, took me to that place. I could almost smell oil on the floor. I think that white reflector at the top is my favorite part, because those old red brick garages always had a light like that at the top over the sign. (There is no brick and no sign, but I see them anyway!). A fascinating piece of impressionism.

A featured exhibit had the paintings and films of Salvador Dali. I am not a fan of Dali’s paintings but I was quite impressed at the creativity of his films, which seemed way ahead of their time. Modern art film makers would benefit from taking a look.

I greatly enjoyed the architecture and design galleries, but I can’t begin to describe the treasures there. Instead I will show just one selection, a carved wooden chess set by Josef Hartwig (1924) which perfectly illustrates that old design slogan, “form follows function.” (Click to enlarge it and see it better).

Fiddling Around

2008-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

On the Fourth of July, I attended The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes at Port Townsend, WA. This festival has been going on annually since 1977, to celebrate traditional fiddle music. In the week of workshops and two days of concerts (I only attended the first day), there were performances of traditional music from New England, Scotland, Ireland, Mexico, Alabama, West Virginia, and elsewhere.

The venue was Fort Worden State Park, an Army artillery installation guarding the entrance to Puget sound since the beginning of the 20th century. The beautiful 430 acres on a high coastal bluff became a Washington state park in 1953. Performances were in a huge, modern-looking balloon hangar built in the 1920’s, converted to a performance hall. Counting rows and seats, I estimate about 1,000 people were in attendance on Independence Day.

Wendy MacIsaac is a fiddler from Inverness County, now residing in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She played fiddle, piano, and performed Celtic step dancing in a lively opening performance. Sample her work at http://www.cranfordpub.com/mp3s/wendymacisaac1.mp3 . The traditional Celtic dance reels were compulsive toe-tappers, but as is the case with nearly all folk music, it was really quite narrow in its variety. To keep things moving, the 4/4 rhythms are often doubled and sometimes redoubled; small key changes relieve the monotony of the cadence-oriented, restricted tonal range. There are lots of gingerbread notes disguising a simple repetitive harmonic pattern of tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic. However, MacIsaac’s show had variety and energy. For example, she was joined by David Mac Isaac on fiddle, and Paul MacDonald, also from Cape Breton, on guitar, who had a magnificent touch with subtle overtone management. He was quickly sucked into the foot-stomping dance music so we got only a hint of his sophisticated guitar talent. When MacIsaac took to piano accompaniment, she put a backbeat against the guitar and the other fiddle, again staving off boredom. So overall it was an enjoyable show.

An off-program duo appeared next, Beverly Smith and Carl Jones. Smith is a well-known singer, fiddler, guitarist, and dance caller, while Jones, also well-travelled, plays mandolin, banjo and fiddle along with his vocals. They treated the audience to some fine harmony singing with gospel numbers, mountain songs, and traditional country tunes. Get their recordings at http://www.smithnjones.net/recordings.html.

Harold Luce and Adam Boyce play old style New England dance music. They are members of a traditional dance music band that has been performing since 1934. I think Harold must be 90 years old but his fiddling was impeccable. Boyce, on piano, did all the talking, and he introduced the various traditional American dance forms, such as reels, hornpipes, quadrilles, and square dance tunes. They even played Stars and Stripes Forever. Luce’s fiddle seemed to be a particularly fine instrument with a real “fiddley” tone, hard to describe. It might have been higher pitched than others, and not scratchy, but maybe with a bit of fuzz at the top and the bottom of the range. It was a very nice country sound. The New England music seemed so controlled, spare, even algorithmic, after the other acts. Comparing them, I thought Luce and Boyce could be saying, “We’re from Vermont and this is as happy as we get.” The high precision was enjoyable, but it did seem a little methodical for dance music. I guess that’s the New England style, not overly demonstrative.

The final act blew the doors off restraint. De Temps Antan is a French-Canadian group playing regional and Arcadian Quebecois music, with so much energy you could hardly remain sitting in your chair. This 5-year old group consists of three young men, André Brunet, Pierre-Luc Dupuis, and Éric Beaudry, who play violin, accordion, and bouzouki, respectively, and all three sing, and play foot percussion, a sort of sounding board they stomp on while playing, often in complicated syncopated patterns, a technique called podorythmie in French. Dupuis does most of the talking, is the lead singer, and also plays Jew’s harp, harmonica, and concertina. The music was loud, upbeat, fast tempo, and energizing, with lyrics in French. In one charming moment, Dupuis explained that they enjoyed traditional call and response songs, so the audience should join right in! Of course, since the song was in French, few people could. The slower traditional ballads were in a less interesting stentorian mode. On the other hand, the high energy, high percussion music occasionally verged on rowdy noise threatening to overwhelm the sound system, which was not well adapted to their style in any case. The accordion was chronically undermiked, as was the mysterious sound of the bouzouki and the haunting Jew’s harp. Nevertheless, it was a fiddle festival, so one can’t complain about hearing too much fiddle work. You can sample their more articulate, Arcadian style at http://www.myspace.com/detempsantan .

I would have liked to hear some Cajun music and also some down home bluegrass, but from the small segment of the overall Fiddle Festival that I did experience, it was a richly varied and satisfying event.

Below: Wendy MacIsaac dancing (18 sec).

D. J. Hall

2008-06-27T11:06:00.001-07:00

Artist Debra Jane (“D.J.”) Hall has a major 35 year retrospective show at the Palm Springs Art Museum. It runs through September 14, 2008 and is well worth a visit.

There are 50 large paintings and numerous pencil drawings and photographs, plus studies and notes used to advise the art director in the film “Spanglish,” which used her look and style.

I’d never heard of this artist and I was in Palm Springs for other reasons, but I’m glad I stopped into the museum. The work grows on you. At first glance I was disappointed, since photorealism doesn’t interest me much. I always think, “Yeah, it’s technically amazing; looks just like a photograph. But so what? Why not take a photo?”

Hall’s paintings mostly show rich, leisured women lounging at well-appointed pools and patios. The sunlight is ultra bright, the colors are primary and crisp, and the subjects (nearly all Caucasian women), haven’t a care in the world except to have a drink and soak up the rays. It’s a pleasant, dreamy atmosphere that just says “California.”

The large size of the canvases let you see how Hall makes the figures so realistic-looking. Almost every contour is outlined with a very thin line of bright or dark color. For example, if you get up real close and the museum guard does not blow the whistle on you, you can see a fine hair of brilliant cadmium yellow just touching the edge of the skin tones all around the women in the sun. From 18 inches you can’t see it, but it makes the figures pop out in the sunlight. Almost every object, no matter how small, is outlined in a similar way.

Still: “So what?” Hall often stages and photographs her scenes then paints from the photograph. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it begs the question, why not be a photographer then? Hall’s answer is given in an artist’s statement of 2001:

"Ironically, my images cannot exist in physical reality, as they are highly contrived composites of various real and imagined sources. I approach each new painting as though I am producing a film: selecting models, wardrobe changes, locations, props, time sequences, etc. For the photo sessions I devise scenarios for my models so they will project what I envision. With the resulting photos I add, delete, and re-configure information to achieve a strong visual structure which conveys my current interests."

So what is her message, her vision? She emphasizes the importance of women’s physical appearance, and most of her models are attractive, while some are older, but “well-maintained,” implying former beauty. That juxtaposition suggests fear, even denial of aging and death, just under the surface of these happy scenes.

Once you realize these pictures are not really about carefree youth and beauty, but their opposites, the paintings begin to look sinister. The shiny, reflecting sunglasses are more than eye protection: they are hiding the reality, from the viewer, and from the models themselves. The omnipresent alcohol, is it a desperate attempt to escape from time? What kind of person has time to sit and drink in the garden with a friend at mid-day? Someone with no plans, no appointments, no prospects, no life beyond appearances. Everyone smiles, but time hangs so thickly in the air it’s a wonder these people can breathe.

Older women have lumpy thighs and wrinkly faces, but big smiles, perfect teeth and expensive clothes to pretend they are still beautiful. They are with younger women -- not girls, but women of experience who have the economic resources to paint themselves with the timeless, confident, carefree palette of youth but who must know it has already passed. Their smiles start to look not light-hearted, but like clench-jawed determination to stop the clock. They are lying to themselves and to you. They know, even if only subconsciously, that turkey neck and accordion lips lie not far ahead. Gradually, these pictures of beauty and light become utterly depressing and you realize you’ve been “had.”

Then you understand the photo-realist technique. It presents ultra-real reality; the California reality of eternal, sun-drenched, leisured, youth and beauty that does not exist except in the minds of these delusional models, and perhaps in the initial fantasies of the viewer. After viewing a dozen or so of Hall’s pictures, you get the joke. It’s very subtle.

If she had shown a more typically diverse selection of multi-colored, not-so-beautiful, overweight women in JC Penny clothing, on plastic furniture, eating hot dogs off paper plates around a pool full of screaming children, all in photorealist style, then we could say, “So what?” The way Hall started on the other side with a delusional fantasy of eternal wealth and youth and made it ultra-real with her meticulous technique, the contrast between reality and imagination could not be more stark. Brilliant.

You can see more of her pictures, and buy them, I think, at http://www.koplindelrio.com/hall/hall.html

MFA Exhibit- Henry Art Gallery

2008-06-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle was the first public art museum in the state, opening in 1927. I enjoy visiting there because it usually has challenging contemporary work. The annual Masters of Fine Arts exhibit is usually especially good. Spring graduates show one or two pieces of work that represents their best effort. Pieces are selected by the students, with their thesis committees.

Stupidly however, the gallery does not allow amateur photography, so I am unable to show what the exhibit was like, and not even able to associate the artists their work. I am unable to properly acknowledge this remarkable display of creativity. This is a pet peeve. Who is damaged by amateur photography at art exhibits? Nobody benefits. It is a stupid rule.

Anyway, about 20 artists presented their work, most of it “installations” or sculpture. There was very little traditional paint on canvas. I wonder if everything has finally been said in two dimensions. I don’t believe it, but it certainly does seem strange that only about 2 out of 20 newly minted artists would think that their best work was in painting. Perhaps that reflects a bias of the faculty at UW.

One of the most memorable pieces was a white, human-sized, human-shaped figure made of cotton batting. It looked sort of like a huge voodoo doll, horizontal, “face” down, suspended from a ceiling panel by several wires which were differentially lengthened and shortened by a set of motors above. This caused the figure to slowly writhe as if in agony as it rose and fell. There seemed to be no pattern to its movements and there was no sound except that of the motors. This was all in a darkened room, making the scene sinister, suggestive of death, mummies, or torture perhaps. Behind the figure was a shattered glass wall, onto which was projected a play of light from behind. The light from behind was reflected from a mirror mounted on the wall, reflecting a projected film clip of the cotton figure rising and falling. The film clip did not seem to be related to the actual motion of the figure. I got the impression I was looking at the ghostly spirit of the cotton figure on the other side of the life and death division. Or maybe its memories. I don’t know. It didn’t obviously mean anything. But it was haunting.

A large installation on the floor of one room showed cedar blocks about 4 inches long and a half inch high, stacked irregularly up to a couple of feet high, in various organic rising and falling shapes, especially cylinders. It was slightly reminiscent of Maya Lin's work. From the center of the cylinders emerged something like blue fingers with white tips; I think they were clay. The whole thing gave me an underwater feeling, as if I were looking at a strange coral reef with blue anemones. Nothing moved, but I still had the impression that everything was undulating.

One large sculpture, in clay or fiberglass, had three figures that were half woolly sheep and half young boy, like mythical figures. They were detailed and life-like, and disturbing. The boys’ spines curved back to meet the body of the sheep just in front of the animals’ front legs. The children were young, clean, with expressive faces and big blue eyes. One was lying down, the other two just looking around, curious. They were mythical figures that didn’t really remind me of any particular myth or mythological creatures. That made them connected to realism as much as mythology and gave them shock value.

Another interesting exhibit was a set of thousands of pins stuck into a white wall. On the end of each pin was a clover leaf shape made of paper, actually cut from pages of a German history book. The flowers near the center of the display were yellowed and the ones right at the center were almost brown, as if the paper had aged, but the net effect of the whole presentation was that there was a large brown stain on the wall. Some of these “plants” extended out onto the floor, and some around the corner onto the next wall. There was also a brown dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a sort of scarf made of wire twisted into loops containing more of those yellow and brown pages from the history book. Many of its petals had fallen to the floor so it looked derelict. Was this supposed to be a political comment about Germany. A stain on German history? A formerly glorious history that has become dry, lifeless, derelict? I don’t know. It was an impressive display though, well-conceived and executed.

One other remarkable piece I remember (without any pictures!) had an organic feel to it despite being made out of thousands upon thousands of white, plastic flex-straws. Those are the drinking straws that have an accordion folded segment that allows them to be bent 90 degrees. Individual straws and bundles of two and three of them were bound by white plastic cable-ties to form a brachiating network that grew out of the wall horizontally, narrowed into a roughly cylindrical area about 3 feet from the wall, then expanded again for another 3 feet to fill a 6 foot square, red window frame. This horizontal structure is suspended from the ceiling on invisible nylon wires. If you look from the front, through the red window frame, you can see all the way through the open, somewhat geometric structure, which seems only slightly denser than the air around it. The overall effect though was like some kind of white ivy on a building, something that had grown aggressively out of the wall onto the window. This organic, plant-like impression was all the more remarkable for being achieved with plastic straws.

Nearly all the presentations were very “organic,” and by that I mean they had natural forms, shapes, and materials, generally soft materials. I saw very few right angles, few “hard” materials like glass and steel, no neon, no mechanical gadgets, no words or numbers. Everything seemed to come from nature or to reference natural forms and motions in some way. Again I have to wonder why this would be a universal among 20 graduating artists? Are they all drinking the same kool-aid? Doesn’t it seem like at least one of them would prefer to work in polished stainless steel, or do something geometric? Perhaps it is the zeitgeist. Frank Gehry comes to mind in architecture. I am not tuned into contemporary art well enough to know what the young people are thinking these days. But from this exhibit, it seems like the young people are all thinking dangerously alike.

SIFF 2008

2008-05-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest in North America. This year they screened over 400 films from all over the world. I’ve attended one or two films during the festival in years past, but generally, I have not participated much. It’s easier to attend a film festival in another city when I’m on vacation. I am too busy and too tired after work to be racing around Seattle in the evenings and on weekends. Also, I just don’t enjoy going to movies. Theaters are expensive, hot, oxygen-deprived, smelly, sneezy, and too loud. Nevertheless, this year I grabbed my earplugs and made an effort to see more of the festival.

My first experience did not auger well. After standing in a quarter-mile line circling the block, I found myself sitting in the balcony of the lovely old Egyptian Theater in Seattle, right under the projection booth. An hour into the film there was a loud thud from inside the booth behind me. I looked up and there was bright white light in the booth window, then the projection room and the screen went dark. Staff swarmed quickly but the booth was locked and nobody seemed to have a key. I assessed that this film was not going to resume any time soon, so I headed for the exit and walked home.

The film I saw an hour of was Mermaid, a Russian Film, starring Anastasiya Dontsova as a girl of 8 living in a shack by the sea, presumably the Black Sea, with her mother and grandmother. She tells herself that her mother was a mermaid, her father a sea captain. She awaits her father’s return, but it is clear to the audience that the father is long gone and this family is abandoned to abject poverty. The girl dreams of becoming a ballerina. We see her again (Mariya Shalayeva ) at 17 in Moscow, trying to make a living at odd jobs in the gritty city. She shows signs of clinical depression (in my humble opinion). She is still slow-moving, uncurious and glassy eyed, and continues to fantasize the ballerina life. She copes with her harsh reality without ambition or hope. She had found a job as a housecleaner when the projector fell over.

Throughout the film there are brief dreamlike episodes of fantasy, sometimes surreal, to demonstrate that her spirit is not crushed by her difficult life. Slick advertisements ironically remind her that all her dreams can be fulfilled. The second revolution in Russia paid off for the gangsters and cronies, but left no place for a young girl's dreams. I don’t know how the story turned out, but I would guess there was no revelation. Perhaps she returns to the sea (her childhood) as an underwater ballerina. The yellow subtitles were often completely lost, against a yellow sand beach, for example. But that hardly mattered since nothing was said of importance. It is a highly visual film, lovely to look at, but aggressively banal in detail. It was interesting to see modern Russia and hear the language, but without narrative drive or character development, it is a slice of life for its own sake. The director was Anna Melikyan.

The next film was screened at the comfortable, airy, SIFF Cinema hall at the Seattle center. Love and Honor is a beautiful Japanese-made film (director Yoji Yamada) set in the Samurai (“Edo”) period prior to 1868. It’s hard to tell just when, but the doctor washed his hands before and after tending a patient, and sanitation was introduced into medicine around 1847, in the West, at least. In any case, this is not your usual swashbuckling samurai movie. The protagonist, (Takuya Kimura) is a food-taster for the local lord, and he goes blind from shellfish neurotoxin and falls into despair. When he suspects his wife (Rei Dan) of infidelity, honor compels him to a swordfight to the death with the other man, even though he is blind! It is a fine, classical story, well told, in beautiful settings and with beautiful costumes. The acting and directing seemed stagey, wooden, and somewhat repetitive, but that may have been on purpose, to convey the classical nature of the story, the well-defined roles participants would have lived back then, especially in courtly life, and to give a sense of distant time and place, much as we get from watching an original Shakespeare. Yet the dialog was colloquial and the characters were humanized, not archetypal forms, and the story was personal. All that familiarity grated with the formality of the acting and directing. Despite that dissonance, it is a satisfying story, well-told, beautiful to look at, with good actors and enjoyable music. I felt that I had been delivered to another era for a couple of hours.

Man, Hungarians can make a dark movie! Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, directed by János Szász, is set in a mental institution around 1900 in Hungary. A doctor (Ulrich Thomsen, who reminded me of a young Kenneth Branaugh) joins the staff at an insane asylum for women run by Catholic nuns. The scenes there are beautifully photographed but it is a dank, dismal, horribly depressing place. This would have been a hundred years after Pinel’s reforms, so the insane were seen as ill and suffering, not possessed, but since psychoactive drugs were still a half-century in the future, there was really nothing that could be done except warehouse these unfortunates. Still, this hospital is progressive for its time, and the very latest techniques in treatment are shown, such as immersion in ice water baths, spinning in a centrifuge, electroshock, and of course, pre-frontal lobotomy. When the camera closes in on the brass rod being inserted beside a patient’s eye, I couldn’t watch, and even though my eyes were closed the “clink, clink” of the director’s hammer on the brass stylus as it penetrated the skull, made me cringe in my seat. Thomsen is assigned to a 25 year old schizophrenic woman (Kirsti Stubø) who writes typical “word salad” madness into volume upon volume of diaries as the only way she knows to deal with her demon. The doctor, we learn, is a morphine addict, and the reason he took the job was have access to his poison. Acting by the two principals, especially Stubo, is utterly gripping. They try to understand each other, and maybe they do, a little.

The best part of the script is having each character talk unwittingly and metaphorically about the other’s demon. She says, “Each day the Devil makes you an offer and each day he takes a little bit of your body until you are his whore.” The doctor nods knowingly yet unknowingly then a little later he shoots up. He writes in his diary that his habit is going out of control and he can’t stop. The woman begs the doctor to “cut out her brain” to relieve her of her torment. Even though the film is extremely bleak, the cinematography is beautiful and haunting, as is the music. The story would be greatly improved by some easy editing, especially some gratuitous nudity and at the end, where it continues unnecessarily beyond the climax. The story of the characters’ developing relationship is compelling. I walked out of this movie deeply shaken.

Transsiberian (director Brad Anderson) has a lot of good talent: Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley, and Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega. An American couple on vacation (Harrelson and Mortimer) take the Transsiberian train from Beijing to Moscow. They are befriended by an American woman (Mara) and her companion, the unpredictable Carlos (Noriega), pseudo-mysterious drifters, possibly drug smugglers. Police detective Kingsley joins the train to add to the suspense, such as it is. But the editing and directing are so overtly manipulative that it ruins the story. We see Carlos with a crowbar in his hand sneaking up behind Harrelson at a stop in Irkutsk, then cut! In the next scene we are back on the train but Harrelson is missing! Meaningful glances are passed around. But wait, it turns out he only missed the train in Irkutsk and he is fine, rejoining the party a day later. That kind of manufactured pseudo-suspense is disrespectful of the audience, actually offensive, and a clumsy attempt to cover up a weak, predictable story.

The first 45 minutes of the movie were obviously added after the main shoot in an unsuccessful attempt to add dimension to the cardboard characters by having them reminisce unconvincingly about previous experiences. If those were important, they should have been shown, not recited. Dramatic helicopter shots of the train moving through Siberia are inserted often to counter the claustrophobia of the train set. Arbitrary blasts of orchestral music attempt to punctuate the waning story line. Lots of “local color” scenes are thrown in to spice up endless shots of people eating, drinking, smoking, and eating some more. An old guy with a gulag tattoo. Wow. Therefore what? Therefore nothing. This movie is a lost opportunity. Mortimer and Kingsley are terrific actors but they can’t save it. The movie will probably enjoy eventual success on cable television.

A film festival is not complete without a documentary feature so I chose Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, the Canadian director, who introduced the film in person. His humorous description of the movie (Love Boat meets Apocalypse Now) suggests a documentary better than this disappointment. He took his crew on a luxury river boat up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges dam, and along the way documented some of the millions of people and their cities, environments, and ways of life that will be submerged when the dam is completed. Flooding had already begun in 2003-2004 when he made the film. Poor farmers living on the banks of the river, living in mud-floor shacks, speak of their desperation and hopelessness. They have no plans, no prospects. They reminisce on their ancient way of life, soon to be obliterated by progress. This is important stuff, but it is also old stuff. We should note that these farmers are holdouts who declined to be relocated by the government to safe, high ground. Why? No clue is offered.

Chang has a photographic eye, and we see ooh-aah shots of neon lights reflected on water, plenty of cute kittens, puppies and roosters, charming tableaux of rustic village life. There is some beautiful, layered Chinese scenery, but not much of it. Chang likes shots that draw attention to themselves such as extreme closeups, long flat shots, blurred fast pans. Other shots are offered ostensibly as candids, but are clearly staged. More political, economic, environmental, and sociological detail is needed to justify this documentary. Pretty pictures and fancy camera work are not enough.

The onboard ship scenes are perhaps unintentionally satirical. It looks like an especially tawdry Carnival Cruise, as old people in ill-fitting clothes dance to sappy music. If Chang could have somehow juxtaposed those images more directly to mud squeezing between villagers’ toes, he might have had something. If he could have juxtaposed cruise goers gorging on buffet food against children eating insects… perhaps that would be too obvious. Yet Chang does not shy away from the obvious. City teenagers are shown dancing mindlessly, drinking vodka at a night club, declaring their desire to become rich. With signs overhead showing the future waterline at 175 meters, well above all life going on, there would seem to be ample opportunity for visual metaphor. The film is good-looking and sentimental and was well-received by the SRO audience at Pacific Place Cinema, but I think it has only the most superficial intellectual basis and will have little lasting impact.

Andrzej Wajda is an internationally known director, and Katyn is supposed to be one of his best, the first of his I’ve seen. It is a historical drama with careful, documentary detail about the Soviet Union’s slaughter of 20,000 Polish army officers at the end of World War II, and the subsequent cover-up as Stalin’s army occupied Poland, blaming the massacre on the Nazis. My understanding is that this lie was not exposed until the late 1990s when archival files were released in Russia. So this would be a very emotional topic for a Polish audience.

The film follows a group of Polish officers as they are captured by the Soviets in 1940 and shipped by train to the interior of the Soviet Union, where they were imprisoned for a number of months then systematically executed. The women and children they left behind wait for letters from them or announcements in the papers, hoping to learn of their eventual release, or at least of their survival. The audience knows, because of an English-language announcement at the beginning of the film, that they are never coming back. A sole survivor returns after the war and becomes a member of the reviled, Soviet-run, new Polish army. He argues in favor of collaboration, survival, and life, and against revealing the truth about the massacre, which can only lead to imprisonment or death. It is a compelling argument. The only counter-argument offered is “I choose the murdered, not the murderers.” Is that a good argument or is it stupid, self-destructive self-indulgence?

It is a beautifully photographed story and a fine way to learn about an important historical episode. Wajda’s reputation is well-deserved.

I hadn’t been to the Harvard Exit theater in thirty years and that delightfully funky place on Capitol Hill hasn’t changed much. There I saw a feature-length animation, a staple of any film festival. Idiots and Angels is writer-director Bill Plimpton’s surreal comedy. Plimpton introduced the film himself, explaining that no cameras were used. He scanned his 25,000 drawings into a computer database and assembled the film. Quite a technical feat!

The wordless story is of a lout who goes to a tavern each day where he drinks, smokes and fantasizes about the barman’s wife. He is a violent, self-centered lowbrow. The pencil-drawings are beautifully realized, with minimum but telling detail. Changing points of view are especially interesting and amusing. When Mr. Lout swigs his drink, we are suddenly deep in his throat, looking at the flash flood cascading toward us. Lots of fun.

Without explanation, he one morning sprouts small wings on his back. He is surprised, but sees them as aberrant growths and cuts them off. There is a Groundhog Day theme to this story, so the next day, the wings have grown back, a little larger. He tapes them down. The following day, they are even larger, and so on. He eventually discovers they are wings, and that he can fly, so he swoops around. He tries some purse-snatching from the air, but inexplicably, he is compelled to return the purse. Are the wings turning him into a “good person?”

There are many promising ways this story could have developed, but the writer had no vision of where he was going. Instead, each scene simply attempts to top the previous one in terms of self-conscious creativity for the sake of creativity. And I admit it was very creative. A loosely structured story flows for a few scenes, then is abandoned to some other theme. The ending is arbitrary because there is just no semblance of a narrative thread remaining. It was a shame he couldn’t have gotten a co-writer to lend him some direction.

One interesting aspect of the whole project is the author’s unconscious illustration of Freud’s theory of infant and child development, from oral, to anal, to oedipal stages. The imagery and symbolism are very much open to psychoanalytic interpretation, which no doubt would be quite embarrassing to the author if he were aware of it. It’s probably just as well that I was not able to stay for the Q&A session after the film, because there would be nothing gained by bringing that up. I enjoyed the creativity, but without a narrative thread, it was just amusing, not important.

A collection of shorts is mandatory viewing, and I chose a well-curated batch called The Art of Memory. The first two these nine films were wonderful; one other was memorable; most of the rest only interesting, but all worth seeing, if only to wonder at the diversity of the human imagination.

“Run,” was probably set in a remote coastal town in Australia, judging from the accents. A working class father encourages (commands) his two children to run each day for exercise and health. The preadolescent girl is chubby and struggles to keep up with her younger brother. She also rehearses “Fur Elise” for an upcoming piano recital, but surreptitiously practices a brooding variation she has composed. The children are brown, possibly aboriginal, and on the daily run, white boys delivering milk taunt the girl and throw milk at her. The milk could represent the absent mother, whose picture is displayed on top of the piano, and whose absence might be the source of the girl’s emotional turmoil. She finally expresses herself at the recital when, unable to remember the Beethoven, she plays her own composition to an astonished and mystified audience. It’s a film dense with symbols, emotion, complex family structure, class and race themes, and psychological development, all in less than 10 minutes: a real masterpiece.

Last Day of December was a Romanian production, if I remember rightly. The language sounded more Russian than Romanian to me, but what do I know. A boy of 14 meets his father in deep snow in a birch forest. We gather that the man is on the run. A well-dressed 40-year old watches from the road above. Four pursuers arrive, we assume police, and chase the man through the knee-deep snow, down into a ravine, in kinetic sequence of exhausting energy and dazzling beauty. The pursuers go in the wrong direction, but the young boy finds the man. After a long moment, he yells to the pursuers, who capture the man, beat him, and take him away. Then we discover that this has all been a flashback of the well-dressed man who was not watching, but remembering the action. He goes to his now-dying father’s house, but in a poignant scene, is turned away. Nothing is forgiven. Another masterpiece.

Two of the remaining shorts were animation, one a claymation, proving it still can be done, but not justifying why it should be. One notable short, “PB&J: A Love Story” was a stop-action animation romance between a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam. They consummate their love in a gooey sandwich. The whole story was no more than 3 minutes long and delighted the audience. The only other short that stayed with me was “Felix,” a German tale about a 14 year old boy who learns sign language so he can have a relationship with a deaf girl he met on the internet. Their budding friendship goes awry when she discovers that he is not really deaf. It is very well acted by the children, but the film only states the theme without exploring it. Could such a relationship work? Maybe for childhood friendship, but not with adults. Now that I think of it, most of these shorts focused on children. That simplifies the ideas and the emotions, but is that really the only way to successfully tell a very short story? Anyway, three hits out of nine is a good ratio so I’d say this package of shorts was a success. [I misidentified “Felix” as a different short in my online review at SIFF.net but it is not possible to edit those posts.]

Young People Fucking: What an inspired title this is for a contemporary comedy of manners centered around sexual relationships! Five relationships are explored: friends, roommates, a married couple, a couple on the first date, a divorced couple. All relationships are hetero, although other tendencies and urges are hilariously suggested. The story rotates through the list of couples to comment on introduction, foreplay, sex, orgasm, and afterglow, to create a set of 5 x 5 = 25 scenes of 5 to 10 minutes each. The camera work and directing are respectful and there is little nudity, because this is really not about fucking, but rather on how twenty- and thirty-somethings understand and deal with sexuality. The writing is brilliant, in a sitcom sort of way, and there are many laugh out loud moments. Afterward however, I realized that I had been manipulated. Virtually nothing about the human condition was revealed or even seriously explored. It was a series of gags, some sophisticated, most sophomoric. There were moments of honesty, as when each of the exes considers returning to the closed door after the tryst, but then each, separately, sadly, wordlessly, turns away from their side of the door. That was wonderful, but most of the scenes were easy gag setups from the beginning, from the “old pal” girlfriend who just wants to be “serviced” to the bored wife who convinces her bored husband to submit to a purple strap-on. The casting was just perfect and the acting truly outstanding, and those considerable virtues made the cliché humor acceptable. The way the audience squirmed, laughed, and groaned, I’d say the subject matter was “very hot” and that sketch comedy was the only way audience anxiety could have been dealt with. I think this Canadian production will enjoy wide release (possibly with an edited title) and will perform an important and much-needed socialization function.

One Hundred Nails
This stunningly beautiful Italian film makes you feel the warm sun on your back and smell the spring grass. A professor of religion becomes fed up with academic theology and disappears from the university for a life of natural simplicity beside the river Po, but not before he takes 100 medieval theology books from the library shelves and nails each to the wooden plank floor with a large (crucifix-sized) iron spike. Out in the country, the peasants embrace him and help him rebuild a derelict stone house to live in, while he tells them bible stories. They take to calling him Jesus Christ. Local authorities levy a huge fine on the town for some infraction and the professor gives the mayor his credit card to pay it, but the police trace the card and arrest him for the library vandalism. In his absence the villagers decorate the town in anticipation of his Second Coming. It’s a long, quiet, and slow film and even the subdued religious allegories are only decoration. Nothing much happens and there is no lesson to be learned. The languid pace communicates the fantasy of spiritual peace one hopes to find in an idyllic village and simple way of life. But if you had the gumption to have acquired a BMW, a university professorship, and an open-ended credit card, I’m pretty sure the ignorant, backbiting civilization of small town life would drive you mad quite shortly. The romantic bucolic fantasy endures best as an imaginary utopia. Even knowing that, this sensuous movie lured me there.

Russian writers and artists often complain that creativity has declined since the lifting of most censorship. Alexandra shows what can be done with a politically sensitive and forbidden topic, in this case the Russian war in Chechnya, right under the noses of the authorities. It is a blatant anti-war film. Or is it? A lovably irritable Russian grandmother visits her grandson at a military outpost in Chechnya. He shows her the inside of a tank and soldiers cleaning their guns. She wanders off-base into the village and befriends some local women there, revealing in mundane conversation underlying class and ethnic attitudes. Russian soldiers are universally transformed from killing machines to boys as each of them shows deference and tenderness to the old woman. Finally she goes home, The End. Who could censor such a banal slice of life? Yet just placing a kindly and feeble old grandmother inside a Russian tank says more than any jeremiad. There are a few pointed conversations, as when she asks her grandson, “Do you enjoy killing people?” He doesn’t answer. I think about several anti-war American films I have seen lately from the stridently didactic Lions for Lambs, to the morally blaming Rendition, or the more intellectually subtle Charlie Wilson’s War. Even at their most indirect, none of those films approaches the artistic audacity of simply juxtaposing a tired, frail old grandmother against roaring humvees festooned with troops. The movie seemed vastly too slow and indirect for an American audience, yet the theater was almost full on a Monday night, so who knows?

The SIFF runs for an astonishing two more weeks, until June 15th. But I am out of tickets, money and time. I feel I took a fair sample of what was offered and I was well-pleased.

Contemporary Native American Art

2008-04-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

The Tucson Museum of Art is the last stop on the tour of a marvelous exhibit of North American native art. The exhibition is second in a three part series called “Changing Hands”, organized and circulated by the Museum of Arts and Design of New York. The 150 pieces of visual art are stunning in their diversity, creativity, and thoughtfulness. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this show after it’s over on May 11, 2008, so maybe you should just go to Tucson and see it while you can.

I had my doubts about a show called Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation- Contemporary Native North American Art from the West, Northwest and Pacific. I expected familiar images and crafts: Kachina dolls, Haida masks, beaded moccasins, carved ivory amulets, painted Kwakiutl cedar chests, and so on. What I found instead took me by surprise.

Beaded Converse tennis shoes? Uncountable tiny blue glass beads are sewn to the canvas to make the shoes blue. Like nearly every piece in this exhibit, this also presents social commentary. These are not your mother’s beaded moccasins! The struggle for Native Americans between tradition and contemporary life is starkly expressed throughout the show.
("Shoes" [The actual title of the piece is a long Indian word I did not write down correctly, so I had to give it my own name. Sorry. Teri Greeves, 1970])

Rant: Photography is not allowed in the exhibit, a stupid rule, it seems to me. I don’t see how the artists’ intellectual property or the museum’s financial investment is threatened by amateur photography. I had to cull these few pictures from the internet. Perhaps the fear is that a blogger will show pictures of the works without proper attribution to the artist, which is exactly what happens when you have to cull pictures from the internet. Rant off.

I can only describe a few of my favorites, although there were literally dozens of mind-bending works. One was a kind of postmodern totem pole. It was a cubist oil painting of totemic images. The painting was curved into a half-cylinder and displayed vertically in a vaguely totem pole shape. It thus had recognizable totemic images in characteristic Northwest Indian style, but portraying multiple perspectives at once, as cubism can do, simulating the experience one would have of actually walking around a real totem pole. What a concept. Was it a totem pole or not? Was it a memory of a totem pole? Was it a translation of a totem pole? Again, past and present are forced to coexist in tightly wound tension.
(Totemic Theory 2, Clarissa Hudson, 2001)

Nearby was a more traditional 6-foot high totem pole carved from cedar. (This show was very well curated, as the placement of these totem-like pieces indicates.) It told a story in symbols, as all totem poles do, but a modern one. A sun figure was on top, represented as a face-like circular mask. Long cedar bark “hair” suggested rainfall, with the water collected in the base, a black wooden chest with faint images of salmon as if seen through translucent water. Between the sun and the water was an Eagle (which is usually on top) and it was doubled over, reaching down to the salmon below. There were a couple of smaller face-like circular images on stems extending from the “shoulders” of the sun. Possibly they represent humanity, and if so, having them the highest images in the totem, higher even than the sun, would further this hierarchical existential portrait. The piece was called “Rainbow People” so that’s a clue (By Tim Paul, 1999).

Near the totems I sneaked a shaky photo of “Cigar Store Indian,”a wooden cigar store Indian with a small black-and-white TV in place of its face, and on the TV were old westerns from the 1950’s – Indians attacking the cavalry and being slaughtered. (Cigar Store Indian. Doug Coffin, 1998)

Etched glass is not a traditional Native artistic medium, yet glass art is pervasive in the Northwest today so it makes sense to see a traditional shamanic amulet represented in glass. The piece is about 12 inches long and 8 inches high, far too large to be an actual amulet, yet the whale-image is covered in animistic spirit-forms. On the reverse side, not shown, is a stylized human being laid out lengthwise, as if it were either an embryo or a mummy. The modern Indian is thus contained entirely within the spiritual images and meanings of the past. Is it the frozen, departed spirit of the Indian, or is it the new Indian spirit about to be reborn from the hard, cold, modern glass? (Shaman's Amulet. Preston Singletary, 2001)

I’m not sure what to make of this large piece representing racks of drying fish, all in aluminum or steel. The circular drying hoops are about 2 meters across and the thousands of tiny metal fish are suspended from the spanning metal "sticks." The drying of the catch on such racks was the “daily bread” and sustenance of traditional people. Now it is merely a geometric abstraction in steel. I’m not sure what it means. (Eric Robertson, The Hub, 2001)

This dish-shaped pattern was called “Pieces of the Puzzle”. It is an attractive piece in its own right, with small images in Northwest Indian colors and motifs from ravens, frogs, whales, and so forth. However others are pure abstractions, just lines and gestures. Yet those abstractions are more than casual “brushstrokes.” Even the simplest of them incorporates the characteristic curves and shapes that define this kind of art, perhaps suggesting how the traditional forms are so deeply embedded in the artist’s being that even a casual gesture reveals them. (Pieces of the Puzzle. Steve Smith, 2004)

There was a surprising amount of anger in this show. Surprising to me, anyway. Of course artists always try to speak from the emotional core of their being, and I would expect reverence for the past, identity confusion, and even ironic statements about modern life. I did not expect the rage, the deep bitterness, expressed in so many pieces. I’m sure that is just my white man’s naivety, but I was genuinely taken aback.

There is also a good deal of humor, but the sense of heartfelt sorrow over what has been lost is palpable. It is a very edgy show in that regard.

One poignant piece seemed un-self-conscious. It had a rather lengthy artist’s statement on the legend card in which she proudly declared that she cared not at all for tradition and was strictly a modern artist. Yet the piece itself was sort of a Chagall-like collocation of dreamy figures and patterns, with small drawings of teepees and huddled people, all on a large scraped hide. (Native Woman's Dreams. Juanita Padhopony, 1994).

Spaced Out Pictures

2008-03-20T12:52:00.001-07:00

During a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center, east of Orlando, Florida, I accidentally came upon an amazing art gallery. NASA has been commissioning artists to represent rocket launches and other aspects of KSC activity since 1962. Who knew?

Andy Warhol: Moonwalk

Tucked away, hidden would not be too strong, behind the popcorn-perfumed lobby of the IMAX theaters is a lovely two-story display of visual arts. I spent over an hour perusing about a hundred pieces in this secret gallery. The $30 admission fee to get into the space center is a pretty high barrier just to see some nice pictures, but if you ever do visit the space center, look for this display! It is not listed on any brochures of “attractions” so you have to know it is there.

Rollout, Columbia.
Martin Hoffman

(Note the white-painted center fuel tank. After the first couple of shuttle flights, NASA stopped painting the tank, to save weight).

Emergence

Dan Namingha

The picture does not do justice to the wonderful Navajo colors. The theme is also terrific, maybe something like "You are pretty smart to be floating in space, but the gods are all around you anyway." (They were always there, always will be there).

Great painting, large, impressive.
Sorry I did not get the details, and the online NASA images are virtually unsearchable.

This is a nice Peter Max work from 1987. There were surprisingly few abstract representations in the collection. NASA claims to have started this art program because the photographs, while extensive, were not capturing the "excitement." But ironically, many of the works they collected strive for realism, like the first example above. I tend to prefer abstraction.

Another Warhol. This one actually might be the famous "Moonwalk," not the first picture, above. Excuse my poor documentation.

There were many other amazing works of art by many artists, some famous, some not, all worth seeing.

Degas in Portland

2008-03-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

The Portland, Oregon Art Museum has a terrific exhibition of work by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Forain until May 11, 2008. There are 110 pieces in the show, themed around ballet dancers in Paris in the late 1800’s.

The Degas pieces are spectacular. These are from his later work, after he “specialized” in dancers. The painted and drawn ballerinas are charming, bright and colorful, “easy on the eyes.” He certainly understood the female figure of that day, which is different from today’s. Professional dancers today who looked like Degas’ healthy specimens would be considered “beefy.” If you go to see pretty ballerina pictures you won’t be disappointed.

But I think most of these paintings are not about ballerinas at all. They are about the empty space that the dancers define. The ballerinas are just a device used for the difficult job of depicting three-dimensional space, empty space, on a two dimensional surface. How can that be done? It is quite a puzzle and Degas solved it, and it is amazing to see how.

His works are arranged chronologically and one can detect a period in the early 1870’s where he seems to have discovered the secret of depicting empty space. There is one piece in particular, Musicians in the Orchestra of 1872, that announces what is to come. We look over the heads of the dark, silhouetted musicians to the dancers some 50 feet away, with nothing between the musicians and the dancers but air. How do we know there is 50 feet of empty space there? I’m not sure, but it’s there. Size constancy is one cue for depth, but that wouldn't seem to be sufficient. There is no linear perspective and in fact the dancers are in front of an ostensibly flat stage curtain. So where does the 50 feet of space come from? I don’t know. It’s a miracle of painting.

Next to that piece are some paintings from a little later, by which time he had clearly caught on to the technique of painting bold, vivid emptiness. I don’t remember which piece was next, and I don’t think it was The Ballet Rehearsal of 1873, shown here, but it was something like that, where at least one third of the canvas depicts nothing but thin air. How does he make that empty space so real, so palpable? Again I can’t say exactly how it's done, but see for yourself. And talk about bold! A picture with "nothing" filling over half the scene? How could you even think of that?

There are about a half dozen ballerina bronzes, which Degas did only in wax and somebody else cast them after he died. The point of them, I believe, is, like the paintings, to show empty space. How can you sculpt empty space? It’s amazing to see how it’s done as you walk around these small sculpltures (no more than 18" high).

Whoever curated the Degas collection surely must have understood the “empty space” theme, but oddly, there is not a hint of it on any of the printed legends accompanying the works. I never use the auditory guides in museums, as their inanity just makes me want to scream, but it is possible that the empty space theme is mentioned on those devices.

I was most impressed by Degas. But I also greatly enjoyed the few posters, paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec. I like the colors and the composition, and his technique of exaggeration, such as by putting the dancer’s leg up so high that you wonder if it is connected to her body, as in this poster, which was on display at the PAM.

I was less enamored by the Forain work. He seemed to be more of an illustrator and I read that he was at one time a political cartoonist, and his drawings and paintings have both a cartoony look and the sociopolitical “message” of an editorialist. Many scenes show a sleazy fatcat producer fawning over a young ballerina. Apparently, in the late 1800’s Paris dance scene, girls had to find a financial “sponsor” to support their dance career, and it is obvious from Forain’s drawings that the older men were interested in more than just philanthropy. The women’s plight is tragic and depressing and I have to say it was an emotional downer to look at all these scenes, however handsomely they are drawn.

The rest of the PAM is worth a look too. Their permanent collection is strong in works of the last two centuries and in 20th century sculpture. The PAM is one of my three favorite art museums in the western U.S. (with Seattle and Tucson). Find PAM at http://www.portlandartmuseum.org/

PDX Jazz

2008-02-20T13:04:00.001-08:00

PDX is the airport code for Portland, Oregon, which hosted its 31st Jazz Festival Feb. 15-24, 2008. I attended the opening weekend only, hating to leave all that good music behind when I returned. This was my second PDX Jazz festival, and it has been satisfying both times, even though I can only attend for one long weekend, not the whole ten day run. The festival has some great venues at the city’s performing arts center and numerous clubs around town, although I have now learned to avoid all shows that occur in hotel ballrooms. They are just not set up for it. Sure, they can cram a thousand chairs into a space, but the air quality is so bad, the oxygen content so low, the temperature so high, that one struggles to maintain consciousness. This has been a consistent experience at both the Hilton and the Marriott, so be advised: bring your own oxygen if it is in a hotel. This is not the case for the Schnitzer, Newmarket, and Winningstad concert halls, which are marvelous acoustically, aesthetically, and environmentally.

Portland is an easy and cheap Amtrak ride from Seattle, comfortable and scenic (if you appreciate shades of brown and grey). Portland is easy to get around in, with free light rail and cute, walkable city blocks. There are plenty of hotels and lots of historic architecture. The city seems to me a bit weak on restaurants. On a Friday night I could not find a restaurant or a bar downtown serving after midnight. In the midst of a Jazz festival? What sense does that make? Portland has major shopping, with all the usual suspects, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Saks, etc., and of course the world-famous Powell’s book store. When it’s not raining, Portland is a lovely city.

What’s amazing about PDX Jazz is the world class lineup, unexpected for such a modest sized festival. Kudos go to Artistic Director Bill Royston who tirelessly introduces each act, and Managing Director Rachel Trice who is never seen. Actually, most of the jazz at the festival is free. Just about every hotel and club in the city has at least one jazz performance every day. There are also numerous educational presentations.

Ornette Coleman
This master of the free jazz movement is now 79 years old but the music is as fresh as a teenager. Stooped, he shuffled onto stage in a royal blue silk suit and a black pork-pie hat, with white sneakers sporting colored LED’s in the toes. He said a few words of introduction but they were inaudible.

He was slow to get to his position but once there, his fingers were very fast. He played tenor sax in characteristic frenetic fashion. He was with an acoustic bass, an electric bass with a wa-wa pedal, and an electric guitar that could have been another bass. It was hard to hear the electric instruments because their sound was blurry. Coleman’s son played drums. Ornette and the rest of the group seem to play in different keys, which is disorienting at first but your ear adapts to it, like listening to two people talking at once. The two tracks are dissonant but complementary in some way I do not understand, so it is actually pleasant, not the noise you might expect from such an adventure. Every once in a while the parts come together on a chord or a riff, just so you know it was not a mistake.

Coleman plays a lot of notes but he only has a few things to say. He exercises his scales like Coletrane, but his main musical gestures are simple figures against the wall of sound put up by the polyphonic support group. His musical statements are small, sometimes only four notes, something simple, as if from a Coltrane ballad – lyrical, suggestive, often enclosing an octave. Then sometimes he would invert that or move it up or down a fifth, creating question-and-answer sequences that stood out sharply against the musical background. It was very conversational.

When he picked up the trumpet, he did not play a baroque solo, but only used it to splash some broad bands of color on what the acoustic bass was saying. He played the violin like a fiddle, sawing away to produce a swatch of contrasting or supporting material. He is the artist, they are the canvas. There were few solos because it is not that kind of jazz, but all the players were in close communication throughout.

As mentioned, the basses were way overmiked, not fuzzing out but muddy. It could have been an intentional technique to produce the dense background that made Ornette’s gestures stand out so well, but I don’t know. The main bassist fiddled with the amps several times, so something might have been wrong. If it was the sound they wanted, then the two electric bassists put in a lot of sweaty performance work for nothing because there was no subtlety to be heard. The second bass, which could have been a guitar, was totally drowned out except for a few moments of mandolin-like beauty.

I really like Coleman, and his 1996 “Colors” album is one of my favorites. Still, I have to say that all his music sounds the same to my untrained ear. It’s a very complex and enjoyable sound but I couldn’t begin to name any individual piece of work of his. Nevertheless it was a fine experience to see the man himself do what he does.

SF Jazz Collective
This nonprofit was co-founded in San Francisco by Joshua Redman in 2004 for the promotion of “modern” jazz, as opposed to the classical jazz of the golden age from about 1930 when sound recording became widespread to about the end of World War II when “big band,” and emerging blues-rock eclipsed the classical sound. The Collective’s mission is to focus on jazz since about 1950. Each year they pick a composer/performer to highlight, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coletrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonius Monk. This year the celebrated master was Wayne Shorter.

An octet performs the works of the honored one, often specially arranged by a group member, and each member of the group is also a composer, so about half of their performance is original new material. The octet re-forms each year. It’s a great concept, ever-new, never stale, and it serves the mission of promoting modern jazz. This was the Collective’s first performance of 2008, and that might explain why it did not immediately catch on fire. It was good, really good, but not a performance I will remember forever.

This year’s Collective had Joe Lovano on tenor, Dave Douglas, trumpet; Stefon Harris, vibes, Miguel Zenon, Alto; Robin Eubanks, trombone, Reneee Rosnes, piano; Matt Penman, bass, and Erick Harland on drums. Shorter’s tunes I could recognize were from the 1960’s such as Infant Eyes, but freshly arranged. There were original compositions by Eubanks, Penman, and others.

To me this is classic jazz: accessible, rhythmic, harmonic, well structured. Before the 1950’s was something like historic or antique jazz, wonderful in its own right, but the kind of music you hear on scratchy old records in the Smithsonian Collection. I guess it’s a matter of what you grew up with.

This year’s SF Collective is a good act. They’re all-stars, but Stefon Harris shines the brightest. He has dominating stage presence, in part just because the vibes are large, but also because of his energetic performance, hands moving faster than the eye can follow. Just to his left was Rosnes on piano and those two instruments are made for each other: a great sound. Renee Rosnes is a standout performer but did not show much of herself. She seemed content to make Harris sound good. Robin Eubanks is a terrific performer but you have to really like ‘bone to appreciate his work. It’s a hard sound to love, in my opinion, but it blends perfectly with Douglas’ trumpet. They could have played that mellow sound all night and dropped the blat-blat stuff. I am not fond of a big brassy sound, I admit, and in fact, an octet is a little too big for me. I like trios and quartets, where I can understand what I am listening to. The Collective mixed it up all right, but some of it seemed loud for the sake of being loud. That’s my ignorant opinion and I’m sticking to it.

The normally lyrical and expressive Joe Lovano was asleep in this performance except for one lovely tune he played on alto at the very end where he really seemed like he meant it. Maybe it took him the whole set to warm up. Or maybe it was because he forgot his funny hat. I have never seen him without a hat before. Maybe that was the trouble. One other complaint was that I felt the vibes were stifled by the rest of the group. To me vibes are all about overtones and when I hear a thumping C, I want to also hear the layers around that, but I couldn’t. That might have been Harris’s style of playing or maybe it was an artistic decision that the group made about their overall sound. Still, I’m just saying the whole point of vibes is to give a resonant richness. I’m sure that is an idiosyncratic view, and anyway, I don’t mean to nitpick this performance. It was terrific straight ahead jazz by some great musicians, enjoyable start to finish.

Classical Jazz Quartet
It was a thrill to see Ron Carter in person. He is a towering musical figure, both metaphorically and literally. His bass must be tuned especially low because his open strings are so thick you can almost bite the sound. He is big, the instrument is big, the sound is big. But he also does not hesitate to climb over the neck with ease and gusto, often doing a glissando on the frets, playing the full range of what a bass can play. When you hear Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring come out of that machine you can hardly believe it.

This group specializes, of course, in jazz renditions of classical music, from Bach to Rachmaninov. I see it as a kind of running joke because after the springboard you are very, very far gone from the classic, although who knows if they maintain the formal structure of the original piece? It’s not obvious if they do. In any case, what they produce is some marvelous jazz that does have a lot of formal structure in its own right, so in that sense, they at least respect the formality of the classics.

Besides Ron Carter, we had the ubiquitous Stefon Harris on vibes, Kenny Barron on piano, and Lewis Nash on drums. One is tempted to believe at first that this is really the Stefon Harris show. The man is fantastic. In one of his introductions he mentioned that he admired Milt Jackson, the ledgendary vibraphonist of the Modern Jazz Quartet. “Do you know Milt Jackson,” he asked the crowd? Somebody in the audience yelled, “Ain’t you him?” It is a reincarnation. Harris is a spectacular player, both technically and expressively. He even does a little Jarrettesque sing-along that you can hear if you have good seats.

(Stefon Harris. NY Times Photo)

An annoyance was that Nash’s drums seemed to be way over-cymballed, if that’s a word. Five different cymbals graced his huge kit and he hammered away at them incessantly, with sticks, brushes, fingers, the ends of the brushes, sticks on the rims, and so on. Too cymbalic! It was noisy, distracting, and starting to grate on my nerves until I gave it some more thought. This was not a mistake, but a design. The key is that Ron Carter is the rhythm section. He is so good, even on comping, that you soon realize he is the engine of the group, not Nash. Carter is the rhythm and the harmony. Why have drums at all then? The role of the drummer in this group has to be that of rounded entertainer, not merely timekeeper, because they already have that. So Nash is supposed to be a featured player, an improviser, an up-front performer, not hidden in the back as the drummer is in so many groups. And given that Nash’s drum solos were among the best I have ever heard, there is no question that he is redefining the role of drums as a musical instrument. Still, the cymbal thing can drive you nuts…

The piano of the great Kenny Barron was strangely subdued. He showed one or two flashes of his brilliance but mostly confined himself to comping, which was stellar in itself. He uses very little sustain, lots of complex and rhythmic chords, but I think it is fair to ask for more because, well, he is Kenny Barron. Again there may a subtle Ron Carter effect at work. Since Carter carries most of the harmonic support, that leave less for Barron to do. They could have soloed him more, but I guess the point of the group is to be a quartet, not a pickup group. They are obviously a highly disciplined and well practiced quartet, so there you are.

One odd observation about the CJQ is that they all wore dark suits and Brooks Brothers’ ties (except Harris, who probably needs to breathe more than a tie would allow. He didn’t even have cufflinks, just open cuffs). Clearly the visual analogy is to the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose players were noted for their handsome suits, thin ties and white shirts. The homage is obvious, but at the same time a little creepy because one of the reasons for the MJQ’s dress code was to “prove” that black men were gentlemen. Still, I appreciated the allusion, and to tell the truth, I ached for them to play Djangology, but you know they wouldn’t dare.

Tim Berne
Tim Berne is a local boy who made good. While studying (or not) at Reed College in Oregon in the 1970’s, he bought an alto sax on a whim and started playing. Moving to New York, he studied with Julius Hemphill and soon started performing and recording, to great acclaim. His trio performed in the large but surprisingly intimate Winningstad theater.

Berne’s sound is hard to describe. It is polyphonic, The traditional structures of harmony, melody are lacking and rhythm is highly variable. His musical statements are actually quite limited to small thirds and fifths, punctuated by octave jumps. It would have almost an ancient sound if it were heard in isolation. But there was no isolation.

Berne played against a continuously hyperactive piano, the pianist unnamed and uncredited. Whoever he was, he must have had considerable athletic training to sustain a 90 minute agenda of presto staccato notes and trills racing furiously up and down the keyboard as if to get somewhere in a hurry but actually going nowhere. He created an amazingly thick, dense background of sound under Berne’s formalist recitations in moderate, even tempos. What made it all interesting is that the two were in different keys. There may not have even been a key signature, since they both roamed and grazed without fences. But there must have been structures invisible to me because they had charts and how could they write anything down unless there was something to write?

At first I found the sound interesting and complex but not particularly pleasant. It’s not just that there was not much familiar to grab on to, but what was presented did not recommend itself with any virtues. Then I moved into examining exactly the notes Berne was playing and they seemed arbitrary to me. The sound was not noisy, but purposeless. But then I thought well, he’s playing exactly the notes he means to play, not any others, so what is the message? And the message seemed to be, “These are the notes I’m playing. Listen to each one. If you wanted to dance, you should have gone to the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. This is the music here.” So I listened and extracted his simple formalisms disguised as polyphonic chaos.

After a while though, the sound, which is complex but varies little in macrostructure, becomes trance-like, hypnotic. One’s auditory ego is perspectivally positioned above and beyond any individual musical gestures and the piece is suddenly revealed holistically, like the smooth surface of an egg with no compositional detail. I realized I was tapping my foot in time to the music even though I could discern no particular rhythmic regularity in it. That was amazing. (The trio’s drummer was strictly a background timekeeper, also unidentified and uncredited). The group’s musical achievement was to pull me into the details of the music but then spit me out, to a place beyond the musical structures, to a transcendent extra-musical space; an intellectual space in part, but still somehow bodily tethered to the sounds. I don’t understand how it worked, but it did. Quite an experience.

Cecil Taylor
This grand master of free jazz (now 80 years old) walked smartly onto the stage (late, after a dreadful opener I won’t mention), sat down and started playing without a word of introduction. He looked good in gray dreadlocks, though only about 3 of them on each side of the head). He played several pieces of solo piano with only a few seconds’ pause between them, barely acknowledging applause. All the pieces sounded very similar to my ear, so they seemed like individual movements of a larger unified whole.

He played extremely dense chords in dissonant harmonies (whatever “dissonant” means any more), at a furious pace, lightning fingers up and down the keyboard. I could not actually see his hands from where I was but I would not be surprised if he didn’t also at times used his knuckles or put his palms down on the keyboard, so dense was the sound. He could have used his forearms for all I could tell, but I think I would have noticed that. He used the sustain pedal extensively to further blend the sound. The point is, it was dense.

The interesting thing about all this dense sound is that it was delivered in short gestures of 1 to three seconds separated by second or subsecond silences (no sustain). A longish segment would be 5 seconds max. The gestures occurred individually at different points on the keyboard within fairly tight ranges, no arpeggio forms. There was no melodic development at all, just these short bursts of multicolored density. What did it mean?

I could be way out here, but what I got from it was visual. These small, dense, multicolored objects are indeed objects, like rocks on the ground, or more like a spiky, rocky terrain. These were clearly well-defined objects, each with their own texture, density, color, and location in space. It was highly visual, and for me, it was mostly pastoral. There were several terrains, but most obviously the sharp rocks and a babbling brook. The water sounds were unmistakable and clearly distinguishable from the sharp rocks. I hope I’m not embarrassing myself, but that’s what seemed to be going on.

(Pic: www.ilachinski.com)

Besides the pastoral scenes, there was also, I think, at least one human conversation, which seemed to be an argument. I realize it is bad form to read extramusical programmatics into a piece but this performance was clearly, obviously, supposed to be a visual presentation. Taylor was a painter, like Ornette was, but Taylor did both figures and background himself. It was an artistic triumph and I’m glad I was there to see/hear it.

Indian Powwow

2008-01-19T18:08:00.001-08:00

On New Year’s Day, 2008, I joined hundreds of Native Americans at the Rillito Race Track in Tucson, to usher in the new year with a Powwow. Several dozen tribes of “Indians” (as they call themselves) were represented, most from the southwestern U.S. but many from Mexico and some from Central and South America.

There was a fancy dance competition extending over several days. “Fancy” is when the performers are dressed in brightly colored regalia including feathers, furs, masks, shells and bells. It is pretty spectacular. Music is mostly tom-tom but sometimes flute and chanting as well.

There were also some serious “ceremonial” dances designed to help the New Year find its feet, I guess, and I was not allowed to photograph those. I’m afraid I did not understand the cultural significance of these dances but admired them nevertheless. They were just as complex as the fancy dancing but less flamboyant and conducted almost naked, which had to be chilly.

I noticed that it was usually the older men who were the expert dancers. Their skill stood out dramatically from the others. They lifted their legs high and stomped the earth like they really meant it. But there were a few young people who were also extremely talented and I was pleased to see that the culture is being effectively transmitted.

There were several tent stalls selling fantastically beautiful jewelry. The silver work is extremely fine. I had to tie my wife down with ropes. There was one Dineh (Navajo) craftsman whose work could be in a museum. I think coral and turquoise are colors that really look wonderful together. The prices were not cheap, it seemed to me: small earrings for $200 and bracelets up to $600. But according to my wife, these were very reasonable prices for fine jewelry such as this was. While I would have liked to have seen some bargains, I’m glad that the crafts people are getting paid what they are worth. They did manage to pry a few bucks out of us.

Other stalls sold Indian blankets, tom-toms, clothing, pillows, toys, knick-knacks, cosmetics and medicines. I especially appreciated the hand-held tom-toms, some of which have a deep, resonant tone with complex overtones. I should have bought one, as they good looking and under $100, but what would I do with it? I listened in on a conversation with an older Indian who was considering buying one. He inquired about the hide, whether it was deer or elk, and how it was scraped and stretched. He listened to the sound and I noticed that after striking the drum he very gently touched his fingernail to the underside of the skin to produce a variety of sounds. Who knew? He didn’t buy at that time though.

We walked around for half a day and enjoyed the sights and sounds. There were quite a few white folks there although mostly Indians. The festival actually went on for ten days with dancing, singing and crafts competition. My feeling was that I had participated in an authentic Indian celebration, not a show-biz representation of an Indian celebration, so I was glad to have experienced the real thing. At the same time, I’m sure with more organization, marketing savvy, and showmanship, this event could be a huge tourist draw for a much wider segment of society, a big money-maker. But then it wouldn’t be real.

(It's a shame I don't understand the dances, but even I could see that this fellow represented death, or ancestors, or possibly even the just-past year, now dead. Notice the skull at the center of the headdress. His white painted face suggests a ghost, and his costume, with the white fringes suggests a skelton. Notice how extremely light he is on his feet, almost floating above the ground, like a ghost. The shell-rattles around his ankles punctuated his every step. The incessant tom-toms put you into a kind of trance until you start to half-believe you are watching a ghost! It was a fantastic performance.)

Here are a few other scenes from the Festival:
This woman was weaving a pattern so fine, I couldn't even see the threads when I looked right over her shoulder!

A very nice tattoo. Looks Mayan to me.

My wife resisting the urge to purchase a leather shawl.

Gaylen Hansen

2007-12-12T11:52:00.001-08:00

Gaylen Hansen is a painter from eastern Washington, which, unlike coastal Seattle, is largely semi-arid, much of it desert chaparral as you move away from the Cascade mountains. Hansen’s paintings, mostly oil on canvas, reflect that environment in his palette and subject matter, which often include cowboys, horses, cattle, birds, locusts, and other animals. But they are not literal representations of the place. Rather, the pictures tend to bizarre surrealism. According to the Seattle Art Museum (www.seattleartmuseum.org/), his category is neo-expressionism, whatever that is.

I liked the pictures because of their humor and imagination, and because of the colors, which recall those of the Washington desert country. For example, he shows an impressionistic trout standing vertically on its nose, on a table next to a steer of the same size also on its nose, and an inverted tulip. Why? No reason, but it’s funny and the colors are great and the rhythm is almost musical. I also like that the canvases are not framed, just nailed or stapled to the wall.

All the pictures have a flat, poster-like, or cartoony quality. In the 30-year retrospective that SAM is currently showing, I didn’t see any rounded, 3-D figures. The pictures also have a certain dreamlike quality and I can see clear echoes of Henri Rousseau, and the surrealism, or postmodernism of Philip Guston, who also developed an eccentric collection of signature images.

In the book sold at the exhibit (which I skimmed but did not buy), the artist acknowledges the influence of cartoonist Gary Larson, but that could be misleading. These are not cartoons, only juxtapositions of images that happen to be humorous because they are recognizable representations of common objects. If they were similarly shaped blobs of color that did not represent objects, the pictures would not be funny, but they would be just as attractive because of the color and composition. Maybe. I’m not sure about that, but I think so.

Hansen’s pictures have been seen all around the world, but he is still not well-known and is often referred to as a regional artist. Maybe this show, which runs through January 6, 2008 at the SAM, will raise his stock. I hope so.

David Mamet

2007-11-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

I first became aware of Mamet as a writer through his 1987 film about the world of con men, House of Games. I was fascinated by the dialog and by Joe Mantegna’s performance. Mamet characters are usually lowlifes, undereducated men who pretend to omniscience. They pronounce eternal truisms about the most banal details of their sordid lives and defend their “positions” on such matters as if they involved the highest moral principle. That makes the dialog seem unself-consciously clever from the characters’ own points of view, humorous to the condescending audience, and well-crafted from a critic’s point of view. Mamet is all about dialog.

I eagerly sought out Glengarry Glen Ross in 1992 and The Spanish Prisoner in 1997 and was not disappointed by either of those films. I even read his short book, Three Uses of the Knife (2000), a series of lectures on the nature of drama. That helped me appreciate his style even better. I also enjoyed Lakeboat, State and Main, and especially, the recent (2005) Edmond, starring William H. Macy in a tremendous acting performance. I haven’t seen all Mamet's films but I have never been disappointed by any of those I have seen.

So it was with high expectations that I went to a local performance of his 1975 play, American Buffalo, produced by Theater Schmeater in Seattle. Directed by Aimee Bruneau, it starred Trick Danneker, Mark Fullerton, and James Venturini as the three actors, the only three characters physically present in the play, although three or four other characters felt like they were also in the play because of how the characters referred to them, a nice feat of playwriting. Donny (Venturini) owns a pawn shop, where all the “action” takes place (and 99.9% of the action is verbal). Bobby (Danneker) is a young junkie who hangs out there, apparently out of loneliness, as does Donny’s friend and poker buddy Teach (Fullerton).

These aimless, shiftless characters have very small horizons. No customers ever appear in the shop, but Donny tells how a customer yesterday bought an American buffalo nickel from him for $50, making him think later that it must have been worth much more than that. Donny recruits the other two into a scheme to rob the customer, who lives nearby, of his presumptive coin collection. They discuss this scheme endlessly for 60 minutes, along with much else, such as the virtues of eating yogurt, how to cheat at cards, and whether the waitress down the street treats them with proper respect. Clearly the men are incapable of even conceptualizing the robbery well, let alone executing it, but that does not stop them from declaring their wisdom on the topic and staking out their points of view on various ancillary matters. It is classic Mamet technique. In the final act, they resolve to forget the whole thing and the play is over.

I am really not a theater person. I see a play once or twice a year, but I have really enjoyed only half a dozen performances in twenty-five years. Why do I keep going? I don’t know. Maybe I just can’t believe that such a popular art form can so consistently escape me.

American Buffalo was a case in point. The production was perfectly competent and I was never actually bored, not to the point that I wanted to walk out. But even while watching it, I kept thinking, what is the point of all this jabbering? Mamet’s dialogic cleverness cannot sustain the full 60 minutes of the play alone. To me, the purpose of a play is to illuminate the human condition in some way. So what was illuminated by these three nattering characters? Uneducated people don’t think clearly? They are not self-aware? Their thinking tends to self-aggrandizement? Okay, maybe, but I think I knew that.

There is a slightly more subtle theme about the nature of male friendship. The characters argue (over nothing), shouting when there is no reason to shout, poking and pushing when there is no reason to poke and push, and finally there is a fight (over nothing) that upsets the furniture and draws blood. But at the end, Teach asks Donny, “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Donny puts aside his crusty authoritarianism for just a moment and answers tenderly, “No.” Despite all the yelling, shouting, threats, insults, shoves and fisticuffs, the men don’t mean anything by it. It’s just the only way they know how to express their friendship. That idea is not new news, but the particular way it was acted out, maybe that was enough to justify the effort. I’m not sure.

I admit there is something magical about sitting with a group of 50 people and having three of them get up and start telling a story; showing a story, actually. It’s a peculiarly human thing to do. Chimpanzees would never do it. Only we can see ourselves in the mirror of the other. So the contextual experience of the art form itself has value, no denying that. But I have a sense of missed opportunity after a play like this.

Maybe it simply was not the most terrific acting. Teach was a hyperventilated kinetic character that seemed cloned from the Kramer character TV's Seinfeld. That was unimaginative, although the director probably realized it would help keep the overall energy level up. Donny was not convincing as a shopkeeper or a criminal and suggested nothing more sinister than a friend’s loudmouth father. Bobby was a cipher. So maybe the problem with me and the theater is that I am too cheap to spring for top drawer tickets to first class productions.

For Seattle theater-goers, Theater Schmeater is at www.schmeater.org.

Mary Lou McCollum

2007-11-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

Mary Lou McCollum

The “event” of interest today is that a friend and visual artist has finally put up a web site to show her wares and talents. See http://maryloumccollum.com. Since she turned professional in 1999, I have seen her talent erupt like spring tulips from the earth.

I am especially fond of her “stairs” series. Stairs have a natural geometry suggesting endless variation. Mary Lou paints them in their stark, existential facticity, inviting the viewer to ascend or descend their still silence into who knows what.

Mary Lou sees stairs in many aspects, from de Chirico-like surrealism to sunny, everyday realism. No people are ever shown in a stairs picture, yet stairs are a human artifact, designed expressly to transport people. Taken out of their human context by the artist, they become almost spooky.

I asked Mary Lou once what the stairs mean to her, but she didn’t know. She said only that there was just something compelling about stairs. She felt that she had only begun to scratch the surface of the theme. I am reminded of Richard Dreyfuss’ character in the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who was obsessed by an image of a mountain plateau without knowing why (it turned out to be a UFO site!).

I also like the chairs series, the interiors, and among the figures, the 9-11 piece. All told, a very nice web site opening!

(The artist and the author en plein air).

Forest Pumpkins

2007-10-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Each year, a local plant nursery and garden store near Seattle invites children from the Boys and Girls Club to display their pumpkin carvings (www.bainbridgegardens.com ). The public views the presentation in the evening and donates to the Club, so it’s a fundraiser for the club and a fine community service by the nursery. And it’s a mob scene. Special traffic controls are erected on the highway, and a parking lot a quarter mile a way is commandeered, with a shuttle van from there to the nursery. It’s an extremely popular event. I sneaked through the “Pumpkin Trail” before the official opening, to get a preview of the pumpkin art.

The pumpkin on the right is the Boys and Girls Club logo. Above it a little pumpkin spells out B + G C.

The pumpkins are displayed on stumps and woodpiles along a charming forest trail. It is a very “Northwest” setting.

The one close on the left says "Got Candy?"

Here are some other entries in 2007.

I especially appreciate the "guts" under the plastic knife, and the x's for eyes.

The one on the ground has an American flag cut into it. Is this the American Monarchy? Are these political pumpkins? We can only guess.

Great idea to carve the pumpkin in this orientation and use the stem as a nose.

Pumpkins of the Carribbean, of course.

This being a Northwest forest, and pumpkins being squash, the ground slugs were very happy with the event, and even added to the mood, as with this guy slithering into an eyebrow.

I liked that this one was placed on stones instead of fallen leaves.

It is amazing to see such creativity and artistic talent in such a humble expression.

Philabaum Glass Studio

2007-10-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Tom Philabaum (pictured left) is a glass artist in Tucson. Originally from the Midwest (Illinois, Wisconsin) he has had his own studio in Tucson since 1975. There is a large gallery exhibiting his, and others’ works, and visitors can go right into the studio to watch craftsmen blow glass (they do a lot more than blow into it, actually). His students and assistants use the studio for their own work on the weekends.

It was plenty hot in the glass studio, but what caught my attention more than anything was the lack of safety gear, not even safety glasses. Human flesh sure looks delicate next to a glowing ball of molten glass. These were weekend studio users, not the master himself, of course. I hope they all signed liability waivers.

I was impressed by the glass art objects I saw at the Philabaum gallery. Here in the northwest, glass is omnipresent, but it is usually from Dale Chihuly, the internationally known glass artist from Tacoma, just down the road from Seattle. Chihuly glass is indeed beautiful but it is vastly overexposed here in the Northwest and one becomes inured to it.

Chihuly glass is grand, swirly, and dramatic. His pieces often take organic forms, like the shell-shaped pieces in the ceiling of the “Glass Bridge” at the Chihuly Museum (yes, his own museum), in Tacoma.

My first reaction to many Chihuly pieces is to wonder how they were made. The objects are so spectacular that you are dazzled by the technology and craftsmanship, which is indeed amazing.

But after a while the novelty wears off. You begin to understand that anything that can be done with glass, has been done. It ceases to be glass and becomes just a set of colorful artifacts without context, unconnected to the ancient craft.

The Philabaum work is not spectacular in the same way, just quietly beautiful. It is a different approach. The forms are often simple, elegant, and compact. You can get an appreciation of glass as glass: its texture, color, refraction, transparency, and so on. And because of that, you also appreciate the artist’s craftsmanship and intentionality. The pieces look like they were made by someone who had something in mind, not like they just arrived from Mars.

Not that Philabaum glass isn’t technically sophisticated work. It is. He is known for his “scavo” technique, in which glass chemicals are applied directly to hot glass, which gives the product an ancient, antique look. His work is varied, and to my eyes, refreshing after having seen too much Chihuly.

If the Chihuly museum is the Disneyland of glass art, the Philabaum studio is the MOMA. They’re both good in their own way, but not comparable. Another difference is that you can own a Philabaum piece like the handsome orange vase above for about $700 (see www.philabaumglass.com) whereas you need many thousands of dollars to even stand near a Chihuly. Small imitations of Chihuly pieces (not even by Chihuly himself) in his museum store are in the thousands. A fair price, perhaps for artifacts from Mars.

Tom Walbank

2007-10-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

The 17th Street Market in Tucson is a large, windowless grocery store with a staggering array of Asian foods, and oddly, guitars, and a tiny stage for performers. It was there I found Tom Walbank's trio: Mike Bagesse: Bass, Dimitri Manos: Drums. Walbank is a slender man under 40 from England who plays and sings gritty Delta blues. His repertoire is vast (and all memorized). His voice has the gutty, raspy, emotional intensity of a Louisiana black man. It was startling to hear his English accent when he spoke between tunes.

Tom plays harp (harmonica) hard, fast, with amazing technique. He's right up there with Junior Wells. I’ve never heard anything like it. His guitar work, especially slide, is skilled. Walbank describes his sound as “John Hammond with a John Lee Hooker obsession,” and I think that’s about right, but he’s more than an imitator. His strongest feature is the way he uses his voice as an instrument. It is thoughtful, artistic, and effective. And I think his voice is actually better than Hammond’s.

I bought a CD he was selling that day, Excalibooty! (2002), a mix of live and studio tracks, many written by him and collaborator Doug Smith (guitar). The collection is a lively footstomper that showcases Walbank’s considerable talents, although the sound quality is not as crisp as one would like – as is often the case with “home-made” CDs. According to his web page http://www.myspace.com/tomwalbank he has no record label. He is easily good enough to be a big star, but maybe he hasn’t differentiated himself enough. Why would you want to hear Hooker/Muddy Waters imitations when the real things are available? Walbank is an interpreter, but he needs to capitalize on his fine vocal talent before he gets too old, if he wants to hit the big time (which, of course, not everybody wants to do. I don’t know anything about him personally). Excalibooty! is marked “unavailable” on Amazon, but you can sample his sound there from his album, Mudhook, Vol. 2 (2006). He played some of those tunes at the 17th Street Market. Well worth the price.

(17th Street Market: A tough gig)

County Fair!

2007-10-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

I went to the Clallam County Fair in August, and the much larger Puyallup Fair in September. I had never been to a country fair and was curious, and the opportunity presented itself in both cases.

Clallam county is out on the Olympic Peninsula, in Washington and the fair is near the county seat, Port Angeles. This is a fairly remote part of the state that takes some driving to get to, so the Clallam fair had a very “country” feel.

I enjoyed walking through the barns and seeing all the farm animals. As a city person all my life, I had never actually before seen newborn piglets or a sheep being sheared or a competition among home made jams and jellies. I have never actually seen a cow being milked, let alone a goat. If you grew up on a farm, you might think it second nature to wash, rinse, and vacuum a cow as if you were detailing an automobile. Believe me, it was bizarre behavior to my eyes.

I especially enjoyed the kids, who take their animals very seriously. It’s a world I can only imagine, and not very well. I loved their intensity as they willed their dogs to obey, or sat studying the “Dairy Goat Journal,” a publication whose existence I was not aware of. I loved the painstaking felt-tip drawings of “The Bones In A Horse’s Foot,” and posters of “Diseases of Rabbits,” and “What Ferrets Need.”

The Puyallup Fair was at least five times the size, maybe ten times, of the Clallam fair, and included a professional rodeo. Puyallup (pronounced “pyoo-AL-up”) is a town south and east of Tacoma, Washington. Being near to the urban centers, it draws huge crowds.

This fair was enormous and really cannot be experienced all in one day. Some people were scooting about on Segways and by the end of a long afternoon of walking, I could understand why.

It had the same barns full of prize farm animals, but acres more of them and more diverse kinds as well. There was an enormous midway full of rides, building after building full of vendor and demonstration booths highlighting everything from the latest farm equipment to the county Sheriff’s office. There were more kinds of junk food in the offing than I knew even existed, nearly all of it deep fried.

One amazing display was the “Mutton Bustin” contest, in which any child who weighed 60 pounds or less could pay $10 to ride on the back of a woolly sheep as it ran across a dirt field. Most kids fell off immediately after the animal bolted from the gate, but some survived the required six second ride, to the roar of the large crowd. It was the perfect introduction to rodeo riding for children. I survived my entire childhood without the thought ever crossing my mind that it might be desirable to ride on the back of a sheep. This is a world as foreign to mine as if it were aliens from another planet.

I went to the big rodeo, for which I had to buy rather expensive tickets, and it was an amazing thing to see cowboys ride bucking horses and bulls. The crowd was huge, at least ten thousand. Unfortunately, I did not know that loudspeakers play incredibly loud rock and roll music during the rides. Apparently that is supposed to enhance your enjoyment in some way. I did not bring earplugs so I was forced to leave after less than a half hour to protect my hearing. I would have liked to have seen more. Rodeo is a very strange form of entertainment, so raw, so primitive, so direct. Man vs animal. I felt like I was in the Roman Colosseum of the first century. It seemed like nothing had really changed over all those thousands of years.

I liked the Clallam fair better. It seemed more intimate and real. I talked to the girl pictured here about her prizewinning goats. She was very proud of the ribbons she had won. It did not occur to her that actually the goats had won the ribbons.

I think I have had enough county fairs to hold me for a while.

(Moo?)

Anacortes Jazz Festival 07

2007-09-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Anacortes (Named after Anna Curtis, wife of the town’s founder), is a lovely old fishing and lumber town in the San Juan Islands, Northwest of Seattle.

Their Jazz Festival is in the last week of August, near the Labor Day holiday, held out on a large wharf on the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The ’07 was their fourth festival, and the first one I attended. There had been an annual jazz festival in Friday Harbor for many years, maybe thirty. Friday Harbor is a small town on another of the San Juan Islands, nearby, but that festival became so popular, despite the difficulty of getting to the island, that it overwhelmed the town. There just wasn’t any way to feed or accommodate thousands of fans, so the festival had to shut down.

Anacortes, which is reachable by a bridge from the mainland to Guemes Island, is more able to handle crowds, or will be in the future. I was lucky to find a room on the outskirts, as everything in town was sold out. Anacortes hopes to rekindle the spirit of the Friday Harbor festival, according to the chamber of commerce festival organizer, with whom I spoke briefly.

There were about 500 people at the Anacortes Festival on Saturday, but I would say only one hundred fifty on Sunday, so they have a long way to go. Cool weather and intermittent rain spittle probably contributed to the poor Sunday turnout. That’s just bad luck. But the acts were much stronger on Saturday and weaker on Sunday also. I did not stay for Monday. Here were some of the highlights for me.

I enjoyed Pearl Django, a hugely popular Northwest quintet specializing in the music and styles of Django Reinhart and Stephan Grappelli. I’m a sucker for a backbeat, and they certainly do that well, but I have to say that this group’s music is in the region of Jazz that borders pop, and I tire quickly of the repetitiveness of pop music. It’s a good group, and I especially like the accordion, but a little goes a long way with me.

Jessica Williams was so cold on the outdoor stage that she actually had to wear gloves with the fingertips cut off. Wrapped in a wool blanket, she huddled over the keyboard to the accompaniment of her trio. But it wasn’t long before she was in outer space and the blanket slipped off her shoulders and the gloves came off. I can’t remember what she played, although it was one of her originals. It was just stunning. Ships passing in the straights of Juan de Fuca stopped, cut engine, and hovered behind the bandstand to listen. She played more originals and a few covers, possibly Easy to Remember or Night and Day, but they were revelations, not “standards” the way she played them. I snapped up three of her CDs, not all of which are easy to find. Worth the price of admission.

The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra (SRJO) is a local favorite group now in their thirteenth year. About two dozen players specialize in big band jazz, which I am not a fan of, but this group surprised me. They were much better than I expected. I could have used more of the bass trombone, an instrument I was not familiar with. The band's sound tended to big and brassy, a little weak in the winds, but overall it really did swing. Some soloists were moderately hot. I appreciated the mix of younger talent and seasoned old timers.

A local quartet, Frankly Moanin, entertained to the outdoor picnic tables during the lunch break. Bass, drums, keyboard and guitar had obviously worked together for a long time, and I really liked this group.

Devin Phillips plays a very hot saxophone, mostly tenor but also alto and bass. He is based in Portland, OR now, having left his native New Orleans after Katrina. His quartet was the leadoff hitter on an overcast Sunday morning at 11 am, which, for jazz players, is the middle of the night. They actually seemed groggy at first but soon got into the groove. Phillips’ playing is fast and aggressive, and that is his virtue and shortcoming. On a slow ballad, he can hardly hold himself down long enough to let much personal expression come through. But on an exuberant piece, like his group’s signature Wade in the Water, he is in his element. The others in the group are also very good but pianist Oliver Anderson is a special standout. Phillips is also interesting to look at. The way he scowls and stalks about the stage, sometimes I see Miles Davis in his face. But when I shook his hand and spoke to him after the show, he was quiet, gentle, polite, and sincere, not at all like the stage persona he projects. I’m quite sure we’ll be seeing more of him. I picked up a CD, called, Katrina-appropriately, Wade in the Water, which is available at http://cdbaby.com/cd/devinphillips

I am crazy about Hammond B3 so I had hopes for the soul-funk group McTuff, which played after lunch. Unfortunately, they cranked the sound system up so high that even with earplugs, the threshold of pain was fast approaching. I moved way to the back of the wharf, but got little relief. Besides the earsplitting sound, I was disappointed by the music, which was raw and rowdy, the sort of stuff you would expect in a bar down by the docks on a Saturday night. It confirmed my bias that “funk” means “unprincipled.” Anyway, just not my cup of tea, and the harsh sound forced me off the festival grounds to walk about the picturesque docks and the Anacortes old town.

(Cool fireboat nearby)