Play Anon

At Last

2012-01-24T23:20:00.000-05:00

Hollywood awards season is a test of endurance for me. More of a clubby series of self-congratulatory pageants dressed in designer finery than a credible display of artistic achievement, the Oscars are perhaps the most obvious of high school popularity contests. And yet my stomach was all butterflies as I anxiously checked the list of Best Actor Oscar nominees this morning. There's something about big-name recognition of longtime favorites that is immensely satisfying, popularity contest or not.

It was amazing - beyond amazing -to see Gary Oldman finally, at long last, get nominated for an Academy Award. Longtime friends will tell you I had a huge crush on him - or rather, on Oldman's awesome, inspiring, occasionally terrifying talent. For all his talk of despising "the method," he seemed to live what he acted. It was thrilling to watch him move between genres so easily, and become so unreservedly, uninhibitedly lost in a role. It still is, I'm discovering.

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead cemented my love of language and literature. What impressed me in the film, along with Oldman and fellow Brit Pack-er Tim Roth's comfort with that language, was their sparky natural chemistry. Taking cues from older traditions (Godot especially) and mixing them with the best of British vaudeville (Laurel and Hardy especially), Oldman and Roth are a tag team of interconnected excellence. I was enchanted by Oldman as the dimwit of the pair, whether he was tinkering with Foucault's pendulum or watching sailboats in the bathtub. But it didn't prepare me for JFK, where I was struck dumb by his performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. Far from being merely imitative, the slight, mushy-mouthed, supposed lone-gun-assassin suddenly becomes very human - a lonely, tortured figure, demonized by his own swirlingly persistent, painfully obvious need to belong. Oldman gets the "lone" part of "Lone Gunman" absolutely dead-on.

Oldman's performance -those urgent blue eyes, the slumped shoulders, the quick temper -seared itself on my young mind. I found State Of Grace and again was astonished. The performance as the wild-card gangster Jackie - haunted, passionate, angry -is simply one of the most memorable ever committed to film. When Bram Stoker's Dracula was released in November 1992, I was well-versed in Oldman's canon, and had no trouble picturing the guy who'd played Sid Vicious years before becoming the sexy demonic Count. He's a great actor - and that's what great actors do. They're not supposed to be pretty. Right? I didn't like Gary because he was pretty. I liked him because he was brilliant. Barely recognizable from one role to the next, Oldman has a great, unsung habit of plumbing the depths of despair, celebrating the heights of absurdity, and living the vida loca (sometimes for real) across the cinematic universe. He is every color in the artist's paintbox, every hue and beam and shadow on the canvas.

So while some of his choices haven't inspired - the reductive baddies in Air Force One, Lost In Space, The Fifth Element and The Book Of Eli come to mind -he's always been eminently watchable. As Radio Times reporter Danny Leigh so eloquently put it, "A chameleon full of indelibletics who all but disappeared inside his characters, Oldman made average films good, and good ones spectacular." Neither the Harry Potter nor Batman re-envisionings were on my cultural radar, but late one night about a year ago, I was watching TV and saw Christian Bale's square jaw jutting out of the famous black cowl on television, and a flood of inspired memories returned, of nights spent worshipping a choir of spectacularly realized misfits I felt I knew so well. Joe, Sid, Jackie, Rosencrantz, Lee, Ludwig, Norman, Jack, Drexel. Dracula. That guy. Then George Smiley sauntered in.

Like many, I've questioned why the Academy Awards -or indeed its poorer Golden cousin -haven't recognized Oldman for his work. He said on NPR Fresh Air recently that he thinks of himself as a "character actor" more than anything, which is a huge shame. Could a character actor so beautifully personify John Le Carre's quietly complex spy? Come now. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a slow-burn sort of work. Its passion is whispered, not declaimed, in the most adult kind of way. Much has been made of how "quiet" Oldman's performance is too. Yet don't confuse that term with "small"; his Smiley is as grand and fiery as anything else he's ever done over the past three decades. It's an inner sort of flame, the sort you can see running across his probing blue eyes when Smiley carefully takes his morning swim, each stroke a calculated piece of focus and concentration. We sense the innate heartbreak Oldman's so excelled at portraying onscreen in the past, when Smiley catches his wife being unfaithful with a co-worker: the gaping mouth, the stunted breath, the wide eyes and wild blinking. We sense that fierce passion when George takes a seat in the film's final moments, straightening his shoulders, jutting out his chin ever so slightly, the merest hint of a smile crossing his lips. You want to shriek at the perfection of it all.

As it is, I'm left, at the end of today, wanting to shriek with joy over that nomination, and yet quietly taking a few deep breaths of joy, contemplating that genius might, just might, be recognized by the popular kids. Some of us think it's about time.

Top illustration by Matthew Brazier.

Home

2012-01-06T01:10:00.001-05:00

Happy 2012.

I've avoided writing a column here for a little while, not only because I genuinely couldn't think of anything good to write, but because of a growing discomfort with living my life online, with having strangers pour over the minutaie of my thoughts and ideas. I've been struggling with what it means to be a writer -a journalist, reporter, novelist, scribe, screenwriter, what-have-you -in the 21st century, and after two months, I still don't have a decent answer. So let's start with "home" - it's been on my mind, and perhaps, in light of the passed holiday season, yours too.

When I moved to New York last March, I had the distinct feeing I was returning home. I didn't know why; I wasn't born there, though I visited frequently as a teen and into my twenties. I always felt comfortable in New York: I had my favorite spots as an adolescent that included Tower Records, Reminiscence, and long-goners The Grand Ticino, and Cafe Mozart. I ran into photographers Matthew Rolston and Albert Watson in the Village. I saw Pavarotti at the Met. I got my Broadway tickets through a friend who worked in the second tower at 1 World Trade Center. I was out so late it was early at the Five Spot and God knows what other jazz spots I wasn't supposed to be in (being under 21). I never thought twice about wandering around alone, taking pictures and notes and mental snapshops of the smell, the look, the sheer... feeling of the Big Bad Apple of the late 80s and early 90s.

It's hard to describe to someone who's not been there. I've a friend who's breaking her Big Apple cherry in March, and though the list of "you must go to"s keeps growing, I remind myself that every single person has a different experience. It's like getting your very own personalized Ben & Jerry's flavor: it has all the things you love, with little bits and bobs of everyone else's yumyums, but you know it was made just for you, with a stamp in the middle when you open the lid saying START SPREADING THE NEWS. I found that flavor when I moved last year, and I had every argument with myself about why I didn't deserve a flavor: I'm too stupid, I'm not connected, I'm too old, I'm not pretty, I'm scared. What? Gluttony's in my veins. Gluttony shrieks for a metropolis that lives and breathes in a twenty-four hour cycle of survival, sweat, sex, sales, and rough-hewn savoir-faire. Gluttony has nothing to do with looks or connections or smarts. Gluttony doesn't respect fear. To experience the full flavor, I only had to step outside and look around. It was so simple.

And so New York became (indeed always was) home for me in a way Toronto never was, and never will be. This acknowledgment, made foolishly public, garnered no small bit of surprise, even shock, in social (and social media) circles.

"But you were born here," people will say, not trying too hard to hide their dis-ease and judgement.

"They're crazy down there," others will add with full passive-aggressive smirkiness. I don't know what to make of the haterating, but I have my theories, the most obvious being Tall Poppy Syndrome, surely an umbilical leftover tied to Mummy Britain.

Theorizing aside, home, for me, has f*ck all to do with where you're born. Gabriel Byrne spoke about this very concept in May when he introduced Edna O'Brien at her reading for Saints and Sinners, his notion of Irish writerly creativity being tied up with what "home" means, of one neither comfortable in one's adopted homeland, nor in the place one was born. I experienced that during a visit I made last month. It was bittersweet, surreal, and strange. I was home, but I no longer had an apartment. I had no base, but I was home, and I had everywhere to go. The sheer thrill of being there made me leap out of bed and thank some gritty unknown power. Living there inspired me to write page after page of ideas, observations, goals, experiences, and to get in touch with friends new and old. It scared the life out of me. It woke me up. I knew returning to Canada would kill me on some level, and it was a murder I had to accept as inevitable.

Returning to Canada this time around underlined that home is, indeed, where your heart is. Perhaps we have to accept the mercy killings of small parts of ourselves until we can get back to where we are truly meant to be. Perhaps the ashes from those graves can be used to make something entirely new, in a place that feels entirely, luxuriously ancient, a glorious mish-mash of deja-vu, fate, hope, faith, and sheer teeth-gnashing determination. Here's to that creation growing into something beautiful in 2012.

Photos from my Flickr photostream.

Are You Not Entertained?

2011-11-29T13:46:00.000-05:00

Inspiration has been hard to come by in these late November days. The greyness is thick, endless, unrelenting and unmoving, smug in its stifling tofu blandness. New tires spin aimlessly on a car that's been flipped upside down and left to rot. Nothing goes forwards fast enough, if at all. To borrow from Beckett, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes... it's awful." No kidding.

The bright spot -and it's a weird bright spot -has been politics, specifically American politics. The race to the 2012 Presidential elections has been spectacularly theatrical, the personalities and behaviors ribald and riveting. Meltdowns! Mistresses! Racist rocks! Rocking racists! Bumps! Stumps! Ooops! Loop-de-loops! Since living in the United States, I just can't get enough of its mad, bad, dangerous-to-know, good/bad/ugly aesthetic. An American-born, Canadian-living friend told me she thinks of America as bacon: it's greasy, delicious, bad for you and good for your tastebuds. It's addictive, unhealthy, and even the smell of it is enough to convince you that you need it. Without it, so many other things would just be boring, grey... depressingly bland. November forever. Ugh.

Yet it's anything but bland in the world of Twitter. At every GOP debate, the microblogging site has resembled a hummingbird on meth: observations, opinions, fact checks, exchanges and retweets come at breakneck speed, with nary a moment to think twice. I've partaken and tried to keep up, @ing one person, RTing another, the new linguistics of a modern communication long and comfortably entrenched into my 21st century vernacular. More than an education, my enthusiasm for the spectacle of American politics has opened a door to connecting with some smart, witty, talented people, using a technology I couldn't have guessed at ten years ago. Perhaps that's the magic.

The sense of event-with-a-capital-E combined with all the elements of theater implies a shared love of real-life drama that in no way diminishes the seriousness of what's being discussed. Online users are like critics' unions, decimating, disassembling, disabusing and discarding, while offering credit where it's due. But unlike theater-theater, political theater is a forum where the off-stage antics of its players are every bit as vital -in a theatrical sense -as their onstage performance. While some larger networks utilize the commentary of silly tweeters in far to serious a manner, it's worth remembering that there are many credible, smart tweeters whose 140-character commentary blasts open new neural pathways, not to mention super-bright highways, along the freeway of 21st century American political life.

As if to match the velocity on that road, I find myself zooming by old interests. Trips to the art gallery replace the theater; the lecture hall goes before the symphony hall; the arena sits in lieu the club. Much as a reflection of my age, it's a reflection of shifting routes in those neural pathways (though I should add, I still love the theater and the symphony).

But the combination of politics and tweeting has brought out a childlike sense of play, something long missing amidst the grey November days.

During a recent GOP debate that I began exchanging theatrical-esque theories on roles for candidates, especially within a (not altogether unsuitable) high school setting. My talented companion and I decided Rick Perry would be the boisterous gym coach who urges you to run faster even though your lungs are ready to explode, Jon Hunstman, the possibly-swoon-worthy English teacher who, by tossing off an insulting comment about your favorite poet, turns you off for life. Herman Cain would be the ever-frustrated business teacher who puts his hands on his head when the class gets too loud, while Newt Gingrich is the perpetually sour-faced math teacher who gives you a yelling-at whenever you ask too many seemingly-dumb questions. Michelle Bachmann would be the history teacher who'd assign you an essay and write you another one back if she didn't like what you wrote. Rick Santorum would be the science teacher who'd argue with his own students, Ron Paul the classics teacher who'd go off on hour-long tangents and entertain student ideas about smoking in the caf.

Theater. Imagination. Possibility. Politics.

More, please. I love my bacon, and I'm not prepared to live without it.

Not now, or ever.

Hey, There's My Kid!

2011-11-09T00:55:00.018-05:00

Showing the world my art was a strange experience.

By "art" I don't mean my writing, which anyone can see online (or in print, if you happened to subscribe to various music zines in the 1990s), or (some 0f) my photography, which can also be seen in various online spots. No, I mean my painting.

Painting was an obsession for me in the early aughties. It was the "last" art I discovered and sought instruction in. It was, to borrow a phrase from Bukowski, my last creative whore - all the others were gone. Used up, dried out, buried under the weight of too many experiences and expectations too soon. "Why not drawing?" I thought. Why not, indeed.

My teacher was an experienced professional artist and instructor who encouraged curiosity and connection -with our fellow budding artists, with visual art of the past and the present, and with our chosen media. After a few weeks of basics in pencil drawing, she slowly introduced the 123s of watercolor.

"Have you painted before?" she asked me during one session, cocking an eyebrow at a snow-covered branch I was working on.

"No... why?"

Beat. A pause.

"Really?"

"Never?"

"No."

Another pause.

"You really look like you have. This... this seems to come quite naturally to you."

It was mere months before I'd shrugged off the watery coil of watercolor and moved on to the rich gooey sea of oils. I loved the sludge-like quality, the caramel richness of colors, the bumpy-buttery ripples and waves of texture. I even loved the sharp, acidic smell.

Many years and many canvases later, writing came calling again, as it inevitably would. Drawing came and went, as my visual side found expression in other things - a rediscovery of photography that ran parallel to technological advacenemtns in digital technology, experiments with black sharpies, trying out color conte for the first time. Drawing and painting had a surprisingly joyous union during a particularly experimental period last autumn, which, I have no doubt, planted the idea of my moving to New York City. Something about trying certain media together, at once, in totally new ways, blasted open neural pathways I hadn't known existed.

And so it was, returning to purely painting. Chris Pemberton, co-founder of the Toronto live painting event Art Battle, invited me to be a part of the Signals From The DEW Line, an event honoring Canadian thinker and author Marshall McLuhan. Held at the storied Gladstone Hotel, the event was a blend of poetry and painting that took as its theme McLuhan's idea that "art, at its most significant, is a distant early warning (or D.E.W.) system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen." Artists, then, are signifiers of change in society, of new ways of thinking and expressing and being. Heady stuff.

I didn't think of any of this when the 18-inch square canvas was given to me. But there was something awfully stimulating about painting with a purpose. It wasn't just some mamby-pamby thing I was doing anymore. I had a due date. I had a deadline. I had a place in the 25-painterly grid. And so, I set about, letting equal parts instinct and experience guide me, as Soundcheck blared in the background and the taste of strong coffee sat on the tongue. A squirt of paint here, a brush stroke there; it all came together, and the piece was still tacky when I carefully walked it through the doors of the Gladstone Hotel lastnight. Suddenly this little canvas was more than just homework: it was my child.

My work has never, ever been exhibited before, not individually, and certainly not amongst the work of other, more accomplished and experienced artists. Once my piece was up, there was a momentary sense of "Oh-Gawd, mine's-crap"-like comparison, but it didn't last. This private act I engage in, of drawing and painting, of going past words (my admitted comfort zone and obvious stock in trade) was being scrutinized, observed, judged and enjoyed. It was like seeing a little one in their first school concert; some kids look more turned-out and comfortable than others, there's a lot of waving and smiling, you wonder if they'll get through it intact. When the whole class is up there taking a bow at the end, you can't help but feel proud -of not only them, but of everyone's else's kid, and the fact your kids all worked together. It fortifies your sense of faith in humanity.

And that's just how it felt, to look at my painting, hanging there with 24 other, entirely-other works. As Christopher observed, "Yours is so very different." Of course my kid is different, I wanted to say. I didn't plan it that way, but I'm not surprised that's how s/he turned out. It's nice to be with a crowd, but not of it. Even so, different-ness doesn't guarantee confidence. Leaving my painting at the Gladstone was strange, and a bit stressful (it's exhibited there with the others through Monday). I had a momentary twinge of -what, grief? separation anxiety? parental sentimentality? -when I walked into my tiny studio space at home and immediately noted that particular painting's absence. It had become a sparky little fixture amongst the larger, older stalwarts, who seemed to hover and surround it in a protective huddle. I got cold thinking of it hanging in silence and darkness all night, alone and open to the elements of unfamiliar eyeballs and sneaky urban spiders.

But my little one isn't alone - it's with 24 other works, all with parnets of their own. There's something reassuring about that - about being together, distinct, joined, and individual, all at once. Sooner or later, we have to let our kids go. We never stop thinking of the days we spent in squawking, squealing, squirming color, bringing this thing to life. That energy is on our own stained hands, the back aches, the neck kinks, the multi-color sinks and the spiky smells around us. We send our kids out into the world, and get right back to making a new one, over and over.

All photos from my Flickr photostream.

Oh yeah: My painting is the super-dark one just above the man-opens-curtain-sees-kitty work. It didn't photograph well -at all.

My kid's difficult that way. Sigh.

No Artificiality

2011-11-04T09:28:00.000-04:00

A recent blog post on the organization A Work Of Heart was met with huge interest, and proved very popular across the internet. People applaud the marriage of creativity and commerce, because it doesn't smack of the patronizing attitudes that so often dominate the conversation around aid.

Far too often there is a kind of smug arrogance over the role one may've played in some do-good initiative or another; one becomes more interested in our laser-pointed act of generosity to The Less Fortunate (who always, it must be said, remain nameless and faceless in their poverty) than in providing empowerment to achieve a livelihood not unlike our own. Western aid is often characterized by an agenda of righteousness, utterly lacking in awareness of history or culture. Self-empowerment, self-determination, responsibility and accountability... what's that?

FELA! may have some answers. The mega-musical, produced by Jay-Z and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, revolves around the life and music of Nigerian artist Fela Kuti. While Kuti may have passed away in 1997, his work -and the show itself - underlines his political and artistic legacies for audiences, both white and black, Western and non-Western, in the 21st century. Kuti's life revolved around politics and art, the hows and why and wherefores of the two intersecting, and the power created therein to affect real change, both in his short time on earth, and past it, for all time, for all Nigerians. Kuti's sound is a musical smorgasbord of influences; he liberally mixed the sounds of indigenous African beats (namely Yoruba drums) with big American-sounding horns and twanging James Brown-style guitars. His work even betrays Middle Eastern influence; there's a distinctly Klezmer mood in "Mr. Follow Follow" mixed in with the funky beats and bleating horns.

In FELA! the songs as used both as plot points and party anthems, and perhaps, both; the party becomes political, and the political becomes a party. "Water No Get Enemy", "Expensive Shit" and "Zombie" are seamlessly interwoven throughout the piece, providing dialogue and narrative drive, along with groove and timeliness. The work may take place somewhere around 1977, but FELA! is less a period piece than it is an evocation of the power of music to empower a people and a nation. One nation under a groove, indeed.

Groove isn't something that Toronto audiences immediately respond to in the theater, however. FELA! opened at the city's Canon Theatre at the end of October, brought to Canada by Mirvish Productions. The show's charismatic lead, Sahr Ngaujah immediately sensed some Canadian shyness during a recent Friday night performance, and he wasn't pleased. The accomplished build the energy, doing call-and-responses, storming off the stage James Brown-style, and getting us on our feet to dance. Ngaujah also showed off his able improv abilities when, during one of his character's asides chatting up the wonders of igbo (or marijuana), an eager audience member shrieked "Pass!" as he lit up what looked like a gigantic joint. Ngaujah looked up with a wicked smile, clearly delighted, and began riffing on the ups and downs of reefer-sharing. It was a warm, off-the-cuff moment that underlined the human heart beating at the center of FELA! as well as the steely resolve of its title character to play by his own rules, come hell or highwater.

As in Kuti's life, the enemy in FELA! is the violent Nigerian government of the 1970s (and arguably, beyond that time period). On a larger scale, it attacks the endemic corruption of worldwide governments by corporate interests. The decision to have an unseen enemy, rather than actual physicalized figures, renders their evil deeds -the rape of Kuti's "Queens", the murder of his mother -more horrific, even as it solidifies Kuti's defiance. Giant screens on either side of the stage portray various shots from the time and from the musician's own life; scenes of mobs, arrests, beatings, of newspaper headlines, of shots of Kuti's compound and The Shrine (the interior of which is the setting for the musical itself) provide a history lesson, but it's wrapped in the pulsing sound of Afrobeat, the sonic hybrid Kuti pioneered and perfected. The production's onstage band, including the talented Morgan Price (who does tenor sax solos) ups the energy ante, and provides able solemnity where needed. Captivating performances by the work's female leads balance out the machismo. British actor Melanie Marshall does a stunning turn as Fela's mother Funmilayo Kuti, her coloratura soprano soaring as she inspires her son even past the grave. L.A.-based actor Paulette Ivory is a force of nature as Sandra, Fela's American wife. Whether she's standing with hand on hip, head cocked, or belting out "Lover" in her strong pop-inflected voice, Ivory's presence is, as we suspect with Sandra, one to be reckoned with.

Interestingly, Toronto critics, amidst their praise of the popular Tony Award-winning work, noted the lack of portraying Kuti's polygamy, and the fact FELA! is lacking in physicalized bad guys - but those criticisms ignore what this work is really about: one man using his art to fight for change. The finale encapsulates the twin impulses toward art and politics that characterized Kuti's life, combinining his untimely passing with that of other key political figures. It's eerie -and eye-opening -to witness coffin after coffin being carried onstage and piled artfully in one corner, each coffin bearing the name of either a murdered figure (like Ken Saro-Wiwa), or a company (like Shell Oil) who must die so that The Shrine (aka Nigeria) might live. One understands more clearly the legacy Kuti left, not only for his own country, not only for his fans, but for people who are fighting for justice, dignity, empowerment, and respect.

Those issues are crystalline in their presentation, but they aren't delivered with any didacticism or smugness. FELA! is too smart for that. Instead, the show is education via entertainment, enlightenment through electrical musical energy. The Torontonians at the Canon knew some of the songs, and could be heard (softly) singing the words or humming along. The subtext was understood, but they couldn't help but get lost in the music. That's the power of art, well done and well-executed. If only this marvelous Mirvish Production was playing longer than two weeks -this is precisely the kind of entertaining, electrifying, timely programming Toronto theatre needs. If you're in the polite Canadian city, make time between now and Sunday (its closing day) to see FELA! -and make sure you shout, dance, and make noise. Not to be charitable - just because it feels so damn good.

Photo credits:

Top photo: Paulette Ivory and Sahr Ngaujah by Tristram Kenton

Middle photo: Catherine Foster, Sahr Ngaujah and Nicole de Weever ©Monique Carboni

Bottom photo: Sahr Ngaujah as Fela Kuti and the Broadway cast of FELA! ©Monique Carboni

Piano Heart

2011-10-31T09:55:00.003-04:00

I don't miss playing the piano. But I miss having a piano.

It was no easy thing to grow up in the shadow of a violinist and band leader, watched over by an opera aficionado, mocked by a large, grand piano parked like a monolith in the living room, its white and black keys jutting out like jagged, menacing teeth.

You don't know what you're doing! it always mocked, You're just reading what's in front of you! Anyone can do that!

Seeing 2 Pianos 4 Hands was an exercise in nostalgia. With its review of time signatures and keys, its lines about semitones and a syllabus, its portrayal of the dreaded Conservatory exams, the show, produced by Mirvish Productions and currently on at Toronto's cozy Panasonic Theatre, gently, humorously reminded me of all the things I hated about my piano-centric past. When I began lessons at the tender age of four, I only knew it was fun to sit at a keyboard and go plunk-plunk-plunk. Over time, I derived a certain smug satisfaction from deciphering little black marks on a page. My considerably more-musical best friend across the street would come by and rock my staid classical world with his off-the-cuff, fast, fun, boogie-woogie improvisations and fancy-dancy pop tunes new and old. It irritated me because not only did it mess up the organized world of Bach, Beethoven et all the RCM presented, but it reminded me of what I could not do: play something fun, straight out of my head, without any little black squiggles for guidance. Music has an important role in my life, but it's not an artform I can actively be a part of, because I am critically lacking in the one thing you need to make a go of it: real musical talent.

It was when I dropped formal music lessons that I realized visual and written arts come far more naturally to me than sonic ones. Writing, drawing, and photography are work -sometimes torturously so -but the kind of work I enjoy. I don't revel in failure so much as get nervous at the prospect of throwing all my dirty laundry out for public scrutiny. It was bolstering, then, to see two men who, for all their success in other artistic disciplines, willingly reveal their shared failure at being full-time professional musicians. Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt, 2P4H's co-creators, are good at a lot of things, mainly within the realm of performance -that includes acting, directing, writing, and yes, lots of very-able piano-playing. A pair of Horowitzes they are not, but then, that's just the point. Not everyone can -or should -be.

2 Pianos 4 Hands paints a portrait of artistry frustrated by the relentless slings and arrows of reality. The show was first performed at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre in 1995, and has since gone on to play over 175 different theaters worldwide, including a six-month run at the Kennedy Center in Washington. The production is simple, with two huge grand, Yamaha pianos facing each other, and the leads kitted out in formal suits (including tails) and alternating characters: piano teachers, parents, their disgruntled childhood and teenaged selves. What could easily slip into saccharine territory comes crashing back into the sour zone, thanks in part to the duo's finely-tuned sense of timing. Moments that could be difficult for non-classical music lovers to stomach (young Ted's swooning over a live recording of Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall, for instance) are quickly given necessary shots of levity (an eyeroll here, a shrug there), elements that work in tandem with the innate chemistry between Dykstra and Greenblatt. The trust they have, in each other, the material, their abilities, the music, shows, and extends itself to both emotional scenes (like those involving a face-off between young "Teddy" and his strict father) and comedic ones (such as young Richard's meltdown during a music competition), offering some far more than the warm-hearted fuzzies a memory show might imply. Artistic passion and brutal truths are dished out with equal vigor, making the final scene -of the two playing J.S. Bach's Concerto in D minor, 1st Movement -all the more poignant. With the two pianos joined in one fussy piece of Baroque splendor, the line between music and theatre is rubbed away, with performer and performance becoming one expression of frustrated dreams, of altered plans, of new awakenings. 2 Pianos 4 Hands is one of those shows that makes you think, and feel, and remember, and hope, all at once. No small feat.

My child-like urge to plunk around on the keys bubbles up every now and again, minus the heavy weight of classical-music education squashing my innate creative curiosity. That's the spark of where all my artistic (and journalistic) pursuits come from, after all- from that prickly-skinned, many-tentacled, multi-eyed, fast-swimming creature called curiosity. Part of giving in to that creature means enduring the occasional mental shit-kicking to keep at it, to commit, to sit in the damn chair until it's done, and to go deeper and reach higher and be better. But what if you hit the glass ceiling? What if there is no "better"? Coming face-to-face with that reality is no easy task; acknowledging it in public, in front of a group of strangers, in the dark, on a stage, every night can be downright terrifying, a horror show of the highest order. But risk is good, and, in the realm of the arts, an absolute necessity. Risk keeps curiosity happy and alive. Kudos to Dykstra and Greenblatt -and to all the frustrated artists. Thank you for putting your risk on display. We hear, we paint, we write, we read, we see. Thank you for taking that risk. Thank you for the music.

Photo credits:

Top photo, Wikipedia.

Middle photo by Rick O'Brien.

2 Pianos 4 Hands photos courtesy Mirvish Productions.

Clutching the Spawn

2011-10-25T15:54:00.008-04:00

After news of a violent dictator's violent demise, the disunity of the European Union, the leaving of one troubled country (and trust issues with another), Jobs, more jobs, a GOP horse race, moaning millionaires, occupiers everywhere, and some very awful flooding, my writer's block feels less important than ever - but it's burning more keenly. My creative panic is running rampant, worried it's losing its sacred pride of place in my life.

WRITE SOMETHING!, it shrieks, late at night.

"I'm tired," I yawn.

WRITE NOW!, it shrieks upon waking.

"I have to go to work," I say, making a sympathetic face.

WHAT ABOUT NOW?!, it shouts in the evenings.

"Walk the dog/do the laundry/email A through M about N through Z."

Oh, and watch the news.

It's a wonder the creative panic -I think it was once called a Muse -sticks around at all.

I often feel like my journalistic self is pushing my creative self out of the way, the big-shouldered bully pushing down the black-caped wimp in the schoolyard. But every once in a while, that caped figure gets back up again and waves a magic wand.

Lasntight, Seamus Heaney was on PBS NewsHour, a program I watch with fervent devotion and intense admiration. It was excellent, if jarring, to see Jeffrey Brown interviewing one of my favorite poets after the newscast's featuring reports on Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, and much more. NewsHour's website features Heaney reading his poem, 'Death Of A Naturalist', which is ridiculously beautiful and worth a watch.

Watch Seamus Heaney Reads 'Death of a Naturalist' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

What a treat to see this celebrated writer speak so candidly about his innate fear over suffering a stroke in 2006, and what a strange blessing to hear him share his initial feelings of doubt when embarking on a new piece work:

...when you're beginning, you're not sure. I mean, is this a poem? Or is it just a shot at a poem? Or is it kind of a dead thing? But when it comes alive in a way to feel that's your own utterance, then I think you're in business.

More often than not, it's been poetry that's brought me back to that uniquely personal "utterance" of late. Daily news does make a glorious, chaotic clang that is its own sexy siren song, but it doesn't hold a candle to the more quiet meditations of poetry. That shrieking creative panic who troubles me morning, noon, and night seems like little more than an ignored muse who toes I keep inadvertently stepping on.

Perhaps I'll let the chorus of Heaney's marshy choir envelope the newsy noise that's been covering up the gigantic, five-borough-shaped hole in my heart. Creation is messy business indeed, but one has to be clutched by the wordy spawn sooner or later, or, more accurately, take a ride on the back of the Leviathan that sloshes its tail through the swampy waters of my daily life. To quote another poet, the readiness is all. Hang on. Eyes wide open. Pen ready.

Paintings:

Top - "The Muses Melpomene, Erato and Polymnia" by Eustache Le Sueur

Bottom - "Urania and Erato" by Sebastiano Conca.

Art Meets Heart

2011-10-24T11:32:00.015-04:00

I'm always surprised and delighted by the sheer number of fascinating, artsy events happening in Toronto at any given time. In addition to Art Battle, A Work Of Heart, which also features live painting, is coming up soon. A Work Of Heart is an initiative that brings together artists and philanthropy in a spirit of cooperation, self-determination, curiosity and sharing. To quote its current release, "artwork is donated by seven local artists... half of the proceeds will go towards building a boarding school in Kenya's Mathare Slum."

Owing to conversations with TMS Ruge and other experts in the field of aid and development, I've developed a kind of mental alarm system for anything resembling Western-style feel-good-isms toward African nations. Too often those efforts are exercises in narcissism and brand-building, offering simplistic answers and reflecting the organizers' romanticized (/stereotypical /racist) image of Africa and its citizens moreso than actively acknowledging the messy, complicated, multi-layered world of development and well, humanity overall. It's easy to reduce a nation -its citizens within it, its continent around it -to easy slogans and poetic images, ones colored by celebrity visits and ad campaigns and big-ass concerts.

Work Of Heart is less interested in big gestures than it is in committing to long-term good. It's a small, grassroots organization working at the grassroots level, lead by people who've been there, done that, and (vitally) plan to, for a long, long time. They put their money, time, energy and resources where their mouths are, their paintbrushes where their heart is. They aren't afraid to get dirty, and they aren't afraid to commit to the long-haul.

Laura Armstrong is the founder of Work Of Heart; she has a degree in Film and English, and has travelled extensively, working with Canadian organization Global Youth Network. It was through her work with GYN that she travelled to Kenya to work with HIV positive women and children, and subsequently got in touch with UCRC (Ugunja Community Resource Centre), an NGO that, to quote its website, "acts as an umbrella organization for more than sixty local community groups including women, children, youth, farmers and people with disabilities." Their motto is "Local Action Is Beautiful." Casey Mundy, a Toronto-based publicist with a degree in Psychology, also worked with the Global Youth Network, where she worked in the Dominican Republic as well as Morocco.

There's something inspiring about these two young Canadian women who, though completely aware of their position as privileged women living and working in the Western world, are moving past that definition and into that of a citizen of the world through their long-term commitments. They understand you can't just build a school, pat yourself on the back, and walk away; in fact, they keep walking towards goals whose benefits are not immediate, but are profound, real, and offer long-term benefit to communities.

A Work Of Heart's latest art event happens tomorrow night in Toronto. I recently exchanged ideas about the organization, and about the roads that intersect between art, aid, and advancement with Laura and Casey. Their answers make me want to continue following A Work Of Heart to see how their initiatives progress.

How did you become interested in aid and development issues?

Laura: During my undergrad at Wilfred Laurier University, I started to participate in volunteer trips abroad. I helped build a house in the Dominican Republic, volunteered in India with famine relief, Peru for Dangue fever prevention, and Kenya to work with women and children with HIV. Different cultures and world issues fascinate me. I want to continue working abroad and learn as much as possible.

Casey: I also became extremely interested in aid and development issues while a student at Wilfrid Laurier. I have spent time volunteering in Morocco and Dominican Republic. Working and living with the local people in another country is a very different experience than simply visiting that location and its renowned tourist destinations. You get to really know the place, the people, their way of life and their motivations when you immerse yourself in their lifestyle.

The main thing I hear and read is that Western-style gestures don't help in implementing long-term change - that it's feel-good-ism for the privileged. How much of this initiative is about the long-term?

Laura: We work with an organization called Living Positive Kenya (LPK) which is located in the Mathare Slum, the second largest slum in Aftrica. This NGO is a support group for women and children living with HIV. Mary Wanderi, who founded this NGO (and is currently Director of Living Positive Ngong), is a pervious social worker who had the heart-breaking job of going into the homes of women who have died and retrieving their children. After dealing with an overwhelming amount of HIV related deaths she decided she had to take action. She then created LPK.

Women can come to LPK to receive support and job training. These women are taught how to live positively while HIV positive. When implementing a development project abroad you need to involve the community as much as possible and think in advance about potential problems and not assume what they would be. Observation and long term planning is key in making a sustainable project. We agree that education is the most vital way to change the future of the LPK children and will give their mothers time to work while their children attend school. That is why this boarding school project is where we are investing our attention and resources.

Why did you create A Work Of Heart?

Laura: I want to be there for the long haul. I am not looking for the the international ‘feel-good-ism’ experience and to simply walk away. These women aren’t just a group we support- they are our friends. We work together to figure out what the deeper problems are in the slum and try to find solutions that work for them and their community. After my first trip to Kenya, I felt that the amount of money needed to upgrade the LPK daycare was something I could easily fundraise. Selling my art seemed like the best bet to raise that money in my spare time. I paint as a hobby so it was nice to have a reason to do it more often.

What role do you see for art in helping to create social change?

Laura: Artists in general have a lot of passion and are always looking for ways to push boundaries with their talent. A Work of Heart allows them to push a new boundary because their art can now physically change a life for the better. Art is impossible to define but can be best described as something that makes us feel less alone. We want to take this concept and broaden it beyond the painting. Through the selling of our art we can connect to people across the world who are in grave need. It’s not just about painting a great picture; it’s about ‘painting a better world.’

Casey: Art is a positive practice that crosses language barriers and can be experienced globally. Art is exciting because it can mean something different to different people and create an emotional response. There is no right or wrong way to paint or be involved with art. I think that this project exemplifies how one person really can make a difference and that visual art, along with all types of art, like music, dance, can have a global reach and connect the world.

How do you find artists?

Laura: Networking. I have friends who paint who know other artists. It has slowly been growing over the past year. People I have never met want to donate pieces to me because they love the concept. It’s a great feeling to see how other artists connect to it so quickly and so passionately.

How do you hope to expand Work Of Heart and its reach?

Laura: We have decided to push our goals and limits further each year. Last year we aimed to raise $1,000.00 and this year we want to raise $10,000.00. This is our first art show. We hope to have larger ones down the road and have more artists from the GTA involved. We have a deep connection to the women and children we work with in Kenya and want to help them build a sustainable community for their children and themselves.

Casey: I hope to continue to raise positive awareness for A Work of Heart through the media and help to build a solid base of supporters. I am passionate about this project and happy to pitch something I truly believe in.

A Work Of Heart Facebook page is here.

Faust It

2011-10-06T12:22:00.002-04:00

Faust is one of my favorite legends. The story of a man who defied the limits of mortality and the chains of morality has a resonance far past its German origins. I devoured both the Marlowe and Goethe tales as a child, enchanted by the mix of the dark and the divine. Years later, I discovered the operatic, musical, cinematic, and rock and roll adaptations. Faust reverberates a lot through popular culture, even making an appearance at the Crossroads, with one Robert Johnson. It brings up questions around how much you're willing to trade in order to get what you want - not necessarily what you need, as the Rolling Stones astutely noted, but what your ego shrieks at you to go after, whether it's love, money, fame, or a gilt-edged, flourescent combination of all three. "Careful what you wish for; you just might get it" -truer words were never more ironically bleated.

It's a myth with personal resonance for many people, particularly those working in the arts; how much would we be willing to sacrifice in order to live comfortably? Compromise is a fact of life and a frequently a necessary rusty old catalyst for success; how much of our selves -our morals, beliefs and ideals -would be give up in order to be published/heard/seen? There's always a trade-off, as Faust reminds us. Nothing comes easy -and nothing ever comes for free.

Director F.W. Murnau, best known for the creepy vampire flick Nosferatu, filmed a much-lauded version of Faust that was released in 1926. It would be his last German work before going off to Hollywood. Though we can't surmise the sorts of sounds Murnau might've wanted for his classic work, we can at least use our imaginations, something that's less and less common in the movie house these days. Accomplished Canadian composer Robert Bruce runs a series of live scoring events for silent films. He'll be performing live musical accompaniment to Faust this coming Friday (tomorrow) night. We exchanged ideas about the film and the role of music in cinema.

Why Faust? What's the attraction?

In this particular case, it is the film more than the legend for me. I have looked at many silent films in search of finding ones that still hold up well today, and ones that do well with my musical scores. I have to believe in the film quite a bit to even get started. Faust was a special case -the film is truly wonderful! What I have done with it musically is easily my best and most effective effort out of all the silent films I have scored. This sort of thing doesn't happen too often in any multimedia project, where the planets just line up so well.

How did composing for Faust compare with other silent films you've scored?

More work went into composing special original music for Faust. The score is also longer than any other one (it's just under two hours), and it's one of the very rare silent film scores I've done that uses more of my deep, more (obviously) classical/ambient music, as opposed to the comedy programs which generally use lighter music. It is more involved -but also more rewarding, for me, and, seemingly, for the audience too.

Why do you think live scoring has become such a popular phenomenon in 21st century culture?

I've been lucky to have done extremely well with my silent film programs so far. Audiences have been very receptive and happy with my programs. Since I only work with select films, I've had the opportunity to really develop the scores and see that they blend and work well with the story/visuals. That's something that probably didn't happen too much back in the 1920s, as new films came in the theaters pretty much every week, and the house musicians had to keep up. It's almost an advantage today to go back and revisit like this.

Silent film/live music programs became a lost art at the start of the sound era. They are also a very different kind of experience. I think the gradual rediscovery of (live scoring) has been a pleasant surprise for many people in recent times. Also, as they are so retro and low-tech - I think that is refreshing in today's super-highly-produced film/media environment. Artists and filmmakers in (the early 20th century) had to rely on pure talent and ability and music, and far less on technical and editing tricks. That shows. Also, the live music element, when it works well, is a very different experience -it's more involved than a recorded score.

Heart And Intuition

2011-10-05T22:37:00.011-04:00

Earlier tonight, I heard Steve Jobs talk about the first time he learned of his cancer diagnosis. It was at a commencement address at Stamford University six years ago. Watching it was, for me, not so sentimental as it was invigorating. Jobs' tone was a mix of poe-faced acceptance and angry defiance. It was good to came across this speech, when there's so many choices swirling inside and out.

"Within You Without You" could very well be my theme right now. The man who wrote it faced some scary choices, as the first part of George Harrison: Living In The Material World (aired on HBO tonight) showed. The episode explored the personal and professional sides of Harrison, with contributions from a variety of sources, both archival and recent. Sir Paul is featured, along with Ringo, Astrid, Pattie, Yoko, George himself (taken from older interviews), producer George, and Eric Clapton (and weirdly, little to no John). The Scorcese-directed work is like a massive jigsaw of odds and sods about the Beatles' guitarist, portraying him as complex and yet "black and white", isolated and yet social, spiritual and yet practical. The first part ended with the strains of Harrison's beautifully mellifluous voice singing about his guitar gently weeping.

Harrison was always thought of as "The Quiet Beatle"; I thought of him as a gorgeous, thought-heavy (/heavy thought) man who composed tuneful melodies and had that troublesome wife. He was many things at once, which is what makes him such an endearing (and enduring) figure to so many. Harrison didn't possess any of the traits the general public perceived about the bands' members; he didn't have John's mouthiness or Paul's bossiness. Indeed, Harrison didn't have any kind of identifiable public persona one could look at and plant a flag beside. But that was his charm. His very opaqueness, one that perhaps hid a perceived sensitivity and delicate curiosity, twinned with an iron will and steely resolve, make him a beloved figure who has floated past the creaking shackles of rock and roll nostalgia.

I thought back to my first night in New York, when I had my face-to-face with Yoko Ono; the mischievous smile she had hid an innate kindness. I thought back to seeing Paul McCartney at Yankee Stadium, and the deep shock that sat in the pit of my stomach as I heard his unmistakable voice jauntily belting out the words to "Magical Mystery Tour." I remember many years ago when Ringo Starr took his seat two rows behind me at The Met. New Yorkers barely noticed, but those who did offered an outstretched hand.

The Beatles were and remain as ubiquitous to culture as Apple computers. My best friend growing up was a Paul (named after Macca), and grew up consistently using Macs. (He is, to this day, an Apple devotee.) When the huge metal boxes with the tiny screens first appeared in elementary school, I joined the club devoted to exploring and learning more about them. I was the only girl in that club. Years later, I remember the butterflies that flew around my stomach as I got my first (but not last) Power Mac, and later, my first Apple laptop, and finally, an iPod (I still have my first generation model), iPod shuffle (which I won), and iPhone (the first version of which was stolen in New York City, in fact). Apple products have become so seamlessly integrated with my daily life so as to be inseparable from its functioning. When The Beatles finally had their work made available on iTunes, it felt like something -gravity? -had shifted completely. One great cultural touchstone was finally connecting to another. The meeting felt natural, good, and right.

Harrison and Jobs may've not had much in common on the surface, but they were stealth figures shaping and moulding a new language in modern culture. And their names are forever linked, however contentiously. Tonight I flipped on CNN to hear Jobs delivering these words in 2005:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out what you really want to do. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition; they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is truly secondary.

Amidst tonight's protests, announcements and memorials, one thing rings clear tonight: life is so short. So very short. Remember. Cherish. "Within You Without You" -- there's a tune, and it keeps playing, on and on.

We were talking
About the love that's gone so cold.
And the people who gain the world
And lose their soul,
They don't know, they can't see -
Are you one of them?

When you've seen beyond yourself,
Then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there.
And the time will come
When you see we're all one,
And life flows on within you and without you.

-George Harrison

Curry Conservatory

2011-10-04T12:23:00.002-04:00

One of my strongest childhood memories involves being assigned to draw of a truism of life. The teacher was seeking a visual representation of folkoric wisdom that might illustrate our understanding of Something Really Important. I chose "Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth." It may have been a tip-off to my future passion for the culinary arts - or perhaps my impatience with throwing too many things in one small space.

I drew a long line of chefs standing across a gleaming counter, a large, bubbling soup pot placed in the very middle with orange flames tickling its bottom. Each chef, with tall white hats pointing like spears, had large, goggly eyes and anxious "O"-shaped mouths. The further the chefs from the soup pot, the longer their spoons. The chefs at each end had absurdly long, spindly spoons, with handles like spider's legs. In another panel, I drew a lady with fat round pearls and grey curls making a face, red tongue hanging over a green pallor, as she, spoon in hand, samples the chefs' offerings. Too Many Chefs indeed. I got an A.

I thought of this drawing, along with the first time I ever tried curry, when I attended a concert recently. The second experience happened at the home of Indian friends of my family's. Plied with naan and dahl, I initially kicked out at the strong tastes and colors, my eight year old palate not accustomed to the blend of spices or how to properly handle the spiky shock of chili on the tongue. Conversion to being a curry devotee was gradual, its progression running parallel to my curiosity and experience of Life Itself. Taken together, these two experiences, of drawings and preliminary taste tests, are the perfect metaphor for a concert I recently attended one rainy, warm night in Toronto. Titled "Andalusia To Toronto", the show was the season-opener at Toronto's Koerner Hall, a space built right into the creaky old Royal Conservatory building. No food, but lots of mixed stuff for the ear, some with too many chefs, some with spicing just right.

Koerner Hall is a beautiful, acoustically perfect venue that seamlessly blends old traditions with new visions. That old/new integration might well describe the show, curated by musician David Buchbinder, the Canadian musician behind the Odessa/Havana music project and, more recently, Diasporic Genius. Buchbinder is an active presence in the Toronto music scene, having founded an assortment of busy, popular jazz ensembles in the last two decades, including the celebrated Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band in 1988. He was joined by a myriad of musical talents, including Cuban-Canadian pianist Hilario Duran, Palestinian oud playing and vocalist Bassam Bishara, and Syrian-American violinist Fathi al Jarrah. The nine-man ensemble - violinists, percussionists, a reed/flute player, all told -produced a gloriously uplifting sound that drew upon Jewish, Arab, and Spanish musical traditions, performing music several centuries old and updating much of it with a modern, urban sensitivity.

It is unquestionably a matter of personal taste as to whether or not you jive with Buchbinder's mad drive to integrate sounds from diverse (and distinct) traditions into a kind of pan-cultural sonic hybrid. I've never been entirely convinced melding Ashkenaz shtetl sounds with Cuban jazz works - not all minor chords are created equal to my ears -but that's also because I have a penchant for enjoying and celebrating sounds as distinct entities. I don't like too many chefs around my broth -but I do enjoy a good curry. And sometimes the blends Buchbinder oversaw were very beautiful. His skill as an arranger and bandleader can't be discounted. The concert's first piece, "Billadhi Askara (The One Who Intoxicates)", a beautiful Muwashahat that offered a solemn start but soon shimmied into a luscious, lilting piece that recalled the best of Hossam Ramzy and His Egyptian Orchestra. 'La Mujer de Terah (The Wife Of Terah)", a Sephardic folk song, featured Israeli-Yemeni vocalist Michal Cohen, who, with her clear strong voice and perfectly-pitched high tones, cast a speel across the Hall as she sang of a woman "roaming on the fields and in the vineyards" and giving birth to "the servant of the blessed God" in a cave.

That's not to say all the pieces were from a religious tradition. In fact, most of what was presented at "Andalusia To Toronto" were creative adaptions and re-workings of traditional folk pieces. Hilario Duran re-arranged two of the pieces featured, including Sephardic folk songs "Landarico" and "Conja (The Shell)", and Buchbinder himself providing several adaptations and original compositions. It's obvious he wants to demonstrate connections between cultures of the past, and to show how those connections can instruct us in the present, and possibly future. But some portions were lengthy and felt far too didactic. "Cadiz", an original composition, was sonically frustrating. It sounded like a highly rhythmic effort at fitting square pegs into round holes, its "broth" a muddy mix that made appreciation of its influences damn near impossible. "Next One Rising" fared somewhat better, with its influences more fluidly integrated between instruments, but there remained a strange whiff of didacticism mixed with over-exuberant creativity. Too many chefs? Or too much spice? Either way, not my favorite dishes.

Buchbinder's curious curry-paella-tagine mix did, however, offer a good metaphor of the Hall's programming choices. Buchbinder's choice of showcasing the sounds of Andalusia was an ideal symbol of the sheer breadth of vision at work here. Yes, the Conservatory Orchestra have dates (November 25th, February 17th, and April 13th), and there are other classical performers featured as part of the season; the lineup includes classical artists Louis Lortie, Angela Hewitt, and Emanuel Ax.

But Koerner Hall doesn't stand solely on its classical music laurels. I was witness to the closing concert of Hugh Masekela's last tour there in November of last year. And in 2012, the Hall will feature yet more great international artists: gospel great Mavis Staples in January, Mexican chanteuse Lila Downs in February, Benin-born singer Angelique Kidjjo in March, and German cabaret performer Ute Lemper in April. This is the kind of delicious curry I can get behind. Too many chefs? Not at Koerner. Their programming is simple: eat what you can, draw while you wait, and take the rest home in a doggy bag. You can't ask for much more than that.

Koerner Hall photos courtesy of KPMB Architects.

Flippant Coward

2011-10-01T11:43:00.003-04:00

Sitting in the grand velvet cushiness of the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto on a recent Sunday afternoon, I was struck by the theater unfolding around me. Ladies parading in all manner of frippery, many tottering on high heels their bridled, bejeweled hooves were desperate to break free of, wearing so many coatings of makeup and perfume as to be aromatically plastic, with cleavage hiked up to the neck and porn star pouts perfected.

The blonde woman behind me, in a black and white mini-dress several sizes too small for her frame and with towering hair that whispered of Moroccan oil and synthetic extensions, decided the time was right to voice loud opinions just as the lights went down.

"Why are they clapping?" she hissed as the over-eager audience broke out in applause when leads Paul Gross, and then Kim Cattrall appeared onstage.

"Shhhhh," urged her suited, slick-haired seatmate.

"What?!" she continued, "They're just onstage."

"Ssssshhhhhhhh," he continued, with some alarm.

"I mean, Gawwd, calm down, people," she continued, unabated, "They're just actors."

"C'mon, it's starting."

"What?! People clapping? Jesus. They're not in a marathon or something."

Aren't they? I wondered, smiling.

She finally shut up so the show could start, but it got me thinking.

Playing Coward is a kind of dance; doing him well is more of a marathon - albeit a well-dressed one involving martinis and silk pajamas and many, many well-placed, well-timed words. Cattrall and Gross are locked in a thrilling two-hour marathon of wills, hearts, words, and energies. This is possibly the most competitive production of Private Lives I've ever seen, and that's saying something; I've seen this particular play well over a dozen times, on a few continents, and each time I've taken something a bit different away - but all those variations doesn't erase the delicious rhythm of Coward's words, nor his brutal portrayal of the chattering, wining, dining, whining, whipping, slipping, shouting, punching upper classes, and their awful, awfully funny, awfully familiar way of living and loving.

Richard Eyre's lush production, currently running in Toronto through the end of October, was last seen in London's West End. This Canadian run is a warm-up for the Broadway run that begins in November. New York audiences would be wise to put aside their notions of Coward as a pish-posh playwright full of puffery, and pay close attention to the vital physicality Eyre brings to the 1930 work. Private Lives revolves around the quarreling, querying, cooing, cuddling, and wholly caustic exes Elyot and Amanda, who run into one another while each is on their respective second honeymoons. Words and fists fly back and forth with equal vigor, making for an engrossing production that milks the gender wars while highlighting the importance of flippancy through deft timing and clear body language.

"Is all this sophisticated, feckless, irresponsible flippancy the stuff that will endure?" asked Tatler after the play's 1930 premiere. Of course it has. Irresponsible flippancy will endure, has endured, and in so many ways, should endure. Private Lives is as known for its barbed witty flippancies, flung back and forth like jaunty shuttlecocks, as it is for its depiction of scary co-dependency in intimate relationships. Coward is a master of flippant verbiage, holding a brutal, dark mirror to the creme fraiche of everyday experience, exposing the rotting fish-smelling underbelly of polite society with a smile, a martini, and an invitation to dance amidst the detritus.

It's important to keep this delicious sense of expose in mind when watching Eyre's gorgeous, glimmering production. Set and costume designer Rob Howell's tidy, boxy balconies of the First Act's honeymoon scene are simply too polite, too neat, too orderly, for Coward's co-dependent heroes. Their wrought-iron-meets-greenery nicety can't contain such volatile lovers. The huge, circular Parisian apartment where they escape is equally telling in its beautiful design; it implies the maddeningly cyclical nature of their relationship, one marked by vigorous, fighting, freaking, and... well, you might fill in the blank. Amanda (Kim Cattrall) and Elyot (Paul Gross) are like the yin and yang of an angry, amorphous amoeba that, between sips of martinis and champagne, screeches I love you/I hate you even as the creature - this monstrous thing called a "relationship" -swallows itself whole, dividing, again and again, into something we all wish we didn't recognize.

So where's the relief? Ah, that's easy. The vitality of flippancy is what powers much of Coward's work, and it has its very-best, most shining, flouncy display and expression in Private Lives. Flippancy's souffle-like texture is sometimes a better balm than the soggy bandage of dew-eyed, saccharine sincerity. As Elyot notes, "All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. . . . Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths." Private Lives wants you to be laughing at the absurd. It demands it. Even when Elyot and Amanda leave their respective mates and vanish into the night... laugh! When they worry over their respective mates' well-being and wind up making love... laugh! When Elyot strikes Amanda and she strikes him back, without restraint... laugh! Laugh!, the work dares us, voila, shibboleths! Encore, rire!

That isn't to say domestic violence is ever hilarious or not a thing to be taken seriously, but it does ask the viewer to confront the sacred cows that amble across one's perceptions of propriety, comedy, relationship and romance, and whence they all doth meet in the dark alleys of life. Such presentation also calls to mind the possible literary inspirations behind the figures of Elyot and Amanda. The play is a puffy, meringue-like counterpart to the heavy steak of other dueling-couples works; their leads the sweet profiteroles to the sour pickles of George and Martha, their verbal wordplay is no less clever than Beatrice and Benedict. There is most certainly a palpable sense of competition between Cattrall and Gross, one that informs and powers much of the energy behind this particular Broadway-bound production.

Of all the memorable Elyots I've seen - Anton Lesser in London, Alan Rickman in New York - Paul Gross' interpretation is easily the most brusque. His Elyot seems entirely disinterested in the niceties of civil society, and engages in them only so long as they amuse him, or those around him. The dark violence of the character is underlined with Gross' deeply physical performance, as he throttles Amanda in the Paris apartment where the newlyweds escape to reunite with one another. It should be noted, Kim Cattrall's Amanda gives as good as she gets; hers is an equally brutish interpretation, and put beside Juliet Stevenson and Lindsay Duncan respectively, is easily the most masculine of Amandas. Oh sure, Cattrall charmingly swans about, first in a towel, then a gorgeous flesh-tone gown, then a swishy silk robe, and finally a prim, fitted skirt-suit - but these are all feathers on a wolf. As the play progresses, Cattrall spits out her lines with such a crescendo of venom you begin to wonder if she'd be better suited to the boxing ring. When Elyot berates her for promiscuity, pronouncing that it "doesn't suit women," she retorts, in full eff-you mode, hand on jutted-out hip, that it doesn't suit men for women to be promiscuous. There was more than a small hint of Samantha in that line, the character from Sex And The City Cattrall is known for, and the line itself received a hearty cheer at the opening. One senses Cattrall's Amanda is promiscuous less out of sheer lust than out of sheer rage at being born the wrong sex. Vengeance drives her much the same way it does her (ex-ish) husband, but she expresses it more through well-placed words and large physicality than in actions.

Indeed, flippancy is what makes the hurtful, hilarious, the painful, pleasurable, the unbearable, bearable. Richard Eyre's production of Private Lives reminds us of this wisdom in bouts of brilliant shallowness and bold declaration. Much more than a writer of witty sex comedies with well-dressed people sipping martinis, Coward's work is a witty sex comedy with well-dressed people sipping martinis -and saying really, really smart, wise things. Pay attention to the language, and how it's used: to soothe, seduce, insult, insinuate, degrade, debase. Rarely do we see polite society reflected with so much venom; even more rarely do we see it dressed so well, and so heartily applauded by those who are being mocked.

I emerged from the Royal Alexandra Theatre thinking that we all probably have a bit of Amanda and Elyot about us. The couple behind me had taken off early -presumably to fight, to love, to spar with words and fists and flying drinks. In short, to live another day. Hopefully with a sense of humor, and always, always well-dressed.

All photos by Cylla von Tiedemann, courtesy Mirvish Productions.

Funnies

2011-09-19T12:11:00.012-04:00

It's an old adage but it's true: when you can't cry, you have to laugh.

The last few weeks have brought a myriad of mixed feelings and reactions at being back in Canada. Joy, because of proximity to things fuzzy and familiar, relief at being near an ill family member, and sadness at being away from a place I feel at home in. There have also been liberal dollops of self-pity, confusion, and a keenly gnawing restlessness. Questions surrounding worth, direction, relationships with artistry, family, and community, and a larger, more silent quest for meaning amidst the madness. Dear Mid-Life Crisis, you're early by a decade.

The best part of these days have been the nights -and no, not because I've developed a taste for seedy bars or taken on a profession involving garment-shedding (yet). The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become the colorful, leaping Castor and Pollux of my moping, grey-hued psyche. Watching the Emmy Awards lastnight, I was struck by the role the programs, and in a larger sense, comedy itself, has played in my life the last few years. If it's true that laughing at the devil makes him flee, it's equally true that humor puts pain (be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or all three) into the Magic Bullet of human experience; laughter gets mixed up with all those other very un-fun ingredients, resulting in a gooey concoction called Hilariously Tolerable, also known as Smiling Feels Good, also known as I-Can't-Go-On; I'll-Go-On, a phrase Sam Beckett knew a thing or two about.

Once upon a time I loved physical, old-timey comedy with a sharp edge of commentary. As a teenager, I had stacks of VHS tapes of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and later, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. I was an avid watcher of Conan O'Brien in his first incarnation on NBC, and I used to howl away many a late night as he brought out Heavy Metal Inappropriate Guy, the Masturbating Bear, and Andy's Little Sister Stacy (a young Amy Poehler, who made such an impression that to this day I can't look at her without remember how she looked with braces, spitting out "I love you!" to an awkward, creeped-out Conan). I also adored the Saturday Night Live era of Wayne's World, Sprockets, and Tales of Ribaldry. Weekend Update With Dennis Miller was my first real introduction to the world of timely-commentary-meets-comedy.

Having turned into a verifiable newshound over the last few years, my taste for newsy comedy has grown, but I've never quite abandoned my long-standing love of the absurd, either. I didn't pay much mind to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report until I was forced to face the the steaming pile of ugly adulthood presents. Suddenly, jokes about stuff on the news made a whole lot more sense. After 9/11 especially, this kind of humor became a necessity for me -and, I suspect for many like me. Nothing made sense except comedy.

Watching the Emmys lastnight, I realized just how aware the TDS & TCR teams are of their collective role: to make us pie-eyed schleps smile. That is no small task. At the end of everyone's crappy/annoying/busy (or wondrous/lovely/easy-peasy) day, we want to turn on the telly and see someone make funny about all the bad stuff in the world and in their every day lives. There's a relief in that -a kind of tonic to the bad forces at work, the stuff you and I feel we can't control -that someone is there to say, yes, it sucks, but here, we're going to give you a side of Marshmallow Fluff with your soft graham crackers. Stuff like wars, political corruption, media incompetence on a macro level, and cancer, chemotherapy, and confusion on a micro one (if there's such a thing as those first two even existing in micro terms) gets shrunk down to bite-sized pieces. We want it. We like it. We want more.

So I believe Jon Stewart when he says (insists) that his role is, first and foremost, to make people laugh. It's hard. The world's a pretty crappy place. We all know that. But it's heartening to know that he and Stephen Colbert make it just a bit brighter for some of us four night a week. Things frequently don't make sense in life, but if there's one thing I consistently take away from these programs, it's that there's a joy at work in the world, one that feeds on not putting anything in place, but in finding the right angles to point at the chaos and shriek, THIS IS NUTS, funny faces in place, absurd narrative in play. To The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I say: thank you x a billion, and, I owe you each a large tray of cookies. Marshmallow Fluff on top, if you really want it.

Bravo, Olar!

2011-09-16T07:06:00.000-04:00

Art Battle is many things: dramatic, thought-provoking, theatrical, joyous, challenging, surreal. It's also a great place to see the work of emerging artists.

My eye was recently caught at the last Art Battle by Iulia Olar, a Romanian-born, Toronto-based artist who was participating. Her gorgeous, vibrant cityscapes were joyously retina-ripping, and I felt honored to be witnessing the creation of not one but two beautiful renderings of Toronto's skyline.

The way Iulia paints - a mix of focus, intuition, feeling and detail -reflects a deeply poetic sense of both her environment and the people in it. Her dance between brushes and palette knives, wielding one, then the other, with a seamless integration of head and heart, smuding here, dabbing there, was a magical thing, akin to the spinning tango dancers I'd see Sundays in Union Square. As with so many arts, either a person has a gift to develop, or they don't. Learning the steps, mixing the colors -they take practise, of course -but it's up to the individual to properly use those energies, with a mix of pinpoint precision and passionate abandon. Iulia does both.

So it was an honor to have this Q&A with her, and to learn more about someone whose talent is bursting with the living of life, moment by moment, stroke by stroke.

How did you first get interested in painting?

I came to Canada as a poet, with three books in my luggage. After three years I realized that I wouldn't be able to write anymore, so I decided to express myself through painting.I started to paint on September 19th, 2009: I went to the store, bought canvases, paints, brushes, and took books from the library... and here I am! I have to admit, I took one year of drawing lessons -that was a long time ago -but never, ever did I paint. I want to remain for as long as possible a self-taught artist. It's so natural and much less stressful.

I also have a wonderful husband, a wonderful son and a wonderful friend. They encouraged me from the first moment. Terry Mardini (my friend) bought over forty paintings -and she exhibited them in her apartment. What a friend! I am very lucky.

Believe me or not, every time I sell a painting I say :"Forgive me, Vincent!" (Vincent Van Gogh). That's my story with painting . You know, I see myself doing this for the rest of my life.

How does being involved in Art Battle help your artistic development?

I consider participation at Art Battle a unique experience that every painter should have. You can test yourself and the public's reaction towards your art, right on the spot. There, you have to give your best in twenty minutes. Leonardo Da Vinci spent seven years giving us the Mona Lisa -and only a few rich people benefit from that type of art. It's not possible (to work that way) anymore. The modern artist has to be there for the people, right away -there is no time to wait.

Who are some of your favorite painters and why?

I adore Vincent Van Gogh. He felt that is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. Because he risked his health and his life for his work: "I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Because he sold one (one!) painting in his entire life but, this, couldn't stop him from painting. What an artist!

Why acrylic paint? Would you consider other media?

I like acrylic because it's an extremely liberating medium. Its versatility is actually its best quality; use it like oil paint, watercolour or gouache. Acrylics gained my favour because they offer many advantages: great colour, a fastness that doesn't fade or yellow or harden with age (or crack), it dries much faster then oil paint too, so it's great for studio work. I use more acrylic paint because I don't feel like considering other media... but who knows? Maybe in the future.

You seem to do a lot of cityscapes; what's the attraction, creatively?

As an artist, you must learn to trust your own feelings, judgment and analysis about what you like and why. Ambivalence in your approach will lead to an ambivalence response from the viewer. You don't have to please all the people by somehow finding the average line.

Yes, I can say, Toronto's skyline attracts me because of that insolent CN tower that lances my sky. Sky bleeds, suffers. People stay at home. Nobody to be seen on the streets. The water: second reality, refuses to capture the mirror image, makes another one more subtle.

This theme reveals my love and my hate, my choleric side. A solitary seagull flies -the guardian of the city. The strong colors I use add life and dynamic they are projections of the people not of the town itself. I also paint flowers, landscapes, family members when I am in the "quiet mood"

What's next in terms of your work and where can we see it?

I have plans to create a website where I'll post all my work and keep in touch with friends, and try to participate as much as I can in public events, art galleries, etc. This is a never-ending story for me and I feel very engaged with every single detail. I start to count my life in days that I paint well. Who knows one day I'll have my own studio, students and I will make my art my entire occupation.

Healing Hearts

2011-09-09T14:11:00.001-04:00

September 11th, 2001 is indelibly burned into my memory -and the memory of millions of others. We all remember where we were, and what we were doing.

It's hard to try to describe that kind of event with any level of appropriate respect, let alone render it into a creative form that might make any kind of sense.

Toronto-based artist John Coburn didn't set out to try to 'make sense' of what he saw during the awful weeks that followed that day. What he did do was sketch, in his identifiably detailed, careful way, life in and around Downtown Manhattan. His sketches became a book in 2002, Healing Hearts, and close to three thousand copies were distributed to families who'd lost loved ones in the Twin Towers. A related, feature-length documentary is in the works, too. It will aim to explore the many stories depicted in the book and feature interviews with those directly involved.

But to get a true sense of John's work and the people involved in Healing Hearts, I highly advise taking a trip Downtown to see his work. A selection of originals are currently being display at Sciame Construction (at 14 Wall Street) through September 15th. With the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday, the significance of John's lovingly detailed images become all the more powerful, their depictions more, not less keen over time and memory.

Speaking with the artist was a moving experience; his love of New York City is obvious, and his grief over what he saw still vivid. We shared favorites restaurant spots, transit tips, and great places to sketch and write. Then we shared where we were on 9/11.

What's your history with New York City?

I've been going down for the last thirty years. I first went at nine with my family, and I did my first little oil painting of the Statue of Liberty as soon as I got home. At 17, I went down with my art college and got hooked on it, so ever since, I've been drawing and working out of there. For anyone who spends time in New York, it always sits fondly in their mind -it's always floating around.

How have you seen New York change?

I certainly cherish the fact that I was there in the late 1970s into the 80s, when it was still seriously had that edge -you know, the East Side and Times Square and all that - it had that strange edge, you really did have to stay on your toes. But it's still good ole New York, that's what I love about it: it's this big churning machine of love and strangeness.

Explain how Healing Hearts came about.

It started from when I was inside St Paul's Chapel [located across from what was the Twin Towers] and the chaplain looked down and saw me drawing. We chatted and he said, "I see people scribbling down addresses a lot -so cherish this. What's going down on paper is picking up the vibe of love and care everyone's reaching out with."

When you're sitting there minute after minute, hour after hour, that life and spirit and energy somehow gets translated onto paper and it's really the first time I ever thought of art as maybe... there is more meaning to a piece of art than an attractive picture on a wall. So when that chaplain said that, in a tiny way these drawings could deal with the theme of healing, he felt people could look at (them) and in their interpretive sense, get enough from their own imagination to see into what's going on.

I met a woman named Rosemary Cain in the Salvation Army tent near Ground Zero. [Rosemary is the mother of FDNY fireman George Cain, who perished on 9/11.] I had these original drawings, which I showed her, and I said, "If I managed to put these into book, would you even want to receive it?" She pulled a photograph of her son out of her purse and handed it to me, saying, "John, if your little book can help people remember my son George, I think it's worthwhile." That one conversation was the only way this book ever happened.

How hard was it to complete?

It was so emotional for anybody to get through a day. When I was about to surrender, I ran into [artist] Bryan Chadwick, a Canadian guy who's been in New York now for 30 years. [Bryan wrote the forward for Healing Hearts.] I showed him these drawings and said "Brian, people think we should try to do something, but how am I going to get this into book form?" We were in his Soho kitchen. "Put down your coffee, we're going to Midtown," he said to me.

We went up to Lexington and 42nd, to a boutique agency. The ad guys were in a boardroom, they saw the drawings and were tearing up and said, "This is how we'll give back. We are honored to design this book." They did a masterfully sensitive job. They created a little treasure. And it was printed for free, and sent by Fedex for free. It took 300 people to make it happen.

How did families react to your work?

I was invited to have this show in New York of these original drawings by Mary Fetchet, who is Founding Director of Voices Of September 11th. Mary and I met over course of year, after she lost her son Bradley, a 24 year-old who worked in finance. She started the foundation, and every year at the anniversary, she's held events for families to get together share what they need to share.

There's also a woman by the name of Selena Dack-Forsyth who lost her 39 year-old son Arron in the attacks. She told me, when 9/11 happened, she had called up a fire chief in the Ground Zero area, saying 'I need boots. I need to go in and help find my son.' The fire chief spent 40 minutes on the phone gently sharing with her this wasn't possible to do.

A year-and-a-half later, when she received Healing Hearts, she sat down and read it cover to cover, and said, "Your book brought me to the site and gave me what I wanted to do that day. I was able to see and feel these moments inside St. Paul's, and the people on the site."

I also received many letters from families thanking us for doing it. A lot of them said, 'The starkness of the pictures of airplanes in the building -we don't need that -we need to see that people cared.' My brother and I, who put the book together, heard from British families who lost relatives in 9/11. A lot of them had never been to New York, ever, and couldn't afford to fly over, but all of a sudden, they flipped through a book that showed how much people cared.

How has Healing Hearts changed the way you approach art?

It's a reminder of the struggle to survive on this planet as an artist. When you sit and you have one mother tell you an ounce of how this might've heaped a bit, that right there makes thirty years of struggling make sense. It gives me the encouragement and the respect to continue on as an artist.

I went into a firehouse in Little Italy -Engine 55, on Broome Street. They lost five guys. I drew outside for a few hours, and the Captain came out, saw the drawings, and said, "These are really beautiful. Would you like to come in and draw a shrine to the five guys we lost?"

After that, they invited me in to have ravioli with them. I drew the guys around table. It was late, and they said, "Hey, you're a ways from home -you are welcome to sleep upstairs." It was just one journey after the other. As you finish one drawing, someone else is standing beside you saying, "Can you please come and see this?"

Pen to paper in New York City, 2011: what goes through your head?

If 9/11 had never happened, I would still be drawing, whether it's cafe architecture or some tree in a park. I would still be doing this because I thrive on people and architecture, especially big cities and big vibes, but yes, with the history and what I've gone through doing Healing Hearts and meeting families and New Yorkers in general, it does make me again appreciate the fact that I am able to put some lines down on paper that might be appreciated next week, next century.

That's what artists are about: writers, filmmakers, and artists like to put little treasures together and have them appreciated years from now. I'm just so grateful.Photo credits:

Top photo from my Flickr Photostream.

Pen and ink drawings by John Coburn, taken from the book Healing Hearts.
Art photos courtesy of John Coburn.

Mourning Is Broken

2011-08-31T17:21:00.000-04:00

This has been the summer of calamities.

A few weeks ago I was glued to the addictive TV-computer super-combo, following the London riots with a mix of fascination and revulsion. Like many, I was appalled by the random violence overtaking the city. It might be plus normale for English society, but to me it was horrifying. And yet, it was hard to turn off and turn away, at least in part because I lived in London a little over ten years ago. As well as being one of the world's great capital cities (I seem to have a penchant for living in them), it is also a personal favorite. Culture dominates every aspect of urban life there, from the markets and bars around Camden Town to the free museums and old-meets-new architecture, from casual pubs to high-end galleries - London, with its heady mix of history, high art, and street life, is a dazzling place.

I recently reflected on how much I felt at home in London when I lived there, and how it wasn't that much of stretch to ingratiate myself there socially and culturally. I wondered, because of Canada being a Commonwealth nation, if the British mindset had seeped in. I may still grit my teeth at the thought of having a Governor-General, and seeing the Queen on Canadian currency (perhaps a little more over the years), but there's something resoundingly vital about the connection , which made the events of mid-August even more upsetting. London will always be home on some level.

On the flip, monarchy-less side of that coin, charting the week that was in New York was a harrowing ordeal, perhaps because of its proximity to Toronto, and its proximity to my having lived there only a month ago. Like London, culture is everywhere in NYC, but it's done differently; no one's tied down by history (or violently kicking against it) so much as integrating it effortlessly into every day life. Old delis, noodle joints, and dive bars (coming down too quickly) are peppered with old, cracked photographs of celebrities, memories, streets, and faces. It isn't high art - you can't buy them. (By contrast, a fast-food joint in west part of Toronto has willfully-worn photos of recent events for sale along its walls for hundreds of dollars.)

You can't buy the kind of energy a place like New York has, though people have peddled that fantasy to the naive and wide-eyed now for centuries. You pay for the museums, it's true, but New Yorkers go on the free nights before grabbing takeaway and heading home. Culture is so much a part of everyday life there - graffiti-strewn walls, old/new architecture, free concerts, impromptu performances -so as to be taken for granted. It's taken for granted because it can be, because that's the strange, exhausting beauty of a Republic, and of what it stands for: if you don't like it, it doesn't matter, no one's mandating you to accept anything, go make something yourself and see if you can do better. Everyone else has.

This shrugging, casually f*ck-it attitude, combined with the fiery-eyed ethos of self-determination and truth-or-dare initiative, creates the perfect storm for me to create in. But I don't like to see the literal perfect storm floating over a place I love -or literal riots. This summer's series of challenges make me wonder what art -theater, dance, film, music, and visuals -will come out, is being conceived this very moment, has been shaped by calamity and chaos. I've been writing non-stop the last few weeks, which explains my lack of posting here. But, with plans afoot to expand, diversify, and cultivate, the calamity and chaos of the summer will, hopefully, lead gracefully into the orderly repose of fall. To quote a favorite song, Everything Must Change.

All photos taken from my Flickr photostream.

Calm

2011-08-29T22:49:00.005-04:00

Weather terror has passed in the Big Apple.

It feels good to have that week over, though it did afford me some great opportunities to chat with some great people. One of those was John Coburn, a Toronto-based artist whose work is being exhibited on Wall Street September 1st through 15th. John did a series of sketches when 9/11 happened -and they're gorgeous. I can hardly believe it's been ten years. Oh my dear city, it's been through so much.

Look out for that feature soon.

Also, and this feels right to announce here, casually: I'm going back to audio interviews. Not through a radio station, but independently. In this age of social media interaction, of emails flying to and fro across the vast buzzy darkness of cyberspace, there's something awfully good about the human interaction of sitting in a room, with a live breathing, thinking person for half an hour, and having a real conversation. Would you tune in? Would you listen?

Fingers crossed. More soon.

Crashed

2011-08-13T13:10:00.013-04:00

First, the obvious: I'm not accepting being away from New York. I vacillate between despair and hope with a dizzying rapidity. That doesn't mean I'm not taking pleasure in small things here: I'm riding my bike to a local job, and the sight of a cardinal-couple flitting around the greenry of a garden is quite lovely. Easy access to a BBQ, a terrace, and a posturpedic bed are excellent. But here is not New York. And I miss the stinky, hot, frustrating massive mess of it all. To say I'm sad I left behind my life there would be a gross understatement; I want late tequila nights and prosecco-filled afternoons and fragrant green-chili early evenings and blinding rooftop July 4ths and the busy buzzy ball-breaking brilliance of Times Square at 2am. Becoming accustomed to isolation and inertia ... is not an option.

It's taken me a while to get back to writing, but return I have, however haltingly. I've been ruminating all week on what to write about the London riots. It's one of my favorite cities, and indeed, was one I called home between 1999-2000. Russell Brand's intensely smart, well-written essay for the Guardian expressed a lot of important things, and Dave Bidini's similarly-insightful piece for the National Post has created new quadrants of thought in my exploration into the meaning of this whole affair on both personal and political levels. I"ll be posting a piece on the riots soon.

For now, musings on transportation, or more specifically, the Awfulness Of Buses And All They Represent. It was sad to wake up, refreshed and fuzzy-haired this Saturday morning, and to discover, amidst my deliciously unhealthy plateful of bacon and eggs, the truly tragic news of a crashed bus. According to Gothamist,

A Greyhound bus travelling from NYC to St. Louis overturned early this morning on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, injuring over two dozen people. One woman was briefly pinned underneath the bus, and at least 25 of the 29 passengers were injured; three of the injured were transported by air to nearby hospitals. According to Bill Capone, the Turnpike's director of communications,"The bus overturned and we don't know what caused it. According to the state police, no other vehicle was involved in the accident."

I will never, ever forget my bus ride down to New York. I'd taken it many times in the past, as a much younger woman, but hadn't done any long-haul travel on one until this past March. The trip through the dense, scary darkness of Upstate New York was made all the more frightening by lashing rain, strong winds, and, dauntingly, a bus driver who seemed to be trying out for the Grand Prix Monaco (or is that Montreal? Or Daytona, perhaps?). The whole "we-don't-know-what-caused-it"-dance doesn't fly after experiencing that kind of hair-rising ride. My heart was in my throat for much of the bumpy, noisy, rough overnight journey.

Amidst the terror, there were some fascinating observations to be made, especially around the people who chose to (/had to) use that mode of transport. The bus was filled with people of all ages, races, backgrounds, who busied themselves texting, reading, sorting through business cards, and making phone calls to loved ones, assuring them they'd "be there soon" and talking about their work days, an earlier job interview, asking after children, asking about neighbours and bills and entirely normal stuff. They struck me as hard-working, exhausted, and stuck in a system where economics forced them onto the cheapest route possible, safety be damned.

Is this is the price of a job in America 2011? I could help but think of that terrifying ride, with guts and nerves and blood churning in some sickening mix, as I read this morning's sad report. Was it just a sad, simple accident, or a darker sign of troubled times? Again, Gothamist reports that "The westbound bus had stopped in Philadelphia and was to stop again in Pittsburgh when it overturned just after 6 a.m" -so it like the ones I took, was an overnight bus, perhaps full of people looking for work, going to work, visiting relatives, returning home. The basic horribleness of the American economy was one of the reasons I returned to Canada; job-seeking is impossible in a place where people are willing (/encouraged) to work for free just to avoid unemployment prejudice. The litany of recent bus accidents (tourist ones included) makes me wonder if they're mere accidents or larger symbols of a changing America.

Struggle is an idea people think is noble -unless it happens to be you doing the struggling. Then it's gross, and f*ck you if you ask for all the checks and balances to be made in order for you to stay healthy and productive. As Jon Stewart so aptly put it Thursday night, "Here's the problem with entitlements: they're only entitlements when they benefit other people." Struggle is easy to label as "noble" and "brave" and "ballsy" when you're not the one doing it. And struggle doesn't change just because location might. America is changing, has changed, will continue to change -just like life itself. The wheels haven't come off, but I'd recommend careful driving. The road ahead is slippery. Sometimes slower is better.

Photo credits:

Greyhound photo (middle), QMI File Photo.

Top and bottom photos taken from my Flickr Photostream.

In The Darkness, Bind Them

2011-08-01T21:36:00.011-04:00

One of the happiest memories of my time in New York City involves attending a taping of The Colbert Report last week.

Getting a ticket was sheer luck; attending was (and I know how corny this sounds) utter magic. The staff is fantastically helpful, the crew is genuinely friendly, and the host is utterly unpretentious. Mr. Colbert came out, all smiles, high-fived those of us lucky enough to be seated in the front row, and addressed a few audience questions. I kept putting my hand up, and just when I thought he might turn away (there was, after all, a show to tape), he turned to me. No, I wasn't nervous. i was curious.

Those who know me well understand the special place Lord of the Rings has in my heart. The popular film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's literary masterpiece was released just before I moved back from the U.K. in 2000, and it hit a deep nerve. Its theme of friendship, goodness, of carrying heavy burdens and resisting the urge to give in to ego and selfishness resonated then, and indeed, still does. Knowing Mr. Colbert is a big Ring-ling, I was curious to find out who his favorite character from the work is. He's spoken at length about it on various episodes of The Colbert Report (and apparently his dressing room is a Rings shrine), yet the character he most gravitates to had, up until last week, remained a mystery.

There was something utterly unique about connecting with someone so famous about something so ... utterly unto itself. Even with the popularity (and acclaim) of the films, those who love Lord Of The Rings feel like members of an exclusive bar where there are drinks like The Suffering Balrog and The Middle Earth Tripper, and we can rhythm off the ingredients and technique with healthy dollops of ease and delight.

The work's tangle of characters, histories, and storylines, combined with powerful mythological underpinnings and strange-but-familiar tone renders its appeal very specific and beloved. Many will have seen the films; few will have read the book(s); those of us who've done both still sometimes have to refer to charts detailing relationships and bloodlines and maps outlining key locations. Why go to all this trouble? Because it's a tale that touches the heart, while being hugely relateable: ordinary person doing something extraordinary -and failing, but for the grace of those who care and want the best. It's epic, it's intimate, it's timely and timeless, it asks a lot but returns even more.

And so it was, Mr. Colbert answered my question with much grace and reverence, which heightened when he (quickly) realized he was in the presence of a fellow fan. Little did I know there was a timely segment referencing Lord Of The Rings on that night's show.

Rings character Faramir said the following, when he was given the chance of owning the One Ring, and I think, intoday's climate of political adversity, international suffering, and religious hatred, it has a particular resonance:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo, son of Drogo.

Thinking back to Stephen Colbert quoting these lines to me feels like a kind of lesson, and warning; when it would be most easy to give in to ego, to sadness, to self-pity and fantastical escapism... don't. It's not the right thing to do. It's more noble to go the hard (if honest) route. It's more authentic, too.

Thanks for the reminder, Stephen. Next time we'll have to talk about hobbits, orcs, elves and goblins. For now, I'm going to memorize those lines. Oh, and I want one of those figurines.

Rumbles In The Barnyard

2011-07-21T23:54:00.000-04:00

When WNYC announced the removal of Ai Wei Wei's Zodiac Heads at the Pulitzer Fountain recently, a wave of shock went through me. Was it government-related? Part of some nefarious plot? No, it turns out the time of the Heads was up and they were off to their next destination in Los Angeles.

All good things, it seems, must come to an end, and sometimes those endings aren't as dramatic as we initially believe them to be.

A week tomorrow, I'm going to be returning to Toronto. The reasons are, I suppose, somewhat dramatic; I've a family member undergoing a third round of chemotherapy, and I've been unable to secure reliable, paid, full-time employment here in New York. Much as it's horribly depressing in the most theatrical way, it is also hugely, soothingly logical. Emotionally, I'm pulled between falling into a huge vat of overheated self-pity and rising above it all in the cold, clear knowledge that this could very well be the sort of vision-over-visibility issue I've been rattling on about for a while now.

Consequentially, Ai Wei Wei's Zodiac Heads have been on my mind a lot. The first time I saw them was entirely intentional, while the second time I had an appointment locally, and the third was totally by accident. Each time, I observed the people there, laughing, posing for photos, snapping away blithely unaware of the plight of the artist behind the dead-eyed sculptures.

Each head represented an animal in the Chinese zodiac, and seemed to be innocuously bland and possibly, to quote an artsy acquaintance, too blatantly, inoffensively commercial to be rendered artistically interesting. But, in my mind, the placement of the heads said a lot about them, and one's reaction to them. Sometimes the context in which an artwork is placed is nearly- or just as -important as the work itself, and in this, Zodiac Heads was certainly no exception.

The Pulitzer Fountain isn't that hard to find -if you know where the Plaza Hotel is. And the world-famous Plaza isn't hard to find if you know where Fifth Avenue is -that mecca of retail exuberance and commercial worship, that temple to spending and decadence. Emerge from the swirling heat of the New York City subway and you're confronted with high-end (or wannabe-high-end) stores, tottering divas, ogling tourists, fast-walking assistants, immaculately-suited business men, and over-make-up'd teenagers. Ai Wei Wei's Zodiac Heads was situated at the end of this zoo of humanity, where Central Park starts.

Far from being a simple "retail bad/art good" dialectic, Ai's work has a whimsical, laughing quality that lives in perfect harmony with its darker undertones. There's a hollow stare to these animals and their coy expressions; the pig head that was nearest to the Plaza has an eerie grin, while the rabbit head was benign if air-headed, and the strong ox looked dazed and overwhelmed.

Zodiac Heads' proximity to the retail mecca of Fifth Avenue underlined the transactional nature of the art world, as well as its paradoxically community-building ethos. People who posed with the Heads may not have know who Ai Wei Wei is, but they certainly had fun with the heads - picking out their own animal, or, failing to know that, their own personal favorites. Acting as counterpoint to all this personalizing, the political (not to mention their historical context) can't be overlooked. China's economic relationship with the United States gains particular heft in such a commercial environment where transactions -whether in clothing or real estate -are a microcosm of not only trading relationships but of supply, demand, and ideas around credit and... owing.

To what do we owe Ai Wei Wei then? Or the Chinese government for freeing him? Anything? Ai Wei Wei's recent release made me re-consider my own position as an artist -here in New York, and indeed, back in Canada. What is the definition of "home"? Where do we find ourselves, truly? To whom do we "owe" our freedom? I wonder how Ai's creativity has been shaped by his captivity in his homeland and how much he's been able to balance his need for freedom artistically with the rules around his release. When and if he figures it out, I'm sure the results will be spectacular.

Until then, I'll keep thinking about his Zodiac Heads. Sure, we're free to figure out "sign," but it remains to be seen whether that's a sign in and of itself, or signifying larger connections and relationships, seen and unseen, real and unreal, factual or mythologized -and the nature of those transactions, their value in our lives, the payment they demand, and the freedom they do and don't grant us. Does it matter? Should it? Some things are choice, others things are necessity; how we negotiate what's in the middle is what makes us better artists -and human beings. Yes, we have an "animal" side, a side that wants glamour without the payback, fabulous without the bill, excitement without anxiety, success without responsibility. But remembering Zodiac Heads, I want to believe in more, in that ever-changing art of the possible. Now, it's up to me to me to live it, and figure out my place in the stars -and here, in the barnyard of earth.

Photos taken from my Flickr photostream (lots more Zodiac Heads there!) ...

Louder Click

2011-07-12T13:43:00.015-04:00

Photography has always been a great love of mine. I stood on O'Connell Street bridge years ago, with friends holding each ankle,trying to capture a rapidly-setting smudge of sun over the spires of a dull, charcoal-sketched Dublin. I loved walking around with my old SLR Minolta snapping bits of graffiti, odd sights, small moments and cherished ephemera.

The camera was put away at music gigs. The dance of sound, motion, and drama made that beloved piece of equipment feel like a demanding, distracting, high-maintenance lover I didn't want to deal with. Even with the advent of digital photography, my non-photography stance at concerts remained resolute. I'm just not one of those people who pulls out the camera (or phone) to snap away when a favorite performer takes to the stage - I prefer to absorb the magic of the moment directly, taking a mental photo of that time, not just sights but smells, sounds, the pressing of excitable people and the slow-fast shuffle of feet.

Aaron Richter, however, is another breed. An accomplished music and fashion photographer as well as the art director for music magazine Self-Titled, his work is at once universal and yet very intimate and personal. It has an immediacy and vibrancy that points to a deep appreciation of both music and the modern, urban culture from whence it springs. Aaron's work is being showcased at the W Hotel Times Square now through August 12th.

I had the privilege of exchanging ideas about music and photography -and the strong connections therein -with Aaron. His answers are sure to delight both photo and music enthusiasts.

How did you first get interested in photography?

I first started taking photos as a kid, doing B&W stuff in darkrooms, and, from probably senior year of high school till about two and a half years ago (I'm 27 now), I didn't really take photos at all. I just sorta stopped for some reason and started focusing on being a writer instead. I moved to New York after college to be a writer and editor for magazines, and that's what I did for about three years.

I started a magazine called MusicMusicMusic with friends and it was real cool. We only did one issue. But the model Erin Wasson was dancing to LCD Soundsystem on our cover in a photo shot by Kenneth Cappello. I also worked full time at a magazine called GIANT that had an incredible art department: iconic creative and art directors and amazing photographers—both well-established (like Ellen Von Unwerth) and up-and-coming (like Ruvan, Miko Lim and Cameron Krone)—shooting for us. I fell in love with that part of the job, and after I got laid off, as everyone working in magazines eventually does, I spent my severance on a camera and have been taking pictures ever since.

How does your work at Self-Titled influence your visual output?

Since I was young I've always sorta thought musicians were the coolest people in the world. And I think a lot of what gets lost in the over-blogged coverage of music these days is any sense of the artists behind the music being legitimately cool anymore—at least a sense of cool that's actually captured and conveyed through the coverage, if that makes sense.

We know so much about musicians now because there's more and more demand for more content and more interviews and more analysis of the music, so there's less mystery, or maybe less intrigue, which makes it seem like you know all your favorite musicians all too well. Imagine if Kurt Cobain had to give a million blog interviews every week and had a Twitter account? We'd have probably all thought he was just a total dickhead, albeit one who wrote incredible songs.

So a lot of what I try to do with Self-Titled is present musicians in a manner that takes back that sort of cool exclusivity, unattainable yet aspirational—this very unarguable, visceral and immediate visual sense of "Wow, fuck! that's cool!" Whether we achieve that from issue to issue, I dunno (it's tough). But as far as my photography is concerned, that desire to make musicians look cool (whatever that means might change from band to band) is always my top concern. To a large extent, I miss that element of music, so I've take it as my job, both as an art director and a photographer, to bring it back as much as possible.

Who are you favorite photographers?

Cass Bird, Ellen Von Unwerth, Tim Barber, Guy Aroch, Ruvan.

How much is a relationship with your subjects important to you? I especially like your shots of Bootsy Collins & Kareem Abdul Jabbar at Bonnaroo.

Every photographer will tell you this is one of the most important elements to a good shoot. It just makes sense. If a subject feels comfortable around you, your photos will be better. My Bonnaroo photos are a weird example here. Most of the work we did in Tennessee for the festival was done very quickly and within a five-minute block of time while an artist was en route to another obligation or about to head onstage. Getting subjects comfortable was something that had to happen almost instantaneously.

You mention Bootsy Collins and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. Both were instances in which I really didn't get a chance to develop any sort of relationship with the subjects at all. Bootsy was great because we met up and he was immediately just a total ham for the camera. Kareem was tough. He's notoriously a tough subject. He really didn't even acknowledge me at all while I was shooting. And I sort of felt like a paparazzi stealing photos that weren't mine. I actually connected with him pretty well only after we stopped shooting. I noticed he was carrying a book about chess and asked him if he played, and he loosened up considerably once he was able to start talking about something he loves.

As far as the rest of my Bonnaroo photos are concerned, two of my favorite series of images are with Smith Westerns and Alexis from Sleigh Bells. The guys in Smith Westerns were very welcoming to me coming into their space and hanging out with them while they got ready to play live, and they let me come up on the stage during their set to shoot. They're very comfortable in front of the camera and are generally just sort of adorable. Alexis from Sleigh Bells I've known for about two years.

I shot Sleigh Bells' first press photos but haven't really seen either Alexis or Derek from the band since then, though we've kept in touch. At Bonnaroo, meeting up was sort of like a little reunion and I got to spend a longer bit of time (maybe 30 minutes) with her backstage. There was no need for any, "Hi. Nice to meet you. My name is Aaron. This is what I'd like to do..." and we were kind of just able to casually catch up, with me every once in a while taking a photo, before I had to head out for my next photo obligation that night.

What do you think of the resurgence of interest in celluloid photography?

It's great that people love shooting on film. Whatever you feel most comfortable with taking photos is awesome. I shoot pretty much entirely digital--probably 90 percent. And I prefer it.

Film is fun, and not having the back of a camera to look at to check to see if the photos are turning out is an incredibly liberating limitation that does wonders for enhancing the mood of a shoot. But with film, I usually prefer point-and-shoot, and in general, I tend to concentrate too much on and get obsessed with imperfections in the resulting photos to let myself be OK with an out-of-focus or weirdly lit photo the way a photographer like Cass Bird can. One of my friends, Bryan Sheffield, has made the shift to shooting film almost exclusively, and his portfolio has just exploded with incredible work since then.

Another photographer I hire for work in self-titled is Caroline Mort, who shoots a very unstudied amateurish style of photography, quite often with disposables, that has such incredible heart and emotion to it. Pretty much every issue, my favorite photo is one of her shots. Again, I've always felt that film, especially the way I've been able to approach it since my darkroom days and compared to shooting whatever-mega-megapixels of a digital camera, is somewhat of an imprecise medium, and there's this awesome charm to a photographer being OK with and having confidence in an image's imperfections. Cass Bird is probably the best at this. Her Urban Outfitters catalogs lately and her T magazine stories... incredible.

Who would you like to photograph that you haven't yet? Why?

Elle Fanning. My goal for 2012 is to become best friends with her. So my thinking is that if I somehow get to photograph her, I can spark our long friendship and then we can hang out all the time and watch Netflix and eat pizza and stuff. That's not weird, right?

Chris Owens, from the band Girls. He's seems legitimately genuine and honest, and he's easily one of the best songwriters we have. All I'm asking for is a week crashing on his couch to follow him around and take photos. Also, Jason Pierce of Spiritualized. The epitome of rock-and-roll cool to me and kind of totally a mystery.

All photographs © Aaron Richter.

To Be Able

2011-07-10T14:44:00.007-04:00

I love this video. And I love this song.

Gavin Friday's last album was Shag Tobacco, from 1995. It was sexy and scintillating, but it was equally thought-provoking and deeply soul-searching. Gavin Friday has always been a favorite artist of mine for his ability to balance these elements, and to merrily juggle the clever, the absurd, the arch and the painfully personal. His latest is catholic, available through his website and iTunes.

Being the sensualist I am, I want to go and get a physical copy. There's something about the direct, tangible nature of the experience -finding a music store (no mean feat in this digital age), coming upon the album, paying, opening the packaging, leafing through the booklet as the CD plays. It's all so old-fashioned, from another era, but outside of concert-going, it's how I enjoy the artistry of music-making most.

And it feels right for an artist like Gavin Friday. The Irish-born singer/songwriter/painter/actor excels at integrating sounds of the past and present into something both classic and futuristic, with a heavy nod toward exploring the sensual aspects of life:

She's upstairs, I'm downstairs,
Drinking coffee in the kitchen
Spoon in the sugar, knife in the butter... I want you.
Do you love me? Say you do.
I'd like to see you undress...

The first single from catholic is called "Able." With its thought-provoking lyrics and stirring electronic swirl driven by heavy beats and Gavin's beautifully low voice rumbling throughout like a sort of world-weary anchor, it's the the sort of grown-up pop that keeps me awake at night, writing and drawing and thinking and returning to volumes of poetry I haven't read in ages. What with the attempts lately to balance practicality, sensuality, desire, want and progress in my life, "Able"is the right song (and video, directed by Kevin Godley), at the right time.

I wanna be able
to hold my own
to breathe without drowning
to find a home.
I want you to love me
don’t want you to lie.

Excelsior, Gavin. It's been too long. Next stop, Manhattan, please.

It Happens

2011-07-06T12:12:00.011-04:00

Today marks the 104th birthday of Frida Kahl o.

I've expressed my love and admiration for her work in past posts. But lately I feel a particular kinship with this most incredible of painters. She was many things through her short 47 years: wife, artist, daughter, sister, rebel, political figure. She was a supremely feminine figure as she reveled in masculine archetypes, and played with gender roles, power roles, expectations of what and how a woman "should" look and express herself, and always, always, she seemed driven by love: of craft, of country, of ideals and desires and of joining the utterly ethereal with the deeply earthy.

She was a victim of ill circumstance, health problems and outright tragedy... but she was never, ever a victim. Her paintings are so alive with her life, her experiences, her... Frida-ness, they draw you into their present moment, drowning you in a gorgeous rush of blues and greens and reds and always, always black.

I thought about Kahlo and her fierce spirit recently. A few weeks ago I had my cell phone stolen. It was taken stealthily, right out of my bag. As is to be expected, I felt stupid, angry, and violated. It was the start of me looking at New York in a different way. I've been coming here for years, reveling in its culture and creative spirit; I've never once been the victim of a crime. Why now? Why did it coincide with my three-month anniversary here? What was the universe trying to tell me? As I kept telling people online and in-person, that phone (which I got my first week living here) contained over 3,000 photographs, a visual diary for all of my experiences. Maybe it was time for the gritty sheen of the city to fade; maybe it was time to wipe the ego-driven slate clean. Maybe it was time to return to Toronto.

As I looked out over the green carpet of Central Park this past July 4th (my first in the Big Apple), two thoughts came to mind: I want to drink champagne up here, and, I want to paint up here (also: why can't I do both?). The roars to resume painting again are growing louder, and I'm not sure what to do. All my equipment's back in Canada. Artists have relationships with the tools of their craft, and you can't simply go and use someone else's and have everything be just fine. It may be a kind offer, but it's like giving me a size 0 dress and expecting me to be comfortable. Since my phone's been stolen, the howls to get back to using my own tools have been more shrill than ever. I come to understand my experiences through both words, and, I've discovered, images. The act of expressing them, moment to moment - whether photographically or with paint -is what matters, not the finished product.

So the shapes, faces, moments, all the "you would"s and the street art - all the stuff I lost and can't leave behind - isn't what brings comfort at the end of the day. "They're just passing fancies... and in time may go..." This sense of living squarely in the moment (is it something akin to love?) has most keenly been experienced via culture for me -in a theater, through hearing music, seeing film, staring at art -those things that have an alive "present"-ness within them. One gives so much to art, and one gets back so much in return. Not so people; sometimes people simply take, whether figuratively, or, in the case of my long-gone phone, literally. Why cry over the past? Why cling? Seems like a recipe for terrible art, if not a terrible life.

And so, I thought of Frida: a victim of a awful circumstance, but not a victim. Horrible things happen, period. Lately it feels as if they've been happening to me more often than not, but there's always tiny stars of goodness to balance it out: invites to the ballet or the theater, or the gallery or museum are always met with a sense of jubilation and glee. They feel like home - a new home, an old home. This home, NYC.

New York,
you're a drag, a dig, a drab bitch of skulduggery
and wait-for-no-one, can-do, keep-up perversity.
You're ragged, you're filth,
you're falling apart and put back together in gilded thread for the billionaires in the black SUVs. You're thunder, lightning, sunshine, wind and rain.
I think I'll weather you just a bit longer.

Now, if only I had my paint brushes and easel, and access to that beautiful view all the time.

Here And Not

2011-06-20T13:00:00.001-04:00

This being both Midsummer as well as World Refugee Day, considering concepts of new and old - and how they relate to the passage of time - seems particularly apt. I've been considering these ideas a lot since moving to New York, especially how they relate to one's physical presence (and simultaneous perceived social absence) in a large urban setting. It's easy to get lost in the crowd in a big city; it's even easier to fit entirely, utterly alone amidst the never-ending seas of people.

As a teenager, one of my very-favorite songs was 'Lonely Town', specifically Frank Sinatra's mournful, majestically sad recording from 1957. It so inspired me, in fact, that I wrote an entire story around it, one that later transformed into a screenplay for my university film writing class. Filled with youthful romanticism, it nonetheless reflected my wide-eyed fascination of the mysterious divide between the busy, buzzing world of urban life, and the weird, disorienting position of being completely alone in that environment.

A recent concert I attended beautifully captured this dynamic. The Aventa Ensemble's concert, appropriately called Voluptuous Panic, saw four American premieres, and took place at Scandinavia House, a gorgeously designed building with predictably lovely decor and an intimate performance space, the Victor Borge Hall. The concert captured the absence/presence dialectic I've been experiencing lately, and writing about madly in my beloved moleskine journal. Something about the mix of cacophony and stillness tapped into the heart of this mystery. Do Nordic composers have a better grasp of emptiness because of the insufferably long winters their respective countries bear? Is there a deeper connection to ideas around nothingness and absence, and their clash with populated areas, because much of Scandinavia is so dark and cold for several months at a time? Per Norgard's ...gennem torne... (...through thorns...) was haunting and morose, but gained some sprightly accompaniment from the impressive harp work of Maria Boelskov Sorenson.Canadian Paul Frehner's work, which titled the concert, was playful and boisterous, while the final work, Poul Ruders' Kaf Kapriccio, was based on the work of Franz Kafka's The Trial, and was suitably haunting, with tons of percussive elements like bells and drums and whistles.

The concert forced a series of questions as to what emotions music, and indeed, art, are meant to evoke: a simple escape from the everyday? An acknowledgement of darkness? An embrace of the void? What is art, if it doesn't force us into the traffic jams of going to and from that inner void, amidst the honking horns of every day life? The Aventa Ensemble, small yet mighty, captured the confusing, awesomely overwhelming contradiction of alone-ness amidst busy-ness, forcing me to look at not only my situation, but that of many people in a new way. Starting out isn't easy; sticking with the journey is harder, especially when it feels like "the day that never ends."

As Gabriel Byrne remarked in his chat with Edna O'Brien, there comes a point where you won't be at home in either place - back where you came from, or in your new place of residence -and, either way, you're going to be alone in some sense, whether it be mentally, spiritually, creatively, intellectually, physically, or all of the above. What to do? Maybe Jenny Holzer was right: contradiction is balance. Maybe I should've gone to the Abrons Art Center this weekend to get tips from Phillipe Petit on that one. As it is, I think I'll keep trying to see as much cultural stuff as I can, walking as much as I can, and enjoying the glorious heat -- solo, curious, with water bottle and journal in tow.

Photos from my Flickr photostream.

Turn On The Dark

2011-06-14T21:39:00.027-04:00

A documentary aired on television earlier tonight about the legendary Chrysler Building here in New York. It brought to mind the incredible sets of Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark. Apparently the famous landmark features prominently in the musical's scenic design, by George Tsypin.

The troubled (and hopefully now, not-so-troubled) production opened tonight at the Foxwoods Theater. I've been following the show's developments for a while, and was one of its biggest boosters, until actor Christopher Tierney suffered a serious injury last December. Then I just got worried. Then frustrated. Then angry. I followed, with some horror, the drama involving director / co-creator Julie Taymor being forced out by the show's producers, in March. Things seemed very ugly and uncertain for a while, and it's something of a miracle the show is finally opening tonight. I'm happy for everyone, though until I see it, I'm going to withhold judgment, and good or bad ideas. Still, I remain very curious.

Lastnight I somewhat quenched that curiosity, and joined a few hundred curious other folk to hear two of Spider Man's producers, who are also its composers (and, oh yeah, mega-mondo big-ass rock stars), spoke in a public forum about the show, its problems, its challenges and its potential. The 92nd Street Y buzzed with energy as the 8pm start time came and went. The intimate auditorium brimmed with either super-excited super-U2-ers, or Broadway fans curious about what the Irish pair might have to say as newcomers to the Great White Way. Author Salman Rushdie was also present, along with a smattering of New York intellgentsia and longtime Y supporters, who sat in thoughtful silence, even as a small but annoying smattering of gushing female mondo-fans over-clapped and giggled at every little rock star face. (Note to self: next time there's an empty seat beside Mr. Rushdie, take it.)

Interviewer Jordan Roth, President of Jujamcyn Theaters (the company behind shows like the award-winning The Book Of Mormon and Jersey Boys) and host of Broadway Talks at 92nd Street Y, asked the two about the attraction of the live stage. Edge rightly pointed out that "(U2) found its feet on a live stage", while Bono noted that "there's a thing happening in culture at the moment, where the live arts seem more important than the recording." He continued:

It’s that inexplicable thing when you get a great performer and great material, and it can only happen in a live context. We were intrigued by it, and we’d seen some great shows like Les Miz and some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows. We saw the chance to do something where we could take advantage of what we were playing around with in rock ‘n roll, and if it was the right project, it might be something we’d want to do.

I pondered this as I sat through the nearly-90 minute Q&A session, which was equal parts frustration (far too much uncritical fan worship) and fascination (body language indicating extreme nervousness for at least one of the composers), peppered with plenty of charm, sarcasm, and humor. The interview was a mix of casual and formal, focusing on U2's creative output, and its connection with the experience of writing and producing on Broadway. Inane questions about "who do you think the next Gandhi will be?" aside (a fan question submitted earlier), it was, for the most part, an interesting mix of honesty, humor, and humility, offering a rare insight into the harried journey of composition and creativity from two very, very famous men.

Walking out of the Y at the talk's end, I reflected on the power of live arts, and of theater especially. Sunday night saw my Twitter stream fill with people's reactions and observations on the Tony Awards, which were unfolding in real-time. People were virtual fist-pumping, guffawing, loudly declaiming -it was a drama in and of itself -as they found a community of like-minded, live-loving souls whose whole existence seemed focused on the sheer pleasure of watching live people do rather ordinary things extraordinarily well. In the wired up world of the 21st century, there's something awfully reassuring and simply good about going to the theater; there's a certain kind of bond created, however unspoken, between audience and cast and crew -it's a symbiotic relationship involving trust, tech, timbre, and sometimes even tap-dancing. MP3s, iPads, and fancy mobiles with a millions apps can't compete -and shouldn't. To see this kind of passion replicated on Twitter for the Tonys was an interesting experience; it's the same phenomenon as during the Oscars, or any other awards show, or any other big event, for that matter. There's a community -but it isn't the same as live theater. Being part of a group of living, breathing, sweating human beings in the dark, watching other living, breathing, sweating human beings lit up and performing before you is a uniquely delicious experience, one that speaks to our common humanity and desire for shared, live experience.

Saturday night I was able to finally able to partake in this shared experience. I attended my first piece of theater since moving to New York, which felt like somewhat of a momentous occasion, even if I went in with mixed feelings about Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. I completely overlooked that awkwardness in favour of the opportunity to see -no, experience -real live people onstage, playing. Playing roles, and beautifully, simply, playing. (As it turns out, David Leveaux's production was so excellent, I'm now a confirmed Arcadia fan.) This is something I think the composers of Spider Man inherently understand; they have, for wont of a better word, been playing, literally and figuratively, onstage now for thirty-plus years. Transferring that energetic faith and exuberant zeitgeist for live performance into a real, concrete thing that serves the difficult, choosy twins of narrative and character is always an uphill struggle, especially if you're used to composing within the fiercely competitive, pressure-cooker world of Broadway.

Lastnight, Bono admitted that the show still has "10%" left to improve on, and won't close that gap for at least another two months. "In the end, The Edge and I have got good manners, we're fun... but we are motherf***ckers," he noted. There was steel in the singer's husky voice, a characteristically Dublin-esque stare-down in his no-nonsense expression, devoid of usual charm, but with a bald, toothsome authenticity that made the comment -and its delivery -deeply affecting and entirely believable. That simple, blunt acknowledgement captured the sexy, succulent siren's call of play and creativity, and her fraught relationship with the ugly, gargoyle-like nose-to-the-grindstone practicality that could only (and must only) be Lady Siren's lifelong mate. What results is frequently personal, but when you're in the performing arts, it winds up being writ large, up for debate, criticism, hounding, and eternal judgment. Such is the fate of such a union, of such a scary, scintillating, and in many ways, artistically necessary undertaking. A near-alchemical mix of faith and hard work sometimes open doors to new worlds -and sometimes not.

In the end, the mantra is simple: Work hard. Play hard. Live hard. That is theater's call to all of us, however we may choose to weave our webs.

Photo credits:

Spider Man: Turn The Dark Off Photo © Jacob Cohl.
Bono / The Edge set Photo © Richard Perry / The New York Times.
92nd Street Y stage photo from my Flickr photostream.

Nowhere Is The Place To Be

2011-06-09T14:57:00.010-04:00

The concept of the void -emptiness, nothingness, ground cleared away entirely -made an interesting return in my life this week.

Philosopher Richard Kearney mentioned it last week during his chat at the Rubin Museum Of Art; together with philosopher Joseph Prabhu, he parsed the connections between Catholicism and Buddhism, bringing in his own experiences about being at a holy cave in India (one central to Hinduism), and confronting the inevitable "void within." There was nothing, he said, that could've prepared him for being in such a dark, dreary place so entirely devoid of human contact and life. Seeing as he was on a pilgrimage, he'd planned to stay for two weeks, and had made the proper arrangements with local monks and authorities. As it was, he lasted three hours.

It's scary to confront this aspect of ourselves, where the external concerns both overwhelm and fall away, and ther'es nothing familiar or comforting to cling to anymore. Kearney brought up the pertinent example of Jesus calling out on the cross, "Father, why have you forsaken me?", drawing attention to the its perfect distillation of the concept of 'void', and what it means to confront that in order to move past it, and into a more meaningful existence. Experiencing this intense, intensely frightening, vast sense of inner emptiness and abandonment is, Kearney noted, a regular part of human experience; it doesn't happen just once, and it shouldn't. "Every day I die again and again and reborn..." Indeed.

This concept manifest into a hard reality after I left the talk, as news came about a potential job having fallen through. Encouragements aside (and I do thank every one of you who've sent them), it was, and remains hugely, painfully disappointing. Simply put, I don't know how I'm going to stay in the Big Apple without paid work. That's a hard reality, and a scary one to confront. Talk about staring into the void.

It's true that the experience of making a new home for myself in New York City has provided several opportunities to stare into -indeed, fully steep in -my very own gaping, airless void, and to examine the relationships between spiritual, creative, and practical aspects of my life, integrating the muck of the past with the even muckier-muck of the present, and the absolutely blank, white-on-white question mark of the future. After Wednesday night, it feels like I'm embarking on a different kind of pilgrimage - searching for meaning, yes, earning a viable living, yes -but balancing that with all the colorful inspiration gained from writing in Soho, from meeting people like Edna O'Brien, from seeing the beautiful couples doing tango Union Square Sunday afternoons, from making inspiring new friends in old places, from small showings of kindness and the incredible vibrancy of living in a city where life can change in an instant.

I'll definitely be returning to the Rubin for more thought-provoking talks, to see their upcoming exhibit about pilgrimage, to be illuminated by the kinds of ideas Kearney and Prabhu exchanged, and to sit and quietly examine the place where the void stops and life begins. Am I on the right track? Only time will tell - but I suppose it's all part of the journey of making a life in the Big Apple.

Lucky Charm

2011-06-05T15:04:00.001-04:00

My writing has changed, and I blame (thank?) McNally Jackson. Without actor Gabriel Byrne liking the bookstore so much, I would've never had the chance to meet and chat with one of my literary heroes -and my writing wouldn't be experiencing the painful if necessary (and deeply overdue) growing pains it is now.

Over the course of the last six days, my moleskine journal has rapidly filled with stories, characters, and ideas. It's becoming more than a collection of random, disjointed thoughts. I have a few pages where I quickly jot down observations: shrieking children, over-friendly pets, that teenage girl with the long, dirty hair flirting with her pie-eyed boyfriend. I see so many things in one day that it's impossible to remember them all, but since last Monday night, I'm making a concerted effort. And I try to take the time now to sit in Union Square or Bryant Park or Central Park, or in front of the library, or any other number of gorgeous New York spots and just sit, breathe, look around, and ... write.

In this attempt to integrate personal and profound, the observed and the other, I can't help but think back to the incredible, inspiring things that flew from the lips of author Edna O'Brien. The Irish author was interviewed about her new collection of short stories by Byrne (a good friend and also Ireland's Cultural Ambassador) at McNally Jackson as part of an Imagine Ireland initiative. The event was hastily organized; to quote the store's twitter stream, "If Gabriel Byrne calls up and says, "Hey, I'd like to do an event with my friend Edna O'Brien in approximately zero days?" You just say yes."

It's hard for me to verbalize the effect O'Brien's work has had on me the last few years, particularly her latest work, a collection of short, powerfully moving stories. Her use of langauge is deeply poetic and loudly, proudly recalls some of the best in Irish writing, namely James Joyce and Seamus Heaney, but with the distinctly feminine voice and brisk narrative quality of Clare Boylan. O'Brien is in a class by herself, however. Born in County Clare in 1930, she had, like many of the time, a convent education and, in her conversation with Byrne, spoke dramatically of the limitations and restrictions placed on her and fellow students. There's a refreshing honesty to both her work and to seeing her read and speak in person. O'Brien is a very theatrical person, and, even in conversation, carefully chooses her words, drawing out vowels and making dramatic pauses, as if she's delivering the best damn monologue you've ever experienced.

With her thick hair, gorgeously pale, smooth skin and an unmistakable twinkle in her eyes, O'Brien is positively magnetic, and it makes reading her work later all the more rich and consuming. Every time I've picked up Saints And Sinners (her latest work, published by Back Bay Books) since last Monday, I've heard her lilting voice, those dramatic pauses, the quavering bits, the quiet bits, the queenly bearing, the Sheela-na-Gig, Lillie Langtry and Danu, combined, condensed, conspiring and co-habitating, all of them singing through every syllable, in her infinitely smart, sexy, strong voice. O'Brien's work is epic, mythical, and vital, but it's also deeply personal, and, as the Guardian rightly observes, "loss is inextricable from love, and from living – and that what saves us, if anything does, is the telling of that truth."

Telling the truth isn't always easy - especially when it's sitting there in front of us. Some truths are easier to swallow than others - and once we discover them, it's up to us how we choose to live with their loud mewlings, awkward quietude, and late-night bawling. Do we pretend they're not there? Or face that truth square-on? On Monday night, Byrne confessed to her that, back when he was growing up in Ireland, "I read your work to find myself." The author seemed stunned, caught off guard by such an admission, and responded, carefully and wide-eyed, "You mean to find an identity? a larger sort of identity?" Byrne re-phrased things so as not to put her on the spot, but we all knew what he meant, as he looked at his friend with a mix of awe, admiration, and gratitude.

I read her work to try to find myself too - and lately I've been adding to that portrait through vigorous, enthusiastic bouts of writing. Where to go with this unfolding narrative, and what to do once I get there -if I get there -remain mysteries, but perhaps that's how it should be. Honesty as salvation feels, to me, like a good place to start.

Thank you McNally Jackson, and thank you, Edna. The moleskine is calling.

Bottom photo courtesy of Rose Hartman.

All other photos are on my Flickr photostream.

Show & Title

2011-05-25T08:24:00.004-04:00

It's hard to know where or when I first heard the name "Mark Kostabi", but I am sure it was on television.

I recall seeing the California-born artist on both Oprah and Eye To Eye With Connie Chung in the 1980s, when the art world was buzzing over his bald, smooth figures and his Warhol-esque Kostabi World. I remember admiring both his personal style as well as his attitude; equal parts intelligence, sneer, smirk, and sulk, he was so much more of a badass than any of the music-world idols my friends liked at the time.

So it's probably fitting that I got the chance to meet Mark Kostabi in-person at a taping of his own television show recently.

The Kostabi Show is a funny, profane, profound, and a fantastically timely comment about the nature of art and democracy. Also, it takes the piss out of the whole idea of 'high art' and what that means for the average individual. Intriguing? Yes. Boring? Never. Infuriating? Occasionally.

Indeed, that could sum up Mark Kostabi's life. Having studied painting and drawing at California State University, he moved to New York in 1982 and quickly became a leading figure in the burgeoning East Village art scene. In 1987 his works were exhibited internationally and in 1988 he founded Kostabi World, where he employed numerous paintings assistants and ideas people who would contribute to (and sometimes entirely paint) Kostabi works. He's done designs for Swatch and Bloomingdale's bags (one of which he gave away during last week's taping), and his work is part of the permanent collections of some big-name places: MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery (in Washington), and many more. He's done a bronze portrait of Pope John Paul II and had several books written about him. Oh, and he designed the album covers for (among others) two little bands you may have heard of: Guns n Roses (yes, he did Use Your Illusion) and the final release from The Ramones, 1995's Adios Amigos. Not too shabby.

This engaging mix of high and low (and Pop) art is reflected in The Kostabi Show. It started as a series of phone calls - literally. Bored by the business meetings he'd have to be part of as a young NY artist and inspired by the films of Andy Warhol, he began taping the conversations, and broadcasting them on public television.

"I thought, if I filmed these (conversations), they'd be more fun, like a kind of performance," he explains. "I had a lot of business meetings on the phone, so I put up a camera and filmed me at a desk talking to real art dealers who were haggling with me. Every phone call I had, I recorded. People were getting hooked the same way I got hooked on that phone call, just knowing it was real."

Inside Kostabi was a big hit with the art world crowd, and was, says the artist, "a precursor to reality TV."

Part of the show involved titling sessions with a variety of Kostabi's friends and associates, including art critic Robert C. Morgan, who inspired the idea for the first formal competitive-titling show. Name That Painting, as it was called, began in 2007 a legal threat from the Name That Tune people forced a change and it became Title This, but when people would refer to it, they'd say simply "the Kostabi show." It stuck. Talk about branding.

Airing Wednesday nights at 8.30pm, the show features competitive titling rounds as well as musical interludes, provided by an in-house band that features a talented ensemble, including Kostabi himself on piano. (More on his musical journeys in an upcoming post.) It's a fascinating mix of people and ideas, with one over-riding theme: paintings should have names. How and why those names are arrived on is a big part of what makes up the show. A panelist of three celebrities gather to be presented with a series of Kostabi works. Past panelists have included jazz musician Ornette Coleman, Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, and the inimitable Tommy Ramone. Once the panel has suggested titles, the assembled studio audience holds up panels, colored red on one side and green on the other, to vote on the titles. Whoever wins gets cash from the erstwhile host and wild applause from the voting public sitting in the bleachers.

Watching the show was funny, amusing, frustrating, emotional, mind-boggling, and more than a little absurd, as Kostabi, ever the showman, jumped between panelists to audience members in desperate attempts to nail down titles for his gorgeously sleek, voluptuously elegant works -which, like Kostabi himself, are still the subject of both passionate adoration and scathing criticism.

For all the fun (and free pizza at intermission!), I had to remind myself to look forwards, at the show, and not around me, where those debated works hang like so many colorful drops in a gorgeous, smooth waterfall of shape and form. This isn't about contemplation, I told myself, this is about diversion. And yet it's an important kind of diversion -isn't it? Was I being conned?

Beautiful paintings came and went with breathtaking speed, and the questions kept coming: Who does art belong to? Who cares? How does originality matter (especially in the digital age)? How does a title shape a work, a painting, a TV show, or indeed, a person?

As Kostabi himself reminded me when we recently met, Picasso didn't think titles were of any great import, while Marcel Duchamp thought they were of huge significance.

"I'm somewhere in the middle," he said, flashing a brilliant smile.

In the middle, maybe. But never, ever mediocre.

Write Round

2011-05-23T22:44:00.000-04:00

As I walked around Frank Lloyd Wright's beautiful white spirals in the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, I ducked into a special exhibition, Kandinsky At The Bauhaus, and... there it was, in all its orbular glory: Several Circles.

Like seeing the work of Klimt recently, experiencing Kandinsky in person was a deeply emotional experience. It forces a reset, a re-focus, a re-adjustment of perception, a realignment of attention, requests complete and utter presence, whispers for a magically pure blanket of silence. In the same breath, the work beckons, like a lover, to come closer, examine its velvet surfaces, its soft curves, its intricate, ovarian details, and slick, areola-like smoothness.

The Guggenheim website offers insight:

"The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

In its magnificent, lidless, concentrated, and sensually concentric presence, I sat, mouth agape, staring at its hip-swirling dance of color, form, light, and texture. The fourth dimension indeed. There are few things that take me so directly there as painting and the written word.

I write, every day, in a real, actual journal, with a real, actual pen. It seems almost quaint. In this world of iPads and iPhones and digitalthisthatandtheother, writing in a journal seems fabulously oldy-world-y, and vaguely old-fashioned. It takes more time to write than type; this forces a stewing of thoughts, a quiet, patient consideration and re-consideration, one that ultimately transforms expressions and observations and perceptions into stained, messy, occasionally wine-spilled musings that melt, all over the pages, like soft, salt-water taffy slowly expiring on the tongue. 'Do I like how this looks on the page?' becomes every bit as important as, 'What am I trying to say again?' and I'm often surprised at how much I miss my journal the times when I go out and forget it. I don't always use it; it's more an observational talisman that makes me look at things -and smell them, taste them, hear them, feel them - a little more closely.

This re-discovery of the joys of physical writing happened by chance. I was sent, not long after I moved to New York, a gorgeous red moleskine journal, by a friend and favorite journalist. It was both a congratulatory gift, and, I suspect, an acknowledgement, from writer to writer, of the fierce and passionate love we hold of words -particularly the tenuous, occasionally frustrating act of bringing them to life. This act, for me, involves a full engagement with the senses. I love things I can touch, things that I can be stained by, things that leave an impression on a page, that have a smell, a taste, a certain eye-catching color. It explains why I cook. It explains why I paint. It explains a lot.

So I was delighted to attend an event celebrating the tactile -recently. Called "Objectivity", the event was held at Eyebeam, a digital art space on the west side of Manhattan. The event was part of A vocabulary of objects, a formal Moleskine event that saw workshop participants make their very own journals. On one side of the sprawling warehouse space, a massive piece of paper had been tacked onto a broad wall that dominated one side of the room. It had a mottled projection across it; black drafting pencils had been set out to encourage attendees to add their own markings. People were riotously, joyously drawing as they balanced glasses of prosecco and chatted. I added to the markings with a few wild lilies. I didn't see one person texting or talking on a phone - only drawing, drinking, watching, creating, and connecting.

When the projection was turned off, and the lights came on, people stared in awe at the motley collection of markings, as the lines formed their own little colonies and empires across the vast expanse of manila. It was awfully refreshing, and even beautiful, to see people so intimately connected with the sensual act of drawing and making things,, and appreciating the after-effects. Is this the power of the sensual world? Are we coming full circle, back to the tangible arts? I pondered these questions as I wandered around and saw Moleskine's designs for iPads and other digital gadgets. I was reminded of the re-ignition of interest in vinyl recordings, and how heartened I'd been at seeing contemporary albums proudly and prominently displayed at the front of record stores. This isn't mere nostalgia or irony -this is the scratching at a more transcendent experience through earthly means, a knock-kn0ck-knockin' on heaven's door through the gates of dirt and mud and bruised knuckles, sharp needles and blood on the tracks.

And so, the Moleskin event At Eyebeam was a bit of heaven, here and now in New York City, 2011, amidst the hub-bub of technology and the joy of digital connectivity. Those have a place. So do the tangible arts. Being able to draw with total strangers felt like a strong reaffirmation of the vital role of the tangible in everyday life. Even as we ostensibly move further away from experiencing daily life with our five senses, at the same time, we move closer to it, taking pensive, tip-toe steps into that "fourth dimension" Kandinsky referred to. Can we make it? Can we commit? I freely admit to being addicted to the bonbons of modern life: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Soundcloud, Linked In ... blogging. But I'm circling back to sensuality, being reminded, in tiny spiraling whispers, that I never left. That fourth dimension is beckoning me, to enter, and re-enter, again and again. I want to keep walking, I'm curious what I'll find in the middle, on the outer rings, and along the way. Stained fingers? That...and a whole lot more.

Top: Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles (Einige Kreise), January-February 1926, Oil on canvas.

Photos: Taken from my Flickr photostream.

Tea Time

2011-05-20T11:29:00.008-04:00

As I poured hot water over my Bewleys tea bag this morning, I thought about the art of tea-making, and how much it's changed, or at least been simplified and degraded by the busy nature of modern life. I enjoyed a thorough education in the fine art of tea and its enjoyment yesterday afternoon at the lovely In Pursuit of Tea, on Crosby Street in Manhattan.

Housed in an inconspicuous part of Soho, IPOT specializes in fine teas and hosts regular tastings. My host, co-founder Sebastian Beckwith, graciously made the assembled a variety of teas -white, oolong, green, black, and pu-erh -in the classical style: using delicate pieces of fine china to brew, and providing dainty Oriental tasting cups for attendants. Sebastian provided a wonderful background to each tea, too, in a casual, conversational way, sharing stories about his recent travels through China and about the vanishing arts that contribute to the manufacturing of certain types of tea.

Like my last tea-tasting with Stratford, Ontario's very own tea sommelier Karen Hartwick at Toronto's Hart House, the experience of tasting various teas, and of sharing my observations with the assembled, transported me into an older, more deeply sensual world, one where the eyes, ears, tongue and heart work in perfect harmony. Having Led Zeppelin play in the store's intimate environment added a sexily jagged rock and roll vibe, and provided the perfect bridge between old world and new.

A big part of the old world, Sebastian explained, is the way various teas are handled. Women who know how to treat and process certain green teas - with their own hands - are slowly dying, and they aren't passing on their knowledge to a younger generation, not because they don't want to, but because the younger generation isn't interested in learning. The same processing could be done via machine, but it just isn't the same, in either taste or experience. It would be, I observed, akin to kneading bread by hand or using the quick-rise, no-knead version. Sure, good, but... not the same. It's a question of personal taste.

The same holds true for writing. I recently attended an event at the wonderful Eyebeam New York;. the happening was done with Moleskine, the good people behind the beloved, legendary journals, notebooks, and other fine writing accessories. In my next blog spot, I'll be going into more detail about the nostalgia for older, more tangible forms of art. You see it reflected in the craze for vinyl records, for gardening, for home cooking. People want to experience life sensually, while holding on to (and developing) their digital identities. In fact, they're interested in linking the two. There's a fascinating kind of circular experience happening in popular culture.

That became achingly apparent yesterday as I inhaled the earthy, flowery aromas of infused tea leaves, listened to Robert Plant "ramble on", chatted and laughed with other tasters, and let the buttery (or grassy, or vanilla) flavors roll around my palate. Tasting life never seemed more rich. Who knew it could fit into such a tiny cup?

More photos from the tasting can be found at my Flickr photostream.

Change The Frame

2011-05-16T00:10:00.002-04:00

Life has a way of turning out exactly like you didn't plan. And yet it's through the labyrinth of choice that we arrive at a new destination.

I made a big choice a few weeks back, and am still living with the reverberations. As befits my culture-vulture tendencies, I tend to turn to art as a means of trying to comprehend (or at least accept) the power of my choices. Lately Andy Warhol has been a big inspiration. He knew his worth as an artist and a contributor to cultural conversation, and understood the exchange that happened (monetary, mainly) was a result of a larger system that he not only milked beautifully, but understood more keenly than many other cultural figures, even now.

Maybe part of my inspiration is derived from the bright yellow poster for The Andy Monument hanging on my fridge. When I look at it I remember first catching sight of Rob Pruitt's gorgeous monument to Andy Warhol in Union Square just steps from where The Factory was once located. It was a mild, breezy day, and the public space heaved with Saturday shoppers and curious tourists who would approach the silver-chrome statue slowly, eyebrows scrunched and head cocked, camera-phone on the ready. Some people knew who it was, some didn't, but most people were in awe of its sheen, its shine, its winking, blinking surface that glinted and glowed in the late afternoon sunshine. Some posed beside the monument; others clicked away, but it wasn't a manic picture-taking frenzy like you'd see beside other statues of famous people.

In the weeks since, people have been leaving Brillo boxes and cans of Campbell's soup at the statue's feet, which feels like a fitting tribute. The frenzied retail activity that happens around the statue feels like a more apt honor, but, for all his love of mainstream culture, Warhol doesn't command the same level of frenzy as, say, the Sistine chapel. In many senses, he defined the way we understand, perceive, and experience mainstream culture in all its bawdy, gaudy glory, and is so steeped in every aspect of our modern being as to be indistinguishable from it.

His influence was examined last month at a chat held by the Public Art Fund (who are behind the Warhol statue) at The New School. With artist Rob Pruitt present, the panel, comprised of artist/writer Rhonda Lieberman, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, and Public Art Fund Director/Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, discussed Warhol's significance and offered their own memories of the famed master of cultural collection and distillation.

While Baume and Lieberman offered heady, thought-provoking deconstructions of Warhol's work, and Kostenbaum gave a cool, Beat-like remembrance befitting his poetic background, Pruitt's tribute was halting, shy, and entirely unplanned. His palpable nervousness was a charming touch to the (all-too-brief) details he gave regarding the process of creating the statue: an assistant did a preliminary drawing (which he confessed to disliking), his art-collector friend modeled (right down to the wig), the statue is hollow, a chrome coating was a natural choice. He also shared his delight at the effect the statue had upon its unveiling in late March. When questioned about Warhol's influence on his work, Pruitt asserted the ubiquitousness of the artist's reach, noting the difficulty of parsing things as "Andy" or "Mine," especially in this day and age of unoriginality-as-the-original-art-impulse. Pruitt also shared a wonderful personal story that, even now, a month on, continues to inspire delight and awe.

When Pruitt first moved to New York as an aspiring artist in the 1980s, he had a dream of working at The Factory. He rang the buzzer of the famed building, introduced himself as only a confident young man can, and, amazingly, was allowed in. He met Warhol, who explained his duties as an unpaid intern between questions about Pruitt's background as an ice cream scooper at Baskin Robbins (apparently the artist thought Pruitt could get them tons of free ice cream) and fielding dozens of inquiries from his Factory worker-bees. Pruitt recalled the experience with saucer-eyes, before confessing that he didn't take the internship: "I had to make money." He took a job in the glove department of Macy's, something that, according to Koestenbaum, "Andy would've respected more."

There's something curiously inspiring about this story. It got me thinking about the value we place on our activities, especially in the age of digital, where (especially as writers and artists) there is an expectation of "free" -a culture that has become a kind of monstrously growing pudding, one that keeps being fed by people who should know better. Whither worth? Everyone has to make a living -and has a right to. It can be, as Warhol serves to remind us, mundane, fantastical, or a mix of both (proudly), but we live in a culture where money is a vital form of energetic exchange. Those 15 minutes aren't enough -you should either make money from it, or pay for it. Right? Wrong? It's worth pondering, especially in an age where we choose to take and give things -talents, time, energy -without a thought. I wonder what Warhol would say.

Change. Choice. Art. Energy. They all seem linked, more than ever.

Pondering Pakistan

2011-05-10T11:38:00.009-04:00

For a long time now I've wanted to write about my interview with Duane Baughman and Mark Siegel. The two men were in Toronto this time last year for the screening of their film, Bhutto, at the annual Hot Docs Film Festival, following their world premiere months earlier at the Sundance Film Festival. The Toronto screening came and went, life moved on, and I never seemed to properly make time to sit down and write - until now.

I visited Ground Zero last week, less than 12 hours after President Obama's historic announcement about Osama bin Laden's death. With news reports filled with pertinent details and reports that paint a damning portrait of Pakistan and its possible role in harboring terrorists (or not), the screening of Bhutto tonight feels like a slow, patient untying of a complex Gordian knot. That's not to say the movie is slow -it isn't - but it is layered, the way any documentary worth its salt should be.

I discussed this in my chat with Duane and Mark last year on the radio:

Independent Lens is broadcasting the timely documentary tonight on local PBS stations (check yours here). Baughman, its Director, and Siegel, Co-Producer, present a complex, if deeply vital portrait of both a woman and a country that we, here in the West, have a lot of preconceptions around -especially since the news of Osama bin Laden being killed May 1st.

With numerous interviews (including fascinating input from The New York Times' John Burns and vitriolic assertions from Fatima Bhutto, Benazir's niece), fly-on-the-wall footage, and a thorough, if compelling history lesson (not to mention a pulsating soundtrack by The Police's Stewart Copeland), Bhutto is a riveting look at a country that's been painted in far too broad strokes by a Western media eager for villains. Truth be told, there are no clear villains in Bhutto, but (hint hint) General Pervez Musharraf doesn't come off very well; he visibly squirms, as the camera casually lingers on him, providing glib answers and a ton of silence. The effect is awkward, as it's meant to be, though his inclusion in the documentary might seem questionable. In fact, when Siegel was on The Daily Show just months after Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West came out (a book he co-authored with Benazhir Bhutto), he took host Jon Stewart to task for having the former Pakistani leader as a featured guest. Siegel had just finished working with long-time friend Bhutto on Reconciliation when she was assassinated. "She prayed for the best and planned for the worst"...

The Daily Show - Mark Siegel
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Even if you still have questions around Benazir Bhutto and her approach to Islam, her handling of government policy, and those troubling corruption charges, you will most certainly come away with a more thorough, nuanced undertanding of the machinations of politics and terrorism, and the place where the two meet, in one tragic explosive moment. Watch it. You'll be glad you did.

The Power And The Glitter

2011-05-07T17:09:00.011-04:00

There's something deeply moving about seeing Gustav Klimt's work in-person.

I missed that opportunity in Vienna years ago, but, thanks to the Neue Galerie here in New York, I got it lastnight. Shown as part of their current exhibition Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, the work, tastefully incorporating design, art, and various writings, is on view at the museum through June 27th.

After checking bags and jacket, I walked up the narrow, winding staircase (reminding me so much of the narrow passageway I climbed in Vienna, to see one of the flats Beethoven lived in) and, on the second floor, caught the unmistakable sight of Klimt's signature golden swirls. I entered one gallery and immediately had to check myself. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (I) stood before me in all its glinting, glistening glory. I almost cried.

Klimt is, for me, one of those painters with such a singular vision and style, any amount of copying or imitation just comes off as hokey and dumb. The closest I ever saw was the costuming for Bram Stoker's Dracula; Oscar-winner Eiko Ishioka really captured the rich, feminine, sumptuous beauty of Klimt while keeping an eye on his penchant for strong contrasts and soft shapes against strong ones. There's a nod to outfits in the exhibit too, with dresses shown beside or near paintings -a nice nod to the role of fashion in culture. I was especially thrilled by the billowing white dress with cascading layers and complex, thick-thick textures; it reminded me so much of Ishioka's design for Lucy's wedding gown/shroud, that I half-expected Sadie Frost to come creeping around a corner of the wood-and-dark-rugged Galerie.

Seeing his work up-close and in-person for the first time, after having loved it for over 20 years, was a much more emotional experience than I anticipated -and the work itself flew off the canvas (or sheet) with a kind of casual ease I wasn't expecting. Outside of a few early works that are featured, it all looks...like bleeding, breathing, blinking. Each work, whether painted in rich oil colors or drawn with pencil, looks like a vein that's been opened. Something divine -and very powerful -pours out on those surfaces. And more often than not, it sees like it was women who inspires the most rolling, flowing, richly memorable moments.

Women play such a central role in Klimt's work; powerful, beautiful, potent, and occasionally terrifying, they are, for me, the sun around which Klimt's artistic output revolved. This sense of female power -and of the power of their sexuality, and his worship of the two combined -was intoxicating to behold. I was especially pleased to see a selection of his erotic drawings on display. As people shuffled by awkwardly, I stopped, and gazed. Klimt was capturing women in their most intimate moments, but there was nothing dirty or lascivious in his depiction. The mix of private and personal -and performance - is intoxicating. Hand-wringing about the line between high art and porn aside, it isn't the guy drawing who has the power here -it's the women with the sighing smiles. Patricia Boccadoro, writing at Culture Kiosk, correctly notes that

when one stands in front of these frankly very erotic drawings of young girls carried away by their own desire, eyes closed, lying on their backs with their legs wide apart and masturbating, they seem natural and are not at all embarrassing. ...They are beautiful in their abandon, lascivious, but fragile and vulnerable, and one senses that the artist was touched by what he saw. There is nothing perverse or humiliating...

He was touched, but I sense, also turned on. And maybe, as The Economist wisely observed, that once Klimt was "(s)tripped of his wet palette and gold, it is the artist who appears naked in the images, offering a startling insight into (his) own private world." The raw, honest vulnerability of eroticism has a power all its own, one we've yet to fully embrace more than a century later.

I thought about Klimt, and art, and powerful women a lot lastnight, as I walked by dozens of posters advertising Lady Gaga's show on HBO and hundreds of push-up-bra'd-and-super-high-heeled young women, as I carefully weighed fattening dinner options and went out in a low-cut, slinky black dress, and as I pulled a sweater on and put on my flat shoes before getting on the subway. What constitutes female power? Is it bling? Boobs? Boys? On a larger level, is it okay to be perceived as purely a sexual being? Where's the person beneath the parts? Does anyone care? Also, I keep wondering about the role of trust between an artist and muse -or, for that matter, being a man and woman. I'm not sure I'd ever be comfortable with any artist sketching me in so vulnerable a state but... that's the power of these drawings: they betray an extraordinary level of trust that translates into a new, empowering form of male/female relating.

Seeing Klimt's work up close gave me a whole new awareness of not only the shifting ground of artistry and the beauty of orchestrating its creation, but of the power I, as a woman, hold, and how easily, quickly, and thoughtlessly I give it away in little tidy parcels every day. I aspire to be Adele. I aspire to be as free as the women in those drawings. I want to vanish into Klimt's beautiful, glittering world. Alas, I'm stuck with a sweater over a dress, navigating a maze of colorless subways in dirty, crazy, loud New York. At least the Neue is close by.

Hope Lives

2011-04-26T22:36:00.020-04:00

Hope as a concept, a feeling, a way of living and perceiving the world feels quaint, strange, and weirdly distant much of the time. And yet it's what drives change in the world.

I thought about this after seeing Love Hate Love, a powerful documentary that had its world premiere at the tenth annual TriBeCa Film Festival lastnight. The work, directed by Don Hardy and Dana Nachman, seeks to counter society's intrinsic pessimism with the idea of something bigger, larger, and more ultimately more important. The movie is a fantastic depiction of vision over visibility in action, viewed across three different lives and experiences. The TriBeCa Film Festival website wraps up the story nicely:

After Steve and Liz Alderman lost their 25-year-old son Peter in the World Trade Center, they took the money they were awarded as compensation and started a series of mental health clinics in Uganda, for those who have been victims of war crimes, child soldier enlistment, and more. After Esther Hyman lost her sister Miriam in the mass transit attacks in London on 7/7/05, she founded an eye care clinic in India in her sister’s name. And Australian Ben Tullipan lost his legs and suffered from massive burns in a bombing in Bali in 2002, after which he made a remarkable recovery.

In a world of cynicism, doubt, anger, vengeance, and fear, the idea of hope stands as a shy, if powerful presence that can change the entire center of gravity.

I remember the first time I went to Ground Zero. I'd been there many times in the past, when the World Trade Center was still in existence. I had a ticket broker friend who worked on one of the floors of the second tower. We'd lost touch over the years but I thought of him that awful day in 2001. When I went down to the site, a mere two months after the attacks, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. Tourists were gawking and taking pictures. People were softly crying. The air was thick with silence and grief.

In the ensuing months, that grief turned to rage, to hatred, to cries of vengeance. Whether you literally lost someone that day or not didn't matter. It was Old Testament eye-for-an-eye justice America wanted. Love Hate Love takes this bloodlust -the tender open wound that weeps from an injury fear created - and flips it inside out. All the people in the film suffered some kind of loss: Esther Hyman lost her sister Miriam in the July 2005 London bus bombings, Ben Tullipan lost his legs in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, and the Aldermans lost their son Peter in the 9/11 attacks. All have turned their grief into something positive. They didn't give in to fear or to hatred.

So while Love Hate Love could be just another Peter Pan-style exercise in feel-good-ism, it's ultimately much more. Through interviews, photos, and recollections from friends and family, we are given a sense of these peoples' monumental loss, and how that colors their day-to-day lives. Hardy and Nachman widen their scope, choosing not to focus on sadness, and in doing that, allow viewers to see how grief, turned inside out, actually looks. And what an awesome sight: small children whose eyesight has been restored. A boy with no legs who learns to accept his "different-ness" and runs around a mini-putt course. A teenaged boy in Uganda who slowly learns to deal with his experiences as a child soldier, drawing his past experiences in colorful, vibrant hues. It could all come off as so trite, so inconsequential. But it doesn't, and it isn't, thanks in large part to the skillful weaving of respective narratives, and the singularly non-political stance taken by the filmmakers. This is a film that refuses to point fingers; instead, it lends hands and opens hearts.

At the post-film Q&A session hosted by film writer and journalist Marshall Fine, the participants, all seated onstage with Executive Producer Sean Penn, seemed amazed, delighted, and deeply moved to be part of the project, and perhaps, a larger movement that the film represents. Esther Hyman fretted that she'd come off "too English" in the film, and she and Liz Alderman both bonded over birthdays (of Esther's sister "Mim" and Liz's son "Pete" respectively) being the most difficult days for them. Each updated the audience with advances on their respective efforts, with the Aldermans talking about the expansion of their mental health care facilities in Eastern Africa, Hyman discussing her eye care center in India, and Tullipan sharing the news that one of the young boys featured in the film whom he speaks with has since gotten out of his wheelchair and is learning to walk with prosthetics.

Whenever I'm in the financial area of Manhattan now, I look to the rising buildings, and I remember that time, ten years ago. I remember all that has happened as a result of it. Giving in to pessimism, as Penn said lastnight, is so easy. Holding on to hope is important -but believing in it, and living it, with a palpable sense of change, is hard. "Be the change you want to see in the world." Love Hate Love shows that, despite, or sometimes because of the odds, it can -and should -be done.

Hope: not so quaint after all.

Poster and middle photo courtesy of KTF Films.

Bottom photo from my Flickr photostream.

Thank You, Ken

2011-04-23T22:47:00.004-04:00

I'm shocked and saddened to learn tonight about the death of one of my favorite food personalities, Canadian host Ken Kostick.

I interviewed Ken along with his TV partner Mary Jo Eustace two years ago, as they were preparing for another season of He Said, She Said (related Mary Jo-centric blog here). Their salty banter and biting commentary made for a lively interview, and I'll never forget Ken's kindness toward me, and the immediate interest he took in my own cooking endeavors. I'll always remember us trading tips about spicing and roasting. He made me feel truly at ease.

His death is a big loss not only to Canadian food TV but to the worldwide market, and to every budding chef. Thank you, Mr. Kostick. You will be missed.

On Bill The Quill

2011-04-23T14:15:00.003-04:00

Today marks the anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1616 (and, some might argue, his birth in 1564).

Much has been written, of course, about the playwright who left an indelible mark on drama and culture. It's impossible to imagine life without him; like Andy Warhol (more on him in a future post), his influence is felt everywhere. Amidst the volumes of academia and the wide-eyed worship, I frequently feel as if the human -the regular, ordinary, beer-swilling, bum-pinching Bill -gets lost.

Filmmaker Anna Cohen seeks to find him, with this wonderful stop-motion animation video, Shakespearean Tragedy (A Comedy), that reminds us that Shakespeare probably suffered from something that afflicts writers everywhere. Hey, we all know Romeo And Juliet was inspired by various poems and stories, but it's fun to see the figures come to life on the blank pages before him, and I love the contemporary touches.

I never enjoyed reading Shakespeare myself; when I'd have to do for high school or university, I'd go to the library and borrow the RSC audio or video performances. There's something about hearing those words aloud, in all their rhythmic, dancing, shimmying glory, that makes them -and their creator -feel more alive.

The clever thing about this video is that there's no dialogue -it's entirely visual. What would Bill say? What should he say? It's refreshing to see a figure held in such high regard by so many has been rendered more human, even in clay.

Winning!

2011-04-20T12:40:00.011-04:00

I didn't know a thing about Win Win when I walked into the cinema to see it lastnight. I only knew it had award-winning actor Paul Giamatti as the lead, and it's been popular with cinema-going New Yorkers who's tried to get tickets, only to find screenings have sold out.

Lastnight wasn't too crowded with people, but the film itself is chalk-full of ideas -and that corny old concept of heart. Except that in writer/director Thomas McCarthy's capable hands, it isn't corny. He takes what could've easily been a very sentimental, schmaltzy concept and delivers with panache, subtlety, and a genuine human feeling for the characters and situations depicted.

Win Win is about a small-town lawyer who makes a morally heinous decision out of sheer financial desperation, and is forced to live with its consequences. McCarthy gently, if skillfully, weaves together twin themes of survival and family (and the connection therein) by offering an unflinchingly look at good, everyday people who say and do ugly, everyday things. The connection Giamatti's character, Mike, shares with the young, sullen Kyle (Alex Schaffer) grows more complex, and yet clearer, with every scene. Mike doesn't see his younger self in Kyle, so much as his current one; struggling against tough odds to find his place, he lashes out, does dumb things, and ultimately comes to understand the power of unconditional love and acceptance as a powerful agent for personal transformation.

The concept of "winning" is laced throughout the work: Kyle's winning a wrestling match Mike and his friends are coaching, Mike winning in court, both of them winning against the odds. Mike ultimately wins in the end, and Kyle ultimately wins in the end (and Mike's family, who play a major role throughout the film, win too) - but that win comes with huge compromises. Mike does the very thing he said he wouldn't do for income; Kyle is estranged from his mother (even if that's probably a plus), and Mike's family is placed with the twin challenges of him not being there much, and taking care of both a newcomer and his relative. Winning? Hell yes. No one said life was perfect -but it is always full of possibilities for growth, even (or especially) through the lean times.

I thought about this concept of "winning" riding home on the subway, amidst squeaky breaks and the inevitable announcements from desperate people looking for spare change. Who's really "winning" in this land of plenty? The notion is, for me (and I write this as a totally uncompetitive person), more about doing "whatever the f*ck it takes" (to quote a line from the movie) and less about demolishing your opponent; it's about your rise, not another's descent. It's about understanding what losing is, too. You can't understand the sweet taste of a win without knowing the acrid, bitter taste of loss. I had the good fortune of recently winning a few sets of tickets to various cultural happenings around New York, which has been cheering. I didn't necessarily have to "beat" anyone to do it -it was random luck-of-the-draw -but there's always a victor, and its opposite. One doesn't -can't -exist without the other.

McCarthy deftly demonstrates this in a short scene in Win Win, where he shows Mike's friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) sitting glumly outside what was once his house, where his ex-wife now lives with a local handyman.

"It's MY house!" he barks at Mike over the phone, after his friend chides him for his obsession. Oh, but it's hard to let go of the old and the comfortable, even that world has turned hideous and strange.

Living in New York is teaching me to embrace winning and losing, and to understand there's more to both (and its respective outcomes) than meets the eye. Some days are all about one, some days, the other, and that's probably how it should be, though it's sometimes hard to accept. Will we play dirty? Throw our opponent against the floor with reckless fury? Allow our reactions to rule our better sense? Walking away from Win Win, it occurred to me that it's how we wrestle with winning and losing -and our ideas around both - in our daily lives that matters. Acceptance exists, as Win Win reminded me, it's just a question of embracing it -and understanding that living that win is probably a whole lot different than we could've ever imagined.

I Love This.

2011-04-16T15:11:00.014-04:00

Musician Son Lux played (le) poisson rouge here in New York Friday night. He was opening for Yoni Wolf of Why?. I came across the announcement on the poisson'sTwitter feed yesterday afternoon, quite by accident. After listening to a selection of Lux's work, I'm starting to wonder if it was grand design.

After a bit of investigation, I was immediately struck by how much Lux's music took me back to my new-music-loving youth, namely the first albums of Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead, and Orbital. Ryan Lott -the man behind Son Lux - has done remixing and production work for bands like Beirut and Anathallo, and studied piano and composition at the Indiana University School Of Music. His debut album, At War With Walls And Mazes, was one of the most acclaimed of 2008. There's something about a well-put-together electronic piece that has the power to reach straight into the heart the way any symphony can. Son Lux gets this.

But it's not symphonies that have been on my mind. Lately I've been madly looking around for contemporary music that has that unique mix of well-crafted tunes, modern approach, and heart... great big weeping, bleeding, operatic heart. The music of Son Lux has this in droves. In a wider sense, it's good to see the extent to which the whole "electronic-music-isn't-real-music"-argument has faded; there used to be an old-fashioned attitude that, because musicians like Son Lux don't have the guitar or piano as their main instrument, they musn't be "real" artists. For me, artists like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk (and a myriad of DJs including Afrika Bambaataa and Howie B.) were instrumental in shattering that stuffy, inert attitude. Electronic isn't just dance -though that's important and vital too - but can be, and is, so much more. It's nice to see mainstream culture accept these artists with open arms. Even straight-laced NPR (whose All Songs Considered bestowed the Best New Artist title in 2008) is streaming the entire new Lux album online.

Son Lux - Rising by Son Lux

I didn't make it to the show Friday night -but I'm not surprised it sold out. This is fantastically trippy, orchestral electronica with more than a hint of its ambient forbears - but it's also rooted firmly in the here and now. I love his embrace of old beats, older harmonies, and very fresh approach to composing and arranging. His work pulls on every heart string, gently, persistently, with great skill and care, moving from the careful tenacity of a cat's swishing to the hard grooves of stilettos on linoleum. Lott/Lux is totally comfortable throwing the sounds of violins, flutes, and clarinets right in with processed beats and synthesizers, and making it sound natural, good, and... fun.

Please Mister Lux, please... play NY again soon. Promise I'll be there, swooning in the front row, and quite possibly in tears.

Photo by Brenden Beecy.

Like We Invented It

2011-04-14T01:25:00.008-04:00

The rain started in light spurts when I got off the subway Tuesday night. Fast-gathering clouds leaned down on an glassy towers and old concrete masses alike with bullying persistence. People glanced up nervously at the sky as they scurried along the sidewalks like nervous beetles. I'd just turned on Peter Gabriel's beautiful cover of Elbow's "Mirrorball" on my iPod and was wondering if anyone could hear the magnificent genius that was ringing, bell-like, in my ears. The track is taken from his gorgeously poetic album of covers, Scratch My Back, released in February through Virgin Music. The album contains a myriad of thoughtful, sometimes surprising cover versions, including Lou Reed's sigh-worthy "The Power Of The Heart" (his proposal to now-wife Laurie Anderson), Paul Simon's "Boy In The Bubble", as well as David Bowie's much-loved "Heroes". The album is fast becoming a favorite on my iPod. It's a million miles away from the noisy, posturing, abrasive world of modern pop. It's not exactly get-up-and-boogie music, but rather, sit-down-and-shut-up music -and I like that. I wish more of that genre existed.

Far from being the bleeping, bloopy, busy electro-pop sound Gabriel became known for in the 1980s, Scratch My Back features minimalist production, a quality that immediately caught my attention. It's very dramatic for its lack of instrumentation, and its careful consideration of orchestration in the way of what to put, and where. "Mirrorball" is a stand-out for its phenomenal string arrangements from Guy Garvey that, to quote Gabriel himself, "use all the colours of the orchestra to provide the heart, passion, intensity and groove" that lay dormant, if vibrantly alive, within the Elbow original. It does sound like Stravinsky -and Eno, and opera, prayer, incantation, invocation, moan and shudder, all at once. Upon first listen, walking through the ever-dampening, rapidly-darkening street in a New York borough, I wanted to weep, laugh, run, and stand still, all at once. Gabriel's knowing, intimate delivery offers a beautiful, world-weary understanding of life and its variance. This begs for a video made in New York, complete with the huge, white flash of light and earth-shaking eruption of thunder that greeted its end the evening I listened to it.

A dramatic, magical end for a beautiful piece of art. New York was listening in.

Everything has changed. Indeed.

Photo taken from my Flickr photostream.

"What Do You Want?"

2011-04-11T23:37:00.009-04:00

It was beautiful in New York today.

The sun was shining, the sky was a lustrous blue, it was mild. The rain that had been threatened all weekend didn't materialize. People were happy to welcome the spring weather, walking around in loose t-shirts and perhaps-too-soon rubber sandals. I got off work and decided I'd make a trip back to Strand Books. Poetry was calling, along with a general desire to walk around Manhattan on a gorgeous Monday afternoon and observe, reflect, walk, and breathe. The rhythm of street life -of peddlers, poets, con artists, lovers, dreamers, stragglers, strugglers, tired parents, scared tourists, oblivious locals, obnoxious students - all co-mingle here with a natural harmony that is both breathtaking and choking. Get out of the way!, I wanted to shout every few steps, if you want to yap with your boyfriend, don't try to walk at the same time! Surely it's a sign of becoming a local, though I still get shocked looks whenever I say "thank you" in a store. Habits from home die hard.

I entered Strand Books and immediately knew what I wanted. I'd seen Patti Smith: Complete when it was first released in 2006, but I couldn't afford it. Now, five years later, in a place where Patti figuratively welcomed me to the city my first night, I couldn't afford not to. Did they have a used copy? Yes, just one -but where? I looked, high and low. Nothing. Was the computer lying? I checked again, and there it was, snugly tucked in on a high shelf; even standing spider-like on the edge of a cart, it was just out of my grasp.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that short people hate asking for help from a tall person. But... I swallowed my vertical-challenge pride. I didn't look at it until I got it home, to my bedside, my bathtub, reading in barefoot with a glass of wine and a sharpie.

Poetry, music, prose, drawing -these things are keeping me sane, even as they drive me to more and more questions. Art isn't and should never be a baggy La-Z-Boy of comfy, feet-up vanity and smug self-congratulations. I keep wondering in what order I should place all the things I've seen and heard these last two weeks: the faces, the floors, the pieces of gum on the sidewalks, the squeaky rails of the subway, the boomboomboom of a hip-hop boy's earbuds -and if I'll ever do all of them justice. My iPod has been a vital tool in attempting to make sense of these moments, giving them themes, names, direction, and momentum. Recent playlists have reflected this tornado of anxious confusion, with a selection of tunes, both new and old, urban and urbane, soft and abrasive, uber-cool and super-gauche.

Bizarrely, this tune has become a mainstay on my iPod since -and even as -I moved. What I love about the above performance (from Brazil this past Sunday night) is that you can't actually see the band; you can only hear them. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe it was on-purpose. either way, there was a forced listening at work, an experience of the quiet-but-awesome marriage between sound, ideas, and art in a way many bands of that caliber wouldn't attempt in such a mondo-stadium context. The slick glammy sheen of the original has been stripped away for a world-weariness and a nose-to-the-grindstone grittiness, even with those gorgeously swooping, theatrical guitars. The audience is clearly confused: where are they? what is this? I don't get it! But... who cares? Should mass art always be digestible? Should life always be full of answers and no questions? Should we be spoon-fed everything our entire lives -even (or especially) the meaningful stuff?

To quote a favorite poet whose posthumous work I recently picked up in Strand Books, "poetry is what happens when nothing else can." That "nothing else" can be so many things -for me, it's the striving to understand everything, all the time, it's the "what ifs" that don't get (and won't be) answered, ever. And so the possibilities -of the streets, the subway, the stains, the sleepless nights and somnambulant days -is louder, softer, harder and more real than any slick glamorous picture people have of the Big Apple, and more beautiful to anyone with two eyes and a beating heart. It is those questions, singing loud, a little more weary but every bit wiser, confusing the masses, and maybe, just maybe, inspiring a few of us along the way, that is the real poetry. Viva love, viva life, viva... New York.

Noise And Motion

2011-04-11T00:56:00.002-04:00

Trying to write about a litany of amazing experiences is like trying to file spaghetti bolognese by ingredient -after it's cooked and on your plate.

Friday night I attended Monodramas at the New York City Opera. Then I had a great meal, met some great people, and walked through a curiously-quiet Times Square. Saturday I went to the legendary Strand Books, and later explored the Lower East Side with a local friend. Today I heard another friend sing at a favorite spot on the Upper West Side, and on the way there, chatted about the wonders of Bukowski with a fellow commuter.

Together these things seem unremarkable, but... trying to put them into some kind of order, and sense, parsing out their colors, textures, sounds, meanings, the small spaces of light between the blocks of firm monolithical EVENTS... is hard. Such efforts demand a certain commitment of time and energy and availability of mind and spirit and fingers, to sit, think, contemplate, and type. Time isn't always on my side.

New York is swallowing me up, and I'm enjoying being in the throes of its guts, thrown this way and that, against hardship, wellship, friendship and relationship. I want to sit down and try to make sense of all this, slowly, carefully, and against the grain of everything New York demands. I love the fast rhythm, but I like the slow numbers too, and I have to mind the splinters and dirt while I'm at it. Never mind the glam, here's bare feet, dry hands, red eyes and low voice. Add a glass of red, Sinatra on the stereo, and a room with a view -or at least access to a great, busy street - and I'll truly feel I have arrived. Until then, I'm on input mode.

Photo is from my Flickr photostream.

More Ghosts

2011-04-06T22:50:00.007-04:00

It was surreal to attend a movie about Dave Grohl's band that was built on the ashes of Nirvana on the very day that marked 17 years since Kurt Cobain's passing.

April 5th, 1994 is a day burned into my memory, not because I was such a huge Nirvana fan, so much as I became a kind of spiritual godmother to the reams of younger people I knew who loved him, and who came to me that day in tears. Grunge hit when I was in high school, and I grew to love the dirty, loud sounds of Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and most especially Pearl Jam. I appreciated Nirvana's loud, abrasive stance, but didn't warm to them immediately. I never felt an urge to see them live, much less to buy their album, but I like the spirit of what they were doing. Grunge was my generation's punk, and it was the alarm bell for a wider world in my narrow, grayishly polite suburban world.

"Heart-Shaped Box" was always a more deeply affecting song for me than "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which seemed too clever and bratty for its own good. Instead of a stream-of-consciousness rant that riffed on teen experiences and peevish observations, I preferred the tortured, life-lived wariness of a scarily romantic, co-dependent love gone sour on itself:

Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet
Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath
Broken hymen of Your Highness - I'm left black
Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back

There's something awfully frightening -and thrilling -about that song, which kind of sums up the public perception of Cobain himself in some sad way.

Foo Fighters: Back And Forth doesn't shy away from the Nirvana legacy, but fully embraces it like a long-lost lover. Grohl reminisces on life as a suburban Seattle-ite, his love for punk, his influences, and his love of a band unit. Cobain's stumbles and setbacks aren't shied away from but, refreshingly, aren't exploited either. The look on Grohl's face as he haltingly names Courtney Love and adds, awkwardly, "his... wife" was bittersweet, if thunderously sad for the bad blood it implied. Overall, I would've liked more 90s-formative-stuff from the doc; I suspect some Foo fans don't understand or appreciate the huge shadow Nirvana casts on Grohl's creative output, and to my I-remember-when head, that's pretty key to getting what he does now. Alas, much of it was left out in favor of more Foo-centric material, though the most important event wasn't shown at all. And that had nothing to do with the choices of Oscar-winning director James Moll.

Owing to a technical glitch (or perhaps grand design), the screening blipped when the tortured singer/songwriter's overdose in Rome was portrayed. All we heard was Grohl, saying over and over again, "I don't know" and a shot of the Rome American Hospital and a cop in uniform standing outside. It was like something out of the Emergency Broadcast Network, or Derek Jarman, or William Burroughs (or all of the above). By the time the screening returned (it was being shown on a satellite signal from L.A.), Cobain's passing had already happened. A whole, wholly significant chunk of the film had been inadvertently excised. In a way, I was relieved, but in another way, it felt like a robbery, not only for me, for but the entire audience in the cinema, many of whom would've been toddlers at the time of the actual event. The effect of that glitch stayed with me the rest of the night, even as the meteoric rise of the Foos was shown in all its gritty, rocking glory.

"I don't know." It was a perfect metaphor for Cobain's life, and indeed, for the struggle so many artists -hell, people -endure pursuing some nameless, formless sort of creative immortality. I left the theater after the screening and walked by the Chelsea Hotel, located just down from the cinema. Ghosts really are everywhere in New York. Even if they aren't apparent, their presence is palpable. Their struggle in life pervades the energy of the city, particularly the creative energy. Forget the well-known figures; it's all the stragglers, the strugglers, the mad, bad, broke ones I notice.

Struggle is a funny thing; it only looks good in retrospect. I thought about Just Kids and about all the artists and poets and lovers and dreamers and... me. Moving slowly down Seventh Avenue, I could feel a million New York ghosts by my side, holding my hand and asking me to look around, take deep breaths, take it step by step. I thought about the woman I'd spotted in the Chelsea lobby, slowly making her way to the door with a walker. I wondered how long she'd lived at the hotel. I wondered how many paintings, drawings, novels, letters, songs, dreams, and rejections she lived with. I wondered if she'd felt as scared, alone, directionless, confused and overwhelmed as I do now.

Ghosts -in a cinema or hotel room, on a dark street, in the creak of a floorboard or the rattles of a window pane -offer mischief, but also hope. Because within the unpredictable is the limitless. Ghosts know this. Maybe I should trust that spirit a bit more. Maybe that should be my new way of remembering April 5th: the Day Of I-Don't-Know, the Day Of Ghosts, the Day That's Every Day. Maybe.

"Sometimes I Feel So Happy"

2011-04-04T22:20:00.016-04:00

At this time last week, I was on a bus racing towards the Canadian/American border, luggage in tow and pie-eyed with worry, anxiety, sadness, and excitement. It was a strange feeling, to zoom by all the familiar sights -first the CN Tower (bathed in red in honour of the city's various charity efforts for Japan), then the low-slung buildings and depressing box malls of the suburbs, and finally the vast vineyards of Niagara. I wasn't sentimental so much as impatient, though I kept telling myself it was a long journey ahead - both literally, on the damn bumpy bus, and figuratively, in the oh-my-gawd-what-am-I-doing? sense.

What lit my resolve through that long, dark ride was the thought that I was seeing Patti Smith soon. Looking back on it six nights later, it feels like a beautiful illusion. Did I really ride 11 hours, sleep barely 2, haul 3 suitcases up 4 flights of stairs, madly clean for 4 hours, rest for (maybe) 1, and then run out the door 7 (or so) subway stops to (le poisson rouge)? Yes. And hallelujah.

To Japan With Love was announced a week before my departure. It featured Cibo Matto, Antony (Hegarty), Patti Smith, and Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono band, which included son Sean Lennon. I knew precious little about Yoko, but she's always been a woman for whom I have a deep and abiding respect. It can't be easy to live with the musty old you-broke-up-The-Beatles moniker for decades, much less the 'Shrieking Weirdo Artist' one (tho I suspect she'd like that). I made sure to leave early and line up outside the Bleecker Street club for a prime spot, and soon began chatting with enthusiastic New Yorkers who not only knew Yoko's work well, but who were big fans and admirers. One Japanese fan even identified a club across the street - Kenny's Castaways - as being a spot where she'd played an important gig in 1974. Everything -and everyone -has a story, especially here in New York.

After 2+ hours of a cold, impatient wait, I wound up being stuck behind one of New York's tallest and most obnoxious (oh, and gassiest) photographers. I managed to angle next to a group of cool women with similarly-small builds but gigantic oodles of rock-and-roll enthusiasm (one of whom's husband kindly provided the photos), and they provided me with good intros to both Cibo Matto, who were on first, and Yoko Ono, who came on later. It was a refreshingly diverse crowd, with nary a hipster or glamazon to be found (though Sean Lennon's bass-playing model-girlfriend definitely threw some good pouts). I kept pinching myself that I was standing there, though the coughing jags provided painful, regular reminders. A constant was my wish that my health could've been better to more fully enjoy the splendor of what was unfolding before me.

Still, the coughing took a definite backseat when Patti came on. With her long, grey-streaked hair, bright eyes, broad smile, thick socks and big army boots, she looked utterly glamorous, strong, defiant, and beautiful. Her voice was like caramel: rich, deep, solid, the sort you want to swim in through a cold, rainy evening. She and her band (which included original members Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, along with Tony Shanahan, as well as her daughter on piano and son on guitar) held the room's rapt attention as they launched into slower hits, as Patti gently, elegantly reminded the audience about the purpose of the evening. She showed her annoyance with that obnoxious photographer in front of me, as her eyes flashed with anger after he kept madly snapping past the fourth song. During an angry, passionate, spit-inducing performance of "Pissing In A River" (one of my all-time favorites), Patti folded her hands, bowed her grand head, and went... somewhere else. Somewhere very deep within herself physically, occupying a private space within a public context, showing herself to be both deeply theatrical and deeply veneered, all at once. Captivating.

As the soft, meandering guitar-rich intro for "Beneath The Southern Cross" was played, I let out a huge, audible sigh, clasping my hands together and shutting my eyes: "Oh to be / not anyone / gone / this maze of being / skin..." When I opened them, Patti Smith was looking at me and smiling. I still recall that look almost a week later. We held that gaze for a while and something in me said, don't look away. Maybe it was a test. Maybe not. Later on, I exchanged a smile with Yoko, who beamed a huge, broad grin right in my direction. When Lou Reed came onstage to play a loud, fantastically raucous version of "Leave Me Alone", us small ladies upfront couldn't help but rock out - and it was apparent Lou liked the input. He kept extending the song, one, two, three times, a false ending, a stare with the Plastic Ono Band's drummer, and then... more. He looked directly at me and... yep, smiled. The spirit was infectious.

Another memorable moment came when Antony and Yoko sang "I Love You, Earth" -another song that continued past its original ending, as Antony's beautiful, eerily ethereal voice floated above the din, the sweat, and the feedback. He towered over the elfish, clearly-awed Yoko, as the two exchanged the words of the chorus, acapella: "I love you... / I love you / I love you... / I love you / I love you... earth." At the song's eventual end, Antony remarked, "that's a fucking punk rock lyric." Hell yeah. Hallelujah. A warm fuzzy goodness enveloped the room as a result and I'll never forget the embrace he and Ono exchanged before they left the stage.

But that look from Patti -that smile, from someone I hold as a hero -quietly whispers to me a week on. It breaths an inspiration not yet discovered, an energy not yet channeled, a path barely begun but already so, so hard. It soothes all the bitter tears of homesickness, the sleepless nights of worry, the crying out for community and the sentimentality over small acts of kindness from strangers. Seeing her majestic goddess-like energy, coupled with a casual, comfortable, confident unpretentiousness, still feels like a dream. But it was real. And hearing her - being mere feet from her - my first night in New York was the best landing-gift I could've possibly asked for.

All photos by Jon Rosenbaum.

Benefit

2011-03-30T12:47:00.004-04:00

My first night in New York was spent at (le poisson rouge), a fantastic live arts space in the Village. As soon as I heard the lineup announced last week for a special Japan benefit show, I knew I had to be there. It was my long-awaited chance to see Patti Smith.

Amidst moving, cleaning, and dealing with a bad cold that won't let go, I haven't really found the right headspace (or indeed heart-space) to blog, but I'm looking forward to sitting down, collecting my thoughts, wiping the bleary-eyed dust bunnies away, and offering up thoughts, reactions, and observations on seeing one of my very-favorite and most beloved of all artists live, mere feet away.

Right now there's too many "to do"s and "must get"s and sneezing. My head's too full of everything, literally and figuratively, to think straight, much less write with any clarity, but it was, for lack of a better term at the moment, a true NY experience, as the mischievously elfish Ono hugged surprise guest Lou Reed before explaining, "We're old New Yorkers." No kidding. I couldn't help but let out a big whoop. Being delayed by service one-night-only service changes en route to my new home wasn't so much an annoyance as a part of the whole grand plan of the evening. Welcome to New York indeed.