(click photos to enlarge)
Quote of the day: ACTING
March 6, 2015ACTING
I’ll tell you, all the film and television things—you do them, and everyone gets so excited about them, and then they disappear so fast. Whereas I’m always amazed about the shelf life of a theatre piece. {Edward Albee’s] The Goat was on Broadway, the longest run I had ever done, I think it was seven months, and 600,000 people saw that. That’s a bad night for a movie or a TV show, where if you get 10 million, that’s a disappointment. But people always come up to talk to me about [Edward Albee’s] The Goat, and that TV show I did shortly before? Twelve years later, no one has mentioned it. The theatre has more staying power than you think. Maybe it’s a smaller pool of people, but the integrity of the experience stays with them.
— Bill Pullman
Photo diary/Culture vulture: Björk at MOMA
March 4, 2015(click photos to enlarge)
The timing worked out for Andy and I to check out the Björk show at the Museum of Modern Art on the first day of member previews.
The show is in several parts, starting in the lobby, where several of the instruments she created for the Biophilia album are displayed. Then there are two parts created just for this show: a room in the second-floor atrium showing the video for the lugubrious song “Black Lake” from her new album. And on the third floor is a special timed-ticket exhibit called “Songlines,” where you’re issued a headset that delivers a pretty hokey narrative (“Triumphs of the Heart”) as you walk through seven chambers displaying notebooks, props, and costumes from her music videos, like this robot from “All Is Full of Love”
I love how the museum casts the security guards for these shows.
A mannequin displaying the costume for “Pagan Poetry,” right down to the pierced nipples.
Some nutty knitwear from the “Volta” era. I was underwhelmed with this part of the show, thinking it was supposed to be the big deal. It’s not.
The real reason Björk warrants a museum show is that she has collaborated with amazing artists to produce a string of music videos quite beyond most people’s in their surrealism and inventiveness. It’s worth planning to hang out in the room showing 30 of her videos for as long as you can.
Quote of the day: POLITICAL DISCOURSE
March 4, 2015POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Being aggressively, even unfairly, criticized isn’t remotely tantamount to being silenced.
–Glenn Greenwald
Culture Vulture: February in NYC
March 1, 2015The relentlessly brutal cold this winter has really gotten me down, to the point of contemplating some future when I spend winters somewhere warmer or even relocate permanently. What stops me? Among other things, I’m spoiled by the steady diet of rich, high-quality, and/or offbeat culture available in New York City. In the last three weeks, I’ve seen a motley series of nine extremely different live shows I could have seen hardly anywhere else:
Pretty Filthy, the Civilians’ docu-musical about the LA porn industry at the Abrons Arts Center;
Disgraced, Ayad Aktar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama on Broadway;
Pour Une Âme Souveraine—A Dedication to Nina Simone, Meshell Ndegeocello’s concert at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series;
“Love, Hate, & Comics,” an evening with Matt Groening and Lynda Barry at BAM;
Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at Classic Stage Company, starring Taylor Schilling and Peter Dinklage;
Stockhausen’s trippy, ritualistic Stimmung performed by Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices at Zankel Hall (above);
Soho Rep’s production of An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s saucy adaptation of a Dion Boucicault melodrama revived at Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn;
a return visit to Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, with co-creator John Cameron Mitchell playing the title role wearing a knee brace after a recent injury, necessarily making the performance considerably quieter, less flashy, and more poignant than Neil Patrick Harris’s; and
All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, a banal play by Canadian novelist Sheila Heti overemphatically performed by Toronto’s Suburban Beast theater company at The Kitchen.
Once upon a time I would have written detailed commentary on each of these performances, but that’s not really what I’m doing these days. I will say that much as I admired the writing and the performances and the staging and the terrific, tuneful score (by Michael Friedman) of Pretty Filthy, I couldn’t help feeling that the show (above) was regrettably tame, both in its content and in its theatricality. I wanted it to be darker and stranger. I wish this company felt freer to color outside the lines. My taste for that kind of theater was happily sated by An Octoroon, an inventive, ambitious, imperfect show (below) not quite like any other show you’re likely to see anytime soon. I highly recommend it.
another eye opens 