Posts Tagged ‘aretha franklin’

Culture Vulture: Aretha Franklin, Morgan Bassichis, Bi Gan, and Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern

April 15, 2019

Another rich cultural weekend:

Friday night: at the Angelika Film Center saw AMAZING GRACE, the long-lost documentary of Aretha Franklin recording her 1972 gospel album. Sublime!

Saturday night: KLEZMER MUSIC FOR BEGINNERS, performance at the Abrons Arts Center by Morgan Bassichis and Ethan Philbrick. Hilarious, fun, informative, and surprising — klezmer arrangements of Amy Winehouse!

Sunday night: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, not the O’Neill play but the second film by the extraordinary Chinese director Bi Gan — every bit as trippy and beautiful as his debut, KAILI BLUES, with again a bravura long take. In KAILI BLUES it was a 40-minute shot; in LONG DAY’S JOURNEY, halfway through the movie, the main character needs to kill some time and goes to the local cinema. When he puts on his 3D glasses, it’s a cue for the audience to do the same. What follows is a mind-boggling 59-minute film-within-a-film, shot in one insanely complicated long take (part of which has the camera attached to a drone). David Lynch meets Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Sunday afternoon: after a Gays Against Guns action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I participated as one of the white-clad non-speaking Human Beings representing Americans killed by gun violence at their places of worship, I strolled through the Museum of Modern Art. In the “New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century” exhibition, I was intrigued by a series of holograms created by Louise Bourgeois.

But I was most curious to check out “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern,” a fun counterpart to “The Young and Evil” show at David Zwirner Gallery, which surveyed the same tight circle of artists and friends.

Who knew Paul Cadmus had designed costumes for the ballet? See-through overalls for a dance called “Filling Station.”

Jared French designed costumes for another ballet, one of which looked to me like “Billy the Kid as a Big Girl.”

Karl Free’s costumes for a cringe-making ballet called “Pocohontas” included this strikingly beefcakey rendition of Captain John Smith.

Kurt Seligmann designed some wild costumes for “The Four Temperaments,” including this one called “Fourth Variation/Choleric.”

My admiration for Pavel Tchelitchew continues to expand with this design for a character known as Nervous System in a ballet called “The Cave of Sleep.”

Elsewhere in the show I admired Paul Klee’s “Actor’s Mask.”

Also this touching painting by Ben Shahn titled “Willis Avenue Bridge.”

 

In this week’s New Yorker: food, travel, and the Queen of Soul

April 2, 2016

There’s a bunch of good stuff in this week’s Food and Travel Issue of The New Yorker. Lauren Collins’ piece on the Salon International de l’Agriculture made me wants to check out that legendary annual Parisian food fair. Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise” reminded me that I’ve always meant to investigate that smoky intense agave spirit, which my friend David Lida raved about to me years before it became trendy. Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” gave me a peek into Bolivian food culture and almost made me want to check it out. I’m still looking forward to reading the dispatch about a Himalayan glacier by the great reporter Dexter Filkins. And I’m inspired to following Roz Chast’s disappearance down the rabbit-hole of looking at Japanese product labels printed between the two World Wars.

aretha by avedon

But nothing interested me more in this issue than “Soul Survivor,” editor-in-chief David Remnick’s article about Aretha Franklin (above, photographed by Richard Avedon), which is stuffed with fascinating tidbits. To name just a few: Miss Franklin will not go onstage to sing until she is paid in cash (“small stacks of hundred-dollar bills”), which she puts in her purse and takes onstage with her, keeping it in her sight at all times. When she goes to the theater, she buys two seats, one for her mink coat. A film exists of the gospel concert Franklin gave in Los Angeles in 1972 that she released as a live album, Amazing Grace — originally filmed by Sydney Pollack, it’s been tied up in technical and rights issues that are on the brink of being resolved and is reportedly unbelievably great. And the Queen of Soul, who sensational performance of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors last December brought tears to President Obama’s eyes, is seventy-four years old.

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