As Tom Petty tributes go, Rhiannon Giddens' "Don't Back Down" was goosebump-inducing.
Of course, every note that comes out of her mouth is pretty much magnificent. And the beauty of hearing that live was that the opportunity dropped into my lap.
Scrolling through Facebook late in the day, I saw that a friend had posted "just now" saying that she had an extra ticket to the Rhiannon Giddens show at the Modlin Center tonight. She offered to gift it to the first person who called her.
You'd better believe I was quick on the draw with my land line. Yes, land line.
Thanking her profusely for the ticket, she graciously insisted that it was nothing more than an overdue thank you to me for all the years I'd ghostwritten a gardening column for her. We made plans to meet up and I marveled at my good fortune.
The parking lot was so crowded that there was an attendant directing people around, a sure sign that I was about to see someone who was a really big deal.
Once in our seats, my friend told me about all the times she'd seen Giddens' first band (the Carolina Chocolate Drops) play, including FloydFest and a $2 outdoor show in Ashland 8 years ago. The woman next to her had seen the Drops almost as many times. I shocked them by admitting I'd never seen her or the band.
Both told me I had no idea how impressed I was going to be.
They were right. With a seasoned band - banjo, acoustic and electric guitars and bass, drums, fiddle, keyboard and mandolin - that traded instruments backing her up, Giddens asked how the crowd was doing and announced they were going to do some fiddle tunes for us before unleashing her operatic voice.
Even her ensemble was noteworthy: a bustier over a long, multi-tiered skirt under a bronze and brown brocade duster, all of which moved as she danced and swayed to the music.
She wore her influences proudly on her sleeve and in her song choices, doing songs by civil rights activist Odetta, Aretha Franklin and Pops Staples, among others. This was a woman who knew her backstory and wanted to share it.
And that powerful voice. Whether wowing us with her range, her scatting or her interpretation of an African folktale, she held the room in thrall with it, all the while also playing fiddle or banjo.
Her appreciation for history was apparent in many of her song choices. One was based on a slave for sale poster she'd seen in which it was stated that the woman for sale had a 9 month old baby and the purchaser had the option to take the child with the mother or not. The resulting song, "At the Purchaser's Option" was equal parts history lesson and heartbroken mother's lament.
Just as moving was her cover of Richard Farina's "Birmingham Sunday" about the four little girls killed in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, while the black spiritual "Children, Go Where I Send Thee" got a faster, more swinging interpretation.
During the intermission, a woman near me commented on how animated Giddens was onstage, dancing and moving about in a way she hadn't done when playing with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. "She had to be just part of the ensemble then," the fan noted.
When the band returned, Giddens came out and heaved a sigh of relief. "A musician's worst nightmare is to come back after intermission and everyone went home." I think it was safe to say that not a soul gave up the opportunity to hear more from her pipes and the talent around her.
She talked about walking through Carytown earlier today and how she'd lived near there for a year, one of many places she could call home. "You have to have a home everywhere when you're a musician," she said.
They did an old North Carolina ballad and a sibling gospel harmony tune with her sister doing the harmonizing. Then she said, "There comes a time in every show when it's time for accordion," and the band launched into a Cajun waltz and a Creole two-step.
Sharing more cultural history, she told us of learning about what were called "coon songs" - full of cliched black stereotypes - and then sang one she'd written called "Underneath a Harlem Moon." It was the opposite of a coon song.
We don't pick no cotton
Picking cotton is taboo
All we pick is numbers
And that include you white folks, too
But it was when she mentioned how tough the past few days had been and mentioned Tom Petty's death that she said she heard an intake of breath from someone near the front. That's right, Rhiannon Giddens was going to cover "I Won't Back Down," imbuing it with heartfelt singing and blistering fiddle work, and providing the audience with a cathartic way to honor Petty and further appreciate her voice.
"Thanks for showing what Richmond can bring!" she said to the sold out Modlin Center crowd. "You brought it!"
She closed with Pops Staples' "Freedom Highway," which is also the title song to her latest album and it sounded just as fitting in 2017 as when Pops wrote it in 1965 during the apex of the Civil Rights movement (she called it Pops' Don't Back Down). And for the encore, she covered Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
A lesser singer, one not as talented or confident, might not have pulled off interpreting so many legends, but a lesser artist also might not have been so in tune with creating a set list that ran the gamut of Negro spirituals to folk songs to civil rights anthems to proto-rock, gospel and soul, while making each wholly her own.
The warning from my friend had been spot on. Never having seen Giddens before, there was no way I could have been prepared for what she delivered on that stage tonight. I was blown away by her voice, her song choices and her captivating stage presence.
No question, it was a girl crush.
At the reception after the show ended, I tried again to thank my friend properly for sharing her extra ticket with me. "I'm just glad you could come," she insisted, saying she was grateful to share the evening with a fellow music-lover.
Consider this post an ode to a landline...and a friend generous enough to give me an evening listening to the phenomenal Rhiannon Giddens.
The stellar Tom Petty tribute was just icing on the cake.
Showing posts with label modlin center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modlin center. Show all posts
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Old Dreams and New Dreams
I know you well enough that I'm certain you spent as much time as you could outside enjoying the beautiful November afternoon.
You'd better believe I did. The Barrister knew of whom he spoke.
In fact, I'd gotten up around 10:15 and been out the door, fed and ready to walk, by 11:15, which worked out nicely since I had plans to meet a friend at the VMFA at noon and it was a glorious morning to cover the distance on foot.
Yes, I'm shallow enough to be thrilled that we're the only U.S. destination for the "Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life" show and no, I didn't know nearly enough about either artist before today's most instructive and larger than expected exhibition.
Even so, it wasn't difficult to recognize the same walkway from Munch's "The Scream" in his "Despair" painting (there was also "Angst," surprising neither of us), although I was amazed to read that there had been a major Munch retrospective at the National Gallery in 1979 and I have no memory of such a thing or why I wouldn't have gone to it.
The show, tying together Munch's incalculable influence on Johns both directly and indirectly, read like a who's who of the creative set of the era.
One of John's 1965 pieces had a Frank O'Hara poem written on it - Sputnik is only the word for travel companion here on earth - and he was friends with composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham.
His 1963 "Hatteras," with an arm print at the top, referenced the Hart Crane poem "Hatteras" and the writer's untimely death when he jumped off a ship, his arm sticking up briefly before drowning.
There was so much good high artistic drama back in those days, none of this namby-pamby Instagramming and tweeting by celebrities instead of doing something that better demonstrates their tortured souls than showing off or whining. That said, there were also several "selfies" taken by Munch that surprised us both.
My artist friend and I were far from the only attendees discussing everything we saw, although occasionally we got off topic.
Her: So he got that out of his system.
Me: Yep, worked through it and moved on.
Her: Like any good relationship...
Everything comes back to relationships. Follow me around for a day and I'll prove it.
Easily one of the most unlikely pieces in the exhibit was Johns' summer bedspread from the early 20th century, notable for its cross-hatched pattern, seen in so many of the show's paintings. Where it got eerie was seeing Munch's 1940 "Self Portrait Between Clock and Bed," because the bedspread in the picture was identical to Johns' real one.
Utility imitating art.
When we finally reached the last gallery, my friend inquired, "Are they going to have a nihilistic gift shop when we leave here?"
Nope, but by then it was lunch time, so who cared?
Amuse was almost completely full at mid-afternoon, but welcomed us to its bar for the soda of the day (strawberry vanilla), mussels and ham in butter, garlic, Parmesan and white wine broth and a special of salmon over pink-eyed peas for my friend while we compared notes on the past few weeks.
In no particular order, we covered upcoming road trips (her husband's and ours), relationships based on sex, post-election online baiting and the work of gray hallways, eventually choosing the wrong chocolate dessert even if it had a magnificent lemon curd to recommend it.
Because she's the best kind of friend, before we parted ways, she gave me a jar full of seashells she'd collected for me in September at the Outer Banks knowing they were just my style, so I walked the nearly three miles home reveling in this incredible weather and shaking a Mason jar of small purple shells.
I'd have recited the words to Crane's "Hatteras" as I walked if I'd known them, but, alas.
By the time Barr came to collect me, I'd used every scrap of sunshine and warm air available, fulfilling his prediction while leaving me resigned to a cooler evening that began at Sabai with Moo Sam Chan (because somebody was unable to resist the siren song of crispy pork belly) and Pad Broccoli (so our arteries didn't close up mid-meal or music) and managed to be in and out in just over an hour.
The parking lots near UR's Modlin Center were mobbed with cars in a way I hadn't seen since Chuck D. came to speak at the Alumni Center and we both knew it couldn't be solely because of the Steep Canyon Rangers show we were attending (although it was sold out). Turns out the problem was simultaneous shows tonight.
I'll admit, Steep Canyon Rangers was only a name I'd heard but knew nothing about beyond that they were a young North Carolina bluegrass band before Barr's invitation. So when they came out - upright bass, acoustic guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo and, yes, drums - we were both a bit surprised.
There's no percussion in bluegrass, right?
Except there is when you're talking about a group of musicians who use bluegrass instrumentation but allow the music to encompass whatever they like, whether rock, folk, jazz, Americana or a sample of the "Jeopardy" theme, among other snippets sampled by the fabulous fiddle player.
When they first walked out, banjo player Graham - he of the unexpectedly deep voice - had to bow his knees to lower himself to the microphone before raising it as he sang, saying, "It's our first show here," and smiling sheepishly. The mic immediately slid back down and he tightened it yet again.
As they began their energetic set, I couldn't help but secretly hope that these guys in narrow-legged suits were as nerdy as they appeared.
Mike shredded his mandolin like nothing I'd ever seen, each musician had lengthy solos like jazz (and the annoying attendant applause) and they about wiped up the stage when they did the title song from their new album, "Radio."
Doing what they referred to as "an old tune," they broke it down to four-part harmony with occasional additions of guitar, mandolin and banjo, a gorgeous thing to hear.
It was especially satisfying when, say the fiddle and mandolin would get into a pissing match trying to outdo each other, then the banjo would jump in and before long it resembled nothing so much as a big grass-tinged post-rock soundscape, absent vocals and soaring through Booker Hall in a completely un-bluegrass like way.
"Thanks you for having us, Richmond," they said. "We could be persuaded to come back."
I'm willing to bet that no one in the room wouldn't be willing to do the same after experiencing a band forged by bluegrass yet completely open to every genre and interpretation performed by guys with solid musical chops and unbridled youthful enthusiasm.
Despite barely over a month of friendship, the Barrister had done himself proud by choosing a stellar night of unexpected music for us to wind down Friday with.
Except, of course, you don't end a superior sunny November day with just music, you end it with conversation at Rapp Session with wine (a killer Chateau du Coing Chardonnay) and smoked bluefish dip studded with red onion and celery, smeared on Saltines.
I have been eating bluefish practically since birth and I expect I'll go out eating it.
That way, there's time to discuss violin versus fiddle, possible hiking destinations (as usual, I made a case for local trails), where to find the best selection of East Coast oysters and how our mothers managed to mangle most of the foods they cooked when we were children.
As tends to be the way when we get together, we covered the important topics: love, loss and the cycle of life, minus the Sputnik references.
The only way to know someone well enough to predict their behavior is to spend a satisfying amount of each evening together exchanging pertinent opinions and back stories.
Or figure out early on they're a sucker for sunshine and roll with it. I can be so obvious about some things...
You'd better believe I did. The Barrister knew of whom he spoke.
In fact, I'd gotten up around 10:15 and been out the door, fed and ready to walk, by 11:15, which worked out nicely since I had plans to meet a friend at the VMFA at noon and it was a glorious morning to cover the distance on foot.
Yes, I'm shallow enough to be thrilled that we're the only U.S. destination for the "Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life" show and no, I didn't know nearly enough about either artist before today's most instructive and larger than expected exhibition.
Even so, it wasn't difficult to recognize the same walkway from Munch's "The Scream" in his "Despair" painting (there was also "Angst," surprising neither of us), although I was amazed to read that there had been a major Munch retrospective at the National Gallery in 1979 and I have no memory of such a thing or why I wouldn't have gone to it.
The show, tying together Munch's incalculable influence on Johns both directly and indirectly, read like a who's who of the creative set of the era.
One of John's 1965 pieces had a Frank O'Hara poem written on it - Sputnik is only the word for travel companion here on earth - and he was friends with composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham.
His 1963 "Hatteras," with an arm print at the top, referenced the Hart Crane poem "Hatteras" and the writer's untimely death when he jumped off a ship, his arm sticking up briefly before drowning.
There was so much good high artistic drama back in those days, none of this namby-pamby Instagramming and tweeting by celebrities instead of doing something that better demonstrates their tortured souls than showing off or whining. That said, there were also several "selfies" taken by Munch that surprised us both.
My artist friend and I were far from the only attendees discussing everything we saw, although occasionally we got off topic.
Her: So he got that out of his system.
Me: Yep, worked through it and moved on.
Her: Like any good relationship...
Everything comes back to relationships. Follow me around for a day and I'll prove it.
Easily one of the most unlikely pieces in the exhibit was Johns' summer bedspread from the early 20th century, notable for its cross-hatched pattern, seen in so many of the show's paintings. Where it got eerie was seeing Munch's 1940 "Self Portrait Between Clock and Bed," because the bedspread in the picture was identical to Johns' real one.
Utility imitating art.
When we finally reached the last gallery, my friend inquired, "Are they going to have a nihilistic gift shop when we leave here?"
Nope, but by then it was lunch time, so who cared?
Amuse was almost completely full at mid-afternoon, but welcomed us to its bar for the soda of the day (strawberry vanilla), mussels and ham in butter, garlic, Parmesan and white wine broth and a special of salmon over pink-eyed peas for my friend while we compared notes on the past few weeks.
In no particular order, we covered upcoming road trips (her husband's and ours), relationships based on sex, post-election online baiting and the work of gray hallways, eventually choosing the wrong chocolate dessert even if it had a magnificent lemon curd to recommend it.
Because she's the best kind of friend, before we parted ways, she gave me a jar full of seashells she'd collected for me in September at the Outer Banks knowing they were just my style, so I walked the nearly three miles home reveling in this incredible weather and shaking a Mason jar of small purple shells.
I'd have recited the words to Crane's "Hatteras" as I walked if I'd known them, but, alas.
By the time Barr came to collect me, I'd used every scrap of sunshine and warm air available, fulfilling his prediction while leaving me resigned to a cooler evening that began at Sabai with Moo Sam Chan (because somebody was unable to resist the siren song of crispy pork belly) and Pad Broccoli (so our arteries didn't close up mid-meal or music) and managed to be in and out in just over an hour.
The parking lots near UR's Modlin Center were mobbed with cars in a way I hadn't seen since Chuck D. came to speak at the Alumni Center and we both knew it couldn't be solely because of the Steep Canyon Rangers show we were attending (although it was sold out). Turns out the problem was simultaneous shows tonight.
I'll admit, Steep Canyon Rangers was only a name I'd heard but knew nothing about beyond that they were a young North Carolina bluegrass band before Barr's invitation. So when they came out - upright bass, acoustic guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo and, yes, drums - we were both a bit surprised.
There's no percussion in bluegrass, right?
Except there is when you're talking about a group of musicians who use bluegrass instrumentation but allow the music to encompass whatever they like, whether rock, folk, jazz, Americana or a sample of the "Jeopardy" theme, among other snippets sampled by the fabulous fiddle player.
When they first walked out, banjo player Graham - he of the unexpectedly deep voice - had to bow his knees to lower himself to the microphone before raising it as he sang, saying, "It's our first show here," and smiling sheepishly. The mic immediately slid back down and he tightened it yet again.
As they began their energetic set, I couldn't help but secretly hope that these guys in narrow-legged suits were as nerdy as they appeared.
Mike shredded his mandolin like nothing I'd ever seen, each musician had lengthy solos like jazz (and the annoying attendant applause) and they about wiped up the stage when they did the title song from their new album, "Radio."
Doing what they referred to as "an old tune," they broke it down to four-part harmony with occasional additions of guitar, mandolin and banjo, a gorgeous thing to hear.
It was especially satisfying when, say the fiddle and mandolin would get into a pissing match trying to outdo each other, then the banjo would jump in and before long it resembled nothing so much as a big grass-tinged post-rock soundscape, absent vocals and soaring through Booker Hall in a completely un-bluegrass like way.
"Thanks you for having us, Richmond," they said. "We could be persuaded to come back."
I'm willing to bet that no one in the room wouldn't be willing to do the same after experiencing a band forged by bluegrass yet completely open to every genre and interpretation performed by guys with solid musical chops and unbridled youthful enthusiasm.
Despite barely over a month of friendship, the Barrister had done himself proud by choosing a stellar night of unexpected music for us to wind down Friday with.
Except, of course, you don't end a superior sunny November day with just music, you end it with conversation at Rapp Session with wine (a killer Chateau du Coing Chardonnay) and smoked bluefish dip studded with red onion and celery, smeared on Saltines.
I have been eating bluefish practically since birth and I expect I'll go out eating it.
That way, there's time to discuss violin versus fiddle, possible hiking destinations (as usual, I made a case for local trails), where to find the best selection of East Coast oysters and how our mothers managed to mangle most of the foods they cooked when we were children.
As tends to be the way when we get together, we covered the important topics: love, loss and the cycle of life, minus the Sputnik references.
The only way to know someone well enough to predict their behavior is to spend a satisfying amount of each evening together exchanging pertinent opinions and back stories.
Or figure out early on they're a sucker for sunshine and roll with it. I can be so obvious about some things...
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Captured for Posterity
Tonight was #3 of 6 dates with a multi-talented dead man.
After twice seeing "Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott" at the VMFA, I was ready for the lecture at University of Richmond entitled, "Gordon Parks from Kansas to New York: A Conversation."
Well...conversation may be a bit of a stretch - it was more of presentation, presentation, questions from moderator, questions from audience - but it did flesh out my knowledge of Parks and provide a bit of mental stimulation after an unusually intense day.
While Peter Kunhart, Jr., the executive director of the Parks Foundation, actually knew Parks (his grandfather was an editor at Life and a personal friend of Parks - he had a photo to prove it), it was Karen Haas, the photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from whence the show originated, who brought unadulterated enthusiasm for everything Parks to the talk.
Rarely, she stressed, does a curator have such a fabulous opportunity to dig deep into a particular segment of an artist's work as she had done with the previously unpublished Fort Scott photographs and artist's notes.
As she pointed out in far more ladylike language, that's the kind of assignment curators have wet dreams about.
She'd even roped in her husband to do a road trip to retrace the places where Parks had gone as Life's first black staff photographer to capture his elementary school classmates as part of an assignment to honestly depict segregation issues.
It seems that while the magazine claimed to be pro-integration, they hadn't actually covered the subject in its pages before. In a stroke of brilliance, they sent a black photographer who took days getting comfortable with his subjects before shooting them.
What Parks discovered was that 11 of the 12 had left Fort Scott as part of southern blacks' great migration to northern cities in hopes of a better life. What Haas discussed was how nuanced were Parks' photos of these migratory families in the years just before the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement began.
The photographer's goal, she explained, was to open the minds of Life's mostly white middle-class readership and he planned to do that with portraits of families in front of their homes (always in all-black neighborhoods), couples eating dinner, posed on couches and children playing piano with families singing along.
The latter was to be especially meaningful to whites because it showed the stability and strength of black middle class families engaged in cultured activities, no doubt images that would have been eye-openers for racist readers.
Except the piece never ran because of the little matter of the Korean conflict breaking out and taking precedence in the magazine (tell me about it - an assignment I turned in last March just ran this week).
But Parks' words and images never ran until this exhibition was mounted.
The importance of Fort Scott in shaping Parks came full circle during the Q & A period when a guy from Fort Scott pointed to a photo on the screen of black children standing on a platform behind rows of white people in seats watching a baseball game.
"I played on that field and my Dad coached me there," he shared, pointing at the image. "And in Fort Scott, Gordon Parks was like a god."
Fortunately for me, I have three more dates with that god.
After twice seeing "Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott" at the VMFA, I was ready for the lecture at University of Richmond entitled, "Gordon Parks from Kansas to New York: A Conversation."
Well...conversation may be a bit of a stretch - it was more of presentation, presentation, questions from moderator, questions from audience - but it did flesh out my knowledge of Parks and provide a bit of mental stimulation after an unusually intense day.
While Peter Kunhart, Jr., the executive director of the Parks Foundation, actually knew Parks (his grandfather was an editor at Life and a personal friend of Parks - he had a photo to prove it), it was Karen Haas, the photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from whence the show originated, who brought unadulterated enthusiasm for everything Parks to the talk.
Rarely, she stressed, does a curator have such a fabulous opportunity to dig deep into a particular segment of an artist's work as she had done with the previously unpublished Fort Scott photographs and artist's notes.
As she pointed out in far more ladylike language, that's the kind of assignment curators have wet dreams about.
She'd even roped in her husband to do a road trip to retrace the places where Parks had gone as Life's first black staff photographer to capture his elementary school classmates as part of an assignment to honestly depict segregation issues.
It seems that while the magazine claimed to be pro-integration, they hadn't actually covered the subject in its pages before. In a stroke of brilliance, they sent a black photographer who took days getting comfortable with his subjects before shooting them.
What Parks discovered was that 11 of the 12 had left Fort Scott as part of southern blacks' great migration to northern cities in hopes of a better life. What Haas discussed was how nuanced were Parks' photos of these migratory families in the years just before the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement began.
The photographer's goal, she explained, was to open the minds of Life's mostly white middle-class readership and he planned to do that with portraits of families in front of their homes (always in all-black neighborhoods), couples eating dinner, posed on couches and children playing piano with families singing along.
The latter was to be especially meaningful to whites because it showed the stability and strength of black middle class families engaged in cultured activities, no doubt images that would have been eye-openers for racist readers.
Except the piece never ran because of the little matter of the Korean conflict breaking out and taking precedence in the magazine (tell me about it - an assignment I turned in last March just ran this week).
But Parks' words and images never ran until this exhibition was mounted.
The importance of Fort Scott in shaping Parks came full circle during the Q & A period when a guy from Fort Scott pointed to a photo on the screen of black children standing on a platform behind rows of white people in seats watching a baseball game.
"I played on that field and my Dad coached me there," he shared, pointing at the image. "And in Fort Scott, Gordon Parks was like a god."
Fortunately for me, I have three more dates with that god.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Cage Match
Some of us live in urban bohemia and some of us grew up in suburban bohemia.
The latter would be Slash Coleman, who came to the Library of Virginia tonight for a reading (actually a retelling) from his new book, "The Bohemian Love Diaries."
Three years ago, I spent Valentine's night with Slash and a bunch of other singles at Crossroads Art, listening to him and a few guests share stories about how the course of true love never does run smooth, a fact of which I was well aware at that time.
Tonight's reading drew a lively crowd, several of whom told me they were intrigued by the book's title.
After chatting with a woman about industrial farming and (no kidding) circumcision during the wine and cheese reception, Slash took center stage in a full beard and ripped jeans to bring us up to date on his life.
And while usually his stories have a humorous side, this one involved him getting a collapsed lung that eventually required surgery to re-inflate and causing him to cancel the rest of his book tour speaking engagements,
Well, except for this one because, here's the thing: Slash grew up in Chester, a word he humorously pronounced all evening long the way the locals do.
Showing us the book cover, we saw a picture of Slash when he was about eight, back when his artist father used to load up the family for monthly trips to Alaska to find an artists' colony.
Except they rarely got any farther than Fredericksburg.
Tonight's talk was about being raised by an eccentric family and his failed love relationships as a result of coming out of all that eccentricity.
He showed us an Italian version of the book with the title changed to "Love with a High Fever," a title he didn't think was any better than his.
I don't know about that.
Sharing the story of his parents' meeting at the tea room at Miller & Rhoads, we heard that Dad, a sculptor, had been a sign painter for M & R and Mom was French and a student at RPI. Along the way, he threw in that Grandpa danced at the Moulin Rouge and Grandma was a watercolor painter.
On his parents' first date, he showed up in a stolen car with a case of Manischewitz wine and a plan to win her heart. Instead he drank it all and passed out and she walked home alone to her dorm.
Disastrous as it sounds, he invited her to Passover for their second date, but they ended up eloping before the second date.
Slash recalled an early interest in sports that was of no consequence to his artistic parents. The closest to sporty they got was when his Dad organized a softball game between the Freaks, a bunch of sculptors, and the Pigs, a team of Richmond police officers.
Begging his mother to let him play baseball, she responded that he would be paralyzed and said no, but he eventually found an old glove in his Dad's studio and signed up for the team himself.
Sharing tales of gymnastics, wrestling and being brought home to his mother after sports injuries, he waxed poetic about Coach Walt, a man who wore Brut by Faberge and had a white person Afro.
It's a pretty vivid visual.
He recalled fondly the period when his father sold roadkill sculptures to support the family. It gets pretty odd here because while the head was from one animal and the legs from another, the body was always made of bread.
Yup, you read right.
So one of his pieces might have the head of a turtle, the legs of a lizard and a pumpernickel body. And when pieces didn't sell after a while, they were retired to the backyard as ornamentation, at least until the bread rotted or was eaten.
I'd say that's pretty bohemian.
In any case, the book is being shopped around as a TV series and who knows, a series could show up on TV about a boy from Chester who came from a family of six Leo women and eight artists.
During the Q & A, Slash said he prefers to read non-fiction because, "I'm interested in how people put their truths together."
Exactly the way I feel about non-fiction and no doubt part of the reason that people read my blog every day.
Or maybe they're eager to read about my love with a high fever exploits, who knows?
Truth telling aside, next on my plate was the annual musicircus at UR, the one hour beautiful cacophony of musicians playing whatever they choose.
Don't ask me, composer John Cage thought it up and I just participate every year.
The musicircus got a late start because the eighth blackbird show ran over, so it was almost 9 when the sirens went off and everyone began playing.
Wandering down hallways, up and down staircases, into practice and classrooms, the milling crowd had myriad options for what kind of music with which to begin.
Since so many people were gathered on the first floor, my fellow Cage lover and I sprinted upstairs in an attempt to beat the masses.
Brian Jones, an organizer of the annual event, had assembled a percussion ensemble that included jazz drummer extraordinaire Scott Clark on tambourine.
Perched on an upholstered chair with two girls on couches for an audience was harmonica player Andrew Ali, whom I've seen play with Allison Self and lately, Josh Small. Tonight he was flying solo, singing and blowing his best blues.
Improv troupe the Johnsons (from Richmond Comedy Coalition) had wedged themselves into a hallway and were hilariously making up stuff with every word that came out of their mouths.
For sheer effect, it was tough to beat Kill Vonnegut, a punk quintet playing under black lights to a rapt audience.
For something completely different, the Family Band looked impossibly young and clean cut, with not a whisker of facial hair in the bunch, belting out Fountains of Wayne's "Stacey's Mom." I think they were all about 8 when it came out.
Tucked into a small room was Monk's Playground, where I recognized Larri Branch on piano, Brian Cruse on upright bass and the female sax player from RVA Big Band. As to which Monk song they were playing, I couldn't tell you.
I spotted David Roberts, whom I recognized from Classical Incarnations, playing piano alone in a room but couldn't hear him over the din, so I stepped in.
Turning, he invited me to look at his score, where I saw the title "Vexations" and the composer, Eric Satie, and an instruction at the top to play the theme 840 times.
David said that Cage had once done it and it had taken him 18 hours. Since the musicircus only lasts one hour, that wasn't happening tonight, but I was curious if repeating the same page of music was vexing him yet.
"A little, yes," he admitted with a smile, but I gave him the award for most Cage-appropriate music choice.
Coming down a stairwell, we happened on a sitar and a moment later the young woman who played it arrived, sitting on the floor to play. It was easily the handsomest instrument of the evening.
And purchased online, of course.
Tucked into a classroom with staffs drawn on the white board were guitarists Scott Burton and Matt White with another musician between them turning knobs and adjusting the effects of their playing to an ambient guitar wall of sound.
Alistair Calhoun took home the prize for smallest guitar, using reverb effects and finger picking to entice me to linger and listen.
DJ Carlito spun world music heavy on the middle east and even getting people to start dancing in the hallway. Pianist David Eslek was playing Lennon's "Imagine."
Downstairs we found the Josh Bearman group, a lot of whom seemed to be the Hot Seats, playing their spot-on old time and bluegrass music.
The gamelan orchestra had a Balinese shadow puppet play on film playing over their instruments, an ideal accompaniment to the lyrical music.
Near the door, Dave Watkins grabbed people's attention coming and going with his electric dulcitar and endless looping to create the sound of a quartet or even quintet.
Because he's Dave, he kept playing long after other musicians had stopped (or even left), treating the lingerers to a sonic finale that blew minds. But then, he's Dave Watkins, so he always delivers the grandiose.
Every year I say it because every year it's true.
Richmond is incredibly fortunate that we have a musicircus put on every year, with dozens of musicians both new to their craft and long-standing, playing their hearts out for free for one hour.
I saw so many people I know taking it all in. There were musicians playing and musicians as guests. Students experiencing it for the first time. Even a few little children in headphones.
Heads full and ears happy, the musicircus beats even Barnum & Bailey for sheer delight in the experience. Plus, no animals are harmed in the making of the musicircus.
That's how I'm putting today's truth together, ladies and germs. Make of it what you will.
Should you have any questions, you can find me in New Bohemia...or thereabouts. Possibly with a high fever.
The latter would be Slash Coleman, who came to the Library of Virginia tonight for a reading (actually a retelling) from his new book, "The Bohemian Love Diaries."
Three years ago, I spent Valentine's night with Slash and a bunch of other singles at Crossroads Art, listening to him and a few guests share stories about how the course of true love never does run smooth, a fact of which I was well aware at that time.
Tonight's reading drew a lively crowd, several of whom told me they were intrigued by the book's title.
After chatting with a woman about industrial farming and (no kidding) circumcision during the wine and cheese reception, Slash took center stage in a full beard and ripped jeans to bring us up to date on his life.
And while usually his stories have a humorous side, this one involved him getting a collapsed lung that eventually required surgery to re-inflate and causing him to cancel the rest of his book tour speaking engagements,
Well, except for this one because, here's the thing: Slash grew up in Chester, a word he humorously pronounced all evening long the way the locals do.
Showing us the book cover, we saw a picture of Slash when he was about eight, back when his artist father used to load up the family for monthly trips to Alaska to find an artists' colony.
Except they rarely got any farther than Fredericksburg.
Tonight's talk was about being raised by an eccentric family and his failed love relationships as a result of coming out of all that eccentricity.
He showed us an Italian version of the book with the title changed to "Love with a High Fever," a title he didn't think was any better than his.
I don't know about that.
Sharing the story of his parents' meeting at the tea room at Miller & Rhoads, we heard that Dad, a sculptor, had been a sign painter for M & R and Mom was French and a student at RPI. Along the way, he threw in that Grandpa danced at the Moulin Rouge and Grandma was a watercolor painter.
On his parents' first date, he showed up in a stolen car with a case of Manischewitz wine and a plan to win her heart. Instead he drank it all and passed out and she walked home alone to her dorm.
Disastrous as it sounds, he invited her to Passover for their second date, but they ended up eloping before the second date.
Slash recalled an early interest in sports that was of no consequence to his artistic parents. The closest to sporty they got was when his Dad organized a softball game between the Freaks, a bunch of sculptors, and the Pigs, a team of Richmond police officers.
Begging his mother to let him play baseball, she responded that he would be paralyzed and said no, but he eventually found an old glove in his Dad's studio and signed up for the team himself.
Sharing tales of gymnastics, wrestling and being brought home to his mother after sports injuries, he waxed poetic about Coach Walt, a man who wore Brut by Faberge and had a white person Afro.
It's a pretty vivid visual.
He recalled fondly the period when his father sold roadkill sculptures to support the family. It gets pretty odd here because while the head was from one animal and the legs from another, the body was always made of bread.
Yup, you read right.
So one of his pieces might have the head of a turtle, the legs of a lizard and a pumpernickel body. And when pieces didn't sell after a while, they were retired to the backyard as ornamentation, at least until the bread rotted or was eaten.
I'd say that's pretty bohemian.
In any case, the book is being shopped around as a TV series and who knows, a series could show up on TV about a boy from Chester who came from a family of six Leo women and eight artists.
During the Q & A, Slash said he prefers to read non-fiction because, "I'm interested in how people put their truths together."
Exactly the way I feel about non-fiction and no doubt part of the reason that people read my blog every day.
Or maybe they're eager to read about my love with a high fever exploits, who knows?
Truth telling aside, next on my plate was the annual musicircus at UR, the one hour beautiful cacophony of musicians playing whatever they choose.
Don't ask me, composer John Cage thought it up and I just participate every year.
The musicircus got a late start because the eighth blackbird show ran over, so it was almost 9 when the sirens went off and everyone began playing.
Wandering down hallways, up and down staircases, into practice and classrooms, the milling crowd had myriad options for what kind of music with which to begin.
Since so many people were gathered on the first floor, my fellow Cage lover and I sprinted upstairs in an attempt to beat the masses.
Brian Jones, an organizer of the annual event, had assembled a percussion ensemble that included jazz drummer extraordinaire Scott Clark on tambourine.
Perched on an upholstered chair with two girls on couches for an audience was harmonica player Andrew Ali, whom I've seen play with Allison Self and lately, Josh Small. Tonight he was flying solo, singing and blowing his best blues.
Improv troupe the Johnsons (from Richmond Comedy Coalition) had wedged themselves into a hallway and were hilariously making up stuff with every word that came out of their mouths.
For sheer effect, it was tough to beat Kill Vonnegut, a punk quintet playing under black lights to a rapt audience.
For something completely different, the Family Band looked impossibly young and clean cut, with not a whisker of facial hair in the bunch, belting out Fountains of Wayne's "Stacey's Mom." I think they were all about 8 when it came out.
Tucked into a small room was Monk's Playground, where I recognized Larri Branch on piano, Brian Cruse on upright bass and the female sax player from RVA Big Band. As to which Monk song they were playing, I couldn't tell you.
I spotted David Roberts, whom I recognized from Classical Incarnations, playing piano alone in a room but couldn't hear him over the din, so I stepped in.
Turning, he invited me to look at his score, where I saw the title "Vexations" and the composer, Eric Satie, and an instruction at the top to play the theme 840 times.
David said that Cage had once done it and it had taken him 18 hours. Since the musicircus only lasts one hour, that wasn't happening tonight, but I was curious if repeating the same page of music was vexing him yet.
"A little, yes," he admitted with a smile, but I gave him the award for most Cage-appropriate music choice.
Coming down a stairwell, we happened on a sitar and a moment later the young woman who played it arrived, sitting on the floor to play. It was easily the handsomest instrument of the evening.
And purchased online, of course.
Tucked into a classroom with staffs drawn on the white board were guitarists Scott Burton and Matt White with another musician between them turning knobs and adjusting the effects of their playing to an ambient guitar wall of sound.
Alistair Calhoun took home the prize for smallest guitar, using reverb effects and finger picking to entice me to linger and listen.
DJ Carlito spun world music heavy on the middle east and even getting people to start dancing in the hallway. Pianist David Eslek was playing Lennon's "Imagine."
Downstairs we found the Josh Bearman group, a lot of whom seemed to be the Hot Seats, playing their spot-on old time and bluegrass music.
The gamelan orchestra had a Balinese shadow puppet play on film playing over their instruments, an ideal accompaniment to the lyrical music.
Near the door, Dave Watkins grabbed people's attention coming and going with his electric dulcitar and endless looping to create the sound of a quartet or even quintet.
Because he's Dave, he kept playing long after other musicians had stopped (or even left), treating the lingerers to a sonic finale that blew minds. But then, he's Dave Watkins, so he always delivers the grandiose.
Every year I say it because every year it's true.
Richmond is incredibly fortunate that we have a musicircus put on every year, with dozens of musicians both new to their craft and long-standing, playing their hearts out for free for one hour.
I saw so many people I know taking it all in. There were musicians playing and musicians as guests. Students experiencing it for the first time. Even a few little children in headphones.
Heads full and ears happy, the musicircus beats even Barnum & Bailey for sheer delight in the experience. Plus, no animals are harmed in the making of the musicircus.
That's how I'm putting today's truth together, ladies and germs. Make of it what you will.
Should you have any questions, you can find me in New Bohemia...or thereabouts. Possibly with a high fever.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Go with the Flow
Yea or nay, video games as art?
Game designer Kellee Santiago gave the talk, "Flow in Games and in Life," for the opening of UR's new exhibit, "Flow, Just Flow: Variations on a Theme."
It's not as unlikely as it sounds.
Kellee's non-competitive video game "Flow" is part of the show.
She's also one of the proponents of games as an art form, along with MoMA who've just added fourteen to their collection.
Who am I to disagree?
And while I've never played a video game before, I played "Flow" as part of this show.
I didn't wait for games to be considered art to play one, it just happened that way.
No, really.
Unlike the healthy contingent of young men in the audience tonight, most of Kellee's stories about game development went over my head.
The part that I did get was about flow itself, that feeling of being engaged in an activity, the feeling of focusing your energy, the enjoyment of the process.
Completely focused motivation.
Which, not surprisingly, most of the young men who asked questions of Kellee during the Q & A, seemed to have on the subject of game design.
But for me it was all about the 21 pieces of contemporary art awaiting us in the galleries in addition to the video game.
The concept of "flow" was expressed in myriad ways throughout the exhibit.
Humming engines and wires, on mulberry paper, with airplane flight patterns, on video and on burnt paper.
And as varied as the mediums were, always the essence of flow came through.
Near a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture hanging from the ceiling was an explanation of the principles behind it.
I read it twice without clearly understanding the concept and turned to the student standing next to me, telling her it was too scientific for me.
"Oh, good!" she said, sounding very relieved. "Me, too."
Call me simple.
One thing was very clear, though. In the context of contemporary art, a video game did not seem out of place.
In fact, it brought to mind the age-old argument about language.
I know people who believe language is a malleable thing, constantly shape-shifting to what the culture is speaking and writing, while others think that language provides guidelines that we adhere to.
Marcel Duchamp proved that the concept of art is every bit as open to interpretation and the proof was in the flat screen and controllers that greeted us in the Hartnett.
We live in a post-Pacman world. It was bound to happen.
The smart money's on enjoying the process.
Even for those of us who will never again play a video game.
One is my limit, even if it is considered art.
Game designer Kellee Santiago gave the talk, "Flow in Games and in Life," for the opening of UR's new exhibit, "Flow, Just Flow: Variations on a Theme."
It's not as unlikely as it sounds.
Kellee's non-competitive video game "Flow" is part of the show.
She's also one of the proponents of games as an art form, along with MoMA who've just added fourteen to their collection.
Who am I to disagree?
And while I've never played a video game before, I played "Flow" as part of this show.
I didn't wait for games to be considered art to play one, it just happened that way.
No, really.
Unlike the healthy contingent of young men in the audience tonight, most of Kellee's stories about game development went over my head.
The part that I did get was about flow itself, that feeling of being engaged in an activity, the feeling of focusing your energy, the enjoyment of the process.
Completely focused motivation.
Which, not surprisingly, most of the young men who asked questions of Kellee during the Q & A, seemed to have on the subject of game design.
But for me it was all about the 21 pieces of contemporary art awaiting us in the galleries in addition to the video game.
The concept of "flow" was expressed in myriad ways throughout the exhibit.
Humming engines and wires, on mulberry paper, with airplane flight patterns, on video and on burnt paper.
And as varied as the mediums were, always the essence of flow came through.
Near a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture hanging from the ceiling was an explanation of the principles behind it.
I read it twice without clearly understanding the concept and turned to the student standing next to me, telling her it was too scientific for me.
"Oh, good!" she said, sounding very relieved. "Me, too."
Call me simple.
One thing was very clear, though. In the context of contemporary art, a video game did not seem out of place.
In fact, it brought to mind the age-old argument about language.
I know people who believe language is a malleable thing, constantly shape-shifting to what the culture is speaking and writing, while others think that language provides guidelines that we adhere to.
Marcel Duchamp proved that the concept of art is every bit as open to interpretation and the proof was in the flat screen and controllers that greeted us in the Hartnett.
We live in a post-Pacman world. It was bound to happen.
The smart money's on enjoying the process.
Even for those of us who will never again play a video game.
One is my limit, even if it is considered art.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Clave is the Word
The mambo kings played songs of love.
And at UR, of all places.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Modlin Center, but the choices of places to eat nearby are lacking.
But Phil's welcomed us in with its usual bar crowd and a waitress who described the salad dressing as strawberry vinaigrette-ish.
Vinaigrette-ish? What does that even mean?
No matter, we eschewed ish for "The Cuban Spectacular: From the Big Easy to the Big Apple, a Celebration of the Mambo."
Because, let's face it, the mambo deserves some celebrating.
Not only was the show sold out, but there was a line of people waiting on standby for any unused tickets and it stretched down the hallway into oblivion.
Meanwhile, we sashayed into fifth row center seats, right between the student doused in cheap cologne to mask her body odor and a jacked up older couple who cheered the musicians after each song.
Maybe they were as tickled as I was about the big band-like staging with custom music stands with the letter "P" on them.
Just like Ricky Ricardo had for his band at the Tropicana nightclub.
Except Ricky's band had no female musicians and tonight we had girl parts on bass, sax, trumpet and drums.
In addition to the evening's entertainment, the multi-media performance also provided a musical history lesson.
We saw pieces of a documentary made by UR in Cuba about Cuban music, interspersed with live music and dancing.
There was a Cuban vocalist singing some of the songs (the Cuban standard "Guantanamera" which even I recognized), a blond student singing others (the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm") and two dancers jitterbugging to "Sing, Sing, Sing" in spats.
Dixieland reared its head with seven pairs of khakis and a tux (not to mention a white tuba) doing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee."
The point was that mambo began in New Orleans, moved up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Chicago and on to NYC.
We heard Cuban trivia, like when a baby first stands in Cuba, people say he's dancing, not standing like we do here.
Telling, isn't it?
There was a demonstration of the habanera bass line which runs through all Cuban music, followed by a lesson in tango.
Two dancers appeared and the man, Edwin, had the hips of a snake and oozed rhythm no matter who his partner was.
He was mesmerizing to watch with his fluidity and effortless moves.
At one point, his partner swooned into him and he moved her body around; her feet stayed put as if she'd become an extension of him.
The consensus in my row was that those two could have danced to every song and we'd still have wanted more.
As part of my continuing musical education, I learned that "Oye Como Va" was written by Tito Puento (not Santana) and the band's spirited performance of it had the bandleader fanning the sax player after his solo and a couple of audience members dancing down in front.
"Bang Bang" was introduced as a "party song" and the three male and three female dancers tore up the stage to it.
On Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca," the keyboard player was jamming so hard that his keyboard was rocking side to side like in a cartoon from the forties.
Only then did we arrive at Latin jazz and the classic "Mambo No. 5," instantly recognizable to even the whitest of us.
Coincidentally, I learned that even the whitest of us had helped give birth to mambo, which came out of the Palladium Ballroom in NYC, where Latin jazz was played to enormous crowds (the club held 1,000 couples) back in the '50s.
That would be crowds of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, blacks and even Irish-Americans, like my great-grandparents.
No thanks are necessary. Just letting you know that my people did their part to bring you the mambo.
The Palladium also held pie-eating contests and skirt-raising contests between dances to mix it up.
Hey, whatever it took to birth the mambo.
Naturally Jose, the vocalist, returned for another Tito Puente song, "Ran Kan Kan" and a dance fest par excellence.
The only place to go after finally having achieved that Latin climax was back to the roots of it all and that's when the Hanover High School Marching Hawks paraded onstage, their bandleader marching sharply to lead them in "When the Saints Go Marching In."
The ensemble took up most of the stage, but it was the marching band's skinny clarinet player who seemed to be having a party of his own onstage.
I can't swear he was playing the notes properly, but certainly he got the award for most enthusiastic playing.
Hanover was joined by the full band for a reprise of "Mambo No. 5" and all at once our lesson in mambo was over.
I'd take the final exam on the jungle madness of mambo, but I'm not sure my hips are slinky enough.
On the other hand, I think I'd do just fine at the skirt-raising contest.
And at UR, of all places.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Modlin Center, but the choices of places to eat nearby are lacking.
But Phil's welcomed us in with its usual bar crowd and a waitress who described the salad dressing as strawberry vinaigrette-ish.
Vinaigrette-ish? What does that even mean?
No matter, we eschewed ish for "The Cuban Spectacular: From the Big Easy to the Big Apple, a Celebration of the Mambo."
Because, let's face it, the mambo deserves some celebrating.
Not only was the show sold out, but there was a line of people waiting on standby for any unused tickets and it stretched down the hallway into oblivion.
Meanwhile, we sashayed into fifth row center seats, right between the student doused in cheap cologne to mask her body odor and a jacked up older couple who cheered the musicians after each song.
Maybe they were as tickled as I was about the big band-like staging with custom music stands with the letter "P" on them.
Just like Ricky Ricardo had for his band at the Tropicana nightclub.
Except Ricky's band had no female musicians and tonight we had girl parts on bass, sax, trumpet and drums.
In addition to the evening's entertainment, the multi-media performance also provided a musical history lesson.
We saw pieces of a documentary made by UR in Cuba about Cuban music, interspersed with live music and dancing.
There was a Cuban vocalist singing some of the songs (the Cuban standard "Guantanamera" which even I recognized), a blond student singing others (the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm") and two dancers jitterbugging to "Sing, Sing, Sing" in spats.
Dixieland reared its head with seven pairs of khakis and a tux (not to mention a white tuba) doing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee."
The point was that mambo began in New Orleans, moved up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Chicago and on to NYC.
We heard Cuban trivia, like when a baby first stands in Cuba, people say he's dancing, not standing like we do here.
Telling, isn't it?
There was a demonstration of the habanera bass line which runs through all Cuban music, followed by a lesson in tango.
Two dancers appeared and the man, Edwin, had the hips of a snake and oozed rhythm no matter who his partner was.
He was mesmerizing to watch with his fluidity and effortless moves.
At one point, his partner swooned into him and he moved her body around; her feet stayed put as if she'd become an extension of him.
The consensus in my row was that those two could have danced to every song and we'd still have wanted more.
As part of my continuing musical education, I learned that "Oye Como Va" was written by Tito Puento (not Santana) and the band's spirited performance of it had the bandleader fanning the sax player after his solo and a couple of audience members dancing down in front.
"Bang Bang" was introduced as a "party song" and the three male and three female dancers tore up the stage to it.
On Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca," the keyboard player was jamming so hard that his keyboard was rocking side to side like in a cartoon from the forties.
Only then did we arrive at Latin jazz and the classic "Mambo No. 5," instantly recognizable to even the whitest of us.
Coincidentally, I learned that even the whitest of us had helped give birth to mambo, which came out of the Palladium Ballroom in NYC, where Latin jazz was played to enormous crowds (the club held 1,000 couples) back in the '50s.
That would be crowds of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, blacks and even Irish-Americans, like my great-grandparents.
No thanks are necessary. Just letting you know that my people did their part to bring you the mambo.
The Palladium also held pie-eating contests and skirt-raising contests between dances to mix it up.
Hey, whatever it took to birth the mambo.
Naturally Jose, the vocalist, returned for another Tito Puente song, "Ran Kan Kan" and a dance fest par excellence.
The only place to go after finally having achieved that Latin climax was back to the roots of it all and that's when the Hanover High School Marching Hawks paraded onstage, their bandleader marching sharply to lead them in "When the Saints Go Marching In."
The ensemble took up most of the stage, but it was the marching band's skinny clarinet player who seemed to be having a party of his own onstage.
I can't swear he was playing the notes properly, but certainly he got the award for most enthusiastic playing.
Hanover was joined by the full band for a reprise of "Mambo No. 5" and all at once our lesson in mambo was over.
I'd take the final exam on the jungle madness of mambo, but I'm not sure my hips are slinky enough.
On the other hand, I think I'd do just fine at the skirt-raising contest.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Dare to Be Naive
Rule #1 of a Monday night: never miss a chance to hear from the friend of a Renaissance man.
With it being Restaurant Week, we needed to find someplace far from the madding crowds and Garnett's fit the bill perfectly.
There were only two other tables occupied and Patsy Cline was on the stereo so we decided to go the date night route.
We toyed with the idea of an Italian but instead chose French, a fresh and fruity Calmel + JJoseph Saint Chinon, a Syrah and Grenache Noir blend.
While enjoying our meal, our server opened a bakery box to show another customer the chocolate almond torte inside.
One look at that dark chocolate ganache and I inquired, "Is that for public consumption?"
Affirmative.
How could we not try a new sweet at Garnett's, one of our favorite dessert spots?
Impossible.
But with limited time and art awaiting us, we took it to go along with the rest of our wine.
University of Richmond was calling with a lecture and art opening at the Modlin Center.
The new exhibit "Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: Twelve Around One" was opening with a talk by long-time friend and architectural partner to Fuller, Thomas Zung.
I'd heard it from a reliable source that he "liked to talk" and frankly, I was curious to hear stories from a man who intimately knew someone as passionate and multi-talented as Bucky.
Zung was both enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Bucky and his never-ending quest to solve the problems of housing, transportation,, education, ecology and just about every other worthwhile cause you could name.
The talk included pictures of Fuller's Dymaxion cars, with Zung commenting, "In the '30s, it was astounding to see Bucky's car coming down the road compared to all the other cars."
Considering it looked like a three-wheeled wingless plane, I guess it did.
I loved that Zung's talk included audio clips of Bucky talking and even singing "Home, Sweet, Home" with his own lyrics, like "Home, home to a dome."
Before one of the film clips of Bucky's cars, Zung chuckled, "I don't know if any of you heard Bucky talk, but when he gave a talk for an hour, it lasted about five."
What struck me was Bucky's belief in what one man can do. "Think for yourself and just do it," was a goal he attacked every day of his life.
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, that hotbed of artistic talent (John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Martha Graham), was referred to by Zung as " a poor man's Paris."
The metaphor is brilliant and believable.
Naturally, we saw images of Bucky's geodesic domes, probably his best-known creations.
But the exhibit made it clear that the man was so much more than just domes.
Perhaps the most compelling was his Dymaxion world map, the first map to show land masses with minimal distortion and the ocean as one body of water.
Fascinated, I could have looked at that all day.
A series of drawings for various projects would have made a comic book artist proud with their deft shading and intricate detail.
His "rowing needle" looked like a cross between a rowboat and a catamaran, a sleek apparatus that took up the whole back area of the gallery, a perfect example of form following function.
I heard that Zing had wanted to demonstrate it, but there hadn't been sufficient time to get it to water.
Too bad. That's something I'd have wanted to see.
Bucky called himself a comprehensivist, someone who works with whole systems. In other words, an artist.
And he was definitely that, in addition to being an engineer, an architect, an inventor and a poet.
I'm not sure I knew we had any 20th century Renaissance men until tonight.
Because surely it is only a man who is interested in so much who would say, "Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time."
Amen, Bucky. I'm right there with you.
P.S. I already nailed the naive part.
With it being Restaurant Week, we needed to find someplace far from the madding crowds and Garnett's fit the bill perfectly.
There were only two other tables occupied and Patsy Cline was on the stereo so we decided to go the date night route.
We toyed with the idea of an Italian but instead chose French, a fresh and fruity Calmel + JJoseph Saint Chinon, a Syrah and Grenache Noir blend.
While enjoying our meal, our server opened a bakery box to show another customer the chocolate almond torte inside.
One look at that dark chocolate ganache and I inquired, "Is that for public consumption?"
Affirmative.
How could we not try a new sweet at Garnett's, one of our favorite dessert spots?
Impossible.
But with limited time and art awaiting us, we took it to go along with the rest of our wine.
University of Richmond was calling with a lecture and art opening at the Modlin Center.
The new exhibit "Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: Twelve Around One" was opening with a talk by long-time friend and architectural partner to Fuller, Thomas Zung.
I'd heard it from a reliable source that he "liked to talk" and frankly, I was curious to hear stories from a man who intimately knew someone as passionate and multi-talented as Bucky.
Zung was both enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Bucky and his never-ending quest to solve the problems of housing, transportation,, education, ecology and just about every other worthwhile cause you could name.
The talk included pictures of Fuller's Dymaxion cars, with Zung commenting, "In the '30s, it was astounding to see Bucky's car coming down the road compared to all the other cars."
Considering it looked like a three-wheeled wingless plane, I guess it did.
I loved that Zung's talk included audio clips of Bucky talking and even singing "Home, Sweet, Home" with his own lyrics, like "Home, home to a dome."
Before one of the film clips of Bucky's cars, Zung chuckled, "I don't know if any of you heard Bucky talk, but when he gave a talk for an hour, it lasted about five."
What struck me was Bucky's belief in what one man can do. "Think for yourself and just do it," was a goal he attacked every day of his life.
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, that hotbed of artistic talent (John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Martha Graham), was referred to by Zung as " a poor man's Paris."
The metaphor is brilliant and believable.
Naturally, we saw images of Bucky's geodesic domes, probably his best-known creations.
But the exhibit made it clear that the man was so much more than just domes.
Perhaps the most compelling was his Dymaxion world map, the first map to show land masses with minimal distortion and the ocean as one body of water.
Fascinated, I could have looked at that all day.
A series of drawings for various projects would have made a comic book artist proud with their deft shading and intricate detail.
His "rowing needle" looked like a cross between a rowboat and a catamaran, a sleek apparatus that took up the whole back area of the gallery, a perfect example of form following function.
I heard that Zing had wanted to demonstrate it, but there hadn't been sufficient time to get it to water.
Too bad. That's something I'd have wanted to see.
Bucky called himself a comprehensivist, someone who works with whole systems. In other words, an artist.
And he was definitely that, in addition to being an engineer, an architect, an inventor and a poet.
I'm not sure I knew we had any 20th century Renaissance men until tonight.
Because surely it is only a man who is interested in so much who would say, "Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time."
Amen, Bucky. I'm right there with you.
P.S. I already nailed the naive part.
Monday, September 24, 2012
A Sunday Kind of Love
First rule of Sunday: start high and get progressively sillier.
You really couldn't start much higher than a dazzling audio vision like "Koyaanisqatsi," the 1983 film about life out of balance with a Philip Glass soundtrack.
Sitting at UR's Modlin Center with a roomful of people willing to forsake a crystalline late summer day and the NFL for a non-narrative movie with only one word in it (the Hopi chant "koyaanisqatsi") surely qualified me as both a music and film nerd.
Unfortunately, not everyone in attendance was as enthralled with the movie as my companions and I were.
Directly in front of us was a UR student who moved constantly and restlessly from side to side in his chair, his head always in his hands as if he needed to hold it up.
In front of him, a kid napped through the whole thing.
Personally, I find the visuals of nature followed by technology followed by cultural references and eventually decay to be a meditation on the planet.
And of course, on the late '70s, early '80s when it was shot.
Like the billboard in Times Square advertising, "Sony Betamax."
And the beauty of implosions, long a fascination for me.
I am one of those people who got up at the crack of dawn to watch the old Times Disptach building imploded back in September '98.
The film had image after image of implosions, truly a combination of science and beauty.
But if you've seen the film, you know how tense the score and images make you by the end of the film.
We stayed for the talkback with UR's music director and the remaining devotees of the film for some additional insight.
Afterwards, the four of us dined at Don't Look Back, discussing the film and its two sequels, neither of which I've seen.
A Frito pie and Herradura Reposado helped clear my head of the apocalyptic vision we'd just seen on the big screen.
And, honestly, where can you go after apocalypse and Fritos but to the Ghost Light Afterparty?
This month's event was called "Sha-GLAP," leading me to suspect a '50s theme.
Walking in to a room full of poodle skirts, bobby socks and ponytails, I knew I was right.
My date guessed that there's be some '60s, too, and a chat with co-host Maggie confirmed this.
The decades may change, but the GLAP is essentially a piano bar with members of the theater community taking the stage to sing whatever the hell they want.
As co-host Matt said tonight, "If you wanna sing a song from Les Mis and then talk about how much you hate Les Mis, that's fine."
Maggie explained the housekeeping issues, including a plea for some appropriate music. "We do appreciate some theme-i-ness."
And we got theme-i-ness almost at once with the marvelous Wonderettes (currently in production at Swift Mill) doing "Son of a Preacherman," complete with choreography and praying hands.
And we were off and running.
Part of the drill at GLAP is always Mad Libs set to a song of the period and we were warned that two Mad Libs were now in circulation and to feel free to contribute any dirty words we cared to to the project.
"F**k hasn't come up and we only have one penis," Miss Mad Lib informed us.
"One penis is never enough," Matt quipped.
Lamentation gave way to opera as Stephanie and Ingrid got up and sang a piece from "Tales of Hoffman."
"Last month we had "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Matt laughed. "And now we have opera. That's what Ghost Light is all about."
Maggie sang "Let the Good Times Roll" with Matt on shaker balls, providing my favorite lyric of the evening, "Love can be such a swinging thing."
Warning us that, "This could be tragic, but we welcome tragedy here," Matt did "On Broadway" (with back up singers), even changing the lyrics to "On Broad Street" and ending with jazz hands.
We like jazz hands at the GLAP.
Elizabeth jumped decades and did "Sweet Baby James," Peter did a soulful version of "Let It Be Me" and Sarah did "Stand By Me" with an impromptu group of backup singers and shakers almost upstaging her.
The Wonderettes returned for a beautifully-executed "Mr. Sandman" and an hysterical "Lollipop" that included a take-off on a Saturday Night Live skit that had one of the Wonderettes wearing prosthetic tubes with doll arms attached.
Georgia was the brave one to sing the first Mad Lib to "It's My Party," full of innuendo and trash talk ("It's my party and I'll masturbate if I want to").
When Matt spotted Evan looking very much like Buddy Holly, he burst into Weezer song, "Ooh,we, ooh, you look just like Buddy Holly and Karen, you're Mary Tyler Moore."
Not gonna lie, it was my first musical shout-out from the stage and I could get used to it.
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" got the bongos and shaker treatment.
One of the night's highlights was Katrina singing (with flowers in her hair) and Iman beat boxing to "Killing Me Softly."
It was the kind of sublime moment that you just had to be present for.
The TheaterLab group did "Summer Nights" from "Grease" and Evan added a mean tambourine to that.
Then it was intermission, meaning pizza time and Matt instructed, "Crank up that tuna-age!" so we had music to munch by.
Sarah did "Freddy, My Love" before raffle winners were pulled.
One prize was a bottle of malbec and Maggie read from the bottle's label that the winemakers selected from grapes that were 47 years old.
"That's so old!" Maggie exclaimed.
God, yes, 47, that's practically deathbed material.
Paul did a sweet version of "In My Own Little Corner" from "Cinderella," complete with high drama and an abrupt and unexpected ending, at least for him.
"That was very unceremonious and I loved it," Maggie observed.
Katie got Mad Lib duty this time and hers came with a warning at the top saying, "This is filthy."
Sung to Grease's "Sandra Dee" it included phrases like "pink velvet sausage pocket."
GLAP is not for the faint of heart, kids.
Nick did a rousing rendition of "If You Wanna Be Happy" with the sage lyrics "never make a pretty woman your wife" and three guys on heartfelt backup vocals plus bongos.
The crowd, now well lubricated, got vocal, testifying as Carla sang Streisand's "Evergreen" to shouts of "Come on!" and "Go, girl."
In a nod to the mood, she even changed a lyric to "Every day I am tipsy."
Katrina got called back up next, prompting her to say, "Oh, great! I have to go after Carla!"
Oh, great was right as she did "Stars and the Moon," noting midway through, "This song makes me cry."
Meanwhile you could have heard a pin drop in the room as everyone listened intently.
Even as our own bottle of Rose got lower and lower, Matt acknowledged, "I just accidentally chugged my bourbon and ginger and there's so many words on this page," before singing the hilarious "Therapy" from "Tick Tick Boom."
Paul did a song requested by Annie, saying, "To all you Glappers who have nothing better to do on a Sunday, there's nothing better than love, so here's "A Sunday Kind of Love."
Once again, he finished unceremoniously, getting many laughs for it.
The last song was "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss)" with Carla, Matt, Maggie and even Evan shaking hismoneymaker tambourine along with everyone else who couldn't resist joining in the last big singalong.
Conclusion after nearly five hours of Glappage?
If it's love, if it really is, it's there in his kiss.
That, and I'm happy to concede that I have nothing better to do on a Sunday evening than let tipsy theater people sing to me.
Where else on earth am I going to be able to relive my youth singing along with a roomful of people to "Good Morning, Starshine"?
Only at GLAP, my friends, only at GLAP.
You really couldn't start much higher than a dazzling audio vision like "Koyaanisqatsi," the 1983 film about life out of balance with a Philip Glass soundtrack.
Sitting at UR's Modlin Center with a roomful of people willing to forsake a crystalline late summer day and the NFL for a non-narrative movie with only one word in it (the Hopi chant "koyaanisqatsi") surely qualified me as both a music and film nerd.
Unfortunately, not everyone in attendance was as enthralled with the movie as my companions and I were.
Directly in front of us was a UR student who moved constantly and restlessly from side to side in his chair, his head always in his hands as if he needed to hold it up.
In front of him, a kid napped through the whole thing.
Personally, I find the visuals of nature followed by technology followed by cultural references and eventually decay to be a meditation on the planet.
And of course, on the late '70s, early '80s when it was shot.
Like the billboard in Times Square advertising, "Sony Betamax."
And the beauty of implosions, long a fascination for me.
I am one of those people who got up at the crack of dawn to watch the old Times Disptach building imploded back in September '98.
The film had image after image of implosions, truly a combination of science and beauty.
But if you've seen the film, you know how tense the score and images make you by the end of the film.
We stayed for the talkback with UR's music director and the remaining devotees of the film for some additional insight.
Afterwards, the four of us dined at Don't Look Back, discussing the film and its two sequels, neither of which I've seen.
A Frito pie and Herradura Reposado helped clear my head of the apocalyptic vision we'd just seen on the big screen.
And, honestly, where can you go after apocalypse and Fritos but to the Ghost Light Afterparty?
This month's event was called "Sha-GLAP," leading me to suspect a '50s theme.
Walking in to a room full of poodle skirts, bobby socks and ponytails, I knew I was right.
My date guessed that there's be some '60s, too, and a chat with co-host Maggie confirmed this.
The decades may change, but the GLAP is essentially a piano bar with members of the theater community taking the stage to sing whatever the hell they want.
As co-host Matt said tonight, "If you wanna sing a song from Les Mis and then talk about how much you hate Les Mis, that's fine."
Maggie explained the housekeeping issues, including a plea for some appropriate music. "We do appreciate some theme-i-ness."
And we got theme-i-ness almost at once with the marvelous Wonderettes (currently in production at Swift Mill) doing "Son of a Preacherman," complete with choreography and praying hands.
And we were off and running.
Part of the drill at GLAP is always Mad Libs set to a song of the period and we were warned that two Mad Libs were now in circulation and to feel free to contribute any dirty words we cared to to the project.
"F**k hasn't come up and we only have one penis," Miss Mad Lib informed us.
"One penis is never enough," Matt quipped.
Lamentation gave way to opera as Stephanie and Ingrid got up and sang a piece from "Tales of Hoffman."
"Last month we had "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Matt laughed. "And now we have opera. That's what Ghost Light is all about."
Maggie sang "Let the Good Times Roll" with Matt on shaker balls, providing my favorite lyric of the evening, "Love can be such a swinging thing."
Warning us that, "This could be tragic, but we welcome tragedy here," Matt did "On Broadway" (with back up singers), even changing the lyrics to "On Broad Street" and ending with jazz hands.
We like jazz hands at the GLAP.
Elizabeth jumped decades and did "Sweet Baby James," Peter did a soulful version of "Let It Be Me" and Sarah did "Stand By Me" with an impromptu group of backup singers and shakers almost upstaging her.
The Wonderettes returned for a beautifully-executed "Mr. Sandman" and an hysterical "Lollipop" that included a take-off on a Saturday Night Live skit that had one of the Wonderettes wearing prosthetic tubes with doll arms attached.
Georgia was the brave one to sing the first Mad Lib to "It's My Party," full of innuendo and trash talk ("It's my party and I'll masturbate if I want to").
When Matt spotted Evan looking very much like Buddy Holly, he burst into Weezer song, "Ooh,we, ooh, you look just like Buddy Holly and Karen, you're Mary Tyler Moore."
Not gonna lie, it was my first musical shout-out from the stage and I could get used to it.
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" got the bongos and shaker treatment.
One of the night's highlights was Katrina singing (with flowers in her hair) and Iman beat boxing to "Killing Me Softly."
It was the kind of sublime moment that you just had to be present for.
The TheaterLab group did "Summer Nights" from "Grease" and Evan added a mean tambourine to that.
Then it was intermission, meaning pizza time and Matt instructed, "Crank up that tuna-age!" so we had music to munch by.
Sarah did "Freddy, My Love" before raffle winners were pulled.
One prize was a bottle of malbec and Maggie read from the bottle's label that the winemakers selected from grapes that were 47 years old.
"That's so old!" Maggie exclaimed.
God, yes, 47, that's practically deathbed material.
Paul did a sweet version of "In My Own Little Corner" from "Cinderella," complete with high drama and an abrupt and unexpected ending, at least for him.
"That was very unceremonious and I loved it," Maggie observed.
Katie got Mad Lib duty this time and hers came with a warning at the top saying, "This is filthy."
Sung to Grease's "Sandra Dee" it included phrases like "pink velvet sausage pocket."
GLAP is not for the faint of heart, kids.
Nick did a rousing rendition of "If You Wanna Be Happy" with the sage lyrics "never make a pretty woman your wife" and three guys on heartfelt backup vocals plus bongos.
The crowd, now well lubricated, got vocal, testifying as Carla sang Streisand's "Evergreen" to shouts of "Come on!" and "Go, girl."
In a nod to the mood, she even changed a lyric to "Every day I am tipsy."
Katrina got called back up next, prompting her to say, "Oh, great! I have to go after Carla!"
Oh, great was right as she did "Stars and the Moon," noting midway through, "This song makes me cry."
Meanwhile you could have heard a pin drop in the room as everyone listened intently.
Even as our own bottle of Rose got lower and lower, Matt acknowledged, "I just accidentally chugged my bourbon and ginger and there's so many words on this page," before singing the hilarious "Therapy" from "Tick Tick Boom."
Paul did a song requested by Annie, saying, "To all you Glappers who have nothing better to do on a Sunday, there's nothing better than love, so here's "A Sunday Kind of Love."
Once again, he finished unceremoniously, getting many laughs for it.
The last song was "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss)" with Carla, Matt, Maggie and even Evan shaking his
Conclusion after nearly five hours of Glappage?
If it's love, if it really is, it's there in his kiss.
That, and I'm happy to concede that I have nothing better to do on a Sunday evening than let tipsy theater people sing to me.
Where else on earth am I going to be able to relive my youth singing along with a roomful of people to "Good Morning, Starshine"?
Only at GLAP, my friends, only at GLAP.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Barefoot and Punjabi
How crazy is it to have a program for a dance party?
Our initial intent was to fuel up for the evening ahead at Secco. It was on the way to UR, there are always such an array of (affordable) wine choices and the food is reliably awesome. Case in point: a lightly fizzy wine from Spain not yet on the menu, Avinyo Petillant (the name means "wine with a prickle") with a highly aromatic nose and loads of effervescence.
There were some lovely new items on the menu, like a Tuscan kale salad with Asian pears, oyster mushrooms, 3-year Gouda with pumpkin seeds and oil that delivered the hearty flavor of kale dressed in its prettiest fall flavors. I coveted the lentil soup with ham hocks and creme fraiche, finding the pig element to be what made the dish sing.
Next to us, a young woman tried flirting with food talk to some nearby guys only to be corrected when she informed them that, "You know, pate is illegal in California."
"You mean foie gras?" one of the guys politely corrected her, grinning at me but allowing the girl to continue to fawn.
House-made smoked paprika sausage with vinegar collard greens was a perfect balance of heat and tang, addicting almost in its complementary flavors. Because we were short on time, we finished with more Petillant and a cheese course of Blue del Moncenesio because it was promised to be a "dense, smokey, meaty bleu."
Not to mention Italian. They weren't lying. With a creamy mouth feel and a fairly assertive taste, it was a stinky cheese lover's dream. We all but inhaled the cheese in order to take our stinky breath to the Modlin Center to see Red Baraat.
Billed as combining a New Orleans street band sound with Bollywood tunes and a go-go beat, I had decided it was a must-see. In fact, when I'd gotten the tickets, the ticket seller had asked if I wanted assigned seats in the balcony or general admission in the orchestra pit.
Are you kidding?
If the Modlin Center is expecting enough dancing for Red Baraat to negate the need for seats, you bet I want general admission. Walking in to a Beatles soundtrack, we saw no one standing down near the stage. Okay, so we'll take seats in the front row and see what happens.
I had to laugh at being handed a program on my way in.
True, it had some information about the band's history in it, including that they were as likely to be found "throwing down at an overheated and unannounced warehouse party in their Brooklyn neighborhood" as at Lincoln Center. But there's not a lot more you can say about this kind of performance in the pages of a program.
A friend came by shortly, telling us of his amazement that the audience was filling up the seats in the back of the theater and not the front. Not us. We were close enough to see the band sweat and spit.
When Red Baraat took the stage, they were missing one member, so they were down to only eight.
It was still a lot of musicians: soprano saxophone, trumpet, bass trumpet, trombone, sousaphone, drummer, percussionist and leader Sonny playing dohl, a double-sided north Indian drum he wore slung over his sweaty shoulder.
Sonny explained that "baraat" referred to a procession that happens for a wedding in India and their first song was "Today is My Best Friend's Wedding Day."
It wasn't long after that when Sonny instructed the audience to stand. Next he directed us to move forward and fill the empty space in front of the stage. Then the band began playing and all hell broke loose.
All of a sudden, the pit was filled with people of all ages dancing wildly to music drawn from Punjabi rhythms with a ferocious horn section that brought jazz and funk into the mix.
By the second song, I knew my shoes had been the wrong choice and deposited them on my empty chair in the front row. Back down in front, I saw an Indian-American friend busting his best Bollywood moves, a sight I never thought I'd live to see.
It was pretty impressive.
I said hello to WRIR's DJ Carlito, the orchestrator of the popular Bollywood dance parties around town, telling him I knew he'd be there. The rest of the evening was pretty much a dance party, pure and simple.
Oh, sure, we heard raucous, we heard sinewy, we heard hard-core sousaphone, but never did the beat waver or the dancing crowd stop moving. I only hope the seated people up in the balcony were having a fraction of the good time we were having down in the pit, but I really don't see how.
As the evening progressed, the temperature went up with all the sweaty, dancing bodies and I couldn't help but think that it was the Alice Jepson Theater's first-ever dance party.
May I just say how satisfying it was to be dropping sweat at a venerable location like UR?
I had told my date just before the show began that I wished we were seeing Red Baraat in an overheated warehouse instead of a stately theater.
Wrong.
By the time the energetic show ended almost two hours later, my shirt was stuck to my back, my hair was wet at the roots and anyone looking at me would have thought I'd been in an overheated warehouse dancing all night.
But you don't get a glossy program at a warehouse dance party, now do you?
Our initial intent was to fuel up for the evening ahead at Secco. It was on the way to UR, there are always such an array of (affordable) wine choices and the food is reliably awesome. Case in point: a lightly fizzy wine from Spain not yet on the menu, Avinyo Petillant (the name means "wine with a prickle") with a highly aromatic nose and loads of effervescence.
There were some lovely new items on the menu, like a Tuscan kale salad with Asian pears, oyster mushrooms, 3-year Gouda with pumpkin seeds and oil that delivered the hearty flavor of kale dressed in its prettiest fall flavors. I coveted the lentil soup with ham hocks and creme fraiche, finding the pig element to be what made the dish sing.
Next to us, a young woman tried flirting with food talk to some nearby guys only to be corrected when she informed them that, "You know, pate is illegal in California."
"You mean foie gras?" one of the guys politely corrected her, grinning at me but allowing the girl to continue to fawn.
House-made smoked paprika sausage with vinegar collard greens was a perfect balance of heat and tang, addicting almost in its complementary flavors. Because we were short on time, we finished with more Petillant and a cheese course of Blue del Moncenesio because it was promised to be a "dense, smokey, meaty bleu."
Not to mention Italian. They weren't lying. With a creamy mouth feel and a fairly assertive taste, it was a stinky cheese lover's dream. We all but inhaled the cheese in order to take our stinky breath to the Modlin Center to see Red Baraat.
Billed as combining a New Orleans street band sound with Bollywood tunes and a go-go beat, I had decided it was a must-see. In fact, when I'd gotten the tickets, the ticket seller had asked if I wanted assigned seats in the balcony or general admission in the orchestra pit.
Are you kidding?
If the Modlin Center is expecting enough dancing for Red Baraat to negate the need for seats, you bet I want general admission. Walking in to a Beatles soundtrack, we saw no one standing down near the stage. Okay, so we'll take seats in the front row and see what happens.
I had to laugh at being handed a program on my way in.
True, it had some information about the band's history in it, including that they were as likely to be found "throwing down at an overheated and unannounced warehouse party in their Brooklyn neighborhood" as at Lincoln Center. But there's not a lot more you can say about this kind of performance in the pages of a program.
A friend came by shortly, telling us of his amazement that the audience was filling up the seats in the back of the theater and not the front. Not us. We were close enough to see the band sweat and spit.
When Red Baraat took the stage, they were missing one member, so they were down to only eight.
It was still a lot of musicians: soprano saxophone, trumpet, bass trumpet, trombone, sousaphone, drummer, percussionist and leader Sonny playing dohl, a double-sided north Indian drum he wore slung over his sweaty shoulder.
Sonny explained that "baraat" referred to a procession that happens for a wedding in India and their first song was "Today is My Best Friend's Wedding Day."
It wasn't long after that when Sonny instructed the audience to stand. Next he directed us to move forward and fill the empty space in front of the stage. Then the band began playing and all hell broke loose.
All of a sudden, the pit was filled with people of all ages dancing wildly to music drawn from Punjabi rhythms with a ferocious horn section that brought jazz and funk into the mix.
By the second song, I knew my shoes had been the wrong choice and deposited them on my empty chair in the front row. Back down in front, I saw an Indian-American friend busting his best Bollywood moves, a sight I never thought I'd live to see.
It was pretty impressive.
I said hello to WRIR's DJ Carlito, the orchestrator of the popular Bollywood dance parties around town, telling him I knew he'd be there. The rest of the evening was pretty much a dance party, pure and simple.
Oh, sure, we heard raucous, we heard sinewy, we heard hard-core sousaphone, but never did the beat waver or the dancing crowd stop moving. I only hope the seated people up in the balcony were having a fraction of the good time we were having down in the pit, but I really don't see how.
As the evening progressed, the temperature went up with all the sweaty, dancing bodies and I couldn't help but think that it was the Alice Jepson Theater's first-ever dance party.
May I just say how satisfying it was to be dropping sweat at a venerable location like UR?
I had told my date just before the show began that I wished we were seeing Red Baraat in an overheated warehouse instead of a stately theater.
Wrong.
By the time the energetic show ended almost two hours later, my shirt was stuck to my back, my hair was wet at the roots and anyone looking at me would have thought I'd been in an overheated warehouse dancing all night.
But you don't get a glossy program at a warehouse dance party, now do you?
Friday, May 18, 2012
Radio for the Eyes
Thank you Ira Glass for letting Taylor Dayne tell it to my heart.
My long-overdue evening with a girlfriend got off to an inauspicious start at the Continental.
It wasn't our first choice since I'd already been there once (enough) but it had the distinct advantage of being on the way to the Modlin Center.
Walking in to a packed bar and nearly full house at 6:00, we inquired about a table.
"Are you going to just drink or eat?" we were asked with no hint of a smile. "You have to eat at a table."
Such hospitality! Such customer service!
After assuring her that we'd come to eat, we were granted a table.
"Do we look like drunkards?" Friend asked me. I made a point not to drink.
The dining room was ungodly noisy, so much so that conversation was all but impossible.
Maybe that's why the portions are so ridiculously large; if you're busy chewing endlessly, who can talk?
Giving up on a convivial meal, I ate my black bean nachos and she her wedge salad so we could move on.
Next stop: "This American Life: Live," an evening of radio brought to life.
Ira Glass' NPR show had been taped last week in NYC and was being re-broadcast tonight for a live audience.
He said the inspiration for the show came with wanting to feature people whose stories were too visual for radio.
Walking in to a Bugs Bunny cartoon, we were also treated to a Superman cartoon and a winsome 2011 cartoon called "Little Boat" before the main event.
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Start.
The show's theme was "The invisible made visible," sort of an analogy for everything we were experiencing.
The band OK Go kicked things off by doing a song with audience accompaniment.
Attendees with a smartphone had been able to download an app that allowed them to push one of three icons on cue to make music.
"Everyone who doesn't have a phone, you're the rhythm section," Ira said.
That was me.
With a screen showing us Luddites when to stomp and when to snap and the phone crowd pushing away, we made music with OK Go playing bells and percussion.
It's hard to explain the sense of shared effort, but looking around at glowing phones, concentrating faces and stomping, snapping participants, it felt like an ad hoc street band with a really good bandleader.
They went on to sing "Needing/Getting" ("It don't get much dumber than trying to forget a girl when you love her") without our assistance.
And the show was off and running.
Act 2: Groundhog Day featured comedian Tig Notaro explaining, "I love Taylor Dayne and not ironically."
And did she ever.
She told of seeing her at a party and, as a huge fan, speaking to her ("I don't mean to bother you, but I love your voice").
A year later she saw her at a restaurant and did it again.
"She's the easiest person in the world to run into," Tig deadpanned.
The uber-fan admitted to more sightings and more awkward conversations ("I'm the reason Taylor Dayne made another album") before saying goodnight to the audience.
Before she could walk offstage, Taylor Dayne herself walked on, singing, of course.
She put her arm around Tig, who pretended to sing a little back-up and bust out her Micheal Jackson dance moves. All with a look of disbelief on her face.
After they left the stage arm in arm, Ira came out and said, "Beat that, Car Talk!"
Comedian Glynn Washington told a story of a well witcher looking for water on his god-fearing family's land.
A short film by comedian Mike Birbiglia riffed on NPR with Mike doing an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Once the interview ends, he insists they go for coffee, where she continues to treat him like an interview subject.
He invites himself to dinner at her house and then tags along when Gross and her husband decide to rob a bank.
At no point does Terry Gross stop interviewing Mike.
The film was called "Fresh Air 2: 2 Fresh, 2 Ferocious." It was hysterically self-mocking.
At one point Ira explained that he was using his iPad to help him do the show, cuing music and video, but admitting the device was "a little buggy."
"My relationship with Apple Corporation is not the best," he noted with a twinkle in his eye.
There was a piece about the discovery of tens of thousand of negatives of an unknown street photographer, Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny who'd taken pictures daily in the 60s and 70s.
I'd heard about this woman and her prodigious picture taking before tonight, but this was a chance to see many of her photographs.
They were like a diary of her life walking around the city. She was compared to Emily Dickinson, whose poems weren't discovered or published until after her death.
"The living always kick the asses of the dead," it was noted because Maier had been the type who did not want her work seen.
The guy who'd bought the negatives from a storage facility after her death said, "I feel an appreciation she'd never have wanted us to feel."
David Rakoff told his story of growing up gay ("You can't imagine the pleasures of seeing undressed bodies in the locker room in the pre-Internet early 80s") and becoming a dancer.
A tumor behind his collarbone eventually robbed him of the use of his left arm, which he kept tucked in his front pants pocket, but he finished his saga of adjusting to the new him with an eloquent dance in the center of the stage.
More dance followed, this time by two women (one named Monicabill) and set to James Brown's "Get Up/Sex Machine."
In turtlenecks and pleated skirts, they did a frenetic piece that beautifully captured the energy and humor of the song.
My friend and I figured they burned more calories in that one dance than we had taken in at dinner, and that's saying a lot.
Davis Sedaris, in clown make-up and tiny hat, did a rant on bad coffee service in a Vermont hotel.
OK Go did "Do What You Want" ("So you were born in an electrical storm, took a bite out of the sun,saw your future in a machine built for two") and credits began to roll.
Ira had explained that he had to say certain things solely to have them available for when the editing process for radio began.
And I've no doubt that those who hear that show on the radio will find it as fascinating and clever as all his shows.
But they won't have stomped and snapped along to OK Go.
Or seen Terry Gross as a knit-capped bank robber.
Much less seen Taylor Dayne walk onstage to the amazement of the woman who'd just been making jokes about her.
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to revel in an evening like that.
Take that, Car Talk.
My long-overdue evening with a girlfriend got off to an inauspicious start at the Continental.
It wasn't our first choice since I'd already been there once (enough) but it had the distinct advantage of being on the way to the Modlin Center.
Walking in to a packed bar and nearly full house at 6:00, we inquired about a table.
"Are you going to just drink or eat?" we were asked with no hint of a smile. "You have to eat at a table."
Such hospitality! Such customer service!
After assuring her that we'd come to eat, we were granted a table.
"Do we look like drunkards?" Friend asked me. I made a point not to drink.
The dining room was ungodly noisy, so much so that conversation was all but impossible.
Maybe that's why the portions are so ridiculously large; if you're busy chewing endlessly, who can talk?
Giving up on a convivial meal, I ate my black bean nachos and she her wedge salad so we could move on.
Next stop: "This American Life: Live," an evening of radio brought to life.
Ira Glass' NPR show had been taped last week in NYC and was being re-broadcast tonight for a live audience.
He said the inspiration for the show came with wanting to feature people whose stories were too visual for radio.
Walking in to a Bugs Bunny cartoon, we were also treated to a Superman cartoon and a winsome 2011 cartoon called "Little Boat" before the main event.
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Start.
The show's theme was "The invisible made visible," sort of an analogy for everything we were experiencing.
The band OK Go kicked things off by doing a song with audience accompaniment.
Attendees with a smartphone had been able to download an app that allowed them to push one of three icons on cue to make music.
"Everyone who doesn't have a phone, you're the rhythm section," Ira said.
That was me.
With a screen showing us Luddites when to stomp and when to snap and the phone crowd pushing away, we made music with OK Go playing bells and percussion.
It's hard to explain the sense of shared effort, but looking around at glowing phones, concentrating faces and stomping, snapping participants, it felt like an ad hoc street band with a really good bandleader.
They went on to sing "Needing/Getting" ("It don't get much dumber than trying to forget a girl when you love her") without our assistance.
And the show was off and running.
Act 2: Groundhog Day featured comedian Tig Notaro explaining, "I love Taylor Dayne and not ironically."
And did she ever.
She told of seeing her at a party and, as a huge fan, speaking to her ("I don't mean to bother you, but I love your voice").
A year later she saw her at a restaurant and did it again.
"She's the easiest person in the world to run into," Tig deadpanned.
The uber-fan admitted to more sightings and more awkward conversations ("I'm the reason Taylor Dayne made another album") before saying goodnight to the audience.
Before she could walk offstage, Taylor Dayne herself walked on, singing, of course.
She put her arm around Tig, who pretended to sing a little back-up and bust out her Micheal Jackson dance moves. All with a look of disbelief on her face.
After they left the stage arm in arm, Ira came out and said, "Beat that, Car Talk!"
Comedian Glynn Washington told a story of a well witcher looking for water on his god-fearing family's land.
A short film by comedian Mike Birbiglia riffed on NPR with Mike doing an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Once the interview ends, he insists they go for coffee, where she continues to treat him like an interview subject.
He invites himself to dinner at her house and then tags along when Gross and her husband decide to rob a bank.
At no point does Terry Gross stop interviewing Mike.
The film was called "Fresh Air 2: 2 Fresh, 2 Ferocious." It was hysterically self-mocking.
At one point Ira explained that he was using his iPad to help him do the show, cuing music and video, but admitting the device was "a little buggy."
"My relationship with Apple Corporation is not the best," he noted with a twinkle in his eye.
There was a piece about the discovery of tens of thousand of negatives of an unknown street photographer, Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny who'd taken pictures daily in the 60s and 70s.
I'd heard about this woman and her prodigious picture taking before tonight, but this was a chance to see many of her photographs.
They were like a diary of her life walking around the city. She was compared to Emily Dickinson, whose poems weren't discovered or published until after her death.
"The living always kick the asses of the dead," it was noted because Maier had been the type who did not want her work seen.
The guy who'd bought the negatives from a storage facility after her death said, "I feel an appreciation she'd never have wanted us to feel."
David Rakoff told his story of growing up gay ("You can't imagine the pleasures of seeing undressed bodies in the locker room in the pre-Internet early 80s") and becoming a dancer.
A tumor behind his collarbone eventually robbed him of the use of his left arm, which he kept tucked in his front pants pocket, but he finished his saga of adjusting to the new him with an eloquent dance in the center of the stage.
More dance followed, this time by two women (one named Monicabill) and set to James Brown's "Get Up/Sex Machine."
In turtlenecks and pleated skirts, they did a frenetic piece that beautifully captured the energy and humor of the song.
My friend and I figured they burned more calories in that one dance than we had taken in at dinner, and that's saying a lot.
Davis Sedaris, in clown make-up and tiny hat, did a rant on bad coffee service in a Vermont hotel.
OK Go did "Do What You Want" ("So you were born in an electrical storm, took a bite out of the sun,saw your future in a machine built for two") and credits began to roll.
Ira had explained that he had to say certain things solely to have them available for when the editing process for radio began.
And I've no doubt that those who hear that show on the radio will find it as fascinating and clever as all his shows.
But they won't have stomped and snapped along to OK Go.
Or seen Terry Gross as a knit-capped bank robber.
Much less seen Taylor Dayne walk onstage to the amazement of the woman who'd just been making jokes about her.
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to revel in an evening like that.
Take that, Car Talk.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Viola da Gamba for Dummies
It's not as hard as I would have thought to find someone to go hear Bach with me.
I offered up wine and cheese (and not just any cheese, but my favorite, Taleggio, and to an Italian yet) as an incentive and was able to find a willing music-lover to go to the Modlin Center with me to hear the "Three Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord."
Yet again I got sucked into that labyrinth of a campus but we managed to get excellent seats fairly near the front despite a good-sized crowd and our last minute arrival.
With no real idea what a viola da gamba was, I appreciated the soloist taking the time to explain about the six or seven stringed instrument once so popular in Renaissance and Baroque times and now largely unknown.
I'm sure part of that is the gamba (legs) part of the instrument. Holding a stringed instrument the size of a cello between your legs with no stand under it has got to be quite an inner thigh workout.
Likewise for finally learning that the harpsichord is a plucked and not struck instrument. Clearly my musical education ended after elementary school's autoharps and "This Land is Your Land."
Despite being surrounded by the walls and stage of Booker Hall, I found myself transported to an 18th century drawing room and the kind of entertainment that might have been put on for a small group of friends and family.
All three sonatas were beautifully performed by visiting soloist Lisa Terry on viola da gamba and UR's Joanne Kong on harpsichord, with the last one being the most affecting.
Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't recognize Bach unless I had a program.
But reading how rarely these sonatas are performed, it seemed like a stellar opportunity to go hear them.
And isn't it about time I did?
When they were over, Terry invited the audience to come up and see the instruments and ask any questions.
A student, and probably a music student, made his way up on stage to ask if he could play it for a minute and she happily handed it over.
In doing so, she told him that the elaborate wooden scroll at the top of the viola was not original to the instrument.
"It should be a fat lady's face, but I didn't like that," she explained. "So I had an English scroll put on instead."
Women like that don't have any trouble getting a guy to go hear Bach with them.
The rest of us work with what we've got...and augment with Taleggio.
I offered up wine and cheese (and not just any cheese, but my favorite, Taleggio, and to an Italian yet) as an incentive and was able to find a willing music-lover to go to the Modlin Center with me to hear the "Three Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord."
Yet again I got sucked into that labyrinth of a campus but we managed to get excellent seats fairly near the front despite a good-sized crowd and our last minute arrival.
With no real idea what a viola da gamba was, I appreciated the soloist taking the time to explain about the six or seven stringed instrument once so popular in Renaissance and Baroque times and now largely unknown.
I'm sure part of that is the gamba (legs) part of the instrument. Holding a stringed instrument the size of a cello between your legs with no stand under it has got to be quite an inner thigh workout.
Likewise for finally learning that the harpsichord is a plucked and not struck instrument. Clearly my musical education ended after elementary school's autoharps and "This Land is Your Land."
Despite being surrounded by the walls and stage of Booker Hall, I found myself transported to an 18th century drawing room and the kind of entertainment that might have been put on for a small group of friends and family.
All three sonatas were beautifully performed by visiting soloist Lisa Terry on viola da gamba and UR's Joanne Kong on harpsichord, with the last one being the most affecting.
Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't recognize Bach unless I had a program.
But reading how rarely these sonatas are performed, it seemed like a stellar opportunity to go hear them.
And isn't it about time I did?
When they were over, Terry invited the audience to come up and see the instruments and ask any questions.
A student, and probably a music student, made his way up on stage to ask if he could play it for a minute and she happily handed it over.
In doing so, she told him that the elaborate wooden scroll at the top of the viola was not original to the instrument.
"It should be a fat lady's face, but I didn't like that," she explained. "So I had an English scroll put on instead."
Women like that don't have any trouble getting a guy to go hear Bach with them.
The rest of us work with what we've got...and augment with Taleggio.
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