Scott Timberg's Blog, page 13

Guillermo Del Toro at LACMA

I MUST admit to being the kind of museum-goer instinctively suspicious of exhibits about popular culture. I say this as someone who loves pop culture and spends most of his life there. But these exhibits can be ways of pandering in an attempt to draw new audiences. I’m all in favor of the new audiences, but turned off by the pandering.

But I had high hopes for the Guillermo Del Toro exhibit at the LACMA, “At Home With Monsters,” partly because the Guadalara-reared, LA-based movie director has always struck me as a smart guy. And partly because “Pan’s Labyrinth” — a darkly surreal fantasy film set in Spain a few years after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War — is, I think, one of best films of the century.

So I’m glad to say that the LACMA is not only entertaining and fun, but manages to connect the director’s obsessions, and his own films, with art history and literary tradition. The exhibit is drawn mostly from Del Toro’s home, Bleak House, which is full of various cinematic and horror-fiction artifacts.

So in addition to spooky old clocks and gargoyle, storyboards from Del Toro’s movies, and macabre contemporary art, and Giger’s studies for “Alien,” we see a statue of Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales, and Goya’s etchings.

At times the exhibit design is a bit busy to the point of claustrophobic, but that helps the viewer feel enveloped in Del Toro’s fantasy life. In fact, in a lot of ways, he has taken several centuries of nightmares — in design genres and cultures — and brought them together in a way that leads to unexpected connections.

Here is an engaging LA Times story about the making of the exhibit. Del Toro talks about growing up as an awkward, out-of-place kid in Mexico, and how he sought comfort in the company of these creatures.

The show will travel, after it closes here at the end of November, to Minneapolis and Toronto. Apparently it will be reasonably different in each city. In any case, this is one not to miss.

 

In Praise of Nuci’s Space

MUCH of the time, it’s hard to know who the good guys are. Other times, essential things become clear. A few weeks ago I attended an event for the Athens, GA, musicians resource called Nuci’s Space, which was formed in honor or a young man, Nuci Phillips, who took his life in 1996. The place is dedicated to keeping musicians from despair.

That night, we heard from a man who came close to killing himself but was saved by the place’s counseling. A very poised 13-year-old boy talked about the way the Nuci’s Space music camp gave him hope after his father committed suicide. It was a heavy night. In any case, the people who keep this place running definitely deserve a salute on CultureCrash: In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a place like this. But every city should have something like Nuci’s Space for its musicians and artists.

Nuci’s does a number of things, from providing practice space for musicians to offering mental-health counseling and helping musicians get medical insurance. Are musicians more prone to psychological maladies than other people? Probably; Edmund Wilson’s “The Wound and the Bow” is perhaps the most poignant inquiry into the relationship between art and pain.

Nuci’s services are available to everyone who contacts the place, even if its mission focuses on members of the local music community. “Nuci’s Space has flourished due to the need for a safe place for musicians,” Bertis Downs, longtime advisor to R.E.M., told me. “By providing support in mental health, and in community-building and sustainability, Nuci’s has become an integral part of the town’s unique cultural community. And emphasizing education of middle and high school students has been a huge part of its evolving mission.”

I’m not sure I’ve known a cultural institution with such widespread support. Mention the place to folks in the music scene here, and they know someone whose life was saved by the little blue building. Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers endorses the place. So does Velena Vego, who books the 40 Watt Club, and her husband, David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker.

Photo courtesy Nuci’s Space

Kai Riedl, director of the Athens Slingshot Festival, describes the Nuci’s Space this way:

Nuci’s is a priceless intersection where all the ages, styles and actual needs of the musical ecology Athens can interact. Even more than a place, Nuci’s carries the torch for the idea that Athens takes its music scene seriously both on and off the stage by adding necessary weight (and action) to the conversations surrounding creativity, economics and mental health. For a town like Athens that broadcasts the city’s creativity as a cultural asset, Nuci’s is the counterbalance to the idea that music is all fun and games, especially in a time where it definitely is not! Things are hard right now in the music industry, from top to bottom, which makes a resource like Nuci’s all the more important.

Riedl says the place has “shifted the conversation about mental health in creative circles, if even just a little bit.” Here’s hoping that Nuci’s Space, a nonprofit which always struggles for funding, can continue to help anchor the lives of musicians in a difficult time. If you can help the place financially, please do. If not, please spread the word.

 

Visit to the High Museum of Art

Over the weekend I made my first visit to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. I didn’t have time to check out the entire museum, and I missed an exhibit dedicated to the Hapsburg Empire. But I did see most of what the place – a 1983 Richard Meier building with a 2005 Renzo Piano expansion – has to offer.

I spent the majority of my time on the skylight level, which includes most of the modern and contemporary work. Compared to the museums in New York and Los Angeles that I know better, the canonical American modernism is a bit thin: I kept waiting to round a corner and see a major Pollock or a large Rothko. But this is a handsome, well-lit space that includes a lot of strong work: This part of the collection succeeds on its own terms.

The first room – “The Modern Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Art” – mixes paintings with sculpture and design. These galleries are intimate and set the work off in good proportion. The painting ranges in quality, but some of the design – Paul Frankl’s Viennese-style bookcase from 1926, K.E.M. Weber’s chrome-plated armchair from 1934 – were striking.

In the Postwar World, the familiar American titans – Guston, Albers, Bearden, Arbus — show up, as do a Noguchi coffee table and two small Rothko paintings.

The galleries get larger as you push toward art of the present. There is an enormous Laura Owens piece, an Alex Katz oil (“Meadow”) nothing at all like his figurative stuff, Anselm Kiefer’s “Dragon.” There are also galleries with several pieces each by Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, and Radcliffe Bailey, who makes partially abstract mixed-media pieces that explore elements of black history.

There was also a small show of Brett Weston’s crisp black-and-white photography. The very earliest pieces were a bit too close to his father Edward’s work. But his urban and architectural work was more distinctive; I was glad to get a sense of his career.

The collection of self-taught and folk-artists, which included a gallery dedicated to the Rev. Howard Finster, was quite fine. (I”ll try to write about it more completely after another visit.)

The exhibit of work by children’s book author Mo Willems was a minor disappointment. Most of the pieces are quite close to what’s already in his books. This said, the exhibit space was well-designed, and my 9-year-old son, who learned to read partly from Willems’ books, enjoyed it.

One of the museum’s highlights is “Analog Digital Clock,” a piece by the Dutch artist Maarten Baas. I won’t spoil the piece’s surprise by explaining it here. But it’s one of the most inventive pieces of contemporary art I’ve seen in the last few years.

Over all, the permanent collection seems to be in good shape, though few of the recent traveling shows have inspired me to make the trek. The museum recently got a new director, Randall Suffolk; I’ll be curious where he takes the place.

 

The Creative Class Thrives in Ancient Greece

The second of my histories of the creative class just went up on the website for Radio Silence, the Bay Area journal dedicated to music and literature. Here’s a passage from it:

Greece saw a kind of civic society of music and dance. Every class from king to serf took part; the children of citizens were educated to sing and play the lyre; and guests at a drinking party were expected to bring a song of their own to lead in the same way that people today typically show up at gatherings with bottles of wine. Athens also had a respected, if small, professional creative class: Players of the aulos performed at various religious festivals and large sporting events, developed virtuosity and individual styles, and competed with each other for prizes. Sophocles described death as a land without music, “lyreless, chorusless.”

By the time the Golden Age dawned, Athens and other Ionian towns and cities had gone through a revolution that may be the most profound change in the history of art: the beginning of art for art’s sake. Art was no longer utilitarian—no longer called the bison, calmed the gods, cured your cold—but became an end in itself. “As soon as man feels secure and free from the immediate pressure of the struggle for life,” Hauser wrote, “he begins to play with the spiritual resources which he had originally developed as weapons and tools to aid him in his necessity. He begins enquiring into causes, seeking for explanations, researching into connections which have little or nothing to do with his struggle for life. Practical knowledge gives place to free enquiry, means for the mastery of nature become methods for discovering abstract truth.” He could have been describing postwar Greenwich Village here.

The piece is here. I’ve got one more coming on the Radio Silence site, in November.

 

Futurebirds at Georgia Theatre

FRIDAY night I caught the Athens/Atlanta group Futurebirds at the Georgia Theatre. On record, they’ve developed a style some have called “psychedelic country,” but it’s also textured in a way that brings to mind the gentle lineage of lush electric-acoustic guitar rock that runs from the Velvet Underground’s self-titled album through  the Feelies to Real Estate. Admittedly, these guys are a bit more Southern and swampy.

Live, Futurebirds are a stomping, reverbed-out t My Morning Jacket kind of experience. I could imagine a very good acoustic or folk-den performance by these guys, but in this mid-sized hall they were loud and anthemic, without destroying the complex guitar harmonies. The hometowb show was the first supporting their new album, Hotel Parties, which is quite fine. I especially like the song “Deadbeat Hits.”

I expected Futurebirds to deliver live; the surprise for me was opener Hardy Morris, well known to local indie fans for his band Dead Confederate, who draw from both grunge and country-rock. Morris was leading a side project, Hardy and the Hardknocks. I didn’t know a single song of his, but just about every number connected, including the more traditional country stuff at the end. Great voice, great knack for tuneful, sometimes epic songs. (The inclusion of pedal steel player Matt Stoessel, who I saw at a low-key but satisfying show by acoustic group Cicada Rhythm, added a nice touch of sensitivity and old-school country grace.)

The common denominator of both Morris’s band and Futurebirds was the electric, ’70s Neil Young. Next time I want the show to conclude with an extended, all- hands-on-deck version of “Cortez the Killer.”

This won’t surprise anyone who’ve lived in Athens for a while, but the Georgia Theatre is a very good place to see a show. With very good sight lines, good acoustics (especially with Futurebirds), numerous places to hang out, including a locally beloved roof deck, this was an excellent introduction to the Athens music scene for this transplanted Angeleno.

Memories of Marlon Brando

I’M STILL LISTENING, MARLON

By Lawrence Christon

It doesn’t happen often because it can’t. The taste of the madeleine that unleashes a torrent of memories and associations, the thing that makes you stop what you’re doing and plunges you into unexpected reverie.

With me, it was hearing Marlon Brando’s voice, that strange, half-vaulted, pureed-through-the-sinuses sound that came alive at the beginning of Stevan Riley’s documentary, “Listen to Me, Marlon,” which came out in January. Based on audiotapes Brando made over the years as a kind of solo psychoanalysis, the film’s tabloid choices and sometime overstretched production values are nonetheless overpowered by the force of Brando’s reflective and arresting personality—very like so many of his films.

A lot of same-sounding adjectives and descriptions attach to him, like ‘brooding genius’ and ‘the greatest film actor ever.’ Certainly he shared the latter distinction, as far as the 20thcentury is concerned, with Laurence Olivier, who was, while more a stage performer, a completely different kind of actor, technical and virtuosic where Brando was intuitive and improvisational. But they both towered over their profession; at the top of their game, they were electrifying, unforgettable. With Brando however, the performance spilled out into the real world in unending examination that was just as enthralling.

One of the definitions of genius is that it changes what comes after. Amazingly, lot of people have already forgotten him. A writer friend of mine asked his new editorial assistant, a recent Ivy League grad, to check a reference on Brando, only to draw the response, “Who?” Which shows how hard it is for us to see, so much later, how Brando’s acting widened and intensified the possibilities of human expression.

It’s also the nature of genius to become diluted over time by copycat mannerisms as form adapts to the terms of initial discovery. In other words, eventually the thrill is gone. But no one who was around at the time can ever forget what it was like when he first hit. The shock of the new was more than unsettling, Budd Shulberg, who wrote the screenplay for one of Brando’s best film roles in “On the Waterfront,” remembered in a 2005 Vanity Fair article what it was like to see the 23-year-old in one of his best stage roles in Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire,”

“…Nothing will ever compare to the explosion set off by Brando in his savage portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, the brutal blue-collar tormentor of his defenseless sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, who has come to take refuge with him and his wife. I will never forget the impact Brando had on me and the rest of the audience. This was a beyond a performance. What we were seeing was a new kind of visceral intensity that veteran theatergoers had never experienced before.”

Visceral intensity of that kind is almost impossible to deliver on film, with its multiple takes, its editing, its total separation from the mood and character of a particular audience in a specific theater. But Brando did it in Stanley Kramer’s 1950 film “The Men,” in which, playing a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, he picks up a crutch and destroys a glass-enclosed dayroom with an explosive ferocity that left you stunned. Veteran moviegoers had never seen anything like it either. In ten seconds he changed film acting forever.

His best period was short, from 1950 through the film version of ‘Streetcar’ (1951), “Viva Zapata” (’52), “Julius Caesar” and “The Wild One” (’53) and “On the Waterfront” (’54).  “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Last Tango in Paris” came much later, of course. But they were exceptions in a career largely filled with grotesque self-indulgence and a self-loathing turned outward—it became de rigueur in most of his films for him to be beaten bloody and comatose, when not shot dead. Long before his death in 2004, he’d blimped out (like that other young genius, Orson Welles) in prophetic display of a figure no one would bank on anymore. Personal tragedy and the ravages of fame—inconceivable now in Selfie America—drove him into reclusiveness.

Early on, Brando was beautiful. He was virile, sexy, irresistibly fascinating, with a smile as big as a Nebraska cornfield and a nearly feminine delicacy that set off his physical power. Like most people, what intrigued me about him was that he was at least as interesting and provocative off-screen as he was on. He wasn’t a Method actor in the Actors Studio sense (he loathed Lee Strasberg as a pint-sized, tyrannical manipulator), but under Stella Adler’s tutelage, which blended the classic tradition of acting as a noble profession with the Stanislavskyan emphasis on the reality of the moment, he was in constant search for what Norman Mailer termed “(catching) the Prince of Truth between disguises.” The search took him to the murky bottom of the human condition. Acting is lying, he said. But he reminded us that we’re acting all the time as we improvise different faces for the world, and self-justifying masks for ourselves.

But what moved me most was the continual surprise he embodied by telling the truth, not just grand portentous lapidary truth, but basic stuff that made sense. Yes, America had a horrible civil rights record. Yes, its treatment of Native Americans bordered the genocidal. Talk shows aren’t really about conversation, are they?  And what makes you think you know somebody because of his or her roles? People come up and look at you, he said, like you’re in a zoo.

We like to congratulate ourselves on cheering the outsider, but when a real one shows up, we don’t like it if he doesn’t join in on the game. For a long time, Brando was a fresh breeze that turned out the air of bad faith that still characterizes the entertainment industry as well as the country. He reminded us of things we thought we knew, or should have known, but had forgotten about or ignored. In retrospect, he reminds me of hope. That’s what I miss most about him.

 

 

Where did the creative class come from?

YOUR humble blogger has been absolutely swamped with a cross-country move and writing about pop culture (mostly) for Salon. I hope to never leave CultureCrash fallow for nearly this long.

At least, I’ve got something I’m proud of to post: Here is a piece on the site of the Bay Area music-meets-literature journal Radio Silence. It began as a chapter from my book intended to answer the question: Why, when, and how did human beings start making music, telling stories, painting images?

In the end, this did not make sense as part of Culture Crash the book, but it’s material that continues to fascinate me.

I get into prehistory, shamanism, the Fertile Crescent, singing Neanderthals, and the birth of writing. Please check it out, and drift around the Radio Silence site as well — I love what they are up to and it was an honor to be part of it. Two more installments, by the way, coming over the next few months. 

Happy birthday to jazz pianist Bill Evans

Remembering the great and influential Bill Evans. Here he is playing “Waltz For Debby.”

 

 

Evans played on the immortal Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he shaped nearly as much as Davis himself did, and soon after led one of the greatest-ever jazz trios, a group destroyed by the death of his young bassist Scott La Faro.

Evans had a long and fruitful career. We’ll salute him around the stereo this evening.

 

 

Arrested Development

IS our culture stuck in childhood or adolescence? Are we disregarding the depths or pleasures of maturity? CultureCrash’s guest columnist weighs in.

“Arrested Development”

By Lawrence Christon

The late, great acting coach Stella Adler was holding a master class on Jean Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors,” a play in which a mousy general is completely tyrannized by his bellowing wife, who is no less a titanic force for being bedridden. Adler didn’t even look at the actress playing the wife, but instead peered out into the auditorium and said, “What is it with you women and your little teenage voices? You’ve all had sex. You’ve had abortions, children. Why is it you pinch your voices into this teenybopper chirpiness. You’re women, for Christ’s sake! Open up!”

I thought of that moment while reading my colleague Scott Timberg’s July 3 interview with philosopher Susan Neiman in Salon. The subject was the cult of youth and the American obsession with emulating it, particularly among those who no longer have it.

Neiman was illuminating in her comments on not only how grueling it is to get through one’s twenties, and how adulthood is so easily misconceived—and dismissed—but she also discussed how Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant turned the eyes of western philosophy on the subject of youth. What struck me was her contention that political leadership likes its constituency young, meaning, or implying, dumb. It strengthens their hold on power. Voila! The kids are not only all right, they’re always right.

I think this is way more than a political strategy, despite the bread-and-circuses template device used by Roman emperors to hide imperial rot, and I suspect Neiman does too and would say so if she had another shot at the question. For modern American culture has always been youth obsessed, at least as far back as the 1920s when, despite WWI, the estimated count of up to 850,000 Civil War dead—the effective loss of a generation—saw its numbers not just restored but partying hearty in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called, “the greatest, gaudiest spree in American history.”

The Great Depression and another world war (or the first one re-staged) brought the party to an end.  The ‘50s introduced suburbia and the inward turn toward the self, aided by this newly popularized psychoanalysis thing and the theories not just of Freud, Adler (the other Adler, not Stella) and Jung, but Fromm, Erikson, Horney, Menninger, and a host of others to tell us who we are and how we got that way. Youth, in particular adolescence, also entered the close psychiatric—and sociological—gaze, though Jean Piaget had begun bringing it into relief in the ‘20s. Advertisers, the first Mad Men generation, began to take notice. Hence the perennially pampered, self-infatuated 18-49 demographic.

The Boomer ‘60s brought us the nuclear cloud of generational  explosion, but instead of radioactive fallout we saw fragments of tie-dye shirts and birth control packets, droplets of patchouli oil, slogan remnants like “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and poster bits of psychedelic derangement marking a Dionysian, countercultural revolt that was essentially romantic in its sweep and wonderful in its pantheistic embrace of the moment—but blind to its destructive naivety and unaware of the crooks and hustlers in its ranks.

Now in mid-to-late middle age, the Boomers still hold the economic clout and the romantic myth that makes Fitzgerald’s age a mere Tupperware party. We’re in bad shape, Mr. and Mrs. America, but the forces trying to hide the fact are in the culture, not just the body politic (which 75% of the American voting public has turned its back on), as we’re promised leaner bodies, better sex, smoother skin, fuller hair, and enough Botox and replicant transplant surgery to keep us bouncing indefinitely through time like bright, indefatigable racquetballs. In short,  we’re being sold the illusion of eternal youth.

This is nothing new, of course. Ever since Tithonos discovered, to his horror, that Zeus’ dispensation of eternal life didn’t include youth in the benefits package, the purity of youth, the ardor of youth, the transports and abandon, the hunger for life (and sex) and the tirelessness of satiation, have always tended to take top billing in the highlight film of memory, however long it grows. And I never know what to make of people who meet through every decade of their high school reunions, whether it’s courage to face or folly to ignore time’s cruel ravages of the flesh.

But we’re old a lot longer than we’re young, and Neiman reminds us that adulthood has its own satisfactions and discoveries that are just as full, if subtler, than first love, or that first touchdown drive. Even Fitzgerald, the eternal party animal, looked at Christ and Lincoln and saw in their model that honor and glory (and in our media-crazed era, fame) aren’t the reward, which is reserved for consciousness of the struggle.

I’m not shilling for AARP perks. But the youth mania, particularly in the arts and entertainment, where the numbers-fuelled radar dish is always turning toward The Next New Thing, leaves a lot of talent and even genius behind in the consumer detritus of the used and prematurely discarded. The culture suffers the loss without knowing it.

Writer Stanley Crouch said it best when he observed of traditional societies, “The goal of a boy is to be a man, and the goal of a man is to be a wise man.” The parallel same with women. To break up the equation, as pop and media culture have done, puts us in disequilibrium. We’re in free fall; we feel it everywhere outside of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, K Street and Silicon Valley. But to try and go back to the way we were is to find nobody there to catch us.

 

 

The “Junk Dada” of Noah Purifoy

RECENTLY I visited the LACMA and saw a number of shows, including the exhibit devoted to Noah Purifoy’s work. Purifoy, who art critic Christopher Knight recently said “may be the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years,” was a black Southerner who became a crucial part of the art movement that rose after the Watts riots.

I’ve known and admired Purifoy’s work for years now, and a decade or so ago I visited his outdoor museum near Joshua Tree, where much of his sculpture and assemblage has been on display. This is part of what made me wonder about the LACMA show: How could work that came from a gritty, troubled part of greater LA, and set down in the high desert, make sense in the clean galleries of the LACMA? How would it stand without its context?

But another context now sits around it — the increasingly intense conversation around race and blackness in America. Purifoy’s work was made in other decades, but it speaks to today. Visual art does not need to address political, social and racial issues to be important, but this work does, and that context helps it hold together in its current setting.

A brief excerpt from Knight’s review:

Few of the 1966 works have been shown in recent years, so they offer an absorbing foundation for what follows. Most are modest in size — some as small as 10 inches, none as large as 3 feet. What they embody, however, is big.

The assemblages were cobbled together from the riots’ debris. Purifoy and artist Judson Powell began to salvage the material in great, weighty piles — 3 tons in all. They began almost as soon as the embers cooled and the smoke cleared.

The show runs into September.