Kris Kuksi, Recycled Sculpture

The beautiful thing about upcycled materials is that the end results often bear no resemblance to the original items. Such is the case with sculptor Kris Kuksi’s toy sculptures, which are constructed out of old toys, statues, and mechanical parts.

According to Kuksi’s artist statement, his work is “feeling that he has always belonged to the ‘Old World’. Yet, Kris’ work is about a new wilderness, refined and elevated, visualized as a cultivation emerging from the corrupt and demoralized fall of modern-day society. A place where new beginnings, new wars, new philosophies, and new endings exist.” That place is apparently also quite macabre and grotesque.
In any case, Kuksi’s mindblowingly detailed toy sculptures remind us that trash and discarded materials can be refashioned into nearly anything we want.

Source: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/11/19/kris-kuksis-recycled-toy-sculptures-will-scare-the-kids/

Debussy’s Homage to Poe, With the Blanks Filled In

What should be done with the unfinished works left behind by master composers at their deaths? This question has long dogged musicians and scholars of later eras, and the debate goes on. Maybe the proper way to respect the masters is to leave their incomplete scores alone. How can we presume to know what an ingenious composer might have intended?

On the other hand, some of these scores are tantalizingly close to being performable. When there are enough sketches, composers and scholars have often tried to fill in the gaps and produce a playable version of a piece. The composer Friedrich Cerha’s completed Act III of Berg’s “Lulu,” which Berg died before finishing and orchestrating, has been embraced by many prominent musicians, including James Levine, who will again conduct the three-act “Lulu” at the Metropolitan Opera in May.

My choice for the most frustrating case of an unfinished work by a master composer is Debussy’s opera “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Debussy’s libretto, adapted from Baudelaire’s translation of the Poe short story, survives incomplete, and the musical score exists only in meager sketches of certain scenes for piano. There are scant indications of basics like tempo and dynamics.

There is simply not enough of Debussy’s “Usher” to work from, and few have tried to finish it. None of which stopped Opéra Français de New York, in partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française, from presenting what was promoted as the American premiere of “a rare double bill of two works by Debussy” last weekend at Florence Gould Hall.

The 60-minute multimedia production, “Debussy and Poe: The Devil in the Belfry & The Fall of the House of Usher,” which I saw on Saturday, included not just performances of scenes from “Usher,” based on Debussy’s sketches, but also spoken dialogue and fragments of music (played on piano) from another, even less complete Debussy opera based on Poe, “The Devil in the Belfry.” Without enough of Debussy’s music, even in sketch form, to fill out an hour, “Debussy and Poe” was padded with four songs and a piano prelude by Debussy.

Still, on its own terms, “Debussy and Poe,” created by the directors Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil and the music director and pianist Jeff Cohen, was a dark, moody and intriguing theatrical amalgam, performed by a small cast accompanied by Mr. Cohen. A quasi-abstract set designed by Rick Martin evoked a spooky library at the Usher house.

For those of us who revere Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” first performed in Paris in 1902 after a nearly 10-year gestation, it is exasperating to have only that unorthodox and mesmerizing Debussy opera. Refined, intellectually cagey and ahead of his time in his comprehension of the unconscious, Debussy was a master of indirection, veiled emotions and psychological subtext. To him, most of what passed for opera was dramatically obvious and musically crude, with too much action and too predominant a role for music.

In Maeterlinck’s haunting “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a landmark play of the Symbolist movement, Debussy found a literary work that inspired him to a new kind of opera. Little happens onstage as the story, set in a vaguely medieval setting, unfolds. Mélisande, a secretive, fragile young woman lost in the forest, is found weeping by Golaud, a sullen widower, a grandson of a king. Golaud takes Mélisande home and marries her, only to see his mysterious wife and his impetuous, handsome younger brother, Pelléas, fall hopelessly, and fatally, in love.

The characters’ inner turbulence, the real story, is conveyed through Debussy’s sensual orchestral music. With its wayward harmonic language, milky colorings, avoidance of dramatic flourishes and spacious pacing, Debussy’s music illuminates the unconscious in ways that spoken dramas and more conventional operas can hardly match.

In Poe’s “Usher,” Debussy felt he had found another source suited to exploring the unconscious and the macabre. Strangely bonded and sickly siblings, Roderick and Madeline Usher, live reclusively in the family mansion, a house that they come to believe is almost alive and bent on their destruction.

Debussy worked intermittently on “Usher” for 10 years. In 1908 Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the enterprising director of the Met, secured the rights to present “The Devil in the Belfry” and “Usher” as a double bill of one-act operas. Debussy cautioned Gatti-Casazza not to get his hopes up, saying, “I am a lazy composer” who sometimes “requires weeks to decide on one harmonious chord over another.” Nothing came of the project. Debussy died in 1918.

During “Debussy and Poe” it was impossible to know how closely the music was drawn from Debussy’s sketches. The production began with the sturdy baritone Michael Chioldi, in spectral pale-faced makeup, singing an intensely subdued Debussy song, “Le Son du Cor S’Afflige” (“The Sound of the Horn Wails”). Then, as Mr. Cohen played fleeting piano sketches from “The Devil in the Belfry,” two young and attractive singers, the baritone Phillip Addis and the soprano Ariadne Greif, as the Usher siblings, spoke dialogue from “The Devil in the Belfry,” looking like children hiding in the corner of the house library, using flashlights to read a forbidden text.

This episode segued into the first two scenes of “Usher,” accompanied by piano, in which Mr. Addis and Ms. Greif were joined by Mr. Chioldi, playing a controlling family physician; David McFerrin, a baritone, as Roderick’s concerned friend; and Alexander Blaise, an actor, playing another friend. As the work progressed, the other Debussy songs and a piano prelude, “Des Pas sur la Neige” (“Footprints in the Snow”), lent substance and connective music to the sketchy work, which concluded with the final scene of “Usher” and Madeline’s death.

In some ways “Debussy and Poe” was a tease, a dramatic patchwork of their work. I was willing to go along and accept it as a mix of sources and speculation. Still, I left wondering what might have been.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/arts/music/26debussy.html?ref=arts

The Voice That Helped Remake Culture

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study, “Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong,” and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing 1983 book, “Louis Armstrong: An American Genius.”

Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary magazine, writes with a deep appreciation of Armstrong’s artistic achievements, while situating his work and his life in a larger historical context. He draws on Armstrong’s wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician who, like a Method actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful.

At the same time, Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong’s gifts: “the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike,” his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his “dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone,” in another trumpeter’s words, which left listeners feeling as though they’d been staring into the sun. The author — who worked as a jazz bassist before becoming a full-time writer — also uses his firsthand knowledge of music to convey the magic of such Armstrong masterworks as “St. Louis Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues” and “Star Dust.”

During his lifetime Armstrong performed with virtually everyone, from early jazz pioneers like Sidney Bechet, Joe Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory, on through more recent masters like Leonard Bernstein and Johnny Cash. His freewheeling incandescence as both an instrumentalist and vocalist would influence not just every trumpet player to come but also countless composers, bandleaders and singers as varied as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

“Even before his face became known to the readers of newspapers and illustrated magazines — and, later, to filmgoers and TV viewers,” Mr. Teachout writes, “Armstrong was the first jazz musician whose voice was heard by large numbers of people. In this way he emerged from behind the anonymity of the recording process and impressed his personality on all who heard him, even those who found most instrumental jazz to be unapproachably abstract. It was the secret of his appeal, and he knew it. So did the many singing instrumentalists who followed in his footsteps, hoping to lure some of the same listeners who smiled at the sound of his gritty tenor voice, which deepened as he grew older but was always as recognizable as a fingerprint.”

Although Armstrong’s life story has been told many times before, Mr. Teachout does a nimble job of reconjuring the trajectory of Armstrong’s experience, which coincided with — or was in the vanguard of — so many formative events in 20th-century Afro-American history, from the Great Migration that brought many Southern blacks North to cities like Chicago to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. He recounts the travails of touring that Armstrong experienced in a still segregated South, to his acclamation in Europe in the ’30s and ’40s and the mainstream American success he finally achieved in the ’50s.

The reader gets a dramatic snapshot in this volume of Armstrong’s life on the mean streets of New Orleans, where he grew up, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old country girl, among gamblers, church people, prostitutes and hustlers; his adventures in gangland Chicago and Jazz Age New York; the rapid metamorphosis of this shy, “little frog-mouthed boy who played the cornet” into the most influential soloist in jazz; and the long, hard years on the road, crisscrossing the United States dozens of time, playing so many one-nighters that he often came off the stage, in his own words, “too tired to raise an eyelash.”

In addition, Mr. Teachout does a fluent job of explicating Armstrong’s apprenticeship under Joe Oliver and Fletcher Henderson; his seminal work with the Hot Five; and the key business roles played by his wife Lil and his mobbed-up manager, the former boxing promoter Joe Glaser, in shaping his career.

As Mr. Teachout astutely points out, Armstrong’s trumpet playing, like his singing and copious writings (including two published memoirs and countless letters, which he pecked out on a typewriter he brought with him on the road), was the means for Armstrong to reflect on all that he had witnessed. “I seen everythin’ from a child comin’ up,” he said once. “Nothin’ happen I ain’t never seen before.”

“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.” This belief in music as a deeply felt and personal expression is one reason Armstrong avoided using musical terminology when speaking about his work and it’s one reason he said that he disliked bop (like other cooler, more modern forms of jazz), complaining that it “doesn’t come from the heart,” that it’s “all just flash.”

Boppers and avatars of the cool, in turn, rejected Armstrong’s desire to entertain the audience — to mug and clown on stage. And yet even Miles Davis, who in rejecting Satchmo’s crowd-pleasing ways went so far as to turn his back on the audience, acknowledged that the history of jazz radiated out from Louis Armstrong: “You can’t play nothing on trumpet,” Davis said, “that doesn’t come from him.”

Source: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=788068676541698049

Margaret Atwood: Once In August

Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen

Filming a Friendship, Founded on Film

VILMOS ZSIGMOND and Laszlo Kovacs, whose cinematography would help change the look of American movies in the late 1960s and 1970s, first met in 1953 on a Budapest street corner near the Academy of Drama and Film, where both men were enrolled as cinematography students. Three years afterward — on Nov. 11, 1956, a week after Soviet troops poured into the city to crush the Hungarian uprising — they ran into each other again on the same corner.

“The Russian tanks were going up and down the street,” recalled Mr. Zsigmond, 79, in a recent phone interview to promote the documentary “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos,” an account of their long friendship that will be broadcast Nov. 17 on “Independent Lens” on PBS. “I said, ‘Laszlo, you know the Arriflex camera, you have it up in the film school in college.’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s where I have it.’ He knew what we were about to do.”

Mr. Kovacs got the camera and some 35-millimeter film stock. The two men roamed Budapest, surreptitiously recording over an hour’s worth of film of the crackdown, then smuggled the undeveloped negatives out of the country via rail to Vienna, jumping off the train 10 miles from the Austrian border and finishing the journey on foot. Their imagery joined the collective record of that grim period, appearing in newsreels, TV reports and documentaries throughout the next half-century.

After the revolution the men moved to Hollywood, paid their dues shooting low-budget horror, action and biker films, then graduated to higher-profile assignments, eventually collaborating with some of the most influential directors of the 1970s, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg. Their association lasted until 2007, when Mr. Kovacs died of pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Kovacs, whose filmography included “Easy Rider, “Five Easy Pieces” and “Frances,” had a style simpler and more forceful than Mr. Zsigmond’s, whose work on movies like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Deliverance” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (for which he won an Academy Award), was more lush and impressionistic. But their artistry came from a similar, shared place. “The whole story, you could write a book about it,” Mr. Zsigmond said, laughing.

The director of “No Subtitles Necessary,” the cinematographer James Chressanthis, who studied under both men in the 1980s, thought so too.

“The story about them during the revolution” were widespread in Hollywood, he said. “But you always heard different pieces of it, different versions of it. Beyond the fact that they were great cinematographers, there was this whole back story that hadn’t been definitively told.”

During the 1986 production of “The Witches of Eastwick” — which Mr. Zsigmond photographed, with Mr. Chressanthis serving as his assistant — Mr. Kovacs stopped by for a visit. “When I saw them together, I realized that this was a remarkable story that people needed to hear,” Mr. Chressanthis said. “But 20 years intervened.”

The one-two punch of Altman’s death in 2006 and the onset of health problems for Mr. Kovacs ultimately spurred Mr. Chressanthis and his co-producers to bring the two men together again — this time in front of a camera — and have them tell their tale.

The result is a movie about a friendship between men who shared certain unusual, difficult experiences, and how those experiences shaped their art.

Mr. Zsigmond described his and Mr. Kovacs’s feel for light and shadow — which they developed together on earlier, low-budget efforts, productions on which one man often served as the other’s assistant — as “poetic realism.”

“It came out of being a couple of guys who had to leave Hungary in a hurry so they didn’t get killed,” he said. “It came out of coming to America and shooting all these movies that were all very low-budget — we called them ‘no-budget movies’ — with very small crews and very small lights. Laszlo and I figured out pretty quick that if you shoot something at the right time of day, it’s going to look gorgeous without any additional light, and that if you do need additional light, you try to make the light look real, not ‘lit.’ I hate movies where the light looks phony.”

Mr. Kovacs’s battlefield-tested resourcefulness and affection for his adopted country’s landscapes informed the look of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture smash “Easy Rider.” The film was distinguished by trippy lens flares, mournful firelight and tight close-ups of motorcycle riders and their machines, which Mr. Kovacs captured while being towed in the back of a sandbag-stuffed trailer. The whole feature was shot with a camera on loan from Mr. Zsigmond.

Even after the men had risen to the upper echelons of their industry, they continued to act and think like low-budget filmmakers. The documentary’s anecdotes include an account of how Mr. Zsigmond “flashed,” or briefly exposed, the negative of Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” to create that movie’s decayed-boozy visuals, and how Mr. Kovacs, while shooting Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces,” constructed a much-needed camera brace out of a termite-riddled branch he’d found in the woods near the set.

One can see traces of the men’s idiosyncratic personalities showing up more vividly in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1973 feature “Scarecrow,” a road film about the deep friendship between hobos played by Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Mr. Zsigmond says the film’s warm light and embracing widescreen images of American landscapes were inspired by his early years with Mr. Kovacs, when they were adrift in a beautiful but forbidding new land.

“When we came to America, we had to stay together just to survive,” Mr. Zsigmond said. “It was like being brothers, that’s what it was.”


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/arts/television/15seit.html?ref=movies

Arthur Rimbaud Documentary