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There is no such thing as the greatest anything. Greatness is subjective. But if, for the sake of argument, or fun, or obsession, or whatever, we choose to at least toy with the concept of greatest modern novel, James Joyce's Ulysses is considered by many to be the frontrunner. And were one to attempt the hopeless task of choosing the greatest book of modern poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus would be a strong contender. Read more »

Part of catching up with the many releases on Leo Records that I haven't reviewed (first installment here) includes covering the label's latest offerings. It just released eight CDs in January; I review half of them here, meanwhile looking back at older related Leo albums (most of the other January releases I will look at in the next installment in this series, which I hope to finish writing within a week). As before, dates in parentheses after album titles are recording dates, where listed; if not available, then year of release ("p." for "published") Read more »

Of the many attempts to chase the legacy of the 1982 benchmark in horror/comedy of the musical variety that is Little Shop of Horrors, Silence! makes a fair play to place. Brandishing a well-equipped arsenal of deadpan, vulgarity, camp, and a wide array of theatrical references, this musical parody of Silence of the Lambs makes killing look easy.

While it is doubtful that any score in this unlikely sub-genre will ever live up to the catchy, simplistic brilliance of Alan Menken (before he whored himself out to Disney), Silence! picks up a ball that was dropped Off-Broadway years ago and has been shamelessly fumbled ever since. In short, it's now safe to go see a musical mock-up of a horror film classic again. Read more »

I've already gone over the best of 2011, and periodically rounded up rock and pop releases as the year went along, yet there were many more albums that came out last year that I also meant to review but didn't get around to then, for one reason or another. Here are a few of them.

Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here Experience edition (Capitol)

Last time I did a review roundup, I dissed the Dark Side of the Moon two-CD remaster's second disc. I'm happy to report that this one's a lot more interesting. Read more »

Paul Pretzer: The Seventh Skill

Start with Hieronymus Bosch, lighten with illustrations from an early volume of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, sprinkle in a touch of Robert Hawkins and season with George Condo for a modern flavor, and, voila! You’ve got Paul Pretzer, a twenty-nine-year-old Estonian painter from Dresden. The combination of anthropomorphic, magically whimsical hobgoblins and oblique narratives has been a winning recipe for generations. Pretzer’s renditions are loosely stylized enough to be painterly; rendered tightly enough on board to be termed illustrative fantasy proto-realism (as opposed to photo-realism), and just creepy enough not to be too cutesy. Most visual story telling of this sort tends to be dark and angst-ridden, but whether or not he intended it, his paintings are too good-natured to be genuinely unsettling, and that may actually contribute to their popular appeal.  Read more »

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage payments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchased in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y. and wonder who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning...but why would I want to do a thing like that? Read more »

The History Mystery
The TADA! Resident Youth Ensemble

Charming, charming, charming! The premise is simple. The History Mystery opens with students in study hall complaining how boring it is to study history, to the tune of "It's a Mystery." One student pops up exclaiming that the figures of history, about whom they are compelled to memorize dates and events, were actually children once themselves. Shortly a magical mystery tour of history commences, taking three students back though time, where they engage with Ben Franklin, Laura Ingalls, the Wright Brothers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others as kids. Read more »

As is the case every year, I start reading year-end lists posted by trusted peers/journalists and discover I've missed plenty of deserving culture. With the glut of films, music, theater, TV shows, books, et al. on numerous websites, TV screens, bookshelves, and periodicals, it's fairly easy. Truth be told, in addition to P.J. Harvey's much-deserved kudos, other women singers/songwriters/bands really stepped up their game this year, making many top ten year-end lists, and I missed out on discovering some of them. With that in mind, here's some additions to my 2011 year's end list. Read more »

Menders
Flux Theatre Ensemble

When departing from The Gym at Judson after the opening night performance of Menders, written by Erin Browne and directed by Heather Cohn, I was acutely aware that I had just witnessed real theater. I know this to be true when a particular mood/mindset overtakes me at the conclusion of a play. Although it will eventually diminish, though not entirely, I want that mood/mindset to last forever. Menders moved me to question what it is to be a human being against the backdrop of the bigger or biggest issues that confront us. Read more »

If the current production of Porgy and Bess accomplishes anything, it is to prove Stephen Sondheim’s preemptive concerns about its approach to this classic piece of American theater to be well-founded. The triumvirate of would-be re-creators consists of Audra McDonald, Diane Paulus, and Suzan-Lori Parks; only McDonald remains standing after the curtain falls.

Seeking to add dimension to the musical’s famed characters while drastically abbreviating its legendary score is a curious undertaking and, in the end, qualities worthy of note are those that long pre-date this version. Drastically reducing the cast’s size had little effect on providing the remaining characters with any enhanced depth but successfully whittled down any grand sense of scale. Ironically, this more resulted in fostering the impression of isolated incident over that of representing a larger world that should be implied as existing outside of the story’s specific realm. This is a two-sided shortcoming shared between director Diane Paulus’s lack of implementation and her cast’s inability to live up to the challenges of this legendary score and libretto. Read more »

In a life that could have stepped straight from the pages of his beloved Dickens, albeit a 20th century and queer version, Peter William Burton was a boy of humble Hackney origins, born as the Second World War staggered to a close, who by dint of an extraordinary passion for books blazed a fascinating trail. His father was homosexual. Common of many of his kind, then persecuted, he married as a means of disguise. Like father like son, but their shared sexuality gave them nothing in common. What it created was an unhappy backdrop for growing up, and a desire to leave home and school as soon as possible. When he read the eulogy at his father's funeral, he stated, "George Burton was an old bugger!" Most of those gathered assumed he was being affectionately ribald. He was in fact being bluntly truthful. It is a great shame that he never wrote a book about this unusual, if imperfect, relationship. It would have made an extraordinary epistle, especially from the pen of one with both an eye for detail and an acute sense of mischief. Read more »

"We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." - Japanese proverb

Not since Matthew Diamond's splendid documentary on Paul Taylor, Dancemaker (1998), has a film honored the essence of Terpsichore, the muse of dance, so well as does First Position.

Bess Kargman's new film focuses on seven competitors, aged 10 to 17, who are putting their personal lives on hold to win top prizes at the Youth American Grand Prix, the "largest competition that awards full scholarships to top ballet schools." Read more »

Leo Records was founded in 1979 by Leo Feigin, a Russian who had emigrated to England. Early in its history, back before the glasnost era, it was most noted for releasing avant-garde Russian jazz at a time when government authorities discouraged the style. As Alexander Alexandrov of Moscow Composers Orchestra says, "What the authorities really hated was free jazz and improvised music – for the reason we loved it, because it was a powerful symbol of individual freedom." Although somehow the Ganelin Trio's first album came out on the official Soviet record label, Melodiya, it was the group's many albums on Leo that earned both the band and Leo world-wide reputations. Read more »

Imagine a mediocre episode of Glee as envisioned by Billy Graham, and you're halfway to Joyful Noise.

Indie director Todd Graff, best known for directing Camp (2003) and being a regular on the 1970's Electric Company, has penned a screenplay for Noise that is so laden with clichés favored by unimaginative creators of bad romantic musicals that by comparison, Step Up 3D and Footloose, the remake, come off as peers of An American in Paris. Read more »

Eagles: Hotel California (Asylum/Elektra)

The Eagles were considered one of the top country-rock bands practically from the day the group came together. Certainly the consecutive No. 1 singles "Best of My Love" and "One of These Nights" and No. 2 "Lyin' Eyes" in 1974-75 made them mainstream rock fans' favorite country rockers by a wide margin. Extensive touring ensued, in the midst of which founding member Bernie Leadon (previously in the Flying Burrito Brothers) quit and the more rock-oriented Joe Walsh (ex-James Gang, and already with a moderately successful solo career) took his place after having opened for the Eagles on tour in 1974 thanks to sharing the same manager, the ruthless Irving Azoff.  Read more »

Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence

From my window on the 69th floor of the Temperance Building, I can see the monument to Rosa Luxemburg that Chancellor Nirenberg erected in Zapruder Park after President Manson resigned and The Bund took control of the city. The first thing they did was to tell everyone that we no longer had to worry about The Flu; the virus had mutated and was now known as The Plague. Infection was spread through physical contact, most often rape (Katya and I had a good laugh at that), and the resulting zombies it produced were now wandering the city. Mostly they come at night. Mostly. Posters of women in sunglasses are plastered on walls. They warn what’s left of the panicked population that one side effect of the zombification is dilation of the pupils, until the whole eye turns black. Zombies look for the whites of the eyes. Sunglasses, the posters tell us, are a fashion-must this season. Read more »

Kramer vs. Kramer goes Iranian with Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, a late 2011 entry that's been deservedly racking up almost every "Best Foreign Language" film award that has been dished out this season.

But A Separation is much than a tale of a man and woman in love whose marital path has come to a fork in the road; it is a dissection of modern morality, both religious and secular, and how impossible it is to live a totally principled life if you're stuck interacting with other Homo sapiens.  Or, to get a little Socratic, "A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true." Read more »

Lola Montes Schnabel: Love Before Intimacy

There is a koan that states, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Thinking about Buddha as something outside of oneself is creating preconceived ideas and is, hence, antithetical to one's awakening. Looking at the work of Lola Montes Schnabel is a little like that. It is hard not to think of the giant reputation of Julian Schnabel, her father, looming over her work. Even if you tried, it might be kind of like not trying to think about elephants, and, well -- you get the point. Schnabel has created a suite of paintings, stylistically not so much indebted to the Neo-Expressionist movement as developing from it, that are worth considering. Read more »