May 2009 Archives

The annual festival begins Friday and already we've got some scuttlebutt. Bank of America and Wachovia have removed their names from the billing of two of Spoleto series. BOA used to put its name for the festival's Chamber Music Series. Wachovia for years did the same for the festival's Jazz Series. They are no longer so willing to have their names on the marquee.

We're told the corporations continue to sponsor the programs. We're told this is not a naming rights issue in which the banks haven't given enough money to claim the marquee. So we're left to wonder why they don't want their names used. Could it be the federal money they have taken to remain solvent since the fall? Don't want to encourage the impression of taxpayer money being at cross purposes.

This and more coverage at Spoleto Buzz.

Knowing thyself is the point of “Six Days on the Road,” that classic trucker song from 1963. Really, it’s true. All that country singer Dave Dudley wants to do is get home to his baby. So he blasts through speed zones, dodges weigh stations and avoids the state patrol. To get through the long night, he takes some little white pills. Now his “eyes are open wide.”

So is his mind. The solitude, uppers and time on his hands lead inevitably to moments of self-revelation. As a man alone on the road, the last of America’s rugged frontier, he could have a lot of women. He has that freedom — and that power — but he knows it can’t be. He’s not afraid his sin will find him out. He just knows his place. “I could never make believe it’s all right.” So he’s going home. Six days away from baby is long enough.

Freedom to explore who you are, and who you will become over time, is inconceivable to Eilis Lacey, the young adult heroine of Colm Tóibín’s charming, witty and unsentimental new novel, Brooklyn (Scribner, 272 pages, $25). Growing up in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy in the 1950s, she fully expects to follow in mother’s footsteps — school, marriage, kids. Life for Eilis is easy to anticipate, like the mist rolling in every morning from the Irish Sea.

The whole story in the New Haven Advocate (plus Hartford Advocate, Fairfield County Weekly) …

Last summer, the same critics who’ve long noted Playboy’s declining cultural relevance were surprised to learn that the magazine had commissioned Denis Johnson — author of the 2007 National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke — to write a 40,000-word serial novel.

Given the impotence of Playboy’s impact — losses for the last quarter of 2008 exceeded $145 million — Johnson’s crime caper will likely get more exposure now that it’s been published in book form by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Nobody Move deserves the attention. Not just for refreshing the hard-boiled idiom of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but also for inventing a variation of the ethical obsessions of Charles Dickens.

The whole story in the Pittsburgh City Paper …

A wonderful and underrated poet, Michael Blumenthal has published an evocative volume of poetry simply called And.

The title and the word, connect the world’s opposites and how they remain unchanged: The “monstrous stays monstrous,” he says, “and the beautiful, too — it stays.” And so it is. The volume is like a sad hymnal, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I had a chance to sink my teeth into And for the Jewish Forward. Here’s a snip.

The pessimism of the narrative voice is moreover built into the grammar of “And” — right down to the title. The word befits “the nomenclature of grief and desire,” Blumenthal writes. And perhaps it’s the perfect word to illustrate humanity’s paradox.

To be human is to long for something, and to long for something is to be in pain, and to be in pain is to be human. It looks as if idealism is damned, too.

But is the world according to “And” really the worst of all possible worlds?

Well, yes. And no.

The whole story …

I regretted that I was unable to get this piece published back when I originally wrote it as this artist is so long overdue for this review. As we all know, life sometimes has a way of getting away from us however this is no excuse on my part.  So under the maxim 'better late than never' here it is:

Richard Kinnaird Retrospective at Lee Hansley Gallery 
13 January - 21 February 2009 

Richard Kinnaird " A Red Space"  acrylic on panel (courtesy Lee Hansley Gallery)


Area painter Richard Kinnaird is a lion (though a rather under-recognized one) of the Triangle's art community. Argentinean by birth and trained in art in the American Midwest (receiving his MFA from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1958), Kinnaird moved to the Triangle area in 1963 for a teaching post in Chapel Hill.  Throughout an academic career spanning some 39 years Kinnaird literally taught thousands of aspiring artists establishing their own career paths through UNC's art department.  Currently an emeritus faculty member, he is also a longtime devotee of abstraction and the rigor necessary for sustained, in-depth work in that mode of painting. 

Kinnaird is also committed to making paintings that explore a fundamental modernist concept: namely what the physicality of paint on canvas or panel can embody.  A quick look at his canvases and you realize that many of the issues he is involved with are still so essential to the medium that they have never really gone away (though relegated at times to the storage bins of past styles and tastes.)  Notions such as surface and flatness of the picture plane, gesture, texture, collaged composition, and harmony of line and color have proven to be longtime preoccupations.  A primary interest is materiality and Kinnaird has been consistent in his fearless adventurousness and experimentation with materials.  Laser cut metal, burnt paper, and polycast resin are but a few of the various media which have found their way into his palette over the years. 

The 64 works in this show are a veritable clinic for painters.  A rigorous vitality of paint application, optical effect, subtlety of surface and shape, and the qualities of edge and line are all probed in skillful fashion.  Kinnaird has a particular affinity for repetitive, rhythmic linework and collage, both of which continually reappear throughout many canvases in the show.  He also has an empathy for Op Art as many of his paintings since the late 1970's utilize a system of overlaid, multi-color parallel lines to produce striking, yet graceful, swirling compositions of arcing lines and underlying geometric shapes.  Works such as "Asylum" and Penache No. 1" are signature works in this vein and convey a delicate balancing act of vibrant pinks, greens, yellows and blues all applied with layered bravura. An interesting sidenote is that many of these paintings have been produced with the artist's own self-designed compass device which he uses to draft his signature arcing lines onto unstretched canvases laid out on the floor.     

Richard Kinnaird " Penache No. 1"  acrylic on canvas (courtesy Lee Hansley Gallery)

The show's installation is compendious and I was particularly struck by the middle gallery which synopsizes a few of Kinnaird's working methods.  Here the Miro-like paintings "Shapeful Lineage" and "A Red Space" converse with the double panel "Ground Cover" in which a plethora of fiery autumn like colors are circumscribed with those trademark line series - as if freshly announcing a hint of things to come. (All be told, this retrospective's timeline is somewhat enigmatic as the artist does not date his works and in fact often considers them to still be unfinished.)  An adjacent wall showcases two polycast resin works aptly titled "Convex Form" and "Concave Form."  These high relief works, reminiscent of the forms of contemporary 'blob' architecture, nudge the boundaries of painting beyond the picture frame to sculpturally occupy the viewers' space.  Their overlapping of material experimentation and elemental form walks that line which all of Kinnaird's work and indeed abstraction itself eventually somehow transgresses: that the paint itself and how it occupies that thin space on the surface of its support can become transcendent. 

It’s so tough to get new plays on the stage, especially in a small town like Charleston. Even tougher when they originate from Charleston. Fortunately, we have a courageous theater company that doesn’t wait for new work to trickle down from New York. The ensemble is called PURE Theatre and the new play is called Sheep’s Clothing by local playwright Spencer Deering. The occasion brought to mind Mike Daisey’s controversial one-man play about How Theater Failed America.

About a year ago, Mike Daisey staged a one-man show in New York called How Theater Failed America. The acclaimed monologuist made the case that regional theater sucks, because it aims for business more than art.

Regional theater typically obsesses over growth, Daisey claimed, focusing on building bigger buildings more than developing better actors. It caters to the wealthy, marketing itself like a luxury item. And it relies too much on importing actors from New York.

Daisey, who is a 2005 Spoleto Festival alum, wasn’t saying anything really new, except this: that the usual problems regional theaters cite as their main obstacles — such as competition from movies and television, drained government subsidies, strained philanthropic communities, and audiences that just don’t get it — are basically hokum.

None of that would matter, Daisey argued in his play, if the focus were on actors and playwriting, not business. In How Theater Failed America, Daisey calls for a return to the repertory model in which a dedicated group of actors hones its skills and creates new work. That means an acting troupe that’s smaller, leaner, and more aggressive artistically. If that sounds like a description of PURE Theatre, that’s because it is.

the whole story here

And you can read City Paper’s review here.

It seemed for a long time poets should only write from their point of view. Otherwise, you run the risk of some kind of liberal-political-multicultural offense. Because in speaking for the Other, you risked appearing to oppress the Other. The result was a kind of poetic narcissism. This is a broad outline that surely over reaches in trying to explain what poets have felt over two decades. But its merits are worth considering, as I did in my conversation with poet Jennifer Moxley, author of the new volume Clampdown. Here’s a snip.

Walt Whitman was large, contained multitudes and contradicted himself. By the 1960s, few American poets did what he did. The universal subject (“I”) was considered a vestige of an old imperial power structure, so Whitman’s “I” was no longer democratic and egalitarian but instead a symbol of white dominance in an oppressive culture. Perhaps the only redemption for Whitman came from new evidence suggesting he was gay.

Too simple? Sure, but that’s more or less what happened, says poet Jennifer Moxley.

You had to write from your particular social marker and not beyond that,” says the University of Maine English professor in a phone interview. “The 1960s saw poetry emerge from identity politics and from politics put into lifestyle choices.”

She now specializes in those social markers, teaching classes in gay and lesbian literature, feminist literary theory and women’s studies. She’s found her own way in volumes of poetry like her latest, Clampdown. In it, one can sense the poet pushing back against a kind of sealed off and self-referential thinking.

“Life is untenable without a universal subject,” says Moxley. “At some point, we fracture into shards of self-interest. There’s no reason I should write and read about only things related to me — a white woman from California. You want to grow and change and take risks. Otherwise, your life is the only life. That’s not good. It should be a political thing.”

Full story at the New Haven Advocate …