Art for Art’s Sake « moonfun.net

Bessie Smith Sings The Devil's Music

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith sang the blues or “the devil’s music,” as some called it. She rose to fame during the bluesiest of eras, the 1920’s. Toughened by a poor childhood, Bessie’s hardscrabble life was interrupted by a few brief years in the sun.

During the 1920’s, Bessie signed a recording contract with Columbia Records and earned more money than any other black entertainer in America—in the world for that matter.

She lost her contract during The Depression, when musical tastes swung away from the blues. People were living the blues; they didn’t want to hear them, Bessie said. In 1937, with a comeback in her crosshairs, Bessie died in an auto accident on the dark, two-lane road from Memphis to Clarksdale, Mississippi.

The Blues Off-Broadway

Few people remember Bessie Smith now. Many never heard of her; some recall her name but can only recollect the ubiquitous sound of tinny recordings.

Get to know who Bessie Smith was at the Off-Broadway show, “The Devil’s Music: the Life and Blues of Bessie Smith,” at St Luke’s Theater (308 W 46th St).

Bessie is played by Miche Braden, herself a big girl, who makes a powerful impression. Braden wears a sweeping purple gown accessorized with diamonds and a fur stole. When she sings, she throws her hands back and her hips forward, a gesture that says “this is me and I am real.” Her voice makes a powerful impression too, but she doesn’t sound like the real Bessie. Maybe it’s the tin that’s missing.

The show takes place in a “buffet flat,” a gathering place where black musicians and friends hung out. Bessie’s loyal musicians are behind her as they party together on the last night of her life.

Between swigs of hooch and bluesy songs, Bessie tells a life’s worth of stories in bits and pieces. She makes no excuses or apologies for her drinking, her temper, or her love of both men and women.

Tough Bessie chokes up only when she speaks of her adopted son and how she lost custody of the boy. Bessie accepts her no-good husband Johnny Gee’s greed, violence and philandering as that‘s the way love is. But the boy’s love meant everything to her, even if she wasn’t around much to care for him.

Every time Bessie utters the word “death” during the course of the show, she cramps up in pain. Ms. Smith knew she wouldn’t see a ripe old age, but her physical reaction to the word made me wince at the obvious device.

St. Louis Blues

Bessie asks the audience (mostly rhetorically) if they’ve ever seen her movie. She answers “Yeah, well, neither did anyone else.” The movie she’s referring to is the 1929 Paramount classic, “St. Louis Blues.” In the film, her man Jimmy leaves her alone and broke. It then transitions to Bessie at a bar singing a beautiful version of the W.C. Handy song.

In this performance, recorded live on a soundstage, Bessie is joined by a band and a Grecian chorus of extras portraying customers at the bar. The result is unique and fascinating. This is the only recorded version of this particular arrangement, and it is hauntingly beautiful.

Braden’s reference to the long-forgotten film is followed by her excellent rendition of “St. Louis Blues,” performed mostly a few feet away from us (she moved among the audience frequently throughout the show).

Smelling Your . . . Silence!

Silence! The Musical

We immersed ourselves in The Silence of the Lambs this weekend. We watched the movie twice straight through, then watched the outtakes, then the documentary and then the movie straight through again.

All this watching was preparation for Silence! The Musical, a parody of the 1991 movie playing Off-Broadway at PS 122 (150 1st Ave). A Greek chorus of dancing “lambs” dressed in black with floppy white ears, white fuzzy gloves and black plastic “hoof” cups opened the show.

Jenn Harris as Clarice Starling nailed Jodie Foster’s West Virginia accent and slight lisp that escaped my notice when watching the movie. David Garrison played a remarkable Hannibal Lecter, not an easy task considering Anthony Hopkins’ classic blue-eyed glare is burned into the public memory.

The Silence! cast acted out the entire movie with sped-up dialogue, pouncing on the many lines in the film that are ripe for parody. (“It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.”)

Some of the most memorable songs are Buffalo Bill’s “Are You About a Size 14?” and “Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket” and of course, the song I can’t get out of my mind, “If I Could Smell Her Cunt.”

The production did so much with so little–just a bare set save three rolling racks of patchwork-sewn “skin.” The dance numbers were choreographed cleverly, especially the dream dance sequence with Clarice and Hannibal. Glitter Hannibal spun Glitter Clarice whose legs split parallel from floor to ceiling, adding extra dimension to the production’s most memorable song.

I highly recommend that you see the movie before you see Silence! Some of the funniest bits in the musical require the audience to remember details of the movie. Well, Clarice, maybe the lambs have stopped screaming, but they are still dancing.

CANstruction: Canned Food Art at the WFC

Canned! Mr Potato Head

When everyone seems to have their hand out, how does a city food bank grab a New Yorker’s attention?

I can’t think of a better way of engaging people in charitable giving than the CANstruction® competition. In CANstruction®, teams of designers, architects or engineers create exhibits using canned food as their medium. After the competition, the structures are dismantled and the food is donated to local food banks. Cities all over the United States and the globe participate in CANstruction®.

I stumbled upon the New York exhibit last week (without knocking anything over). A couple dozen over-sized aluminum can sculptures were displayed throughout the World Financial Center. Most teams went with a “feed-the-hungry” theme with smart titles like Paint the Town Fed or Feaster Islander.

Stand too close and the pieces look like a grocery store aisle. But step back a few paces and oh yeah, that’s what it is. The placard beside each piece tells how many cans in the design and how many New Yorkers each will feed. The numbers are staggering, but so is the need.

Enjoy my photos below and also check out the CANstruction® photo gallery for images from other cities and earlier years.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

I saw the play The Diary of a Teenage Girl Sunday night. The teenager, Minnie, has a lot to tell dear diary—far more than the typical teenager. That is, I hope she has far more material than the typical teenager. After sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend, what worse choices could she make? Quite a few, it turns out.

Minnie dives into the seedy side of 1976 San Francisco with confused exuberance. She lacks boundaries; her mother, just an old teenager herself, lives to party. In her own way, mom worries about Minnie, but not enough to take action.

Based on the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the play’s tagline is “a story of female sexuality and unabashed optimism”. I don’t know about unabashed optimism, but Minnie’s optimism is certainly rebounds time after time.

The play, staged at the Three Legged Dog, an ultra-modern space in Tribeca, literally happens all around you. The audience sits on carpeted steps and leans back on green cushions in the bowl-shaped theater. Center stage is only one step down from where I sat. At times, the actors performed only inches away from me. The five-actor team used the raised perimeter of the room and the multiple entrances to create a surreal effect.

The warm brown theater “walls” with painted cream-colored arrows and flowers were the screen for the video and images that played through most of the show. Video appearing on all four walls added to the sense of being inside cartoon pages. Videos of the actors made you feel like you were seeing their home movies. The images, sometimes a pencil drawing, sometimes abstractions like water, added to the sense of a diary.

The play is engrossing and well worth seeing. Even if you were a different kind of kid, this show will take you back to those wonderful, horrible years of being a teenager.

Times Square Subway Art

As New York City prepares for the ball-drop madness that is a Times Square New Year’s Eve, I recall walking through the empty 1, 2, 3 train corridor in the near silence of a Saturday morning earlier this month.
Forget about tomorrow’s crowd. With just the normal weekday throng of commuters hustling through the station, you can easily miss the art embedded in the station’s walls.
I noticed the lit, metal-framed images one quiet Saturday morning, pre-coffee, on my way to a class. Get up close and you’ll see the ceramic glazed iconic images that draw a parallel of New York revelry to Paris in the 1890s. The color and the party themes remind me of the surreal debauchery of the movie Moulin Rouge!
The artist is Toby Buonaguiro and you can check out all 35 of the ceramic New York images.
The New York City subway system is filled with art. You just need to take the time to notice it.

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