Funkalicious Apple Trip
“The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.”― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I was in New York last week for a whirlwind of meetings. When I go on a business trip I always pack in the amount of meetings I have—if I have to be away from the family, which I in no way like to do, I want to be as efficient as possible. But, the 8+ meetings a day has precluded me from getting to take in any of the beauty and culture the city has to offer. So I decided to make sure that at least once every New York trip I take a meetings while taking in some art…or just walking around the city exploring. Every block of New York is and adventure and it is nice to take a bite of the apple.
This past week I squeezed in more than usual, and was (as always) blown away at what I got to experience:
WANGECHI MUTU: INTERTWINED (at the New Museum): The best art exhibit I have seen in 2023, this 25-year retrospective of Wangechi Mutu takes over the entire New Museum, each floor being as mind-drenching as the next. Her paintings and sculptures and video and mixed-media pieces explore crazed worlds and alternative realities, using a mix of paints and shells and found and made objects with an organic style that makes the unnatural seem natural—mind bendingly supernatural—begging the question as to how someone’s mind can be blessed with a vision allowing to produce such profoundly new, beautiful crazed creations. I saw a lot of Camille Rose Garcia and H. P. Geiger in her work…although her vision is completely her own. She is still so early in her career. I cannot wait til the next retrospective. From the museum’s website: “Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.”
Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason (The Morgan Library): The Morgan Library always (always) curates such amazing exhibitions and right now they are boasting a gaggle of great ones including a curated group of paintings and drawings of faces by George Condo (Entrance to the Mind) and the joyfully curious Uncommon Denominator by Nina Katchadourian. I spent most of my brief time going deep in the Claude Gillot exhibit Satire in the Age of Reason. In the early 1700s, Gillot was doing everything from painting to designing opera costumes to dabbling in architecture to illustrating books. His illustrations are what drew me in; 18th century France’s answer to Hieronymus Bosch (and maybe Wangechi Mutu as well!), Gillot’s illustrations find satyrs and other part human-part crazed beasts, witches and spirits dabbling in dark magick and fanatical reverie and ancient rituals. His illustrations around the Italian opera character Harlequin are beautiful as well…but those warped illustrations will stay with me for a long while.
The Grolier Club: Celebrating the Art & History of the Book Since 1884: Fellow friend and colleague Noam Dromi and I stumbled upon The Grolier Club as we were walking from a meeting at Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle (which I had never been to before and loved, who’s walls are adorned with hand-painted scenes by Ludwig Bemelmans of the Madeline story books). The Grolier is the oldest book/printing club in the US, housed in a brownstone with a classic ivy-league designed interior, and is members-only except for the open invitation to view whatever show they have up curated by their members. The current show showcases menus from the 1840s to the 1940s (a piece of one is above). We spoke to a member known as the Pop-Up Lady (popuplady.com) who told us about her pop-up book exhibit she had recently curated. You can take tours of their past collections on their vimeo page (an Oz conversation is here) and stop by the club anytime to gander at the current exhibit and their past catalogs. The Grolier will be a regular stop for me for now on.
Lucinda Williams Live at the City Winery: This is the first Lucinda performance I have seen since her stroke. Without having the full range of motion in her left hand anymore, Lucinda could no longer play the guitar. She was helped on-stage, initially looking quite fragile, grabbing the mike for support. But then the band kicked in and she began to sing…revealing that her voice is still as powerful as ever. In a truly courageous one and a half hour set, Lucinda blasted through classic numbers…maybe a little slower, a little grittier, a little bluesier than before (which sounded great)…like on the title track from her break-out record Car Wheels On A Gravel Road or the killer Ma Rainey cover-not-cover You Can’t Rule Me (a theme for the set, triumphing over the scourge of mortality). Fan favs like Fruits of My Labor and Greenville (with Laura Cantrell singing back-ups) sounded gravely divine. She played songs from all corners of her career, as well as songs from her upcoming record…focusing on tracks that she talked about in her new memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You, which is just coming out. You could tell that many of her songs that deal with hardship and loss have taken on a whole new meaning for her; She never implicitly talked about her stroke…but she sang about it through her poetry. The band was an incredible motor, watching her every move so they could play right on time with her (learning with her the rhythm of her new reality)…often going into blues and psych jams with a force that noticeably lifted her up. She even was helped back on stage for an encore…ending with Neil Young cover Keep On Rocking In A Free World…as she smiled and threw peace symbols at her adoring crowd. She did not want to leave the stage. Yes, the stroke has changed her…made her more vulnerable and slow. But her performance last week at the beautiful City Winery venue was a heroic celebration of the human spirit.
Happy May Day!
Edison in Hollywood: the Infancy of the Phonograph
A great paper. As the writer Allen Koenigsberg discusses: “This article on how Edison conquered Hollywood may not be generally known. Original Lobby Cards from the work of Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney help to elucidate the conflicts between popular culture and real history. The investigation of these arcane subjects even involves how the first phonograph arrived in England (1888), how crying babies entered US Presidential politics (1892), and what was contained on extra-terrestrial golden discs launched into the Cosmos (1977).”
The First 16 Magazine is released today in 1957
With articles like “The Cats Who Make Music With Elvis,” “The Elvis America Doesn’t Know,” “Why Elvis Prayed,” and “The Elvis Diary” how could a nation not embrace 16 magazine? To read the whole thing go here.
The Alice Fletcher Korean Cylinder Recordings : A Small Part of D.C. History
19th Century Korean recordings…woah….go to the article to hear them (!) as well as hear a video that discusses how they were made.
2,000-Year-Old Graves Found Near Notre Dame During Excavation for Train Station Expansion
“The skeletons, which included men, women, and children, were found in wooden coffins that had been burned, as was the Parisii’s custom. As such, only small bits of wood and metal nails were left behind apart from the skeletons. Some skeletons had a coin placed in their mouths of in the coffin, likely an offering to the god Charon who would ferry the dead to the underworld.”
Alan Ruck and Matthew Broderick on Succession, Show Biz, and Ferris Bueller
Pretty great to be a fly on the wall on a conversation between these two…the Ferris Bueller duo.
Ma Rainey
By: STERLING A. BROWN
I
When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun’,
From Cape Girardeau,
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff;
Comes flivverin’ in,
Or ridin’ mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin’ fools. . . .
That’s what it’s like,
Fo’ miles on down,
To New Orleans delta
An’ Mobile town,
When Ma hits
Anywheres aroun’.
II
Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements,
From blackbottorn cornrows and from lumber camps;
Dey stumble in de hall, jes a-laughin’ an’ a-cacklin’,
Cheerin’ lak roarin’ water, lak wind in river swamps.
An’ some jokers keeps deir laughs a-goin’ in de crowded aisles,
An’ some folks sits dere waitin’ wid deir aches an’ miseries,
Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ gold-toofed smiles
An’ Long Boy ripples minors on de black an’ yellow keys.
III
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo’ song;
Now you’s back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong. . . .
O Ma Rainey,
Li’l an’ low;
Sing us ’bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’;
Sing us ’bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go. . . .
IV
I talked to a fellow, an’ the fellow say,
“She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway.
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
‘It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night,
Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
‘Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll
Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
‘Den I went an’ stood upon some high ol’ lonesome hill,
An’ looked down on the place where I used to live.’
An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried,
An’ Ma lef’ de stage, an’ followed some de folks outside.”
Dere wasn’t much more de fellow say:
She jes’ gits hold of us dataway.
