Same Thing, Different Ways
Rhiannon Giddens
At an audience meet-and-greet before Rhiannon Giddens’ Chicago concert Sunday, someone asked how she is able to productively work in so many genres and art forms. A legitimate question. Giddens’ opera, Omar, premiered at the Spoleto Festival last year. She wrote the score for the ballet Black Lucy and the Bard, which can be seen on PBS. At various times in her career, she has explored Gaelic traditional music, the African-American banjo tradition, and she’s currently Artistic Director of the multicultural Silk Road Ensemble, which unveils a new project in a few months. Pitchfork magazine recently called her a "folk polyglot." But her eclecticism goes way beyond that.
Her response to the question about the diversity of her artistic choices revealed a lot about her musical sensibility: "I'm doing the same thing, just doing it in different ways."
Rhiannon Giddens.
The concert that followed proved her point. Backed by a crack quintet that included longtime collaborators Dirk Powell and Francesco Turrisi (also her life partner), she featured several songs from her recent album, You're the One, that drew on traditions from different places in the music universe. The wry "Hen in the Foxhouse" is a juke-joint boast that reverses the gender dynamics of traditional blues braggadocio. ("I really don't care how big it is, just keep it out of my way.") "Who Are You Dreaming Of" channels the Great American Songbook vibe of crooners like Anita O'Day or Rosemary Clooney. "You Louisiana Man" is a rollicking rock 'n' roll jam session, building on an infectious riff that gets tossed from banjo to violin to organ.
Always in conversation with history, she honored the 60th anniversary of the Alabama church bombings with a moving cover of Richard Fariña's "Birmingham Sunday" (made famous by Joan Baez). And wrapped up the evening with a house-shaking zydeco-inflected cover of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Up Above My Head."
As she said at the meet-and-greet, "The best art comes from a mixing of cultures," and there was plenty of glorious mixing Sunday night. Giddens also responded to a question about her fame: Doesn't she wish she was more famous? A curious question for the winner of multiple Grammy's, a Pulitzer Prize and several other awards. But Giddens is not playing sold-out stadiums, her answer to that question was instructive and inspiring. She once had people around her who pushed her toward that sort of "fame," she told the crowd, but she wasn’t interested. So she changed management and went in a different direction.
"Fame wouldn’t allow me to do the things I want to do," she told the crowd.
Amen to that.
Theater Geeks
I was a high school theater geek. Which was curious, since I never sang or acted. I made my way into that idiosyncratic high school clan by way of the piano. I played for school choruses. I played for musicals. I played for sing-alongs during cast parties. I played whenever and wherever people wanted to sing.
Molly Gordon and Ben Platt in Theater Camp.
What music did I play? Back in the mid-1970s, Broadway didn’t have the same cache with teens as it does now. There was no Wicked, no Rent, no Spring Awakening. A Chorus Line was just breaking into the zeitgeist. Instead of those now staples, I played songs from Guys and Dolls, The King and I, and Kiss Me, Kate, the shows our school performed. My fellow theater geeks also loved Fiddler on the Roof, Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar, even though we never staged them. There were many spirited singalongs, and to this day, I believe I know the words to every song from those shows.
I was nudged back to that distant past with the movie Theater Camp, which had a brief run in theaters and can now be seen on Hulu and other streaming channels. I didn’t go to a theater camp and didn’t really know they existed back then. But the film captured the peculiar camaraderie of that teen thespian world (which was still going strong 40 years later, judging from my son’s experience at a different high school).
Theater Camp started as a short film by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman and expanded into a full-length film with the help of Ben Platt and Noah Galvin. Gordon and Platt star as two of the camp’s “instructors,” who vow to keep it going for one more summer when the director (Amy Sedaris) succumbs to a strobe-light induced coma at a school performance of Bye Bye Birdie. The pair have a great time filling in their quirky characters, but the film and stage really belong to the young campers, who enthuse and emote with the deep-hearted fervor that only a theater kid can muster. They race to the call board when the audition results are posted and squeal when they see their assignments. When the future of the camp is threatened, they pour their hearts and souls into keeping this world open—a cherished place where they can continue to be their weird and wonderful selves, if only for a few blissful summertime weeks. Theater Camp won’t win any Oscars, but it might just help you remember your own moments of weird and wonderful. Watch it and who knows—folks in your household might be hearing strange sounds from the shower the next morning: “One, singular sensation, every little step….”
Caravaggio’s Bros
It’s occupies a small corner of one of the museum’s galleries. But the loan of two paintings by Caravaggio is an “occasion,” and the Art Institute of Chicago’s curators have built a little show around it. “Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome” surrounds the two works with paintings by the so-called Caravaggisti, followers of the 17th-century master.
Carravaggio, “The Cardsharps.”
The half-dozen paintings all have a brilliant sense of color, light and shade—real Renaissance eye candy. Historians call these artists Mannerists for their active, dramatic compositions. But what struck me was their old-fashioned narrative quality. The painters of this era savored the chance to spin a story out of a single image.
This is nothing new, of course. Artists of that time and before (and since) have told stories through static images. Spending time with these works—more than a passing glance—offered a chance to parse them out.
Domenico Fetti, Melancholia
In “The Cardsharps,” a rich, naive youngster is preyed upon by a couple of crooks. With a little help from the curators, you’ll notice the difference in the hustlers’ clothes, including the fingertip-less gloves that allow him to feel marked cards. And, of course, there are “extra” cards hidden behind his back and a dagger at the ready.
“Melancholia,” by Domenico Fetti isn’t as much a story as a character sketch—or a sketch of one of the Renaissance “humors.” Here, signs of human progress in art and culture are everywhere: in the lower right corner a book, a sculpture, a painter’s palette and a fasces suggesting strong government. Astronomy looms—an image of the moon (behind the dog), a telescope (we’re just two years after Galileo’s invention), a device depicting the motion of the planets (an armillary sphere, barely visible in the upper left corner). Isn’t this a great time to be alive?
I guess not: that guy just can’t shake the skull—mortality staring him down.
Street Scenes
A recent walk in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago: The converted elevated rail line (The Bloomingdale Trail at the 606) isn’t as spectacular as New York City’s High Line, but it affords some great views and a path through interesting neighborhoods.
Bookforum!
Literary magazines are perennially struggling, so it wasn’t too surprising when Bookforum, the excellent quarterly published by Artforum announced it was shutting its doors last December. But thanks to a new deal with The Nation, the magazine is back in circulation. It’s first “renewed” issue arrived at my door last week.
It may not be everyone’s cuppa, but Bookforum’s connection with Artforum, a storied visual art magazine founded in 1962, means it leans into contemporary culture and ideas. (In contrast to The New York Review of Books—equally storied, but inclined more toward the historical or political, as its recent essay about hairstyles in Renaissance Europe demonstrates).
The new Bookforum issue, for example, features a substantial essay on the iconic novelist Don DeLillo, articles about the German cinema pioneer Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the renegade artist Harry Smith, an appreciation of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, and reviews of new novels by Lorrie Moore and Emma Cline.
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Have a good week.