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.cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } The Town With a Song in Its Heart Jamming on the porch of the Wildflower Bed & Breakfast in Mountain View, Ark. Houston Cofield The Town With a Song in Its Heart Follow the winding roads to Mountain View, Ark., home of the Ozark Folk […] More
The long-contested, now beloved French singer’s home is open to the public, with everything exactly as it was on the day he died in 1991.Jester, troubadour, agent provocateur, Serge Gainsbourg rhymed his way through life in a fog of Gitanes smoke, making music of every genre. Jane Birkin, his great love, was a “baby alone in Babylon.” Asked once on a TV show how he would like to die, Gainsbourg shot back: “I would like to die alive.”Now, 32 years after his death in Paris at age 62, Gainsbourg feels very much alive at the Maison Gainsbourg, his Left Bank home that opened to the public last week, along with a museum nearby. Nothing has moved — not the Steinway piano, the Gitanes pack, the Zippo lighter, the empty bottle of Château Pétrus, the typewriter or the framed spiders.All the walls are draped in black fabric. Gainsbourg preferred black, he once said, “because in psychiatric hospitals the walls are all white.”This eerie exercise in preservation — giving the impression that Gainsbourg has sidled out moments earlier — is the act of love of his daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, now a renowned actress, singer and movie director. “To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” she said in an interview. “I would go to the house from time to time, and mope and hurt and brood from terrible loss.”The Maison Gainsbourg is sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe contents of Gainsbourg’s apartment are left as they were on the day he died in 1991.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesSerge Gainsbourg was the son of Russian Jews who fled their homeland after the 1917 revolution and settled in Paris. As a teenager he wore the Yellow Star that the Nazis and the collaborationist French Vichy government imposed on Jews. He and his family survived World War II in hiding.If, as he followed his pianist father into a postwar life of Paris cabarets, Gainsbourg quickly showed contempt for pieties, moralizing and conformism, he had good reason: He knew well, having been marked for death as a Jew, the limits of the French Republic’s motto of liberty, equality and fraternity.His house, which is already sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then, is dark and cluttered, a lair. In a whisper, Ms. Gainsbourg, 52, accompanies visitors through an intimate audio guide delivered via headphones. We learn that she was not allowed to play the Steinway, only an upright piano. The large collection of police badges arrayed on a table were coaxed from cops her father invited in. Antique dolls on a bed upstairs terrified her. When her head first brushed the crystal ball hanging from the chandelier in her father’s bedroom, she knew she had grown.“To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” said Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis, until they split in 1980, was the home of Gainsbourg and Birkin, Charlotte’s parents, whose erotic lovemaking duet “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” was a groundbreaking hit in 1969. It was banned in Britain and Italy, and Gainsbourg attributed its success to the Vatican, which called the song “obscene.” An earlier recording with another of Gainsbourg’s loves, Brigitte Bardot, was played once on French radio before Bardot’s then husband, Gunter Sachs, threatened a law suit. It was finally released in 1986.If the song was explicit, it also bore the imprint of Gainsbourg’s lyricism. “You are the wave, me the naked island,” Birkin murmurs.Gainsbourg was a bard who never shied away from the Eros and violence that, through melancholy eyes, he saw at the heart of life, and serenaded with what the French newspaper Le Monde once called “an imperious languor.” A haunted troublemaker who drank and smoked his way to an early death, he trod a fine line between provocation and outright taboo, offering a relentless invitation to confront hypocrisies.“To be an artist you need a lot of sincerity, which comes at a very high price,” Gainsbourg said toward the end of his life.“I can’t imagine my father surviving our current times,” Ms. Gainsbourg said. “Perhaps he would have adapted. But our culture is scary. Everything is calculated, pondered, and you run the risk of being canceled at any moment and no long being able to express yourself. That is what is frightening for an artist.”Gainsbourg was hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMs. Gainsbourg said she wasn’t allowed to play her father’s piano; she had to play an upright model.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs it happened, I moved to the Rue de Verneuil, where Gainsbourg lived, in the summer of 1991, a few months after his death, for my first tour as a Paris correspondent. I watched in some wonder as adoring declarations (interspersed here and there with antisemitic bile) formed a canvas of graffiti across the length of his home.Soon the Gainsbourg spell had me. I listened to the songs, filled with dark irony and fatalism, that had made him such a disruptive force in French society over the preceding decades.He was the haggard minstrel of shameless lovemaking attuned to the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. He was the subversive with a permanent stubble, hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.” Paramilitary veterans forced Gainsbourg to cancel a concert in Strasbourg in 1980, a foretaste of the rise of the French extreme right.He was the Jew who in “Yellow Star,” from the 1975 album “Rock Around the Bunker,” mocks his executioner-inflicted badge as a prize (“I’ve won the Yellow Star”), or perhaps a sheriff’s emblem, before concluding: “Difficult for a Jew, the law of struggle for life.” He was the outsider with an uncanny eye and level gravelly delivery; as another outsider, I had much to learn.A single song, “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas” (or the ticket-puncher at the Porte des Lilas Metro station), released in 1958, propelled Gainsbourg to fame. Described by the writer Boris Vian as “the essence itself of musical and lyrical art,” it evokes the desperate life of the “man you meet but don’t look at” in a place where there is no sun. He makes “holes, little holes, always little holes, holes for second class, holes for first class,” and dreams at last of holding a gun to “make myself a little hole” that will land him forever in a big one.A life of struggle, and sometimes a fight for survival itself, was the world that Gainsbourg first knew with his immigrant parents. He would never forget it. In myriad genres — rock, reggae, Afro-Cuban, pop, funk — he went on to explore themes of love and loss, often with deadpan humor. He in turn influenced countless musicians, from hip-hop to indie.Ms. Gainsbourg told me she was long overwhelmed by her father’s legacy and the question of what to do with his house. She thought about enlarging it in 2008 with the help of the architect Jean Nouvel, but the project was expensive and she retreated. In some ways doing anything was still “unbearable.” Then, in 2013, her half sister, Kate Barry, Birkin’s daughter from an earlier relationship, died in a fall from her 4th-floor Paris apartment. Ms. Gainsbourg fled to New York.Only now has Ms. Gainsbourg felt ready to open the house and the museum, which contains letters, school reports and a wide range of mementos from her father’s life — even if she is still in mourning for her mother, who died in July.“I know that she is very happy I did this, even if perhaps she no longer felt at home here,” Ms. Gainsbourg said of Birkin, who continued to work closely with her father even after their separation.Gainsbourg near the end of his life in his apartment on the Rue de Verneuil.Jerome Prebois/Sygma, via Getty ImagesHer mother always pushed her to become an artist, Ms. Gainsbourg said. When she was 12, she recorded “Lemon Incest” with her father at a studio in New York. “The love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most dizzying,” she sings in a high-pitched, tremulous whisper.A video accompanying the song, a melody from Chopin with a disco beat, showed father and daughter on a wide bed, he shirtless in jeans, she in a shirt and underwear.“It took me 20 minutes to record and I sang as well as I could because I knew it was his declaration of love,” she told me. “The most important thing is that I say this is the love we will never make together.”I asked if it would be possible to record today. “Probably not: It would be seen as shameful disrespect to people who have suffered incest. Certainly, but that does not change the fact I am very proud the song exists, and that I sang it. I was always respected by my father. Are we going to condemn Nabokov, or any art that shocks?”In the cluttered house, cigarette butts are piled in an ashtray. They made me think of Gainsbourg’s “God Smokes Havanas,” recorded in 1980 with Catherine Deneuve.In it, Gainsbourg sings (in an inadequate translation of the beautiful French):God is a smoker of HavanasHe told me himselfSmoke carries you to paradiseI know it, my love. More
After a 1962 visit, a mutual love affair began between the composer and the country’s musicians. A new series at the Japan Society explores this relationship.About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations.As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.The similarity was, indeed, profound. The overlap between Cage and Japan went deep; for us today, suspicious of appropriation, it is a precious example of a truly mutual cultural exchange. And it has inspired a four-part series at the Japan Society in New York that begins on Sept. 28 and continues into December.Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock.His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.John Cage conducting Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo” at Hokkaido Broadcasting Company in 1962. From left: Yoko Ono, Yuji Takahashi (behind her), Kenji Kobayashi, Ryu Noguchi, Toshinari Ohashi, Toru Konishi, John Cage (with his back to camera), David Tudor and Ichiyanagi at the piano.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”As Yang emphasizes, the meeting of Cage and Japan did not begin with his arrival in 1962. Avant-garde Japanese musicians had been aware of Cage, who was born in 1912, from the late ’40s, through journalistic accounts of his work and, eventually, scores.“I felt an ‘Eastern’ sense from Cage’s music,” the composer Kejiro Sato wrote in the mid-’50s.In a 1952 letter to the critic Kuniharu Akiyama, Cage wrote, “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan.” He later wrote to Akiyama that Japan “is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality for me.”After his early studies with Schoenberg, the prophet of 12-tone technique, Cage had undergone a transformation: a “great leap of the heart,” as the critic Kay Larson put it in “Where the Heart Beats,” her 2012 book on Cage and Zen. Starting in the mid-1940s, he delved into Indian music and philosophy; attended some of Suzuki’s American university lectures on Zen Buddhism; and discovered the “I Ching,” the Chinese text which he began to use as a stimulus for chance techniques in his music. His new course diverged from both tonality and dodecaphony.In 1952, this great leap culminated in a piece that asked a pianist merely to sit at his or her instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds. The music would be all the sound in the performance space that was not music; “4’33,” Cage’s most famous artistic statement, was more a philosophical inquiry into the passage of time, the nature of silence and the distinction between individual and collective experience than a standard concert event.As the ’50s went on, some of the fruits of his innovations began to filter into Japanese publications, which wrote about Cage’s embrace of Eastern art and ideas. Avant-garde critics observed that Cage’s musical choices (like his use of percussion rather than the traditional Western orchestra), his rhythms and his adoption of randomness as a compositional tool were influenced by Eastern examples, including the Japanese concept of “ma,” the notion of empty space or silence.Cage at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto in 1962. He would return to Japan many times after ’62, including with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationFor Cage, Zen was not only an aesthetic inspiration; it also spoke to his more general desire to re-energize a Western world he perceived as in serious crisis. At the 1954 Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, he told the critic Hidekazu Yoshida that “America is a mixed nation and has no unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality. Yet I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover Americans’ lost spirit.”Inspired by Cage and by European musicians making similar investigations, such as Stockhausen, composers like Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yuji Takahashi had begun to work with chance; graphic scores, rather than traditional Western notation; and Cagean instruments like the “prepared” piano, adjusted with objects that affected the sounding of its strings. A contemporary music festival in Osaka in 1961, which included works by Cage, brought his brand of indeterminate, malleable music to Japanese audiences for the first time. (The response was decidedly mixed.)This all laid the groundwork for Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in New York, to invite Cage to visit Japan, under the auspices of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, a nexus of experimental performance in the 1960s. He and Tudor spent six weeks there: In addition to their trip to Tokei-ji, they toured widely, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo; had the rare honor of viewing a geisha banquet; spent the night at a monastery; and even used a chance procedure to choose the color of a necktie to buy.In Kyoto, they were shown the Zen temple Ryoanji, renowned for a rock garden with 15 stones arranged in a geometric pattern. Cage’s drawings based on the stones, made 20 years after the trip, inspired his highly mutable ensemble piece “Ryoanji,” which will be performed at the Japan Society on Oct. 21 — with some of the performers streaming live from Japan.Cage and Tudor’s concerts during their visit had a galvanizing effect. Performing Cage’s “Music Walk” in Tokyo, Tudor lay under the piano; Yoko Ono, already an important artist and musician who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time, put her body on top on the piano strings. In “Theater Piece,” Tudor cooked rice and stir-fried, with contact microphones attached to objects around the stage: the cookware, a piano, toys.For the premiere of “0’00,” a follow-up silence exercise to “4’33,” Cage sat at a desk and wrote a sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Contact microphones had been attached to his pen and glasses, so, as the Cage scholar James Pritchett writes, his action “was both the creation of the score and its first performance.”“0’00,” dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono, will be among the works performed at the Japan Society on Dec. 7 in “Cage Shock,” a program meant to convey a sense of the 1962 visit. It was not until 1969 that Hidekazu Yoshida, the critic, used that phrase, and some have suggested it overstates the suddenness of what was actually a more gradual influence.But it is clear that experimental work in a Cagean spirit grew more common in Japan after the visit. Even a composer like Makoto Moroi, who was skeptical about the 1962 performances, took to working with indeterminacy and graphic notation — as well as traditional Japanese instruments — in the wake of Cage Shock.For Cage’s part, Yang writes that visiting the country “corrected his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient Eastern country, he found a vibrant, modern society.” Both sides of the exchange had their ideas of the other refined and deepened.Cage and Tudor returned to Japan two years later on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and again with Cunningham in 1976 — and then five times in the 1980s. His last visit, in 1989, was to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize. The citation called him “a prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era” through “a new style of contemporary music by his new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought.”By then, Cage was mulling what he called a “Noh-opera,” possibly to be based on works by Marcel Duchamp. But Cage died, in 1992, before he could realize the project. On Nov. 16 at the Japan Society, a team led by the composer and performer Tomomi Adachi will offer a kind of completion of the idea — which, like so much of Cage’s work, transcends traditional boundaries of genre and culture.“It was Cage,” Takemitsu said, “who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my mind to get out of my own restraints.” More
A Briton with a rich baritone, he charmed audiences, mostly in Europe and America, with sentimental songs, like his signature hit, “The Last Farewell.”Roger Whittaker, a British singer whose easy-listening ballads and folk songs caught the sentiments of perfect summer days and last farewells, touching the hearts of mainly older fans across Europe and America for four decades, died on Sep. 12 in a hospital near Toulouse, in the south of France. He was 87.His longtime publicist Howard Elson said the cause was “complications following a long illness.” Mr. Whittaker had retired to the region.Born to British parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Whittaker grew up there with the infectious rhythms of East African music in his bloodstream. His grandfather had been a club singer in England, and his father, a Staffordshire grocer who played the violin, had been disabled in a motorcycle crash and moved his family to Kenya for the warm climate.Roger learned to play the guitar at 7 and developed a rich baritone in school choirs, where he sometimes sang in Swahili. At 18, he was drafted into the British colonial Kenya Regiment, and for two years he fought Mau Mau rebels in the struggle that led to Kenyan independence. He then studied medicine in South Africa and science in Wales, intending to become a teacher.But music intervened. He had played club dates to pay for college, and he also recorded songs on flexible discs distributed with the campus newspaper, The Bangor University Rag. A record company liked them and in 1962 released his first professional singles, including “Steel Men,” his cover of a Jimmy Dean hit about bridge builders.“Steel Men” leaped onto the British charts, the opening wedge in a career of international tours and record albums that celebrated ethnic and working-class pride, the passing seasons and family gatherings at Christmas. Over the years Mr. Whittaker recorded for various labels, including EMI, RCA Victor and his own Tembo (Swahili for elephant) Records.Tours took him repeatedly to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, a concert grind that often exceeded 100 gigs a year and outlasted the millennium. He learned to fly small planes and sometimes used them on his tours.He wrote much of the music he performed, made a documentary film about Kenya, wrote an autobiography, appeared frequently on television and radio and sold a reported 60 million albums worldwide. One of them, “‘The Last Farewell’ and Other Hits,” recorded in 1971 and forgotten, became a sensation later, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts in 11 countries and eventually selling 11 million copies.“‘The Last Farewell’ is an ersatz show tune about a British man-of-war, love, heartache and heroism,” Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times in 1975. “Released four years ago, the tune was discovered by an Atlanta disc jockey while idly going through a pile of discarded LPs. He liked the song, played it on the air, and soon Atlanta was liking it too. That affection soon spread to Nashville, then to the entire country-music market, then to the pop audience at large.” It became Mr. Whittaker’s signature song.In 1980, Mr. Whittaker invited children to submit lyrics and poems about peace for a songwriting contest. It drew a million entries from 57 countries. He wrote and recorded music for the winning entry, written by Odina Batnag, 13, of Manila. She was flown to New York and introduced, with her song, “I Am But a Small Voice,” at Radio City Music Hall. Proceeds went to a UNESCO program for disabled children.By the 1980s Mr. Whittaker was performing in 50 to 70 American cities regularly. Boston was a stronghold.In addition to singing, he whistled, yodeled and had audiences sing along. Critics called it schmaltzy, but crowds loved it and joined in, especially on hits like “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” (1969) and covers of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Jethro Tull’s “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.”Mr. Whittaker performing on television in about 1965 in Germany, where he had a big following.Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG, via Redferns, via Getty Images“Whittaker’s audience is mostly white and middle-class, probably daytime TV watchers who enjoy the kind of plain, folksy charm he projects,” Thomas Sabulis wrote in The Boston Globe. “He’s no great singer or songwriter; he doesn’t have Neil Diamond’s talent, Tom Jones’s sex appeal or Barry Manilow’s knack for milking the obvious. What he does have is a steady, unspectacular baritone and an avuncular, almost evangelical tone as comforting as it is mediocre.”Tragedy struck in 1989. Mr. Whittaker’s parents, still living in Kenya, were victims of a brutal home invasion by four robbers. His mother was tortured for eight hours and his father murdered. The killers were never caught. His mother moved back to England.“It will affect me for the rest of my life,” Mr. Whittaker told reporters, “but I believe we should all live without hate if we can.”After a period of mourning, Mr. Whittaker resumed recording and touring. In 1995, he sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville at a 50th-anniversary party for former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who were fans. In 1997, despite a surgical knee replacement, he kept some 100 concert dates in Europe and America.He stopped touring in 2013, at 77, and retired to the south of France after years living in England and Ireland.Roger Henry Brough Whittaker was born in Nairobi on March 22, 1936, to Edward and Viola (Showan) Whittaker, who, after his motorcycle accident in 1930, had settled on a farm in Thika, outside Nairobi. His father recovered and became a successful builder and businessman in Kenya. His mother managed theaters.After graduating from the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi in 1954 and finishing military service in 1956, Roger began premedical studies at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out after 18 months. He became an apprentice teacher but, needing more education, enrolled in 1959 at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University), and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1962.Still uncertain about his future, he consulted a faculty adviser, who, he later recalled, told him, “Have a try in show business and if you haven’t made it in 10 years, come back here and teach.” Mr. Whittaker soon landed a singing job at a resort in Northern Ireland and began his career.In 1964, he married Natalie O’Brien, who became his manager and co-author of his 1986 memoir, “So Far, So Good.” She survives him, as do their five children, Emily Kennedy and Lauren, Jessica, Guy and Alexander Whittaker; 12 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and an elder sister. A documentary film, “Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari,” which related a history of Kenya and revisited settings of the singer’s early life there, was released in 1982.Mr. Whittaker found his greatest European success in Germany. While he admitted he could not speak German at first, he sang and recorded in German “phonetically,” as he put it, until he became more fluent. He matured into one of Germany’s favorite singers, selling 10 million albums there.He also had a devoted following in the United States, where he was best known for “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” (1970); his version of “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1982); and “New World in the Morning” (1971), the title track of an album that also included “The Last Farewell” and “A Special Kind of Man.”“Women do not throw underclothes or room keys onstage at his concerts,” Diane White said in a sweet-and-sour appreciation in The Boston Globe. “No one gets high. No one gets hysterical with excitement. And yet Roger Whittaker is one of the most popular entertainers in the world.”Alex Marshall More
The festival presents a violent Shakespearean interaction with fruit, dance for neurodiverse and neurotypical audiences and showers of (play) money.There is a strange kind of hunger that can overtake you at a fringe festival: so much to devour and so little time to devour it. New York has been starved of a fringe since 2019, a loss even though the fringe that we had struggled to define itself. But an hour and a half away, the Philadelphia Fringe has endured. Originally a showier event, with a goal of attracting established, out-of-town stars, it has since refocused on local artists.During a recent weekend at the festival, which runs through Sunday, I swallowed an entirely reasonable number of shows, each of which felt appropriately fringe-y, flowing comfortably beyond the mainstream. Built for small, temporary stages, these shows validate fringe festivals as places of experiment, milieus to test and explore. Of the four that I saw, three were about appetite and the mess that appetite can make. And the last was less about hunger than it was about feeding its spectators, creating a nurturing, restful space for all.“Citrus Andronicus” is classic fringe — a cute idea, overstretched. A collision of toy theater, object theater and Elizabethan drama, it restages “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (which is saying something), using much of the produce section. In a space bedecked in a worrying amount of plastic sheeting, a college professor (Madeleine Claire Garcia) attempts to give a lecture entitled “Blistering Viscera: Revenge, Violent Tribalism, and the Subjugation of the Feminine in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” But she is repeatedly interrupted by two porters (Eli Lynn and Peter Smith), who are delivering boxes of fruit for the conference’s banquet. The professor can’t shush them, so she recruits them, replacing her lecture with a high-potassium plot summary. Many bananas are sacrificed.I’m enough of a weirdo that I might have preferred the original lecture. While the clowning, under the direction of Charlotte Northeast, is nimble, there are ultimately only so many things a person can legally do with a tangerine. Eventually, the professor also becomes infected by the pulpy, pithy madness, emphasizing how the desire for revenge, for violence, can poison us all. A few further ideas are introduced (the lights blink whenever the name of Aaron, one of Shakespeare’s rare Black characters, is spoken), but ultimately unexplored.Courtney Henry in “Rhythm Bath,” a performance installation designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences.Wide Eyed Studios“Citrus Andronicus” is presented by the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which has a mandate to make classical work more accessible. But bold, bloody “Titus” isn’t especially difficult and the goofy idea, however playfully executed, can’t sustain a full-length show. But what riches for the compost bin!Riches also animate “Make Bank,” a site-specific performance at Manufacturers’ National Bank. Audience members use an item plucked from a junk drawer to gain entry to the space, and that item can then be bartered for shells, corn husks, trinkets and yard sale detritus. A Mesopotamian spice bazaar is set up in one corner, a Dutch tulip market in another; a disembodied teller appears in a dark room; and a Meso-American deity resides next to the vault. Divided into groups, attendees assemble the items they have collected — by barter, gift or theft — into totemic sculptures while burlesque performers populate the space. One is (under)dressed as a Dutch maiden with windmill pasties, the other as a cow, presumably a cash cow. There is also a singalong to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”If “Citrus Andronicus” suffers from too few ideas, “Make Bank,” directed by Terry Guerin, produced by Meg Saligman and devised by Dylan Smythe and Lillian Mae Ransijn, has perhaps too many, though these also entail themes of greed and waste. The atmosphere, however unfocused, is one of excess. Expect to be showered in paper money. The money is fake. The sense of abundance is real.So ostensibly are the facts of the effusive, floral “Rose: You Are Who You Eat.” John Jarboe, who uses she/her pronouns, begins this autobiographical solo show by gnawing fried chicken from a bucket. Then she confesses to a murder. Apparently, she absorbed a twin in utero, a phenomenon known as vanishing twin syndrome. But that twin, who would have been named Rose had she lived, didn’t really vanish. This piece, which Jarboe describes as a “support group for gender cannibals,” is a reckoning with identity and queerness.Jarboe has long believed that she ate Rose, but as she sings toward the end of the show, it “Turns out Rose ate me.”Produced by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, with Emily Schreiner, as part of a rolling world premiere, and directed by MK Tuomanen, “Rose” is still in bud. A show about gender cannibals, adorned by tender, frisky music composed and performed by Emily Bate, Daniel de Jesús, Pax Ressler, Be Steadwell and Jarboe seems original enough. And Jarboe is an appealing performer. But as she acknowledges, the coming-out story is already a cliché. While certain moments are wholly unique, like Jarboe’s repurposing of a hockey jersey as a ball gown, others borrow overtly from artists like John Cameron Mitchell and Taylor Mac. The show seems to end twice before it actually concludes with a call-and-response section, which is then followed by a medley of covers: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Kiss From a Rose.” Some love, some pruning, and “Rose” should bloom.After so much fruit, money and flowers, so much wanting, so much appetite, it was restful to retreat into “Rhythm Bath.” A performance installation created by the choreographer Susan Marshall and the set designer Mimi Lien in conjunction with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, the dance piece is staged on an upper floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House. The ceiling is covered in white parachute fabric, which breathes in and out. Through holes in the fabric, glimpses of feathery, cobweb-like material can be seen, some of it lit with fiber optic filaments.The afternoon show I attended was a relaxed performance, as are all of their performances, designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences. The seating was flexible, the lighting (Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) subdued and the sound (Dan Trueman and Jason Treuting, who also composed the music) kept to a reasonable volume. Spectators who found it too much could retreat to a darker room with a giant bean bag. That afternoon, as 10 dancers performed elegant versions of pedestrian movement — walking, standing, leaning — I saw two young women in the audience stand up and join in. Another spectator faced the wall. A fourth watched while wearing headphones and dark glasses. All seemed to be enjoying themselves.In contrast with the excesses of the other shows, this performance was simple, even restrained. The mood was meditative. It was, in its quiet way, the most nourishing thing I saw.Philadelphia FringeThrough Sept. 24 at sites around the city; phillyfringe.org. More
Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.The only music-streaming account I’ve ever had lasted less than 72 hours in 2012. In 2023, I’m still building a non-streaming music collection, shelling out hard cash for what the streaming industry has convinced consumers should be free. As a very online millennial, that makes me somewhat of an anomaly among my peers. I know it’s a privilege for me to pooh-pooh streaming — after all, for those with less disposable income than I have, it offers access to enormous music libraries at little to no cost. But even for those who can afford to purchase music, the concept of paying for songs is a foreign one to many of us.People like me, who came of age in the decade after Apple introduced iTunes and before Spotify took over the market, belong to what is probably the last generation to remember what it was like to own a music collection that doesn’t live in the cloud. Maybe that’s why I never latched onto streaming services — I didn’t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds Spotify data that it then sells to advertisers. There’s also the matter of fair pay: Streams are the slowest way for musicians to earn money, at fractions of pennies per stream. Most important, though, I don’t like how streaming feels — like I’m only borrowing something for a while, rather than having a handpicked library of albums (digital or physical) that I’ve vetted and can keep forever.I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the same: a media player where I can see my entire music library hosted on my local machine rather than in the cloud. In fact, I have several libraries across different devices and drives that — much to my dismay — all differ from one another slightly. What I lack in portability, I make up for in security. Once I add something to my iTunes library, I have it forever. I have no fear of platforms’ removing artists, or of artists’ removing themselves.When I started this journey in grade school, I, like many of my peers, got around the new order via dubious means. I started by importing CDs I found at the library (the “Juno” soundtrack, anyone?) to my hard drive. I graduated to downloading MP3s online in the heyday of music blogs (“Bitte Orca,” by the band Dirty Projectors, darlings of the hype machine) and searching Google for compressed files. I was a D.J. at my college’s radio station, where we shared files and browsed the station’s racks for CDs we could rip, all to fatten up our iTunes libraries.These days I’m paying for nearly all my music, and have become more selective when adding to my collection. I lean into Bandcamp for MP3s. The platform’s low barrier to entry allows nearly anyone to share and sell their music, whether they have a distributor or not — a limiting requirement for most major streaming platforms. Bandcamp is also possibly the best way to give the most money to small artists, aside from picking up a T-shirt from the merch table. If something isn’t available on Bandcamp, I’ll scope out used CDs to buy and rip. If I love something enough, I’ll try to get the record. If it’s out of print, I’ll throw it on my wish list and cross my fingers for a reissue. At the end of the day, the goal is to have something to hold onto: a digital file, a CD, a record, anything other than an ephemeral stream.This isn’t always convenient: Depriving myself of streaming means there’s no easy way for me to repeatedly listen to a song without a deeper monetary commitment; but for me, listening to music is not about convenience so much as engagement. Resisting Spotify pushes me to actively find new music, as opposed to sitting through Discover Weekly playlists generated by an algorithm. I tune into local college stations, or online stations like the London-based NTS Radio network, and go down rabbit holes on YouTube, whose algorithm can still surprise me as long as I give it the right seeds. YouTube can be the most reliable platform for obscure finds, like live sets or rips of small-production seven-inches lost to time (I’m still trying to find out more about Naming Mary, a not-so-S.E.O.-friendly ’90s shoegaze band with little to no internet presence that surfaced after several recommended videos).This process of discovery has created a stash of albums that is dwarfed by Spotify’s bloated world of curated playlists and anarchic algorithmic “radio stations.” I prefer it that way. When everyone has access to everything, nothing is stamped with the personal memories — the particulars that hold our experience of music together. I don’t need the entirety of recorded music at my fingertips. I just need the few curated albums that I cared enough about to collect. Having my own library means I can distinctly remember the context of every find, and that makes my intimacy with the songs I care about — the ones I can mentally fill in when one earbud falls out as I’m tying my shoes — feel especially rich.Denise Lu is a visual journalist at Bloomberg News. She has previously worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. More
In story and song at the Café Carlyle in Manhattan, the star makes sense of a career that has included chaste nights with George Michael and drama with her mother.“Most of the time, I’m halfway content.”Those words are Bob Dylan’s, and they were delivered one night last week by Brooke Shields during her sold-out debut show at the Café Carlyle, the intimate Manhattan supper club where Bobby Short, Elaine Stritch and Debbie Harry have performed.It was five months after Ms. Shields had returned to the spotlight with “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” an acclaimed documentary that chronicled the ups and downs of a career that got its start in the 1970s, when she was a child model and actress marketed as a sex symbol.A number of celebrities came out to see her at the venue, which is blocks away from the Upper East Side apartment where she grew up. At a table close to the stage were the actors Naomi Watts, Billy Crudup and Laura Dern. Nearby sat Mariska Hargitay, with whom Ms. Shields has worked with on “Law & Order: SVU.” The crowd also included two men who had done cabaret at the Carlyle: Isaac Mizrahi, who designed the loosefitting orange dress Ms. Shields was wearing, and Alan Cumming.Whether by design or chance, Ms. Shields, 58, has reflected the mood of the times across her nearly five-decade career. In the louche, druggie ’70s, she starred (at age 11) in “Pretty Baby,” the Louis Malle film about a romantic relationship between an adult man and a child prostitute. In the striving, just-say-no ’80s, she graduated from Princeton and wrote a self-help book for teenagers in which she discussed her decision to remain a virgin.The celebrity guests at the show included, from left, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn the next decade she starred on Broadway (in a revival of “Grease”), displayed a talent for pratfalls in a hit sitcom (“Suddenly Susan”), and married and divorced a tennis star (Andre Agassi). In 2001, she married the comedy writer and filmmaker Chris Henchy, with whom she has had two children, and returned to the Broadway stage in “Chicago.” She has also found time to write memoirs and host a podcast, “Now What.”And Ms. Shields pointed out during the show that somewhere along the course of her varied career: “I performed at Sea World. With Lucille Ball.”Her Café Carlyle residency is scheduled to run through Sept. 23. Every night is sold out. On Tuesday, she opened with “I Think We’re Alone Now,” making it into an ironic lament about how she has rarely felt alone since her mother decided she would be a star.“I practically came out of the womb famous,” she said, during a spoken-word interlude. “They tell me the doctor asked for a selfie.”She also went through periods when career seemed to be over: “The other day,” she said from the stage, “I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”In “Fame Is Weird,” a song written for the show by Matthew Sklar and Amanda Green, she moved from her encounters with the public to her experiences with fellow celebrities. In the intro, she said she had turned down Donald J. Trump when he asked her out on a date, but soon conceded that she had consented to Elizabeth Taylor’s request that she pre-chew her gum.“I chewed it first,” Ms. Shields said, “so I got the better end of the deal.”Mariska Hargitay, seen here speaking with the actor Beth Ostrosky Stern, worked with Ms. Shields on the show “Law & Order: SVU.” Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe also recounted being mean girl-ed by some of he world’s best-known women. When she met Bette Davis at the Oscars, she said, “Hi, I’m Brooke Shields,” to which the star replied, “Yes, you are.” A similar encounter occurred when Ben Stiller brought her to Madonna’s house, Ms. Shields said. The greeting she received from Madonna was curt: “Oh, you.”In many ways, the show seemed like an effort by Ms. Shields to work through her ambivalence about having fallen closer to earth after the years of childhood and teenage stardom. In the second half, she roasted and paid tribute to her mother, Teri Shields, who in the ’70s and ’80s became a focal point for the culture’s misgivings about stage parenting and the sexualization of children in Hollywood.“She has been in the press almost more than I have,” Ms. Shields said, “and, probably, you all have your opinions of her.”She went on to note that life with her mother, who died in 2012, wasn’t all bad.“There was a lot of laughter and so much fun,” she said. “She would do really crazy things. She would see a dog tied outside of a store, waiting for their owner to come back, and she would get right down in front of the dog to say, ‘They’re never coming back.’ It was just so sick. It’s dark. But really funny.”She also acknowledged her mother’s alcoholism. “We named a cocktail at the bar for her. Actually, we named several for her,” Ms. Shields said, before getting serious about how much she missed her. She added that one reason she wanted to play the Carlyle was that it was a place her mother had taken her when she was young. “She would be really proud,” she said.With that, she launched into Mr. Dylan’s melancholy “Most of the Time.”Ms. Shields donned a cowboy hat to sing the Dolly Parton hit “9 to 5.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMs. Shields, who appeared to have a cold, sounded a bit like Bob Dylan as her throat began to give out. She then moved into material about the trials and tribulations of being a wife tot Mr. Henchy, who was seated in the audience, and the mother of two teenage daughters, Rowan and Grier. While delivering Tina Dico’s “Count to Ten,” she apologized to a man seated close to the stage, who was catching much of her spit.Toward the end, she sang “Faith,” a 1987 hit by someone she knew, George Michael. She delivered the lyrics with conviction while also using the song to make a cheeky reference to the nights when she stepped out before the paparazzi in the role of the public girlfriend to Mr. Michael and Michael Jackson.After the applause, the fashion designer Christian Siriano offered a quick review: “She was great, even though she clearly has Covid.”Moments later, Ms. Shields emerged from her dressing room and went through some quick hellos with friends and well-wishers. A waiter asked her what she would like to drink. “Tequila,” she said, before moving to a corner table for a chat with a reporter.Told of Mr. Siriano’s thoughts, she said, “I don’t have Covid!” But she said she did have a respiratory ailment that had landed her in the hospital a few days before the show.Her vocal coach brought her cough drops. Publicists hovered. Ms. Shields explained that her cabaret show began taking shape in the spring. Working with the writer and director Nate Patten, as well as with the musical director Charlie Alterman, she said she wanted to put together an evening that would involve telling her own story truthfully while making it a source of comedy.Alan Cumming in the company of Ms. Dern.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe was aware that this was a difficult moment to humanize the people who decided it was appropriate for her to appear in a movie at age 11 as someone whose virginity was auctioned off. Yet her mother was still her mother, and she loved her.“Ambivalence is where real life happens,” she said. “I mean, the point of it all is that we’re not one thing or the other. We’re human beings, and we’re fraught.”Ms. Shields was asked about her experience with Mr. Trump.“I was making some movie in the late-90s,” she said. “My phone rang and it was him. He said, ‘You and I should date. You’re America’s sweetheart, and I’m the world’s richest man. People will love it.’ At which point I stifled laughter and said, ‘Thank you, I’m very flattered, but I have a boyfriend and I don’t think he would appreciate me stepping out on him.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think you’re making a big mistake.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have to take my chances.’”Did she not know that George Michael was gay? And did they really go on a date?“A few,” she said. “He was very respectful of my virginity.”“Read the book!” a publicist yelled, referring to “There Was a Little Girl,” the 2014 memoir in which she tells the tale.Ms. Shields added that, despite the appearance that her relationships with Mr. Michael and Mr. Jackson seemed merely for show, she had real bonds with both of them.“We had so much fun,” she said. “I wasn’t just a purpose, as a beard. It actually was more than that. The conversations, the fears, the discussions.”The talk turned to her podcast — in which she has spoken with Stacey Abrams, Rosie O’Donnell, Chelsea Handler and Kris Jenner — and the one person she has been itching to get: Britney Spears, who hasn’t given in an interview in years.“I tried very hard to find a way to be the first actual interview,” Ms. Shields said. “And I haven’t gotten it. But I am the only person who could do justice to the reality of the story. Whatever it is.” More
Global performers including Angelique Kidjo, Laurie Anderson and José Feliciano will inaugurate the theater at ground zero.The first public events at the new $500 million Perelman Performing Arts Center, the opulent new theater near the site of the World Trade Center, are deliberately laden with symbolism. The center is opening its doors with five shows on Sept. 19-23, collectively titled “Refuge: A Concert Series to Welcome the World.”Each concert offers a different kind of refuge as its theme: Home, Faith, School, Family and Memory. Home (Sept. 19) presents musicians who gravitated from around the world to New York City; Family (Sept. 22) has sibling and multigenerational groups. School (Sept. 21) features musicians who have made education an integral part of their work.The series affirms the city’s diversity with an international lineup that includes Grammy-winning stars — Angélique Kidjo on Sept. 19, Common on Sept. 21, José Feliciano on Sept. 23 — along with lesser-known musicians dedicated to preserving and extending deep-rooted traditions. The program for Devotion: Faith As Refuge, on Sept. 20, includes klezmer music from the Klezmatics, electronic transformations of Afro-Cuban Yoruba incantations by Ìfé and Moroccan Sufi trance music from Innov Gnawa.Two decades after the Sept. 11 attack, the center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, describes the Perelman’s mission as “civic healing.”“We want to say that everyone is welcome,” Mr. Rauch said. “There’s a lot of trauma and resilience on our part of the island that we want to honor. You know, there were 93 countries represented in the people who lost their lives on 9/11. And so it’s important that we welcome as many different artists and audiences into our building as possible.”The Perelman joins a New York City arts landscape full of big-budget performing-arts institutions, from Lincoln Center to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Shed. Is the scene too crowded? “When every man, woman and child who lives in the five boroughs of New York City has a life that is saturated in performing arts, then we can begin to talk about whether there’s too much,” Mr. Rauch said.The center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, describes the Perelman’s mission as “civic healing.”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAngélique Kidjo alongside the dancer Supaman on Sept. 14, opening night at the Perelman.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAlthough the new arts center is a monumental marble cube with elaborate technological underpinnings — theaters that can be configured more than five dozen ways, sitting on foot-thick rubber supports to insulate them from subway noise — the tickets for the inaugural shows were priced pay-what-you-will from $15-120. Most of the concerts are sold out, but some will also feature free after-parties in the Perelman’s public lobby. Forró in the Dark, which plays upbeat music from Northeastern Brazil, follows the Sept. 19 show. The center plans frequent free lobby performances.Arturo O’Farrill, the pianist who leads the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, is performing on Sept. 20 in the “School as Refuge” concert. He founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, which provides instruments and music lessons to public-school students in New York City. When the center was being built, Mr. O’Farrill was part of an advisory committee of artists; he urged the center to pay close attention to acoustics. “I found it incredibly welcoming to artists’ voices,” Mr. O’Farrill said. “That’s not always the case with institutions.”He added, “Bill’s a very forward-looking person. This programing is about community. He’s a very thoughtful man, and he’s looking to expand the conversation on what performing arts is, what elitism does to the arts. He’s not interested in perpetuating elitism.”Laurie Anderson, who is to perform on Sept. 19, is pragmatic but hopeful about the center’s future. “Sometimes a place opens and it never finds its audience,” she said. “I always like it when it’s opened up to the people who live in the neighborhood, but nobody lives in that neighborhood — it’s mostly abandoned offices now. So how do you make a community out of a bunch of empty offices? We’ll see. Maybe you make it by bringing music that’s just so incredible that everybody wants to get on the subway and go down there. That would be great.”Ms. Kidjo, the clarion-voiced singer and songwriter whose albums have connected West African music to the Americas and Europe, was enthusiastic about the center’s inaugural statement. “We are all refugees from somewhere,” she said. In 1983, she fled to Paris from the dictatorship in her homeland, Benin; she now lives in Brooklyn. “I think that each one of us, we have the responsibility and the duty to welcome somebody that is in a dire situation. For a performing arts center to support that speaks straight to my heart. Because everybody needs a place to put your load down and say, ‘I’ve found a place.’She added, “We have a special status after what happened on 9/11 — to prove our openness to the rest of the world. And we have the place called the Perelman Center right next to ground zero that is open to the whole world. It’s just the beginning. We have to live up to the promise.” More
