04 2016

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april INTERVIEW

PAPA BEAR | 24 Multi-faceted guitarist Tony Levin of the progressive rock bands Stick Men and King Crimson has played on more than 500 albums, including those by Cher, Pink Floyd, Yes, and Buddy Rich; written a tone poem about whale-watching; invented Funk Fingers (sticks attached to the fingers of bass guitar players make percussive sounds); became a blogger in 1996, long before there was such a thing as a web blog; and even began his own record label, Papa Bear Records.

ART Cold Spring Boxes, 2001. Casein on canvas mounted to Masonite, 15 x 10 3/8 in. James A. Michener Art Museum, Bequest of the Estate of Laurence G. Taber 2012.46.1

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5 | A THOUSAND WORDS 6 | Katherine Steele Renninger 8 | George Tooker’s Highway 10 | ART SHORTS Silverman Gallery Moderne Gallery Trenton City Museum / Ellarslie 12 | EXHIBITIONS 16th Annual Arts Alive!

Morven in May Bethlehem Fine Art & Craft Show

THEATER 14 | CITY THEATER

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36 | JAZZ LIBRARY Dexter Gordon 38 | SINGER / SONGWRITER Bonnie Raitt Sandy Carroll David G Smith Brian Cullman Rio en Medio

ENTERTAINMENT

40 | NoLa by Brian 42 | Masaharu Morimoto

THE BEAT

Ellarslie, Trenton City Museum, Breath of Fire

34 | NICK’S PICKS Bill Charlap Trio Laurin Talese Julian Shore George Coleman

FOOD

16 | THE LIST

ABOUT LIFE 45 | Who’s Got the Power?

18 | CITY

ETCETERA

18 | VALLEY

46 | L. A. TIMES CROSSWORD

FILM

47 | AGENDA

20 | KERESMAN ON FILM My Golden Days 22 | CINEMATTERS Take Me to the River

28 | FILM ROUNDUP Francofonia Hockney Remember Sunset Song

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30 | REEL NEWS Phoenix East Side Sushi The Hateful Eight Creed

Francofonia

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1-800-354-8776 • 215-862-9558

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Trina McKenna trina@icondv.com

ADVERTISING 800-354-8776

EDITORIAL Executive Editor / Trina McKenna Raina Filipiak / Advertising filipiakr@comcast.net PRODUCTION Designer / Richard DeCosta Assistant Designer / Kaitlyn Reed-Baker CITY BEAT Thom Nickels / thomnickels1@aol.com VALLEY BEAT Geoff Gehman / geoffgehman@verizon.net FINE ARTS Edward Higgins Burton Wasserman MUSIC Nick Bewsey / nickbewsey@gmail.com Mark Keresman / shemp@hotmail.com Bob Perkins / bjazz5@aol.com Tom Wilk / tomwilk@rocketmail.com FOOD Robert Gordon / rgordon33@verizon.net

PO Box 120 • New Hope 18938 (800) 354-8776 Fax (215) 862-9845

MUSIC 32 | KERESMAN ON DISC Bill Frisell Tortoise Mavis Staples Gary Lucas’ Fleischerei Piero Umiliani

Filling the hunger since 1992

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS A. D. Amorosi / divaland@aol.com Robert Beck / robert@robertbeck.net Jack Byer / jackbyer@verizon.net Peter Croatto / petecroatto@yahoo.com James P. Delpino / JDelpino@aol.com Sally Friedman / pinegander@aol.com Geoff Gehman / geoffgehman@verizon.net George Miller / gomiller@travelsdujour.com R. Kurt Osenlund / rkurtosenlund@gmail.com Keith Uhlich / KeithUhlich@gmail.com

26 | BAD MOVIE The Brothers Grimsby

Take Me to the River

The intersection of art, entertainment, culture, opinion and mad genius

MUSIC

14 | VALLEY THEATER

15 | ICEPACK

ICON

ON THE COVER: George Tooker, Highway (1953). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.134

ICON is published twelve times per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. ICON welcomes letters to the editor, editorial ideas and submissions, but assumes no responsibility for the return of unsolicited material. ICON is not responsible for claims made by advertisers. Subscriptions are available for $40 (shipping & handling).

Copyright 2015 Prime Time Publishing Co., Inc.

ART A THOUSAND WORDS STORY AND PAINTING BY ROBERT BECK

nuts & bolts THOSE OF YOU WHO live around Stockton may have seen the pink Cadillac that was parked near what used to be Schuck’s Garage. I was intrigued and stopped to look it over. From a distance the car appeared to be in rough shape— something you might find in a salvage yard rather than a repair shop—and closer inspection reinforced that assessment.

Despite an earlier, somewhat optimistic attempt to arrest the severe rusting with primer, very little of the body seemed savable and many significant parts were missing.

The interior was worse. There was none. No door panels, no seats, and little of anything you might mount them on. I saw road where there once was a floor.

Knobs, levers, trim, even the glove compartment, were gone. Anything of use had been scavenged, and what remained was in an advanced state of decomposition. There was a wooden skid wedged between the side rail and the transmission hump on the driver’s side, presumably to give someone tasked with moving the car a place to kneel and steer.

The big surprise was that this wreck of a 1957 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible was sporting a fairly new canvas top. At first I thought the new top might have been attached as the first step to stabilize it for restoration, like you might first put a new roof on a project house to protect subsequent repairs. Once I saw the state of the corpse that seemed pointless.

Seeing the car flooded me with a mix of experiences, memories, dreams, and loves from my past and present—a feeling that hung with me all day. The next afternoon I drew the car in charcoal on a large panel in my studio. I left off the new top. For three days I let thoughts percolate in my mind, glancing at the drawing now and then, waiting for a context and environment to suggest itself and for superfluous details to fade from memory.

I’m not interested in replicating things I see—art isn’t about duplication—

but it wasn’t just any car and there were details I felt should be described with fidelity. The larger subject was the cocktail of emotions that emerged from the encounter, what Picasso called the thing behind the thing. There were many issues to resolve.

Where would the car be, or rather what emotional landscape does the car exist in? What other elements or symbols might refine the narrative? What time of day, type of light, or color harmony, would best fit?

Rendering the car wasn’t a big concern but there were challenges. Getting proportions right was important. Cars have purposeful design cues and I didn’t want it to look a little off.

Wheels and tires can be difficult, and their size and placement is crucial. Rust is easy. Primer, I had to learn.

The decrepit condition of the car reminded me of a painting I did of a lobster boat in a field in Maine, so I roughed in a version of that landscape. I liked the idea of a not quite sunny day, laden with atmosphere. It’s not cheery and not dismal; it’s just a day. The boat painting also had a flock of crows in it, and I decided that including birds passing in the background would introduce the idea of constant flow to counter any sense of termination. The farmhouse brought its own mix of triggers: an earthy,

time tested, hard working reality, which in some ways is in contrast to the notion of a pink Cadillac.

And then there is the guy. The painting is not just about the car; it’s about what the car means, which presupposes there is somebody for it to mean something to. There are a thousand ways to go wrong with putting people in a painting. They can look like those strange figures that architects use, or appear to have some gruesome anatomical deformity that compromises the focus of the image. Simple is better: supply a heartbeat, get the anatomy right, and give it a gesture that demonstrates a connection to the painting.

While our reaction to what we see can be immediate and firm, it is formed by recollections that are often layers of gray rather than black or white. Many complex elements tug in different directions, but collectively they locate an impression. The process of creating a painting is an effort by the artist to decode his response to a subject and stitch together a refined statement, not about what he discovered, but what he learned. ■

Robert Beck’s work can be seen at www.robertbeck.net.

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Art

Morrell’s Spinning Wheel and Wool Winder, 1988. Casein on linen canvas mounted on Masonite, 18 x 24 in.

BY BURTON WASSERMAN

U

Katherine Steele Renninger

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UNLIKE THE EMPHASIS ON shifting light, color, and atmosphere one finds in the artworks of well-known New Hope Impressionists, the art of Katherine Steele Renninger transformed the spirit and flavor of the northeast Pennsylvania countryside into crisply fluent arrangements of shape, texture, pattern and space. Above everything else, they are superbly orchestrated complexes of design.

On occasions when we served together as co-jurors of competitive exhibitions, she frequently made the point that such considerations as sound balance, keenly fused unity and optical variety were especially significant factors she looked for in her search for aesthetic significance in the examples she was called upon to judge.

Her own work was very much influenced by such masters of the modern, style called Precisionism, evidenced by such masters of that style brought to fulfillment in the mature works of Charles Demuth and Charles Scheeler. She was also strongly influenced by Arthur Meltzer and Paulette Van Roekens, with whom she studied at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.

RIGHT: Jams and Jellies, 1997 Casein on canvas mounted to Masonite 11 7/8 x 23 7/8 in.

Private Collection

BELOW: Men’s Bath House, 1982 Casein on canvas mounted to Masonite 18 x 27 in. Private Collection

At this time, the Michener Art Museum, located next to the County Library in Doylestown, is presenting an excellent solo show of her distinctive artworks. It is scheduled to remain there, on public view, until June 12, 2016.

Over the years, Renninger held many exhibitions and won numerous awards at the Phillips Mill in the region of New Hope and the Coryell Gallery, in Lambertville, NJ. Back in 1995, she presented another invited solo retrospective in the Michener Art Museum, on whose Board of Trustees she also served for several years.

An exceptionally good example of

Renninger’s style in the show is the picture titled “Morrell’s Spinning Wheel and Wool Winder” from the permanent holdings of the Michener Museum. The principal shapes of circle and diamond, given voice by the composition, provide a lively contrast to the overall arrangement as the forms interact with each other. The rest of the total design consists of variously sized, so-called geometric elements counterpointing each other with a controlled measure of rhythmic vitality and varied tonal suggestion. In a way that defies verbal description, the picture projects a magical stillness, resonating with the bu-

colic atmosphere of rural Bucks County.

Renninger’s principal medium of choice was casein tempera, a dairy-based, water soluble, adhesive material which dries to a firm and permanent layer of either a transparent or opaque appearance.

With uncanny power, it provides an irresistible attraction for a spectator’s eye, with a character all its own.

As a rule, the appearance of human figures is entirely absent from Renninger’s vocabulary of painterly vision. In their place she deals with commonplace household gadgets and the shape of gingerbread trimmings once seen on Victorian

era dwellings. The working mannerisms of the casein medium apparently contributes to the look and feel she gave these bits and pieces of subject matter.

The ultimate sensation projected by the works on view is one of integrated wholeness, a peaceful interaction of related parts, joined together as a well-regulated totality of being. ■ James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 So. Pine St., Doylestown, PA. 215-340-9800. michenermuseum.org

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Art

BY ED HIGGINS

ALTHOUGH HE DIED AT the age of 90 in Hartland, Vermont, in 2011, George Tooker has been hard at work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia for the past five years. That’s the year his painting Highway was placed on long term loan to the Academy by the Terra Collection in Chicago, Illinois.

The loan came about after the Academy staged a massive 2009 Tooker retrospective put together by then curator of modern art, Robert Cozzolino. At that time, Cozzolino, who is now in Minneapolis, was quoted in an NPR interview as saying that Tooker’s style and his medium of choice, egg tempera, harkened back to the Italian Renaissance. Egg tempera is permanent, a particularly difficult medium to master, and only a handful of other American artists used it.

Tooker may be the the most important American artist no one has heard of.

In fact, according to Cozzolino, “He didn’t produce to sell—he produced because he really believed in the work he was doing.”

Cozzolino, struck by Tooker’s images of urban life, its frustrations, confusion, and stress, sought the loan and planned to use it in conjunction with other art works. His idea was to shift the painting around and insert it into other exhibitions, thereby “gradually, over time, making its potential meanings expand through new juxtapositions.” Highway is currently serving this purpose within Seachange, the Museum’s Norman Lewis exhibit until April 3.

Highway is a surreal image of a roadblock: “Three cars, their snarling aggressive, fang-like grilles mirroring their drivers’ frustration, are immobilized by the authoritative gesture of a mysterious figure completely clothed in black, his head blocked from view by a red reflector he brandishes as if commanding the viewer himself to halt. Movement is thwarted by the screen of signs sporting downward-pointing arrows and the barriers that hem in the cars, their striated grilles echoing vivid zebra stripes. Globular street lamps trace the highway’s

George Tooker, Highway, 1953 (detail). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.134

George Tooker’s Highway

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path backward under a lowering sky tinged with unnatural colors as if by smog, but the view is otherwise cut off by the road barriers; only the tops of old-fashioned red-brick buildings and broad black smoke-stacks are visible above them, signs of an unseen ravaged industrial landscape.”

Tooker said, “I really hated highways.”

He was born in Brooklyn, went to Harvard where he majored in English literature, and then joined the Marines in 1942, but was given a medical discharge.

He then studied at the Art Students League with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller. He was associated in New York with a group centered around Paul Cadmus and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirsten. He and his partner, William Christopher, also a painter, moved to Vermont in the 1950s. During the Civil Rights movement, Tooker, a strong supporter, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Christopher died in 1973 in Spain. Six years later Tooker converted to Roman Catholicism and returned to live in Vermont permanently.

George Tooker was a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He exhibited at major museums and in 2007 was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President George W. Bush.

Part of the power of Tooker’s paintings is that one can’t simply walk past them and conclude the experience. The paintings have to be “read” and inevitably pondered for their meaning.

When the meaning is clarified, the experience begins.

Clearly Highway resonates with the Delaware Valley audience who must endure the Schuylkill Expressway, Route 42 onto the Walt Whitman Bridge, the clogged Blue Route—and anywhere in both directions on I-95. ■ Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, Corner of Broad and Cherry Streets, Philadelphia. (215) 9727600. pafa.org

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George Tooker, Dark Angel, 1995-96. Egg tempera on gesso panel. On view in the Museum as part of the permanent collection.

Art Shorts CURATED BY ED HIGGINS

Desmond McRory at Silverman Gallery

Itfah Geva at Moderne Gallery

McRory considers himself to be a tonalist painter, simplifying his subject and setting the mood with an overall tone of colored atmosphere. He was born in Bucks County and now lives in Hunterdon County, NJ. He learned painting largely through self-study, which included visits to major museums in America and Europe.

His recent works concentrate on the landscapes in and around Bucks and Hunterdon counties.

In describing his style, he says, “I realized about two years ago that my heart is really at home in an artistic style that flourished about 100 years ago: tonalism. Many of the prominent Bucks County Impressionists began painting in a tonalist style. The father of the New Hope Art Colony, William Lathrop, never really completely abandoned that style. Tonalist painters attempt to capture the mood of scene without a great reliance on specific detail or saturated colors. There's a spiritual sense to tonalist works that really appeals to me.

“While studying in Europe, I bought a train pass and a Youth Hostel pass and would spend my free time in art museums and galleries. In London’s Tate Museum I was drawn to the paintings of Joseph William Turner, noting how his style transformed from photo realistic to Impressionistic. I remember thinking ‘what is he seeing that I am not?’”

Silverman Art Gallery, 4920 York Road, Route 202, Buckingham, PA. 215-794-4300 silvermangallery.com Through April 17.

Itfah Geva, an artist who lives in a kibbutz in northern Israel, is being given his first solo exhibition in this country.

Technically intricate one-of-a-kind pieces that are “elegant and organic” according to the gallery. “The highly original works of Itfah Geva and his technical/business partner, Gal Goldner, are an integral part of the dramatic shifts that have taken place in the world of craft over the past few years. They have already been included in two major museum exhibitions and in several magazine articles. Pushing the boundaries of today’s studio craft concepts, the pieces are the result of a unique combination of design and technology that the two men, friends since they were teenagers, developed together. These extraordinary forms are painstakingly constructed of carbonfiber-reinforced polymer, paper, bronze and exotic woods

“breath” that animates each work.

Ancient ceramic traditions of Japan have been a powerful formative influence in contemporary ceramic practice. When Peter Callas studied pottery in Japan, he learned traditional firing in the anagama kiln, then built the first anagama kiln in the United States in 1976.

Lisa Cecere of Wall Township has made several kimono-inspired sculptural works created during her recent artist residency at Shigariki. Thaddeus Erdahl constructs large-scale heads and figures in his Princeton studio. A more ritual conflict is implied in Vicky Smith’s prize-winning Chess Set, where facing teams of chess characters are all set up for battle.

James Jansma has been developing stunning wall works, substantial and colorful clay paintings, in his Hopewell studio. Pam Lethbridge and Scott Rosenthal collaborated on a playful series of sculptures which were exhibited at Snyderman Works Gallery in Philadelphia last year. Laura Demme teaches workshops in the Philadelphia.

Both Laura and Vicky Smith are associated with the Cheltenham Art Center. Ingrid Jordan and Mike Welliver are well known in Mercer County. Rosanne Ebner brings her sculpture from New York City. Fran Leyenberger produces an abundance of ware in her Yardley studio.

Ellarslie in Cadwalader Park, Trenton, NJ (609) 989-3632. ellarslie.org

Plexus table of birch wood and carbon fiber.

from carefully selected trees—all part of Geva/Goldner’s efforts to bring symbolism and meaning to objects of everyday life.”

Goldner and Geva handcraft innovative furniture, sculpture and jewelry primarily out of exotic woods and carbon fiber. Goldner studied mechanical and industrial engineering at the Ben-Gurion University. Geva, an artist, studied industrial design at the Holon Institute of Technology. Together they founded “Life Assistant,” with the mission of developing and designing technological innovations for an aging population, and ABA Science Play, where they develop projects for cutting-edge playgrounds. Moderne Gallery, 111 N. Third St., Philadelphia.

Through May 6.

Breath of Fire at Trenton City Museum

“Winter Vignette,” 24x18 inches.

A dozen regional ceramic artists are currently showing at the Trenton City Museum, Ellarslie in Cadwalader Park, through April 30. The show features flasks, urns, a chess set and sculptural forms.

Most of the artworks included in this show depict or imply the body, whether literally or metaphorically. Each handmade hollow form encloses air within it—the

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Thaddeus Erdahl, “The Deal”

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EXHIBITIONS

16th Annual Arts Alive!

Downtown Quakertown, PA 215-536-2273 QuakertownAlive.com Saturday, May 21, 10:00 AM- 4:00 PM (Rain date May 22) Presented by Quakertown Alive!, the juried art show and Spring festival will delight visitors with the sights, sounds, and tastes of Upper Bucks County. Artisans, local businesses, and community organizations will be out in force along Broad St. from Hellertown Ave. to Fourth St. to entertain visitors. A wide variety of artisans will be showcased at this year’s event: handcrafted jewelry, furniture, and decorative home items as well as fine art will be available. True treasures and unique finds can be found along Broad St. in the many booths and shops. All of the local merchants invite visitors to browse their offerings, event specials and extra goodies. Many local and neighboring merchants will have booths set up. This is an exciting family-friendy event, come explore.

Laura Baring-Gould, Boston MA, metal

Morven in May: A Celebration of Art, Craft and Garden Morven Museum & Garden 55 Stockton Street, Princeton, NJ 609-924-8144 www.morven.org May 7, & 8 One of New Jersey’s most anticipated spring rituals, Morven in May, is a juried exhibition & sale of contemporary, American-made fine craft and welcomes a select group of 35 professional fine craft artisans from around the country. Mediums include glass, ceramics, decorative and wearable fiber, mixed media, jewelry, furniture and basketry, all displayed in gallery-style booths in a grand tent on the museum’s Great Lawn. The fun kicks off with a Friday evening preview party, and then opens to the public for two days of art and garden treasure hunting.

Proceeds from Morven in May help fund the museum’s exhibitions, historic gardens, and educational programs.

Heirloom Plant Sale. Morven will also offer for sale a distinct collection of plants for your garden. These include fragrant heirloom flowers, unique new varieties of annuals and perennials, carefully chosen flowering shrubs, and select plants from Morven’s own gardens.

CRAFT SHOW AND PLANT SALE PUBLIC HOURS 5/7, 10–5:00; 5/8, 10–4. Craft Show Admission: $10, $8 for Friends of Morven (purchase tickets at tent entrance) Children ages 12 and under, FREE; Plant Sale Only: FREE

Kari Lonning, Ridgefield CT, basketry

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Rachel Calderin

51st Annual Bethlehem Fine Art & Craft Show Bethlehem Fine Arts Commission Main Street, Historic Bethlehem, PA BFAC-LV.org May 7 & 8 Sat. 10am-5pm, Sun. 11am-5pm Held over Mother’s Day weekend, the sidewalk art show is a celebration of the finest local and regional artists. Over 80 juried artists and craft artisans participate each year. Judging takes place on Saturday and prizes are awarded that evening at a reception sponsored by the Bethlehem Fine Arts Commission. Stop by Booth #27 to observe the Artist in Residence at work. Families are invited to take part in the Children’s Art Activities. Join in on fun, interactive art projects or make mom a handmade gift or card. Local musicians will perform along the show route. Visit the information booth to view this years special piece of art to be raffled during the show.

Bethlehem boast great restaurants, shops and a rich history. It’s a perfect opportunity to enjoy a wonderful day in Historic Downtown Bethlehem.

Pam Cummings

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THEATER VALLEY

CITY

Gem of the Ocean Gem of the Ocean is the most mythic of August Wilson’s ten decade-by-decade plays about African-Americans in 20th-century Pittsburgh. It revolves around Aunt Ester, a soul washer who claims to be 285 years old, which would make her Methuselah’s great-greatgreat grandchild. Her clients include Solly Two Kings, a former slave who conducted the Underground Railroad, and Citizen Barlow, who is instructed to cleanse his sins on the bottom of the ocean, the site of a treasure chest of African spirituality.

Lehigh University’s production of Gem is an extended family affair. Aunt Ester is played by Kashi Johnson, a Lehigh theater teacher and a veteran actor/director. Her academic colleague Darius Omar Williams, a poet and a playwright, plays Solly Two Kings, who doubled as a Union scout during the Civil War. Director Akin Babatunde, a Lehigh artist-in-residence, mentored Williams in the early 1990s at a Mississippi theater where he directed an all-black Death of a Salesman.Gem is the fourth Wilson play for Babatunde, who grew up in Brooklyn as Charles Royall. During his long, distinguished career he’s been a company member at LaMama, the vaunted theater lab, and the author of an original play about pioneering black Shakespeareans. (April 8-10 and 13-16, Lehigh University) Bhudoo Last year Touchstone Theatre transformed an immensely popular 16th-century Chinese novel about a scripture-seeking monk and his merry band of demon-fighting deities into a crazy caravan that time traveled between the old Wild East and the new Wild West on Bethlehem’s Greenway, where tai chi is practiced by Chinese visitors to the nearby casino. This year the actor-led ensemble is premiering another wacky pilgrimage. Bhudoo (BOO-Doo) is an original fable from a far-away land featuring three wizards who compete in deception, delusion and divinity. It will be staged at four Bethlehem venues before it heads off to Hungary and Italy, where fables are truly fabled. (April 1-3, Ice House; April 14-17, Moravian College; April 30, Advent Moravian Church; May 1, Saucon Park) Once Once has been a hit twice, first as a surprisingly popular 2007 movie with an Oscarwinning song (“Falling Slowly”) and then as a 2012 play that won Tony awards for musical, book and six other categories. This touching, sparkling urban fairy tale follows the seesawing relationship between a fiercely talented, fiercely conflicted Dublin busker and a sublimely talented, sublimely curious Czech pianist who juggles a budding musical career with marriage and motherhood. The magnetic score was composed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the film’s co-stars. The deaths of their band and their romance are vividly chronicled in the 2011 documentary The Swell Season. (April 12, State Theatre) Bullets Over Broadway Another successful screen-to-stage crossover, Bullets Over Broadway is a flapper-era raging-ragtime comedy-caper. Woody Allen wrote the book, riffing off the screenplay he co-wrote about an anxious young playwright dealing and dueling with his show’s mobster backer, the mobster’s dimwitted showgirl girlfriend and the mobster’s muscle man, who turns out to be an excellent script doctor. The original Broadway production was directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, who did the same for The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Her lighting designer Donald Holder practiced his craft at Muhlenberg College’s summer music-theater festival. Her costume designer Santo Loquasto, a former Easton resident, cut his teeth at the Pennsylvania Playhouse in Bethlehem. (May 8, Lehigh University) Ulysses in Nighttown Theater publicist Marjorie Barkentin dramatized the storied “Nighttown” section of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, in which ad salesman Leopold Bloom and novelist Stephen Dedalus have themselves a surreal dark night of the soul in a Dublin brothel. The 1958 Broadway debut was directed by actor Burgess Meredith and starred Zero Mostel and Carroll O’Connor. (April 27-30, Muhlenberg College) ■ —Geoff Gehman 14 ■ I C O N ■ A P R I L 2 0 1 6 ■ W W W . I C O N D V . C O M ■ W W W . F A C E B O O K . C O M / I C O N D V

Machinal What began smashingly with Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour – a season of chancy, experimental theater events dedicated to The Women, EgoPo Classic Theater winds up with the work of risky and risqué playwright Sophie Treadwell and her hardcore Machinal, a fierce feminist drama written in 1928, based on a true story of a woman executed for murdering her husband. How very Susan Hayward prison movie camp.

(April 20 - May 8, Latvian Society of Philadelphia)

Mary Tuomanen, Chris Anthony. Photo by Dave Sarrafian

He Who Gets Slapped Few who hear the name “Broad Street Ministry” think “theater.” People who know BSM and its principle orchestrator, Bill Golderer, consider the non-denominational Center City church building across from the Kimmel as a safe and stylish haven for the city’s needy, be it of spiritual or culinary nourishment. The Ministry also traffics in acoustic music and punk rock shows on occasion. Almost secretly, however, the BSM has contributed to Philly’s theater scene—a modern rendition of Don Quixote, a solo work from Theatre Exile’s Artistic Director Deborah Bloch, a not-so-long-ago co-presentation of Romeo Castelucci’s On the Concept of the Face Regarding the Son of God with the Fringe Arts Festival. This month things get raucous and funny as the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective and the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts hook up on a Russian tale about a sad clown. (Through April 16, Broad Street Ministry) I Will Not Go Gently The title may come from Dylan Thomas’ poem about his dying father, but the oneactor (but several characters) show itself— from the mistress of 1812, comic theater’s best friends—finds humor in the obsessiveness of youth culture and ‘80s punk-pop with Jennifer Childs’ script focused on coming back from (or with) each topic with equal difficulty. While Childs allows herself to be steered by the best—Barrymore-winning director Harriet Powers—the actress/author heads into South Philly’s Buckeye Studio with composer/sound designer Christopher ColucJennifer Childs. Photo by John Flak. ci for an album filled with more alter egos than a Marvel comic strip. (April 21- May 15, 1812 Productions at Plays & Players Theatres) Dumpsta Players’ 20th anniversary and live finale The Dumpsta Players have been a literal and figurative trashy part of Philly’s punk theater ecology with daring, silly, sitcom-ish looks at the culture at large and this city specifically. Think Charles Ludlum meets John Waters and you’re almost there. Now, the troupe are ending their 20-year live theater run at B&B’s with a massive retrospective show before moving on to doing their colorful events live-to-tape for PhillyCam and public access TV. A must for the month. (April 20, Bob and Barbara) ■ —A. D. Amorosi

ICEPACK A.D. Amorosi on the news, nightlife and bitchiness beats

When Grammy-nominated nu-soul singer-songwriter Andra Day brought her jazzy Cheers to the Fall tour to Ardmore Music Hall at the end of March, the show didn’t win appearances from any of her album’s Philly session guests such as Questlove and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Who did show—and play, opening Day’s set—was Saleka Shyamalan, the piano-hammering daughter of Bucks County-based Sixth Sense director M. Night Shya-

(L) Saleka & M.Night Shyamalan; (R) Lyor Cohen and Jesse Lundy at Ardmore Music Hall. Photo: Kim Rosen.

malan who stood in VIP with the rest of his family and friends stuffing the Hall’s VIPlevel mezzanine. Also in attendance was hip hop music biz exec Lyor Cohen and entertainment legal eagle Simon Rosen.

Shyamalan (who occasionally goes by Saleka Night) was conversational on stage as well as off. Before playing along with Day’s band during the latter’s set, the young Shyamalan played a gorgeous buoyant set of emotive pop-soul songs that crossed the border of Carole King and Vanessa Carlton. Beyond using the classical piano chops she learned as a kid (yes, she realized that she’s still a kid at 19), Saleka’s sturdy, winnowing voice was gorgeous on angst-filled self-penned tunes such as “Unfinished Business” to the bluesy “Waited So Long.” On stage, she joked that she couldn’t talk about a “hypothetical” romance with her folks in the room. Dad wouldn’t have cared. M. Night wouldn’t offer a critique of his daughter’s performance when I caught up with him, but he did offer that he was “very very proud of her.”

For her part, Saleka—after her solo set—mentioned that, yes Day is a friend of hers for some time, and that she was intensely nervous about having her Dad in the house at Ardmore. “I’m not surprised he wouldn’t tell you what he thinks,” laughed Saleka.

“He has his own mind about things and isn’t afraid to share his opinion—which is a great thing.”While the elder Shyamalan wouldn’t discuss Wayward Pines (his television series) or his two due-for-2017 films Split (with James McAvoy and Haley Lu Richardson) or Labor of Love (re-teaming the director with Bruce Willis), the younger Shyamalan confirmed previously heard rumors that she is recording lots of new material at MilkBoy Studios on N. 7th Street in Northern Liberties Philadelphia, and that she is each session’s principle producer. “I’m young but I like that sort of control, as I know what my songs should sound like.” While she was reticent to mention when the songs would be released or through what label (if any) it is important to note that there were so many top tier music biz folks in attendance, I would be surprised if a major label deal was forthcoming. Stay tuned.

On the food front, besides the dozen or so restaurants that are opening early this spring, one big deal that is won-and-done is that Captain Jesse’s corner of 8th & Washington—a towering property of fresh seafood and produce sales—was recently sold to a New York City seafood consortium who are planning a restaurant, shop and, of course, condominium, for the property. ■ W W W . F A C E B O O K . C O M / I C O N D V ■ W W W . I C O N D V . C O M ■ A P R I L 2 0 1 6 ■ I C O N ■ 15

The List APRIL CURATED BY A. D. AMOROSI

3 David Cross The other half of HBO’s Bob and David, the star of Todd Margaret, every bad comedy’s lamest guest—his stand up is punk rock, but more Pavement, than say, Wire.

(Merriam Theatre) 4 Andrew Bird The country-classical swing violinist turned art-pop sensation croon-warbles his way into your heart every time. (Electric Factory) 6 Jonathan Richman The man behind the Modern Lovers and almost-punk-hits (“Roadrunner”) is a roadworn troubadour who’s just a bit creepy when you get close. (Union Transfer)

ents its 15th anniversary show with this area’s most strident pianist. (Philadelphia Argentine Tango School) 9 Fab Faux Late night talk show instrumentalists from Letterman and Conan O’Brien get together and play Beatles songs really well.

(Keswick) 9 Big Night Out w/Peter Wolf The once-and-still J. Geils’ lead singer makes raw knuckle R&B the way it used to be done: cold and bold. (WCL) 9 Anderson Cooper/Andy Cohen These Manhattan skyline BFFs, one CNN’s top anchor and long-time bon vivant, the

7 Acid Mother Temple You love deeply amorphous, eerily psychedelic, noise Japanese rock just as much as I do. I just know it. (Johnny Brenda’s)

other a host with the most-est who runs the Bravo network make money from their friendship. (Academy of Music) 9 Santana Guitarist Carlos Santana gathers together whatever living members of his original namesake ‘60s ensemble are left for a slithering Latino rock party. (Tower)

Back Tattoo, Schumer opens her new tour in our neck of the woods. Dig it.

(Santander Arena, Reading, PA) 7, 8 Gogol Bordello If the Pogues were Boogoslavian and not Irish, these gypsy punks would be regarded as the drunkiest rockers that ever graced the stage. (Union Transfer)

8 Dave Burrell Musical curators of the highest order, Philadelphia’s finest bookers of floating avant-garde everything Fire Museum pres16 ■ I C O N ■ A P R I L 2 0 1 6 ■ W W W . I C O N D V . C O M ■ W W W . F A C E B O O K . C O M / I C O N D V

16 Doogie Horner Doogie Horner was a humorous graphic designer for Philly’s Quirk Books (see Everything Explained Through Flowcharts: All of Life’s Mysteries Unraveled, Including Tips for World Domination and the cover for Quirk’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). As a stand-up, he applied his skills to NBC’s America’s Got Talent during its fifth season and has made regular stops at Philly’s Helium Comedy Club with his nonsensical absurdisms. That’s where Horner recorded his comedy album debut, A Delicate Man, this past November. (Norristown Theatre) 21 – May 8 Allentown Jazz Fest Performers include Steve Coleman, Jeff Tain Watts, Jojo Mayer/Nerve, Lucy Woodward, Al Chez, Laurence Hobgood, Bryan Tuk Complex, Eric Mintel Quartet, Scott Tixier, Hector Rosado, Hell’s Kitchen Funk Orchestra, Chris Cummings Trio, Tiffany Ly, B.D. Lenz, and many more. allentownjazzfest.org

7 Amy Schumer On the front end of her Comedy Central network show’s third season, the back of Trainwreck’s mega-success and an upcoming book, The Girl with the Lower

Photo: AP-Jordan Strauss

16 Nicole Henry The elegant, powerful jazz singer and LU Jazz Repertory Orchestra in concert.

(Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University)

13 Matmos This married, gay duo makes music from cut hair sounds and the tumbling tones of washing machines. (International House) 14 Boz Scaggs The Lido Shuffle never sounded lovelier or bluesier. (Keswick) 15 Iggy Pop/Josh Homme If this is the last time we see or hear the Ig, his Post Pop Depression album produced by Queens of the Stone Age’s Homme with a hint of the Germanic vibe Pop made famous with Bowie during their Berlin period, this one is a winner.

(Academy of Music)

22 Chuck Nice With “An Evening of Comedy to Benefit Abington Police Athletic League,” the onetime Philly comic, featured commentator on Best Week Ever and occasional CNN wonk does a mitzvah. (Keswick) 23 Trevor Noah The Daily Show may still be shaky in Jon Stewart’s host seat, but his jokes pretty much land each and every time. (SugarHouse Casino) 24 Concert The Meistersingers of Southern Lehigh High School. Cathedral of the Nativity, Bethlehem) 29 Cakes da Killa Englewood, NJ not only has a rapper; it has a great gay rapper. (Johnny Brenda’s) 28, 29 Pearl Jam Sometimes just surviving is enough.

(Wells Fargo Center) ■

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the beat VALLEY

CITY

BY GEOFF GEHMAN

BY THOM NICKELS

Martin “Marty” Baron is a veteran newspaper editor renowned for an almost rabbinical devotion to detail. There are glimmers of his obsession in Liev Schreiber’s steely, laser-cut portrayal of him in the film Spotlight, which depicts Baron supervising the Boston Globe team that painstakingly, painfully chronicled the local Archdiocese’s extensive cover-up of sexual abuse by its priests.

Baron addressed his Talmudic tendencies after a free Feb. 18 screening of the movie at Lehigh University, his alma mater. During a Q&A he cast himself as a public servant dedicated to hard work, teamwork and telling as much truth as possible. His dedication helped The Globe win a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

The Bethlehem appearance launched a whirlwind ten days for Baron, now the executive editor of The Washington Post. On Feb. 24 The Post ran his revealing, compelling article about his Spotlight experiences. He wrote that he didn’t expect a movie would be made because the main characters, pedophile priests and muckraking journalists, are generally considered box-office poison. Until he read the screenplay he didn’t know that some of the Globe’s reporters were reluctant to expose Catholic sins in a Catholic city. He agrees with journalists across the country that Spotlight is “stunningly accurate” and a much-needed boost for “this badly bruised profession.”

Baron praises Schreiber for capturing his well-known remoteness and dourness. He doesn’t mind that the actor doesn’t smile, something Baron has been known to do. He salutes a Facebook friend for insisting that Marty “is an easy audience for a joke.”

On Feb. 27 Schreiber thanked Baron in a Tweet after Spotlight won five Film Independent Spirit awards. The next night Baron returned the favor after the movie received the best-picture Oscar. His Tweet was sweet: “Awesome!”

Dave Fry has spent nearly 40 years as one of the Valley’s busiest, most beloved pied pipers. He’s united countless crowds as a children’s entertainer, folk troubadour, rock ’n’ roll teacher and co-founder of Godfrey Daniels, the roots-music haven. He’s a whiz at singing, picking guitar, joking and getting listeners of all ages to play seriously.

Fry identified himself as a playful player while accepting a lifetime achievement honor during the 17th Lehigh Valley Music Awards show in the Musikfest Café. He climaxed his speech with a story about unlikely fans. One night during Musikfest, he was approached by three teens dressed in Goth outfits of long black cloaks, chains and spikes. He expected to be harassed. Instead, he was serenaded with a lick from one of his most popular sing-alongs: “I like peanut butter, creamy peanut butter, woo!”

Karl Stirner, who died in February at age 92, personified citizenship. Over four decades he improved his adopted hometown of Easton as an inventive sculptor of recycled metal, a concerned landlord of an arts building, a curious curator, a real-estate agent without a license, a cultural shepherd without a crook, a therapist without a shingle. He was that rare person who helped save a theater’s life and lives.

I always enjoyed Karl’s unconditional kindness, salty wisdom and cranky humor. I relished these qualities while preparing a 2000 Morning Call profile pegged to Karl Stirner Month, a Valley-wide tribute. I began the story by referring to a sculpture he made from an industrial pipe, a car muffler and the ramp of a Sears delivery truck. He called the work “Each Man Is Adam” to illustrate his belief that anyone can be salvaged through creativity, hard work and hope, that everybody has a divine spark of renewal.

Vicki DaSilva specializes in photographing her illuminated verbal sculptures in established architectural settings, a process she calls light graffiti. In February the Allentown resident created quite a splash with an image of a scripted, blue-neon word outside a Manhattan building owned by Donald Trump. She used “LOSER” to trump the presidential candidate’s clichéd way of dismissing his detractors.

DaSilva should be commissioned to create a Karl Stirner homage. How about “CITIZEN KARL”? Or “EACH MAN IS ADAM/EACH WOMAN IS EVE”? ■ Geoff Gehman is the author of the memoir The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons (SUNY Press). geoffgehman@verizon.net.

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If Mayor Kenney gets his way, Philadelphia may have the highest soda tax in the world. Kenney wants to raise the tax to an unprecedented three cents per ounce in order to fund that ambiguous money-sucking vortex known as “the schools,” namely his pre-K plan for low income students. The tax on sugary drinks, if approved, would raise the cost of some large bottles by three dollars. Sweetened iced tea will also be affected as well as mixed fruit drinks, which after Kenney’s tax would cost almost four dollars a bottle. City Hall is on a major brainwashing campaign to convince the public that Pre-K is essential and worth extra tax dollars.

Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez wants to provide municipal ID cards for illegal immigrants. These ID cards would provide access to city services: allow illegal immigrants to file police and fire reports; open bank accounts; get gym discounts; and museum memberships. Cross the border illegally and you are rewarded a gym membership. It’s about time we broke the law so that we can finally get a coveted Planet Fitness card. Sanchez’s bill has the support of the mayor, who sponsored a similar bill in 2013.

A recent philly.com headline caught our attention: 30 Vetri Employees Lose Job after Immigration and Background Checks. Marc Vetri sold his business to Urban Outfitters in 2015, never suspecting that the new owners would discover that 30 of his employees had entered the country illegally and working for his company. Vetri expressed shock at Outfitters’ purge: “We wish all these workers could continue to work for us. They’re so loyal, and they’re hard workers. Some of them have been over to my house, and I bring my kids to their houses for play dates. It’s very sad.”

The 2016 Saint Patrick’s Day Parade honored the martyrs of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin. Jane Duffin, editor of The Irish Edition, gave us VIP passes to the reviewing stand where we spent three hours gazing at the back of Mayor Kenney’s head. The Mayor was in front of us at ground level on a single chair, his presence inconspicuous at first. No security detail, no entourage. He blended into the scenery as if he were Mr. Joe Average, a far cry from the previous Mayor who was always on a public peacock strut. Once people discovered the Mayor’s whereabouts, shouts of “Hi Jimmy!” filled the air. When a loud ceremonial gun went off, the blast caused Jimmy to lose his balance and fall off his chair. Dazed, he looked in our direction, shook his head and laughed. “I thought for a moment it was an execution firing squad!” he exclaimed, relieved that he wasn’t on the ground. It was ironic that no photographer was present to catch this rare moment, but we saw and heard it all. We like Mayor Kenney’s good humor (despite our criticisms of some of his policies), and were quick to tell him that we would do anything to protect him.

We missed the memorial celebration for West Philly artist Joseph Tiberino at Dirty Frank’s, although we hear that the bar was so packed a passerby might have thought the drinks were free that day. Artists from all over came to honor a city legend who along with his long deceased wife, Ellen Powell Tiberino, came to be known as The West Philly Wyeths. The Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum was founded in 1999, several years after Ellen Powell’s death from cancer at 54.

The tragic death of Colin McGovern, 24, stabbed to death in Rittenhouse Square during a fight over a hockey hat, should be a warning to students who like to bar hop through Center City in drunken groups. McGovern was with friends at 3 AM when he said something provocative to 40-year-old Steven E. Simminger because he didn’t like the hat he was wearing. Simminger did not take the high road, said something back, and then the two wound up fighting until McGovern wound up dead. Urban psychopaths come in many guises, so it’s wise to curtail beer-fueled snarky comments when you come across a solitary misfit in your travels. ■ Thom Nickels is the author of Philadelphia Architecture, Tropic of Libra, Out in History, Spore, and recipient of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architecture Journalism Award. thomnickels1@aol.com

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FILM KERESMAN ON FILM REVIEW BY MARK KERESMAN

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My Golden Days

ONE OF THE STAPLES of film is the coming-of-age story, where our Hero/Heroine (or plural) goes from the age of innocence into the age of awareness. Summer of ’42, The Last Picture Show, Liberty Heights, Federal Hill (a fine, underrated film), and To Sir With Love are examples of this genre. The French import My Golden Days is another such, just released on these shores. The focus is primarily on Paul Dedalus (young: Quentin Dolmare; grown: Mathieu Almaric) as he discovers love, or something like it.

It begins as the adult Dedalus, a diplomat, is detained by mysterious authorities as it seems there is another Paul Dedalus traveling internationally…and so begins our tale.

Paul is an unhappy child—his birth mother is dead, he hates his stepmother, and there’s trouble at school for him and his younger brother. When Paul was still in high school, he and his friend Marc went on a school trip to Russia, and they were recruited, as it were, by an association whose aim was to help oppressed Jews leave Mother Russia. (This is set in the 1980s, when signs reading “Save Soviet Jewry” could be seen in many American Jewish neighborhoods.) We get a bit of another genre, the International Caper film—but these lads aren’t smuggling plutonium or bio-weapons, but passports and money for anxious Jewish folk to fly the coop. It could get unpleasant if they’re caught….still, teenage French students aren’t exactly up at the top of the KGB security risks list. Back in Paris he meets Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), a lovely blond straight out of Unhinged Gal casting—she smokes a lot, is frequently contrary, neurotic, moody, and sarcastic. If you, Dear Reader, think she is going to be the great love of Paul’s life, haunting him into adulthood, you’d be right. Paul courts her in a manner befitting French film—he carries on with lots of pseudo-profound babble and turns everything into, in Hunter Thompson’s phrase, a mind-bending crisis. Paul, too, is an archetype— the Sensitive, Intelligent Fellow Who Thinks Too Much..

The good: My Golden Days captures lots of the awkwardness, silliness, desperation,

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rebelliousness, and confusion of youth—kids buy dope from dangerous dealers, guys battle (sometimes literally) for the attentions of a young lady, and there are achingly familiar scenes of schoolyard conversation and party scenes generously displayed. The not-so-good: The story is told in flashback—but unlike most movies with flashbacks, there’s precious little cutting to the present, almost rendering present-day Paul an afterthought (until the very end) or plot device. But the real problem is that these youths do not talk like kids—they talk as if they are in a remake of 400 Blows or Breathless or if they were philosophy majors in college trying to impress each other. A teenage girl says to teenage guy: “Your soul is small.” Uh-huh. Paul declares his love for Esther: “My eyes devour you.” Her response, suitably cold and existential in tone, “I have that effect on people.” Guy asks girl question fraught with portent—slight meaningful pause, then the reply: “Oui, the word hanging in the air like the toll of a bell.

The pacing of the film is, to put it mildly, ploddingly slow—it’s not that the movie itself is dull, but many scenes go on for too long, and there are too many pauses between lines of conversation. Would you be surprised to know young Paul spends time with a curmudgeonly professor (you know, one that never gets out of her comfy chair) who challenges his intellect in a kindly yet snotty manner? Further, Paul, like many teenage boys that think too much (and I ought to know, because I was one myself), can be a bit excruciating, and Esther seems at times a fickle jerk. I couldn’t wait for these characters to become “adults” so I could chill with my good-for-nothing drinking buddies or watch something uplifting, like A Streetcar Named Desire. Francophiles might find this of interest. ■ Mark Keresman is a freelance writer and regular contributor to ICON, downBeat, Paste, SF Weekly, and Jazz Review, and has written liner notes to over a dozen albums of varied genres. He lives in Chicago.

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FILM CINEMATTERS REVIEW BY PETE CROATTO

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Take Me to the River

RITER-DIRECTOR MATT SOBEL’S Take Me to the River ends with a family driving into the vast unknown, accompanied by the opening plucks of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” That will trouble viewers craving reassurance. Many, I hope, will bristle in recognition. Families don’t harbor secrets as much as they bury troubling events to sustain a happy façade. Sobel hands us a shovel and walks off. The mix of uncertainty and the familiar hits home—pun fully intended. We not only wonder about this family, but our own.

At a family reunion in the Nebraska farmland, 17-year-old Ryder (Logan Miller) and his parents, Cindy and Don (Robin Weigert and Richard Schiff), appear to be the lone out-of-towners. The vibe there is friendly if distant. Ryder, who is gay, gets teased for his fire engine red short shorts and funky sunglasses from the Elton John Collection. But with his mop of golden California hair and his drawing abilities, Ryder is quite the artsy attraction—especially among his girl cousins.

One of them, nine-year-old Molly (Ursula Parker of Louie) takes an interest that ranges between sweet and knowingly coquettish. Ryder indulges her, tying her shoes and taking her to an old barn on their grandmother’s property. She wants to reach a bird’s nest on the ceiling. Ryder puts Molly on her shoulders. Then, a scream pierces the tranquil barbecue. Molly runs toward her family. She sports a splash of blood on her summer dress.

Keith (Josh Hamilton), Molly’s father, is incensed. Ryder doesn’t know what happened: what he experienced doesn’t match the outcome. Cindy, in a clipped, profes22 ■ I C O N ■ A P R I L 2 0 1 6 ■ W W W . I C O N D V . C O M ■ W W W . F A C E B O O K . C O M / I C O N D V

sional voice, asks to examine Molly. That request is met with more anger. Ryder begs his mother to let him announce his gayness. It’s met with silence. So he runs off. Problems follow Ryder and—as a new day arrives—multiply. Everybody is off. Ryder’s mom follows him, offering to spend the night. Her tone is more sugary than parental, even when the family car is vandalized. Keith (played with a captivating mix of redneck menace and down-home charm by Hamilton) wants to see Ryder, but for lunch with his family. The invitation is delivered by one of his daughters with the warmth of an IRS auditor.

In his debut feature, Sobel keeps us off-balance beyond his characters’ behaviors (agendas?). There are barely any musical cues to cushion us for a payoff. We sit and agonize. Take Me to the River begs for gothic treatment—shadows and harsh angles—but it’s mostly sunny and bright. There are no tells here, making it easy to sympathize with Ryder. He’s thrown into an unknown country without a map. Sobel’s decision to exclude Cindy and Keith’s mom from the proceedings shows us that everyone—even the adults—are on their own. Nobody is escaping this family visit unscathed.

What Ryder faces are the twisted and feral stories behind every family, the ones that lurk beneath the assumed togetherness. Sobel explores that dynamic with restraint, declining to offer every detail—all the better to capture that existential frustration. (At 84 minutes, the movie is necessarily lean.) Sobel’s disdain for gooey proclamations or hugs turns Take Me to the River into an effectively unsettling parable on why we can’t go home again. ■

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interview A. D. AMOROSI

PAPA BEAR

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Multi-faceted guitarist Tony Levin of the progressive rock bands Stick Men and King Crimson has played on more than 500 albums, including those by Cher, Pink Floyd, Yes, and Buddy Rich; written a tone poem about whale-watching; invented Funk Fingers (sticks attached to the fingers of bass guitar players make percussive sounds); became a blogger in 1996, long before there was such a thing as a web blog; and even began his own record label, Papa Bear Records.

ONY LEVIN IS A monster when it comes to the bass—mastering it, taming and terrorizing it, remaking it a new in his lean, mean image via his early adoption of the Chapman Stick and the tap dancing Funk Fingers. Since the late ‘60s, the fluid Levin has played and toured with more greats and not-so-greats than easily listed, cutting quite a sartorial figure as a tall, thin bald man with a sculpted, bushy mustache. Along with his work as bassist for the still-touring King Crimson and as stalwart sideman for Peter Gabriel (who has summer dates in Philly with Sting), Levin hosts a series of solo albums and self-starting recordings as Liquid Tension Experiment, the Levin Brothers (with keyboard playing sibling Peter) and as Stick Men. That last rhythm-heavy guise brings him to the area this month, April 13 at New Hope’s Havana and April 14 at New Jersey’s Roxy & Dukes.

Did you officially start with classical music? I asked this question last week of Andrew Bird, a violinist currently known for country swing and pop—what was the last classical piece that turned you on, that made you long for the form?

I still listen to Classical a lot, and in Stick Men shows we sometimes do our version of Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite.” It’s crazy with only three players. So yes, it’s a part of my musical life even after these many years of not playing classical. You ask the last piece that got me involved… well, it’s not something unusual, but every morning when I go into my studio and start to organize the day’s work, it’s Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that I put on to help me focus.

I’ve read on more than one occasion that you fronted a barbershop quartet. Having spoken with many artists within doo wop and vocalese, as well as seeing that a capella’s tradition has been reborn—albeit in a slick fashion—was barbershop singing a tough road to hoe?

I haven’t done a barbershop arrangement in some time, but yes, I’ve had fun through the years with them, and you never know when the chance will come up to throw one in. I‘ve done that with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, and my own band. It’s a fun form both to perform and to hear.

Your first gig was Aha!, with the Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston’s band. What was that switch to rock/prog on such as high level like—Preston having just come off the Zappa gig must have been akin to Jimmy Page leaving the Yardbirds, no?

Don Preston was, and is, a very special, free-thinking artist. He took that band in some unusual directions, and even though we were spectacularly unsuccessful, it was a great experience for me. By the way, the [band’s] full name was Aha, the Attack of the Green Slime Beast and the other members were Ray Collins and Billy Mundi, both alumni of Zappa’s band.

Do you wish that more artists would call on you to play tuba?

The truth is, since I have grown baffi [mustache] it’s hard to get a good sound on the tuba, and that’s a long time. I’d say even if I was asked to play it, I’d be wise to play something else.

Why do you to choose to be the band’s leader on an album or tour?

Through a lot of years in music, I’ve found that I’m equally happy in any of the three show situations—being the backup player to an artist, or in an equal band, or being what we call the front man. It’s the music that captivates me and if that’s good, I’m a happy musician. It’s a timely subject since in our Stick Men touring I’ve usually been the one talking between pieces, but in the last year we tried sharing the spotlight among the three of us, and found it’s a better show that way. Okay, in Italy it will be mostly me because the others don’t speak Italian.

You’ve been doing shows and albums with your brother Pete, more so now within the last few years than before. What motivated that union?

A few years ago we had the idea to return to the music that we both loved as young boys. That’s a long time ago. We did the ‘smooth jazz’ of the 1950s, and featured melodic songs with quite short solos—some tracks only three or four minutes long. The group I really liked most then had a great bass player, Oscar Pettiford, who also played cello. So, with me on cello and Pete on keyboards, we wrote new music in that style, added a sax player, and made, I think, quite a nice album with no

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thought about what the market wants or the jazz scene is into. This was an album from the heart. And for that same reason, we decided to make it an LP, too. We toured some last year but, alas, my touring schedule this year doesn’t allow time for it, so it’ll be 2017 before we re-convene the band.

I think of Pete as a jazz player at heart, who also plays rock very well. And I’m a rock player at heart, who can play some jazz. So in some ways Pete is truer to the form than I am. I’m not speaking here about our album together, which was definitely within a form. Probably from my experience in progressive rock, I’m usually pretty open to stepping into unusual territory musically.

You’ve lent your unique sound to many songwriters.

I don’t want a comparison, but take David Bowie, Paul Simon, Lou Reed and the McGarrigle Sisters—what made the process of playing with them different?

The first point to make is that I’ve been very lucky to have wonderful artists choose me, or happen across me, for their music. What happens with me as a bass player is simply that I’m a big fan of good music, so I hear the song, whether it’s a famous artist or an unknown one, and I begin to internally fashion a bass part that seems really good for that song. I don’t come in with ideas about how I’ll play, that’s determined by the music. Then in the studio the process of making an album varies a lot depending on the album. With some artists, they want to have input to the bass part—certainly with Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel. With David Bowie, he seemed happy to let me make up the bass part. With the McGarrigles— who are great—there wasn’t much time in the studio, so the parts came together quickly. That happens on a lot of recordings. And on the one track I played for Lou Reed’s Berlin, Lou wasn’t there, just the producer and me.

How was playing with jazz flutist Herbie Mann?

Very cool. I did a few albums, but a lot of touring.

Very loose and fun music, with the band changing each week depending on who was free to go out on the road.

He just wanted a good rhythm section and left us free to come up with the grooves, then he’d play over it.

>

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Stick Men Tony Levin, Markus Reuter, and Pat Maschelotto

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bad movie REVIEW BY MARK KERESMAN

The Brothers Grimsby WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES FORCE TWO dissimilar types to join forces for some sort of greater good, wow, what an opportunity for hilarity…especially when one of the screenwriters has a cheery disdain for, dare this writer say, good taste. Sacha Baron Cohen has been responsible for some genuinely funny movies, Bruno, Borat, and The Dictator—like our South Park lads, Cohen wove deranged satire about politics, celebrity culture, cultural stereotypes, and just about everything. But there was a sense of intelligence about them and even something of a moral center. The Brothers Grimsby, however, pushes the envelope of sanity and taste—but there’s nothing in the envelope.

Brothers Grimsby is for those who find Rob Schneider and Tom Green “comedies” too artsy-fartsy or high-falootin’ for their taste. Next to this, the with-no-socially-redeemingqualities Deadpool—which I highly recommend—is a Merchant-Ivory production, a documentary by Les Blank or Errol Morris, and a slice of snob-appeal indie cinema scored by David Byrne rolled into one.

Actor/writer Cohen plays Nobby, a broad caricature of North England football hooligans, a supposedly loveable bonehead; character actor Mark Strong plays Sebastian, an icily suave agent for the anti-terrorist branch of MI6, the same organization for which James Bond plies his trade—separated as wee lads, the former spent years searching for the latter. Nobby finds Sebastian just in time to cause the latter to botch a crucial shot during an operation to foil an assassination. So Sabastian accidentally kills the wrong guy and is now on the run from his bosses who are convinced that this Ace Operative has either been turned and/or has become embarrassment and so issue what amounts to a kill-on-sight order.

Does this give the different as night as day brothers a chance for re-bonding? What do you think? These scenes would be touching, actually—if the parts before and after

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them weren’t dedicated to the worst gross-out humor imaginable. Nobby introduces Sebastian to his children, one of whom is nicknamed Luke, short for leukemia. When he introduces his wife Dawn, played by the adorably roly-poly Aussie actress Rebel Wilson, Sebastian asks, “When are you expecting?” To which she replies, “I’m not pregnant, I’m fucking fat!”

During a gunfight, Sebastian gets shot with a poison dart and will die in less than two minutes unless Nobby sucks out the poison from an area that should not be mentioned in a family-oriented publication as this. I, Dear Reader, will leave this horror to your imagination while I swig from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Usually in comedies like this, the dumber half will at some point rise to the occasion and impress the smarter half—this doesn’t really happen. Nobby starts out as an oblivious bonehead and simply becomes a more dangerous bonehead. If you’ve ever wondered just how funny a child in a wheelchair being used as a weapon can be, have I got a film for you!

Of course movies like this have to have “straight men”—the serious, not-intentionally-funny characters off of which the alleged jokes can be bounced. Here, Strong is the main straight man, and for such an accomplished pro spy/assassin, shows remarkable restraint in not throttling his brother. Isla Fisher and Ian McShane portray Sabastian’s gal-pal and boss respectively, and they’ve little to do but look nonplussed, and Penelope Cruz (spoiler, like you care: she’s the villain) must have really needed a paycheck for her 14 minutes of screen time.

In conclusion, this writer read that the residents of Grimsby, a for-real English town from which the brothers hail, are upset at the way their town is portrayed. If I lived there I’d want the head of Cohen (who co-wrote this atrocity) on a stick…heck, I don’t live there and I want to see his head on a stick. ■

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FILM FILM ROUNDUP

Francofonia

CURRENT FILMS REVIEWED BY KEITH UHLICH

Francofonia (Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov).

Starring: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Benjamin Utzerath. The great Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov returns to a museum setting in his latest feature, though sans the single-shot gimmick that helped sell his dense, hypnotic Russian Ark (2002) to American audiences. That doesn’t make this docudramatic exploration of the complicated history of France’s Louvre any less compelling. The primary focus is the strange friendship that blossomed between one of the institution’s directors, Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and Nazi soldier Franz Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) during WWII, which resulted in numerous works of art being saved from destruction by SS forces.

But there’s much, much more to this lilting essay-film, which also makes room for intimate considerations of the Louvre’s many masterworks (cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel photographs the paintings and sculptures with an astonishing, probing clarity) as well as some cheekily fanciful asides involving a ghostly Napoleon Bonaparte. [N/R] ★★★★1/2

Hockney (Dir. Randall Wright). Documentary. Randall Wright’s feature-length portrait of English artist David Hockney adheres, sometimes to a fault, to the talkingheads style of most nonfiction filmmaking.

Yet it still admirably aims to meet its subject on his varied playing field. (A few transitional sequences burst with vivid hues, as if imitating one of Hockney’s colorful canvases.) There are a plethora of testimonials from friends and colleagues, as well as intimate home movies, shot on both film and video, that show the delights and discontents of being a virtuoso. (Most fascinating are the sections that deal with Hockney’s consuming depression and his rocky relationship with his young protégé and lover Peter Schlesinger.) The man himself also speaks frequently; he’s much older and world-weary, and minus the bleachedblonde hair and thick black spectacles that defined his quirky fashion sense. But it’s clear—inspringly so—that he’s still forever in search of ways to push his art forward, in no way content to rest on his laurels.

[N/R] ★★★1/2

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Remember (Dir. Atom Egoyan). Starring: Christopher Plummer, Dean Norris, Martin Landau. Since his awards-feted crossover hit The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan has been applying his chilly, intellectualized aesthetic to increasingly trashy projects. The results have been, to say the least, mixed and often risible. Something about this confidently absurd thriller, however, gets under the skin.

It helps to have as compelling a leading man as Christopher Plummer, playing an Auschwitz survivor with dementia who hunts down the Nazi soldier, now hiding in America, who killed his family. The premise is ridiculous and exploitative, but Egoyan treats it as if it were grand tragedy—a potent approach, as it turns out. As the story gets sillier (the climax, not to put too fine a point on it, is a doozy among doozies) the theme of history as a fluid construct forever being rewritten only deepens. [R] ★★★1/2 Sunset Song (Dir. Terence Davies). Starring: Agyness Deyn, Kevin Guthrie, Peter Mullan. Every frame of British writer-di-

rector Terence Davies’s latest overwhelms with its visual scope and emotional grandeur. This adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel follows the coming-of-age of Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), the daughter of an abusive farmer father (Peter Mullan) who finds love and learns to fend for herself circa WWI. The images, as usual with Davies, are consistently stunning, beautifully filmed on both 65mm celluloid and hi-def digital, and rapturous in the way they slow down time (and its inevitable passage) to a poetic essence. More impressive is how Davies gives both the joyous and tragic extremes of Chris’s journey equal weight. She’s no naïve heroine being set up for a fall, but a flesh-and-blood woman who experiences love and heartbreak to their fullest capacity. The film’s middle section, which involves Chris’s marriage to an adoring local boy (Kevin Guthrie) soon to fight in the European trenches, is especially affecting in its vision of romantic bliss and ecstasy.

[N/R] ★★★★★

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FILM REEL NEWS RECENTLY RELEASED DVDS REVIEWED BY GEORGE OXFORD MILLER

Phoenix

Phoenix (2015) ★★★★★ Cast: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf Genre: Drama Rated PG-13 Nelly (Hoss) a German-Jewish nightclub singer, was one of the lucky ones who survived the Nazi concentration camps. Yet she lost her family, her career, her groveling husband Johnny (Zehrfeld) who ratted her to the SS, and even her identity. Wounds left her face, and her sense of self, horribly scarred and unrecognizable. She can’t face the future or accept the present reality, she just wants to return to her life as a happily married singer. With the help of her friend Lene (Kinzendorf), she gets reconstructive surgery and begins looking for her treacherous husband. The twist is that she will recognize him, but he won’t know her.

Denial may be one of humankind’s most powerful emotional survival strategies, but it comes with a debilitating debt that only forgiveness can repay. This story of betrayal, survival, guilt, and the need for normalcy touches the human emotions that define our lives.

East Side Sushi (2015) ★★★★ Cast: Diana Elizabeth Torres, Yutaka Takeuchi, Rodrigo Duarte Clark Genre: Drama MPAA rating: None Is the world ready for a Latina sushi chef? Apparently not, even in California with firmly entrenched Asian and Hispanic populations, culture, and popular cuisines. This feel-good foodie movie has more on its menu than an underdog chef with an appetite for dreaming big. Juana (Torres), a single mom and gym janitor by day, rises before dawn to work with her father on his fruit cart. When she gets robbed, a door cracks open in the dead-end trajectory of her life. She sees a help-wanted sign in a sushi restaurant and impulsively hits up the owner for the job. Naturally, the owner resists hiring a woman, much less a Latina, to make authentic Japanese sushi, and her father (Clark) thinks her place is in a taqueria.

Juana discovers that society’s gender and ethnic limitations are more challenging than crafting a sushi roll.

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The Hateful Eight (2015) ★★★★ Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Walton Goggins Genre: Western drama Writer and Directer, Quentin Tarantino.

Rated R Set in post-Civil War Wyoming, this fusion of a John Ford western and Agatha Christie mystery pits eight unsavory characters trapped in a log cabin during a blizzard. We’ve got a bounty hunter (Russell) with his femme fatale fugitive (Leigh), a Union soldier (Jackson), a Confederate general (Dern) and rebel renegade (Goggins), the local hangman (Roth), and other nefarious miscreants. As the blizzard rages outside, a hateful rage incinerates the eight trapped inside. Tension intensifies and violence erupts in typical Quentin Tarantino dialogue-heavy, bloodbath fashion. Characters reveal their complex backstories with a conflicting mixture of deadpan humor and brutal violence. At one point in the movie’s production all the Navajo extras walked off in protest of the film’s disrespect to their culture. Likewise, violencesensitive viewers might leave the theater.

Creed (2015) ★★★★★ Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson Genre: Drama Rated PG-13 After six Rocky Balboa movies, the victorious underdog theme of the franchise is ingrained in popular culture’s collective memory, especially Philadelphia’s. The latest undertaking follows the formula, yet looked at from another angle, is about adopted family. Family has to take you in, but friends have a choice.

So did Creed’s wife who rescued his love child Adonis (Thompson) from prison.

So did Rocky (Stallone) who agreed to mentor the aspiring fighter. As so did Adonis who adopted Rocky as the father he never knew. This character-driven study deeply explores the personal needs and motivations of the aspiring young fighter, the aged champion, and the people they love. The original Rocky won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976. Forty years later, the handoff is complete with Stallone netting a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. ■

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MUSIC AN ECLECTIC ASSORTMENT REVIEWED BY MARK KERESMAN

Bill Frisell ★★★★★ When You Wish Upon A Star Okeh Guitarist Bill Frisell is, naturally, one of America’s ace jazz guitarists, and one of the reasons—aside from his inspired and concise technique and uniquely airy sound (plus he can play both sweet and dirty)—is Frisell’s embrace of nearly ALL

ments and production impart a very full sound. Frisell & company play faithful to the originals—Ennio Morricone’s “Once Upon A Time in the West Theme” remains ominously creepy but now there’s an offsetting lilt to it—but expand on them as well, taking some of the tunes where they’ve never been before. Fun for hepcats of all ages. (16 tracks, 64 min.) okehrecords.com Tortoise ★★★1/2 The Catastrophist Thrill Jockey Tortoise is a band (mostly) from Chicago whose music defies easy categorization. Primarily instrumental (there are two vocals here), Tortoise slice and dice aspects of rock, jazz, R&B, dub, electroni-

music, not just jazz. He recorded a John Lennon tribute disc and has worked with figures disparate as John Zorn, Elvis Costello, Ron Carter, and Lucinda Williams. When You Wish is another kind of “tribute” set, one where Frisell interprets some iconic soundtrack music.

From the brisk gallop of the “Bonanza Theme” to the slightly-off-kilter “Shadow of Your Smile” to the sultry “You Only Live Twice,” the latter two featuring the cool, Helen Merrill-like vocals of Petra Haden. Frisell works with a small group— viola, bass, drums, and Haden (singing words and wordlessly) but the arrangeCORRECTION The wrong photo of Allison Miller ran with the review of her latest CD, Otis Was a Polar Bear, in the March issue. Below is the correct photo.

Allison Miller.

ca, and soundtrack music (especially that of Ennio Morricone and Howard Shore) until the distinctions between them blur together in a dizzyingly pleasing manner.

“Shake Hands With Danger” mixes a thudding, doom-laden, almost metal-like beat with cyclic, metallic sounds and shimmering, tense melodramatic slabs of guitar, ideal for a to-be-filmed thriller. The loping, loopy “Tesseract” evokes the glory daze of Chick Corea’s and John McLaughlin’s fusion wizardry but seen/heard through a prism. Of the vocal selections, “Rock On” is the early ‘70s hit by David Essex given a wry, slightly surreal reading and “Yonder Blue” is a hazy, hot-fun-inthe-summertime slice of psychedelic soul, featuring the slightly husky, soothing voice of Georgia Hubley (of Yo La Tengo), sounding like a lost gems by The Rascals or Sly & the Family Stone as remembered from a long ago dream. While Catastrophist doesn’t reach the heights of previous Tortoise albums—sometimes there’s more of a “quirk factor” than the organic, naturalistic flow of TNT and Millions Now Living…—it’s still a fascinating, stimulating, and unpredictable listen. (11 tracks, 44 min.)

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Mavis Staples ★★★★1/2 Livin’ On a High Note AntiA member of the legendary Staple Singers and a solo performer, Mavis Staples is one of America’s treasures, a singer that strides and blurs the divides between the secular and the Sacred, the dirt on the streets and the Divine. She has a powerful, husky voice—I was tempted to say “soulful,” which it is, but Staples was one of the singers that virtually defined the style

known as rhythm & blues (later known as soul) in the 1960s. Given rich-but-not-excessive, sympathetic production from guitarist/songwriter M. Ward (who also has a musical partnership with Zooey Deschanel as She & Him) and a batch of songs written for Staples by Ward, Valerie June, Nick Cave, Ben Harper, and Neko Case, Staples delivers an album embodying “old-school” musical values. Sharp, terse, and smoldering guitar, engaging choruses, soothing organ, buttery horns, gospel-charged background vocals, and above all, That Voice—like Sinatra, Elvis, Nina Simone, and Aretha in their respective primes, Staples doesn’t merely sing songs, she sings Life, about, to, and for it. If Cave’s “Beside Me” doesn’t give you pause, check yourself out with a medical professional. (12 tracks, 39 min.) anti.com Gary Lucas’ Fleischerei ★★★ s/t Cuneiform Strap yourselves in, kids, because we’re going to the center of the American Experience—I’m talking about cartoons, naturally. In the first half of the 20th century, animator/inventor/director Max Fleisher (1883-1972) gave America and the world moving pictures (animation) featuring

Popeye, Betty Boop, and Superman. As with many classic cartoons, music is a big part of the appeal, and Gary Lucas’ sextet presents a marvelous recreation of and homage to these cartoons’ soundtracks.

The songs herein draw upon Tin Pan Alley pop, Broadway pop, small-band hot jazz, blues, klezmer, ragtime, and even classical music to accent the phantasmagoric onscreen madness, and Lucas’ small combo (acoustic guitar, bass, drums, trombone, sax, drums) and singer Sarah Stiles, who perfectly recaptures the irrepressibly pert, perky, adorably naughty, wee hepkitten gal voice of Betty B (imagine an animated counterpart to Zooey Descahnnel in the 1930s, you youthful readers, you). Yes indeed, this disc is a handy-dandy time warp, and those seeking a window to our cultural past (especially if you like the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Asleep at the Wheel, Asylum Street Spankers, the early works of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, Tom Waits, and snazzy acoustic guitar a la John Fahey), this set is crazy good fun… swing it! (12 tracks, 43 min.) cuneformrecords.com Piero Umiliani ★★★1/2 Fischiando In Beat Schema Piero Umiliani (1926-2001) was an Italian composer of movie music for spaghetti Westerns (Son of Django), Euro-spy, and softcore sex movies (Orgasmo, Sex Pot— you can’t make this up, folks) in the 1960s and ‘70s, and some of his music was used on The Muppet Show. Fischiando reissues on CD an album of his instrumental music released 1969 and it’s an entertaining mélange of big band jazz, daffy pop, and pseudo-rock & roll/R&B, the latter the kind of “music” used in movies back-when to show how “hip” the filmmakers were (and no doubt cheaper that getting the rights to use the real thing). The closest modern-day equivalent would be the scores to the Austin Powers series and Tarantino’s movies. True, it’s dated but also delightfully cheesy, and Umiliani’s arrangements were outrageously clever— imagine if Neal Hefti (arranger for Count Basie and composer of the Batman TV show theme) or Gil Evans wrote the music for Car 54 Where Are You or Gilligan’s Island (or better still, Police Squad). This could be background music to the great Cocktail Party in the sky, where the guests include Troy McClure and Eva Gabor. (12 tracks, 34 min.) ishtar.it ■

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MUSIC REVIEWS OF STRAIGHT AHEAD & MODERN JAZZ BY NICK BEWSEY

Bill Charlap Trio ★★★★★ Notes From New York impulse!

There’s just something right about the way pianist Bill Charlap interprets a song. He’s revered among both musicians and singers as someone who understands

it’s over before you realize it. Sublime ballads (“Too Late Now”) mix with joyful swingers (“Tiny’s Tempo” was popularized

by Charlie Parker) and a surprise or two (John William’s “Make Me Rainbows”). The album closes with an elegant Charlap solo, “On The Sunny Side Of The Street.” (9 tracks; 52 minutes)

brates the act of discovery, of going places and experiencing life. Shore made a splash with his 2012 debut, Filaments, which demonstrated the quality and depth of his

Laurin Talese ★★★★1/2 Gorgeous Chaos self-released I have an unabashed enthusiasm for singer/songwriter Laurin Talese, a Philadelphia-based vocalist who demonstrates uncommon originality and vision on her splendid debut, Gorgeous Chaos.

She’s a co-writer on half of the album’s 12 tracks, which are boosted with tight, sophisticated arrangements and by ace accompaniment. As a singer, Talese is sure to make waves with the neo-soul ballad “Winter,” featuring a high-grooving keyboard solo by Robert Glasper, which anchors the album, and also with the jazzpop confection “Kissing A Fool,” a flawless duet she performs with Vivian Greene. I and plays the lyric as much as the melody.

Charlap carries on in the tradition of Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones, masters of playing the Great American Songbook, swinging and squeezing perfect notes out of every tune. The Trio never play songs the same way twice and if there’s even the smallest reason to catch Charlap in person, you must not deny yourself the reward of that experience.

Until then, the superb Notes From New York is the best thing to being there.

Charlap shares a telepathic connection with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington—they’ve been playing together since 1997. “I’ll Remember April” speeds along at a spirited clip, with the Trio swinging an effortless groove, stopping on a dime and a pause, before dipping back into the fast lane. On the fleet tempos, the Trio has an elastic quality. You can hear them playing together, then apart before moving back toward the center and picking up again as one voice. This is a fast, meaty recording and Nick Bewsey is a member of the Jazz Journalist’s Association and votes in the annual NPR Jazz Critics Poll and Downbeat’s Critics Poll. www.countingbeats.com

love the way Talese confidently navigates the zippy Broadway cadence of “This Love” and brings an upscale panache to “Made Up My Mind,” a swinging track with a buoyant Joe Sample-like piano solo by the remarkable Eric Wortham. The album is delivered like a Valentine and Talese’s voice carries the day, soaring with warmth, sincerity and an abundance of grace. (12 tracks; 54 minutes) (Available for download on iTunes) Julian Shore ★★★★1/2 Which Way Now? Tone Rogue A beautifully composed ensemble album from the pen and imagination of pianist Julian Shore, Which Way Now? cele-

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compositional talent, along with his skills as a leader. “Our Story Begins On The Mountain” is cinematically rendered and stocked with sweeping strings, and Shore’s warm touch at the keys makes for a welcome overture to the songs that follow. The record is resolutely pretty, yet Shore invests in a degree of depth and unifying interplay that binds the stories together with a dazzling sense of rhythm and flow. His core band—guitarist Gilad Hekselman, bassist Aidan Carroll, tenor Dayna Stephens and drummer Colin Stranahan—achieves a remarkable coherence on tracks like “Back Home” and “Across The Ice.” Sinuous horn playing, shuffling tempos, the beautiful vocals on “Alpine,” and the angular percussion of Dizzy Gillespie’s beguiling “Con Alma,” are just parts of the sonic adventure that Shore takes us on. In full, this is a luminous album from start to finish. With saxophonist Noah Preminger and percussionist Samuel Torres. (10 tracks; 59 minutes) George Coleman ★★★★ A Master Speaks Smoke Sessions Saxophonist George Coleman may

have started his career in Memphis playing with B.B. King, but by the time he arrived in New York in 1957 to play on a jazz record for the first time with Lee Morgan (City Lights, Blue Note), his star was ascendant. His brief tenure with the Miles Davis Quintet is how many jazz fans know Coleman, but the dynamic sax player soon established his own following and estimable discography. (That’s him playing tenor on Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage recording.) Now 80, Coleman betrays no sense of diminished faculty or stamina on A Master Speaks, his first album as a leader in 20 years. His tone remains deep, burnished, husky and soulful.

The album starts with a bang—an ex-

George Coleman, 1963.

tended arrangement of “Invitation” kicks off with a spirited Horace Silver-like riff played by pianist Mike LeDonne. It’s a fine groove that’s joined by bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer George Coleman, Jr. that Coleman, Sr. just glides into. It’s a syncopated swinger that lets his dark, smooth sax go on the prowl. Authentic in feeling, Coleman gives standards such as “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “Darn That Dream” a level of swing and class that they deserve along with a renewed melodic interest. Guitarist Peter Bernstein sits in on “Blues For B.B.” a stately Coleman original that fetes his former mentor in the most lyrical way, and the band wraps its up with a high-style, old-school jam, “Time To Get Down.” Coleman admits he doesn’t like to record much, but he loves to play. Lucky for us, A Master Speaks captures his voice in all its glory. (9 tracks; 66 minutes) ■

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MUSIC JAZZ LIBRARY

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BY BOB PERKINS

DEXTER GORDON

Photograph of Dexter Gordon by Herman Leonard.

I BECAME INTERESTED IN the career of Dexter Gordon when I read he was once a member of Billy Eckstine’s pioneering jazz orchestra in the early days of modern jazz.

Many great and near-great jazz artists came out of that band in the mid-1940s. Gordon, along with Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and a host of others spent time in the band before it dissolved after several years.

Few understood what that progressive jazz band was doing at the time, because socalled bebop was in its infancy and crying for public attention. Gordon was 21, and had already been maturing in several important large and small bands, including those of Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong. Even prior to developing into a seasoned musician with the those bands, he’d served a musical apprenticeship as a youngster in his hometown of Los Angeles, where his father was a doctor whose patients included Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton.

Gordon left the Eckstine band in 1945 and made New York City his home, and it was there that he began to play in clubs along fabled 52nd Street and record with Charlie Parker and other up-and-coming jazz greats, and under his own name.

Although their playing style and horn-sound differed, Gordon credited Lester Young as a major influence. Gordon’s sound was heftier than Young’s cool and languid tenor sax voice. He was also accomplished at playing a little behind the beat, and very often while engaged in interpreting one song, he would drop in recognizable sound bites from other songs. His overall sound was undeniably of his own making, as were his little musical idiosyncrasies. Some jazz critics say that the early playing of John Coltrane bore a Gordon influence.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gordon became another in a long line of talented jazz musicians who were addicted to drugs; consequently, the remainder of the decade was a struggle to kick the habit, while trying to find and sustain employment. His work schedule was broken up twice due to incarceration.

The decade of the 1960s brought better fortune in the form of a Blue Note Records contract. But 1962 saw Gordon leave the U.S. to settle in Europe, establishing home bases in Paris and Copenhagen. He remained abroad for 15 years, teaching and playing the clubs and concert dates with fellow expatriates Bud Powell, Kenny Drew, Ben Webster, Horace Parlan and Bobby Hutcherson, to name a few. He and other African American jazz musicians found Europe a much better place to ply their craft, because of racial issues here at the time, and because European audiences displayed a greater respect for jazz musicians.

Gordon visited the U.S. on occasion to record for Blue Note, the same label he recorded with in Europe. He returned home for good in 1976 and enjoyed a hero’s welcome at New York’s Village Vanguard. His career continued on a successful note through the 1970s and into the 1980s, and some of the attention he had not received over the years, came about via a role in the 1887 film, ‘Round Midnight, with Gordon starring as Dale Turner, an expatriate jazz musician. The film, said to be a thinly veiled reference to the lives of Bud Powell and Lester Young, well-known American jazz musicians who had also left the U.S. to live and work in Europe. Gordon received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal.

Had Dexter Gordon come along a little later, he might have enjoyed a dual career as a jazz musician and an actor. He was six foot-six, and photogenic, but time was not on his side. Just three years after garnering international attention for his work in Hollywood, he passed away at the age 67 in a Philadelphia hospital.

To many jazz fans Gordon will not only be known for his way with the tenor saxophone, and his academy award nomination, but also for famed jazz photographer Herman Leonard’s classic photo of him at New York’s Royal Roost—with sax in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a billow of smoke encircling him. Leonard loved to take photos of jazz artists who were smoking, allowing the smoke to add drama to his work. The photo of Gordon in this situation was his masterpiece. ■

Bob Perkins is a writer and host of an all-jazz radio program that airs on WRTI-FM 90.1, M-Th. 6–9; Sun 9–1.

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The fam Palm car tur

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MUSIC SINGER / SONGWRITER REVIEWS BY TOM WILK

Bonnie Raitt ★★★★ Dig in Deep Redwing Records Bonnie Raitt’s Dig in Deep, her first album of new material in four years, finds the veteran singer/songwriter living up to the title with a selection of songs that plays to her strengths as a guitarist and vocalist. “Unintended Consequence of Love,” one of five songs she had a hand in writing, opens the CD with a slice of feisty rhythm and blues highlighted by Mike Finnigan’s percolating organ lines.

Raitt has long had an unerring ear for choosing songs that she can make her

own. “Need You Tonight,” a No. 1 single for INXS in 1987, might seem an unlikely selection but she turns it into a sultry plea. Los Lobos’ “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes” is a tailor-made rocker for Raitt and her band while showcasing her sizzling slide guitar work. “Gypsy in Me” finds her exploring the call of the open road that is a musician’s life.

On her own songs, Raitt serves up some timely political commentary for an election year on “The Comin’ Round is Going Through.” “You got a way of running your mouth/You rant and rave, you let it all out/The thing about it is, little that you say is true,” she sings. With “The Ones We Couldn’t Be,” Raitt presents a sorrowful post-mortem on a failed relationship.

She also remains a capable balladeer on Bonnie Bishop’s “Undone,” a song of regret about actions taken in the heat of the moment. Raitt captures the tender-

ness of Joe Henry’s “You Changed My Mind,” a song of optimism about the future. 12 songs 52 minutes.

Sandy Carroll ★★★1/2 Last Southern Belle Catfood Records Last Southern Belle, the latest studio CD from Sandy Carroll, is a concept album of sorts about life below the Mason-Dixon Line, its past and present and its ups and downs. Carroll, whose songs have been recorded by bluesmen Albert King and Luther Allison, offers a clear-eyed view of Southern living.

The title track is a character sketch of a woman who “loves Elvis and Jesus and her red Cadillac” and is a fixed point in a changing age. “Times they keep changing till the old ways are gone,” Carroll observes. “Southland Rules” provides a lighter look at Southern customs that have been passed down to succeeding generations, while “Family Reunion Day” celebrates the ties that bind. On “Hallelujah Hill” and “Water Run Deep,” Carroll acknowledges the power of tradition and religion in the South. “Oh change gonna come though it sure seem slow,” she sings on the latter. It echoes William Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Carroll’s music is a mix of blues, country, rock and gospel delivered in her distinctive voice. “Boys of Shiloh” wraps up the album with a remembrance of the 1862 Civil War battle in her native Tennessee and the toll it took on the Union and Confederate soldiers. It’s a solemn conclusion to a thoughtful album. 11 songs, 43 minutes.

David G Smith ★★★ First Love Hey Dave Music Like John Prine and Guy Clark, David G Smith draws inspiration from his life and those around him. His songs on First Love capture the drama and good times, the laughter and loss that are the components of the modern world.

“Fear” describes the hesitancy in making a commitment in love and the ongoing battle between the heart and the head. Smith’s aching voice capture the emotional pain with backing vocals from Mary Gauthier. The title track mines similar emotional territory in trying to find ro-

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with “Walk the Dog Before I Sleep,” which features a reference to legendary bluesman Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.” The melodically uplifting “Nothing” is a meditation on the origin of the world and the mystery of creativity.

“God made the world out of nothing,” Cullman sings, “and nothing’s always waiting in the wings.”

“Time if There is Time” finds Cullman in an introspective state of mind as he delivers a Dylanesque series of lyrics. The Opposite of Time shows Cullman’s time has come as a recording artist. 12 songs, 44 minutes.

mance on the rebound but not always succeeding. The moving “In the Silence” describes the personal struggles in dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, a song inspired by Smith’s father who has dementia. “Questions” takes the process a step further as a boy and his grandfather try to come to terms with the premature loss of the middle generation – the boy’s father and the grandfather’s son.

Smith, whose music is a mix of folk and country styles, breaks the somber mood with some lighter songs. “Nightlife in the Stix” is a reflection on the simpler pleasures of a rural lifestyle while “I Can’t Tell” weighs the merits of telling the truth versus discretion in potentially embarrassing situations. 10 songs, 34 minutes.

Brian Cullman ★★★1/2 The Opposite of Time Sunnyside Records Like Lenny Kaye, lead guitarist for Patti Smith, and Chrissie Hynde, Brian Cullman has made the transition from music writer to musician. The Opposite of Time, Cullman’s second solo album, finds him easily moving among a variety of styles from with the help of co-producer Jimi Zhivago.

“Times Are Tight” starts off the album with a swamp-rock feel that recalls the work of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Tony Joe White. With its jangly guitar, “And She Said” switches gears for an infusion of power pop.

Cullman serves up a hypnotic blues

Rio en Medio ★★★ Rio en Medio Radio WW Recordings Rio en Medio, Spanish for River in Between, is a pseudonym for Danielle StechHomsy. Like a river passing through multiple countries, Rio en Medio Radio encompasses multiple genres and languages as she takes listeners on an eclectic journey.

“Terrapin Karma” mixes StechHomsy’s lyrics with excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and a poem from a Middle Ages troubadour. That’s followed by “Come Back Baby,” an austere take on a blues song that features just her vocals and classical guitar. StechHomsy varies her musical approach throughout the album. “Farther,” a song about the four seasons has an ethereal feel in which her voice seems to float

through the mix. “Marigolds: A Scattering” offers a stark lyric on the wonders of nature. “Sera Pasai” (Evening Song) and “Y Deryn Du” (The Blackbird) are a pair of acoustic tunes performed in English and Welsh, respectively, and show her range as a performer. Like poet Robert Frost, Stech-Homsy follows the road not taken and stays true to her art. 12 songs, 44 minutes. ■

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food

BY ROBERT GORDON

NOLA BY BRIAN I CAN THINK OF no finer restaurant to review for this issue than NoLa by Brian in order to close out 30 years of restaurant reviewing. Since my 2007 “discovery” of Brian Held at Juliana Rose in Newtown, his first venue, this congenial CIA grad’s relentless search for perfection, coupled with often uncanny culinary instinct have wowed me.

Brian left Juliana Rose to debut Rouget, a BYOB he named because the wall color reminded him of rouget, a popular Mediterranean fish. He shined at Rouget. Shortly after my rave review, Craig Laban, the Philly food critic whose comments on Bucks County eateries are typically lukewarm, awarded Rouget three bells. Laban’s assessment: “the best food I’ve eaten in Bucks County in the last decade.” I concur with the assessment. However, I differ with the intimation that Bucks wants for good food.

In 2012, Brian pulled up stakes again to launch the eponymous Brian’s in Lambertville. I anticipated he’d be a hit.

In my first review of Brian’s I wrote, “Lambertville draws a more cosmopolitan clientele, more in tune with big-city styles, tastes, and rhythms. Brian’s should shine in this liberating arena.” Brian’s in Lambertville has done just that, as affirmed by the myriad emails I receive singing its praises.

NoLa by Brian nestles into the space that longtime occupant Meil’s made iconic. It’s ideal for Brian, who can exercise a strong presence in both due to the proximity of Stockton and Lambertville.

NoLa bills its fare as “Contemporary cuisine with traditional roots.” That’s a depiction that provides a talented chef who’s well practiced in Mediterranean and French techniques ample gastronomical space. Brian has an uncommon knack for coming up with a contemporary flourish that caps off and transforms a dish into something memorable. For instance, at NoLa the empenadas crammed with beef tongue and blood sausage are delectable. But it’s the pickled fennel in mache salad that enlivens the ensemble.

Ditto for the apple brown butter that caps celery root purée. The apple butter gives a just-right tone absent cloying sweetness. Moreover, the difference in consistency the tiny apple bits add serves as a just-right contrast to the silky smoothness of the soup.

House-made ravioli crammed with light, airy trout mousse in an orange sage brown butter studded with pine nuts. Cream-colored polenta nestles in the hollowed-out center of delicata squash. Next to it are roasted pork belly and house-made sausage topped with wild mushrooms and spinach salad. Not only is the topping tasty, it’s a visual treat as well.

Savory herb sauce on locally caught sea bass whose crispy gaufre cap adds a tasty Gallic touch. Duck Breast with tarte flambée and red cabbage brings tender duck breast à l’orange fanned colorfully across an elongated bed of vividly hued red cabbage. The lush and luscious tarte flambée that accompanies the duck is a delicious flourish that stamps the dish as destination-worthy.

Naturally, desserts are house-made. In pot de chocolate, the Chef deftly dials up a chocolatey taste that’s wonderful. A pinch of sea salt tops the pot and lends an inspired punctuation.

Brian’s in Lambertville has already established itself as a colossus in the Bucks scene. Its scion, NoLa by Brian offers the same level of ambitious, exciting, and fetching fare—the kind that made my three-decade career on the Bucks restaurant beat pure joy, with due respect to Craig LaBan. ■ NoLa by Brian, 18 Bridge St., Stockton, NJ. 609-460-4863. brianslambertville.com

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S WA N

HOTEL Modern Cuisine h Classic Comfort Corner of Swan & Main Lambertville, NJ 609-397-3552

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foodie feature

BY A. D. AMOROSI

Morimoto

15 years on Chestnut Street

American Wagyu Carpaccio. Photo ©Reese Amorosi

Japanese A5 Wagyu from Miyazaki, Japan.

Photo ©Reese Amorosi

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IN 2001, STEPHEN STARR teamed with Hiroshima-born Masaharu Morimoto for his first pairing, Chestnut Street’s Morimoto. With a cool interior executed by Karim Rashid (a one-time University of the Arts interior design professor known for revolutionary colorful furnishings and modernist collaborations with Issey Miyake), the Japanese restaurant with an estimated cost (then) of $2.5 million would be an elegant, but deceptively simple seafood haven. There would be a concrete wave of eggshell white, a long narrow hall with an undulating wave of hand-applied plaster and carbonized, wide-slat bamboo, and an algebraic grid of hollow units from which inlaid light fixtures glow. Morimoto was lush with rare sushi, sashimi and raw bar bites in an atmosphere as romantic as it was serene. “I want to entertain,” Morimoto told me then. “Make customers happy. I want people to come back again and again and remember the fun. I want the drama to be there from very start.”

Fifteen years later, Starr has expanded his universe from Philly only into global domination, and Morimoto has become as iconic as any culinary world master—a four star chef whose face is familiar to viewers of the Food Network. Their joint restaurant? Since its start, Morimoto has become one of Philly’s true destination restaurants, known principally for the wooden wishing well of blowfish and sea urchins with fresh orchids, Drunken Shrimp Yopparai and Yose Dofu, a tableside dish.

Chef Masaharu Morimoto. ©Reese Amorosi Until now.

Morimoto’s Executive Chef Benjamin Dayag has been at the restaurant three years and understands how the simple oceanic wave of his restaurant’s design stands for freshness, simplicity and nature itself. Only now that freshness also stands for a Japanese steakhouse program worthy of this city’s premiere fish bar. “We wanted to feature the several different types of Wagyu out there,” says Dayag pointing to Morimoto’s Oregon-based Wagyu (a rib eye cut), prepared as a delicate but meaty Carpaccio, and an Australian Wagyu in two cuts—a 10oz Filet Mignon or a 12oz New York Strip, each with a little bit of chew (blame the Japanese style Crossbred Wagyu and Holstein hybrid). This is the highest grade of beef in the world, Japanese certified A5 Wagyu from Miyazaki, Japan, which is exclusively sold by the ounce. “This is even better than Kobe,” says Dayag of the A5 Wagyu.

Morimoto and Dayag see their steakhouse menu and seafood menu as symbiotic— equally bold, equally fresh, equally rare in every sense.

The taste differences and subtleties among the three types of beef come down to flavor profile. “When you look at the fat content, you get the taste profile,” says Dayag.

“The rib eye’s fat content goes really well with the hot oil.” This adds an acidity to the Carpaccio that goes handsomely with the nutty flavor of the Oregon-based cut. With the Australian hybrid beef, you’ll find a grassier, grittier taste. “During its time grazing free range on the family’s farm, they’re fed grass and special barley-based rations.” As for the fatless A5 Wagyu from Japan, Dayag describes the tender manner in which the special cattle is treated: “The A5 is a whole other level. Their farmers cry when they give the cows over. The care the breeders give them—rising with them every morning, massaging them—they’re like family members. Their children.”

Their children are yummy. ■

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Markus Reuter, Pat Mastelotto & Tony Levin as Stick Men

<

24 / TONY LEVIN

You and Pat Masteloto played in the most recent King Crimson septet and, as always, gave Robert Fripp’s vision another unique twist. When he asks each collaborator to do his own thing—and you’ve certainly been down this road with him many times before—how do you decide what you’re going to do with him?

Crimson is always a pleasure for me, and it’s always a challenge. In this incarnation we’re doing a lot of music from the past, that I hadn’t played bass on, and that’s an extra challenge; deciding how closely to stay with the original part, and where there’s room for me to be myself without losing the special character of the great material. I’d say I rely on Robert Fripp’s reactions quite a bit, to see if my ideas on that work well for the guy who wrote the music and has been playing it since the beginning. With our new material, it’s again up to me, but I value Robert’s sense of where the band is going.

That’s important for a band this large, so you have a distinctive voice and don’t go flying in each player’s different direction.

King Crimson will tour in Europe this fall and winter. I don’t know about next year’s schedule, but the plan is to keep this band together and making music for some time.

What do you like so much about Masteloto to play with him in settings outside of Crimson/Fripp?

I’ve played with Pat really a lot, and in very different situations, and it’s always a pleasure and an inspiration. He’s one of those few players who has a sense of how to play progressively, so does the right thing in a Crimson or Stick Men context. But he also has a great groove, so when it’s time to be simple and rock out—when there’s finally some bars of 4/4!—he’s among the best players you can have for that.

You worked with near-Philly native Lou Christie and played on Who Knows What Tomorrow’s Gonna Bring? by organist Brother Jack McDuff with Philly trumpeter Randy Brecker. Philly has a deep feeling for the jazz Hammond B-3 and, of course, there’s Brecker. What do you remember about these sessions?

No stories from those sessions, I’m afraid—some 45 years ago—but yes, I think the Lou Christie album was named Lou Christie. My memory is hazy, but I seem to remember ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon,’ an old standard being part of the sessions. Jack McDuff, for sure—at Atlantic— it was a thrill for me. And I did many things with Randy and Michael Brecker; we were in a band together when we first came to the big city (NYC) called White Elephant.

How would you describe the arc between Power Play, the music that lives in the performances of Midori, and what will exist within Prog Noir’s tunes?

Well, because we’re just finishing the mix of Prog Noir, it’s very much on my mind. This time we took a lot of time to write special new material and a lot of it. We could have actually released the album a year ago, but chose to keep refining the material. So it has, I hope, the best of what we do in Stick Men—a unique sound with just three players. But the touch guitars and Pat’s electronics lets us make a very full sound—a unique style of writing; among others, there’s a song about Pluto becoming a dwarf planet. And a unique sense of what we want to do musically. ■

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What’s the big difference between Michael Bernier and Markus Reuter in Stick Men? Like most musicians, they’re completely different from each other. Markus writes from a standpoint of having had composition training, as well as being part of Fripp’s Guitar Craft experience. Michael is a fan of jazz rock, has amazing chops, and comes up with his parts and pieces in no time at all. I know that for me, I’ve learned a lot from both of them, and have a lot to continue to learn in this world of touch guitar playing.

about life

BY JAMES P. DELPINO, MSS,MLSP,LCSW,BCD

WHO’S GOT THE POWER? THE DYNAMICS OF POWER and power distribution exist in all relationships. While we may strive for equality in all areas, some or most areas of relational dynamics are imbalanced. In a parent-child relationship, for example, it’s important that the parent holds the lion’s share of power over the course of the child’s development. To the opposite extreme are situations where the imbalance of power is abusive either physically or mentally or both. Even healthy and thriving relationships don’t reflect equanimity across the board.

The reasons for power imbalances may be conscious and healthy. They can equally be conscious and unhealthy. They can manifest in forced ways as well as ways that are freely chosen. The power imbalance can be unconscious for one or both partners, or include parts or the entirety of a family system. One common and generally healthy power imbalance is when one partner excels in a certain area and both partners agree she or he should have more power there. One example might be where a wife works in the financial industry and takes charge of budgets and taxes at home.

Perhaps the husband in this case is good at and enjoys painting and becomes the chief painter of walls and ceilings in the home. In this example a couple acknowledges each other’s strengths and chooses to manifest them in this area of task assignment. If the couple doesn’t like cleaning dishes, they can switch the tasks back and forth. Many power alignments achieve balance when each party thinks the other has a task as equally challenging or undesirable to do.

When relationships fall into patterns of who does what, it may be an unconscious enterprise altogether. Consider a couple who have preconceived notions about what their roles should be. If each one has a picture that roughly matches the other’s picture, then no discussion may be necessary for them to thrive. Gone are the days of role assignment based on gender, except in those relationships where gender and role assignment are given more weight. Where one partner is stronger or healthier it may be she or he who literally does the heavier lifting. A color blind man may defer choosing the new color for the living room to his partner. In less functional couples, role assignment may be based on the expectations of doing the things the way they were done during the formative years of their life. This can lead to “...we do it the way your mom did or the way my mom did.”

While power struggles occur to some degree in most relationships, some of these struggles are more dysfunctional than others.

Some power dynamics are forced or thrust upon us by society. We all have to pay taxes, we have to send our kids to school, the lawn has to get mowed at some point, and someone has to do the shopping—all examples of forced dynamics. How these decisions are made can be healthy as well as unhealthy. When one person in a partnership takes on too many responsibilities it can lead to resentment and anger. When one person avoids doing certain things, it forces the other person to do them.

Intimacy and sex are a virtual battleground for imbalanced power dynamics: who initiates; how often; is there just sex with little or no intimacy; what kind(s) of sex; differences in intimacy needs; communication; and differences in level of desire. While this list is by no means exhaustive, they suggest how many areas can become out of balance. While no two people are exactly alike in these areas, managing the competing needs and wishes of each other is a challenging task. For someone who has been molested or sexually abused, any sex act may trigger a negative response. For a person who requires hefty amounts of reassurance to feel emotionally safe, sex may flow naturally if there is a deeply felt connection. In a healthy relationship there is good communication about these things. In less healthy relationships, the power dynamics are acted out in defensive ways such as: withdrawal; blame; accusatory remarks; hyper-sexuality; cheating; lying; excessive shopping; gambling; use of alcohol or drugs. While these are all defensive behaviors, they are also failed strategies and coping mechanisms. ■

Jim Delpino is a psychotherapist in private practice for over 33 years. jdelpino@aol.com Phone: (215) 364-0139.

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The Los Angeles Times SUNDAY CROSSWORD PUZZLE

THIS JUST IN

By Gail Grabowski Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

ACROSS 1 5 10 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 29 31 32 36 37 40 41 45 46 50 51 53 54 55 57 59 61 62 63 65 66 68 71 72 75 76 79 80 81 84 85 86 88 89 90 95 96 98

Let the tears out Fast-food pork sandwich Oar Datebook opening Ad, basically “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” for one Riveting woman?

Break-even transaction Twistable snack Rock guitarist Eddy Bungling Off-the-wall answer?

Bud who’s been fired?

Search online about auditory issues?

Sources of complaints Porch furniture material Breakfast grain Course accomplishment High-altitude home Maine course 1941 FDR creation GEICO gecko’s financial counterpart?

“Bambi” role Talmudic scholar Pull-down beneficiaries Some tech sch. grads Spew out “Happy to help” Trickles Smooth transition “Hedda Gabler” playwright Colorado county or its seat Kept for later Reunion attendees One fastidious about table manners?

Medit. country Bing’s co-star in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” Use as support Oscar winner Williams March VIP “Papa Bear” of football Chicago’s “in the Park” time Mazda sports car Rocks in rye Primatologist Fossey Easily deceived One-time Capitol Records parent Editor’s marks in the margin?

“Get it done” Alley game Moto portrayer

99 101 102 104 105 109 114 115 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

Evens up High bond rating Willowy Radio-active sort?

Displeased reaction to election turnout?

Streams stocked with elongated fish?

Rare cry from the slots Come from behind Asian capital Technology prefix It may be reserved Guadalajara gal pal “What the Butler Saw” playwright Chain with stacks Puts in Polite title Picking out, as a perp Team that’s played in the same park for 100 years

DOWN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 28 30 33 34 35 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 47

Political coalition Intangible quality Little singer Ex-Soviet leader Brezhnev One getting too personal Caddies carry them Back “That’s not important” Tournament pass __ Lanka Dance in a line Apply to Slimming option, for short Release Term of affection Make more potent Org. with an Anti-Retaliation webpage Red-bearded god Brings forth Blood work, e.g.

Cultural pursuits It may be a sign of stress Caddy contents, perhaps Ruin in the kitchen Golfer Aoki Consequence of a heist injury?

Purim month Lower in price Part of a project to recycle golf accessories?

Comes after Like “American Sniper” Supreme Court appointee

after Sonia 48 Land on the sea?

49 Stop on a line 52 Tiny Tim’s dad 56 Graphic beginning?

58 Be mindful of 59 Breakaway factions 60 Iberian river to the Mediterranean 63 Kitchen gadget 64 __ Minor 65 Conan Doyle, by birth 66 Fate 67 Eventually 69 Barely detectable amount 70 Tabriz native 73 State secrets?

74 Salad bar choice 77 Criminal likely to get caught 78 Portfolio holding, for short 80 Stage successes 81 Benefit 82 Lady’s company?

83 Trees used for archery bows 86 Scuttlebutt 87 Concerning, with “to” 91 Parties, to pirates 92 Part of IPA 93 Bit of cybermirth 94 Picking up 97 Goes over the wall?

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100 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Having a twist Not flimsy Europe’s longest river Sing like Rudy Vallee Plastic choice Had to pay Despicable sort The Tide

110 Dead set against 111 Island where Bette Midler was born 112 A lock may be in one 113 Soaks (up) 116 Holiday veggie 117 __ polloi

Answer to March’s puzzle, BILL SESSION

Agenda CALL FOR ENTRIES Philadelphia Water Color Society 116th International Anniversary Exhibition of Works on Paper, at West Chester University, John H. Baker Art Gallery, Rosedale Ave. and High St., West Chester, Pa. Entry Deadline: June 10.

Show Dates: September 6–October 14, 2016. Prospectus download from pwcsociety.org website in April, 2016 or send SASE to PWCS Entries, 13 Brandywine Dr., Elwyn, Pa. 19063. Two Entries, Includes pastel, water media, drawings, hand-pulled prints. Members $15.00, Non-Members $45.00. Juror of Selection: Mary Whyte, AWS; Juror of Awards: Stewart White, AWS, NWS. Prizes over $6,000.

FINE ART THRU 4/9 2016 Winter Show: Anthony Smith, Francis Beaty, Joe Billera, Edigio Galgano, Katelyn Lau, Ward Van Haute. Bethlehem House Contemporary Art Gallery, 459 Main Street, Bethlehem. 610-419-6262.

BethlehemHouseGallery.com THRU 4/16 Judy Pfaff, Somewhere After. Lafayette Art Galleries, Easton, PA. 610-3305361/5831. Galleries.lafayette.edu.

THRU 4/16 Things That Might Have Happened: Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography since 1960; 45 works by 12 artists. Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown. muhlenberg.edu/main/aboutus/gallery THRU 4/24 Inside Out: Carol Tippit Woolworth, Catherine Drabkin, Pahl Alexander Hluchan, Colleen Randall, Daniel Jackson. Regional artists explore the concept of “place”—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Pkwy, Wilmington, DE. 302571-9590. delart.org THRU 5/15 This Light of Ours, Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. Free entry Sundays, see website. Allentown Art Museum, 31 N. 5th St., Allentown, PA. AllentownArtMuseum.org THRU 5/21 MUGA group show: Joann Goodwin; Armor Keller; Kay King; Leslie Ross Stephens; Judith Sutton; Patricia Tieman; and Janine Dunn Wade. Artists reception with refreshments 4/24, 1–4. Hours: Mon–Fri 10–8; Sat 10–2. The Conservatory, 4059 Skyron Drive, Doylestown, PA. THRU 5/29 Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our Amer-

ica presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-20th century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge. Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Delaware. 302-571-9590. delart.org 8-30 153rd Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings.

Reception 4/17, 2-4. Philadelphia Sketch Club, Main Gallery, 235 So. Camac St., Philadelphia. sketchclub.org 4/9-4/30 The Beckwith Endowment Exhibition for Emerging Artists. Anthkopoceneans, A Group Show. Fri. – Sun., 12-5. New Hope Arts, 2 Stockton Ave., New Hope.

215-862-9606. newhopearts.org 4/13-16; 4/20-23 Spring Open House featuring Bruce Lindabury. Ahlum Gallery, 106 No. 4th St., Easton. 11-4 PM. AhlumGallery.com 4/23-4/24 ACE Studio Tour. Ahlum Gallery, 106 No. 4th St., Easton. 11-4 PM. AhlumGallery.com 5/1-6/12 The Art of the Miniature: 24th invitational exhibition of fine art miniatures from around the world. Reception 5/1, 1-5.

The Snow Goose Gallery, 470 Main St., Bethlehem. 610-974-9099. View the exhibit online. Thesnowgoosegallery.com

FINE CRAFT 5/7 & 5/8 Morven in May: Art, Craft and Garden.

Juried show features jewelry, furniture, wearable and decorative textiles, ceramics, mixed media; 36 fine craft artists from around the U.S. Come see the best heirloom plant sale in NJ. Morven Museum & Garden, 55 Stockton St., Princeton, NJ. 609-924-8144. Morven.org 5/7 & 5/8 51st Fine Art & Craft Show. Historic Main Street, Bethlehem. Sat.,10-5, Sun. 11-5. Over 80 regional, national & local artists. Fun for the entire family, art projects for the kids too. Presented by Bethlehem Fine Arts Commission. Bfac-lv.org

THEATER

DINNER & MUSIC

THRU 5/1 Touchstone Theatre’s original work, Bhudoo – A politically inspired musical fable where the audience votes to determine the fate of three wizards in the mythical land of Bhudoo. Various venues in Bethlehem. touchstone.org or 610-867-1689.

Thursday nights, Community Stage with John Beacher, 8-midnight. Karla’s, 5 W. Mechanic St., New Hope. 215-862-2612.

Karlasnewhope.

4/14-4/17 Bhudoo, a fable, a choice, a game. Original work by the Touchstone Ensemble.

Touchstone Theatre, 321 E. 4th St., Bethlehem. 610-867-1689. touchstone.org 4/22-5/1 The Island, by Athol Fugard, John Kani & Winston Ntshona. Allentown Public Theatre. Fridays, 7pm, Christ Lutheran Church, 1245 Hamilton St., Allentown.

Saturdays, 12 & 5pm & Sundays, 2pm at The Arts Park, 5th & Court, Allentown.

Allentownpublictheatre.com 4/24 Compagnia Finzi Pasca La Veritá. A world inhabited by feathers, shapes, ladders and memories. Family Friendly.

Zoellner Arts Center, 420 E. Packer Ave., Bethlehem. 610-758-2787. ZoellnerArtsCenter.org 4/27-4/30 Ulysses in Nighttown. Based on the novel by James Joyce. Muhlenberg College Theatre & Dance, 2400 Chew St., Allentown. 484-664-3333. Muhlenberg.edu/theatre 4/27-5/8 Me and My Girl. Act 1 Performing Arts, DeSales University, Labuda Center for the Performing Arts, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley. 610-282-3192.

Desales.edu/Act1 4/29 Barrage. High-octane fiddle fest. State Theatre, 453 Northampton St., Easton.

1-800-999-STATE. Statetheatre.org 5/4-5/8 In the Mood, a 1940’s musical revue.

Matinee & evening performances. Bucks County Playhouse, 70 S. Main St., New Hope. 215-862-2121. BucksCountyPlayhouse.org

5/21 16th Annual Arts Alive. Juried Arts/Craft Festival, Downtown Quakertown. 10-4.

Rain: 5/22. 215-536-2273. Presented by Quakertown Alive. Quakertownalive.com

5/8 Bullets Over Broadway, The Musical.

Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, 420 E. Packer Ave., Bethlehem. 610-7582787. ZoellnerArtsCenter.org

DANCE

FILM

4/13-4/16 Dance Emerge, vibrant new dance works by emerging choreographers. Muhlenberg College Theatre & Dance, 2400 Chew St., Allentown. 484-664-3333.

Muhlenberg.edu/dance

4/1, 2 DeSales University Film Festival, 2016.

Act 1 Performing Arts, DeSales University TV/Film. Gambet Center Auditorium, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley. 610282-3192. Desales.edu/act1

Thurs.-Sat., Dinner and show at SteelStacks, Bethlehem. 5-10, table service and valet parking. artsquest.org

CONCERTS. 4/12 John Arnold, classical guitarist. Arts at St. John’s, St. John’s Lutheran Church, 37 So. Fifth St., Allentown. 610-435-1641.

Stjohnsallentown.org 4/16 Youthful Masterpieces. Chamber orchestra and soloist George Li, piano. Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, First Presbyterian Church, 3231 W. Tilghman St., Allentown. 610 434-7811. PASinfonia.org 4/24 The Meistersingers of Southern Lehigh High School. Cathedral Arts, Cathedral Church of the Nativity, 321 Wyandotte St., Bethlehem. 610-865-0727. Nativitycathedral.org.

4/30 Bill Charlap, Jazz Pianist. Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, 317 Hamilton St., Easton. 610-330-5009.

AtTheWilliams.org

Church of the Nativity, 321 Wyandotte St., Bethlehem. 610-865-0727. Nativitycathedral.org.

MUSIKFEST CAFÉ 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem 610-332-1300.

Full schedule: Artsquest.org

KESWICK THEATRE 291 N Keswick Ave, Glenside 215-572-7650.

Full Schedule: keswicktheatre.com

EVENTS THRU 4/17 Street Meet. Collaboration between Homebase Easton and local streetwear label, ABEmpire, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, street culture. Open daily.

Graphic design class & free events every Sunday. Homebase, 432 Northampton St., Easton. Homebase610.com 4/8 Anna Deavere Smith. Allentown Art Museum, Muhlenberg College, Baker Theatre, 2400 Chew St.. Allentown. AllentownArtMuseum.org 4/9 Spring into Easton: A shopping and tasting crawl. 12–4. Prizes: Downtown Easton Gift Cards. Pick up a game card at participating shops. Info: EastonMainStreet.org/SpringIntoEaston

5/1 Satori 20th Anniversary Concert. Cathedral Arts, Cathedral Church of the Nativity, 321 Wyandotte St., Bethlehem. 610865-0727. Nativitycathedral.org.

4/22 Lehigh Valley Faces presents Lyricist Lounge in the Museum’s Community Gallery, music & poetry.Allentown Art Museum, 31 N. 5th St., Allentown. AllentownArtMuseum.org

5/6 Peter Richard Conte, organist; Andrew Ennis, flugelhorn. Arts at St. John’s, St. John’s Lutheran Church, 37 So. Fifth St., Allentown. 610-435-1641. Stjohnsallentown.org

4/29-5/1 Restaurant Week: Clinton’s Fine Food & Drink. 4/30, Under the Tent, 4-8, 20 local vendors. Hunterdon Art Museum Terrace.

Clinton, NJ. Info: Clintonguild.com.

5/8 Philippe Jaroussky, countertenor.

Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, 317 Hamilton St., Easton. 610330-5009. AtTheWilliams.org 5/8 Vox Philia. Cathedral Arts, Cathedral Church of the Nativity, 321 Wyandotte St., Bethlehem. 610-865-0727. Nativitycathedral.org.

5/13, 14, 15 20, 21, 22 109th Bethlehem Bach Festival: The Heart of Our Season. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Bethlehem. Various locations.

Complete schedule: Bach.org.

5/15 Satori Student Competition Winners in Concert. Cathedral Arts, Cathedral

4/30-5/22 Show House 2016, The Moyer-Metzger Manse. 1406 Hamilton St., Allentown, PA. Society of the Arts. Info: sotapa.org 5/15-5/22 New Hope Celebrates , 2016 Pride Festival. Town-wide events include, history & educational offerings, parties, arts and shopping experiences. Concluding with a mile long Parade & Pride Fair Celebration. New Hope, PA & Lambertville, NJ. Newhopecelebrates.com

POETRY 4/2 New Hope Beat Poets Society, Bring Your Own Beret Poetry Showcase. New Hope Arts, 2 Stockton Ave., New Hope. newhopearts.org

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