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INTERVIEWS

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

THE FUNNY FASHIONISTA | 20

Parker Posey may be known for her expert comic timing, but the enduringly talented character actress has also evolved as a woman of style, as shown in herlatest film, Café Society

ARTHUR LUBOW | 22

A conversation with Diane Arbus’ biographer on why she felt compelled to seek the weird and perverse, subjects for her camera that she regarded as aristocrats for having been born with trauma.

ART

5 | Diana 6 | Baseball Cards at the Met 7 | Thomas Eakins

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8 | ART SHORTS Alison Saar at Grossman Gallery

MUSIC

31 | JAZZ LIBRARY Gene Ammons

32 | SINGER / SONGWRITER Lori McKenna

Absolutely Abstract at The Philadelphia Sketch Club

Ally Venable Band Dan Penn

Yelena Strokin at New Hope Arts

10 | EXHIBITIONS Riverside Festival of the Arts Robert Beck: Over East New Hope Arts & Crafts Festival 12 | THEATER

CITY THEATER

VALLEY THEATER

Thomas Eakins, in frontal view, in Chestnut Street studio, 1891-92. Gelatin silver print. From Thomas Eakins, Photographer.

Clint Morgan

34 | FOODIE FILE

Food Processors

35 | ABOUT LIFE

Fear and Loathing

ENTERTAINMENT

37 | HARPER’S

FILM

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14 | THE LIST 39 | AGENDA

16 | Don’t Think Twice 18 | Weiner 24 | The Adderall Diaries

18

Dear Country

FINDINGS INDEX

ETCETERA

L. A. TIMES CROSSWORD

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Advertising 800-354-8776 EDITORIAL Executive Editor / Trina McKenna Raina Filipiak / Advertising filipiakr@comcast.net PRODUCTION Designer Richard DeCosta

Assistant Designer Kaitlyn Reed-Baker

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

A. D. Amorosi / divaland@aol.com

Robert Beck / robert@robertbeck.net

Nick Bewsey / nickbewsey@gmail.com Jack Byer / jackbyer@verizon.net

Peter Croatto / petecroatto@yahoo.com James P. Delpino / JDelpino@aol.com

Edward Higgins / ehiggins2581@gmail.com Geoff Gehman / geoffgehman@verizon.net

R. Kurt Osenlund / rkurtosenlund@gmail.com Bob Perkins / bjazz5@aol.com

Keith Uhlich / KeithUhlich@gmail.com Burton Wasserman

Tom Wilk / tomwilk@rocketmail.com

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

ICON is published twelve times per year. Repro-

29 | POP The Soundtrack Now

Parker Posey at Cannes premiere of Café Society.

Trina McKenna trina@icondv.com

Thom Nickels / thomnickels1@aol.com

MUSIC

30 | JAZZ, ROCK, CLASSICAL, ALT The Rave-Ups Maya Beiser Heroes of Toolik Jerry Bergonzi Luke Winslow-King

PUBLISHER

www.icondv.com

George Miller / gomiller@travelsdujour.com

28 | REEL NEWS Sing Street All the Way Lobster Louder than Bombs

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1-800-354-8776 • 215-862-9558

Mark Keresman / shemp@hotmail.com

26 | FILM ROUNDUP Author: The JT LeRoy Story Florence Foster Jenkins Hell or High Water The Lovers and the Despot Anthony Weiner.

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duction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. ICON welcomes letters to the editor, editorial ideas and submissions, but assumes no re-

ON THE COVER: Spider Lullaby, 2012 Scott Fraser. From the Truth & Vision: 21st Century Realism exhibit, October 22 - January 22, 2017. Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington. delart.org

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essAy And pAinting by robert beck

Diana

DEPENDING ON THE WEATHER, Dozer, the fattest Lab in the land, likes to take his siesta on the asphalt in front of Doug Dodge’s boat shop. You come around the corner and it looks like a black bear died in the middle of the road. He leaves you just enough room to get by. If Dozer’s not there, or sleeping in the sawdust in the back of the shop, he’s out looking for a porch to take a nap on. Any porch will do.

Dozer is one of a few dogs that stroll the village on Beals Island, as much a part of everyday comings and goings as the lobster boats or gulls. Technically he belongs to Doug, but Doug’s more of a chauffeur than anything.

As to who feeds Dozer, there’s a reason he’s that fat.

When another Doug, Doug Hylan, a boat builder in Brooklin, Maine, heard about the series of paintings I’ve been doing in Jonesport he recommended I introduce myself to a crab-picker named Diana Kelly who lives on Beals. Diana is a direct descendent of the guy who first settled the island and knows everything and everybody.

Hylan said that Diana didn’t live far from Dodge’s shop and that Dodge knew her well so I headed over to the Island to see if I could find him. Both this serendipitous way of connecting with my subjects and the phrase, “See if I could find him,” are a glimpse into how I spend the bulk of my painting days when I’m in Maine.

Doug was in the shop making a fitting for the bushing on Uncle Billy’s propeller shaft while Billy watched.

In addition to being a boat builder Doug is a mechanic, and there were a number of disassembled engine blocks around the half-finished hull of the wooden lobster boat he was working on. I told him that Hyland said I should meet Diana. Doug suggested we go do that.

At that moment a different black Lab walked into the shop. He was plenty big, but not as big as Dozer. “Who’s this?” I asked while scratching him behind the ears.

“That’s Blackie,” Doug said, as he put down the grinder and wiped his hands on a rag. “He belongs to Emma Carver, up on the hill.”

The four of us walked out to the cars. Blackie got in with Doug and Uncle Billy. We drove around the cove to

Diana’s House and went inside but she wasn’t there.

Doug, Bill and Blackie headed off to lunch, and I went back to the mainland.

Later that day I managed to get in touch with Diana, who had been out for a walk, and I drove back to her house. I don’t know her age but she is clearly older than I am. We stood in her kitchen as she gave me a lesson in crab picking, which she has been doing for many, many years. Diana picks two buckets of crabs every day or so— about fifty crabs to get five pounds of meat. It pays her taxes. Back in the day she would do five times that. She gets the crabs off one of the boats at the wharf and steams them, then picks after they cool down.

I was fascinated by Diana’s hands; the strength and assuredness of her motions working the small, dull knife to both dig the meat and crack shells. She talked to me about her life as she worked. Diana had been a school bus driver, a school custodian, and she mended gill nets

for the fishermen, all while picking crab and raising kids.

After picking, Diana wanted to show me the knife that she wore out. She climbed on a chair to reach into the back of the kitchen cabinets and rustled through drawers in another two rooms until she came up with it.

The steel blade was noticeably short and the hardwood sides were worn through to the metal tang.

Diana gave me one of the containers of meat that I had watched her pick, more than a half-pound—the same fresh crab you get in those round plastic containers in the supermarket, but this just a few hours off the boat.

That would be dinner, on a bed of greens with some hard-boiled egg and Thousand Island dressing. Superb.

I made arrangements with Diana to come back the next day and paint her working in the picking shed in her backyard. Then I thanked her and let myself out the front door. I had to step over Dozer, who was snoring at the top of the steps. n

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The Old Ball Game: New York Baseball 1887-1977 THIS TIME OF YEAR the pennant races tighten up, the air turns brisker and the fans begin to think about the World Series. For many years that meant two New York teams would play on into October. Generally, they were the American League Yankees and the National League Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Giants.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue is celebrating that tradition with a new exhibition of baseball cards, that unique American folk art which has enthralled youngsters for close to 150 years. Titled The Old Ball Game: New York Baseball, 18871977, the show features more than 400 cards from those teams mentioned, but also from the New York Metropolitans, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms and the Giants, once known as the Gothams. It runs through October 20.

The cards are from the Met’s own collection, the second largest in the world after Cooperstown, most from the Burdick collection and many never before seen in public.

Between 1943 and 1963, Jefferson R. Burdick, known as the greatest of all card collectors donated more than 30,000 cards to the Museum, after he had devised a cataloging system for the collection. His system is still in use today.

Burdick, a lifelong bachelor, was born in Central Square, in Upstate New York, in 1900. He graduated from Syracuse University and worked most of his adult life as an electrician at the Crouse-Hines electronics factory in Syracuse. In his early 30s chronic arthritis forced him into tasks that he could do while sitting. He rejuvenated an interest in card collecting from his youth, and in 1960 wrote, “A card collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cares to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day—brought to life in vivid pictures and prose.”

He expanded into collecting greeting cards, playing cards, valentines and other advertising ephemera. When he decided to donate the collections to the Met, there was a total of 306,000 items. The Met accepted on the condition that he catalog the 30,000 baseball cards. Burdick moved to New York, set up a desk in the prints department and set to work. In June 1963 he finished work and in March of that year he died.

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The glories in the show transcend fan loyalties. Even National League fans will marvel at Murderer’s Row—the first six batters in the Yankees 1927 lineup: Earle Combs, Mark Koenig, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel and Tony Lazzeri.

Another section deals with Dodgers fans’ worst nightmare; it’s the famous l951 home run hit by Bobby Thomason in the one-game playoff to see who would face the Yankees. I watched it on a black-and-white television in a Columbus, Georgia, barbershop. The pitcher was Ralph Branca and the game was the first televised nationally. To note how ingrained was the love of the Brooklyn Dodgers: Peter Hamill and his newspaper buddies counted the three most evil men in the world Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the man who moved the team to Los Angeles.

About that time (mid-1950s) the centerfielders of the three New York teams were Mickey, Willie and the Duke. No further explanation needed.

Another section deals with Jackie Robinson and his story but to add to it is to know that Branca was one of his closest friends on the team. The late New York poet, Joel Oppenheimer, remembered shouts of “Yankel, Yankel” in the Ebbets Field bleachers when number 42, Jackie Robinson, came to bat. That’s the Yiddish diminutive of Jacob, Jack in English.

Burdick, according to his New York Times obit, was not much interested in baseball: “He rarely if ever attended a game.” It’s clear that it was the pictures, the printing process, and history that were of greatest interest to him. And, as artifacts of some historical significance, the cards are a delight. For most fans, however, it’s the memories that provide the warmest pleasure. n L-R: White, 3rd Base, Detroit, from the "Gold Coin" Tobacco Issue 1887; Brown, Catcher, New York, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes 1887; M. Brown, Chicago, National League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company 1909-11; Chase, New York, American League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company; Card Number 207, Whitey Ford, Pitcher, New York Yankees, from the series Topps Dugout Quiz (R414-7), issued by Topps Chewing Gum Company 1953

art

bUrt WAsserMAn

Thomas Eakin’s setter Harry on Carpet, 1885. Platinum print, 2 9/16 x 6 5/16.

Thomas Eakins, recorder of everyday things

Thomas Eakins and students, swimming nude, 1883.

Platinum print, 8 15/16 x 611 1/16 in.

BY AN ODD QUIRK of coincidence, two great masters of dealing with the human figure in art form, Edgar Degas in France and Thomas Eakins in the United States, became deeply interested in photography during the late years of the 19th century.

At this time, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is offering an excellent solo exhibition of photographs by Eakins from their permanent holdings. Thomas Eakins: Photographer is scheduled to be on public view from October 19, 2016 to January 29, 2017. The show is being presented now to honor honor the 100th anniversary of Eakins’ death.

The installation is comprised of 60 photographs and three highly significant paintings. Together, they illuminate his desire to explore themes drawn from everyday life, accurately represented, and given expression to the reality of human locomotion as scientifically as possible, as well as such provocative issue as gender and sexuality in aesthetic terms.

The Museum of the Academy acquired these photographs in 1985 as a gift from Charles Bregler, a former student of Eakins. For connoisseurs who are especially interested in Eakins, this show is a glorious treasure trove. They reflect the master’s depth of concern for giving profound voice to such subjects as the nude figure, portraiture and landscape.

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Art Shorts Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1989, Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists in 2000, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 1998, and Joan Mitchell Artist in Residence in 2013. Saar was named one of 50 fellows in the United States Artists Program in 2012.

Council on the Arts Fellowship, and has had solo shows in Philadelphia and New York.

The Sketch Club is America’s oldest club for artists.

Since 1860, the PSC has served as a meeting place, forum for ideas, and a vital bridge between the creators and supporters of art. Past luminaries have included such American masters as Eakins and Anshutz.

Yelena Stokin, Purple Spring (detail) Philadelphia Sketch Club’s 2015 First Place Award, Michelle Neifert, Perception of Beauty, acrylic on canvas

Absolutely Abstract

Alison Saar, Sleufoot Slide, 2015, acrylic, gesso and charcoal on found sugar sacks and linens

Alison Saar at Grossman Gallery The Grossman Gallery of Lafayette College, 730 High St., Easton, will present Breach, an exhibition of Alison Saar’s research on American rivers and their historical relationship to the lives of African Americans. The show will run from September to December 17.

Saar, selected as the 2016-17 Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Artist in Residence, explores issues of gender, race and racism, and the African diaspora. She mines mythology, ritual, history, music, artistic heritage of other cultures, and her bi-racial heritage as sources for her work.

She was born and raised in Laurel Canyon, Calif., the daughter of artist Betye Saar and painter/conservator Richard Saar. She received a BA in studio art and art history from Scripps College, Claremont, California, and an MFA from Otis Parsons Institute. She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1985, 1988), and was awarded the John Simon

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at The Philadelphia Sketch Club Jurors began selecting works for the Sketch Club’s 2016 Absolutely Abstract open juried exhibition in midAugust. Those selected will be shown at the Club’s headquarters, 235 S. Camac St., Philadelphia, from September 2 to September 24.

Jurors include Liz Osborne who is nationally recognized for her elegant, intelligent and inventively abstract paintings of landscapes and interior still-life scenes. Born in Philadelphia, Osborne attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she was recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright Award. Osborne received her BFA at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was hired as faculty in 1961 at PAFA and retired in 2011. Osborne has recently shown at Michener Art Museum, George Washington University Art Museum, and Locks Gallery. She has upcoming exhibitions at Delaware Art Museum and Lancaster Art Museum.

Juror Lois Schlachter is a graduate of The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia College of Art The University of the Arts). Lois is a prolific painter and her work is exhibited and collected extensively.

Juror Charles Kalick attended PAFA from 1967 to 1972. He was awarded a Cresson and a Ware Traveling Scholarship. Kalick was also a recipient of the 1991 PA

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Yelena Strokin at New Hope Arts Glimpse Through the Flemish Window by Yelena Strokin is on exhibit through September 29.

Strokin said, “During my career as a photojournalist my tools included my camera and notebook. So, when I traveled around the world, it opened itself to me in my pictures taken from Europe to Asia, places like Cambodia, Bhutan, and Nepal. Through my photography, people got close to me, from Tibetan monks to children in small villages, to urbanites in large cities. I learned about their various cultures, their emotions and personalities, and it allowed me to picture not only the gorgeous landscapes they inhabited but also the often ancient architecture characteristic of each place. This exploration gave me endless joy and became the start of building a career in photography.

Inspired by my colorful experiences, I then worked as a food stylist and always as a photographer, but now my heart is in the work of photographing still life. I will spend days on compositions using only the natural light seeping through the window in my home studio, just like the old world masters did. My photographs are not altered by any postproduction processes, hence the images are as the eye sees them. You could experience each scene almost as if it were taken from a moment in your own life.”

New Hope Arts, 37 West Bridge Street, New Hope, PA

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EXHIBITIONS

Stern Man, 24 x 30 Painting by Gale Scotch

Robert Beck: Over East Maine Maritime Museum 23 Washington St. Bath, ME 04530 207-443-1316 mainemaritimemuseum.org September 17– January 22

Cecily with artwork.

20th Annual Riverside Festival of the Arts Larry Holmes Dr., Easton, PA September 17 & 18 Saturday 11:00-5:30; Sunday 11:00-5:00 EastonRiversideFest.org This lively arts festival features over 60 fine art and craft artisans along Easton’s scenic waterfront. Special events include a Native American opening ceremony on Saturday morning, many artist demos and workshops, live music, performances, spoken word, 10,000 cranes project to benefit children’s hospitals, a kids’ creative zone (thanks Crayola!) with art projects all weekend, plus riverside Easton YOGA to the beat of a Lenape drummer Sunday morning. Artists compete to win $2,000 in the Juried Art Gallery, $2,000 in the Plein Air Art Contest. Live music, libations and food trucks. The Riverside Festival of the Arts is a function of Arts Community of Easton, Inc. (ACE), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

Off Great Wass, 24 x 36

Barnaby clinic.

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For nearly 20 years Robert Beck has been painting the coastal life in Maine. In its first-ever solo exhibition of a painter’s work, the Maine Maritime Museum presents Over East, an Artist's Journal: Paintings by Robert Beck of the Contemporary Maritime Community. The 58-painting exhibition includes both his studio compositions and images painted from life, from years working among the people of Jonesport and Beals Island, villages little more than an hour from Canada. “This is an honor, especially for an artist who doesn’t live in Maine,” says Beck.

“This body of work is very close to my heart and the Maine Maritime Museum is the perfect venue.” Amy Lent, executive director, agrees: “This is life on the coast of Maine and Robert Beck has captured the soul of it with respect. Maine Maritime Museum is proud to present these paintings and celebrate this way of life.”

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New Hope Arts & Crafts Festival New Hope-Solebury High School 182 West Bridge St., New Hope, PA Saturday & Sunday, September 24-25 Hours: Sat.,10–6, Sun., 10–5 Newhopeartsandcrafts.com New Hope’s 23rd Annual Outdoor Juried Arts and Crafts Festival is located in the historic river town of New Hope PA, known for its arts community, this event should attract 15,000 visitors. Over 160 fine artists and craftsmen will exhibit using media such as oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics, works in wood, wearable art, glass art, photography and more. This is an outdoor, rain or shine event with free admission, ample parking, a complimentary shuttle, festival food, and music. New Hope’s business district is just a few minutes’ walk away. This is a quality, juried event and our artists will be recognized with ribbons and cash prizes.

Josh Axelrod display

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theater VALLEY

CITY

The Producers. The wonderfully wacky Mel Brooks devised this musical, a spinoff of his film, about a brash, desperate producer who hoodwinks a shy, gradually sly accountant into creating an intentionally awful musical designed to close in one night, allowing them to run off with the money of old-lady investors. Their spectacle of a plan becomes a spectacular failure when the first-night crowd falls in love with “Springtime for Hitler,” a campy Nazi love letter. The original Broadway production received a record 12 Tony awards and pioneered the uber-priced premium Broadway seat. Bill Mutimer, whose recent Valley credits include Avenue Q and The Full Monty, directs the local version for MunOpCo Music Theatre, 89 years young. (Sept. 17-18 and 24-25, Scottish Rite Cathedral, Allentown)

Rizzo. Philadelphia’s 2016-2017 theater season will be big. Philadelphia Theatre Company (PTC) opens Sept. 23 with Rizzo, directed by Joe Canuso, produced in time to counter demands to replace the Rizzo statue at the Municipal Services Building. The Wilma opens with Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling. Directed by Blanka Zixka, Bovell’s play has been called an “intricate fabric of overlapping connections,” “[a] sorrow-sodden family drama [where] the forecast is continually gloomy.” Rain charts the fates of two families through several generations and was Time magazine’s Best Play of the Year in 2010. “This play is like a fine port, a peaty scotch, or a long-form piece of music; it’s meant to be taken in slowly,” wrote Alan Katz in a DC Theatre Scene review.

Big Fish. Susan Stroman, who won Tonys for directing and choreographing The Producers, performed the same duties for the 2013 Broadway production of Big Fish, a musical adaptation of the charming 1998 novel and 2003 film about a son who tracks his tall tale-telling father through a fisheye-lens world starring a giant, a mermaid and a mythic fish. The Valley version is staged by Star of the Day Event Productions, which over the last two years has presented Gypsy and Bat Boy. (Sept. 23-25, Oct. 1-2 and 7-8, McCoole’s Arts and Events Place, Quakertown) Bad Jews. Joshua Harmon’s play is a savagely funny, savage verbal tug of war between two cousins—one very Jewish, the other very not Jewish—over their grandfather’s sacred relic, a gold ornament spelling “Chai,” the Hebrew word for “life,” which he saved by hiding under his tongue in a Nazi concentration camp. Their seesaw debates take place on the day of their grandfather’s funeral. (Sept 30-Oct. 2, Oct. 5-7, Lehigh University) The Miracle Worker. The Pennsylvania Playhouse, one of the Valley’s most active companies, continues to celebrate its 50th anniversary by staging William Gibson’s scorching, tingling tale of the blind, deaf and mute Helen Keller being awakened by Anne Sullivan’s tough love and supreme common sense. In 2003 the late Skye McCole Bartusiak played Helen opposite Hilary Swank’s Anne; in the 1980s Bartusiak’s parents, Donald and the late Helen, were pivotal Playhouse players. (Sept. 30-Oct. 1, Oct. 7-9, Oct. 13-16) Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s titanic romantic tragedy is telecast live from London, courtesy of a company organized by Kenneth Branagh, who starred in and directed the splendid films of Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing. The star-crossed leads are played by Richard Madden, who rippled as King Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, and Lily James, who rippled as Lady Rose in Downtown Abbey. They rippled together in the 2015 film Cinderella. (Sept. 29, Theatre 514, Civic Theatre of Allentown) Blithe Spirit. The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival crew turned Noel Coward’s ghostly comedy into a comic ballet with a ghostly breeziness. As Charles, an urbane novelist researching the occult, Ian Merrill Peakes made marvelously agile spastic retreats while trying to navigate between Elvira, his dead, very lively first wife, and Ruth, his living, very dead second wife. Karen Peakes, Ian’s real-life spouse, played Ruth with sparky, snarky gusto while Eleanor Handley played Elvira with sparkling flapper flair.

Linda Thorson’s medium, whose séances unwittingly resurrect both wives, whipped herself into trances with hilariously clever gestures, including wind-whipped scarecrow windups. At times she was as bullish and as blissfully blindered as an Agatha Christie detective. Director Anne Lewis’ pacing was as bracing as a dry martini. n — Geoff Gehman

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Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The Lantern Theater Company gives us this George Bernard Shaw play which was banned by the British government for three decades because the profession is prostitution. Mary Martello will play the hard working Mrs. Warren whose goal in life is to move out of London’s slums. Feminist Germaine Greer, writing in The Guardian, said that when Shaw created Mrs. Warren, “His uber-whore, the bodies of real-life prostitutes had been found in London streets, brutally dismembered by Jack the Ripper.” Greer insinuated Shaw had no heart because a prostitute’s chance of reaching her 50s healthy and wealthy was about as great as winning the lottery.

A Streetcar Named Desire. The 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival (Sept. 9-24) will be an artistic implosion of the good, bad and ugly. Some of this year’s offerings include The Deep Blue Theater Collective’s “radical re-imagining” of the American classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, which means that Blanche Du Bois will probably fall into an absurdist abyss. Sexual high jinks is the energy behind Carried Away (Brian Sanders’ Junk), or 50 minutes of male on male “skin against skin” and “disco within punk” that will attempt to raise audience body temperatures with cutting-edge choreography. Classic literature takes the lead in The Duende Cycle Theatre collaboration’s staging of Bodas de Sangre/I Only Came to Use the Phone. Bodas (Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding) takes place in Miami while I Only Came was inspired by a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. Classic Fringe absurdity kicks in with Antihero by Tribe of Fools at the Painted Bride Arts Center where “comic book nerds turn vigilante against the Philadelphia Parking Authority.” Festival-goers will have the opportunity to bang their heads against the wall with a beautiful insane woman with long hair who shows a lot of leg while dressed in a skimpy hospital gown when they attend the Manayunk Theatre Company’s Bedlam: Shakespeare in Rehab. There’s also The Elementary Spacetime Show by Cesar Alvarez at the Arts Bank that will show us what happens when a young girl attempts suicide and “wakes up” in a universe filled with vaudeville absurdities—everything, of course, sans angels on pogo sticks or talking sardines, but who knows?

Cat-A-Strophe. Yoel Wulfhart, aka Philly’s Samuel Beckett, has written the epic play of the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Cat-A-Strophe, is Wulfhart’s own version of the Samuel Beckett play of the same name. Wulfhart describes Cat-A-Strophe as “what would happen if Samuel Beckett, Dario Fo and Hannoch Levin co-wrote a sitcom.” Wulfhart says the play is about the human experience. “As children we all have great hopes, but then many of those hopes do not come to fruition. It’s a farcical play, not funny but sad, but only funny on top. It’s a play about repetition, about how we repeat something over and over again hoping for something different.” Cat-A-Stropheis Wulfhart’s first play and the first production of his company, Fail Better Productions at The Papermill, a multi-disciplinary artist community at 2825 Ormes Street. Born and raised in Israel, he’s been in the U.S. for 30 years. “The cast of Cat-A-Strophe can’t get through rehearsals without the entire production crew falling to the ground in peels of laughter,” he says. n — Thom Nickels

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cUrAted by A.d. AMorosi

SEPTEMBER 8 OF MONTREAL

10 TIFFANY

17 ANDY FAIRWEATHER LOW

23 BRIAN WILSON

Long stuck making records that manqué the unholy mix of Bowie and Prince, Kevin Barnes’s band’s new Montreal album, Inno-

The 80s bubble gum scene had no better student than the lass who sang “I Think We’re Alone Now” amongst other hits. (Havana, New Hope)

Once upon a 1966, Low was the toast of the British rock foundation as a founding member of Amen Corner, then eventually

The beachiest Beach Boy celebrates the 50th anniversary of his forlorn masterpiece Pet Sounds with an ensemble so dreamy it will make you cry. (Tower)

11 SINBAD

24 JOHN SCOFIELD’S “COUNTRY FOR OLD

Comedian best known for solo HBO specials, film and The Cosby Show where he played Coach Oakes. Havana, New Hope

MEN” W/STEVE SWALLOW

The genius, elastic jazz-soul guitarist Scofield just made a hillbilly album with bassist Swallow that the pardeners will play

13 CORRINE BAILEY RAE

Modern jazz-soul’s nicest lady spreads her playing in the backing bands of Eric Clapton and Roger Waters. Hear some history. (Havana, New Hope) 18 KT TUNSTALL

cence Reaches, is more direct, focusing as it does on shiny synths and EDM tones.

(Union Transfer)

Thumpy rhythm queen Tunstall brings her new album, KIN, to South Street. (TLA) 20 LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY

A new album, Make Me Free, and a longin-the-works documentary, Vision of Paradise, are but grist for the mill for the god of dub. (World Café Live)

8 JOEY BADA$$$

With that many dollar signs in his name, this MC is surely money. (Electric Factory) 9 TITUS ANDRONICUS

24 BUCKETHEAD

The once-depressed, always-wry, dramatic metal ensemble from the NJ/Philly area head home to celebrate the release of their first live album, S+@dium Rock : Five Nights at the Opera. (TLA) 9 JONATHAN EDWARDS

Folkie troubadour Edwards hasn’t been around much since the dawn of “Honky Tonk Stardust Cowboy” and “Sunshine (Go Away Today),” so I’m anxious to see him.

(World Café Live Delaware) 9 CULTURE CLUB

Creamy soul singer and soon-to-be-reality star Boy George and the rest of his famed ragga-hop, Brit pop band return without blouses. (Electric Factory) 10 6TH ANNUAL HAVERFORD MUSIC FESTIVAL

Some of some dry pop/urbane folk’s finest figures Lisa Loeb, Sasha Dobson, and The Figgs’ Pete Donnelly play in….wait for it…

Havertown for a day long party.

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The saddest, strangest, wettest film ever gets a modern operatic turn from Lansdale, PA composer Missy Mazzoli. (Opera Philadelphia at the Kimmel)

Because noisy six-string shredding Buckethead known for wearing a mock KFC bucket on his head as well as his brief tenure with Guns N’ Roses hits Ardmore’s late night circuit. (Ardmore Music Hall late)

22 TERRY BOZZIO

26 DEATH

Bozzio is the manic drummer behind Zappa’s best latter-day work to say nothing of the New Wave rock of Missing Persons.

He’ll be alone and drumming in West Philly on this night. (WCL)

Before all-black-rock bands such as Philly’s Pure Hell and NYC’s Bad Brains, there was the Motor City’s most morbid and literally black metal men, Death. Boo. (World Café Live)

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29 JEREMIH

The Brit-mistresses of atmospheric shoegaze pop play together for the first times in over two decades. (Union Transfer)

The most sexed-up R&B singer since Teddy Pendergrass takes hold of a tender ladies night at the Fillmore and never lets go. (Fillmore)

22 BREAKING THE WAVES OPERA

love over Northern Liberties. (UnionTransfer) 14 DANNY BROWN

Electro hip-hop’s most sinister player with the biggest hair brings his menace to bear on a new album, Atrocity Exhibition. (TLA) 14-18 LOVE JONES LIVE

What a lovely idea: the African American spoken word scene of the 90s, run through with a cool romantic backstory, made a splash with the 1996 dramedy Love Jones.

Twenty years later, it’s a new soulful musical starring creamy, Philly R&B crooners Chrisette Michelle, Musiq Soulchild, Marsh Ambrosious and more. (Merriam) 17 BOOK OF LOVE 30TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

22 JAH WOBBLE & THE INVADERS OF THE HEART

The Philly-born Book of Love (known first as the art school, post punks of Head Cheese) celebrate three decades of gender-baiting electro pop with old music and new. (World Café Live)

The one-time jazzy-dub PIL bassist also a collaborator of Can’s Holgar Czuaky and U2’s The Edge plays his first American dates in forever on the heels of his new album, Everything is Nothing. (Underground Arts)

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30 BUZZCOCKS

One of the few remaining Brit punk bands from the first round (1976-77 era) come around and prove that age and rage is just a number and an attitude. (TLA) n

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Don’t Think Twice

N DON’T THINK TWICE, writer-director Mike Birbiglia (Sleepwalk with Me) and his wonderful cast explore what happens when your potential runs out. What defines this terrific, future-to-be-beloved drama is that we are touched by their struggle. It reminds us of the lives we have left behind.

The film follows the six players of the Commune, a successful NYC-based improv group. Thanks to nights jumping off a cliff together, they are close. And they speak in the language that guarantees their survival.

Upon learning their venue is being sold to Donald Trump, they take turns imitating the sentient orange crayon. Comedy propels them through tragedy, terrible day jobs, and romance. When co-stars Sam (Gillian Jacobs) and Jack (Keegan-Michael Key) make love, they joke.

Egos are fragile, none more than Miles (Birbiglia), the founder, who uses his position to bed his much younger female students and to convince himself that he’s just been shy of making it for two decades.

For Miles, being the leader of the Commune is everything, so when Jack and Sam get auditions at Weekend

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Live—Saturday Night Live with a different title—it’s awkward. It’s even more so when Jack gets the gig and Sam bails on her audition. The Commune had a mission; the personalities fed off each other. Jack’s departure poisons the ecosystem.

H umor can’t solve the gray reality that the remaining members are well into their thirties without their own accomplishments. Aside from Sam, everyone starts writing packets for Weekend Live. Jack, who’s trying to survive his first season, can’t help. Sam is torn. Comedy is a profession for strivers, but she likes where she is. Jack’s urgings sound more like lectures.

It’s an unfortunate irony that people who have turned going with the flow into a profession can’t do that when the stage lights dim. Sam finds happiness and herself teaching improv. Others aren’t so lucky. Miles tries to pry his way into Bill (Chris Gethard) and Allison’s (Kate Micucci) writing team, but he’s rebuffed. He starts seeing an old high school classmate (Maggie Kemper), which may be redemption. Or a hastily arranged back-up plan.

It’s hard to tell, which is exactly the point.

Sam grasps the truth behind getting older: you, and what you want, change. We’re expected to fight for our

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dreams. What if they deplete our soul, as is clearly the case with Miles, who becomes increasingly petty as Jack’s success balloons?

Not everybody is meant to be a headliner. Fame is fleeting. You will be around much longer. Birbiglia dishes out so many jabs, and they accumulate until the glowing creativity falls and the people are revealed, whether it’s Miles looking at his flabby self in the bathroom mirror or Lindsay (Tami Sagher) coming home to an admonishing note from mom on her bedroom door. Even Jack is fighting for his television life, stealing his troop’s old skits to get precious airtime. (“We’ve been replaced by Ben Stiller,” Miles says.) The humbling provides a showcase for Jacobs, who along with the Netflix series Love, has displayed an exceptional ability to play shattered characters willing themselves back together. Her last improv scene with Jack should be a fitting finale, but it doesn’t fit into her evolving script.

That it’s so heartbreaking captures the messy loveliness of Don’t Think Twice. Sometimes the real courage is not sticking to a lifelong dream that has seared itself into our essence—it is abandoning it for something more fulfilling. You just hope others want to join you. [R] n

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Weiner ANTHONY WEINER WAS A firebrand Democrat Congressman until a sexting incident—he e-sent a woman not his wife a photo of a bulge in his undies (there’s really no other way to put it) in 2011 and the scandal sent him packing. In 2013, Weiner eats crow, publicly admits he did wrong, and asks for another chance at public office; this time, he runs for Mayor of New York City. During this run, he lets a documentary crew (led by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg) cover his Mayoral campaign. Then word of yet more sexting incidents emerged—Weiner had an erotic e-chat with a Las Vegas bimbo. So begins a painful political flameout and it’s all caught on camera for posterity.

The fascinating thing about the documentary Weiner is, without being impartial (an impossibility anyway), it presents a likeable yet (very) flawed politician as he goes down with his ship—and lets the viewer make up his/her own mind. We’re shown Weiner as passionately caring about the middle class and trying to fend off media vultures as they pick at his not-yet-cold political carcass. True, Weiner did get himself into some sexual peccadillos—but one could admire him as he retorts to a journalist that asks him about one of his scandals [I paraphrase but it’s close]: “Why not ask me about housing in the Bronx?” After all, no matter how thinly one slices the cheese, there are always two sides to it—the “journalist” was concentrating on the politician caught with his (figurative and literal) pants

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down and Weiner says, “OK, my scandal affects me and my family, but how about the issues that affect the city as a whole?” The reporter had, of course, no response. After all, was he the first politician to get caught being naughty?

John F. Kennedy was a serial fornicator and his father was a pro-Hitler ex-bootlegger. Nixon extended the Vietnam War and shredded the Constitution, yet he’s remembered as the president that opened relations with China…before leaving office in disgrace, but I digress. But, and this is a crucial “but”: The media was a very different beast then than now.

This is a warts-and-all view of Weiner, the family man with a loyal wife, a child, and a cat, and the pugnacious politician on the campaign trail. We see him fighting an uphill battle, trying to live down his goof/error in judgement while trying to rally the support of the people of NYC, some of whom have the attitude: “To hell with the personal stuff, here’s a guy that could do some good for us,” while a few yell “Pervert!” He’s assembled a staff that takes the slings and arrows for their loyalty to the chief. His wife, Huma, is practically the definition of the long-suffering but loyal wife, yet with a big difference: She is a friend of and former adviser to Hillary Clinton. She knows politics firsthand herself, so perhaps that gives her the additional “edge” with regard to supporting her husband. But when the second scandal breaks, we get to see how the whole media circus wears her down. How it affects Weiner is a

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double-edged sword—it seems to energize him as he summons the resolve to face down his media accusers. But then he, too, is gradually worn down, spending more time defending himself and his family than actively campaigning for mayor. Time and time again Weiner himself comes off alternately as brave and narcissistic, foolhardy and pugnacious, principled.

The fly-on-the-wall aspects and the insatiable lust for details on the part of the documentarians almost proves their undoing for this as a film. As with many biographies and fact-based dramas, the viewer knows it’s not going to end well, but the viewer’s interest could and should be maintained throughout. After a while Weiner (the film) gets bogged down in a spiral of redundancy—here’s a scene of tension between Weiner and his wife, and then here’s a scene of Weiner vs. the press, and then other similar scenes. We see several clips of Weiner being mocked on TV shows, followed by another tense scene of Weiner with his staff and/or wife, scenes of New Yorkers calling Weiner names, yadda, yadda. Simply put, Weiner grabs you in that train-wreck fashion—scary and sad but you can’t look away—and descends into I’ve-seen-this-already tedium.

Despite this, Weiner remains a singular look into the world of politics and media feeding-frenzies, and d’ya know what, pilgrim? No one really comes off well (except for loyal Huma), and that is a sobering lesson, perhaps the biggest, cruelest lesson of Weiner. n

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the funny fashionista

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Parker Posey may be known for her expert comic timing, but the enduringly talented character actress has also evolved as a woman of style, as shown in her latest film, Cafe Society.

BACK IN FEBRUARY OF 2005, a hot new reality show called Project Runway had reached the finale of its first season, promising to crown America’s next great fashion designer. On the judges’ panel, series regulars (and industry bigwigs) Nina Garcia and Michael Kors weren’t joined by a model, a stylist, or a magazine editor, but actress Parker Posey, who’s more known for her comedy than her couture commentary. Posey was introduced by host Heidi Klum as a “style icon,” and she certainly looked the part, her hair blown out into a bold, 1970s-style afro, and her sunglasses chunky enough to rival Anna Wintour’s.

“In wardrobe, on the day of filming,” Posey says, “the only thing that felt right for me—for whatever reason—were these rhinestone pants. But they weighed about ten pounds and I couldn’t even sit down in them.” Instead, Posey opted to take inspiration from a role she was concurrently playing in a stage production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly. The sunglasses were from the costume department. The hairstyle was in keeping with her character, and it was one she’d rock later that night in a performance of the show. And the giant knit scarf, she says, was one given to her by her therapist “from the ‘70s—from Ireland.”

Posey’s description of her outfit is aptly cinematic, but more importantly, it points to a key virtue of any style maven: improvisation. As it happens, the same trait that makes Posey such an ace comedienne is one that makes her continuously and notably chic.

Today, cozied up on a window bench in New York’s Crosby Street Hotel, Posey is dressed in a seamless conglomeration of pieces, including a lightweight silk top by designer and friend Gary Graham, a pair of flowing trousers by Electric Feathers (another New Yorkbased brand), her hairdresser’s ring, and eggshell-colored heels that she “can really stomp around in” and that complete the look without pretense.

“It’s so easy,” Posey eventually says—not in regard to the apparent effortlessness of her ensemble, but to the way it feels and, by extension, looks. It’s a great, breezy summer outfit for Posey, a true New Yorker whom you’re likely to see walking the streets of her West Village neighborhood, her dog typically in tow. In addition to area designers, she often talks up local performers at every level of stardom. (Four years ago, when I spoke to her in the same hotel about her indie flick Price Check, Posey was raving about her rising co-star, a fellow funny lady named Amy Schumer.)

Though she was born in Baltimore, this is the town in which Posey got her start, and talk of memorable costumes inevitably leads to a mention of Party Girl, a 1995 comedy that christened Posey as an indie queen, and outfitted her in all sorts of fun, enviable garb.

“I still have that Vivienne Westwood, red, satin, corseted thing,” she says, excitedly. “It’s beautiful.” In addition, Posey says it’s not uncommon for her to bring her own pieces to set—things, perhaps, that were already worn, and that she hunted down at consignment shops. “It’s more personal,” says the actress, who’s donned her own finds in past projects like Broken English and Woody Allen’s Irrational Man. Shifting onto her stomach on the cushioned bench, and bending her knees so that her heeled feet are pointing straight up in the air, Posey gets even more comfortable before we bring up Café Society, Allen’s Irrational Man follow-up, and quite possibly Posey’s most fashionable film to date. Taking place in 1930s New York and Hollywood, Café casts the actress, 47, as Rad, the head of a modeling agency who speaks with a Rosalind Russelltype swagger.

“I love this time period,” Posey says, recalling her grandmother, who came of age in

Parker Posey during Olympus Fashion Week.

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that era. “I think women were really great then. They had attitude, but also elegance and strength.” Posey notes that she was thrilled to play someone who’s very proudly her age, and doesn’t have to be a bitch to exercise influence. “We have this archetype of the kind of woman who’s powerful,” Posey says. “And Rad is not that at all. She’s very real.”

Her hair color, however, is about as artificial as it comes. Café Society gives us our firstever glimpse at Posey as a full-blown bottle blonde, her hair done up in a dramatic coif of pearly yellow. Today, she’s sporting the remnants in a sort of rough-chopped, two-toned bob, and she admits that the dye job did a number on her hair. “It fried it,” she says, “and there’d be white-blonde snow raining down on my keyboard.” But the experience isn’t one she’d give back. “There’s a whole lineage of blondes in Hollywood,” she says, quipping that she wished she’d done it sooner to get more work. “But really, it just fit the character—it felt right, and fun.”

Also fitting the character are an embarrassment of lavish Schiaparelli gowns, which evoked the period while giving Posey a decidedly daring look. One particular piece, Posey’s favorite, was a purple and golden sequined number with rats and squirrels printed onto it. “Rats and squirrels!” the actress shouts. Even costume designer Suzy Benzinger had her doubts about Allen’s comfort with such outre attire, but ultimately the director

Parker Posey and Paul Schneider in a scene from Cafe Society

wanted to follow through with his character’s high-fashion aura. “I mean, she runs a modeling agency,” Posey says with a grin.

“I feel lucky,” the actress continues, and while it may have a little something to do with it, she’s no longer talking about baroque duds on loan from upscale fashion houses.

“Maintaining a career after 40 is a big deal, and my career has relied on a lot of luck, and not a lot of business. For example, Woody happened to see me at a film festival, along with a casting director, and who knows if I would’ve gotten the part in this movie if that didn’t happen. Some people’s lives are more regimented and structured, but with the life of the freelance artist, so much is left to luck and chance.”

And what a difference the years can make. Posey’s filmography has been a rollercoaster of the big and the small, the fringe and the mainstream. In 1998, she originated the role of Fay Grim in Hal Hartley’s low-budget Henry Fool (she’d later revisit the part in Hartley’s 2006 sequel), and that same year, she starred with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail. In 2000, she etched herself into the comedy history books with her role in the cult flick Best in Show, while also appearing in the mega-popular horror sequel Scream 3.

When we got together in 2012, Posey was doing a lot of guest spots on TV shows like Louie, New Girl, and The Good Wife. Now, she has a plum role in Allen’s most gorgeous effort since Midnight in Paris.

But it’s all work for Posey, who likes a variety of media. Since January, she’s been doing a lot of writing, and she says she’s been working on both a memoir and an “adult coloring book with a how-to” element. She mentions something about developing an app in a studio with friends—one of them is a magician and the other dresses like a wolf. (“It’s very silent-film,” she notes.)

“I just want to create in different forms and focus on my ideas when I’m not working,” says Posey, who’ll soon star in Mascots, her fourth film with Christopher Guest, debuting this fall exclusively on Netflix. “I want to express, and to stay creative,” she adds.

Now, she’s looking forward to tomorrow night, when she, her director, and her Café Society cast mates (including Blake Lively, Kristen Stewart, and Jesse Eisenberg) will be attending the New York premiere of their film with an after-party at the storied Carlyle Hotel. where she’s seen many artists perform.

Who will she be wearing to the premiere party? “Gary Graham,” she says. “I like onestop shopping.” n W W W. fa C E B O O k . C O M / I C O N D V

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A CONVERSATION WITH DIANE ARBUS BIOGRAPHER ARTHUR LUBOW

NEARLY FIFTY YEARS LATER, and I am still riveted, mesmerized, discomfited, and haunted by the stares of a Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room, a Naked Man Being a Woman, a Jewish Giant at Home, and a Hermaphrodite and a Dog in a Carnival Trailer.

I was first exposed to Diane (pronounced Dee-Ann) Arbus’s work in l972, in an Aperture magazine monogram displaying eighty of her now classic photographs, published in conjunction with a posthumous exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. (Arbus had taken her life the year before, at 48.) The “freakish” people who stared out of those pages seemed almost mythic. And the people-less images of a Castle in Disneyland, a Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, and a House on a Hill, Hollywood seemed like settings for a fairy tale in which one of Arbus’ gallery of transvestites, midgets, and mentally disabled “stops you and demands you answer a riddle.”

THE MAIN INSIGHT IS ABOUT HER PSYCHOLOGICAL What compelled Arbus DEFICIT. SHE NEEDED TO SEE THE MIRRORED REFLECto seek the weird and perverse? Who were these TION OF HERSELF IN THEIR FACES AND IN THEIR REpeople that Arbus regarded SPONSES TO HER. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THAT as “aristocrats” for having PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITION…AND HER ART IS been “born with their trauSOMETHING NO ONE HAD REALIZED BEFORE. ma and having already passed their test in life”?

What was it like to live in their world? And, most provocatively, what questions were they asking us about the riddle of our own odd secrets.

I met with Arthur Lubow, author of the recently published biography Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, to mull over such questions.

Twelve years in working on this book? Really?

[Laughter] Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It wrote about Arbus for The New York Times Magazine in 2003. There was a long time after I wrote the piece that I wasn’t sure that I was going to do the book. So it was about six or seven years of working in a serious way on the book.

Why invest so much of your life in Diane Arbus?

She was such a fascinatingly complex and seductive person. John Szarkowski, who for twenty-nine years was head of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art and her most important backer, said that people were just as interested in Diane as she was in them. You can see that in the photographs. And people who knew her could talk about her endlessly. It’s part of why I got interested in her. I felt I would never get to the bottom of her, and she would never bore me.

How does the book break new ground?

The main insight is about her psychological deficit—her inability to feel things directly and her reliance on the response of other people. She needed to see the

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mirrored reflection of herself in their faces and in their responses to her. The connection between that psychological condition—I don't know what you’d want to call it—and her art is something no one had realized before. It came to me gradually by reading her letters and by speaking to her close friends. It made sense of a lot of things I couldn’t otherwise understand. That seems to me to be the book’s central theme and revelation. There is also is a lot of information about the way she worked and her relationships with people close to her that hadn’t come out before.

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Diane Arbus in Central Park, 1969. Photo: Garry Winogrand

a She herself described a breakdown during which “she put her hand over her face or where her face used to be because she didn’t feel as though she existed anymore.”

Yes, she had a recurrent sense of emptiness and weightlessness. She needed that reflected image of people responding to her presence. It’s there in her classic photographs.

Marvin Israel, her mentor and lover, said that what lifted her spirits most was finding these people she photographed. So it was when the work was going well that she was most elated.

In the book, you paraphrase Lisette Model, her teacher, saying that the act of seeing and being seen, memorialized in a photograph, strengthened her sense of self and her sense of being.

Yes, she said that in learning how to photograph, Diane gained the power to live.

You’ve sourced allegations that she had an incestuous relationship was her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, that she participated in orgies that she photographed, that she had anonymous sexual encounters in buses and movie theaters, and on and on. Would you describe her sexual behavior as“pathological”?

I don't think it's a useful term. I think it was obsessive, maybe compulsive, and

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I think it relates to her anxiety about her inability to feel things directly and yearning for intense experience. She said this to her psychotherapist at the end of her life. Was she bi-polar? I don’t know. I quote her as writing to a friend “I am literally scared of getting depressed. And it is so goddam chemical, I’m convinced. Energy, some special kind of energy, just leaks out, and I am left lacking the confidence even to cross the street.” I don't know how useful these categories are. Sometimes they’re useful if you’re prescribing medication, but I’m not. It seems reductive to put her in these various procrustean beds.

Oscar Wilde said that every man has his disciples and it is usually Judas who writes the biography. Anyone see you that way?

No, on the contrary, I hope my book makes her seem much more likeable and much more courageous than many people think of her as having been. And much more fun to be with. She did take her own life. She did suffer from depression. But people who knew her remember her as being hilariously funny. And if you read her letters or listen to her talks, she is very funny. So I hope the book is a corrective in a way.

I guess you’re thinking of Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography, which is a window into a tortured soul.

I don't think that Arbus’s friends recognized the woman they knew in Bosworth’s portrait. A lot more information has come out in thirty-two years since she wrote that pioneering book. So it has a number of errors, large and small. Bosworth’s father and brother had both committed suicide, so she was interested in accounting for Arbus’ suicide. Originally her book was to examine the suicides of Arbus, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, but she got so interested in Arbus, that she did the book just on her. It is true that Arbus was fascinated by death from an early age. She said of Hamlet that “he was only happy when he was dead” and of Medea that “some women are not meant to live.” But Arbus’ suicide was not what drew me. It was the connection between the life and the art that got me interested.

Arbus was someone, you say,“ who would immediately spot a hairline crack in a golden bowl.”

It’s an allusion to Henry James and the golden bowl with a hairline crack that nobody but one person, a connoisseur, really sees. Arbus was very attuned to the way in which people presented themselves and tried not to be the way they are. She could spot that immediately because it stands out. So when she photographs female impersonators, you can see the hairline under the wig.

Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C. 1963

Diane Arbus, “Self Portrait, Pregnant”

Girl Sitting in Bed with her Boyfriend, N.Y.C., 1966

Two ladies at the automat, NYC (printed later), 1966

Would you have liked to be photographed by her?

[Laughter] I wouldn’t really. I don't know what she would have found. But chances are she wouldn’t have wanted to photograph me either. She would not have found me interesting. She said in a lecture that she would not care to photograph most people in the audience. The people she photographed are exceptional looking in some way, which I don't think I am.

>

36 A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C, 1966.

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Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961

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The Adderall Diaries WRITING IS A TRICKY subject for movies—few things are potentially more dull than watching a writer at his/her typewriter/computer click-clacking away. So naturally many movies about writers focus on what leads up to the writing process, and it’s more interesting about writers wrestling with their personal demons as they go about their craft. Well-adjusted writers would be, I imagine, dull as well—so movies focus on writers with dysfunctional lives. In Capote the writing of In Cold Blood consumed Truman Capote’s life to the point of figurative derailment; Charles Bukowski was an alcoholic, William S. Burroughs was a junkie, and so forth. The Adderall Diaries is another movie about an unhappy writer (James Franco) writing about his dysfunctional life and, alas, it’s not a very interesting one.

The story is a sadly a common one: In flashback we see a happy family destroyed by illness and abuse. Franco grows up to be Stephen, a drug-taking hipster writer who’s published tales of his angst-laden, bad-choices past, but something tosses him into a spiral. The abusive father that he wrote about and described as “dead” (not as in “dead to 24

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me,” but deceased, in the ground, history) shows up at a book reading in the presence of Ed Harris. Harris is this movie’s saving grace, especially when he yells, “I oughta be getting royalties!” He postulates that while he was a far from perfect dad, his son was an out-of-control drug addict who fabricated some of the stories in his book. When Harris is on-screen, he charges his scenes with righteous working-class-Joe fury, in stark contrast to Franco as the seemingly narcoleptic writer. In fact, Franco’s character is a cliché: Scruffy appearance, messy apartment, perpetually mopey, sullen facial expression, and rides a motorcycle.

The clash of these two characters is memory—one recalls things one way, and vice versa. But this is only dealt with in a somewhat superficial fashion—“You were a bad father!”

“You were a bad son!” Actually, much of this movie touches upon lots of things lightly. Stephen decides to follow a murder trial, one that he hopes—without of hint of modesty or irony—to be “his” In Cold Blood. The defendant here is played by Christian Slater, who has so little screen time it’s a wonder why he bothered.

Did I mention Stephen has a girlfriend? Don’t all tor-

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tured writers in the movies? In this case it’s Lana, whose role is summed-up as “the writer’s girlfriend.” Lana is a court reporter, one that looks as if she walked onto the set off of a modelling catwalk and is such an ace at reporting that she never has to file a story, leaving her lots of time to, well, be his girlfriend and have (rough, on him) sex. At no point did this writer ever believe this couple had any chemistry or even liked each other. We never are clued-in as to how the rough lovemaking and murder trial really tie-in to anything. Additionally, while I know these kinds of movies rely on flashbacks to tell some of the tale, do the flashbacks have to be all shaky-cam, grainy, and intentionally disorienting in that art-house manner that looks suspiciously like the work of a first-year film student?

The Adderall Diaries is more a collection of strungtogether vignettes about, oh, unhappy people acting unhappy at length—not being, mind you, but acting unhappy. Recommended only to gotta-see-it-all fans of Franco, Heard, and/or Harris. The Adderall Diaries was based on the memoir by Stephen Elliot who pretty much disavowed it. n

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Hell or High Water.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story (Dir. Jeff Feuerzeig). Documentary. What’s it like to be inside the mind of a deranged sociopath? Look no further than this compelling, though one-sided documentary about Laura Albert, a San Francisco-based writer who, during the late-’90s to early’00s, passed herself off as teenage truckstop hustler-turned-William S. Burroughsesque literary sage JT “Terminator” LeRoy. Albert is the primary interviewee, justifying her manipulations of the publishing establishment as a kind of punk stunt. In truth, the more she details and defends her often jaw-dropping escapades (playacting suicidal scenarios on the phone with several mentors; sending out her husband’s half-sister to act the part of LeRoy during public appearances), the more unhinged she seems. This a fascinating trainwreck of a film—a would-be sympathetic portrait that nonetheless betrays the monstrousness of Albert’s charade. You should watch it in close proximity with Marjorie Strum’s The Cult of JT LeRoy (2014), a harsher doc that offers a clearer, more pointed analysis of this bizarre lit-world put-on. [R] HHH 26

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Florence Foster Jenkins (Dir. Stephen Frears). Starring: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg. It’s nice to see Stephen Frears back in the deceptively farcical mode of the great Prick Up Your Ears (1987). At first glance, especially on the level of performance, Florence Foster Jenkins seems like a broad burlesque of the eponymous (and infamous) New York society matron (Meryl Streep, pitch-perfect, unlike her character), who fancied herself an opera prima donna, but in fact couldn’t sing a note. Jenkins’s vainglory was aided and abetted by a devoted husband, St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant, using his considerable charm to intriguingly diabolical ends), and a meek accompanist named Cosmé McMoon (Simon Helberg, channeling Producers-era Gene Wilder).

As the film goes on, it becomes evident that the light-hearted surface is meant to mimic the delusional bubble in which Jenkins has encased herself. This is the story of a person unable to recognize that they’re leading an especially pathetic life, which doesn’t mean—in Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin’s multifac-

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eted telling—they aren’t worthy of our sympathy. Proposed alternate title: Ignorance Is Bliss: The Movie. [PG-13] HHHH Hell or High Water (Dir. David Mackenzie). Starring: Ben Foster, Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges. Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan pens another character-driven, flyoverstate noir, with director David Mackenzie (Starred Up) taking an agreeably leisurely approach to the material. The big draw here is Jeff Bridges as retirement-age Texas ranger Marcus Hamilton, always ready with a racist jest and an equally large helping of Southern charm. He takes on a last case involving a series of bank robberies being pulled off by a pair of cash-strapped brothers (Ben Foster and Chris Pine), though nothing plays out quite as you’d think it would. Mackenzie overdoes the recessionera window-dressing in much the same way that Andrew Dominik did in 2012’s Killing Them Softly. But his eye for evocative widescreen compositions and his sensitive handling of each cast member down to the smallest role (no one person emerges as a clear bad guy or good guy)

more than makes up for any minor missteps. [R] HHH1/2 The Lovers and the Despot (Dirs. Ross Adam and Robert Cannan). Documentary.

It’s a story too crazy not to be true. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee becomes the muse of fellow South Korean director Shin Sang-ok. Their films are lauded, but their relationship hits the rocks. Then one of their biggest fans—dictator Kim Jong-il—arranges their kidnapping, reuniting the duo in North Korea, where they fall back in love, make a number of propagandistic features (clips of which, such as a shameless Titanic ripoff, are interspersed throughout), and plot a daring escape to the free world. Aesthetically, The Lovers and the Despot is pretty much doc-by-numbers. And it never deeply grapples with the tale’s political implications (namely, the contradictions inherent in a tinpot despot like Kim affording his imprisoned duo a great deal of creative freedom). Yet Shin and Choi’s strange love story is by itself enough to recommend a watch. [N/R] HHH

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FILM

dvds revieWed by george oxford MiLLer

Bryan Cranston as LBJ in “All the Way.”

REEL NEWS

Sing Street (2016) HHHH Cast: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Aidan Gillen, Lucy Boynton Genre: Musical drama; Rated PG-13 Universal themes fill this personal introspection of coming of age in 1980s Ireland. The teen years are a time of rebellion, impossible dreams, and painful self-discovery. It’s daily life supercharged with feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, but also hope, ambition, self-worth, and (especially) romance. Conor (Walsh-Peelo) dodges bullies in a harsh new school, his fighting parents, and struggles without friends. Then, lost in the scary, cruel world of adolescence, he sees Raphina (Boynton), but instead of only dreaming about her, his infatuation drives him to action. He asks her to star in a music video he says he’s shooting, except he has no band and plays no instrument.

She agrees and he’s launched on the tortuous road of discovering who he is and what he can be if he faces the obstacles. This feel-good story hits the right notes with period and original music, energetic acting, and youth that make you yearn for the days when an unpredictable life filled with unimaginable possibilities lay ahead.

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All the Way (2016) HHHHH Cast: Brian Cranston, Melissa Leo, Anthony Mackie Genre: Historical drama Rated TV-14.

What better time to review the politics of the 1960s, one of the most bitter, contentious, hateful periods in U. S. history since the Civil War, than in the present presidential race? Lyndon Johnson unexpectedly became president just as the Civil Rights Act had ruptured Washington with the Republicans and Dixiecrats (Southern Democrats) on one side and the Civil Right leaders and the White House on the other.

The story here is how LBJ, a master at manipulation, persuasion, compromise, and reward and punishment, muscled the legislation through a conservative, overtly racist Congress, then went on to win the next presidential election, though the Southern Democrats forever bolted from the party.

Cranston masterfully captures the larger than life personality of LBJ and his blusterous determination in the face of overwhelming opposition.

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Lobster (2016) HHHH Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly Genre: Weird, satire, drama; Rated R If the Academy gave Oscars for weird movies, this satire would be a sure bet. Set in a dystopian world where being unmarried is a criminal offence, singles are shipped off to a country resort and given 45 days to find a mate, or be transformed into the animal of their choice. David (Farrell), who choses a lobster as his totem, arrives with his brother, a border collie on a leash. Far from being a wanton sex party, the austere atmosphere barely inspires monotone flirting. Yet the draconian rules compel David to bolt for the forest where the Loners rule and love comes with severe penalties. Of course he falls madly in love with another loner (Weisz), and once again is at lose-lose odds with an uncompromising ethos. The nuanced acting, sight gags, and deadpan humor perfectly match the suppressed emotions of this absurd allegory. The all-too-clear parallels with today’s crazed, polarized society leave very little wiggle room between loving or hating the movie.

Louder than Bombs (2016) HHHH Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid.

Genre: Drama; Rated R From comedy to drama, Hollywood loves the raw human fabric exposed by dysfunctional family relationships. When one person’s pain confronts another’s, they can cry or laugh, heal or bleed.

When Isabelle (Huppert) a well-known war photographer, dies in a car crash, her husband Gene (Byrne) buries his grief deep inside, while their teen son Conrad (Druid) retreats into the virtual world of video games. The older son Jonah (Eisenburg) marries, has a daughter, and becomes a sociology professor, but has he really moved on? When Jonah returns home to help arrange a retrospective of Isabelle’s photographs, the three men discover the truth in the images is not absolute but can be altered by how the photo is cropped and framed. As they expose their grief, anger, suffering, and deep secrets, they discover that memories, views of others, and often ill-founded versions of the truth also must be reframed. n

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MUSIC

A.d. AMorosi

POP

Film and television scores are more cinematic than ever ONCE UPON A TIME in Hollywood, names like Bernard Hermann and Dimitri Tiomkin offered epic, story-driven sweep to films whose scores they composed. As time passed, jazz and pop became part of the cinematic soundscape with composers such as Henry Mancini and Michel Legrand creating thematic scores for their directors. Ennio Morricone and John Williams are still around, thankfully, to craft grand orchestral passages for modern spaghetti westerns and solar system blockbusters. The soundtrack now, however, is driven more by the whim and quirk of its composers and the necessity to satisfy the film’s vision—as well as extending itself onto the dance floor and into the pop charts.

now on the early rap and funk tip. What director Baz Luhrmann and hip hop icon Nas have decided to do with its winding score is offer new zotzed-out hip hop music, spoken word and dialogue from the series’ main characters—Jaden Smith’s Dizzee, Shameik Moore’s Shaolin Fantastic—with offbeat classics of the era such as the disco-fied C.J. & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun” and the Fatback Band’s “(Are You Ready) Do the Bus Stop.”

Ennio Morricone.

Michel Legrand.

Austin, TX synth-wavers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, on their own or as S.U.R.V.I.V.E., have created an analog-based brand of pulsing rhythms and icily dark, sweeping melodies on albums such as their 2012 debut, Survive, on the Mannequin label, and their upcoming horror score-inspired RR7349. Yet, it is the soundtrack for the 80s-centric Netflix hit Stranger Things that’s proving to be the duo’s crowning achievement for creating sonic work as evocative as the sinister program itself.

Rather than go for era-centric shiny synth pop at one with the Reagan years, they find the creepy, unsettling pulse of an America crumbling around itself from greed, sloth and the denial of its crises (AIDS, etc).

Another Netflx show, The Get Down (like HBO’s sadly cancelled Vinyl) deals with the 70s music biz, only

Suicide Squad may be a spotty, cartoonish film to sit through, but its soundscape (like another new comic book-y film, the clubby XOXO) creates a sketchy, collagelike, heart-pounding score. This stitched together electro-rap quilt featuring the explicit “Purple Lamborghini” (Skrillex & Rick Ross) and “Standing inThe Rain” (Action Bronson, Mark Ronson & Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys) is much better than the film.

Not every new, great score moves like lightning.

Some are still thunderous, but subtler and quieter. While working on their new Bad Seeds album Skeleton Tree (whose September release coincides with a sad and stunning making-of documentary, One More Time with Feeling, which screens on September 8 at Upper Darby’s Studio Movie Grill), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis composed and recorded the morose, dramatic but aggressively emotional score to Hell or High Water [reviewed in this issue]. A modern cops-and-robbers Western with a vendetta at its heart, Cave and Ellis’ ruminations are blood-lusty, and evil—and sounds just like Jeff Bridges looks in that flick.

When it comes to pensive, few scores are as still, but ever-so-vibrant, as the just re-mastered soundtrack to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Starring David Bowie and minor-key master composer/pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto in his first film role, the score is delicate, studied, spare, yet full of forbidden colors and shadowy secrets, perfectly fitting filmmaker Nagisa Oshima’s quiet cinematic masterpiece. n

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JAZZ, ROCK, CLASSICAL, ALT The Rave-Ups HHHHH Town + Country Omnivore There is a point where the musical histories of Pittsburgh and Los Angeles intersect/overlap/get jumbled—The RaveUps are one. Spawned in the ‘burgh, The Rave-Ups went west to seek fame and for-

Maya Beiser HHHHH Tranceclassical Innova NYC-based cellist Maya Beiser under “you mightn’t know the name but may’ve heard her,” as she’s been featured soloist in movie soundtracks (Blood Diamond, After Earth, others), guested with the Boston Pops, and worked with composers Brian Eno, Phillip Glass, and Steve Reich.

Like fellow travelers Kronos Quartet, Beiser stretches and blurs boundaries between genres/styles but without compro-

Heroes of Toolik HHHH Like Night Self-released Heroes of Toolik is comprised of musicians with impressive NYC resumes: Drummer Billy Ficca, a member of Television; Peter Zummo (Lounge Lizards); Ernie Brooks, original member of Jonathan Richaman’s Modern Lovers and currently bassist with Gary Lucas; guitarist Arad Evans, member of Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra; and Jennifer Coates, old-timestyle fiddler-about-town. Noisy outré barrage? Not at all—while some of this Night sounds coolly lopsided in a manner that evokes the soundtrack to The Twilight Zone, much of it recalls the post-punk era when bands defined their own styles, i.e., Raincoats, Talking Heads. The songs are spacious, not unlike classical chamber music, with wry, almost-hidden melodic hooks, bits of swing recalling Django Reinhardt, vocal harmonies, bits of Grateful Dead-like jamming and Garcia-esque riffs.

The lead vocals embody a dry, laconic, almost Mose Allison-like lounge-lizard (no pun intended) cool. In an era where too much music can be described (and dismissed) in three words or less, the eclectic, mysterious set needs a Night-length chat over coffee or a beer. (9 tracks, 43 min.) heroesoftoolik.com

mise. The aptly-titled Tranceclassical finds Beiser weaving a mesmerizing yet visceral tapestry with just her cello on “Three Parts Wisdom” by Glenn Kotche (the drummer for Wilco) and she transforms Lou Reed’s harrowing “Heroin” into an elegant, Mozart-flavored rhapsody, her whispery. little-girl-lost voice almost melding with her instrument. On the other hand, the pugnacious “Hellhound”—based in part on Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound On My Trail”—features some truly scary Led Zep/Black Sabbathinspired heavy rock grind. If you’re a fan of mod classical, traditional classical (she performs J.S. Bach and Hildegard von Bingen herein), King Crimson, and/or the dreamscapes of Cocteau Twins, Low, and Lush, do investigate. Great cello playing, too. (9 tracks, 66 min.) innova.mu

Jerry Bergonzi HHHH Spotlight On Standards Savant While not massively known outside of jazz-head circles, tenor saxophonist/educator Jerry Bergonzi has quite the track record, leader on over 20 discs and was a member of Dave Brubeck’s quartet circa 1973-1982. Spotlight On Standards is both a slight departure from his (admittedly exemplary) norm and a revisiting of a past triumph—this is the first time since 2001 that Bergonzi recorded in the soul jazz-inspired tenor/organ/drums context. Has JB gone “old-school funky/organ combo” on us, trying to get in on that action? Not really, as Bergonzi is still roaring in his visceral style, albeit with a couple of lads that bring modernity to the earthy organ combo sound, much as the late great Larry Young

The Rave-Ups. L-R: Tim Jimenez, Terry Wilson, Jimmer Podrasky, Tommy Blatnik. Photo: Greg Allen.

tune, disbanded, reformed, and in 1985 released the lost classic Town + Country.

T+C was an early gem in the crown known now as Americana, but in ’85 it was some sort of alternative rock with a (then ungainly) hard country twang. Lead singer/songwriter Jimmer Podrasky’s voice had some of the reedy, plainspoken, earthy wail of Dylan and Dylan godkids Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and Gram Parsons. The Rave-Ups’ guitars had the keening whine and twang akin to Dire Straits and Uncle Tupelo and the crackle of the ‘60s Rolling Stones. Try to get the Flying Burrito Brothers-flavored hoedown “By the Way” out of your cranium after but one listen. (Guest pedal steel guitarist Sneaky Pete Kleinow was in the FFBs, btw.) Bob the Zim’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” gets a treatment like a cross between The Band and The Who—downhome yet big-city exultant. T+C is as good a slab of American rock & roll (roots division) that could be had in the ‘80s but too few knew it. Here it is again, long outof-print with 11 bonus tracks—don’t get left out, pilgrim. (21 tracks, 79 min.) omnivorerecordings.com

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‘Trane-type energy to his organ-led combos. On a program of originals and classics such as “Dancing in the Dark,” JB mixes brainy angularity and unpredictably probing (though certainly not tentative) playing with old-school ballad panache. (JB listens to Sinatra daily.) If you yearn to groove to thorny jazz that cooks, look no further. (9 tracks, 64 min.) jazzdepot.com Luke Winslow-King HHHH1/2 I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always Bloodshot Born in Michigan, based in New Orleans, guitarist/singer Luke Winslow-King is one of those performers whose style spans the breadth of American music—blues, gospel, N’awlins jazz, traditional country music, and rock & roll. Though consisting of all original material, the songs of Trouble Don’t Last sound as if they could’ve come from the song-books of Big Bill Broonzy, The Band, Slim Harpo, Albert

King, (and King acolyte Stevie Ray Vaughan), Dr. John, Tony Joe White, Bonnie Raitt (especially her first two platters from the early ‘70s), and even Stephen Foster, yet there’s no retro feel or whiff of copycatism. Luke Winslow-King plays some snazzy, wailing-yet-terse guitar, has a smooth, mellifluous voice and his band conjures slinky, sultry, swampy grooves. This Trouble, in fact, makes a nice companion piece to Eric Clapton’s Me & Mr. Johnson and Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On a Gravel Road…and that’s an assessment this writer does not make lightly. Get it. (9 tracks, 38 min.) bloodshotrecords.com n

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GENE AMMONS HOTEL

MY FIRST FULL-TIME JOB after high school was at a now-defunct all-night restaurant in Center City Philadelphia. I got to my nightly gig via public transportation.

At the street corner where I boarded my nightly trolley, there was a tavern, and almost every night, while waiting, I heard the same tune coming from a sometimes open window of the tavern. The song was “My Foolish Heart,” and the player was tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons.

The year was 1951, one year after Ammons had recorded the song. It became a juke box favorite, and frequenters of the tavern must have liked it, too—and I became a Gene Ammons fan.

Ammons enjoyed much more than average success as a jazz musician, but surely could been more successful, had he not become hooked on drugs, and had his career interrupted a total of ten years because of time spent in prison.

He was born and raised in Chicago, where his father, Albert Ammons, was a well-known boggie-woogie pianist. Gene chose to play the tenor saxophone after hearing Lester Young. He studied under Walter Dyett, the famed director of music instruction at Chicago’s De Sable High School. Over the years, Dyett’s students included Nat King Cole, Eddie Harris, Richard Davis, Johnny Griffin, Milt Hinton and Dinah Washington, to name a few Ammons performed with his father and other professional musicians while still in high school, and at 19 landed a job with Billy Eckstine’s band, which included Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and other up-and-comL-R: Ernie Leaner, Gene Ammons, George Leaner. Photo: Ted Bell ing jazz stars. It was in the Eckstine band that Ammons acquired the nickname “Jug,” a reference to the size of his head, which was rather large. When band members were to don straw hats for a certain occasion, and not one was large enough for Ammons head, Eckstine dubbed Gene “Jughead.”

When the Eckstine band folded in 1947, Ammons formed his own small band which included Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt. At this point in his career he had developed a straight-ahead jazz style. His sound was big and round; he could swing with the best, and had few peers when it came to ballads. He continued to front small bands from the late ‘40s to the mid‘50s, with a break in between, when in 1949, he replaced Stan Getz in the Woody Herman band.

A possession of heroin conviction in 1958 resulted in a two-year prison term. Upon his release in 1960, he was imprisoned for one-year for playing in a nightclub, which broke the terms of his parole. In 1962, he was arrested again for drug possession, and this time served a seven- year prison term. He was released in 1969. While incarcerated, Prestige Records continued to release his recordings, so the Ammons name and music had been out there, although he hadn’t been.

When released from prison the last time, Ammons was diagnosed with an enlarged heart and emphysema, but he continued to record and to play venues in cities other than New York, where the New York State Liquor Control Board, had revoked his license because of his drug arrests.

I remember first hearing Ammons when he played so-called straight ahead jazz. Some time in the early 1960s his style changed, and he played a blend of bluesy, funky, soul-jazz. But though the change of style, his up-tempo tunes were always buoyant—and Cupid couldn’t have inspired more romantic ballads.

Veteran Philadelphia jazz fans should recall the Ammons and Sonny Stitt regular appearances at the venerable Showboat jazz club on Lombard Street, and their “battle of the saxes,” show. They rocked the joint.

I’ll always remember Gene Ammons for the reason expressed earlier in this piece, because to me, it’s kind of ironic, that today, as a very mature radio music-program-host, I have been, and still am, playing on-the-air--the music of someone I first heard as a teenager, while standing on a street corner waiting for a trolley, well over a half-century ago. Eugene “Jug” Ammons passed away July 23, 1974, at age 49. n W W W. fa C E B O O k . C O M / I C O N D V

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

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music

TOM WILK

SINGER-SONGWRITER Lori McKenna HHHH The Bird & The Rifle CN Records Lori McKenna’s songs have recorded by some of the top country artists, including Faith Hill, Tim McGraw and Keith Urban. The Bird & The Rifle, McKenna’s 10th studio album, shows she is second to none in performing her own songs, which examine the joys and frustrations of everyday living. The title track, a folk-based country song, uses the bird and rifle as a symbol for women and men in defining and realizing their dreams. “Halfway Home” details the elusiveness of love and the determination of the song’s narrator not to settle for second best.

“Giving Up on Your Hometown” finds McKenna reflecting on her youth from a middle-age perspective on the inevitability of change. “You can’t keep everything the way you want it,” she sings with a hint of

resignation and acceptance. “We Were Cool” serves as a companion piece to that song as a couple find the dreams of youth giving way to adult realities.

McKenna uses a sharp, expressive voice to convey the pain of “Wreck You” or the sincere words of advice she passes on to the her five children on “Humble & Kind.” As a songwriter, she brings a singular vision to her work that helps her to stand out from her contemporaries. (10 songs, 37 minutes) Ally Venable Band HHH No Glass Shoes Connor Ray Music Ally Venable has been making inroads as a blues guitarist in her native Texas, as she and her band have been recognized

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for their music in the East Texas Music Awards. At 17, Venable displays promise with No Glass Shoes, her debut solo album. A mix of original songs and covers of classic blues tunes, Venable shows her potential with “Trainwreck,” the opening track which features some solid guitar interplay between herself and Bobby Wallace. “Woke Up This Mornin’,” another Venable original, fits in nicely with the Texas blues tradition and feature a memorable groove that would be at home on a ZZ Top album. The accusatory “Wise Man” spotlights the keyboard work of Randy Wall. Vocally, Venable stands out on the title track, a reference to Cinderella, and the confessional “Too Much Too Soon.”

On the cover songs, Venable and her band add an up-tempo backing to a version of Alberta Walker’s “Downhearted Blues,” transforming it into an extended jam. “Messin’ with the Kid,” originally a hit for Junior Wells, is an apt tune for the teenage singer. (8 songs, 33 minutes) Dan Penn HHH1/2 Close to Me – More Fame Recordings Ace Dan Penn is best known as a songwriter, co-writing such hits as “Dark End of the Street,” “Sweet Inspiration” and “Cry Like a Baby.” Although he’s had a sporadic recording career, Penn is a commanding singer whose earliest work has largely gone unheard. Close to Me offers a collection of previously unreleased demo recordings that Penn made at Alabama’s Fame Studios as a way to encourage other artists to record them. Recorded between 1963 and 1966, the songs show Penn’s ver-

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satility as a singer and his ability to adapt his material to a variety of styles while still in his early 20s.

“Without a Woman,” a pleading ballad, seems tailor-made for Joe Tex. The roughedged “Miss Personality” has echoes of Wilson Pickett backed by Booker T and the MGs while the wounded feelings of “It Hurts” evokes the spirit of “It Tears Me Up,” a hit single that Penn later co-wrote for Percy Sledge.

Penn utilized a series of collaborators in his songwriting. “So Many Reasons,” cowritten by Marlin Greene, has the breezy feel of late ‘50s Sam Cooke. “Love is a Wonderful Thing” sounds like a blend of Motown and the early singles of the Young Rascals. Close to Me, a sequel to 2012’s The Fame Recordings, offers a new perspective on the history of ‘60s soul music. (24 songs, 60 minutes) Dear County HHH1/2 Low Country pOprOck Records Dear County makes a good first impression with the release of Low Country, their debut album. The Oakland, Calif.based band offers a fresh take with their mix of country, rock and soul sounds.

“On and On” opens the album with a powerful, straightforward rocker that spotlights the vocals of Arrica Rose and features guitar work by Mark W. Lynn reminiscent of Neil Young. The connection to the iconic rocker is reinforced with a faithful rendition of “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” the title track of Young’s debut album with Crazy Horse.

Dear County ventures into other styles with “Oh My Darlin,” which recalls the pop side of Big Star and Rose’s vocals calling to mind Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Dusty Springfield. The mid-tempo confessional tone of “Ain’t it Pretty (How a Heart Breaks)” features country-style harmonies that emphasize the sense of loss in the lyrics. “All I Regret” has echoes of early ‘90s Jayhawks with its instrumentation, while “Baby, Let’s Dance” has the breezy feel of a summer pop song. Low Country will leave listeners with high expectations for their next album. (9 songs, 36 minutes).

Clint Morgan HHH1/2 Scofflaw Lost Cause Records The struggle between good and evil has been a recurring theme in the popular arts. Clint Morgan offers his take on it with Scofflaw, a concept album that examines the lives of those living outside the law from the Wild West to the current day with a mix of original songs and well-chosen

covers. Morgan, an accomplished pianist, delivers a potent mix of roots music with the help of his backing band. “Waco” features a swampy, blues feel with guitars that provides an ominous mood in describing a criminal’s career path. “Wild One” is a ‘50sstyle rocker that depicts the attitude of a post-World War II juvenile delinquent that spotlights Morgan’s piano work. “I Got a Gun” and “The Face in the Mirror” are character sketches of Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, respectively. “D.B. Cooper Blues,” musically based on Jimmie Rodgers’ “California Blues,” is a fanciful imagination of the airplane hijacker who disappeared with $200,000 in 1971 and was never seen again. Morgan turns Bob Dylan’s “Wanted Man” into a minor-key lament for a fugitive trying to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair” is a bluesy lament that features singer Diunna Greenleaf in a key supporting role.

Morgan switches gears to end the album with a handful of gospel songs to suggest the possibility of redemption.

Maria Muldaur lends capable vocal support to “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling,” a 19th century hymn, and “I Done Made It Up in My Mind,” her own, upbeat composition. (19 songs, 75 minutes) n

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FOODIE FILE

A.D. AMOROSI

FOOD PROCESSORS RATHER THAN FOCUS THIS month’s column on one restaurant, chef, idea, taste or trend, I’ve been thinking about how this month is flush with good, new (or renewed) spaces and events. So let’s get good.

Cheu Noodle Bar hits Fishtown Having already caused a wild taste sensation with their hipster noodle salon on S.10th Street in the Jeffer-

Luuuuuuuuuuke After opening his signature LP Steak at Valley Forge Casino Resort, Chef Luke Palladino shuttered his deca-

Terry Leach and Jason Evenchik. Photo ©Reese Amorosi

quirkily designed hot spots (Vintage, Bar, La Casa de tu Madre), some of which (Heritage, Time) double as live jazz boites with hearty, inventive menus and innovative cocktails. Maybe Garage South Philly along the Cheesesteak Vegas Strip is a beer can joint, but its wide open room hosts Skeeball, Boardwalk games and this city’s top chefs stopping by for pop-ups. So, too, will its brand new brother Garage North which now resides at Fishtown’s busiest strip, the corner of Girard and Frankford Avenue.

Evenchik & Co.’s real crowning glory (for now) is his spanking new Midtown Village bar/Pacific Rim eatery, Tiki. This trend, awakened from its 50s/60s slumber earlier in the 2000s missed Philly—and maybe that’s a good thing because Evenchik’s kitsch vibe, tasty morsels and Hemingway-inspired cocktails feel and taste organic.

Chef Luke Palladino. Photo ©Reese Amorosi

dent Italian steakhouse, Palladino’s on Passyunk, in July for what has been called “renovations” by some and “closing” by others (rumors of angry unpaid vendors and landlords have surfaced of late). Having eaten everything from Luke’s different, daily gnocchi and his gorgeous steaks, here’s hoping his September re-opening is a reality.

Jason Evenchik’s team goes Tiki, hits the Garage again Slowly and quietly, restaurateur and empire builder Jason Evenchik—with collaborator/GM Terry Leach and AGM Tim Heuisler—has crafted a small village’s worth of

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Up, Up and Away at SkyGarten It’s impossible not to love being 51 floors above pavement during the spring and summer months, perusing every Philadelphia vista usually only available to William Penn and Tom Knox. Since Three Logan Square’s SkyGarten opening, Chef Jeremy Nolen (Brauhaus Schmidt, Whetstone), Doug Hager and the Top of the Tower team have made a beer garden menu filled with brews, cocktails, bratwust, burgers, and more. Now, SkyGarten and its newer-still food/booze program will run during autumn and through the holidays. New Year’s Eve at SkyGarden sounds lovely.

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Shawn Darragh and Ben Puchowitz .Photo ©Reese Amorosi

son Hospital area, and a dumpling den with Bing Bing Dim Sum on East Passyunk Avenue, Shawn Darragh and Ben Puchowitz are back for more. The duo runs roughshod this fall over Frankford Avenue (a famed, onetime police horse stable) with their second, bigger Cheu Noodle Bar up North.

Feastival: the food fest with art and heart Nick Stuccio’s FringeArts Festival is always the East Coast’s most hotly anticipated, avant garde theatre and performance art gathering of creators from Philly, NYC and the global village. With that, his post-fest fundraiser, Feastival, started and organized by Audrey Claire-Taichman, Michael Solomonov and Stephen Starr, is similar to the FringeArts Fest in its collection of chefs from Philly who are making food from around the world. On September 29, at (for the first time) at FringeArts’ 140 N. Columbus Boulevard HQ/performance space, Feastival hosts the usual chefs from Bistro La Minette, POD, to name only two. This year, however, newbies such as ROOT, Kensington Quarters, and the gents of Hungry Pigeon will jump aboard the worthy charity. Plus, you’ll have to duck the aerialist and dancers from FringeArts’ minions. Tickets at phillyfeastival.ticketleap.com/2016audi-feastival n

about life

JAMes p. deLpino, Mss,MLsp,LcsW,bcd

Fear and Loathing FEAR IS A UNIVERSAL experience. We all have fears and that’s part of being human. Sometimes fear is helpful in that it can save, protect and prevent negative things from hurting us. Sometimes fears are powerful enough to cloud and impair judgement and decisionmaking—fear can be friend or foe. As much as fear can motivate us to feel, think and behave in certain ways, it can also freeze decision making. It can disrupt and distort the cognitive processes; it can distort our perception of reality.

There are those who induce fear into the collective consciousness with the purpose of creating certain desired results. Parents use fear to motivate behavioral compliance at home or academic performance in school. “If you don’t do well in school you’ll hurt your chances for happiness and success later in life” are words that every child has heard from teachers and parents.

Consider how the psychology of fear can influence the economy and drive markets up or down. Poor economic news can often influence investors to withdraw their money for fear of losing some or all of it. Perhaps as a vestige of primitive evolutionary residuals, our brains are structured to place the most emphasis on the most recent information. While this may have been a good survival tactic in the primitive world, it can become a great disadvantage in modern times. The news of today can often contradict the trends in the longer term. While long-term investment is less risky, day traders take a risk for quicker gains. Both of these models are examples of investment strategies that are driven by fear. It’s difficult to rid ourselves entirely of fear, so some investors diversify their portfolios to defend against loss.

The fear of the stock market dropping will often drive investors to hard commodities like silver and gold. It’s been estimated that ninety-percent of Americans fear they will not have enough money in retirement. The fear of outliving our money is rampant.

In this political season of presidential politics fear is especially poignant. Regardless of our political persuasion

or belief, each side siezes on the dynamics of fear in the hope of convincing us that the other party spells doom; that there are terrible consequences contingent upon the outcome of the election. Each party touts a vision that illustrates the other side will only make things worse. “The politics of personal destruction” has become a catchphrase for political pundits to toss about. Using fear to demean the character, words, deeds, and even the mental health of another is an attempt to manipulate our perception of the candidates. The use of fear is also a powerful tool to solidify the base of each party—it drives voters to the polls.

Fear is often registered more powerfully in our mind than positive perceptions. This, too, may reflect more of the primitive structures in our brains. The news media shows a decidedly fear-oriented perspective to drive ratings and spur political argument.

The overwhelming number of negative stories that dominate the news and talk show formats reflect how effectively fear and negativity draw viewers. The rarity or absence altogether of good and positive news reinforces the notion that fears sells.

Marketing uses fear to induce us to purchase goods or services. Perceived scarcity, another vestige of the primitive human brain from when scarcity could mean suffering, disease and even death, still has a strong hold. Marketing phrases such as, “While supplies last”; “For a limited time only” are examples of using the concept of perceived scarcity.

Since politicians are well versed in marketing perceptions of themselves as well as their opponents, the use of perceived economic scarcity is a helpful tool that favors one candidate over the other.

Fear is a feeling and feelings are not facts. Facts are the defense against perceptual distortions of fear.

While politicians try to sway us with characterizations, there’s nothing like facts to dispel incorrect portrayals. As we see, however, strongly held beliefs are most often indifferent to facts. n

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23 ARTHUR LUBOW

Susan Sontag believed that “most characters in Arbus’ Grand Guignol appear not to know that they are ugly” Do you find them ugly?

I quote Lisette Modell, Diane’s teacher, as saying about Sontag, “She knows everything, but understands nothing.” I think in this case that is true. Arbus said that you may think they’re ugly, but I’m not telling you they’re ugly, and she didn’t think that herself. A friend once asked if she wanted to photograph his uncle, who had this huge disfiguring goi-

Author Arthur Lubow. Photo: Stephen Salmieri.

ter. And she said “No.” She felt sorry for him because he was disfigured. The people that Sontag thinks are so ugly are sideshow freaks, but they’re not ugly.

They’re just odd looking.

Of Arbus it was said that was “exalted as a genius and reviled as a predator, who conned her subjects out of their dignity.” Do you believe that her work ridiculed and exploited her subjects?

Sontag’s essay, which appeared in l972 in the New York Review of Books and became part of her book On Photography, certainly promoted that view. But after Arbus’s death, she was seen by many as a martyr to empathy. Both are ridiculous oversimplifications. Most of her pictures are both funny and sad. Like Kafka and Beckett. That was what made the pictures so powerful and so unsettling. She could feel the poignancy of their situation, but it didn't depress her. She said to her students that someone’s tragedy is not the same as your own. You can identify with it, empathize with it, but you always have to remember that their problems are not your problems.

Why begin the book with Diane’s statement: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know”?

Her photographs are an exchange or collaboration between her and the subject that was a secret in a sense. And you, the viewer, are sharing something with the

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picture that is a kind of secret. It is analogous to the reader of a biography. I have over a long time had my encounter with Diane Arbus and have written this book as a result, and you, the reader will have your own encounter with that book. The questions that are left behind are huge. A book like this can’t answer many questions. You can’t about anybody, but she was, as I’ve mentioned before, a very complex person.

You end the book knowing much more about her than you did before, but you realize how much you don't know about her.

You’ve written that “A camera for Arbus was like a latchkey. With one around her neck she could open almost any door,” She said she loved secrets and could find out anything, but guarded her own secrets. I’m trying to reconcile her openness with friends about taboos and conventions she broke without remorse or regret with her secrecy.

She was fascinated with other people’s secrets. She was amazingly consistent in many ways throughout the course of her life. One of them was her complete obsession with secrets. But she knew that one way to get them was to trade for them. It is something journalists know intuitively. You tell people about your own life. You do it if you're a natural at this kind of work. She really wasn't. She writes as a girl in her 1940 autobiography as a high school senior about sharing secrets and then feeling bad about it. For example, she told Freddy Eberstadt, a friend of hers, that she slept with every man who ever asked her. Freddy said to me that she said that to him, because she wanted him to tell her about his own sex life, which he said he didn’t do.

Which of her secrets would you’d like to know. I guess the three missing pages from her diary might be one of them.

When the body was found the diary was opened to that day. It said “Last Supper.” When the diary was recovered from the police, two or three pages had been carefully razored out. Doon, Diane’s daughter, says that the police must had done it. But that seems completely implausible to me. So the natural thing is to imagine that Marvin Israel had done it. He was the one who was alone with that diary.

Diane had been despondent, feeling he had abandoned her. There are even suggestions that he was having an affair with Doon, who, I assume, is the only living person who might know about those pages. She is not saying. Diane’s psychiatrist had said how angry Diane was at Marvin. Anyone can speculate. A reader can speculate as well as I can.

Did you ever feel like abandoning the project?

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I never thought it wasn’t worth it. Tom Wolfe said that the journalist has to believe what he is doing is every bit as important as what his subject has done. If you don't believe that, you should be in another line of work. The most frustrating thing was trying to persuade people to talk to me.

Some people wouldn’t. That was maddening. When I failed to persuade them, I would be bummed out for a day or two.

Why the reluctance so many decades after her death?

It was an unauthorized biography. The family didn’t want me to do it. So some people didn’t want to for that reason.

Some people felt that it would somehow be a betrayal of Diane. Or they would tell me some things, but they would say that other things should be kept secret and I couldn’t. On the other hand, people who liked the magazine piece and with whom I had spoken to earlier, were happy to see me again.

The estate, which is really Doon with an assist from her father and sister Amy, has been criticized s for its tight control over Arbus’ materials. They demand scrutiny of what has been written before allowing use of their materials. And rarely authorize use of their photographs.

Was that your experience?

I tried to get Doon and her father to cooperate with the book. I failed. They said very early on, they would not provide any photographs for the book, so I never asked. They didn't authorize reproduction of anything. But we, meaning I and the publisher and their lawyers from the publishing house, judged that everything I quoted from her writings fell within the definition of fair use.

Doon has said that the photographs need protection from an “onslaught of theory and explanation. They require no explanations, no sets of instruction on how to read them, no bits of biography to prop them up.”

If her argument were subscribed to, there wouldn’t be any art criticism, there wouldn’t be any type of scholarship. Whatever her motives may be, I can’t really say.

I do think that Doon felt burned, especially by the Susan Sontag essay that came out at the end of 1973.

The Estate has recently gifted the archives to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Does the Estate retain any powers over that gift?

It's a gift and a promised gift. And the archive is closed indefinitely. When I asked the curator in charge of the Department of Photographs, Jeff Rosenheim, how long it would remain closed, he said

it wasn't up to him. It was up to Doon and Amy. The terms of the agreement haven’t been disclosed.

Finally, living with Diane Arbus for so long, do you think you would have liked her? One critic accused you of trying to like her more than you do. Clearly the critic thought she was “mercilessly self-involved” and resented her belief that photography gave her license to go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wanted to do.

It isn’t what I feel, but it doesn’t bother me that he would come away thinking that. If one is hoping to capture the complexity of Diane Arbus, it follows that people will respond in different ways. I myself rarely like books that tell you what to think or, more accurately, I don’t want to write that kind of book. I like that people can come to conclusions different from mine. I was on a panel with a man who completely adored her work but felt he wouldn’t have liked her. That was true in real life, so why shouldn’t it be true in reading the book. But to answer your question more directly, I have been told by others that I’m in love with her. That is much closer to the truth. n

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7 THOMAS EAKINS

Eakins’ aesthetic curiosity probably was aroused by his desire for accurate representation, inspired by his interest in dealing with expressing the reality of human movement as scientifically as possible. He apparently felt the camera was well suited to this effort. His attitude could have been an outgrowth of his deeply felt belief about the value of studying human anatomy through laboratory dissection for enhancing the painter’s ability to render the living figure with biological authenticity.

As the current exhibition at PAFA demonstrates, Eakins managed to treat such typical athletic activity as swimming with a high degree of success by 1880.

Through exercising an exceptional, original talent, he invested his photographs with a rare measure of creative vitality and classical eloquence—all too infrequently realized by most other practitioners of the new lens and film medium that came into being two centuries ago. Beyond examining the unusual accomplishments of Eakins as a gifted visionary, the exhibition allows visitors to probe questions of photography as an art form in its own right. To this day, Eakins’ legacy includes important areas of study encountered by art students all across the land. n

harper’s FINDINGS Men and women perceive female faces with makeup as more attractive than those without, but men see such faces as more “prestigious” and women see them as more “dominant.” Singers who employ vocal fry seem more expressive if they are female and less expressive if they are male. Straight men evaluating the pain of another man will rate it lower if he has an attractive female partner. Australian teenage boys whose empathy is one standard deviation above average have nearly twice as many female friends as boys whose empathy is one standard deviation below, and a study of ninth graders found that opposite-gender friends are unlikely to date. Researchers found that young, educated, neurotic women are particularly likely to report aversion to the word “moist.” However, moist-averse subjects are no likelier than other subjects to condemn consensual incest, and all study participants rate “moist” more negatively when it follows “fuck” and “pussy” or “paradise” and “heaven,” and more positively when it follows “cake” and “delicious” or “nigger” and “retarded.” Psychologists described the case of a brain-damaged Italian man who compulsively speaks bad French and bakes excessive amounts of bread.

9 Breast milk thwarts infant diarrhea. Babies who lead their own weaning are likeliest to choke on apples, raw vegetables, and dried fruit, whereas spoon-fed babies are likeliest to choke on corn, crackers, meat, and rusks. Chinese children, as they mature, more closely associate facial attractiveness with trustworthiness. Experienced mother pandas spend more time grooming and nursing their cubs, who also whine less. Bears exhibit lower self-esteem, higher BMI, and riskier sexual behavior than other gay men.

A Homo rhodesiensis femur was found to have been gnawed by a hyena. A study of 954 mammal species established that penis bones evolved at least nine times and disappeared at least ten. An analysis of Kinsey data collected between 1938 and 1961 found that boys rated their first post pubertal same-sex experience just as positively regardless of whether it was with another adolescent or with an adult man. Adults with Williams syndrome are at risk of immediately seeking to meet new online “friends” in person. At the Mayo Clinic between 1995 and 2015, hypersexuality, nose-picking, dementia, and eating the cotton from one’s Depends were noted among coprophagists.

Herpes may cause constipation.

9 Perch larvae exposed to high concentrations of polystyrene come to prefer eating plastic. Invasive aquatic hydrilla weed dumped from home aquariums into Florida waterways is being eaten by large invasive apple snails, who are then eaten by snail kites, who go insane. Electric eels will, as Alexander von Humboldt reported, leap from the water to administer shocks. An expert tree climber with a measuring tape climbed to the top of a yellow meranti that is now the tallest known tree in the tropics and texted, “I don’t have time to take photos using a good camera because there’s an eagle around that keeps trying to attack me and also lots of bees.” Fat air passengers are treated most kindly by female African-American flight attendants. French doctors proposed that anorexia nervosa is less about the fear of getting fat than about the pleasure of getting thin. In Germany, certain psychopaths are beneficial for the workplace. Crowd-sourcing brain-wave data may make it possible to predict seizures in dogs. Psychologists unveiled the Mind Excessively Wandering Scale.

INDEX estimated number of U.s. children responsible for the caretaking of a family member: 1,400,000 estimated portion of antibiotics prescribed in the United states that are unnecessary: 3/10

portion of Americans who favor replacing the Affordable care Act with a single-payer system: 3/5

Average number of abortions per 1,000 women in countries where abortion is illegal or heavily restricted: 37 Where abortion is legal: 34

percentage change since 2001 in the number of crimes reported at U.s. universities: –34 in the number of forcible sex crimes: +126

percentage of Africans who believe that being LgbtQ should be criminalized: 45

no. of children detained by somalian government last year under suspicion of involvement w/rebel groups: 346 number of child soldiers recruited by the somalian national army last year: 218

percentage change over the past year in the number of foreign fighters joining the islamic state ea. month: -75 factor by which the no. of U.s. troops in iraq has increased since the islamic state’s offensive of 6/2014: 22 Minimum amount earned in 2015 by traffickers smuggling refugees into europe: $3,000,000,000

Amount the swiss municipality of oberwil-Lieli was fined for refusing to admit syrian refugees: $292,000 number of refugees the swiss federal government had asked it to admit: 10

percentage of chinese who would allow a refugee to live in their own home: 46 of Americans: 15

number of members of the prohibition party, the third-oldest U.s. political party: 30

tons of trash left in san francisco’s golden gate park by people celebrating the marijuana-themed 4/20 holiday: 11 percentage of canadian marijuana users who believe the drug has no effect on their ability to drive a car: 44 portion of U.s. teenagers who think they are addicted to their mobile devices: 1/2 number of successive years that the U.s. suicide rate has increased: 15

date on which Louisiana expanded its hate-crime laws to include offenses against police officers: 5/26/2016 Amount for which george Zimmerman auctioned the gun he used to kill trayvon Martin: $250,000

percentage of black chicagoans who say it’s very likely a young person in their area will fall victim to violence: 49 Who say it’s not at all likely: 3

number of U.s. states in which a 17-year-old criminal defendant is automatically tried as an adult: 9

percentage of U.s. universities that consider an applicant’s criminal record as part of the admission process: 66 portion of U.s. school districts that hold active-shooter drills: 2/3

estimated number of Mississippi public-school students who are subject to corporal punishment: 31,236 cost of a new high-school football stadium approved this year by a texas school district: $62,800,000 percentage change since August 2014 in north dakota’s tax revenue from oil and gas: –65 percentage by which weekly U.s. coal production has dropped since January 2015: 44

portion of U.s. cities that failed to meet World Health organization guidelines for air-pollution levels last year: 1/5 of european cities: 3/5

estimated portion of U.s. public swimming pools that are in violation of health and safety regulations: 4/5

number of condoms distributed by the int’l. olympic committee in 2012 London summer games: 150,000 for the 2016 rio de Janeiro games: 450,000

number of people on waiting list of London restaurant where patrons dine in the nude: 46,000 soUrces: 1 American Association of caregiving youth (boca raton, fla.); 2 U.s. centers for disease control and prevention (Atlanta); 3 gallup (Washington); 4,5 guttmacher institute (n.y.c.); 6,7 national center for education statistics (Washington); 8 international Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex Association (geneva); 9,10 United nations office of the special representative of the secretary-general for children and Armed conflict (n.y.c.); 11,12 U.s. department of defense (Arlington, va.); 13 europol (the Hague); 14,15 Andreas glarner(oberwil-Lieli, switzerland); 16,17 Amnesty international (London); 18 prohibition party (Mcconnellsburg, pa.); 19 san francisco recreation and park department; 20 state farm canada (toronto); 21 common sense Media (san francisco); 22 national center for Health statistics (Hyattsville, Md.); 23Louisiana state Legislature (baton rouge); 24 United gun group (kansas city, Mo.); 25,26 kaiser family foundation (Menlo park,calif.); 27 Juvenile Justice gps (pittsburgh); 28 center for community Alternatives (syracuse, n.y.); 29 U.s. government Accountability office (boston); 30 U.s. department of education; 31 Mckinney independent school district (tex.); 32 north dakota office of state tax commissioner (bismarck); 33 U.s. energy information Administration; 34,35 World Health organization (geneva); 36 U.s. centers for disease control and prevention; 37,38 international olympic committee (Lausanne, switzerland); 39 Lollipop (London).

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The Los Angeles Times SUNDAY CROSSWORD PUZZLE

FITTING JOBS

By Mark McClain Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

1 5 8 14 18 19 20 21 23 24 25 27 30 31 32 33 35 36 38 39 40 43 44 46 49 51 53 54 55 57 58 59 60 62 64 66 67 70 73 74 75 77 80 81 83 84 85 87 89 90 93 95 96 97 98

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ACROSS Places for reps Texter’s “Mercy me!”

National park near Bar Harbor Make the grade Eté month By way of Hard work Official order Bit of trickery Some urban commuter lines Fitting job for Will?

Would rather Pipe piece Anchor in a race Strange craft 2001 Audrey Tautou title role Warble White-coated critter Time lines, perhaps Value of a Benjamin “Sesame Street” network Greyhound, e.g.

Hasselblad product Fitting job for Stu? “Parlez-__ français?”

Whitman’s dooryard bloomers Makes a choice Promising Fennel-like herb Birdhouse creation Stinging remarks Sign of life Create a new look for Georgia, for one Notable periods Darken, say Fitting job for Sue? Fed. power agcy.

Spotted Gothic cathedral feature Not for the masses Long accounts Tournament pass Seesaw sitter of song Beneficial Bit of physics Hayride perch Inveterate critic Entom. and geol.

Fitting job for Roger?

Archaeologist’s project Colorful pond fish Supplement, with “to” Bunch Workbench grippers

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100 102 104 105 106 108 109 113 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

“You __ worry” Eponymous chair maker University lecturer Dallas Cowboys logo One with a flat to fix, maybe Body art, slangily Is more efficient Fitting job for Bette?

Icky stuff English: John:: Slavic: __ Hardly eager anticipation Ill-tempered Keebler spokesman Peter on piano Phishing targets: Abbr.

Hockey rink area Rapper Mos __ Became

DOWN 1 Williams title role 2 The Isley Brothers’ “It’s __ Thing” 3 Fitting job for Art? 4 She kept Martina from winning a seventh straight Wimbledon in 1988 5 Pitch too eagerly 6 Thickness units 7 It’s paid at pumps 8 Swiss landscape feature 9 Negligent 10 Get rid of 11 Paso __: two-step dance 12 George’s lyricist 13 Puerto Rico hrs.

14 “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” verb 15 “Never __ moment!”

16 Clam-digging area 17 Ticker tapes, for short?

22 Vietnamese holiday 26 Barnum “attraction” 28 Seemingly forever 29 Plains people 34 Common mass transit requirement 35 Flanged fastener 36 Composer Grieg 37 TV pundit who wrote “Years of Minutes” 39 “My bad!”

41 Order (around) 42 Scottish isle 45 Celebrate, as the new year 47 Bookstore section

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48 50 52 56 58 59 61 63 64 65 68 69 70 71 72 73 76 77 78 79 80 82 85 86 87 88 91 92 94 99 101 103 104

French vineyards Atlanta-to-Miami dir.

Olin of “Chocolat” __ Park, Colorado Precisely Check words Wrath Needing no Rx Came after Early 20th-century car Atmosphere component Bring in Fitting job for Miles?

TV component?

Does the job perfectly Scandinavian natives Scruffy couple?

First name in desserts Slightly Nike and Demeter Gusted “Odyssey” threats Ravel classic Tarzan’s foster family Places for prices Lightly wash 1970 self-titled pop album “Anne of Green Gables” town Becomes Produced Having lunch Like most people Veteran telejournalist Sawyer

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106 107 110 111 112

TV screen type Corn units Mouselike critter Former filly “I must not think there are / Evils __ to darken all his goodness”: Shak.

114 Dopey comrade 115 Miscalculate Answer to August’s puzzle, ART NOUVEAU 116 Reuben basic

agenda CALL FOR ENTRIES philadelphia sketch club 2016 Large format Juried Art show Entry deadline: sunday, september 18, 2016 at Midnight. exhibition dates: october 7-29, 2016 Eligible: open, juried show. the Jurors will select works for exhibition & award prizes.

Submissions: Max. of 10 two-dimensional works in any medium. Works must be offered for sale during the exhibition. Min. size is 40”; max. is 65” on any one side including frame. All work must be framed, wired, ready for hanging. no clip frames. improperly framed pieces will be rejected.

Entry Fee: psc Members: $1 first piece; $20 add’l. works. non-members: $40 first piece; $20 add’l.

Reception: sunday, october 16, 2016 2 - 4 pM. prizes: 3:00 pM. Entry on-line: sketchclub.org/psc-official-online-submission-site FINE ART tHrU 9/3 American summer. silverman gallery, bucks county impressionist Art, buckingham green, rte. 202, 4920 york rd., Holicong. 215-794-4300. silvermangallery.com tHrU 9/5 dark Humor: African American Art from the University Museums, University of delaware. delaware Art Museum, 2301 kentmere parkway, Wilmington, delaware. 302-571-9590. delart.org

10/15-12/17 experimental printmaking institute, from the epi-center: A retrospective in two parts. Lafayette college Art galleries, easton. 610-330-5361. galleries.lafayette.edu. tHrU 10/23 Andó Hiroshige, views of Japan. Allentown Art Museum, 31 north 5 th st., Allentown. 610-432-4333.

AllentownArtMuseum.org tHrU 10/15 photo and video installation by deborah Jack: the water between us remembers, so we carry this history on our skin... long for a sea-bath and hope the salt will heal what ails us. Martin Art gallery, Muhlenberg college, 2400 chew st., Allentown.

Muhlenberg.edu/main/aboutus/gallery 9/1-30 Member show: ruth fackenthal. reception 9/11, 2016, 2-4. philadelphia sketch club, 235 s. camac st., phila. Wed, fri, sat & sun 1-5. 215-545-9298 sketchclub.org 9/2-24 2016 Absolutely Abstract exhibition. reception 9/11, 2-4. philadelphia sketch club, 235 s. camac street, phila. Wed, fri, sat & sun 1-5 pm.

215-545-9298 sketchclub.org 9/9-12/18 patricia scialo, photographer, the project Wall. reception 12/18, 1-3. new Arts program galleries, 173 W. Main st, kutztown. fri/sat/sun, 11-3.

610-683-6440. newartsprogr.org

tHrU 9/18 edward koren: the capricious Line. delaware Art Museum, 2301 kentmere parkway, Wilmington, delaware.

302-571-9590. delart.org

9/15-10/15 Hans Moller: Modern color. reception 9/15, 6-8. the baum school of Arts, 510 Linden st., Allentown, pA. 610-433-0032. baumschool.org

tHrU 10/02 Aoy Art center juried photography show LevitAtion on patterson farm in yardley, pA. gallery is open fri, sat, and sun, 12 - 5pm. Artists’ reception fri, sep 9, 6-9pm. artistsofyardley.org.

9/17-10/1 James feehan. preview by appointment. recepton 9/17, 6-8. fri-sun125. new Hope Arts, 2 stockton Ave, new Hope. 215-862-9606. newhopearts.org

tHrU 10/2 our strength is our people: the Humanist photographs of Lewis Hine.

Allentown Art Museum, 31 north 5th st., Allentown. 610-432-4333. AllentownArtMuseum.org tHrU 10/2 our America: the Latino presence in American Art. Allentown Art Museum, 31 north 5th st., Allentown. 610432-4333. AllentownArtMuseum.org

10/14-11/6 faculty / student invitational show. this show demonstrates skills of students and talents of instructors. reception 10/14, 6pM. fri, sat & sun 12-5. Artists of yardley, 949 Mirror Lake road, yardley. artistsofyardley.org 11/4-12/18 Maxan Jean-Louis, painter, Mirror of the soul. recep., 11/4, 6-9. new Arts progr galleries, 173 W. Main st, kutz-

town, pa. fri/sat/sun 11-3:00. 610683-6440. newartsprogr.org ART FESTIVALS 9/17 -9/18 riverside festival of the Arts 20th anniversary. over 60 juried fine art and craft artists. children’s arts projects, art workshops & demos. free. sat.

11-5:30, sun. 11-5. easton. eastonriversidefest.org 9/24 -9/25 new Hope Arts & crafts festival features over 175 juried exhibitors, live music and food court. free admission, rain or shine. sat., 10-6, sun., 10-5. new Hope-solebury High school, 180 W. bridge st., new Hope. newHopeArtsandcrafts.com 10/1 stahl’s pottery preservation society’s 9th Annual Autumn pottery festival.

9-4. 25 participating potters, pottery site tour, demos, refreshments, baked goods. $4 Adult/under 18 free. rain or shine. 6826 corning rd., Zionsville, pA. 610-965-5019. stahlspottery.org THEATER 9/10 rhythmic circus. Zoellner Arts center, Lehigh University, 420 e. packer Ave, bethlehem. 610-758-2787. zoellnerartscenter.org 9/17 start Making sense. Zoellner Arts center, Lehigh University, 420 e. packer Ave, bethlehem. 610-758-2787. zoellnerartscenter.org 9/23 cirque Éloize. Zoellner Arts center, Lehigh University, 420 e. packer Ave, bethlehem. 610-758-2787. zoellnerartscenter.org 9/28-10/9 charley’s Aunt. Act 1 performing Arts, desales University, Labuda center for the performing Arts, 2755 station Ave., center valley.

610-282-3192. desales.edu/act1 10/6 charles krauthammer. state theatre, 453 northpton st., easton. 610-2523132. statetheatre.org 10/6-10/9 crazy glue, a madcap tragic comedy. touchstone theatre, 321 east 4th st., bethlehem 610-867-1689. touchstone.org

10/8 vanessa Willis. Zoellner Arts center, Lehigh University, 420 e. packer Ave, bethlehem. 610-758-2787. zoellnerartscenter.org CONCERTS 9/9 the complete organ Works of J. s. bach, part 1, organist stephen Williams. cathedral Arts, cathedral church of the nativity, 321 Wyandotte st., bethlehem. 610-865-0727. nativitycathedral.org 9/18 vince gill, one of the most popular and most recorded singers of the past quarter-century. state theatre, 453 northampton st., easton, pA. 610-252-3132. statetheatre.org 9/23 the complete organ Works of J.s. bach, part 2, organist stephen Williams. cathedral Arts, cathedral church of the nativity, 321 Wyandotte st., bethlehem. 610-865-0727. nativitycathedral.org 9/25 the Allentown band. Arts at st.

John's, st. John's Lutheran church, 37 s. 5th st., Allentown. 610-435-1641. stjohnsallentown.org 10/1 Melodic conversations. cheryl bishkoff, oboe. Handel, vaughan Willias, borodin, and Janácek. christ Lutheran church, 1245 W. Hilton st., Allentown. 610-434-7811. pAsinfonia.org 10/4 Henry Lee, organist. Arts at st.

John’s, st. John's Lutheran church, 37 s. 5th st., Allentown. 610-435-1641.

10/11 david Leonhardt. Arts at st. John’s, st.

John's Lutheran church, 37 s. 5th st., Allentown. 610-435-1641. stjohnsallentown.org 10/14 the complete organ Works of J.s. bach, part 3, organist stephen Williams. cathedral Arts, cathedral church of the nativity, 321 Wyandotte st., bethlehem. 610-865-0727. nativitycathedral.org 11/19 gala concert, grammy Award-Winning, roomful of teeth. the bach choir of bethlehem, foy Hall, Moravian college, bethlehem. bach.org

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HAVANA 105 so. Main st., new Hope, pA 215-862-5501 HavananewHope.com 9/10

tiffany, with special guest kathryn dean 9/17 Andy fair-Weather Low & the Low riders with special guest, Alex skolnick trio 10/6 daryl stuermer 10/7 Magic dick & shun ng with the slide brothers 10/14 countdown to ecstasy 10/23 brand x KESWICK THEATRE 291 n keswick Ave glenside, pennsylvania 215-572-7650 keswicktheatre.com 9/11 9/12 9/23 9/24

sinbad glen Hansard/Joe purdy buddy guy christopher Lloyd goes back to the future 9/30 colin Mochrie & brad sherwood 10/6 Lyle Lovett & robert earl keen 10/7 david bromberg MUSIKFEST CAFÉ´ 101 founders Way, bethlehem 610-332-1300. Artsquest.org 9/1 9/6 9/8 9/9 9/16 9/20 9/22 9/23 9/28

dave Alvin & phil Alvin with the guilty ones robert cray band sister Hazel the steel Wheels tapestry: A tribute to carole king John Mayall the subdudes glass blast 2016 An evening with graham nash

EVENTS 9/1-9/30 dundore and Heister: butchery demonstrations, featured products & inspiration every thursday. easton public Market, 325 northampton st., easton. eastonpublicmarket.com/calendar 9/14 om to yum, yukato yoga & the dharma kitchen. easton public Market, 325 northampton st., easton. eastonpublicmarket.com/calendar 10/1 & 10/2 easton garlic fest, 10-5. centre square, easton. rain or shine. eastongarlicfest.com

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