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contents

JANUARY ~ 2013

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS

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SWIMMING WITH SHARKS | 28 A busy and beloved conservationist and author, Carl Safina now serves as the host of PBS’s Saving the Ocean, a docu-series that kicked off in October and continues through this winter. The show takes the rare positive approach to informing viewers on how to save the seas, but Safina surely imparts that these issues are still no laughing matter.

CULTURE WARRIOR | 30 Armed with acerbic wit and biting criticism, Joe Queenan takes on America’s culture.

AMY SADAO | 32 Sadao moved 3,000 miles from her home to become the new heart of The Institute of Contemporary Art.

FEATURES

Larry Fink, English Speaking Union, NYC, 1975

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CINEMA’S SOLE SURVIVORS | 26 The great films of 2012 all told of long protagonists struggling to survive in the modern world, which, for all its amenities, can be a tough, alienating and unforgiving place.

A NIGHT WITH THE THREE STOOGES AND A DAY WITH MOE | 35 Never the darling of critics and reputedly not a favorite of women, these admitted “low-comic slapstick artists” nevertheless have transcended the gender gap, times, tastes, eras, critics, and have remained instantly identifiable personalities for more than 80 years.

COLUMNS

FOOD

City Beat | 5 A scene from Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Backstage with Bruce Klauber | 5

WINE

Jim Delpino | 41

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Sally Friedman | 42

Standout Wines of 2012 | 40

Regional Theater & Dance | 44 The Beauty Queen of Leenane; The Mountaintop; Catch Me If You Can; West Side Story; Boeing Boeing; A Tale of Two Cities; Assistance; Les Miserables

Agenda | 54

Ted Hallman | 9 Exhibitions | 14

MUSIC

Cinematters | 16 Django Unchained

Nick’s Picks | 46 Iris Ornig; Kurt Rosenwinkel; Patrick Cornelius; Reggie Quinerly; Manu Katche

Keresman on Film | 18 Killing Them Softly Bad Movie | 20 Playing for Keeps

Singer / Songwriter | 48 Gary Clark Jr.; Johnny Cash;

Reel News | 22 The Intouchables; End of Watch; Searching for Sugar Man; Seven Psychopaths

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Film Roundup | 24 Promised Land; Not Fade Away; Hyde Park on Hudson; Deadfall ■

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Footlights | 45 Golden Boy

FILM

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L.A. Times Crossword | 52

The Solution to Gun Violence is Clear | 6

A Perspective on Perspectives | 10

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ETCETERA Harper’s Index | 53

Father Earth | 7

Moe Howard, Curly Howard and Larry Fine.

Dave Brubeck

STAGE

Alliteration of the Month | 6

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Jazz Library | 50

OPINION ART

Joe Queenan.

City Tavern | 37 Baci | 38

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Joey + Rory; Mighty Sam McClain; Nine Times Blue Bex Marshall; Woo; Jim Lauderdale;

ON THE COVER: Carl Safina, host of the PBS series, Saving the Ocean, and founder of Blue Ocean Institute.

Allan Holdsworth; Bessie Smith

Illustration by Victor Stabin. Website: victorstabin.com.

Keresman on Disc | 49

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city beat

THOM NIICKELS

ThomNickels1@aol.com

THEY COME INTO THE neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, well before the scheduled Streets Department trash pickup. If you happen to be inside your house and hear them outside sorting through your trash, you might think they’re homeless people with looking for scrap metal. But take a closer look and you’ll see a uniformed city employee in rubber gloves going through the mess.

Watch as they inspect old bags of pampers, bundles of stored doggie doo, Kentucky Friend chicken bones, or last week’s discarded orange rinds. They’re not looking for illicit drugs, but for that one renegade plastic soda bottle you may have forgotten to place in your recycle bin. When that happens—regardless of the fact that a passerby may have thrown a plastic bottle into your trash—you are issued a $50 ticket for the infraction.

The City of Philadelphia employs about 47 trash-picking officers whose job it is to inspect your trash on trash day for misplaced recyclable items. Ideally, these inspectors are supposed to grant some leeway when they inspect trash. The unofficial but rarely followed rule, as we understand it, is that residents are permitted a couple of misplaced recyclable items, but when that number exceeds four or five, the inspector writes a ticket. But shouldn’t the trash police be looking for blatant violations, such as large bags of recyclable items posing as trash? Why this Orwellian overkill just to make a fast buck? Is it really about saving the environment? What about allowing the trash police to ticket people who litter?

We recently spotted a young professional woman ball up a large wrapper she’d been carrying and throw it down a sewer. The woman bent over and stuffed the enormous bag into the sewer in full view of passersby, as if what she was doing was the most natural thing in the world. What was even more curious was that she was well dressed and acted as if she’d been doing this sort of thing all her life. Who does she think cleans up the sewers? Did it ever occur to her that if every Philadelphian did that the sewers of Philadelphia would back up and we’d have an urban version of Camus’ The Plague? After all, if Philadelphia wants to be known as the City of Tickets, let’s at least do it right.

Killadelphia is a word that makes most Philadelphians flinch, however there’s no getting around the fact that years ago there were fewer city murders. In December 1959, a 16-year-old Manayunk schoolgirl by the name of Mary Ann Mitchell went with friends to the Roxy Theater in Roxborough to see the movie, South Pacific. Afterward, Mary Ann caught the “A” bus in order to return to her parents’ home on DuPont Street. The young schoolgirl was never seen alive again because the next day her badly bludgeoned body was discovered in a wooded area in Montgomery County. Mary Ann had been sexually assaulted and her body desecrated after death. A small-time criminal—39-year-old handyman Elmo Smith—was accused of the crime and sentenced to die by electrocution in 1962. Following the murder, the name Elmo Smith took on a Freddie Krueger-like ring. For years, bad jokes about there being an Elmo Smith behind every bush and alleyway made the rounds in Philly schools. Donna Persico, a Manayunk native, believes that Smith was charged with a crime he did not commit. In Murdered Innocence: The Maryann Mitchell Murder Revisited, Perisco explains why she feels that a local city bus driver was guilty of the murder.

There’s nothing like a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth to get a party going, and to get vegans to move to the other side of the room. At Voith & Mactavish Architects’ annual holiday party, the classic roasted pig was on display, somehow reminding us of the character Piggy in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and, of course, calling attention to the firm— VMA rates as number 40 in the Top 100 women-owned businesses in the Philadelphia region.

Led by the statuesque Daniela Holt Voith, AIA, and supported by talented lieutenants like John H. Cluver, AIA, the firm is especially noted for its innovative designs within the context of tradition. Sadly, Cluver informed us that this year’s party will be the last at the firm’s 1616 Walnut Street address, which means a fond farewell to VMA’s conversation-stopping 24th floor private outdoor balcony. Next year, Voith & Mactavish will be in new digs, although the roasted pig will still be scaring away vegans.

We took the number 11 trolley from City Hall and headed to the West Philadelphia historic estate of William Hamilton overlooking Woodlands Cemetery. It was a cool, brisk night with the moon visible between tree tops when we started our solitary walk through this city of tombstones. “Dead people are our friends,” we mused, while strolling past the graves of Thomas Eakins, Anthony J. Drexel-Biddle and Samuel David Gross, M.D. of The Gross Clinic fame, and countless other luminaries. Inside the mansion, Executive Director Jessica Baumert

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backstage with bruce klauber THE INTENT OF THIS space is to offer an “insider’s perspective” into the worlds of arts and entertainment. As a writer and performer, I find the backstage door often open, so my point of view, I hope, is unique. “Backstage” will focus on future, present and sometimes past happenings and an opinion or two. And because jazz remains my literal and figurative “beat,” I’ll add to ICON’s already-incisive coverage of America’s only original art form. From time to time, you’ll hear from other “expert voices” who have graciously consented to share their insights, including the Philadelphia Inquirer’s cutting-edge gaming writer, Suzette Parmley, and area artist/arts activist, and onetime Channel 57 Community Affairs’ Director Toni Nash. What you won’t read here is rumor, gossip, innuendo, hard criticism or anything about Kim Kardashian. Unless she’s working with the Basie band.

A Cornucopia for Musicopia Since 1974, Musicopia has been this area’s leading advocate for improving in-school music instruction, providing programs like workshops, assemblies, and long-term residencies. And Musicopia is the largest provider of outside music education resources for schools on the East Coast. ICON has joined forces with Steinway and Sons dealership Jacobs Music, and jazz/classical radio station WRTI, to present a benefit for this worthy, non-profit organization. “An Afternoon of Jazz and Classical Music: A Benefit for Musicopia” will feature some of this area’s leading jazz artists and Musicopia student ensembles, in what we anticipate will be a memorable afternoon on June 2, 2013 at the Philadelphia Ethical Society on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Watch this space—as well as the ICON, Jacobs and Musicopia Facebook and web pages—for updates, times, lists of performers, and ticketing information.

Jazzy Doings Those who grumble about the lack of jazz in the Philadelphia area shouldn’t be grumbling. There’s plenty of it, though it’s often presented in forums other than the traditional jazz club. Chris’ Jazz Café continues to book “names”—look for appearances this month by guitar masters Pat Martino (January 19) and Jimmy Bruno (January 5)—but the local scene is thriving via non-profits like Jazz Bridge (JazzBridge.org) and Alan Segal’s The Jazz Sanctuary (TheJazzSanctuary.com). Between them, they sponsor more than 50 annual concerts in community centers and churches, each featuring the cream of area players and singers.

And world class jazz can be heard in some other unlikely places as well. The Prime Rib restaurant within Philadelphia’s venerable Warwick Hotel is not a jazz room or even a listening room, per se. Nonetheless, since 1997, management has presented, seven nights per week, the area’s top jazz pianists, joined by upright bassists twice a week. My colleague, Andy Kahn, who plays the room every Thursday and serves as the venue’s “informal music coordinator,” gives the current schedule: Paul Sottile on Sunday; Lucas Brown on Monday; Ted Gerike on Tuesday; Tom Adams on Wednesday; Andy Kahn on Thursday; Pete Cole with bassist Bill Stumm on Friday; and Tom Lawton (sometimes Dave Posmontier) with bassist Dave Brodie on Saturday. For a supposed “non-jazz room,” The Prime Rib gets its share of appreciative listeners. On one Thursday night, for example, I ran into a well-healed patron and rabid Andy Kahn fan, who personally knew giants like Louis Armstrong and Lennie Tristano. Good music, jazz or otherwise, is where you find it.

Boardwalk Beat In the late 1970s, singer Peter Lemongello could not be ignored. He was everywhere, and everywhere included gigantic billboards on turnpikes and interstates, hyping his latest gig, and by way of ads that saturated what used to be known as UHF television. Indeed, with his partner, recording industry vet Sal Romano, Lemongello pioneered the use of selling records—remember “records”?—on television and actually ended up selling over a million of something called Love 76. This parlayed into appearances at top venues, including Carnegie Hall, no less, guest spots on every major talk and variety program on network television, and even inspired a “Saturday Night Live” spoof of the UHF singing phenom.

I met Lemongello in the early 1990s, during a golden period in Atlantic City’s history, when many of the lounges were featuring live music, often of the Sinatra and jazz-oriented variety. During my time in the Taj Mahal lounge with the late singer Sonny Averona, Lemongello guested with us nightly, demonstrating his consummate ease with a song and general good humor. Off stage, he impressed me as a gentle man, totally at ease with himself, and comfortable with his fame. With changing times and tastes in Atlantic City and elsewhere, op-

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The solution to gun violence is clear

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

FAREED ZAKARIA

Filling the hunger since 1992 ANNOUNCING THAT HE WOULD send proposals on reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a number of sensible gun-control measures.

But he also paid homage to the Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this calamity—from mental health issues to school safety. His spokesman, Jay Carney, had said earlier that this is “a complex problem that will require a complex solution.” Gun control, Carney added, is far from the only answer.

In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.

People point to three sets of causes when talking about events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third, easy access to guns. Any one of these might explain a single shooting. What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.

To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year—3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people. Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes—theft, burglary, robbery, assault—the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.

Is America’s popular culture the cause?

This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.

There is clear evidence that tightening laws—even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership—can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic

weapons—a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions—gunrelated homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide—a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)

There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action? Certainly those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of information and entertainment.

Instead, why not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns. And not another toothless ban, riddled with exceptions, which the gun lobby would use to “prove” that such bans don’t reduce violence.

A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife.

Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.

The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.

What we lack in America today is courage. ■

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City Beat Editor Thom Nickels Fine Arts Editors Edward Higgins Burton Wasserman Classical Music Editor Peter H. Gistelinck Music Editors Nick Bewsey Mark Keresman Bob Perkins Tom Wilk Theater Critic David Schultz Food Editor Robert Gordon Wine Editor Patricia Savoie Contributing Writers A.D. Amorosi Robert Beck Jack Byer Peter Croatto

James P. Delpino Sally Friedman Geoff Gehman Bruce H. Klauber George Oxford Miller Thom Nickels R. Kurt Osenlund Victor Stabin

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a thousand words

STORY AND PAINTING BY ROBERT BECK

Father Earth

Upper York Road.

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WE WERE REALLY LUCKY to avoid major property damage from Hurricane Sandy but the roads were blocked, power lines were down, nothing was open and I wasn’t going anywhere. There were still some leaves left on the lower branches of the trees, so I took my kit down to the end of the driveway to get some work done.

It’s not often that I get to paint an autumn scene. My annual exhibition is held at the end of October and it always coincides with the changing colors. That keeps me occupied with gallery business and by the time I get back to painting the trees are bare. So this was, in its way, a treat.

The fall transformation changes its face dramatically from beginning to end. When the leaves first start to shift, the pale reds and oranges play off greens that still haven’t turned. At peak they are isolated high-chroma passages set against masses broken by their complements, with fewer broad swaths of brilliance than you might guess. This was toward the end of the season when the color is earthy and less vivid. Getting autumn right is more a matter of contrast and balance than adding pure color. A fall painting is as good as the artist’s ability to handle everything other than the most vibrant areas.

The sky never seems as brilliant or the air as pure as right after a storm. Chilly day aside, it was sunny, quiet and still down by the road, with just an occasional car searching for the secret path out of Sandy’s labyrinth. I was enjoying being back in the saddle—drawing, blocking-in, making decisions on color, value and brushstroke, squinting, moving back to take a look.

It was as if a trap door opened under my feet…I stepped past the edge of the driveway and right into the drainage ditch.

Falling is different when you are in your sixties. As you age you learn to use experience to counter declining physical skills, but reaction is everything at a moment like this. By the time I got the message it was out of my hands.

I summoned the agility of my youth, but found it had calcified somewhere around the time I began listening to classical music. Layers of clothing kept me from flailling my arms, and I went to my fate with little resistance.

Let’s pause here for some statistical analysis. The ditch was about a foot deep and I’m six feet tall. That puts my point of impact roughly four feet below my center of gravity. Add three inches for every decade past thirty and another six for the pancake breakfast and this was serious cause for concern.

The gully was filled with leaves. I disappeared like an oversized beanbag into the crunchy-fluffy bed with a whoomph, marked only by bits of spent foliage cast upward to sway and settle lightly on the spot from where I had vanished.

It was good that I hadn’t encountered a big rock or branch when I landed, and my cold-weather clothing offered some padding. The initial survey reported no injuries. I had, however, landed in an awkward position. My attempt at twisting around to see where I was going served to position me on my side with my feet higher than my head.

Being a guy, it was imperative to get up quickly and pretend that nothing happened. One arm was pinned beneath and I had to rock back and forth to get it free. Then it took some squirming and flopping to get my feet under my body. I emerged from the pool of leaves just as a car came by. They had to notice a figure heave and rise from the organic litter at the side of the road, but they didn’t stop to check it out. It actually sounded like they sped up.

I was glad to be operating under my own steam at that point, plucking leaves from my collar and cuffs. Glad my glasses were still on my face. Glad I didn’t survive the hurricane only to become another victim of plein air painting scooped up by the recue squad. Or, with the enigmatic clue on my easel sending the search party in the wrong direction, not to be found until the spring thaw. No, I was back to the brushes in no time, just a few bumps and aches here and there, quickly, as if it didn’t happen. Of course, we don’t have to tell my wife about this, okay? ■ Robert Beck lives in Bucks County and maintains a gallery and school in Lambertville, NJ. Email: robert@robertbeck.net Website: www.robertbeck.net

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worked the crowd of mostly Penn students and West Philadelphians as volunteer Penn bartenders poured fortified Portuguese Madeira, favorite drink of French novelist George Sand and Frederic Chopin as well as the Founding Fathers—George Washington drank a pint a day—while a few teetotalers stuck to cranberry juice. When we looked around for Center City people we were told that The Woodlands is still too much of a secret in Philly, but she hopes to change that. We wondered how this could be, given the mansion’s spectacular setting and history. On hand was the Dill Pickle Old Time Orchestra (610-4361000) featuring Charley Handy, Zach Say, Brenden Skire, Nikoli Fox, and Eliza Jones (of the award-winning group Buried Bed). The band played a mixture of American old time string band music, Tin Pan Alley and 18th century fiddle tunes, not quite causing the dead outside to awaken, but almost.

When we heard that local author Sarto Schickel was going to speak about his book, Cancer Healing Odyssey (Paxdieta Books) at the First Unitarian Church in Center City, we headed over with a few friends. Schickel, who is tall with mesmerizing eyes, told us the story of his wife, Sun Hee, diagnosed with ovarian cancer and a collapsed lung, but who has been possibly cured through a macrobiotic diet, a touch of chemo, along with a trip to the Gerson Clini in Mexico, where cancers tend to disappear after extensive juice therapy and coffee enemas. If this sounds to you like Sci-Fi, we recommend Schnickel’s book as a sturdy case study. In fact, Schnickel’s presentation was so good we decided it was PBS-worthy and wondered why he wasn’t doing this on television.

By the end of Schickel’s presentation, we weren’t even all that spooked by the coffee enema thing, even if we prefer Starbucks to “down there” injections.

We headed to the Radnor Hotel on the Main Line to help celebrate Bernie Robbins Jewelry’s 50th anniversary, but arrived late, just after the winner of the first annual Student Design Contest was announced—Raymond Hakimi, from New York’s FIT. Students from fashion schools and colleges were invited to submit three pieces in September. A Facebook vote was held with the finalists going before Robbins’ executive team and a panel of celebrity judges, one of whom was Ivana Trump. We learned from Cashman and Associates’ Laura Krebs that the owners, Harvey and Maddy Rovinsky, do know a lot of high-end celebrities. Yet Harvey and Maddy weren’t obsessing on star power that night but on Hakimi’s win and the presence of their infant granddaughter, their first, bundled up in a portable mini crib set atop a jewelry case, a juxtaposition proving that life’s real jewels are not the ones under glass. We spoke to winner Hakimi, whose design will be produced and sold in all seven Bernie Robbins stores. Also on hand was Ilaria Lanzoni, one of the celebrity judges, whose Hearts on Fire jewelry design company in Boston has taken that city by storm.

“I met Ilaria at the Trevi Fountain in Rome,” Harvey said, his eyes lighting up like sapphire diamonds. The Trevi Fountain—can anything be more fortuitous?

Today’s 20-something’s will never know the eclectic mix that was the 1960s and 1970s, when life, politics and art had a special kind of power. There was Andy Warhol riding his bicycle through the streets of Manhattan, Allen Ginsberg chewing on his harmonica, Yoko Ono in a box and Ed Sanders and the Fugs providing musical accompaniment as thousands shouted, “Hell no, we won’t go.” Posters, illustrations and other ephemera linked to the years around the counterculture can be found in the Collab Gallery in PMA’s Perelman Building. Titled Double Portrait, famous husband and wife team, Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, fresh in from New York City to receive the annual Collab Design Excellent Award, led us around the gallery where we were hit with more images than we could process. On display was Chwast’s best political work of the 1960s, antiwar posters like “End Bad Breath” (1968), created to protest the U.S. bombing of Hanoi and “War is Good Business: Invest Your Son” (1967). Paula, who describes herself as “a designer who illustrates,” met Seymour when she was an art student at Tyler School of Art. Who knows why Philly journalists didn’t show up for the Double Portrait preview in droves— any hints as to what motivates them? Chwast’s posters speak to a kind of genius in this age of mouse-controlled digital Photoshop “art” which can only hope to ascend to the heights of the work of real graphic designers. Then again, Paula would castigate us for this sentiment. “You can’t be a designer and say, ‘Oh, this is timeless.’ Nothing is timeless,” she’s been quoted as saying.

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portunities for singers like him dried up, and he seemed to have fallen off the radar. But it’s nice to have discover that he returned to the scene not long ago. He now lives in Florida, works frequently at the many theaters there, and will be making his grand return to AC at Resorts Casino/Hotel on select dates from Jan. 8 through Feb. 13.

And Boardwalk Blues The news is not so rosy for AtC’s newest hotel/casino, the $2.4 billion Revel. Generally ill-conceived, built at the wrong time, in the wrong neighborhood, and geared to a market that only exists in someone’s dreams, Revel’s future is iffy at best. We’re told that Revel’s trendy HQ nightclub is doing some business, but the rest of the facility is a virtual ghost town. According to the Inquirer’s Suzette Parmley, the future of Revel is uncertain.

In August, she wrote that if Revel didn’t turn things around quickly, there would be trouble ahead.

“Despite massive state subsidies, it is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy,” Parmely wrote. “Some blame the casino's poor timing, coming on the scene amid a still-weak economy and bruising competition from surrounding states. Others say it has simply overreached, trying to be too like Vegas in a middle-of-the road, drive-in market. And still others are turned off by its lack of buffets, its no-smoking policy, and its dearth of moderately priced restaurants. “For whatever reason, it’s a formula that is just not working.” The big question is, if bankruptcy happens, and that appears to be likely, what will happen to this 20-acre, 1,400-room facility, and the 2,800 full-time and 1,000 part-time workers employed there?

Book Beat The late, eclectic jazz genius of the baritone saxophone, Pepper Adams, may be a name known only to aficionados, but he was and is important enough to be the subject of a book. “Pepper Adams: Joy Road” (Scarecrow Press) a comprehensive bio-discography by Gary Carner that lists virtually every recording Adams ever made—as well as the stories behind many of them—is an outstanding project that will prove to be essential to jazz scholarship. Carner told me that almost 30 years of work went into this. It paid off. The listings of recordings are so extensive that on page 243, for example, a private session featuring Adams jamming in a Philadelphia club—circa 1973—is detailed, and the small print confirms that the pianist on that date was our friend Andy Kahn, and that the drummer was a young kid from Overbrook named Klauber.

Jerry Blavat: The Geator Turned Author Broadcasting pioneer Jerry Blavat, a.k.a. “The Geator with the Heater,” is not often thought of as a literary figure or best-selling author. However, Jerry’s office reports that his autobiography of last year, “You Only Rock Once” (Running Press), is going into its third printing and is now in a Kindle edition via Amazon.com. I read, re-read and reviewed Blavat’s work and I loved it. Until something else comes along, “You Only Rock Once” stands as the definitive history of the rich world of the Philadelphia recording, music and entertainment worlds, charmingly and honestly told by someone who was there, was and is a part of it, and helped shape it.

The Geator continues to be busier than ever with his incredible, six-nights per week personal appearance and broadcasting schedule. Among other things, he’s headlining on New Year’s Eve with The Trammps at the new Valley Forge Casino/Resort, and will present “The Divas of All Time” show—which includes legendary singers like Darlene Love, Candi Staton and Freda Payne—at the Kimmel Center on January 26.

Academia: For Arts’ Sake If it has to do with art in the Greater Delaware Valley, Toni Nash is often on the scene. Since 1998, Art Sanctuary has been devoted to utilizing Black American art—from established and aspiring artists—“to transform individuals, unite groups of people, and enrich and draw inspiration from the inner city” by way of its innovative and inspiring educational programs. Ms. Nash has let us know that founder/director Lorene Cary, also an acclaimed author and Senior Lecturer within University of Pennsylvania’s English Department, has stepped down as Executive Director after 12 years. The baton has been handed to Valerie V. Gay, an Assistant Dean at Temple, a lecturer, writer, and activist with a Bachelor of Music Degree in Voice Performance from University of the Arts. For information on the essential programs offered by Art Sanctuary, visit ArtSanctuary.org.

Though Drexel University does not offer a music major, its music program is, in the words of newly-appointed Music Program Director Luke Abruzzo, “robust,” with, among other things, “18 music ensembles.”

Abruzzo succeeds Drexel’s Myron “Mike” Moss, a master teacher and beloved educator who suddenly passed on July 2. We’ll have much more detail from Luke Abruzzo about present and future plans for Drexel’s music program in the next “Backstage” column. Right now, he wants to emphasize that Drexel “does not conduct fund drives, and that the vast majority of the school’s concerts are free.” So what about support? Abruzzo replies: “The only support we need is an eager audience.

Join Me Backstage I welcome you to be a part of this space. Please email your items to DrumAlive@aol.com. And in the meantime, I’ll see you backstage. ■ Bruce Klauber is the biographer of jazz great Gene Krupa, writer/producer of the Warner Bros. and Hudson Music "Jazz Legends" DVD series, CD producer for the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound Records, Public Relations Director of the Philadelphia non-profit, Jazz Bridge; a working jazz drummer and entertainment industry professional since childhood. He received his Bachelor's Degree from Temple University and an Honorary Doctorate from Combs College of Music for his "contributions to music scholarship and jazz performance."

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art

M MACRAMÉ, AS PRACTICED BY 13th century Arab weavers, has been seen through the centuries as a craft, an adjunct to the work on the loom, a sailor’s way to pass the time and earn cash, and, certainly, a 1970s hippie hobby. The basic skills involve the square knot, hitches, half hitches, and double half hitches, but it’s the combinations and the materials that count.

Fast forward to modern times and fiber art has artists using such diverse materials as telephone wire, cotton swabs, and paper clips. The art of weaving is still seen as the bedrock of textile art and that art has directly impacted society from French tapestries to Navajo blankets and Quaker quilts.

In her debut exhibition at the Michener Art Museum Director, Lisa Tremper Hanover has curated a whimsical installation of Ted Hallman’s fiber art. Hallman, one of the leading fiber artists in the country, has produced Suspended Harmonies, a smallish but complex exhibition that is slated to run through March 3. The major feature in the installation are knotted fiber “trees” that reach from floor to ceiling and twist and

EDWARD HIGGINS

Ted Hallman turn much as wind-beaten trees become gnarled by age and weather. Each has roots and a crown like Grecian columns. The trees are surrounded by pieces that are tangled for the most part, with some pieces of smooth draping ribbons making up contrasts. One part of a ribbon piece appears like nothing so much as a rainbow waterfall.

Others are like circuitry gone bad.

According to Hanover, “The installation at the Michener is a brand new exploration of synthetic materials such as plastic tapes woven into vertical armatures creating treelike forms. He plays with wire and colored streamers of cords and tape to create floating clouds and plant canopies. Visitors will weave themselves through the installation.”

The exhibition works well in the Michener’s Pfundt Gallery, a smaller space.

Hallman was born in 1933 in Bucks County, the son of an artist and an art teacher. His education and career have taken him across the country. He graduated from the Tyler School of Art, got a master’s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (MFAs in painting and textiles), and a

doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in educational psychology. He has taught all along the way, and spent 24 years at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

His art education began at age three when he attended classes taught by his father who was a professor at West Chester University. Hallman Sr. was a well-known regional painter. He studied with N.C. Wyeth and his work is in the Michener collection.

His mother, an art teacher, made her own clothes and taught Hallman to make garments. Small wonder then that he did his first fiber art as a Cub Scout.

Like many fiber artists, Hallman studied the work of Japanese artists, and has studied and taught in France. While teaching in Canada, Hallman led many student groups to Europe. He still conducts numerous workshops and says, “I love to teach. I don’t consider it a stepsister to my art.”

Hallman is one of the country’s most prominent fiber artists. His work was among the first to be collected by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is also in the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of

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Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His work can be found in the permanent collections of overseas museums, as well—Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Applied Art in Helsinki, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. His fiber art has also been shown in exhibitions across the country and the world.

The line between craft and art has always been a fine one. Hallman said that he had always considered himself to be just a weaver. Still, today’s art audience equates the work of glassblowers, potters, designers, and other craftsmen, to art. This concept follows the age-old theme that art is but an historic artifact—and the very modern concept that art is what the artist says it is. The key feature of Hallman’s work, or any other craft, is if it can enhance life. In that context, Hallman’s work is a resounding success. ■

Edward Higgins is a member of The Association Internationale Des Critiques d’Art.

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art

BURTON WASSERMAN

A Perspective on Perspectives

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ing up the staircase of an elevated station on a rail line in New York City. In contrasting light and dark silhouette shapes, the composition is divided into several areas, perfectly balanced, soundly unified and dynamically animated.

In “Staten Island Ferry,” Faurer presents overlapping transparent planes of assorted subject matter observed on a ferry moving in the Hudson River while a skyline view of lower Manhattan is seen in the distance.

The late Helmut Newton was the master of a style that often joined glamorous vignettes with perverse suggestions of a sexual nature. One such image is included in the exhibition. In addition, as the show also demonstrates, Newton exercised a curious talent for photographing famous celebrities from the twin worlds of entertainment and the creative arts.

Other interesting items in the show are selections by such gifted artists as Elliott Erwitt, Larry Fink, Mary Ellen Mark, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Steichen and Gary Winogrand. Their combined vision makes up a memorable sampling of recent photographic accomplishment. ■

perimeter-bordered frame of reference. They exist, embedded in a fixed, light sensitive emulsion surface.

Aside from the varied pictorial content of the specific works on display, the chief unifying feature of the installation is the way it shows that, at their best, these visions can be as significant a means of aesthetic expression as such older forms of art as drawing, painting and sculpture. At the same time, today, photography is the world’s most ubiquitous means of capturing and preserving the overt appearance of people, places and things—they give voice to an extraordinarily vast range of profound human emotions and ideas.

Visitors are also bound to be awestruck by the way the exhibition comes alive with a marvelous variety of experiences based on periods of thoughtful contemplation able to endure beyond tomorrow for the benefit of future audiences.

In addition, another one of the important features of the show is the way that the unique individuality of each of the artists represented by works on view, makes its presence felt.

Though the cognoscenti are aware of the work of Louis Faurer, his accomplishments are not as well known as they deserve to be. As a group, many of his best photographs were devoted to a style that has come to be known as street art.

In a piece titled “El Station: 53rd St. and Third Avenue,” some figures in the form of cast shadows appear to be mov-

Dr. Burton Wasserman is a professor emeritus of Art at Rowan University, and a serious artist of long standing. Dr. Wasserman’s program Art From Near and Far is on WWFM in Central and Northern New Jersey and Bucks County and WGLS in S. Jersey.

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Louis Faurer (1916-2001), Staten Island Ferry, 1946

Helmut Newton, Charlotte Rampling, Arles, 1973

Larry Clark, Untitled from the Tulsa portfolio, 1971

Larry Clark, Untitled from the Tulsa portfolio, 1971

AMONG ITS MANY TREASURES, the University of Pennsylvania owns an exceptional body of fine art photographs.

In September of 2011, Gabriel Martinez, a senior lecturer of photography in Penn’s School of Design, surveyed and documented every item in the archive with Heather Gibson, the collections manager.

When the task was completed, Lynn Marsden-Atlass, the director of the Arthur Ross Art Gallery, invited Martinez to curate an exhibition with exceptional examples from the holdings on hand. In turn, he suggested this assignment be carried out with the aid of eight associates who are each highly regarded photo-artists on the teaching staff of the University.

The exhibition they subsequently organized constitutes a diversified offering of unusual selections titled Nine Perspectives on a Photography Collection. It will remain on public view, free of admission, in the Arthur Ross Gallery until January 27, 2013. The various pieces on view add up to what Martinez rightly describes as, “a balanced pictorial symposium, leading to an objectivity no one photographer could obtain.”

On a personal level, I am always amazed by the way photographing a subject changes it from what it was once to a new reality. Unlike objects in the ordinary everyday world, photographs are, in part, defined by a time and date of exposure. In addition, they are flat images surrounded with a

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Larry Fink, Pat Sabatine’s Eighth Birthday Party, April 1977, 1977

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Delicate Balance.

Mann’s Mind: Thomas Mann Sculptural Objects The Gallery at Penn State Lehigh Valley 2908 Saucon Valley Rd, Center Valley, PA January 28–March 16 Reception Thursday, January 31, 5–7:00 p.m.

Thomas Mann is widely known for his inventive jewelry designs, known as Techno-Romantic™ Jewelry Objects.

He describes himself as an artist working in the medium of jewelry, but there is more to the MANN than meets the eye. In fact, he regards himself principally as a sculptor who works in a wide variety of scales….some of which, as it happens, are wearable! So, for Mann, it’s all just a matter of scale and this exhibition, Mann’s Mind, which is part retrospective and part new work, comes down to the artist’s interests in the issues of scale. But there are other dimensions to this unique presentation—dimensions of content. Mann also presents large drawings, small monotypes, sculptural models and assorted other objects that truly prove there’s a lot going on in Mann’s Mind.

Lecture: An Artist Re-invents….Re-Imagines…

Re-Creates to Survive January 31, 2013 12:15–1:30 p.m. Room 135 Thomas Mann has been a self-employed practicing art professional for over 42 years. In this hour-long show and tell session, Tom recounts his experiences from 9/11 to Katrina to surviving the economic crisis... and other bumps in the road, as he works to keep his business and career successful and invigorated. He will share some of his tricks on working every angle to keep his boat afloat in the tumultuous seas of the American economy. Free and open to the public.

Painting by Philip Jamison.

Woodmere Art Museum 9201 Germantown Avenue Chestnut Hill, PA 215-247-0476 woodmereartmuseum.org woodmerecollection.org Woodmere Art Museum maintains a collection of more than 3,000 works of art that tell the story of the art and artists of Philadelphia. To share some of the newest additions great treasures, Woodmere presents three exhibitions that focus on the growth of the collection: Just In: Recent Acquisitions in the Collection of Woodmere Art Museum (Jan. 26-March 17), including works by Pennsylvania Impressionists, Arthur B. Carles and his circle, and contemporary abstract painters; Objects of Desire: Philip Jamison Collection (Jan. 26-May 5), celebrating the Philadelphia collector’s dedication to artists of the region and his transformative promised gift to Woodmere; and Philip Jamison Watercolor: The Spirit of Chester County (Jan. 26-May 5), an accompanying look at Jamison’s own majestic watercolors of rural Pennsylvania. ■

Design ƒor Survival™ with Thomas Mann Entrepreneurial Thinking and Tactics for Artists February 1 & 2, 2013 9 am-noon and 1-4 pm both days Tuition: $200

Flower Still Life, 2001, by Charles Jay (b. 1947). Oil on board, 36 x 24 in. Promised gift of Philip Jamison_from the exhibition Objects of Desire_Philip Jamison Collection

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Barn With Marigold Buds.

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Fresh Picked The Quiet Life Gallery 17 South Main Street, Lambertville, NJ (609)397-0880 www.quietlifegallery.com Through January 27 “Painting en plein air is a collaboration between the energizing, inspirational, unpredictable forces of nature and the artist. Working outside in the elements tends to make one work fast, and a kind of grace can happen. In the studio I try to ‘stop before I’m finished.’ The dreamlike, fa-tasy aspect comes from an idealized, Edenic sense of nature. I would so like myself and others to slow down and enjoy the view. The landscape gives us food for the eyes, body and spirit.” — Virginia Fitch Fresh Picked is an assortment of work, including recent pigment stick paintings, and local scenes of “flora” that maximize this medium’s brilliant jewel tones. The artist sought out colorful rural places, both wild and cultivated, for painting sites that provided the initial inspiration for these non-traditional plein air landscapes.

Painting outside can truly be a wild and unpredictable experience and she doesn’t count on being able to finish a painting in one outdoor session. She then brings it into the studio and lets the imagination take over for a somewhat surrealistic “something else.” These inner and outer worlds provide both tension and balance to each other.

For two consecutive years, Fitch grew the cut flower share at Asbury Village Farm CSA in Warren County, NJ. “I’ve always taken refuge in nature and feel very much at home there. Like others raised in suburbia, I’d always been a real romantic about farming, and that stint woke me up to how much work it really is. Kind of like painting! But with both, I’ve gotten a lot of help from the muse and Mother Nature.”

Phlox.

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PETE CROATTO

Django Unchained QUENTIN TARANTINO’S 1994 MASTERPIECE Pulp Fiction was the first time going to the movies felt life altering.

Ten years later, after Kill Bill: Volume 2, I had given up on the fast-talking auteur. Something was amiss. It felt like he was too busy living in other worlds, sampling movie memories from his childhood and video store days, instead of creating his own.

With some hesitation I reacquainted myself with the writer-director by watching Django Unchained. I’m glad I did. It feels like the Tarantino who won me over in October 1994: cool, insightful, dying to get your attention. He’s back to being the wild child having too much fun with his chemistry set. It’s one of the few movies in 2012 that caused me to leave the theater with a swagger—while feeling a little regret over my self-imposed abstention.

Taking place in 1858—“two years before the Civil War,” according to Tarantino—Django Unchained never walks in a straight line. In Texas, dentist-turned-bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) buys a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) to track down Django’s former overseers. This begins a successful partnership that spans several months and many dead bodies before a final assignment: retrieving Django’s estranged, still enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from a Mississippi dandy plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Now a free man, Django poses as a talent scout for Schultz, who plays a big spender eager to pursue Candie’s love of slave fighting. The partners are forced to stay at the Candieland estate, which only aggravates the pain underneath Django’s freedom. Schultz, a gentle soul, is the only one who treats him like a person. And he’s constantly asking Django to assume a role, whether it’s posing as a fancy-pants valet or picking off bandits. Django tells a concerned Schultz he’s “getting dirty” by antagonizing Candie’s crew. The man is not just talking about his acting approach.

Django suppress his rage and betrays his race; Schultz has to battle his moral consciousness. We know this because Schultz never lords Django’s past over his head. He was hired for a job, so why are people staring when they ride horses into town? Schultz may be the latest in Tarantino’s line of eloquent cold-blooded killers, but he has a soul.

When Candie is about to sic the dogs on a runaway fighter who cost him a measly $500, Schultz offers a reimbursement.

Django overrules him. Morals don’t exist in this world.

What happens to that slave propels both men toward a bloody, cathartic fate. The beauty in Tarantino’s approach here is that the excessive violence doesn’t damage the characters’ substance. Foxx (taking over for Will Smith) and Waltz 16

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Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington.

summon the emotional toll of their characters’ work, but they have fun. You can hear Waltz—it’s impossible to overstate how good he is—relish the twisty lines of dialogue Tarantino provides. And the angrier Foxx gets, the better he is. You can hear the rage boiling even as Schultz cools him down with each kind gesture.

Some may say that Tarantino is wallowing in stereotypes and shock, whether it’s the almost non-stop utterance of “nigger” or Samuel L. Jackson’s simian resemblance. As Schultz might say, it’s part of the show. It’s clear that Jackson, playing Candie’s ancient house slave, runs Candieland. And the violence, exquisitely captured by cinematographer Robert Richardson, is frequently comic relief. Schultz shoots a small-town sheriff dead, but no one reacts until a woman faints. Before Django ambushes a room of grizzled bad guys, we see one painting a birdhouse. Tarantino, playing a rascal with a vague accent, becomes a real-life Yosemite Sam, holding sticks of dynamite at the worst possible moment.

Tarantino’s willingness to question the decorum of what-

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ever genre he’s honoring made me love Pulp Fiction, a trait that endeared me to Django Unchained: a plantation owner (Don Johnson) figuring out how to communicate with a free black man; a nascent version of the Ku Klux Klan (whose members include Jonah Hill) getting stymied by poorly constructed hoods; a defenseless slave driver begging for forgiveness by reminding one of his angry workers that he once gave him an apple.

Every reason I’ve expressed for liking Django Unchained sounds contradictory. Part of the fun is watching Tarantino connect the dots to produce something this entertaining and enriching from disparate elements. It’s a hell of a trick, and a terrific movie. Wieder sehen, Quentin. [R] ■ A senior critic at Filmcritic.com from 2002 to 2007, Pete Croatto also reviews movies for The Weekender. His essays, reviews, and features have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, TCNJ Magazine, Deadspin, and The Star-Ledger. You can read more on his blog, whatpeteswatching.blogspot.com.

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keresman on film

Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini.

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Killing Them Softly

STARRING AND CO-PRODUCED BY Brad Pitt, Killing Them Softly is yet another view into the working lives of relatively small-time mobsters, recalling other such films as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, and Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead. These characters aren’t well-dressed mover-and-shaker kingpins such as Michael Corleone, Mayer Lansky, or even John Gotti—these are guys you might well see at almost any bar in America. Some very smalltime criminals (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendolsohn) are employed by a small-time mob guy (Vincent Curatola, The Sopranos) to knock over a mob-hosted card game. The “hook” is they figure the “host” of the game, Markie (Ray Liotta), will be blamed because the word is that he had one of his own card games held up in the past. Rob a bunch of (mostly) crooks who aren’t going to call the police, and there’s a patsy handy…simple, huh? Of course, if it were that simple, there’d be no movie.

Enter Jackie (Pitt). The unseen higher-ups need to restore “order” so profitable card games can continue unmolested…otherwise, every crumb-bum will think they can rob mob-protected games with impunity. Jackie is their Mr. Fixit, an enforcer/assassin charged with permanent removal of the offending parties. Unfortunately, Jackie is acquainted with one of the three miscreants, so he calls in some help in the personage of Mickey (James Gandolfini), an old professional who’s seen better days. In fact, it would not be a stretch to imply that Mickey is a once-respected mob hitter who’s gone to seed. Age, jail time, and divorce have dulled his edge. Mickey is more interested in drinking and whoring than in taking 18

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MARK KERESMAN

care of business, much to Jackie’s consternation. Jackie is a cold-blooded pro who wants to “take care of business” with as little personal muss and fuss possible. While some pro killers take sadistic pride in their work, Jackie doesn’t want to make some poor schmuck suffer—he just wants to do what needs to be done and move on. Richard Jenkins plays a slightly befuddled (imagine an older Bob Newhart) middleman (his “job title” is never clearly stated) whose job is to relay info and orders between Jackie and the bigwigs while trying to keep costs down (yes, even the Mob is impacted by the economy) and minimize any fallout.

Killing Them Softly is a character study of low-level lowlifes and slightly higher on the food chain mobsters, albeit with socio-political pretensions. In every car or bar, it seems like the only sound that comes in loudly and clearly is news radio or CNN, with sound-bites about the economy and bits of speeches by G.W. Bush and President Obama. Hardly any of these scenes in bars, cars, and card games have music in the background. One might think the director/screenwriter Andrew Dominik was trying to draw heavy-handed parallels between mob life and the hi-level chicanery of Big Business in America. Golly, ya think so? After a while, I wanted to shout at the screen: “I get it, already. Crime in downtown dives, crime on Wall Street, it is all crime.” It’s this unsubtle over-indulgence in Style-with-a-capital-S that causes Killing Them Softly to almost collapse under its own weight. One of the murder scenes is so much like a slow motion ballet-of-bullets I was half-expecting the dance consultants for The Black Swan to be in the credits. Dominik tries too often and too obviously to

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“dazzle” the viewer the way some rock guitarists overindulge in look-at-me technical displays.

What does make Killing Them Softly worth seeing is the acting. The crooks who rob the card game are pathetic excuses for criminals—they’re bumbling, street-smart but otherwise dimwitted, junkie-jerks who would actually be better off in jail.

Pitt is back to grunge mode a la Fight Club, and icily credible as a no-nonsense, slightly world-weary, allergic-to-bullshit hitter who keeps a “healthy” distance between himself and his work. Gandolfini’s Mickey is pathetic in a way that makes you actually feel sorry for him without actually liking him—he’s a killer, but mob guys aren’t supposed to be this vulnerable; you just know this guy’s “price” for heavyweight work (i.e., killing) is not as high as it once was. Ray Liotta’s Markie seems like an older, slightly wiser version of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill, a guy who’s realized that it’s better to book the action than play it.

His character gets a beating that is, quite frankly and quite rightly, very difficult to watch—as in Reservoir Dogs and The Killer Inside Me, we get to see in all its messy, bloody antiglory what vicious violence against a fellow human being is really like, that it is not in any way or sense cool or something to casually shrug off.

Killing Them Softly—dandy acting, but style-over-substance. I sentence Dominik to ten viewings of The Friends of Eddie Coyle and five viewings of The Valachi Papers. ■ In addition to ICON, Mark Keresman is a contributing writer for SF Weekly, East Bay Express, Pittsburgh City Paper, Paste, Jazz Review, downBeat, and the Manhattan Resident.

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MARK KERESMAN

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Playing for Keeps

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ERARD BUTLER IS THE new Colin Farrell—a hunky actor from the UK who was once hailed as a Next Big Thing, an It Guy, until lots of mediocre movies messed-up/stalled his career. Case in point: Playing For Keeps, in which Butler plays George, once a huge soccer star and now a failed entrepreneur with an ex-wife and a son that he doesn’t see enough. It’s a buy-the-numbers rom-com, slick and sentimental, and if it weren’t for the cast it’d be a madefor-TV family/Hallmark Channel-type movie.

Simply, to be closer to his son—and perhaps even his ex-wife Stacie (Jessica Biel), George becomes coach of his son’s soccer team. Before you can say Playboy’s Advice Column, soccer moms are throwing themselves at George. But they’re not really characters, but character types: Needy Neurotic (Judy Greer), Silly Trophy Wife (Uma Thurman), and Executive/Power Woman (Catherine Zeta-Jones). As it is with movies, spontaneous sexual acts rarely have consequences, except perhaps in the case of Trophy Wife’s husband Carl (Dennis Quaid), who will surely win the Annual Rod Steiger/Christopher Walken Award for Wild Overacting as the Backslapping Wheeler-Dealer J. Paul Gottalottagall.

He practically froths at the mouth and hands out $20 bills to anyone he wants to impress. The women, too, act as if

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George is the only thing between them and a chaste, frustrated life.

Playing For Keeps may not be awful, but…no, it’s awful.

Butler is somewhat charming as the once-a-player guy forced to maturity, but he’s not really given much of a personality to work with. Biel (even though she’s 30) looks too young, and frankly too blank to be the ex-wife and mother of a soccer-aged child. [slight spoilers] Is our hero going to walk away from a likely six-figure income to be with his, uh, happiness? Is George going to be “besieged” by beautiful women at all the wrong times? Is George going to have heartwarming moments interacting with his son? Will George’s skill as a soccer player enable him to bond with his once-neglected son? Will the once irresponsible go-for-thegusto guy learn the hard way what is really important in life? Would ESPN hire a sportscaster with a Scottish accent thick enough to cut butter? What do YOU think?

For the most part, the slickly-produced but uninspired Playing For Keeps, like most Hollywood rom-coms, exists in a world far removed from the one(s) in which most of us live. Compared to this, Skyfall is a documentary about Britain’s MI-6 and Hostel was produced by the Slovakia Tourism Board. ■

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reel news

REVIEWS OF RECENTLY RELEASED DVDS BY GEORGE OXFORD MILLER

Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell in Seven Psychopaths.

★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC

The Intouchables (2012) ★★★★ Cast: Omar Sy, Francois Cluzet Genre: Comedy Rated R for language and some drug use.

Running time 112 minutes.

In French, with English subtitles.

Awards: César awards, Best Actor (Sy) This feel-good comedy pits a wealthy, stuck-up, white Frenchman against a hipster, free-swinging, black immigrant.

The template is familiar but acted with such exuberance that you have to hang on for the ride. Philippe (Cluzet) survived a paragliding crash, but is paralyzed and needs a live-in caretaker. Driss (Sy), on parole for robbery, applies only to get a pass on his unemployment card. Philippe likes the young man’s irreverent attitude toward life and his own helpless condition and hires him. True to life, and movie stereotypes, humans grow and change when tested by hardship, and both men excel at challenging each other’s assumptions and expectations. Europeans loved the award-winning comic-tragedy, which may be the highest grossing non-English film of all time.

End of Watch (2012) ★★★★ Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena Genre: Cop drama Rated R for strong violence, some disturbing images, pervasive language, sexual references, some drug use.

Running time 109 minutes.

Here is a cop buddy movie with a twist: These two guys really love their job because they love their mission “to serve 22

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and protect.” And they always have each other’s back, regardless. When they get transferred to an east L.A. district controlled by the Mexican cartel, they meet the bad guys head-on, cocky and without fear. Soon the cartel puts out a hit on them and their mission becomes “to serve and survive.” Another twist: Taylor tapes the everyday beat for a film class while some of the street gang members do the same for their own self promotion, so we get POV from both sides of the street. Yes, contrived, but done effectively. Career-defining performances

by Gyllenhaal and Pena show us the price paid and the friendships formed, by the officers on the beat who protect us.

Searching for Sugar Man (2012) ★★★★ Cast: Sixto Rodriguez (aka Sugar Man) Genre: Documentary Rated PG-13.

Running time 86 minutes.

Awards: Audience Awards from Sundance, Tribeca, Los Angeles, and numerous international festivals.

In the 1970s, a record executive discovered Sugar Man (Sixto Rodriguiez) playing folk blues in a Detroit bar and signed him for two albums of original songs. At last, a talented nobody made it big… Wrong. His socially-conscious albums quickly faded from the scene and so did he, never to be heard of again. Except in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement embraced his message and soulful sound and he became bigger than Elvis, the Beetles, Michael Jackson. The rumor mill reported he burned himself on stage and other bizarre reasons for his disappearance. Finally, 40 years later, a pair of filmmakers journeyed to Detroit to find the true story of their leg-

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endary hero. Even if you guess the surprise ending, the amazing story resonates with suspense and excitement.

Seven Psychopaths (2012) ★★★★ Cast: Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken Genre: Goofy comedy Rated R for violence, bloody images, pervasive language, sexuality, nudity, and drug use.

Running time 109 minutes.

Writer’s block can be devastating, especially in Hollywood.

A hapless screenwriter, Martin (Farrell), has the title for his next screenplay but nothing else. His buddy Billy (Rockwell) suggests putting an ad in the newspaper for psychopaths to interview for plot ideas. What an intro to introduce the wackiest characters the silver screen has seen in decades. In the meantime, Billy and his partner (Walken) kidnap rich people’s dogs for the reward money, but get in deep when they snatch a mobster’s (Harrelson) Shih Tzu. Don’t worry about a cohesive plot—writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) didn’t.

But he nailed the madcap, crazy criminal genre with enough satire and absurdity to satisfy the inner child in us all. Really, who needs superheroes, or super stupids, when the world of the bizarre awaits? ■

George Miller is a member of the Society of American Travel Writers and believes that travel is a product of the heart, not the itinerary. See his webmagazine at www.travelsdujour.com.

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film roundup

PETE CROATTO

Laura Linney, Bill Murray as FDR and Olivia Williams in Hyde Park on Hudson.

★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC

Promised Land (Dir: Gus Van Sant). Starring: Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, Titus Welliver, Terry Kinney. Corporate sweet-talker Steve Butler (Damon, reteaming with Good Will Hunting director Van Sant) is sent to rural Pennsylvania to convince townspeople to lease their land so it can be tapped for natural gas. Everyone prepares for a big payday until the resident science whiz/sage (Holbrook) objects, leading to the arrival of a young, charming environmentalist (Krasinski). Steve soon reconsiders what he’s representing. We never buy the doubt. And it’s not because Damon is too busy wearing the earnest beret to don the black hat: he actually tells the obligatory love interest (DeWitt) that he’s “not a bad guy.” Steve is an old pro so we never believe that his conscience would suddenly wobble when faced with simple wisdom from the farmland. (If he and Krasinski switched roles, that might work, though The Office heartthrob would have had to contain his unbearable smugness.) By the end, Promised Land has gotten away from the thorny issues that pierce the soul and celebrates simple, obvious values represented by American flags and smart little girls selling lemonade. It makes for a wonderful PSA. As a movie? Not so much. Damon and Krasinski wrote the script. [R] ★★ Not Fade Away (Dir: David Chase). Starring: John Magaro, Bella Heathcote, Jack Huston, Will Brill, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald. The Sixties were a crazy time, man. That’s the message behind the pointless, annoying directorial debut of Chase, the creative force be24

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hind The Sopranos. A drum-loving Jersey boy (Magaro) starts off as a straight arrow eager to join the military. Then he dives headlong into rock and roll, forming a band, letting his hair go electric, and having a tempestuous relationship with a student from the Marianne Faithfull School of Boredlooking Beauties (Heathcote). These developments enrage his parents (Gandolfini and Molly Price), graduates of the Whatsa Matta University of Working Class Stereotypes. It’s a long slog. Every guitar pick-thin character can be described through labels: hippie, square, concerned parent. Chase’s idea of propelling the plot is to introduce another crisis. The ending seems lifted from another incredibly pretentious movie. Behind these egregious faults is a stifling blandness.

The film’s cultural revelations and you should-have-beenthere incredulousness—We made a bong from a toilet paper roll! The Beatles changed everything!—are second-hand.

Chase somehow thinks this is all new information when it’s been covered, analyzed, and parodied since the first episode of Laugh-In. [R]★ Hyde Park on Hudson (Dir: Roger Michell). Starring: Bill Murray, Laura Linney, Samuel West, Olivia Colman, Olivia Williams, Elizabeth Marvel. The latest in a line of nostalgia-tinged naughtiness (My Week with Marilyn, Hitchcock) takes us to June 1939. A perfect storm is forming over President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, NY. Habitual paramour and distant cousin, Daisy (Linney), is in love with FDR (Murray); wife Eleanor (Williams) lives elsewhere, and the King and Queen of England (West, Colman) are coming for an important weekend visit. Cue

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the flustered rich folk! Prestige picture is written all over this effort, but writer Richard Nelson can’t decide on the angle. Every shift of perspective—from forbidden love story to comedy of manners to political drama—is jarring and incomplete. And Michell’s polite, folksy approach guarantees that the movie seals lids shut instead of blowing them off.

Don’t let the MPAA rating fool you. Watching Hyde Park on Hudson is like watching slides of your great-grandparents’ vacation to upstate New York—with a few boudoir shots thrown in for spice. [R] ★★ Deadfall (Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky). Starring: Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Hunnam, Sissy Spacek, Kris Kristofferson, Kate Mara, Treat Williams. Following a horrible car accident, two bank robbing siblings (Bana, Wilde) separate and hope to reunite in the wintry backwoods. Sis hitches a ride with a disgraced Olympic boxer (Hunnam) who is running from a new set of problems. Meanwhile, bro kills at a furious rate, making his way to the home of a couple (Spacek, Kristofferson) for a Thanksgiving dinner that ends up fit for a hostage negotiator. “This is like an old movie, don’t you think?” Wilde’s character observes. A little too much, actually. Director Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) and first-time screenwriter Zach Dean aren’t interested in telling new stories. Deadfall recycles elements of Fargo, Scarface, The Ref and other hard-boiled fare but offers little to keep our interest. The finale is more implausible than intense and the illfitting performances range from muted to cartoonish, but the absence of absorbing characters and conflicts really keeps us from warming up to this snowy thriller. [R] ★★ ■

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feature

Jaoquin Phoenix.

IT’S HARD TO LIVE in today’s world. Not just hard in the ways that have returned from our past to bite us again, with wars and widespread depressions claiming lives and dignity, but on a very personal and mental level, too. In developed places, it is hard, perhaps, because everything is easy, the endless shortcuts and options of technology making effort unnecessary and contentment impossible. No matter how The year was full of characters he or she has been touched by the simply unable to slip into life’s changes of economy, conga line, their inner battles too climate, or global events, the contemviolent to allow for peaceful, porary human’s conformist escape. common plight is one of postmodern, post-Google, post-WiFi existentialism, a great throng of people emerging from an era of privilege, with limitless connection to the world but little clue of how to live in it. At the movies, if 2011 was the year of musing on the apocalypse, with great films like Take Shelter and 26

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Melancholia observing the end of the world as we knew it, then 2012 was the year of scrambling through the rubble, trying to find one’s way in the universe in the wake of a tectonic shift, and grasping for meaning and happiness amid apathy, cynicism, and iEverything.

The best movies of the year each reflected the gist of this bittersweet narrative, which sees the world in a kind of swirling tumult, everyone struggling for individual ways to stay afloat.

The most literal iteration of the theme came in the year’s most breathtaking spectacle, Life of Pi, which saw a young man (Suraj Sharma) survive the foundering of his family’s ship, only to share a lifeboat with a ferocious tiger in the middle of the ocean. Symbolism doesn’t get much plainer than it does in Yann Martel’s hit novel, and the script for Ang Lee’s adaptation employs a tiresome, tell-all framing device, but the splendor of the film’s set pieces underscored the universality of Pi’s humbling smallness, his intimate fight against his demons unfolding as something at once momentous and infinitesimal.

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py (Quvenzhané Wallis) in Beasts of the Southern Wild, a gorgeous, allegorical pseudo-fantasy set in a bayou community stricken with Katrina-like devastation. Only six years old, and forced to grow up motherless in singularly hazardous conditions, Hushpuppy faced down predators of the mortal, elemental, and emotionally manifested sort, dealing with her father’s (Dwight Henry) illness, the invading rescue teams tasked to drain her community, and a stampeding race of prehistoric monsters representative of her myriad growing pains. Beautifully tactile and charmingly ramshackle, Beasts got mythic in its depiction of modern endurance, which tests those thrust into maturation just as it does those plagued by arrested development.

Another pint-sized protagonist clawed to find his way in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s transcendent The Kid with a Bike, a French-language gem that charted the woes of 12-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), whose paternal abandonment showed calamitous ripple effects, making him a ball of uncertainty running wild and somewhat blind. Ever-accomplished in their abilities to harness the essence of youth, the Dardenne brothers

R. KURT OSENLUND

Holy Motors.

succeeded in making Cyril’s distinct torment deeply heartbreaking, ultimately implying that events beyond reason reached out to help him soldier on.

The notion of being a part of something bigger than oneself, and surrendering a degree of control to best fit into the natural way of things, factors heavily into that which weighs upon today’s population, a society of multitasking, one-person armies defined by autonomy and selfreliance. In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix was astonishing as Freddie Quell, a post-WWII veteran and army of one with a serious spiritual deficit, his inexplicable void padded with sex, rage, and handcrafted hooch. The central focus of Paul Thomas Anderson’s rumored Scientology meditation, Freddie nestled beneath the wing of cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose community, albeit riddled with strikes against its credibility, seemed a worthwhile stand-in for the world at large.

But Freddie’s fight to fit in was steadily thwarted by his own self-defeating insistence on holding the reins, a conflict that, in keeping the men apart, kept life’s very possibilities at arm’s length for Freddie.

The year was full of characters simply unable to slip

into life’s conga line, their inner battles too violent to allow for peaceful, conformist escape. In Oslo, August 31, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his debut feature, Reprise, Anders Danielsen Lie played a recovering drug addict at last returning to public life after rehab, and finding it tragically tough to rewire himself, giving up early on an attempt to land a job, and finding engagement in simple pastimes to be a futile uphill climb. Surely one of 2012’s sadder films, Oslo depicted one of the unlucky ones, whose outlook remained gloomy to the bitter end, but it served as a call for those of similar unease to fight that much harder, however seemingly hopeless the crusade.

In a related vein, Sarah Polley’s beguiling Take This Waltz featured Michelle Williams as Margot, a woman who, in true millenial form, couldn’t get no satisfaction, no matter how many available avenues she boldly exploited. No longer excited by the perfect marriage she shared with a loveable nice guy (Seth Rogen), Margot sought greener pastures in the sculpted arms of a dreamy neighbor, only to find herself inevitably tiring of him as well. In what might have been 2012’s most hauntingly splendid motif, director Sarah Polley showed Margot joining her new beau W W W. FA C E B O O K .C O M / I C O N D V

on a carnival ride, the car perpetually running in circles to the tune of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the out-with-theold-in-with-the-new anthem of the modern era. Polley revived the scene for her film’s final moments, but presented Margot on the same ride alone, a chilly, yet visually sublime illustration of elusive fulfillment.

Also last year, there were plenty of terrifically gonzo art films that showcased individuals scrambling to maintain sanity and sense of self in an age that poses challenges to both. In American Animal, Matt D’Elia gave a drastically unhinged performance as Jimmy, an eccentric young man with a terminal disease, who revolted against his roommate’s decision to take a new internship, wishing the two could maintain their all-expenses-paid lifestyle in an apartment gifted to them by Jimmy’s parents. Through a series of bizarre acts, which involved dress-up, play-acting, and adopting animalistic behavior, Jimmy staged his protest

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exclusive interview R. KURT OSENLUND

ILLUSTRATION BY VICTOR STABIN

Swimming

W

A busy and beloved conservationist and author, Carl Safina no

a docu-series that kicked off in October and continues through this winte

viewers on how to save the seas, but Safina surely imparts t

CARL SAFINA IS ONE impressive multihyphenate. Seemingly tireless in his exploits, the New York native is a conservationist, author, adjunct professor, founder of the eco-friendly Blue Ocean Institute, and all-around visionary in the world of ocean preservation. Through his career he has penned six books, including a children’s story, about the ways our oceans are changing, landing himself recognition from The New York Times and a handful of awards, including the John Burroughs Medal, the James Beard Medal, and the Lannan Literary Award.

His byline has appeared on nearly 200 articles, for outlets as prestigious as the Times and National Geographic. He has a great deal of noble advocacy under his belt, leading campaigns to influence fishing policies and protect vulnerable sea life.

This past fall, Safina added television host to his list of accomplishments, exposing viewers to the issues he champions on PBS’s new show, Saving the Oceans. The program may look like your typical, modern environmental docu-series, but, to employ a fishing term, there’s a catch: Rather than following the apocalyptic trend set forth by films like An Inconvenient Truth, Saving the Oceans exercises a positive modus operandi, showing audiences solutions and active problem solvers instead of statistics that make everyone’s hair stand on end. It’s part of a hopeful mission that’s grown within Safina since his childhood, which was saturated with oceanographic knowledge, interests, and passion.

And yet, Safina remains a realist. In a candid interview, the 57-year-old speaks as much about the can-do outlook he aims to impart to others as he does the hard truths that cannot be ignored.

Among other things, he opens up about overpopulation, the lack of worthwhile oceanfocused media, and the tough decisions that should be made on the heels of Superstorm Sandy.

Safina reveals himself as a well-rounded man who, in addition to hitting the high seas professionally, wisely considers the same hot water that all of us are in.

So much of what we hear about the environment lately involves doomsday data and grim outlooks, but Saving the Ocean takes a more positive approach. Why do you think it’s more important to send a message of hope than it is to use scare tactics?

Because I think hope motivates the work that we want people to do—work that will helpsolve these problems. My definition of hope is the ability to see how things could get better. So, if you show people how things can get better, you give them hope. If people don’t think things can get better, they’re not very likely to work on something that they think won’t work. It’s a motivator that helps lead to solutions.

The show premiered with two pilot programs in 2011, and then it kicked off with its first full season this October. Can you describe how the project came together?

Sure. A mutual colleague introduced me to the producer on the phone, and we had a very good conversation about the possibility of doing something together, and we discussed what isn’t out there.

What was out there was a lot of stuff that did not talk about the issues at all, or was very doomsday and very gloomy. So we thought, “Why not try to find the things that have good solutions and focus on them?”

In your travels for the show, are you encountering a lot of things and places you previously hadn’t seen in your other work?

Yes. To a very significant amount, we’re doing things that are new to me—places I have not been, and issues I have not been involved in.

Are any of your prior experiences influencing certain topics for the episodes?

Yeah, we’ve gone to a couple of places that I had visited before, and there are a lot of people whom we are visiting and working with who know about my work from things that I’ve done. So that’s helped to ease the entry in a number of cases.

ng

WITH

Sharks

r, Carl Safina now serves as the host of PBS’s Saving the Ocean,

ough this winter. The show takes the rare positive approach to informing surely imparts that these issues are still no laughing matter.

I know the show doesn’t dwell on the negative, but what would you say is the single greatest threat currently facing our oceans?

The number of people in the world. And all the things that flow from them.

The Associated Press just released an article stating that a record percentage of Americans finally do believe that climate change is a very serious problem. Why do you think it’s taken so long for certain people to accept, or even warm to, that notion?

Because there’s a gigantically funded misinformation campaign. That’s the main reason. The other reason is it’s frightening. Another reason is that intentional change scares a lot of people.

I recently read on your blog your somewhat controversial opinion that it’s not worth rebuilding in a lot of the coastal areas that were devastated by Superstorm Sandy. Could you discuss those views a bit?

Yeah—there’s no sense building things that are going to get knocked down again. That’s pretty much the logic. Many of these things are rebuilt using tax money from everybody else in the country, and it’s policy to continue to put people in harm’s way, and infrastructure in harm’s way. It helps to literally ensure that it will happen to them again, and that everybody will be asked to pay for it again. So I think that people should be directed to relocate, but not to rebuild in flood areas. And we could start to see parts of the coast opening back up, and creating what the coast is supposed to be, which is a barrier against storms and a place for public access and public recreation…a place that people can pull back from when something very bad is coming their way.

I’m going to switch gears a bit and discuss some of your writing. You seem to be very prolific. How do you find the time to write and still do so much work in the field?

Oh, it’s all a trade-off. If I could just focus on writing, I would write a lot more, and if I could just focus on all the other things that I like to do, I’d do a lot more of those, too.

So everything is always competing for time. There’s not a very carefully engineered way of just getting up to a certain number of books, or approaching a certain number of hours of advocacy work. It’s not so orderly. I’m always frustrated that I’m not doing a lot more, because there’s a lot more I wish I had time to do.

Are you busy working on another book?

Well, I’m busy, that’s for sure, and I’m trying to get started on another book. But, again, there are a lot of other things competing for time. If I could, I would prefer to focus on the book.

Of course, we’re speaking in the wake of the presidential election. Any specific actions or policy changes you’re hoping to see in the next four years, particularly in relation to the issues you champion?

Well, I think that energy policy, and a lot more encouragement of sustainable energy from the federal government, would be ideal. Because right now we have all the fossil fuel people sending all their lobbyists around to make sure nothing good happens.

There have been a lot of films and media in recent years that have covered the state of the world’s oceans. Are there any in particular that you’ve seen that have gotten it right?

No. I haven’t seen anything that I really loved. I think all of them have done some good things, but all of them have fallen short of being really perfect, or at least of being deadon with their particular message.

Being a seafood eater, one of the things I’m always wondering about is the ethics of that market, and whether or not I’m being a responsible consumer, what with all the overfishing and depleting species. Is there a way to be a responsible seafood eater?

Well, we have a partnership with Whole Foods, and I know that they do not sell anything that you’d rate in the socalled “red category,” which has a lot of those problems. And I believe that they are very, very sincere about not outsourcing from the kind of fisheries that have a lot of problems. And they’ve been building what they’ve been doing over the last few years. So that’s one way.

You grew up by the sea, and you’ve become a conservationist, of course, making a lot of personal strides to save the oceans beyond just study.

Was there anything else in your upbringing that fostered any of this? Were your parents involved with any of these issues?

No, they were not. They introduced me to fishing, and they introduced me to wildlife, but they were not active with conservationism or anything like that. But I knew from visiting the zoo, or the Museum of Natural History in New York, or the New York Aquarium, that animals were having prob-

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exclusive interview

Culture Warrior Armed with acerbic wit and biting criticism, Joe Queenan takes on America’s culture

a

things, wouldn’t that be worse than having a never-ending list of books to read?

FTER YEARS OF WRITING shrewdly, eloquently, and viciously about popular culture in books such as Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon, Joe Queenan is making it personal. The renowned humorist’s stunning 2009 memoir, Closing Time, detailed his tumultuous Philadelphia childhood with an unreliable, alcoholic father and an emotionally numb mother.

Books served as a way to elevate Queenan from a dead-end life. Those wonderful, mystical objects take center stage in One for the Books ($24.95, As far as I’m concerned, Viking), available for sale tea is coffee, the square now. A voracious reader— by his estimate, he’s read root of sixteen is my turbetween 6,000 and 8,000 tle, and Denmark is in Porbooks—Queenan, 62, tugal. And if you don’t shares his astute observations on the reading life: like those facts then get how bookstores and liyour own facts, because braries beat Kindles, the these are my facts. value of awful books, how a bad cover can deter us from reading a book.

The overall theme of One for the Books makes it indispensible: Books—actual books with spines and pages and dust jackets—represent a life and feed it. We form friendships based on them. We remember where we were when we bought them. “The presence of books in my hands, my home, my pockets, my life will never cease to be essential to my happiness,” he writes.

Queenan, who has authored ten previous books and has written for just about every major publication, was more than happy to talk about books. And writing.

And Philadelphia, a city he loves even though it has low self-esteem. He spent nearly two hours enthusiastically answering my questions in early October.

The interview, edited and condensed for clarity and space, begins after Queenan concludes a lengthy list of the books he’s reading or has read, including a recent, not-so-hot novel about the 1960s (Aria Beth Sloss’ Autobiography of Us] and a sub-par effort from Tom McCarthy.

Yes, and you’d just be like everybody else.

Exactly.

This is a kind of managed insanity. That’s what the book is about. Because if I was compulsive about everything in my life, I wouldn’t be able to function. But I’m really only compulsive about books. I’m not as compulsive about music as I am about books. …I could get up tomorrow and write exactly the same book about music, because I think I’ve been to about 2,000 concerts, so I could write the same book about music. But the difference is I’m not constantly thinking about music. I’m not constantly, like, reconfiguring my collection of CDs or I’m not thinking about whether I still like Frederick Delius. Whereas with books, I’m always thinking and I’ve always got these projects going and I think it’s probably because books saved my life.

Would the way you look at books be any different if you weren’t a writer?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. People who aren’t writers, they don’t see how writing works. They read the story.

They don’t see how words are put together. They don’t hear rhythms. It’s like no matter how much you know about music if you talk to a professional musician, they just ignore you. …I think one of the things about art is that you do not have to appreciate what an artist or a writer or a musician does to enjoy it, you just enjoy it at a different level. When I go to the National Gallery of Art in London with my friend Mike, who is a painter, he points things out that I would never, ever, ever notice about painting… So I think that you look at things completely differently if you understand how they’re done, but that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them. You don’t have to know how a helicopter is assembled in order to enjoy being in a helicopter.

You’ve written here and in Closing Time about reading Fitzgerald while cleaning out the overhead funnel at a bubble gum factory and how the bookmobile provided an escape for you. Is that enjoyment or escapism diminished with your current approach to reading?

If you didn’t have the curiosity to get different mind-sets, to be exposed to different

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No, not at all. I think one of the great things about writing is you feel, even though there are so many writers who are so much better than you, you feel like you’re on the ship with them. Like you’re in steerage and they’re in first-class. But you’re on that ship.

One of the things I really like about the way my career played out is that I write op-ed pieces and I write movie reviews and I write book reviews. And part of the reason why I enjoy doing that is that what’s George Orwell and Graham Greene did. I always thought it was great that those guys didn’t go off to some writer’s colony in New Hampshire and disappear for ten years and not write a book. They were constantly engaged in their society. They were constantly reading something and going, “Well, fuck that, I’m going to write an op-ed piece about that.” I just always admired that so much about them. I admired those writers who participated in discourse with their society, rather than going off into some ivory tower.

I loved…when Romney said to Obama, “You can have your own airplane and you can have your own house but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” And I just thought, so now we’ve reached the point where Mitt Romney is quoting from something he read in Maureen Dowd’s column that she remembered Daniel Patrick Moynihan saying. And the way Romney said it was [like], Yeah right, Mitt, you thought that up. That wasn’t one of your 25-year-old speechwriters who thought that up. But it was also like, “What a clever boy am I. I said, ‘You’re not entitled to your own facts.’” So I thought about it and go, Why not? Why can’t we have our own facts? So I wrote this story for The Wall Street Journal: I’m just going to have my own facts from now on and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, tea is coffee, the square root of sixteen is my turtle, and Denmark is in Portugal. And if you don’t like those facts then get your own facts, because these are my facts.

When that idea came to me, it was like, “My God, this is so great.” It’s not like you pat yourself on the back and go, Wow, that’s so fucking ingenious. I thought of this great idea. It’s like, Thank you, whoever it is out there, the god of ideas, for throwing that one my way.

And you don’t get that by going to a writer’s colony or locking yourself in a room for six months.

PETE CROATTO

You don’t get it by reading The New Yorker, because that’s just an echo chamber. You get it by being responsive to the world that is around you. That’s the exhilarating thing about being a writer: Either you believe that the world is an exciting place or you don’t.

And if you believe that the world is an exciting place then you’re just responsive to the things that go on around you, and then you can transmute them.

One of the problems with the chattering class is that everything they say you go, “Yup, New York Times page A16, October 12. I read that story too.”

Speaking of responding to the world relating to books, has anyone given you a Kindle?

I think somewhere along the line somebody offered me one, but I just said no. I have no interest in that. I don’t care if people use them. It doesn’t bother me. A friend of mine in England, who is very, very smart and very welleducated, she has a Kindle because she loads it up with 12 crummy books and she goes to Italy. That makes perfect sense if you’re reading crummy books, but if you’re reading books that you love and that you want to go back and read over and over again, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t read 12 books on vacation. I might read two books on vacation. I don’t read a lot when I’m traveling. I don’t read on planes very much. I usually talk to the person sitting next to me.

Why is that? When someone talks to me on a plane, I’m usually looking for an excuse to get out of the conversation.

Because I think within about 45 minutes of talking to strangers, they will tell you the central drama of their life. I think that people go into some sort of confessional mode. I’m never going to see you again, and I’m going to talk to you. People just tell you the most amazing things about their marriages, about their careers, about their kids. I do find it interesting that almost immediately when you talk to people you can figure out what’s wrong with them. A psychologist will milk it for ten years and keep having them come back, but almost immediately you can find out exactly what’s wrong with

Author and cultural critic Joe Queenan.

them, exactly what they would need to do to fix their life. And I’m sure they would say the same thing about me. I’m interested in people, too.

And one of the reasons that I don’t read things like The New Yorker is because sometimes I go to parties up here and all they talk about is stuff they’ve read in The New Yorker or The New York Times. You know there’s a whole world out there that is not just that, and all you’re doing is exchanging opinions of people who are just like you. So, it’s like, let me guess: You hate Romney. Let me guess: You hate the Tea Party. Let me guess: You’re disappointed that Obama didn’t accomplish more in his first [term]. Let me guess: You wish we would get out of Afghanistan. Let me guess: You don’t understand why children don’t read more. Yeah. OK. We’re on board with that one. I like more to engage with people who I don’t know where they got their opinions from. One of the problems with the chattering class is that everything they say you go, “Yup, New York Times page A16, October 12. I read that story too.”

where I was, who I was with. And you mention in One for the Books that a Kindle can’t do that. I think the Kindle is more for people who are interested in the technology. If you’re reader, you’re a reader. The technology isn’t going to help you get in that direction.

That’s exactly right. When I was a little kid I read The Iliad and things like that. I read Treasure Island and Kidnapped. I think the first time that I was aware of a book striving for some kind of artistic merit was when I read A Farewell to Arms, which interestingly enough is a book I no longer like. But when I read A Farewell to Arms I was very conscious of the fact that this isn’t like stuff that I’ve been reading. And I don’t know if everyone has that experience.

I think that’s one of the functions of books like Girl with the Pearl Earring. They’re books that occupy that middle ground between art and trash. Those books are

Going back to books: Behind me are three bookcases full of books. Like you, I have memories attached to my books, about W W W. FA C E B O O K .C O M / I C O N D V

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exclusive interview

A. D. AMOROSI

Amy Sadao The new heart of ICA

AMY SADAO SPEAKS, she seems to surge forward, jettisoning herself from a seated or standing position as if propelled by her own drive and passion. That ardor was necessary for one in the seat of power for ten years at New York City’s Visual AIDS, a legendarily innovative nonprofit which long promoted AIDS awareness through contemporary art. Similarly, Sadao will require that energized determination now that she’s been named (in August 2012) the Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art on the cusp of the ICA’s 50th anniversary in 2013.

That birthday won’t be met with the usual greatest hits grandstanding or retro laziness but rather look-sees “I had the experience of standing into works from recent arts history in a space and not understanding and quirks of the the immediacy of what exactly culture still unwas going through my head. scratched by ICA. That includes the What is this and why am I here? first monographed Why do I want to stand here? Yet cumulative exhibithat was compelling enough reation from activist/photographson for me to move 3,000 miles er Brian Weil, the from my home to know more.” bodily adornment oriented White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart show and large scale Expressionist Scottish sculptor Karla Black.

At the very heart of all of Sadao’s work and activism and outreach, one simple dictum holds true: “I love talking about art and having relationships with artists,” exclaims Sadao. “Their works, the continuum across time...” she says breathlessly without finishing. This moves her.

Executing the goals of a museum (a Kunsthalle really as it mounts art exhibitions and symposia without maintaining a permanent collection) set upon the rock of an educational institution (University of Pennsylvania) with an alumni dedicated to showing its finest face is a good place for Sadao and her curators (she never ceases

WHEN

If A.D. Amorosi can’t be found writing features for ICON, the Philadelphia Inquirer, doing Icepacks and Icecubes (amongst other stories) for Philadelphia City Paper, he’s probably hitting restaurants like Stephen Starr’s or running his greyhound.

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Amy Sadao. Photo: David Kelley.

to credit others involved, from donors to potentials audiences) to be. Especially when you consider that this transplant, first from California then Manhattan, enjoys this city’s cultural mix, straight forwardness and genrejumping, discipline-leaping audiences. She felt that the ICA and this city was the future of where art and communion collided; at least her future.

“I built a relationship to Philadelphia because of ICA,” she says of the last twenty years and being continually interested in their programs, their exhibitions and their publications. “Quite conceivably, the ICA was like the richest food, the thing you want to dig into. I took more than a few sick days and faked illness to go down to the ICA.” In the last two years, a personal relationship with local poet/teacher Thomas Devaney gave her greater reason to be here.

Beyond ICA’s stretch of glass and concrete, being in Philly on a regular basis introduced her to the audiences within and around the structure. She saw that we’re a city of co-minglers. “When I used to go to the ICA salons or the big post-exhibition parties, you had to ■

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scrape people off the walls to get them out of here.”

With that, her role as ICA’s executive director and de facto civic leader is to reach into that audience and keep them abreast and aware. She wants the experience of any arts organization, hers in particular, to be public and easy to digest. “ It is not your audience’s job to find out who you are,” she says. “They shouldn’t have to wonder if each exhibit is for them. It is our job to get you here. It is free. Our curators—over a dozen—are exemplary and wrote the book on curatorial practices [literally, in the case of senior curator Ingrid Schaffner]. And we are the only contemporary arts museum in town.”

A discursive free contemporary one at that. Sadao wants each exhibition that passes through its doors to ignite conversations and disagreements within its walls while reading its publications and sitting in installation artist Wendy Yao’s big blue hammock as part of the ICA’s on-going Excursus series. Like the noisiest library with dozens of conversational motivators running at full speed at one time, the ICA wants vibrancy at the heart of its aestheticism at every moment.

That should be no problem for Sadao based on her background.

She trained for a career as an artist at Cooper Union, New York City’s private institution, not knowing what kind of artist she could be. “I was 16, 18, I didn’t know. Some people know immediately what kind. If it was twenty years later—today—we wouldn’t have to decide. There wouldn’t have to be rigid distinctions between disciplines. Today, jazz artists present light sculptures. Choreographers take photos. There’s fluidity amongst disciplines.” She likens that liquid slide to bands whose members do solo albums, have side projects and work with players they met in their youth. “You pull apart and you push together all that you have been and can be,” she says. “I approached going to school for art because I love contemporary art and I didn’t even know what it was. I had the experience of standing in a space and not understanding the immediacy of what exactly was going through my head. What is this and why am I here? Why do I want to stand here? Yet that was compelling enough reason for me to move 3,000 miles from my home to know more.”

She whispers this: “So I was a really bad artist, you know? Maybe if I had come now....”

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really good. I make fun of them: the books that if women haven’t read by December 31, they have to throw away, like Life of Pi or Bel Canto or The Shipping News or any of those books. What I don’t like is when people talk about those books as if they were great. …One of things I constantly have happen to me is I will read about ten books from the library or that I pick up somewhere, and they’re good books… They’re very readable books. They’re frequently written by people who went to writers’ schools. They’re professionally crafted books.

They’re excellent books, but then after I read them it’s like, “I’ve got to read some Balzac. I’ve got to read somebody who can really throw that fucking knockout punch. I’ve got to read Jane Eyre. I’ve got to read Cervantes.”

You’re a voracious reader of fiction, but why the emphasis on writing non-fiction? And do you have an idea for a novel that you’d like to try at some point?

I wrote four novels and I wrote about 100 short stories, and I got about 60 of the stories published in literary magazines, not the big ones. I also had them published in some skin magazines and things like that. I had this epiphany. I was at this small book fair at New York University in 1981.

There were all these people there that I sort of knew by correspondence. There was this one guy there who was going to publish my novel. He invited me to a party in Chelsea. So we went to these people’s loft, and all of the people were gathered around in this circle and they were mourning this woman whose husband put out a self-published magazine that had bankrupted them and then she had committed suicide, I think. They were all sort of telling anecdotes about her, holding hands. And I thought, Wow, this totally sucks. I went into the bathroom to get something to drink, because they said there was beer in the bathroom—and the entire tub was filled with Old Milwaukee. And I just said to my wife, “I want champagne. That’s my idea of being a writer.

I’m going to be like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. This is not for me.”

It was very important for me to be successful as a writer.

And it was very important for me to be successful as a satirist. But it didn’t particularly matter to me in what form that happened. So I literally, literally, stopped writing fiction for 30 years and then last year I wrote a novel that nobody liked, except my agent…And then I just started writing another one and I’m about halfway through that. Now I’m just writing them recreationally. I think I’m in the middle of two new novels, and they’re short, funny, but I’m just doing it purely recreationally. Because writing is so easy for me, so I can come in and write tons and tons of stuff every day if I have any trouble. I wrote four stories in the past two days.

The ideal thing is when your work is something that you actually love, and not something that you enjoy the results of. I like the physical act of writing. I like coming to my office and putting words on the page and then sending it to somebody. The rest of it—I like the money, obviously—I don’t particularly care about anything other about writing.

As a rule, I don’t talk very much about my writing. I don’t go to parties or anything like that, and I don’t really use my writing to advance my social standing. I think I’m like a painter. They’re only happy when they’re painting. I think a lot of writers are very happy when they’re at parties and conferences and don’t really enjoy the writing that much.

For a lot of writers, I think it’s drudgery. But for me, writing—the jokes are new to me when I write them. ■

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What the art world lost as a practitioner it gained as an administrator. The commerce of beauty, joy and the sublime—and her desire and willingness to share experiences of all stripes—made her a perfect match for such responsibility.

Ten years at VisualAIDS in New York City defined her in that it allowed Sadao’s public consciousness, her dedication to contemporary art and, even greater, her sense of loss and devastation at those victims of the deadly HIV+/AIDS virus collaboration. She sought to create, in a non-profit manner, a venue for stricken artists and their support teams, provoke dialogue and keep alive the legacies of those who passed.

She fought long and hard to remind audiences that AIDS wasn’t over. “It’s about not forgetting, to keep the dialogue about AIDS ongoing through contemporary art, to get involved,” says Sadao of keying into her extraordinary capacity for action. “So much of that came and comes from artists and activists, people who work together to change the world.” She insists that she still speaks daily to so many of the artists who passed away during her ten year tenure at VisualAIDS. “We correspond daily. I see their faces before me. I hope that I can do good based on what those people shared

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lems. I learned about habitat loss, and I knew the word “endangered” at an early age, and that all seemed to enter into something that I would want to work on. But, then, just watching decline myself—seeing fishing getting worse, seeing things disappearing. That was a tremendous motivator for me to do something.

Carl Safina.

Carter Mull, Pascal’s Wager (Dream of a Perfect Life), 2004-05. Type c print, 25 x 32.5 inches. Courtesy of Carter Mull and Marc Foxx Gallery

with me. That level of responsibility drove me at VisualAIDS and continues to drive me now.”

It is happy circumstance that the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s fiftieth anniversary under her executive directorship is dedicated to the continued memory of Brian Weil. Decided upon and curated three years ago, the late photographer and the founder of City Wide Harm Reduction (the first needles exchange program in New York City), has never had a richly comprehenisve monographed exhibition, after 20 some major shows to his name. He does not have the recognition and understanding befitting an artist of his stature—until now.

“I think the AIDS pandemic—the history, its leading lights –will be explored more through its activism and contemporary arts,” says Sadao.

With that, the job of an executive director must be, with its curators, to tell the future and watch the pennies in an unforgiving economy. How does one watch the future when everything around you is already future forward. “My job is to make the impossible possible,” laughs Sadao who mentions that working at a non-profit where she stuffed envelopes and took out trash made her appreciate frugality. “My job is to make certain that artists have the space to breathe and that audiences get to breathe right along with them.” ■

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So far, Saving the Oceans has covered sharks, swordfish, whales in Baja—what else can viewers expect as the show continues?

There’s a really nice river project in the Pacific northwest involving some of the Native Americans there, and other local communities. There’s a really good episode about sea turtles, and there’s a show about when cod can come back, and what it will take to bring cod back. So, a good variety of things.

The philosophy behind your work seems to be a certain faith in the human spirit merged with environmental responsibility. Do you see the global culture as evolving to embrace that philosophy, or is the world, in general, still too cynical about these issues?

I think it’s very much a mix. I think, in general, we’re more aware of these problems than ever before, but because the human population has doubled in my lifetime, the pressures to keep doing things the wrong way or do things better but not better enough to get ahead of the curve of our stillexpanding numbers, are very substantial, and they’re pretty overwhelming at the moment. This is not just a question of ‘can we grow enough food.’ It’s a matter of our increasing pressure on freshwater, forests, reefs, the atmosphere and the ocean, and all the other species that are in a downward spiral, including the big icons like lions, tigers, bears, apes, giraffes, elephants. The species we like to paint on nursery walls to welcome children into a world rich with fellow creatures are all plummeting in numbers. Imagine nursery walls that are blank. The faith I have is that we know the solutions.

Teaching girls to read and write lowers the birth rate; that’s win-win-win. The question that remains is how much will we continue to degrade the planet’s life-support systems before we hit an inflection point that will begin relieving the pressure? And what will be left to work with by then. ■

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BRUCE H. KLAUBER, D., MUS.

A NIGHT with the THREE STOOGES and a day with MOE “Why don’t you get a toupee with some brains in it?” — Moe to Curly.

ONE OF THOSE “URBAN Myth” yarns that continues to make the rounds concerns a “Most Admired Men of the 20th Century” poll taken some years back. As the story goes, the top three winners of the poll were, in this order: Abraham Lincoln, Reverend Martin Luther King, and Moe of The Three Stooges.

Myth or not, the fact is, much like I Love Lucy, the Stooges’ films continue to be shown somewhere in the world every day of the year, and have been since their film shorts were sold to television in 1959. Never the darling of critics and reputedly not a favorite of women, these admitted “low-comic slapstick artists” nevertheless have tran-

The interview was scheduled at the theater for the early afternoon, and I made my way to the TLA. While almost there, the excitement was too much for me. It was déjà vu all over again: I puked.

scended the gender gap, times, tastes, eras, critics, and have remained instantly identifiable personalities for more than 80 years.

Why? Because they’re darn funny.

In 1959 and 1960, the venerable, slapstick comedy team was in the midst of one of the most miraculous comebacks in show business history. Almost washed up by 1958, when their 23-year Columbia Pictures contract for short subjects was canceled, a number of television stations around the country purchased a bargain package of vintage Stooges’ films offered by Columbia, often shown on children’s shows in tandem with Popeye cartoons. No one had high hopes for these films, some produced as early as 1935, but Columbia had little to lose, in that these films were produced during the “pre-residual” days and no additional monies were due to the comedy team no matter how well or how poorly the films fared on television.

Surprisingly, the kids went wild over the three comics and they gained an entirely new audience. In that cartoons were the basis of children’s programming in those preSesame Street days, and The Three Stooges were human cartoons, their success on the tube was virtually ensured.

Even in glorious black and white.

Moe Howard, who owned the act and the name, saw what was happening on television, ratings-wise, and went into action. Kids were clamoring to see these three guys,

L-R: Larry Fine, Mildred Harris, Moe Howard, Curly Howard.

however elderly they were at that point, in person. The first priority was to find the proverbial “third stooge.” Curly Howard, Moe’s brother and probably the most popular of all the Stooges, died in 1952. Replacement Shemp, another Howard brother, died in 1955. Joe (“You crazy you!”) Besser, who stepped in for Shemp and filmed the trio’s final Columbia shorts, no longer wanted to travel.

Larry Fine, it’s been said, discovered a burlesque comic named Joe DeRita working in Vegas, who, with head shaved, bore a startling resemblance to the “original” Curly. DeRita auditioned and was hired as the third Stooge.

When the shorts started making some noise on television, The Stooges landed a booking at what was one of this country’s legendary nightclubs, now shuttered, the Holiday House in Pittsburgh, PA. The club’s owner hired the boys— W W W. FA C E B O O K .C O M / I C O N D V

after the owner’s own children went nuts over The Stooges on local television—to do matinee shows, with the menu consisting of hamburgers, hot dogs and Cokes. The Holiday House was sold out for weeks. In 1959, the veterans were suddenly in demand for personal appearances, merchandising deals, comic books, recordings, television guest shots, and surprise of surprises, full-length feature films. No more shorts for these guys.

Philadelphia television personality Sally Starr played The Stooges’ short films on her highly-rated program, Popeye Theater, and one afternoon, Moe, Larry and Curly-Joe

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

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dining

ROBERT GORDON

City Tavern A HEFTY EARTHENWARE PLATE arrived. Wisps of apple-smoked bacon and fresh basil swirled above plump jumbo shrimp and bulky bacon strips that were laden with fresh basil.

On the side was a bowl of colonial era horseradish-based barbeque sauce.

“That’s the smell of freedom,” my wife said paying homage to Stephen Colbert. Colbert would indeed give the City Tavern a tip of the hat for its patriotic trappings. But he’d follow with a wag of the finger. Why? Because at City Tavern, it takes an act of Congress to make a menu change. Seriously, it does. City Tavern is on federal territory. The Tavern operation falls under their jurisdiction. But Colbert’s finger-wag would be an act of truthiness, not fact.

Bureaucracy has never held Walter Staib back. Staib is the City Tavern’s unsinkable Chef.

He’s been turning out tasty, historically accurate dishes there for decades.

Staib is a Philly immigrant who, like Ben Franklin (a City Tavern regular), has brought international renown to his adopted city. Ed Rendell appointed Staib Philadelphia’s and Pennsylvania’s Culinary Ambassador. Staib has won four Emmys for his PBS show, A Taste of History, and authored four cookbooks. He won Condé Nast’s “Top Philadelphia Chef ” Award in the Cadillac Culinary Challenge. German President Dr. Horst Köhler conferred the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The German-American Heritage Foundation chose Walter as the “Distinguished German-American of the Year 2012.”

Walter Staib’s rigor, vigor, and respect for authenticity make him an ideal match to the demands of his unique role. By law, Staib must warrant the colonial authenticity of every menu item. That might sound like a recipe for stifling, dull cuisine.

“On the contrary,” Staib insists, “Philly’s colonial food was the envy of the country. Ships loaded with oranges from Valencia and the newly discovered cornucopia of Caribbean fruits and spices came to Philly from Europe via the southern shipping route. Ships landing in Boston and New York took the northern route via Greenland. Their ships had nothing on them that compared to Philly’s bounty. The colonial period was an age of culinary discovery, expansion and experimentation. New World foods like corn, potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, and chili peppers, to name a few, were finding unique expression. And to top it off, unlike other colonies that barred entrance on the basis of nationality and religion, Philadelphia welcomed everyone. All kinds of cooking heritages commingled here. Philly was the place to eat in the colonies.”

Your server can fill you in on that counterintuitive history. Staib’s wait staff is drilled extensively on gastronomic history. They’re delighted to spice your dining experience with historical intermezzos.

To be fair, some menu items don’t match the vibrancy of their modern day analogues.

The cladding on Giant Cornmeal Fried Oysters is bulkier than the light tempura-like breading that is au courant north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But sparked with herbed remoulade, the fried oysters win you over, not as elegant fare but as satisfying comfort food. Ditto for Crab Cakes “Chesapeake Style”—huge balls of tender crabmeat coated to crunchy crispness.

West Indies Pepperpot, a piquant potion of beef cubes, taro root, habanero chili, allspice and greens, was a Philly favorite when George Washington was sleeping around. A delicious salmon dish sees peppered, smoked salmon on one side of a plate across from smoked Pennsylvania brook trout on the other side. In between is a mound of tomatoes, diced red onions, leafy veggies and capers—all topped by a house-made sauce of mayonnaise and horseradish.

Rack of Lamb clad with Dijon mustard and pecans is sparked with rosemary-infused jus and house-made Béarnaise sauce. Citrus marinated Paillard of Salmon is a bit dry despite the help of spunky Béarnaise sauce. Roasted Duckling with clover-honey glaze and fruit chutney is delicious. The herbed-barley and asparagus nicely moderate the rich duck meat.

Colonial Turkey Pie is homey and satisfying. Chunks of turkey team with mushrooms, peas, and red potatoes—and the pastry crust is as wholesome as grandma’s.

Leave it to Ben Franklin to invent a colonial vegetarian dish. Chef Staib tracked down a 1770 letter Franklin wrote to John Bartram instructing the great botanist to fry tofu. Yes, tofu. The dish is tofu with sautéed tomatoes on top of linguine, served with Sally Lunn bread and spinach. The tasty treatment measures up to the rest of Mr. Franklin’s eclectic body of works.

The original City Tavern burned down in 1834 (caution: they say that one ghost continues to hang around). It was completely demolished in 1854. In 1948, the Democratic Convention brought Harry Truman to town. Outraged that the nation’s birthplace was being shamefully neglected, Truman set out to salvage it. In 1948, Congress designated this historic section of Philadelphia as Independence National Park. They commissioned a bona fide reconstruction of City Tavern with ten beautifully appointed dining rooms over three floors.

Al fresco dining is one of the city’s best kept secrets. The space, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of our nation’s independence, is secluded and superb, with a unique ambiance that’s perfumed with, yes, the smell of freedom. ■ City Tavern, 138 South 2nd Street at Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA (215) 413-1443.

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Baci THE TINGLE OF A holiday homecoming swept over me when I settled into Baci’s dining room last month. No matter what the season, Sarand Husenaj, the decorator and owner’s daughter, brings the building’s colonial pedigree into festive harmony with the present—a transformation that mirrors what her father, Chef David Husenaj, does with traditional Italian fare. Baci emanates the familial warmth of the old-fashioned parlor. A piano stretches out near a wall in the center of the room and is brought to life on Saturdays when the eclectic strains of longtime regional favorite, Andy Prescott, sits down to play. Andy’s warmth and joie de vivre are a perfect fit to Baci’s vibe.

Outside the main dining room, and communicating with it, is an attractive, woodsy bar area—a haven for a loyal band of talented locals who oftentimes join Andy at the piano. Behind the main dining room is another large, colonial dining room, ideal for banquets and get-togethers.

Down below is an English pub serving pub nosh with a flair.

Baci is a welcome sentry in the underserved dining zone between New Hope and Doylestown. Don’t look for boldfaced experimentation or bravado on the menu. Do look for recipes whose flavors ring bright and undiluted as they do in Anitra al Forno, a salad with roast duck. Balsamic vinaigrette adds piquancy to spring greens stocked with copious shreds of roast duck and goat cheese and strawberry slices for fruity zest and curb appeal.

Fresh tastes roar in the bruschetta as well. Onions, diced tomatoes, white beans, and garlic cloves cap crispy toast rounds of Italian bread. All ingredients are at their peak freshness and flavor. The bread is crisp, not soggy (the most common faux pas in lesser kitchens) and white beans, an underused ingredient in most regional bruschetta recipes, add sturdy texture.

Baci’s homey ambiance is chorused via culinary touches like the basket of Italian bread that greets every diner.

Breads are accompanied by dipping sauce infused with rose-

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mary, basil, and sea salt. To me, the heady scent of rosemary recalls the knack that Tuscan chefs have for igniting so many of their dishes with this flavorful spice. It underscores the authenticity of Chef David’s style.

Although the fare is Italian, some Gallic accents and American contemporary riffs are evident. David grew up in France, where he started pursuing his métier. But he also spent ample time in Italy where he developed a predilection for Italian cuisine. His Italian chops are apparent in his version of calamari: rings of unbreaded calamari intermingle with rabe that’s mined with garlic cloves. A pool of mild marinara sauce with diced fresh tomatoes surrounds it. The calamari is of excellent quality—tender and succulent. Gamberi alla Toscana is spot-on Tuscan fare. Huge shrimp ring a mound of cannellini beans and garlic cloves wetted with white wine, garlic and tomato sauce. The Gamberi, priced at $10, can suffice as a meal in itself. In fact, up and down the menu, portions are large and prices are low, particularly given the excellence of the dishes.

Tortellini con Salsiccia mixes mushrooms, tomatoes, and sausage with silky smooth tortellini clad in a light cream sauce. A bottle of St. Francis Old Vines Zinfandel nicely complements both the Gamberi and Tortellini dishes, although you’re better served to ask David for recommendations.

Over the years, his wine recommendations have been perfect. The Baci wine list presents a fairly extensive list of well chosen, moderately priced bottles. Wine can also be ordered by the glass.

Besides the Gamberi, many other dishes reflect the bold tastes of Italian comfort food. In Granchio al Monte Carlo, a giant Portobello mushroom cap poises over succulent, fresh crabmeat on a layer of homey risotto. But it’s the oomph of a hearty cream sauce au gratin teamed with a pool of puckery-sweet balsamic that elevates the dish. The same goes for Ravioli alla Panna. Heavenly light Gorgonzola cream sauce floods a plateful of ricotta-filled ravioli and a mound of diced fresh tomatoes. But the fistful of walnuts tumbled into the mix gives the dish an earthy crunch that distinguishes it.

Stufato di Manzo is another winning work of the Italian comfort food genre. Bones and fat are removed from succulent beef short ribs, which are then marinated and cooked in lush tomato sauce and served with mashed potatoes.

Again, I’ll mention that prices are low. Capellini al Frutti di mare is one of only two pastas priced above $16. This rendition corrals a bowlful of shrimp, calamari, clams and mussels on a bed of capellini, a pasta whose diameter slightly exceeds that of angel-haired pasta. The capellini is a smart pasta choice that sets a velvety platform for the shellfish—in the same way Baci’s winning ambiance sets as an ideal platform for a fine dining experience. ■ Baci, Route 202 & 413, Buckingham PA (215) 794-7784. www.baciristorante.com

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

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Whoopee! wine

Winner of the

ICON

PATRICIA SAVOIE

Looking Back: 2012’s Standout Wines

monthly drawing for

DINNER FOR 2: MARK DOBROVOLSKY

THE YEAR 2012 OFFERED A lot of good and interesting wines.

Here are some that stood out from the hundreds I sampled.

Gosset NV Brut Rose Champagne. At a December tasting of rosé Champagnes, this was one of the finest. It is bright salmon pink and is dry, but not bone dry. Aromas of fruit and flowers. A lovely core of red fruit. An assertive bubbly but with great structure. ($70-80) Sparkling Pointe Brut. This producer of sparkling wines on Long Island’s North Fork continues to make some excellent bubbly. They use the traditional Champagne method and produce a Brut, Topaz Imperial Rosé and a Brut Seduction.

The Brut reminds of pears and apples and is crisp and creamy. ($29) Casa Marin Sauvignon Blanc “Cipreses Vineyard” Sauvigon Blanc 2011. From Chile’s San Antonio Valley.

This vineyard is right on the Pacific Ocean and the climate is windy and cold. This keeps the yields down and produces a SB that, while in the New Zealand style—citrus, grass and herbal notes— Hermitage. to my taste beats most of the NZ wines I have tasted recently. Winemaker Maria Luz Marin teases out the lemon zest and candied lime flavors. The wine is mouth-filling with assertive acidity. Intense. Will make you love Sauvignon Blanc all over again. ($19-22) Nicolas Joly Chenin Blanc “Les Clos Sacree (Les Vieux Clos)” 2010. Chenin Blanc is the only grape allowed in Savennières, in the Loire. Joly is perhaps the leading proponent of biodynamic wine making. What does he think about the grape? “Chenin Blanc is like a difficult child: they will go on to be either a genius or a terrorist.

Too often we see the terrorist version of Chenin.” An excellent example of Chenin, but probably not for everyone. A deep brownish gold color. It shows rich, honeyed aromas of apple, pear, quince, lime leaf, toasted nuts and orange rind, and on the palate, it is rich, nutty. It is full-bodied, with balancing acidity leading to a complex, long finish. ($30-40) Weingut Groebe Riesling “Aulerde” Westhofen GG 2011. This wine comes from a single Rheinhessen vineyard with vines over 50 years old. It is fermented in small, previously used oak casks. The wine is brilliantly clear. It is dry with a touch of white flower in the nose and some lime, green apple and mineral in the mouth. Crisp

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Here’s how: Send an email with the subject line

Glorious Food Write YOUR FULL NAME and send to

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Whoopee!

Winner of the

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DINNER FOR 2: SHELLY LEPENDORF You can win, too.

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trina@icondv.com Patricia Savoie is a wine and culinary travel writer.

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acidity makes it perfect with foods. The Groebe family has been producing wine for 500 years and this is a standout! ($17-20) Renato Ratti Barolo. One of the top Barolo producers in Piedmont is Renato Ratti, where son Pietro is the winemaker. This winery was the first to bottle a single-vineyard Barolo (Nebbiolo grape) and is one of the most innovative producers. They make three different Barolos: Marcenasco ($45-50 for 2008), Conca ($70-75 for 2008) and Rocche ($78-85 for 2008), from vineyards of the same name. I favor the Conca and Rocche, which is balanced, elegant, almost Burgundy style. These wines will last many years in the cellar, but can be drunk now.

Chapoutier Crozes-Hermitage “Petite Ruche” Rouge 2009. This is a textbook Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Purplish red, with intense blackberry, smoke, fig, pepper and spice notes. Full bodied, a bit brambly, with a hint of acacia flowers. ($26-30) Flowers Pinot Noir Camp Meeting Ridge Vineyard 2009. From California’s Sonoma Coast, where Pinot Noir is making a new name for itself. The Camp Meeting vineyard is planted 1,200 to 1,400 feet high on the mountain side. Biodynamic farming methods are used. Aromas of nutmeg, black and red fruits and flavors of dried cherry and blueberry. Minerality and plush texture. One of California’s best Pinot Noirs. ($65-70) Condado de Haza Tempranillo 2008. Owned by the Fernandez family in Ribera del Duero, the 2008 is a deep purple color with aromas of vanilla, blackberry and flowers. It offers tastes of herbs and berries. Intense with a lingering finish hinting licorice. ($28) Barbeito Madeira Sercial 1978. A fortified wine from the Portuguese island of Madeira, it keeps for years, even after being opened. Sercial is the grapes used for the base wine. Every home should have at least one bottle of Madeira. This is a stunning wine.

Its tawny gold color and aromas of quince, citrus, hazelnut and vanilla overlay a very dry wine. Sip at the end of a meal or as an accompaniment to nuts and dried fruits. ($125-150) Sheldrake Point Vineyard Riesling Ice Wine 2010. Located on Cayuga Lake in NY’s Finger Lakes region, where it is cold enough to freeze the grapes most winters, so Ice Wine can be made. This one is lush, with clean honey, pear, quince and apple aromas and flavors.

Perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, so the wine isn’t cloying. ($45-50 half bottle-375 ml) ■

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about life

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

Hidden Behind an Outer Mask is Often A Fearful Person

DEFENSES DISRUPT COMMUNICATION, BLOCK closeness and prevent intimacy. Defenses are triggered by fear, real or perceived. Defenses also serve to reduce anxiety and potentially protect us from danger. By creating distance, defenses protect us from people or circumstances that may cause hurt or injury. They can be a healthy response to a real threat or an unhealthy response to perceived threats to the self. Defenses are one of the more common experiences to all mankind.

Sometimes, defenses are consciously employed, while at other times they flare up out of our awareness. Avoidance, for example, is most often consciously employed when someone is uncomfortable with a topic. Distracting the flow of communication or changing the subject is a frequent presentation of avoidance. When caught in a lie, or fear of being caught in a lie, avoidance is deployed. When someone doesn’t like crowds they often avoid crowded malls or public functions.

The discomfort of crowds can be so pervasive that it becomes a default setting in that it becomes unconscious to the individual.

Defenses can be mild, moderate or severe in their presentation.

Attacking and blaming are common defenses that can range from mild criticism to full scale attacks on the person. Sometimes these attacks can become physical and lead to violence or death. Fear can become powerful enough in defensive form as to override compassion or logic. Even a harmless sounding defense like ‘sudden loss of energy to the body’ can become annoying and ultimately problematic when it becomes severe. A good example of this defense is a child outside playing who is called inside to do a chore. The response of “I’m tired” is an example of ‘sudden loss of energy to the body.’ This defense is also common among some domestic partners and can cause a great deal of stress and fighting.

Some defenses last only seconds while other defenses can become long acting or even chronic. A quick flare of Jim Delpino is a psychotherapist in private practice for over 30 years. jdelpino@aol.com (215) 364-0139.

temper to back away another is an example of a short term defensive approach. An extended punishing anger can wreak havoc on closeness and intimacy in general between two people. The amount of time a defense is deployed speaks to the level of fear underlying the defense. Since defenses reduce anxiety by avoiding the trigger or discharging the anxiety, time is a measure of how long this process takes

for a given individual. Some defenses can become chronic, because the fears they express will not resolve. In some cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the fear of things associated to the trauma is enough to trigger avoidance for life. In cases of agoraphobia, some individuals avoid leaving their homes at all for fear something outside will gravely harm or even kill them.

The most commonly observed defenses are: avoidance; over-accommodating; blaming; attacking; overcompensating; sudden loss of energy; flooding with information; rationalizing; intellectualizing; rudeness; changing the subject; focus on sex; repetitiveness; non-responsiveness; over-responsiveness; sudden nausea or headache not caused by physical illness or medication side effect; W W W. FA C E B O O K .C O M / I C O N D V

argumentative/combative; over-responsible; over-giving.

When observing defensiveness it is easy to judge. It is better to assess and understand than to judge. The defenses are outer masks, but hidden beneath them is a fearful person. The fearful person behind the mask is attempting to reduce the fear that triggers and then drives the defenses. Defenses are strategies for anxiety reduction.

When fear and anxiety are sufficiently high they block good communication. When good communication between people is blocked, closeness is sacrificed for a state of feeling misunderstood and separate from others. When the feeling of separateness or disconnection is strong, intimacy between people is prevented. Freud once defined intimacy as being “close with relatively little or no defensiveness.” Having good communication, closeness and intimacy often depend on the ability to be less or non-defensive.

Being less defensive requires personal growth and the development of good assessment skills.

When we are able to read people more accurately and more deeply, many of the fears that trigger defenses begin to diminish. Fears are then replaced by knowledge and wisdom. Remembering, for instance, that an angry person is most often afraid and hurt allows a different understanding and therefore a different approach. It’s a bit like Dorothy pulling back the Wizard’s curtain to find a simple man instead of a fearsome one. All the theater and smoke were but defensive overcompensations.

Learning how to relax the defenses of another person is the other major key in promoting good communication, closeness and intimacy. Being relatively non-defensive is always a good start. Most often people trigger each other’s defenses without realizing it. Becoming good at reassurance helps to reduce defenses. Since 80 percent of communication is non-verbal, working on pleasant and nonthreatening signals also contributes to relaxing defenses.

Asking and exploring the fear(s) of another is the best way to create the circumstances for less defensiveness. When the triggers for the defenses are known, they can often be modified or eliminated. ■

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sally friedman

Art: Still in the Eye of the Beholder EVERY DAY, MANY TIMES a day, I look up from my word processor to give my eyes— and my soul—a break. Every day, my eyes land on several things. One is an oil painting on the wall near my desk. It’s of a lone bicycle rider in urban traffic, wending his way between a taxi and a car. I’m pretty certain the streetscape is of Manhattan. I love that painting. It’s an essential part of my world, and if I ever looked up and didn’t see it, I’d feel bereft.

You know that old saw about “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like?” Well, that says best just what I feel. I’ve never been an art snob because I couldn’t be. I lack the training and the cultivated sense of taste. But when my old friend Joan presented me with this oil, simply framed in dark wood and with her signature scrawled at the bottom, I knew it was a keeper.

Joan, a decidedly modest woman, kept protesting that it was nothing—that the space deserved better. I knew otherwise. I knew that while there may be those who revere Picasso and Monet, I love my Joan painting for its colors, its stark simplicity and the fact that somebody cared enough about me to offer it as a gift.

On the opposite wall from Joan’s streetscape is another cherished piece of art.

This one is in the form of a shadow box, and inside it is the tiny figure of a woman. One half of her face is smiling; the other half reveals a lone tear trickling down her cheek. On her little purple dress is an appliquéd felt heart ripped in half.

My wonderful, simple shadow box collage is part of a series called Survivor Dolls. It was made by a woman at the local shelter for abused women, and given to me in appreciation of some writing I did about the place. I did that writing out of concern, out of passion for the cause, and out of hope that these women would find their way back to better, safer lives. I needed no reward.

But oh my, how I cherish that shadow box and the little figure it holds. How often I walk over to it and read the words inscribed within it about the struggle to break the cycle of

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abuse, about the courage of women who seek help and about their lonely, brave journeys.

No, it’s not a museum-quality piece. It’s not perfect in its stitching or hand-work. But the space where I spend so many hours would be so much less special without it.

I grow attached to things. And I hate to part with them, which is why our house looks the way it does. I especially want things around me that have meaning attached to them.

So even as I write this column, I can look up and see the photos of grandchildren that surround me. I’ve deliberately chosen quirky ones, photos heavy on imperfections. My favorites show these beloveds with cockeyed smiles, pensive looks, odd haircuts and scruffy clothes.

Sure, we have those glossy grandparent portraits, but they’re not the same as the authentic urchin photos that I adore. And my lopsided arrangement of them would make any self-respecting decorator faint, but I need to take in, in one sweeping glance, each of the seven as I fancy them—real, messy, moody and altogether wonderful.

And there’s one more piece of “art” I must have near me. For years and years, I hid an old black and white photo of my father in a dresser drawer. After he died, I couldn’t bear to look at it. Too many memories of the man with the deep dimples smiling out at me, looking so proper and lawyer-like, but with a twinkle in those blue eyes that reminded me of his less formal side. No, that photo was not to be in my field of vision.

Then one day, I simply reached into the drawer, pulled out the picture and positioned it on the top shelf of a bookshelf that is over my left shoulder. If I turn my head ever-so-slightly, there’s dad.

One of these days, I may actually invest in fine art, the kind that has a pedigree. Some day, I may carry home a true masterpiece. But for now, I have my treasures within sight, crudely framed, poorly arranged, but so special. And, as they say in that famous credit card ad, that’s…priceless. ■

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regional theater

EDITED BY DAVID SCHULTZ

The Beauty Queen of Leenane 1/10-2/10

West Side Story 1/8 & 1/9

Assistance 1/2-2/3

Martin McDonagh’s first produced play is a Tony Award-winning satire of the skirmishes and silent feuds between mothers and daughters. In a small town in western Ireland, spinster Maureen Folan lives with her diabolically helpless mother Mag. Maureen’s married sisters escaped long ago, leaving Maureen stuck at home, chafing against Mag’s cunning manipulations and lamenting her missed chances. When romance blossoms between Maureen and the sweet, uncomplicated Pato Dooley, it pits mother against daughter, setting the stage for an explosive, wildly funny, and deeply affecting finish. Starring Mary Martello and Megan Bellwoar. Lantern Theater Company @ St. Stephen’s Theater, 10th & Ludlow Street, Phila. (215) 829-0395. $10-$38. www.lanterntheater.org

More than fifty years ago, one musical changed theater forever. Now it’s back and mesmerizing audiences once again.

From the first note to the final breath, West Side Story soars

What do Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Anna Wintour have in common? They all need assistance. Enter the world of Nick and Nora, 20-somethings working in a tyrannical tycoon’s downtown Manhattan headquarters, juggling phone calls and jumping through hoops with marathon endurance—all for the privilege of being mocked and insulted by their velociraptor of a boss. Fireworks explode in this office full of ambitious ladder-climbers, shooting some to the top and leaving others burnt and scarred. Written by Leslye Headland. Wilma Theater, 265 South Broad Street, Phila.

(215) 546-7824. $39-$48. www.wilmatheater.org Les Miserables 1/2-1/13

The Mountaintop 1/18-2/10 A gripping re-imagining of the events taking place the night before the assassination of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After delivering his magnificent and memorable “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, an exhausted and defeated Dr. King retires to Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel where he encounters a mysterious and spirited stranger as an epic storm rages outside. Written by Katori

as the greatest love story of all time. This revival, based on the Tony Award-winning librettist Arthur Laurents’ Broadway direction, remains as powerful, poignant and timely as ever.

The Bernstein and Sondheim score is considered to be one of Broadway’s finest and features classic songs that resonate in your memory. Five decades have not dimmed the extraordinary choreography or the score. State Theatre, 453 Northampton Street, Easton, PA. (610) 252-3132 $55-$60. www.statetheatre.org

Since the film version of this iconic musical has just been released as a blockbuster film with Hugh Jackman as its lead, it might be a propitious time to revisit it again onstage. This newly revised incarnation features new staging and spectacular re-imagined scenery inspired by the paintings of Victor

Boeing Boeing 1/18-2/3

Hall. Directed by Patricia Mcgregor. Philadelphia Theater Company @ The Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad Street, Phila. (215) 985-0420 www.PhiladelphiaTheatreCompany.org Catch Me If You Can 1/15-1/20 Based on the hit film and the incredible true story that inspired it, the first national tour of the high-flying Broadway musical lands for a brief stint at the Academy of Music. The astonishing true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., a world-class con artist who passed himself off as a doctor, a lawyer, and a jet pilot—all before the age of 21. With FBI agent Carl Hanratty on Frank’s trail, we’re off on a jet-setting cat-and-mouse chase, as a jazzy, swinging-sixties score keeps this adventure in constant motion. Book by Terrence McNally. Score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Academy of Music, Broad & Locust Street, Phila. (215) 893-1999. $20-$100. www.kimmelcenter.org/broadway1213 44

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Set in Paris in the 1960s, Boeing Boeing tells the story of an international playboy, his three flight-attendant fiancees and the maid who helps him keep track of which woman he will be hosting for the weekend. Enter a clumsy best friend and the simultaneous arrivals of all three women, and audiences are sure to be jet-setting to high octane laughter with this vibrant production. Written by Marc Camoletti. Winner of the Best Play Revival Tony Award in 2008. Pennsylvania Playhouse, Illicks Mill Road, Bethlehem. (610) 865-6665. $19$22. www.paplayhouse.org

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A Tale of Two Cities 2/20-3/3 The French Revolution. An aristocrat. A death sentence. A timeless tale of vengeance and hope. This play has it all and then some. Dickens’ exhilarating tale pits Charles and Lucie Darnay, the epitome of all that is good, against Sydney Carton, a selfish opportunist whose life has been built on disappointment and lost love. An epic tale of interwined destinies, sacrifice and vengeance that truly represents the famous first line, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” Act 1, The Labuda Center for the Performing Arts.

DeSales University, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley. (610) 282-1100. www.desales.edu/act1

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Hugo. Based on the classic novel, Les Miserables is an epic and uplifting story about the survival of the human spirit. To date, it remains the third longest-running Broadway production of all time. Seen by nearly 60 million people worldwide in 42 countries and in in 21 languages, this musical inspires hope amid the horror and despair of the violent history that it depicts so vividly on stage. Three hours to watch onstage, versus 900 or so pages to read via Hugo. Academy of Music, Broad & Locust Street, Phila. (215) 731-3333. $25-$100. www.kimmelcenter.org/broadway. ■

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footlights

Seth Numrich and Danny Burstein. Photo: Paul Kolnik.

DAVID SCHULTZ

ONE COULD DO NO better than to see this glorious revival of playwright Clifford Odets’ powerful play this winter.

And playing at the Belasco Theater, where it originally premièred in 1937, is an added bonus. Among the many pleasures of this scintillating work is how fresh it still seems with its psychically wounded protagonist aching for fame and fortune as a prizefighter at the expense of doing what he knows is his true life calling—playing the violin and becoming an artist.

Joe Bonaparte (Seth Numrich), a young violin prodigy, with exquisite talent to burn, wants to prove he is a “real man” to his family of Italian immigrants, so he gives up the violin and enters the world of prizefighting. Joe, a strapping youth with puppy dog eagerness is driven to obsessive lengths to attain his goal, fighting and and climbing over anyone at any cost to his body and soul. That, in a nutshell, is the simple telling of the story—but, of course, not the whole story.

Danny Burstein as Joe’s personal coach and father figure, Tokio, seems to be the only human in his swirling uni-

verse that senses what Joe’s soul is aching for, and their interaction is touching and revealing. However, Joe’s evolution from man to monster is inevitable.

Tony Shalhoub perfectly captures the elder Bonaparte.

We watch him go way beyond the Italian stereotype of an immigrant father, evoking the heartbreak of seeing his son slipping away from him. This is, among many other layers, a play about sons and fathers, and the painful act of separation and defiance that comes with growing up.

Actress Yvonne Strahovski as Lorna Moon has the important and pivotal role as both Joe’s unattainable love, and mistress to cagey, restless boxing manager Tom Moody, played by actor Danny Mastrogiorgio. Ms. Strahovski brings an ethereal beauty and touch of melancholy to her reading of Lorna.

Director Bartlett Sher imbues the entire production with craft and sharply delineated individual characterizations.

Each performer seems perfectly calibrated to the 1937 timeframe, and they capture the almost jazz-inflected rhythms of speech that Odets penned.

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This production of Golden Boy is sweeping and operatic. It even has two intermissions to give the evening an added gravitas. Costumes by Catherine Zuber brings the mid-1930s to vivid life. Lighting designer Donald Holder bathes the entire production with brilliance—each character is perfectly lit and framed in ways that are simply breathtaking. This has to be one of the most gorgeously lit plays in recent memory, and it adds immeasurably to the emotionally wrenching scenes that ratchet up to the inevitable climax.

At times the scenes can go on for a bit too long, and some of the speeches do seem remarkably dull. But what this towering playwright had to say about the human condition still stings deeply. ■ Playing at the Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, Manhattan, through January 20, 2013.

David Schultz is a member of the Outer Critics Circle.

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nick’s picks Iris Ornig ★★★★ No Restrictions Iris Ornig Music German bassist Iris Ornig has called New York home since 2003 and during that time she’s played with some of jazz’s most intriguing contemporary musicians (i.e. Gretchen Parlato, Ambrose Akinmusire, Joel Frahm). Her No Restrictions is a showcase featuring eight original tracks and two covers, by Michael Jackson and Bjork. Fresh tunes, memorable melodies and illustrious playing distinguish Ornig’s American debut recording and it’s a promising start for this talented jazz musician.

Ornig has assembled an in-thepocket band with Mike Rodriguez on trumpet, Helen Sung on piano, Marcus Gilmore on drums and current king of the modern jazz guitarists, Kurt Rosenwinkel. Her compositions have clarity and purpose, allowing room for graceful solos, especially from Sung on “If Anything Goes Iris Ornig.

Wrong.” Sung, Ornig and Gilmore set up Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” with Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe” rhythm line, while Mike Rodriguez takes the lead and delivers a bit of sleek improvisation—his tone often evokes Art Farmer. On the Jackson track, there’s a nice middle section where Ornig takes her solo, a tuneful play on the melody that bops along on its own resolve.The straight-ahead swinger “Uptight” is one of the album’s highlights along with “Gate 29,” a tune with a bounce and solid hook that provides the best solo opportunities for Rosenwinkel and Sung. Rosenwinkel doesn’t guest on many albums and his presence here lifts the date a little bit higher. Throughout No Restrictions, Ornig provides one catchy tune after another and she’s fashioned a terrific album with satisfying results. Find it at www.cdbaby.com (10 tracks; 63:11 minutes) Kurt Rosenwinkel ★★★★1/2 Star Of Jupiter Wommusic Modern guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel has that suggestive aura of coolness that’s embodied by only a handful of jazz musicians. It’s neither deliberate nor studied—it just is and it comes from his playing, which sends a tingle up the leg of influential critics and jazz fans alike. He also wears a distinctive Greek fisherman’s cap. A Philadelphia native, Rosenwinkel establishes a metaphysical connection to his compositions for his double album, Star Of Jupiter, his 10th album as a leader and at 42, a major accomplishment and statement on the possibilities of the music. It’s also his most commercial effort yet. Rosenwinkel, on the album: “Being able to vamp on a simple progression for a long time…” he says, “I’ve never had a band that really wanted to do that and I love the fact that that’s something we do… immerse into and experience that warmth of the groove.”

He returns to a quartet format on Jupiter for the first time since The Next Step (2001) and his tight, stellar band features pianist Aaron Parks (who’s played with the guitarist on his live dates at the Village Vanguard), bassist Eric Revis and fellow Philadelphia native, drum-

Nick Bewsey has been writing about jazz for ICON since 2004. A member of The Jazz Journalists Association, he blogs about jazz and entertainment at www.jazzinspace.blogspot.com. Twitter: @countingbeats

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mer Justin Faulkner.

Revis and Faulkner are also part of Branford Marsalis’s quartet, but their work here is transformative and no less inventive. Star Of Jupiter is the most experiential of Rosenwinkel’s albums. After the angst and release of the fiery opener, “Gamma Band,” the album settles on celestial rhythms and calmer environs that are both beautiful and mysterious. Melodic gems abound—“Welcome Home” pulses with warm electronic piano, “Something Sometime” Kurt Rosenwinkel. Photo: lourdesdelgado.com soars with indelible guitar playing, “Heavenly Bodies” is an ethereal ballad with a midnight groove—all on disc one. “Kurt 1” places Rosenwinkel in Pat Metheny terrain but retains its originality with its compact melody and riffs on its groove. “Under It All” is another expansive and lovely ballad, while “Déjà vu” mixes things up with a straight-ahead vibe. The set closes with the title track, a pop inflected tune that is streaked with lush harmonics and Latinesque rhythms.

Each of Rosenwinkel’s albums, even those where he collaborated with Q-Tip of A Tribe called Quest, have their merits, but the guitarist has invested Star with a cosmic consciousness that rises above anything he’s done previously. Rosenwinkel has his own defined sound and signature vamps and works them into a cohesive, confident statement. Star Of Jupiter is a superior and highly involving album, jazz or otherwise. Self-released, you buy or download Star Of Jupiter at www.kurtrosenwinkel.com. (12 tracks; 42:52 / 48:47 minutes) Patrick Cornelius ★★★★ Maybe Steps Posi-tone A busy sideman, pianist Gerald Clayton is the keystone talent supporting the alto saxophonist Patrick Cornelius on his third album, Maybe Steps, along with a quintet that includes bassist Peter Slavov, drummer Kendrick Scott and guitarist Miles Okazaki. The Julliardtrained Cornelius leads his quintet on nine originals and three lovely covers. The originals provide the winning moments, from the effusive title tune to the Ravel-inspired “Bella’s Dreaming” and the expressive lyricism of “Brother Gabriel.” This is a great showcase for Cornelius’ impressive compositions—his

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Patrick Cornelius.

NICK BEWSEY ★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC

tunes are complex yet accessible and uniquely melodic. Clayton, Slavov and Scott (a formidable drummer with a strong new album, Oracle) form a grand rhythm section and underscore Cornelius’ lively tunes with verve (“Shiver Song.”) Clayton pairs well with Cornelius, effusively comping behind the saxophonist and he bundles his solos with great post-bop ideas. Cornelius’ influences may include Coltrane, Parker and Rollins, but he’s definitely got his own thing going on with Maybe Steps. This is a confident and assured statement, and it’s an album of hip twists and solos (“A Day Like Any Other”) thanks to a special band of musicians and their gifted leader. (11 tracks; 56:09 minutes)

Quinerly’s liner notes detail stories behind the tunes and their personal connection. The packaging and graphics are exemplary. Upon receiving this music for review, I mistakenly thought it was a soundtrack to a film or documentary (that I really wanted to see).

Freedman Town was formed to give its settlers and residents a sense of community and place. Quinerly evokes these moods and gives this moment in history a soulful signature and strong musical identity. To Quinerly’s credit and Houston’s wellspring of creativity, Music Inspired by Freedman Town is a welcome musical destination. (11 tracks; 56:49 minutes) Manu Katche ★★★★ Manu Katche ECM

Reggie Quinerly ★★★★ Music Inspired by Freedman Town Redefinition Music Drummer and composer Reggie Quinerly is the latest shining star from Houston, a town that’s deeply connected to jazz and counts musicians such as Joe Sample, The Crusaders, Kirk Whalum and Robert Glasper among its many famous sons and daughters. For his debut, Quinerly zeroes in on Freedman Town, the former name of Houston’s current Fourth Ward where newly emancipated African Americans settled after the civil war. Currently settled in New York and active on the scene there, Quinerly has created a memorable, swinging recording that’s easy on the ears and inspirational as well.

Quinerly’s an adaptive drummer and resourceful bandleader. He heads up a distinguished group with pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist Tim Warfield, guitarist Mike Moreno and bassist Vicente Archer.

Enoch Smith, an accomplished singer with a Broadway-ready voice, collaborates with Quinerly on a remarkable blues called “Freedmantown” by also contributing an uplifting piano solo and he fronts this soul jazz cut as a get-together with folksy affability. The album deserves a sustained shelf life due to QuinReggie Quinerly. erly’s gift for composing warm, accessible tracks. Notably, “Live From The Last Row” echoes Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” but is not derivative at all and the two standards, “I’m Old Fashioned” and “Sentimental Journey,” showcase the band’s groove and elasticity. The material here took shape over many years and

Drummer and percussionist Manu Katche is a musician of the world with a style informed by multi-cultural sounds and techniques, achieving recognition through his work for Peter Gabriel, Sting, Simple Minds and many other rock and jazz groups. Although his first solo record was rooted in rock, his move to ECM has produced a series of groove-oriented contemporary jazz recordings. His fourth release for the label, the eponymously titled and highly listenable Manu Katche features textures that score on waves of percussion, soothing rhythms and atmospheric melodies. It’s the closest thing to smooth jazz in ECM’s discography, but the quality and degree of musicianship mitigates any negatives associated the genre.

With new musicians on board— trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, saxophonist Tore Brunborg and the excellent British pianist Jim Watson— Katche invests his music with cinematic drama. “Running After Years” simmers with urManu Katche. gency, “Bliss” unfolds over a mysterious layer of sustained Hammond B3 tones, while “Loving You” toils in synthetic trumpet loops and propulsive back beats over a lovely, jittery theme. “Short Ride” features nice dynamic interplay and “Beats And Bounce” is a self-referential title that glistens with a pop-like theme. This is inventive and attractive instrumental music and Katche always has a few tricks to play. He has a refined sound and his tunes percolate with interest, and though Katche’s affinity for earthy grooves put him squarely in Harvey Mason and Fourplay territory, that’s not bad company to be included in at all. (10 tracks; 52:12 minutes) ■

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singer / songwriter Gary Clark Jr. ★★★1/2 Blak and Blu Warner Bros. Records Guitarist Gary Clark Jr. draws inspiration from the past while looking to the future on Blak and Blu, his major label debut album. A product of the vibrant music scene in Austin, Texas, Clark has developed into a first-rate musician whose influences stretch across multiple genres. “Travis

TOM WILK ★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC

merous albums of gospel music, his first love, as well as concept albums about railroads (Ride This Train) cowboys (Johnny Cash Sings Songs of the True West) and Native Americans (Bitter Tears: Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the American Indian).

There also were albums for young people (The Johnny Cash Children’s Album) tributes to his homeland (Ragged Old Flag and America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song). His first two concert albums recorded behind bars— Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin—were big artistic and commercial successes that confirmed his legendary status.

The box set also spotlights his collaborations with the Carter Family and wife June Carter Cash on such songs as “Jackson” and “If I Were a Carpenter.” In his 50s, Cash enjoyed a revival with the Highwayman, a country supergroup that featured Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Taken as a whole, this collection is music with staying power.

Joey + Rory ★★★1/2 His and Hers Sugar Hill Records Rory and Joey Feek are husband and wife who are also

Gary Clark, Jr. Photo: Frank Maddocks.

County” is a slice of Rolling Stones-style rock that shows off Clark’s fast fretwork. “The Life” is a streetwise examination of the drug culture that is an effective mix of soul and hiphop. Clark’s churning guitar work on “Glitter Ain’t Gold (Jumpin’ For Nothin’)” recalls Vernon Reid’s work with Living Colour.

Clark pays tribute to his predecessors with a medley of Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Rock From The Sun” and Little Johnny Taylor’s “If You Love Me Like You Say.” The title tracks features samples from poet Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man” and guitarist Albert King’s “As The Years Go Passing By.” “Please Call Home,” with Clark’s relaxed vocals, has echoes of ‘70s Philly soul while “Next Door Neighbor’s Blues” is an effective showcase for Clark’s acoustic guitar work. With Blak and Blu, color Clark’s future bright.

Joey and Rory.

musical partners. They team up for the aptly named His and Hers, their latest album together, which offers an artful blend of country, folk and bluegrass.

“Josephine,” the CD’s opening track, is a moving tale of morality and love inspired by the letters of a Civil War soldier that is sung movingly by Rory. Joey delivers a wistful performance of “Waiting For Someone” in a vocal style that

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Mighty Sam McClain ★★★1/2 Too Much Jesus (Not Enough Whiskey) Mighty Music Too Much Jesus (Not Enough Whiskey) has to be in the running for most memorable album title in recent years.

Mighty Sam McClain works to ensure the music is just as memorable in this collection of 14 songs that draw on his blues, gospel and soul roots.

As a singer, McClain, who turns 70 this year, combines the testifying power of Solomon Burke with the emotional grit of O.V. Wright. “Stand Up” finds McClain as a preacher, exhorting his listeners to do the right thing. “Missing You” is a ballad that recalls ‘70s soul man Al Green in its smoothness. “Real Thing,” co-written with legendary New Orleans pianist Allen Toussant, is a slice of Crescent City soul with a percolating horn arrangement. “Use Me” is a prayer to God. “All I want to do is your will,” McClain declares. The title track was inspired by McClain’s decision to stop drinking and embrace his faith. When he noticed some of his friends coming by less frequently, he realized why: Too Much Jesus (Not Enough Whiskey). If he lost some friends, McClain gained a good song for his album.

Nine Times Blue ★★★ Falling Slowly Renegade Records

Johnny Cash ★★★★1/2 The Complete Columbia Album Collection Columbia/Legacy With 63 compact discs, The Complete Columbia Album Collection offers a sweeping and first-rate portrait of Johnny Cash in all his roles: patriot, Christian, spiritual seeker, family man and country legend. Cash became a star on Sun Records in the mid-1950s, but became an international icon after he joined Columbia Records in 1958.

He enjoyed some of his biggest hits in his early years with the label: the Western-themed Don’t Take Your Guns to Town and the mariachi-flavored Ring of Fire. He took advantage of the label’s promise of musical freedom to record nu-

has echoes of Dolly Parton.

Both singers take turns on lead vocals on the album’s dozen songs, recalling the technique employed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Double Fantasy, their 1980 album. On “Someday When I Grow Up,” Rory humorously recounts a man’s struggle to to give up childish ways as a husband and father. “Let’s Pretend We Never Met,” performed by Joey, recalls Hank Williams’ “Settin’ The Woods of Fire” in its liveliness. The title track is a sad ballad of a couple leading parallel lives while living under the same roof that’s a perfect match of Joey’s singing and Rory’s songwriting.

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Nine Times Blue takes its name from a Mike Nesmith song, a fitting choice for a group rooted in power pop, one of the genres that made up the music of the Monkees, Nesmith’s former band. The Atlanta-area based quartet serves up a pleasing mix of memorable melodies and heartfelt lyrics that recalls the work of Crowded House, the Gin Blossoms and the Smithereens. The title song kicks off the album with a jangly blend of electric and acoustic guitars.

Jason Brewer’s propulsive drumming provides a rhythmic kick to “Crazy to Think,” a romantic kiss-off song by Kirk Waldrop, the band’s principal songwriter. The soulful “Grace” receives an assist from Philadelphia-area musicians Brett Talley and John Faye on guitars and backing vocals, respectively. “Serena” invites comparisons to the jangly pop of early ‘80s Marshall Crenshaw. “I Can’t See You” offers a burst of musical energy with its layered guitars and vocals, while “Silent Words” is a creative slice of pop songcraft. ■

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keresman on disc Bex Marshall ★★★1/2 The House of Mercy The House of Mercy No, Dear Reader, you are not seeing “double”—album title and label name are one and the same. Bex Marshall is a UK singer, guitarist, and songwriter most easily comparable to the young Bonnie Raitt—there are similarities (soulful, slight-

MARK KERESMAN ★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC

and Clive Ives, It’s Cozy Inside is best described as homemade electronica. The Ives lads play all instruments—guitar, violin, keyboards, winds, percussion, and electronics—and their “songs” are instrumental vignettes one-to-five minutes long. Imagine someone re-casting the cinematic Americana soundtrack-ery of Ry Cooder (with touches of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ very English pastoral-ity) into the context of Brian Eno’s Music For Films or Another Green World but without the benefit of Cooder’s and Eno’s studio acumen. In other words, it’s “progressive” music that sounds as if it were wrought in the lads’ kitchen when they had it to themselves.

It’s surreal but playfully so, and contemplative without being solemn, ethereal, or drone-y. Their acoustic axes “sound” electronically-generated and the electronic elements feel organic and almost funky. There may not be a genre or subgenre known as “impish chill-out” but nobody told the Ives brothers...and it’s nifty, like clouds parting on a breezy, formerly overcast day. dragcity.com

“Norwegian Wood” and Bill Evans’ “Very Early” display moderation, letting the music shimmer and breathe, leaving the kitchen sink in the, uh, kitchen. moonjune.com Bessie Smith ★★★★1/2 Complete Columbia Recordings Columbia/Legacy Singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was perhaps the first great female blues superstar. True, there were other women singing blues during her heyday but Smith put some urban(e)

Jim Lauderdale ★★★1/2 Carolina Moonrise Sky Crunch/Compass

Bex Marshall.

ly scratchy voice, impressive guitar chops) and there are differences. Marshall—playing an acoustic steel-top resonator guitar, no less—adds chunks of traditional country and bluegrass into her blues-rock stew; her voice is raspier, and there’s old-school R&B as her stew’s oregano—”Rent My Room” could be an old gem by Barbara Lynn or Allen Toussaint, her voice slyly draw(l)ing out the lyrics. Marshall wields a mean slide on her six-strings, but judiciously, so as to make you want more. Steve Lockwood contributes some sharp Charlie Musselwhite-like harmonica. The House of Mercy won’t win awards for originality but, like the best chefs, Marshall mixes familiar ingredients in ways that make your tastebuds tingle for more. bexmarshall.co.uk / facebook.com/thebexmarshall Woo ★★★★ It’s Cozy Inside Drag City A CD reissue of a long-unavailable/obscure-even-when-itwas-new (circa 1989) album from two British brothers, Mark

shemp@hotmail.com

The late Gram Parsons envisioned a style he called Cosmic American Music, a comprehensive blending of (primarily) country music and R&B but including gospel, pop, folk, and rock & roll—nowadays, some call that Americana. (Whatever.)

Since emerging from SoCal’s alt-/prog-country scene in the late 1980s, singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale has achieved that—his songs have been performed by no less than George Jones, Patty Loveless, and Vince Gill, his recordings garnered tons of critical acclaim (translation: not big sales). Carolina Moonrise is Lauderdale’s collaboration with Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead (another proto-Americana combo, don’cha know), and it’s a dandy straight-up bluegrass collection. It’s a no-frills, straight-up/trad-leaning, high-lonesome bluegrass—a couple of guitars, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and bass, led by Lauderdale’s worldly yet tender North Carolina (where he’s from) drawl. Hunter’s words are that of America and the folks that live, love, and work therein, with a bit of a surreal hippie edge. This Moonrise sounds both ancient and modern at the same time…y’know, like so much American music. compassrecords.com Allan Holdsworth ★★1/2 None Too Soon MoonJune To worshippers of electric six-string acrobats—oft-known as “guitarists”—Allan Holdsworth has permanent residence on Mount Olympus. Holdsworth is a great player, no doubt about it—could he have filled the guitar chair in the bands of Tony Williams, Bill Bruford, and Jack Bruce otherwise? I think not. In 1996, at the behest of British jazz piano ace Gordon Beck (1936-2011; played w/ Phil Woods 1969-72), Holdsworth recorded an album of jazz standards, including gems by Joe Henderson, John Coltrane, and Irving Berlin, plus while it is thoroughly interesting, it’s not without potholes. True, the musicianship is stellar throughout, but Holdsworth, bassist Gary Willis (Tribal Tech) and drummer Kirk Covington share a damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead approach that sacrifices beauty, swing, and heart for—dare I say it—a jazz-glazed Emerson Lake & Palmer. A dandy tender take on the Beatles’

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Bessie Smith.

lust(er) onto and into the blues idiom without diluting it. She was the Madonna of her time—she was among the highest paid singers of her day; her 1923 single “Downhearted Blues” sold over 750,000 copies in its first six months, and the hardpartying Smith was (relatively openly) bisexual. She was a major influence on singers Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Lucinda Williams, and Janis Joplin (who in 1970 paid for the headstone for Smith’s theretofore unmarked grave). This handsome ten-disc box set presents Smith’s output for the Columbia label—her accompanists include pianists Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson, sax icon Coleman Hawkins, and a trumpet-playing lad named Louis Armstrong. She sang with clear diction and with a dark, robust power. The seeds of blues, jazz, rock, R&B, and more were sewn by Smith, and while the contents can be a bit numbing if glommed in one sitting (almost every song-title has the word “Blues” within—do the math), Complete is virtually essential for devotees of American roots music. legacyrecordings.com ■

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jazz library

BOB PERKINS

B

DAV E BRUBECK

BY NOW MOST EVERYONE is aware that pianist, bandleader, composer, Dave Brubeck, passed away last month at the age of 91, just one day shy of his 92nd birthday. One needn’t be an authority on jazz music to have heard of Brubeck, and be familiar with some of his music.

Brubeck was one of the best known musicians in jazz for a number of reasons. He was an innovator, and introduced new ways of interpreting the music of other composers, and he added to the jazz library by writing well-known compositions bearing his own name. His musical creativity was not restricted to jazz, because in his time he also composed two ballets, a musical, a mass, four cantatas, an oratorio, works for jazz combo and orchestra, and solo piano pieces. All this while leading either octets, trios or quartets, during a professional career that spanned seventy years.

Since his death, and since he was so well known, I thought I’d take a different route in writing about him, and offer a few personal observations.

I became aware of Brubeck in the late 1940s when he fronted a trio and recorded the standard, “Body and Soul.” The other two members were vibraphonist/drummer, Cal Tjader, and bassist Ron Crotty. The group dressed the time-honored standard in new clothes. The treatment of the song caught my ear, and the ears of many other listeners. I did a little research and discovered that Brubeck hailed from Concord, California, was college educated and classically trained.

Brubeck met alto saxophonist Paul Desmond who persuaded to him expand the group and make it a quartet. Good move. With a few personnel changes along the way, the quartet became one of the best known small groups in jazz, often booked a year in advance. The quartet played a number of colleges and universities, and became very popular with students. In 1954, Brubeck made the cover of Time magazine. Brubeck said he felt bad that Duke Ellington had not received the recognition. A couple years later, Brubeck wrote a song to honor Ellington, and titled it appropriately, “The Duke.” The song has become a jazz standard.

By 1958, the quartet was comprised of Brubeck, who did most of the arranging, Joe morello on drums, and Eugene Wright on bass. Wright was African-American, and some southerners had a problem with him being on stage with his white colleagues. Brubeck simply said “If Gene doesn’t play, the band doesn’t play.” He gave up a few bookings, but the group had plenty of others.

I was chosen to emcee a concert around 1983 at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, at which Brubeck, his sons, and the Modern Jazz Quartet were the featured attractions. While Brubeck and sons were performing, I met a very personable lady backstage. She didn’t give her name, but we talked for about an hour. When Brubeck came backstage, he said to me, “I see you’ve met my wife, Iola.” Having been unaware if this, I was so glad I hadn’t said anything stupid to Mrs. Brubeck. But then...I didn’t know anything bad to say about her husband in the first place.

I had a chance to chat with Dave that night, and I discovered that we shared the same date of birth, December 6. I also learned that around 1950, he and his wife lived in an apartment building on North Broad Street in Philly (it was known as the Flamingo Apartments back then) for about six months. The couple’s first born was only about six months old at the time. Another bit of irony is that the apartment building was the same one in which I was living at the time—33 years after the Brubecks had departed.

I had the pleasure of introducing Brubeck again about 20 years later at the Kimmel Center in Philly. As I brought him on stage to thundering applause, we shook hands and he whispered, “Are you still in that apartment building?” To say that I was surprised that he remembered me would be an understatement. ■

Dave Brubeck. Photo: Andrea Canter

Dave Brubeck (L) and Gerry Mulligan (R) at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958. Photo: Nat Farbman.

Bob Perkins is a writer and host of an all-jazz radio program that airs on WRTI-FM 90.1 MondayThurs. night from 6 to 9pm & Sunday, 11–3pm.

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<

35 / BRUCE KLAUBER / A NIGHT WITH THE THREE STOOGES

showed up in person on Starr’s show and announced they would be appearing in a few weeks in Philadelphia at the Latin Casino nightclub. This, by the way, was the original Latin Casino, then located at the corner of 13th and Walnut Street in center city Philadelphia.

Along with millions of other kids, I was a gigantic Stooges’ fan, and there was simply no question that I had to be at the Latin and nagged my folks—not Three Stooges fans—for weeks. They relented and I, indeed, saw The Three Stooges in the flesh. They were, incidentally, as Moe used to say, “even uglier in person than on TV.” What kid wouldn’t be unbelievably excited seeing these guys in person? I know I was, and I was so worked up that I did what any kid would do: I puked.

What I can say with some certainty is that the only performer I’ve seen though the years who drew more people to a night club was Frank Sinatra.

Fast forward to 1973. Larry Fine had suffered a stroke, Joe DeRita had retired after bombing with an act called “The New Three Stooges,” and Moe was working as a single, initially on college campuses, where he showed vintage Stooge films and answered questions from the audience. Ultimately, he found new life doing his old routines on the popular Mike Douglas television show. Howard was in Philadelphia for the Douglas program and for a gig at The TLA Cinema, still in operation. At the time, I was a student at Temple University, a radio/television/film major minoring in journalism, trying vainly to get a writing position on the Temple News. I was told by the newspaper’s editor to “stand in line.”

My thought was, if I could get an exclusive interview with Moe and submit the story to the Temple newspaper, they would have to hire me. After all, this was Moe. I used a contact I had at the local UHF television station—the station that was broadcasting Stooges’ films daily—to help me set up an interview. The interview was scheduled at the theater for the early afternoon, and I made my way to the TLA. While almost there, the excitement was too much for me. It was déjà vu all over again: I puked.

After calming down, I met Moe Howard and found him to be one of the most intelligent and gentle people I’ve ever met, in or out of the business. He was white-haired and about 74 years old then, but he was still Moe. Initially, I addressed him as “Mr. Howard,” but he insisted I call him Moe. I told him I had been watching The Stooges on television every day since I was eight years old. “You’ve got a lot of courage, kid,” he replied.

Given that I had a good knowledge of show business by then, I figured that the only way to make my mark as a journalist was to come up with questions that were rarely asked.

So, instead of asking Moe the usual, “Did you guys ever get hurt?” I opened with, “Moe, how long have you been working a single?”

He was impressed, and remarked that no one had ever asked him that before, and explained that after Larry’s stroke and Joe DeRita’s retirement, he finally had to break up the act. Though he hated to do that, he enjoyed working the colleges and loved that the students wanted to get a pie in the face thrown by the head Stooge. Those pies, Moe told me, were filled with shaving cream.

After we were joined by his wife, Helen, Moe asked me about my interests. I told him of my drumming and interest in jazz. He then launched into a story about his friendship with progressive jazz bandleader Stan Kenton and how he insisted that Kenton be hired to appear in the Marine Ballroom of Atlantic City’s Steel Pier during every Stooge Pier appearance in the main theater. Kenton and The Stooges? Who would have thought?

He did not hesitate to voice his bitterness about Abbott and Costello. Moe resented that A & C were doing full-length features for years, while The Stooges were stuck in Columbia’s shorts department from 1935 to 1958. He believed that Costello was getting advance prints of Stooges’ film shorts in order to copy the original Curly. If you can sit through the dross of most of Abbott and Costello’s pictures, you’ll see the validity of Moe Howard’s claims.

We spent several marvelous hours together, and at the end of the interview, Moe presented me with the ultimate rarity: An autographed picture of Moe, Larry and the original Curly. I wrote my story and with autographed picture in hand, waltzed up to the offices of the Temple News. Those in charge were astonished. I was hired instantly, and given carte blanche to write about whatever I wanted.

I had planned, however tentatively, a career as a jazz musician, but with Moe Howard’s indirect help, I came to believe that entertainment journalism—which later evolved into writing and producing videos on the major figures of jazz—was my calling. I can thank Moe Howard for my long career as an editor, video producer, writer and author.

About a year after my interview with Moe Howard, plans were made to resurrect The Three Stooges. Joe DeRita would return to the act and long-time Stooge foil Emil Sitka (“Hold hands, you lovebirds”) would take the place of Larry. Moe blacked in his hair, photos were taken and there was a contract for a feature film appearance in the works. It never happened. Moe Howard died in 1975.

His autobiography, Moe Howard and The Three Stooges, one of a load of books about the Stooges on the market, was published posthumously two years later. Several years ago, a surprisingly good television movie about the Stooges was aired to great ratings. And the now-on-DVD Stooges’ feature film, produced lovingly under the auspices of the Farrelly Brothers, is well on its way to a $60 million box office, just from movie theater showings.

So like them or not, yet another generation is laughing at The Three Stooges. Why? Because they’re darn funny. ■ W W W. FA C E B O O K .C O M / I C O N D V

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The Los Angeles Times SUNDAY CROSSWORD PUZZLE

MISSING PIECE

By Pancho Harrison Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

1 6 11 14 19 20 21 22 23 25 27 28 29 30 31 33 35 40 42 44 45 47 51 52 53 54 55 56 58 61 63 64 66 69 70 73 75 77 78 79 82 83 84 87 89 91 92 93 96 97 99 100 102 52

ACROSS Argentine grassland Teacher’s request Cell unit: Abbr.

Wise words Oklahoma natives Poetry middle name “Double Fantasy” artist Pageant accessory Item on a resolution list Wiggly belt?

Abate Headliner Choose to participate Dr. concerned with rhythm __ tai Some are inflated Stick-to-it-iveness Listed in England?

Those, in Tijuana Look askance __ test Flour or sugar, e.g.

High degrees Floride, e.g.

Desdemona’s husband was one Stage direction One may be coed Words to one taking off Fictional plantation “Madness put to good use”: Santayana Richard’s “Stakeout” co-star Blast from the past Marcus’s partner Closet contents, maybe Classic comedy duo Snacks in shells Jet-setter’s transport, perhaps Dutch painter of “The Cat Family” Blessing elicitor Deal with, as thirst Andean ancient Trailing Baseball family name Prefix meaning “vinegar” Further Supermodel Sastre Pueblo Revolt tribe Sucker that debuted in 1931 M.I.T. grad, often Opposed Splendor “I have no idea” It’s often between two periods ■

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Tiff Ready, as a keg But, to Brutus Brink Pablo __ y Picasso Plant with stickers ’60s-’70s compact resurrected in 2012 Vigorous effort Use 121-Across on Path to enlightenment Notre Dame’s river River frolicker Wimbledon courts, in essence Cockpit calc.

Vampire’s undoing Oscar winner Witherspoon

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 24 26 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 43 45 46 48 49 50 52 53

DOWN Got set for a shot?

Fragrant extract Yellowstone bellower Latino Muppet prawn Took over __ Paulo Yellowstone buglers A-list Got by Captivate Spell-casting art Not up to it “Cape Fear” actor Really hard to hum along to Bad-mouth “That’s the spot!”

Miracle-__ Use the feed bag Assigner of G’s and R’s Teddies and such Data Fill to the bursting point Fixture in many an office hallway Digging Sch. staffer Polite rural affirmative Tyke Very affected Without __ energy Fang Toothbrush handle?

Home-school link: Abbr.

1974 title role for Dustin Henry James biographer Leon Alley Oop’s kingdom

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Infomercial cutter Nutritional stds. “__ a stinker?”: Bugs Bunny line Church pledge Site of a Biblical plot In need of a massage Midday event Baccarat call One may include a walk-off homer Like pre-digital recordings Fixes the fairway, say Made tidy Blood typing letters Bus. driver?

URL opener Cries of discovery It means nothing at Arthur Ashe Stadium Go on first Bolivian bears Tea serving?

Dazzle Scout shirt feature Largest penguin Breaks off In-flight beverage?

It doesn’t last White-plumed wader Long bone Condition

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“It’s nobody __ business” Caterpillar rival Mount near Catania Doze, with “out” Head of France?

High-speed PC connection

118 Andean tuber 119 Daily newspaper index 120 Piece that can follow the ends of the nine longest puzzle answers 122 Pint-size Answer in next month’s issue.

Answer to December’s puzzle, IN AND OUT

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INDEX Facts compiled by the editors of Harper’s Magazine

Estimated percentage of North American pit-viper litters that are “virgin births” : 5 Percentage of freshmen at four-year colleges who declare “Roman Catholic” as their religious affiliation : 26 Who declare “None” : 25 Percentage of college students in Iran who are female : 56 Number of subjects that Iranian universities have barred undergraduate women from studying : 77 Average salary subjects in a September study offered a fictional woman applying for a U.S. u niversity laboratory position : $26,508 Average salary they offered a fictional man with identical credentials : $30,328 Percentage of murders of Pakistani women in 2011 committed by the victim’s husband or brother : 38 Minimum chance that a Bangladeshi woman’s first experience of sex is rape : 1 in 4 Amount Massachusetts has been ordered to pay for the sex-reassignment surgery of an inmate serving life in prison : $23,000 Minimum square footage of San Francisco apartments allowed under new regulations : 220 Number of San Quentin prisoners who could reside in one such apartment, based on their average cell size : 10 Minimum funds smuggled out of China in the past two decades by officials fleeing the country : $120,000,000 Percentage change in the theft of Apple products in New York City since January : +40 Chance that a crime committed in New York City in 2012 was one of these thefts : 1 in 7 Projected percentage increase in the 2012 U.S. GDP attributable to sales of the iPhone 5 : 0.33 Percentage of U.S. children who save their allowance money, according to a survey of American parents : 1 Percentage change in the likelihood a child will eat an apple from the school cafeteria if the apple has an Elmo sticker on it : +68 Projected year by which more than half of Americans will be obese : 2030 Average number of times each week U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong patient or body part : 40 Rank of preventable medical errors among the leading causes of death in the United States : 3 Portion of the National Institutes of Health’s research-chimp population going into retirement in the next year : 1/5 Percentage increase since 2000 in the compensation of full professors at the fifty wealthiest private U.S. universities : 14 In the compensation of the presidents of those universities : 75 Average SAT score (out of 2400) of students from households with an income below $20,000 : 1322 From households with an income above $200,000 : 1722 Average out-of-state tuition surcharge a resident child of illegal immigrants must pay to attend a Florida public university : $14,521 Percentage of British teens who say they are embarrassed to be seen reading : 17 Percentage of recruiters or hiring managers who find applicants with nonfelony criminal records “very difficult” to place : 31 Who find this about applicants unemployed for more than two years : 44 Percentage increase since 2008 in the portion of Americans who call themselves “lower-class” : 28 In the portion earning more than $100,000 annually who do : 20 Ratio of U.S. tax breaks to tax revenue in 2011 : 1:1 Number of Washington, D.C., cops arrested in the past four years : 93 Number of trees that will be cleared so the space shuttle Endeavor can be towed to the California Science Museum : 400 Number of rental bicycles vandalized in wealthy areas of Paris in September in the name of class warfare : 50 Percentage change in the past five years in the share of new U.S. cars sold to people between ages 18 and 34 : –42 Portion of New York City taxis driven by women : 1/100 Minimum number of miniature liquor bottles stolen by employees at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2012 : 117,000 Estimated minimum number of adult male elves who could get drunk off this amount of alcohol : 60,245

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Index Sources 1 Warren Booth, University of Tulsa (Oklahoma); 2,3 Higher Education Research Institute (Los Angeles); 4 UNESCO Institute for Statistics (Montreal); 5 Human Rights Watch (N.Y.C.); 6,7 Jo Handelsman, Yale University (New Haven, Conn.); 8 Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (Lahore); 9 World Health Organization (Geneva); 10 Marci L. Bowers (Trinidad, Colo.); 11 Panoramic Interests (Berkeley, Calif.); 12 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (San Quentin); 13 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing); 14,15 New York City Police Department; 16 JPMorgan Chase (N.Y.C.); 17 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (Durham, N.C.); 18 Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics (Ithaca, N.Y.); 19 Trust for America’s Health (Washington); 20 Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare (Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.); 21 Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality (Baltimore); 22 National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Md.); 23,24 The Chronicle of Higher Education (Washington); 25,26 The College Board (N.Y.C.); 27 State University System of Florida (Tallahassee); 28 National Literacy Trust (London); 29,30 Bullhorn (Cambridge, Mass.); 31,32 Pew Research Center (Washington); 33 U.S. Department of the Treasury; 34 Fraternal Order of Police (Washington); 35 California Science Center Foundation (Los Angeles); 36 JCDecaux (Paris); 37 Polk (Southfield, Mich.); 38 New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission; 39 Queens County District Attorney’s Office (Queens, N.Y.); 40 Harper’s research.

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agenda CALL TO ARTISTS CALL TO ARTISTS March 8, 2013- Delaware Valley Art League Jury for St. David’s Art Festival Exhibition- Up to 3 paintings may be submitted for 1 entry fee of $25 from 10 AM. to 1 PM. All work must be 20” x 30" or smaller. Open to all members. New membership applications will be accepted until 1 PM when the jury doors are closed. Paoli Presbyterian Church, 225 South Valley Rd, Paoli, PA 19301 We are now reviewing artwork for inclusion in our limited Artist Membership Gallery. This type of art gallery is similar to a cooperative, but with less responsibility and more benefits. A $100 per month member fee and a low 15% commission will apply. Artists must gallery sit one day per month. For more information go to www.twenty-twogallery.com, click on the Contact Us page and then click the “Artist Membership Inquiries” link or contact us at: Twenty-Two Gallery, 236 S. 22nd St., Phila. PA 19103, (215) 772-1911. email: info@twentytwogallery.com GoggleWorks Center for the Arts 2013 Juried Exhibition. Home: Interpreting the Familiar Grand Prize: solo show in the Cohen Gallery.

GoggleWorks is the country’s largest, most comprehensive interactive arts center. Cash prizes for 1st, 2nd & 3rd place. Open to all media. Up to 3 works allowed, $35. Juror: Genevieve Coutroubis, award winning photographer and director, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia. Deadline: January 30, 2013. Exhibition: May 11 – June 23, 2013.

Prospectus: www.goggleworks.org/Exhibitions/Call-for-Artists/. 201 Washington St., Reading, PA, 19601, 610-374-4600 Bethlehem Fine Arts Commission’s 48th Annual Fine Arts & Craft Show, A Juried Exhibition.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (Historic District), May 11-12, 2013. Outdoors. Artists’ reception & award ceremony. $1,600 in prizes. Image deadline February 15, 2013. Download prospectus from www.bfac-lv.org. For additional information, call 610-865-3924 (after 5pm).

February 8, 2013 10AM-1PM for jurying at Paoli Presbyterian Church, 225 S. Valley Rd, Paoli, PA. Delaware Valley Art League Spring Show at Radnor. March 2- May 4, 2013. Delivery March 2, Pick Up May 4. Juror is Ron Coppola, artist- illustrator. One painting per artist.

Fee: $10 member. Memberships available.

February 8, 2013 10AM-1PM for jurying at Paoli Presbyterian Church, 225 S. Valley Rd, Paoli, PA 19301- Delaware Valley Art League Spring Show at Valley Forge March 9- May 11, 2013. Delivery March 9, Pick Up May 11. Juror is T. Mark Cole, working artist and graduate of PAFA. Two paintings per artist. Fee: $10 member. Memberships available.

ART EXHIBITS

215-247-0476 woodmereartmuseum.org THRU 1/6 Bruce MacDougall, “Searching for Wabi-SabiDiscovering Molly.” “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” in Upstairs Gallery II. Red Filter Gallery, 74 Bridge St., Lambertville. 347-2449758. redfiltergallery.com. Th.-Sun. 12-5.

THRU 1/6 Harold Kalmus: Recent Sculpture. Reception 12/14, 6-9. Twenty-Two Gallery, 236 S. 22nd St., Phila. Wed-Sun 12-6. 215-772-1911. twenty-twogallery.com THRU 1/13 Franz Kline: Coal and Steel. Sixty-four works by the artist, many of which have rarely or never been viewed by the public. Allentown Art Museum, 31 North Fifth St., Allentown, PA. 610-432-4333. allentownartmuseum.org THRU 1/13 Walker Evans & The American Social Landscape Photographers. Allentown Art Museum, 31 North Fifth St., Allentown, PA. 610-4324333. allentownartmuseum.org THRU 1/27 Virginia Fitch: Fresh Picked. The Quiet Life Gallery, 17 So. Main St., Lambertville, NJ. 609-397-0880. quietlifegallery.com THRU 1/31 Kardon Gallery presents a two-generation exhibit with work from grandfather Si Lewen and grandson Damon Kardon. 139 South Main Street, Doylestown, PA (a branch of the Si Lewen Museum, Bethlehem, PA.) Wed.-Sat. 10-5, Sun. 12-5, and by appt. 215-489-4287, www.kardongallery.com.

THRU 2/3 17th Annual Holiday Show. Opening reception 12/8, 4-7. Artists’ Gallery, 18 Bridge St., Lambertville, NJ. Fri, Sat, Sun 11-6. 609-3974588. lambertvillearts.com THRU 2/28 New gallery in Lambertville, Mark Pullen Fine Art presents New Work. 32 Coryell St., Lambertville, NJ. 855-582-1882, 267-614-8059, markpullenfineart.biz THRU 3/2 Delaware Valley Art League. Winter Juried Show at Penn Medicine at Radnor, 250 King of Prussia Road, Radnor, PA 19087 delawarevalleyartleague.com

1/12-2/10 New Hope New Media, Exhibition and Lecture. Featuring the work of nine artists. Opening reception Jan. 12, 6-8 pm. New Hope Arts Center, 2 Stockton Ave., New Hope PA. 215862-9606, for more information www.newhopearts.org

1/31-2/3 “Nature Relationships and Spirits”, Lew Minter, inspired by Native American belief that everything possesses a spirit. Jan. 31, 4-6pm, artist’s reception. Grossman Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, PA. 610-330-5361, http://galleries.lafayette.edu 3/2-5/4 Delaware Valley Art League Juried Spring Show at Penn Medicine at Radnor, 250 King of Prussia Road, Radnor, PA

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1/8 -1/9 West Side Story, 7:30. State Theatre, 453 Northampton St., Easton, PA. 1-800-999STATE. statetheatre.org 1/12 A Chorus Line, Zoellner Arts Center, 8pm.

Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. Free parking attached to the center. 610-758-2787 or www.zoellnerartscenter.org 2/20-3/3 Charle’s Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, adapted and directed by Wayne S. Turney. Act 1, DeSales University, Labuda Center for the Performing Arts, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley, PA, 18034. 610-282-3192, www.desales.edu/act1 DINNER & MUSIC

THRU 4/7 The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

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2/10 MotionHouse, Zoellner Arts Center, 7pm.

Lehigh University, Bethlehem. Free parking attached to the center. 610-758-2787, www.zoellnerartscenter.org

THEATER THRU 2/1 Bill Hudders, Oddly Familiar. SFA, Schmidtberger Fine Art, 10 Bridge St., Suite 7, Frenchtown, NJ. 908-268-1700, www.sfagallery.com

THRU 1/6 Murray Dessner: A Retrospective. Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave, Phila.

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1/10-3/3 "Works for the New Year", photographs by Wederich/Old, "Wabi-Sabi", by Bruce MacDougall continues in Upstairs Gallery II. RED FILTER GALLERY, 74 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ. Thur.-Sun.12-5. 347/2449758, inquire@redfiltergallery.com,http://redfiltergallery.com

DANCE 2/7-2/9 Master Choreographers, New works by renowned choreographers. Muhlenberg College Theatre & Dance, Allentown, PA. 484664-3333, Muhlenberg.edu/dance

CONCERTS Some organizations perform in various locations. If no address is listed, check the website for location of performance.

1/18 Utrecht String Trio, 8:00pm. Chamber Music Society of Bethlehem, Foy Concert Hall, Moravian College, W. Church & Main Streets, Bethlehem, PA. Tickets: lvartsboxoffice.org. cmsob.org 1/20 David Clark Little, harpsichord, “French Elegance and Spanish Fire”. 4 pm, Arts at St. John’s, St. John’s Lutheran Church, 37 So. Fifth St., Allentown, PA. 610-435-1641, www.stjohnsallentown.org 1/24 Jesse Cook, Juno Award Winner! 8pm, State Theatre, 453 Northampton St., Easton, PA. 610-252-3132, 1-800-999-STATE. Order online www.statetheatre.org

1/7: 1/11: 1/18: 1/19: 1/25 1/27 2/11 2/14 2/16

Of Jimi Hendrix An Evening With Little Feat She Said Sunday. Voted the Lehigh Valley’s Best Cover Band.

The Wailers Perform Survival The Fabulous Greaseband Ann Popovic Ladysmith Black Mambazo Citizen Cope-VIP Tour Package Bev Conklin Patrizio Buanne

MAUCH CHUNK OPERA HOUSE One of America’s oldest vaudeville theaters, built in 1881. 14 West Broadway, Jim Thorpe, PA. 570-325-0249. mauchchunkoperahouse.com 1/12:

1/18:

1/19: 1/25:

1/26: 1/27: 2/2 2/8 2/9 2/15

Dancin’ Machine; The band that had everyone dancing to non-stop hit after hit from the disco era, is back.

Billy Cobham’s Spectrum 40 Band.

An exciting return engagement by one of the world’s greatest drummers.

An Evening with Savoy Brown.

The Eilen Jewell Band. The band is comprised of modern players authentic to Americana and Jazzy Swing sound.

Fred Eaglesmith Travelling Steam Show It Was a Very Good Year with Tony Sands. Frank Sinatra’s early days.

Great White Caps Vagabond Opera Valentease Tusk-Fleetwood Mac Tribute

CLASSES/LECTURES THRU 1/31 Patricia Hutton Galleries features small paintings, as well as winter landscapes of the Bucks County countryside. 47 West State St., Doylestown, PA. 215-348-1728, www.Patriciahuttongalleries.com

THRU 3/31 Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image.

Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown. michenerartmuseum.org

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1/28-3/16 Man’s Mind: Thomas Mann Sculptural Objects. Artist Rec.: Jan. 31, 5-7pm.

The Gallery at Penn State Lehigh Valley, 2908 Saucon Valley Rd., Center Valley, PA. 610-285-5261

THRU 1/6 Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude FisherFishman and Razel Kapustin. Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave, Phila.

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Broad St., Philadelphia. PAFA.org 1/6-2/10 “Pennsylvania”, Theo Anderson’s photographs ask us to stop and see the landscape we inhabit. Jan. 13, 2-4pm, artist’s reception.

Williams Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, PA. 610-330-5361, http://galleries.lafayette.edu

Saturday nights: Sette Luna Restaurant, 219 Ferry St., Easton, PA. 610-253-8888. setteluna.com

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Thursday nights: John Beacher’s Community Stage, 8-12pm, Community Stage sign ups, 9pm: Solo act, 8-9pm. Karla’s, 5 W. Mechanic St., New Hope. 215-862-2612.

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1/27 Family Concert, The Write Stuff-Meet Our Young Composers. Winning student compositions performed by The Bach Choir and Bach Festival Orchestra. 3pm, Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. 888-7433100, Bach.org 1/27 Winter Vivaldi, Baroque music performed by principal instrumentalists of the Sinfonia and piano soloist, Father Sean Brett Duggan.

3:00pm, Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, Wesley Church, 2540 Center St., Bethlehem, PA. www.PASinfonia.org, www.LVArtsBoxOffice.org 2/1 Mountain Heart, An award-winning cuttingedge acoustical band that's shared the stage with Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss and others.

Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. 8pm. Free parking attached to the center. 610-758-2787, www.zoellnerartscenter.org 2/10 The Lyric Consort, “Songs and Poetry of Love for Valentine’s Day”. 4pm, Arts at St. John’s, St. John’s Lutheran Church, 37 So. Fifth St., Allentown, PA. 610-435-1641, www.stjohnsallentown.org ARTSQUEST CENTER AT STEELSTACKS (Musikfest Café) 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem, PA 610-332-1300. artsquest.org 1/5:

Craig Thatcher's Tribute To The Music

1/31 Artist Lecture: An Artist Re-invents…Re-imagines…Re-Creates to Survive. Thomas Mann, 12:15-1:30pm. Penn State Lehigh Valley, 2809 Saucon Valley Rd., Center Valley, PA. 610-2855261 2/1-2/2 Design for Survival with Thomas Mann. A workshop that benefits artists in all mediums, learn small business management, and career development. 9am-4pm (both days). Jan. 31, artists talk, reception and view Mann’s exhibition. Tuition: $200 (25% discount for Lehigh Valley Arts Council members). Penn State Lehigh Valley, 2809 Saucon Valley Rd., Center Valley, PA. More info and to register, LV.PSU.EDU/ARTSPROJECT EVENTS Thru 1/31 Peddler’s Village, January Sales Event, up to 60% off. Peddler’s Village, Routes 202 & 263, Lahaska, Bucks County, PA. 215-794-4000, www.Peddlersvillage.com 2/1-2/2 The Emmaus Arts Commission presents SnowBlast Winter Festival! Schedule is packed with free, community-wide art related events including an appearance by the SnowBlast Ice Princess, sculpted ice demonstrations & the Ice Bar, SnowBlast Art Show and Sale at the Clock Building featuring musical performances, and much more. Emmaus, PA. For the full schedule visit www.emmausarts.org

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27 / FEATURE / CINEMA’S SOLE SURVIVORS

Life of Pi.

against all things orderly, as none of them would save him from his isolating fate. It’s the only thing he knew to do in his effort to press on, his rebellion aimed at threats both outside and within.

In Holy Motors, French filmmaker Leos Carax’s captivating whatsit, chameleon Denis Lavant delivered the year’s best transformative turn, portraying an actor being carted around in a limo, each stop involving an impromptu, public performance. Though rife with developments both bizarre and inexplicable, Carax’s film triumphed as a portrait of an artist in transition, holding tight to whatever bits of his gift that he could in a time when cinema, among many other things, is irrevocably changing.

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis largely took place in a limo, too, presenting Robert Pattinson at his revelatory best as Eric, a young billionaire whose pampered life began rapidly unraveling. Both plugged into the world and very much removed from it, Eric monitored his global business from the limousine’s cabin, where he was also visited by underlings, sex partners, analysts, and a physician, who, in a daily checkup, gave Eric the ambiguous diagnosis of an “asymmetrical prostate.” Emotionally and psychologically green in matters of the real world, Eric allowed both wisdom and madness to enter his comfort zone, which became a maddening bubble as he was whittled down to the pretty-boy equivalent of a raw nerve. Complete with ominous Occupy themes and resonant threats of worldwide financial ruin, the film was a consummately topical account of today’s man in upheaval.

But it certainly wasn’t just degradation for these cinematic heroes and antiheroes. At least two great men were seen finding ways to not just overcome their respective hardships, but disseminate those victories for the benefit of all. With This Is Not a Film, condemned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi gave the world something altogether miraculous, crafting what may be the first true lyrical work of DIY defiance. On house arrest in his native country, awaiting an impending prison sentence as punishment for past creative efforts, the celebrated auteur was seen recording himself with the help of a colleague, first staging scenes of

unmade works, then ruminating over past projects, then finally engaging in what seemed like impossible kismet, crushingly chatting up a media maker in training as clamor of the volatile setting stirred in the background. Smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive hidden inside a cake, the movie depicted an innovator unbound by his cage, and unwavering in his insistence on persevering.

A perseverance of a different sort drove the narrative of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which followed America’s 16th president through the last four months of his life, an extraordinary stretch that contained the end of the Civil War and the elimination of slavery. Faithfully extraordinary in the title role, Daniel Day-Lewis embodied a man traversing the rocky, treacherous terrain of 19th century politics, balancing his own personal and familial wellbeing while leading a whole society through a milestone fraught with uncertainty. In Tony Kushner’s brilliant screenplay, Lincoln was written as someone both heroic and deeply flawed, and his greatest virtue was revealed to have been a dogged tenacity, whose ripple effect has rocked the nation ever since.

The year’s greatest protagonists were all presented with unapologetic honesty, their fights—and, sometimes, failures—to thrive in the world indicative of the daily travails of so many contemporary beings. But perhaps the greatest of all was the one who carried similar burdens but reached far outside of himself, so far that the weight he carried eventually seemed light by comparison. There are many virtues to all of these fine movies, but the most useful may be one that Lincoln puts forth, suggesting that to tackle this present, we may want to learn from the past. ■ R. Kurt Osenlund is the managing editor of The House Next Door, the official blog of Slant Magazine. He is also the film critic for South Philly Review, and a contributing writer for ICON, Slant, Cineaste, Fandor and The Film Experience. He compiles his work and posts other goodies at his blog, www.yourmoviebuddy.blogspot.com. Email: rkurtosenlund@gmail.com.

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