HubArts.com

Morning reading: Globe's latest on the Rose Museum and more

Geoff has a good piece in the Globe this morning on artist James Rosenquist pulling out of his planned fall show at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. Rosenquist said he is just too busy with the fallout from a fire at his home and studio last year to make the show, and that his decision had nothing to do with the controversy over the future of the Rose. But then there's this about his covnersation with (Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz): "He said, ‘Would you show with us in the future?’ ’’ recounted Rosenquist, who acknowledged that the Rose controversy was also weighing on his mind. “I said, ‘If things get resolved, I would.’ But I don’t want to deal with it, really. It’s a big mess.’’ Sounds to me like he doesn't want to make waves, but isn't going to bat for the administration, either. ... You'll also want to read my opera review - that's right - in the Globe this morning, "Taste of opera works in short, sweet servings."

Gov. Patrick signs bill creating cultural districts, but there's no money

It was ever thus. The Mass. Cultural Council announced that Gov. Deval Patrick yesterday signed the legislation authorizing the creation of state-sponsored cultural districts in Mass. cities and towns, which we told you about a couple of weeks back. The goal is to “attract artists and cultural enterprises to a community, encourage business and job development, establish tourist destinations, preserve and reuse historic buildings, enhance property values and foster local cultural development.” But at this point, there's no funding, and MCC will spend the next few months looking for ways to make the program effective with existing resources. This could be a great thing for places like Fort Point, Rocky Neck and my house. But the odds of it having an impact without $$$ diminish considerably. Stay tuned. The complete release is after the jump.

Creative districts for Mass. cities and towns?

The creation of state-sponsored cultural districts is included in bills designed to advance economic development in Massachusetts that have been passed by both houses of the state legislature. But we're a ways from seeing them become law - the House and Senate have to iron out a compromise bill, and it has to be sufficiently palatable for Gov. Deval Patrick to sign it. Even if he does, it's not yet clear what the actual criteria and benefits of such a designation will be. Still, there's a lot of promise here. And it's a rare bit of good news amid draconian budget cuts.

According to text passed along by the Mass. Cultural Council, the House bill puts it thusly: "A cultural and creative district shall be a well recognized, labeled, mixed-use, compact area of a city or town in which a high concentration of cultural and creative facilities serves as an anchor. The goals of a cultural and creative district shall include attracting artists and creative enterprises to a community, encouraging business and job development, establishing tourist destinations, preserving and reusing historic buildings, enhancing property values and fostering local cultural and economic development. A city or town may create and designate a cultural and creative district subject to certification by the Council. The Council shall develop a certification program to prepare a city or town to become home to a state designated cultural and creative district by creating an application process and developing qualifying criteria and guidelines."

Seems like a noble goal. I'm all for building the creative economy, which tends to get knocked as piffle by fiscal conservatives who don't want to acknowledge its huge economic impact. But what exactly does a certified creative district get? Even if this bill passes by end of session July 31, the answer for now is, uh, respect. The House text: The Council shall in cooperation with the executive branch, constitutional offices, quasi governmental agencies and the Joint Committee on Tourism, Arts and Cultural development identify additional and existing state incentives and resources that will enhance state designated cultural and creative districts and shall report their findings together with drafts of legislation as may be necessary to carry its recommendations into effect..." That report is to be made by Dec. 1.

Incentives and resources that could be used include tax breaks, historic tax credits, grants and incorporation into current cultural grant programs. It will also be a really nice thing to put on signs and hang around the 'hood.

Have to say I'm less convinced of the need for another provision the cultural community is backing in the same bill, which would also establish a commission (OH BOY ANOTHER COMMISSION!) to study how schools foster student creativity. The commission would develop the Creative Challenge Index to “rate every public school in the Commonwealth on teaching, encouraging, and fostering creativity in students.” I'm sensing a big fat target for Howie Carr, no?

We'll keep you posted.

Boston modern architecture not an oxymoron

"Boston Modern Architecture: Spirit of Reinvention" is the topic of a panel discussion at First Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough St., sponsored by the National Trust For Historic Preservation, Wednesday at 7 p.m. Those of us who wish to get snarky about whether there's enough of it for a discussion should take a look at the booklet prepared for the event, with text by my old Boston herald colleague David Eisen. There's plenty, from the First Church itself and the Polaroid Building to our ever-controversial, brutalist City Hall and private residences like the Gropius House and the Six moon Hill development. A lot of it is hidden away on college campuses where it's seldom seen, much less visited, by the public at large. But it's there, and its future will be debated Wednesday by a group including preservation architect David Fixler; Kathy Spiegelman, Chief Planner, Allston Development Group at Harvard University; and Charles Birnbaum, President, Cultural Landscape Foundation, and former coordinator for the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative.

The event is part of the Modern Module program, which is "aimed at building public support for and engaging in discussions focused on the study and protection of America’s modern architectural resources." The series of events is coordinated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation.The program is free and open to the public, but you have to go here to preregister.

Picture by Bobak Ha'Eri under a Creative Commons license.

Beantown Jazz Fest salutes Big Easy

The 10th annual Berklee Beantown Jazz Festival Sept. 15-25 will tip its stylish cap to the music and culture of New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina - and, though the announcement doesn't mention it, smack dab in the middle of another Big Easy disaster courtesy of BP. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard (right) is the most prominant New Orleansian on a bill that also includes Paula Cole, the Bad Blus, Danilo Perez, the Wild Magnolias, Jonathan Batiste, Nona Hendryx and many more. The 10-day event touches venues all overer the city before shutting down Columbus Ave. on Saturday the 25th for a big free outdoor party with three stages. Other than refusing to capitalize the T in Beantown, I am on board. I can already taste the BBQ.The complete release is after the jump.

Hear O'Malley talk about *that* scene

You may remember our rave for Boston comedian Mike O'Malley's performance on "Glee" last week, as the blue-collar dad defending his gay son. Callie Crossley interviewed O'Malley yesterday on her WGBH FM 89.7 "Callie Crossley Show," in advance of last night's "Glee" season finale. It's worth a listen, not just because she quotes us to him, twice! Not sure why they use a video player, but oh well. The fun starts at about 42:00.

I have a great way to bump up attendance and press coverage for Petah Coyne's exhibit "Everything That Rises Must Converge," at MASS MoCA in North Adams through next February. Simply change the title to something like "What BP Hath Wrought" and tell everyone the work was created in response to the Gulf oil disaster. Because that's all I could think about as I strolled through the galleries on Saturday. Coyne's more recent works, the sculptures that make up the majority of the show, all have the same motif: taxidermy birds (and a few animals) being engulfed by black blobs.

 The blobs are made of heaps of plastic flowers and other materials coated with black wax. Most seem like islands or floating slicks, with a few breakaway dribbles. Others hang on black cords from the distant ceiling of MoCA's tallest gallery. The birds are mostly pheasants, and here and there is a squirrel. The largest and most dramatic of the works, "Untitled #1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu)" (2009-2010) features a skeletal, leafless apple tree turned black, with ten taxidermy peacocks perched in its branches.

The exhibit title comes from a Flannery O'Connor short story. There's something New Orleans-y about these pieces,  bayou gothic. A funereal dusting of dark red plastic flowers completes the mood. The BP interpretation is unavoidable, even if there are no pelicans or turtles.

The work is striking, but it also begs interpretation because, like so much of the stuff you see at MASS MoCA, it is intended to "evoke intensely personal associations," in the glass-half-full analysis of the exhibit guide, or without coherent, easily explicated  meaning beyond the initial shock, in my own glass-half-empty view. The accompanying text sounds like random art-world blather: "Coyne's works both rise and converge at MASS MoCA, making palpable the inherent tensions between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death." Personally, I like the BP explanation better. We'll just have to add "nature and technology" to the list of dualities.

But maybe I'm a philistine. In a gallery holding earlier work, I was consistently bored until I got to a hanging sculpture, "Untitled #720 (Eguchi's Ghost)," made of miles of filaments that turn out to be not hair or fiber but pieces of a shredded Airstream trailer. It is, as the text says, "a startling transformation from industrial to organic," but doesn't have anything to do with the 1961 Japanese short story that supposedly inspired the piece. It's unnecessary for the viewer to understand a artist's inspiration or even their intention; some of the most amazing, powerful works I've seen at MoCA were utterly baffling. But "#720" did not make me think of a Japanese short story or the transformation from industrial to organic or any of those random opposites listed above. It just made me think of Cousin It on "The Addams Family." See? Philistine.

(And by the way, could there be a more pretentious way of titling work than calling everything you do Untitled, numbering it, and then giving it a very title-y sounding term in parenthesis? Is that supposed to make us feel "the inherent tensions between named and unnamed?" Or is it just annoying bullshit?)

In general, the exhibits at MASS MoCA now are underwhelming, the great Sol LeWitt retrospective excepted. At least I found the initial gothic shock of Coyne's work compelling, even if the explanation was not. But "Material World," in which seven artists were invited to interact with the museum's brilliantly reclaimed factory environment, mostly disappoints. (How many times are we going to see a MoCA gallery heaped with random coils of rope or something similar?) The bright exception is Alyson Shotz's "The Geometry of Light," Tobias Putrih's "Re-Projection Hoosac" inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel in North Adams. A skein of fishing line is hung across a large, darkened gallery, and a single spotlight deployed to make it cast patterns that change with every step the viewer takes. It makes you think about line and refraction, and how you locate yourself in the space. "How many people clothesline themselves over the course of a day?" I asked the guard stationed there. "A lot," he said.

I always look forward to seeing what's in Gallery 5, the cavernous, football-field-sized space that has held my favorite exhibits in a decade of coming to MoCA. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's "Gravity Is A Force To Be Reckoned With" didn't do much for me, alas, in part because it is dwarfed by the space. It's a play on Mies van der Rohe's plan for a "House with four columns," a glass-walled structure that takes the Farnsworth House a step further. The artist has turned it upside down, and the result is intended to comment on modernism and transparency, freedom and consequence. I get it, but Gallery 5 won this round.#

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis is becoming a rent-a-center, according to a fascinating Edgers p1 piece in the Globe today. ... Louise dug Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of the rarely seen "Timon of Athens," which I wrote about last week. ... JC Lockwood is worth reading on Kristen Miller's new album, "Walk." ... A fascinating, um, real estate brief. Really. ... And oh, yeah, my Friday theater column, about the Stoneham Theatre. ... In Maine, they're hoping the movie about the Wyeth family (Andrew et al) will be made there. ... Big gallery expansion at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. ... phew, enuf.

OK, two Lady Gaga-related items in a row is at least one too many, I know. But...

Mike O'Malley (left) is a Boston native and a huge Sox fan - he emcees things like the Hot Stove, Cool Music concerts - so this is HubArts-related. The guy deserves a shout-out for one great scene last night in "Glee's" Lady Gaga-centric episode "Theatricality," so we're going to give it to him.

Fox's "Glee" is a fun show, though I get tired of its relentless fabulousness - everyone is always having a moment, and the high-school kids' let's-put-on-a-show inspirations keep turning into these giant, Oscar-night-worthy production spectaculars. But Jane Lynch as psycho cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester is pretty much a must-see, and the actors who play the kids are mostly very good. It's hard not to root for Chris Colfer, who plays the just-out-of-the-closet Kurt; not long ago Colfer was a gay high school kid getting a hard time from his peers, and now he plays one on TV, with flair. That's him below, in full Gaga getup.

O'Malley plays Burt, Kurt's father, a blue-collar widower who accepts who his kid is, but isn't always perfect. In a recent episode, Kurt was hurt when Burt (sorry) showed up unexpectedly at school - but only to take Finn to a ballgame. Finn, played by Cory Monteith (bottom left), is emphatically straight, a big jock who's trying to be a better dude since he accepted his own singing and dancing side and joined the Glee gang. Lately Burt has started dating Finn's widowed mom, and Burt was trying to bond with Finn, but also maybe just a little too glad to have a jocky kid to take to ballgames and such. You following?

So last night, it turns out that the thing between the parents is serious - they're moving in together. And Finn is not cool with it. Not cool with mom knocking boots with Burt? Maybe. Not cool with the idea of bunking in with Kurt? Definitely. So Kurt, who has a crush on Finn, tries to make him comfortable by re-decorating their basement quarters...like a Morroccan harem from the 30s. Or something. I mean...whew. And Finn finally loses it.

Now this is where a less well-written show would have him learning some easy lesson about tolerance, or maybe admitting it's just the mom thing. But, uh, no. He comes right out with it. He knows why Kurt is excited about him moving in, and he calls him on it. "You think I don't see the way you stare at me?" he says. It's a supremely uncomfortable moment, and Kurt crumbles, eyes welling up, exposed and humiliated. But Finn is freaked too, probably for a combination of reasons, including the fact that being a better dude isn't easy. And he starts raging against the "faggy" decor.

And that's where O'Malley comes in. Hearing the F word shouted, Burt enters, infuriated but in control, and blisters Finn's ears with a speech about why the word is wrong, and how he used to say it himself the same way Finn says it, and he knows what it means, and he's not going to hear it spoken to his son that way. And Finn is entitled to believe what he wants out in the world, but not in Burt's house. And Finn can't answer, he leaves without a word. It's less than a minute of acting by O'Malley, but it's terrific. It looks like authentic living, a guy who has crossed a line and isn't going back behind it.

Of course "Glee" always has to go over the top, so the writers fuck it up with a scene at the end where Finn dons  major Gaga drag himself and sides with Kurt against some other jock bullies. It's way too on-the-nose, too much a moment, and totally "Glee." But in that basement scene, all three guys did some real acting, especially O'Malley. After that it was just a matter of mopping up and giving "Glee" loyalists their weekly tear duct hose-out.

O'Malley was funny in a gonzo supporting bit on "My Name Is Earl," and his laconic line delivery was the only thing worth saving in the terrible sitcom "Yes, Dear," which somehow ran for five season. His own show lasted a whole two episodes back in 1999. He's been very good as Burt, in what's really a straight acting role, and he just killed it last night in the most dramatic scene I've ever seen on "Glee."

You can watch the episode here (after the ad), and if you just want to see the scene in question, fast-forward to 25:17.

This blog will now resume not thinking about Lady Gaga at all.#

This has nothing to do with the Hub, but it's arts, and I know a lot of folks who are interested...so... Stieg Larsson's thriller "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" comes out in the U.S. next Tuesday. I'm lucky to know someone who spent the extra Euros to get a copy of the already-released British edition, and I finished reading it at five to midnight last night. It's not a standalone like "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire" - you really have to have read the rest of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy to enjoy this one, I think. But if you've read the other two, there's no chance you won't enjoy this.  SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP.

But wait, before you go, please enjoy my contribution to the #lesserbooks thread on Twitter: "The Girl With The Temporary Dragon Tattoo."

Unintended interpretations at MASS MoCA

I have a great way to bump up attendance and press coverage for Petah Coyne's exhibit "Everything That Rises Must Converge," at MASS MoCA in North Adams through next February. Simply change the title to something like "What BP Hath Wrought" and tell everyone the work was created in response to the Gulf oil disaster. Because that's all I could think about as I strolled through the galleries on Saturday. Coyne's more recent works, the sculptures that make up the majority of the show, all have the same motif: taxidermy birds (and a few animals) being engulfed by black blobs.

 The blobs are made of heaps of plastic flowers and other materials coated with black wax. Most seem like islands or floating slicks, with a few breakaway dribbles. Others hang on black cords from the distant ceiling of MoCA's tallest gallery. The birds are mostly pheasants, and here and there is a squirrel. The largest and most dramatic of the works, "Untitled #1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu)" (2009-2010) features a skeletal, leafless apple tree turned black, with ten taxidermy peacocks perched in its branches.

The exhibit title comes from a Flannery O'Connor short story. There's something New Orleans-y about these pieces,  bayou gothic. A funereal dusting of dark red plastic flowers completes the mood. The BP interpretation is unavoidable, even if there are no pelicans or turtles.

The work is striking, but it also begs interpretation because, like so much of the stuff you see at MASS MoCA, it is intended to "evoke intensely personal associations," in the glass-half-full analysis of the exhibit guide, or without coherent, easily explicated  meaning beyond the initial shock, in my own glass-half-empty view. The accompanying text sounds like random art-world blather: "Coyne's works both rise and converge at MASS MoCA, making palpable the inherent tensions between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death." Personally, I like the BP explanation better. We'll just have to add "nature and technology" to the list of dualities.

But maybe I'm a philistine. In a gallery holding earlier work, I was consistently bored until I got to a hanging sculpture, "Untitled #720 (Eguchi's Ghost)," made of miles of filaments that turn out to be not hair or fiber but pieces of a shredded Airstream trailer. It is, as the text says, "a startling transformation from industrial to organic," but doesn't have anything to do with the 1961 Japanese short story that supposedly inspired the piece. It's unnecessary for the viewer to understand a artist's inspiration or even their intention; some of the most amazing, powerful works I've seen at MoCA were utterly baffling. But "#720" did not make me think of a Japanese short story or the transformation from industrial to organic or any of those random opposites listed above. It just made me think of Cousin It on "The Addams Family." See? Philistine.

(And by the way, could there be a more pretentious way of titling work than calling everything you do Untitled, numbering it, and then giving it a very title-y sounding term in parenthesis? Is that supposed to make us feel "the inherent tensions between named and unnamed?" Or is it just annoying bullshit?)

In general, the exhibits at MASS MoCA now are underwhelming, the great Sol LeWitt retrospective excepted. At least I found the initial gothic shock of Coyne's work compelling, even if the explanation was not. But "Material World," in which seven artists were invited to interact with the museum's brilliantly reclaimed factory environment, mostly disappoints. (How many times are we going to see a MoCA gallery heaped with random coils of rope or something similar?) The bright exception is Alyson Shotz's "The Geometry of Light," Tobias Putrih's "Re-Projection Hoosac" inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel in North Adams. A skein of fishing line is hung across a large, darkened gallery, and a single spotlight deployed to make it cast patterns that change with every step the viewer takes. It makes you think about line and refraction, and how you locate yourself in the space. "How many people clothesline themselves over the course of a day?" I asked the guard stationed there. "A lot," he said.

I always look forward to seeing what's in Gallery 5, the cavernous, football-field-sized space that has held my favorite exhibits in a decade of coming to MoCA. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's "Gravity Is A Force To Be Reckoned With" didn't do much for me, alas, in part because it is dwarfed by the space. It's a play on Mies van der Rohe's plan for a "House with four columns," a glass-walled structure that takes the Farnsworth House a step further. The artist has turned it upside down, and the result is intended to comment on modernism and transparency, freedom and consequence. I get it, but Gallery 5 won this round.#

Tasty breakfast links!

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis is becoming a rent-a-center, according to a fascinating Edgers p1 piece in the Globe today. ... Louise dug Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of the rarely seen "Timon of Athens," which I wrote about last week. ... JC Lockwood is worth reading on Kristen Miller's new album, "Walk." ... A fascinating, um, real estate brief. Really. ... And oh, yeah, my Friday theater column, about the Stoneham Theatre. ... In Maine, they're hoping the movie about the Wyeth family (Andrew et al) will be made there. ... Big gallery expansion at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. ... phew, enuf.

Glee, Gaga and Mike O'Malley

OK, two Lady Gaga-related items in a row is at least one too many, I know. But...

Mike O'Malley (left) is a Boston native and a huge Sox fan - he emcees things like the Hot Stove, Cool Music concerts - so this is HubArts-related. The guy deserves a shout-out for one great scene last night in "Glee's" Lady Gaga-centric episode "Theatricality," so we're going to give it to him.

Fox's "Glee" is a fun show, though I get tired of its relentless fabulousness - everyone is always having a moment, and the high-school kids' let's-put-on-a-show inspirations keep turning into these giant, Oscar-night-worthy production spectaculars. But Jane Lynch as psycho cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester is pretty much a must-see, and the actors who play the kids are mostly very good. It's hard not to root for Chris Colfer, who plays the just-out-of-the-closet Kurt; not long ago Colfer was a gay high school kid getting a hard time from his peers, and now he plays one on TV, with flair. That's him below, in full Gaga getup.

O'Malley plays Burt, Kurt's father, a blue-collar widower who accepts who his kid is, but isn't always perfect. In a recent episode, Kurt was hurt when Burt (sorry) showed up unexpectedly at school - but only to take Finn to a ballgame. Finn, played by Cory Monteith (bottom left), is emphatically straight, a big jock who's trying to be a better dude since he accepted his own singing and dancing side and joined the Glee gang. Lately Burt has started dating Finn's widowed mom, and Burt was trying to bond with Finn, but also maybe just a little too glad to have a jocky kid to take to ballgames and such. You following?

So last night, it turns out that the thing between the parents is serious - they're moving in together. And Finn is not cool with it. Not cool with mom knocking boots with Burt? Maybe. Not cool with the idea of bunking in with Kurt? Definitely. So Kurt, who has a crush on Finn, tries to make him comfortable by re-decorating their basement quarters...like a Morroccan harem from the 30s. Or something. I mean...whew. And Finn finally loses it.

Now this is where a less well-written show would have him learning some easy lesson about tolerance, or maybe admitting it's just the mom thing. But, uh, no. He comes right out with it. He knows why Kurt is excited about him moving in, and he calls him on it. "You think I don't see the way you stare at me?" he says. It's a supremely uncomfortable moment, and Kurt crumbles, eyes welling up, exposed and humiliated. But Finn is freaked too, probably for a combination of reasons, including the fact that being a better dude isn't easy. And he starts raging against the "faggy" decor.

And that's where O'Malley comes in. Hearing the F word shouted, Burt enters, infuriated but in control, and blisters Finn's ears with a speech about why the word is wrong, and how he used to say it himself the same way Finn says it, and he knows what it means, and he's not going to hear it spoken to his son that way. And Finn is entitled to believe what he wants out in the world, but not in Burt's house. And Finn can't answer, he leaves without a word. It's less than a minute of acting by O'Malley, but it's terrific. It looks like authentic living, a guy who has crossed a line and isn't going back behind it.

Of course "Glee" always has to go over the top, so the writers fuck it up with a scene at the end where Finn dons  major Gaga drag himself and sides with Kurt against some other jock bullies. It's way too on-the-nose, too much a moment, and totally "Glee." But in that basement scene, all three guys did some real acting, especially O'Malley. After that it was just a matter of mopping up and giving "Glee" loyalists their weekly tear duct hose-out.

O'Malley was funny in a gonzo supporting bit on "My Name Is Earl," and his laconic line delivery was the only thing worth saving in the terrible sitcom "Yes, Dear," which somehow ran for five season. His own show lasted a whole two episodes back in 1999. He's been very good as Burt, in what's really a straight acting role, and he just killed it last night in the most dramatic scene I've ever seen on "Glee."

You can watch the episode here (after the ad), and if you just want to see the scene in question, fast-forward to 25:17.

This blog will now resume not thinking about Lady Gaga at all.#

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (Off-topic)

This has nothing to do with the Hub, but it's arts, and I know a lot of folks who are interested...so... Stieg Larsson's thriller "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" comes out in the U.S. next Tuesday. I'm lucky to know someone who spent the extra Euros to get a copy of the already-released British edition, and I finished reading it at five to midnight last night. It's not a standalone like "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire" - you really have to have read the rest of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy to enjoy this one, I think. But if you've read the other two, there's no chance you won't enjoy this.  SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP.

But wait, before you go, please enjoy my contribution to the #lesserbooks thread on Twitter: "The Girl With The Temporary Dragon Tattoo."