ArtsBeat

Zagajewski's poetry of the cosmic world and the human face

"Poetry summons us to life, to courage/ in the face of growing shadow./ Can you gaze at the Earth/ like the perfect astronaut?" writes Adam Zagajewski in "Houston, 6 p.m." from his collection Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002).  This creative tension between engagement and reflection--the sense of holding up a darkened mirror to the transfigured world--has made Zagajewski one of the most admired contemporary poets in Europe and North America.    
 
Zagajewski, the acclaimed Polish language poet (born in the city of Lvov in what is now the Ukraine), essayist, novelist, and 2004 winner of the biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literaturewill visit Buffalo to deliver the 33rd annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading at 8 p.m. this (Friday) evening in 250 Baird Hall on the UB North Campus.

Of goats and murderers and movies

Movies are not life. Any fool knows that. But sometimes the horrors on front pages and the 24-hour news stations are so brutal that it's almost as if we needed to be reminded.

Sometimes movies get lucky when they're caught in history's wake. Usually they're not.

The current case in point of a phenomenally unlucky movie is Grant Heslov's "The Men Who Stare at Goats," a wild, black comic satire on New Age military shenanigans in Iraq. It is being nationally released today, just as the nation is mourning the shocking and horrific deaths of 12 people Thursday afternoon in a massacre attributed to a soldier --an M.D. and a psychiatrist yet--unhinged by prejudice and imminent deployment to the Middle East.

In other words, an absurdist comedy about military nut jobs is going into theaters at the exact moment that banner headlines are reminding us just how much horror that derangement can cause in the world, even on military bases full of those charged with the nation's defense.

A movie can hardly suffer worse luck on its opening weekend. Unfortunately, it's a pretty good movie too --by no means a great absurdist film comedy but a good way to employ George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.

The same ongoing history that can grind up a movie in reality's terrors, of course, can work to a movie's benefit. No movie in American history ever seemed more prescient than "The China Syndrome" whose opening almost perfectly coincided with the threat of nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island.

Not this time, though. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was probably not aiming at Hollywood, much less a specific American movie, but he might as well have been.

-- Jeff Simon

Erie County funding for the arts

This has been available for a couple of weeks now, but I want to post up the page of Erie County's proposed 2010 budget that outlines funding recommendations for arts and cultural groups. In all, the county has allocated $5,066,500 to 43 arts and culturals.

Check out the recommendations in a PDF below, or download it here.

Humanities-speak gone wild

Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green links to the College Art Association's list of papers to be presented at its annual conference, summarized here by the Art History Newsletter. This is the kind of thing I love to read, simply for the utterly confounding, intentionally obfuscating and always entertaining terms certain writers and academics sometimes use to sex up the titles of their papers.

My fave: “Pray, Sir, Whose Dog Are You? Nobility and Animality in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Pictures.”

This list, which is definitely one for the ages, reminds me of Gary Kamiya's much-circulated essay for Salon, jokingly titled "Transgressing the Transgressors: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bull***," available here. It documents a successful attempt by physicist Alan Sokal to place a completely invented paper into a prestigious cultural journal simply by couching it in terms that appeal to what Sokal characterized as a group of lazy intellectuals.

Accentuate the positive

Anyone who's seen more than a handful of productions at Buffalo-area theaters will tell you that when it comes to accents, a select few actors can pull them off, and plenty of them can't.

It's not uncommon for a cast -- otherwise eminently capable and moving in their portrayals of German sergeants or cockney housewives -- to adopt accents that approach camp in their complete lack of resemblance to the source dialect. To my ear, and I suspect to many others, a lack of consistency in the accent department can have the effect of throwing even a fine production off-kilter. More often than not, productions that dispense with accents entirely (except in the rare case when actors have enough time and training to properly prepare) come off far better, and without that stifling sense dislocation we all experience when we hear Kevin Costner's half-hearted rendition of, say, Sir Robin of Loxley.

So it was with plenty of interest that I read a profile by Alec Wilkinson in this week's New Yorker of Tim Monich, dialect coach to the stars. It provides a fascinating glimpse into just how difficult adopting a foreign accent can be, just how much practice and discipline it requires, and how seriously Monich takes it. Here's an excerpt:

'Pictures Generation' wins odd new art award

A photograph by Cindy Sherman from her "Untitled Film Stills" series. Part of "The Pictures Generation,

" a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"The Pictures Generation," a show that closed earlier this year at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been dubbed the best group show of the year in something called "Rob Pruitt Presents: The First Annual Art Awards." This new collection of awards -- part genuine contest, part performance art piece, part fundraiser -- was jointly sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and Calvin Klein.

It's an unconventional award, to be sure. Pruitt, an artist whose work often deals with the machinations of the art world, organized the Oct. 29 awards ceremony to resemble a Hollywood affair. An account of the evening from the Guggenheim's Web site:

After a dinner of locally sourced cuisine culled from Brooklyn-based restaurants and chefs, presenters including Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum Richard Armstrong, Cecily Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, James Franco, Knight Landesman, Julianne Moore, and Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector announced the winners. On receiving her award, a statuette created by Pruitt resembling a celebratory bucket of champagne that also serves as a fully functional lamp, Heilmann acknowledged the significance of being recognized while also declaring, “The Guggenheim belongs to all of us."

Talking theater on WECK

Last Thursday, Constance McEwen Caldwell of the Theatre Alliance of Buffalo invited me to participate in the alliance's weekly radio segment with Loraine O'Donnell on WECK AM 1230. O'Donnell, a well known local actor who recently appeared in the Irish Classical Theatre Company's production of "Blood Brothers," grilled me about the News' star rating system, my background in journalism and theater and the challenges of critiquing Buffalo's wide-ranging and diverse theater community. Download the segment here, or listen below:

TAB-102909

--Colin Dabkowski

Zukofsky's son seeks to stifle scholars

The progeny of major literary figures have long played an active role in determining the stature and reputation of these writers' works among future generations of readers. Recently, however, the heirs of several important 20th century writers have exercised their rights of literary executorship in ways that have raised questions about their role in advancing that legacy.

'Turner to Cezanne': the Everson's potent exhibition

 
"The Francois Zola Dam," ca. 1877-78, from "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection" at the Everson Museum of art in Syracuse.

This week's ArtsBeat column focused on a promising cross-cultural collaboration now under way in the city of Syracuse. The focal point of the collaboration, in which several Syracuse cultural organizations are mounting programs that reflect in diverse ways on the Impressionist movement in visual art, is a small jewel of an exhibition at the city's Everson Museum of Art.

"Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection," is not your typical touring blockbuster show. It features some 50 works of art from the collection of Welsh sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who, during their collecting careers in the early to mid-20th century, amassed a significant trove of works by pre-Impressionists like J.M.W. Turner and Corot, straight-up Impressionist masters like Monet and Pissarro and post-Impressionists like van Gogh and, perhaps most importantly, Paul Cezanne.

An elephant could paint that

It's a big week for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which today announced the appointment of Leslie Zemsky as the first female board president in the institution's history. To the surprise and relief of many an art-lover, the gallery also announced today that it would extend its hours to be open six days a week as opposed to a paltry four, starting Nov. 3.

The gallery also opened its exhibition of recent work by North Tonawanda-born artist Robert Mangold (look for a preview of the show in tomorrow's Gusto), who was in attendance at the gallery today for an event announcing several major new acquisitions and forthcoming exhibitions. Times are as tough economically as they've ever been, but from the looks of it, the Albright-Knox is soldiering through with tremendous momentum.