The Flaming Lips
Charlottesville Pavilion
Tuesday, September 12
music Every rock music fan has been there: front row center at a highly anticipated gig, waiting in vain for that one inspiring moment. Whether it’s a die-hard Zen Arcade fan fuming through another Hüsker-free Bob Mould solo show, or a Bob Dylan disciple enduring one of the man’s infamous late-’80s snore-fests (when he was abusing his back catalogue so badly, fans actually hoped he wouldn’t play his biggest hits), most live-music devotees can easily reel off a litany of disappointments.
Unless, of course, that wily concert-goer has spent his or her musical life attending nothing but Flaming Lips shows.
As lead singer Wayne Coyne and his traveling neo-psychedelic carnival proved last Tuesday at the C-Pav, the band seems constitutionally incapable of putting on a bad concert. Where some bands disdainfully refuse to play their biggest hits, the Lips gleefully embrace them (hell, not only did they play “She Don’t Use Jelly,” they actually kicked it off with a video clip of a “90210”-era Shannen Doherty introducing the band). Where some singers expect the audience to sit and watch in worshipful silence (we’re looking at you, Lyle Lovett), Wayne Coyne encourages a level of audience participation that could only be topped by actually handing over all of the instruments and microphones to the screaming fans. And, where some bands utilize high-tech lighting and tasteful video effects to make themselves seem larger than life, the Lips employ an entire flea market of hilariously low-budget gadgets to mind-blowing effect, turning every venue they play into a Dr. Seuss-inspired wonderland.
From the opening giant-ballon-and-confetti-cannon assault that accompanied “Race for the Prize” to the closing, power-chord-perfect rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (with its pointed video montage of Bush Administration meanies), the show really couldn’t have been more of a blast. By turns joyous, Pollyannaish and surprisingly political (for him, anyway), Coyne—along with drummer Steven Drozd and guitarist Michael Ivins—whipped up a crazy musical cavalcade that proved a perfect fit for the Pavilion, turning that giant white tent into an overflowing circus full of dancing Santas, singing sock puppets, streamer-shooting shotguns and wildly screaming fans. Top that, Ringling Brothers! —Dan Catalano
All Aunt Hagar’s Children
By Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 399 pages
words Southern Virginia, so vividly illustrated in Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World, receives brief mention in his second collection of short stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Instead, our geographical point of reference is Washington, D.C.—a city containing both a nation’s history and, as Jones’ characters show us, a multitude of complex personal histories as well. Convicted criminals spend time in Lorton prison, newlyweds visit family in Arlington and even make train trips into the heart of the American South. Yet however long their leashes, Jones’s children are always drawn back to our nation’s capital, if not physically, then through the memories of a past to which they are forever tethered.
Jones, a native Washingtonian with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, returns to the same territory (and in some instances, the same characters) covered in his first collection of stories, Lost in the City. To say that the individuals in Hagar’s Children are lost would be obvious—for aren’t existentially angst-ridden individuals the perfect fodder for short stories? Whether it’s a medical student coming to terms with the practices of a “root worker” (read: voodoo) or an aged lothario who finds himself the unwitting landlord of a crack den, Jones’ Washingtonians are beautifully rendered contradictions that, for all of their drama, remain utterly captivating.
“Old Boys, Old Girls” is a classic sin-and-redemption story in which the murderer Caesar Matthews finds himself out of sync with life inside, and outside, of prison. Both “A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru” and “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River” provide escapes from the everyday. The former story details a trio of women united by their survival of horrible disasters, while the latter explores a hostess’ encounter with the Devil in a Safeway.
Of course, an unspoken rule of short story collections is that there has to be one among the herd that stands out, displaying a particularly impressive amount of skill and style. In “Tapestry,” the concluding tale, a new bride, torn between an uncomfortable marriage in a foreign city and longing thoughts of home, painfully accepts the predestined future hovering over her: one rooted in the cross streets of D.C. As he writes, “Anne was not at all a morbid person, but it occurred to her quite simply that wherever it was she would die, it would not be in Mississippi. Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later.”—Zak M. Salih
Complicit!
Contemporary American Art & Mass Culture
UVA Art Museum
Through October 29
art “Complicity” is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “participation in a wrongful act.” But the artists in the current show at the UVA Art Museum have not been complicit in anything illicit—except, perhaps, telling the truth in an era of high gloss and spin. Utilizing every type of medium available, they reflect back to us our culture’s complexities and contradictions, while, at times, revealing our collective shadow in a way that forces us to question who we are.
Love and human relationships are given ample play in this exhibit—and it makes sense, given the fact that marriage is one of our biggest institutions, and sex our most powerful marketing tool. Included in the show is a photo-realistic painting entitled “White on White,” by Julia Jacquette, which features a series of wedding dresses arranged like items on a store shelf. Marriage is supposed to be intimate and sacred, but the grid-like composition and the absence of any human being in this painting alludes to the commerciality of love in our culture.
In stark contrast to the stylized painting is a mixed-media installation, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, called “Cabin Fever,” which contains three-dimensional sculptures of trees inside a dimly-lit wooden box. The viewer is asked to look inside the (casket-shaped) box to view an enchanted forest at night. But the audio quickly overpowers the viewers’ enchantment: flies buzz, a couple argues, and a gunshot silences all but the nighttime creatures. This piece could just as easily be titled “Sound Bite”—I physically jumped from my chair when forced to confront the darker side of what we do in the name of love.
Another piece, “Play Date,” by filmmaker John Waters, is perhaps even more disturbing. In it, the lifelike faces of Charles Manson and Michael Jackson are grafted onto two dolls, who sit on the floor facing each other, arms outstretched. The juxtaposition of these two individuals—one a convicted murderer, one a troubled celebrity, both deeply ingrained in our pop-culture memory—with the childlike innocence of dolls, creates an effect at once fascinating and repulsive, especially when one remembers they were once innocent and lovable children.
Viewers will wince as they realize how inexorably woven into the web of mass culture we all are—just as the artists themselves can’t completely escape the very influences they seek to comment on. If this exhibit is indeed a portrait of who we are, the question remains: Who do we want to become? How do we get there from here?—Karrie Bos