Author: andrew-cedermark

LOOK3 approacheth; TREES are in the trees

The LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph is still a good two weeks away—it returns to town June 9-11—but related exhibits are popping up well in advance of the opening date. Heralding the approach, as usual, is the TREES exhibit, with large images posted in the trees running all the way down the Downtown Mall.

This year’s TREES photographer is George Steinmetz, an exploration photographer and regular contributor to National Geographic who shoots aerial photographs of desolate regions from a motorized paraglider. He writes, "From the sky I can see the forces that have shaped the land: wind, rain, volcanoes, faults, and increasingly the machinery of humankind. Most of the wetter regions have been developed by humans so deserts have become some of the last great wilderness areas left on our planet, and are equally worthy of protection."

Steinmetz gives a presentation at The Paramount Theater on June 8, 2011, at 7:30pm

See more here or on the Mall.

And parents, worry not—this year’s TREES exhibit is PG.

Categories
Living

Hunt and Wimer race to document an exploding sport

Ever since Dave Matthews struck it big, locals have been wondering what’s our Next Big Thing. While that discussion has often veered towards bands, what stands perhaps the best chance of keeping Charlottesville on the national cultural map is something else entirely: scantily clad women arm wrestling for charity.

Check out the latest CLAW bout at 7:30pm on Saturday, May 28, at the Blue Moon Diner. Proceeds benefit A FERTILE Foundation.

As CLAW—Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers, invented after an impromptu arm wrestling bout between local performers Jennifer Tidwell and Jodie Plaisance—infects the nation like a bad case of jock itch, filmmaker Brian Wimer and photographer Billy Hunt find themselves in the unique position of having documented the events almost from the beginning. Today, CLAW has grown from a fun Charlottesville fundraiser into a bona fide national organization with chapters from Brooklyn to Chicago, and D.C. to Taos, New Mexico. “It’s exploding,” says Wimer. “Six months from now, there will probably be six more.”

With the pair’s ongoing documentary project, dubbed CLAW: The Movie, they have appointed themselves the sport’s official chroniclers, a task that is part sports photography, part war photography, part anthropology. (Wimer and Hunt are trying to raise $5,000 to fund their travel and other expenses through Kickstarter.com.)

As new chapters spring up in different cities across the nation, says Hunt, “Each organization has its own way of doing things.” In Chicago, a longtime destination for aspiring improv comics, he says the emphasis is on performance; the referee can make wrestlers do anything he wants—Hokey Pokey included. In careerist D.C., CLAW is super-competitive, with wrestlers at each other’s throats to raise the most money for charity. And in the small, working-class city of Kingston, in New York’s Hudson Valley, matches emphasize the spirit of public service, with wrestlers campaigning for charities they themselves benefited from.
But as the sport has spread, so have injuries associated with it. One wrestler aggravated a previous back injury after a brutal bout; another had to bow out because of tendonitis. All this in addition to the now-infamous incident at Blue Moon Diner in February, where the sound of a wrestler’s arm breaking echoed throughout the audience. “Like a regular sport, they’re fighting through their injuries,” says Hunt. “It’s a serious thing.”

Though painful, it makes for rich documentary material. Hunt and Wimer say they’re planning to tag along with the CLAW roadshow next spring, when representatives will hand-deliver the gospel of sexy women arm wrestling for charity to smaller communities across the nation. Easier to document for the local filmmakers will be a potential CLAW national championship, to be held in town next year.

As for the competitive spirit that makes CLAW a fun night out, Hunt and Wimer have plenty, too. “We are the best lady arm wrestling documentarians that have ever lived—ever, in the history of the world,” says Hunt. 

Play it forward

By the time you read this Live Arts will have announced its 2011-2012 season. This year’s committee was led by Sara Holdren, a production assistant and regular theater presence around town. Holdren writes in the announcement that the season’s selections try to “distill and maintain the spirit of Live Arts, while branching out into ever new and exciting territory.” (Expect a permanent replacement for Satch Huizenga, the producing artistic director who resigned in December, in the coming months.)

So how’d they do? The season opens with Superior Donuts in October, Tracy Letts’ comedy about a Chicago sweet shop and its former radical owner. Later, Live Arts mines the early 20th century with the French playwright Georges Feydeau’s 1907 work, A Flea in Her Ear (March 2012) and the Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped (May 2012).

And then there are the surefire blockbusters: Mel Brooks’ film classic-turned-Broadway classic The Producers opens in December. The much-loved musical Hairspray, based on the movie by John Waters, opens in July 2012.

Lest we forget the fare that will receive short runs, the local comedy writer Denise Stewart will reprise her recent autobiographical one-woman show Dirty Barbie & Other Girlhood Tales in late November. A new theater ensemble called Melanin will also premiere; the group, run by Leslie Baskfield, Clinton Johnston, Ray Smith and Jared Ivory, is dedicated to “exploring works of African-American artists and interpreting works through an African-American perspective” and will put on three one-night-onlys: Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Oak and Ivy.

See the complete announcement on the Feedback blog at c-ville.com.

 

Live Arts announces its 2011-2012 season

Live Arts announced its 2011-2012 season last night. This year’s committee was led by Sara Holdren, a production assistant and regular theater presence around town. Holdren writes in the announcement that the season’s selections try to “distill and maintain the spirit of Live Arts, while branching out into ever new and exciting territory.” (Expect a permanent replacement for Satch Huizenga, the producing artistic director who resigned in December, in the coming months.)

So how’d they do? The season opens with Superior Donuts in October, Tracy Letts’ comedy about a Chicago sweet shop and its former-radical owner. Later, Live Arts mines the early 20th century with the French playwright Georges Feydeau’s 1907 work, A Flea in Her Ear (March 2012) and the Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped (May 2012).

And then there are the surefire blockbusters: Mel Brooks’ film classic-turned-Broadway classic The Producers opens in December. The much-loved musical Hairspray, based on the movie by John Waters, opens in July 2012.

Lest we forget the fare that will receive short runs, the local comedy writer Denise Stewart will reprise her recent autobiographical one-woman show Dirty Barbie & Other Girlhood Tales in late November. A new theater ensemble called Melanin will also premiere; the group, run by Leslie Baskfield, Clinton Johnston, Ray Smith and Jared Ivory, is dedicated to “exploring works of African-American artists and interpreting works through an African-American perspective” and will put on three one-night-onlys: Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Oak and Ivy.

The complete list is below.

  • October 7-8, 2011: Friends with Benefits, presented by Joel Jones, Michael Parent and friends.
  • October 8, 2011: A Song for Coretta, by Pearl Cleage, directed by Leslie Baskfield and Ray Smith.
  • October 21-November 19, 2011: Superior Donuts, by Tracy Letts, directed by Chris Baumer.
  • November 5, 2011: The Live Arts Gala.
  • November 30-December 3: Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales, written and performed by Denise Stewart.
  • December 3, 2011: Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Cilnton Johnston.
  • December 9, 2011-January 14, 2012: The Producers, by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, directed by Matt Joslyn.
  • January 28, 2012: 24/7, presented by the Whole Theater.
  • February 3-18, 2012: This is Not a Pipe Dream, by Barry Kornhauser, directed by Will Rucker (Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble production).
  • February 24-25, 2012: From Bondage to Promise, directed by Leslie Baskfield and Clinton Johnston.
  • March 2-24, 2012: A Flea in Her Ear, by Georges Feydeau, directed by Boomie Pedersen.
  • April 20-May 12, 2012: Adding Machine: A Musical, by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt, directed by Bree Luck.
  • May 12, 2012: Oak and Ivy, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, directed by Jared Ivory.
  • May 18-June 9, 2012: He Who Gets Slapped, by Leonid Andreyev, directed by Sara Holdren.
  • July 13-August 4, 2012: Hairspray, by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan.

What do you think of this year’s Live Arts season?

The benefits of being press-shy

As a person who spends hours each week thumbing through press releases, I’ve come to appreciate artists who avoid the necessary evil of self-promotion and allow the reputation of their art to precede what they have to say about it. Of course, an artist has to reach a certain level of notoriety before anybody cares that you’re not self-promoting—how you get there is anyone’s guess.

Such has been the case with the famously press-shy director Terrence Malick, whose fifth feature in four decades, Tree of Life, won the Palme D’or at Cannes this week. There’s been a big, and not unexpected, to-do about how Malick wouldn’t walk the red carpet or appear any press conferences. What, exactly, is this guy’s deal?

An conversation with the film’s production designer Jack Fisk, the husband of Sissy Spacek who lives locally, provides some interesting insight into what makes Malick tick. From the Los Angeles Times:

"It turns out Malick is a huge fan of Zoolander, Stiller’s 2001 send-up of fashion fabulousness—so much so that for Malick’s birthday one year, Stiller dressed up as the character Derek Zoolander, made a personalized video card and sent it to the director. ‘I think Zoolander is one of Terry’s favorite movies ever,’ said Jack Fisk, Malick’s longtime production designer, who has known him for nearly 40 years. ‘He watches it all the time, and he likes quoting it.’"

Wait—did Jack Fisk just say that this very serious American filmmaker’s favorite movie is Zoolander? 

Details like this are especially delicious when they’re hard to come by.

What do these things have in common?

What’s going on this weekend?

First things first: It’s UVA graduation, so make your restaurant reservations if you haven’t already. And onward… 

Some nice bands tonight at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar: Vandaveer is a prolific D.C.-based songwriter who has apparently been called his generation’s Nick Drake, which doesn’t sound so far off. Opening is Nettles, a new local band-to-see whose frontman Guion Pratt is, judging by his lyrics, as good a poet as he is a songwriter. Details are here.

In this week’s Feedback column, I write about Dzian!’s last show, a "The Love Boat"-themed affair that will usher its members out of town. Dzian! has tasked itself with the considerable task of rewriting rock and roll with Asian influence—which is a lot more fun than it sounds. Read about it here.

Farewell, Dzian!

Six Degrees of Separation is the story of a young man who goes from door to door, winning entry into various estates by convincing rich people that he is the son of Sidney Poitier—which, of course, he is not. The show opens tonight at Live Arts, which wraps up its inaugural Shorts Festival this weekend as well. Details are here.

The Importance of Being Earnest shows through the weekend at Four County Players, but makes the switch over to the Hamner next weekend (Earnest details are here); for now, the Hamner is hosting Ocean View Odyssey, the local playwright Robert Wray’s update of The Odyssey, about a New York lawyer who returns to his home state of Virginia. Details.

Even if you’ve never listened to The Blind Boys of Alabama, you’ve almost certainly heard them—the performance of “I Shall Not Walk Alone” that so delicately characterized Sawyer’s back story in "Lost"? Them. The rendition of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” that was easily the best theme song for "The Wire." Them too. Even Prince agrees (below): Saturday night at the Jefferson Theater is going to be a killer show. Jim Waive opens.

What’re you up to this weekend?

 

Donor gives Glenmore house to the Paramount Theater

The Paramount Theater announced yesterday that a longtime supporter will donate the proceeds from the sale of a home in Glenmore to the Paramount Theater Foundation. Acccording to the release, the sale of Mary Helen Jessup’s home takes a big chunk out of the $1.5 million in mortgage loans the theater still owes on restorations. 

"The golf-front residence, located a short walk from the Glenmore clubhouse, is a very attractive 3,600 square foot, home, with an enchanting, completely fenced back yard," reads the release. Other amenities include full golf membership to Glenmore Country Club, 12′ ceilings and, of course, the knowledge that your purchase went to help the local arts.

The house is listed at $799,000.

Fore!

 

Categories
Living

Dzian!'s last show will be "The Love Boat"-themed

When saying the name of the band Dzian!, smile and click your thumbs in the air. Dzian! Go ahead, do it—it feels good. Dzian!! Now savor it. It may be your last chance to do so while the band has a show on the local music calendar (at The Bridge, May 21), creating a void on the local scene that no one is likely to fill.

When you say Dzian!, give a thumbs up. The Asian-inspired surf-rock group plays a nautical farewell show at The Bridge/PAI on May 21, with performances from the Nakashi Dancers, Fire in the Belly Dance and Catherine Monnes.

Aside from the whole thumbs up thing, no rock band in town is likely to be as educated—or as fun—as the world-surf rock group. Over the last two years Dzian! has played a variety of normal venues (The Box, the Tea Bazaar) around town, and not-so-normal ones like Fashion Square Mall and St. Anne’s-Belfield School, where a confused student is said to have wondered whether Dzian!’s members, who cut a faux-glamorous figure in concert, were middle schoolers allowed to dress themselves for the first time that day.

Frontman Wendy Hsu says that Dzian! in its inception aspired to “a fashionable coolness from the ’30s through the ’80s in Taiwan.” She originally envisioned the group as a Nakashi band, referring to a genre that started on the streets of Taiwan in the 1930s, when a Japanese occupation tossed traditional Taiwanese music in a blender with a world of pop influences. By the time Hsu, who this month finished a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, caught her first Nakashi show, it was the late 1980s, and she was 8 years old. She says her parents covered her eyes so that she couldn’t see the bawdy theatrics that Nakashi picked up in its transition from the traditional tea rooms to the stage.

But censoring Nakashi only increased its allure, and two decades later Dzian! was born. Hsu refers to the band on her blog as a form of “a post-fieldwork, post-academic project of public scholarship,” intended to inject Asia and Asian-America into the world of rock music. “The band has really grown to be more than just Nakashi,” she says, filtering a variety of other musics through the garage rock lens.

A new EP, to be released at the going-away show, is called Ali Shan A’ Go-Go. It begins with the sound of a vintage tube radio tuning in to a Chinese broadcast. Like how Brian Wilson wished they could be California girls, on Ali Shan A’ Go-Go Dzian! wishes that all music could be American music. The first track, “Moon Over Ruined Castle,” is a Japanese song that Hsu grew up hearing. Dzian! performs it in the style of Eleki, a Japanese mode named for the electric guitar that brought traditional playing styles to bear on surf rock, by bands like The Ventures and The Shadows.

Two other songs on Ali Shan A’ Go-Go are popular Taiwanese nursery rhymes that Hsu reworked over a boring winter break. “Ali Shan,” the title track, celebrates the beauty of a famous mountain. Hsu’s version riffs on the Shadow Music tradition, surf rock that was Thailand’s answer to Japanese Eleki. A fourth track, “Œvilteen,” is an original song by Jonathan Zorn, the guitarist and computer music composer, who also mixed and mastered the EP.

Hsu says that the Nakashi tradition was mostly “functional music,” an accessory to whatever else is happening in the room. Which sort of explains why they would play at the mall or at a high school, and why they might get a kick out of hosting a “The Love Boat”-themed going-away concert. (Recommended attire is “cruise casual.”)

But the cruise ship show will also usher Dzian! out of town. Hsu moves to Los Angeles for a post-doctoral fellowship at Occidental College this summer, and most the band’s other members will also move West. Which brings Hsu to one of the best things about being in a band that plays functional music. “You can play it anywhere,” she says.

Filmmakers launch fund drive for CLAW movie

Looks like Kickstarter is here to stay, folks, and the latest notable local project posted to the fundraising website is a film by Brian Wimer and Billy Hunt "about the revolution currently happening in women’s arm wrestling." They’re talking about CLAW, of course, the organization that started as the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers that’s now metastasizing to cities nationwide under the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers banner. (Read all about CLAW here and here.)

Hunt is a local photographer and Wimer a filmmaker behind a rash of zombie activities (including the Danger.Zombies.5k.Run). The pair, who have photographed CLAW since its beginnings, is looking to raise a total of $5,000 over the course of about a month to bankroll an adventure that will allow them to document the spread of the lady arm wrestling phenomenon.

Check out their pitch below, with lots of great CLAW footage.

Taking a spin with Astronomers’ new album, Size Matters

Gotta admit—I’ve been turned off by Astronomers in concert, mostly because the band is almost too good for its own good. All that super-clean shredding can make you feel like you’re watching a bunch of robots, designed to provide danceable alternative music for fans of Muse, The Strokes and Minus the Bear. But the band’s great new album, Size Matters (listen now) files down the band’s glossiest edges, and pulls into view the group’s essential charm, lost unto me until now: Astronomers is an endearingly nerdy band.

Take, as an extreme example, one of the album’s best cuts, “Tatterdemalion.” It isn’t some gawdy Muse-indebted fist-pumper about an imaginary world-historical conflict; it’s titled for a supervillain in the Marvel comics universe. The tune is written in 5/4 time, which can lend the impression (especially in concert) that a rock band is trying too hard, sometimes at the expense of emotional depth. But a layer of lush harmonies bury the song’s jagged rhythm, culminating in a well-arranged, gorgeous head-bobber. And like a tatterdemalion, the song shows in its tatters that it’s human after all.

So what I thought was a glossy, alienating ambition is in fact sharp attention to detail that’s exhilirating to hear on Size Matters. It also makes the group easier to in the local scene: the group’s intergalactic themes puts them in Corsair’s camp, and their endearing nerdiness puts them up against the Hilarious Posters. All this makes me look forward to checking out Astronomers with a fresh perspective at the band’s release show on May 27 at the Southern. And as luck may have it, the Posters have also just finished a disc to be released at the very same show.

Look for a proper review of Size Matters in next week’s C-VILLE.

What do you think of Astronomers new album?

What’s going on this weekend?

If you missed the garage three-piece Red Rattles when they opened for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion earlier this week, catch them tonight at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. Also on the bill is a band composed of all white guys called Black Girls, who play appealing soul music. Details are here. (Read a recent Feedback column about Red Rattles here.)

Black Girls, the band

Black Girls from Duy Nguyen on Vimeo.

On Saturday night, The Southern has the literate Minneapolis-by-way-of-Hawaii songwriter Mason Jennings, a songwriter of many voices who pens hits with hints of Dylan and The Doors and a dose of appealing sloppiness. Opening is Charlottesville’s finest songwriter Sarah White, who announced earlier today via twitter that she’s joined the Dave Matthews Band Caravan date for Atlantic City, New Jersey. Wow!

Mason Jennings at the Southern Saturday.

Those who have recently walked around Paris for hours in search of the Musée National Picasso only to find it closed for renovation—guilty, sadly—will be pleased to see that the Picasso exhibit at the newly-reopened Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, "Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris," is still open. But the show closes May 15, so this weekend is the last chance for locals to take a field trip. That’s right, a field trip!

Speaking of, take a ride up the mountain to Thomas Jefferson’s house this weekend for the Monticello Wine Festival, where you can "enjoy the splendor of spring while tasting Virginia’s best selection of wines." Can’t argue with that. Go.

What’re you up to this weekend?