BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE MON. & TUES., OCT. 25 & 26 THERE AREN'T MANY ...
OWN MASSACRE
MON. & TUES.,
OCT. 25 & 26
THERE AREN'T MANY people in music quite like Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe. Remote, evasive, even sometimes combative, Newcombe is also (to put it mildly) preoccupied with cults, conspiracies, covert intelligence networks like the CIA, mind control and (of course) late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, around whom no small suggestion of whispered conspiracy and tragic myth still swirls. (Newcombe insists on referring to Jones in the present tense, as if Jones is still alive.)
One doesn't know whether to laugh or cringe at his elliptical, megalomaniacal responses to interview questions. Is he delusional or is he aware of the hidden ways that power interconnects? Or is he just fucking with your head? Luckily, his music renders all of the above moot-except for the fucking-with-your-head part. Sort of. Certainly, as Newcombe's chosen band name would suggest, the Brian Jonestown Massacre doesn't shy away from psychedelia. But Newcombe's impenetrability makes the cohesive, vulnerable grace of his music all the more rewarding. He may "not have very good social skills," as one band member (one of more than 50, actually, who've passed through the band) once put it, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from his work-except that Newcombe lets his weaknesses hang out.
The latest album And This Is Our Music opens with what sounds like a very real answering-machine message from a woman wronged-and, even before he utters a word, Newcombe seems quite believable as the "fucking asshole" she says he is. From there, though, Our Music is tender sadness all the way. Newcombe may do a sorry job conveying his humanity otherwise, but he does so with flying colors where it really matters. He also must be applauded for having a body of more than 200 recorded songs, putting out albums whenever he can and touring regardless of whether he's promoted an album. Whether that's bad business or not, he's still out there doing it. And, despite the obvious retro leanings of his stuff, he makes retro respectable in a way most of these other garage clowns can't even touch. He doesn't deviate much from his general approach (lilting, psychedelic rock, sometimes with a British shoegaze twist, sometimes more bluesy), but each album has surprising continuity and stands apart from the rest.
Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts.), 212-260-4700; 8, $12, $10 adv.
SABY REYES-KULKARNI
AL GREEN
THURS. & SAT.,
OCT. 21 & 23
SINCE FOUNDING HIS own church and becoming a reverend in 1976, Al Green has had a bumpy, on-again, off-again relationship with secular music. Thankfully, he's back at it. For last year's I Can't Stop, his first secular album since 1995's Your Heart's in Good Hands, Green reunited with longtime producer and collaborator Willie Mitchell-the man whom Green lovingly refers to as "Poppa"-as well as many of the musicians the pair worked with on Green's run of classic 70s hits, which includes "Take Me to the River" and "Let's Stay Together" among others. (Mitchell and Green worked together last on 1995's He Is the Light, but hadn't done an R&B album since 1976's Have a Good Time.)
Green would have to be in some serious denial to shun the intense sensuality that landed him atop the charts in the first place and, given his flip-flopping, you might expect some confusion on his part. But whatever's made Green change his mind several times hasn't prevented him from keeping his sense of humor about the whole thing. Though he still firmly insists that spiritual and sensual should be kept separate "like oil and water," he is refreshingly pragmatic.
"Every day ain't Sunday," he quips, "'cuz Monday, I gotta go to work!"
Well-publicized past demons aside, at 58 the man's jovial manner is contagious. And he is refreshingly candid about his ministry not being taken seriously:
"When they [the gospel community] see me sing what I sing about God, they gonna say, 'Man, you jokin me,' and I understand that. But, if God don't have nothin' to do with your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I don't know what in the world he has to do with your Sunday. Everyone got here by either falling in love, being married or...just simply fooling around. You got here some kinda way!"
In any case, his current set list reflects both his gospel and R&B material. And, when it comes to matters of good taste, he runs his work past a higher authority before anyone else: his own mother. "If Mom likes it," he enthuses, "I don't care what the other folks think!"
Thurs. at Apollo Theater, 253 W. 125th St. (betw. Frederick Douglass & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvds.); 212-531-5303, 8, $52-$87. Sat. at Beacon Theater, 2124 B'way (74th St.), 212-496-7070; 8, $45-$85.
SABY REYES-KULKARNI
SI*Sé
MON., OCT. 25
THE FASTEST WAY to describe the downtempo jungle Latonica of Si*Sé is thusly: Mosquitos rooming at the Hotel Costes. Like Chris Root's quaintly quirky Braziliana, this Si*Sé has its own similar story at its root. Currently based in New York City, multi-instrumentalist Cliff Cristafaro (also known as DJ U.F. Low) and Dominican Republic-reared singer/jungle DJ Carol C make a band. Unlike the guitar-and-organ-drenched Mosquitos' display of 60s bossa/samba, Si*Sé's equally sandy, equitably soft-shoe electronic music is geared toward a more futurist esthetic. Same vibe, different century.
That said, the urban diaspora unveiled by the muffling drum 'n' bass duo on their first (and only) eponymous Luaka Bop CD of 2001 found them fusing everything from the supple funk of the Fugees and eerie jazz of Everything But the Girl with the precociously bopping pop of Basia in their electrosamba mix, all with Carol's dreamtime vocals floating above their Mexicali rosiness. And, honestly-that's a very good thing, despite what you might think of the influences. From the chipper, mellow cover of Oran Juice Jones' "The Rain," the rarified reggae of "Burbuja," the Brazilian c&w of "Lullaby" to its trip trejo-hopping "Dolemite" and "Bizcocho Amargo," their debut was delicious.
It must've been. With only one CD under their belt, the duo-now expanded to a quintet-created a conjunto-crushed velvet-loving cult around the simmering sound of its debut, an ethnotronica you're dying to hear more of.
Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778; 11, $10.
A.D. AMOROSI
TINARIWEN
TUES. & WEDS.,
OCT. 26 & 27
WHEN THE 2000s roll on and critics point toward the striped-white stripped-bare blues of the usual Caucasian suspects, pray they'll include the baleful, inventive blues of Tinariwen in their VH1-like surveys. I can't imagine I Love the 2000s laughing about the twitching electric guitars of the mostly Mali-born ensemble, whose 10 members hid throughout Libya and Algeria for years due to their lyrics, which mix personal politics and illustrative imagery. Can't see Hal Sparks yucking it up about the revolution that was the Touaregs' move from traditions of violins and lutes to chicken-hypnotizing electric guitars.
But that's what Tinariwen did and do: help fuel a revolution in sound and poetry. The stripped, clicking blues gallop of its guitars-think a minimalist-minded Keith Richards joining Television's Lloyd and Verlaine at their steadiest-is as hypnotic as its mix of creeping call-and-response vocals, ancient wails and ageless lyrical concerns, dire and dear. Though 2002's debut, Radio Tisdas, was stark, 2004's Amassakoul is starker still, yet more diverse. The Television reference is important to note. Amassakoul's best songs tangle with flat, un-dubbed, under-produced scraggles and plucks of gnarly guitars, reminiscent of Marquee Moon's most open prairies. Their in-tandem approach makes the tiniest whining high-pitched solo winces throughout "Chatma" and the brambling "Amidinin" stick out. But the guttural hiccupping blues of "Oualahila Ar Tesninam" seals tight those same desert spaces with a claustrophobic energy, a mix of sneering lead vocals, blessed-out background chants and a megaphone's interruptive message. Like the rest of Amassakoul, "Oualahila Ar Tesninam" asks of its countrymen to "wake up" and remove "the poison in your blood"-a message that rings as clear in the deserts of the Sahara as it does the basements of Brooklyn or the Mississippi Delta that inspired Tinariwen's musical revolution.
Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778; 7:30 & 9:30, $20.
A.D. AMOROSI
RATATAT, JUNIOR BOYS, MOUSE ON MARS
SAT., OCT. 23
THE ROCKTRONICS OF Mike "Snake" Stroud (guitarist for Ben Kweller and Dashboard Confessional) and rhythm master Evan Mast (who doubles as lap-topper ''E*Vax") roll hiphop's minute into its choppy, happy atmospheric mix on Ratatat's self-titled debut CD. There's a sleekness that finds the duo on the analog synth/slick guitar tip that will remind you at first of Daft Punk. That won't last long. Ratatat is too roughshod to sound fussy and French. Yet the duo never lose sight (or sound) of the grandeur its melodies deserve.
That too should be said of Junior Boys. Last Exit has all the makings of something sleek-the space-funk bass, the antiquated Anglo Electro, Jeremy Greenspan's Soft-Spandau soul-boy vocals. Yet before you can start singing "True," tunes like "Bellona" prove to be gruff epiphanies toward something more raw.
Oddly enough, the headliner is Düsseldorf's Mouse on Mars. Always the glitchy bridesmaid of lo-fi melodicism, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma-after darned nearly a decade of releasing quietly mad albums filled with slivers of light and shade-have torn open the curtains and let out the big orb for Radical Connector. Rather than change their mordant songs-sung-blue or the twittering glitch appeal, they've simply super-sized the melodies for something more opulent and wide on tunes like "Wipe That Sound."
Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 9, $14.
A.D. AMOROSI
ANTHONY DAVID & ANGELA JOHNSON
WEDS., OCT. 20
TACKED ONTO A long bill that includes the release party for the new Roches sisters CD and Julian Fleisher and Martha Plimpton's swashbuckling cabaret of Escape from LA comes something swarthier and more soulful-two of mod R&B best newbies, Anthony David and Angela Johnson. Nearly direct from Atlanta's Apache Café-home to the likes of India Arie and Van Hunt, Anthony David brings a voice that's familiar and-
Scratch that. Rather, it's his shimmering acoustic guitar-based songwriting and his smoothly swallowed voice that are familiar to those who love Arie since David spent time in India's ensemble, singing and songsmithing. But nothing can prepare for what he brings to his debut CD, 3 Chords & the Truth. Within the walls of Truth there's sumptuous gruffness reminiscent of Bill Withers' weathered silk degrees with just a hint of Olu Dara-the fluid, husky voice, the flickering acoustic esthetic, the weary wordy bluntness mired in damnable secrets. But make no mistake. This is no retro. Strange acoustic-hop rhythms and slinky intimate vocal nuances make this so new and so sexy, it's creepy. Listen to the sweet urban hang of "Skyline" and the twittering sensual "Georgia Peach" and prepare thyself for a miracle. A minor miracle, but one stunning nonetheless is the hook up of Angela Johnson.
Slow, rolling funk-phonia is no mystery to the Utica native, what with her having driven the soul train nightly as singer for Cooly's Hot Box as well as vocalising with house heads like Junior Sanchez. But on her own, she packages all the graceful goodness of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway's sinewy heartbroken romanticism into one bundle of bliss on her debut CD, They Don't Know. Though ripe with the influences of soul's masters (especially Stevie Wonder on "Don't Wanna Be the One"), Johnson, the writer and the singer, is on the road to forging a unique, delectable groove. Dig.
Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778; 11, $12.
A.D. AMOROSI
WHITE CHOCOLATE
THROUGH WEDS., DEC. 1
IMAGINE PHILLIPE DE MONTEBELLO, that pompous director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wearing a birka, a keffiya or even a sheitl. Like the Mona Lisa with a moustache, time would transform this revisionist image into contemporary idiom. In other words, we'd get used to it.
That's the premise as well as the conclusion to White Chocolate, William Hamilton's frothy comedy about an Upper West Side couple, Deborah Beale, a Jewish socialite and her blueblood WASP husband, Brandon, who, on the eve of his appointment to that exalted post-Phillipe de Montebello's, that is-wake to discover that their skin has turned black. Not only that, but their daughter cannot recognize them.
If only their conundrum were truly challenging, and not just embracing of our guilt-ridden liberalism, this might have made an engaging evening. As it stands, however, Hamilton, a New Yorker cartoonist, has rendered a comic sketch with the grace of Erte, shades of Cole Porter and the substance of John Kerry. At its best, Chocolate has some terrific dialogue, busting into clichés and jokes about color, some of which are truly white, instead of right. But at their worst, these repeated behaviors play on the tackiest elements as in the plethora of black musicals where stereotypical racial behaviors, intentionally or not, evoke the mockery that should insult rather than exalt.
In this respect, Julie Halston renders the most annoying caricature as Brandon's anti-Semitic sister, who, imitating their racial transformation, dons an Aunt Jemima costume flaunting a martini shaker, as though she were hurling herself through the set of Gone with the Wind. Apparently, she just doesn't want to get it. Erik Laray Harvey as the gay buppy, and Brandon's opponent, is somewhat sassier at playing the race card than Reg E. Cathey as the central character, but then his is a thankless role unto the end.
As the pushy Jewish wife and gossip columnist, Lynn Whitfield is essentially slick and apropos, until director David Schweizer pushes the action into the shrill and hysterical discovery scenes of Act II. With nothing new to discover, we're left to obvious proclamations such as, it's too bad that "we just can't see through race to see who people really are." Designer James Noone, on the other hand, captures the certain color scheme for their Upper West Side triplex with black and white tiled floors, gray curtains and white walls that are suspiciously black around the edges. Unfortunately, his cardboard set pieces too quickly sum it up.
Century Center for the Performing Arts, 111 E. 15th St. (betw. Union Sq. E. & Irving Pl.), 212-239-6200; Tues.-Sun. at 8, Weds. & Sat. at 3 & 8, $55-$60.
ISA GOLDBERG
ZITO'S PORTRAITS
IF YOU HAD your portrait painted, what would you want the world to see, to know about you? Paintings done in oil can last for thousands of years. What face would you make? What clothing would you wear? And what found object would you choose-a muffler perhaps, a bar stool, a tv tray?
As lovers of art, we may know and even inspire artists, but we rarely have the chance to join in the act of creation. Enter Zito's Lower East Side Studio Gallery where portraits are painted on found objects and the viewer actively becomes the viewed.
To create your picture, you start by bringing a "readymade," or you can search Zito's cellar to discover your special "canvas" somewhere among the wreckage he regularly drags in off the street. Next comes the setup: You can choose to sit or stand, hang a backdrop or hold a prop. One patron brought a friend to make him laugh. Stimulated by these elements of chance, Zito begins to paint. In roughly two hours you're immortalized.
Because this is a "studio" gallery, you'll find paintings, drawings, supplies and mementos crowding the walls, floor and tables. A stripper poses on a closet door and a gimpy con artist smiles down from a cheesy mirror. A face stares out of an ashtray. One woman is seen in profile painted on a clock. Another, lost in thought, appears on a broken window. A wooden tabletop is the resting place of his father's image, a serving tray holds an anxious friend, while a car muffler displays the picture of a pretty 50s-styled Mexican girl.
Zito also paints from photographs, but scanning the narrow storefront studio it's his portraits done from life that grab your attention. Although he works in different styles, from graphic pop to mock-Renaissance, his best work, I believe, is his relaxed approach. Using colorful brushy strokes of paint, Zito focuses in on the eyes, capturing the sitter's presence and slight self-consciousness.
Viewing Zito's portraiture and considering the choices made by his sitters should stimulate your own imagination. What would you choose to communicate, how would you pose, and what found object would best symbolize your ideas? Art, your reflection and garbage will never look the same again.
Zito Studio Gallery, 122 Ludlow St. (betw. Rivington & Delancey Sts.), 646-602-2338; Weds.-Sun. 12-7, free (portraits range in price).
JULIA MORTON
ARMAGEDDON
THROUGH SUN., OCT. 31
ANIMAL IS A QUARTERLY MAGAZINE; Animal is an art gallery; Animal is an artist's representative; Animal is the brainchild of Matthew Trumino. The gallery's current show, Armageddon, is running now at the Animal Gallery.
Five years ago Trumino turned his love of graphics and visual art into an organization that presents, publishes and promotes new artists. Despite his training in commercial art and limited knowledge of fine-art practices, the artistic results are impressive.
During a quick walk through the narrow storefront gallery, you are filled with the energy of authentic visual emotion. Trumino is open to just about anything-the gallery does not preach adherence to one idea-but his advertising esthetic shows in his choosing works that display an instant impact. That said, the current show offers a wide range of views and artistic styles.
Matos' Pretty Girls Make Graves is a large, soft-focus watercolor. Matos has managed to give the piece a layered appearance. We seem to be staring into a milky pool filled with floating bits of cartoons, bodies and other objects.
Francisco Guerrero has painted a straightforward pop image of a bikini-clad woman, sitting in a vile haze, wearing a gas mask. Diana Garrido's Efficiency uses an emotional, painterly approach to depict a cramped family of three preparing food.
Several artists refer to their childhoods using comic-book figures, sports images, childish colors and toys. Wombat paints cropped box covers taken from toy models of tanks and planes to comment on the show's end-of-the-world theme. Travis Lindquist creates Prototypes, toys made of found toys that are reassembled-for example, a sweet peachy plastic baby with large mincing teeth set into the face.
Asif Mian, a Palestinian artist, paints a raw-edged canvas with a Mickey Mouse-like character running, his head blown off, his body on fire and smoke pouring out his ass. Michael Ricardo Andreev creates shiny black sculpted relief landscapes that contrast sections of withered trees and barren grounds with lush, symbolic gardens of paradise.
Graffiti is another influence that shows up repeatedly, as in the work of John Sebastian, who uses a moody combination of spray paint, lettering and stencils to create thoughtful exploration of isolation in Today's Mathematics.
Animal, the magazine, features many artists in its pages; thanks to the support of Trumino's friends in advertising, some of the artists are living off their art. And thanks to the internet, cheaper magazine printing and advertisers who want a "street" look, artists who find the "art world" gallery system unbreakable or undesirable can now find other means to show and sell their art.
Animal Gallery, 437 E. 9th St. (betw. Ave. A & 1st Ave.), 212-460-8125; 1-7, free.
JULIA MORTON
THE SKULL PROJECT
THROUGH TUES., NOV. 2
BY THE 1980s the penetration of American culture in Mexico was well underway, especially in our upscale suburban neighborhood, where Halloween was celebrated year after year. The influence of the holiday was reinforced by the private bilingual school that my sister and I attended, where we were encouraged to wear costumes. Other children made fun of me back in the pre-Harry Potter days; to my classmates, a robe and a pointed-hat constituted not a wizard, but some form of kiddy-drag. To most Mexicans, witching was solely a female domain.
Despite the traumas caused by my early revolutionary forays into gender-bending, late October was always a time I looked forward to. Some of the best parts of growing up in Mexico were the preparations for the Day of the Dead, celebrated on Nov. 2. It was right that our school educated us on our national traditions and did not let us get totally seduced by Americana. In art class, we would make sugar skulls and carved-paper place mats for a Dia de los Muertos altar. In history class, we learned about syncretism, which means the fusion of differing belief systems; the holiday was created from the confluence between the Catholic All-Saints Day and pre-Hispanic indigenous customs.
A couple days ago in the East Village, I ran into another example of syncretism. The Skull Project, created by artist Paul Wirhun and currently featured at the cemetery yard of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, revived memories of my childhood dealings with the macabre, of my sugar-skull-making youth. Wirhun, who learned the craft of egg-batiking (egg painting) from his Ukrainian mother, calls it a "public art ritual," its purpose to commemorate the Iraq War dead. People are handed a dyed-black egg and asked to create an image of a skull by applying a bleaching process devised by the artist. The skull eggs are then placed in piles representing the different nationalities of those who lost their lives; the goal is to have 15,000 to 37,000 eggs representing the known casualties.
"In Ukraine, eggs are used as talismans," Wirhun told me. "Eggs are a symbol of life, and in this project they represent its opposite."
The project has also been inspired by American-Indian traditions (it was inaugurated with a ceremony calling on the four cardinal directions) as well as Santería and its cult of the ancestors (Wirhun is a practitioner). The choice of St. Mark's as a venue brings added significance; founded by Peter Stuyvesant, it was one of the first European religious sites in Manhattan. When I asked the artist whether he had also been influenced by the Mexican holiday, he told me he had originally meant to close the project on Nov. 2 because of the national elections. The coincidence between the Day of the Dead and the elections is, we agreed, uncanny.
The cemetery yard of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 E. 10th St. (2nd Ave.), 917-279-4996, 11-dusk, free.
HECTOR MEZA
LORI NIX: LOST
THROUGH TUES., NOV. 2
LIKE MUCH OF HER previous work, the images that compose Lori Nix's new series, "Lost," cleverly blur the line between truth and illusion. By photographing miniature dioramas of natural settings that incorporate tiny plastic figurines and children's toys, Nix creates artificial landscapes heavily laden with impending doom. The tiny scale of her original designs is all but forgotten in the final product: Each photograph is as epical and surreal as any of Gregory Crewdson's monumental constructions.
For Nix, tiny details inform each open-ended narrative, so it's important to view these photographs up close. In California Forest Fire a silver campervan is parked along the banks of a quiet stream. Someone's shirt and jeans dry on the clothesline nearby and a tv antennae protrudes from the trailer. Inside, the campers are still relaxing, totally oblivious to the approaching conflagration.
There is something darkly comical about the dopey ignorance displayed in Nix's narratives. Her characters are reminiscent of the morons who die first in b-movies-they're the kind of lamebrains who go off to take a piss just as the killer approaches. In Outpost, a tiny figure is seen hitchhiking along a desolate country road, surrounded only by three enormous satellite dishes channeling something in the night sky beyond. The tiny hitchhiker sticks his thumb out, as if he truly believes this action could make a car appear here.
Each of the 10 photographs in "Lost" shines with the kind of vibrant color that can only appear in movies-and dreams. Theatrical lighting lends an uncanny quality here; In Nix's vision, each sky is ominously ablaze and every landscape seems both strange and familiar.
Alona Kagan Gallery, 540 W. 29th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-560-0670; 10-6, free.
LAUREL ANGRIST
GOOD SAMARITANS
THROUGH SUN., OCT. 24
IN THE LAND OF "churches and liquor stores," on a set lit from its high, stained ceiling by 18 unsparing fluorescent banks (a subterranean space with all the charm of your school cafeteria or a bingo hall), Good Samaritans has Richard Maxwell's latest pair of average Americans traipsing through the throes of the mundane and find-hollers! songs! life's blunt edge!
Rosemary (Rosemary Allen) has 35 years as intake coordinator and rehab counselor at "ARC," which takes an Evangelical perspective "and expects its clients to follow those principles." Newcomer Kevin (Kevin Hurley) arrives on the zonk with a judge's order in his plastic bag then spews names of gambling havens from Monaco and Geneva to Aruba and Surinam.
"I will make it my business to make your business my business," Rosemary counters, adding that neither of them wants him to be there, that being "what we have in common."
He'll get a pass to play Lotto: she'll have him bring back bulk Clorox with a two-for-one coupon. Rose doesn't know computers, knows people who do; Kevin still uses DOS because he "got tired of asking friends for help all the time."
Her soliloquy on 50-year-old backseat sexcapades precedes his mounting one of the barren hall's tables to recite his appetite for stimulants. These two have a future, if that's not giving the obvious away.
In a phone interview, the writer/director said, "Rosemary is a social worker with a clear idea of right and wrong. Kevin has a clear idea of what's fun and what isn't. When you put these people in a situation, conflict arises-especially because one is in a position of authority, and one isn't. It can be seen as an allegory," Maxwell added, "because that comes out whenever you're dealing with good and bad."
From the buzz Maxwell generated on the theater scene-with a 1999 Obie for House (his self-described Greek tragedy in a normal household), accolades for Caveman and Drummer Wanted, plus a nod from Entertainment Weekly as an entertainer of note, and with his incursion into classics, Henry IV, Pt.1, produced at BAM and then panned in the press last year-the difference between what he's making and conventional theater is night and day. From sets that make the shoebox seem replete, to songs appearing out of nowhere (or at the tap of a tape deck) and delivered in voices fixed flat to a fault, Maxwell's newly skewed the paradigm for experimental theater.
Maxwell's bare language is issued with a methodical indistinction that's retained in songs. (A reviewer commented that they talk like an instruction manual in a foreign language; Ionesco's absurdist breakthrough, The Bald Soprano, was inspired by an English phrase book.) Dull unto camp, the rigor of Maxwell's method ekes out eerie effects: An overhead sink hose is left bobbing, the hinged door bats, Rose takes Kevin's arm or he acquiesces to join her by the window. Canny consistency is required for these little triggers to arise, and Samaritans veers near recognizability as the late stakes rise. But by skirting both play-acted nobility and the gutbucket of standard theater, the hour-long play exposes its audience to queer moments that well in the marrow, a fleeting sense that materializes faintly, creeping like a deja-vu.
Born in Fargo, Maxwell interned at Steppenwolf in Chicago then mounted a reduxed Oklahoma! and found that, after nine months of philosophizing with his collaborators, the audience laughed. "My first theater experience was musical theater," he says, "and my first experience writing was writing songs for bands I played in. When I got into directing, I got to incorporate both of those worlds."
Moving to New York a decade ago, he interned at Richard Foreman's Ontological Theater; Maxwell's New York City Players meld Foreman's signature farce-of-concentration to the teeming Americana of Sam Shephard. Samaritans may look devoted to the surface, but its lurking tension drives that surface until it cracks.
St. Anne's Warehouse, 38 Water St. (betw. New Dock & Main Sts.), Dumbo, 718-254-8779; Weds.-Sat. at 8, Sun. at 3, $25.
ALAN LOCKWOOD
SORROW, SUSPENSION, ASCENSION
THROUGH. SAT., OCT. 30
THERE WERE PLENTY of snickers when Sam Taylor-Wood was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 1998. Until then, she was best known for her marriage to Jay Jopling, heir to an English Lord and Damien Hirst's dealer. Rightly so, considering her uninspired send-ups of masterpieces like Velásquez's Rokeby Venus and da Vinci's Last Supper.
Those grins turned to grimaces four years later when the 35-year-old Taylor-Wood was awarded a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery. (Francis Bacon didn't receive the honor until four years after his death.) But people bit their tongues. After all, Taylor-Wood had spent the past couple years battling colon and breast cancer. Unlike Hannah Wilke or even Annabel Clark's beautiful, sobering photos of mother Lynn Redgrave, Taylor-Wood's response to her illness was a post-recovery self-portrait in which she held a taxidermied "hare" (borrowed from Hirst, no doubt) and wore a chic, "single-breasted" suit.
Her latest consists of photos of actors crying. It is as insipid and impertinent as anything she's done thus far, and even more so for its poor timing. Maybe she's never heard of Douglas Kirkland or seen his photo of a weeping Judy Garland, but she must be familiar with her own work. Her 1994 short Method in Madness already raised the question this new series seeks to address: Is he crying, or acting?
The real question is, "Who gives a fuck?" Are we expected to feel bad for Ed Harris and Benicio Del Toro in custom-tailored shirts, staring out the window of their five-star hotel suites? And don't forget poor Hayden Christensen and Michael Pitt. Your twenties are hard enough without being good-looking and a millionaire.
What's more unnerving than Taylor-Wood thinking people care about this crap (and even more distressing than the folks over at Matthew Marks believing there's a demand for it) is that they're both right.
The day I went to see the show-a Wednesday morning-the gallery was filled with a group of Long Island and Jersey housewives come to the city.
"Today we're doing Chelsea," one of them said. Her guide-a trophy-wife neighbor with a degree in art history, dressed in a pin-stripe pantsuit-described how she had it from a reliable source that Laurence Fishburne's shoot nearly brought the artist to tears.
This is whom today's art-stars are making work for: the people who can afford to buy it.
Had irony or flat-out mockery been her intention, Taylor-Wood's photos would've been interesting, though still unseasonable. Then again, maybe Taylor-Wood had just shown Jude Law Peter Turnley's latest spread in Harper's or Alex Majoli's images from Afghanistan. Then I could see why he'd be bawling.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-243-0200; 10-6, free.
SEAN MANNING