11.29.07: Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre's Sol y Luna at the Southern Theater

Flamenco is a mature art form: it deals in burnt emotions, passion and rage kindling in flamenco’s throaty singing, mercurial guitar playing (smooth, then harshly strummed), and hard beating dance. In Sol y Luna Zorongo immerses the audience in flamenco culture, providing a program of technical excellence and vivid feeling with (thank goodness) no storyline to get in the way. But good as all the performers and musicians are, the evening belongs to two: Domingo Ortega and Susana di Palma.

Domingo Ortega, a Spanish guest artist, is a flamenco virtuoso. He can simply keep time (which is all that most of us can do), but he prefers to delay, to hit not the dull center of the beat but the sweet spot just before late, the fat, the pink of the beat. He can keep up with anything, slamming his heels as fast as the guitarist can strum, but Ortega’s not merely following the music: he appears instead to be leading it, fully in command. His arms and upper body create aggressive arcs and stances as if he was born angry, and he never loses track of his upper half in the frenetic motion of his feet. But Ortega’s virtuosity isn’t limited to flamenco technique. He is, for lack of a better word, a virtuoso seducer. He held the opening night audience breathless, hanging on every teasing leaving-off and reeling at every pyrotechnic blast, swooning over his bad-boy attitude and silky black knight-white knight suits. Watching him, I got the feeling that when the word gets out, Ortega will have a Sunday audience full of women in their underwear, and he won’t care.

Susana di Palma is an artist of a different stripe. An older performer, she still has sharp technical skills, but she keeps them a bit in reserve, bringing out a fast sequence just for the fun of it (or so it appears). What di Palma places first is her dramatic versatility and the freedom that versatility yields. Like James Sewell ballerina Sally Rousse, di Palma has a girlishness that yet never belies her age and a wisdom that never shrivels into cowardice or sentimentality. In her one solo di Palma creates such a complex character on stage—a woman who hears the music and can’t help herself, a showoff who’s half making fun of her own excess, a bawdy woman intent on hiking her skirts up as far as they’ll go, a woman crying over her heart’s wildness. She held the audience spellbound, almost afraid to disturb her with applause.

Sol y Luna is a great chance for audiences not only to become acquainted with flamenco but also to see two top-flight performers. You can take the kids, but I suggest a date instead. Flamenco’s adult fare: it takes a little living to appreciate the smoky artistry here—artistry of heartbreakers and the heartbroken.

Sol y Luna continues through December 2 at the Southern.

11.28.07: All Over But the Shouting Book-Release Party at First Ave.

Forget about The Replacements. If you live in or near Minneapolis, or just like to read about Minneapolis, you should probably read All Over But the Shouting, the new “oral history” on The Replacements compiled/written/arranged by Jim Walsh. It’s going to help you understand our civic character, our “preoccupation with everyone else’s humility,” as Grant Hart puts it in the first chapter. It’s also a good geographical study—specifically of a neighborhood in South Minneapolis, the so-called “Catholic Ghetto,” a huddle of working- and middle-class families that sent their kids to parochial school, spawning The Replacements and Soul Asylum and Jim Walsh (a lot of those dudes still live around there). You’ll also figure out what Uptown is all about, or at least the area from Franklin to Lake Street and Hennepin to Lyndale, where all those bands ended up living and practicing.

Walsh’s writing has an exuberance that’s always bothered me. He seems to be rooting for the underdog in everything he’s ever written, he consistently finds hope in the everyday, and he does this thing where he separates two or three nouns or adverbs with slashes: “passionately/drunkenly,” “manager/mentor/fan/friend.” It’s as if all the words sound so awesome he can’t make up his mind.

But in All Over But the Shouting, Walsh does several important things well. First, he tells a story about this important band that people are starting to forget about (I’m not even that huge of a fan and I can say without hyperbole that The Replacements’ Let It Be stands right there with albums like Revolver and Sticky Fingers. People shouldn’t be forgetting about these guys).

Second, his exuberant writing only makes a few cameos—he tells this story by carefully selecting clips from newspapers, old interviews, old reviews, together with new interviews with whoever would talk to him (it’s obvious that Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson did not, at least not on the record), and some important bystanders that knew the band back in the day, along with a few fans who saw them 100 times, and a few who never did. He even interviews his own family for their take on growing up in the same neighborhood.

The research must’ve been a bitch. Not only does he weave these threads together to tell a coherent story, which would’ve been difficult enough, but there is a sense of time in motion: there are moments of suspense (are they going to be signed in New York or not?) and moments of heavy psychological tension (you’re right there with Slim Dunlap, feeling all that Judas-weight for replacing Bob Stinson). And perhaps most dauntingly, the thing Walsh does best is write in an honest way about people he considers his friends.

Writing about your friends is tough to do. If you’re a writer and you’re interested in art in this modestly sized city of ours, you basically don’t have a choice.  You’re inevitably going to become friends with some of the artists, and then you’re screwed. Maybe this is why Walsh sounds so exuberant all the time—he’s constantly rooting for his peeps.

I felt the pressure at First Ave. Wednesday night at The Replacements tribute concert for the release of AOBTS. Something like fifteen bands were all covering three or four Replacements tunes each, and I had a couple of close buddies who were going up. Thank God they came though. Johnny Swardson did a stark desperate cover of “The Ledge” in the Entry, and my buddies in Revolver Modele turned “Unsatisfied” into goth disco fever in the Main Room.

I shouldn’t have worried. I know it’s impossible to sound like Westerberg, and most everybody else did too. Nothing to lose then. It was like that movie of five-minute shorts by famous directors about Paris—Paris, Je'Taime—where people just did their spin on a common theme in a well-run circus for people with short attention spans. You can’t go wrong with everybody doing a couple of covers and then shouting, “Thanks, good night!” Even if they suck, it’s only for a couple minutes.

I bounced between the rooms, running into people, saying hello between songs. I was down in the green room below the Entry drinking free Bud and talking to Terry Walsh, Jim’s older brother, about the Delmon Young trade as Jeremy Messersmith did a beautiful version of “Skyway” above us. I was back in the Main Room for Kruddler’s motley cover of “Little Mascara” and The Alarmists' clinical assault on “Left of the Dial.” (Their lead singer had a Moby Dick’s T-shirt on even though the place was torn down while he was probably in pre-school.)

I went back to the Entry to see Stook! do “Unsatistfied” in a way that made my buddy Ross quip, “That’s exactly how I would’ve done it.” (I’ve never heard Ross sing a note.) Made it back to the Main Room to see Birthday Suits blister through two glorious, completely unintelligible tunes that may or may not have been Replacements songs. I left after that, pretty secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to wake up and hear that Westerberg showed up at 1 a.m. and did all the hits. E-mail me if I did.

Good times/Wednesday night/Replacements nostalgia/Very Minneapolis.

11.24.07: Leo Kottke at the State Theatre

For more than a quarter of a century, guitarist extraordinaire Leo Kottke has made a point of playing a so-called “holiday” concert in the Twin Cities on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It’s a tradition—a longer tradition than the Holidazzle Parade, at any rate—so one would expect more of a sense of occasion. A Thanksgiving story, maybe, or a droll recollection from a childhood Christmas in Minnesota? How about a tune relating to the holidays? An offhand remark about winter? A syllable or two about anything that happens in the last two months of the year?

Not when Kottke’s in town. All of the above would make logical sense, of course, but that’s the problem. This is a Leo Kottke tradition, after all, so he does it his way. Last night at the State Theatre, the closest Kottke got to acknowledging the season was a story about Halloween.

But that’s OK, because tradition demands that a Leo Kottke concert make as little sense as possible. What he does with a guitar has always been mystifying, and his humorous patter between songs has always been full of charmingly ridiculous non-sequiters, as if he’s still a little buzzed from the 1960s. But in concert, the two somehow fit together so well that Kottke fan sites have taken to publishing entire transcripts from concerts rather than simple set lists. The tunes themselves are fun to listen to, but it’s the tales in between that hold them together. Sort of. (Leo Kottke–brand epoxy would not work very well.)

Last night’s show began fairly typically, with Kottke looking like he just woke up from a nap, then playing a couple of instrumentals to warm his fingers up and get used to the idea that 2,000 people were watching. The first words out of his mouth were, “I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to figure out how not to play this next song, and I have lost.” Then he launched into “Louise,” and followed it with a story about Al Franken wanting him to play “Julie’s House,” a tale in which Kottke explains to Franken that he doesn’t play that song anymore because it hurts his fingers—after which, of course, Kottke played “Julie’s House.”

In between anecdotes about an eighty-three-year-old golf-course maintenance man and moonshine-maker named “The Prosecutor,” a story about John Fahey getting beat up by a bunch of college wrestlers in Dinkytown, and one about how Doc Watson destroyed his confidence so badly that he has never been able to tune his low “E” string properly, Kottke played beautifully, trading off between six- and twelve-string guitars, as he always does.

For us old-timers, he threw in “Living in the Country,” and “Little Martha” amid a grab-bag of other instrumentals from throughout his career. He seemed to be in a singing mood too, for he crooned “Corrina, Corrina” and “Tony and Mario” as well. Like an old guitar, Kottke’s voice has deepened and mellowed, and these days he even sings in key most of the time. And if you’ve ever heard the man sing, you know that’s a gift in itself.

11.21.07: Alec Soth: Dog Days, Bogota at Weinstein Gallery

Alec Soth’s images of people and places along the Mississippi River, in Sleeping by the Mississippi, rightly earned him acclaim. His follow-up, Niagra, follows a similar storyline, offering up an America as populated by present and past at once. Soth has a real knack for capturing that duality, and it comes through in Dog Days, Bogota as well. The exhibit is currently on display at Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.

In his introduction to the Dog Days—the only textual clues he gives, since the photos themselves are untitled—Soth explains his approach to photographing the birthplace of his adopted daughter Carmen Laura. “In photographing the city of her birth,” he says, “I hope I described some of the beauty in this hard place.” That beauty takes shape in a dozen different ways. A little girl standing on a rocky ledge above the city holding a doll. A young man in a bright tie against a backdrop of urban decay. A wall in a working-class home lined with photos of children.

Bogota is, of course, strongly associated with the drug trade in many Americans’ minds. It’s less a place than a set of assumptions. That’s one of the things that makes Dog Days so powerful. Soth shows us a landscape that manages to look half finished and falling down at the same time, a place where beauty coexists with gritty reality.

Dog Days, Bogota continues through January 12 at Weinstein Gallery.

11.16.07: TU Dance at The O’Shaughnessy

That TU Dance put on an excellent show last night won’t surprise anyone familiar with the work of this modern dance/ballet company. No, the question with two-year old TU Dance isn’t whether you’ll see great dancing, or whether the audience will pop up at the end in a well-deserved standing ovation, but how much risk and vision choreographer Uri Sands will find in his new works, and which dancers will emerge from technical virtuosity into individuality.

First, the choreography. I don’t know whether Sands has gained in choreographic confidence and finesse since TU Dance’s debut or whether I’ve gotten better at seeing into his work—probably a little of both—but I find him a more interesting dance thinker these days. His crowd-pleasingly beautiful moves are still there—big jumps, long lines, soaring lifts—but the beauty seems more complex, labored over, and earned. In The 6 Beginnings, I got the feeling Sands was trying to reinvent the classical dance body, moving from a streamlined and upright shape with active legs and decorative arms to a four-square shape, a splay, with arms and legs equally active. This shape is awkward, chunky, its moves scrambled—so when it attains peace and grandeur, as when women race towards men and leap into still lifts, arms stretched up like elm-limbs, or when four men sit comfortably upright as Lincoln on his Monument, perched on the backs of four women, it’s breathtaking.

I would love The 6 Beginnings if it had a more substantial underlying structure than simply six sections, each titled with a “pre-” word (preoccupied, precipitate, etc).

. . . And Let Go, one of two premieres here, is a short duet set to a relaxation tape (complete with therapeutic synth and repeated injunctions to “let go”), and it’s a gem: Sands makes the most of his same-height dancers (Nathan Trice and Eva Mohn), creating a partnering of equality, the two swirling around each other as we are repeatedly told to “let go.”

The second premiere, Beverly, is Sands’s pure motion piece for the evening, his high-energy close. I hope Sands will someday create a work in which soul thinks as deeply as modern ballet thinks in his other works, but Beverly is certainly enjoyable. Even Shapes and Gaits, the older piece in this evening, looked subtler and more complex than when I saw it last.

The dancers all are superlative; Sands and his co–artistic director (and wife) Toni Pierce-Sands are to be commended for ferreting out such interesting dancers from the local scene and elsewhere. The company’s diverse, too—still not as diverse as I think Sands and Pierce-Sands would like, but showing an impressive mix of cultural origins and body types, from the long and graceful Ned Sturgis to the gymnastic fireball Alanna Morris. Eva Mohn’s the reliable standout here, with her liquid coordination and palpable love for what she’s doing, and she doesn’t disappoint in this concert. Whether other dancers shine seems to depend on what choreography they get. This summer I was impressed by Berit Ahlgren’s elegant rigor, but this fall it was Luke Melsha and Marciano Silva dos Santos who caught my eye. Tall and graceful Melsha, still in college but already a commanding performer with a roguish sense of humor, stepped in for the missing Bernard Brown, doing so well you’d never have known it wasn’t his part from the beginning. Silva dos Santos stood out in Beverly, finding the sweet spot in the beat more surely than any other dancer. Toni-Pierce Sands also performs; her excellence is well-known, but she’s still a discovery every time she moves.

TU Dance performs through Sunday at The O'Shaughnessy.

11.13.07: Shining City at the Jungle Theater

In The Departed, Vera Fermiga’s police psychologist asks Matt Damon’s dirty cop, “You know what Freud said about the Irish?”

“ ’Course I do,” Damon’s character answers. “What Freud said about the Irish is we’re the only people impervious to psychoanalysis.”

Shining City, the new Conor McPherson play at the Jungle, is about an Irish shrink. Like most Jungle productions, it’s a small, one-room play. The room is the setting for a series of conversations between two people: The shrink, Ian, played with a wan nervousness by Patrick Bailey, and a crass but surprisingly articulate fifty-something businessman, played by J. C. Cutler, who feels guilty because his wife was killed in a car accident. The room is Ian’s office-slash-studio apartment—he’s moved out of his brother’s place, leaving his pregnant girlfriend in the lurch.

You can find a bunch of articles on the net that try to get at some of the modern medical reasons why Freud found the Gaelic race so difficult to figure out (brain chemistry, hormones, etc.), but the situation is pretty clear to me: The Catholic Church got there first.

So you would expect a play about Irish psychoanalysis to contrast the relationship between patient-analyst to layperson-priest, and McPherson doesn’t waste any time. In the second scene, it’s revealed that Ian gave up his collar to be with his girlfriend. And now, it seems, he’s breaking it off with her. He’s sorry—so sorry—it’s just that he didn’t realize at the time that leaving the priesthood wasn’t quite the end of his journey. His pregnant girlfriend sits on the couch, confused, hurt, angrily listening to his confession, before confessing that she cheated on him before he knocked her up.

These back-and-forth confessions run through the entire play. McPherson’s characters stutter through their guilt, not . . . quite knowing what they feel.. . . . and trying to figure out . . . exactly . . . how to explain . . . what they did. The actors do a nice job of convincing us that these constipated thoughts and feelings are being labored over in real time. Each character sifts through his or her own heartbreaks, trying to find an elusive peace that we used to call “God.” These are some of the most realistic fight scenes I’ve witnessed outside of that R. Kelly clip on YouTube and my own apartment. 

Shining City runs through December 23 at the Jungle Theater.

11.11.07: Hip Hop Live at First Avenue

We’ll get to the Hip Hop Live review in a second, but first, let’s pour a forty for our homey, Norman Mailer. During the weekend, The Original Wigger passed away at the age of eighty-four. It’s been more than fifty years since Mailer wrote “The White Negro,” a 1956 magazine essay that basically lauded a “white hipster elite” for talking, listening, and playing like black people. “The White Negro” is collected in Mailer’s first anthology of self-aggrandizement, Advertisements for Myself. In Advertisements, Mailer prefaces “The White Negro” by explaining that when he wrote it, he was smoking a lot of reefer while simultaneously trying to kick cigarettes. You can tell—it’s full of jazzy bebopsterisms such as “swing” and “goof,” and there are definitely parts where Mailer comes off like a poseur attempting to articulate this minority mimicking a minority, these white kids’ existential attempt to deal with the “psychic havoc” of the atomic age though jazz and dope. Although almost derailed by incomprehensible beatnik babble, “The White Negro” was a well written, antiestablishment rant that actually argued for the psychopath trapped within what Mailer characterized as a constipated, conformist post-war American society. No doubt, Mailer was ridiculed for what he wrote, excoriated in turn by everybody from Eleanor Roosevelt to William Faulkner to James Baldwin. Although later, even Baldwin came to admit, “White is a not a color, it’s an attitude. You’re as white as you think you are.”

So on Sunday night at First Avenue, the same Sunday night Larry David, another middle-aged Jewish guy, moved on from the shiksa who broke his heart to embrace Vivica A. Fox’s brown sugar on Curb, it was obvious Mailer was just as much onto something as he was on something. Here was Brother Ali, the albino Muslim from the north side, our own God emcee, backed by the Rhythm Roots All Stars, a ten piece, mixed-race funk-and-soul revue out of Los Angeles, while the audience, at least 75 percent white negro, nodded along to the beat in their oversized New Era caps and their brightly printed hoodies. “Every time I play this place, it turns into North Minneapolis,” Ali boasted. My buddy turned to me and said, “It looks more like a bar mitzvah in here.”

Ali’s fight-the-power preaching can sound a little corny, especially in front of a band full of unwashed Portland burnouts wearing knit caps while pounding on their bongos. The man has a commanding, booming voice, and on “Uncle Sam Goddamn”—chorus: “land of the thief/home of the slave”—he used it in a way that Mailer, the old pugilist, might have appreciated, as a blunt, rhetorical weapon. The crowd loved it, probably because they mistrust the establishment to a similar degree as their hero, but there’s something forced and conventional about the Brother’s lyrics—in the same way that an outraged letter to the editor written by a suburban dad sounds strident but by the book. For all his shout outs to “independent hip hop,” he sounded like he was striving for the middle of the road I’m-just-a-regular-guy-trying-to-get-by-and-raise-my-son sort of thing. And although the kids were responding, there’s nothing hip or outsider about relating to the mainstream. He has a big voice, but he couches it in little-guy terminology. It’s a little square, maybe. Too Horatio Alger. Too evangelical. Ultimately, an affirmation of traditional American values even in its dissent.

But when Staten Island’s Ghostface Killah, aka Ironman, aka Toney Starks, aka Pretty Toney, aka Black Jesus (all noms de street), stepped on stage, here was Mailer’s cool-cat orgasmic psychopath. Ghost is the emcee I was there for, the biggest star, at least commercially, on the bill. He’s the McCartneyesque “cute one” in the Wu Tang Clan—both physically and lyrically—who’s grown into his rough whine to the point where now he’s really the only Wu Tang solo act left selling any records. Early on, he dropped “Ice Cream,” a hit about appreciating fifty-seven flavors of female, and he had the entire Hopkins High Class of 2004 in attendance rapping along with him. Ghostface’s show wasn’t flawless by any means—the Rhythm All-Stars had trouble translating some of the more minimalist Wu Tang beats to a live setting, and Ironman’s crew of sidemen were a little overeager, stepping on some of his best punch lines. So the most entertaining moments happened in between songs—such as challenging the crowd to a Wu-off. (The audience made it through quite a bit of “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin to F*&k Wit” before he cut ‘em off and said, “Ok, that was pretty cool . . . but nah, I ain’t convinced.”) Or when he told everybody a story to introduce “Greddy Bitches.” (He was inspired by a murder of groupies that ate all his Oreos from his tour bus’s refrigerator—Ghost is diabetic). Laughing along, it seemed to me an artist such as Ghost is the model for Mailer’s hipsters—the black guru so committed to living in his own lunatic world, he doesn’t worry about violating the genteel mores of the crowd outside the building. Although Ghost did demur, “I don’t refer to all women as ‘bitches’ all the time, you know . . . we just talkin’.”

In “The White Negro,” Mailer writes, “To swing is to be able to learn, and by learning take a step toward making it, toward creating. What [the hipster] must do . . . is find his courage at the moment of violence, or equally make it in the act of love . . .” Uh, I didn’t really get all of that, but Mailer could have been writing about Hip Hop Live’s headliner, Rakim. What old jazz heads called “swing,” hip hop calls “flow.” And Rakim’s flow is universally acknowledged—and on this night, reaffirmed by both Ali and Ghostface within their own sets—as being The Truth. Deep down, back in ’56, Mailer wished he could flow like that, wished he could approach anything as “far out” as Rakim doing what he do. Ra took the stage with a posse, but they didn’t say a word. And the Rhythm Roots All Stars were behind him, but he barely needed them either (although their sound complemented Rakim’s old school flavor most effectively). This dude didn’t even need choruses or hooks. He went through his great 104 bar opuses, one marathon font of hypnotizing verbal knowledge: “My Melody,” “Paid in Full,” “Microphone Fiend,” even brought Brother Ali out to duet on “Ain’t No Joke” before closing with “Eric B is President.” The crowd knew every word. Rakim’s tone is as serious as Ali’s, as anti-establishment as Ghostface’s. But befitting his ancient thirty-nine years, he never felt the need to shout. He just prowled the stage, striking few poses, holding the microphone to his vein like a needle, dropping into a boxer’s crouch, and rapped about the streets, the dark outskirts of town, all of the places Mailer entitles “the enormous present.”

11.10.07: John Waters at Fitzgerald Theater

If there's one thing John Waters has mastered, it's how to capture his audience's attention, both in his films and in person. At the Fitzgerald last night, he immediately connected with the crowd and never let up during his hilarious one-man show and a Q&A with The Current Fakebook host Mary Lucia.

When Waters first appeared onstage, he received one of those incredibly long applauses that verges on being uncomfortably long. His opening line? "Thank you. You make me feel like Johnny Mathis."

Waters then launched into his one-man show, This Filthy World. It's an autobiographical standup routine that he proclaims is not a lecture; it's vaudeville. After asking us to think of him as our "filthy elder," Waters proceeded to crack open the door to his unparalleled mind. He told stories of where he comes from (Maryland), how he learned to make movies on his first camera (an 8 mm), and shared behind-the-scenes anecdotes that added up to a chronological history of his films.

Colorful storyteller that he is, Waters also clued us in to some of his social and political musings. For instance, in order to make reading cool, he says if a person goes home with someone, and they have no books in their apartment, the person should abstain from having sex with them. (Of course, his version was a bit raunchier.)

Another idea of his to better the world: Make a New Year's resolution to only perform oral sex on teachers. In turn, the teachers will be happier and be better able to keep students from being bored. That way, kids won't grow up to kill us.

A risqué declaration for a wholesome Midwestern venue, but can you really argue with his logic?

Waters did tailor his address for his Twin Cities audience, saying we don't deserve a bad rap for hosting the Larry Craig incident at our airport. He also announced that on his way out of town today, he's arranged to have airport security show him the infamous stall.

His nonstop wit pummeled through four decades of filmmaking, from Mondo Trasho to Pink Flamingos to Hairspray (of which he said, "I accidentally made a family movie called Hairspray").

He interjected some humorous punches on hot-button issues:

On drugs: "Ecstasy [is] a drug that makes you love everyone. Sounds like hell to me."

On gays in the military: "I'm for an all-volunteer lesbian army . . . They could find Bin Laden."

On family: "Gay people have more children than Catholics . . . I'd be a good uncle—I'd get you an abortion, I'd get you out of jail . . . "

After his monologue, and a brief intermission with music from the God Damn Doo Wop Band, Waters and Lucia returned to the stage. Q&A sessions often circle back to running themes, and this one was no different in that there was quite a bit of discussion of mental health, in which Waters, fittingly, has a strong interest.

Waters' next film, he said, is a children's Christmas story called Fruitcake, starring Jackass's Johnny Knoxville as the father. From the man who brought dining on excrement to the big screen, I'd expect nothing less.

11.9.07: No Country for Old Men Opens at the Uptown Theater

One take on Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 novel No Country for Old Men is that it’s more movie than book. In a merciless review of the book a few years ago, Joyce Carol Oates snipped that it “reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino.”  While it’s fun (and maybe frightening) to imagine everyone’s favorite ADHD auteur adapting McCarthy’s eulogy to the morally decaying American West, I think we should all be a little thankful that Joel and Ethan Coen had that honor instead.

The St. Louis Park brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men opened yesterday at the Uptown Theater, and it is a revelation. Like all of the Coens’ films, No Country is a crime story told with a good dose of humor and (this time) a great deal of blood. Like the best of their movies, it’s also a reminder that the problem with genre films is not that they’ve been done too much, but that they’re often done with so little imagination. The Coens’ oeuvre is a master class on how to turn a genre picture inside out, at once subverting viewers’ expectations and paying wry homage to the once-classic, now creaky, conventions of film noirs, gangster movies, psychological dramas, even slapstick comedies.

Set in 1980 in the small towns that border Texas and Mexico, No Country triangulates between a hunter (Josh Brolin) who takes off with $2 million in cash he discovers at the scene of a drug-run-gone-wrong, the mysterious assassin (Javier Bardem) who is looking for him and the money, and the longtime law man (Tommy Lee Jones) who is trying to get to Brolin before Bardem does. In its economy of storytelling and its tone, the film most resembles the Coens’ stripped-down 1984 debut, Blood Simple, another Texas-set murder story that has a virtuoso scene in which predator and prey face-off in adjoining rooms. (No Country gets extra credit for arming Bardem with a cattle gun that handily blows through door locks.) 

The filmmakers’ dirt-dry humor finds a nice partner in McCarthy’s famously terse writing. But this time the simple-man shorthand seems more organic, less a device to produce laughs (which it, thankfully, still does) and more a point-of- entry to the characters. There’s a bit of a somber edge to the film and definitely to Jones’ character, a third-generation sheriff who is undergoing a spiritual crisis of sorts as he tries to reconcile the carnage brought by the nascent border drug trade with the mythic West he loves. As the title not so subtly suggests, his crisis is our crisis, a point that is teased out late in the movie as the sheriff’s uncle tells him, “This country is hard on people,” and warns that it’s only vanity to think that one can stop the rot that’s started.

Jones slips comfortably into a role that’s become almost standard-issue for him, while Bardem, an unconventional choice for the part of a psychopathic killer who is so evil he seems to be operating in a sort of parallel universe, pulls off the miracle of being truly, believably menacing for no apparent (worldly) reason. Brolin is another surprise as a Vietnam vet who recognizes how life-changing the money could be and keeps paying for that greed over and over again. He never overplays his character, never strains to make him more sympathetic, just lets his natural decency come through. Kelly Macdonald plays his wife, Carla Jean, a role that doesn’t have much meat and to which she doesn’t really bring much either.

The Coens practically have their own repertory company by now. While the acting branch (John Turturro, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand) sat out this film, the behind-the-scenes talents are all there: director of photography Roger Deakins, composer Carter Burwell, costume designer Mary Zophres, even hair guy Paul LeBlanc, who made characters out of the 1940s ’dos of The Man Who Wasn’t There and does the same with Bardem’s pageboy-from-hell.

I haven’t read McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, so I can’t say whether the Coens were in the enviable position of taking a mediocre book and elevating it to art (always a better proposition than adapting the next great American novel). But I do know that their macabre chase story is both artful and entertaining in a way that’s hard to argue.

11.9.07: Yo-Yo Ma at the Ordway

It has become cliché to refer to Yo-Yo Ma as a “rock star” of the cello. It is also incorrect. Yo-Yo Ma is much bigger than that. There are hundreds of rock stars, but only one Yo-Yo Ma.

No, Ma is more like Tiger Woods or the Dalai Lama—a titan of his art whose fame and reputation is so transcendent that people who have never heard him play a note revere him. If asked to name a classical musician, many people in this country could only come up with one name: Yo-Yo. The man isn’t just a cello player. For many people, Yo-Yo Ma is the cello. He is classical music.

Ma’s reputation precedes him so far that on the way to see him play one can’t help but wonder, Can the man possibly be that good? If Ma is a hundred times more famous than, say, Matt Haimovitz (another well-known cellist), is Ma a hundred times better? Of course not; fame doesn’t work that way. But there has to be something, you tell yourself—there must be a reason why the man has been elevated to something approaching a musical god.

Friday night at the Ordway, the hall was packed to the rafters for the 125th anniversary celebration of the Schubert Club. Most had paid more than a C-note for a ticket to be there and hear Ma play with his favorite piano accompanist, Katherine Stott. All, I imagine, were listening for the same thing—that special touch of magic that makes Yo-Yo Ma so great.

Did they hear it?

Well, of course. One of the nice things about classical music is that it’s impossible to fake. One can quibble over Ma’s technique (hardly flawless) and interpretations (he often overplays), but at the end of the evening none of it matters, because it is impossible to deny the most endearing thing about Ma: his passion and intensity.

Ma is one of those rare musicians who gives you 100 percent on every note, and will give you 110 percent if he can find it. He grimaces and squints. The veins in his neck and jaw pop out when he plays, and he attacks the strings so violently at times that he looks like he’s going to fall out of his seat. During Shostakovich’s "Sonata in D Minor," Ma practically shredded an entire bow, snapping so many horsehairs that he kept having to reach up and snap them off lest they slow him down on the next furious assault. Sometimes his head snaps so hard that you’re afraid it’s going to pop off. At other times, he curls around his cello like an octopus and stares at his fingers like a man possessed. During softer passages, though, he will often lean way back in his chair and look up to the heavens with an expression that says, “Whoa, look what’s coming out of my fingers now!” Even he seems amazed.

Yet for all of this animation, the music flows out of Ma so naturally that one doesn’t get the impression he practices and learns like everyone else. His bodily contortions look more like someone who is trying to figure out how to get his body out of the way so that this astonishingly beautiful music can come through. Yo-Yo Ma doesn’t play music; the music plays him.

Last night’s program kicked off with "Sonata in A Minor for Arpeggionne and Piano," which was appropriate for the anniversary occasion. Ma further endeared himself to audience by dedicating the evening to the memory of former Schubert Club president Bruce Carlson, who died from leukemia last year. Ma also played “Le Grand Tango,” by Argentinian composer Astor Piazzola, “Bodas de Prata & Quatro Canto,” by the Brazilian composing team of Egberto Gismonti and Geraldo Carneiro, and “Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano,” by Cesar Franck. Ma and Stott also did three short encores, capped by the popular student piece, “The Swan,” by Saint-Saëns.

All of which were played superbly, with just enough magic to make everyone in the place a believer in the legend of Yo-Yo Ma—even me. 

11.7.07: Alex Ross at Fitzgerald Theater

Alex Ross sure knows how to do a book tour! As classical music writer for The New Yorker, Ross is one of the most erudite commentators on the arts in the country today, and he’s the author of the new culture history, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Not content to just talk about music, he brought along the Turtle Island String Quartet to offer musical examples and made the event a party.

Being a frequent and avid reader of his writing in The New Yorker, I came expecting a challenging and inspired conversation. And until near the end, I was disappointed. Little of what he said had the depth of his writing. His reading of excerpts from the book just pointed out how facile much of the presentation really was.

For example, in talking about the early twentieth century, the two big stories he focused on were the riots inspired by the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s composing under the oppression Soviet domination. For most of the people familiar with Ross and interested in hearing him, those would be familiar stories. And there was nothing particularly new or revelatory in his retelling.

Part of the problem may have been that the event was being taped for broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio. Fred Childs, host of Performance Today on National Public Radio, was the moderator. Ross could only answer the questions he was asked. And while Childs’ questions might generously be called populist, they were, in reality, rather shallow and superficial. 

The presence of the Turtle Island String Quartet also felt out of place. These were splendid musicians and their performances raised cheers, particularly in a work by Cuban saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera and excerpts from their new CD, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.

But they seemed to have little connection with the main point of the evening. In fact, Ross had plenty of illustrative musical examples of his own that he played on his computer. Those might have been more extensive had the quartet not been present. And worse, they seemed to be part of the dumbing down of the evening. They followed a discussion of Milton Babbitt, one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and difficult composers, with an excerpt from West Side Story. It’s hard not to be cynical and think that their presence was primarily a marketing decision.

All that said, there were indeed moments of great wit and genuine insight in the discourse. Ross started out rejecting the whole term “classical music,” feeling that it burdened even the most forward-looking compositions with the stigma of music from the distant past. “Awesome music” was his suggested replacement (though he acknowledged that we are probably stuck with classical). He spoke of the 1920s as an era of an “explosion of possibilities” in terms of the synthesis of popular and classical styles and drew some significant parallels with our own age.

In fact, it was in discussing the current the state of music that he became much more absorbing, making a strong case for the interconnectedness of pop and classical genres. He played excerpts of pop singer Björk and of Dawn Upshaw singing a song cycle by Osvaldo Golijov, making a strong case that if you did not know, you might legitimately think that the former was the classical piece and the latter the pop one.

It was in his assessment of the future that Ross became the most passionate—and the most compelling. Far from seeing the fracturing of twentieth-century music as signaling the end of concert music, he sees it leading to a renaissance, a new golden age of infinite possibility. He sees the traditions as not dying, but multiplying, so much so that it’s hard to keep up. In reframing the issue, he offered exciting possibilities, even for the most traditional of symphony orchestras. And he left me wanting to read the book.

11.6.07: I'm Not There at Walker Art Center

I’m bored with biopics, those stylized film biographies that attempt to condense the life of someone famous down into a two-hour Oscar bid. True, traditional Hollywood biopics tend to have the showy star turns and epic-sized production values that make for reliable Oscar bait, but the movies themselves are usually predictable and often outright dull.

If you have even a passing knowledge of the film’s subject, it’s hard not to feel manipulated by the Cliff Notes psychology and short-circuited exposition often at work in a conventional biopic. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles? Russell Crowe as John Nash? Denzel Washington as Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter? Good turns by all. Still, I suspect that Lawrence of Arabia and Raging Bull hold up as two of the greatest biopics of all time because they were made by artists pursuing an original vision—not an express line to the Oscar podium.

When biopics detour from the genre’s plodding conventions for a more subjective interpretation, they’re often pilloried for their efforts (Marie Antoinette and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus being two recent, if flawed, examples). The latest to subvert expectations is I’m Not There, which imagines the mercurial life of Bob Dylan through six different actors, including an African-American boy and Hollywood’s go-to junior Streep, Cate Blanchett. Director Todd Haynes’ trippy anthem to the hometown folk-rock god opens locally November 21, but it screened last night at the Walker, where it was introduced by Haynes’ longtime producing partner Christine Vachon whose films (Safe, Far From Heaven, Happiness, Kids, Boys Don’t Cry) are often unapologetically outside the mainstream.

Prematurely winterized in a trenchcoat-length black rain jacket and some serious combat boots, Vachon (who is producing local screenwriter Shawn Otto’s Dreams of a Dying Heart with Hilary Swank this winter) offered pointers for watching the decidedly unusual film to follow: “Let it wash over you,” she suggested. “Don’t think about it too much.”

Sound viewing advice for the crazy quilt that is I’m Not There, a fascinating piece of cinematic showmanship in which Haynes answers the question: How do you represent music’s most inscrutable shape-shifter? He started by casting six actors to either play Dylan, Dylan as interpreted by an actor playing a Dylan character, or in some cases merely an aspect of Dylan’s personality or influences. Each character has his own storyline, which Haynes shot in a period-specific film stock and style (black-and-white a la Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the Don’t Look Back–era Dylan; 16mm for early Greenwich Village folk-scene Dylan) and to which he’s scored thematically appropriate Dylan songs and scripted dialogue sampled heavily from the great man’s catalog of famously elusive one-liners.

Christian Bale plays both the soft-spoken early sixties folk singer Dylan and also the Born Again evangelical Dylan of the seventies. Heath Ledger has the role of a womanizing actor (playing Bale’s Dylan) who is married to a character loosely modeled after Dylan’s first wife, Sara Lownds. Marcus Carl Franklin is a rail-riding hobo named Woody (Guthrie, of course), and Ben Winshaw is a teenage Arthur Rimbaud. Richard Gere, in the film’s weakest narrative thread, is a hippie outlaw Billy the Kid who has retreated to the sticks, dropping out as Dylan did after his motorcycle crash.

The actor everyone will be talking about is Cate Blanchett, inhabiting the petulant rock-star Dylan of the late sixties who delights in tearing down everyone around him even as he’s booed by audiences who feel betrayed by his newly electrified music. Blanchett delivers a gutsy, exhilarating performance that is finely calibrated to the film’s surprisingly cheeky tone—and her performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Nothing is conventional about Haynes’s approach. He jumbles time rather ruthlessly and marries metaphor and biography in over-the-top fantasy sequences that will doubtless irritate even those Dylan nuts who know what they’re getting themselves into. The biggest surprise for me (no Dylan-phile, by any stretch) was how thrilling all this is to watch. Haynes’ artistry is all over the screen. And despite the film-geek touches and parade of name actors, I’m Not There manages to be massively entertaining, unpretentious, and bold in a way few biopics (and frankly few films) rarely are.

“I really think people are experiencing biopic fatigue,” Vachon said when she returned to the stage after the screening to answer questions and trade barbs with an audience member who called the film "cartoony." I’m Not Here, as with all art-house fare, will have to find its legs in an oversaturated market, but Vachon says she thinks audiences will appreciate a film that turns the whole idea of the Hollywood biopic on its head. She’s peddling a very peculiar film, so there’s no telling if this is the one to change their minds, but I sure hope it gets the chance.

11.5.07: Dominick Argento's Eightieth Birthday Celebration at Plymouth Congregational Church

An invitation-only audience gathered in Guild Hall at Plymouth Congregational Church last night to celebrate the eightieth birthday of composer Dominick Argento. I recently complained in the Star Tribune that there were appallingly few events to commemorate that milestone. This soiree, organized by VocalEssence director Philip Brunelle, was exactly what was called for.

The festive evening was a fitting tribute to a man who is essentially Minnesota’s composer-in-residence. He has written for Minnesota Opera, Minnesota Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, even the Guthrie Theater, to name only the largest organizations. But the evening took on a national, even an international feel with letters of congratulations from composer Conrad Susa, mezzo soprano Frederica von Stade, and baritone Håken Hagegård.

As befits Argento’s oeuvre, the program featured primarily vocal music. Offering a retrospective of his career, the selections covered almost fifty years—from 1958 to 2007. Soprano Maria Jette almost encompassed that entire span with her two selections, one of the Six Elizabethan Songs from 1958 and the unaccompanied "Silver," written for her in 2004. She called Argento her "favorite composer” and told the story of how she tricked him into composing for her. Jette’s love for Argento was apparent in her performance, as it was in performances throughout the evening.

What was truly astonishing in the juxtaposition of songs from six decades of work was Argento’s amazing consistency. His unique voice revealed itself early, and he has been true to it throughout his career.

Upon hearing this wide profusion of music, my reaction was to revere Argento all the more. He swam against the stream of his era, eschewing the intellectual and academic avant-garde compositional styles of many of his contemporaries. He is an unabashedly emotional composer, unafraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and to indulge in rich, old-fashioned lyricism. His goal is always to connect with his audience and to sensitively communicate the essence of the text he is setting, and he is usually successful.

On this occasion, he had some of the best singers in the Twin Cities getting those emotions across. I was impressed by the different generations of musicians who came out. The evening opened with excerpts of his 1968 song cycle, Letters from Composers, performed by tenor Vern Sutton and guitarist Jeffrey Van, who had originally premiered it. On the other hand, baritone Bradley Greenwald was just a child in 1967 when the opera The Shoemaker’s Holiday, from which he sang an excerpt, was premiered. And Sonja Tengblad, just a year-and-a-half out of college, gave one of the most affecting performances in an excerpt from Argento’s youthful opera, Colonel Jonathan the Saint, from 1962.

Brunelle and Sonja Thompson were the accompanists throughout. Brunelle also played a piece for piano four-hands, "For the Angel Israfel (Whose Heart-Strings Are a Lute)," with his son Christopher. Speaking of fathers and sons, Michael Sutton played "Impromptu for Michael Sutton," which Argento wrote for Michael's father Vern’s fiftieth birthday. The evening had many such intimate and personal moments, but then again, Argento’s music often inspires that kind of reaction.

If there was a disappointment to the evening, it was a bit too much formality. The singers simply performed and then got off the stage. Only Jette took time to share some personal reminiscences. I know that several of the singers have very funny Argento stories they could have shared. But that is the merest quibble in the face of so much excellent music-making.

The final work was 2007's Three Sonnets of Plutarch, a masterful song-cycle receiving its U.S. premiere in a stunning performance by Minnesota Opera Resident Artist John Boehr. Not only did the work not betray any signs of the diminishment of age, it revealed Argento at the top of his game. It is as accomplished and passionate as anything he has written. So Happy Birthday, Dom! And when you’re done celebrating, I can only hope you’ll get back to composing. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

11.3.07: PhotoBravo at Minnesota Center for Photography

From the look of things, the Minnesota Center for Photography is attracting not only photography enthusiasts, but those with dollars to indulge their affinity. Those attending Saturday night’s PhotoBravo 2007 event—an annual auction featuring works from both established and up-and-coming talent—were enjoying the open bar and engaging conversation. The talk reached the level of a low roar.

It’s good to see such obvious signs of success. If any organization deserves to succeed it’s MCP, which manages to feel like a true community player with deep roots among photographers while simultaneously drawing a well-heeled audience for their work.

PhotoBravo is equal parts social event, art sale, and exhibition. It’s unique in that the work on display tends to be a “best of.” You’ll see pieces from past shows. You’ll also see big-name photographers who have gone on to bigger things but still maintain a connection to the community—for example, Alec Soth, Wing Young Huie, and Doug Beardsley all donated pieces to the auction. You’ll see the rising stars such as Brian Ulrich, one of Photo District News’s thirty emerging photographers for 2007, and a slew of interesting emerging photographers such as Xavier Tavera, Mickey Smith, and others. You’ll see even see works by the likes of William Wegman and Jerome Liebling.

Many pieces were valued in the high hundreds to low thousands. While it would be a definite stretch to call such numbers attainable given the median income in this country, the photographs up for auction were certainly accessible by art-world standards. And at the very least an auction allows one to indulge in an entertaining game of “what if?” to ask: “Which pieces would I bid on?”

Given the options last night, I’d be hard pressed to pick one piece. But with a few thousand dollars in my pocket, I’d certainly have made bids for Lori Ginker’s portrait of the war wounds of an Israeli veteran—not exactly a piece to hang over the sofa, but extremely provocative and powerful nonetheless. I’m also quite partial to Orin Rutchick’s Agra #266 and Keri Picket’s The Secret, to name but a few. If you missed the auction, you can see the works that were up for grabs.

Images:
Top Left: Two Women, Miami Beach, FL, Jerome Liebling
Center Right: The Secret, Keri Picket
Bottom Left: Agra #266 (Taj Mahal, Woman in Black), Orin Rutchick

11.2.07: Bruce Springsteen at Xcel Energy Center

I saw rock and roll’s past on Friday night, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.

Okay, okay, before I start getting all Jim Walsh doing Jon Landau, let me explain. Rock and roll has really been kind of bumming me out lately. For the last couple of years, I’ve lost interest. Haven’t been going to a lot of shows. Haven’t been buying many albums. Haven’t even been listening to old albums that I used to love. I’ve actually been listening to a lot of rap—the most exciting record I’ve bought in the last twelve months was Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury. And I couldn’t really put my finger on why I would rather listen to two former gangstas rap about grinding crack in Virginia Beach than, say, a husband and wife from Montreal singing about bad dreams.

And then I read “A Paler Shade of White,” an essay in The New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones, that tried to explain “how indie rock lost its soul.” It’s all over the net—the echo chambers are reverberating with rock dorks who buy it or don’t. I think Frere-Jones made some good points: that indie rock, or white rock and roll in general, has become an over-careful, over-sensitive, bass-less, sex-less, and even senseless popular music. Frere-Jones laments the end of “musical miscegenation” that the PC era has wrought, where bands like Wilco put out albums like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, full of “embarrassing poetry laid over plodding rhythms.”

A part of me thought, “Damn, Sasha, that’s harsh.” But most of me was jealous I hadn’t written the essay first. “A Paler Shade of White” laid out what I loved about gangsta rap and how I was feeling about rock. I would even go Frere-Jones one further: I listen to rap because it’s funny. These guys are joking about horrible stuff going on in the street with a sense of humor; it’s like a musical Colbert Report in a way. For all their glock-brandishing and ho-callin’, these street niggas understand irony. I mean, rock and roll used to be funnier, right? And it doesn’t have to be that novelty, Barenaked Ladies kind of funny. Listen to Dylan. Listen to the Sex Pistols. Jeez, listen to Soul Asylum.

Okay, sorry I made you wait this long for a Springsteen review, but my point is, last night, when I was scalping a ticket in front of the Xcel for $120 to see the seventh Springsteen show in my lifetime, I’ve probably never been less excited to see him. My resentful feelings towards rock and roll had calcified to the point where I was dreading the seriousness of Springsteen, all his passionate earnestness. I loved his last album, his 9/11 album, The Rising—I bought it the day it came out. But I downloaded Springsteen’s newest LP, Magic, yesterday, only a few hours before the show.

He started with one of the new songs, “Radio Nowhere”—which I really didn’t find ironic until right now, at this point in the essay. It sounds very Springsteen—it would fit on The River, maybe even Darkness—but I guess I haven’t spent enough time with the song or the album to figure out what he was talking about. Then the E Street Band fired up the next song, “No Surrender,” and, uh, well, I started crying. (Easy there. Not like bawling. Man tears, okay?)

Look, I swear I’m not some middle-aged divorced dude that suppresses all his sadness and then starts blubbering when he hears “Thunder Road,” but here was The Boss, forcing out these lyrics about “a war outside these walls”—I mean, the man’s carotid artery is visibly strained as he pulls these songs out from somewhere south of his heart—and he’s doing this in front of a big, barnstorming, 1960s-style R&B band with drums, bass, a sax, a piano and three guitars, and yeah, maybe it wasn’t cracking me up the way Jay Z’s braggadocio does, but I was definitely feeling it. It made me think about my father, and how hard he worked, and it made me think about the fight that I had with my girlfriend the night before, and how hard and bloody and sweet life is, how catholic the experience of living is. All the Springsteen staples.

Unlike a lot of the rock and roll out there, Bruce Springsteen always has something to say. He wasn’t as preachy as I’ve seen him in the past (and I’ve never minded that, actually, because Bruce preaches like James Brown in The Blues Brothers—it’s infotainment), but he still talked and sang about what’s right and wrong with this country. His new stuff, like his old stuff, deals with the fact that we make war but not much else, the way we’ve been played by our leadership, the sad results of that, and about how most men and women have to get up in the morning, no matter what’s on Fox News or CNN.

I’m not going to break down the set list like Springsteen Nation loves to do (go to backstreets.com for that), but in the middle of the two-hour set, he did play one of my favorite songs, “Incident on 57th Street,” a super old song off 1973’s The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle. It’s about Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane running the gauntlet of NYC’s pimps and pushers “with bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat up old Buick but dressed just like dynamite.” It’s a sprawling seven-minute story-song with a lot of flow, but without much of a hook. It would fit in perfectly on a Wu Tang record. Who said Springsteen ain’t gangsta?

10.31.07: Graphic Reality: Mexican Printmaking Today at Highpoint Center for Printmaking

If you’re looking for a connection to Mexico on Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), be sure to include Highpoint Center for Printmaking on your itinerary. Walk in the door and you’ll be met by a selection of prints brimming with Mexican folk imagery woven into works on very contemporary themes. The show, Graphic Reality: Mexican Printmaking Today, features the work of about a dozen printmakers, most of them mid-career pros. Organized and curated by Artemio Rodriguez, Graphic Reality comes to the Twin Cities following runs at the International Print Center in New York and at Columbia College in Chicago.

Some of the most eye-catching works come from Rodriguez himself. His prints fill an entire wall of the gallery (though it’s a fairly small space). His imagery and style—black-and-white compositions without a speck of gray—evoke the so-called “father of Mexican printmaking,” Jose Guadalupe Posada. But like any family resemblance, the variations are what make the story interesting.

Rodriguez plays with Mexican folk images in clever ways. Will you see skeletons and religious icons? Yes, except that Rodriguez adds pop culture and political elements to the mix. Two examples are Super Muerto, a deathly superhero clad in cape and underpants, and Gluttony, a man with food-stuffed cheeks and fast-food logos tattooed on his arms.

Other artists in the show incorporate similar imagery, but in vastly different styles. If Rodriguez descends from Posada, then Oscar Camilo de las Flores may well trace his roots back to Hieronymus Bosch. Absorbing his dense, detailed prints requires some sustained attention. Like Bosch, Camilo de las Flores’ prints suggest a landscape at once timeless and historic, where human actions—both banal and grand—take on a mythical quality.

In the introduction to the show, Rodriguez says that the printmaking community in Mexico is “fresh and alive and diverse,” taking its creative inspiration from many sources. Rodriguez and Camilo de las Flores are two variations on this theme. Other artists in the show follow very different threads to very different, but equally compelling conclusions.

Graphic Reality runs through November 28 at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

Images:
Top left, 21st Century Calligraphy, Oscar Camilo de las Flores
Center right, Gluttony, Artemio Rodriguez