By Gregory Solman

In Fracknation, Irish investigative journalist Phelim McAleer finds a combustible metaphor for the contrived controversy of hydraulic fracturing in the footage of the Sautner family hustlers of Pennsylvania.

McAleer couldn’t politely interview the couple without Craig threatening a lawsuit (apparently emboldened by the radical National Resources Defense Council), and Julie threatening to pull a pistol on McAleer on a public road, where she voluntarily stopped to shout at him. (It’s rich to watch her sheepishly press a gun permit against the inside of her car window, demonstrating the Defense Technique When Not Being in the Least Threatened.) So McAleer pulls a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a taping of the Sautners, apoplectic upon hearing the Environmental Protection Agency—such a right-wing frat under Lisa Jackson—confirm the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s finding that their water tests safe and clean.

McAleer notes the irony that not having contaminated water would be considered good news to all but those looking for an Erin Brockovich ending to their woes, real or imagined, or in ideological lockstep with what is now a full-fledged anti-fracking movement, replete with its own agitprop such as Josh Fox’s polemic GasLand and Gus Van Sant’s desperately “relevant” fiction, Promised Land. For the greenshirts, only bad news is good news: Recall that the same eco-special interests were all for using natural gas when it was an empty-handed gesture, when they thought we were almost out. (Their next suggestion: Francium power—but only if actually bottled in France, in IWW-run shops.)

In Fracknation, McAleer is mostly after the would-be Michael Moore, Fox, in whose disputatious documentary the Sautners display their dubiously adulterated water and others light their taps—and a large part of the impressionable public—on fire. But that’s a well-known, ancient phenomenon having nothing to do with fracking, and everything to do with methane naturally seeping wherever it can, as surely a few of Fox’s newfound celebrity friends must know from living near the La Brea Tar Pits, where the streets spontaneously combust from time to time. (Clearly, if the greenshirt “gascists” could redevelop Los Angeles, there’d be nothing within miles of mid-Wilshire—well, except maybe environmentally sensitive Ed Begley-esque manses—an area that would be turned into a no-man’s-land preserve to hasten the return of the kangaroo rat.)

When McAleer catches up to Fox—he, too, in the Moore mode—and accuses him of recklessly associating fire-water with fracking (which has never once been proven to have contaminated groundwater, occurring thousands of feet beneath the water table), Fox says, “Yes, but it’s not relevant.” And from his perspective—which smacks of Hillary Clinton’s on Benghazi—it isn’t. Despite Fox’s pose as a friendly naïve explorer in GasLand, reinforced by a lazy narrative drawl suggesting Bill Murray’s muttering groundskeeper in Caddyshack, his project aims to stop shale gas production, by any means necessary.

The moratorium on leasing that GasLand inspired animates McAleer to work the other side of the documentary-cliché fence, matching Fox’s often sincere-sounding fracking alarmists with a Depression-era revival of plaintive, tearful farmers fearful of losing their land because their gas leases have been shut off amid already hard times. Besides them, McAleer finds plenty of residents in Dimock, Pa., who don’t appreciate GasLand’s suggestion that their homesteads are toxic wastelands, inhabited by greedy despoilers and easy marks for Matt Damon.

McAleer systematically eviscerates GasLand’s false implications and sloppy inferences (finally, not even distinguishing between oil and gas production, and instantly trotting out a Halliburton/Cheney conspiracy, the not-so-secret handshake of Club 9/11 Truth). McAleer interviews specialists who assure us that the mathematical detection of seismic activity does not constitute an earthquake (and that the greenshirts’ beloved geothermal energy is worse). He unveils collusion between biased government officials, liberal media, non-governmental organizations and their Hollywood waterboys. He embarrasses Fox, a Columbia University grad, for his woeful ignorance of physics, engineering and chemistry.

Fracknation then travels to Europe to suggest that new-school communism under Vlad Putin has a hidden hand behind the anti-fracking agenda, so that Russia can continue to use a gas monopoly in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a political cudgel, turning it on or off as it pleases, and charging little old ladies in Poland half their pensions for gas and electricity, bringing to mind Dr. Zhivago’s arrests for foraging firewood. (He might have contrasted their plight with the thousands of Californians driving natural-gas Honda Civics—the cleanest cars on the planet, including electrics—for an unsubsidized $1.36 a gallon, thanks to fracking, what reasonable people call a win-win.)
Fracknation’s timing is good, though it’s unlikely to crack already ossified myths or affect fracking’s prospects, when even the use of that vulgar-sounding nickname is as devious as cubic zirconia ads referring to the genuine article as “mined diamonds.” Fracking friends and foes—and the movies they love—have formed skirmish lines almost identical to those of the climate-change controversy.

So we’re going nowhere from here. But it’s heartening to see someone take on a few of the anecdotal, unscientific and politically motivated accusations against the practice, before they, too, become immune to counter evidence.

The frack list (neuropathy, fish kills, cancer, dead bunny rabbits, migraines, animal hair loss, neighborhoods erupting in flames) is already reminiscent of the hysterical global-warming compilations which currently run from “acne” to “yellow fever”—until “aardvark population decline” and “yam rust” are added by someone, anyone, somewhere. The same camps have enlisted the same recruits, including anti-capitalists out to control the economy by fiat, communist style; enrich themselves, like Qatar’s over-compensated useful idiot, Al Gore; or just feel morally superior to others and, in the sweetly juvenile manner of the Mars Attacks! teen hero, suggest, to a mariachi version of the national anthem, that “maybe, instead of houses, we could live in tepees, ’cause it’s better, in a lot of ways.”

Documentary ‘Fracknation’ debates ‘Gasland,’ ‘Promised Land’ and the greenshirts—and wins.

By Gregory Solman

The Best in Order of Preference

1. “Late,” Florrie
2. “Super Ultra,” Charli XCX
3. “Cold Summer,” CJ Hilton
4. “Warrior,” Queen of Hearts
5. “Skitszo Pt. 1,” Colette Carr
6. “Iconic,” Icona Pop
7. “True,” Solange
8. “Cityswitch,” SRH
9. “Ghost,” Sky Ferreira
10. “Against the Wall,” Kat Graham

The release of an EP has become a rite of passage in pop music. It’s meant to mark an artist’s readiness for greater things, while defining how that artist wants to be seen by his or her public.

In the pre-download days, the music industry didn’t have much use for EPs. They were neither here nor there. It must not have seemed worth it—all the paper, plastic and aluminum it took to convert five castoff tracks into a marketable product.

But EPs have now been embraced by the demoralized, declining music industry, precisely because the format is flyover country. There’s no recognized history of past success, no tradition associated with EPs. Failures go unnoticed amid that flat terrain.

Many of the artists who made notable EPs in 2012 probably won’t become pop superstars. But they were successful in this particular year, in this particular format, because unlike major-label moneymakers and TV talent show contestants, the recordings were made to justify their claim on an audience’s attention and did so, even if just for the length of a few tracks.

Stuck neither here nor there, they devised a destination for themselves and went there. And it turned out to be somewhere worth going. To me, that’s pop.

Florrie.

‘LATE,’ FLORRIE
“Late” is Florrie’s third and final EP before her major-label debut, expected to drop sometime this year. All three were produced by Xenomania, the British pop production outfit where Florrie was once house drummer.

She has also been a model, and there is something of a runway attitude about these four tracks. Even more than in “Introduction” and “Experiments,” the first two Florrie EPs, the songs here march out fiercely to meet you.

“Late” goes way beyond ambition, aesthetic and commercial. These songs are so focused and tightly wound they suggest that, for Florrie and her collaborators, the pursuit of pop perfection has become an idée fixe.

Indulging Xenomania’s famous penchant for toying with song structure, Florrie builds ecstatic melodies out of chants that initially seem lightweight (e.g., “I shot him down-down-down-down-down-down,” “You gotta earn every inch of my body, babe”).

But if the songs on “Late” have a common “theme,” it’s that Xenomania’s pop vision—which Florrie incarnates—is not to be trifled with. The polish and sharpness of this sophisticated EP render totally irrelevant the question of how seriously we’re meant to take it.

That’s because Florrie and Xenomania prize sincerity over seriousness. The final track, “To the End,” clarifies the sense of moral purpose behind their embrace of what’s commonly labeled disreputable. Florrie calms the culture’s Fear of Music as she intones, “Who knows what the future holds? Better do what you’re told … I will only bring you happiness.”

Henri Matisse, “Young Sailor II,” 1906
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was given a paintbox by his mother as a diversion. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed the course of art. As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting.

His early stylistic experiments have inspired the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. This chronological installation of nearly 50 paintings focuses on series of works—especially pairs of canvases—that show the artist consciously thinking through issues of composition, and ways to give his color full voice. The thrill of the show is that, as Matisse instructs himself, he instructs us too, in the language he knew best.

Matisse’s formidable powers are evident from the start. Hanging alongside a vivid still life from 1899—painted in heightened impressionist hues—a second version somehow preserves much of its weightiness of forms even though reduced to flat, planar colors. Nearby, a Cézannesque still life hangs next to a pointillist version of the same setup. A brushy image of a seated sailor, rendered in a subdued palette, hangs next to one with almost crystalline shapes in blazing Fauve hues. What all these paintings share is an eloquence of colors—or, more exactly, a poignant measuring of the intervals between them.

In 1907-8, Matisse painted two remarkable versions of “Le Luxe,” depicting a standing figure with two attendants. The first has deliberately modeled volumes, but the second’s unmodulated color planes are enough to capture the verticality of the standing figure—the sensation of looking up at her head, and down to her feet, her height measured out by color-charged bands in the background. The artist makes the pose momentous with minimal modeling—much as did Giotto and Duccio, two early Renaissance artists whose works Matisse had admired that summer in Italy.

Henri Matisse, “Le Luxe I,” 1907
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There was no turning back. In one of two stunning paintings from 1914, a window’s cool light gently suffuses a studio view, but the artist’s drawing expands the space almost violently, anchoring a chair and bowl at the bottom, while planting, at our eye level, a distant tower rhyming with the window’s vertical partition. In the second canvas, by contrast, sunlight splashes forcefully across the floor, tracing deep shadows. Elements are rendered more harshly, even irrationally, yet the means are the same: the re-creation of a scene by observing a particular light, and cajoling the forms within into life.

The last galleries include the hieratic, flattened figures, still lifes and interiors from the late ’30s and ’40s, along with four series of photographs of paintings in progress, which afford a gratifying, over-the-shoulder view of the artist at work.

In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents. Oh yes, he also knew a thing or two about color.

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., through March 17.

Amy Roper Lyons jewelry

CRAFTS, ART FAIR AND OFF THE MAIN IN NYC

Christies

A wealth of graphic and decorative art awaits New Yorkers in the coming weeks. Refer to the websites for details, and take advantage of all this bounty during the preview exhibitions.

To read the full article at City Arts click here.

Tracy Letts Takes on his Mentor Edward Albee in New Production

By Ben Kessler

Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? returns to Broadway in a 50th-anniversary production from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Tracy Letts and Amy Morton will appear in the iconic roles of George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple locked in terminal, tragic combat on a New England college campus. Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks will play Honey and Nick, the catalytic younger couple whose own deep-seated “issues” are teased out and mirrored in the main conflict.

Letts, a seasoned stage actor, is perhaps best-known as the writer of the Tony Award-winning August: Osage County, which aimed for greatness (and, in the estimation of many critics, succeeded) by cranking the theme of American dysfunction—Albee’s ace—up to 11. Letts packed the stage with head cases, updating the conventions of naturalistic drama with reality-TV shamelessness.

For Letts, essaying George (an Everest of a role) may present an irresistible opportunity to illuminate the aspects of Albee’s play that galvanized and inspired him. But can the writer who unleashed the clamorousAugust: Osage County render in performance the delicate balance of irony and rue that makes George’s “Dies Irae/up yours” monologue in Act Two one of the American theatre’s most memorable? (I would be interested to see Steppenwolf alum John Malkovich give it a try.)

It’s obvious that Virginia Woolf’s scathing poetry has no place in the Kardashian era of lazily contrived reality-TV “drama.” Yet the play’s metatheatrics (Honey and Nick as onstage audience surrogates) speak to issues of spectatorship that, if anything, are more relevant now than they were in 1962. Against pop culture’s ongoing desensitization, Albee’s language and cunning structure still have the power—five decades later—to jolt us into being appalled, instead of entertained, by cruelty.

Keanu Reeves—who better?—Parses the Digital Revolution

by GREGORY SOLMAN

Chris Kenneally’s Side by Side represents the rare “industrial” that’s not promoting any particular point of view, and should give pause to cinephiles as well as visual and dramatic artists with only a passing interest in that moribund art form, the movies. It curates a thoughtfully chosen collection of interview subjects, traversing the production and distribution range, and seats co-producer Keanu Reeves as a modest, intelligent interlocutor, lending the project a quiet prestige.

In what will be a worthy companion piece to future dirges on the death of cinema, the work examines the generation of Hollywood moviemakers on the verge of abandoning film for a dubious digital future, thus documenting one of the most significant turning points of any artistic medium in our times.

Painter turned director David Lynch declares that he’s done with film (wiseacres may retort that they’re done withhis films). Infamous digital promoter George Lucas—whose Industrial Light & Magic once stocked fake lens flares to make early digital productions look more like film—says celluloid simply has no place to go. (Given his hot-rod passions, one wonders if Lucas would say the same of that other 19th century technology, the automobile; or if he really, honestly, thinks Attack of the Clones is more visually appealing than Vittorio Storaro’s work for the LucasArts production Tucker, or even the look achieved by the second-timers who shot American Graffiti in such memorable widescreen.)

But the documentary gently counters digital’s early adopters with equally passionate skeptics. Martin Scorsese laments the loss of daily film rushes as “a special time” to judge performances lost on tiny digital monitors, and other directors describe the “betrayal” of film dailies not delivering on their unseen promise. Comparing early digital systems to “trading oil paints for a set of crayons,” David Fincher sees Hollywood’s feckless embrace of novelty over quality as the tendency to “not only kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but sodomize it first.”

Digital imaging has improved to the point of acceptability to some, but not to others like the great Vilmos Zsigmond, whose understated praise of the film image as “incredibly beautiful” carries an elegiac sadness. The work of cinematographers once thought “genies” and “magicians” for conjuring images they’d promised on the next day become demystified by electronic monitors. But just as directors make the case for the certainty of in situ image production, others cite the intrusion of everyone on set, including preening actors, muddling singular vision with groupthink.

Old school film editors such as Anne V. Coates concede to the inevitability of digital editing systems but point out the discipline lost in the transition from methodical thinking, followed by mechanical splicing, to simply pushing buttons to make fast, unnecessary cuts and mix-master versions (what another editor describes as images “manipulated to death”). Coates casts doubt on whether an editorial masterpiece such as Lawrence of Arabia could have survived the technology intact. Scorsese stays true to sensibility describing the blood mixing with razor-blade cutting. Tim Burton’s favorite editor Chris Lebenzon evocatively describes the aesthetic shift even in the inner sanctum of the editing room, the ramping whirring of film reels in machines giving way to a keyboard-clicking silence better suited to candles and incense.

Performance in cinema has been transformed by the replacement of 10-minute film reel takes, and (as one professional puts it) the sobriety of money moving through the machine, to impossibly long digital video takes. For theater-trained John Malkovich, digital means a merciful end to stop-and-start dramatis interruptus, but for others, endless takes and capricious re-takes feel more like Groundhog Day. Reeves intervenes with a story from his experience on A Scanner Darkly, when he pleaded with the director, “Can we please stop?” and Fincher recalls a Robert Downey Jr. scene in which he left urine in mason jars on the set as a protest to digital takes without breaks.

Slightly missing the point of virtual reality’s yin-yang, James Cameron reminds Reeves of the artificiality of every filmmaking process and asks, “What was ever real?”

Well, a face as interesting as Keanu’s, for starters.

Kenneally covers most of the angles with assiduous sequentiality. Yet there’s still more to explore. Though the cinematographers explain the rupture to color space wrought by the technical aspects of cameras and lenses—depth of field, resolution and dynamic range—there remains a more fundamental philosophical discussion on the ontology of the photographic image, the difference in experience between watching real objects in space, pro-filmic events photo-chemically encased in what Roland Barthes called an anterior-present tense, versus watching the virtually real in a synthesized environment, in a kind of unavoidable immediacy.

A demonstration of Digital Intermediate “power windows” as a replacement of film color timing (given short shrift as an art), suggests a new tension between the cinematographer and digital colorist but ignores the audience’s perspective, and the profound question of whether viewers can ever again trust, much less admire, an image subject to infinite manipulation. In the days of film telecines—a precursor to DI machines—even the best in the business described their jobs as humbly translating the cinematographer’s vision; with a once-unheard of chutzpah, the digital colorists now say they’re part of a collaborative team. So it’s not hard to imagine that the art of the great cinematographers interviewed here will die with the film medium, or become drowned in a crowd-sourced mud pit.

If it isn’t already obvious, Kenneally confirms that film cameras are going the way of manual typewriters (and his project was doubtless too early to mention that Kodak is now bankrupt). And it wouldn’t have taken an excursion into industrial conspiracies to point out that Sony, with a lot of help, foisted upon cinema, all its visual artists, its audience and the home-video aftermarket a compromise 16:9 aspect ratio format that has over-determined the very shape of movies forever.

And as to the possibilities suggested by cheap-camera digital democratization—all those frustrated filmmakers lacking only the means of production? Maybe someday. But surely anyone who thinks movies are getting better hasn’t the eyes to see.

Brooklyn Homecoming could Solve Barbra’s Career Problems

by DENNIS DELROGH

New York Celebrates the Art of Flamenco

BY JUDY GELMAN MYERS

No one can make the mistake of calling New York the home of flamenco, but ever since the Great White Way crowned Jose Greco “New Broadway Personality of the Year” in 1952, the city has made flamenco its own. Aficionados make daily pilgrimages to Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Library to study some of the greatest flamenco legends who ever lived: Farruco, Fernanda de Utrera, Chocolate, captured for the Jerome Robbins Archive in the incomparable 1986 Broadway show Flamenco Puro. And, if flamenco historian Brook Zern can be believed (and he always can), Paco de Lucia found his calling in New York when guitar friends led him to Sabicas, who was in the city with Carmen Amaya, and Sabicas charged the young hotshot with finding a new approach to flamenco.

This fall, New York continues venerating the art of flamenco by importing the best of the best. Festivities commence at the Joyce, where the season opens with Noche Flamenca. Hailed as one of the most authentic touring flamenco companies today, Noche presents an extended two-week engagement of Flores para los Muertos (Sept. 18-30), mounting two world premieres. Fans of leading lady Soledad Barrio will be thrilled to learn that she’s opening a flamenco dance studio on the Upper West Side.*

Drom’s New York Gypsy Festival presents dancer/singer Elena Andujar on Sept 28. Some may recognize Elena as the flamenco dancer in the film Devil’s Advocate; some may recognize her portrait in Richard Avedon’s bookAn Autobiography. Everyone will recognize this talent for what she is—a spontaneous voice with native-born instinct and intense rhythmical response. With a deep knowledge of the traditional repertoire, she incorporates the rhythms of rap as she reworks ancient lyrics with a sense of humor.

Giving Gypsies their due as the incomparable practitioners and most likely originators of flamenco, the World Music Institute offers Festival Flamenco Gitano, a sensational four-concert ticket. To appreciate the importance of this series, it’s necessary to know that flamenco has traditionally been transmitted generation to generation within a few great Gypsy families.

The series kicks off Oct. 5 with recording legend José Mercé, who learned flamenco at the feet of his uncle, the illustrious singer Manuel Soto de Sordera. Mercé will be accompanied by Diego del Morao, whose incredible technique can be traced back to his father, the incomparable Moraito. On Oct. 6, a 12-member multigenerational company presents Fiesta Jerez—flamenco puro straight from its Andalusian birthplace. Perhaps the greatest flamenco dynasty takes the stage on Oct. 7, with Farruco’s daughter, La Farruca, and grandson, El Carpeta, so named because he remembers even the most difficult dance steps after seeing them only once. Finally, Diego El Cigala returns to his flamenco roots on Nov. 3, accompanied as he was last year by Diego del Morao.

*For information on Soledad Barrio’s classes, email mariola@nocheflamenca.com or go tonyflamcalendar.com.