When I visit someone’s home I am drawn inevitably towards their bookshelf. You can always learn something about a person by the books they read. The idea of creating a portrait through books, or to be precise, through the covers of books that someone has read is the central conceit behind the seminal project by R.B. Kitaj entitled, “In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part.” It is a portfolio of 50 screen-prints produced in 1969, 33 of which are currently on display in “R.B. Kitaj: Personal Library”at The Jewish Museum.

Kitaj was an artist full of big ideas. He was an early British pop artist, working at the same time as David Hockney and Richard Hamilton. While Kitaj was primarily a figurative artist this specific project would later be seen as a sort of bridge from the 60’s into the era of 70’s conceptual art. While often sensual and emotional, Kitaj’s work was always overflowing with intellectual questions and riddles. The notion that a person is the sum total of the books they’ve read, the information they’ve taken in, and by extension the choices they’ve made, turns this set of prints into an artistic mystery game.

What are we to make of the man who has chosen to read both The City of Burbank Annual report for 1968/9 and the collected Articles and Pamphlets of Maxim Gorky, Coming of Age in Samoa and a textbook entitled The Wording of Police Charges? Hints are dropped  by the inclusion of The Jewish  Question and The Tower by W.B. Yeats. As you walk through the show each book adds another set of clues about the nature of the man portrayed. It is a fascinating and totally successful game; except for the fact that the curators have chosen only 33 of the 50 available images. One wonders why and how the choices were made of what to show and what to omit Pieces of the portrait are missing.

The project consists of large screen-prints based on photographically enlarged images of the book covers, bindings and dust jackets. Viewing the worn and torn edges of these mostly pre-World War Two editions, we see the history of Kitaj’s relationship with these books and the beauty that age and handling has added to their already luscious old-world book design. The enlarged discolorations, delicate scuff marks, and deep elegant colors force you to focus on how beautiful books used to be. By enlarging the scale of the book covers Kitaj has re-contextualized them as objects that carry the full weight of their original intent along with the bemused hipster coolness of Pop art. The mundane becomes precious.

The one jarring note to what is a strangely moving and beautiful show is a lackluster installation. The prints are hung on a dingy pale blue wall that feels institutional, making the room seem dull. One thing we know is that the man portrayed by “In Our Time” was anything but dull.

“R.B. Kitaj: Personal Library” runs through August 11 at The Jewish Museum. 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St.

Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker — played by Greta Gerwig — running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be a professional dancer, even though she demonstrates no aptitude for it.

You gotta love her, is writer-director Noah Baumbach’s privileged position. Frances Ha is Baumbach’s love letter to Gerwig, his current paramour, (she was the ingenue in his film Greenberg who replaces Jennifer Jason Leigh in the protagonist’s affections). Yet Baumbach is the one American filmmaker with the least aptitude for showing love on screen after William Friedkin — yet Friedkin has skills in the opposite direction. Once again aping the self-absorption made fashionable, (though never popular), by the Mumblecore indie film movement of young hipsters, Baumbach’s title refers to Andrew Bujalski’s early Mumblecore release Funny Ha Ha. Baumbach uses Gerwig, that movement’s female icon, to express his own confusion of artistic-pursuit with social-climbing — which here comes off as ambivalent misogyny.

Greta Gerwig stars in Frances Ha.

Probably because Baumbach never examines his own hatefulness, he expects others to view it affectionately. The embarrassing spectacle of Frances/Gerwig gracelessly trotting across dance studios, flopping on beds and peeing in the subway, (she’s called “undatable” by a couple of dorks), is only comparable to grotesque females in Baumbach’s previous films. Frances/Gerwig’s “weird man-walk” might be intended to recall Cybill Shepherd’s gauche stomp in Daisy Miller, but Peter Bogdanovich made her sympathetic, (as Whit Stillman miraculously did with Gerwig in Damsels in Distress). Here, Frances/Greta’s lunatic personality crosses the parvenus of Woody Allen’s Manhattan with the Left Bank jeunne filles of the French New Wave.

While Frances Ha looks terrific, (cinematographer Sam Levy imitates the Nouvelle Vague’s sunlit black & white fairly well), its gloss lacks the New Wave sense of discovery. Everything’s so derivative, from using street addresses as chapter titles to lifting Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts score, it merely matches Allen’s unoriginality. Check out Criterion’s new Blu-Ray version of Godard’s Band of Outsiders to see the style of black and white chic that Baumbach simultaneously aspires to and disgraces. Godard made then-wife Anna Karina the disarming center of a still-stylish triangle, (with the irresistible Samy Frey and Claude Brasseur), and subjected them all to absolute moral scrutiny—whether racing through the Louvre, robbing a mansion or improvising an immortal line dance in a bar. But Baumbach only celebrates proud hateful retorts and transparent privilege (Frances/Greta’s Paris trip becomes the same nowhere as Tokyo in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.)

Baumbach can hardly get a fair review in this town where his personal spider-web network of family/media connections guarantees indulgent endorsements; so his deficient poison pen letter gets praised as a cinematic valentine by confreres who share his warped values — the private life exploitation and payback of New York’s Manhattan-Brooklyn boho/bourgeoisie, (same as with his detestable The Squid and the Whale). Private code is what Frances/Greta pines for when she describes a “secret world [shared with her best friend played by Mickey Sumner], that’s what I want in life.” Maybe you have to be a Mumblehattan elite to love this kind of self-love.

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By Ben Kessler

Justin Timberlake’s enduring commercial, critical, and street-level success can perhaps best be explained with an insight from Sigmund Freud: There is no “negative” in the unconscious.

Ironically, though, in our messed-up culture JT’s shameless lack of negativity must be defined negatively. In other words, JT demands to be known by what he blessedly is NOT.

Ever since his emergence as a solo artist with Justified (2002), JT’s charisma has made for great showbiz by dramatizing the impact of black pop culture on the mainstream. At the beginning of his solo career, he certainly benefited from opposition to Eminem’s purely negative co-optation of hiphop.

Justin Timberlake

Take Taylor Swift’s recent hit “I Knew You Were Trouble.” Swift’s succession of singles supposedly inspired by high-profile breakups follows the JT template that won him success with the kiss-off tracks “Cry Me a River” (2002) and “What Goes Around…Comes Around” (2007).

But Swift’s song’s breakup is both romantic and musical: She parts ways with the country-western milieu “Trouble” was clearly meant for and inspired by. Choosing impersonal Top 40 production over the rootsy instrumentation that might have made her sentiments relatable (if nowhere near as original as JT’s producer Timbaland’s ever-effervescent grooves), Swift ensures her hit is a zeitgeist affair, saturated in the ego-stroking love of disappointment that characterizes dominant youth culture.

Now consider JT’s epic love song “Mirrors.” Unlike other 20/20 tracks that pay explicit homage to black pop icons (Al Green on “That Girl,” Curtis Mayfield on “Pusher Love Girl”), “Mirrors” is, for most of its 8:06 running time, sonically untethered: a mix of beatboxing, handclaps, synths, strings, and guitars that shouldn’t create a pleasing sound but does. When JT sings, “It’s like you’re my mirror/My mirror staring back at me,” it doesn’t reflect narcissism but an awesome and awed faith in the mystery of human connection. And especially when JT sings the chorus with only handclaps and a swirling guitar riff behind him (a moment made for stadium gigs), “Mirrors” turns that faith into a participatory event.

The song’s coda achieves true genius as its melody — at the unlikeliest of times, five and a half minutes in!! — resolves into an r&b ballad. “Say goodbye to the old me, he’s already gone,” sings the multitracked JT over a chant that loops like a bassline: “You are, you are the love of my life.” No top-tier popstar has dared such a sweetly revealing moment in recent memory. Bad movies and boy bands aside, here JT lays bare the core of his true artistic calling. He earns full forgiveness for his participation in The Social Network. (Elsewhere on the album, “Tunnel Vision,” which describes how love and desire purify perception, could be JT’s calling-out of myopic Hollywood.)

JT brings pop artistry back by reminding us that the primary mission of a pop musician is to make us feel and dance. That’s both the power and subject of “Don’t Hold the Wall,” which contains what is possibly the album’s key lyric, addressed to a coy dancing partner: “You’re so far out/I had to come get you.” Against expectation, the song is not a banger, but insinuates with an exotic (bhangra-inspired), erotic aural rhetoric. No matter how far out the culture gets, JT and Timbaland will come get us.

The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself not so much. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenberg’s plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and that’s what the media response, (foregrounding Luhrmann’s $125 million budget and hyping Jay-Z’s irritating hip-hop music score), respects above movie content.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in director Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

When we talk about this Great Gatsby, the event and advertising hype are more meaningful than the film. It signifies a transfer in cinema’s cultural impact from narrative enjoyment to the artificial processes of commercialism. Interest in this film derives from political and cultural forces exemplified by advertising, not F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel which romanticized working class 1920s bootlegger Jay Gatsby, (played by an aged, agitated Leonardo DiCaprio), whose social-climbing obsession centers on Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the flame of his youth now married to rich, bigoted lout Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton, wasted).

Fitzgerald’s tale here loses its trenchant all-American subject. Luhrmann trades the story of Gatsby’s personal striving for another pointless exercise in excessive computer-generated gimmickry and pop-culture hodge-podge. Shill journalists, ignorant of film style, submit to this visual torture as if it were original or effective. Luhrmann’s signature camera move changes the zoom into a whoosh—a simulated evocation of cinema’s most glorious kinetic gesture. What an Italian film critic once described as “the bliss of camera movement” becomes a shrill, over-amped, unnatural sensation.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star in The Great Gatsby.

Scale and spatial logic disappear, so does any emotional dimension. Luhrmann bloats Fitzgerald’s slim, breezily-worded tale to a draggy, repetitious and pretentious epic. Ideas about class, (hidden points about ethnicity), details about desire, frustrated idealism and American history get both dragged-out and run-over. Luhrmann’s screen images whiz around Long Island and Manhattan just as they did Paris in his 2002 Moulin Rouge, destroying any realistic sense of place or experience. Luhrmann’s visual exaggeration is like is Gatsby’s corrupt aspirations: he asks “You think it’s too much?” after sending a roomful of flowers to Daisy yet doesn’t heed when told “I think its what you want.”

Instead of representing an authentic modern vision of class, Luhrmann’s lack of narrative skill destroys comprehension so completely that he inadvertently exposes the novel’s flaws. Luhrmann’s own opportunism reveals Fitzgerald’s. The important subtext of Gatsby’s (ne Jay Gatz) attempts at Wasp integration is lost. His mentor Meyer Wolfsheim in becomes an Indian Bollywood figure; Daisy and Tom’s friend Jordan Baker’s haunting line “We’re all white here” is omitted; and narrator Nick Carraway is turned into a sycophantic dolt, (miscast Tobey Maguire’s googly-eyed performance is one of the worst in recent screen history).

Carraway’s voice-over narration sounds like he just learned to read which may be the key to Luhrmann’s Attention Deficit Disorder directorial style; it replaces visual significance and precision. Making a Great Gatsby that looks like both a comic book movie and Peter Jackson’s King Kong reduces our culture to little more than a TV commercial marketing Hollywood product.

This Gatsby is only about the profit-making potential of what movie exhibitors used to call “film exploitation” and it confirms our news media’s surrender to that goal.

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Newscasters have disgraced their profession and politics by making cameos with apparently no qualms that news is just another form of celebritized fiction. There’s an unholy alliance between the news industry and Hollywood. No matter the deprivations Americans across the country still suffer from Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, West, Texas and the economy—the Correspondents’ dinner is a ritual for the privileged, the ruling class that Americans like to think doesn’t exist. That’s one reason they go to the movies, (the most shameful reason), and Spielberg made this short to further that ends of mystification, misguidance and manipulation.

Steven Spielberg’s Obama.

The mockumentary’s unfunny jokes start with Spielberg asking “I mean who is Obama, really? We don’t know. We never got his transcripts.” This would only be amusing if it weren’t true. There’s obscenity in joking about the media’s protection of Obama’s image and its implicit lack of decorum which began (negatively) with the media’s assault on George W, Bush’s presidency. But Nevermind. (That might have been a more clever title for the short—what, was Tony Kushner too busy reading Entertainment Weekly?).

Steven Spielberg’s Obama was made redundantly, to disguise the euphemistic Beltway metaphors of Lincoln, (such as that despicable moment when Abraham Lincoln, arms outstretched, mendaciously emulates the scales of justice—but politicking with his right hand and prevaricating with his Left). Yet, those who care about the honor of Spielberg’s best work have to pay mind to this short’s dishonesty. It gainsays the fact of Obama’s media-based mythification by joking about it.

Spielberg pretends in the short to be thinking about doing a first film about Obama and smirks, “Picking the right actor to “play Obama that was the challenge. So I needed someone who could dive in and really become Barack Obama. And as it turns out the answer was right in front of me all along: Daniel Day Lewis.” This plays the movie going public cheap, as if they weren’t smart enough to catch that Obama was already the subtext of Lincoln. Spielberg knew this, he let screenwriter Tony Kushner go forward with the rhetorical ruse which The New York Times only cottoned to after the film’s release.

In an analysis titled “Confronting the Fact of Fiction and the Fiction of Fact,” two thumbs-up reviewers chimed “Lincoln isn’t just about how President Lincoln navigated the passage of the 13th Amendment; it is also about President Obama whose presidency could not be imagined without that amendment.” So much form the limits of Times critics’ imaginations. They finally admitted that Spielberg and Kushner’s fabrications were rooted in the dark heart of millennial White Liberal fantasy, not historical fact or African American dreaming.

Because Obama has become the fulfillment of White Liberal dreaming, his mythification in Lincoln and throughout the mainstream media is accepted without vetting—so much so that even Spielberg can contribute to the mythification, attempting to sway an election and then kid about it.

His short’s suggestion that the Obama myth required an actor of Daniel Day Lewis’ stature is inadvertently revealed. Spielberg boasts about Day Lewis’ method of ”becom[ing] his character: Hawkeye from Last Of The Mohicans, Bill the Butcher in The Gangs of New York and Abraham Lincoln from Lincoln. And you know what, he nailed it.” Nailing it is the correct, crucifying term for the Washington Correspondents Dinner’s deprecation of American history.

Spielberg’s litany accidentally links Obama’s presidency to questionable representations of American history: James Fennimore Cooper’s White fantasy that Leslie Fiedler once explicated, (in Love and Death and the American Novel) as the embodiment of Eurocentric fears and the basis of America’s racial delusions, (a critical thesis now forgotten in the Ebert age); Scorsese’s post-Vietnam imagining of America’s hostile social legacy and immigrant brutality. Spielberg ties all that to Lincoln, not to absolve it but to unconsciously root it to the racial and political confusion about slavery and identity that the unvetted Obama represents.

But, wait! It gets worse! Obama himself takes part in Spielberg’s charade. After once claiming “I have a lot on my plate,” Obama generously took the time to complete Spielberg’s fantasy by showing how he prepares for public performance: Looking into a mirror, Obama preps “Hello, Ohio! Hello, Ohio!” “I love you back.” “Look, look, let me be clear about this.” The only thing that’s clear is that the gathered media aristocracy, (including the low-down yet highly-placed of Hollywood and Manhattan), approves this disingenuousness. It’s all right with them. They want a President as lacking in dignity as they are, so they reduce him to their level—morally, professionally, politically.

This short is Spielberg’s most Brechtian comedy: he gets the President of the United States to ridicule the supposedly sincere reasons his constituents support him, undermining the prestige of office that even his opponents are obliged to respect. (One could argue that the media’s out-of-control disrespect the presidency began with George W. Bush or maybe our lapdog media was born during the Clinton administration). For Spielberg, Obama willingly portrays a performer in the act of deceiving the public. (Only Bill and Hillary Clinton taking on the roles of the mafia gangsters The Sopranos was as offensive.)
It is not funny when Obama-as-Day-Lewis confuses things, saying “The hardest part? Trying to understand his [my] motivations. Why did he [I] pursue ‘health care’ first? What makes him [me] tick? Why doesn’t he [I] get mad? If I was him I’d be mad all the time. But I’m not him, I’m Daniel Day Lewis.” It’s as bad as a Saturday Night Live skit. Or a Jon Stewart Early Show skit. Or a Real Time with Bill Maher skit. (Or a Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow skit, I mean, “newscast.”) That’s how low the producer of the terrific early Zemeckis-Gale comedies has sunk.

For the past seven months I’ve personally been fielding questions about why I didn’t like the movie Lincoln. Going through the unpleasant effort of explaining the film’s basic inaccuracy and unfairness to people who were prepared to love and defend it simply because it was customized to their political sentiments, made my explanation all the more frustrating. (When die-hard Spielberg scoffers praised Lincoln, I knew their commendations had nothing to do with esthetics or history, only with the film’s slanted politics and strenuously forced contemporary parallel to Obama’s lame-duck presidency.)
Now, after the disappointment of the Kushner-Spielberg Lincoln, we get its unfortunate sequel—actually a coda. A coda ought to reinforce a work’s preceding revelations but it’s become apparent that after his previous great films showed the humane aspect of the human experience, Spielberg has taken up the partisan view. Now that Spielberg shows us what Lincoln actually meant, one can really, rightfully rue it.

By Elena Oumano

The six artists behind “Wan-Der-Lust,” a month-long, (now through May 15), mixed-media pop-up exhibit on the ground floor of 72 Wooster Street, announces its mission in a black painted scrawl over the entrance:
“Wanderlust is about the primal impulse for exploration. The work assembled expresses a freedom pulsing through the body blood.

The collective narrative in this exhibition is informed by journeys unknown; inspired by the moment. The work is meant to inspire a state of constant flow and transformation. Through these works on paper, canvas, photography, sculpture and furniture, we express the human craving for discovery.

Wan-der-lust by Peter Rupprecht.

Welcome to Wanderlust. We invite you to suspend in your reality.”

Since art of necessity involves exploration, transformation, and discovery, perhaps more to the point is photographer Peter Ruprecht’s observation that this show embodies the “Burning Man ethos of collaboration brought into the real world.” Photographers Reka Nyari and Ruprecht; artists Jody Levy and Arten Mirolevich; sculptors/furniture makers Dara Young and Yarrow Mazzetti; along with Harlan Berger of Centaur Properties, the developer hosting “Wan-Der-Lust” before 72 Wooster is sold, met at Burning Man and formed a camp that creates art alongside others as part of the pop-up community that takes over Nevada’s Black Rock desert every year. Over the course of a few weeks, they’ve transformed a rough, rubble-strewn NYC space lacking electricity into a gallery in order to showcase the individual works that often bear traces of each other’s fortuitous interference.

All the contributors here evidence imagination and skill, but Ruprecht and Mazzetti show the strongest.

Mazzetti’s powerfully authentic heart of pine and stainless steel furniture includes a sleekly gorgeous dining table and a chest with 5 theme drawers, each crammed with objects and opening to a flood of music.

Ruprecht, a former Olympic skier and financial consultant who’s untrained in photography, first bought a camera in 2006 and a few years later, had a billboard looming over Times Square. His richly-colored, high contrast images are not framed. Instead, Mazzetti’s aluminum backings extend the images’ space beyond four corners, underscoring their generosity and excitingly alive quality. A series of meticulously rendered etchings by Mirolevich, a visionary artist also working in water color, pen and ink here stands out as well. He’s the only Wan-Der-Lust artist with professional representation, But galleries are currently circling Ruprecht. Three of his photos were snapped up at the opening night party attended by 2000 people gathered mostly by internet word-of-mouth—further evidence of Burning Man’s infiltration into the real world.

From May 6 to May 11, Carnegie Hall will present a festival called “Spring for Music.” It offers five orchestras in six concerts. The orchestras come from around the country, and one of them was to have been the Oregon Symphony. The Oregonians found themselves short on cash, however, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) will play two concerts (May 9 and 10).

The first DSO concert consists of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Kurt Weill and Maurice Ravel. The second one is devoted to Charles Ives—his four symphonies. The concerts are conducted by the DSO’s music director, Leonard Slatkin.

Leonard Slatkin

I say to him, in a phone conversation, “I’m glad to be hearing Ives. But it’s a shame not to hear Walter Piston—he’s never played.” Slatkin informs me that he himself conducts Piston. But it’s true: The mid-century Americans are largely ignored. Music follows fashion, and Piston, William Schuman, Peter Mennin and the rest of those guys are out of fashion. A young conductor, says Slatkin, should make a project out of reviving them.

A young woman named Caroline Shaw has just won the Pulitzer Prize, notes Slatkin. She does not call herself a composer, interestingly enough. But performers will naturally want to perform what music she has written, or will write. What they’re unlikely to do, says Slatkin, is unearth, say, the Seventh Symphony of Roy Harris. (That composer’s Third was once well-known, but has faded from the repertoire.)

Slatkin grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a famous musician: Felix Slatkin, the violinist, conductor, arranger and so on. In and out of the house trooped even more famous musicians: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, yes, but also Art Tatum, the jazz pianist, and Frank Sinatra. Felix Slatkin died in 1963, when he was only 47. Leonard was 19.

He is now doing what his father wanted to do but did not live quite long enough to do: head an orchestra. His father wanted an orchestra of his own to conduct, somewhere. He was on the verge of getting one when he died. Leonard Slatkin has held many music directorships in his career. He started in Detroit five years ago.
The DSO has come through a rocky period. Before there was a national recession, there was a “one-state recession”: Michigan’s. The DSO was not immune. Then, toward the end of 2010, the musicians went on strike, for six months. The orchestra is now back on its feet, reformed and flexible.

The musicians took a pay cut—22 percent, on average. But they can earn more with optional work. The orchestra’s main home is still Orchestra Hall, downtown. But they are also out in the suburbs, in six different venues. Occasionally, the musicians break out into smaller ensembles, such as string quartets. “We don’t do flash mobs yet,” says Slatkin, “but that may come.”

Ticket prices have fallen, and ticket sales have increased. Also, concerts are streamed live on the Internet. “We are redefining the word ‘audience,’” says Slatkin. The webcasts are free of charge. Doesn’t this keep people from going to the concert hall? On the contrary, says Slatkin: The webcasts whet their appetite for the live-and-in-person experience.

The DSO is even developing an audience abroad, says Slatkin. “So, when the time comes to resume international touring, we have a head start. People not only know how we play, they know what we look like.”
You can buy all nine Beethoven symphonies from the DSO for a mere 20 bucks: They are downloadable. Slatkin figures we will have compact discs for another three or four years and then yield entirely to new technologies.
The DSO also has a number of programs designed to provide music education to young Detroiters—this used to be the job of families and schools. Slatkin himself enjoyed an excellent music education in the public schools he attended. He may have come from a spectacularly musical home, but “I cherished that hour when the music teacher came in with an autoharp.” Our society has changed, though, as we all know.

In short, the DSO has found a way to keep itself afloat, and moving forward. They are coping with the challenges of today, and also taking advantage of opportunities—such as the Internet. Slatkin is a particularly good ambassador for music. He is not only a fine conductor, he is one of the best talkers about music you’ll ever hear. He has some things in common with a conductor he much admired, Leonard Bernstein. And after all these years, he still loves music as much as ever.

“I have the best job in the world,” he says. “It is an honor and a privilege, as well as a responsibility.” He continues, “I stand in front of a hundred musicians and give a downbeat. To this day, I’m not 100 percent sure why that sound comes out”—the hard-to-beat sound of an orchestra.

Broadway’s new Black (or non-traditional cast) production of The Trip to Bountiful comes alive when Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly Texas widow longing to return to her titular hometown, stands up and sings a church hymn in a desolate bus station. It is the chestnut “Blessed Assurance” and as Tyson prances and sings, the audience spontaneously joined in.

Was it a response to the actress and her legacy of cultural landmarks (Sounder, Roots, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, East Side/West Side) or gospel’s call-and-response tradition that veteran Black performers and audiences bring to Broadway? It was a surprising—and unexpectedly satisfying—moment; unscripted by playwright Horton Foote whose synthetic Southern doggerel treats the human condition like bolts of preprinted fabric. Familiar ideas about family, aging and the passing of time are cut and stitched into ready-made, second-hand drama—the half-tragic equivalent to a sitcom.

But there’s Tyson as Carrie Watts, the role that originated by Lillian Gish and that won Geraldine Page an Oscar. This occasion forces one to realize the paucity of roles for older actresses (Tyson is 80), especially black actresses. Tyson seizes the vehicle to communicate her principled talent to a culture that has forgotten what that means.

When Carrie cries “I want to go back to Bountiful,” Tyson gives it the yearning of a woman who feels existentially stranded in a debilitating, non-nurturing place, a cramped two-room Houston apartment with her son Ludie (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and his frustrated, harpy wife Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams). The situation parallels the lack of mobility faced by black actresses toiling in an unwelcoming or restricting profession.

Tyson and Candola Rashad in A Trip to Bountiful.

Tyson‘s career milestones have always happened against the odds yet her successes are impressive because their always demonstrate moral integrity. Not the worse legacy, it puts Tyson in the same league as Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte–powerful performers who also stood for something. In this case, the memory of a bountiful artistic and political calling in which personal artistry illuminates mere professionalism.

That Tyson’s lack of sentimentality—her defining quality—fits Carrie Watts is ironic. Foote’s determined yet nostalgic crone is utterly average, suffering typical old-age dilemmas. Not exactly a warm matriarch, Tyson makes her stubborn, self-obsessed drive to return to her roots seem vital, (her subtle anger recalls Tyson’s Rebecca in Sounder). She works Foote’s threadbare, pseudo-homey clichés for all they’re worth.

There’s no richness in Foote’s writing, the flat, naturalistic language resists poetry; Geraldine Page gave the film her hammy but great emotionalism to stave off Foote’s unintended yet unavoidable bleakness. In the last act, director Michael Wilson lets Tyson nearly transform Carrie Watt’s dotage into principle: “I found my dignity and strength” she says looking at her girlhood home with the symbolic name, (a bland version of the yearning psychology William Inge expressed better in Come Back, Little Sheba).

That line isn’t quite believable but we know what Carrie/Tyson means: The search for stronger values and desire to restore personal heritage are clear. The sympathetic audience provided a Tyler Perry response, giving more implicit Christian fellowship than Foote intended. (Singing “Blessed Assurance” also recalls Tyson’s very excellent Peter Bogdanovich TV movie Blessed Assurance.) With Tyson’s presence, this production’s new ethnic focus evokes the Great Migration history of blacks relocated to urban living yet retaining ambivalent memories of the South as home. Jeff Cowie’s set, superlatively lighted by Rui Rita, recalls the Hudson River School of bucolic radiance; creating a visible, nearly cinematic passage of time.

The years since Tyson performed in the legendary 1961 production of Genet’s The Blacks have seen the once-thriving Black American theater movement pass. In this not-good-enough play Tyson’s richness and will makes one nostalgic for Black theater’s forgotten bounty.

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Unmistakably, Pal Sverre Hagan’s appearance in Kon-Tiki as Norwegian explorer Thor Heyedahl is modeled after Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Not just tall, blue-eyed with burnished blond hair, Hagan also conveys obsessive determination like O’Toole’s Lawrence, making Heyerdahl’s decision to build a balsa-wood raft and float from Peru to Polynesia more than a landmark in anthropology. It’s also a heroic European’s foolhardy adventure, verging on genius, which the directorial team Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg obviously admire.

Pal Sverre Hagan in “Kon Tiki”

Taking Lawrence of Arabia as a model, Ronning and Sandberg demonstrate a multi-leveled approach to Heyerdahl’s famous 5,000 mile voyage. They achieve the rare combination of historical replay, intelligent spectacle and sensible biography. Without the luxury of David Lean’s epic length, Kon-Tiki conveys the breadth of Heyerdahl’s 1947 daring as he opposes complacent scientists, gathers a five-man group of risk-takers as crew and ventures from cramped civilization into the limitless physical world.
Ronning and Sandberg shape both the danger and monotony of Heyerdahl’s mission to show the personalities of explorer and crew. The sub-theme of existential self-discovery starts with Heyerdahl’s near-drowning in childhood which explains the irony that he never learned to swim. It’s not a metaphysical study like Ang Lee’s sentimental sea adventure The Life of Pi but a day-to-day demonstration of men testing themselves amongst themselves and against the elements.
Despite Kon-Tiki’s grand subject it isn’t grandiose. It recalls Lawrence of Arabia‘s simplest qualities: a close, fascinated look at a historical figure, recreation of post-war global temperament and awe at nature’s majesty. These Scandanavian directors, (previously known for the breezy feminist western Bandidas starring Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz and produced by Luc Besson), chose a classical model in Lawrence, but they also honor their native heritage in an approach to environment that also recalls Jan Troell’s atmospheric filmmaking.
Extraordinary sightings of luminous underwater creatures, whales swimming beneath the raft and sharks threatening the Kon-Tiki as it becomes waterlogged are marvelous and thrilling, (colorfully shot by Geir Hartly Andeassen), but never overblown. It’s a perfect mix of CGI and nature ­— unlike the cartoonish extravagance which made The Life of Pi contradict its own spiritual premise.
Ronning and Sandberg’s modernity requires them to query nature, fate, existence. They do so less subtly than David Lean whose pre-computer generated imagery (CGI) respect for the infinite was part of his narrative richness. Kon-Tiki begins with Heyerdahl’s mother saying of his childhood rescue “God had nothing to do with it!” The film’s remaining narrative, though not exactly reverent, shows ambivalence about Heyerdahl’s ultimately discovery and triumph.
A night sequence panning from the raft, up to the heavens and back again, challenges us, the viewers, through visual awesomeness. Then Heyerdahl theorizes “Nature accepts us as part of itself like birds and fish.” Not as eloquent as Lawrence of Arabia, Ronning and Sandberg fit the wonders they show to contemporary skepticism. At least they never reduce Heyerdahl to the explorer’s cynicism in Werner Herzog’s man-vs.-nature films.

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Many incredible works of art are on view at New York auction houses in the next few weeks as the spring season shifts into high gear. The traditional contest between the two mega-houses begins with auctions of Impressionist & Modern Art, where works from important private collections are the name of the game. Check the websites for preview schedules, e-catalogues, videos and blogs, as well as soon-to-be-posted information about late May sales of American and Latin American art.

Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
The May 7 & 8 auction of Impressionist & Modern Art features highlights from the collection of the late Elisabeth and Alex Lewyt, (think vacuum cleaner), with proceeds to benefit a foundation for animal welfare. Their notable paintings include a Cezanne Still Life and Modigliani’s provocative “Amazon”; among their superb works on paper is a treasure-trove of illustrated artist’s letters. The academic 19th Century European Art to be sold on May 9 can’t compete for my attention with the exciting selection of Contemporary Art in the May 14 & 15 auction that contains wonderful works by Pollock, Still, Newman, Bacon, Serra and numerous others; many pieces have been donated to benefit the Whitney Museum of the Future, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and a number of other philanthropic endeavors. An important carved wood Eket Ogbom headdress from Nigeria is featured in the May 16 sale of African, Oceanic & Pre-Columbian Art. One of the big surprises of the spring season is the range and quality of collections amassed over many years by the late performer Andy Williams, whose Navajo blankets comprise a single-owner sale on May 21. On May 22, a large inaugural sale of Arts of the American West consists of American Indian art and Western paintings, with many fine examples of Native American pottery and basketry and Northwest Coast artifacts.

Derain 1905 portrait of Amélie Matisse

Christie’s (christies.com)
A video on the website provides an excellent introduction to some of the works of Impressionist & Modern Art in the May 8 & 9 sale. Among highlights are Soutine’s “occupational” painting, “Le Petit Patissier,” Derain’s 1905 portrait of Amélie Matisse wearing the blue and white kimono in which she frequently posed for her husband and artist-friends, a Picasso still life and an Arp sculpture from the estate of psychologist and philanthropist Mona Ackerman. The evening auction of Post-War & Contemporary Art on May 15 features highlights from the collections of Andy Williams and Celeste and Armand Bartos, and other marvelous pieces presented in a must-have catalogue containing lengthy illustrated essays on the wide-ranging art-historical influences and interrelationships inherent in many of the works. The same spirit continues in the daytime sessions on May 16, which include 24 works from the collection of Chicago contemporary art dealer Donald Young, 14 works being sold to benefit Human Rights Watch, and pieces being sold to benefit the Brooklyn Museum and the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. This auction preview deserves several visits.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Dustheads”

Bonhams (bonhams.com)
Garry Winogrand’s 1959 shot of a couple and their pet monkey in a convertible on Park Avenue, NY is a highlight of the May 7 Photographs sale; an Emil Nolde watercolor of peonies and black-eyed Susans is among the stars of the Impressionist & Modern Art auction later that day. The European Paintings to be sold on May 8 are represented by a charming oil sketch by J-B-C. Corot of his friend Constant Dutilleux painting outdoors in Douais, 1854. An attractive selection of Contemporary Art on May 14 leads with Mel Ramos’s large 1962 painting of D.C. Comics supervillain, “The Trickster.” A large sale of African, Oceanic & Pre-Columbian Art to be sold May 15 offers wonderful pieces from many cultures, including a rare wooden standing female figure from Angola.

Swann (swanngalleries.com)
A strong selection of Art, Press & Illustrated Books on May 9 features works on graphic design from the inventory of the late New York specialist bookdealer Irving Oaklander (see printmag.com/imprint/farewell-irving-oaklander-bookseller.) The annual sale of Modernist Posters on May 13 continues the theme, with masterpieces of typography, well-known and less familiar examples by famed poster artists, highlights from the personal collection of designer F. H. K. Henrion, and even a section of psychedelia. In addition to top-notch prints and editioned sculptures, the May 16 auction of Contemporary Art offers unique works on paper, such as Sam Francis’s untitled gouache and ink composition of 1981 from the “Ten Puffs” series, and a late 1960s oil painting of a horse by M. F. Husain.

Phillips (phillips.com)
Up-to-the-minute Contemporary Art is the focus in the May 16 & 17 auction. The sale of Latin American Art on May 23 features works from the second half of the 20th century.