By Valerie Gladstone

Terrence Blanchard takes big risks. Ever since his early years with drummer Art Blakeley’s legendary Jazz Messengers, the 51-year -old trumpeter has stepped out to try new things, winning five Grammy’s along the way, most recently for the heartrending song cycle A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke. He wrote his next film score for Red Tails, the story of the Tuskegee pilots, following up with the music for the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 2012. His first opera, Champion: an Opera in Jazz, based on the story of the gay boxing champion Emile Griffith, will have its premiere at Opera Theater of St. Louis June 15-30. “I learn something new each time I start an unfamiliar project,” he says on a recent call from Chicago. “A lot of reassessing and reevaluating goes on.”

Terrance Blanchard

Blanchard credits his years with Blakeley with giving him the confidence to lead such a musically adventurous life. He follows his mentor’s example in many ways. “Art never gave us direction,” he explains, “nor do I my musicians. It helped us develop – you make better music that way. You broaden the net.” For all his high-profile projects, he still likes nothing better than jamming with his group, which he will do at the Jazz Standard May 29-June 2. During the gig, he’ll be introducing tunes from his newest album, Magnetic, due out from Blue Note Records on May 28. Written by him and his musicians, the original numbers range from bop to electronic. As a convert to Buddhism, he says, “My music reflects my spirituality and beliefs. Whatever I’m dealing with in my life comes out in the music.”

By showing a willingness to change, adapt and grow, Blanchard developed the skills to write music for all kinds of works, though none have been more different nor more challenging than an opera. “I had to write for a range of voices rather than instruments,” he says, “and consider different registers and focus on melody.” But Emile Griffith’s story grabbed him emotionally, making it easier for him to write. Griffith was enjoying a successful career as a boxer when he unintentionally killed Benny Paret in the ring, ostensibly because Paret called him a derogatory word for gay. What especially got to Blanchard was Griffith saying later in life, “I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. I love a man and to so many people this is an unforgiveable sin.” This kind of compassion and sense of humanity infuses Blanchard’s music and makes listening to him such a rich experience.

Terence Blanchard plays at Jazz Standard May 29 through June 2.

The cynicism that makes Iron Man 3 so lousy is defied by the good-time camaraderie of Fast & Furious 6. Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Connor (Vin Diesel and Paul Walker) are more likable than Robert Downey’s snarky Tony Stark and their friendship makes for greater drama and comedy than Stark’s joshing relationship with Rhodes (Don Cheadle). What’s finer is Fast & Furious 6’s sense of solidarity; Dom and O’Connor’s criminal-and-cop alliance avoids the Iron Man franchise’s juvenile brand of excitement, (that shrill blend of exaggerated violence and superheroism), to provide truly heroic lessons in skill, courage, unity and speed.

Both films use previously established characters and rituals to explicate 2013’s post-9/11 malaise, (it’s remarkable how the low pleasures of mere genre movies can answer the disappointment of a high-serious thriller like Zero Dark Thirty). But where Iron Man 3 offends lingering fear and doubt and misrepresents the commonweal, Fast & Furious 6 with its gang of outlaws, (including Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez), joining federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to capture a terrorist offers a metaphor for recognizable community mobilization.

The Iron Man movies cannot overcome their essential cartoonishness. They count on inherited comic book fans but the Fast and Furious franchise’s origin in kinetic filmmaking, (the first film’s beautiful nighttime chase scenes have not been surpassed), provide a more realistic, richer thrill. Fast & Furious 6 doesn’t resort to Iron Man 3’s pessimistic but basically meaningless conceit “We create our own demons.” Such comic-book derived sarcasm insults post-9/11 history.

That fake Bin Laden figure in Iron Man 3, (played by Ben Kingsley at his most amusing), favors a dubious political position on the war on terror — trivializing it — while also exploiting it. Yet Fast & Furious 6’s Julian Assange-like villain Ian Shaw, (played with suave ruthlessness by Jason Statham), updates and upgrades the post-9/11 moral quandary. In fact, Shaw’s threat is uncannily similar to Iron Man 3’s specious promise. Tony Stark’s billionaire intrepidness (like Batman) replaces a democratic ideal with aristocracy. (No wonder critics who hated the colorful class satire in Pain & Gain preferred Iron Man 3’s mediocre, class-denying sarcasm.) In this way Iron Man 3 turns patriotism into elitism — as in the scene where the empty-shirt President of the United States hangs in crucifix effigy wearing an Iron Man suit.

Fast & Furious 6 restores democracy to the people. Its working-class cast of heroes represents ethnic street variety — from Diesel’s bi-racial virility and Walker’s blonde/blue virility to their multi-culti male and female comrades. This accounts for the series’ ongoing popularity. Its can-do concept of heroism (“Show me how you drive, I show you who you are,” says Dom) beats superhero projection. The series has progressed from being an underground noir expressing urban conflicts to confronting international crisis in a homey way.

When Gadot, (as one of Dom and O’Connor’s expert driver-martial artists), boasts “This is what we do!” she improves on President Obama’s expedient “That’s not who we are.” Her assertion defines both the gang’s skills and loyalty. Dom puts a fine point on it: “It’s all about family.” His implicit soldierly patriotism gives the film significance beyond its genre. In a central role, Rodriguez plays her scenes truculently, dulling the effect of a loved one who loses memory yet bonds through instinct, but in this kind of movie, action is character, (as Walter Hill said), and director Justin Lin moves quickly between each character’s set-piece. Lin has achieved greater action skills, especially in the airplane/cars chase sequence juggling several climaxes at once. Too darkly lit, it should have been major and revelatory like the multivalent action scenes in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race or Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin; instead it suffices as metaphor for democracy rallying against jumbo jet peril.

In Iron Man 3 the terrorist-villain maliciously teases “America, ready for another lesson?” That adolescent taunt conveys historical cynicism in the guise of entertainment; director Shane Black implies that America craves images of its own destruction. Fast & Furious 6 revels in action but it relishes feeling. Just like the Jesus piece Dom carries, a comrade lost-in-battle adds depth and historical resonance to this film’s creation of heroes, not demons. Not malicious in his 9/11 reference, Dom/Diesel in the slowed-down final scene prays “Bless our table.”

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Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight’s ongoing chronicle of an aging, talkative, narcissistic couple Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (he’s author of two books This Time and That Time; she’s artistic) threatens to become the The Thin Man series for indie movie hipsters.

And that’s precisely the problem. Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) are dramaturgically thin. Like any sequel, Before Midnight follows a formula: Jesse and Celine babble, flirt, babble, fight, babble and reunite. This time they jabber while vacationing in Greece which director Richard Linklater photographs like Hoboken, (not the Mediterranean jewel of Clare Peploe’s Greece in High Season), just to keep the bland franchise aesthetically consistent.

No doubt this talkathon appeals to indie geeks who haven’t realized that cinema is a visual medium; basing the series on dialogue allows its fans to utilize the screen simply as a vanity mirror. This verbal emphasis suggests that the script, (credited to Linklater and his actors), might well include improvisation. But is it the actors or the characters who think every thought in their heads must be uttered?

Hawkes and Delpy seem so natural in these roles that their characterizations stress behavior over action; self-involvement over interaction. The opening scene shows Jesse escorting his teenage son to a return flight back to America where he lives with his divorced mother. The possibility that Jesse will deal with the personal complications of parenthood continues when Celine arrives with their angelic twin daughters. His guilt and her self-sacrifice are promising. But the children and their obligations are soon shoved off-screen, leaving Jesse and Celine to imbibe egotism the way Nick and Nora Charles downed martinis.

The European locale doesn’t sharpen their sense of being in the cosmos because their world only extends as far as their noses. Jesse’s scraggy gruffness and Celine’s spreading rear-end displace any eroticism; what’s highlighted is the way these characters still embody all the liberal pieties, biases and affectations. Their constant boasting and self-flattery and philosophizing accurately reflect the utter banality of the half-educated—the essence of all Linklater’s films.

Before Midnight’s most profound observation isn’t a sense of mortality from approaching middle-age, (as suggested by the title), but a facile agnosticism. Celine accuses Jesse of being “a closet Christian” then behaves blasphemously in an ancient church. Existentialism is offered when an elderly woman mourns “We are important to some but we are just passing through.”

Later, Celine argues “There’s no one human state. The human state is multiple.” That’s really funny because Before Midnight, like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, has but one mode: discursive self-infatuation. Only when the parenthood subject crops up later do Jesse and Celine focus their logorrhea. It gets personal and hurtful. Delpy throws herself into Diane Keatonesque emotional extremes while Hawkes’ exasperates to a draw. It’s what Noah Baumbach can’t do yet Linklater does nothing with it. He makes the mistake of referencing Roberto Rossellini’s marriage drama Voyage to Italy and even imitates the climactic sunset moment of Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert. This is hipster filmmaking at its most ignorant: Linklater, Delpy and Hawkes don‘t seem to realize that Rossellini and Rohmer’s masterpieces were about miracles, not mundane naturalism.

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What punk? An extravaganza prefaced by a non-smelly replication of the club CBGB’s toilet, “Punk: Chaos to Couture” is the Metropolitan Museums of Art’s most recent nod to what used to be termed popular culture. Here, go directly to couture despite some mood-inducing references, in piped-in time-appropriate music and paraphernalia. On opening day there was none of the whiff of rubber either, promised by some promotional bits, though many looks of wonderment from a crowd who had missed it all, taking forbidden pictures­ — perhaps the only spontaneous expression of authority-challenging at hand.

The exhibit credits an admitted re-colonizer, Brit rock promoter Malcolm McLaren, for packaging punk, quoting him as saying he was first inspired by Richard Hell of the Voidoids when catching his act at CBGB’s on the lower east side at 315 Bowery. Taking home to England the look of spiky hair, sloganned and ripped T-shirts and of course attitude, he and then-inamorata Vivienne Westwood, now a high end designer, showcased and sold punk-inspired designs in their store Seditionaries at 430 King’s Road in London. The first room of this show’s seven is titled “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Dolce and Gabbana gowns.

That’s pretty much it for the American side of things, with club-goers described as middle-class kids with dyed hair having a good time watching Blondie, the Ramones, and Patti Smith. The next room/gallery has a background T-shirt display in dim lighting to preserve the precious objects, from Seditionaries. For those who were enlivened by last year’s Alexander McQueen exhibit, which happened to also have been curated by Andrew Bolton, this exhibit’s chief organizer, you understand why Westwood and McLaren went for patched-together tartans, particularly in pants, though you have to make your own fill-in-the blank connection to the juxtaposed, more recent McQueen designs. It helps to remember McQueen’s comments that Scotland was historically raped by the Brits; thus the fabric tears and holes.

Then it’s on to display of today’s world class designers, mainly Europeans and Japanese: fanciful for the Italians, severe and dark for British, etc. I began to believe. Yes, punk—studs, rips, staples, wildly strappy heels­ — is incorporated, even in an apparently straightforward dress by Rossella Jardini for the House of Moschino. At first it seems to only have a sparkly bodice, but up close you can see, indeed, it is composed of teeny-tiny safety pins, making use of one of punk’s tenets: using disposable objects. To the museum’s credit, there is wall text quoting Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols: “Tears, safety pins, ripped over the gaff, third rate tramp thing, that was poverty, real lack of money. The arse of your pants falls out, you just use safety pins.” It’s a short step to “DIY Bricolage” featuring gowns made of garbage bags — real ones, some cut to look ruffly, even of materials designed to look like garbage bags — manneristic but seemingly wearable.

Yet the most sophisticated piece was a man’s evening suit, with the famous punk red splatter-over-the-heart T-shirt reinterpreted by Saint Laurent’s Hedi Slimane as discrete but shiny red beads on the breast region. Other fabulous, using the word advisedly, ball dresses from Dolce and Gabbana are voluminous, painted or patterned with pretty graffiti-inspired images, which is supposed to make them punk. But as Joe Strummer of The Clash says in wall text, “All the stuff about Pollock was a veneer. We didn’t have any overalls, so we got covered in paint [after painting a warehouse]. It was a good way to put something together to wear on stage.”

Bondage locks as jewelry, traceable to Sid Vicious, are pointed up. A contemporary red leather S&M harnessed affair by Westwood signals the show. Red (blood) of course, and black (nihilism) are the dominant colors. Even Karl Lagerfeld leaped on board, some. His 2011 Chanel suit of elegantly cut, subtly metallic fabric, with holes-on-purpose, triggered an overheard comment from one woman to another: “Oh, I remember that. I would never wear it of course.”

Yet does the show draw a clear line between punk and high design? Is ripping up a T-shirt really the same as deconstructionism? The canard of fashion starting from the streets is not new, with designers on the look-out for inspirations to create, promote, and make a buck from. And one connection is not made, but then it was easy to miss even in the ’70’s. The Mudd Club, an unmarked door at 77 White Street in pre-monied downtown Manhattan, was also a punk scene for musicians like Lou Reed, David Byrne, Nico, the B-52’s.

Artists such as Marisol, Basquiat and Keith Haring, designers like Betsey Johnson, filmmakers such as Amos Poe and Vincent Gallo stopped by: visual and aural artists on the edge. Anna Sui and William Burroughs showed up, and how could all these creatives not influence each other? Their impact on art, design, even clothing, was breakthrough. Upending, if not anger, was the game. Same for punk, which probably never intended to have its by-products sold for thousands in boutique stores, or even as knock-offs in malls—or become totems in hallowed museum spaces.

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.