"Dirt Day" Laurie Anderson at the Walker

I saw Laurie Anderson perform "Dirt Day" at the Walker last night. I ended up with an extra ticket at the last minute, so I left it at the box office; they said a woman was on the waiting list. After I had been in my seat for a while, she arrived, offering to pay me. I said that since it was going to be my birthday, the ticket was a gift. We talked and discovered some things in common, so after the show, exchanged emails.
The piece was nothing like the "hits" I know, but combined many of the elements of her previous work. It was infused with great melancholy, as well as humor.

And, for old time's sake, here's the first thing I ever heard her do:

Frida Kahlo show comes to the Walker Art Center in October

Frida's coming to the Walker! Here's the press release:

Frida Kahlo Centennial Exhibition to Premiere at Walker Art Center and Travel to Philadelphia and San Francisco

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), will present a major exhibition of the artist’s paintings spanning her career. Curated by art historian and world-renowned Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera and Walker Associate Curator Elizabeth Carpenter, Frida Kahlo premieres at the Walker October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008, before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and SFMOMA.

Few artists have captured the public’s imagination with the force of Frida Kahlo. Making clear her powerful influence on artists working today, Frida Kahlo will include some 50 paintings from the very beginning of her career in 1926 to the year of her death in 1954. While concentrating on Kahlo’s hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits, it also will include those particular portraits and still lifes which amplify her own sense of identity. As Kahlo’s artistic practice progressed, her images grew in confidence and complexity, reflecting both her private obsessions and political concerns.

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition will feature iconic images of Frida Kahlo by preeminent photographers of the period from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection as well as personal snapshots with family and friends from the artist’s own photo albums, some of which have never before been published or exhibited. The photographs pose fascinating questions about an artist who was both the consummate manufacturer of her own image and a beguiling and willing photographic subject.

A major publication with newly commissioned essays, bibliography, exhibition history, and illustrated timeline, will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibition Tour

Premiere
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mid-February–Mid-May, 2008

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
June 14–September 16, 2008

Because Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, 100 years ago, Frida fans world-wide are oganizing an amazing array of artistic events inspired by her life, her work, and her myths. The most up-to-date news about all things Frida can be found at the website Frida Kahlo and Contemporary Thought, as usual. It is a fan site, and posts a disclaimer about not being official, but I have found it endlessly useful and fascinating, and I thank the site owner Daniela Falini for her labor of love. The site functions with frames, so you can't link directly to the sub-categories, but here is a list: I encourage Frida fans to explore the links in the side bar:

• Frida news (archives going back to the year 2000)
• Frida paintings (including both online sites and museum sites)
• Frida cult (which is currently featuring news about the 2007 centennary shows world-wide)
• a brief biography
• some critical essays
• "the most complete bibliography on the Web"
• Frida and the contemporary arts (dance, theater, fashion, cinema) comics about Frida; exhibitions (permanent and temporary)
• "friends" which has a host of related links.

you're on candid camera

On Thursdays at the Walker Art Center, admission is free, and there are often lectures or films. We had a little something at the Wolfgang Puck restuarant 20.21, and then saw a program of three films that are part of the series Expanding the Frame.

Here's the program description: "In an era that revels in the voyeuristic cult of celebrity and celebrates surveillance on reality TV, these works sharply critique our society under watch: Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know of Our Neighbors; Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not to Be Here; and Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It.".

Baron's film includes the story of the Mass-Observation Movement, which I had never heard of before; this New Yorker article gives a great account of combination of anthropology, surrealism, and mass wackiness. This film was a traditional documentary, telling a story through images, sound and interviews. The other two films were much more experimental, or rather much more deliberately non-Hollywood narrative, and hence somewhat more demanding to watch.

In Order Not To Be Here has multiples segments that look as if they are footage from surveillance cameras: parking lots, ATMs, store aisles, spaces around buildings, in corridors. At night, when people are not in those spaces, but you can hear sounds of dogs barking, cars or trains going by, police sirens in the distance, these scenes look likes places where something is about to happen. But nothing does. When a camera is trained on something for more than a few seconds, for up to half a minute, and NOTHING SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING, you are forced to look differently. You notice the sounds, you start to speculate on what the image might mean. You fight off annoyance or tedium, or you surrender yourself to a kind of trance-like receptivity in which you suspend your narrative expectations (although they never really go away) and let the images and sounds wash over you, as in a dream. What is happening becomes your feelings about the images, your relationship to the sequence. The opening and closing sequences DO contain more traditionally narrative elements that frame these static shots in light of surveillance, apprehension and escape, so the overall effect is one of expectant paranoia (not an especially pleasant experience, but a fascinating one). In looking for more information about this film, I discovered this site, Peripheral Produce where one can purchase DVDs of experimental film.

The New Standards

The New Standards is a group I saw last year at the Dakota. They are totally awesome, as the kids say. The group is a collaboration between John Munson (bassist/vocalist, of the bands Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic), Chan Poling (grand piano/vocals, maybe best known as member of The Suburbs, but also a composer for Theatre de la Jeune Lune among others), and Steve Roehm (muy hot on the vibraphone).
Ana, Jose and I went to see a free show they gave as part of the Walker's Free First Saturday activities. The guys are phenomenal live--we were treated to a mix of the songs on their CD, and some new songs. The parents bopped along to songs they knew, and the kids were almost as much fun to watch as the band. They opened with a cover of Lucinda Williams' Essence (!) with one "judicious edit" for the youthful audience, and went on to perform songs by Beck, David Bowie (or was it Mott the Hoople?) Curtis Mayfield, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and The Replacements. Also new to me was their arrangement of Outkast's "Hey Ya" (the kid next to us said "I know that song!") that had the beat of the original, but also went to town on those great chords shifts of the two "Hey yas" (such a simple lick, but so gorgeous). They put a different spin on the "shake it, shake it" with Munson almost whispering the lyrics. I hope they are about to release another recording. I'll definitely try to see them again at their next gig in town.