I am really looking forward to November’s Target First Saturday, which takes place on November 7th and highlights our special exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present. Rock music and rock journalism are two of my passions and I’m excited to see them coming together with the programming around this exhibit.
As a public programmer I’m always looking for new entry points into an exhibition’s content and how to make that content accessible and engaging for Museum visitors. In conversations about public programming for the exhibit with Gail Buckland, the guest curator, she discussed how one of her goals with the exhibition was to focus on the photographers and the images they have created, not only on the musicians and bands featured in them. She also wanted to have an event that captured what up-and-coming rock photographers are doing now and invite them to participate.
Inspired by Gail’s idea, and because we love Brooklyn photographers, on First Saturday we are inviting local photographers to come and shoot the bands that are playing and post their photos to the Brooklyn Museum’s flickr group. Afterwards, Bob Gruen, a rock photography legend who is featured in the exhibition and has shot the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and The Clash, will look at the photos and blog about his favorites here!
The Beets. Photo by Aubrey Stallard. All Rights Reserved.
In addition, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the lineup of bands: The Beets, Grass Widow, and Crystal Stilts. In choosing the bands, my colleagues and I wanted to try to capture the feeling and energy of the Brooklyn indie scene that’s really taken off over the past few years. To select the bands and capture the feeling of shows in clubs alternative spaces around the borough we teamed up with New York City indie show organizer extraordinaire Todd Patrick (aka Todd P.). I first went to one of Todd’s shows in Portland, Oregon in the late 1990’s, and felt there was something special and community oriented about it. Since then, he and I have both moved to New York and he’s been organizing shows in Brooklyn for years. He really has his finger on the pulse of the scene here and able to spot talent as it emerges, while keeping that community vibe to his shows.
As a final note, even if you don’t take pictures you can participate by dressing up as your favorite rock star. I look forward to seeing you here with your camera and your outfit! You’ll know me, I’ll be the Brooklyn Museum staff member ensuring the bands have sound checked, the photographers are happy while dressed like a 1960’s French popstar.
With the exhibitionWho Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, opening tomorrow at the museum, I thought now would be a great time to acquaint our readers with the museum’s vintage collection of psychedelic posters. I started documenting these posters a few years ago after I noticed a wooden box high up on a shelf in the museum’s Works on Paper storage area. In this box I found close to three hundred stunning posters.
I thought it was interesting that these were part of our collection so I did some research. I found that they had been brought into the museum by the museum’s then print curator, Jo Miller. At the time they were purchased, in 1972, these posters were relatively unknown outside of San Francisco, although there had been an exhibition of Fillmore posters at the Museum of Modern Art around this same time. Since their purchase, almost forty years ago, these posters have never been shown at the Brooklyn Museum. You can view a few here and a larger selection on the Museum’s contemporary collections pages.
Between 1966 and 1971 posters were being produced as publicity for dance concerts, or dance parties, at venues such as the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. These concerts featured loud, live bands, colorful light shows, often poetry readings or performance art, and were mostly fueled by LSD or acid. These unique events were part of what became known as the psychedelic experience.
Organized respectively by Chet Helms and Bill Graham, major promoters on the West Coast art and music scene in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, these concerts helped introduce performers that would go on to become legendary Rock Stars, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, to name a few. Amazingly, on these same concert bills were Rhythm and Blues greats such as Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, and veteran Jazz and Blues musicians including Miles Davis and Albert King! Please stop by next week for more on these posters and the artists that created them.
Since early 2007, I’ve been working with the noted photo historian Gail Buckland to create Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History. It’s hard to believe, now 2 years later, the show’s about to open on October 30th.
Pouring over hundreds of photographs, the exhibition slowly took shape . . . the section themes emerged . . . and I started to work with different design concepts. Should the design span the past 50 years of rock, from blue suede shoes to psychedelic to punk to grunge to today? Or should it feel like an austere Chelsea gallery . . . like a “serious” photography exhibition? Should it feel more round and analog . . . or more geometric and digital? Like drums and guitars, with wailing vocals? Like Led Zeppelin is in the room?
The final design, which you’ll see at the end of the month, is the result of thinking through many ideas of what an exhibition about music could look and feel like and how the visitor should move through the space. Next week we’ll begin hanging the works in the gallery, one-by-one . . . but in final preparation, there is one special component of the show that I’ve had a guilty pleasure assembling: the album cover chronology.
Over the Summer, I’ve rummaged through most every rock-and-roll memorabilia store in the city . . . scoured listings on ebay endlessly . . . encountered many vinyl aficionados . . . and had quite a few “a-ha” moments. And yes, we’re including all formats . . . 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs . . . . but mostly vinyl . . . hopefully you’ll have a cool walk down memory lane, just like I did.
The catalogue for the show Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions draws our attention to how Jesper Just uses a variety of popular songs in his films, from the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” to Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” Those pop tunes are prominently featured in two of the films shown in the exhibition: Bliss and Heaven and The Lonely Villa.
There is, however, another episode in Just’s treatment of music, this one involving the rarified world of grand opera. His early film The Man Who Strayed (2002) consists almost entirely of a sparse restaging of Violetta’s death scene from the end of Verdi’s La Traviata. And surprisingly, this could be Just’s most widely seen film, largely because it’s available online at Artnode and has been bootlegged on YouTube (below) and elsewhere.
In The Man Who Strayed, what are we to make of a classical-music drama so remote from the torch songs, ballads, and Top Forty hits heard in many of Just’s other films? Why does he take us to the opera?
It’s useful to remember that Verdi’s 1853 masterpiece is only one of numerous adaptations of the story of Marguerite Gautier (called Violetta in Verdi), first told in the novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, published in 1848. Stage adaptations of the Dumas novel about a tubercular courtesan of the Parisian demimonde subsequently became vehicles for stars from Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse to Tallulah Bankhead and, later on, Isabelle Adjani. On film, the property served Greta Garbo well in her MGM Camille (1936), directed by George Cukor, as it has many other actresses (or, as we now say in our gender-neutral way, “actors”).
The story has become a touchstone, in recent times, of gay-themed drama, in which it has been frequently retold. The 1973 play Camille: A Travesty on La Dame aux camélias, written by—and starring, in drag—the late, great Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, is in some ways the most important neo-Traviata: a full-fledged cross-dressing remake in modern colloquial language, its denouement capped by a memorably tragicomic eulogy spoken over the deceased heroine: “Much will be forgiven you, for you have loved much. Toodle-loo, Marguerite.” Adding a further layer of reference, a decade later Ludlam would play the lead role in his Galas: A Modern Tragedy (1983), about a thinly disguised diva named Maria Galas, a renowned Violetta and Norma, whose stage career ends bitterly, as does her affair with a Greek tycoon. Others have pursued the Violetta/Camille story as well: in Terrence McNally’s 1989 play The Lisbon Traviata, the two affectionately satirized opera-fanatic principals, Mendy and Stephen, briefly act out lines or vignettes from their favorite Maria Callas records (epitomized by the pirate LPs of her celebrated performance in Lisbon) as comments on their own unsatisfactory love lives: to them, the way she abandoned herself to the role of the doomed heroine becomes a template for how destiny inexorably undoes the life of the heart. The chapter “The Callas Cult” in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993) points to the broader implications of such self-identification with Callas’s Violetta: remarking on fatalistic views of the late soprano, who died aged only 53, Koestenbaum writes, “Untimely death assists her legend and connects her to themes that have shadowed gay culture: premature mortality, evanescence, solitude.”
The Violetta/Camille trope thus inevitably carries a lot of baggage. Yet despite an array of precedents and analogues, The Man Who Strayed puts its own distinctive twist on this familiar nineteenth-century story.
For one thing, The Man Who Strayed tells the story in a relentlessly anti-glamorous way. Its barren urban setting, perhaps recalling the cruising zones in certain Fassbinder films, consists of little more than rough pavement under a concrete overpass, seen in unforgiving daylight, with none of the lush, shadowy, film-noir atmosphere of other Just productions.
Another deglamorizing feature of the film, unusual elsewhere in Just’s body of work and in La Traviata retellings: both protagonists are decidedly middle-aged. As his characters, Just puts before us two frankly unlovely guys, both with considerable mileage on them, rather than a somewhat older individual infatuated with a much younger person as seen in the relationship between Verdi’s Violetta and the boyish Alfredo or in several of Just’s other films.
Even as it casts a cold eye on its urban streetscape and its aging actors, the film also drags Verdi’s soaring music back down to earth. The two men mime and sing along to the end of La Traviata’s final act, from the lines “Più a me t’appressa, ascolta, amato Alfredo” (”Come closer and listen, Alfredo my beloved”) to the last cries of “È spenta!” (”She is dead!”) and “O mio dolor!” (”Oh, my grief!”), one of them singing the role of Violetta and the other, Alfredo. We watch with growing discomfort as the rasping, untrained voices of the two men, sometimes resorting to quavering falsetto, sometimes almost shouting, heedlessly take on the high-flying demands of Verdi’s arching melodies. As would-be opera singers, the two of them strain heroically, and fail desperately.
Yet it is precisely the way their distressing vocal performances, at first unaccompanied, are mercifully lifted aloft by the entrance of a professional recording of the opera—welling up, after a while, on the soundtrack—that carries the two men from harsh urban grit to some transcendent realm of human tenderness and utter heartbreak. For there’s no denying the emotional power of the travesty we’re witnessing, as surging waves of melody break over the street-level action. It may come as something of a revelation that the death of one graying, badly dressed, middle-aged man in the arms of another can be as poignant, as tragic, as Violetta’s dying in the embrace of ardent young Alfredo. But the outpouring of lyrical music makes it so. Singing along with the prerecorded opera that surrounds the couple, Just’s expiring “Violetta” croons his love-death as a kind of karaoke Liebestod.
The two remarkable actors are Niels Weyde and Søren Steen. The brief scene played out between them, lasting little more than five minutes, can bring tears to our eyes even as it veers dangerously close to the ridiculous—a potently ambiguous state of affairs familiar in opera itself.
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