FORTH GO

Comic Steven Wright performed at Durham’s Carolina Theatre last week as part of his When the Leaves Blow Away tour. I’ve been a fan for a long time and saw him perform in Chapel Hill about 20 years ago. His style is still the same, and about half the content was familiar.

This show was about two hours of constant humor, with one short, witty observation after another. A few longer sequences and mini-songs were the only relief for the smile stuck on my face. A couple samples: “the Earth is bipolar” and “what has Jesus ever done for Santa Claus’s birthday?”

After the show I could barely remember any of the jokes, but I know many are still in my brain because they surface into my consciousness when jogged. For instance, yesterday someone was talking about ballet, and I remembered Wright’s observation that the ballet should just get taller ballerinas so they wouldn’t have to dance on their toes.

My only complaint with the performance was that his borderline-mumbling, deadpan delivery sometimes crossed the line and was unintelligible from where I was sitting. If only those other people would stop laughing!

I saw Helvetica, the documentary film, at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham. The festival, in its tenth year, may have gotten too big for its own good. There were too many films for all of them to be shown in the Carolina Theatre, so some pieces, including Helvetica were shown in ballrooms of the adjacent hotel. Unfortunately, sitting in those fixed, armless chairs for so long was an unpleasant experience making it hard to enjoy the film.

As a long time Mac developer including a stint writing printer drivers, I’m probably more conscious of fonts than most people. Maybe that’s why I didn’t find so interesting the plethora of shots showing the pervasiveness of Helvetica in the world, especially signs and advertising. I did appreciate seeing interviews with lots of font designers who showed great passion about their work, including those involved with it from its beginnings in the late 1950s.

The style of the film emulates the style of the font itself. Helvetica the font is known for its neutrality. Some love the neutrality because it lets the content deliver the message alone. Others hate it because the neutrality gives up the opportunity to communicate on another level. The film is little more than a collection of interviews and shots of the font’s usage in the real world with little commentary provided to guide the viewer, which seems fitting to mirror the neutrality of the font.

Tidbit: the designer of the American Airlines logo spoke proudly of his work noting that AA is the only airline not to redesign their logo in the past 40 years and that the logo was the first public usage of what programmers call “camelCase”, — that is, two or more capitalized words joined together without intervening spaces.

Bonnie and I saw the musical Rent at UNC’s Memorial Hall, but never quite figured out that the hype was all about. It may have just been us (and the MIT art reviewer) because everyone else in the theater acted like it was the best thing ever. There was even anticipatory cheering when some scenes started, reminiscent of fan reactions during The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The crowd was noticeably younger than usual for the Performing Arts series (it’s the first time I’ve noticed that student tickets had sold out), and perhaps they identified with the young characters.

Maybe I needed a prequel to build interest in the characters, but I couldn’t feel too sympathetic about a bunch of squatters being evicted from an abandoned building. Otherwise, I was able to enjoy the music and the interesting choreography. The set was impressive with multiple levels and entrances. The writing had some nice symmetries without feeling too contrived.

Some technical artifacts made it hard for me to follow along at times. All the actors wore microphones which made it difficult to tell who was singing at first when there were a dozen actors on the stage (since the sound came from the audio equipment, not the actor). And in spite of the microphones, some actors still crossed the line from singing to yelling at times, both losing the pitch and making the words unintelligible (or maybe the audio equipment was to blame).

The final show of the 2005-2006 Carolina Performing Arts Series was Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis & Guests. A big title for a big production. The stage was filled with over a dozen horns and about as many African percussionists centered by a piano and directed by Wynton Marsalis.

Marsalis was a great host, giving the audience short introductions to all of the pieces, most of which were new compositions celebrating Congo Square in New Orleans, which apparently was the only place African slaves were allowed to play music and was an early spark for the Jazz movement. All the musicians were top-notch, and it seemed like each one got a turn as the featured artist.

I enjoyed those features more than anything else since it was harder for me to appreciate the expertise when 20-25 musicians were all contributing equally. The numbers also made it hard to see the musicians, so I especially appreciated the last bit when everyone who wasn’t tied to a piano and drumset formed a line across the front of the stage while continuing to play before marching off.

It’s hard to count the requests I get for reviews of recent Memorial Hall performances, so here are short reviews of the recent ones.

Mark Morris Dance Group
Modern dance, at a level even an unsophisticate could understand. Several pieces using lots of dancers with musical interpretation themes.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra
Nice drums.

Russian National Orchestra with Yefim Bronfman
Yefim Bronfman was the pianist and only played for the first set. He and the orchestra seemed to playing at a very high level with lots of very fast, complicated sequences. The musicians in the crowd were very impressed.

Vijay Oyer, Michael C. Ladd and Ibrahim Quraishi
One of those experimental performance art kind of works. Fortunately, they provided lyric sheets in the program and I had time to read some of it before hand, so I had some idea of what was going on. I took it as very interesting presentations of 8 – 10 poems about news events, from the Hindenburg Disaster to Jon Stewart on Crossfire, but mostly about war. I liked most of it, but some parts were too harsh, such as shrieky music, flashing bright lights, and a five minute rant in Japanese.

The stage was interesting. Lowered stage lights served as a suspended stage with live musicians underneath on the real stage.

Brentano String Quartet with Mary Nessinger
Lots of plucking and otherwise atonal sounds made this too harsh for me to even stay after intermission. The program says it best: “as pure a musical portrait of dread and anxiety as one is apt to encounter.” At the next performance we overheard someone who wished they had left after intermission.

Academy of Ancient Music
This British orchestra playing Mozart was a welcome change from the string quartet. Most of the pieces had a single lead violinist playing against the rest of the orchestra, which I found more interesting than the usual synchronized violins. My only complaint was that they were too casually dressed, with outfits only loosely matching.

We should have been suspicious when art director Emil Kang suggested that we let the performance wash over us in his (long-winded, as usual) introduction. Carl Hancock Rux’s Mycenaean started out with lots of interest, but then slowed down terribly for the last half and lost me. I’m sure the slow down was intentional and relating to the subject matter of sleep and dreams, but the actors’ murmurings weren’t intelligible enough to keep my attention.

Mycenaean included several video screens and actors playing various roles or dancing or singing to produce a single conglomerate performance. Part of the video was live from a camera held by one of the actors. The segments that had dialog were very well done with parts requiring precise timing from the actors as they interrupted one another and sometimes spoke over one another.

Carl Hancock Rux had a relatively minor part, playing a Mycenaean soldier appearing in dreams of contemporary characters. I didn’t know what to expect coming in, but he had a very rich voice, and I think some attendees were fans of his music and were disappointed that he didn’t sing more.

I skipped the sold-out Bonnie Raitt concert last week, but Bonnie and Beth went and enjoyed it. Of note: a few rows of seats were added within the orchestra pit.

The performance of Emanuel “Manny” Ax on piano along with Richard “Dick” Stoltzman on clarinet was much better than I expected. After seeing several pianists at Memorial Hall this year, Ax was the first to offer any kind of visual feedback with his animations and facial expressions.

I didn’t care too much for the Debussy piece that they started out with. With a lot of gaps and pauses, it seemed to be missing something. Bonnie liked it, though, and found it reminiscent of old movie scores.

Things picked up, however, when Ax performed a long solo that may have been largely improvised. It certainly wasn’t on the program. The third piece was a more classical duet, and after intermission there were three more duets from contemporary American composers. These were lively with something interesting happening on either the piano or the clarinet or both.

The casual comments from the performers also helped make the music more enjoyable, I think. Ax expressed how wonderful it was playing Memorial Hall’s new Steinway and how much he appreciated that there was a laundry in the basement. During one pause between movements, a cell phone could be heard ringing and Ax answered it by playing a ringtone on the piano.