Music Review: Gorillaz, "The Fall"
(05/01/11 5:28am)
By Katie Zaborksy
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By Katie Zaborksy
Last Thursday, acclaimed music scholar Greil Marcus stopped in at the Nasher Museum of Art to give a talk entitled “Our Old, Weird America: The Mole In the Ground.” Prior to attending, I described the talk to friends as “something that should be really cool about American culture and folk music and maybe Bob Dylan.”
Last week I had coffee with one of my oldest friends at Duke. I met him on the second or third day of Orientation Week at an “Arts at Duke” info session. He was fresh from a summer spent on a sculpture project, and I from one of intermittent dancing—the highlight of which was rolling around several trees outside the Durham Performing Arts Center to the tunes of a 50-minute instrumental soundscape. When he and I met that day in the Nelson Music Room, we acknowledged each other according to the neon flyers that color-corresponded to our artistic interests. They bespoke our identities at that point—I “dancer,” he “visual artist; musician.”
Next Tuesday, Feb. 26, Durham-based band Mount Moriah will release their highly anticipated second album, Miracle Temple, and perform a free show at Bull City Records. Heading the group as lead singer and lyricist is all-around Triangle music veteran Heather McEntire, known outside Mount Moriah as a member of Bellafea, Un Deux Trois, creative director of Girls Rock NC and co-founder, along with bandmate Jenks Miller, of the independent record label Holidays for Quince. Recess Editor and longtime Mount Moriah enthusiast Michaela Dwyer spoke with McEntire about the best and worst ways Mount Moriah’s music has been described, McEntire’s creative writing background and the artistic magnetism of the American South.
Recently I learned that my grandparents are coming for graduation. I was astonished to hear that they had found somewhere to stay in Durham, given the hoopla that’s already precluded hotel bookings within a 10-mile radius of Duke’s campus. In her email to my mom, my grandmother mentioned a good rate and a place that included breakfast. Surprisingly, though, the confirmation was in British Pounds. As it turns out, my grandparents—the psychologists who discourse freely on Ingmar Bergman and first introduced me to The New Yorker—had accidentally booked a hotel in Durham, England.
Exhibit charts Duke's racial history
MUSIC
Nov. 24, 2012, circa 11:11pm, Gchat.
Eric Oberstein, Trinity ’07, recently returned to Duke—from serving as Executive Director of the New York City-based Afro Latin Jazz Alliance—to hold the newly created position of Associate Director of Duke Performances. In the thick of DEMAN Weekend, Recess Editor Michaela Dwyer talked to Oberstein about his Cuban background, riding the elevator with well-postured Alvin Ailey dancers and what it really means to be an arts administrator.
The term “cover” is hardly ever used for art forms outside of popular music. It seems silly, after all, to call something like photo artist Sherrie Levine’s 1980 Untitled (After Walker Evans) series—replicas of Walker Evans’ Depression-era photography—a “cover” of Evans’ original work. Visual art, like Levine’s, is more friendly to terms like “appropriation”; theater and dance often employ “reinterpretation” or “revision.”
Last Tuesday, multidisciplinary artist Meredith Monk and her Vocal Ensemble arrived at Duke for a two-week Duke Performances residency leading up to her performance of Education of the Girlchild Revisited, an iteration of her 1972 operatic work. Recess Editor Michaela Dwyer, who saw the piece as an impressionable young dancer at the American Dance Festival in 2008, talked to Monk about her own college experience, the human voice as artistic instrument and the risk inherent in live performance.
It’s rare for me to be in social situations where I am uncomfortable and so determinedly correct in my feeling uncomfortable that I address the public about it. An example: over the weekend I sat in a movie theater, high-tops flexed atop the empty chair below me, happily downing an Icee that cost more than most meals I ate in Berlin this summer. It was capitalism and fall break in full, lazy glory, and I rested on several judgments (laurels?)—betting my friend that “everyone coming to see this movie would resemble the characters in it,” squirming after a few seconds of generic acoustic strums during the opening credits, which were rendered in typewriter Courier—but I was at peace with an open mind. Emma Watson portraying a complicated American high schooler who, like Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, screeches that she “love[s] The Smiths!” couldn’t be that bad. Especially considering the big-budget context of a film adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s epistolary novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which, being big-budget and all, supposedly necessitates cute-ification.
New Editor’s Note. Let’s begin at the beginning, and let’s get personal. Quickly.
On September 22, the U.S. Senate approved Obama’s appointment of Emil Kang to the National Council on the Arts, the advising body for the National Endowment for the Arts. Kang, who is the executive director of the arts and a professor of the practice of music at UNC-Chapel Hill, also helms Carolina Performing Arts, which is presenting a year of programming entitled “The Rite of Spring at 100” that engages Igor Stravinsky’s landmark piece. Recess Editor Michaela Dwyer chatted with Kang about his new position, his cultural work in Detroit and the state of the arts in contemporary universities. The following are excerpts from their conversation, which began with their shared enthusiasm for Irish theater and then progressed toward the value of art in society.
You’re on a train riding west. The whistle blows and a musical track unfurls in breezy loops. Each reiteration roars, then puffs out like smoke. You’re leaving. Something feels familiar, safe, like a favorite part of a favorite record that’s been set on repeat. Then the drums kick in, insistent and clean, only to make way for a gravelly growl: “Can’t you hear that Duquesne whistle blowin’?” Really?, you want to spit back. Of course I can. But there’s no perceptible whistle, after all, and are you actually on the train, and who’s this importuning old man whose wizened leer you can’t quite visualize?
A few days ago, a friend who is currently studying abroad in Berlin emailed me some photo-snippets of her life overseas. The photos half assure me she’s already engaged in a vibrant life there, half help me to reconnect visually with the somewhat surreal experience I had living in the same city this summer. I like to think of it as a half and half solution, uncurdled and ready for the coffee that I newly drink. Not speaking a lick of German save for the word for art, “kunst,” I felt, like Salinger’s Franny Glass, “hopelessly selfconscious” as I pounded the streets of Berlin with a) little more than the word for the very subject I had come to Berlin to respond to and b) a haircut not nearly as trendy as the preternaturally tan, monochromatic-clothes-wearing young Berliners.
How to write about Toni Morrison? I’m not sure how much or even what exactly the name conjures for you. Like most things in my life, it’s referential and, in being so, largely nostalgic:
Last week Ross named me editor-elect of Recess, so now it’s a “thing.” It was a bit startling to see “Michaela” bare and un-bylined and left for all the readers I don’t know to sound out (no, it’s neither “Mickel-a” nor “Michella”). I’ve become accustomed to seeing my name attached to a diversity of Chron articles, but I’ve never been quoted within one. When I was asked to comment on something about the Marketplace during my first year here, I vehemently declined, fearing my words would be tangled up in those of my insufferable dining companion who liked to disparage women leaders and talk incessantly about his private high school. Those days, I just wanted to talk to someone else who’d seen the movie Once and knew “ADF” stood for the American Dance Festival.
Starting next Tuesday, Duke’s mascot will take a break from its traditional athletic duties in Wallace Wade and Cameron Indoor and shimmy into a more artistic space. If on that night, however, you’re passing by or heading to the Main Street music venue Casbah, don’t expect to see anyone in a blue-and-white character bodysuit. In this venue, it seems safe to say that a certain “Professor Diablo,” while mysteriously titled, may look much more like a typical culture-savvy Durhamite.
Over the weekend, I voluntarily neglected the roughly Siberia-sized number of obligations I had for this week and chose to watch the Oscars. I produced only a handful of genuine, if trite, reflections: I like Jessica Chastain’s dress; Meryl Streep and Christopher Plummer are total dreamboats; I should stop pretending I don’t like Woody Allen, etc. One moment, however, led me to a level of excitement and anxiety similar to when I stopped caring about all the plotlines on Downton Abbey except for those involving Sybil and Branson. Pina, an unexpected, gorgeous, quirky art film/documentary about the German choreographer Pina Bausch, was pitted against, among others, the documentary with a suspiciously-familiar-uplifting-sports-team-narrative called, prosaically, Undefeated. And Pina lost.