And some comic relief in troubling times.
BY BEN WINTERS
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In the closing moments of Cabaret, a shell-shocked Cliff Bradshaw is escaping the looming menace of newly fascist Germany. "It was," he concludes, "the end of the world." When our own world ended in September of last year, everyone in the arts knew that terrorism, counter-terrorism, counter-counter-terrorism, and war would be what loomed in whatever world replaced it.
Strange things were bound to happen.
Something strange happened to Uday Menon, and was reported by Joyce Purnick in the Oct. 22 issue of the New York Times. When Menon showed up to see Kiss Me Kate with his wife, he "was swept off the ground and handcuffed by four police officers. Fearful of being shot, he did not resist a search. The officers found nothing incriminating, and his J.P. Morgan I.D. gave him 'some shred of credibility. ’" An overly vigilant Telecharge agent, Purnick reported, had become suspicious of Menon’s request for a "crowded" show and his "accent and…foreign-sounding name."
Strange, too, were the events of Nov. 2 for French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. In an incident reported widely (particularly in European news sources), Boulez "was the target of a pre-dawn raid by the ever-efficient Swiss police in his hotel room…because his name featured on a list of potential threats to the nation’s security," according to a Dec. 5 story in London’s The Guardian by Jon Henley. The internationally famous avant-gardist was quickly cleared of suspicion and offered a letter of apology from the Swiss fuzz. Boulez has been on their terrorism watch list for six years, Henley explained, ever since a music critic panned one of Boulez’s shows and got a nasty phone call promising retaliation.
In the slings-and-arrows file, PI finds a public rebuke from Robert Brustein, directed at the Italian Nobel theatre artist and Nobel Laureate Dario Fo. Brustein, theatre critic at The New Republic, used his October 8 column to take Fo, an old friend, to task. "Dario Fo and Franca Rame [Fo’s wife and collaborator] have been circulating an appalling newsletter called 'Give Peace a Chance’," Brustein wrote. "There they attribute the attack on the World Trade Center to 'the bloody beasts of capitalism,’… this sort of vicious–and fatigued, outdated, and melodramatic–Stalinist ranting is inexcusable."
Many people thought it was inexcusable how a Brooklyn-based sculpture studio called StudioEIS–commissioned to create a memorial to New York’s firefighters, based on the famous flag-raising photograph from Ground Zero–were tinkering with history. "The men in the photo, which was taken by Thomas E. Franklin for The Record in Hackensack, N.J., are all white," explained staff writer Christine Temin in The Boston Globe on January 16. "In the 18-foot-tall sculpture, one of the figures will be white, another African-American, and the third Hispanic. Is this an earnest attempt at inclusiveness, or the wilder shores of political correctness?"
The next day’s Washington Post had an answer to Temin’s question from Fire Chief Nicholas Scoppetta and the statue’s patron Bruce Ratner. After an outcry from fire department rank and file, and a threatened lawsuit from the three guys who actually raised the flag, "Scoppetta announced he 'will consider new options’ for a memorial," said Lynne Duke’s Post article. "Ratner, whose real estate company manages the fire department’s headquarters building in Brooklyn and who commissioned the statue, has agreed to allow the department to take the lead in finding a new design."
Duke’s report also included these statistics: "New York City is 44.7 percent white, 27 percent Latino, 26.6 percent black, but those minority groups each represent about 2.7 percent of the city’s 11,000 firefighters."
Outgoing National Endowment for the Arts chairman William Ivey had this to say about the function of the arts in our strange new world: "In a time of crisis and intensified national unity, there’s always a danger that cultural work may become a lower priority. But there’s also the real prospect for a heightened sense of the value of our cultural heritage, which is so much a part of what we want to defend."
Cross your fingers.
You did NOT Just Say That
Ridley Scott’s new film Black Hawk Down, taking as its template the nuanced bestseller recounting in tremendous detail the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (from Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden), vividly demonstrated that in-flight helicopters are pretty and that large masses of Somolians with guns are scary. Political celebrities were in attendance at the Washington, D.C. premiere, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architects of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post was there to record their thoughts, post-screening: Rumsfeld, reports Out & About columnist Roxanne Roberts, thought the film "powerful," and Wolfowitz concurred.
"'It’s a powerful film,’ said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. 'I think it’s good for this time. It reminds people what it’s all about.’" Josh Hartnett, one of the film’s young stars, could not agree more. "'We just need to be aware of what we’re doing in the world,’ [Hartnett] said, declaring Black Hawk a 'very important film.’"
While America’s top warriors confirmed their love for war movies, a high-profile British millionaire, and chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Art, declared war on "concept art" in the pages of England’s New Statesman magazine.
"It is the product of over-indulged, middle class…bloated egos who patronize real people with fake understanding, " wrote Ivan Massow in the widely discussed article. He named artists like Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst as being particularly ludicrous, and said the critics were cowardly for not calling such art what it is: "pretentious tat."
The British arts world, Massow concluded sadly, is "in danger of disappearing up its own arse."
Striking Bach
More fun news from the United Kingdom, where a railroad company has just the thing to chase off graffiti artists–uncultured young whipper-snappers that they are.
"South-east England rail operator First Great Eastern thinks it may have found the answer to late-night vandalism," reports Gramophone, the digest of classical and symphonic music. "It’s playing classical music to drive away teenagers who tend to congregate at some of its stations!… A spokeswoman for the company said that 'The youths tend to congregate at these particular stations and for safety reasons we don’t want them messing about there. It is quite widely used in Germany, and it was something we were happy to try and seems to have worked.’"