Regina Hackett

Anything to keep consciousness at bay…

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,
…
Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

Auden, September 1, 1939, here.

Click to enlarge images. 1.Joe Biel 2.Dan Webb 3. Joseph Mills 4. Pat DeCaro

Caution advised for theater companies tempted to send an April Fool’s press release. If at all subtle, it could wind up in the press with your name on it.

No such caution is needed in Seattle, because there are no theater critics to receive it. Almost none. There’s the great Brendan Kiley at the Stranger, but press releases are beneath his dignity. And there’s workhorse Misha Berson of the Seattle Times, but she’s so committed to print and averse to online that April 1 will be over before she can respond, so she won’t.

That leaves, I suppose by default, an art critic. From Stephanie Coen of Intiman Theatre:

SEATTLE– On Wednesday, April 1, the Hammering Man, one of Seattle’s most beloved icons, shocked onlookers when he committed a double murder, with an axe. Inspector Porfiry of the St. Petersburg police, currently on a sight-seeing tour of Seattle, managed to take the attached photo moments after the event, which is being investigated as “a murder with a psychological explanation.”
The story behind the Hammering Man’s crime and punishment will be revealed at Intiman Theatre, where a 90-minute version of Dostoyevsky’s psycho-thriller — ironically titled Crime and Punishment — opens on Friday, April 3 and plays through May 3.
The Hammering Man — who is also known in certain circles as #3277164 — has never before exhibited any signs of violence, nor has he expressed the idea that he is an “extraordinary man” who has the right to kill.
Inspector Porfiry is consulting on the investigation, and will help the Seattle police determine whether the Hammering Man should be sent to Siberia.

To make sure I – the single, solitary member of the press who might think Hammering Man is involved in the production – understand it’s a joke, Coen went on:

In other news, Intiman is responding to the current economic crisis in innovative ways. Its 2006 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre is now for sale on eBay.

And:

Despite the economy, however, Intiman will not make across-the-board cuts: Joan Didion’s solo show The Year of Magical Thinking will be performed by both Penn and Teller.

Well done, Ms. Coen. Her email here. Intiman’s killer You Tube advance below:

Of course, Hammering Man might be involved. That’s the thing about jokes. Within one, a kidding-on-the-square sometimes lies coiled.

* Fine obit of Nicolas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Path, who was a fisheries biologist who took his life in Alaska, here. I love one line from a friend of his, who said  he would often “seek out a larch tree in a forest of spruce.”

* Tyler Green’s two-part report on an interview with Robert Frank at the National Gallery of Art, here and here.

* Sharon Butler’s illuminating discussion on Two Coats of Paint of oil paint application, that “full strength oil colors with high absorption, especially lamp and ivory black, should never be overpainted with pigments of lower oil content.” Noted.

* Wooster Collective on the latest Dan Witz, here.

* D. K. Row on William Jamison’s beautiful men, here.

* Emily Pothast on Mandy Greer, here.

*  And Joey Veltkamp on high points of exhibits opening in Seattle on Thursday. Good list. Wish I’d written it.

While not an expert in seeking remuneration, I instinctively feel that begging is not the best strategy for arts writers.

Culture Grrl disagrees here, here, here and most recently here, the last having the distinction of being not only plaintive  (“Did no one miss me while I was gone?”) but threatening ( “See you tomorrow (maybe).”)

Culture Grrl (Lee Rosenbaum) is an industrious reporter, especially on museum administration news. But if she’s that intent on raising a bit of what Bernie Bertie Wooster calls the necessary, she should consult an expert.

Or hook up with Rob Brezsny. Their needs appear to be in sync.

(Click images to enlarge.)

The hill and dale of Thomas Hart Benton, detail from Susanna and the Elders, the de Young Museum in S.F. (Photo, C-Monster.)

Benton swings again: John Currin, The Gimp (Gagosian Gallery)

(Click on images to see them larger)

History does not misplace a movement that rewrites the rules of its region across a time span of two centuries, but few of the 58 paintings in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur have ever been seen in the wider world, even by scholars.

Their base is the miniature. Jodhpur painters could produce palm-size cosmologies full of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, dancing girls, flute players, warrior monkeys and battles waged on the backs of elephants.
Over time, however, they allowed themselves more room. And instead of filling bigger spaces in a miniaturist style, they expanded into wider worlds with open, rolling rhythms and colors with air in them. The jewel-box shine of the miniature became the saffron and sherbet shades of a dynamic pleasure dome.

However gorgeous, and it is gorgeous, such a show wouldn’t be expected to attract big numbers in Seattle, even with ecstatic local reviews (here, here, here and here). My favorite review headline from this group (first click) comes from Jen Graves – Your Brain Lights Up With Happiness.

Yes it does. Maybe outrageous skill and blissed-out iconography are more powerful attractions than previously imagined, or maybe it’s the Slumdog effect – all things Indian riding the Slumdog wave.

Whatever the reason, SAM reports that Garden and Cosmos is running 200 percent over the museum’s optimistic pre-crash projections. It’s on view at the museum’s sleepy satellite venue, the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park. Its numbers are dwarfed only by King Tut in 1978 and Bruce Guenther’s Jacob Lawrence retrospective in 1986, both before SAM moved its headquarters downtown.

Speaking of downtown, SAM’s doing well there too. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is attracting the pre-crash projection of 20,000 visitors in the first three weeks. Considering the attendance dive SAM experienced after the economy fell apart in the last year of the Bush administration, that number is amazing.

Possibly it has something to do with this. Advertising its pay-what-you-can admission policy (instead of keeping it a secret), was second on this list of what SAM needs to do to connect with a younger audience. So far, so good.

(Click on images to see them larger.)

Helen Levitt died in her sleep on Sunday. She was 95. Lovely Margarett Loke obit in the New York Times here.

For someone who had a long and distinguished career, Levitt seldom had much to say about it. If she grew tired of having critics exclaim over her early work and ignore her later, she rarely expressed this view in public.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, she captured the animal radiance of an urban childhood – the chaotic fun of hanging out where lots was happening. As far as we know now, which isn’t enough, she didn’t work much in the 1950s and 1960s but came back big in the 1970s.

Her career charts a course from the specific to the nearly abstract, from black-and-white to color. In later years, she liked to lift the edges off objects and give them a shake.

I remember a print of a woman dressed neatly in a grid of crisscrossing checks leaning into a cab. The car’s checkered trim seems to have wondered off her skirt. In another, three motley roosters stroll down a street, heading for a clump of cheap chairs with gold and red floral patterns blooming with startling force under plastic wrap.

Her unifying thread is a focus on gestures. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Weegee, she specialized in the fleeting, spontaneous and tossed off.

In her early work, children rule. They are ruffians with the grace of angels. In what is probably her most famous image, three of them stand staggered on the steps of a brownstone, two in face masks, the third struggling to tie hers on.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard hit the same theme, but his kids are grotesques. Hers is tender. He put the masks on the children and posed them. She found them as they moved outdoors and caught them in the act of being themselves.

In Seattle, Levitt’s work is at the G. Gibson Gallery.

St. Sebastian is an S&M icon in Roman Catholic iconography. Joe Biel removes the weapon from its signal place in erotica and locates it in the horror of the day-to-day – an image of someone who is dead and doesn’t know it.