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	<title>City ArtsCity Arts | City Arts</title>
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	<description>New York&#039;s Review of Culture</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 21 May 2012 18:53:12 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Book on Clarke</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/20/the-book-on-clarke/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/20/the-book-on-clarke/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 20 May 2012 05:01:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Renfreu Neff</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DA. Pennebaker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonas Mekas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[maya deren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maysles Brothers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richard Leacock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Drew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shirley clarke]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8278</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Recalling a Film Pioneer’s History Shirley Clarke was the godmother of indie films. “Underground films” they were called in the ’60’s, and despite technology that made film and video equipment more maneuverable, making it more accessible to individual creativity, it was essentially a male universe. The Direct Cinema gents &#8211;Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers &#8212; on one side and seemingly austere opposite the likes of Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Before them all was the legendary Maya Deren, indeed the high priestess of avant garde film and, to this day a poetic visionary and intellectual force to be reckoned with (The Legend of Maya Deren, a 3-volumn “documentary biography” by VeVe Clark, Millicent Hodson &#38; Catrina Neiman, was published by Anthology Film Archives in1984). No such exhaustive work has been done on Shirley Clarke’s filmography, but that vacuum may be lessened with Milestone Films having acquired the rights to four of her features and over a dozen of short films for restoration and release over the next four years. This long overdue retrospective, Project Shirley Clarke, got underway with The Connection, her first feature film and the most controversial movie of [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Political Pollutant, or Tsunaminity</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/18/political-pollutant/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/18/political-pollutant/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2012 17:34:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Armond White</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adam sandler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[armond white]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charles chaplin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[don't mess with the zohan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eddie murphy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[larry charles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[megan fox]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sacha baron cohen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the great dictator]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tsunanimity]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8275</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and mob-mentality is confused with democracy. Cohen mocks an archetypal Middle East/African dictator&#8211;Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Iran’s Ahmadinajad adding a little of Libya’s Moamar Quaddafi&#8211;in the figure of General Aladeen of Wadiya. As the bushy-bearded despot, Cohen makes fun of torture and killing&#8211;the humanitarian disasters that have become daily entertainment for newsmedia. In a thick, gutteral blur of Arabic and Yiddish, Cohen spouts the cliché regional bigotry that he takes no more seriously than his amateurish director Larry Charles takes comic timing, composition or political argument. In this era of polarized pop culture, Cohen and Charles are only about opportunism, which means The Dictator reverses Chaplin’s bold and inventive comedy that was intended to unite audiences through humane, not politicized, appeals. The plot of Aladeen visiting the U.S. where a factotum (Ben Kingsley) plans his assassination through the employment of a lookalike, trashes politics. Having as much to do with Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Animal Kingdom</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/17/animal-kingdom/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/17/animal-kingdom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 May 2012 13:02:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mario Naves</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Galleries/Gallery Beat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Visual Art]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anne Arnold]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Crosman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Yau]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mario Naves. Alexandre Gallery]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8273</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Anne Arnold Humanizes the Wild The sculptures of Anne Arnold, on display at Alexandre Gallery, are so masterful—so pointed and witty, economically configured and nuanced—that you can’t help but wonder: Why has it been 24 years since this artist was last graced with a solo exhibition? Read the accompanying catalogue Anne Arnold: Sculpture from Four Decades and you’ll get an idea. Both veteran curator Chris Crosman and critic John Yau make a point of Arnold’s “singular position in American sculpture”—that is to say, how the work sits firmly aside the run of –isms that typify the usual telling of post-war American art. You know the routine: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Post-Modernism, etc., etc. and blah, blah, blah. What to do with an artist whose vision touches lightly, if at all, on these blue-chip precedents and, instead, goes its own blessed way? You hope that the Alexandre show will dismantle “preconceptions about what ‘important’ art means” and that it “broadens our sense of history, progress in art, and what we consider modern.” The sophistication of Arnold’s meditations on the animal kingdom—dogs are the specialty, but her empathy and know-how extend to pigs, rabbits, cats and hippos—will be plain to [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Shallow Children</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/shallow-children/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/shallow-children/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 22:01:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Steve Haske</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[On Gaming]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8268</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Game Prediction: To Err Is Human “Technology will eventually destroy us.” That’s probably an idea you’re familiar with, whether by observation of the increasingly alarming dependency we have on our electronic devices, or maybe just exposure to allegory in science fiction. It also might be an apt description for Binary Domain, a sci-fi shooter that explores some exceptionally thought-provoking themes. Criminally overlooked in retail despite its unique qualities, Binary is in many ways similar to Blade Runner: in the future, cybernetic technology is so advanced that it becomes possible to create robots that are indistinguishable from humans. After a U.S. attack by a so-called “hollow child,” an international spec-ops team is sent to Japan to apprehend the creator of the world’s most advanced robotics technology, under violation of an international treaty banning the research and development of sentient intelligence in machines. Only unlike Blade Runner’s replicants, hollow children have no idea they’re not human. There’s plenty of commentary that can spark just from this setup: humanity playing God, ethics in technology or even, as Binary was developed by a Japanese team, issues Japan has historically grappled with regarding its military stance or its own cultural identity. It’s a bit unexpected [...]]]></description>
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		<item>
		<title>Spooky or Kooky?</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/spooky-or-kooky-2/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/spooky-or-kooky-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 21:58:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Armond White</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Film]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8265</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Tim Burton’s Campy Dark Shadows Gone are the days when Tim Burton films made you laugh first. Now Burton more likely makes you cringe, as in Dark Shadows, his new film version of TV’s 1960s daytime soap opera. It retells the story of Barnabas Collins, an early-American fishing scion who had been turned into a vampire by Angelique, a witch he spurned. “She caused me to be a vampire so that my suffering would never end,” says Barnabas (Johnny Depp) in tones so sepulchral they’re almost satiric. Yet, Burton loses his signature balance of dread and humor. There’s an indecisive, scattershot approach to both vampire legend and pop culture camp. It’s as if Burton couldn’t decide to be kooky or spooky. Burton’s done genre makeovers before, yet Dark Shadows isn’t a transformation like his 2001 Planet of the Apes or his do-over Batman Returns, which definitively grasped the comic-fright tone missing from his now-forgotten 1989 Batman blockbuster. Burton’s Dark Shadows never takes hold as a gothic vision of American history (Sleepy Hollow II) or a comedy about love versus spite, the occult versus the all-too-mortal follies that transpire within the personalized crosscurrents of ruthless business practices in the Collins family [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Less Talk, More Rock</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/less-talk-more-rock/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/less-talk-more-rock/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 21:50:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jay Nordlinger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Classical Music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Neikrug’s New Concerto at the Philharmonic On a Friday afternoon, the New York Philharmonic began a concert with the Corsair overture of Berlioz. Then it was time for a new work, a concerto for orchestra by Marc Neikrug. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did not stride to the podium to conduct. He and the composer ambled out holding microphones. Uh-oh. At the Philharmonic, it seems, there cannot be a new piece without talk from the stage. Without special pleading and hand-holding. Gilbert made a crack. He said the premiere of the piece had taken place the night before, so “don’t worry about the new-music thing, guys.” The piece was no longer new, see? This was kind of witty, but also incredibly condescending. If audiences are skeptical of new music, maybe it’s because they have been fed so much bad new music over the years. And whose fault is that, “guy”? Neikrug made some rambling remarks about physiological reactions to musical notes, I think—I found it hard to understand him. If you’re going to impose talk on the audience, at least do it well. Some people are cut out for it, some are not. Before he left the stage, Neikrug declared that [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Preserved Expectations</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/preserved-expectations/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/preserved-expectations/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 21:48:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Joel Lobenthal</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Dance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8260</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ballet’s Perilous History on Video Not enough of Natalia Makarova’s high artistic quality nor her particular qualities were on view at the tribute to her staged by Youth America Grand prix late last month. The videos shown of her performances existed almost in a class of their own. I don’t think that this was deliberate, for the performers chosen were top international names. Granted as always that they came from all four corners of the globe and may have been tired, etc., etc., I still missed Makarova’s line—flowing even when she stood absolutely still. I missed her float and illusion of impalpability. I missed her ability to sustain the fiction that a kinetic pulse continued beyond the actual conclusion of a step or an extension. Of course Makarova would have been extraordinary at any time or place. But watching the videos shown and thinking back to the many times I saw her dance live in the late 1970s and 1980s, something startling was clear: Although individual aspects of ballet technique have strengthened quantitatively, technique as an integrated expression has not really progressed. But going back 100 years or so, there is no question that what was considered ballet dancing is [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Moga Better Deco</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/moja-better-deco/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/15/moja-better-deco/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 21:45:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Marsha McCreadie</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Visual Art]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8257</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Japan Shapes 20th Century Art and Culture Sometimes the best way to get at a culture is to smash it up against a disparate element, or encase it in a seemingly alien time frame, seeing unexpected elements in each, even redefining each. So it is with Art Deco, and Japan, a yoking you never thought of before. No there are no Cole Porter photos, but there’s a marvelous poster of three high stepping dancers worthy of the Stork Club. A vase with a single “modern” but delicate stem line of willow right down the middle, and with the traditional Japanese emblem of a cicada now highly formalized, blew me away (“Vase with Cicada and Willow Design,” Katori Masahiko, 1931). All of a sudden, Japanese obsession with perfection seems congruent with Art Deco’s geometrical matrix, a reaction against art nouveau. So how come we never knew about this before? For one thing, most of this 200 piece collection is from a private collection, shown through the generosity and collector perspicacity of Robert and Mary Levenson of Clearwater, Fla. (There are also five paintings on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.) Moreover, while we always thought of pre-World War II Japan as [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Citizen-Artist</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/08/citizen-artist/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/08/citizen-artist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 May 2012 21:47:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Armond White</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Film]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8249</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A NoËl Coward Film Series to Remember In a Noël Coward-worthy lyric, a pop singer-songwriter once mused about “the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost.” Seeing some of the newly restored 35mm prints of classic Noël Coward films in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Coward on Film (May 11-13) inspires such wistfulness. As part of the citywide Noël Coward tribute Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward, the film series at the Walter Reade Theater makes it evident that current pop culture has not produced the kind of multitalented demi-giants like the 20th century’s Coward, Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, Melvin Van Peebles. Very possibly Michael Jackson and R. Kelly might have joined their ranks, had scandal, opprobrium and racism not intervened. And George Clooney certainly doesn’t rate—no matter how relentlessly the media celebrates him or how egregiously he fails. Coward’s output as writer, composer, performer and filmmaker typifies a lost era of doubling on brass; the expectation that an artist should be good at more than one thing, even if only to create vehicles for himself. Coward’s inventiveness is nothing like today’s preening self-promoters. His film work reminds one of how an artist’s engagement with [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Vuillard Confidential</title>
		<link>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/08/vuillard-confidential/</link>
		<comments>http://cityarts.info/2012/05/08/vuillard-confidential/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 May 2012 21:42:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mario Naves</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Visual Art]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://cityarts.info/?p=8246</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Master of Intimism Gets Intense Long gone, I hope, are the days when the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was pooh-poohed as being insufficiently radical or, if you prefer, overly bourgeois—as if art steeped in domesticity and comfort somehow precluded pictorial innovation. If Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, doesn’t put that avant-gardist trope to bed, nothing will. Actually, make that the first three galleries. In them, we encounter an artist of brooding intensity and startling economy. The standard telling of Intimism underlines how a select group of painters brought Impressionist facture out of the sunlight and into the dining room. Dubbing themselves the Nabis—from the Hebrew and Arabic, meaning “prophets”—these artists looked for inspiration in the color-laden symbolism of Paul Gauguin, the decorative flourishes of Art Nouveau and the flat spaces found in Japanese prints. The resulting imagery spoke (as the novelist André Gide had it) “in a low tone, suitable to confidences.” Low, confidential and given to unnerving moments of introspection. New Yorkers familiar with MoMA’s “Interior: Mother and Sister of the Artist” (1893), a cornerstone of the permanent collection, know Vuillard wasn’t inspired by hearth and home so much [...]]]></description>
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