By Sandra Schulman Murals and public art are making big waves in Palm Beach County, with paintings stretching up to 10 stories high on buildings in and around town. Glamorous gallerist Nicole Henry of Nicole Henry Fine Art in West Palm Beach is ready to unveil a big project to bring attention to the enormous possibilities here in town. She has announced an ambitious exhibit … [Read more...]
The View From Home 67: Weird Winnipeg, Rohmer, Robbe-Grillet, Preston Sturges, and an Afrobeat pioneer
My Winnipeg: Canadian experimentalist and silent-movie fetishist Guy Maddin called this 2007 feature (Criterion, $26.47 Blu-ray, $22.99 DVD) a “docu-fantasia.” This is as good a label as any to define My Winnipeg, an otherwise uncategorizable journey into the hypnogogic memories of Maddin’s past and the hometown in which he spent it. Shot mostly in soundless black-and-white, … [Read more...]
Ex-NEA chief Gioia to highlight 11th Palm Beach Poetry Festival
To anyone who knows Miles Coon, the founder and director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, it should come as no surprise to learn that Coon starts off a phone conversation with a recitation of “A Lock of Her Hair,” by renowed American poet Robert Wrigley. Wrigley is one of the luminaries — including Chard deNiord, Linda Gregerson, Thomas Lux, Maurice Manning, Molly Peacock, … [Read more...]
After 21 years, Palm Beach chamber fest opens fall series
A musical series that began almost the same way a kids’ lemonade stand does —as an activity for friends to have some fun in the long days of summer — expands after 21 years this week into the fall season. Tomorrow night at the Wold Performing Arts Center at Lynn University in Boca Raton, and Friday night at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth, the Palm Beach Chamber … [Read more...]
Sundays: Into the unknown unknowns
By Myles Ludwig I’m in a melancholy mood today. Two things have been on my mind this week. When I thought enough about them, I realized they were the same: we don’t know what we don’t know. That much-mocked Rumsfeldian tautology has resurfaced with a vengeance this week and it applies as much to the current Syrian situation as it does to the profoundly personal questions of … [Read more...]
‘Before Midnight’: A threequel worth waiting for
Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight opens on a scene to which any divorced parent who received the short end of the custody stick can relate: the desire to stretch out precious time with one’s children before they inevitably vanish into the arms of that other person you used to love. In Before Sunset, the second film in what has become a trilogy shot in nine-year, real-time … [Read more...]
Composer Waxman to get world premiere at Lynn
Time was when Donald Waxman was proud of his pen-and-ink hand, because the notes he wrote out for his manuscript scores were legible and performers found them easy to read. That all changed a few years ago at the hands of a student who dragged the composer into the digital notation era. “He said, ‘Mr. Waxman, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to teach you how to use … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Into the Woods’ and ‘Master Harold’
Most fairy tales see the world in extremes of good and evil or right and wrong. But leave it to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, in their musical constructed from intertwined fables, Into the Woods, to consider the ambiguity in these stories, asking us to look at matters from the witch’s viewpoint or the much-maligned giant’s perspective. Is it that adult take on stories … [Read more...]
‘Red’ marks major advance; ‘Pitmen’ proves inert play
“The art of making art” is a frequent fascination of playwrights, who find in the visual arts a metaphor for their own struggle of creation. Currently, by a fluke of scheduling, two such plays on the creative process are on view -- John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning Red and Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, from the following season on Broadway. Both are well-produced and … [Read more...]
Art Palm Beach offers trip down rabbit hole into art Wonderland
“I chose the hammerhead because they’re on the red list and in danger of extinction,” said the artist Marc Hubert D’Ge— who looked like remarkably like a young Gregg Allman — in a charming Aix-en-Provence accent of his installation piece, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves. He stood beneath a 10-foot, taxidermied shark mounted on an exhibition wall with a video running … [Read more...]