In addition to the compelling, original videos we feature from our Charlotte Viewpoint team of contributors, Director of Film Donald Devet shines the spotlight on some of the best short videos from around the world. As curator of our Video Gallery, Donald identifies and shares videos that are thought provoking, inspirational, innovative and just plain fun.

Image to the left: The Enigmatic Memory Of Love, by Honora Jacob. Oil on canvas and plexiglas, 48"x26"

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Charlotte’s vibrancy in the visual arts has varied in intensity over time and to take the city’s current “art pulse” we should look first at the gallery scene.

In recent years, the commercial side of the art world has taken a big hit, here as elsewhere. For people who work in the visual arts – teachers, artists, creators, students and designers – this is a moment of great flux, with several major galleries closing up shop, and others due to follow suit.

Several months ago the innovative GalleryUp in Rock Hill, and NoDa’s Green Rice traded their brick-and-mortar locales for an Internet presence only. Following a year or two of such gallery closings – the Joie Lassiter Gallery and Center of the Earth being primary examples of top-flight establishments calling it a day – the list of physical closings just got longer. Hodges-Taylor Gallery (now “Hodges-Taylor Consultancy”) will soon leave its prime North Tryon Street location in TransAmerica Square to join the ranks of Charlotte art consultants who operate primarily online.

But Hodges-Taylor is not totally giving up on physical presence and a space where patrons can stand in front of the actual art objects instead of staring at pixels on a screen. Come September, the venerable gallery will tuck itself quietly into a corner of South End’s developing art scene beside the light rail in the old brick industrial building that houses the Crosland Studios at 118 East Kingston Avenue.

There it will be in good company: just a block down the tracks is the classy Hidell-Brooks Gallery which remains active, and where, according to co-owner Rebecca Brooks, “people are at least talking about buying art” after a long and depressing recession, during which time patrons came, looked, drank the wine and explained just why they couldn’t make a purchase.

Nearby, and appealing to a different demographic, the Lark & Key Gallery and Boutique, at 128 East Park Avenue, continues to satisfy with its plethora of well-received and tasteful art. Now ensconced into its South End location, far from the madding NoDa crowd, the atmosphere of the gallery seems even more happily thoughtful here, just like the visual art it represents. This pleasant visual art is like a good yoga practice session, restful yet energizing. Its contents are quiet, meditative, and soothing.

Its current exhibition, Memory & Metaphor, features the work of three artists: Honora Jacob and Duy Huynh, both figurative painters; and Jennifer Mecca, a potter. The work of this trio (on view until May 26), varies in nature, power and content. The two painters compete on the walls, while the pottery of Mecca, who uses gentle colors in the Lark and Key palette, favoring celadon, light aqua and copper, is a pleasant complement to almost anything in the Gallery and Boutique.

The two painters delve into romantic material to different depths, with Jacob’s approach to the figure being thinner and sketchier. While Huynh’s idealized serenity may not appeal to everyone, the style he has mastered has quickly become the defining quality and standard of this South End gallery. 

The title Memory & Metaphor is a rich and potent one, and by the way, the name of a major monograph on Charlotte’s own master artist Romare Bearden. It speaks of dreams and memories residing in that region of the mind skewed just short of the present moment. The exhibition promises a slightly tilted moment in time, a-là déja-vu with a hint of surrealism. Huynh’s work, which always resonates with depth and thought, lives up to this promise. Jacob’s vacant-faced figures, though decorative, don’t carry the same emotional punch.

Right next door to Lark & Key is Ciel Gallery + Mosaic Studio, currently featuring Back to the Garden, a juried show of mosaic and ceramic pieces, one highlight of which are pretty ceramic flowers by Terry Shipley. This pair of galleries appeals to similar audiences, and when the food trucks are in place across the tracks on the corner of Park and Camden, one block away and next to South End’s Common Market bar and deli, this little urban node bursts with creative activity on a Friday night.

A block further west, in the cavernous spaces of the old Gaines Brown Design showroom at 1520 South Tryon Street, Larry Elder is prepping for the move of his eponymous gallery from his prosaic strip mall space on South Boulevard. Gaines Brown’s interior has housed many large exhibition designs over its years of operation; it will be intriguing to see how Elder copes with this increased scale of interior space.

Elder Gallery is scheduled to open in May, and its new proximity to other South End highlights makes the South End gallery scene the premier art venue in the city outside the established museums, leaving NoDa to profit mainly from music and bars.

And speaking of museums, Charlotte’s Mint Museum has added one of the area’s most original art thinkers and curators to its staff – Brad Thomas, who illuminated the campus at Davidson College for twelve years with a series of high quality and innovative art exhibitions at the College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries. Thomas joins Carla Hanzal as the curators tasked with building the Mint’s contemporary and modern collection.

As a top priority, Thomas is anticipating a “cross pollination” of ideas among institutions and individuals, and is “excited to join . . . at this critical juncture when the arts are now a unifying source of cultural pride and identity,” he said.

Among other topics, Thomas is planning to address the challenge of “the sometimes polarizing nature of the arts in this community,” he said. This promises more exhibitions that challenge Charlotte art patrons to think, rather than merely gaze with appreciation.

The prevalence of tasteful visual art to help us through hard times in Charlotte is no bad thing, of course, and this genre can be found in local galleries and museums alike. The recession has been very hard on the city’s visual artists and art establishments – some didn’t make it out the other side – but a strong museum establishment, coupled with a surging South End scene, promises a modest renaissance in the city’s art fortunes, in both scope and content.

In addition to the compelling, original videos we feature from our Charlotte Viewpoint team of contributors, Director of Film Donald Devet shines the spotlight on some of the best short videos from around the world. As curator of our Video Gallery, Donald identifies and shares videos that are thought provoking, inspirational, innovative and just plain fun.

This week's featured video is Sugar Creek Prelude, by Billy Haake.

From the curator: This film won first prize in the The Charlotte Film Community's 2012 "Inspire Charlotte" film contest. Filmmakers were required to tell a story using elements in a photograph selected at random. Billy Haake chose a pastoral photograph by Jerry Keys showing an axe, a chopping block, a pile of firewood, a shovel, a straw hat and a uniquely shaped piece of driftwood.

A collaboration between the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and 3D animator Matthew Weinstein, May 4 at the Knight Theater. Also: Matthew Weinstein, a spotlight show at the Mint Museum Uptown, on display until August 19.
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Left Image: Matthew Weinstein, American, 1964-
Ernie's (Artichoke), 2010 Acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the Artist and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, New York
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Throughout the 20th Century, painters and sculptors had a curiously sidereal relationship to the newly invented animated cartoon. As an invention, it was almost too profound to take seriously. It sequenced drawing in an entirely new way, conveying time, music, and story as never before. It might transmit almost anything, but chiefly concerned itself with mischievous bunnies, skeletons converting themselves into marimbas, or antic mice squeezing musical notes from the udders of the barnyard cow.  It quickly became relegated to a "low" art—actually, it was a visual art that visual art didn't know what to do with.

This changed first via Pop Art then through the first wave of graffitists. Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Meyer Vaisman, Christian Schumann, each were haunted by 'toons. I remember the late Frank Moore discoursing at length on the dynamic properties of a sequence in a Looney Tune—Daffy Duck falling sans parachute from an astronomical height through a desperate series of dysfunctional props to the final splat. Moore may as well have been explicating Giotto.

Matthew Weinstein, subject of a current "spotlight" exhibit at the Mint Uptown and the animator/auteur of a 3D cartoon version of Ravel's Bolero with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra on May 4th, is presently the most significant proponent of this re-hybridization process between painting and animation. Unlike Scharf or Haring, he is not only influenced by cartoons; he makes them. They are not like the cheerfully rickety creations of underground film, like Joseph Cornell or Harry Smith, but almost balefully slick. Actually, they are as beautiful as an advertisement.

This is an observation, not an insult. His detail has the graphic finesse of a jewelry ad with every pearlescent sheen or diamond glint glittering back at you; his backgrounds are the deep but clear ultramarines of an Absolut ad; his gilded skeletons are the skeletal equivalents of Rolexes, and the presiding muse of his creations—a Koi with Man Ray lips and the kohl-rimmed eyes of Kim Novak or Elizabeth Taylor—is disturbingly seductive. The imagery is kitsch distilled into visual opium.

Viewing Chariots of the Gods – up at the Mint – or The Childhood of Bertold Brecht or the CSO’s Bolero, one feels something of the anxiety induced by Michael Powell’s Tales of Hoffman, or the films of Douglas Sirk, or the French homo-pop photographic team Pierre et Gilles, or—indeed—in Ingres. They are reports from an underworld that can replicate everything in this world but natural light, and this is why they can also be recognized as a trap. This is why the beauty is scary. It is why Weinstein's work is by no means as genial as it first appears to be.

The choice of Ravel's Bolero as the musical source of the collaboration between Weinstein and the Charlotte Symphony proved to be a bold but well-aimed stroke. The Bolero, it must be noted, is number one on a survey list of compositions that orchestral musicians hate to play, for it requires a relentless mechanical precision in the service of an insane amount of repeated notes. These must build into the most famous orgasm in the history of music. It is said to have been inspired by the syphilitic paresis that gradually reduced Ravel to a state of near-idiocy, the hallucinatory audition of a repeated redundant note being a symptom of the condition. This casts a strange light on the relationship between love and death when it is remembered that the Bolero is considered an erotic work.

Weinstein's Bolero uses as a central metaphor a golden spiral winding languidly around clockwork machinery. Ascending on this spiral are what appear to be floral arrangements or artfully arranged haute cuisine or elaborate cocktails, one of which contains the Alluring Koi. She wends her way past the machinery, and through the slowly revolving bones of two gilded skeletons, one of which applies new lipstick to her lips, as well as mascara and blush. She floats thereafter to a tentative rendezvous with a gigantic soldier in a helmet and aviator glasses. And after this sad-because-impossible tryst, she floats to the last stage. This is a meticulous reconstruction of a room based on Ernie's, the restaurant in which James Stewart first glimpsed Kim-Novak-as-Madeline-Elster in Hitchcock's Vertigo. It feels like deja vu all over again as this room burst into flame. Finis.

The highlight of the program that preceded the Bolero was the Ravel G Major Concerto, which Louis Schwizgebel, the pianist, played with tendresse. The orchestra was not as en pointe, and needs to practice their blues in French. Warren-Greene also conducted the Roman Carnival Overture with proper Berliozian fire, but with some ragged playing in the brass section, and Faure's Pavane with the transparency vital to this work. Incidentally, there were also some timing problems toward the conclusion of the Bolero. Despite these small reservations, it was by far the most interesting program that the Charlotte Symphony has ever done, and a high-water mark to aspire to again. The Weinstein/CSO Bolero is also exactly the kind of work that might be successfully marketed to anime freaks, cyber-geeks, punks, tattooists, and NASCAR enthusiasts—in short, all the people currently not in the audience. We might then be able to afford another such bold experiment.

Manoj P. Kesavan is annoyed and somewhat impatient with my line of questioning. I'm probing him on his background as is my typical style in conducting research and he’s having none of it.

“It’s boring!” Kesavan scolded me, re-opening his laptop and diverting his attention from me to the screen in front of him. “None of my academic or work history is very relevant or of interest to the work that we are doing or the journey that we are on. You could have found answers to these questions by doing some basic online research.”

This wasn’t my first clipped exchange with Kesavan, an architect by training and experience. He is very quick to cut to the chase in waning conversation and advance the discussion to areas he finds more stimulating. He’s certainly not one for navel gazing and is well known in artistic circles around this town as a “creative instigator,” a label given to him by Roger Baumgarte, retired Psychology Professor from Winthrop University.

We’re meeting together with Faron Franks, Kesavan’s affiliate artist-in-residence partner at the McColl Center for Visual Art, in their tiny, sun-filled bell tower studio to discuss their latest exploratory creative project, que-OS (pronounced kay-oss). “Que”  is the Spanish word for “what,” and "OS" stands for "open studio."

Challenging assumptions

“Usually (organizational) entities are all about solutions and solving problems,” explained Franks, who also is an architect. “With inquiry and questioning, better and often more meaningful solutions are more likely. Through questioning and critique we employ a process that challenges any assumptions in play and get to more substitutive discussion and collaboration allowing ideas to go further.”

Kesavan concurred. “Without critique and questioning, true innovation and creativity isn’t fully realized,” he said. “I see that missing in Charlotte - the true critique that leads to progress and breakthrough.”

The que-OS moniker describes their process and approach to creative work more than serving as a label for a particular work product or project. It also aptly applies to the pair’s history of working with a broad variety of creative, curious, critical and collaborative Charlotte artists that Franks and Kesovan have come to know through various forums, such as Point 8 and Pecha Kucha.

The pair met when Franks moved back to Charlotte in 2005 after working in Chicago, and joined a monthly Point 8 Forum discussion. Kesavan started these monthly discussions, initially amongst his coworkers at a private architectural firm, to “talk about architecture in a more abstract way,” he said.

“So often when working the focus can be directed primarily on projects and schedules,” said Kesovan. “I wanted focus on the art of architecture and trends – the kinds of subjects that made us become architects in the first place.”

These discussions ultimately expanded and came to be hosted by local galleries and arts institutions. Artists and others joined a core group of intellectually curious individuals in spirited discussions.

“The focus was on the idea,” Franks said. “We were having a moment where ideas could incubate and be discussed and fully explored.”

Baumgarte, who attended several Point 8 Forums over the course of a couple of years and even presented at one, echoed some of the same sentiments.

“I recall being very impressed at the cross-section of people involved and the emphasis on collaboration,” he said. “Manoj has the unique ability of getting people together in creative ways.”

The project

With collaboration at its core, the que-OS project is described by the McColl Center as “an experimental ‘Open Studio’ that will be the base for inquiry into issues of design and art, approached through public forums, lectures, and writing. Kesavan and Franks seek to bring together a wide range of designers, artists, and members of the community to work collaboratively on projects of broad interest and impact.”

That the term is a homonym for “chaos” is no accident and is a source of amusement for its creators, who have taken a deliberate “creative-first” approach to their initial project – a wide sweeping cultural initiative to celebrate the Democratic National Convention later this fall.

Undertaking a process that breaks all standards and rules of large-scale public art projects, Kesavan and Franks have formed three core teams comprised of creative contributors, curators, and administrators. The most unusual process element of this initiative is that it’s being led and driven by the creative contributor group, a diverse collection of architects, designers, software and application engineers, visual, performance, and mixed media artists.

The team is taking their ideas and thoughts in real-time to curators of some of the most established cultural institutions in the city, including the Mint Museum, UNC-Charlotte’s College of Arts & Architecture, The Levine Museum of the New South, The Light Factory, and the McColl Center for Visual Art. In turn, an executive/production team is being briefed and will assist in securing placement, funding, and execution of the various works.

Sharing the singular, unifying theme, which has been identified as “Chance and Choice,” the creative team of participants reads like a Who’s Who of Charlotte artistic innovators and includes, Matt Cosper, Carrie Gault, Ron Edelen, Antoine Williams, Gerry Derksen, Evan Danchenka, Marcus Kiser, Jason Michel, and others.

“Every one of these people has a profound desire to create,” said Franks. “And each of them has proven themselves as individuals that get things done. The reason I’m involved and what I believe the other participants see is the possibility of what can be created collectively goes well beyond what any of us can do individually.”

Culture from the ground up

Matt Cosper is a playwright, actor, and director who has been a fixture on Charlotte’s theater scene for the past decade. He was excited to join the group of artists that are working together on this project.

“This is culture from the ground up,” he said. “que-OS is about artist-generated events, which I find tremendously exciting. Much of Charlotte's cultural scene seems planned from the top down and honestly that's why a lot of it feels pretty dead and corporate.”

Outcomes are still in the planning stage, though are likely to include: installations, live performances, exhibitions, and interactive art that will engage Charlotte visitors and residents alike. The unique works will feature collaborative installations at various points in the city and combine real and virtual/interactive media, live performances, traditional exhibits, and opportunities to customize the direction of artistic experience to individual participants.

“This is something we see as an evolutionary step from what was started at Point 8,” said Kesavan. “We are platform builders, which is reflective of our training. We want this model to be sustainable and a framework for what comes next.”

In regards to the platform they are creating, Cosper said: “It's fantastic. It speaks to a de-centralization of the arts and culture sector that we're seeing across the country. It is a profound democratization of how culture is created and experienced. So much of the artist’s life in late capitalist America is about petitioning gatekeepers for permission (i.e. resources) to do our work. This initiative takes the gatekeepers out of the equation, or rather, says ‘We're headed in this direction, and you're welcome to come along, but you'd better keep up.’"

If Kesavan and Franks have their way, come September, there will be a whole lot of keeping up to do.

In addition to the compelling, original videos we feature from our Charlotte Viewpoint team of contributors, Director of Film Donald Devet shines the spotlight on some of the best short videos from around the world. As curator of our Video Gallery, Donald identifies and shares videos that are thought provoking, inspirational, innovative and just plain fun.

Talking to Carlton Hargro, who stepped down as editor-in-chief of Creative Loafing last summer, is a wild ride. A talented writer and editor who focuses on popular culture, political and social issues, Hargro can change lanes in conversation, swerving from sharp and provocative insights about politics to speaking with the same passion and enthusiasm about his favorite comic character, Aqua-Man.

A self-described nerd wearing trendy specs and a Captain America T-shirt, you get the impression Hargro got straight A’s in school and had an active imagination, while possessing at the same time a “cool factor.” There’s a mischievous smirk, laugh, and effusive charm that balances his sharp wit.

That explains why he - along with Creative Loafing photographer Jasiatic - promote and host Su Casa, one of the hippest parties monthly at Dharma Lounge in SouthEnd.

Hargro met with Charlotte Viewpoint at Amelie’s Bakery in NoDa to discuss work, life, and his diverse interests.

Last summer you stepped down as editor-in-chief of Creative Loafing. Why did you decide to leave at that time?

It was just time to go. I think that there had been enough changes in the company. I had been there for eight years. I started out at the Atlanta one, moved here, and I kind of did the things that I wanted to do. You know when its time to go.



What do you hope to bring to your new digs at Qcitymetro?

My major goal is to infuse Qcitymetro with more arts and culture and entertainment coverage. Also, I want to bring a little bit more of a voice and a personality to the stuff. I think before Qcitymetro made a brand as a straight news website, and I want to bring in the aspects that they are not covering, and do it from an angle that they are not doing it from. Then hopefully we will bring in a new audience to add to the audience that they already have.



You are originally from Gary, Indiana. What did you take away from your formative years in that environment that has helped you to pursue your career goals?

My father always told us as kids that we should work for ourselves. He always really pushed us to do it because he had to work a regular job, and then he had his own side business - a lawn care business. For so long I just worked for other people, just job, after job, after job, after job, and when I was thinking about leaving Creative Loafing, I thought, this was an opportunity for me to work for myself, to a certain extent.

The other thing is, we are at a time in the media where you don’t have to be attached to a major media outlet to be a major media person. I figured that out and it’s all about you as the brand. All these media outlets are just vehicles for what you’re doing – for your message. But first you have to know who you are and what you bring to the table, and then all this stuff helps you out. Back in the day if you worked at The New York Times, that was your stamp. But now it’s not like that.

What is your title at Qcitymetro?

I don’t really have a title - I’m an editor and a writer at Qcitymetro. I mean, it’s only two people working there. It’s like you do everything and I do everything, too. 



You came here from Creative Loafing in Atlanta, a city that has 
emerged over the past 20 years while holding on to its history and
 culture. What do you think Charlotte needs to invest in as it continues to redefine itself and covets being a major metropolitan area?

You know, I disagree with the question a little bit. Atlanta is known as a city that burns itself down every few years anyway. I mean, they blow up every damn thing too, and they put something new up. They have that new mentality. Now the difference is that it hasn’t necessarily made Atlanta less of a city. They haven’t burned all the bridges that lead to the past, they just blow ‘em up and rebuild them and they say your walking on a new street that takes you… someplace that used to be. Atlanta and Charlotte are just two different cities.

I think Charlotte was probably a cooler city before I got here, even though I used to think differently. There are a lot of crazy people in Atlanta and it’s very much an atmosphere that encourages weird stuff to go on. Charlotte used to be like that. When I read the old Creative Loafings and I talk to people, there was a lot of weird stuff going on here, like in the ‘80s, because it was more rough. This whole area [NoDa] was rough. They cleaned it up and in their search for personality, they took away some of the personality.

Charlotte is going to have to stop getting in the way. They want to know how to create a creative class. Well, you find the people that do it and you give them resources to do it more. Not blow everything up and then look out of town. It’s not going to work. The other side of it is, it’s just organic. It’s just the people here who want something different. Su Casa came from somebody’s house- Jasiatic was doing it at her house.

So if we want something different as Charlotteans, we have to make it. I think you need the institutions respecting the ground level people and the ground level people actually working and pushing to get to wherever they want to go.

You were recognized by “The Root 100” in 2010, the publication’s list
 of “emerging and established African-American leaders who are making extraordinary contributions.” It was noted was that you were one of the few African-American editors of an alternative publication. What’s does that recognition feel like?

Put it like this: Alternative newspapers are thought of as white publications for the most part and my idea when I worked at Creative Loafing in Atlanta was to bring the black aspect of an alternative audience to that paper and write about those things that interconnect. I think a lot of times when alternative weeklies write about black people that they write about us in the weirdest ways. The black people that read the paper won’t even like that kind of stuff.

I think to a certain degree here in Charlotte so many black people just didn’t know what to do with me, or Creative Loafing. They just didn’t know how it fit in their mind. They’re like: “What is this and that.” At its best, it’s kind of a down and dirty publication, and if you’re not down with that, you’re not down with it. I’m not saying you’ve got to like it, but I like “Savage Love” and I like some stuff like that, so it all fit together for me.

Your interests are certainly diverse as a foodie, music lover, and comic book
 collector. Which would you describe as your overriding passion?

Well, comic books are #1. Oh yeah, totally.

Why?

I’ve been reading them since I was five years old. I’m forty-one and I have almost ten thousand comic books. I read ‘em every day. I read about them. It’s an art form that I really dig. It’s words and pictures together which is film, which is animation, which is so many things that come from that. You know storyboards for films are basically comic books. I think I connect with the idea that you capture a moment in time and you put that together with the literary.

But secondly is music. When I was in Atlanta I wrote about music a lot. Now that I’m here, I write for Creative Loafing in Atlanta again and I cover music. Right now I’m working on a list of the top ten soul albums of last year. I love music, especially soul music.

You recently had a Kickstarter campaign - “Finally, cool black superheroes” - to pursue your comic book endeavor. How did that go?

I didn’t get the money. However, I really did it as a marketing tool to let people know that I do comic books. For so long, people in Charlotte just thought that I wrote about comic books because I use to review them for the paper. So it was like, I actually make them and I wanted to let people know that I did.

The plan is still for the comic to come out in 2012, so that’s what I’m working on. This one is called “Isis.” It’s a black female superhero, but that may not be the one that comes out in 2012 because I have lots of them. It just depends on which one works the best.



What book are you currently reading?

I’m the kind of person that reads books and puts them down. I take a book, read a little bit and put it down, read another, come back to it. I’m reading a memoir by Staci Ann Chin, she’s a social critic. Prodigy from Mobb Deep wrote a memoir called My Notorious Life. Also a graphic novel called Footnotes in Gaza,  [by Joe Sacco] about this journalist who went to the Gaza strip and he’s talking about the history of the conflict there. It goes back way deeper than people know.

Su Casa, the party you promote at the Dharma Lounge billed as “a new monthly oasis for Charlotte’s culturally starved,” is certainly a sensory fusion of art, film, music, and fashion. Aside from being a fun and eclectic party scene, is there a social network budding at this event that will produce more offerings like this in Charlotte?

I don’t really know. I guess that’s up to people that come to it to say: “Hey, I wanna do my own thing” or “I wanna do something different at another place.” What we were trying to do is build a community of people, especially when it comes to African-Americans, who are creative people. We want to bring them together, and let them know that there are other people out there who are like them and that they should collaborate. We want that to be a place where you come together and commune. That’s the big idea that’s going on under all that stuff.

Are you the kind of guy who comes up with a five-year plan? If so, what is yours?

I don’t necessarily come up with five-year plans, but I come up with plans. I’m a Virgo so I’m very strategic. My idea is that in the next few years I want to start my own book publishing company, and also be doing related things like toys, and animation, and film.

That’s what I’m working towards. Then at the same time, I always want to have my hand in media - because when you work in the media it gives you access.

It’s a little past 8 p.m. when I get in touch with Adam Cody. The vocalist has just finished leading Charlotte’s Wretched through its set — the first of seven tonight — on the massive Metal Alliance Tour. This night, they’re in Danvers, Massachusetts, but the tour will veer north into Canada, cut through the Midwest, travel south along the West Coast, and wind up in Texas before it ends on April 21.

The path that led Cody to Wretched is similarly routed. Cody began his career as the singer for Winston-Salem’s Glass Casket in 2001. That band toured heavily, recorded, and built a solid reputation for itself and the Tar Heel metalcore scene it shared with acts like Between The Buried and Me and Alesana. After Glass Casket broke up, Cody played in the more concise grindcore band Columns.

Wretched, meanwhile, had moved beyond its foundation in 2005 — “as a jam band,” according to the band’s Victory Records biography — to record two albums of increasingly cohesive metal informed by the more melodic approach to death metal taken by European bands like At The Gates and In Flames.

When Wretched released the second of those albums, 2010’s Beyond The Gate, Columns was asked to open the hometown release show. “I remember sitting, watching that night and I was pretty amazed at the stage performance and the sound,” Cody says.

Being an active touring band, Wretched had already become familiar with the demands a road-bound lifestyle could have on a band. Then-vocalist Billy Powers couldn’t make a tour; the band needed a fill-in and called Cody. He couldn’t make it either, but expressed his interest. When Powers officially left the band, Cody joined, splitting his time between Wretched and Columns.

The metalcore scene in which Cody and Glass Casket were entrenched was similarly inspired by the Gothenburg sound, epitomized by At The Gates’ 1995 opus Slaughter of The Soul. Glass Casket began to take on more and bolder melodic instincts, and more progressive tendencies. In other words, Cody was a natural fit for Wretched. “A lot of the [metalcore] bands we played with were pretty much doing just breakdowns and punk beats and stuff like that,” Cody says. “Eventually, people started to bring a lot more melody in and harmonizing with each other. It just got a lot more musical.”

Wretched did, too. Son of Perdition, the band’s third album, was released March 27 - 12 days into the Metal Alliance Tour. With the addition of Cody and bassist Andrew Grevey, the quintet — which also includes guitarists Steven Funderburk and John Vail, and drummer Marshall Wieczorek — was able to craft its most coherent and approachable effort. In a press release for the album, guitarist Steven Funderburk said, “[Son of Perdition is] far more rhythmic and grooves more than our previous records."

Cody agrees with the notion. “You could consider a couple of the riffs to be sludge or doom, and that’s pretty new,” he says. And those aren’t the only metal subgenres the band dips into for influence. The album opens, after a short haunted-house organ-and-choir intro, with “Imminent Growth,” a blast of shrieking black metal, majestic and malevolent. “Dilated Disappointment” is perhaps the band’s most straightforward death metal bludgeoning. The three-song suite “The Stellar Sunset of Evolution” explores Opeth-like prog and Metallica-thrash with equal aplomb.

Metal’s subgenres are the product and perpetuation of a historically narrow view of the genre taken by bands and fans alike. But Wretched turns its omnivorous treatment of influences into an asset.

“Bands like Between The Buried And Me and Meshuggah and all these bands doing very progressive stuff kind of opened the doors to play whatever you really want to play,” Cody says. “I think this new CD is exactly that. I can tell right off the bat that one song is very Meshuggah-influenced, and people will probably recognize that as soon as they hear it, but it still has our own Wretched sound.”

The multifaceted approach also makes Wretched a fitting teaser for the bands they’re touring with. Headlined by DevilDriver, the Metal Alliance Tour also features technical death metal bands The Faceless, Job For A Cowboy, and Impending Doom; the Priest-meets-Exodus thrash of 3 Inches of Blood; and Maryland’s supremely brutal Dying Fetus. Falling somewhere in between, Wretched’s something-for-everyone approach seems to be paying dividends.

“The Dying Fetus fans will come up and it seems like they really enjoy the short, fast death metal song,” Cody says. “Then fans of some of the other bands are enjoying the other song, which is a little more thrashy, and it has a repeating chorus, so it’s automatically a little more thrash and a little more — I guess you could say — commercial.”

“But, you know,” he offers, “there’s no singing on the record, so it’s not very commercial.” Commercial or not, Son of Perdition is the type of album that hints at a fruitful career for Wretched, that the days of done-by-8 p.m. opening slots might be behind them.

At the Mint Museum through May 12:

SURREALISM AND BEYOND, a collection of three exhibits: 

Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy

Seeing the World Within--Charles Seliger in the 1940's 

Gordon Onslow- Ford--Voyager and Visionary

At the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro through May 6

WE DONE ALL WE COULD AND NONE OF IT'S GOOD 

Trenton Doyle Hancock 

___________________

By the 1940's—the time covered in the Mint's three shows—Surrealism had ceased to be a scandal and had become chic. As a movement which exalted the operations of the unconscious mind, it dovetailed nicely with the popularization of psychoanalysis then at its apogee. The result—to cite one example—was Gregory Peck mazily wandering through Salvador Dali's dreamscape of pendulous eyeballs and giant scissors in Hitchcock's Spellbound. There was also a brief vogue for hats in the form of footwear or bedecked with plastic lobsters.

That World War II had driven the surrealist leadership to these shores only increased its renown. Though the Surrealists were not the only major artists exiled here - Leger was in New York during this time and Mondrian, too -their presence gave American painters something large and challenging to bump against that they had hither-to lacked. Gorky, Baziotes, Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Gottlieb et al. were epigonic Surrealists before they became themselves.

The generational differences as they played themselves out on canvas might roughly be described as an argument between narrative—dream narrative in the case of the Surrealists, of course—and abstraction, and between the Surrealist mandate to topple art in a systematic derangement of the senses and the American urge to create a new Sublime. To be a painter who treated paint as a living substance - what Arshile Gorky has in common with Rubens and Delacroix - was of little interest to the Surrealists; indeed, it was a tradition that they would have preferred to overthrow. But after Gorky, Rothko et al. experimented with Surrealism, they rejected it in favor of their own passionate identification with abstraction. Such painters as Gordon Onslow-Ford and Charles Seliger, the subjects of two of these shows at the Mint, were left behind in the Surrealist dream zoo, while Pollock and De Kooning dripped and trowelled themselves onto new terrain.

Ironically, both Onslow-Ford and Seliger look more contemporary today than they might have at the summit of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950's, or Pop art in the '60's, or Minimalism in the 70's, as the decay of each movement lead to a reintegration of all the corny, biomorphic, ideogrammatic, pictographic, and symbolic/oneiric devices that Abstract Expressionism had eliminated. Though neither Onslow-Ford nor Seliger seem to me to be completely realized painters, the problems both wrestled with - such as the representation of metamorphosis and story in art - are now modern all over again.

Seliger seems to me to be the more consistent painter, with a preoccupation with depicting a biological form x-rayed in the process of its own time-lapsed metamorphosis. A leaf unfolding will be depicted in this process in all stages inside and out. This is a particularly difficult problem, solved only once or twice in history, in Leonardo's anatomical drawings, and in the Russian Surrealist Tchelitchew's masterpiece “Hide and Seek.” Seliger isn't on this level, but to attempt such a thing at all is heroic, and he sometimes comes close to clinching it. His work at the end of the 1940's also broaches this problem almost collagistically, with a sense of one time-value being held in check by another. This sense of multiple time-values on one canvas gives him a curious affinity with the work of Tim Rollins and KOS from the early 1990's - the Mint owns a fine example - and with the hyper-collagist Trenton Doyle Hancock, now up at the Weatherspoon in Greensboro.

Onslow-Ford is more scattered in his effects but there is at least one painting in his show that looks like something Kenny Scharf might have done for one of his Hanna-Barbera inflected album covers for The B-52's in the 1980's. Both artists were too late and too soon, and are worthy of the reevaluation curator Jon Stuhlman has given them.

The case of Yves Tanguy - who with his wife, Kay Sage, is the subject of the Mint’s third show - is a different sort of paradox. Of all the surrealists, no one - not even Rene Magritte - has a narrower range as a painter. Even so, his paintings are unforgettable.

His specialty is a landscape of petrified biomorphic forms which may have been plants, creatures, sculptures, or structures in some prehistoric "before" and which now stand as a barrier-reef in a post-historic "after" in a desert of fog without a horizon. These creature/sculptures - though not recognizable - are depicted in almost taxonomic detail, with an eye to volume and shadow, in shades of silver, buff-grey, and mother-of-pearl, and with a brushstroke almost Flemish in its self-effacing finesse. Just as Giacometti's attenuated figures of a standing woman or a walking man became identified with post-war Existentialism as enunciated by Sartre and Camus, so Tanguy's landscapes became associated with the endemic dread of the nuclear era after Hiroshima.

Their influence has been wider than supposed, as almost every depiction in science fiction or in animated cartoons of a post-apocalyptic or futurological landscape borrows from Tanguy. J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World can be described without a stretch as a Tanguy-based novel; Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet can be described as a Tanguy-based cartoon. There are Tanguy-like landscapes in authors as different as Dino Buzzati and Stanislaus Lem. The futurological backdrops of the cartoons of both Disney's Buena Vista studios and those of Hanna-Barbera might also be described as an attempted domestication of Tanguy's chill vision.

The Tanguy/Sage show is obviously a labor of love but its thesis - that Tanguy was formatively influenced by his wife, Kay Sage, rather than vice versa - strikes me as an exaggeration. Viewing their paintings side-by-side, the overriding sense is of folie a deux rather than independent activity. Tanguy's most obvious influence is de Chirico, but he strides leagues away from him, whereas Sage's most influences are de Chirico and Tanguy, and she tends to stay close to home. She often reverts to a de Chirico-esque composition with a strong central figure, as Tanguy creates obsessive mazes from his creature/structures. There has been quite rightly a reevaluation of the women artists of Surrealism. But while Dorothea Tanning, in particular, will be sooner or later perceived as being on par with her ex-husband, Max Ernst, Sage's paintings seem to trail in the wake of Tanguy, and while Tanning survived Ernst for almost four decades, this was something Sage was unable to do. She shot herself to death nine years after Tanguy died; the bleak landscape both had envisioned was one she was could not traverse alone.

Tanguy died in 1955, at a time when Surrealism had become old news. Somewhat like the heroine of The Makropulos Case, however, it "died" under mysterious circumstances only to be spotted somewhere else under another name. It catalyzed the literature of the Latin American Boom, and released the tribal energies of African literature from a missionary colonialism even as the poetry of Breton and Aragon had become passé in Paris. It also spilled over onto the American stage - the only thing Sam Shepherd and Robert Wilson have in common, for example, is their Surrealist roots. That it is by no means exhausted can be seen in the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Weatherspoon Museum, whose work seems to me to be better painting than many of the "classic" Surrealists.

Hancock is the youngest artist to be included in the Whitney Biennial, which he was in 2000 and again in 2002. The accolade is warranted, as he can do almost anything - paint, print, scissor, shape, collage - and put it under one harness. He can make a landscape out of words, he can turn the words into creatures, he can turn the creatures into wallpaper patterns, and execute these peculiar operations with a regularity peculiar to him. To this he may add fur or feathers, painted felt components, collaged components of his own making scattered like confetti over his huge canvases. His compositional sense is on the same high level as his fabricating skill. One of his word landscapes may resemble a synthesis of a backdrop out of a Tex Avery cartoon with a Gethesmene from Mantegna. Others may be as upfront as a heavily impasto'd nose sprouting zits and follicles from Philip Guston.

In addition to Avery and Guston, his influences seem to be William Blake, Stan Lee, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and perhaps Tom of Finland. He also appears to have studied the history of newspaper comics, comic books, and animation with the same reverence that an earlier generation studied Bernard Berenson on Florentine painting. He has been framed as a sort of outsider artist with a private mythology, like Henry Darger, and this - though only partially true - points to an Achilles heel in his genius. These paintings illustrate his own personal cosmology based on a battle of good and evil, of color versus black and white, of the half-human half plany Mounds versus the blood thirsty Vegans, with a pantheon of major and minor figures, subplots, and even a Trenton Doyle Hancock character with the phallic name of Torpedo Boy. This mythology would be of very little interest, though, if he did not paint like an angel.

Until recently, the problem of a private mythology is one which has vexed poetry more than painting, and the sensation one has viewing a Hancock painting is much the same as one has reading a poem by Yeats, or Robert Graves, or James Merrill - one believes "The Second Coming" or "To Juan at Winter Solstice" or "Voices from the Other World," but not in the synthetic doctrines set forth in Yeats’ A Vision or Graves' The White Goddess or Merrill's Ouija Board Trilogy. Each of these are actually a form of deflected autobiography used as a kind of scaffolding to reach to the epic. The same is true of Hancock's mythology - as a device that permits him greater artistic freedom it is successful, but as a cosmology it is a fantasy purporting to be a belief.

"I am the lie which tells the truth" said Cocteau, but the problem, one might reply, is that you don't know the difference. With a talent as copious as Hancock's, the question hanging fire is whether this "mythology" will remain self-referential and solipsistic or deepen in meaning beyond himself.

"Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway, junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers." - George Orwell.

The quote is doubly apt. Much of animator Don Hertzfeldt’s work – particularly the “Bill” trilogy, whose conclusion will premiere at The Light Factory on April 14 – concerns the grind of day-to-day life. Hertzfeldt spent thousands of hours of his own life making the trilogy, drawing each animation frame by frame and filming them with an antique 35-millimeter downshooter, one of the last such models on the planet, similar to the one used to make the early Peanuts cartoons. 

Hertzfeldt’s style is innovative, in a back-to-the-future kind of way. He combines experimental visual effects with some of the most basic drawings imaginable. His characters are all stick figures, but drawn with the élan of a cave painting – simple, even somewhat abstract, but powerfully evocative in their way. 

For an artist who constructs his films from such basic elements, Hertzfeldt manages to be quite expansive in theme. His earlier short films (like Billy’s Balloon), offer a defamiliarizing mix of slapstick and empathy. The first chapter of the “Bill” trilogy, about a middle-aged man who gradually succumbs to a mental disorder, is a mature reflection on modern life, doting as much on the ennui of workaday life as it meditates on the precariousness of emotional health. 

In all his films, the sparseness of the visuals creates space for soaring scores. Hertzfeldt is a self-professed classical music lover, and his films feature passages from Beethoven, Smetana and Bizet, among others. 

Aside from influencing a minor sub-culture of other animators (much of Adult Swim's current offerings are visibly indebted to his work), Hertzfeldt has been offered several advertising deals from major corporations including Cingulair and United Airlines. 

He has turned them all down.   

Hertzfeldt is on tour with the third and final chapter of the Bill trilogy, It's Such a Beautiful Day, which will premiere at his April 14 engagement, sponsored by The Light Factory at the Carolina Crownpoint Cinema. The program, which begins at 7:30 p.m., includes It’s Such a Beautiful Day, along with the first two chapters of the Bill trilogy and some of his other work. Hertzfeldt will be on hand to introduce the films and discuss them with the audience.

I talked to Don Hertzfeldt ahead of his Charlotte appearance. 

Now that It’s Such a Beautiful Day is complete, you’ve produced 60 minutes – in three installments – about the same character and the same basic story. Do you recommend watching them in one sitting?

I didn't always feel this way while making them, but today I can say "yes" without hesitation. I wanted so much for them to be able to stand alone, and be strong enough as their own separate pieces, that I never actually gave much thought about how they'd all string together in one sitting - which is probably kind of dumb when you're making a trilogy. But I don't think I sat down to review Chapters 1 and 2 even one time for reference in the two years of making Chapter 3. So it was a pretty nice surprise and relief to see after finishing Chapter 3 that not only were they not intolerable all together, but they were actually really enriching each other and creating something bigger and more interesting.

I've read several interviews where you discuss other filmmakers who were significant to your work, but I wondered if there were artists in any other media?

Outside of film, I think Edward Gorey was probably a big influence - his writing is really wonderful and surreal and often just perfect. Often he'll use not one word too many, or one word too few. He’s also somebody I think a legion of artists and writers have sort of stolen from over the years and maybe never properly credited or appreciated. 

In a New York Times interview, you answered a question about animation and technology saying, "We have over 100 years now of amazing film technology to play with, I don't understand why any artists would want to throw any of their tools out of the box.” That seems like an opposite attitude to Robert Frost's dictum, that writing poetry without meter was like "playing tennis with the net down." What is it about the themes and the characters in your work that lend themselves to your particular style and production techniques?

I’m guessing what Robert Frost was probably referring to had more to do with form and structure. And I’m certainly not doing too much to change film form or structure. The old cameras I use - these 35-millimeter downshooters from 60 years ago - just provide me with images and experimental effects that would have been literally impossible to come up with any other way. It’s not much more complicated than that. The three Everything Will Be Ok movies really wouldn't exist without them.

Can you imagine using a computer to animate one of your stories?

Sure, there's no sense in forcing a format onto a project if it wouldn't benefit from it. There's plenty of projects I’d like to work on next that don't require a bunch of specific experimental images like the last few shorts have. There’s been a major public misconception about two things: One, that somehow its ‘film versus digital,’ as if it's some sort of cage match where there can be only one true format to shoot on. And two, that working with digital tools and computer animation is somehow this magical thing that does everything for you. I think computer animators get a lot of disrespect from that, unfairly, because they're working just as hard as traditional animators, yet most people sort of seem to think that there's a "make art" button on a computer that just vomits out beautiful movies for you. There are many things you can do with my old cameras that would be more expensive or impossible to do digitally, and there are many other things you can do digitally that would be more expensive or impossible to do the other way. But no matter what, there really are no short-cuts in animation. Whichever format you choose, you’re going to be working for a very, very long time.

Your movies are funny and often expansive in theme, and I can see how a minimalist style of animation helps on that front. But your characters - as in the "Bill" trilogy - are also quite emotionally compelling. What is it about stick figures allows you to squeeze so much pathos out of them?

Thanks. That’s a really hard one to answer, but it's been very interesting over the years to try and draw performances out of relatively little - often a character who's just a few dots and lines. Not much is calculated, but from scene to scene I usually do my best to try and animate what a character is thinking rather than what a character is doing. That sounds a bit strange, but that helps a lot.

I know that it often takes a while for you to complete a film, which seems to mean that the process is split by necessity into several discrete phases (drawing the animations, filming, editing, adding music, etc.). How do you visualize a film before you make it?

Almost always, the moment that I get a new idea for a scene, the visual of it is immediately right there too: The scene's framing and composition, usually right down to which direction each character is facing. And if I try to change those details along the way, it just feels terribly wrong. I can't think of any moments right now where I’d written a scene first but didn't have those specific visual details pop in my head right there with it. I’m not sure why that is.

What’s the most lucrative advertising deal you’ve turned down? Did you think twice?

I turn them down before it even gets to the talking-about-money stage. But probably more money than I’ve ever made before, that’s for sure.

Any ideas for your next project?

I’m on this tour until around May, and then I’ll roll up my sleeves and get back to work on stuff this summer. There are five projects I’d like to somehow get off the ground in the next year and only one of them is a movie. I’d also like to paint the house.

Ron Brendle spotted me hunched over my coffee at Caribou and approached the table bearing gifts. As we greeted each other for the first time, Brendle thrust no less than five shrink-wrapped CDs into my hand in anticipation of my unfamiliarity with his discography and the breadth of his work.

Anticipation, as most jazz lovers come to understand, is that which sets truly great bassists (drummers, too) apart from the merely good ones. The pairing of percussion and bass provides the foundation and structure from which jazz improvisation can unfold. Like the chassis of a sports car, the tempo and timing provided by a great bassist need to be anticipatory and seamless in their flow through the music. 

LIFE OUTSIDE THE LABELS

“My whole thing is I don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” said Brendle, who has indeed spent a lifetime in a variety of musical pursuits that eschew categorization. Drawing my attention to the top of the stack of CDs he handed over, he wanted to make sure I didn’t discount his latest recording: Bunky Moon’s Schtuff We Like. “Play it loud,” he said, echoing the all-caps instructions found in the liner notes.

What I heard upon playing it was a bit like King Crimson or even Pink Floyd. Progressive, a bit harder charging rock and roll, and some straight-up jazz that belied my expectations of what I might find from one of Charlotte’s busiest and best-known jazz bassists.

"I like to play it all,” Brendle said. “Some of my favorite stuff is eclectic – from Leonard Cohen to Captain Beefheart, for example."

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Brendle grew up east of Statesville in a rural farming community of Cool Springs.

“My earliest exposure to music was through my great-grandmother’s pump organ in the house and listening to the Arthur Smith Show.” Smith, best known as the composer of “Dueling Banjos,” had a syndicated musical variety show that came from Charlotte in the 1960s. 

Brendle’s first musical instrument was a silver plastic saxophone that he bought from a department store in the fifth grade. While he went on to play bass drum in his high school marching band, it wasn’t until college at Appalachian State University that his love for jazz began to develop and bloom. 

There, after initially playing guitar, he took up cello and started playing jazz.

“I played with the orchestra, but wanted to play guitar with the Jazz Big Band,” Brendle said. “I came at it somewhat backwards from most. I got into modern jazz and free-form jazz and worked my way back to the classic forms.”

Brendle cites greats like Ornette Coleman, Larry Coryell, and Miles Davis as those who influenced his style of play early in his career.

CHOOSING A PATH

“I can’t help but wonder how things could have been different for me had I followed my passion for bass and gone to New York City at the same as many of my friends,” said Brendle, with a tinge of regret in his voice. “But after I graduated college, I had a young family I felt needed the security of a steady paycheck and I wasn’t confident in my own chops as a bassist. I’d only been playing bass for a couple of years at that point and I didn’t feel I was ready for that stage.”

Instead he came to Charlotte and apprenticed in a violin repair shop. It offered a steady paycheck and the opportunity to play more bass and jam with local musicians. It wasn’t long before people began to take notice. A session bassist on dozens of LPs over the past years, Brendle has played and/or recorded with the likes of Mose Allison, Frank Kimbrough, Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis, and Clark Terry. He even had the opportunity in the mid 1980s to study with legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida.

Brendle has a reputation as the type of bass player who is both adventurous and straight up. That he’s accompanied a cross section of jazz greats is both a testament to his talent and passion for his music and a hint at perhaps what could have been had life’s circumstances unfolded differently and taken him further afield from Charlotte, his home base for the past three decades. 

When he finally felt ready to venture beyond Charlotte, his family situation again didn’t allow for that. And while he may at times reflect, as most of us do, on what could have been, Brendle has accomplished much right here that has earned him a strong following.

A CHARLOTTE FIXTURE

Establishing himself as a fixture for years in Charlotte’s jazz scene, Brendle has a string of QC accolades, including two North Carolina Arts Council Jazz Composer Fellowship Grants, a Charlotte Arts and Science Council Grant, numerous Creative Loafing “Best Jazz Artist of the Year” awards and several annual “Best Bass Player” awards from Charlotte Magazine. He fronts two separate trios that play weekly gigs Uptown, Wednesday nights at Sullivan’s and Thursday evenings at Blue. 

ALWAYS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Though he never met his biological father, Bill Walker - Beat poet and counterculture founder of the legendary Washington, D.C. coffee house, Coffee ‘n’ Confusion – Brendle identifies with him as a kindred spirit and rebel of a sort. 

“I like that same freedom that my dad must have found in his pursuits,” he said. “Jazz has so many musical elements that come together in different forms allowing for all types of creation. Rhythm, creative improvisation, spontaneous composition - there is structure, but is has to be brought together. That’s where the energy and fun is.”

For Ron Brendle, jazz is a puzzle that he never tires of working on.

The second in his "Talking Shop" series with QC theater scene leaders, Matt talks with Theatre Charlotte's Ron Law. Click here to read his first interview, with Actor's Theatre of Charlotte Executive Director Dan Shoemaker and Artistic Director Chip Decker. 

Founded in 1927, Theatre Charlotte is both the oldest arts organization in Charlotte and the oldest continuously producing community theater in North Carolina. As a community theater, Theatre Charlotte uses volunteer actors who work with professional directors, designers, and stage managers. 

In recent years, under the leadership of Executive Director Ron Law, they have experienced a renaissance, consistently breaking attendance records and becoming a magnet for talented local performers eager to hone their skills and tackle juicy roles in between paying gigs. 

In a continuing series of conversations with the leaders of Charlotte’s performing arts groups, I spoke with Ron recently about the current scene in Charlotte, his own work as an artist and administrator, and the future of theater in the Queen City. 

How do you perceive Theatre Charlotte’s role in Charlotte’s arts scene?

I think we are one of the leading producers in Charlotte and have greatly diversified our programming, producing such varied fare as The Full Monty, Rent, The Graduate, Annie, Steel Magnolias, and Rent. Last season, we presented The Glass Menagerie featuring an African American cast and 40% of the audience was African American. We finished at 97% capacity for the season. 

Our mission is to create outstanding theater opportunities relevant to the people of the Charlotte region. Our vision is to make theater relevant in the lives of more people by demonstrating that theater can inspire, educate, and unite community. I think we fill the niche between the “edgier” theaters (Actors Theatre and CAST) and the Blumenthal Broadway Light Series and Children’s Theatre. 

Is there a program, beyond Theatre Charlotte’s main stage season, that you are especially proud of?

I am especially proud of our Student Theatre Guild. This is an area-wide theater club that combines social networking, monthly workshops, attending theater and volunteer opportunities with a two-week summer theater intensive. The summer theater intensive culminates in three public performances of a musical production. Last summer, it was Sweeney Todd the Student Edition and this most recent summer, Cabaret. Next summer, the production will be Pippin. Next summer Theatre Charlotte will also be inaugurating its middle school summer intensive, which will culminate with public performances of Beauty and The Beast Junior. The leads in this production will be played by college students who belong to the Student Theatre Guild. The middle school intensive will segue into the teen summer intensive.

Sweeney Todd and Cabaret are great, but that is some pretty dark, mature material. I'm sure the teens eat it up, but have you had any complaints or issues with parents and audiences that think the material is inappropriate?

They are dark and mature. Sweeney Todd was MTI's school edition, but didn't really change much except to shorten songs and things. We did the original version of Cabaret from the late 1960s which is not as "adult" as the revival was. We have an early meeting with parents of interested students and discuss all this, so there are no surprises. 

There seems to be a demand for non-traditional high school shows. Plus, there has been each year a group of college students that participate.

How does Theatre Charlotte participate in the larger dialogue, regionally and nationally? Do you see this as a priority for the organization?

Theatre Charlotte is an active member of the American Association of Community Theatre, as well as the North Carolina Theatre Conference and Metrolina Theatre Association. I am in my 3^rd term as President of the Board of Directors of NCTC and have served as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Metrolina Theatre Association. 

Theatre Charlotte was selected as the NCTC Community Theatre of the Year in 2009.

Where do you see theater in Charlotte going? Where would you like to see it going?

The theater community has been cooperative in regards to sharing resources, information, and coordinating programming. I think there will be even more collaboration and partnerships. I see growth in multicultural efforts, such as productions and casting.  Theatre Charlotte audiences have become younger and include a higher percentage in people of color. This is happening due to both programming and marketing. I think this diversity will create more dynamic and exciting opportunities for both artists and audiences.

Are there any artists, groups, or events that stick out to you here as being especially exciting?

The new facility that CAST occupies is exciting as it enables this incredible organization to expand its offerings and to reach larger audiences. Since Charles LaBorde has retired as principal of NWSA, he has become a major artistic force as both director and actor at CAST, Theatre Charlotte, and CPCC.  Mark and Meredith Sutton’s PlayPlay! Theatre concept is unique and innovative for this area. I am excited that Gina Stewart directed Doubt, Nicia Carla is directing Around the World in 80 Days, and Jill Bloede is directing The Odd Couple (female version)—all at Theatre Charlotte. And finally, I think the work that Quentin Talley is doing with On Q Productions is an exciting addition to the area theater scene.

What bothers you about the scene in Charlotte? What would you change?

I hate to keep beating the same old drum as others, but Charlotte is a major metropolitan area with no regional theatre or LORT presence. Artists are deprived of employment and audiences are deprived of the kind of work that can be done at this level.  If I could change that situation, I would. 

With regards to the LORT situation, is there anything that you can put your finger on as to why that void exists? Is there a conversation that the community - artists, audiences and advocates - can be having that will help move the situation forward? 

Nothing I can put my finger on. There has been a discussion off and on since Charlotte Rep folded and nothing has come about. I think the economy and the cost of such an undertaking have presented considerable barriers. I really don't know what, at this point, could move this forward. 

In addition to the compelling, original videos we feature from our Charlotte Viewpoint team of contributors, Director of Film Donald Devet shines the spotlight on some of the best short videos from around the world. As curator of our Video Gallery, Donald identifies and shares videos that are thought provoking, inspirational, innovative and just plain fun.

This week's featured video is We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth, by James W. Griffiths.  

From the curator: This luscious postcard to the flora and fauna of Malaysia is hypnotic. The narration adapted from excerpts of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" creates an added feeling of timelessness.

See Opera Carolina's Eugene Onegin Thursday, March 22 through Sunday, March 25. 

Writing to Tchaikovsky to congratulate him on the premiere of his opera, Eugene Onegin, the novelist Turgenev could not resist adding "but what a libretto!"—and so it has been ever since. 

This is the risk incurred when setting a work that is the wellspring of Russian literature, as Pushkin's novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin, is generally held to be. But surely Tchaikovsky can be forgiven for writing what is, after all, a great opera. His Eugene Onegin may substitute fate for insight, and yearning for wisdom, but the music has a freshness and a refined melancholy all its own; it also has a naturalness rare in opera.  Something in Tchaikovsky's passionate sincerity of approach to his characters convinces us that we know them as we know ourselves.

Eugene Onegin is also a beautifully proportioned work—a trait seldom ascribed to Tchaikovsky—which conceals great artistry under the guise of immediacy. An example would be the ingenious mirroring of the encounters between Tatyana and Onegin in acts one and  three—it is our half-conscious recognition of the music that gives the last act its sweep, though this is something we do not so much realize as feel. Add to this the pastoral choruses of the opening, the glittering ballroom dance music in acts two and three, the indelible melodies—Lensky's aria was even popularly reincarnated as a tango—the marvelous orchestration, and one of the few three-dimensional heroines in opera, and its stature as a masterpiece becomes clear.

I have sometimes thought that the debate concerning Pushkin's verse versus Tchaikovsky's opera might be short-circuited if the opera were simply re-titled "Tatyana," for the heroine is where Tchaikovsky's heart is, and it is equally apparent that he prefers the character Lensky to Eugene Onegin himself. In Pushkin, Onegin's affectation of a Byronic hauteur is wittily anatomized, but in Tchaikovsky's opera it is undergone by the heroine as she is spurned. In Tchaikovsky, Onegin is initially as little understood as any cruel beloved; he is as incomprehensible as the heartless are to the tender heart.

Opera Carolina's production of Eugene Onegin is its first foray into the field of Russian opera, and as such, it is a great success. Dina Kuznetsova's Tatyana, though by no means infallibly acted or directed, is never-the-less a great performance. Her letter scene in act one alone is worth the admission, and she surpasses this in act three, where her character grows in moral splendor before our eyes. 

Vasily Ladyuk's Onegin does not match this standard—though his voice is beautiful—presently he lacks the body language which would convey Onegin's languor and aristocratic aloofness. 

Yeghishe Manucharyan was a fine Lensky, who sang his famous act-two aria with sweetness, security, and vulnerability rather than lugubriousness. Kristopher Irmiter, likewise, illumined the role of Prince Gremin, and was roundly applauded for making something vivid and humane from this small part. 

Dawn Pierce, as Olga, Tatyana's flighty sister, was excessively arch, and John Kaneklides—though a talented singer—over-sauced his role as the effete Monsieur Triquet. Another miscalculation was in the opening duet between Madame Larina (Martha Bartz) and Filipevna (Victoria Livengood) which is a wistful reflection on the transience of things, not a dirge.

The stage direction by Brian Deedrick had one brilliant moment—the transition between act two and act three, which cleverly and poignantly synopsized Onegin's years in a moral wilderness to the strains of Tchaikovsky's extroverted polonaise. There was otherwise too much operatic acting, as opposed to acting. Dina Kuznetsova was wonderful in her role except when she was required to twirl with joy during the letter scene, which temporarily made an incongruous impression, and in defense of Dawn Pierce's Olga, it must added that she was required to act like a giddy child, not a lively young lady.

How much better a performance would this Onegin have been if the singers were not subjected to a series of movement clichés moribund since the time of silent film. Surely Tatyana and Olga can undergo the transports of love without using the gestures of Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish. 

Onegin is one of the few operas that might be done in the seemingly artless manner of Jean Renoir in A Day in the Country or The Rules of the Game, and be more effective for it.

The stage sets, by Peter Dean Beck, were effective in act one, but left no room for the dancers in the cotillion scene, and hobbled Mark Diamond's choreography quite a bit. 

James Meena's conducting of the score was taut rather than indulgent Tchaikovsky, but he left room for beauty even so. The winds have distinguished themselves in Otello, in Cosi, and now in Onegin, and the strings sometimes gave off a burnished glow unusual in a first night performance. 

As a consequence, there are five or six Russian operas that I hope they perform sooner rather than later, with Tchaikovsky's own Queen of Spades heading the list.

Many people may not realize it from listening to the radio, but Wilco has become one of the best American bands of the last two decades. Their eighth album The Whole Love was released this past fall. Recently nominated for Best Rock Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, it’s an excellent example of what makes the group so compelling. 

In today's music industry, many artists find a niche sound that defines them and then repeat that formula to sustain their career. By contrast, Wilco frequently shifts between musical styles and influences – blending a fascinating mix of country, folk, bluegrass, rock, pop, and electronica. They create songs and entire albums that sometimes sound like several different music acts working simultaneously. Common sense would dictate that this would confuse listeners and hurt the band’s popularity, but after sixteen years, when many groups’ artistic and financial prospects dwindle, Wilco continues to build a loyal audience while mapping out new musical territory.

WILCOGRAPHY

Wilco's initial line-up rose from the ashes of another great band - the seminal Uncle Tupelo, who in four albums and seven years spawned a new genre of high volume alternative country rock – which was rooted as much in a love for the Ramones, the Minutemen and the Sex Pistols as it was for Hank Williams and the Carter Family. 

Led by two singer/songwriters, guitarist Jay Farrar and bassist Jeff Tweedy, the band wrote and played powerfully defiant songs about Middle America and the working class, and seemed destined to become stars. By the time of the group's fourth album and major label debut Anodyne (1993) however, Farrar and Tweedy were barely on speaking terms and determined to pursue their own artistic visions. Farrar, who had the lower, more traditional country-sounding voice and was the act’s initially dominant creative force, left Uncle Tupelo to form Son Volt. In response, the raspier, folksier sounding Tweedy switched to guitar, took the remaining band members, and soldiered on as Wilco.

Wilco's first album A.M. was released in 1995, and Tweedy considered it something of a placeholder as the band tried to determine which musical direction they wanted to pursue. As its title suggests, the record was filled with catchy, driving melodies that would have seemed a perfect fit for the radio, but the album fell through the cracks – a victim of being too country for rock airwaves and too rock for the country format. 

The next several years though would be pivotal as Tweedy broadened Wilco's musical palette exponentially. Their second album, the two-disc set Being There (1996), is the first great Wilco record, where their signature sound began to take shape. It combines Tweedy’s more personal and idiosyncratic songwriting with more sophisticated production and an increasing variety of musical styles. After working with Billy Bragg to add music to a number of unfinished Woody Guthrie lyrics for two critically acclaimed albums that would become known as Mermaid Avenue Volumes I and II (1998, 2000), Wilco released Summerteeth (1999) – probably the most pop-oriented record they ever made. But the songs’ increasingly dark lyrics and quirky arrangements didn’t sell - even though the album got strong critical praise.

When Wilco delivered their fourth album, the haunting and experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2001, the new leadership at Reprise Records didn’t hear a single and asked for the band for changes. Wilco said the record was finished as-is, and the label dropped them from its roster – creating a flood of press and increased interest in the group’s music. 

In the end, Wilco left Reprise with their master tapes and ironically resold the album to Nonesuch Records - another Time Warner label that was lower profile, but more artist-friendly. Thanks in part to the extra publicity, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became the band’s most popular album – both critically and commercially, selling over 500,000 copies to date. 

Numerous music outlets praised it as one of the best albums of the 2000s – including Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Since then, Wilco has continued with more genre-blending statements. While it would be easy to categorize later works such as the Grammy-winning A Ghost Is Born (2004) as abstract and computer driven, the under-appreciated Sky Blue Sky (2007) as laid-back country pop, and most recently Wilco [The Album] (2009) as a return to more accessible mid-tempo rock -- in reality each record contains stellar songs that defy those simple stereotypes. 

KINGPIN

In interviews, concerts, and documentaries such as I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: a Film about Wilco (2002), Jeff Tweedy often comes off as quiet, relaxed, and self-deprecating. But anyone paying attention will see a determined and often unyielding artist who knows what he wants and more importantly what he doesn’t – from both a creative and a business sense. 

From the get-go, Tweedy has been less concerned with creating hit singles than interesting music for both the players and listeners. For him, the songs come first, and sometimes this preference leads to transforming accessibly catchy tracks into something more tantalizingly off-kilter -- often including distorted feedback and ambient noise. 

This particular vision has led to his severing ties with several more traditional minded band members – most notably his lead guitar player, keyboardist, and occasional studio engineer Jay Bennett. Bennett was Tweedy’s musical writing partner for many of the best songs from Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the Mermaid Avenue albums, and his departure was a tough loss that a lot of people questioned. In retrospect, the change makes sense, considering the path the band has followed. 

Tweedy grew up a shy kid in the Midwest. He overcame a drinking problem in early adulthood, as well as an addiction to painkillers in 2004 that resulted from debilitating migraines that have continued to plague him since youth. He is upfront about his history of clinical depression and panic attacks – one of which he turned into a disheveled but riveting extended guitar solo at the end of “At Least That’s What You Said” -- the beautifully sad opening track from A Ghost Is Born. 

Tweedy’s songs often focus on self-introspection and personal relationships, sometimes displaying a wry sense of humor that can be easily lost on the casual music fan (“I’ve been lost/I’ve been found/I’ve been taken/By the sound/Of my own voice/The voices in my head”). In his lyrics, he can sometimes be vaguely poetic, creating something like a Rorschach test for the listener. One of Tweedy’s greatest songs is the enigmatic “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," in which he sings what seem to be non-sequiturs over a hypnotic, nocturnal groove that seems disjointed but then remarkably pulls together -- creating an emotional picture of loneliness and despair that anyone listening can take their own personal meaning from. 

THE WHOLE LOVE 

Wilco’s current lineup has been together more or less since 2004, with bassist John Stirratt being the only original member besides Tweedy. But drummer Glen Kotche, keyboardist Michael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, and jazz/avant-garde rock guitarist Nels Cline are a lot more than Jeff Tweedy’s backing musicians, providing a cohesive band sound and an intuitive understanding of his compositions that are both nuanced and exciting. The Whole Love, available on the group’s new independent label dBpm Records, almost seems like a summary of the band’s career strengths up to the present.

The first track, “Art of Almost,” is an electronic piece reminiscent of Radiohead that harkens back to the densely layered soundscapes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born. In it, Tweedy sings about missed opportunities and the desire to break free of his own self-destruction, as the song’s syncopated drum beats, computer samples, and melodic fuzz builds to a thrashing climax with impressive guitar fret work by Cline. 

“I Might” is next, featuring rollicking acoustic guitars and a keyboard part that sounds lifted from a Doors record, in which the singer playfully jokes with his partner about his unpredictability. Tweedy touches on the recurring theme of long-lasting love in both the guitar feedback/sunny ‘70s pop of “Dawned on Me,” and sweet electric folk guitar-picking of the title track. 

In the darkly beautiful “Sunloathe,” the music sounds like a cross between Pavement and George Harrison circa 1970, as the singer tries to hang onto embracing life. 

Other highlights include the sublime acoustic number “Black Moon,” the catchy rave-up “Standing O,” and “Open Mind,” which seems to channel the spirit of country rock legend Gram Parsons. Balancing out the soul-searching statements of affection, Wilco’s sense of humor shows up in the vaudevillian, wish-I-was-home postcard “Capitol City” and in the folksy “Rising Red Lung” - which sounds like a stark Nick Drake song, but lyrically details the joy of the creative process. 

Only on the closer, “One Sunday Morning,” does the band step wrong, turning an initially moving lament into a repetitive twelve minute dirge. Two of the session’s bonus tracks would have served the album better – either the B-side cover of Nick Lowe’s droll “I Love My Label” or the breezy, wistful pop of “Sometimes It Happens.”

Music critic David Fricke sums Wilco’s music up best in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, saying:

“There’s pretty stuff in there. There’s hard stuff in there. There’s mystery in there. There are really sweet tunes, and there’s an abrasion in there as well. It’s all there. You really have to sit with it. You have to allow yourself the time to get something out of it. We are now in a culture that expects everything to happen immediately. People are so impatient that as a result, we are looking at things in ways like ‘How much time do I have to devote to this?’ It’s really sad. Literature, music, art, poetry – even new technological inventions are not meant to be done and done with that quickly.” 

For an often-overlooked band that’s never had a big hit, Wilco has done remarkably well – winning awards, appearing on television shows like Saturday Night Live, and selling out decently sized venues with set lists that change nightly. They are a prime example that artists can flourish in the barren landscape of today’s recording industry, and that there is still a lot of great music being made -- if fans are willing to look for it. 

WILCO (THE COMPILATION): 20 GREAT SONGS BY WILCO 

Wilco is primarily an album band that benefits from repeated listening, and the best place for anyone to start is to pick up copies of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Being There. But for those on a budget, here is a list of 20 great Wilco songs that showcase different sounds and styles throughout their career. To watch a free hour-long set from September 2011 that the band performed at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York before appearing on David Letterman, click here. 

1. Wilco (The Song) – [Wilco (The Album)]
2. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart – [Yankee Hotel Foxtrot] 
3. Casino Queen – [A.M.]
4. California Stars – [Mermaid Avenue]
5. Dawned On Me – [The Whole Love]
6. Sky Blue Sky – [Sky Blue Sky]
7. Radio Cure – [Yankee Hotel Foxtrot] 
8. Airline To Heaven – [Mermaid Avenue Vol. 2]
9. Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again) – [Summerteeth]
10. At Least That’s What You Said – [A Ghost Is Born]
11. Someday Soon – [Being There]
12. Impossible Germany – [Sky Blue Sky] 
13. Sunloathe - [The Whole Love]
14. You And I  - [Wilco (The Album)]
15. Art of Almost – [The Whole Love]
16. Jesus Etc.  -– [Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]
17. One Wing – [Wilco (The Album)]
18. Handshake Drugs – [A Ghost Is Born] 
19. I’m Always In Love  - [Summerteeth]
20. I Got You (End of the Century) [Being There] 

The Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte (ATC) is arguably the Queen City’s leading professional troupe for adult audiences. They are commissioning new works, involved with national performance organizations, and their seasons offer a good idea of what is happening right now on other stages around the country. In recent years they have been known for producing loony (and a little lewd) satirical musicals like Evil Dead, Batboy, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch alongside new work from the nation’s leading playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Steven Dietz, and Eric Coble. I talked with Executive Director Dan Shoemaker and Artistic Director Chip Decker about their organization and the state of the Charlotte theater scene.

How do you guys perceive your organization’s function in the local arts ecosystem?

Chip: I’d like to think we are perceived as a leader and supporter of the local scene. We are always open to discussion and exchange of ideas as well as any help, advice or use of space, props or set pieces. We do not see other theaters as competition. We see all the theatrical organizations as partners trying to bring Charlotte excellent professional grade work.

What ATC production in the 2011-2012 Season are you most excited for?  

Dan: That’s like asking, “which one of your children do you like the best?” I could do a riff on each of our selections and it would be valid in my opinion. Every show is unique in its own way, from The Rocky Horror Show to The Marvelous Wonderettes.  In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and a Tony Award nominee for Best Play. Next Fall also was a 2010 Tony nominee for Best Play. Cuttin’ Up was localized by playwright and York County native Charles Randolph Wright. But I am most pleased that we were able to get the performance rights to Clybourne Park, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in April 2011, as it deals with integration and gentrification from two different standpoints over a span of 40 years.

Chip: For me, it’s Clybourne Park, for two reasons: First, it is a brilliant, Pulitzer Prize winning play. On all fronts - writing, characters, story, intrigue – it is quite nearly the perfect play. Secondly, it has a central theme of gentrification. It speaks to so much of what is good and difficult about Charlotte. It is not about nor does it take place here in Charlotte, but it certainly could.

How do you see ATC participating in the larger dialogue in the field? Regionally? Nationally? 

Dan: ATC is already participating in a larger dialogue in the field through membership in the National New Play Network and Theatre Communication Group. Through these organizations we are aware of trends and new plays making an impact across the country. 

Chip: In our effort to bring new work to the Charlotte area and to also help create new shows with a hope of an extended afterlife, we are recognized by our professional peers across the country.  And now, with the Launch of our own New Voice for a New Generation play festival this summer, we only hope to raise that awareness.

Tell me more about this new play festival. 

Chip: Because I love new, original works, this grant and this program is really a dream come true. It’s an idea I’ve had for several years but could never get it funded. My goal is to have four staged readings of four new original works, performed over four days. The purpose is threefold: First, to find and produce (as staged, script-in-hand readings) four new outstanding original shows; second, to give four new directors the opportunity to work with mentors here at the theatre to eventually work into an opportunity to work on main-stage productions; and third, to give the winning show a full stage production for the following year.

And thanks to a very generous grant from The Women's Impact Fund, we are finally able to create this event. We have already begun receiving submissions from playwrights around the country.  Prospective directors will be interviewed this month. Thanks to the grant, we will be bringing all the playwrights in for the week of the festival, and all the directors, director mentors, actors, and technicians will be receiving a nice stipend for their work. Plus, the winner gets a full stage production the next year as part of the festival’s second year - a two-week run to start right after the festival. The winner will be chosen partly by the audience, a panel of judges, and the artistic staff here at the theater.

Where do you see theater in Charlotte going? Are there any developments you would like to see?

Dan: I would really like to see more interest in a new regional LORT theatre for our community that would thrill us with a mixture of the classics and contemporary work and act as an incubator for new talent much the same as Charlotte Rep. 

Chip: The arts scene in Charlotte is lacking. Not that there are not amazing artists in this city, it’s just difficult for them to flourish under a smothering corporate blanket.  Charlotte tries way too hard to be like other cities and then to create an artificial arts environment, one that can be perceived as safe and comfortable for everyone. This really only stifles great art and funky things from happening because the best art will always come from the heart of the people attempting to make it. When Charlotte starts embracing and nurturing the talent, energy, and creativity of the artists here, and stops trying to create a false creative consciousness, the arts scene will really take off.

Any local theatre artists that stand out to you?  

Chip: A small handful right now. I’m not going to name names as that is just too Sophie’s Choice. Suffice it to say there are some amazing on-stage talents in the area and also, some brilliant technical and design gods and goddesses walking around in our midst all over the city.

Anything that troubles you about the Theatre Scene? 

Dan: Yes - sponsorships, contributions, and foundation support across the country has dwindled due to the recession and these are vital components to a theater’s growth. 

Chip: There is a lot that troubles me, but I don’t think anyone is really ready to have that conversation in Charlotte.

The Ulysses Festival includes 22 events over 35 days. Click here for a schedule of Ulysses-related activities.  

The Ulysses Festival, Charlotte’s new Spring festival of the arts, may have started out a fabulous accident of sorts, but the same can’t be said for its future. 

Let’s start at the beginning. The birth of 'Ulysses the festival' mirrors the life cycle of the butterfly from which it draws its name: it started small, changed shape and form, only to emerge after gestating, rich with color, contrast and beauty. 

Some time ago, a casual conversation about upcoming programming between James Meena, director/conductor of Opera Carolina and Tanya Davis Sparks, artistic director of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra revealed both groups were scheduled to perform works by composer Peter Tchaikovsky in 2012.  

Opera Carolina was set to debut its first Russian opera — Eugene Onegin — and Meena suggested the groups cross-promote. Symphony Maestro Christopher Warren-Green joined the discussion, and what would eventually become Ulysses began to take shape. 

The initial collaboration between the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, N.C. Dance Theatre and Opera Carolina quickly spiderwebbed out of Uptown and across county and state lines. Ulysses’ organizers set out to unify and celebrate the arts community in an unprecedented fashion. 

Support through collaboration

“Ulysses is a reflection of Charlotte’s positive outlook on the future and the role art plays in the future of the community,” says Meena, the driving force behind the festival. “For the cultural community, it is an opportunity to speak to new audiences and to strengthen the ties that already exist between the many organizations that call Charlotte home.” 

A planning team — including representatives of the symphony, orchestra and dance theatre, as well as contract design and media specialists — spent the latter part of 2011 finalizing the festival, which grew to include 22 events over 35 days and includes regional cultural partners like Wingate University, the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival, the Light Factory, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and the Mint Museum.

“The difference between Ulysses and other attempted festivals is that this partnership began with the partner organizations themselves,” Meena says. “Rather than a top-down mandate to create something, Ulysses is a child born from the partner organizations having recognized the benefits to our collaborating and creating something that does not replace our current programming, but enhances it.”

Great works and working together 

The festival takes its name and inspiration from that of the beautiful Ulysses butterfly, a symbol of Spring, wonderment, rebirth and promise. The inaugural festival not only celebrates the first time so many arts groups have come together thematically, but also the local debut of great works, including N.C. Dance Theatre's Sleeping Beauty and Opera Carolina's Eugene Onegin, which is also the first Russian opera brought to stage in the group's 63-year history.

“The Ulysses Festival is a great example of organizations getting together to provide vibrant, diverse and enriching cultural experiences for residents and visitors to enjoy,” said ASC President Scott Provancher.  “Our community loves festivals and the Ulysses Festival provides programming that is not only entertaining, but educational which is a bonus. I look forward to the Ulysses Festival having great success and becoming a tradition in Charlotte.”

Last month more than 1,200 people met Ulysses for the first time at a free community day at Levine Museum of the New South on Feb. 25. Multi-generational families were drawn to the celebration of all things Russian, which included dancing, live music, crafts, shopping and cuisine. 

“We in this community recognize the power of collaboration and advocate for it,” Meena says. “And so, when a collaborative effort is created that is positive, and that enhances the cultural assets already in our community, it is no wonder the community would embrace it.”

Future in the works

That synergy was present during a January meeting at North Carolina Dance Theatre. Crowded into the boardroom were the biggest names in the Charlotte arts scene: NCDT’s Jean Pierre Bonnefoux, CSO president and executive director Jonathan Martin, Light Factory executive director Marcie Kelso, CSO musical director Christopher Warren-Green, Wingate University’s Laura Kratt and James Meena among others. 

The room crackled with creative energy as the group, including festival sponsors, brainstormed ideas and thematic ideas for 2013 and beyond. The collaborative spirit was alive and well as ideas were bandied about without fear of reprisal or judgment.  

“Time will tell,” Meena says, “but we hope Ulysses is a conduit through which attendance is enhanced, and through which programming can be created that is unique and exciting for audiences, the organizations and the community at large.”

In addition to the compelling, original videos we feature from our Charlotte Viewpoint team of contributors, Director of Film Donald Devet shines the spotlight on some of the best short videos from around the world. As curator of our Video Gallery, Donald identifies and shares videos that are thought provoking, inspirational, innovative and just plain fun.

This week's featured video is The Making of "Hero," by Miguel Endara. 

From the curator: This "making of" video is all about the fine art of stippling. The drawing you'll see being created took 210 hours of stippling, approximately 3.2 million dots. How did Miguel count the dots? He can produce 4.25 dots per second. Multiply that by the 210 hours and it rounds off to an even 3.2 million.

Editor's note: You can see Geist's smaller, gallery-sized sculpture and Leighton’s works on paper and fiber construction at the New Gallery of Modern Art. The small, well-lit art gallery is located in the Radcliffe Building on the Green, across South Tryon Street from The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. But you have to hurry. The exhibition closes on March 15th.

Patricia Leighton and Del Geist  work with very larges canvases: outdoors in the lush English landscapes of Devon; the drier, harsher terrain of the American West; and swathes of Canada’s greenest landscape near Banff. Now they have come to Charlotte to create the city’s largest ever artwork, a massive sculpted landform with totemic markers at the proposed UNC Charlotte light rail station.

“Stone • earth • paper,” the enticing first show in Charlotte by this well-traveled pair, is now on view at The New Gallery of Modern Art in uptown Charlotte through March 15th.

The show offers a glimpse of some past and present works of art by partners Leighton and Geist, with a selection of projects rendered on paper by Patricia Leighton, plus her striking fiber and wood sculpture that leans against the entry wall to the gallery like a poignantly discarded Plains Indian travois. Bold sculptures of black slate, poised and stacked in steel frames by Del Geist, command the floor space, while smaller stones loom from the walls.

But it is a future project, to be installed much farther northeast from this fresh, easy-to-visit art gallery in uptown Charlotte, that is the artists’ major focus.

Land art at the rail station

About a year ago, Leighton and Geist, who have worked together for more than 20 years, won a Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) commission for the Lynx Blue Line Rail Extension to the UNC Charlotte campus light rail station. The genesis for the idea came from David Walters, a Professor of Urban Design at UNC Charlotte. When Walters, a former CATS Art-in-Transit advisory board chair for more than five years, studied the site in question, he realized that the visual drama of the train line, exiting a tunnel under Hwy 29 and crossing a bridge over Toby Creek on the campus, was a prime site for a land art earthwork, defining the station as a place of arrival and departure for the university.

Several people were involved in making this happen, chief amongst them Pallas Lombardi, CATS Art-in-Transit Program Manager, who knew that a project of this ambition would require collaboration on a large scale. As part of the contract process, Ms. Lombardi arranged for the artists to work with other design and engineering professionals.

Leighton and Geist have been working out details of their concept with CATS engineers and local landscape architects, Land Design, together with botanists and horticulturists to research native grasses and other indigenous vegetation, and a geologist from the university to assist in the search for native regional stones. To further enrich the arrangements, both artists are active in the community as resident artists at the McColl Center for Visual Art, and teach UNC Charlotte art and architecture students in their studio classrooms.

A confluence of energies

Events that seem serendipitous – having a show in Charlotte at the same time they are designing a major earthwork for Charlotte; and achieving successful collaborations in working with CATS and teaching students - is what Del Geist describes as a “confluence of energies.”

The fruits of this complex confluence will indeed bring something entirely new to our city. When the earthwork and totems are realized in about five years’ time, the impact will be huge for people in Charlotte – tourists and natives alike – as they ride the Blue Line northeast to go to class, to watch the university’s championship soccer team, or to fill the seats of the new football stadium. People who can’t wait five years for the project’s completion can at least whet their appetites by studying online one of Leighton’s trademark works developed in collaboration with Geist  – the “Sawtooth Ramps," a massive modeling of earth alongside a freeway in Scotland.

Geist’s signature pieces involve carefully selected stones, often massive, usually in combination, raised from the earth and repositioned in carefully site-specific ways. He often designs with repeating elements in formation, and his rows of stone shapes upon steel legs make a strong statement when implemented among the gentler undulations of Leighton’s green pastures and other particulars of nature she chooses to reshape.

Geist’s sculpture is forceful and “masculine,” often jagged and “dangerous-looking” in form and strength, even intimidating in a gallery setting. His constructions -- made of great shards of slate and chunky boulders and galvanized steel -- cry out for large, open, outdoor landscape settings. In the gallery setting, patrons need to exercise caution!

While Leighton tends to work in concert with a setting, Geist often creates work that counterpoises the actual landscape by using massive rocks and poles to make his abstracted statements. The works of both artists are reduced in scale, and “domesticated” in the gallery from their raw, natural settings, but when you realize the breadth of the show’s content, you’ll see that it offers a much larger view. Indeed, the intimate setting of the gallery re-presents the artists’ work almost like a map, a chart for patrons to read their way into the larger, literal and metaphorical landscape.

Within the complex design process central to much of their work, the artists retain traditional handcraft working methods. They don’t use computer-aided design programs themselves: when their studio models and drawings for a project are complete, they hand them over to engineers who create digital mock-ups and construction drawings. “Engineers,” Geist says, “are the glue of the Earth.” More than 100 people may be involved in the completion of this project from inception through detailed design and construction.

Leighton, originally of Scotland, and Geist, whose background is decidedly American, met in California in 1983, and have established a successful working method. They are a known entity of talent – committed visionaries who work well with others.

“We like deadlines,” says Leighton, describing their hectic Charlotte schedule. “We find ourselves using both right and left sides of the brains, back-and-forth.”

Light and shadow

The products of the artists’ visions are captured and conceptualized in the many drawings and prints taped on the walls of the second-floor studio they occupy at the McColl Center for Visual Art. The space emits a pleasant buzz of activity, with the tabletops filled with maquettes and mock-ups, sculptural masses with tiny human figures. The working scale model of their UNC Charlotte site-specific installation stands to one side, showing how the planned earthwork slopes steeply in places, sculpted to capture light.

“Light is very important and significant,” explained Leighton, “and in this case the sun will graze the north face of the slope at certain hours. There will be lots of light and shadows for visual effect.”

Place making

While much public art in Charlotte is added onto a site later to “fix” or otherwise humanize the existing space – such as setting a sculptural piece in front of a building, or in a blank plaza (think of the various sculptures around the junction of Trade and Tryon Streets) - the integrated, multi-disciplinary process so well developed by Leighton, Geist, and their technical team illustrates a more deeply rooted form of “place making.”

This kind of public art is incorporated into the urban design of the site from the conceptual stage – literally from the ground up – and this particular CATS project promises to be an exemplar of its type. Here, with our somewhat checkered past concerning public art, it’s still relatively rare for artists to work with engineers and designers from the very beginning of a public art collaboration. Lombardi, the CATS Art-in-Transit program manager, explained that the selection of Patricia Leighton and Del Geist had a lot to do with the fact that “they are experienced public artists who take a comprehensive approach to integrating art into place that stands the aesthetic and physical tests of time.”

There could be no better setting for an artwork that will last for decades - even hundreds of years - than a university, an institution that’s a creator and keeper of knowledge and culture. When we ride the train into the university station, walk across campus lost in thought, or jog along the much-used Toby Creek Greenway, we will all be enriched by the work of these two artists who contrive visual poetry from bringing together earth, stone and sky.

See Jersey Boys at Belk Theater through March 11. Click here for more information.  

Long before Snooki or "The Situation,” a different breed of youthful cool swept over the sands of Monmouth, Seaside Heights, Ortley, and the dozen or so other beachside hangouts peppering New Jersey’s storied shore. They may have been city boys from Newark, but Franki Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi (aka Franki Valli & the Four Seasons) spent plenty of time ocean-side during the mid 1950s perfecting their craft of making girls swoon, guys jealous, and simply oozing the coolness that was to be their generation’s coin-of-the-realm.

Far from an overnight success, the band had several incarnations and failures before finally connecting the right dots and tapping into the national zeitgeist that turned their falsettos and pitch perfect harmonies into the teen anthems of the day. Number one hits such as “Sherry,” “Rag Doll,” and “Walk Like a Man” filled jukeboxes in the early ‘60s and were the must-have 45s of the era. 

With 71 chart hits during the ‘60s (including 40 in the Top 40, 19 in the Top 10, and 8 No. 1’s), it would be difficult to underestimate the impact that Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons made on the generation of baby boomers that grew up alongside them. 

These are the very same baby boomers riding the nostalgia train today and scooping up tickets to Jersey Boys, Broadway’s backstory of Valli and the hardscrabble toughs with the golden voices who made good in a very big way. Since opening in 2006, the show has been a consistent cash machine for theatrical producers.

When the Boys last performed in the QC in the spring of 2010, they eclipsed the previously held weekly box office gross, taking in a cool $1.16 million in their opening week. Is it any wonder that this long running Broadway staple is back for an encore? 

If youth is wasted on the young, then nostalgia is the prerogative of the aged. Jersey Boys tees up precisely what audiences stand in line for and swoon to when they deliver: A pure, schmaltzy, thick musical soundtrack to their halcyon days. Of course there is a story to be enjoyed but the real draw is the music. Theatergoers will not be disappointed as the show gives it up in one hit after another under the thin veil of the four main character’s narration that provide the voiceover to the way it was.

If there were a “Fifth Season,” it would have to have been the legendary Bob Crewe, producer, arranger, and singing talent in his own right who latched onto our heroes at the time they started to take off. This was no coincidence, as Crewe, who is notably less flighty than portrayed in the show, was a driving force and primary lyricist behind the group’s earliest hits, helping develop the sound and recording style they became known for.

Portraying Crewe in this touring production is Charlotte’s own Jonathan Hadley. Hadley’s name may be familiar to local theater buffs, especially those who attended Queens University where both his father, Charles Hadley and his step-mother, Jane Hadley, held prominent roles in the English and Theater departments for decades.

Jonathan was last seen on Broadway channeling Marvin Hamlisch and Michael Bennett in A Class Act. He has toured with Into the Woods, Fiddler on the Roof, and Forbidden. His Off-Broadway credits include Finian's Rainbow, Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi, Kuni-Leml. Hadley has also been seen on television in Another World and Sex and the City. He received his BFA from North Carolina School for the Arts and an MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College.

I spoke with him about his return to Charlotte, the Boys, and their endearing legacy.

You are from Charlotte – what is it like to return home while working?

I grew up in Charlotte, went to AG Middle School and Myers Park High School. It is wonderful to see so many familiar faces in the crowd at the theater and I’m scrambling now to get tickets for all my family and friends. It’s also nice to be able to sleep in a familiar home and be close to my family for three weeks – that is a luxury that touring performers don’t often enjoy.

You started on Broadway in the role of Bob Crewe and then brought it out on the road. Is that unusual to join a touring production from the main stage?

Not at all. It’s great when you can play in New York and be at home, but I feel fortunate to have been offered to take the role on the road. I auditioned and Franki Valli and Bob Gaudio actually were in the theater – it was terrifying. I must have done all right as here I am playing the role now going on four and one half years. I’ve also just signed on to another year on tour.

How do you define Bob Crewe – what is his relationship like with the rest of the guys?

I definitely refer to him as the “Fifth Season.” He knew Frankie Valli from church and these guys all hung out together. It was natural that they would write and play music together.

What are people the most surprised about regarding the show?

One thing I hear quite often is that people are surprised at how many (most of the time all) of the songs they know and that each of these songs was in fact a Four Seasons song. There are nearly 30 songs in the performance. As endearing as the music is, however, what brings people back is the story. The book is really solid with full character development, real tension that illustrates the money issues, the ego issues, the jealousy, and the conflicts that were in play with these guys.

What should people pay attention to and look for that is out of the ordinary?

We have over 300 different costumes in play in this production and even though there is one main set, there are many set pieces that fly in and fly out. The scene behind the stage is organized chaos. People may not realize that there are only three women in this production given all the costume changes, one girl has literally a twelve second change – it is mind boggling.

What is your favorite part of touring with the show?

I love to see how differently it plays in different parts of the country. Audience reactions – particularly to some of the language - varies considerably. We actually modified the script in Dallas and Memphis based on some concerns expressed, but up north in Pittsburgh or Boston, it’s like “Bring it on!”

Bring it on, indeed.

Editor's Note: Author Mark West and Pat Siegfried, the co-owner of Black Forest Books and Toys, host a Seuss-a-Thon to celebrate Dr. Seuss on March 3 from 11:00 to 3:00 at Black Forest Books and Toys, located at 1942 East Seventh Street.

As a long-time children’s literature professor at UNC Charlotte, I spend a lot of time reading children’s books and studying the history of children’s literature. As I see it, Dr. Seuss ranks as America’s most influential children’s author.

My students often tell me that the first book that they read on their own was a Dr. Seuss book. The first books I read on my own, however, were the deadly dull Dick and Jane books, but I remember checking out Dr. Seuss books from my elementary school library and bringing them home to read. I liked them much more than the Dick and Jane books we read in my first grade class. I later learned that Dr. Seuss originally wrote The Cat in the Hat in an effort to provide children with an entertaining alternative to the bland Dick and Jane books.

As Dr. Seuss understood, there is a difference between being able to read and wanting to read. When I was six, I was able to read the Dick and Jane books, but I didn’t want to waste my time. On the other hand, since I enjoyed reading about the Cat in the Hat, I read it and other Dr. Seuss books without being compelled to do so by teachers or parents. Dr. Seuss knew that that true literacy involves not just knowing how to read but actually wanting to read.

Given Dr. Seuss’s association with the development of literacy, it is fitting that his birthday is now celebrated as a sort of national literacy day. Dr. Seuss (whose real name was Theodore Seuss Geisel) was born on March 2, 1904. Seven years after his death in 1991, the National Education Association decided to mark the occasion of his birthday by holding an annual literacy event called Read Across America.

Read Across America

Intended as a celebration of reading, this event has taken root in elementary schools across America, including schools in Charlotte. Various education organizations, such as Charlotte’s Communities in Schools, work together with local school systems to hold literacy-related activities on March 2nd. These activities involve bringing children’s authors to schools and having parents and other special visitors read aloud to students.

For Charlotte-area educators who are concerned about literacy issues, the Read Across America campaign provides an opportunity to do something positive in the face of a vexing and persistent problem.  

Educators in Charlotte as well as the rest of North Carolina are well aware that too many of our students are struggling readers. According to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, about 32% of 4th graders in North Carolina are rated as “below basic” in terms of their reading scores.

Literacy - not just an 'in-school' issue

Bruce Taylor,  Associate Professor of Reading and Elementary Education at UNC Charlotte, argues that the causes of this problem are complex and that the challenge of improving children’s reading abilities is one that cannot be solved by the public schools alone.  For this reason he has helped organize the Charlotte Mecklenburg Literacy Roundtable, which brings together educators from CMS, Community in Schools, Freedom School Partners, UNC Charlotte’s teacher education programs, and other groups.   

As Taylor points out, “This is a complex issue which is tied to broader social problems, such as poverty.  It’s tempting to spend all of our time engaged in handwringing over the magnitude of these problems.  While I know that the Read Across America campaign won’t solve all of these problems, it’s a positive and celebratory step that reminds us all of why we are concerned about children’s literacy.   Introducing to a child the pleasure that comes from reading a Dr. Seuss book is a step in the right direction.”

This year Dr. Seuss’s birthday is also the day that the animated film The Lorax opens in movie theaters across the nation. Based on a Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book by the same title, this film features the voices of Zac Efron, Taylor Swift, and Danny DeVito. I am hoping that this film does the book justice. Frankly, I have not been that impressed with the recent feature-length films based on Dr. Seuss books. However, I think it is significant that a book that Dr. Seuss wrote 41 years ago is being made into a movie now. The Lorax deals in part with the deforestation of our planet, which is even more of a concern today than it was in 1971.

Seuss' work in cultural / art history

March 2 also is the day that the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is opening its special exhibit titled “Mid-Century Modernism: 1957 and the Bechtler Collection.” Now this might not seem like it has anything to do with Dr. Seuss, but in fact 1957 is the year that The Cat in the Hat was originally published.

I recently had lunch with John Boyer, the President and CEO of the Bechtler Museum, and we spent much of our lunch talking about how The Cat in the Hat relates to the changes that were happening across America and Europe during the late 1950s. As Boyer pointed out to me, 1957 was an important year in the history of modern art. It marked a time when artists were experimenting in an almost playful way.

According to Boyer, “it was in 1957 that Barbara Hepworth starts to work in bronze, and Soulages begins to use Japanese brushes in his paintings.” In this context, the innovative nature of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat is in keeping with the experimental work that artists were engaged in at that time.

Seuss-a-thon March 3

I have been an admirer of Dr. Seuss for many years, but this year I felt I needed to do something special to mark Dr. Seuss’s birthday. I contacted my friend Pat Siegfried, the co-owner of Black Forest Books and Toys, and we hastily organized an event that we are calling a Seuss-a-Thon. We are holding this event on March 3 from 11:00 to 3:00 at Black Forest Books and Toys, which is located at 1942 East Seventh Street. The event will feature continuous reading of Dr. Seuss books for four straight hours. By bringing together admirers of Dr. Seuss, both young and old, we hope to create a shared and amusing literary experience.

In the words of the Cat in the Hat, “We can have lots of good fun that is funny.” Everyone is invited to come and help us celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday and his lasting contributions to the world of children’s literature.

Another year brings another crop of up-and-coming bands promising great things for a Charlotte music scene that is as restless as it is ambitious. From the next wave of adventurous punk bands to house-party garage rock favorites; from achingly beautiful folk-explorations to crisp, bright pop and every place between, Queen City music lovers have plenty to get excited about in 2012.

Here are 10 Charlotte-area bands worth keeping an eye on this year.

DENIRO FARRAR

Charlotte rapper Deniro Farrar has let loose a flood of new singles over the past few months, collaborating with the likes of Little Brother’s Rapper Big Pooh and up-and-coming producer Clams Casino. It all works for Farrar who, drawling his syllables like taffy, can illustrate an everyday struggle (as he does on “NWO”) or indulge in a lyrical bacchanal (as he does on “Fuckin’ Ridiculous”) with equal finesse. As RCRDLBL’s Hillary Kaylor wrote of Farrar’s work on those songs, “Dude's got dichotomy.” Like T.I. or David Banner, Farrar’s syrupy drawl is a malleable tool well-suited for both carefree braggadocio and more thoughtful examinations.

JOINT DAMAGE

Joint Damage’s punk rock might be anxious and jittery, but it’s also remarkably catchy. That’s hardly surprising though, given its members backgrounds. Drummer Michael Houseman plays in the engaging free-improv combo Great Architect, bassist Thomas Berkau leads the pop gang Yardwork, and singer/guitarist Nick Goode is at the front of Brain F≠’s bouncy garage-punk. This trio’s first output, 2010’s Nunca Mas cassette, was an in-the-red burst of snotty punk bliss. The band’s forthcoming LP for Sorry State Records, Strike Gently, promises more of the same, but more focused, more ambitious and more ferocious. In other words, better.

 JUNIOR ASTRONOMERS

In 2010, Junior Astronomers released their second recording for free, via Bandcamp, titling it I Just Want To Make A Statement. And that’s exactly what it did. With the EP circulating the Internet and the band maintaining an ambitious touring schedule, it was clear that the quintet had every intention of bringing its wiry indie rock, informed by punk urgency and post-rock dynamics, to the masses. Favorite Gentlemen Records, the Atlanta label that had already launched the careers of Manchester Orchestra and O’Brother, took note and signed the band last year. Expect them to hit the studio in the late Spring to cut a new album, after a jaunt to the annual South by Southwest music pilgrimage in Austin, Texas.

MATRIMONY

2010’s The Storm & The Eye was a noteworthy debut for Matrimony. Most bands take years to develop a sound so carefully crafted and so professional in its presentation. There were no raw edges, no rookie mistakes. With the swooning smoothness of The Swell Season, the down-home rollick of The Avett Brothers or Mumford & Sons, and plenty of skybound pop swells, Matrimony’s music is meant for large audiences. And with their recent signing to Columbia Records and a new album expected this summer, the band built around married couple Jimmy Brown and Ashlee Hardee Brown will have the opportunity to find those large audiences.

NÖ PÖWER

With a murky, echo-haunted take on raw hardcore, Nö Pöwer’s 2011 demo tape was a singular entity. Spacious isn’t usually term used to describe punk songs, but the seven collected on the cassette leave dark, noisy recesses between bright blasts. Like New York noisemakers The Men, Nö Pöwer’s psychedelic dischargeis an exciting confrontation to the norm. The quartet — which comprises ex-Grids frontman Rob Davis, drummer Hunter Campbell, guitarist West Hasty, and bassist David Michaud — will release its No Axis 7-inch this Spring via Inkblot Records and Charlotte’s Self-Aware Records.

ONE ANOTHER

One Another made its debut in 2009, but geography prevented the trio from capitalizing on its potential. During a period in which guitarist Chris Thomas pinballed between Charlotte, New York, and Chicago, the trio gelled long enough to cut and self-release last year’s Keep Moving EP. A slab of retro-and-proud early ‘90s punk and indie touchstones, Keep Moving fits neatly into the loud-indie revival that’s propelled the reunions of bands like Dinosaur Jr and Superchunk, and the formation of ones like Yuck. And with One Another’s three members all living in the same city again, the band seems poised to make waves this year.

PAINT FUMES

Paint Fumes came out of the ether to become a tentpole of the local house party circuit, and left in their wake a mess of hoots, hollers, and perfectly scuzzy garage rock. The trio’s fuzz-fueled and wild-eyed garage rock suggests genre icons like The Oblivians, while keeping pace with the frantic pop of Ty Segall and the real-gone psychedelics of Apache Dropout. And this year Paint Fumes’ intoxicating blasts will find their way to vinyl. The band plans a three-song 7-inch before unleashing their debut LP, Uck Life, via the excellent Slovenly Recordings this summer.

SERFS

Last July’s Spaces single was a brief but powerful introduction to Serfs: two songs of fuzz-burned lo-fi pop with all the casual melody of Best Coast and the hazy, hooky melancholy of Crystal Stilts. Ripples of punchy pop-punk and bleary classic pop filter through Serfs’ songs like sunlight through dusty windows. In February, the quartet of singer/guitarist Phil Pucci, guitarist David Scanlon, bassist Patrick Doherty, and drummer Woody Hassell is set to record a follow-up single, Social Cycle, for a March release.

SUNSHONE STILL

Okay, so technically, Sunshone Still is from Columbia, S.C., where bandleader Chris Smith resides. But the band’s third LP, ThewaytheworldDies, is one of the last recorded works to feature the late Charlotte musician Rodney Lanier (Sea of Cortez, Jolene) and the gorgeous accoutrement he added with guitar, accordion, and steel guitar. Lanier’s is a vital contribution to this collection of songs penned after Smith’s brother’s suicide. Touchstones like Calexico’s cinematic twang, Sparklehorse’s rich textures, Howe Gelb’s off-kilter waltzes, Sebadoh’s lo-fi grit, and Mark Kozelek’s whispery laments traipse through the album, but Smith is the master of his influences, weaving together a touching memorial.

VEDA WOOLF

The sparse, haunting music collected on Veda Woolf’s December EP Lonely Widow is as chilly and distant as it is thrilling. Swirling in dark shadows and open space, spidery guitar lines and breathy incantations coalesce into ghostly folk songs somewhere between the art-rock leanings of Chelsea Wolfe, Tara Jane O’Neil’s skeletal arrangements, and Kate Bush’s warped and etheral pop. Recorded by Young And In The Way guitarist Rick Contes, Lonely Widow captures a dry chill that complements YAITW’s bitter metal, but Woolf’s vocals cut through the cold, making the EP one of Charlotte’s most memorable and promising debuts in recent memory.

Contrary to what you've heard, or maybe even experienced, 2011 was a halfway decent year for new cinema. I know, looking at those Oscar nominations, you see tired Vaudeville schtick trying to pass for high culture in Midnight in Paris, palatable lies about racism in America in The Help (but yay, Viola Davis), and cornball sentimental bombast pitched at an eardrum-shattering, audience-insulting level in Steven Spielberg's genuinely painful-to-sit-through War Horse. When people tell me (and many have) that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is easily the worst Best Picture nominee this year, well, it really makes me want to skip it. And yet, a lot of good films came out this year, just like they always do, if you knew where to look. Some of them even got Oscar nominations.

Looking over my personal list of the year's best films, I was surprised to see that three of them were directed by a woman, and five of them had a woman in the lead role. So even though we'll probably have to wait another twenty years before another woman director wins an Oscar, 2011 was The Year of the Woman to my mind.

I managed to pare my selections down to ten films this year, for the sake of tradition. I left off some films that I admire a lot, so I'll mention a few of them to warm up.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

An assured debut from writer-director Sean Durkin, featuring a star-making lead performance from Elizabeth Olsen, and a great, sinister turn from John Hawkes. One of Durkin's creative partners, Antonio Campos, who produced MMMM, wrote and directed the equally accomplished and even more disturbing Afterschool in 2008.

Tree of Life

I was enthralled by a lot of this film. Terrence Malick perfectly captures the innocence and confusion of pubescent and adolescent small-town life. It's gorgeously elegiac, and it all feels so genuine and lived and real. And Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and those kids are terrific. I loved the film, in fact, except the parts with Sean Penn, the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and about 75% of the whispered voiceover.

Take Shelter

I was lukewarm on writer-director Jeff Nichols' debut feature, Shotgun Stories, but this one, also starring the great Michael Shannon, is a step forward. The film nails the way one's personal economic anxieties can so easily become the end of the world. In fact, I've changed my mind. This is moving into my top ten. The list now goes to eleven. I don't have the heart to remove Moneyball, which is maybe my favorite baseball movie ever, and probably also number ten on my list.

TOP 10 FILMS OF 2011

I can't put the following selections in order. I love all of these films, not equally, exactly, but they affected me in different ways, and it's hard to compare the persistent anxious feelings evoked by the intense We Need to Talk About Kevin with the jubilation I felt watching something like Hugo. These films all do what they are supposed to do. Maybe you haven't heard of them all, but hopefully that just makes lists like these all the more exciting.

Certified Copy

I wasn't sure that Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami would ever make a film that thrilled me like this again. In recent years, he's become more of a formalist, with films that felt more like exercises or essays than fully developed features. Certified Copy maintains some familiar formal elements, along with the playful but artistically and thematically purposeful reflexivity that makes his earlier films like Through the Olive Trees so enthralling. Juliette Binoche and William Shimmell star as a two strangers (maybe) who take a road trip together, pretend to be a couple (or are they really a couple?), and deal with the breakdown of their relationship. Through this beguiling tale, Kiarostami wittily examines the nature of artifice, fiction, creativity.

The Future

Go ahead and call her "twee," "gratuitously quirky," or "annoying." Those things might even be true, to an extent, but Miranda July's second feature is also very funny, smart, and insightful about the nature of contemporary relationships, particular among a specific milieu. An artsy L.A. couple's decision to adopt an injured cat (Paw-Paw, voiced by July, much to the dismay of many critics) causes them to think about their future, and take drastic action. This movie is a delicate arthouse flower, but July's poesy is precise and direct and emotionally potent for me in a way that Malick's wasn't. Paw-Paw's story, in all its implications, moved me as much as anything I saw this past year, and you might have a similar reaction if you just let the weirdness wash over you and stop being such a cynical bastard for a minute.

Hugo

"Martin Scorsese is making a 3D children's film" is not a sentence I ever wanted to hear or read. For one thing, I hate 3D. To date, it has been nothing but a waste of money and a source of eyestrain, and of course, one doesn't have to be a cynical bastard to recognize that most movies are only in 3D to earn a little extra money per ticket off the backs of struggling parents. And Hugo, as much as I love it, did nothing to change my mind about the format. But at least Scorsese is using it in a subversive way, to get people—children, even—to appreciate the history of cinema. A boy living within the walls of the Paris Montparnasse train station discovers that a bitter old vendor is actually the great, forgotten silent film master, George Méliès. The first half of the film is pretty engaging, but it's all the setup for something genuinely transcendent, made all the more moving by how personal we know this material is to Scorsese.

Meek's Cutoff

It's not as though I'd given up on Kelly Reichardt, but after loving her darkly comic debut, River of Grass, and being enthralled by her politically-charged male-bonding road movie Old Joy, the acclaimed but overly pedantic Wendy and Lucy was a disappointment, a great performance by Michelle Williams aside. Reichardt expanded her range and returned to sharp, subtle filmmaking with her stark, minimalist Western, Meek's Cutoff, which also stars Williams as a strong-willed woman among a group of pioneers on a disastrous trek through the Oregon desert. Their untrustworthy guide, Stephen Meek (an hilariously gruff and gritty Bruce Greenwood) has apparently led them astray, and when they come across a Cayuse (Rod Rondeaux) who may be willing to help them find water, their loyalties are divided. Naturally, any 2011 movie about Americans getting lost in the desert is going to have contemporary political resonance, but Reichardt crafts a suspenseful, thoughtful tale, and never beats us over the head with her allegory.

Moneyball

I loved Michael Lewis's book and was disappointed when I heard Steven Soderbergh's film of it  had fallen through. He wanted to do something more documentary in nature, with Scott Hatteberg and David Justice playing themselves, and the studio apparently was not willing to spend the money to make a Brad Pitt movie that was half a documentary. Bennett Miller took over the project, with Steven Zaillian's script reworked by Aaron Sorkin. I thought Miller's Capote was okay, but was unprepared for how rollickingly entertaining Moneyball turned out to be. And yes, Brad Pitt delivers one of the better performances of his career as Billy Beane, whose own experience as an overhyped prospect informed his reassessment of the way Major League Baseball evaluates its players. While the film didn't capture the wide-ranging story of Lewis's great book, it essentially got its baseball right, a rare feat in cinema.

Project Nim

Documentaries are about everything everywhere, from the world's oldest known cave paintings (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), to international sex scandals (Tabloid), to recording gay neighbors arguing (Shut Up, Little Man!), but this was the one that moved me. I was not the biggest fan of director James Marsh's last doc, Man on a Wire, but that was partly because I found his subject, Philippe Petit, so insufferable. This film's subject is Nim Chimpsky, a charming chimp caught up in a lifelong whirlwind of selfish humans, bad science, abuse, and neglect. In the 1970s, they tried to teach Nim sign language, and raise him as though he was a human child. If you don't know the story, it's probably better that you go in cold. There’s a lot of heartbreak here, and only one human, really, who goes out of his way to do right by the poor chimp. It's a film that says a lot more about humanity than it does about apes.

Rid of Me

Even if you're a cinephile like me, it's pretty likely that you missed this one. I think six people paid to see it in the theater. I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival and immediately fell in love. A press screening nearly a year later confirmed my initial impression. This is a superlative low-budget independent film. It's funny and has a unique editing style which will stop annoying you if you just stick with it, I swear. Meris (Katie O'Grady) is forced to move to her husband Mitch's (John Keyser) small town when his tech company goes bankrupt. Mitch immediately gets back in with the social circle he grew up with, and Meris tries desperately to fit in with the old gang, but she's an outsider, and they want him with his old high school girlfriend. Alone and bereft, Meris takes a job in a candy store, where she meets Trudy (Orianna Herrman) and gradually becomes part of a punkish, hipster scene. Portlandia fans will appreciate the way writer-director James Westby skewers both the hipsters and the squares. All should be able to enjoy the heartfelt ode to self-discovery and female friendship lurking beneath the uncomfortable humor.

A Separation

Back in 2009, I wrote about Asghar Farhadi's wonderful About Elly, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival. I actually started watching A Separation without realizing that it was made by the same filmmaker, but it wasn't long before I recognized Farhadi's style in this intricate, absorbing family drama. As with the earlier film, characters deceive each other, and themselves, and what at first appear to be harmless actions turn out to have disastrous consequences. A middle-class Tehran couple, Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) split up. After years of trying, they've gotten a visa to leave the country. She wants more opportunities for their adolescent daughter. He can't leave his elderly father, who suffers from dementia. In Farhadi's world, every action, every word spoken in a heated moment, can have unforeseen consequences. He has a uniquely meticulous eye for visual and aural detail. He creates tension using dialogue, and cannily deciding what his characters and his audience learn and when. Like About Elly, A Separation is fascinating to watch, with vivid, believable performances throughout. Whatever you think of the Oscars, I'd love to see Farhadi win one for his screenplay.

Terri

Terri (Jacob Wyscoki) is an obese teen who has become so acclimated to his place on the social food chain that he goes to school in his pajamas. Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), the vice principal, takes an interest in Terri, and makes an effort to engage him. Terri makes a couple of friends who are as at odds with the accepted social norms as he is. There have been so many movies about teen outcasts finding their way in the world that it's absolutely stunning to find one this fresh, this funny, and with this kind of painstaking emotional honesty. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has made an accessible (if frequently uncomfortable) and genuinely beautiful (if frequently ugly) film about growing up strange, and the daily struggle to figure out who we are. In its wit, its sincerity, and its honesty, it would make a great double feature with Rid of Me.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

And then, the darkness. Aside from the torment I endured at the hands of "master craftsman" Steven Spielberg during War Horse, this may have been my most unpleasant movie-watching experience of 2011. Like Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay is a tremendously talented visual stylist, and someone I am generally rooting for going into the film. Even if you can't stomach Kevin, you should definitely check out her earlier films, Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. Ramsay was originally supposed to write and direct an adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, having acquired the rights before the novel was even completed. When the book became a bestseller, and Peter Jackson started sniffing around the project, Ramsay was forced to bow out. After that traumatic experience, it was years before Ramsay made another film. And what a gloriously dark, twisted, and heartbreaking tale it is. Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a globe-trotting adventuress somehow bogged down in American suburbia raising the family she never meant to have with her obliviously upbeat husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly).  Her first child, Kevin (chillingly played by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller as toddler, child, and teen, respectively) seems to sense her resentment to the turn her life has taken, and resists every effort she makes to bond with him. We rarely see parenthood, as a concept, portrayed in anything other than an idyllic light, so it's refreshing—even subversive—to see this horrifying depiction of the hell that it can be. Ramsay's use of color and sound and the impressionistic way she jumbles the chronology combine with Swinton's bold, heartbreaking performance to create a uniquely unsettling filmgoing experience. While there were many movies this year about the end of the world, this, to me, was the scariest movie of 2011.

8th season showcases powerful dramas, perseverance

Charlotte Jewish Film Festival Feb. 25 – March 11

Film festivals are grand experiments for curators and audiences alike. Organizers look for connections among films that relate to each other and an overarching theme that, however tenuously, ties the films together. Filmgoers look to festivals as an opportunity to dive deeper into a particular genre, take advantage of particular films as catalysts for discussion, and experience supplemental film programming while exploring back stories from those with specialized expertise. For both, the festival is an opportunity to realize the promise of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

Charlotte’s Jewish Film Festival, now launching its eighth season, delivers on this count, coming into its own in as a fixture in Charlotte’s spring calendar. The CJFF is maturing as a regional film event that offers attendees the opportunity to tie into significant cultural offerings, participate in interfaith discussions, gain insight into filmmaking from experts, and explore iconic popular culture.

Festival chair Jeff Turk said the selection committee works hard each year to select not only films that illuminate the Jewish expertise, but also those that reach broadly across religious lines and speak to the human experience.

“We know from our surveys that festival attendance from non-Jews and secular audience has grown annually,” said Turk. “I believe this is because of the universal appeal in the story lines of the films we present and the overall quality of the films we screen.”

Whereas last year’s festival was documentary-heavy, this year’s festival is the year of the drama. Seven of the 10 films presented are dramas. The other three are documentaries and for the first time in several years, the festival will not feature a full-length comedy as part of its offerings.

A special guest writer

Those with a proclivity for humor will not be shortchanged as one of the brightest programming spots over the two-week series is an in-depth conversation with Mike Reiss, the longtime writer/producer of the Emmy winning Fox animated television series The Simpsons.

Reiss will host “Jews in Toons: An animated evening of entertainment” at the Levine JCC in Shalom Park on the closing evening of the festival - Sunday, March 11, at 7 p.m. He will share rare clips and inside stories from one of TV’s longest running animated series.

No stranger to film festivals, Reiss appeared at last year’s Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco where he brought down the sold-out house. As the former editor for both the Harvard Lampoon and National Lampoon, Reiss’ talk wields his own brand of sarcastic and occasionally adults-only humor in enlightening audiences about the nuances of “The Simpsons and Other Jewish Families.”

Emotional investment 

It is in the dramas, however, where this year’s festival will undoubtedly make its most lasting impression. No film more so than opening night’s La Rafle (The Round Up). This French war drama, made in 2010, captures the harrowing story of the 1942 Nazi roundup of more than 13,000 French Jews as told through the eyes of one Jewish child. Known historically as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, named so for the the Paris bicycle racetrack and stadium which served as the departure point for the arrested Jews being sent to concentration camps, this black page in French history is depicted through both the horror and the courage that arose in defiance.

Holocaust-oriented films are seldom the deliberate first choice among viewers. There must be a reason to see a film that tells, graphically and personally, stories of human depravity, cruelty, and criminal activity beyond what most of us can comprehend. For today’s filmmaker capturing the Shoah, the Jewish Holocaust of 6 million killed, some new insight or perspective must be brought to bear for today’s audiences to invest emotionally in experiencing a film such as La Rafle.

Writer, director, and producer Rose Bosch has managed to find not only a story that has been all but overlooked in most historical accounts, but a perspective and voice that grabs hold of viewer in the first scene and doesn’t let go until long after the credits have finished rolling.

Parisian Melanie Laurent (one of the stars of Inglorious Bastards) as Nurse Monod gives an Oscar-worthy performance as one of a handful of caregivers providing aid to the thousands of displaced French Jews who were housed like cattle in the Velodrome awaiting their disposition. She serves as the film’s conscience and gives a face to the countless French partisans and resistance fighters who called upon their government to do the right thing only to be ignored.

La Rafle is an important film that should be seen. It will screen on Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:30 p.m. at Regal Ballantyne Village Stadium Five.

Another dramatic festival highlight is the Argentine drama Anita. This film also depicts tragic consequences of politically inspired violence, yet leaves viewers inspired and joyous at the triumphs of the eponymous special needs character played deftly by Alejandro Manzo, a Down syndrome sufferer. This film screens at Regal Ballantyne Village Stadium Five on Sunday, Feb. 26, at 2 p.m.

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness is a very recent (2011) U.S. documentary on the literary genius behind Fiddler on the Roof and countless other humorous tales of Jewish life at the turn of the century. Sholem Aleichem was widely known as the “Jewish Mark Twain” and this comprehensive biography details his rollercoaster ride to success as well as the story of an entire generation of immigrants discovering America and making their mark. This wonderful film will be shown on Saturday, March 3 at Temple Israel, Shalom Park at 7:30 p.m.


In what has been a steady and deliberate effort to secure the best films and programming available, the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival after eight years is clearly coming of age.

For more information on tickets, complete schedule and programming visit the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival website.

There's more to the Charlotte Museum of History's newest exhibit on the Civil War than meets the eye. Mounting an exhibition takes years of planning and just plain elbow grease. Museum staff and a host of volunteers work together to assemble the exhibit's many kiosks, video stations and display cases; dozens of artifacts, archival documents, broadsides and reproductions are carefully unpacked and examined before being put on view - little known activities that the public never gets to see. Traveling Exhibits Coordinator Kim Graham from the Cincinnati Museum Center along with Charlotte Museum of History's Exhibits Manager Lee Goodan give a behind-the-scenes tour of this fascinating world of museum exhibits.

Musician Dylan Savage performs in a Concert of Ideas and Music Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. in UNC-Charlotte's Robinson Hall. 

Music is my life and my profession. Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been enjoying a growing awareness of how seemingly unrelated disciplines are more interconnected than I initially thought. At first glance, our universe can seem like a place full of things, people, and disciplines that have little or no connection to one another. That was certainly my pre-college perception. I moved from classroom to classroom thinking literature had nothing at all to do with math and music had nothing to do with physical education. No teacher ever hinted otherwise. 

Since then, thankfully, I have grown to see the world through a more revealing lens. With this growth came the realization that almost all things are connected in some way or another, and some quite meaningfully. These connections could often be symbiotic. When I examined two common points between (seemingly) unrelated disciplines, I often came away with a much deeper understanding of both disciplines; greater than a separate examination would yield. Finding these connective strands was quite exciting to me. 

First connections

At first, as a piano student at the Oberlin Conservatory, I began to see the more obvious connections. For example, at a poetry reading, I became aware of how a certain poet was accentuating rhyme and pentameter in such a way that a steady, pulsing rhythm became palpable. The rhythm of the delivery just yanked meaning from the words in a way I had not experienced before. At that moment, I saw with greater clarity just how melody and rhythm in music are given more depth and meaning through a successful rhythmic delivery. That recognition gave me a more profound sense and appreciation of the function and power of rhythm in poetic meter and music. 

Not long after, in Oberlin’s wonderful Allen Art Museum, I happened upon a Van Gogh painting.  The vigorous, steadily repeating brush stroke patterns on his canvas were so visceral, dominant, and three-dimensional, that it further changed the way I perceived and used rhythm in my own playing – for the better. I recognized that I was often hindering the forward flow in some of the music I was playing by over-using an expressive device called rubato (where the tempo is slightly pushed forward or pulled back in speed) and it was causing my playing to lose forward momentum because I was obscuring the beat. Soon, more and more connections began to fall into place: I saw that character development in literature was quite analogous to the development of melodic motives found in music – that had me thinking more carefully about how to more clearly reveal and express those motives as they unfolded in the pieces I played. 

Music in the marketplace

Later, I began to notice connections that were not so obvious, such as the many connections between music and business or between sports and music. As a musician, I had never thought of the sounds I produced at the piano as a product. However, once I realized that my music was indeed as much a product to me as the running shoe was to Nike, I underwent a complete transformation in how I viewed myself as a musician. I was no longer at the mercy of the marketplace; I had some control and tools to create my own niche.

I started to treat my music as a product and applied many of the business field’s marketing principles to create opportunities for myself that had not previously existed. As a result of some well-placed ads, professional promotional materials, brand creation, and some networking I was able to support myself solely through my music while a graduate student at Indiana University – in a town glutted with starving musicians.      

A new worldview

As time went on, I became more and more inquisitive. The more I looked for meaningful connections between music and other disciplines, the more I saw. This way of looking at the world became a mainstay of my existence. I couldn’t imagine not doing so.

Often, as a result of my interdisciplinary examinations, I would come away with a better understanding of how to accomplish something or solve a problem in music, such as how the technique of using slow-motion replay in sports could also be used with great effectiveness to analyze inefficient motion at the keyboard. That topic became the subject of my dissertation and many subsequent articles, TV features, master classes, and lectures.

I soon realized how my specialized training as a pianist could be helpful to other disciplines as well - such as helping computer programmers better-use their arms, hands, and fingers to reduce the rate of carpal tunnel injuries. I built a consulting business around that idea.

A concert of ideas and music

On Tuesday evening at 8 p.m., Feb. 21, I will present a Concert of Ideas and Music in Robinson Hall at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.  There, I will explore connections between music and a number of seemingly unrelated disciplines in a format of conversation, demonstration, and music. I will be accompanied by fellow UNCC faculty members from a number of diverse fields such as electrical engineering, architecture, sports science, neurology, dance, complex systems, and business. In a series of seven vignettes, I intend to show how knowledge from one field can profoundly influence the understanding of another.    

This presentation won’t be all talk. There will be a number of instances throughout the program in which I will play full-length pieces in various styles, ranging from classical to jazz – yet each piece will be connected to a specific topic. For example:

• A professor from kinesiology and I will demonstrate how slow-motion replay is used to help both athletes and pianists increase performance levels.
• A colleague from the neuroscience department will explain why more detailed knowledge of how the brain works can help musicians with performance anxiety and memorization challenges.
• An electrical engineering colleague will explain how his knowledge of the structure of jazz harmonization helped refine his process of building more efficient circuit boards.
• A professor from the Belk School of Business will explain a marketing process that can dramatically help a musician (or anyone) build a larger audience or understand how and why to create a brand.
• I will demonstrate how my years of playing collaboratively with other musicians have given me a unique perspective of teaching team-building skills -- skills that are highly relevant and coveted in today’s business world.

Learning across disciplines

As our country moves increasingly from a manufacturing-based economy to an idea and innovation-based economy, we will need more educational programs that promote imagination-based thinking. The kind of education that encourages drawing ideas from various disciplines. The kind in which knowledge is not just a series of facts, but grist for seeing connections and finding answers in the most unlikely places. The kind that prompts students to sit still, ponder the “what-ifs,” and value doing so.  Some of today’s best scientists and engineers already engage in these practices: recently, Volvo automotive engineers carefully studied locust swarms to give them insights into how to better-design their accident avoidance software. How was it, they pondered, that so many insects could fly so tightly together, quickly change direction, and not run into each another? 

This concert of ideas and music, then, is intended to intrigue, illuminate, and, hopefully, motivate more people to contemplate and value the inter-connectivity between things, people, and disciplines.

2011 proved a productive year for music in Charlotte. With a mix of long-time players and ambitious newcomers, straightforward song crafters and experimental adventurers, there was plenty to be excited about. The following is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of output, but to my mind, it’s the cream of the crop. Albums are listed alphabetically by artist.

Andy the Doorbum - The Man Killed The Bird, And With The Bird He Killed The Song, And With The Song, Himself (self-released) / Appalucia - Appalucia (self-released)

2011 was a productive year for Andy Fenstermaker. His latest solo outing as Andy The Doorbum is as ambitious and accomplished as its title is long. Fenstermaker’s long been an ace storyteller with a Tom Waits-ian knack for casting affecting tales of derelict characters, but here he shows a keener knack for arranging as well. That impulse is what drives the full-band effort from Appalucia to such delirious highs. Joined by a gang of buddies, The Doorbum leads a rambunctious, humorous rave-up not unlike a riled-up and fully inebriated not-so-distant cousin of the Avett Brothers.

Aqualads- Treasures (self-released)

On their fourth outing, Aqualads don’t reinvent any wheels. They do, however, fill the old ones with plenty of fresh air. Here, the long-standing surf band barrels the crisp guitar runs and swinging drums of genre forbears like The Ventures into picturesque settings. Heat-stroked Morricone-esque Spaghetti Western melodies give “Vientos Del Sur” a smoldering Latin swing, while the moody, moonlit exotica of “White Sands,” suggests more shore-bound activities. The sound might be revivalist, but it’s no reenactment. In the Aqualads’ capable hands, surf-rock stakes a mighty claim for currency.

BrainF≠- Sleep Rough (Sorry State/Grave Mistake)

After a pair of stellar singles, Brain F≠ outdid itself on its full-length debut. In its turbulent 10 tracks, Sleep Rough emphasized all of Brain F≠’s strengths — and particularly the vocal interplay between front-persons Elise Anderson and Nick Goode. As the band whips itself into a storm of jittery guitars, counter-intuitive bass lines, and muscular drumming, Anderson sings at the center with an unfazed detachment, grounding the band and drawing its volatility like a lightning rod. That tension, driven equally by the rough melody of early West Coast punk and hardcore’s strident urgency, makes Sleep Rough one of the year’s most exciting records — from anywhere.

Click here to stream (2 songs). 

The Catch Fire - Rumormill (No More Fake Labels)

For long-time local music fans, The Catch Fire might be considered a supergroup. Fronted by Alternative Champ Mike Mitschele and Jon Lindsay, an in-demand sideman and up-and-comer in his own right, and bolstered by Bellglide’s rhythm section of bassist Adam Roth and drummer John Cates, The Catch Fire’s polish is less than surprising. The chemistry between Mitschele and Lindsay is undeniable, and Rumormill, the band’s debut, is an effervescent pop-rock primer build from a thorough synthesis of all that is catchy — from the Elephant 6 swells of “Sing Along” to the Comboland jangle of “Choking Chain”; from the spacey dream-pop of “Ambulance” to the punchy power-pop of “Back In The Band.”

Click here to stream. 

Elonzo- A Letter to a Friend (self-released)

On A Letter to a Friend, Elonzo’s easygoing Americana finally delivers the confident, cohesive statement the Rock Hill band has long promised. Frontman Jeremy Davis leads the band — which also includes his sister, pianist Maggie Davis Bourdeau, her husband, drummer Dan Bourdeau, and bassist Stephen Narron — with his honeyed vocal and the casual sway of his acoustic guitar strums. But its the sonic impulses at the band’s edges — Maggie’s elegant piano, Jeremy’s undercurrent of electric guitar squall — that helps the band bolster the narrative drama in its songs.

Click here to stream. 

Great Architect - Cultural Games (Kinnikinnik)

Easily dodging the so-called “sophomore slump,” the now six-piece Great Architect showcases a less-improvised, but more dynamic voyage of instrumental avant-rock. Drawing heavily from the free jazz backgrounds of many of its members, Great Architect maintains a sense of spontaneity and a fearlessness of the din it can create. But it’s not all chaos, either. And at its best, which is not uncommon on Cultural Games, Great Architect crafts a clear picture of time and place. Songs like “Ocean” and “Pageturner” suggest daring unmade films, filled with taut pacing and explosive conflict.

Click here to stream. 

The Houston Bros. - Empty Spaces (self-released)

On their fifth recording, the veteran outfit displays a remarkable consistency and an unwavering knack for muted melodic hooks. Draped loosely in dreamy reverb, and with principals Matt and Justin Faircloth singing in drifting harmony, songs like “The Future Is Here, Part 2” become bittersweet mirages of nostalgia, pushed along gently by Justin’s unhurried drumming. Nothing here is overstated, favoring instead a patient and spacious mood that lets wavering guitar twang, horns, and piano seep into the recording’s farthest corners. Likewise, nothing is out of place, or unnecessary. Indeed, Empty Spaces is a document of veteran restraint, and assured craftsmanship.

Moenda- Moenda (Kinnikinnik)

Moenda’s full-length debut is also the final statement of the band as a quartet; electronics whiz Steven Pilker departed the band before the album was released. The din captured here, though, was worth preserving. Pilker, in league with synth-player Robin Doermann and guitarist Ross Wilbanks, fill the spaces between Davey Blackburn’s hard-swinging drumming. And special note should be taken of Blackburn’s drumming, a gymnastic whirlwind that feels like it could fit a jazz-riot or a heavy metal blitzkrieg. The band’s rhythmic instrumentals act as a soundtrack to an apocalyptic dance party — and what a party it is!

Click here to stream. 

Yardwork- Brotherer (Lunchbox)

The long awaited full-length from Yardwork finally arrived this year — and it was worth the wait. The band’s knotty, exuberant pop still defies easy definition. It sprints with the urgency of punk, but swings like a worldly funk; its layered arrangements suggest the polyglot pop of contemporaries like Yeasayer, but the rootsy sing-alongs lean toward Akron/Family freak-folk. Whatever it is, though, Yardwork’s sound is vibrant and infectious, and totally their own.

Click here to stream (1 song).

Young And In The Way - V. Eternal Depression (Antithetic) / I Am Not What I Am (self-released)

In their three years of existence, Young And In The Way have released five recordings. With no shortage of ideas and refinements to their approach, the band has also steadily improved on each record. So with the double-feature of this year’s I Am Not What I Am and V. Eternal Depression, their brutal and captivating blend of grinding hardcore and atmospheric black metal has further embraced the band’s own extremes — from tight, volatile bursts of hardcore to panoramic expanses of chilly ambient metal. Growing attention beyond Charlotte seems to attest to the band’s continued potential, too.

To stream, click here and here. 

Madama Butterfly, presented by Opera Carolina, at the Belk Theater January 26, 28, 29

The debate as to whether Puccini's Madama Butterfly is a symbolist pipe-dream or full blown verismo opera is effectively upended in Opera Carolina's production, where it is seen afresh. This is in great part due to the sets, costumes, and projections of Jun Kaneko, which are bold, beautiful, and ingenious but—best of all—put these qualities in the service of Puccini's great score. Michael Baumgartner's lighting design, like the sets, is not only striking but musical. It is more than an experiment, it is an artistic success.

The basic ground of Kaneko's set is a tilted spiral form beginning as a long ramp backstage and resolving in the middle as a circular platform. It is whorled with black stripes on a stark white ground evocative of the undercurrent of time, of fatality—like the title graphics of Hitchcock's Vertigo or the whirlpools of Hokusai. A huge Shoji screen serves as a visual metaphor for Butterfly and Pinkerton's home. Throughout the opera, large paper panels are dropped in changing configurations and with changing projections drawn in Kaneko's fine hand upon them. The look is severe but never mechanical, simple but never naive, the proportions nearly as beautiful as a Cycladic vase.

James Meena, the conductor, skillfully underscores the many vignettes hidden in the arc of the score. He pointed out things in Madama Butterfly that aren't always noticed, those beautiful details which elevate Puccini above his verismo confreres like Cilea and Leoncavallo. He made me aware that Puccini was aware of Debussy.

The choreography worried me at first, but it soon shed its orientalist movement clichés and became beautiful by the time Madama Butterfly's retinue entered. The four black leotarded, square hooded figures which acted as Madama Butterfly's household furniture or servants—I couldn't decide which—seemed to synthesize the costumes of Bunraku puppeteers with cabinetry, but they were never used to the point of annoyance, and after a while I grew fond of them.

The weak link of this production was Fernando Portari's Pinkerton. Pinkerton is a callow bastard, to be blunt, but we must find what Butterfly finds attractive in him if the tragedy which follows is to convince. Unfortunately, his performance was a recital of the part. Yunah Lee's Madama Butterfly was superbly acted but seemed to me vocally underpowered in act one's big duet and in “Un Bel Di Vedremo.” She was, however, gripping in the second part of act two, which was heartbreaking, as it should be. Both Todd Thomas' Sharpless and Margaret Thompson's Suzuki were fine contributions. Thompson brought to her part an almost Brahmsian beauty, and her duets with Yunah Lee's Butterfly were some of the evening's best singing. The brief appearance of the Bonze—played by John Fortson—was haunting.

One other fault of the production was to sanitize the role of Goro, making him less of a pimp than he should be. The same was true of the surtitles, which failed to make the unpleasant points of Pinkerton's character entirely clear, as well as omitting some of the wordplay of the libretto.

If you have an interest in sculpture, painting, lighting, staging, and their interplay with music, I would urge you to see this production of Madama Butterfly. It outweighs conventional ideas of success; it is what the future of opera may look like if it is good.

Photos by jonsilla.com