Art Fraud Alert

Art Fraud Alert

  
 NY Times Photo of Brooklyn Museum 

As someone who has attended the Brooklyn Museum Orchestra of St. Lukes concerts for several years I was shocked and angered to see that this years concerts will be ‘free to children under 12’. This makes them at best family concerts that should be free to all begin with. Sure there are children who can sit through a concert but unfortunately most of them live in Europe. Also presenting concerts by part time musicians, armature and ‘semi-pro’, as concerts by true professionals is fraud. Real professional musicians don’t have day jobs and can and do practice everyday. Also, lets face the truth, no self-respecting classical musician wants to play under the conditions of a Park Slope birthday party. In a city so rich in music everyday of the year it is foolish to waste you time listening to the bottom-feeders of the classical world. I suspect most music lovers already know to avoid the Orchestra of St. Luke’s but to new and occasional listeners I strongly sugest that you avoid the Orchestra of St. Luke’s concerts at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Museum and Morgan Library & Museum. If you go your more cultured friends will think you are silly yahoos.

Don't you Love Fall

The evil, and incompetence, of banality at Ethel at BAM

    After a  soaring start the Next Wave Festival crashed in a  disaster so complete BAM may be following the The City Opera into oblivion.  It seems the BAM has become too big to manage.  A tragedy.  I saw the Saturday performance but according The Times the Thursday performance was an equal embarrassment.

  The insults began as we entered the theater  as the lech who claims to be the ‘house manager, leering at the at the incoming  theatergoers mostly the ones too young  for him.    He was dressed in his Wallmart best, his ass crack deciding weather to show itself or not.

   . As we took our tickets and showed them to one on the bizarre slobs pretending to be  an usher, His grotesque stomach hanging over his misfitting jeans. he insisted we we go up the stairs, because our tickets  for row H and they said to to go up entrance 1.  When I explained to him that my wife had a knee, problem and that entrances 2 and 3 were much closer he got belligerent and insisted we could not go in anywhere but the stairs or the elevator.  After grabbing our tickets we finally entered the auditorium and walked the eight steps to our seats. The tickets were marked wrong, one can only assume that Karen Brooks Hopkins has never walked across the street to see the theater in person. Her gross incompetence is truly breathtaking.

   Then began the most entertaining part of the evening the seating of the paying customers.  While professional ushers did a great and courteous  job, the Walmart clone at the lower right  part of the auditorium was so drunk or otherwise impaired he was not even able to walk straight. He was no use at all so out of it that each time he tried to help someone he took several minutes to figure if they were on the right or left.  One assumes he was a doing a promo for a Jerry Lewis festival at BAM Cinema.  If Ms. Hopkins is trying to break an ushers union, if there is one, I think she will quickly find that we will all support the existing ushers.and BAM will cease to exist.

   Now we come to bad part of the evening.  The show simply consists of music the we are told was composed by 12 composers buts its all just a drone of boring music specifically meant to be devoid of any character or meaning.  This music by the yard has the same purpose as the state music under Stalin and the Nazi regime.  To make everything seem the same and encourage mindless drones.  The group Ethel, named for a character on the I Love Lucy show, plays the simple score in total goose-step, you really can’t tell who is playing what at any given time.  The whole point is to banish any kind of character from the score.  The effect of sameness was made greater by over amplification,  overmodulation made it impossible for the music anything but ugly. Something named Dave Cook, was given the blame for this, avoid him at all costs.avoid this fool at all costs.  One thing for sure is the composers who ‘wrote’ this disgrace. will be forgotten as quickly as the composers who were willing to write this kind of state music in Germany and The Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s were.

  There was a visual of EPA photos from the 1970s projected on four ripped panels of of paper.  No one in the company bothered to fix them at the Saturday performance.  Perhaps they knew the no none wanted to see  the pathetic march of meaningless faded snapshots  to do anything for the production.  Steven Cosson is credited as director be he seems to have taken the  money and run ,perhaps he was too busy trying to pick up more of the meaningless middlebrow awards he is so fond of.

 Perhaps BAM is going the way of City Opera, perhaps they will learn from their mistakes, but as a Producers Council member and someone who has loved BAM for more than 35 years I will not give any more support until Joseph Mellio is either fired or learns what the evils of banality are. I hope all decent members do the same.  For those who wonder what Fox gets for large  contribution to BAM, know you know.

NEVER AGAIN

Lest We Forget

    In this day of the fast news cycle Trayvon Martin and all his murder and the 'acquittal' of his killer mean will be forgotten. If we don't let the state of Florida know that their 'Stand Your Ground' law and bogus show trial will not be tolerated the killing will inevitably go on - with the victims predominantly young black men.  So let me ask you a simple question. Will you give up Florida citrus products to avenge Mr. Martin's murder, or will you stand with the status quo.

click like or share if you agree, comment to share our ideas.

Not much fun this Sunday

Sumer doesn't seem like much fun after Saturday nights verdict.  This country is at a crossroad and it doesn't know it.  I think the next week may be hard one in some places, you can't blame people for being angry.   We should never forget that Mr. Zimmerman was egged on by a Florida law that made him feel that hunting black people was accepted behavior.  In 2013 innocent people can't even walk the streets in Florida.  I think its time to stop visiting the state.

In Texas the war on women continues unabated, another reason summer is robed of its sizzle.  The forces that be in Texas seem to think sexual pleasure must be punished.  Its a sick and ugly position. 

Exercise

Rainbow

Summer Pictures 1

Going Home

On Vaction

Sunset Lake - Alton, NH

The Famous June Moon

 

American Progress

Music Review: Alan Gilbert, Emanuel Ax and the New York Philharmonic

    Its summer and we all want things to be just a little easier, and that includes the NY Phil and its audience.   We wish for easy and free parking and there it was right across from Lincoln Center.  We ask for a program that is fun and somehow doesn't tax us too much and Mr. Ax, Mr. Gilbert and company are glad to oblige with a program that was more laid back than it looked at first glance.
 
     First up was Mr. Ax and pauseHaydn.  The rendition was nothing if not fleet, as if the soloist had to get home for a favorite TV show.   We sat on the piano side and couldn't help but be impressed by Mr. Ax's virtuoso playing, but by the time we got into it was over.  Just what we expect from an opening piece but we kind of expect more from a first rank pianist.

      The other two pieces are more linked in my mind.  The First Christopher Rouse's Symphony No. 3, in its NY premier, promised a lot with a huge orchestration.  One expects a composer to make a great statement with such a huge force behind him but Mr. Rouse choose instead to make a lot of little statements featuring a hodge-podge of different styles from different sections of the orchestra.   It was fun in its way and people enjoyed it but it seemed a little too much like the composer showing off all his tricks.

    After the intermission we had the privilege of listening to the music of Richard Wagner, sort of.  The piece, A Ring Journey, arranged by Mr. Gilbert after suite by another conductor, Erich Leinsdorf.  Somehow it may have been one conductor to many.  Despite heroic work by Philip Myers  and the rest of the brass section the work lost the heroic feel of the actual ring.  One problem was the work was a juke box musical of themes from the ring, played out of order.  The result was as flat and strangely un-Wagnerian as I recall Mr. Leinsdorf's Wagner conducting was at the MET in my youth .  Laid back Wagner for summer, not bad exactly but perhaps a little too easy even for summer.

 

Bleeding Harts

Theater Review: Master Builder

  Spend an evening at the rocky beginning of the sexual revolution. The Brooklyn Academy of  Music  Harvey Theater presents the fascinating, brilliant and terribly neurotic Master Builder.
     ’The Master Builder’ by, Henrik Ibsen, translated by Dave Eggers and directed by Andrei Belgrader, is in every way the hottest show in town.  In the first act all the characters are apparently clumsy and often act with humor both sly and open.  Burlesque seems to be always in the mind of the translator ,director and actors. In the first act.
    John Turturro (Halvard Solness) is the last ‘Master Builder’  of the old guild system.  With all the important commissions  going to Architects He can now build only homes..
    He compensates by ways familiar to us  to this day. He rapes a fourteen year old girl on the day of his last church  commission.  The day he lost his faith in god and himself.   Wrenn Schmidt (Hilde Wangel)  plays the young woman who was raped and visits him to pick-up a promised property. Kelly Hutchinson (Kaja Fosli),  who both works for the master builder and his mistress.  The perfect frosty Ibsen wife  Katherine Borowitz (Aline Solness) knows that sex games are going on can not admit it.
    Like many of plays of the higher theater, both classic and modern, this play requires an understanding of the complete work.  This includes all of the higher arts.  In this case the sex was so strong for some sexually disturbed  patrons that they had to walk before or during intermission.  Even some ‘critics’ perhaps walked a out as well.  Just saying.
    I won’t go into detail  about the second act but  it will tell you why Freud wrote ‘Shakespeare, Ibsen e Dostoevskij: 1913 27’  and Why the good  Dr. Freud said it was his favorite Ibsen play. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce and George Bernard Shaw pretty much thought it was the great work of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
Lets all thank BAM, Mr. Eggers,  Mr. Belgrader ,  John Turturro and the rest of the artists for a rare great evening.
Special thanks to every one involved for having the guts for jumping the sexual bubble in this production. I am proud to say I had random fun sexual feelings for Ms. Hutchinson and Ms. Schmidt.    I don’t know why I shouldn’t have

Film Reviews: East and Frances Ha

Two films with rather hot actresses Brit Marling (East) and Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha.) One film pretends to be about revolution
but is in the end it is as reactionary as its presenter, Rupert Murdoch. Besides the pretention of the sentimental plots concerning all the stars in the film we get to see dizzy group of ‘freegans’ who do jams killing CEOs especially if they happen to be their parents. Its hard to understand what possible radical effect they want from dumpster diving - don’t all people deserve fresh healthy food. Somehow I think that’s the moral point, not feeding people out of date partly rotten food. Rupert Murdoch and Brit Marling seem to me to believe in pretty much the same philosophy. Remember that when you see the reactionary Brit Marling portrayed on TV as some kind of radical. Fortunately we have a real revolutionary film playing just now. The revolution is delightfully the sexual one and Greta Gerwig is leading it. In the film she plays Frances, a young woman who thinks she has had sex with too many men. She thinks she can keep the number under twenty if she sleeps with former encounters. Needless to say all the men on her list are useless to her. Fortunately her across the hall neighbor, her male counterpart when it comes to sex, serves as a perfect boy friend. Both Frances and the audience learn not to feel guilty for their sexual pleasure. Now that is Revolutionary.

Moonrise over Brooklyn

A trip to the garden

Somehow cooling I hope

Publish Post 

Thugs protect Whites Only in Prospect Park

An epidemic of de facto racism is spreading in brownstone Brooklyn.  This includes the many areas of  Brooklyn boarding  Prospect Park. The recent event where large mobs of drunk rich inbred idiots got to use large parts of the park exclusively, while the rest of us were turned away by goons from CSS Security.  Note the mob who came keep me from taking pictures.  Pretty good for a 64 year dialysis patient who was just photographing wildflowers.  What an army of cowards, they must think they are the junior Pinkertons.

 


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