Angela Perley Lets Go to Produce Solo Debut '4:30' - by Anne Marie

Angela Perley has been tracking sales of 4:30 like a proud parent monitors a newborn’s growth, curious whether the 70% male audience so far for the album will hold, whether the sale demographics will translate into tour audiences, and eager to glean whatever other information she can. She says she feels she’s been working on the album “for years,” but in a good way. It’s clearly been a labor of love.

Perley says that Angela Perley & the Howlin’ Moons had fulfilled their two-record deal with Vital Companies with 2014’s Hey Kid and 2016’s Homemade Vision, and she knew it was time to put what she had learned to work. Perley had been watching the recording process closely, taking detailed notes, and felt she “knew how to do it to keep costs as low as possible” while “maki[ng] it in a way to be true to her.” Perley and former Howlin’ Moon guitarist Chris Connor co-produced 4:30, named for her bedtime. Perley says she feels most creative once the world quiets down. She wrote the songs late at night and would bring them to Chris to lay down an electronic drum track. She and Chris would then try them out live with Jake Levy on drums.

Perley and Connor poured their own funds into 4:30 and that got them close, but not quite to the finish line. Perley realized she was approximately $13,000 short of what was needed to complete the final production and post-production work on the album and made the decision to crowd-source the remainder through Kickstarter. The all or nothing approach of Kickstarter’s funding platform made her “nervous” but she did her research and ended up exceeding her goal, raising more than $15,500.

Perley’s careful research and attention to detail can be seen in the amazing musicians she found to bring out the richness of her songs. Friend Patrick Sweany had raved about Nashville keyboardist Robbie Crowell (Kesha, Diamond Rugs) and it “just happened to work out” that the “one time” Crowell had free in January Perley, Connor and Levy were able to travel to Nashville to record. Perley also convinced Andy Carlson (R.E.M., Billy Bragg) to add strings and took the suggestion of Mike Landolt (Maroon 5, O.A.R.) - who mixed the record - to have Dave Collins (D’Angelo, Bruce Springsteen) do the mastering.

4:30, released August 2nd, appears to be getting the praise it deserves. Perley graciously accepts congratulations for the write- up and video premiere of single “Let Go” on Billboard. That article appeared under the tag “Country” and the author Gary Graff described her music variously as “psychedelic garage pop to melodic pop and heartfelt country and Americana.”  When asked how she would describe her sound, Perley says she mostly thinks of her music as “rock and roll,” but acknowledges that “it has country elements in there.” She says that she and Connor played at the AmericanaFest the past couple of years in Nashville and “she identifies with that term, too – somewhere in between.”

Perley is less willing to define her songs.  When asked about the story behind “Don’t Look Back Mary,” a slow, sad, achingly beautiful poem of a song, Perley will accede only that while there’s “a little of herself in it,” it was “inspired off of a couple of people” and that she “knows a lot of Mary’s”; women who are “a bit broken by some sorts of abuse over the years but still have a beauty and a strength.”

Photo by Mitchell Multimedia

A video for “Don’t Look Back Mary” by Columbus local Amber Thompson will soon be out. That video will join the existing video for the upbeat, rocking song “Let Go,” which Perley admits is her “favorite of the moment” – a “mental check for her to let go of some of the expectations of the music industry and her career.” That video by Dawn Aquarius uses full-on 70’s era Scooby-Doo style psychedelic animation to depict, in a wild tumbling visual feast, a girl listening to the song spin on vinyl, Perley and Connor playing guitars, rabbits spinning, butterflies emerging from chrysalises, and the lyrics “what a wonderful feeling, what a wonderful feeling” spiraling.

With the album’s successful release in the rearview mirror and these promotional efforts underway, it certainly must be a wonderful feeling!

Nine Albums That Changed My Life - by Anne Marie

(This is the second installment of what we here at Pencilstorm hope becomes a regular feature of the site: X-amount of records – it doesn’t HAVE to be 10 – that changed our writers’ lives. Our Virginia correspondent JCE launched the series a week ago, his inaugural offering is linked here…Ten Albums That Changed My Life - JCE. Anne Marie is featured here for the second round.)

I first wondered who this JCE was when he wrote a TV Party Tonight! about Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse. I’d never met another person who listened to Sparklehorse or who had even had heard of Linkous. Since then, I have gleaned from JCE’s writing that we’re around the same age and have daughters around the same age, so I guess it’s not surprising that in taking up his challenge tonight, two of my albums overlap his list.

Saturday Night Fever (Soundtrack) - When this movie was released in December 1977, I had just turned 11, and was the oldest of my siblings, ranging in age down to 5. I remember that somehow, however improbably, we convinced my father to take us to see this movie and he had to argue with the ticket guy to get us in, but in we went and see it we did and it was the most exciting two hours of my young life and then we got the soundtrack for Christmas and I became obsessed with the Bee Gees and their younger brother Andy Gibb for at least the next year, spending any gift/babysitting money I’d receive on fan magazines with glossy (fully-clothed) centerfolds.

The Cars / The Cars, Candy-O and Shake it Up - When their self-titled debut came out in 1978, it was not on my radar (that being full of Brothers Gibb that year), but by 1982, Shake it Up’s title track was getting major radio play and I bought that album and the debut and Candy-O. I had just gotten my license and when my cousin Karen would visit from Texas for extended vacations twice per year, I would drive my old Chevy Nova to mall parking lots where no one could hear us sing the songs from all three at the top of our lungs. Karen was my closest cousin in both age and personality and sadly she died in an auto accident when she was 18. But I’ll have these memories forever.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers / Damn the Torpedoes - How Tom Petty managed to sneak onto the radar to shake me out of my disco fixation in 1979 is still a mystery, but I think that it was when I had my Columbia House membership where I would get all these 8-track tapes sent to me each month. Anyway, Petty entered the picture and my sister and I, who just years earlier were jumping on our beds and arguing over whether David or Shaun Cassidy was cuter, both totally agreed that we loved this guy and every song on this album - and so it went with pretty much everything he ever did. Over the years, if a Petty song came on the radio and I was with my sister, we’d both reach out instinctively to crank the volume. This album was pretty much the first thing I can remember us agreeing on and is one of those points of connection that years later allowed us to transition from feuding siblings to lifelong friends.

Steely Dan / Aja and Donald Fagan / The Nightfly - By the time I started at Boston University in late 1984, MTV had been around for years and I thought that even though I hailed from rock-heavy Rochester, NY, I had been exposed to the world of music. And yet, I was wrong.  There was so much music that I had missed. Among my classmates at BU were two quirky best friends from Philadelphia, Bob and Brian, who were obsessed with a band called Steely Dan.  And this was music unlike any I had heard before – rock combined with jazz - and it blew me away.   

Ben Folds Five / Ben Folds Five - I love it when I hear fresh music, music that seems new to me. That gets me excited to find out, who is this? And once I know the answer, when can I see them live?  That’s how I felt in 1995 when I first heard Ben Folds. The debut is an amazing album and I’ve followed Ben Folds - with his distinctive voice and storytelling and piano- pounding delivery - ever since.  What’s really cool is that about five years ago now, my daughter Caitlin decided that she too loves Ben Folds and so we have been seeing his shows together ever since.  That makes three acts that she and I will see together if at all possible: Ben Folds, Guster and The Flaming Lips. Enjoying music with both of my kids (and having taken each of them to their first concert - both saw different Flaming Lips tours) is definitely life-changing.  I almost cheated and selected my favorite Ben Folds Five album - The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner – which is the first that came to mind. While it doesn’t fit the rules of the challenge, my favorite song on that album, the heartbreakingly beautiful Magic, has provided comfort following the untimely death of my sister’s son Matthew this year.

Alvvays - Antisocialites - In December last year, I went to the CD 102.5 Holiday Show, mainly to see Spoon, but was blown away by opening act Alvvays, a Canadian indie-pop band fronted by Molly Rankin, who looked like she had stepped straight from a J Crew ad but proceeded to give a high-energy performance full of songs from their then recently released Antisocialites album, decidedly more punk/harder edge than their 2014 self-titled debut, especially as performed live.  Just a few months later, I would move to Boston to start a new job and life and that album would become my personal soundtrack, in steady rotation for a six-month period of 2018 and still played regularly.

AML 11/18/18

Random Thoughts About A Thousand Thoughts - by Anne Marie

While I have fully-loaded cable plus Amazon plus Netflix, and generally love having all those thousands & thousands of viewing choices, I do sometimes get nostalgic for the days when we had just four national television networks and everyone would watch the Wizard of Oz or A Charlie Brown Christmas on the same night. There is just something to be said for a shared experience. It’s a large part of what keeps me going to see movies at theaters.  Yes, I like a big screen and seeing a movie when it first comes out, but I really like how seeing the movie with a bunch of other people somehow heightens my own reaction to it. That happened when I went to see The Post a few Saturdays ago. It’s a movie based on actual historical events - so I knew the ending - but that did not stop me from being on the edge of my seat as Meryl Streep so convincingly played Kay Graham’s hand-wringing, lip-biting uncertainty over whether or not to publish the Pentagon Papers, and it was worth every penny of my $10.25 when the whole theater broke into raucous applause at the ending. 

But what’s even better than watching a movie together with others?  For me, it’s enjoying live music.  That’s when I’m most in the moment and when I most can feel the energy of not only the performance but the crowd reacting to the performance.  Director Sam Green has developed a merger of both movie and live performance, a form he calls the “live documentary.”

Last Thursday night, The Wexner Center for the Arts co-premiered A Thousand Thoughts, a live documentary by Sam Green and the Kronos Quartet. (Columbus was supposed to be the “World Premiere” but it actually premiered earlier that week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. I guess that was an offer too good to refuse.)

This is how it worked. Green spent weeks combing through the archives of the Kronos Quartet, housed floor to ceiling, room to room. in a second floor San Francisco apartment that doubles as their practice space.  He interviewed and filmed current and previous members of the quartet, as well as a handful of the nearly 1,000 composers with whom Kronos has collaborated (including Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, the Inuk throat-singer Tanya Tagaq and the Chinese pipa player Wu Man), then fashioned a film which played on a large screen while Green narrated the history of the quartet from its founding in 1973 by violinist David Harrington up to the present, as Harrington and Kronos’ three other current members – violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang - played live on the stage in front of the screen to more than twenty compositions, providing the soundtrack to the movie, while oftentimes also telling parts of the story from within the film. 

This is how it felt.  Always interesting and entertaining. At times intense.  At times powerfully moving.  And overwhelmingly immediate and fleeting. I did not see one person look at a cell phone or even whisper to their neighbor.  We were hundreds of people in the collective moment from 8:00ish to 9:30ish. (Sam Green told us the exact times to the second at the start and at the finish but since I was in the moment and wasn’t taking notes, I don’t remember.)  Unlike a live concert, you could never be complacent in a moment.  You could never think to yourself, “Oh, here comes that long [bass][drum][guitar] solo” and mentally check out. There was always a new clip or image hitting the screen, a new part of the story being told. 

The story of any group that has been together for 45 years is sure to have its share of comic and tragic moments and both were shared in equal measure, from the quartet's outlandish hair and clothing stylings throughout the years in an effort to break with the stuffy “penguin suits” of traditional string quartets (my favorite were the Star Trek-looking outfits), to the deaths in quick succession of Dutt’s longtime partner, of Harrington’s son and the loss by cellist Joan Jeanrenaud of her baby, who was stillborn. 

In one of the most compelling portions of the documentary, Harrington described how following the joyous event of the birth of his first grandchild in early 2003 he felt himself pulled down into a deep depression. He related that the buildup to the invasion of Iran began to trigger flashbacks to his late teens and early 20's and his reaction to the Vietnam War, and he dreaded what the world would be for his grandson.  As a consequence of the depression, he lost his inner resonance, and was unable to hear/feel music inside of him.  He felt hopeless and on a downward spiral until he realized he needed to talk to someone with a great voice to lift him up, and he thought of Howard Zinn, the American Historian and author of People’s History of the United States (and - by the way - my Professor back in the day at Boston University).  Harrington describes how he got Zinn’s telephone number from a friend of his, called him and asked “What can a normal person do in this time?” The film then cuts to Zinn’s answer in a clip from Zinn speaking at a fundraiser for Spare Change street paper and the Homeless Empowerment Project in 2004.  (It's at 11:19-12:42 of the video below.)

Then we are back to Harrington saying that after an hour of talking with Zinn, he had confidence and energy and could return to his mission of finding music that can protect people from suffering and children from harm, which is what still drives him after more than four decades.

Although Sherri Geldin, Wex director, mentioned that there are plans for a limited tour of the production, I am not sure where, and as far as I know, it was one show only for Columbus. But if you can see it somewhere else, do!  And, in the meantime, go have another shared experience at the Wex.  Here’s a few upcoming events on my calendar:

Paris is Burning on Feb. 6th @ 7 PM – winner of a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, looks at the drag ballroom subculture of 1980s Harlem (1990) 

In the Intense Now on Feb. 16th @ 7 PM – documentary revisits the revolutions of 1968 in France, Czechoslovakia, Brazil and China (2017)

Dementia 13 and Lick the Star on Feb. 24th @7 PM – a double bill of Francis Ford Coppola and daughter Sofia Coppola movies - or catch Adam O’ Farrill’s Stranger Days, a jazz quartet that took the last Winter Jazzfest in NYC by storm, in the Wex Performance Space at 8 PM

You can find the full calendar of events at www.wexarts.org.

And, if you are looking for a place to eat before or afterwards to continue your communal experience, check out the South Village Grille, a relaxed and yet upscale little grill located next to the Thurman Café in German Village. This place is so good that it inspires love letters rather than reviews on Yelp. The food (American, with especially fantastic seafood & vegetable selections but also steak and many other offerings), craft cocktails, atmosphere and service have been very, very far above par on each of my visits (and there's also plenty of free, on street parking).  If you want a fun place for a drink and snack, try Service Bar, the front portion of the distillery at Middle West Spirits, tucked in a street back from High Street in the Short North.

Even though we are finally having a bit of an actual winter, it's definitely worth heading out into it in Cbus!

Anne Marie covers the Wexner Center and other non-KISS related material for Pencilstorm.

A Public Service Announcement for KISS Fans: Mandatory Holiday Viewing - by Anne Marie

My son is a huge James Franco fan and he recently suggested Why Him? for family movie night.  Why Him? came out last December.  Set at Christmas time, it features Bryan Cranston as Ned Fleming, Hollywood's version of a Midwest normal dad, going out to California with his wife and son to spend the holiday with his daughter at Stanford to meet her new boyfriend.  As a comedy, it's pretty much a ripoff of the Meet the Parents storyline, but it has some funny moments and I especially liked Keegan-Micheal Key's character, Gustav.

As we watched it, and repeated reference was made to the fact that the Flemings' favorite band was KISS, and KISS was on the soundtrack and worked into the very fabric of the plotline, I thought, "How has Colin not mentioned this? This must be on his annual holiday watch list."  And when I asked him, I was floored when he responded, “I don’t know that one!  You have one-upped me on KISS!  How is that possible?”

How is that possible?!?  This is the dude whose blog has more than 30 articles devoted to KISS, who has himself written multiple articles about the band, one in which he describes an entire Sunday morning devoted to Googling Kiss setlists and then watching the videos on Youtube and another in which he compares the finer points of Paul and Ace’s respective solo albums, and who can expertly steer any conversation towards the band, to wit this recent Facebook discussion which began as which Rock Hall nominees would become inductees in 2018, and then became which bands were fully formed on their debut album, and then somehow became an all out KISS-o-mania celebration:

James Baumann I always think of The Pretenders and The Clash as the answers to this question. R.E.M. is a good choice as well.

Colin Gawel Scott Carr I don’t think they really hit stride until Heaven Tonight. Love the debut but it’s pretty quirky.

Matt Walters KISS’ debut is pretty hard to beat, although they weren’t really “fully formed” in the sense they weren’t a whopper with cheese yet. 😉 The Jam, The Beastie Boys, Exploding Hearts (RIP), Television all have 5/5 debuts, too. I might also throw Franz and TVOTR in there too. Also You Am I but nobody’s ever heard of them.

Peter Nichols Colin Gawel Sh*t, I forgot "Get The Knack".

'Twas brilliant!

Peter Nichols I mean, the drumming alone deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

James Baumann Matt Walters Love me some You Am I.

Steve Elshoff Van Halen.

Steve Elshoff Jeff Buckley.

Colin Gawel Matt Walters KISS is but sonically it just doesn't have the goods. Alive is really the record in my opinion.

Colin Gawel Van Halen ! duh. Facepalm.

Kyle Siegrist Metallica Kill 'Em All

Kyle Siegrist Colin Gawel IMO the Kiss debut lp is their best, but I agree Alive put them on the map.

Colin Gawel Kyle Siegrist best songs no doubt but I always play Alive for folks. Actually, they probably hit their peak on Destroyer. Artwork - sound - songs - all that jazz.

Colin Gawel Or possibly Crazy Nights.

Scott Carr Rock And Roll Over beats Destroyer all day long.....

Colin Gawel Scott Carr now you are just trolling me. Everybody knows I’m a Destroyer guy.

Scott Carr hehe....

Kyle Siegrist Remember I'm not really a Kiss fan like you or Scott. For whatever reason I personally just like thier debut best. I also really like The Elder.

Colin Gawel In other KISS related news I guess the greatest book ever written is being re released and I’m not talking about the Bible.

Scott Carr Colin Gawel I thought you were a Crazy Nights guy????

Scott Carr that book is anazing...

Colin Gawel Guess the author was on Eddie Trunk and an updated version coming out. And rumor has it Vinnie Vincent is on the cover. Seriously.

Matt Walters vinnie's also on the back cover! It's a commemorative edition specifically highlighting how overrrated he is by certain fans of the band ;)

Matt Walters I think this discussion about KISS vis-a-vis the "fully formed on the debut" comment is really interesting. On KISS boards, the debut typically is a solid #2 among fan aggregate polls (behind RARO - usually Hotter than Hell is third and Destroyer is f...See More

Colin Gawel Kyle Siegrist I think reasonable people can agree The Elder is better than The Wall.

Rick Kinsinger Am I the only one who suspects that Colin's motive for this entire thread was to turn it into a discussion about the KISS discography?

Kyle Siegrist Colin Gawel yeah that's a no brainier

Nate Puderbaugh Oasis "Definitely Maybe"

Pete Vogel Some of my fave debut albums: VH, Boston, Foreigner, The Cars, Tom Petty, Led Zep. All broke new ground, IMO.

Scott Carr Rick Kinsinger isn't that why all Facebook threads are started?

Colin Gawel Matt Walters I can't find pre order for updated KISS touring history? Can you help a brother out?

Scott Carr ColinGawel I think the only place they are taking orders is through pledge music.....

Colin Gawel Scott Carr good tip. Stumbled on many other Kiss books in my quest. You read that Elder one?

Scott Carr yeah The Elder one is good. If you have the solo album book, it's done by the same guy. Lots of info....

Matt Walters Colin Gawel I believe it sold out. Let me check the FAQ

Scott Carr Colin Gawelhttps://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/alive-forever

So if you, like Colin, are a KISS fanatic who hasn't seen Why Him? yet, or if you are just looking for another Christmas-themed raunchy comedy to pass a couple of hours, Why Him? is currently on demand.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

* * *

DO NOT EVEN GLANCE BELOW HERE OR WATCH EITHER OF THE VIDEO CLIPS IF YOU WANT TO BE FULLY SURPRISED BY JUST HOW KISS "PLAYS" INTO THE MOVIE.

Holiday Edition of Some Things to See: in Columbus and Streaming Online - by Anne Marie

In early November, some friends and I had plans to have lunch at Heirloom Cafe and see the Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life exhibition at the Wexner Center.  But there was a hitch.  Veterans Day was celebrated that Friday and OSU, including the Wex, was closed.  Bummer.  We were physically hungry and art-starved and so we headed instead to the Columbus Museum of Art where we enjoyed lunch at the Cameron Mitchell-catered Schokko Art Cafe overlooking the new sculpture garden and then toured the current CMA special exhibition, Beyond Impressionism – Paris, Fin de Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec and Their Contemporaries.

The CMA is the only U.S. stop for this exhibit of more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and other works. If you are still reading this, you may just be enough into art to know that Columbus is also the only traveling location for the Cindy Sherman exhibit as well. You may be asking yourself just how is humble li'l old Columbus shaking off its Cowtown reputation and pulling off these art coups?  I'm not sure, but however it’s happening it’s all the more reason to go see some art.  

Presented in partnership with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Beyond Impressionism exhibition explores the Parisian art scene, focusing on the most important French avant-garde artists of the late 19th century, including Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Odilon Redon, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  This exhibit has something for everyone.  Impressionism, Symbolism, Pointillism, the Nabis, and Art Nouveau. My favorite find was Redon, whose displayed works ranged from hybrids of humans and inanimate objects like The Egg to images of fantastic creatures like Pegasus to delicate but vibrant flowers or an imaginary vision of a beautiful boat.

The Egg (1885)

The Wing (1893)

Pegasus (1895-1900)

If you are like we were the day of our visit, and are overly chatty and many of the pieces lead you to reminiscence about past trips or art history classes taken back in the day when you were in college, you will definitely have a hard time seeing this is one viewing.  By the end, we could only briefly walk through the prints by the Nabis, the best known of which are the colorful Moulin Rouge posters of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Good thing the exhibit is on view through January 21, 2018 since I need to go back.  Museum admission is free on Sundays and the exhibit is only $6 and free to members.    

I got the stomach flu the weekend after Thanksgiving. Luckily, it really was a stomach bug and not anything related to the turkey day meal itself since no one else was taken out by it. With Caitlin in Pittsburgh for a weekend of hockey and the guys off busy with Blue Jackets hockey and Buckeye football, I was left on the couch recovering - and in charge of the remote control.

I’d had the Glen Campbell documentary, Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, on my “to watch” radar for years and with Campbell's August passing, Scott Carr’s mention of the film again in his in memoriam piece,  and an encore presentation of a story about the making of the documentary that aired on All Things Considered, I felt it was overdue for viewing. If you haven’t heard about this one, it follows Campbell and his wife Kim as they receive his Alzheimer's diagnosis and then embark with a small extended family on what began as a 5-week farewell tour that eventually expanded into over 150 shows across the country over 15 months.  While I’m not a huge country music fan, I grew up in the pre-Sony Walkman days of AM/FM radio where the whole country seemed to know the same songs and watch the same few tv channels so I know a few of his solo hits. But before fame struck, Campbell was a studio musician with The Wrecking Crew and he has immense musical talent that transcends genres. At first I enjoyed the film and watching Campbell soaking up the applause from his faithful fans. He was still able to play the music even as lyrics completely evaded him without the teleprompter. But, I couldn’t quite finish it. It was just too painful to watch this man who was the epitome of the alpha male (four times married, the embodiment of the Rhinestone Cowboy and the Wichita Lineman) as his kids kept teasing him forgetting to stay on his mark on the stage or as he had to pee in wastebaskets because he couldn’t remember the way to the bathroom.

Next up was The Winding Stream, another 2014 documentary, about the Virginia folk band the Carter Family. This quirky little film tells the story using interviews and goofy, but kinda charming, animated still photos intermixed with musical footage. I wasn’t at all familiar with the early story of the start of the Original Carter Family and enjoyed having living relatives tell the tale of how A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter left the family farm in 1927 to travel to Bristol, Virginia to make recordings in an old hat factory. But what was most fascinating about the early period was the story of A.P. collecting music from all over the country and turning it into songs. On the one hand, old family music that wasn’t recorded anywhere else and may have been lost was preserved but, on the other, no compensation was paid.  The film moves through the start of Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, the end of Sara and A.P.’s marriage and her self-imposed exile to marry and live with his cousin Coy in California, June Carter’s marriage to Johnny Cash, and up to the creation of the Carter Family Fold, where you can still go hear their music today in Virginia.

Last, but not least, I watched Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s film making the case that the Stooges were one of the most under-appreciated, greatest rock-n-roll bands of all time. I have to say I expected more scenes of wild mayhem in this movie, but I was good with what I got instead.  Iggy Pop, at age 69, looking intensely at the camera and telling the story as clearly he wants it told. And I respect that. I recently heard that reporters are pissed that Robert Plant, out to support his latest solo album, essentially tells them to go get a life when they keep asking him if he plans to write a book.  He tells them it’s all between his ears and that’s enough.  I get the sense that for Iggy that’s not quite enough but he wants to tell the story his way.  What’s there is good stuff (you just wish there was more). Childhood stories, opening for the MC5, working with Bowie, almost making it to stardom but needing to return home broke to his parents’ trailer, and performance footage. One of my favorite moments is when Jarmusch captures the reaction of the Asheton brothers’ mother, as related by their little sister, of when Iggy called to put the band back together 35 years later. “Iggy called! Iggy called and he wants to get the band back together!” says the excited 70-something year old about her 50-something year old sons getting to play with the Stooges again.  I love that power of rock and roll.

Happy viewing! - Anne Marie

Cindy Sherman at the Wex: Her Camera Always Lies - by Anne Marie

Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, an exhibit featuring more than 100 works by the artist spanning more than four decades, opened September 16 and runs through December 31 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Cindy Sherman exhibit is the grand finale to a spectacular year in which every artist featured in the Wex galleries was a woman, and each exhibit outshone the next.  If you think you’ve never heard of Cindy Sherman, you may be aware of her without realizing it.  In the past few decades, she and her work have achieved iconic status.  I last saw a Cindy Sherman exhibit years ago at the MoMA in NYC and it was the talk of the town.  So, my Cbus friends, I hope that you appreciate how incredibly lucky we are that Sherri Geldin and her fellow magicians at the Wex have managed to procure this show for Columbus.  NYC does not get this show.  Columbus is the only stop outside of the inaugural show at The Broad in LA and you will not regret working a viewing into your entertainment schedule before 2017 draws to a close.  

When you go, I would highly recommend that you take advantage of one of the free docent-led tours that the Wex offers on occasion (call to confirm dates and times) and can be scheduled at other times for groups of 8 or more. That’s what my friends and I did recently and our docent - lovely retired Barrington Elementary librarian Carol, and docent-in-training, Medieval Art History student Izzy - could not have been any more knowledgeable or engaging.  Before we knew it, more than an hour and a half had flown by and I had to call the restaurant to push back our dinner reservations at Trillium down the street. But I digress......  

We began our tour in front of a giant full wall-sized selfie of Cindy.  We decided this particular self-portrait of the artist is unusual in that it is unadulterated. No image-altering makeup, costumes, prosthetics. She sits in what appears to be in an urban bar setting looking steadily off to…? But even though this looks like the real Cindy Sherman, is that who we are supposed to be seeing, or is she supposed to represent someone else, a larger identity? And so the questions begin: Who is Cindy Sherman? What does she want us to see in her art? She stars in all of her photos but claims that they aren’t autobiographical.  She has been willing to accept that much of her art is an examination of gender and identity but resists defining herself as a feminist.

Here’s what I know about Sherman (courtesy of Wikipedia and some other quick internet research): Cynthia Morris "Cindy" Sherman was born January 19, 1954 in NJ. She attended college at SUNY Buffalo from 1972-1976.  In 1983, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the first of numerous honors to follow including a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1982, with Sherman still in her twenties, Eli and Edye Broad began with uncanny prescience to amass the world’s largest collection of her art.  It’s much of that collection, on loan to the Wex, that makes the current exhibit possible.

Our next stop was a bit of a strange one and I have to thank our docents for encouraging us to make it.  We pondered the entry wall painted with the exhibition title at the base of the stairs. We looked at the title - Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life - painted in pale blue and framed in pale pink, the colors typically reserved for baby showers, for representing gender.   We decided this is a signal for us to watch for Sherman playing with stereotypical ideas of gender, and with that we dove into the main exhibit starting with one of her latest works from  2016 - Sherman a la Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, part of her recent series of aging starlets, likely as she confronts her own aging now that she’s in her early 60s, within the context of an industry notorious for discarding actresses as they age.

After a quick stop at some of her very early work, we moved on to Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) from when Sherman moved to NYC from Buffalo at the age of 23. In these, she uses makeup, costumes and scenery to present herself as popular stereotypes of generic Hollywood stars and other women.  The pictures look so real that at first you struggle to place which film they are from.  Even though your brain knows that every picture in the exhibit is Sherman, she is so skilled at the art of deception that you get pulled in.  Our group decided that the picture below looks like a young Liz Taylor-type caught in a tryst.

Although she occupies both sides of the camera, Sherman thinks of herself as an artist, not a photographer.  For her, and for the viewer, the art is in the transformation and the transformation is intended to make us think about the pervasive influence of history, advertising, cinema and the media on identity and particularly female identity.  Nowhere else was this more powerfully evident to me than in the Centerfolds.   Artforum magazine commissioned Sherman to create a series of centerfolds. She did, but rather than looking erotic or sexy, hers look scared, hunted and victimized and the magazine rejected them.

I haven’t even scratched the surface here. So much to see! Did I mention that you can see pictures that I swore were Sherman as Courtney Love and Hillary Clinton, but they weren't? Did I mention that you can watch Sherman's 1997 horror movie, Office Killer starring Molly Ringwald, Carol Kane and Jeanne Tripplehorn which, if you bring the kids, is in a separate viewing room along with Sherman as a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll?  Or that there’s a free audio guide with celebrity commentary by Miss Sixteen Candles herself and John Waters (which I didn’t listen to on my first visit but will on my next)?

You just gotta get to the Wex!  - AML

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