Stanley Agbontaen’s “Village Market” will be among the thousands of works at Artexpo this weekend
Pier 94 on the Hudson
Twelfth Ave. & 54th St.
March 26-27, $10-$15 www.artexponewyork.com
After two days open just to the trade, the thirty-second international Artexpo welcomes the public Saturday and Sunday, with more than three hundred exhibitors as well as educational events and special art-related programs. On Saturday morning at 10:00, Free Arts NYC will sponsor a children’s mural painting benefiting underprivileged youths; at noon, Ben Angotti, Marthalicia Matarrita, Andre Trenier, and Julie Freil will fight it out in a live art battle in the sculpture garden; and Michael Pacitti will lead the “In Living Color” seminar at 4:00. On Sunday at 11:00, Eric Smith will moderate a panel discussion on “The Future of the Art World” with Anthony Deljou, Nan Miller, and Robert Reeder, followed at 1:00 with Smith lecturing on “Marketing 101: What They Didn’t Teach You in Art School.”
Saturday night’s screening of Barry Levinson’s POLIWOOD documentary will be followed by a discussion with producers Tim Daly, Robin Bronk, and Robert E. Baruc
Combining art and activism, the Artivist Film Festival is “dedicated to addressing human rights, children’s advocacy, environmental preservation, and animal advocacy.” The seventh annual festival kicked off last night with a screening of Jamal Joseph’s PERCY SUTTON: A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and HARLEM IS MUSIC and continues today with Brian Single’s CHILDREN OF WAR, about Ugandan children who have escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army, preceded by Linda Chavez’s THE ONE WAYZ, involving an immigrant family dealing with the father’s deportation to Mexico. Friday night also includes Brian Malone’s INTELLIGENT LIFE: CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR WORLD and Taghreed Saadeh’s ROUGH CUT. The stars come out on Saturday night, featuring Barry Levinson’s POLIWOOD documentary, which examines the 2008 Democratic and Republican Conventions; the compilation film 8, with shorts by Gus Van Sant, Mira Nair, Gael Garcia Bernal, Gaspar Noel, Addis Ababa, Jane Campion, Jan Kounen, and Wim Wenders; Joyce Chopra’s New York-set GRAMERCY STORIES (followed by a discussion with Chopra); and Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy’s BELONGING documentary about climate change, narrated by Dustin Hoffman. The Artivist Film Festival shows that the world needs a lot of help – and that each one of us can make a difference.
David Bellantoni’s BIRTHDAY DUET has advanced to the semifinals of the Network One Act Festival
TBG Theatre
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through March 31
Tickets: $15
212-239-3198 www.thenetworknyc.com
A different kind of March Madness is going on at the Barrow Group Theater in Midtown, as more than forty twenty-minute plays have been whittled down to thirty for the semifinals, which began March 24, with each production getting an additional two performances prior to the finals. Of the plays that we’ve seen, three have made the finals: David Bellantoni’s “Birthday Duet” is scheduled for March 26 at 6:00, along with “The Gift,” “this Functional Family,” “Dream State,” and “Walter,” and March 28 at 6:00, with “this Functional Family” again, “Ouroboros,” “Beard Envy,” and “Mr. McDonald Has Wings of Fire”; Robert King’s “Halfrican-American” has one showing left, March 27 at noon, with “Mirage,” “BFF Soulmates,” “Beard Envy,” and “A Diner, a Shiner”; and “Mr. McDonald Has Wings of Fire” will also be part of the March 26 8:30 block. Each session features five twenty-minute one-act plays, with the audience voting for their favorites. Award categories include Best Play, Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Actor. Writer-director Bellantoni was also in the finals last year with “Foreplay,” a subway-set drama that was nominated for Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Show and won for Best Actor. This year it’s going to be tough for anyone to beat John Warren in the acting category for his frantic, riotous performance as the title character in Jeffrey Belanger’s “Mr. MacDonald Has Wings of Fire.”
Adapted from Billy Roche’s short-story collection TALES FROM RAINWATER POND, Conor McPherson’s THE ECLIPSE is a gracefully told love story / ghost story, a romantic melodrama with surprising, horrific jump-out-of-your-seat elements. Ciarán Hinds, who was named Best Actor at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival for his complex performance, stars as Michael Farr, a recent widower with two small children living in the seaside town of Cobh in County Cork. Michael, a high school shop teacher, volunteers for the annual Cobh Literary Festival, serving as a driver for such special guests as bestselling authors Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn) and Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle). While Nick, a nasty, bombastic blowhard, tries to rekindle a previous brief fling with Lena, Michael thinks she might be able to help him explain the nightmare visions he’s been experiencing involving his aging father-in-law (Jim Norton). Dublin-born McPherson, who has written such Broadway plays as SHINING CITY and THE SEAFARER and written and directed such films as SALTWATER and THE ACTORS, has crafted a nearly perfect movie, a slice of life that is captivating from start to finish, with beautiful cinematography by Ivan McCollough and a moving score by Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin (with McPherson contributing guitar, bass, and drums). Hinds and Hjejle are both gentle and electrifying together as two lonely people desperately trying to get on with their lives. THE ECLIPSE is a special, magical movie that should not be missed.
A LOAN EXHIBITION CELEBRATING THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARTIST’S DISCOVERY
Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday-Saturday through April 3
212-245-6734 www.gseart.com
Seventy years ago, Galerie St. Etienne held a solo exhibition of the work of a self-taught painter from upstate New York. The eighty-year-old artist, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, chose not to attend the opening of “What a Farmwife Painted” because she was already familiar with all the canvases. Also known as Grandma Moses, she painted idyllic scenes in a folksy style, Americana as seen through a primitivist lens. One of her earliest champions was Galerie St. Etienne founder Otto Kallir, who collected outsider art in addition to such German Expressionists as Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, and Oskar Kokoschka. Kallir’s granddaughter Jane, who now runs the gallery, is celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Grandma Moses’s entrée into the international art world with a revelatory retrospective that will change everything you ever thought about the famous octagenarian.
Nearly seventy works are on view, in addition to archival photographs and some of Moses’s tools. Using oil paint on board or pressed wood, Moses created charming landscapes of her town, horizontal images often with small figures in the foreground, houses and barns in the middle of the canvas, and sky in the upper third. Bathed in spring greens or winter whites, the pictures depict such activities as taking in the laundry, celebrating weddings and holidays, making apple butter, flying a kite, and sledding through the snow. The peaceful settings are interrupted in several works by storms that have hit or are on their way. Two of the most vibrant pieces are “The Quilting Bee,” which features her boldest use of color and is the only painting set indoors, and “When Leaves Turn,” dominated by gorgeous fall hues. The show reveals that Moses was no mere curiosity; she was a skilled painter with a unique visual language. As the excellent exhibition essay concludes, “After seventy years, Grandma Moses’s achievement endures. This, in the end, is the mark of artistic greatness: the ability of the work to survive in multiple shifting contexts and remain forever fresh.”
ROGER MARIS: BASEBALL’S RELUCTANT HERO by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary (Touchstone, March 2010, $26.99)
Wednesday, March 24, Borders, Time Warner Center, 10 Columbus Circle, free, 7:00
Tuesday, April 13, Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and Sports Bar, 42 Central Park South, free, 4:00 www.borders.com www.mickeymantles.com www.books.simonandschuster.com
In seeking to publish the definitive biography of Roger Maris, coauthors Tom Clavin and Danny Peary had a very specific goal in mind as they spent two years speaking with Maris’s family and friends as well as such Hall of Famers as Yogi Berra, Al Kaline, Ferguson Jenkins, Stan Musial, Tom Seaver, Ralph Kiner, and dozens of other baseball players, broadcasters, and executives.
“Like us,” the two writers point out in the acknowledgments at the end of the just-released ROGER MARIS: BASEBALL’S RELUCTANT HERO, “they passionately believed that Roger Maris never received proper recognition from fans and the media for his talent and achievements, his fine character, and his pivotal role in the emerging war between the press and uncooperative celebrities.”
The chapter titles alone reveal that this is not just some feel-good biography: “Family Turmoil,” “Defiance,” “The Villain,” “The Betrayal,” and “Rock Bottom.”
Peary, who has written some twenty books, recently took some time away from his hectic schedule to answer some questions about asterisks, steroids, and home run champs.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about Maris while researching the book?
In the book we document Roger’s war with reporters who were frustrated in their attempts to get him to exchange good quotes for friendly coverage. I knew before doing the research that Roger had a hard time dealing with celebrity and simply attributed that to his being shy and another midwesterner who cherished privacy. What I didn’t know was that he was so unwilling to answer personal questions because, also, there was a history of secrecy in his family dating back to before he was born (including much dysfunction, feuds, and grudges) and that Roger had always kept quiet about his parents hating each other, and his mother’s disreputable behavior.
An even bigger reason Roger was uneasy talking about himself and his on-field heroics was because he idolized his older brother, Rudy Jr., who was considered the better athlete until he got polio. Roger always felt guilty that he went on to have the baseball career that was intended for his brother, so he never felt comfortable tooting his own horn. Rudy Jr.’s polio affected him in profound ways, particularly in regard to the press as he broke Ruth’s record. The sad part is that Roger most definitely became a better athlete than his brother ever would have, but he never admitted it.
Do you think Maris should be in the Hall of Fame?
One reason I wanted to write this book, with Tom Clavin, is that I was there when Maris played and believe Roger’s history as written by sportswriters who didn’t like Roger personally is a distortion of the truth, which was he was a great player who is worthy of Hall of Fame consideration. That he was the guy who broke Babe Ruth’s record — no one else can make that claim — might be enough, as Hank Greenberg asserted, to qualify him for the Hall. But he accomplished a lot more, including two MVPs and All-Star appearances, matching an in-his-prime Mickey Mantle in stats in their seven years together, being the top left-handed batter in the league during his time in the AL, and being an exceptional clutch hitter even when his average was low.
What really qualifies him, I believe, is that he led his era in World Series appearances — seven in nine years — and the only two years his teams didn’t make it were when he was injured. He came to the Yankees when they were a third-place team and they won five straight pennants; he came to the Cardinals when they were a third-place team and they won titles both years he was with them (he was the only major addition to the team), and they stopped winning when he retired. I value greatness and accomplishments over stats, and Maris was great and was the most “winning” ballplayer of his time. (His teams in the minors also improved dramatically when he joined them, so he had a history of making moribund teams into contenders and champions.) Unfortunately, there is no stat for being a great all-around player and there is no stat for never making a mistake, which is how his managers described him. I agree with his teammates who played with him after 1962 who believe he should be in the Hall of Fame.
Maris initially had an asterisk next to his home run record, and now there are many people calling for asterisks to go next to the names Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire, who all hit more than sixty-one homers presumably while taking steroids. Who do you think is the current home run champion, in your mind and the mind of the public?
No asterisk was ever implemented for Maris, contrary to popular belief, but it didn’t matter because Babe Ruth’s name remained in the record books along with Roger’s as the home run champion for 154 games — no other category had such a thing. In 1991, commissioner Fay Vincent got rid of Ruth’s name. McGwire, while on steroids, erased Maris’s name from the record book, getting rid of his identity for the younger generation, a real travesty. Maris was the only one of the four players who bettered Babe Ruth’s record to do it without performance-enhancing drugs and of course should be regarded as the home run champion.
Many of his fans call him the Natural Home Run Champion, and that seems like an appropriate title. Unfortunately, we can never get rid of the other guys from the record books unless they admit they all took illegal substances — and unfortunately steroids weren’t officially illegal in those days. It would be great if the more than one hundred players in the Mitchell Report admitted what they did and we could put asterisks by all of their numbers, but that won’t happen. And remember, it’s not just home runs but singles, doubles, and triples in the record books that are suspect as well. All of the steroid users committed a grave crime against Maris and Ruth but also against the rest of us because the record book can never be fixed.
Tom Clavin and Danny Peary will be reading from and signing copies of ROGER MARIS: BASEBALL’S RELUCTANT HERO on March 24 at 7:00 in the Time Warner Center Borders and on April 13 at Mickey Mantle’s at 4:00, right after the Yankees’ home opener.
“I wanna be like Nikki Corvette,” the Donnas declared on their 1998 song “Gimmie My Radio.” A dozen years later, the Donnas find themselves on the same inspired bill as the Detroit rock-and-roller, who has teamed up with Amy Gore of the Gore Gore Girls to form Gorevette. Along with GGG bassist Lianna Castillo and Powertrane drummer Al King, Gorevette melds 1970s punk with 1990s garage rock on their debut EP, LUSTFULLY YOURS (Strange Girl, January 2010), consisting of seven songs that would make the Runaways jealous. The tunes fly by on a smooth sonic wave, from the Ramones-like “Baby Let’s Rock,” the shortest song on the album at 1:59, to the cool title track, the longest number at a mere 2:39. Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek adds a stirring guitar solo to album opener “Nothings Gonna Stop Me,” a 1960s girl-group sound drives “Honey Don’t You Know?,” pretty background vocals lift “Fake It,” and harder-edged guitars power “Brand New Lover” and “Candy Man.” Gorevette will pull into the Highline Ballroom on March 24, playing with the Donnas and New York City indie band Russian Vogue.
Also this week, the Black Lips and Box Elders are at the Bowery Ballroom on March 24, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, Witch Hunt, and Disaster Strikes are at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on March 25, the Ruby Suns and Toro y Moi are at Brooklyn Bowl on March 26, Love Is All is at Maxwell’s on March 27 with Crystal Stilts and Beachniks and at the Knitting Factory on March 28 with Beach Fossils and the Beets, and Vivian Girls and German Measles are at Brooklyn Bowl on March 28.
