Pianos
158 Ludlow St.
Monday, March 26, $8, 9:00
212-505-3733
www.paulacarino.com
www.pianosnyc.com
“I am lucky in love / I don’t need your comfort or care / I am so lucky in love / even when life is unfair / Yeah, don’t tell me life is unfair,” Paula Carino sings on “Lucky in Love,” from her excellent 2010 album, Open on Sunday, which she financed through Facebook fan donations and released on her own label, Intellectual House o’ Pancakes Records. We’re not about to tell the singer-songwriter, yoga teacher, blogger, and pop-culture columnist that life is unfair, but we don’t mind saying that if life were indeed fair, Carino would be a star. The multitalented musician has been a fixture on the New York City music scene for the better part of a decade, whether playing solo shows at the Parkside Lounge on the Lower East Side or at Freddy’s Backroom in Brooklyn (or twi-ny’s tenth-anniverary party at Fontana’s) with her backing band, which she has given such names as the Better Mind Your Own Business Bureau, the Virtually Spotless, and the Scurvy Merchants. Carino, who lately has been studying counseling psychology while working on a new album, appears to have finally arrived at a permanent appellation for her group: the Good Evening Friends, as in the Frankie Laine and Johnny Ray duet and the classic vaudeville sign-off. Carino and TGEF, featuring Nancy Polstein on drums, David Benjoya on guitar, and Andy Mattina on bass, will play their first gig under that name at Pianos on March 26 at 9:00, preceded by Jett Brando at 8:00 and followed by Teeth and Tongue at 10:00, Dope Dod at 11:00, and Rocky Business at midnight.
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye opens tonight at Clearview Cinemas in Chelsea, with Losier and Genesis P-Orridge on hand for a Q&A following the 7:00 screening.