John Colpitts and Man Forever will kick off the sixth annual Ecstatic Music Festival on January 29 with Tigue (photo by Lisa Corson)
Who: Man Forever, Tigue, Phil Kline, Judd Greenstein
What: Ecstatic Music Festival kickoff
Where: The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC and WQXR, 44 Charlton St. at Varick St.
When: Friday, January 29, $20, 7:30
Why: The sixth annual Ecstatic Music Festival, sponsored by the Kaufman Music Center, gets under way January 29 at the Greene Space with the pairing of Man Forever (Ryonen, Pansophical Cataract), led by John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions), and Brooklyn-based trio Tigue (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic, and Carson Moody, joined by Tristan Kasten-Krause and Ben Seretan) teaming up for a new look at Louis Thomas Hardin’s 1971 album, Moondog II. The evening will be hosted by Phil Kline (Unsilent Night), with discussions and Q&As with the artists and curator Judd Greenstein. “The Ecstatic Music Festival brings together artists who don’t typically work together and gives them the opportunity to create something completely new on the stage of an intimate chamber music hall,” Kaufman Music Center executive director Lydia Kontos explained in a statement. “The result is invigorating and often genuinely surprising concerts audiences would not be able to experience anywhere else.” Greenstein added, “This year’s festival is as varied as any we’ve ever presented, with collaborators coming from areas of the musical spectrum that are new to the Ecstatic Music Festival.” The festival continues through March 19 with more than four dozen sonic artists playing Merkin Concert Hall; a festival pass is $150, while other packages are available at various discount levels. Among the shows to look out for are Rachel Grimes and Longleash on February 10, Yo La Tengo and Alvin Lucier on February 17, Lee Ranaldo and Dither on March 2, and William Tyler, Quindar, and Nick Hallett on March 17.
French stage and opera director Patrice Chéreau made an offbeat choice for his debut film, deciding to adapt British thriller writer James Hadley Chase’s The Flesh of the Orchid, the 1948 sequel to his first novel, 1939’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which had been made into a 1948 film by St. John Legh Clowes considered to be one of the worst movies ever. So it’s little surprise that The Flesh of the Orchid is a dark and gloomy, not wholly successful, both tantalizing and frustrating tale of lust and greed. Following up her controversial role in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, the exquisite Charlotte Rampling stars as Claire, a mentally unbalanced heiress who has a penchant for blinding men who attempt to have sex with her. But she takes an odd liking to Louis Delage (Bruno Cremer), a man with financial problems who is on the run after witnessing a murder committed by a pair of cold-blooded killers, brothers Gyula and Joszef Berekian (Hans Christian Blech and François Simon). Meanwhile, Claire’s aunt, the elegant, très chic Madame Wegener (Edwige Feuillère), and her ne’er-do-well son, Arnaud (Rémy Germain), are hot on her trail as well, determined to lock her away again so they can get their hands on the family money.
The extraordinary story of nineteenth-century Jewish-American Renaissance Man Solomon Nunes Carvalho is told in the beautiful documentary Carvalho’s Journey. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, the Jewish cultural center of the U.S. in 1815, Carvalho was a painter, daguerreotypist, inventor, philosopher, husband, father, and practicing Jew. In 1853, Mathew Brady recommended him to explorer John C. Frémont, who was looking for a photographer to document his fifth and final Westward Expedition. So Carvalho brought his bulky equipment and set out to do what no one had done before, take pictures of a vast and treacherous landscape, a journey that would risk the lives of everyone involved as Frémont searched for a railroad route through the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, Carvalho never lost sight of his faith and his deep love for his wife, Sarah Miriam, as evidenced by the detailed, poetic letters he wrote her in addition to his 1857 memoir, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. “With few men, religion is a color, a lifeless, abstract notion, but abstraction is not pure religion. Religion must signify itself in our actions in life. Aye, it must embrace the whole sphere of our activities and affections,” Carvalho, voiced by Josh Hamilton in the film, wrote. Historian David Oestreicher explains, “He was very proud of who he was, but at the same time he was a proud American; he saw the promise of America. I believe that he was being a good American by exercising his right to openly belong to his people. I don’t think he saw a conflict there.”
