Dusty Wright's Culture Catch - Smart Pop Culture, Video & Audio podcasts, Written Reviews in the Arts & Entertainment

Ice Cream For Crows

Gary Lucas — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:28:30 +0000

Ice Cream For Crows Gary Lucas May 29, 2026 - 17:28

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Willie DeVille strolled into Don Van Vliet's dressing room at The Bottom Line in 1978 after Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band had delivered a fantastic return-to-form performance in NYC. This was two years before I joined Van Vliet to play on Doc at the Radar Station. I was working at CBS Records as a copywriter at the time, and I was backstage as Don's good friend.

After introducing himself to a relatively friendly Beefheart, Willie gushed:

"Hey Don — I got your tunings off your guitarist — and they're beautiful!!"

Don sprang up, fuming:

"You mean... the tunings I INVENTED??"

"Exactly!! Hey man, I gotta take a leak..."

Willie waltzed into the little toilet off to the side of the dressing room, the door closed, and Don said in a hushed, theatrical voice:

"Up, Simba!"

Loud sounds through the door of Mink as he is relieving himself.

"Down, Simba!"

Willie came out all smiles, said his goodbyes, shook Don's hand (he was a big fan), and stumbled out into the night.

I left with Don shortly thereafter. We took a taxi to an all-night coffee shop, where, over multiple cups of java, he continued fuming about DeVille's brazen thievery and his guitarist's apparent betrayal — and then we went back to his room at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where the band was staying.

Around 3 am, having worked himself into a lather over this supposed treachery, he rang the offending guitarist's room and woke him.

"HEY MAN!" he hollered into the phone. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, giving my tunings away to Mink DeVille??"

"Don, those are standard blues tunings — Drop D, open A, open E..."

"Man, don't you understand? I've been ripped off so much! People are like CROWS!! They'll just PECK AWAY!!"

"Okay, sorry, Don. I gotta go back to sleep..."

That was my cue to leave. It had been quite a night.

I went home to crash for a few hours before heading up to Black Rock for yet another boring day working for the Man (who, as everyone knows, "can't bust our music" — in the words of a famously tone-deaf CBS Records ad of the late '60s).

But that day I was all smiles. I always loved hanging with Don.

Who once stated as a Beefheartian axiom:

"A little paranoia is a good propeller."

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Meditative Traces of the Neches River

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:33:51 +0000

Meditative Traces of the Neches River Thalia Vrachopoulos May 26, 2026 - 12:33

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Art Review

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painters

EG-1, 2026, color woodcut, 114" x 270"

Bill Pangburn’s exhibition, Printed Traces: A Neches River Journal, at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET), because of the subject’s personal significance to the artist, should first be discussed in terms of its symbolism. Rivers, since antiquity, have occupied a central position in the philosophical, religious, and metaphysical imagination of humanity, serving as enduring symbols of flux, temporality, memory, purification, and transcendence. In Heraclitus's fragments, the river becomes the ultimate expression of perpetual becoming, encapsulating the idea that existence is defined by constant transformation and instability. Classical philosophy and mythology have further developed this symbolic dimension of the river whose waters represented forgetfulness, oblivion, and the soul’s journey between worlds. Within the Abrahamic traditions, the Jordan River acquired spiritual significance as a site of revelation, purification, and rebirth, especially through baptism.

For Pangburn, the Neches River transcends its immediate geographical and industrial identity within Orange County, in Southeast Texas. Pangburn’s Neches River abstract woodcut prints are animated by shifting textures, layered surfaces, and fluid spatial rhythms, reminding us of various minuscule biomorphic and microscopic organisms. They evoke perpetual movement and light not merely as natural phenomena, but as manifestations of temporality and evanescence. Much like the rivers of ancient philosophical and religious traditions, the Neches River in Pangburn’s work functions as a liminal space suspended between material presence and immaterial transcendence, reactivating the archetypal symbolism of the river within a contemporary artistic vocabulary, transforming the landscape of Southeast Texas into a site of mystical reflection on the passage of time, the fragility of perception, and the continuous movement between the visible and the unseen.

In that sense, Pangburn’s dense black-and-white works of interwoven lines possess a visceral immediacy akin to the visionary writings of António Vieira, particularly insofar as both articulate encounters with the otherworldly through sustained engagement with the motif of the river. In Vieira’s case, his traversal of the Amazon River by canoe in the 17^th century becomes not merely a geographical journey but a spiritual passage, wherein the immense and fluid expanse of the river functions as a catalyst for arcane reflection. The Amazon, in Vieira’s writings, is rendered as an unstable yet generative flux in which material reality and the uncreated energy of God converge, producing a mode of thought shaped by immersion, drift, and revelation. Pangburn described in an interview the formative experience of being in a boat at the center of the river, recalling how his attention shifted toward the reflections and shadows cast across the water’s surface. Much like Vieira’s account of drifting through the Amazon as a site of spiritual and perceptual transformation, Pangburn’s woodcuts channel the unstable rhythms of water, reflection, and movement into densely layered compositions that evoke both ecological complexity and visionary experience.

In a parallel but formally distinct manner, Pangburn’s practice translates this experiential logic into a visual and procedural language of drawing and printmaking, while also emerging from a sustained research interest in natural environments, biotopes, and riverine ecologies rooted in his identity as a native Texan. His aerial woodcuts evoke the dense landscapes of the Neches in the process of desiccation, where waterways appear fragmented into winding curves, exposed channels, hills, and eddies, suggesting the visible traces of ecological depletion. This sensibility is deeply connected to Pangburn’s concern with contemporary environmental crises, particularly the destruction of ecosystems and the increasing scarcity of accessible water sources affecting vulnerable and geographically isolated communities around the world.

In contrast, Margaret Scott Dobbins’ concurrent show Environments Imagined, also housed at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, approaches landscape through an explicitly generative and improvisational mindset, allowing environments to emerge from imagination, associative memory, and the open-ended prompt of "what if," resulting in forms of dreamy aquarelles and vibrant colors that drift toward non-objective topographies. While both Texans, the artists depict the natural environment as a space of becoming rather than of static representation. Pangburn’s work remains more compelling in its refusal to surrender fully to romantic reverie or utopian abstraction. Even as the river operates as a crossing into the transcendent, it is continually anchored to ecological reality and the material consequences of environmental disruption. This tension prevents Pangburn’s imagery from dissolving into purely imaginative landscape-making, instead sustaining a critical awareness of ecological loss and instability that grounds the visual experience in contemporary environmental urgency.

left to right BT 3, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17" BT 2, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17" BT 1, 2026, woodcut, 96" x 17"

Yet Pangburn’s intricate, Daedalian configurations of infinite monochromatic linework (composed as endless mazes, labyrinthine structures, and recursive curves) operate as meditative constructions through which temporal and perceptual boundaries are suspended. Rather than describing the river through textual narration like Veira or imaginal fancy like Dobbins, Pangburn enacts a comparable condition of flow through the disciplined repetition of line, whereby the act of making becomes an embodied form of contemplation. From a distant vantage point, some of the compositions may evoke an affinity with the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism, recalling in particular the all-over fields of mark-making associated with Jackson Pollock. Yet such an initial reading is quickly unsettled upon closer inspection. As the viewer approaches, the surface resolves into an extraordinary system of interlacing forms: sinuous, river-like trajectories of black ink that interweave with finely articulated white interruptions, producing a dense, calligraphic topology of flow and counterflow.

Ultimately, Bill Pangburn’s Printed Traces: A Neches River Journal, presented at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET), culminates in a visual language where his monochrome lines do not merely represent riverine systems but generate a perceptual environment in which the viewer is drawn into a continuous oscillation of flow, recursion, and spatial drift. In this sense, Pangburn’s practice subtly displaces the logic of the Situationist aerial cartographies and dérive, which sought to map psycho-geographical movement from an external or elevated perspective. Instead of surveying space from above, his works internalize movement, collapsing distance into an embodied experience of passage. The trajectory of the river is no longer diagrammed as an external network but approaches the contemplative intensity of calligraphic traditions in Islamic art and Zen Buddhist practice, where the gesture of inscription is inseparable from breath, attention, and inner stillness. The line becomes both a printed trace and an experienced event so that the viewer is not positioned outside the work but is gradually absorbed into its rhythmic continuity of ever-changing forms.

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Careful What You Wish For

Chet Kozlowski — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:45:59 +0000

Careful What You Wish For Chet Kozlowski May 24, 2026 - 14:45

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Literary Review

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drama films

How far will you go for love? That’s the question posed to the characters of the new film Skin of Youth.

Set in Saigon, Skin of Youth centers on Nam and his transgender love, San. They are embroiled in a torrid romance, and both make a living with their bodies: Nam is a scrappy boxer, San is a bejeweled dancer in a drag cabaret show. San dreams of a sex change and scopes out the men who frequent her club. One, Mr. Vuong, offers to finance her operation (and throw in enough for a vacation besides), in exchange for, well, whatever the rich guy wants. Nam is crushed by the fact that he can’t help but love himself. He marries San in a fanciful ceremony. “Grandma,” he exclaims, “I have a wife!”

Nam’s grandma provides traditionalism: all she wants from Nam’s marriage is grandbabies, something San can’t biologically provide her. While San does Mr. Vuong’s bidding, Nam takes up with a prostitute, intending to make her pregnant. Mimi is barely an adult herself, and when San sees her protruding belly, she resents her, then takes her in and establishes a unique family.

Mr. Vuong has many uses for San. He is a sadist and abuses her. Which propels Nam: he’ll finance her surgery himself by abandoning “legitimate” boxing—where he is headstrong and resents rules—and getting into the bone-crushing “dog cage” circuit, where the stakes are higher, and he’s beaten to a pulp nightly.

If the subject is tawdry, the production is anything but. Writer/director Ash Mayfair immerses us in Nam and San’s lurid world, all neon and sweaty shadows. With elegant staging and jackrabbit editing, she crosscuts between Nam’s bloody carnage and San’s glitzy performances. For the most part, Skin of Youth is suspenseful, solid filmmaking. Ms. Mayfair spares us nothing, and the world she depicts is complex. The fights are blistering, while some of the most effective scenes simply show the characters moving around their humdrum life of Saigon poverty. Ms. Mayfair has a good eye for the telling detail and endears us to her characters within minutes. The sex scenes are explicit but essential to the scenario.

The performances are all excellent. Trân Quân plays San with a doe-faced radiance, by turns seductive and tragic. She is heartbreaking as she yearns for and plans her surgery. Nam (a wide-eyed and rooster-haired Võ Diên Gia Huy) scoots through crowded alleys and markets on his motorcycle, barely avoiding police. Phan Thi Kim Ngân plays Mimi with an endearing childlike innocence. And Hajime Onoue is properly sinister as Mr. Vuong.

On the downside: perky pop music takes the sting out of some hard-hitting scenes (was that a decision of its Western distributors? If so, it’s misguided). As the story unfolds, and we wonder how Nam, San, and Mimi’s fates will resolve, we are plunged into a courtroom drama. It’s a narrative copout. The climax is generic when it should be as powerful as all that comes before.

________________________________

Skin of Youth. Directed by Ash Mayfair. 2026. Vietnamese with English subtitles. Runtime 122 minutes.

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The Folly of Youth

Jay Reisberg — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:15:38 +0000

The Folly of Youth Jay Reisberg May 22, 2026 - 20:15

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Film Review

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TV series

Playing Around (TV Mini Series, Season 1, 2026)

Original Spanish Title: “Soy Germán Andrés Yanex (G.A.Y)”

Directed by James Camargo De Alba

Screenwriters: James Camargo De Alba and Deimer Vergara Torres

Cinephobia Releasing, streaming on Amazon Prime and Vimeo

Season one of the Spanish-language Playing Around is the most thoroughly enchanting miniseries to come my way, at once outrageously hilarious and deeply poignant. There is so very much to like about Playing Around, particularly the extraordinary flair and sense of whimsy which James Camargo De Alba brings to the entire production. In Colombia, the twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, Germán (portrayed by the series creator James Camergo De Alba), is desperately seeking a lasting relationship before he hits thirty. He goes about it the modern way: using meet-up sites, with mixed results. He appears to be hitting it off with various successive candidates, each of which must be “the one”, only to find they lack the ability or desire to go the distance.

The series opens with Germán announcing to his mother, Gloria (played to perfection by Obeida Benavides), that he is gay. She is taken aback but really just wants her son to be happy. Gloria is the kind of wise and compassionate Mother everyone should have, and she shares her wisdom and vulnerabilities in a decidedly endearing manner. Prior to his straightforward declaration, he muses in fantasy sequences about how to broach the topic with her: he imagines being whisked down a hospital corridor on a gurney after a bloody accident. Might this be the best time to tell her? This first season series is full of these cinematic asides, always colorfully rendered, and I began looking forward to them. Throughout Playing Around, Germán also looks straight into the camera, punctuating the action with his face expressing his personal feelings about what’s going on. [These devices reminded me of Federico Fellini's use of fantasy in 8 ½, when the character Guido displays his vision of how he will respond to being hounded.] Gloria inquires about Germán's past interactions, and we are presented with a selection of his encounters. Early on, Angel is introduced: a fellow university student who has missed his bus, and Germán tells Mom he’s staying the night. We’ll be seeing a great deal more of Angel as the series proceeds. Germán certainly is making the effort. Later, Germán meets Daniel and Diego, who invite him to join them in a “thruple.” Both Daniel and Diego secretly go off alone with Germán, which ends with Diego attempting to strangle him in a violent, jealous rage. So much for the “thruple”! Germán is the kind of well-mannered young man who expects those with whom he engages to be as sincere and authentic as himself — and therefore experiences a great deal of letdown. But he still proceeds with his quest, filled with twists and turns that sustained my rapt attention through to the episode's conclusion.

A standard recap of the entire season will not sufficiently capture the high-toned atmosphere of this series, so I'm providing highlights to hopefully convey the spirit of Germán’s adventure.

Near the middle of this first season, we experience a set piece. Germán works for a company that renders customer telephone support. He receives a letter inviting him to a photo session to create a calendar aimed at promoting the company’s diversity. An overly exuberant young manager arranged the photo session with various staff members who, in her mind, display diversity. There is Monica, who is Afro-Colombian, but (in the manager’s vision) she isn’t dark-skinned enough and gives her makeup to darken her complexion. Luis is a trans boy. Jorge has a hearing aid (in just one ear). Jenny uses a wheelchair — the bourand the manager tells her that she needs to look more pathetic and she halfheartedly complies. German, as a “gay” man, doesn’t look gay enough for her and costumes him in a preposterous feathery outfit with sparkly spectacles. She then plies the "diverse group" with strong drink, and a party with dancing ensues. Cut to: Germán waking up with a hangover in bed with Luis, wondering how he got there. They commence an affair. Germán frolics sweetly with Luis — but when Germán broaches becoming partners, Luis backs away, suddenly departing to walk his dog. Germán opens his phone to find that Luis has unfriended him. Heartbreak!

Gloria suggests that Germán may receive useful guidance from a psychotherapist. He declines her suggestion in favor of a regimen of self-care: working out, Tai Chi, yoga, running, and affirmations spoken into a mirror — all undertaken with diligent (and often goofy) resolve. It doesn’t work. He falls back to being down-and-out depressed, and finally takes his mother’s suggestion for psychotherapy. He makes an appointment at a clinic, not knowing which therapist he will be assigned. Unbeknownst they assign him to Angel. Angel says he might not be the right person to help Germán, but he has a friend who is a holistic therapist who channels angels and aligns the chakras, who might be more appropriate (appropriate?). Regardless, they slowly settle into conversation, and later have a second session after which they part in a particularly warm and friendly manner. Might this interaction with Angel evolve into what Germán seeks?

Playing Around is beautifully crafted, full of soft, bright light everywhere, and glossy in the best sense of the word. The sets provide a lovely backdrop for the action, and the cinematographer, Mariano José García Sánchez, certainly knows how to position and move his camera in these gracious settings. The music, composed by Emiro Pérez, is delightfully airy, seamlessly melding with the action. James Camargo De Alba, as Germán, shows that he is a superb actor as well as director, and the entire supporting ensemble plays their roles with natural grace.

I greatly favor independent productions like Playing Around, because I sense there were no "suits" (the moneypeople killjoys of Hollywood) compromising James Camargo De Alba’s intentions. I truly look forward to subsequent seasons.

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Don’t Be Cruel

Chet Kozlowski — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:29:41 +0000

Don’t Be Cruel Chet Kozlowski May 20, 2026 - 01:29

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Film Review

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drama

Poor Nore. She just wants to get laid, and none of the men will do it.

They know her. She’s a regular at the bar, and most of them have either bedded her or heard about her. She asks the owner. No go. The bartender. No go. A married man is sitting on the couch. She tells him she has nowhere to sleep, and he offers to pay for a room. But he won’t be joining her.

The new film Easy Girl is writer/director Hille Norden’s feature debut. Upfront, it asks the question: How hapless must a girl be to offer herself and be rejected?

All this is witnessed by Jonna, a shy tomboy who can’t take her eyes off Nore. When a man finally responds to Nore’s proposition, Jonna insinuates herself between them and drives him off. Jonna offers her a spare room in her apartment.

Nore moves in. Jonna doesn’t necessarily want sex with Nore, she just wants to bask in the glow. Jonna is fascinated. She watches her dress. Nore makes her own clothes, blowsy gowns that make her look like a cross between Tinkerbell and Blanche Dubois—fairy princess as predator. But even as Nore remains upbeat, Jonna notices her body is covered in bruises and self-harm scars.

Nore brings home a succession of damaged men: a masochist, one with one eye. Jonna takes up with the ones Nore has brought home and discarded. The men profess their love, but they get a cup of coffee in the morning, then get out. If they balk, Jonna defends her friend: “Do you have a problem with her liking sex?” One guy, Michel, can’t get it up for Nore, yet takes up with Jonna and becomes the women’s guardian angel.

And then the bottom falls out. Literally. In an unexpected cinematic trick, we plunge through the looking glass into Nore’s psyche. There’s her younger self, open and naïve and seen in what we suppose is a flashback, being violated by her first love. We hear her abuse happen off camera as her adult self and Jonna observe from across the room. Jonna asks, “Who would hurt someone they love?” Nore replies, “What’s the point of hurting someone you don’t care about?”

It’s this second half that sets Easy Girl apart. Surreally, the younger Nore joins her adult self and Jonna on the dance floor and on the prowl. The film switches from a depiction of casual sex to an intense meditation on the long-term consequences of sexual violence.

Easy Girl is writer/director Hille Norden’s feature film debut. It’s an incredibly intimate film, rendered with rich imagination. Ms. Norden has tricks up her sleeve and a story to tell. Her directorial style is at once earthy and flamboyant.

Easy Girl’s advertising campaign is misleading, suggesting a softcore thriller. Its title is sexist: who but a male would consider Nore “easy”? (The original title “Lihtne tüdruk” translates to A Simple Girl, closer to the mark. The film has also been seen under the title A Smalltown Girl, which is totally beside the point.

As Nore, Dana Herfurth is mesmerizing, as lean as a lightning bolt. She’s a waif, a lithe body with a strawberry cream complexion. Nore seeks out men (“I can’t be alone”) and accepts defilement, and her shift from party girl to abuse survivor is convincing. Luna Jordan plays Jonna with an impish charm that ripens into wisdom as she helps her friend. Jonna is Nore’s foil and alter ego until young Nore (Vera Fay) comes along. As Michel, Jakob Gessner simmers with razor-sharp conviction, you’re never sure what he’s capable of or how his impotence and suppressed rage will manifest.

Easy Girl most resembles Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), a similar study of sexual license, except that protag presented as a symbol of liberation and free love. Nore’s psychic wounds come from trauma, and they go deep: according to her, “You’re allowed to love people who hurt you,” even while carrying a burden of guilt and pain.

___________________________________________

Easy Girl. Directed by Hille Norden. 2026. In German with English subtitles. Runtime 124 minutes

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Actors Shine in Electrifying Becky Shaw Revival and Well, I’ll Let You Go

Helen Eisenbach — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:17:55 +0000

Actors Shine in Electrifying Becky Shaw Revival and Well, I’ll Let You Go Helen Eisenbach May 20, 2026 - 01:17

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Theater Review

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Broadway

Alden Ehrenreich and Madeline Brewer in BECKY SHAW - Photo by Marc J. Franklin

There’s a moment late in Bubba Weiler’s dramedy Well, I’ll Let You Go where you can hear the audience gasp. A young woman we’ve just met blurts out a piece of information that upends everything we’ve been told so far. It’s a satisfying shock in a play that’s mostly been a tease, parsing out (in small portions) the details of its central mystery: How was a beloved husband and pillar of the community killed, and what events led to his “hero’s” death?

One rewrite away from coalescing into something magical, Well feels like a short story transposed to the stage, sometimes inventively, sometimes sluggishly. The writing and characters are often distinct, funny, and unexpected, and the story becomes especially strong in its final quarter, when uneven storytelling gives way to revelatory plot twists, beautifully written and acted, that awaken the audience—as well as the play’s numb lead.

Until that last lap, Well doesn’t quite cohere in tone and pacing, thanks in part to an overdetermined framing device that undercuts opportunities for actors to bring their own drama and nuance, and a stalled opening scene featuring a character of no discernible value, dramatic or otherwise.

The cast is almost uniformly wonderful: Lortel/Obie winner Emily Davis is heartbreaking; Constance Schulman is comically delicious; and Danny McCarthy, Cricket Brown, and Amelia Workman give compelling, emotionally resonant performances of characters we haven’t seen before. Narrator Matthew Maher shines brightest in a wordless scene that almost justifies the play’s Our Town–inspired framework; the actor seems more comfortable inhabiting a role than carrying the weight of exposition. As the play’s dazed, grieving widow, Obie Award winner Quincy Tyler Bernstine moves in rare moments of anger or radiant happiness, but I couldn’t help wishing she had imbued her character’s fugue state with more emotional color.

Lauren Patten in becky shaw. photo: Marc j franklin

By contrast, there is not one moment in Gina Gionfriddo’s searing, sensational Becky Shaw that could possibly be improved. Arriving on Broadway almost twenty years after the regional/Off Broadway debut that got it nominated for a Pulitzer that it deserved to win. This electrifying production creates the kind of magic that’s rare on any stage. All it takes, apparently, is a dazzling script that continually surprises; a fleet, ingenious staging that renders even the scene changes exhilarating; and a remarkable cast fully up to the task of reaching the black-comic heights and emotional depths created for them.

A dysfunctional-extended-family drama that defies categorization—and gravity—Becky is a twisty, twisted ride, here scathingly funny, there unexpectedly moving. At every turn, the actors soar: from Lauren Patten’s highly strung seeker, a challenging character perfectly embodied, to her devoted beta husband, an initially puzzling choice who, in a nuanced Patrick Ball’s hands, will prove to contain multitudes; from the chillingly droll Linda Emond to the chillingly sly Madeleine Brewer, a Machiavelli in a summer frock. In a role first made irresistible by a silky, manipulative Thomas Sadoski, Alden Ehrenreich bears down without letting up, until the one player he can’t seem to beat creates fault lines in his armor, to devastating effect. Becky leaves him on a precipice, the play that bears her name stunning in every sense of the word.

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Through the Eye, Not with It

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:06:29 +0000

Through the Eye, Not with It Thalia Vrachopoulos May 12, 2026 - 19:06

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Art Review

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abstract expressionism

A Figure of the Soul, 2025, 122x122 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

Gong Byung: Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence

Exhibition Tenri Cultural Institute, New York City

April 13^th- 25^th, 2026

As the season nears the threshold of summer, the Manhattan art world undergoes a palpable transformation, mirrored in the city's shifting meteorology. There is a particular resonance this Spring in the way the atmosphere softens, as the Atlantic wind loses its wintry bite and grows progressively warmer. This sense of a hyper cosmic bridge between the primordial and the contemporary is nowhere more evident than in the city’s galleries.

Anastasiya Tarasenko’s solo, Primordial Soup, at Anna Zorina Gallery, emerges as a profound anchor for such a pre- and post-historical mediation. While the title ostensibly references Alexander Oparin’s hypothesis regarding the elemental biogenesis of the planet, Tarasenko transcends the purely biological to offer a spiritualized rendering of this evolutionary sludge. Her Old Master-like canvases deconstruct and challenge evolutionary theory, saturating it with a visceral Boschian grotesque that exposes the raw instincts of human consumption. Amid this material instability, the work channels the sublime mysticism of artists such as Mikalojus Ciurlionis, who was known for translating musical spirituality into turbulent seascapes.

An even more compelling bridge is found in the abstract work of Korean artist Gong Byung with his debut solo exhibition, Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence, curated by Paris Suechung Koh at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Gong’s series is paired with the sophisticated precision of Koh’s curation, where the strategic placement of each piece allows the ambient light to activate the artist's intricate carvings. Gong’s series offers a unique visual synthesis of non-objective abstraction with the Zen metaphysics of emptiness or Sunyata. The thirteenth-century Japanese Zen monk, Dogen, in his celebrated writings, does not conceive of emptiness as a nihilistic void or mere absence of being, but rather as the dynamic interdependence and impermanence of all phenomena. Herein, emptiness and fullness cease to exist as opposites, and reality is understood as an unbroken process of becoming; a generative matrix of boundless potentiality. By systematically carving into the transparent substrate, Gong creates a sculptural idiom where the act of removal becomes the very genesis of form. This density of emptiness mirrors Dogen’s rejection of dualism, effectively collapsing the distinction between the void and the manifest. Simultaneously, light refracts through the engraved trajectories of Gong’s chisel, manifesting a light of presence that captures the fleeting and luminous nature of existence, elevating the industrial to the spiritual and providing a profound encounter with the essential non-duality of being and non-being.

The Eyes of the Soul, 2023, 97x97x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

At first glance, Gong’s circular works A Figure of the Soul and The Eyes of the Soul resemble an immense eye suspended in darkness. The work’s hollow center recalls a pupil as both a physical aperture and a spiritual emptiness. Yet this void is not an absence in the negative sense. Rather, it evokes a condition akin to śūnyatā, empty of fixed substance, yet immeasurably full of cosmic vastness. The radiating lines extending from the center create the impression of an industrialized periphery, simultaneously mechanical and organic, as though the works exist between celestial cartography and engineered precision. The golden surface of The Eyes of the Soul resembles a monumental cymbal caught in perpetual vibration. At the same time, the silver-white expanses of A Figure of the Soul suggest a biomorphic galaxy in continuous expansion, within the infinite flux of the universe. This sensibility resonates profoundly with the artist’s own statement that “time is flow, and living is flow,” and that the layered traces of carving, scratching, pressing, and pouring become material manifestations of existence itself. The transparent acrylic surface, which according to Gong “reveals everything, even the smallest dust and the innermost layers,” functions not merely as material but as a philosophical membrane through which the artist seeks to render “more beautiful and pure forms of the soul, as well as unknown worlds.”

Emotional Loneliness, 2025, 204x122x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

In his monumental work Emotional Loneliness, Gong abandons the centripetal cosmology of the earlier round compositions in favor of an immense horizontal field that unfolds like a haunted threshold between matter and disappearance. The work evokes the spectral atmosphere of an analog transmission slowly dissolving into static; its dense accumulation of vertical incisions resembles both frozen rainfall and electronic interference hovering in vacant nullity. In this sense, the piece possesses a haunting quality: it appears as though the image was caught between memory and erasure, between the persistence of presence and the inevitability of entropy. The lower register, with its fractured crystalline textures and sediment-like accumulations, recalls the abstracted ice landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, yet stripped of Romantic figuration and translated into a post-human vocabulary of material vibration. Vast, empty, and glacially silent, the composition confronts the viewer with a sublime expanse that resists narrative anchoring, producing instead a meditative confrontation with immeasurable distance and existential isolation.

At the same time, the work extends the transcendental ambitions of Mark Rothko into a radically different metaphysical terrain. Whereas Rothko’s chromatic fields sought spiritual immersion through color and atmosphere, Gong’s Emotional Loneliness approaches sublimity through the ontology of emptiness itself, an abyssal field in which form continually dissolves into nothingness. The acrylic panel, transparent yet resistant, records countless acts of carving, scratching, and accumulation until the surface itself appears fossilized by duration. What emerges is an image that feels simultaneously geological and digital, ancient and post-industrial; a frozen psychic landscape in which silence acquires material density, and where the soul, stripped of all symbolic ornament, confronts the infinite coldness and beauty of emptiness itself.

My Inner Self, 2025, 245x122x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Paint

Similarly, Gong’s My Inner Self, with its dense violet-electric hues recalling the crystalline luminosity of Mikhail Vrubel, intensifies the charged energy of the inner landscape. In this striking composition, Gong moves beyond the earlier themes of silence and loneliness, transforming the canvas into an ethereal field of chromatic vibration alive with metaphysical force. The work evokes, with even greater philosophical tension, Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas of emptiness as a generative and dynamic state of being. At the same time, its luminous interiority suggests certain Vedāntic notions of consciousness, without fully equating emptiness with Ātman. Here, Gong creates a deep panorama of indigo and pulsating magenta that seems to flicker with its own inner light. This chromatic intensity suggests that the emptiness of the self is not a static void, but a charged space of latent spiritual energy. The inner self thus appears as a vast, non-objective expanse in which the carved acrylic substrate serves as a conduit for shimmering otherworldly force.

Relationship, 2024, 152.5x101x5 cm, Sculpting on Acrylic Panel, Special Pai

Gong Byung’s work urges us to depart from mere optical observation toward a more radical mode of perception. As the Atlantic winds carry the promise of summer, his canvases remind us that we must learn to see through the eye, not with it. To see with the eye is to be trapped by the industrial rigidity of the material and the surface-level finish of the acrylic; to see through it is to engage the inner vision of emptiness as a lens of enlightenment. Gong’s masterfully carved substrates act as this very threshold, where the transparency of the medium ceases to be a physical barrier and becomes a conduit for the sublime. Density of Emptiness, Light of Presence forces the viewer into a state of seeing through the physical towards the hyperphysical. Ultimately, the "Density of Emptiness" is revealed not as a void to be feared, but as the primary site of a "Light of Presence," an internal landscape where the soul, unburdened by the dualism of being and non-being, finally recognizes its own luminous continuity within the infinite flow of the universe.

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O The Humanity

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:45:35 +0000

O The Humanity Chet Kozlowski May 7, 2026 - 15:45

Topics

Film Review

Tags

drama

We are fascinated by the workings of hospitals. Evidence every TV show from Dr. Kildare to E.R. to Grey’s Anatomy (now in, what, its 79^th year? Kidding, 22) to the current fave, HBO’s The Pitt. We thrill to dedicated professionals charging purposefully down pristine halls, barking instructions and jargon. So much at stake, so many skills on display. They assess, they race against time, they grieve. We admire them and identify with them.

Medical dramas work best as episodic series. They are a continuum: save some, lose some; there’s always more to come. The new drama Late Shift is self-contained. It feels like it's happening in real time, but crisply distills an eight-hour shift to two. It’s a day in the life of Floria Lind, a nurse, not in the E.R., but nonetheless dealing with life and death.

Floria arrives at the hospital on public transit, the picture of empathy and cool efficiency. She’s cheery and professional, a locus of calm in an understaffed world. We trail her from room to room as she checks in with patients. Most are appreciative, like the African immigrant about to undergo surgery who shyly drops that he has no relatives or friends to stay with him. “I’m your friend,” assures Floria. To calm another, she sings to her.

Others complain: their test results have not come back yet; an ornery patient on private insurance times his services with an expensive watch and declares them mishandled. Inattentive doctors display a lack of humanity. Overworked and losing her cool, Floria’s mantra becomes “there are only two of us on duty.”

Of course, the center cannot hold. The shift wears on, and Floria’s patience wears out. She becomes harried and fed up. She deals with that damn watch. And finally, she turns her attention to the quietest of the lot, a squeaky wheel who hasn’t asked for notice, and whose circumstances turn out to be the most dire.

As Floria, Leonie Benesch is a perfect Everyperson. I’ve seen her in another workplace film on Netflix, The Teachers’ Lounge. She’s extremely watchable. As Floria, she presents as stalwart and natural. We believe in her. We root for her. Ms. Benesch has also been in Babylon Berlin and The Crown.

Director Petra Volpe has several films to her credit. She is as efficient as her protagonist. In her hands, Late Shift is Steadicam heaven: Ms. Volpe’s camera glides and dodges and hovers around Floria, a frenetic witness to the mayhem. The viewer is invested in Floria’s plight: with so many successes, it’s the failures that haunt. The climax is quietly devastating and set to Hope There’s Someone by Antony and the Johnsons, itself a haunting coda. Late Shift concludes as a parable and offers an incisive view of a health care system that is humane yet still imperfect.

Floria faces mortality itself, and we realize that tomorrow, or on her next shift, she will do it all over again.

_____________________________________

Late Shift. Directed by Petra Volpe. 2025. A Swiss and German production, in German with English subtitles. 92 minute

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Give My Regards To Broadway

Robert Cochrane — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:25:32 +0000

Give My Regards To Broadway Robert Cochrane May 6, 2026 - 19:25

Topics

Book Review

Tags

autobiography

GAELYNN LEA: It Wasn't Meant To Be Perfect (Algonquin Books)

It Wasn't Meant To Be Perfect is a book with other books within. A coming-of-age saga where a girl meets a shy boy, a folk 'n' roll road-travelogue, a tract of passionate resolve, a tale of a creative soul and her journey into unexpected limelight. It reads like a well-structured novel, at times joyous, occasionally steeped in pathos, yet always effortlessly funny and engaging.

Gaelynn Lea was born in 1984 with osteogenesis imperfecta. The genetic condition commonly known as brittle bones. Her limbs had fractured many times in the womb, and by the time she had arrived, they'd set in their broken fashion. Another aspect of her condition is being of small stature. Not the start one would necessarily anticipate, but her family, creative souls, worked within their slender financial means, whilst providing immense love and diligent care. Their daughter showed an aptitude for music, and an enterprising music teacher turned her initial limitations around by allowing Gaelynn Lea, perched in her wheelchair, to play a violin like a cello, which had been her pupil's initial instrument of choice, but the economies of scale had other ideas.

The book offers wonderful insights into a soul's fascination with and desire to make music, and this daughter of the town of Duluth, which also spawned Bob Dylan, never allowed the barriers placed before her because of her disability to impede her creative desires. Initially, she simply wished to learn her instrument, then to play, but her passion was fully ignited by her first experience of a live orchestra. Her innate ability initially drew the attention of Alan Sparhawk from the band Low, who gifted her a loop pedal and another small creative piece slotted into place. Then one day, like a bolt from nowhere, she wrote her first song, entering a new phase without quite realizing that she had.

The book has moments of utter amusement, wisdom, and callous despair. The scene of Gaelynn's tiny frame being carefully decanted into a rucksack whilst her older siblings planned a sweetshop trip illicitly is comedy gold. Her callous treatment by arrogant doctors, which almost cost her life, or a benefits officer's advice, intent on rescinding all of her Medicaid support after her change of circumstances since getting married, "Get divorced!" brings into sharp relief the casual cruelty meted out by the able-bodied world on those with disabilities.

Happy in her status as a violin tutor, things changed drastically for her when, on the advice of a friend, she reluctantly entered and then won NPR's Tiny Desk competition in 2016. Her tales of life on the road as a wheelchair user are grim, and her gradual sense of advocacy for herself and others in her position becomes an inevitable development. She is disarmingly guileless. When approached to sing with Michael Stipe, she had no idea who he was, though she knew of REM. The same applied to Daniel Craig when she was asked to write the music for the 2024 Broadway production of Macbeth in which he played the lead. She simply took the job and completed the project to much-deserved acclaim.

Gaelynn Lea has pulled off the same feat Quentin Crisp did sixty years previously with his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant. Whereas Crisp exposed a gay world that few had any knowledge of, she allows her readers to experience up close and personal, hers as a creative, disabled woman. It is candid and completely lacking in self-pity, but illuminates aspects the able-bodied are privy to ignore, be that getting into a building or onto a stage, using a restroom, or being treated as an equal.

It Wasn't Meant To Be Perfect is an eloquent introduction to Gaelynn Lea's inner world. A funny, witty, and moving read, beautifully written and effortlessly engaging, I defy anyone who encounters it not to come away with a feeling of immense affection and a change in their assumptions about those classed as the disabled.

It will also, hopefully, widen the coterie of listeners for her exquisite music, her lilting voice, and her hauntingly beautiful songs.

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GRAVITY IS THE MASTER: CAPTAIN BEEFHEART vs. (One of) THE GRUNT PEOPLE

Gary Lucas — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:55:27 +0000

GRAVITY IS THE MASTER: CAPTAIN BEEFHEART vs. (One of) THE GRUNT PEOPLE Gary Lucas May 3, 2026 - 20:55

Topics

Music Review

Tags

avant garde

The mastering of the 1980 Virgin/Atlantic album Doc at the Radar Station, which includes my first-ever appearance on a major-label album, performing the Don Van Vliet instrumental composition "Flavor Bud Living" solo, was a complicated affair.

Mastering is a very important step in the process of realizing the finished black vinyl album, all dressed up in a shiny, attractive cover packaging for sale in the marketplace, and eventually placed lovingly on a turntable by music fans. It’s an end-stage refinement, a goosing of the mixed-down two-track quarter-inch master tape for optimal playback at home, preferably on a good stereo system; basically, a tweaking of the final submitted master tape for maximum oomph in the ear of the beholder. Refinements added in the mastering process include additional EQ, reverb, and volume adjustments, plus compression where needed, with the result next to be inscribed by a cutting lathe digging one big concentric groove into the gleaming surface of a blank lacquer disc — the master template for metal stampers to be manufactured and sent out to the record plant to pump out multiple vinyl album copies. For audiophiles, a well-mastered vinyl album was like, umm, ice cream for crow, boasting crystal-clear sonics that seemed to leap out of your stereo speakers in an almost 3D reproduction of the music on record — and mastering engineers like Bob Ludwig and Bernie Grundman became legends.

In spring 1980 our recording and mixing engineer Glenn Kolotkin, who had toiled for months with Don and the guys to get a really well-recorded album in the can at Soundcastle Studios in Glendale, California, convinced us to take care of this all important mastering job back in Manhattan at CBS Records Mastering Studios —essentially a garage, which at the time was located right next to my place of employmentat at Black Rock on West 52nd Street, where I tolied as a copywriter for CBS Records — and to have this operation done on CBS's spiffy new Discomputer Cutting Lathe, supposedly the state of the art in the field, with micro-adjustments to the abolute sound made by computer.

Don and his wife Jan flew in from the desert, and I rented a car and picked them up at JFK, acting as their chauffeur (another managerial duty — my then wife Ling and I were Don’s de facto managers during that period, as he trusted we had his best interests at heart — which we did). Early the next night, I drove them over to the Mastering Studio, where we met Glenn (a really good guy) and the troll in charge of mastering our album and operating the Discomputer. The dude who handled this critically important operation was literally a middle-aged semi-inebriated "wild and crazy guy" named Stanley, who didn't get the music at all (naturally), laughed incessantly and tortured Don Van Vliet mercilessly throughout the session, who after listening through the album repeatedly began singing "I vent to see da Gypsy Vo-mannn" in a grotesque parody of the Beefheart singing voice, while futzing with the controls of this new disco-contraption.

Stanley set the mastering levels too high on the first pass, and Don’s recorded voice proved too extreme to track during "Hot Head," the first number on Doc at the Radar Station. A "chip fire" broke out midway through the first song, melting hot PVC that piled up all over the diamond-tipped cutting stylus, which jammed at that point in the song and ceased moving, refusing to inscribe the groove further, rendering this first pass useless. (Shades of Don blowing up a ribbon microphone while laying down the vocals for “Electricity” on the very first Beefheart album, Safe As Milk, in 1967 due to the sheer power of his voice. You can actually hear the mic break up and disintegrate near the end of the song, when he sings: “Eeeeeeeeee-lek-triiciteeeeeeee!"

photo by Glenn Kolotkin taken at Sound Castle Studios Glendale for recording of Doc at the Radar Station

Don freaked. He look worried and started sweating, He was normally, imperiously, cool as a cucumber and in control of most life situations unfolding around him (easy when you live in the Mojave Desert) — except when he collided with mainstream music biz functionaries in NY, LA, and London — and now he was at the mercy of this clown, this "human paraquat" (to quote The Dude in The Big Lebowski, who dug Beefheart). We'd put such care into the realization of this album, and this fucker literally did not get Don or his music, couldn't care less in fact, and seemed hell-bent on screwing up the final stage here.

Don literally laid it on the line and pleaded with him:

"Sir! Don't you understand that this album may be the LAST FAIR DEAL GOING DOWN??"

I don't think I ever saw Van Vliet desperate like this, ever. Don seemed to have no ability or agency to King Canute-like roll back the rising tide of bullshit that threatened to engulf him at this moment.

The guy just smiled uncomprehendingly at Don as if he didn’t understand what Don was worried about. Glenn quickly intervened and suggested we break for a drink at a watering hole across the street.

So we took Stanley across the street to his favorite bar in an attempt to humor/pacify the guy into cutting the crap and doing his job properly. Stanley knocked back a few more, which seemed to calm him down. And when we got back to the studio, he eventually cut an acceptable master for us on the mighty CBS Discomputer Cutting Lathe.

Saved!

The album came out a few months later to spectacular reviews (thank you, Charles Shaar Murray, among others).

The week of release, though, Atlantic severed its distribution ties with Virgin Records, and the album literally disappeared from retail shelves overnight.

We had a UK and European tour that autumn, which was a triumph, with audiences and critics alike hailing a return to form for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band--but good luck finding the album at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street in London.

That was my first taste of hard knocks in the music biz...and it was not going to be my last, not by a long chalk.

They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I'd had a taste of the poison of show-business — the endless cycle of recording and touring and promoting and publicizing, and then doing it all over again — the whole vampire circus.

And despite the defeat of our superb album ultimately crashing and burning due to a situation beyond our control, I enjoyed the whole experience. I felt alive in contrast to the deadness I felt as an employee of the corporation.

It got me adrenalized, and higher than any drug I'd ever taken — and I wanted more.

“I can't go on. I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

And I'm still here to tell the tale.