Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Banner over the Met Opera entrance. Photo by Jill Krementz

No, it’s not Kentridge’s nose, nor does the nose even know whose nose it is. Could it be Shostakovich’s nose, or Gogol’s nose? Well no, this nose is most definitely Kovalyov’s nose, “the devil knows,” whose nose, he says. But when he woke this morning, Collegiate Assessor (Major) Kovalyov had no nose. This peripatetic nose, it seems, is off on a jaunt; having escaped overnight from Kovalyov’s sleeping face and then from a loaf of bread into which Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch had made a fresh cut for his breakfast (don’t ask how the nose got into the bread loaf—this is a fable, after all), the nose, now in full mufti, is seen taking the air along Nevsky Prospect. This nose acts to be his own nose, no one else’s, though a much too high-held nose to deign even a glance at Kovalyov’s now nose-less, pancake-flat, face.

The Nose off on a jaunt.

This demonic fable satirizing mid-nineteenth century Czarist bureaucracy had lost none of its acerbic edge almost a full century after its publication in 1836 when it became the subject of Dmitri Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, nor another eighty years after that when South African artist-filmmaker William Kentridge accepted an invitation from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to design and direct an opera; he chose The Nose, the Met’s first ever production of this avant-garde and still wildly bizarre opera. The Nose was performed this past March in a series of sold out performances that ran concurrently with a comprehensive retrospective of Kentridge’s drawing, prints and animated films at MOMA on 53rd Street, a fifteen-minute stroll from Lincoln Center.

Continue reading ‘William Kentridge’s “Nose”’

ONE

W. Eugene Smith at the Jazz Loft, his 4th floor window.

He wired the whole place for sound recording—from the street level entry at 821 Sixth Avenue, to the fifth floor walk-up loft at the top. It had been a derelict, virtually abandoned building. From the time he occupied a fourth floor loft in 1957 until he left it at the end of the 60s, photojournalist W. Eugene Smith recorded over 4,000 hours of live music, radio and TV programs, and just plain everyday talk, on quarter inch audio tape, using a variety of open reel machines. He also exposed some 1500 rolls of 35mm. still film, a total of about 40,000 photographs. Some of the images, like the audio recordings, documented the all night rehearsal and jam sessions of Manhattan’s top jazz musicians, arrangers, and composers who had discovered the loft to be an ideal playing venue after-hours or between their club gigs. The area’s daytime streets in the heart of the bustling flower market were deserted at night: no neighbors to complain, no police likely to show up to bust the booze and drug-fueled impromptu sessions. Smith’s elaborate wiring handiwork was not meant to be hidden; the exposed cables were splayed like spider webs along walls and ceilings, all leading to the central control recorders in his fourth floor photo darkroom. Jam sessions were sometimes interrupted by the sound of Smith’s drill poking up through a floorboard, followed by a snaking microphone cable. The mikes were visible where they were near the musicians, but not so visible in other areas. The five-story loft was Mecca for a generation of jazz stars, as well as for up and coming unknowns, and even down and outers—anyone who could blow or play at a level that could pass muster for Monk, Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk (all regulars at one time or another), and dozens of hipsters who made the loft a sometimes second home.

Continue reading ‘W. Eugene Smith, David X. Young and the Jazz Loft’