A note on the arts

Gravity Radio, a multi-media song cycle by the com­poser Mikel Rouse, comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival on December 7 and runs there through the 11^th. It’s a ter­rif­ic piece, even without the visu­al element—I’ve only wit­nessed a rel­at­ively stripped-down incarn­a­tion of it, a while back, but the CD has been a pretty con­stant pres­ence on my iPod and ste­reo in recent months. I’ve been a fan of Rouse’s music since it began appear­ing, via his then-band Tirez Tirez, on Les Disques Du Crepescule and Sire in the early-to-mid ’80s; I reviewed one of the bands’ albums—I can­’t remem­ber now wheth­er it was ‘87’s Social Responsibility or ’88’s Against All Flags—for the Village Voice back in the day. His stuff in the clas­sic­al realm is also bra­cing and thor­oughly pleasurable—I think his 1993 album Soul Menu is one of the greatest col­lec­tions of com­posed music for what’s gen­er­ally referred to as “rock” instru­ment­a­tion ever, and has equal appeal for fans of Steve Reich and Henry Cow/National Health, I would think. And, to bow to that increas­ingly apparently-obsolete journ­al­ist­ic con­sid­er­a­tion regard­ing poten­tial con­flicts of interest, yes, I have been friends with Mikel (whose work you can find out a lot more about from his excel­lent web­site, here) for some time. 

But wait, there’s more con­flict! Because while this is Rouse’s second time out at the Next Wave festival—his first was with the ter­rif­ic multi-media opera The End of Cinematics—Gravity Radio marks the Brooklyn Academy of Music debut of Claire Kenny, known to read­ers of this blog as “My Lovely WIfe,” and, indeed, that is her lovely self in the col­lage of images above, her ador­able vis­age some­what hid­den by micro­phone, spec­tacles, and sheaf of paper. Gravity Radio takes the form of an aired, you know, radio broad­cast, its songs are inter­spersed with news read­ings that are taken off the AP wire on the day of the per­form­ance; Claire col­lates the mater­i­al and appears on stage to read it. She’s a GR vet­er­an, hav­ing toured with the piece in January of this year, and she’ll be trav­el­ing with it briefly (to Cleveland and Western Pennsylvania) before it hits BAM. (On the CD the news­read­ing is done by Veanne Cox, the vet­er­an act­or whose many claims to fame include play­ing Toby, Jerry’s heck­ler on the Seinfeld epis­ode “The Fire.”) I could not be more proud of her and excited for her, and am a little bit weirdly stage-fright nervous to post about this. So maybe now might be a good time to point out that the opin­ions expressed on this web­site rep­res­ent those of the author and do not rep­res­ent the opin­ions or policies of His Lovely Wife, who is neither angry, nor bit­ter, nor old, and who actu­ally loves mumble­core films (or, as she some­times calls them when she’s feel­ing whim­sic­al, “le cinema de la jeunnese”)…okay, I just made up that last part, she’s only ever seen Mutual Appreciation and she thought it was “okay.” But any­way, the point is, she is not me, but rather, she is a ter­rific­ally gif­ted per­former, and she’s in a won­der­ful show, and if you’re in the tri-state area and are of a mind to go, you def­in­itely should. I’ll be at the stage door of the Harvey every night, just like DeNiro in City By The Sea (God love you if you ever sat through that horror…).