12 Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before October 23

Rineke Dijkstra, Still image from The Gymschool, St. Petersburg. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Rineke Dijkstra, Still image from The Gymschool, St. Petersburg. (Photo: Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20

Opening: “Rineke Dijkstra: The Gymschool, St. Petersburg, 2014” at Marian Goodman Gallery
Celebrated for her sensitive portraits of adolescents, young adults and people in transitional stages of life, Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra returns to New York for her fifth solo show at the gallery with The Gymschool, St. Petersburg, a three-channel video installation. Originally commissioned for Manifesta 2014, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, the video documents 11 young Russian gymnasts, aged 8 to 12, bending their bodies into incredible—almost abstract—forms without showing the least bit of emotion.
Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, 6-8 p.m.

Wendell Castle, Blanket Chest, 1963. Courtesy of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. (Photo: Courtesy Dirk Bakker/Detroit Institute of Arts)

Opening: “Wendell Castle Remastered” at the Museum of Arts and Design
One of the most influential American industrial designers, Wendell Castle has been making innovative furniture, which could easily be mistaken for biomorphic sculpture, for more than 50 years. This exhibition pairs his groundbreaking works from the 1960s with remastered, digitally crafted versions made via 3-D scanning, 3-D modeling and computer-controlled milling from the past two years, as well as two new bronzes located outside the museum in Columbus Circle.
MAD Museum, 2 Columbus Circle, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., free with museum admission

Justin Adian: “Fort Worth,” installation view. (Photo: Courtesy Skarstedt)

Talk: “Justin Adian in Conversation with Alex Kitnick” at Skarstedt
Mr. Adian is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist who makes vibrant abstract paintings by stretching oil enamel-painted canvas around foam cushions mounted on wood. Tuesday the artist sits down with independent curator and Artforum critic Alex Kitnick to discuss the works on view in his first solo show at the Chelsea gallery. Recalling the quirky abstractions of Blinky Palermo, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Tuttle, Adian’s sculpted paintings are whimsically constructed and smartly displayed, with several pieces hugging the corners and edges of the gallery walls.
Skarstedt, 550 West 21 Street, 6 p.m.

Joaquín Torres-García, Constructif avec quatre figures (Constructive with four figures), 1932. © Sucesión Joaquín Torres-García, Montevideo 2015. (Photo: Courtesy Pablo Almansa)

Opening: “Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern” at the Museum of Modern Art
A retrospective of the work of the Uruguayan Modernist master Joaquín Torres-García, this exhibition offers nearly 200 of the artist’s radical paintings, sculptures, frescoes, drawings and collages. The show begins with his early figurative works—made in Barcelona, where he studied at the turn of the century—then focuses on his Dadaist works and abstractions made in New York and Paris, before ending with his colorful canvases painted in Montevideo, where he died in 1949.
MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, 7-9 p.m., by invitation only, opens to the public on October 25

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21

Laurie Anderson, a scene from Heart of a Dog. (Image: Courtesy of Abramorama / HBO Documentary Films)

Screening: “Heart of a Dog,” directed by Laurie Anderson at Film Forum
On the heels of her critically acclaimed performance at the Park Avenue Armory, Laurie Anderson’s feature-length film makes its American theatrical premiere. A story about her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, it weaves in the artist’s childhood memories with philosophical ponderings on 9/11, surveillance and data storage. Famous for her haunting, 1981 song “O Superman” and 1986 concert film Home of the Brave, Ms. Anderson—one of the best-known avant-garde musicians, composers and artists of her generation—will be present at the premiere.
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, New York, 7:50 p.m., $13

Hank Willis Thomas, The Truth Is I…, 2015 (Photo: Liz Ligon, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery)

Hank Willis Thomas, The Truth Is I See You, 2015. (Photo: Liz Ligon, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery)

Talk: “Public Art Funds Talks: Hank Willis Thomas” at the New School
Hank Willis Thomas discusses his conceptual-based practice and continued engagement with public space at the New School. And he should know about public space—Mr. Thomas is currently showing work in two Public Art Fund exhibitions: the group show “Image Objects” at City Hall Park, where he has a sculpture of a Harlem Globetrotter spinning a basketball on his finger to reference the Statue of Liberty, and his highly touted solo show, “The Truth is I See You,” which displays peoples’ notions of truth as thought-bubbles, at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn.
The New School, 66 West 12th Street Auditorium, $10

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22

Martha Wilson, Mona/Marcel/Marge, 2014. (Compositing artist: Kathy Grove. Photo: Courtesy P.P.O.W)

Opening: “Martha Wilson: Mona/Marcel/Marge” at P.P.O.W
A mover and a shaker on New York’s Downtown art scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, Martha Wilson was the founder of the beloved Franklin Furnace and a member of the all-girl conceptual feminist punk rock band DISBAND. For her second solo show at the gallery since joining its roster in 2011, Ms. Wilson takes on the topic of aging with self-portraits that reference art history in poignant yet humorous ways—transforming herself into Catherine Deneuve in Makeover and Marge Simpson as Mona Lisa, altered by Marcel Duchamp, in Mona/Marcel/Marge.
P.P.O.W, 535 West 22 Street, 6-8 p.m.

Max Ernst’s studio at Huismes, 1961. (Photo: Courtesy Jürgen Pech Archive and Paul Kasmin Gallery)

Opening: “Max Ernst: Paramyths, Sculpture 1934-1967” at Paul Kasmin Gallery
The first show of sculpture by the Dada and Surrealist master in New York since 1993, “Paramyths” presents a succinct selection of pieces in bronze and limestone made by Max Ernst between 1934 and 1967. Highlights include the 1944 bronze sculpture of a woman in the shape of a flower, Jeune femme en forme de fleur, and 1967’s La Plus Belle (The Most Beautiful), an elongated abstract figure carved in limestone. The artist’s 1944 edition Chess Set, which is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will also be on exhibit.
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27 Street, 6-8 p.m.

William Kentridge, Refuse the Hour. (Photo: John Hodgkiss, Courtesy BAM)

Performance: “William Kentridge: Refuse the Hour” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
Following his critically acclaimed productions of The Magic Flute, at BAM in 2007, and The Nose, at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, South African artist William Kentridge is back at BAM. Mr. Kentridge presents the multimedia chamber opera Refuse the Hour, a collaboration with a fellow South African, the composer Philip Miller. The narrative, delivered by the artist himself, traverses time from the Greek myth of Perseus to Einstein, as all get caught up in a Dadaist discord of sound and imagery that includes dancing, singing and animation.
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m., $30-$110

“Gego: Autobiography of a Line,” Installation view. (Photo: Courtesy Dominique Lévy)

Reading and Book Signing: “Anne Tardos” at Dominique Lévy
Artist and composer Ann Tardos reads her new poem Gego, inspired by the abstract drawings and sculptures of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt, 1912-1994), currently on view in the gallery. The French-born, Hungarian-American poet will also read selections from her new book Nine—poems consisting of nine words per line and nine lines per stanza.
Dominique Lévy, 909 Madison Avenue, 6:30-8 p.m., RSVP required

Visitors in Angela Fraleigh’s studio during EFA Open Studios 2014. (Photo: Matthew Vicar)

Tour: “EFA Open Studios 2015” at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
With 73 internationally exhibited artists working under one roof, this is an excellent opportunity to see the state of the art, as they say. A sampling of the diverse artists, the EFA studio program includes Arab-American painter Samira Abbassy, Mexican-American performance artist Pablo Helguera, Korean-American painter Kira Nam Greene, Nigerian-born draftsman Toyin Odutola and Japanese-American painter and sculptor Saya Woolfalk. Between the four hours of viewing on opening night and additional hours on Friday and Saturday, it’s like a year’s worth of museum and gallery going in one shot.
EFA Studios, 323 West 39 Street, 6-10 p.m.

Andrew Masullo, 5766, 2013. (Photo: Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery)

Opening: “Andrew Masullo: Recent Paintings” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and alum of the Whitney Biennial, Andrew Masullo makes small-scale abstract paintings of whimsical forms with vibrant colors. Mr. Masullo’s charming canvases have little to do with the real world but a lot to do with the language of painting; his work is reminiscent of that of fellow abstractionists Paul Klee, Paul Feeley and Thomas Nozkowski. This is Mr. Masullo’s first show with the venerable New York gallery, which celebrates its 65th anniversary this year.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 6-8 p.m.

FILED UNDER: ART WORLD HAPPENINGS, EVENTS, EXHIBITIONS, FILM, GALLERIES, HAPPENINGS, MUSEUMS, OPENINGS, TALKS, THINGS TO DO

OBSERVER MUSIC

Everything Is Garbage: How Shirley Manson Sowed Pop’s Future

What world hath Garbage wrought?

A pioneer in the ’90s alt-rock scene, Shirley Manson made her name as a thought-provoking, outspoken frontwoman who was always years ahead of the curve. Garbage’s leading lady dominated rock the way that Katy Perry and Taylor Swift rule the pop scene today, without compromising a thing in the process. Along with her bandmates Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson, Manson mixed rock, electronica and hip-hop to distinctive, innovative effect—20 years later, the radio is still playing catch-up. To commemorate the band’s 1995 debut, Garbage released a deluxe edition of their self-titled LP earlier this month and just embarked upon a 20 Years Queer tour, where the band will play its debut from cover to cover.

Prior to the start of the tour, Manson spoke to the Observer about discrimination in the music industry, remembering how to play songs from Garbage’s debut and whether or not she feels like she fits in 20 years later.

It’s been 20 years since Garbage’s debut LP came out, how do you feel like you’ve changed the most?

The thing that has changed the most for me as a person over 20 years is that I’m not afraid anymore. I just don’t feel frightened, and that’s a nice place to be.

Today there are a lot of women in pop that have huge voices. Do you think that women in pop have more of a voice than women in rock nowadays?

Definitely. I don’t know if they necessarily use their voices, but they definitely have the platform on which to reach people and influence people and be exposed to the world. I think we’re all aware that there’s been a dearth of women in alternative rock for a decade if not more. That is one great thing is that the women of pop have ruled the airwaves for a decade of pop, so that’s great progress for women in general.

You said that women in pop aren’t necessarily using their voices. How do you think they could be using their voices better?

I don’t know. I think it comes down to each individual. I don’t think anyone should be telling any artist what they should be saying and how they should be saying it. I’ve just noticed that a lot of the most popular figures tend to be very popular with what they say, and they don’t want to take a stand, which I understand. It’s not for everybody to be so careful.

‘The system that exists in the music industry is definitely not in favor of the female perspective.’

Was there a particular time that you can remember in the music industry that you feel like you didn’t count? That particular question was one that was trending on Twitter between women in the music industry.

I feel like in general “the individual” doesn’t seem to count. I don’t think it’s specific to being a musician or female musician, necessarily. I think it’s hard in our culture that seems so narcissistic and a culture that focuses only on the glorification of self to ever feel like another person matters. I feel like it’s a strange time for all human beings and not just female musicians. I’ve been very lucky—I’ve been very aggressive as a woman and have been able to circumvent the male-dominated industry, but the system that exists in the music industry is definitely not in favor of the female perspective. Unless you’re really able to be either very strident or very beautiful, I think it’s hard for anyone to be paid attention to in the realm of female musicianship.

I know it’s been a long time since you’ve been working in music, but more specifically, do you remember the first time you were discriminated against for your opinion, as a woman in the music industry?

I wouldn’t say it was the first time, but the most enduring frustration I had as a woman musician was when I joined Garbage and I’d been in the music industry at this point for a decade with my former band. I had joined Garbage, and I called up our lawyer to discuss a specific situation with him. He basically refused to discuss the subject matter with me and insisted only upon talking with my male counterparts.

You’ve got me going now…the other situation, we had dual management for a while, and one of the managers couldn’t deal with me. He found me too aggressive, and he decided to approach the whole band in order to solve the situation of me being somewhat difficult to deal with. He proposed that his partner in the management company deal with “the girl,” and he deal with only the male members of the band. Thankfully for me, my band was like, that’s absolutely outrageous and we fired them as a result. The fact that he thought that was a legitimate proposition was shocking to me. It’s crazy. I’ve had my fair share, definitely. I feel like I can take care of myself ultimately. It doesn’t crush my spirit in any way. I notice it, and it annoys me, but I feel like I have the abilities to circumvent all that old-school nonsense. It’s perplexing sometimes.

You’ve said before that you didn’t feel like you fit into the music industry. Do you feel like the battle to fit in has subsided for you, 20 years since your debut? Do you feel like you finally feel like you fit in, in the music industry?

Oh god, no. We are still such a strange, little entity. We don’t really sound like anybody. We don’t do anything in the way that anybody else seems to, so, no, I don’t feel like we fit in. I feel like fitting in is overrated at this point. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even want to fit in—fuck all that shit. I don’t want to be a part of that scene and way of living. I feel like at this point I’m rejecting that. I guess in a way it’s a bit of survivalism. I think I’m fine sitting by myself—right where we are. We’re living in such a homogenized society now—everyone is wearing the same watch and talking on the same cell phones. Everybody feels like they should Botox their foreheads, make money and serve self. I find that whole idea repugnant. That’s so at odds with how I view the world.

‘…When we were at our most successful, I was the most miserable I’ve ever been as a person. I thought I wanted it, but when I got it, I just didn’t find as much value in it as I thought I would.’

That makes sense to me. In 20 years you’ve played a ton of shows, what’s your best touring story?

I don’t know if I have any great stories that I’d ever necessarily share. Touring is such a bizarre way to live. You slowly lose your minds and you lose your center. You don’t know which way is up or down or north or south. I always feel like it’s a bit like going to outer space—when you come back you can’t really articulate what it’s like except that it’s magic. We’ve had so many experiences and toured with so many incredible talents. This whole thing has been a mental adventure. I just know that I find it the most exciting thing I’ve done, and the most selfish, depraved adventure of my life too.

Now looking back on your career, do you still feel intimidated by any specific artists? Or do you not feel that intimidation factor anymore?

I don’t feel intimidated, but I still feel in awe of talent that’s so glaringly obvious. I still feel the power that still excites and inspires me when you meet certain talents. I have a great affinity for musicians, and I love being a part of that brethren in a way. I don’t feel intimidated by much, truth be told at this point.

Were there any songs off of your debut LP that you hadn’t played in 20 years that you’ve had to play for the “20 Years Queer” tour? What did it feel like to play those songs again?

Well, I thought that it was going to be a lot weirder to get back into rehearsal and play these songs that we wrote 20 years ago. My band was teasing me that I’d need an auto-queue. I started worrying that I wouldn’t be able to remember these songs, but it came together really fast. I’ve been surprised how your muscle memory kicks in and all of the words appear gloriously in front of your eyes. It’s been a surreal experience. You literally feel like you’re Doctor Who and you’re back in 1995. It’s really fucking weird.

‘Everybody feels like they should Botox their foreheads, make money and serve self. I find that whole idea repugnant. That’s so at odds with how I view the world.’

So you guys are working on a new record. Will it sound different to Garbage fans? Is there something you’re doing that you haven’t done before with this record?

I’m weird now, and I say this with every record: it sounds different, but at the end of the day, we always sound like us. We can’t escape the sound we make together—for better or for worse. I’m aware that we don’t really sound like anybody else. I think at this point with the deluge of music we continue to be buried under on a daily basis, that says something. To remain somehow individual in this massive swarm of sound is definitely both wonderful and also inescapable at this point. To us, we have all the nuances of all the records we’ve made, it sounds different, but for those who aren’t as familiar with our records, it probably just sounds like Garbage.

Obviously you’ve had hits over the years like “Stupid Girl” and “Only Happy When It Rains,” the list goes on, do you feel like you need to have a “hit,” so to speak, on your records? Or do you feel like it’s not necessary at this point?

I feel like we can exist as artists regardless of whether or not we have hit records. Of course it would be nice, but I think we came to the realization that unless you’re young or a brand new artist, the vehicles in which to reach your audience become diminished somewhat because there are new artists coming out and they deserve time and attention. We’re part of a lineage and I’m privileged to play a role in that. As long as I get to make music, that’s all that matters to me at this point. The rest I can’t control. I’ve had an incredible run, and I had so many opportunities as a result. I have a wonderful, creative and artistic life, and I’m very grateful for that. That’s how I see it. I think you can exist outside of the mainstream really well. A lot of time when we were at our most successful, I was the most miserable I’ve ever been as a person. I thought I wanted it, but when I got it, I just didn’t find as much value in it as I thought I would.

FILED UNDER: 20 YEARS QUEER, BUTCH VIG, DOCTOR WHO, DUKE ERIKSON, GARBAGE, KATY PERRY, SHIRLEY MANSON, STEVE MARKER, TAYLOR SWIFT

‘The Leftovers’ Recap 2×03: Oh Yeah, There’s Still a Cult!

Laurie, just straight chillin’ with a normal computer machine. (HBO)

After two episodes of new characters and locations, both building to the same awesome cliffhanger, it’s a ballsy move to spend this hour focusing on Laurie, Tommy, and the current state of the Guilty Remnant, basically shorting the narrative drive the series has built so far in its second season to catch up with all of its more unpleasant elements.

Laurie and Tommy, mother and son reunited after their separate, miserable adventures last season, are running a kind of Guilty Remnant recovery group. Tommy’s falling back on his experience as a cult member to infiltrate GR cells and identify people who seem like they want out, Laurie’s housing these folks in a rented office (down the hall from a call center, where folks blather for a living, ha ha) and writing a book about her experience in the group.

Early in the episode we see Tommy, while undercover, ask an anguished Remnant (here forth to be known as The Saddest Blonde Woman in the World) if she’s okay, and as with last week this seems to the be question the show is posing of each character. This week it’s almost immediately evident that Laurie and Tommy might be doing good work in helping GR members escape and reunite with their families (although that doesn’t turn out super well for The Saddest Blonde Woman in the World) but they are decidedly not doing well themselves. Between infiltrations Tommy is boozing and passing out to Youtube videos of his old boss, charismatic cult leader Holy Wayne, and Laurie’s resolve to help folks is undercut by the fact that she runs down some GR’s she spots in the road, later hinting this is something she does frequently, and the dawning sense that maybe she’s not as interested in saving people as she is in turning a war on the GR into the organizing principle of her life.

And okay, there’s your theme for the hour, and maybe the season so far, and maybe human history. If life is a big raging storm of mystery and tragedy, we either choose a port to shelter within or erect a new one. And sometimes we outgrow that port, or it turns out we’re shitty builders, and then what?

This is a tough, if compelling, hour. Laurie and Tommy and the most anguished and screwed up people in a show where a woman hires prostitute to shoot her in the bullet proof vest so she can approximate the experience of death. And it’s never quite clear what the creators of the series want us to think of the Guilty Remnant.

Maybe that’s not what I mean, maybe I shouldn’t worry about what the creators want me to think. Maybe I just have a hard time figuring out what the GR is doing here. Narratively they’re villainous, mostly, drab and spooky and fascistic and unflinchingly awful. They hound The Saddest Blonde Woman in the World to death, and when Tommy is finally caught trying to liberate members they tie him up in a laundry van, have Meg (Liv Tyler is back, and Meg is as all in on the group now as Laurie is opposed, I guess) rape him and then threaten to burn him alive.

Thematically it’s hard to see where they fit, too. New members are instructed that their pain is meaningless, but their whole deal seems to be making sure everyone feels as much pain as possible, all the time. If this is all about ports in storms, the port offered by the GR seems to be a particularly shitty one.

Laurie’s meeting with her perspective publisher towards the end of the episode sheds an interesting and complicating light on the GR’s place in the show. The publisher makes it clear that the world at large views them as kooky and laughable. When he asks about the origins of the constant smoking, Laurie is kind of baffled—she doesn’t know why they smoke, no one told her.\

As a port in a storm, if we can keep that going, the GR seem a particularly miserable choice. Their deal seems very in line with the way an angst-ridden, mopey teenager deals with hurt feelings, by inhabiting those feelings completely and making sure that if they’re not happy, no one is. They have no doctrine, no explanation for why they do the things they do, but here’s the complication—it seems to work. After a couple infiltrations, Tommy claims the GR seem to have something to offer. Laurie admits to her publisher—when he points out the kind of lack of emotion in her manuscript–that she has little memory of the entire experience.

Anyway it’s pretty clear that Laurie isn’t really as mad at the GR as she is distracting herself by raging at them when the publisher runs down her entire character arc from season one in like 20 seconds and she responds by viciously attacking him. I guess one thing that can happen when the port you’re seeking shelter in turns out to suck is that your disappointment in that port becomes a shelter unto itself.

At the end of the episode Laurie realizes that for all their faults the GR is giving people comfort when all she can offer them is a return to lives they found unfulfilling in the first place (speaking of which, right before The Saddest Blonde Woman in the World steers her van into oncoming traffic and annihilates her entire family there’s a shot of her husband digging through a plastic shopping bag of snacks that for some reason struck me as the most desolate image I’ve ever encountered and made me doubt the viability of human society in the long term, which is either killer mis-en-scene or means I need to get laid). Laurie and Tommy hatch a plan to revive Holy Wayne’s spiel about healing hugs, and the episode ends on a fairly promising note, as these two running a cult in order to save people from a cult can only lead to some interesting television.

Amy Brenneman is great throughout this episode, nailing the emotional volatility of a woman who is really more heap of wreckage than seaworthy vessel.

FILED UNDER: HBO, JUSTIN THEROUX, RECAP, THE LEFTOVERS

‘The Walking Dead’ 6×2 Recap: Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing

The Walking Dead. (photo: Gene Page/AMC)

Wow. I don’t know if that was the most violent episode of The Walking Dead yet, but it was certainly close.

Coupled with the massive season premiere, it does seem like the show has decided to kick things into a higher gear. In many ways, this is the Walking Dead we’ve always been waiting for. The speed and randomness of its violence, the sheer brutality of its images, the sense of things coming apart, even as each character has his or her own interesting vignettes and personal arc…

Well, the characters who actually show up: During this episode’s action many of our protagonists are off herding the gigantic parade of walkers—the only moment of contact between the two parties Morgan, who shows up midway through the episode to take care of the air horn that is ruining their plan.

The rest, including Rick, Daryl, Glenn, Michonne, Sasha and Abraham, are still off presumably trying to get those distracted marchers back on the road and away from Alexandria. (We’ll have to wait until next week to see how that cliffhanger’s resolved.) The fact that the show can turn in an episode this good without a bunch of its most beloved characters shows just how good its ensemble is, something we sometimes forget when the Rick Grimes Crazypants Hour takes center stage.

And of course, their absence gives them room to show a lot of scenes of Carol being her amazing badass self. As well as young Carl being levelheaded, effective and remarkably un-annoying. (It doesn’t hurt that the show has introduced a far more annoying and whiny teenaged character, Ron, as his sometimes rival.)

Even though he doesn’t appear at all in the episode, though (he’s barely even mentioned), Rick’s fingerprints are all over it. Ron and his mom fight about him, and the fact that Carl’s dad killed Pete is clearly feeding into Ron’s seething jealousy of Carl.

We also spend some time with Denise, the new doctor who has to take over now that Pete is gone. Played by Nurse Jackie’s Merritt Wever, she’s perfectly cast as a panic-attack-prone psychiatrist in way over her head. But after Ethan Embry last week and her this week, The Walking Dead has really got to stop casting recognizable actors as newly introduced Alexandrians. The town just isn’t that big that we wouldn’t have seen these people before. Now that most of them have been killed and there are only like 12 Alexandrians left, if like Juliette Lewis just shows up in the next episode like, “Hey, yeah, I’ve been here the whole time,” I’m gonna call shenanigans.

But it’s mostly Rick’s predictions, not his actions, that have a big impact on this episode. The show just keeps making them come magically true. Isn’t it weird that right after he comes along telling the Alexandrians that they have to learn to defend themselves, they’re suddenly attacked for the first time? Though it’s probably not a coincidence: The Wolves have likely been watching the walls for weeks for the right opportunity to invade, the time when the town was least defended, and Rick’s “lead the zombies away from us” plan involved almost certainly the largest party to ever leave the walls all at once.

More predictions coming true: Last week Rick told Daryl that Alexandria is better off not recruiting new citizens, and lo and behold, it turns out that Aaron’s recruitment pics, which he was forced to leave behind when the Wolves nearly trapped him and Daryl last season, provided the attackers with vital knowledge of the town’s layout.

The Wolves are interesting antagonists, in their apparent lack of motivation. They’re not interested in stealing stuff or taking over the town. The lunatic things they say seem to indicate they have some philosophy of purging the world of humans, who they think no longer belong in it, but that really doesn’t matter. They just seem nuts and really into killing as brutally as possible.

Which brings us to the central conflict of the episode, the dispute between Carol and Morgan. Carol, the first person to see the attack begin, finally flips back from housewife (she’s literally just put something in the oven) to ninja warrior and begins offing Wolves with extreme prejudice. Meanwhile, Morgan tries to repel the attack without killing anyone. At one point he and a still-helpless Father Gabriel are tying up a Wolf he has subdued, and Carol just comes by and shoots the prisoner in the head. You don’t get more of a contrast of attitudes than that. And in the episode’s final scene, they just pass one another by on the street, wordlessly.

The problem with this conflict is that it’s stupid. It’s obvious that Carol is right and Morgan is wrong. The show has already established very, very well that you have to be willing to kill without mercy to live in this world. It’s all well and good that you have your own Zen attitude and all, Morgan, but not everybody can wield a staff like you and incapacitate bad guys with a nonlethal weapon. Some of them are just good at shooting, and that’s how they survive.

Not to mention that at one point, after Morgan drives five Wolves off instead of killing them, their leader picks up a gun from a dead body on the way out. Nice job arming the enemy, bonehead.

Meanwhile, the episode clearly wants us to think that when Carol dresses up like a Wolf—even drawing a W in blood on her forehead—she is in danger of becoming one. Always a danger with chameleon-like characters. And after the violence has passed (it all only took 45 minutes, according to Carol’s kitchen timer), she seems full of doubt, sitting down on a porch and rubbing at her bloody W, while considering lighting up a cigarette she just complained about as a disgusting habit a few hours earlier.

But the thing is, we know Carol isn’t a Wolf. She isn’t killing for the sake of killing, she’s killing to save the ones she loves and the things she values. Carol is, above everything else, the show’s quintessentially practical character. She does what needs to be done. If Morgan wants to dissent about what should be done, that’s his choice—but it’s not actually helping anyone survive.

And survival is what this is all about, as the introductory sequence, giving us Enid’s backstory, reminds us. We see how Enid weathered the apocalypse, adopting as her mantra “JSS” (also the episode’s title), which stands, we find out, for Just Survive Somehow. It’s a nice contrast to The Walking Dead’s overwhelming obsession with what people have had to become to survive in this world. Enid, she of the thousand-yard stare, has taken a wider view. It doesn’t really matter what you become, as long as there’s a you at the end of it.

FILED UNDER: RECAP, THE WALKING DEAD, TV

Julie Andrews, Actress and Author, Muses on Her Newest Children’s Book

Julie Andrews at the New York Botanical Garden's Rose Garden Dinner. Ms. Andrews and Rose Garden curator Stephen Scanniello were honorees this year. (Photo: Kelly Taub/BFA.com)

Julie Andrews at the New York Botanical Garden’s Rose Garden Dinner. Ms. Andrews and Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden curator Stephen Scanniello were honorees this year. (Photo: Kelly Taub/BFA.com)

The New York Botanical Garden’s annual Rose Garden Dinner is already one of the more enchanting evenings of the New York social calendar—a night of wine, champagne, delicacies and dancing enjoyed between a saunter through a magnificent garden and dinner in a ballroom. Add Julie Andrews to the list of this year’s honorees, and you have an incredibly elegant event.

Ms. Andrews giving remarks during the cocktail hour held at the Rose Garden. (Photo: Kelly Taub/BFA.com)

Now 80, Ms. Andrews is much more than the stage and screen actress best known for her classic titular roles in musicals like My Fair Lady, and Victor Victoria, and films such as Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and The Princess Diaries. She also happens to be the author of over 30 children’s books, with her newest title just published and hitting shelves in time for Halloween.

The Very Fairy Princess: A Spooky, Sparkly Halloween, is the seventh in a best-selling series co-authored with her daughter, writer Emma Walton Hamilton. It follows the daily adventures of Geraldine (Gerry), who is convinced she’s fairy princess and goes nowhere without her crown and wings.

Ms. Andrews’ revealed The Very Fairy Princessseries is being adapted for an animated television series.

The Observer spoke with Ms. Andrews before the evening festivities, which were filled with the sounds of familiar tunes from Ms. Andrews films—a little “Spoonful of Sugar” here and “Sound of Music” there. Here, Ms. Andrews’ thoughts on princesses, her daughter, and a long-lasting career of creating memorable characters and stories for children.

On why she decided to pen a princess-themed book series for young girls.

This particular [series] came about because we had done a series for boys, and [the publishers] said “Would you do something for young girls? Preferably, about princesses?” We did not want to do another princess book in the vein that they had already been done, so we took as our inspiration my Emma’s daughter, Hope, who is convinced, and has been for many years, that she is a very fairy princess, because of something she feels inside. In her youth, she never went without her tiara and her wings. She always dressed in pink. Always had holes in her socks, and her tights about her ankles…It’s not about a princess being full of glamour or sparkle, but it’s about the sparkle she feels inside that tells her she is a “very fairy princess.” It’s become a real joy to write these little books.

On what it’s like to work so closely with her daughter, Ms. Hamilton.

We have very different talents, but are very compatible. The best idea wins, we’ve never fought, and we laugh a great deal, drink a lot of tea, and have a ball. She’s the nuts and bolts of the story. She’ll say, “Mom, we need to crescendo to a first act ending,” and I add more of fanciful parts of the stories, such as the opening and closing parts of a chapter, but we develop them together in terms of an outline.

On what jumpstarted her career as a children’s book author.

The [first] book came about as a result of a game that I was playing that required a forfeit. My children came for the summer while we were filming and we lived on this glorious estate. They just ran so wild that they didn’t pick up their laundry, didn’t brush their teeth, didn’t make their beds or even try to.

And [finally] I said “OK, let’s play a game. If you don’t do this, you pay a forfeit.” My eldest daughter, my stepdaughter, said “Well, you’ve got to play too… You have to stop sort of cussing so much.” Of course, I was the first to lose the game, so she said, “You owe a forfeit,” and I said “What’ll my forfeit be?” She said, “Write us a story.”

And that’s how the first book came about—as a result of really bawling out my kids.

FILED UNDER: ACTORS, CHILDREN'S BOOKS, DINNERS, GALAS, JULIE ANDREWS, MARY POPPINS, MUSICALS, NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN, NYBG, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, VERY FAIR PRINCESS BOOKS

OBSERVER MUSIC

Battles Harnessed the Art of Repetition to Create ‘La Di Da’

Battles. (Photo: Grant Cornett)

Battles borrowed the title for its third album, La Di Da Di, from the Slick Rick hip-hop classic cut of the same name, but the reason for the co-opt has nothing to do with rapping. Appropriately, the math rock band chose this nifty title for its first all-instrumental record because it isn’t made up of real words. La, di and da, guitarist/bassist Dave Konopka told the Observer before setting off to practice with his bandmates (former Don Caballero and Storm and Stress guitarist/Echoplex player Ian Williams, and former Helmet drummer/percussionist John Stanier), are the kind of rudimentary mumblings any musician without a set of lyrics might utter during the songwriting process.

Singing was never a focal point for Battles. Vocals were added sporadically to 2007’s Mirrored and employed as a sharp left-turn on 2011’s Gloss Drop, which co-opted vocals from Gary Numan, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and Boredoms’ Yamantaka Eye. This time around, the band ditched that distraction entirely, digging deep into its instincts. Ableton, the German music software company, recently filmed a short Battles documentary, The Art of Repetition, which captured the arduous process behind creating this deeply percussive, sometimes funky, often squally, and lovingly squiggly record.

Can there be an art to repetition?

That’s an interesting thought. The title of the film came from Ableton. Repetition has always been one of the elements we used in our bag of tricks. The art side of it is making it interesting and not monotonous. The problem to solve is working with repetition and being able to manipulate it so it is interesting to us and the person who is listening, of course.

Repetition in music can be hypnotic, though.

Yes, it can. But I think it only takes three revolutions for people to pick up on it, and then there is that gestalt thing—you see it in sports stadiums where people are sitting at a boring Red Sox game [Konopka laughs, he’s a Massachusetts native] and they hear that da da da and they start clapping their hands and getting excited. There’s a Pavlovian trained dog element that comes into it.

In the documentary, John says, “Looping is the backbone of this band.”

It’s usually the first element when we’re working. John relies on the loops a lot. It is the bedrock of the song and it starts with Ian and myself. When we begin a new album, we separate and we all just go off to our home studios, and do this incubation period where we try to come up with ideas. Looping has become an element we’ve relied on as a starter.

Has that changed over the course of three albums?

‘The goal has been: How can we manipulate loops and take snippets and make a new thing, all using the same source material?’

In our earlier albums, the loop was just for the sake of playing something while we were trying to get into a groove. When you can get into that repetitive state, the more you listen to a loop, the more you hear it in a different way. You hear more you can sink your teeth into; much more than when you’re playing with another person, which has an organic element. With a loop you can even leave the room and come back in and hear it completely differently. You hear it on the off beat or start it in a different place. It’s just finding your groove in that.

As we’ve progressed, or regressed, depending on your perspective, the goal has been O.K., how can we manipulate loops and take snippets and make a new thing, all using the same source material. So that’s been a big part of my new process: taking a loop and cutting it up and sending it through different pedals to yield new sounds.

Sounds similar to the William Burroughs cut-up writing technique. So, initially the loop was directing you, but now you are directing the loop?

Yes, exactly, but even before sometimes it started as a loop, but it doesn’t end up as a loop, it becomes a live part, and vice versa, a live part can end up looped. We still have this common thread but it’s evolved because we record ourselves on the computer. So, rather than John playing the same part for five hours so I can listen to it and find what I’m going to play, I can just listen to one loop and come up with as much material for it as possible, and find as many different ways as I can that I can enter the loop.

That sounds like a lot of repetitive listening, really, five hours? Your neighbors must love you.

It tends to get pretty crazy. I’ve realized the best way to piss off people around you in your practice space or studio is to play the exact same thing for hours. It drives people nuts. Unless they’re really stoned, then they can deal with it.

Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies

Translation from English

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

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