On the Culture Front: Bill Maher, John Cale and More

On the Culture Front: Bill Maher, John Cale and More
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These past few weeks have been filled with blissful cultural overload. From the New York Comedy Festival to the continuing of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the offerings have been wide-ranging and limitless. I saw two shows at NYCF: Chris Hardwick at Carolines and Bill Maher in the more expansive Theater at Madison Square Garden. I’m still mourning the end of Hardwick’s comedian game show @midnight, so it was nice to see him live. He has a warm, laidback delivery that goes well with the conversation approach of his material. At one point, he descended into the audience to comfort a woman sitting next to me who just lost her job. The show ended on a bit of an odd note though with Hardwick breaking into song alongside one of his openers.

Bill Maher has a more pointed delivery and is usually exasperated about something (these days it’s the crumbling of our democracy and the latest temper tantrum of our orange-shitstain-in chief), but his bits never feel didactic even when he’s telling us exactly-what-to-do. People have come up to him and asked him to run for office, he told us at MSG. It’s an idea he laughs off and rightly so. He doesn’t have the stomach for the kind of magnanimous lying the office requires, and throughout the show there were moments when a large part of the audience was uncomfortably quiet, often when he spoke of Islamic Extremism. One of his most potent arguments is that being a liberal means standing up for liberal values not embracing diversity at the cost of human rights.

Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced” is one of the most interesting plays that deals with discrimination. His newest play, “Junk,” is more straight ahead entertainment. Focusing on the Junk Bonds of the 80s, it can be seen as an origin story for our current financial market. Its protagonist, Robert Merkin (Steven Pasquale), echoes Michael Milken though Akhtar isn’t caged in by historical events. Pasquale plays the shady financier with a ruthless drive tempered with an underdog’s insecurity. Joey Slotnick also shines as his right hand dark overlord. The dialogue is often too on-the-nose and some storylines are tied into uncomfortably neat bows, but the play maintains its momentum due to Akhtar’s keen sense for scene construction and Doug Hughes adept direction.

“The Band’s Visit” draws rich and nuanced pleasure from its naturalistic pace. David Yazbek’s lush yet not forwardly melodic songs weave through Itamar Moses’ subtle and well-observed dialogue so seamlessly that the audience often forgets to applaud. This is a good thing. David Cromer, who builds worlds for characters to thrive in, is in his element here. There’s a melancholic intimacy that echoes throughout the isolated town of Bet Hatikva, which a group of Egyptian musicians have mistaken for the city of Petah Tikva. They’ve been invited to play a concert in the latter and are dumbfounded when they arrive in the former. A comic gag gives way to a more profound story of loneliness and our power to break through it. The most memorable song, “Papi Hears the Ocean” captures a young man paralyzed by his desires and unable to speak to women. The dialogue is blunt and the melody climbs awkwardly across the scale. There’s a thin and shifting line between humor and heartache that pervades most of the show.

John Leguizamo deals with his feelings of being an outsider with levity mixed with brutal facts and personal confessions. His latest one man show, “Latin History for Morons” is part Howard Zinn lecture structured around dealing with his son being bullied in his New York private school. Like any good professor, Leguizamo has a blackboard, but it’s more set decoration than necessity. The story he’s really telling (with the help of longtime collaborator Tony Taccone) could be told on a stool and bare stage. As he explores how Latin history has been erased from our textbooks, he also comes to terms with what he’s erased from his own life, and in the process is able to begin to reclaim it. In a way this is a feel good show that acts as an antidote to the current anti-immigrant sentiment, but Leguizamo is also a consummate entertainer and his impersonations and penchant for silliness make the show sing.

The Pink Room’s Twin Peaks Burlesque show at Joe’s Pub is all about silly, subversive and sexy fun. Part tantalizing strip show, part performance art and fully evoking the surreal beauty of David Lynch, it’s exactly that kind of show you want to see at midnight on a cool night with a couple glasses of Joe’s IPA made by the excellent 10 Barrel Brewing Co in Oregon. One of my favorite moments was watching a performer elegantly slide out of a pair of skinny jeans. Now that takes skill.

I once heard The Mountain Goats John Darnielle say that he has a standard chord progression that he uses to capture the flow of his lyrics when inspiration strikes. “This Year” is a good example of this catchy momentum. His songs are packed with a kind of descriptive abundance usually reserved for novels. He’s written a couple of those as well, but it didn’t mention it during his rousing set at the newly minted warehouse venue Brooklyn Steel. Previously a trio, the Mountain Goats shine as a quartet. Their new album, “Goths,” is filled with lush slice-of-life portraits from “Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds” to “Paid in Cocaine.” He played the former sitting down at a keyboard and introduced the latter with a sly deadpan delivery. There’s a deep frustration and anger that courses through some of his best songs. On “No Children” he sings, “I hope it stays dark forever/I hope the worst isn’t over” but instead of sounding bleak it feels liberating as if by saying these things he’s exorcising them from us. This is true too of Darnielle’s ultimate revenge song, “Up the Wolves.” When sung in a room full of strangers, it feels less like a call to arms than a cathartic wash of the muck that can weigh us down.

John Cale’s show at BAM the other weekend was exhilarating. He played “The Velvet Underground and Nico” in its entirety along with the better part of “White Light/White Heat.” BAM has a reputation for epic concerts (from Sufjan Stevens multimedia ode to Brooklyn “BQE” to a rare acoustic performance by Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum), but this ranks among their best. It would have been special enough to see Cale with his band, but he assembled an all-star rotating band that included Kurt Vile and his shredding solos, Sky Ferreira who shined on “Sunday Morning” and MGMT who lit up “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” The show ended with a deafening rendition of the noise epic “Sister Ray” featuring the entire group of musicians banging away into blissful sonic oblivion.

Big Dance Theater’s “17C” uses a generous dose of whimsy to propel their examination of Samuel Pepys diaries, feminist playwright Margaret Cavendish and more broadly: gender politics throughout the ages. In lesser hands, the shift between dialogue and dance could feel arbitrary, or worse, pretentious, but Annie B Parson and Paul Lazer are pros who know when to have their characters speak and when to let them dance. The result is a liberating journey that squeezes a multitude of experiences and perspectives into 80 mins of performance. I laughed frequently throughout while also feeling guilty about my gender’s dark history.

I discovered my love of gin when searching for a whiskey replacement during the scorching months of summer years back. The Botanist is actually made in Islay, Scotland home to the world’s great peaty scotches, including my favorite, Ardbeg 10. Made with 22 foraged botanicals, it has a clean earthy smoothness. At a recent event, it paired nicely with food from Olmsted. My favorite was a cocktail made with beets that led me to wonder if alcoholic veggie juices might catch on? I hope so.

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