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(01/24/13 2:30am)
Last Friday and Saturday evenings, The Rude Mechanicals (The Rude Mechs) performed their original play The Method Gun at the Seeler Studio Theater. The performance by the Austin, Tex.-based ensemble occurred alongside a week-long residency at the College, in which they provided workshops for and gave feedback to students. After seeing the performance, I must admit to being keenly jealous I wasn’t invited to sit in on one of these classes.
The performance began in a rather unorthodox manner, as the troupe had already been on stage walking around beforehand, greeting members of the audience and making slight adjustments to the set. When the flow of people into the theater finally tapered, it was a member of the troupe who took on the role of usher, announcing — in a tongue in cheek way, of course — to the audience to turn off all cell phones and abstain from taking photos.
The play itself traced the nine year training process of Stella Burden’s acting troupe as it prepared Tennessee Williams’ A Street Car Named Desire, although without any of the main characters. Burden, an acting guru who left the troupe early on in the process (she does not appear in the play), was the mastermind of “The Approach,” a dangerous acting method that combines “risk-based rituals” and Western acting methods. The narrative structure of the play is disjointed, and the troupe often broke character to further muddle the line between drama and real life. The fact that Stella Burden is a “truly fictional” character, as the troupe so equivocally put it in a discussion after the performance, adds only another layer to the performance. Indeed, the troupe’s unique ability to infuse traditional elements of story with a heightened sense of self-reflexivity made the performance a one of a kind experience.
I do not think I have ever seen a play that posed lofty, interesting questions in such a farcical, often vulgar way. Aside from the recurring question of what is real within the performance, the play explored the powerful influence certain individuals have in people’s lives and perhaps the distorted images that are then projected onto them. Or I could be totally wrong. That’s the kind of performance this was. The whole production was so open-ended that people will likely read into it in many different ways. What most people will agree to, however, was the absurdity of some scenes, such as when the actors started the performance by practicing crying, or the various scenes in which a vulgar tiger appeared randomly and commented on tangential topics. And of course who could forget the scene in which two male actors walked across the stage completely nude, save a string connected to helium-filled balloons wrapped around their penises.
If I haven’t conveyed this fact in a clear way yet, the play was extremely entertaining from start to finish. Most of the fun came from trying to figure out what was going on in addition to anticipating the next ludicrous thing that would happen. In the end I think it is difficult to convey with words what happens in The Method Gun. While some people might be bothered by this, I believe it is what makes the play interesting and the ensemble exceptional.
(11/14/12 11:25pm)
Kid Millions, aka John Colpitts ’95, has played with the experimental rock band Oneida for 15 years. His current solo act, Man Forever, incorporates local talent from the locations where he has performances. The Campus had the privilege of speaking with him before he began his weeklong residency at the College, during which he taught classes and worked with student bands. As the culmination of his week at the College, Kid Millions will be giving a performance with students Erik Benepe ’13.5, Joel Feier ’13 and Nick Smaller ’14 Friday evening in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts.
Middlebury Campus (MC):How big of a departure for you was your solo album Pansophical Cataract in comparison to what you’d been doing with Oneida?
Kid Millions (KM): The reason I did something outside of Oneida was because I was asked by a label that’s part of the Secretly Canadian family. That family of record labels puts out Oneida records, and they asked me to do something different. And, yeah, I guess it was a big departure in some ways because it was just me and I called all the shots.
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MC: How did you come up with the name Kid Millions? Did it come from the old movie?
KM: The name came from the movie, but not because I saw it. Our band was touring in Salt Lake City, and I saw a poster somewhere for the movie and was like ‘OK.’ I’d wanted a new name when I was traveling because I felt like I was kind of shy and not outgoing enough. I’d actually named myself different things with other bands, so it just made sense at the time.
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MC: You try to get local talent to accompany your new solo guise Man Forever when you travel. How does this manner of performing differ from having a set band play with you?
KM: With preparation it’s like a whole different game because when you travel with a band you’re basically rehearsing every night. With this, I have to start from scratch every night. I have to see what kind of musicians I get. I usually like to get two hours with them. I try to send scores in advance, but even then they might have different expectations of what I want. It’s very different, but the cool thing is I get to meet so many people — I meet like five or six different people everywhere I go and we get to hang out. That’s one of the biggest positives. For the most part, people are thrilled to do the pieces.
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MC: Is there a certain philosophy that informs your music-making or does it just come about organically?
KM: I’d say there’s a philosophy. The people I’ve worked with tend to be rock and experimental people. They’re not typically conservatory musicians, not used to just getting a score and playing it. People in this world are more about expressing themselves — that’s the assumption they take with them to the stage. What I really wanted to do was to get people to stop expressing themselves because I was really sick of it. I was getting sick of the jamming aspect of live performance, and I wanted the music to be more of just one sound. Of course there’s a lot that goes into it, but the general philosophy for me is to simplify. ... It’s useful if you have facility on some instruments, but it’s not everything. All of that technique is removed, and it’s just about the music, I hope.
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MC: When does your residency officially start and what kind of things will you be doing?
KM: I get [to the College] on Tuesday morning, and I’m going to be working with a couple of classes. One is [Professor of Music] Su Tan’s composition class Music 209 and the other is [Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music] Peter Hamlin’s Electronic Music 212. With Su Tan, I’ll be talking to students about the practical steps and choices that you would want to make to have a career in music. I want to demystify it a little bit. I want to just give people a set of resources and tools to look up and use in order to bridge the gap between academia and life outside of that because it’s hard to really know anything when you’re in school.
When I was at Middlebury it was wonderful. I had these great teachers, but I was really on my own in terms of conceptualizing how to make music part of my life outside of school. It didn’t feel like it was possible. That might have been in my head, but it also felt like there were assumed pathways that my professors were aware of and then there was a whole pathway outside of that that I wasn’t aware of. I want to talk about that so people will be focused on their studies but also know what it would take to be part of a musical community outside of that.
With Peter Hamlin’s class I’m doing a remix project. I’ll be talking to students about that, and I have a few tracks that haven’t been released yet that we’ll work on. Potentially, the artists whose tracks these are might use what we make if they like the remixes.
I’m also doing workshops for bands. That will happen for all the days I’m there. I think the idea is for me to hear students perform and I’ll just talk about it with them — hear what they want to get out of performing and doing music. From there I can give them ways to develop that.
Also, at night I’m working with three Middlebury students to play my music. We’re going to rehearse the music and play a show on Friday night at the school in room 125 in the Center for the Arts. The group that I’m working with will also play in Montreal on Saturday and Burlington on Sunday.
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MC: How does it feel to come back to your alma mater to teach and give a performance?
KM: Well I don’t know yet. I’m excited though. It’s complicated, honestly. I’m nervous because I feel like the caliber of student is going to be really high and I need to address that and hold my own. But no, I’m really excited. Middlebury was a really perfect place for me when I was that age. I was getting my bearings with music. I knew I wanted to get serious about music, but I just didn’t know what kind of place I was going to have with it. I think Middlebury is such a small community that it’s safe enough to explore and figure out your own taste. I’m really curious just to see what things will be like. When I was there, it was hard to find people who were into crazy music like me. I’m curious to see what is compelling to students in college now.
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MC: What can people expect from the performance Friday evening?
KM: Well, I’m not 100 percent sure. It’s going to be something we develop while I’m there. I think it will be something really exciting. I think it will definitely have the hallmarks of American minimalism crossed with say punk. Perhaps even some improvisation within limited boundaries. It should be fun.
(10/31/12 4:04pm)
Pianist Paul Lewis performs Schubert's Klavierstücke in E Flat Major, D. 946 No. 2 in a previous recording. On Friday, Oct. 26, he performed the powerful finale to his Schubert cycle.
Last Friday night Paul Lewis performed to a packed concert hall in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts. In 2011 Lewis began a two-year project to perform the mature piano works of Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Friday night was the fifth and final concert of the cycle, and the College was one of the few venues to host the cycle in its entirety.
Considering Lewis’ recognition as one of the best Schubert interpreters in recent memory, Friday evening’s performance was quite a treat.
Lewis performed Schubert’s final three sonatas, which were written down in the final weeks of his life and published posthumously. In these sonatas we see Schubert’s vast imagination at work. For instance, in the second movement of the C minor Sonata, d. 958, Schubert introduces a tender, reflective theme in the first few measures. At this point the adagio is very balanced and diatonic. However, Schubert hints at the ensuing complexity of the movement with a subtle chromatic chord at a cadence. Not surprisingly, the listener is soon thrust into a minor passage that drudges up the musical equivalent of night to the opening’s day. Listening to Schubert’s attempt to reconcile these contrasting ideas before the end of the movement was by itself worth the price of admission.
I could hear distinct elements of the second movement of d.958 in the allegro of the Sonata in A major, d.959—particularly the lyrical theme, which reappeared in an altered form and showed up transformed yet again in the fourth movement. As the concert progressed, one could sense the intricate connections between the sonatas, and Lewis seemed privy to their secrets as no one in the audience could be. The way in which he inhabited each sonata made the concert itself seem like one fluid process from start to finish, as Lewis played each note and passage with such conviction and heightened sense of expression as to convince the audience that no other interpretation would have been appropriate. Perhaps another way of stating the same phenomenon is that he made everything look easy.
If ever there was a lapse in the collective attention of the audience, it might have been due to Lewis’s physical playing style. As many pianists tend to do, Lewis played accented chords with his entire body, as if he were using the keyboard to push himself up from the piano bench at one point. Also, during especially demanding passages, one could see the intensity in Lewis’ facial expressions — his furrowed brow and slight frown — and hear the occasional grunting sound emanating from the stage and throughout the concert hall. If I’ve portrayed Lewis in a Jekyll and Hyde kind of way — composed pianist as he enters the concert hall and wild man at the piano — then let me clarify.
Although this intensity of expression might be disorienting to some, it merely demonstrates my earlier point that Lewis immerses himself in each piece. Although much less idiosyncratic, Lewis’s playing style reminds me of the late Glenn Gould’s if only because both pianists become fully absorbed in the music when they play, this state then manifesting itself in the body as accented gestures. No one can fault a pianist for this type of expression.
Although Lewis didn’t sing while he played, as Gould did, there was perhaps one other important parallel between the two, specifically in their relationship with the music they play. Schubert, for Lewis, is what Bach was to Gould and perhaps what Chopin was to Rubenstein: an individual composer whose work speaks most clearly and naturally to the performer, who is then able to channel the music in a unique and refreshing way. Friday evening’s performance suggested Lewis understands Schubert’s works as few others do.
(10/25/12 5:10pm)
Jazz has been called America’s music, and looking at its history, one can see how interconnected it is with the country’s past. Its backbone incorporates features of ragtime, the American Negro spiritual and the blues — all forms of music developed by African Americans.
It also incorporates musical ideas from late-Romantic music, and many of the standards we know today were written by Jewish composers with fresh immigrant roots.
The 1930s saw a rise of big-band jazz, and around that time it became a part of the College music scene. As jazz transformed over the decades, the music stayed at the College.
In the early 1970s students coined the name “The Sound Investment” for the main jazz group on campus. Seven years ago the group became known as the Sound Investment Jazz Ensemble when it became an official college ensemble. On Oct. 26 Middlebury College’s Sound Investment Jazz Ensemble will perform a show at 51 Main.
The group studies a wide-variety of jazz styles, playing musical charts from big bands like the Count Basie Orchestra to more contemporary works and arrangements. For anyone who has seen the ensemble before, the performance Friday night is bound to be different in many ways. The group itself is constantly changing. Students leave because of graduation or to study abroad only to be replaced with fresh new talent.
Director of Jazz Activities at Middlebury College and director of the ensemble, Dick Forman, commented on how he works with this fluidity.
“I like to choose repertoire that take advantage of the strengths of current members,” he said.
The current group’s personality is conducive to playing various styles.
“Mainstream, straight-ahead jazz, with a nod to bop is mostly what we’re playing,” said Forman. “But over the course of a year, we’ll do everything from classic swing to contemporary jazz.”
Last spring when the 17-piece big band played at 51 Main, they filled the building, playing to an eager crowd that didn’t want them to leave. Paul Donnelly ’15, who plays bass in the ensemble, remembers the evening well.
“Playing at 51 Main last year was an interesting, crazy and great experience,” he said. “Fitting both the size and sound of a 15-plus person band into such a small space was a whole lot of fun for the band and hopefully everyone else at 51 Main.”
Forman expects that Friday’s performance will go over well, and Donnelly is also excited about the show tomorrow night.
“With an even bigger band this year, Friday’s show should be a blast,” said Donnelly.
Big-bands are known for their rich, swinging sound, and Friday night should not disappoint.
The performance starts at 9 p.m. and lasts until 11 p.m. at 51 Main downtown. The group will also play on Nov. 16 at 9 p.m. in McCullough Student Center at a dance hosted by the Middlebury Swing Dance Club. Also, the group will perform in the concert hall at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts on Dec. 1.
(10/25/12 5:08pm)
The Killer’s new album Battle Born features an interesting mix of sounds that the band has experimented with over the years.
Some of the tracks have an art-rock feel whereas others are more pop-oriented. Overall, though, the album feels like a tired rehashing of old clichés, as it lacks a stand-out single.
I would not consider myself a Killers fan, but I did like their first two albums, Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town, when I was young.
The tracks that worked for me on those albums were driven by captivating guitar riffs and catchy choruses.
Even more so than the music itself, I felt that the older work put out by the Killers felt more honest the songs and lyrics were something that came from their heart.
And let’s face it — at the risk of sounding like a hipster — huge critical and financial success have really brought down the overall quality of the Killers music as the years have gone by.
Unfortunately, over time the band has shifted their focus away from guitar-driven songs and established a more synth-oriented and electronic sound, perhaps reflecting a more general shift over the last several years in pop music.
In the process of developing a less guitar-oriented sound, the band also seems to have thrown away the ability to carefully and tastefully incorporate electronic timbres into their works.
Many tracks on Battle Born have fills and transitions that seem out of place in relation to the rest of the song, and the album itself is also full of cheesy synth lines and flat guitar parts.
For instance, “The Rising Tide,” a song with a lot of potential, feels watered down because the guitar takes a backseat to a generic 80s ostinato on the synthesizer that may or may not be from GarageBand.
The most redeeming feature of the song is the crunchy guitar solo that shines through the fluff in the middle of the song but disappears as quickly as it comes.
I’m not sure if I would say the band has run out of creative ideas, but most of the songs just feel forced.
“Be Still,” a song toward the end of the album, has a weird electronic drum backing and even stranger lyrics:
“Don’t break character/ you have a lot of heart/ is this real or is this a dream/ be still, be still.”
There’s a message in the song of hanging on in tough times that made me uncomfortable; there might be a place for this heart-to-heart message somewhere in pop music, but with lyrics like “Rise up like the sun and labor ’till the work is done,” it’s hard to take the band seriously unless you’re a time-traveling puritan.
Another song, “Carry Me Home,” perhaps best demonstrates the band’s morewishy-washy sound on this album. The Killers have never been edgy by any means, but the band fails a perfectly good motive in this song by not fully committing to a minor key. In the verse, they introduce a nice riff with a minor tinge that makes you think the song is going to be dark.
I was excited because this seemed like the first actual risk the band was going to take in an otherwise very conventional album. Instead the band keeps the song largely in a major key, eschewing what could have been a more complex sound for a basic pop cliché.
I know that looking for emotional complexity in a song from the Killers would make me an idiot, but is it wrong to expect that a band develop promising material?
In past albums like Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town, we see more of a meshing of ideas and the songs just seem to be better written.“Mr. Brightside” and “When You Were Young,” for example, were both fully realized songs whose elements worked together as a whole. The main guitar riff in “Mr. Brightside” is one of the more memorable riffs of the last decade in pop music, and “When You Were Young” also incorporated itself into the public conscience of popular music.
Tracks on the new album, however, lack the direction and determination of these earlier songs. What makes nearly all songs off the Killers new album ho-hum? Many factors play a role, but the mostly likely explanation is a deviation from the formulas that worked in the past.
(10/17/12 10:24pm)
On Thursday, Oct. 12, the second poetry slam of the year took place in the Abernethy Room at the Axinn Center at Starr Library. Poor Form Poetry — the College’s slam poetry group — hosted the event, which drew a large crowd of students, professors and community members to the small, cozy space.
Presenters at the slam performed memorized poems about a wide variety of topics. At the beginning of the evening, five randomly selected members from the audience were chosen to serve as judges for the evening, and they rated each performance on a scale from one to 10 with dry erase boards and markers. Often the crowd disagreed with the judges, groaning in response to what they felt were low scores.
The judging system also serves to decide who will form the five-member team to compete at College Union’s Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) next semester — the national championships for college slam poetry.
In order to determine this year’s team, Poor Form poetry scheduled four events known collectively as the Middlebury Poetry Slam. The Oct. 12 event was the second in the series.
The top three performers from the first three events will compete in a “grand slam” later this semester. Of the nine competing in the grand slam, five will be chosen to represent the team at nationals.
Although Thursday’s slam was technically a competition, one would never get this impression from the performers. More than anything they seemed focused on effectively delivering their pieces, which touched on subjects ranging from the shallowness of some men to childhood memories and everything in between. Often the topic revolved around personal subject matter and the performances seemed emotionally-charged. One in particular discussed trying to find love after various negative encounters with men mostly interested in drunken hook-ups.
Perhaps because of their personal nature, many of the poems clicked with audience members, who were told before the performance by host Chris De La Cruz ’13 to snap or react if something “moved them.” There was a good deal of snapping throughout the slam, and the relate-ability of the poems seems to be their defining feature, as the poetry eschews standard poetic forms in exchange for greater freedom of expression.
Jocelyn Remmert ’13, a psychology major, enjoys going to slams and has been to four so far during her time at the College.
“I love them, and I just keep coming back even though I have no poetry background.”
Bella Tudisco ’13.5, who performed at the event, added that the slams are an inclusive forum.
“The slams are open and anyone can perform if they want to,” she said. “I hope they bring something new to Middlebury [and] bring a voice to new people.”
Although Poor Form Poetry is perhaps the only slam poetry group at Vermont colleges, according to Maya Goldberg-Safir ’13, president of the group, it is only a part of “a greater spoken word community on campus that includes Verbal Onslaught,” Middlebury’s premiere open-mic spoken word performance that happens monthly, usually at 51 Main.
For anyone looking to get involved in this community, Verbal Onslaught is a good place to start, but Poor Form Poetry also hosts weekly workshops on Thursdays at 5 p.m. in the Gamut Room in which anyone one can come.
The third round of the Middlebury Poetry Slam will happen on Friday, Nov. 8.
(10/10/12 9:15pm)
Because the position of reel critic is tenured to ensure public opinion does not hinder free thinking, I loved Taken 2. I’m aware that the movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes stands at a firm 18 percent (the image of rotten tomato particles next to the figure emphasize this), but in spite of this fact, I think it might be worth the price of admission.
Even though I enjoyed the film, I don’t disagree with people who said it was a bad movie. There are essentially two ways of viewing the film. The first way involves using your mind; if you’re too analytical when you watch the movie, you’ll get caught up in the many non sequiturs that plague it, like the minor detail that Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), blind-folded and bound in the back of a van, can track the distance from his hotel in Istanbul by listening to the clicks of his watch and vague sounds he hears outside that spur vivid images in his mind of locations he has been to maybe once. I’m not kidding.
The second way of viewing the film is to watch it with your heart. This sounds corny, but it is the secret to watching most “bad” movies and makes this picture much more enjoyable. I believe anyone can watch the film from the second perspective if they try. Really, you only need to take a few things into consideration before viewing Taken 2. Realizing these things will relax your mind and put your gut in control, making it practically impossible to take the film too seriously. First off, the movie isn’t really about anything except Liam Neeson.
Director Oliver Megaton knows the key demographic of 18-35 year-old males wants to see as much Liam Neeson in 24 frames per second as can be managed. If this means making other characters uninteresting at the expense of getting him more screen time, so be it.
Second, you need to give Liam Neeson’s character a break. All action movies let their heroes escape from hairy situations against all odds. Also, the fact that he has cool gadgets of all sorts is a feature in many films, from the Mission Impossible movies to The Cat in the Hat.
Perhaps the most useful thing to realize about Taken 2 is that the basic premise of the movie assumes you have amnesia. (This same assumption fueled the creation of five Final Destination movies) The first Taken, even though it incorporated all of the action movie clichés in existence, rocked because the plot was very basic but engaging: Liam Neeson’s daughter gets kidnapped in Europe so he sets off to kill the people who did it.
With this strong motivation, we can forgive some of the film’s absurdities.
The problem with the Taken series is that any sequel has to involve the kidnapping of a member of Liam Neeson’s family or else the film seems unrelated.
Maybe they’re just unlucky, but after a while the family just starts to look bad: How many times can a member of the Mills family be kidnapped? Three?
(10/10/12 9:14pm)
In the atrium of the Johnson Memorial Building, sculptures featuring welded steel rods, paper, fabric, wood and many other materials have taken their final place in a new exhibit.
This exhibit, “Line in Space: Just a Corner of Your Memory Palace,” features work from the studio art class Sculpture I, and it officially opened to the public on Wednesday.
While passersby will appreciate the uniqueness and visual appeal of the exhibit, they might not look at each piece in terms of its component parts.
Artists, however, do think in these terms, and an important question today, in light of climate change and pollution in general, is the impact that certain art materials might have on the environment.
Professor of Studio Art Jim Butler notes that art has largely phased out harmful chemicals over time.
“When I was a student, turpentine was used as a solvent,” he said.
“Today we use mineral spirits instead, which are much better for the environment.”
Butler also mentioned that in printmaking, “water-based ink has replaced oil-based ink” and that toluene, a solvent used to dissolve paints, “is not used in the field anymore.”
“ Also,” said Butler, “at the College we reuse work rags they are collected and washed by the school. You don’t use old ragged T-shirts and then throw them out like in the past.”
Echoing Butler’s sentiment, Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art Sanford Mirling, who is teaching Sculpture I this fall, added that the safer solvents are also disposed of in accordance with the College’s policy on handling hazardous materials.
“We make sure those materials are taken care of properly,” he said.
As is the case with many college art programs, a culture of reusing and recycling pervades the studio art program here.
“First of all,” said Associate Professor of Art Hedya Klein, “if it still has life to it, we store items for later art making. Recycling services picks up wood shavings, paint, paper and metal. We sort these out for them, and I know they have different piles for everything.”
Mirling makes a point to get the most use out of materials, citing the current “Line in Space” exhibit as an example.
“Evio’s piece incorporates a blue curtain, which we’ll use again,” Mirling said, pointing out the installation by Evio Isaac ’13, which consists of a large blue curtain hung by wire and resembles a leaning tepee from one angle.
“The Plexiglass in his piece has been reused three times,” he said.
In fact, one goal of Isaac’s instilation was to only purchase materials that could all be used more than once.
Katie Rominger ’14, also a student in Sculpture I, reused materials for her instillation, a towering curtain that incorporates steel, cloth and surgical masks, amongst other items.
“They [the art department] provide us with a lot of reused fabric,” she said. “I feel like there is a decent amount of reused material.”
Although he agrees that people in the studio art department reuse material, Misha Gershcel ’13 feels that some waste is inevitable.“Some things you just end up throwing out,” he said. “Although spray paint can’t be great for the environment, it’s convenient and sometimes I use it on projects.”
Gerschel also added that in comparison to the bigger picture, “the carbon footprint that art leaves is a drop in the bucket. Art also has intrinsic value; you can ‘upcyle’ by reusing old materials to make something new and better,” he added.
Professor of Studio Art Jim Butler emphasizes the department’s awareness of the issue and their efforts to minimize the impact of art waste on campus.
“Talking to my colleagues — it’s a big concern. You know, this country has so many materials you don’t have to buy new ones.”