April 8

The American Folk Art Museum presents a show of the collages of the endlessly fascinating Henry Darger (1892-1973), who has probably become the most famous American "outsider artist." I remember the initial excitement that so many of us had when we learned about Darger's work in the Eighties, and that excitement has not faded: one indication that we are dealing with a major creator.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37235

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/index.php?p=folk&id=6172

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

The self-taught African-American artist Winfred Rembert works in a most unusual medium:

A self-taught artist, Rembert grew up working in the cotton fields of Cuthbert, Georgia, in the 1950’s. He was arrested after a 1960’s civil rights march and survived a near-lynching before serving seven years in jail. It was in jail, creating wallets next to another inmate, that he first learned to hand-tool leather. Years later, at the suggestion of his wife, Rembert integrated storytelling and the tales of his youth into tableaux on sheets of tanned leather....Rembert often begins his pictures with drawings to work out detailed patterns. When the stories are carved and tooled into the leather, his images take on texture and depth, and finally he paints the surfaces in vivid dyes. The surface of the piece becomes an important aspect of the composition. The final images offer a flamboyant narrative of life in the still-segregated South of the mid-twentieth century. 

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36273

http://www.adelsongalleries.com/exhibitions/2010-04-07_winfred-rembert/

http://www.winfredrembert.com/

The influence of outsider art, however we choose to define it (and that is a contentious subject), has not been lost on more conventionally trained artists such as the Canadian painter Kim Dorland. One commenter at the last link below actually refers to his work as "naive art," which it emphatically is not, but there is a trace of shared visual appeal between Dorland's use of bright thick colors and cut-out shapes, and the work of certain outsider artists:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/art-review-kim-dorland-at-mark-moore-gallery.html

http://www.markmooregallery.com/artists/kim-dorland/

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/05/artseen/kim-dorland-north

http://beautifuldecay.com/2009/06/08/interview-kim-dorland/

http://www.blogto.com/artists/kim_dorland/

Polar Bears, a new play by British novelist Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), sounds fascinating, something I would make a bee-line for if I was anywhere near London's West End:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831270630408/Polar+Bears.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Haddon

But you can't be everywhere, which is one reason I at least love to read about events I'm missing. An art show devoted to the elaborately beautiful scores of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis closes today at the Drawing Center in Manhattan: 

http://www.waggish.org/2010/04/04/iannix-xenakis

http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_current.cfm?exh=662

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis

Xenakis was also an architect, not surprising to anyone familiar with the "spatial" qualities of certain of his compositions; as with the American composer Henry Brant, the placement of musicians in (sometimes unusual) performing spaces was of great interest to Xenakis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brant

Brant, also attracted to unusual instruments and combinations, and an incorporator of jazz in his music, might well have enjoyed Bud Shank's Fifties experiments with playing his alto sax in ensemble with valve trombones:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/bud-shank-and-valve-trombones.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_trombone#Valve_trombone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Shank

The brilliant graphic novelist Seth (It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken) has compiled a list of his favorite Criterion DVDs:

http://www.criterion.com/explore/84-seth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_%28cartoonist%29

It's a a very interestingly diverse list, with Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (great pick) rubbing up against the home-made horror film Equinox. The Canadian short Paddle to the Sea is unknown to me -- I'll have to check that one out.

Among notables born on this date are philosophers Edmund Husserl and E/M. Cioran, journalist Seymour Hersh, singer songwriter Jacques Brel, theater director/choreographer Michael Bennett, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, architects Richard Neutra and Kisho Kurokawa, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, composers Giuseppe Tartini and Dimitrios Levidis (Greece), conductor Adrian Boult, tenor Franco Corelli, jazz singer Carmen McRae, lyricists E.Y. Harburg and Fred Ebb, mountaineer Andrew Irvine, baseball players Catfish Hunter and Gary Carter, film director Hugo Fregonese, special effects artist Douglas Trumbull, novelists John Fante and Glendon Swarthout, and actors Mary Pickford, John Gavin, Patricia Arquette, and Robin Wright Penn. I grew up on Adrian Boult's magnificent recordings of the Vaughan Williams symphonies and owe him a real debt of gratitude. It is interesting to read at Wikipedia that he was an accomplished conductor of more radical composers as well, adept in Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, and Bartok, although almost never asked to record them in the studio. I wonder if air-checks exist of any of these performances?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Boult