Andanh.com

Author and gallery owner Sam Sarowitz worked in film development hell before turning his extensive collection of movie posters (now 12,000+) into a lucrative business, and now a book. Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters (Mark Batty Publisher), culled from Sarowitz’s Posteritati Gallery in New York, offers a fascinating look at several golden ages of movie marketing. Most of the posters come from the late 1950s and after. Hollywood classics are the focus, but there’s a nice selection of French New Wave, world cinema classics, and genre pictures (Halloween, Deep Throat), with some telling nuggets thrown in: the US poster for In Cold Blood, for example, used the eyes of the real killers, not the actors.

Read more

VIDEO: The trailer for Baghead

Whether the Duplass brothers belong to the mumblecore mix is open to debate (and indeed, Swanberg and Bujalski would be happy if the term –– which refers to the way characters seem to speak before they know what they want to say –– simply went away), but they’re savvy enough to recognize that the supposed genre is ripe for spoofing. They’ve constructed a compact meta-movie laced with knowing winks.

Filled with alcohol-fueled plans of penning a screenplay populated with plum roles for themselves, the four pals, unsuccessful actors all (surprise!), decide to drive to a remote cabin for the weekend. What will the film be about? “Love!” declares schlubby Chad (Steve Zissus), who wants Michelle (Greta Gerwig, from Swanberg’s LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs and his upcoming Nights and Weekends, which she co-directed), the vacuous young twentysomething just off the bus from the Midwest, to be his “movie girlfriend.” Of course, Chad secretly pines for her to be his actual girlfriend. The youngest of the group (the rest are pushing 40), Michelle actually has eyes for Chad’s pal Matt (Ross Partridge), the handsome alpha male with “Elvis hair” who’s been dating Catherine (Elise Muller) on and off for 11 years. Neither this nor his knowledge of Chad’s hopes stops Matt from planning to sleep with Michelle, who deflects Chad’s advances by telling him that “You’re like my best friend . . . or my brother.”

VIDEO: The trailer for American Teen

Burstein’s main subjects come from five different cliques. There’s the sweet jock (Colin Clemens), the pretty misfit (Hannah Bailey), the powerful prom queen (Megan Krizmanich), the clever outcast (Jake Tusing), and the sensitive heartthrob (Mitch Reinhold). They don’t stay in separate worlds for long, though. Midway through filming, the stars align. Sitting in the audience at the Warsaw Community High School talent show, watching the artsy Hannah rock out on her guitar, Mitch comes to a realization. He doesn’t want to graduate without ever talking to that girl. He develops a full-blown crush, and he and Hannah launch a when-social-hierarchies-collide story line that John Hughes would approve of. “There are so many girls who would give their left boob to be with him,” Hannah tells the cameras. Five or ten years into the future, Hannah and Mitch might have had a chance. But this is high school; even when you succeed in shocking people with your happiness, they don’t always let you get away with it.

With all her charms and idiosyncrasies, Hannah is American Teen’s unofficial star, and through her keen eyes we watch the lives of the others unravel. Burstein nonetheless switches perspectives with a light, non-judgmental touch. It’s easy to sympathize with Hannah’s heartbreaks, her city-rebel-stuck-in-a-small-town personality, and her battle with depression, or with the way Jake uses a caustic, self-depreciating wit to deal with his insecurity. But mean girl Megan is portrayed as neither a witch nor a martyr, and popular Colin struggles to find peace with his family’s expectations. He and Megan may have peaked early, but nobody is all bad or all good in American Teen.

VIDEO: Interview with Nanette Burstein

Before you began filming American Teen, what made you decide to chronicle the lives of teenagers culled from various places on the high-school food chain: a jock, a princess, a nerd, a misfit?
If you watch teen fiction films, you see the same stories told over and over again. There’s basically four of them. The Romeo and Juliet story across class or race of clique lines, like the forbidden love. Triumph over adversity, which often involves sports, but not necessarily. The underdog looking for acceptance, which is the nerd, usually. And the mean girl’s power struggle. And all of those stories, I found, existed in reality.

What prompted you to try to create another narrative of the high-school experience, a period that’s been defined and redefined ad nauseam?
I hadn’t seen a really complicated high-school movie that took a lot of the experiences that I felt or saw around me. High school was a really formative time in my life — I think for a lot of people in both a good and bad way. Through the pain and torture, I realized who I was.

Tell me about your selection and screening process. Why did you choose the town of Warsaw, Indiana, as the setting?
I looked in the Midwest because I think there’s a timelessness and more of an innocence about that part of the country than the rest of America. And I wanted to be in a town that only had one high school because I think that there’s more social pressure that way. You can’t escape — or you’re super-powerful. I wanted it to be economically mixed; I was hoping for it to be racially mixed, but that was hard to find in the Midwest, in small towns, at least. We called, you know, just hundreds of schools that sort of fit this demographic . . . and out of that found the best stories all in one place.

VIDEO: The trailer for Brideshead Revisited (2008)

“Excuse me, Mr. Waugh, did you see the new movie version of Brideshead Revisited?”

(Editor’s note: the following exchange took place in an undisclosed location, presumably celestial.)

“New movie? What was wrong with the old one?”

"I believe they’ve updated your book. New and improved is how they like to describe these things.”

“Improved?”

“Well, sir, you still have Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as a poor — ”

“Poor? Charles? Do they think I wrote The Talented Mr. Ryder?”

“ — student who goes to Oxford and falls in love with Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) and his sister Lady Julia (Hayley Atwell) and their Wiltshire manor, Brideshead (Castle Howard in Yorkshire), and he and Sebastian drink too much, and then the Flytes’ pious mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), takes Charles under his wing. The three young people go to Venice — ”

“Julia goes to Venice with Sebastian and Charles?”

“ — to visit the Flytes’ father, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), who went off to the Great War and stayed on the Continent and took a mistress (Greta Scacchi), and there’s some kind of Carnival — ”

“In Venice in the summer?”

“ — where Charles kisses Julia and Sebastian sees it and gets upset.”

“I didn’t write that.”

“It’s in the script, sir. And Lady Marchmain gets upset too because the Flytes are Anglo-Catholics — ”

“They’re Roman Catholics. As was I.”

“Anglo-Catholics is what it says on the jacket of the new Everyman edition, sir. And Charles can’t marry Julia because she has to marry a Catholic.”

“Lady Marchmain appears to know more about Catholicism than I do.”

“So she gives a ball at Brideshead and announces Lady Julia’s engagement to Rex Mottram (Jonathan Cake).”

“But Lady Marchmain detests Mr. Mottram.”

VIDEO: Santogold, "L.E.S. Artistes"

I know I can’t be the only person whose ears perked up earlier this year on hearing the chorus of the then-new Ashlee Simpson single “Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya).” In retrospect, even though Bittersweet World bombed with little more than a collective shrug from the public, the song’s commanding chorus, with its soaring yet sing-song melody and its vaguely ’80s stomp, bore the stamp of songwriter Santi White — a/k/a Santogold.

If Ms. White’s gig working on this song (and Bittersweet World’s “Ragdoll”) gets played down in her bio in favor of subsequent gigs opening for Björk and Coldplay and her friendship/collaboration with M.I.A. and DJ Switch, consider that an act of misdirection. Although those artists are much “cooler” and have more cultural currency, Ms. White’s work on “Outta My Head” and “Ragdoll” bespeaks the pop-savvy combination of huge choruses and offbeat sing-songy chantitude that now make up her willfully diverse major-label debut, Santogold (Downtown/Atlantic).

So what’s her current game plan? Santi (responding via e-mail to reserve a strained voice for her tour with Coldplay) is coy: “My methodology seems to be sink or swim.” At once an out-of-the-blue ingénue and an interdisciplinary music-biz vet who’s dipped her feet into the deep end of major-label A&R and songwriting, Santogold has crafted an odd and off-kilter pop record. If it’s the work of a crazy outsider, it’s also created with the sheen of someone who knows what she’s doing. “The key [to this record] was having a strong vision of how it should sound in my head. That way when I worked with different producers, I made sure that their style merged with my vision rather than overpowered it.”

Even if “Santogold” the music-biz phenomenon seems to have come out of nowhere, Santi White the savvy vet has been prepping this debut for the better part of a decade. Has it all gone according to plan? “Well, I’ve pretty much been unprepared for each part as I’ve stepped into it. And as much stress as it causes me, there’s always so much more to learn.”

One thing Ms. White has had to learn is that the media don’t always know what to do with an artist whose genre straddling challenges racial assumptions — she caused a small uproar when she accused those who would label her music as R&B and hip-hop of being “racist.” “Hip-hop, particularly old-school, is one of the genres that has influenced me as an artist, as well as punk, dub, new wave, indie rock, and electronic music. I just am disappointed when journalists belittle the broad scope of my music by shoving it in a little genre box, especially one that’s the least accurate.”

With his new album expected to hit #1 on the Billboard charts this week, I think (Nasty)  NAS is getting a bit swell-headed. He recently told MTV News about a grandiose fantasy: to record one album produced entirely by DRE and another produced entirely by DJ PREMIER, then drop them both on the same day. I’m guessing no self-respecting label would ever let him split his chart position like that, but I can’t hear those kind of pragmatic concerns over the deafening whoosh of a million hip-hop fans springing tremendous boners.

In other tremendous rap-boner news (this time in the classic “blunder” sense): thesmokinggun.com recently outed coke-rap champion RICK ROSS as, of all things, a former prison guard. In terms of hip-hop credibility, being revealed as a former Department of Corrections employee is like being outed as a former darling little tea party. Ross, struggling to wriggle out from beneath a weighty pile of evidence, posted a video denying it.

Somebody tell NICK CAVE to shave off that moustache before it rapes again. He looks like someone George C. Scott would beat up in Hardcore.

PAUL WESTERBERG just released a digital album for the unconventional price of 49 cents, and I simply can’t bring myself to listen to it. I dig some of his music, and I could probably scare up the money, but something about that price point seems incredibly fishy and uncouth, like a crazy hobo trying to sell me a dollar bill for 99 cents. I don’t know what your little game is, Westerberg, but leave me out of it!

Nearby: we’re getting another round of deluxe REPLACEMENTS reissues soon. Let’s hope they go for a decent, God-fearing price that won’t make us feel we’re being laughed at.

Also in the digital-music vein; CONOR OBERST is streaming his new solo album for free on his Web site. Be aware, however, that free Conor Oberst music is in the end much more expensive than 49-cent Paul Westerberg music, because it’s twice as likely to turn you into a tit.

If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for CHAPTERHOUSE to re-form, good news: you’re probably dead.

An appeals court has ruled that JANET JACKSON’s leathery Super Bowl horror wasn’t a big enough deal to justify the massive fine that the FCC tried to levy against CBS. An outrage! Until the FCC has collected its justly awarded $550 million and used the money to build some sort of Skynet-style networked nipple-containment/destruction system, our national nightmare can never truly be over.

PICTORIAL: Movies and visual imagery inspire Empirical as much as does music.

Talking with Nathaniel Facey, the 25-year-old alto-saxophonist in the London band Empirical, you find it difficult at first to pin down where and how the quintet (who play the Newport Jazz Festival August 10) developed their unusual compositional style. Some tunes have a straight-ahead post-bop feel, like Facey’s “Blessing”; with its standard song form mixed up with contrary keys and rhythms, it’s bright and hooky, like a cross between Ornette Coleman’s “Blues Connotation” and Miles Davis’s take on “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Other numbers, like Facey’s “Palantir” and pianist Kit Downes’s “Dark Lady,” are episodic marvels, one theme supplanted by another, each solo with its own background setting in the shifting textures of the piece. Although all five players in Empirical impress, it’s the writing that impresses most on their homonymous debut — the piquant ensemble voicings, the unfolding narrative structures.

Over the phone from London, Facey names an array of influences: Wayne Shorter (“particularly his current quartet”), Steve Coleman, Tim Berne. All of these offer keys to the band’s individual playing, even particular rhythmic or harmonic devices. But they don’t explain “Palantir,” whose 16-minute length is more the result of detailed writing than any extended solo passages.

“I think it’s a lot of things,” says Facey. “But we’re all fans of films and visual arts. For myself, I really love films and animation, as well as the dramatic nature of film music. That’s something that’s an inspiration: the more creative scores and really nice films. The music of The Lord of the Rings [Howard Shore] is really great, Pan’s Labyrinth [Javier Navarrete] as well. So there’s definitely the pictorial thing, as well as trying to conjure imagery or play in a really dramatic way.”

“Palantir” was inspired in part by “the mystical seeing stone” of that name from The Lord of the Rings. (Facey says he was watching the DVDs of the movie during the piece’s gestation.) Drummer Shaney Forbes’s “Kite” conjures the flight of a hawk over the Tuscan town of Vinci; it’s dedicated to Leonardo. Phelps’s lovely ballad “Clapton Willow” is about a district in Northeast London (not the guitar god) and a willow tree that lends a sense of calm to the troubled neighborhood.

NERVOUS REKS: “I allowed myself to get caught up in the idea of being a rap star without really being at that level.”

Since jumping skills-first onto Boston’s rap scene seven years ago, Lawrence-born MC Reks has earned a variety of reputations. He’s been known as one of the region’s lyric savants, a raging self-absorbed asshole, and an unwieldy stumbling lush. There’s a reason I say those things with no regard for my own health or for his feelings: Reks has spent the past half-decade exiting the darkness and ensuring that his legacy is tied to the former accolade and not the latter mishaps.

“I burned a lot of bridges,” he says about his relationship with the New England rap establishment, as well as with Brick Records, which released his infinitely respected debut, Along Came the Chosen, in 2001, but turned down his 2003 follow-up, Rekless (eventually self-released). “I was immature, and I made decisions that were devastating toward my career. I just thought that I was on top of the world, and with that mind state, I allowed myself to get caught up in the idea of being a rap star without really being at that level. I had no dues paid to warrant that kind of mentality, but I had that mentality. I learned real quick when things started to get bad.”

Hip-hop artists rarely come so clean, but Reks specializes in telling it like it is, and in the wake of slipping from Boston hip-hop’s top spot, he knew where he stood. Those who find it difficult to understand how an artist could feel so exalted on what amounted to underground scene might consider that around the turn of the millennium Boston hatched more critically fellated subterranean talent than any city save for New York, Philly, and Los Angeles. Akrobatik and 7L & Esoteric were attracting boom-bap fans from as far away as Germany. Mr. Lif and Virtuoso were introducing heads to a new breed of figurative consciousness. Edo G was resurrecting — and the list continues, from Made Men, OVM, and Ripshop to Insight and Edan. Reks’s brazen blacktop enlightenment and writing abilities enabled him to ascend the ladder quickly . . . too quickly.

“I allowed my head to get swollen. Everybody knows my issues with drinking, and a lot of that played a part in it as well — my inability to calm down on certain things was having a devastating effect on not only my music but also on my wife and my son. I had to take time off just to realize what was important and to figure out how I could grow.”

At least Wolf Parade had the guiding hand of Isaac Brock on their debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary. The production talents of the Modest Mouse frontman, who signed them to Sub Pop, helped ensure its ecstatic critical reception. Brock also helped reconcile the more classic rock and pop tendencies of guitarist Dan Boeckner with the more esoteric leanings of keyboardist Spencer Krug. (Each of the two writes about half the tracks.)

That Wolf Parade’s June follow-up, At Mount Zoomer, surpasses Queen Mary in the eyes of many critics is impressive given that Brock wasn’t around this time. Like their debut, it embraces a dense, almost cryptic existential lyricism, with ecstatic, riff-happy guitar and keyboards leading the way. But At Mount Zoomer — composed largely of songs that began as jam sessions at the church their associates Arcade Fire own on the outskirts of Montreal — sheds Brock’s oft-stifling influence in favor of a progressive ’70s flavor that recalls Jethro Tull more than Modest Mouse. Album closer “Kissing the Beehive” clocks in at 11 minutes, and epic guitar solos abound. Yet somehow the album coheres, most of its songs buoyed by simple, sing-along choruses. Wolf Parade’s lyrics are always a puzzle, but the album’s recurring themes are risk, adventure, and separation.

Risk in the creative process as well: before recording, Krug and Boeckner made no effort to see whether they were on the same page. “Dan and I don’t really confer when it comes to lyrics,” says Krug. “That’s sort of like an unspoken rule, where we leave each other alone. It doesn’t appeal to us to work that way. It would make it not fun. So I don’t really know what he’s singing about most of the time, and he doesn’t know what I’m singing about.”

To hear Krug tell it, the CD sort of jelled, as if under its own power. “It just came together naturally. There weren’t any overarching visions. It was more just making a record that we wanted to make and seeing if it was usable.”

Momma nature stepped in and closed down the second stage, then cranked up the lightning bolts to chase Angels and Airwaves off the main stage after three songs. And yet the rain didn't keep the Kids from their punk rock summer camp. If you're not in these photos -- up front, and in the pit -- what the hell were you doing?

Warped Tour 2008: Cobra Starship
Photo: Carina Mastrocola

Read more

GOLD SOUNDS: The curious music of Extra Golden is a story that sounds simple but was realized only through extreme difficulty.

Writing about Extra Golden, you’re tempted to focus on the novelty: two indie-rock dudes taking off to Nairobi to jam with a pair of benga masters sounds like the premise for some awful Jack Black movie. (Please don’t please don’t.) The subsequent stateside visit to play a festival, the series of visa nightmares, and the divine intervention of Barack Obama (not joking) could make a great sequel. And the music — some hamfisted hybrid of butt rock and benga, shredded out on a tooled-up nyatiti — could be a hit soundtrack. For a week.

But the curious music of Extra Golden is a more detailed, less straightforward story that sounds simple but was realized only through extreme difficulty. It’s overtly non-ironic in approach, and utterly earnest in spirit — another tough sell in times when all musical curiosity is cut down as “co-opting.” In short, it sounds better than it sounds on paper.

Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson started the band then known as Golden 15 years ago. In an indie-rock climate that favored chilly distance over visceral kicks, Golden came on like a summer storm, with all sorts of gruff riffage and brute force. Aside from some flourishes, they didn’t sound that preoccupied with urbanized strains of African folk. But according to Minoff, “people’s interests change,” and shortly after their split in 2002, Eagleson left for Kenya to study toward his PhD in ethnomusicology.

Within a year, Eagleson grew close with vocalist Otieno Jagwasi as well as drummer Onyango Wuod Omari. After some successful jammage, he invited Minoff to visit him in Nairobi. And though this, the birth of Extra Golden (who come to the MFA this Wednesday), would be the part where things get a little wacky in our movie version, Minoff was surprised at how normal much of it seemed.

“There are a lot of similarities between benga and rock. The chords are the same; the bands have the same set-up; they’re playing every night in clubs.” And the clubs themselves, though open to the elements, weren’t so different from the sparsely outfitted basements every indie-rocker knows well. The resulting album, Ok-Oyot System (Thrill Jockey), glowed with a let’s-do-this attitude (it was recorded outside with a laptop, a couple of mics, and one amp), and also a enchanting simplicity (benga typically relies on a single key, repetitive rhythms, and trickling guitars). That the music’s greatest feat was its modesty didn’t tickle wacky expectations. And the AIDS-related death of founding member Otieno Jagwasi before the album was released lingered as a dour reminder of the realities beyond the bio.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Nothing in these “Dancing-on-View” performances looked like any known dance technique, but it all looked like dancing.

Sara Rudner has been making “Dancing-on-View” since 1975. Last week, she brought this extraordinary work to Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance and the Institute for Contemporary Art. “Dancing-on-View” is neither a set piece of choreography nor an improvised free-for-all. You could call it a series of gambits and structures, an evolving research into how bodies can be maximally expressive and minimally stressed, a generator of lifetime dancing pleasure.

For four showings in the Concord Academy dance studio and two long afternoons at the ICA, Rudner assembled nine New York colleagues and eight Boston dancers. They’d been working here together for the past three weeks to produce 35 phrases or chapters of movement. One imagines the segments could be performed in random sequence, collage fashion, but on Wednesday night at Concord and Saturday at the ICA they were done in the same order, and the event took us through build-ups and cooldowns, surprises, reprises, and conclusions, as in a conventional dance piece. Except for the informality.

“Dancing-on-View” imposes a curious duality. We look at super dancers performing with tremendous accomplishment, and at the same time we see them at ground level, as explorers committed to the idea that there’s always more to be learned about themselves and their collective enterprise. Everything has an air of being in progress. To achieve perfect ensemble coordination, they stop and rehearse tiny chunks over and over. They show us refined beginnings and endings, but the endings are provisional, the beginnings continuations. Dancers replace other dancers, learn one another’s roles. The piece will go on into the next decade or the next century.

The audience is thoughtfully provided with a “menu” of items. One dancer sits at the side with a stopwatch to announce the title of each new segment and give the names of featured dancers, so we can learn who they are. Emily Beattie, Kellie Edwards. Carey Foster, Sunny Hitt, Amelia Mitter-Burke, Catherine Murcek, Marissa Palley, and Megan Schenk made up the Boston contingent. The New Yorkers were Megan Boyd, Ashley Byler, Erin Crawley-Woods, Peggy Gould, Anneke Hansen, Rachel Lehrer, Lynne Schlesinger-Ruedeman, Maggie Thom, and Lori Quill. Plus the incomparable Rudner.

INNOCENT: Evelyn Nesbit at age 17, posed as half child and half woman by Photo-Secessionist portraitist Gertrude Käsebier.

Nesbit’s father died young, and her waifish beauty, contravening the buxom-and-pudgy Victorian ideal, made her, at age 14, America’s most popular artists’ model. Evelyn took her charms to the Broadway chorus line, from which she was snatched by society architect Stanford White, who in turn befriended, supported, and, when she was 16, raped her, after which she became his underage mistress. Mentally ill Pittsburgh millionaire heir Harry Thaw vied for her attention; he took Evelyn to Europe, where he sadistically beat her as punishment for enduring White’s “seduction.”

Evelyn nevertheless married Thaw in 1905. They lived in Pittsburgh with his pious nouveau riche Presbyterian family, who held her in the kind of contempt today reserved for porn stars. Then while on a trip to New York, Thaw assassinated White during a musical staged on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The subsequent trials exposed Evelyn’s sordid past and set legal precedent for the insanity defense.

It’s a famous story, dramatized by Hollywood in the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (which starred 22-year-old Joan Collins as Nesbit), and drastically reimagined as fiction by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Nesbit herself published two, sometimes inconsistent, accounts: The Story of My Life (1907) and Prodigal Days (1934).

Never has this awful tale been better researched or described than in Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu’s American Eve, which sets a lot of records straight. To say that Uruburu takes Nesbit’s side oversimplifies the deep and subtle arguments she makes in the defamed showgirl’s defense. Uruburu defuses the obvious question — “What was she thinking?!” — by building a psychological profile in which sexual naïveté plus parental abandonment aggravated by an unearned notoriety based on looks alone adds up to certain doom. Is this telling the story from the “woman’s point of view?” Yes, but American Eve is by no means an exaggerated or strident feminist tract. And it is, after all, a woman’s story.

AS YOU LIKE IT: Loud, fast, highly physical, and filled with the ache of love.

Up close, the Forest of Arden, an elevated glade tucked into Boston Common, looks like verdant, dappled clouds tacked to two-by-fours. But wander back to the Parkman Bandstand, before which As You Like It unfolds as this year’s offering of Free Shakespeare (presented by Citi Performing Arts Center through August 3), and set designer Scott Bradley’s jumble of cutouts on poles looks more like a forest. Such are the perplexities of pitching an al fresco show to thousands of people. As director Steven Maler knows from 12 years of amplifying the Bard in the city’s great outdoors, subtleties designed for those in front will be lost to those picnicking near Tremont Street. So his As You Like It is loud, fast, and highly physical. But the ache of love at the core of Shakespeare’s romantic pastorale will be felt as through an analgesic.

This is the second time As You Like It has taken a turn on Boston Common. It’s a natural, since the comedy quickly leaves the repressive court for the more liberating — if also cruel — elements. The mercurial Duke Frederick has usurped his brother Duke Senior’s kingdom, and the true duke has taken up rustic residence in the forest. In Maler’s early-20th-century staging, Frederick is a fascist whose underlings wear red armbands bearing a Mussolini-esque logo. And Duke Senior, himself a carnivorous usurper in the land of Bambi, has arrived in Arden in the vintage airplane we see crash-landed at the back of the woods.

Rosalind, the deposed duke’s daughter, remains at court to keep Duke Frederick’s daughter, Celia, company. At least she does for Shakespeare’s first act — long enough to be love-smacked by Orlando, youngest son of Sir Rowland de Bois, come to try his luck against Frederick’s thuggish wrestler, Charles. Charles doesn’t knock Orlando out, but Rosalind does. When she’s banished by her uncle and dons male clothing to head for the forest, Celia goes along, as does the ribald jester, Touchstone — here pedaling a bicycle-drawn cart from which he takes a break to shake up some martinis. Orlando, to escape his malevolent older brother’s murderous designs, also goes into the woods, accompanied by a faithful septuagenarian.

WHAT IS TIME? WHAT IS DEATH?: The two LOA volumes compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions.

Published last spring, the first Philip K. Dick volume in the Library of America series caught this wave at its peak. This new offering might not be so fortunate. Could renewed optimism and faith in the political system have dispelled the cynicism and the paranoia that draw readers to Dick? Never fear: the next terrorist attack, needless war, shocking assassination, economic collapse, or Republican administration will put the Dick industry back in business

In the meantime, Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, who did the first volume, can be read in a more personal context. Taken together, the nine novels in these two collections compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions, mapping twists and turns in an exhilarating and terrifying mental labyrinth.

Rather than being simply an exercise about imperialism in an extraterrestrial setting, Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip poses the kind of questions that might bug a brilliant mind cranked up on speed at three in the morning. Like, what is time? That proves a headscratcher on the sparsely settled Red Planet colony where Goodmember Arnie Kott, the crudely ambitious but nonetheless appealing head of the powerful Water Workers Local plumbing union, figures that what he needs to get ahead is a “precog,” someone with the gift of prophecy. For though the planet’s climate might not nurture much in the way of agriculture, it has spawned a generation of autistic children, and according to Dr. Glaub, a Martian psychiatrist, these enfants terribles suffer from an inability to experience time sequentially. Like God, they see everything happening at once in a single everlasting instance.

The transition, which Boston is only beginning to recognize, has been some 15 years in the making, including a merger, a building expansion, more exhibitions, and increasingly ambitious shows. The Cornell show, Peabody Essex chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan told me this past December, “really is about signaling, in as direct a way as we could think of, that we mean business about doing work in the modern- and contemporary-art arena.”

It’s a striking transformation. The Peabody Essex evolved out of the East India Marine Society, founded in 1799 as a repository for cool stuff brought back by Salem’s China trade. In 1992, it merged with its neighbor, the Essex Institute, a locally focused antiquarian society dating back to 1821.

The new Peabody Essex Museum was the sole-surviving Enlightenment-era cabinet-of-wonders museum from the early American republic, but it felt dark, dusty, and stodgy. When Dan Monroe arrived from Oregon’s Portland Museum of Art to become director in 1993, it was a backward-looking, colonial institution concentrating on New England, Native American life, natural history, and the cultures Salem touched via the China trade.

Between 1996 and 2003, Monroe tripled the museum’s operating budget, and led a capital campaign to renovate and expand the museum, which culminated in the opening of a new Moshe Safdie–designed facility in 2003. It offered new galleries, a soaring glass atrium, and a 200-year-old merchant’s house that was shipped from China and reassembled on the museum campus.

Signs of a new curatorial vision could be detected in such exhibits as a 1997 show that mixed works by contemporary Native Americans with historical Native works from the museum’s collection. Barbara O’Brien, director of Simmons College’s Trustman Art Gallery, says a turning point came with the renovated museum’s 2003 opening exhibit, “Family Ties: International Contemporary Artists Interpret Family.” In it, freelance curator Trevor Fairbrother — a former contemporary-art curator at Boston’s MFA — assembled a “provocative” and “subtly conceived” (according to The New York Times) but accessible theme show of contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Kerry James Marshal, Zhang Huan, and others.

The straightforwardly named Boston Contemporary Group aims “to support an environment in Boston for critically relevant contemporary art.” Just what that means is under discussion, but the group hopes to cultivate new clients, generate excitement about art, spur dialogue, and bring in much-needed revenue.

“We’re trying as much as possible to build a contemporary art scene in Boston,” says Russell LaMontagne of LaMontagne Gallery. He dreamed up the idea a couple months ago, and enlisted Steve Zevitas of Steven Zevitas/OSP Gallery and Camilo Alvarez of Samson Projects as co-founders. The final charter member is the not-quite-year-old Proof Gallery.

The group is so new that its members haven’t even gotten together to vet ideas yet, but proposals include joint advertising, organizing talks and studio tours, sponsoring public art, and giving out awards. Its first baby step is bostoncontemporary.org, a centralized Web site that members hope will become a hub for the arts in the Hub. The site will not only publicize the group’s own projects but also offer information about other notable area exhibits.

It is hoped that the site will manifest the foundation of a vision for the city’s art that LaMontagne is just beginning to articulate — something younger, fresher, more challenging, more conceptually oriented. Julia Hechtman, who arrived from Chicago a year ago to co-found Proof, notes that a lack of do-it-yourself spirit in Boston has people less engaged, but says, “I have a feeling that this community is really ripe for something new and something exciting.”

One might say that the founders are young (none older than 40), emerging leaders of the city’s art scene. But in fact they’ve already emerged as significant players: Alvarez through his respected four-year-old gallery; LaMontagne for formerly being co-owner of hotshot LFL Gallery in New York (he was one of the L’s) and then opening up his own Boston gallery in spring 2007; and Zevitas for his 15-year-old journal New American Paintings and his seven-year-old gallery, which he’s in the process of moving from a third-floor space inside 450 Harrison Avenue to a more prominent storefront space downstairs. The fact that 10 galleries have recently closed or reduced operations, at least temporarily, has only increased their stature.

RAMMED EARTH Tere O’Connor’s piece examines social behavior as quirky, brainy, and possibly purposeless.

“Beauty Ecstasy Serenity Anxiety” is how Margaret Leng Tan inscribed the CD liner notes on some of the music she played for Eiko & Koma’s Mourning last Thursday at Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance. Those words could have described not only the powerful piano pieces by John Cage, Bunita Marcus, and Somei Satoh but also the dance itself. With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe, and Tan matched them in theatrical as well as musical intensity.

As she strokes a prepared piano, with each key tuned to two tones that produce eerie overtones (Cage’s In the Name of the Holocaust), you look at a leaf-covered ramp and a high, indeterminate brown shape with leaves or shreds of bark peeling off its surface. Two bodies lie in the leaf litter, their heads straining back toward the audience. Shadowing this tableau was my own unforgettable picture of the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11.

All of Eiko & Koma’s concerns are in this first image: the fusion of human and natural worlds; the stillness; the mysterious open metaphors that slowly shift under changing light and sound and movement. Mourning is based on some of their earlier pieces, like Offering, which was seen at Northeastern University in 2003. But in a way, you could say all their pieces are one piece, with slight changes of focus. The constant element is their earthbound, polymorphous movement.

As they begin to edge toward each other in the leaves, you can see distinct differences between them. Koma’s moves are effortful, spasmodic. He seems to be working against himself even when he’s covering a minute distance or giving in to gravity. Eiko slips through the slowest, oddest rotations. She seems to have no joints, but there are times when she looks broken, her limbs dangling or horribly wounded. Both of them are naked except for black furry sacks that encase their torsos. You hardly ever see their faces, and they never stand upright on their own two legs.

Koma often seems like some lumbering animal, butting Eiko’s curled-up body from behind or reaching out an inarticulate hand to touch her. She claws at bunches of leaves. She slides onto him, hurls into him without using her arms. They make tiny moans and toothy hisses and grunts. They keep colliding in some kind of sexual need, then rolling apart.

Nicholas Hlobo, Injeke, 2008. Ribbon, rubber on Fabriano paper.

Hlobo has also developed a performance work, “Thoba, utsale umnxeba” (approximately, “to lower oneself and make a call”), which he will present in the gallery on July 31, sitting on an African reed mat and wearing a costume that will create a ritual attachment between the artist and the gallery. After the performance, the costume, the sculptural props, and a recording of Hlobo’s voice will become part of the exhibition.

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) was established in 1914, and by the following year it had begun collecting and exhibiting the work of local artists. These included expatriates returning from war-torn Europe and bringing with them international influences to the outer tip of Cape Cod. Over the decades, PAAM has reflected the philosophical and æsthetic debates of the larger art world through ongoing exhibitions and educational programs. Opening at PAAM August 1, the annual “MEMBERS’ 12x12 OPEN EXHIBITION AND SILENT AUCTION” presents work by emerging and established artists, all of it created on 12x12 inch panels. The works are for sale by silent auction, with proceeds going to support PAAM and its programs.

LIFE’S STORIES: Hecht’s narratives unfold like elaborate improvisations.

Hecht’s stories read like elaborate improvisations. Almost plotless, they recount a loosely related series of events, all embellished with the narrator’s singular social observations, free associations, phobias, and obsessions. The title story of her first collection, Do the Windows Open?, is ostensibly about trying to overcome her fear of taking the South Fork bus from East Hampton to Manhattan. (The title gives you an idea of the base level of anxiety.) The recurring themes and characters include an unnamed husband who floats through the background offering commentary like a one-man Greek chorus. One character is referred to by a phrase that’s repeated verbatim and functions like a call-back in a comedy routine: “the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto.”

Hecht told the Believer that when people ask her what her stories are about she says, “They’re about the way things are now.” The domestic is always yoked to the global or the infinite, in the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. And everywhere Hecht is marking civilization’s decline: from personal etiquette and the degradation of the English language to fashion to international catastrophes, the “Alfred E. Neuman president” and “the globally warmed-up days.”

GOING TO ST. IVES: Lee Blessing’s canvas may be small, but his concerns are global.

Welcome back to the director’s chair, Tina Packer. The Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company’s artistic director, who’s spent the past few summers on the thespian side of the footlights, returns to playing boss lady with a vigorous, ultimately magical All’s Well That Ends Well (in repertory through August 31) that, if it doesn’t solve all the problems of the Bard’s “problem play,” at least hides them under musical bridges. Realizing that one of the play’s settings, Roussillon in the south of France, is where the troubadour movement of the Middle Ages was born, Packer turns the Countess of Rossillion’s cynical clown, Lavache, into the play’s “resident troubadour” — albeit one whose bluesy growl suggests Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen more than a mediæval minstrel. In the aging-rock-star persona of Nigel Gore, he fronts the 20 musical numbers, some drawn from Shakespeare’s texts, that are the glue connecting the play’s comedy, tragedy, fairy tale, and masochistic romance

So what are All’s Well’s bugaboos? For starters, its fanatically determined heroine, Helena, is in love with a jerk. The low-born lass, daughter of a famous physician but brought up in the Countess’s court, has set her cap at the Countess’s callow, snobbish son, Bertram, who’s described by critic Harold Bloom as “a spoiled brat” and “authentically noxious.” The excuse for Bertram — for those who care to make one — is that his insensitivities are those of youth and that he’s ultimately transformed. (Never mind that, moments before the happy ending, he’s been lying his head off.) Packer casts not a Zac Efron but 40-year-old — albeit handsome and dashing — Jason Asprey in the role. But she does begin the play with a prescient bit of horseplay in which childhood chums Helena and Bertram engage in some mock fencing — until by accident he wounds her, leaving a red blot on her white camisole and a bewildered look on her face.

Neither, for all the jumping-up-and-down charm of Kristin Villanueva, is the monomaniacal Helena a flawless heroine. The character’s an Elizabethan case study for Smart Women, Foolish Choices, stubbornly affixing her affections to the shallow Bertram — though, to her credit, she realizes the match is not likely: “ ’Twere all one/That I should love a bright particular star/And think to wed it, he is so above me.” Then, when she cures the King of France of a “fistula” and claims Bertram as her prize, only to be brutally rejected, she turns so crafty you’d think she’d taken manipulation lessons from Measure for Measure’s “duke of dark corners” — even resorting to the Boccaccio-borrowed “bed trick,” a sexual bait-and-switch that figures in both plays.