THIS WEEKEND IN OMAHA: 04.11.14

It can’t be easy being in a family where everybody seems to be famous. There is Ellis Marsalis, Jr., who quietly, from the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, became the educator for an entire generation of jazz musicians, including Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Jr., and  Nicholas Payton. Ellis literally fathered four musicians as well. There’s trumpeter Wynton, who has managed nine Grammys in his career. There is saxophonist Branford, whose career included playing on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and leading the band on the Tonight Show. There’s drummer Jason, an NEA Jazz Master award-winner.

And then there is trombonist Delfeayo, who perhaps followed his father’s lead most closely, and will be at the Holland Center on Saturday, thanks to Omaha Performing Arts. Delfeayo has done a lot of work as an educator, cofounding the Uptown Music Theatre in New Orleans. He’s also a producer who has had an enormous amount of influence in the way contemporary jazz is recorded, with its focus on the sounds of acoustic instruments.

This Saturday will see the opportunity to see Delfeayo as a performer and, unsurprisingly, he is superlative. He doesn’t record often, with his last album dating back to 2011, but it’s a good sampling of what he is capable of. Called “Sweet Thunder: Duke and Shak,” it was a new recording of music composed by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, inspired by William Shakespeare. Delfeayo interpretation both respected the original work – he recorded with an octet, as Duke did – but added elements of New Orleans hot jazz to Ellington’s stately swing.

I’ve never met Delfeayo. I met Branford briefly in Minneapolis. I wandered by a church, and there he was, inside, speaking about the importance of studying civics in school. I mention this by way of segue, and I realize it is an odd one, but segues are never fun when they are invisible.

And so, here it is, the segue: I also have never seen “War Horse,” now at the Orpheum, but I once took a class in puppeteering from the people who created the titular horse. They are the Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa, and they were at the Walker Art Center with a show called “Zeno at 4 a.m.” This was based on writing by Italian author Italo Svevo, and consisted of a distressed puppet in a bad bedevilied by troublesome dreams, or perhaps hallucinations, that the troupe projected behind him. These were abstract and nightmarish objects engaged in confounding motion, and were created from scissors and bottles and other things you might find in a rubbish bin; these were manipulated on a nearby table and filmed lived, forming the projection.

I’ve also seen Handspring’s production of “Woyzeck on the Highveld,” which set Georg Büchner’s tragic play in South Africa, acted out by appropriately mournful seeming puppets. So they have a particular talent in taking literary works and bringing them to life with objects, and it’s no wonder they were tagged to create the life-sized horse puppet that stars in this adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel. The story tells of a workhorse purchased to work on the front lines during World War II, perhaps humanity’s ghastliest war, and the horse witnesses the worst of it.

This is the sort of thing that puppetry is especially good at. The play’s horse, Joey, is a metonym for the human experience of war. He must be our witness, and yet be enough of a blank for us to project our own experiences onto him. And yet, still, he must be a believable horse, despite visibly being made of steel, leather, and aircraft cables and having live puppeteers visible onstage operating them.

From the sound of things, they accomplished this task admirably. I base this in part on reviews for the show, which have burst with praise, and from the throngs of playgoers I see downtown emerging from the play, who look gutted. Usually people don’t have much of an emotional reaction to aircraft cable, much less sobbing at the fictional adventures forced on the cable. Sometimes puppetry is so very like magic it’s indistinguishable.

It’s actually a bit too much to take in all it once, which is how I like my art. I am a notoriously fast gallery attendee, speeding through with just a darting glance at each piece of art. It’s usually because I am making a bee line for the wine table, and I typically return to investigate any art that intrigued me.

But I never feel this is the way to get to know a piece of art. Admittedly, unless the artists goes for especially complicated composition, there’s often not a lot of immediate information to get from, say, a painting – years ago I interviewed Steve Joy, then the curator for the Bemis Center, and he opined that painting is a shallow medium. I don’t know that it always is, but it can be, and so sometimes it seems like a glance is enough.

But I am a lifetime museumgoer and have my own art collection, and if there is one thing I have repeatedly found, it’s that seeing a piece of art for years, especially by living with it, changes your experience of the art dramatically. Favorite pieces fade, while works that seemed oblique or awful become comforting and prized. And it’s not just that we change over time, and so our tastes about art change.

It’s that art changes us. It may be a shallow medium, but a shallow culture of Clostridium botulinum can still produce enough botulism to do you in. And it is often the art that seemed least interesting or most alienating that carries with it the strongest poison. Stare it for an hour and you might find youself liking what you previously hated. Stare at it for a week and it may change the way you think about art. Stare at it for years and it might change who you are.

I’ve had it happen to me. When I first saw Gedi Sibony’s art, I was a rooster in a top hat who people through coins at to dance on a hot plate. Look at me now.

The Joslyn Museum is offering a similar opportunity to experience the long-term effects of art this Saturday, part of a national movement called “Slow Art Day.” The setup is simple: Look at five or more pieces of art for 10 minutes or more, and then discuss. It really doesn’t seem like that much of a challenge, but 10 minutes can have its effect. I expect when people meet to discuss, the art will have had its effect.

I expect they will be gutted.

That last sentence was something we call a “button” in the writing game – just a little phrase that ties everything together and makes a piece of writing feel like it’s deliberate and crafted, rather than a sort of typed form of babbling. Usually you don’t highlight the button, but leave it there without comment and congratulate yourself on once again using the tricks of writing to punch up your column.

But I say what’s the fun of a button if it’s invisible.

NO STRANGERS AT KANEKO

Once, there was a stamp. It was diamond-shaped, and on it was a picture of a camel racing a locomotive. It came into the hands of a young boy named Richard Feynman, and his name may be familiar to you, because he later grew up to the win the Nobel prize in physics in 1965.

As a boy, Richard collected stamps, and the one with the camel joined others in his collection, all from someplace in the world called Tuva. At night, he dreamed of Tuva.

It was then inaccessible, and very little was known about it. There were field recordings of Tuvans singing, their voices somehow producing two tones at once, one deep and guttural, one high and flutelike. Richard spent his life obsessed with Tuva, and, at the end of his days, sick with cancer, he tried to go to the country that made the stamp. It took him a decade to make arrangements, and he died just before his visa arrived.

This is the power of an image. Sometimes it seems like the world is not so very big a place, but then we see something that reminds us that there is still so much of it we haven’t seen and do not know. We’re all a bit like that boy in Far Rockaway, Richard Feynman, looking at a stamp of a camel racing a train and wondering at it.

The gallery space at KANEKO is just now filled with images like these. It’s an exhibit created for the Annenberg Space for Photography, called “No Strangers: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World,” and it was organized by a man named Wade Davis, who knows a thing or two about how big the world is. He has a remarkable title – he is the Explorer in Residence at National Geographic. His career has mostly been focused on ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, fields that look at how indigenous cultures use plants for ritual purposes and for medicine.

Davis also authored a book many years ago called “The Serpent and the Rainbow” that recounted his experiences in Haiti trying to track down the origins of stories about zombies, which he credited to blowfish poison, which can simulate death. The book was made into a horror film of the same title in 1988, in which Bill Pullman, as Davis, is buried alive and must dig his way out of a coffin, and how many ethnopharmocologists can claim that? There can’t be more than five or six, probably.

Davis takes photos on his adventures, and he’s not alone. This exhibit is made up of a handful of photographers’ work, spanning the globe and investigating the intersection between culture, history, and the world. The text of the exhibit alternates between alarming – we are in a period of mass language extinction, as an example – and a bit woo, in that there is a tendency to describe these cultures as somehow being mystically in touch with the ebb and flow of nature in a way modern man has forgotten. And perhaps they are – I haven’t met them, and all I really know about nature is that I am sure it would kill me if it had a chance.

But it is the photos that do the most work. Or, rather, I should say that they have the potential to inspire the most work, in that the images raise questions that demand to be answered, and the viewer needs to take responsibility for finding those answers. There are images of African tribal rituals and of Buddhist training (including an image from the Shaolin Temple that provides more evidence for a pet theory of mine: everything is improved by kung fu.) There is a startling image of fowl hunters emerging from the Indus River in Pakistan with birds attached to their heads like masks, effectively making the hunters into living decoys. There is a photo of a Pashupatinath yogi engaged in “penis yoga,” hoisting bricks with his member while staring at the camera with an expression that is not easy to discern, although it is not the expression I would have picked were I in the same circumstance.

The images seem to belie the title – these are images of strangeness. Indeed, the show highlights the moments that distinguish their subjects from their viewers – few Omahans, as an example, will participate in teenage circumcision or scarification rituals. Although, in fairness, the world may be big, but people travel a lot in it, and so there may be a few Omahans who will experience these things. I won’t be doing penis yoga anytime soon, but there are those of you who might, and I’ve seen more surprising things become popular. Perhaps Omaha will find itself at the forefront of a penis yoga fad, for those who are finding hot yoga a bit dated and are looking for something a tittle more outré.

I am sure there will be those who respond to the Pashupatinath yogi, in the way that the diamond stamp of the camel struck young Richard Feynman. There were photos that struck me, and, in fact, they are no too far removed from Feynman’s beloved Tuva. They are photos by Hamid Sardar-Afkhami, a Harvard-trained scholar and photographer with a fascination for outer Mongolia. And who wouldn’t be fascinated?

Sardar-Afkhami’s photographs look into Mongolia, especially the “Dark Havens,” a no-man’s-land regularly targeted by Tuvan bandits, where reindeer herders have gunfights with rustlers, and where men on horseback hunt with eagles. The images are extremely striking, especially to me – I imagine it’s very much as Feynman felt as a boy, seeing the Tuvan stamps. The photos demand investigation. Who are these people? How is it that there is a place in the world where horses rear back with fur clad riders atop, and there, at the end of one arm, wings rising for flight, is a golden eagle?

And perhaps this is why the show is called “No Strangers.” These Mongolians are strangers now, but I have already done some reading. I have already started to learn about them, to satisfy the curiosity that the photos engendered. They were stranger a few weeks ago, when I first saw the images. And a week before that, they were unknown to me.

I don’t know if these eagle hunters will stay with me the way the Tuvans did Feynman; if, at some moment, I will decide I must travel to the Dark Havens to see the bandits, the reindeer herders, and the eagle hunters. But I might. I surely might. One day, these people may not be strangers to me at all. One day, I might be on ponyback, in furs, and eagle on my arm.

In my dreams, I already am.

"No Strangers:  Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World" appears at KANEKO through April 19.

iROZEALb AT THE JOSLYN

More than a decade ago, the Joslyn Art Museum offered a display of Japanese woodblock prints from a tradition called “ukiyo-e.” This translates approximately as “pictures of the floating world,” and depicted all manner of worldly subjects, including actors, wrestlers, landscapes, and, in history if not at the Joslyn, explicit depictions of coitus.

These prints, called shunga, were spectacularly graphic, often to an exaggerated extent. Naughty bits are not merely engorged and engaged in vigorous interplay, they are exaggerated to elephantine proportions. They were more than sexual -- they resembled a whale engaged in a battle with a giant squid. In fact, in 1814 an artist named Katsushika Hokusai created a piece of shunga called “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” in which an octopus has his way with an unclad woman.

This theme (called “tentacle erotica”) has persisted in Japanese art, by the way. It has little to do with what I am writing about here, but you never know when a reader might discover an interesting sensual byway, and I’m happy to provide.

I mention all this because The Joslyn, which 15 years ago demurred from shunga, has an exhibit right now that is directly inspired by it. In a little alcove off to the side of their permanent modern collection, there are a handful of pieces by artist with a name that sounds less like a traditional fine artist and more like a world beat deejay: iROZEALb.

And so, there, in the Scott Pavilion, are a half-dozen images of couples, well, coupling. They aren’t especially graphic -- exquisitely patterned kimonos cover whatever dance between squid and whale may be going on underneath. But there’s no doubt as to what is happening, as the couples are intertwined, ecstatic, sometimes wrapped in a shared pearl necklace, sometimes even with a few pearls in their mouths, with unavoidable erotic connotations. One woman even has her breasts exposed, although, in place of nipples, she has what looks to be tattoos of kanji, Japan’s logographic writing system. Calligraphic erotica! I may have found my own byway!

And there is so much more to like. Her couples are often wearing headphones, the cords coiled around them -- like tentacles, now that I think about it. I cannot imagine what shared music they are listening to, although it is fun to imagine what I might listen to in similar circumstances, and then disappointing to realize that I have no idea. This must be addressed. Everyone should have a playlist ready for the moments when their lives become shunga.

I am not sure that sex is the subject of these images, however -- at least, not exclusively. iROZEALb seems intrigued by the subject of identity, and, more than that, how flexible identity can be. Her couples, despite their Japanese garb, are ostensibly African-American. Hidden among classical Japanese habiliments are hoodies and sneakers, as though, when not fornicating, these characters sometimes breakdance.

The women have Afros, and both have facial silhouettes that I am sure the artist intended to be understood as those of black people. And yet their skin color, which is appropriately brown, seems in these images to be makeup, and incompletely applied. Their hands, ears, back of neck, and other places where makeup might be forgotten or washed away, show another skin tone -- blue. Legs are half-blue, and here it is clear that the brown color has been painted atop the blue.

The artist’s statement says that she was influenced by ganguro, a fashion fad in Tokyo that saw Japanese women wearing what seemed to be blackface. Initially shocked by this, iROZEALb investigated it further. She certainly discovered that the Japanese women who browned their faces weren’t merely impersonating the skin tones of black artists they admired, although they were doing that. The style also borrowed from kabuki makeup -- a popular subject in ukiyo-e prints -- and folklore. In fact, there was an offshoot called yamanba, named after a mountain witch. This fact makes me think American fashion fads are woefully bland.

It is interesting that the skin in iROZEALb’s paintings is blue. After all, these pieces depict a complicated series of references that almost entirely seem to be Japanese and African-American. Yet, when it comes down to any particular identity, the artist remains cagey.

These are not black people dressing in Japanese garb; neither are they Japanese people painting their skin brown. They are blue people doing both, although, to be fair, mostly what they are doing is listening to music and making love. It’s possible to get lost in the complex discussion of identity that iROZEALb presents, but that is subtext, and isn’t what the subjects of the painting are interested in. They are interested in music, they are interested in pearl necklaces, and, more than anything, they are interested in sex.

Now I think I will excuse myself. I have a playlist to work on.