My pretend commencement speech

I realize that it’s that time of year when kids are graduating, some from high school, some from college. I don’t know the exact dates, mind you, but I know it’s around here.

With that in mind, I offer the following advice to the scores of young people hoping to make it in some artistic field, based on what I’ve learned over the years — some things that work, some things I wish I’d done.

Don’t say you want to be an artist, writer, etc. Just be one. But don’t talk about it endlessly. Just do it.

Give yourself deadlines. This seems obvious. But too many people meander and put things off. It will also prepare you for professional jobs.

Any work for hire you can find is work for hire worth doing at least once. You never know what will lead to the next thing. In my experience, even the most unlikely ones somehow lead to the next opportunity.

Don’t feel like you need to live in a city. It’s usually too expensive. You have to get work to match the high rent, bills, the cost of public transportation, the cost of food, the cost of everything. You want as low an overhead as you can get. So if you must have a day job, it doesn’t need to suck up all your time. You can find community and kindred spirits elsewhere. Don’t believe the hype.

Move away from home, even if it’s just the next town over. You need to flex. You need to be unencumbered by who you used to be.

Go for long walks often. It’s a simple way to get off your butt and move, and it also gives you the opportunity to observe, eavesdrop, learn.

In conjunction with this, allow yourself to be unreachable for periods. Don’t just walk away from the Internet, turn off your cell phone and give yourself some contemplation time. Uninterrupted quiet is becoming harder and harder to achieve, but to be truly creative, you need the time to let your mind explore itself.

Some diversions are not only pointless, but damaging to your work. To this end, don’t watch broadcast TV. It’s a complete waste of your time and cable is a waste of your money.

 Don’t get drunk more than one night a week. That’s all you can afford, and not just monetarily. This advice isn’t so much in regard to the night you are drunk, but the day after, when you are recovering. It’s a waste of your day. You aren’t at full capacity. If you must go out and get drunk, do it on a work night. And do not tell your boss at the day job I said that.

Function with as few pairs of pants as you can manage. I think this speaks for itself.

People who create drama are obstructive to anything good. Dump them while you’re young.

Seriously think about the level of educational debt and realistic plans for paying it off before you go to college. Your college debt will inhibit your ability to make a living from your chosen art, so make damn sure you know what you’re doing before you do it. Look at alternative plans — that is, gaining experience without school trajectories — in your decision making.

Consider that, in the arts, it is actually possible to be successful without graduating from college. Ask Neil Gaiman. Or Tom Hanks. Or Lady Gaga. Or James Cameron. Or some non-arts greats, like Bill Gates or Tiger Woods. Or literally thousands of others.

 If you insist on having a credit card, limit it to professional use — creative materials only.

Learn a trade. Know how to build things, fix things, make things. Know how to work with your hands. It pays for itself a hundred times over.

Don’t freak about getting health insurance. You’ll hear horror stories, but horror stories in health care are like horror stories in air travel. They’re not the common experience, but they grab your attention and make a big impression anyhow.

Not having health insurance is technically a gamble, but if you take care of yourself, it’s a gamble you can win in your 20s, a time when the obsession with having it will keep you tied to some horrible full-time jobs that impede your progress.

With this in mind, don’t smoke. Total money pit. Plus it taxes your immune system, so you get sick easier.

Do get your teeth cleaned at least once a year. Spending hundreds in your 20s will save you literally thousands by your mid-40s. Once you make a living at your craft, it sucks to spend all of it on dental work to correct earlier neglect.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Just seriously enough. Prats still get work, but people make fun of them behind their backs.

Always assume there is room for improvement in your creative work. Everyone’s a critic and they like to prove it. Listen.

 If you’re just in it for money and security, better to stay out. You’re probably not cut out for this kind of work.

And don’t feel compelled to follow every suggestion I’ve given. Do think about each one, though. Be creative with your life.

Profile: Ben Shapiro – Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters

A new documentary about photographer Gregory Crewdson captures not only his creative method, but his life-long relationship with the Berkshires, which fuels his photography.

The film “Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters” makes its area premiere at the Berkshire International Film Festival on Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.

Crewdson’s renown has centered partly on the production values of his photography and partly on their locations. Treated like a movie shoot, Crewdson scouts locations, builds sets and casts photos like a film director would, with results that show the fruit of the intricate conception and pre-production. His chosen area of focus is the Berkshires, and his huge photos of Pittsfield, North Adams and many other places in the region have graced museums around the world as well as Mass MoCA and the Berkshire Museum.

Director Ben Shapiro first encountered Crewdson when he was asked in 2000 to film a piece on him for the public television series “Egg,” a show covering the arts. This footage of Crewdson photographing a beanstalk scene was taken in Lee and used in Shapiro’s film. The two men became friendly and four years later, Shapiro was asked to do another piece on Crewdson by another television program. After that, Shapiro began to devise a larger work based around Crewdson and his photography.

“I had a sense of how I would represent him and his work on film,” Shapiro said.

“We got to know each other a little bit, and based on that, he felt comfortable inviting me to come to the sets and to follow him and keep on filming.”

Shapiro’s film follows Crewdson as he creates the body of work known as “Beneath the Roses” as well as utilizing the older footage, which captures him at work on “Hover” and “Twilight.”

Crewdson’s focus on the Berkshires began from his childhood encounters with the area. Though he was a Brooklyn kid, his family took regular trips to Becket, which ignited a fascination and communion that continues to this day.

Shapiro has a similar connection to the Berkshires. He was born in Stockbridge, though he grew up in Southern California. His parents would bring him to visit friends throughout his life and have returned to the Berkshires more recently, as has Shapiro’s sister.

Even with the commonalties to the region, Shapiro didn’t have an preconceived plan for a film about Crewdson other than the starting point of how interesting he was. Any thesis took shape with time spent observing Crewdson.

“I knew that after I had visited a couple of his sets that there was something very special happening in the way he created the pictures,” Shapiro said. “I felt like there was a drama there and a visual interest there that went beyond and was even apart from what’s captured in his photographs. That was very compelling to me, so I knew I wanted to do that.”

What always surprised Shapiro and further seduced him into Crewdson’s work was the scale of the productions, which were so large in service of capturing something so ethereal, as measured against the concerns of the creator, which were things Shapiro says any of us could relate to. There was a gripping humanity within their scope.

“Even though the scale of the work was so large, his concerns are the same kind of concerns anyone else has on a project,” he said. “You’re working on an article or you’re working on a film or you’re working on a photograph and you hope it will be good, you hope it comes off well, you hope you can pull it off. Things come off well at some point. Some things seem more difficult. Gregory’s concerns are very much what anybody goes through when they’re making any kind of creative thing.”

Just as ideas float around Crewdson’s images, they also float around his work space, triggering thoughts that the filmmaker would file away for the editing room. Crewdson himself, however, is not so apparently as large as life as his photos are. In fact, he’s an unassuming, nice guy who, to meet, you might not connect with the psychologically charged photos that hang in museums. The images are equated with a fascination with the dark corners of the world, but Shapiro maintains it is more properly characterized as a wider interest that is inclusive of said dark corners.

“There is certainly a dark side to Gregory’s photographs, but there is also an interested side — interested in people, interested in how the world looks, interested in the experience of seeing,” he said, “and I think those are all obviously very much a part of him. When you talk to him, those things become apparent, as well. I wouldn’t want to reduce his work too much in a one-dimensional way so that the work is strange.”

Rather than wearing his obsessions on his sleeve, Crewdson chooses to focus on getting them onto the wall. His photographs exist like outside representations of the what goes on in his mind — thoughts for which the surroundings they are created in are crucial, so creating a melding of the psychological and the physical. There’s enough there that is personal to Crewdson, but he also populates his images with prompts that any viewer can latch onto, as well as elements of the locations that are specific to the spot. The images could not exist without the landscape Crewdson has chosen.

“It’s a fusion,” Shapiro said. “It combines elements of documentary photography and something constructed, including the fact that a lot of the people in the photos are from the communities where the pictures take place. So it is merging imagined aspects and these documentary aspects.”

It’s not so much that the images are the stories of these places, but the stories as Crewdson has chosen to divulge them after years of unraveling them in his head.

“The imagined aspects are an interpretation of those places,” said Shapiro. “They’re very connected to those places and also Gregory’s life-long response to those places.”

Scouting is a crucial component to Crewdson’s process and highlights his relationship with the landscape. The film shows the amount of time the photographer spends just driving around the Berkshires, parking, staring, communing with possible locations. There’s quite an intricate and prolonged “getting-to-know-you” period with any location before he settles on using it. Crewdson’s give and take with any location becomes so intimate, though, it’s as if he’s looking into its soul as well as his own, something that could only result from a relationship.

“It’s funny. There are some photographs that I wasn’t around for when he made them, and I’ll be driving around the area and I’ll spot a location,” Shapiro said. “It happened with that motel shot, and I was driving up from Monterey to North Adams and I drove by that place and thought, ‘Oh that’s where that is.’

“That was interesting to me because I knew that Gregory must have driven past that place just as I had. It’s not like these buildings are things he’s discovered. He’s probably seen them all many, many times. But after visiting them over and over again, at some point, some idea comes to him about that particular place and he follows that train of thought. That’s just how his process works.”

Even more than taking residence here, his travels have cemented him as a member of the community, and these connections add to the way his work unfolds. It’s become a key component to the photography since he lives in his own canvas.

“There’s not a solid barrier between him and his work and the community he lives in, or the community he’s part of up there, which is significant,” Shapiro said. “He meets people and interacts with people in the community. He spends a lot of time driving around looking at things, and so part of his work involves connecting with a community in those ways.”

“Visually, by inhabiting it, by having history there, those things all contribute to his work. That’s one of the things I was hoping the film would draw out a little, all those things about his relationship with the community, his interests and his life that all go into the making of his pictures.”

Review: The Holding

One of the most interesting aspects of the Berkshire International Film Festival has been its embrace of the horror genre. Certainly the festival is not overrun with horror titles, but each year there is special care taken to bring in works of interest within the indie realm, often low budget, but never trashy.

Past efforts have seen such offerings as last year’s magnificent Lovecraft adaptation, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” and this year introduces the British film “The Holding.”

Let’s not mince words: “The Holding” is not only a horror film, it is slasher film. Let’s say that again so it is clear in everyone’s heads: “The Holding” is a slasher film. With slashing. And killing. And more slashing.

It is also an extremely interesting effort with much to reward anyone who is willing to giving themselves to the genre and dive into steep harrowing tension for 90 minutes.

But when you enter the theater, understand that you are going to watch a slasher film and forgo any pearl clutching about it.

Think “The Field” with violent revenge and misogyny as not only its themes, but the reason for its cascading action.

In “The Holding,” abandoned wife Cassie (Kierston Wareing) attempts to keep her farm that has hit on troubled times, as well as raise two daughters, with one entering the teen rebellion phase (Skye Lourie) and the other preoccupied with the Bible (Georgia Groome).

All are trying to cope with the disappearance of her husband and their father as well as the hostile encroachments of a neighboring creepy farmer, Karsten (Terry Stone), when Aden (Vincent Regan) enters their lives. Claiming to be a friend of Cassie’s husband, he insinuates himself into their lives and slowly begins to at least attempt to control all aspects of their lives.

I don’t think I spoil anything by saying there is something not quite right with Aden, especially since the film doesn’t lead you on either.

It dispenses with any pretense to the contrary fairly early on, and the appeal is frankly in the suspense of when Cassie will wake up and see the truth, and the terror of Aden as he goes about his nasty business.

Aden is a slasher character, sure, but he also functions as a metaphor for the problems and secrets you try to escape. If you don’t deal, they will pursue you, and just when you need them the least, they will pounce on you with a violent fury.

Such is the case with “The Holding.” In fact, the clue to this subtext is right in the title of the film. Cassie’s “holding” is the farm — her heritage, her family’s work, the past — and also the site of one of her biggest secrets, which will not go away and figures into her refusal to sell the place.

Even without that subtext, “The Holding” still stands up as an entertaining slasher movie.

Though the plot resembles “The Stepfather,” the execution reveals great skill by director Susan Jacobson that hints this might someday be qualified as a lesser work in an impressive filmography, and that’s not bad at all.

Microbial Theology

Very often I will read science news that seems to have direct implications on wider religious beliefs, but I am always astounded — OK, not really, it’s a figure of speech — that the issue isn’t being widely reported and discussed in places of worship. If science is God’s work and laws, then it is astonishing how little it is put into use in fealty to him.

The question that has been on my mind recently is one of origins. Everyone asks about belly buttons, but I want to know when Adam and Eve were created. Were they brought forth with or without the numerous bacteria that the human body seems to require to function properly?

I know churches don’t often think about bacteria. I’ve seen plenty of those pithy little signs that sit out in front of them that mention honoring parents and God and things Jesus said and kindness, but I’ve never seen one sign begging you to thank the bacteria in your stomach without whom you couldn’t digest a portion of the food you love.

That’s how a good bit of digestion works, you know — the bacteria that lines your belly takes care of it for you. Otherwise, you would poop it out without anything taken, as if you had been supping on bits of soap or rocks.

My educated guess is no, Adam and Eve were not born with the bacteria, but they gained it upon entering the world, just like babies. Research on the subject in the last decade has expanded our knowledge about the relationship between bacteria and humanity, and, though science isn’t willing to necessarily jump the poetic gun in this matter, I certainly am. It appears bacteria does so much for us that our bodies cannot naturally do themselves and affects so much of our health to a degree that what ails us depends upon not only our environment and behavior, but how our personal society of bacteria act, that there’s no such thing as a pure human creature walking the earth.

Put more directly, every human, as pointed out in a recent Scientific American article by Jennifer Ackerman, is an ecosystem — a microbial social network. We aren’t just humans; we are symbiotic existences that need each other to function in this world. Even identical twins have different microbial life in them — it’s one of the things that make you you.

The number of genes our bacteria give us over the course of our lives is hundreds of times more than what our parents do.

Biologist Sarkis K. Mamanian is quoted as saying that microbial life within us is a “fundamental part of us.” In many ways, they are us.

My Adam and Eve concerns lead to another point of interest, one that concerns beginnings but not Biblical ones — babies. And particularly abortion.

One of the main sticking issues with abortion is centered into the question of when life begins. I don’t actually think that’s the proper question. The more appropriate one is when does a fetus become a human — after all, the opposition to abortion has nothing to do with merely life, but with the life of a human being.

There are all sorts of definitions for what makes a human coming from all possible sides, but it occurs to me that one of the basic parts of being a human on Earth is the symbiotic relationship to a society of bacteria that lives inside each human and of which each human depends upon to survive. In other words, you aren’t human in the day-to-day definition of the condition until you grab some bacteria.

A baby in its mother’s body is a creature of purity, incapable of surviving because of its lack of bacteria. The bacteria it requires to survive is not gained until the baby passes through the birth canal — apparently a bacteria-laden cesspool, it turns out — and then takes to the mother’s breast for more direct passage of the micro-organisms that will allow the child to digest. Without those creatures, the baby can’t eat.

Further bacteria is picked up in the early days from whoever is in the human portion of the family. Baby grows up, keeps amassing bacteria, and becomes, like the rest of us, a fully functioning bacterio-human creature.

It seems to me that the major component in what makes a human a functioning human in biological terms — as distinguished from a fetus — is the symbiosis with bacteria. Without the bacteria, I’m not sure the fetus is technically a human.

Now you can bring that into your pro-life/pro-choice debates as you see fit, but the larger point is this: Scientific advancement does affect spiritual beliefs. Just because Genesis doesn’t have Adam naming micro-organisms along with the animals in the garden doesn’t mean that they weren’t there. Adam just couldn’t see them and God didn’t apparently feel the need to give him a microscope and point them out. Fair enough. Perhaps Adam’s newly-created brain wasn’t prepared for such knowledge. Perhaps that’s what the apple was — knowledge without learning, knowing without absorption.

But all these years later, the children of Adam have garnered the time they were supposed to have, and their God set forth this journey of understanding. The idea that God offers black and white solutions is not consistent with the complexity that science studies.

At the very least, when you teach your children to say their prayers at night, one instance of “God bless the bacteria who help me live and make me human” is surely merited next to parents, grandparents and others as a mandatory component of that child’s existence.

Review: Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City” by Guy Delisle and Best of Enemies: A History of U.S. and Middle East Relations by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B.

Two recent graphic novels have taken one topic — the conflict in the Middle East — and given it two very different, but equally compelling, treatments. What unites the two books is their viewpoint — one is by a French-Canadian travel cartoonist, the other by a French scholar specializing in Arabic history. Neither present the American viewpoint, and this enlightening vantage point — as well as the great talents of the people producing the work — recommends both books to American readers who want to understand the re gion apart from their own cultural biases.

In “Jerusalem,” Guy Delisle follows up his previous travelogues with this account of a year in the holy city. Delisle’s partner works for Doctors With out Borders and he spends his time raising their children and working on his book. It’s a mix of ordinary life and willful discovery — Delisle wants us to know everything from the way traffic flows and supermarkets are stocked, to the way settlers view their invasion of Palestinian neighborhoods. He’s a friendly and self-deprecating presence, and that’s the strength of his work. Informed, but not an expert, Delisle truly manages to function as the everyman for his reader, despite the exotic nature of he and his partner’s occupations.

And so Delisle moves from the practicalities of settling in, shopping for groceries and taking the kids to the playground to the less ordinary areas that Israeli existence offers, taking trips to settlements and Palestinian colleges, and wrangling with the government to get special permission to visit Gaza. He gets to know people through his profession, interacting with other cartoonists and teaching a few classes, as well as other trans actions, and is the sort of curious soul that lets a path unwind in the name of finding out something new, perhaps uncovering something hidden.

The revelations are less from the wider geo-political one and more from an examination of the little lives involved. Delisle’s focus is on what it is like to be an ordinary person in an extraordinary backdrop, and what normal means in such a situation anyhow. As he interacts with not just Jewish citizens, but secular ones, as well as Christian and Muslim, he uncovers a situation that is more diverse — some would say shattered — than we have a sense of, and therefore, even more complicated than the lens of U.S. media portrays. Israel, it turns out, is much, much more than just the Jewish homeland or the current site of Palestine, but Delisle manages to capture that reality with gentle humor not often tied to the situation in Israel.

“In Best of Enemies,” Filiu and David B. take a straight for ward technique of unraveling the history of the region from the Arabic point of view, with a starting point in the Epic of Gilgamesh — drawing direct parallels from that ancient text to the modern situation, via its enormous influence on world culture — on through the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran. In between, the book chronicles the history of conflict as the main point of interaction be tween the west and the middle east.

In the most fascinating chapter, Filiu frames the American perspective of Arabs by chronicling our country’s less celebrated first war after the Revolution, which saw a succession of naval efforts against the Muslim pirates originating from Morocco, Algiers and other ports. It was the capture of American trade ships in 1785 that brought Barbary pirates to the attention of the American public, and created a series of talks with the government of Tripoli and others to try to buy peace.

It was Thomas Jefferson’s pithy elitist tongue — and guilt over slave-owning — that destroyed these efforts and lead to battles and blockades and blood shed that wouldn’t end until treaties were signed in 1816, and France took the Algiers in 1830.

Oil became the next object of conflict, with Israel brewing.

Filiu and David B.’s work is just part one, taking the history up to 1953 — no doubt the follow-up will be just as crucial. Their take on the wider swathe of the region incorporates an exciting tension that is accentuated through B.’s illustrations — they literally explode with fury in places.

Delisle, however, has moved on from Israel — the images and observations he presents remain a haunting marker to his one-time effort to capture the country. That is obviously an impossible task, but Delisle manages to humanize the larger issues by allowing us to meet the people and routines on both sides that exist in the middle of history.

Profile: Janice Wright Cheney

Janice Wright Cheney’s work focuses on nature, but largely measured against its relationship with man — and sometimes, how those two might clash.

Cheney’s work can be viewed in “”Oh, Canada”,” which op ens Saturday, May 26, at Mass MoCA.

Cheney’s sculpture, “The Widow”, depicts a bear covered in roses — each hand-felted, dyed and sewn onto a taxidermy form. It was born by an un expected emotional experience that Cheney had one night while driving. Returning to her home in Moncton, New Brunswick, from Nova Scotia, she saw a dead bear curled up on the side of the road.

“I don’t know, it just filled me with this terrible sadness, like I just felt really, really sad,” she said. “I started thinking about that bear, who loved that bear? Who mourns for that bear?’ “

The thoughts were anthropomorphic, Cheney admits, but the sentiments were en trenched in a struggle she was having internally about creating a work addressing her own experience with loss. That seemed too personal, but the bear functioned as an emotional conduit that expressed Che ney’s views in the wider terms she saw them in.

“I was thinking how the bear could be the widow — not the dead bear, but the bear that was left behind,” Cheney said. “There’s a universal story about loss and also about reconciling love and desire and death. That’s what the work is about. And it’s about survival.”

However, it wasn’t a work that Cheney was actively pursuing until a meeting with Mass MoCA curator Denise Mar kon ish, who was interested in having Che ney be part of the “Oh, Canada” show and asked what she might have available or if she had anything new she was working on. She had ideas on what she’d like to be working on.

“I described it to her and she said, ‘Yes, please, make that,’ ” Cheney said. “If I wasn’t part of this exhibition, that piece might have just stayed an idea. Some times you need the deadline or commitment to make it happen, so I’m grateful to have the opportunity to make the piece.”

Cheney actually made two different sculptures because she couldn’t decide between two bear forms she liked in the taxidermy catalog she used. That sister sculpture is now showing in Halifax. Cheney had previously used taxidermy forms for her “Coy Wolf” series, which stemmed from re search she did in the New Brunswick Museum, in conjunction with an exhibit she had there.

A conversation with a biologist there directed her attention to coy wolves, which are hybrid dogs born from western coyotes migrating east and native red wolves that inhabit Eastern Canada and Maine. Cheney fashioned coy wolf sculptures that draped their hybrid biology on them like an adornment and brought the reality into fairy tale territory.

“The wolf has been long gone from Eastern Canada, but is now back disguised as a coyote,” said Cheney. “Using ideas about disguise, I decided I would play on some narratives about wolves, like ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ and so on.

“I needed a wolf form, so I used a taxidermy form as the starting point, covered the creatures in cloth and dressed them in the furs of other animals, including coyote pelts. It’s as if they’re trying to pass themselves off as something that they’re not. They’re like little old ladies, but they’re dangerous.”

In the past, Cheney has fashioned creatures in more vague terms, lacking the precision provided by the taxidermy forms but providing the opportunity for visceral responses that are as much created by how we collate visual information and perceive what we view as what is actually there in front of us.

For her piece “Cellar,” Che ney created rat forms from old fur coats she cut up and stuffed, placing them in formations to elicit a reaction of invasion.

“I took a few liberties be cause I wanted to make a lot of rats,” she said.” I needed a really simple form. They’re basic, but they’ve got the right ingredients: the furry hump and the tail. That’s all you react to, I think, when you see a rat.

Her animal creations, she says, are directly related to her earlier work on insects and really thinking about what is unsettling about them.

“Part of it is when you see them and you don’t know how many there are, and they’re scuttling or moving about,” said Cheney. “That’s part of our bodies’ reaction or repulsion, and the rats can do the same thing. They’re just bigger. But it’s this sense of unease in the way they move about in those clumps.”

At center of these concerns is the idea of vermin — creatures that are not wanted. Bear, coyote, rat, insects, they are all intruders on human territory, and Cheney is fascinated by the casual violence we condone in the name of wildlife encroaching on human-claim ed territory.

“You’re allowed to shoot a coyote, no questions asked,” she said. “They’re not welcome here. There’s been much in the media about it. Governments have experimented with bounties, which basically don’t work, and biologists beg them not to do it. But just to give the public this perception that they are dealing with the coyotes, the government of Nova Scotia did have a bounty on coyotes last year. I’m interested in what people’s reactions [are] to having wildlife sharing this planet.”

“Definitely there’s tension between where humans have decided it’s our land, our environment, so bears are considered dangerous, which they are. It’s interesting, the work that goes to trying to control.”

Twelve years ago, Cheney was working in more traditional drawing and painting medias to explore similar ideas, but then decided to experiment.

“I began to use embroidery as a way to depict insects, and it worked so well,” she said. “I could make really realistic little studies of insects that, to me, were more satisfying and pleasing than doing them in materials like paint or drawing materials. What started out as an experiment has turned into, 12 years later, my practice.”

The flexibility of the material was one major reason for Che ney’s transition to textiles, but she also liked the history of the material and the implications of using it in art. Cloth-based art is usually associated with women’s work and craft store-centered work. Cheney chose to embrace it, but also to mess with it subject-wise.

“It’s taking this very feminine association and making things that aren’t very feminine at all,” Cheney said. “Insects and carefully embroidering cockroaches and playing with that attraction/repulsion, or making a tension for the viewer between the seduction of the material hopefully, but then what is being depicted isn’t always what’s expected.”

With “The Widow,” Cheney continued her pathways into the unexpected by incorporating the emotional into her work while still embracing her usual practices for gathering artistic topics. If that’s what the future holds for her work, it is hard to say. Cheney asserts that she probably won’t make any further use of taxidermied forms as the basis of her sculptures, but her ideas will continue to reflect the natural world as she finds it.

“Traditionally, my work has been very much research-based,” she said. “I’ll pick up something that’s been in the media or something I’ve read about, you know, the idea persists and you start to think about how that could be and come out in a piece of art that could be layered and make something interesting that also has these meanings. Pretty much my work comes from that kind of place, but ‘The Widow’ piece is quite different.”

Review: Monsieur Lazhar

In the Quebecois film “Monsieur Lazhar,” which was nominated for an Oscar this year, community is revealed as something born of need and interdependence, not nationality or borders on a map.

The mysterious Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Saïd Fellag), a Algerian immigrant in Quebec, seems like an unusual agent of heaven when he arrives at a grade school offering his services to the principal. The school has just been ravaged by the tragedy of a teacher’s suicide and is currently undergoing the official style of healing that sees parent/teacher meetings and appointed psychology consultants as the way to address grief. The biggest part of the agenda, though, is to carry on as normally as possible and provide a light to the darkness, rather than investigating what lurks in the shadows and dealing with that.

Bachir, however, sees things differently. As he settles into his position, he also begins to notice the unsettled emotions that lurk within the children, especially in an emotional struggle between Simon (Emilien Neron), the student who discovered her body in the classroom, and Alice (Sophie Nelisse), a precocious and direct girl who seems to be holding Simon responsible.

Flying in the face of official orders not to, Bachir finds he can’t turn away from the children’s concerns as they continue to bubble to the surface, and revelations about his personal history unveil a fable of grief, survival and redemption.

Director Philippe Falardeau — whose 2006 film “Congorama” was a remarkable comedy of national identity as a personal mask — displays a mannered compassion in his adaptation of the one-character play by Évelyne de la Chenelière and brings the audience into a scene that could be macabre and depressing, but is, in fact, the exact opposite. The hopeful nature of the film rests in the face of Fellag, who has a way of balancing the weary sadness in the character’s soul with the transformative agenda he’s embraced when it comes to the children he teaches.

Walking a delicate line be tween authoritarianism and passion in a way the system seems to have mixed up, Bachir’s teaching job becomes a sort of penance that he must do, and one that he sees as the possible source of salvation for him as well as the children with whom he’s taken on.

Fellag is flanked by some wonderful child performers — Neron and Nelisse particularly hold their own and are as compelling as any adult in the film. In this way, “Monsieur Lazhar” joins “The Kid With A Bike” as more than just a positive film about the darkness of children, but an accepting film about the depth of a child, with the understanding that they are neither on equal level nor different planes from adults. Everyone requires delicate handling — children and adults — and everyone has the capacity for compassion and cruelty.

Alienation is the result of geographic and cultural differences, as well as the ones in our own souls. “Monsieur Lazhar” boasts the progressive message that we can all overcome the divisions if we choose to not take them personally during the healing, and with a bit of sacrifice, we can accept our own humble role in that process.

Game of Thrones or Game of Groans?

If you’re not dodging Mad Men spoilers online, then you may be trying to avoid those for “Game of Thrones.”

Depending on who you talk to, this HBO fantasy series is either a sophisticated political drama with sword and sorcery trappings — admittedly more sword and less sorcery — or a blatant excuse for some softcore porn exhibitionism.

I’d say it’s both, and the tug of war battle between the two factions is more likely to be the undoing of the show than, say, the child actors growing up too fast.

For those who have never watched, the show is based on a series of books by the unfortunately suspender-wearing author George R. R. Martin about the political realignments in a madeup world that vaguely resembles some barbaric period on earth.

The series follows the lives of people in various places during these conflicts, most notably two prominent families, the vile Lannisters and the rugged Starks. What has garnered as much attention as the sophistication in plotting and intensity in performances is the show’s tendency to indulge in exposition dumps amid fairly graphic sex scenes. I say fairly because though pretty much everything on a woman is revealed to the camera, less of the male characters play peek-a-boo with the audience, and if it’s two male characters having sex, you won’t see anything as graphic.

Though there is some male eye candy, it’s never required to sit doggie-style on a bed with clear lighting and the saliva of the scene’s director practically dripping on its rear-end while HBO counts its money.

Two women? You see almost anything your brain can conjure up, complete with long explanations of plot points that the writers are too lazy or rushed or something to just demonstrate with actual story.

The problem here isn’t that there are sex scenes— this is not about being prudish; go on, have sex scenes— or that the sex scenes represent lazy writing. The problem is that the sex scenes are meant to be part of a larger expression of the gender politics in the show, but the way the scenes are realized undercut any such meaning and, instead, work against the bigger point.

It’s like the old cautionary drug and sex films of the ’30s that wallowed in the behavior they supposedly railed against. More to the point, it’s not about the characters having sex — it’s about the viewer watching them have sex. And that’s an entirely different thing.

The idea is that within the world of “Game of Thrones,” women are objects, disposable in many cases and often just used and humiliated as receptacles for the base requirements of the male body. Point well taken, I say, especially when juxtaposed to stories of women fighting for their place in society and using the tools the men give them in order to seize power—“Game of Thrones” is full of these stories. The lot of women— and what they do to survive — is at the center of the show and part of its strength.

The problem is you can’t rail about women as objects and then use them as such on your own terms. If the sexual interaction in the show is supposed to be part of the unpleasant lot of women in this world, then why isn’t the sex presented as unpleasant and reflective of this situation?

“Game of Thrones” has publicly prided itself on a gruesome, violent realism of a darker, though admittedly made-up, era.

This permeates all portions of the story, especially with the craggy, portly, hairy, old, misshapen men cutting things off of each other and stabbing everyone and living in filth. It’s a grim view of humanity — except when a naked woman is involved, then all these counter-aesthetics are thrown out the window.

Why no gross, hairy, scarred women having unbearably repulsive sex?

Why are rapes or beatings featuring naked women shot with a gauzy steam and anticipation similar to the sex scenes? It begins to feel manipulative, and that’s a crummy feeling in otherwise well-realized fiction.

The real problem with the show is that roughly 90 percent of any given episode— it varies — doesn’t focus on hot women servicing male cast members.

This means there’s a whole lot more in there that’s worth seeing. It’s this 10 percent that’s causing all the issues — 10 percent, I have come to understand, that isn’t reflective of the books the show is based on, 10 percent that comes down to Hollywood producers who don’t trust the actual material to maintain an audience.

That 10 percent represents a casual form of sexism that too often gets overlooked in film and television. I think one day these moments will be like those unsettling ones when you’re watching a wonderful film from the 1930s when, out of nowhere, a black person finally appears as a servant and utters something in a dialect and delivery that is so comically racist that you can’t believe such an era ever existed.

It’s horrible, it’s disrupting, and it’s embarrassing for us in the future who witness such ugliness in works that are otherwise worthy and intelligent.

It also represents a missed genre opportunity. Like the “Lord of the Rings” films before it, “Game of Thrones” has the opportunity to not live up to the wider expectations that the fantasy genre merely exists as wishfulfillment for 13-year-old boys.

Such a shame that it insists on giving ammunition to every naysayer hoping to tear it down because they hate the clichés of the genre “Game of Thrones” is supposed to transcend.

Review: Blue by Pat Grant

Probably no one reading this could tell you what it was like to be a goof-off surfer kid in ’90s Australia, skipping school and creeping through the planned coastal community. But that’s pretty much why Australian cartoonist Pat Grant made this graphic novel. He’s well aware of the obscurity of his biography in the experience of the wider reading world, and he’s ready to impart that experience for all of us.

“Blue” follows a trio as they skip school in order to hit the waves, but they find themselves tempted by rumors of gruesome remains of a dead body on the train track. They don’t run right out there to see the thing, though— they meander, they quibble, they curse, they cause harmless trouble, they act like kids who have broken the leash.

But there’s a provincialism endemic in small-town life, which often rears its ugly head in everyday rhetoric as racism, and such is the case here. Not overt racism, but the first pings of fear when difference makes itself apparent.

In this case, it’s the slow but steady integration of weird, blue blobbish people from the sea who are washed ashore in odd little homemade boats and stand out from the bland whiteness of the typical dullness. They are not the center of an invasion story, but the edges of a feeling that pervades “Blue,” the notion that something is changing, that the reasons the town was manufactured in the first place are rapidly dissipating.

It’s a surreal and sometimes silly stage, but Grant’s power at taking this cartoon version of his own hometown and expressing the isolation that is part of his heritage is powerful and appropriately unsettling. What could have been a tossoff tale about three kids goofing around in a beach town in Australia becomes something much, much more. It’s an attempt to focus on the beginning of something in the haze of childhood, haunting and a bit confused, an experience we all face in our efforts to compile our own histories.

Profile: Paola Prestini

Composer Paola Prestini’s latest work, “Oceanic Verses,” captures migratory patterns in Italy — the result of its own journey through the time and culture of that country, as well as Prestini’s own experiences.

The piece follows the stories of four archetypal characters as they make their ways across Italy and along the Mediterranean Sea. At center is a scholar, who has lost her luggage and spends the course of the opera trying to get it back and encountering the other characters. Their inner lives are realized through video, and music unites them in action.

The performance of “Oceanic Verses” takes place tonight at the museum at 8.

The version being performed at Mass MoCA will be a semistaged one, concentrating on the film aspect of the multimedia presentation, and the four leads and how they come together with the technology. Later performances will incorporate both a full chorus and choir as it moves toward its final version.

The project began as a commissioned piece of music four years ago. Carnegie Hall asked Prestini for work, and she chose as her subject matter the area where she was at a residency — Lecce, in the Salento area of Italy — where she had been working with kids in a foster care home.

“I ended up recording them, which I do often, and what emerged from that beautiful session was a beginning of falling in love with the folk music of the area,” Prestini said. “As I began to investigate the folk music, I began to put together a collection of songs of poetry and scenes of the area that inspired me.”

The commission gave Prestini an immediate opportunity to apply what she was learning into thematic terms, wrapping her musical ideas within four archetypal characters, who became the muses for the piece, alongside meditations on various other texts, poems and songs relating to the region.

“It was more abstract; it was the poetic essences of these characters,” said Prestini. “There were these pillars in my own mind of what I wanted the story to be, to explore this woman who ends up at some point getting lost in the arc of the opera, and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore motherhood. There were these pillars that I wanted to explore, but they have become much more concrete in this newer version.”

Expanding on the themes and music came with the realization that she also wanted to expand the creative scope. She had already brought filmmaker Ali Hossaini in to be part of the project, and after performing the piece at Carnegie Hall, enlisted Donna Di Novelli to work on the libretto for a fulllength opera version of the piece that not only mined the same concerns in a different way, but also gave the source poems and songs a new context within a stronger narrative that captured the poetry of the Italian landscape as Prestini encountered it.

“When you go there, there’s this sense of a fading civilization, and yet it’s ripe with hope for new direction,” she said. “That’s because of the patterns of immigration that have gone through this land for centuries.” These patterns trace Prestini’s early childhood there, as well as the music that comes out of her.

“It was a place that I had left at a very young age,” Prestini said. “I think I was 2 or 3 and we had moved to a border town in Mexico, so it took a long time to get back to Italy and to understand it in terms of how it would have specific resonance in my own art. This was the first time that I went and I actually did see something that resonated with me. What it was was the music. It was these patterns of immigration, and it was this land that was slowly falling apart and had a very, very strong beauty.” The opera is multi-lingual, most notably incorporating different dialects into the presentation, as well as the language Griko, which is currently spoken by only about 400 people.

“I speak several different languages and I think in different languages, and I wanted to create a piece that felt natural to me in terms of these different characters,” Prestini said. “They have these incredible moments in the opera where it just felt more natural to have them sing in the original dialect.”

Griko is derived from Greek and is mostly limited to the areas of Salerno and Calabria in Italy. Its place in the opera is most profound when the main character has a breakdown and, at one point, hears a song in Griko that becomes transformative and also brings Prestini’s work in the area full circle.

“It’s sung by the children, which in fact was the song that I had recorded many, many years before when I was in Italy,” she said, “and then juxtaposed with the understanding of the words that the woman choir sings, which forces her to take a really good look at her own life and the decisions she’s made.”

“All of this is to say that it’s so strong to hear this song sung in this language that is disappearing and that thread of cultures that are fading, of languages that are being lost, is definitely woven into the tapestry of the opera.”

The multi-media presentation is integral to the emotional weight of the opera and is the center of Prestini’s creative concerns for more than a decade. It’s become such a natural coupling for her that the realizations are seamless in her brain— she can’t, at this point, have one without the other.

“I’m always thinking about imagery and I’m always thinking about words, and I’m always thinking about electronics,” Prestini said, “and as I’ve been working more and more in multimedia, it’s been a very natural, fluid process. I definitely write music and have a very specific image in my mind.”

At the same time, as Prestini creates that balance, she refuses to skimp on the music, which may well function as the foundation of a sturdy whole work.

“The reality is that it’s very important to me that the music stands on its own,” she said. “We live in this world of visuals and through visuals, our minds have become so much more facile. So, if I’m going to create a piece like this, I’m going to want to think extraordinarily deeply about the visual counterpoint and anything else going on.

“What I’ve learned, and what I’m learning, when you do a work like a video opera, it’s an incredible balance. It affects staging, it affects pacing and the sets, and you want to make sure that certain things are foreground and certain things are background. But in terms of why I’m so passionate about it is that I believe that if you’re going to do multimedia, it should be done really well and really thought out and with equal attention to each discipline.”

Multimedia productions also offer the chance for her, as a composer, to work in collaborations that musical composition wouldn’t typically offer as well as direct the course of her own creative output and the results of those endeavors.

“It’s a whole other level,” said Prestini. “The really good thing about commissioning your own work and working this way is that there’s no set path. You decide how you’re going to collaborate, you decide who you’re going to work with, and you try to get it as right as possible. I’ve learned so much from the techniques of filmmakers and the techniques of poets and visual artists, and it’s actually affected how I create music.”

These methods from other artistic disciplines that Prestini has learned not only contribute to the richness and process of her composition work, but contribute to the shared areas of the collaborates, in which each becomes part of a whole creative body that must work with as few bumps between them as possible.

“If you work with a filmmaker or visual artist, they think much more abstractly and as composers,” Prestini said. “We have to think about the horizontal nature of music, like how does it work in time. I found it was much easier to create visual timelines to be able to all be on the same page. It’s just a beautiful process of learning how to communicate and learning skills and constantly refining the poetic counterpoints.”

The end goal, as evidenced in works like “Oceanic Verses,” is not an opera with visual components, but like the landscape it seeks to reflect, a multisensorial piece of art that might boast strong parts but transcends them all when brought together in a way that you couldn’t imagine them separate at all; they form something entirely new.

“It should be so fluid that it almost feels like one expression, one mode of expression,” Prestini said. “It’s a form of synesthesia.”