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- CRITICS' CHOICE, Page 12
-
-
- MUSIC
-
- INDIGO GIRLS: INDIGO GIRLS (Epic). Love's Recovery and Land
- of Canaan are the winners here, in an album full of saline
- nouveau folk songs sung by two gifted writer-performers. The
- Indigos have their roots in the up-front message music of the
- early '60s and the more abstruse lyrical digressions of the
- Georgia rock band REM; it's an intriguing combination and one
- that merits nurturing.
-
- TIN MACHINE: TIN MACHINE (EMI). It's David Bowie, lying low
- with a new band that he helped create and whose rough edges he
- hones to a good cutting edge. Lots of fever-blister guitar work
- and apocalyptic Bowie lyrics. Crack City ought to be a sci-fi
- hallucination, but Bowie knows better: he makes it into an
- everyday nightmare.
-
- ART
-
- HELEN FRANKENTHALER: A PAINTINGS RETROSPECTIVE, Museum of
- Modern Art, New York City. In the 1950s, Frankenthaler's
- lyrical washes of color had a decisive influence on abstract
- expressionism; today she ranks as America's best-known living
- woman artist. These 40 canvases from four decades show why.
- Through Aug. 20.
-
- ON THE ART OF FIXING A SHADOW: 150 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY,
- National Gallery, Washington. The history of photography as
- art, assembled from public and private collections around the
- world. Over 400 original pictures representing 200
- photographers. Among them: Louis Daguerre, Alfred Stieglitz,
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Through
- July 30.
-
- AGAINST NATURE: JAPANESE ART IN THE EIGHTIES, San Francisco
- Museum of Modern Art. Architect Arata Isozaki and fashion
- designer Issey Miyake are famous abroad, but contemporary visual
- art from Japan is still little known in the West. The first
- major U.S. museum show from Japan in more than 20 years brings
- American audiences up-to-date with a survey of new work from the
- cultural center of East Asia. Through Aug. 6.
-
- BOOKS
-
- POLAR STAR by Martin Cruz Smith (Random House; $19.95). In
- a sequel to his best-selling detective novel Gorky Park, Smith
- sets Moscow investigator Arkady Renko off on another bizarre
- case. The setting this time is a fishing boat on the Bering Sea;
- one dead body leads to others along an arc of increasing menace
- and violence.
-
- FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar
- Straus Giroux; $22.95). Friedman won two Pulitzer Prizes during
- the 1980s while covering the Middle East for the New York Times.
- Now based in Washington, he looks back on the harsh realities
- of a region drenched in myths and bloodshed.
-
- THEATER
-
- ASPECTS OF LOVE. London's West End is illuminated by Andrew
- Lloyd Webber's lyrical meditation on romance. Five actors led
- by the able Michael Ball discover that love is a process of
- teaching and almost of parenting. Lloyd Webber's score, though
- repetitive, is gorgeous.
-
- UBU. Played on a tiled set that suggests an immense urinal,
- this revised version of Alfred Jarry's absurdist classic Ubu
- Roi -- about a murderous nincompoop who seizes the crown of
- Poland -- remains as hilarious off-Broadway (and only a little
- less outrageous) than when outraged Parisian theatergoers rioted
- in 1896.
-
- TELEVISION
-
- THE MOON ABOVE, THE EARTH BELOW (CBS, July 13, 9 p.m. EDT).
- For the 20th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's one small step, Dan
- Rather and Charles Kuralt are on hand to wax nostalgic.
-
- COPS (Fox, July 15, 8 p.m. EDT). Glasnost reached another
- milestone last spring, when the producers of this
- documentary-style series about real cops were allowed to follow
- a group of Soviet policemen. Two weeks of shooting resulted in
- this special one-hour episode.
-
- P.O.V. (PBS, debuting July 18, 10 p.m. on most stations).
- This summer series -- a collection of independent documentaries,
- all expressing their makers' "point of view" -- launches its
- second season with Who Killed Vincent Chin?, an Oscar-nominated
- film about the 1982 slaying of a young Chinese-American
- engineer.
-
- MOVIES
-
- WHEN HARRY MET SALLY . . . it was loathe at first sight.
- But he (Billy Crystal) learned to accept her (Meg Ryan) as a
- friend, with almost no romantic strings attached. The "almost"
- makes for a witty sexual tension in Rob Reiner's comic valentine
- to love, friendship, Manhattan and Woody Allen.
-
- GREAT BALLS OF FIRE. This bio-pic stamps demon rocker Jerry
- Lee Lewis as a feral innocent in a time warp, instead of
- cottoning to the sexual and class danger he held for Middle
- America. But Dennis Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee with a nicely
- calculating recklessness, and Winona Ryder is hypnotically
- enigmatic as the singer's nymphet bride.
-
-