“What up, everybody?” pianist Gerald Clayton asked the crowd at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night. “We’re about bringing everybody together, from different genres and headspaces.”

By then, Next Collective, a tight and smart band of young jazz musicians on the rise, had worked through versions of songs that spanned contemporary pop. “Twice,” by Swedish band Little Dragon, began as an overlapping dialogue between saxophonists Walter Smith III and Logan Richardson, then gave way to ringing chords and a thrashing 4/4 beat. “Africa” spilled out nearly as silkily as neo-soul genius D’Angelo’s original, yet with fresh harmonic suggestions and a tiny stutter to its step. Trumpeter Christian aTunde Adjuah joined in for “No Church In the Wild,” summoning tenderness to match Frank Ocean’s sung version (on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne”), as guitarist Matthew Stevens and bassist Ben Williams traced that tune’s serpentine line in tandem. But then Adjuah blew hot, fresh improvisations and squealed asides to his bandmates; drummer Jamire Williams began messing with the song’s throb of a beat, splitting and sliding it gently but just enough.

The mostly young listeners hooted and hollered as much for Pearl Jam’s “Ocean” as for the melody of “No Church.” Here was that meeting of headspaces Clayton mentioned, and it came naturally: These songs form the playlist for the lives of both those onstage and, mostly, in the audience. Formally, Next Collective was assembled by Chris Dunn, an executive at Concord Music Group, by drawing from the label’s roster. Yet these musicians already led overlapping lives, and have already been turning each other on to the music on the collective’s new CD, “Cover Art.” Tuesday night’s gig was a release party, and its success owed in large part to the savvy promotion and production work of New York-based Revive Music Group, who have deep hooks into the crowd Concord hopes to reach.

Next Collective might invite comparison with New Directions, the young-gun amalgam band of a decade ago created by Blue Note Records. But that project looked largely to reinterpreting classics from the Blue Note catalog, not current hits. There’s nothing new in playing jazz versions of alternative rock and hip-hop tunes, nor is it radical by now for a small jazz ensemble to find a sound as influenced by, say, Bon Iver (Next Collective covered “Perth” on Tuesday) or MeShell Ndegeocello (her “Come Smoke My Herb” is on “Cover Art”) as by Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet. Back when he called himself Christian Scott, Adjuah (who changed his name last year) built a solid career with such philosophy, leading a band that included both drummer Jamire Williams and Stevens. The shared cohesion and sense of purpose from that experience was evident at Le Poisson Rouge. Genres cease to matter when a rhythm section slides as gracefully from rock’s straight four to jazz’s swing to hip-hop’s layered beats as this one did. Ben Williams briefly stole the show during “Fly or Die,” by N.E.R.D, yet his more subtle moves throughout the set offered the sort of details and prompts that help elevate such an enterprise from cover band to jazz ensemble. The same could be said of Clayton, who soloed little on piano, yet squeezed unexpected lyricism out of even Dido’s “Thank You.”

Still, these musicians have been and still are doing this stuff on their own recordings and in bands led by others. (Pianist Kris Bowers, who is on the new CD — and, by the way, is in the mix on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” — missed Tuesday night’s gig because he was touring with singer Jose James.) Their calendars are full enough for Tuesday’s show to be the lone listing on Next Collective’s itinerary. That’s a shame for two reasons. Working as collective with Concord’s backing might — and should — make for better marketing to the very listeners so many jazz presenters are desperate to attract. Also, touring as a unit would be revealing — not only about how much these players can grow as an ensemble, but just how much invention they can breathe into this material. The latter is an interesting question.

A few months ago, Benjamin Schwarz, literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic, reviewed Ted Gioia’s book, “The Jazz Standards” (Oxford University Press), under the unfortunate headline “The End of Jazz.”

More often than not and especially recently, such foolish obituaries about jazz concern a shrinking audience. But Schwarz focused on an aesthetic concern — chiefly, the drying up of jazz’s lifeblood of raw material, the great and sophisticated tunes of the so-called “Great American Songbook.” Schwarz ended his piece like this: “Jazz, like the Songbook, is a relic — and as such, in 2012 it cannot have, as Gioia wishes for it, an ‘expansive and adaptive repertoire.’”

In his essay, Schwarz made a deep and deeply correct point about a mid-20th-century phenomenon: yes, there were a “fleeting set of cultural circumstances” that gave rise to a “Songbook,” the recurrence of which is conspired against by everything from demographics to education policy to commercial music formats. But I didn’t buy anything he said beyond that. Frankly, I don’t think jazz needs a songbook. It moves forward — or better, along its big circle — just fine without one. But if it did, that songbook would be a playlist that does not cohere in structure, style, and social references like Gershwin and Berlin did. This new songbook is in the phones of many who were at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night, not to mention the musicians onstage. How “expansive and adaptive” it is remains an open question, one I’d like to hear this band consider further still.

Our most talked-about stories in visual art, February 25-March 1, 2013:

— Julia Halperin previewed next week's Armory Show art fair, including a bevy of special programming celebrating the centennial of the landmark 1913 Armory Show exhibition, while Benjamin Sutton took a look at the offerings at this year's ADAAArt Show, which marks its 25th anniversary.

— ARTINFO editors on (almost) every continent picked the best artworks they'd seen during the month of February, from Douglas Gordon in Berlin to TextaQueen in Sydney.

— Kelly Chan toured architect Annabelle Selldorf's enormous new purpose-built David Zwirner gallery complex on West 20th Street in Chelsea.

— Janelle Zara looked into the innovative design of Superkilen park in Copenhagen, a bold-hued urban plaza designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, urban landscape architects Topotek 1, and artist collective Superflex.

— Coline Milliard picked the 10 best booths at the new London art fair Art13, from hometown favorite October Gallery to Dubai gallery Lawrie Shabibi.

— Dion Tan spoke to Gutai group member Takesada Matsutani about the collective's origins, his new exhibition at New York's Galerie Richard, and the Guggenheim's current retrospective of the movement's output.

— Rising star artist and self-described anti-finish fetishist Julia Dault discussed her work's genesis in tacky textiles and construction materials.

— Ben Davis pondered how the Guggenheim's "UBS MAP Global Art Initiative," which recently debuted with the opening of "No Country: Contemporary Art From South and Southeast Asia," became so very lost.

— Photographer Brandon Stanton, founder of the popular blog "Human of New York," caught DKNY stealing his work for a window display in Bangkok after he specifically turned down an offer when the fashion label sought his permission to use his pictures.

— The new design fair Collective, founded by architect Stephen Learner, revealed the details of its inaugural edition, slated to coincide with Frieze New York in May.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

Miroslaw Balka, “The Order of Things” at Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, through March 30

In this Foucauldian installation exploring historical trauma, the Polish artist has transformed the gallery into a sealed-off, echo-enhancing chamber in which two large black hoses relentlessly pour brackish water into what appears to be a pair of massive, rusted dumpsters; entering through a small door that heightens the disorienting sense of being dwarfed and possibly menaced, the viewer may have a sense of the “stationary anxiety” caused by endless repetition, though the piece's minimalism detaches it from any sense of collective history. — Lori Fredrickson

Melanie Bonajo, “One Question, Three Rooms, 44 Possible Answers” at PPOW Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor, through March 30

An array of texts and images, many with an emphasis on texture and color, probe issues such as gender, sex, and the surrounding power dynamics with a levity often absent from such discourse, offering a reminder that humor and charm can be effective means of inquiry. — Sara Roffino

Hilary Harkness at the FLAG Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, through May 18

Like a radical feminist appropriating the visual style of “Where's Waldo?,” Hilary Harkness offers voyeuristic access to spaces like historic battleships, submarines, military bases, and a Christie's auction house in the 15 impossibly detailed cutaway paintings brought together here (spanning 2000 to 2011), all of which are inhabited by a scantily-clad and supermodel-proportioned all-female population — except in the show's only painting of an outright orgy, which is all-male — whose activities, whether trifling, tantalizing, or deadly, register, in the best pieces, as simultaneously funny, creepy, absurd, and disturbing. — Benjamin Sutton

“New Prints 2013/Winter” at International Print Center New York, 508 West 26th Street, 5th Floor, through March 9

I went to the IPCNY to see the exhibition of pop-up books, but found myself totally captivated by the “New Prints” show instead, especially Serena Perrone's “Maintaining a Safe Distance and Living to Tell,” a multi-paneled, three-toned print panorama of violent landscapes, David Sandlin's “Pure-Ton-o-Fun Co Scatalog (book),” a neon-hued, illustrated, accordion silkscreen featuring wide-eyed anthropomorphized-object cartoon characters, and Kasey Ramirez's haunting “Edifice,” which evoked an ocean pier at night, thus renewing my love for the medium thanks to a happy coincidence. — Alanna Martinez

Shinique Smith, “Bold as Love” at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, through March 16

This show made me think a lot about chaos theory as it relates to consumption. — Shane Ferro

Visitors and exhibitors are unanimous: Art13 London’s opening yesterday was a good one. Over 6,000 people made it to Olympia Grand Hall in the sleepy West London neighbourhood of Kensington, including 3,000 VIPs. A number of very serious collectors were spotted strolling the aisles, although some of the most recognizable faces – the Rubells, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Sydney Picasso – had all been smartly linked to the fair, either as members of the advisory board or speakers on Art13 London’s extensive talks programme. Heartthrob du jour Harry Styles, from the British boy band One Direction, took his first steps as an art collector, purchasing a Ben Turnbull sculpture at Eleven Gallery for £1,800 ($2,700).

Now that the glitter has started to settle, it’s time for a first tally, and while the floor appeared much quieter today, the figures are looking good. “This is the London art fair we’ve been waiting for,” said Eleven Gallery’s Charlie Phillips, who also sold a large collage by Turnbull for £16,500 ($25,000) and two framed video pieces by Gerry Fox at £2,750 ($4,100) a pop.

At time of writing, the biggest sale went to Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts from Budapest, who sold “Mass Writing,” a large 1958 abstract painting by Judit Reigl for £200,000 ($300,000) to a British collector. Reigl is still working at age 90, and she’s one of the fair’s discoveries. Born in Hungary, the painter moved to Paris in 1950, where André Breton put together her first exhibition. She has been enjoying a reappraisal of late, and her works have found their way to some of the world’s biggest art museums, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Tate.

The staff at the Shanghai and Hong Kong-based Pearl Lam Galleries, which is presenting works by Su Xiaobai and Zhu Jinshi, was also all smiles, and confided having sold “more than two pieces” for prices ranging from $80,000 to $150,000. The fair felt “fresh,” they said, adding it was “a good time of the year” to do it.

That wasn’t obvious at first. In March, Frieze Week is a distant memory, June’s auction week not yet on people’s minds, and the Armory is only days away. But the choice of date characterizes Art13 London’s ambitions. This wasn’t meant to be a satellite fair, feeding off Frieze’s crumbs. From the start, Art13 London has presented itself as a destination, able to attract its own crowd, which might or might not overlap with London’s bigger fair’s usual clientele.

Beijing’s PIFO Gallery is certainly not regretting the trip, having sold abstract paintings by Kang Haitao, Zhang Xuerui, and Liang Quan, priced between £15,000 and £20,000 ($23,000 to $30,000). Head of gallery development Niru Ratnam summed up Art13 London’s approach: “70 percent of the galleries are new to London, and 50 percent of the artists have a non-Western background … That’s really what we are trying to do.”

The choice seems to have paid off. Fair fatigue is hard to escape when confronted with the same galleries, showing the same artists from London to Hong Kong, Basel to New York. For now, Art13’s buyers seem to be mainly based in Europe, with London collectors overwhelmingly predominating. But with such a global makeup – and if the fair continues to deliver – this could change quickly.

“I’m really impressed,” said Sam Dukan, from Paris’s Galerie Dukan. “Usually new art fairs don’t start with a gallery selection of this quality. The main London galleries are not here, we knew this was the case, but there are some major foreign galleries.” For his first outing in the British capital, Dukan has gone local and curated a solo presentation of black-and-white drawings by the London-based artist Nina Fowler, priced between £1,800 and £7,000 ($2,700 and $10,000). A large drawing of James Dean in “Giant,” the biggest piece on display, sold last night during the last minutes of the private view.

Not all the galleries are on a roll, though. “Sales-wise, it’s been quite slow,” confided Selma Feriani, from London’s Selma Feriani Gallery. So far, she has sold a video by Sama Alshaibi (“The Tethered,” £9,000/$14,000) and a fetching abstract painting by Amel Bennys (£5,000/$7,500) to collectors she already knew. Galerie Ramakers, from The Hague, was also somewhat disappointed, despite having come with a stunning selection of collages and sculptures by the Dutch artist Ossip (with prices starting at a very reasonable £750/$1,100).

“People take a while to get used to new things,” mused African contemporary art dealer Jack Bell, from Jack Bell Gallery. “But they are generally very happy to discover new artists.” Already gone from his solo display by the Benin photographer Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou were a single image and a triptych, £5,000 and £2,000 ($7,500 and $3,000), respectively, from the artist’s “Demoiselles” series.

Overall, spirits were high when ARTINFO UK left the building. “It’s probably one of our best fairs,” beamed Asmaa Al Shabibi, co-founder of Dubai’s Lawrie Shabibi. Most of their works by Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan and American artist Asad Faulwell ranging from £650 to £15,000 ($1,000 to $23,000) have found good homes. “And it’s so nice to be in London.” Then she rushed off to look after another client.

Art13 London, March 1-3, Olympia Grand Hall.

In a continuation of Hollywood’s fairy-tale trend, which in 2011 yielded a Red Riding Hood and last year two Snow Whites, Emma Watson has begun negotiations to play Cinderella. 

Walt Disney, which produced 1950’s animated “Cinderella,” has hired Kenneth Branagh to direct the film – which may or may not have anything to do with Charles Perrault’s 1697 telling or the 1812 version by the Brothers Grimm. Cate Blanchett has been cast as the wicked stepmother.

Watson’s “Harry Potter” co-star Daniel Radcliffe is meanwhile in final talks to play Baron Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant Igor in “Frankenstein,” 20th Century-Fox’s revisionist adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel.

The Scottish director Paul McGuigan has been lined up for the British-based project, which was written by Max Landis (“Chronicle”) and reportedly has sci-fi and circus components. Igor, for once the main protagonist, has been described as “pathologically dirty, with long hair and wearing old clown clothes.”

Guillermo del Toro’s plans to direct Watson in “The Beauty and the Beast” and to make his own version of “Frankenstein” appear to be on hold.

Georges Méliès brought his illusionist’s touch to the first Cinderella film in 1899 (see below). Lotte Reininger’s 1922 silhouetted animation “Aschenputtel” had its own exquisite magic. Over the years, Cinders has been played by the likes of Mary Pickford (1914), Deanna Durbin (1939), Leslie Caron (1955), Julie Andrews (on TV, 1957), Gemma Craven (1976), Drew Barrymore (1998), and Anne Hathaway (2004).

Igor’s history is slightly more confusing, since he is often mistaken with the gnarled weirdos played by Dwight Frye in Universal’s horror cycle. The prototype was Frye’s hunchback Fritz, who delights in tormenting Boris Karloff’s Monster in James Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein.”

Frye had played the fly-eating lunatic Renfield in Tod Browning’s “Dracula” earlier that year and would go onto play Frankenstein’s assistant Karl in Whale’s masterpiece “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). Assigned to get the boss a fresh heart from the accident hospital, he cuts corners by jumping out on a woman passer-by and taking hers. Frye added immeasurably to these films, but he never played an Igor.

The name became iconic when Bela Lugosi was cast as Ygor in Rowland V. Lee’s “Son of Frankenstein” (1939), which was the last of the cycle to star Karloff. The character is a crazy, hirsute blacksmith whose broken neck owes something to Jeremiah Flintwinch’s twisted neck in Charles Dickens’s “Little Dorrit.”

Lugosi reprised him in Erle C. Kenton’s “The Ghost of Frankenstein” (1942); it starred Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Monster, eventually the recipient of Ygor’s brain. Despite the fame he had acquired playing Count Dracula, Lugosi made a less impressive foil than Frye.

The first actor to own the name was horror ham Lionel Atwill, who played the mad museum creator Ivan Igor in Michael Curtiz’s Warner Bros. horror “Mystery of the Wax Museum”(1933). In André de Toth’s 1953 3D remake “House of Wax,” starring Vincent Price, Igor was the deaf-mute sculptor played by Charles Bronson.

Marty Feldman was memorably bug-eyed as the hunchback Igor in Mel Brooks’s spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974). These days, of course, not even the Baron’s sidekick can afford to be ugly, hence the casting of Radcliffe.

A suggestion: Rupert Grint as the Baron, Robert Pattinson as the Monster, and Kristen Stewart as the Bride.

Below: Georges Méliès "Cinderella" (1899)

Shary Boyle’s status as one of Canada’s best-kept secrets is about to change. This summer, the Toronto-based artist will bring her dreamlike creations to the 55^th Venice Biennale, taking over the country’s discreet modernist pavilion with fantastical sculptures, installations, and projections. Details are still under wraps, but the exhibition — curated by National Gallery of Canada’s  Josée Drouin-Brisebois—promises to be quite a spectacle (in contrast with the quiet mood of Steven Shearer’s display two years ago). Boyle is a keen show-woman, and she has collaborated with several musicians — including Peaches and Feist— and developed a unique take on live drawing and shadow theatre using quaintly charming overhead projectors. During a quick visit to London, the artist sat down with ARTINFO UK to discuss her commitment to the handmade, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the trappings of national identity.

Looking at your work, which can be almost phantasmagoric, I was wondering how you relate to the city of Venice.

It’s a no-brainer. I think when I was selected the jury was feeling that the history, the mythology, the ambience of Venice was really a natural fit with my work. Outcasts persecuted from other areas of Europe went there trying to hide in the lagoons, and they became this very powerful merchant class. That history is interesting to me: the idea of a group of strugglers, bound together to create this strong identity and Venetian pride. I’m also very interested in how they always put art before religion there. But the place is haunted, you know; the first time I saw it, I was just mesmerized by the idea of that water lapping up the staircases. It’s like the city of Atlantis, you have a vertigo or you want to descend into the water — it calls you. And there are so many ancient buildings: a mix of Eastern Islamic, Roman, gothic, and classical architecture that’s extraordinary. It’s really a place where I feel the Other can exist.

Which is obviously a theme that has been running through your work in many different ways.

Absolutely, and I also really respond to the classical material. I’m somewhat of a figurative artist, and I’m working in plaster, porcelain, organic kind of traditional materials: bronze, casting, things that have a long tradition and heart in Italy.

What initially attracted you to porcelain?

I’m generally interested in some form of invented essentialism. I like to look to the root causes of things. I’m an artist who is inspired by life as opposed to art. So it goes the same with my materials. I make my own work and that’s a little bit rare in today’s larger contemporary art scene. Because of that, I’m not interested with the derivative. I like the base things, the things that come from the soil or that have been around for a long time.

Is the handmade, the gesture, important?

Absolutely. If my hands are shaping every single element of a piece, no one can recreate it. It’s not as if my idea could be translated by any hand: the hand and the idea are absolutely integrated in my work, and that’s where the power comes out of it. Every piece of work of mine that you see is me.

And yet you are very open to collaborations. You’ve famously worked with musicians, for example.

Yes, that’s the performance part of my practice. There’s a real division between the private studio world and this other part of my personality that’s very performative, social, and particularly inspired by music. I’ve had a long history with music myself. It was a natural move from me to go into the arts but I always had this second love.

So how do the two fit together?

Well, music is a huge part of my studio practice. I’m in there listening to music all the time and I’m deeply involved with a culture of musicians: very dear friends, partners or whatever are musicians so that world is influential just in the feeling, the euphoria, and the inspiration of the music itself.

But in terms of the performance, it’s a very straightforward, analogue relationship I have with early animations and magic shadow stuff. In the late 1990s, I did a short film with a woman, and for the first time ever I had my drawings filmed, so I got to see a rush of my hand drawing. Looking at that, I realized the suspense and the performative potential of watching a drawing being made. I immediately rented an overhead projector and started experimenting with a musician. We began putting together shows, where I was just live drawing behind her as she was singing. And then they became very complex and more and more integrated with the narrative of the performance until it was a truly an audio-visual spectacle. That has just developed to the point where now I’ve been doing full live theatre shows, with up to three overhead projectors. People are like: can’t you just do this on digital? I don’t even bother explaining, it really has to be the overhead projector.

Can you see this kind of collaboration informing your presentation in Venice?

Absolutely. I’ve been bringing the projector into the gallery and actually collaborating with myself, with projections onto my more studio-based practice, which involves sculptures, and two-dimensional, three-dimensional installations.

You’ve said that the Canadian pavilion was “a tricky space.”

Yes, it’s kind of a greenhouse, it’s based on a nautilus shell design, there’s the tipi-like element of a sloping ceiling, it’s very unusual. I find it really charming and eccentric. The scale is amazing politically, in terms of where it’s positioned between these two colonial behemoths. There’s the U.K., Germany, and then there’s this tiny garden shed hidden in the bush, Canada. The space is great, I like it. But I do recognize that it has to be seduced. It can’t be worked against. So luckily, I had chemistry with it right away.

You’ve discussed Toronto’s “cultural inferiority complex” in relation to cities such as New York or London. Do you see this changing?

I would like to be a part of that changing. I’ve been one of the rare artists who stayed in Canada. That has been a little bit of a liability, because it’s meant that my work is not as known outside the country as my contemporaries’. I hope that some interest [generated by the pavilion] comes back to Toronto, and the plethora of artists working there so exceptionally. But when you are in a country like Canada, removed enough from the central forces of cultural economy, it also allows you the freedom and liberation to do things in a really inventive way — and because of that, I think there is a crazy amount of innovation.

There are clearly references to Canadian folklore in your work – but you’ve also got a very ironic take on the Canadian identity. I’m thinking, for example, of your piece “Canadian artist,” which was a response to you being described as such.

That’s right, no one knows what that means or what it is at all. Identity, cultural identity is an invented term that is about gathering as many examples of people that you feel the proudest about and claiming them as your ancestors. [For this piece] I just did three or four generations of an invented family tree for an invented self. There are a least 55 people involved, and I traced their bloodline with ribbons through the appropriate progenitors back to the individual that was “the artist.” It was extraordinary just to imagine the amount of genetics. We tend to claim one ancestor, but we are just all universal hobos, and we have to claim all of it.

With concerns such as these in mind, how do you feel about the somewhat outmoded model of national representation in Venice?

It’s definitely outmoded, and it’s very bizarre. For people who aren’t in art culture, the closest comparison is the Olympics and the idea of a national competition, which is so uninteresting to me. To bring it back to Canada, we are a place where people have always come. The French and the English were invaders of a place where people had been for thousands of years. And as the years come by all sorts of people come. So there’s no way that I can represent Canada. But what I can do is think of the diversity of people that are going to be at the Venice Biennale, from so many different cultures. If I look at it like that, I think: what do I want to say to this scope of humanity? Luckily, I’m someone who is very interested in talking about core, universal subjects so in that way, there’s a translation possibility that hopefully will affect everybody.

Shary Boyle at the 55^th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Canadian Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, June 1 – November 24, 2013. 

Robin Hood and his Merry Men – fairy tale heroes? Not when we last looked (despite certain affinities with the English folklore figure Robin Goodfellow, or Puck). Nor is Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Nor is L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy Gale.

Just what constitutes a fairy tale seems to be causing some confusion in the Hollywood press. Last Friday, Deadline reported:

“As New Line today opens ‘Jack the Giant Slayer’ and Disney readies next week’s ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful,’ Hollywood’s infatuation with revisionist fairy tales shows no sign of abating. Dreamworks jumped into the fray last night by closing a mid-six figure against seven-figure deal for ‘Merry Men,’” apparently “a tentpole reimagining of the Robin Hood legend… an ensemble piece centered around the supporting characters Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, and Will Scarlet.”

Variety had announced on Thursday that Disney’s “Cinderella” is “the latest fairy tale the Mouse House is getting into the megaplex after Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Sam Raimi’s ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful,’ and [the] Angelina Jolie vehicle ‘Maleficent,’ based on Sleeping Beauty’s villainess.”

Identifying Carroll and Baum’s dense, neo-mythic fantasies of shifting consciousness with the tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm isn’t without some validity since all have been subject to Freudian and Jungian interpretations. Oz, with its witches and lost princess, showed Baum’s obvious debt to the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen.

However, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is a strictly American fable (possibly an allegory of the late 19th-century populist movement). Wonderland and the 12th^/13th-century England of Robin Hood have entirely different typologies and atmospheres to those of such classic European fairy tales as “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” The alignment of the upcoming Robin Hood movie with Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), Raimi’s “Oz” (opening Friday), and the current crop of bona fide fairy tale movies strongly indicates how Hollywood is currently wedded to refashioning iconic storybook characters and refracting them through the CGI prism while weighting them with such positive (and mass-demographic-pleasing) phenomena as the kick-ass young heroine and social equality.

Robin Hood is a legend about resistance to political oppression, though it has sometimes been rendered as an Anglo-Arcadian myth. Wikipedia’s entry Fairy Tale nicely explains the distinctions between the two story forms while allowing that they can converge.

The various movies and television series featuring Robin Hood, which I wrote about here, often honor different aspects of the original ballads. The new movie that’s being scripted by Brad Inglesby and will be directed by Scott Waugh could well co-opt English medieval robbery and realpolitik and transform it into Hollywood action blah. That’s if the Deadline report proves accurate: “There is a high-concept revenge angle that tonally is reminiscent of ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’”

Does this mean Robin Hood is going to be killed at the outset? And/or does it mean there’s going to be a Sherwood tale more perplexingly Southern Californian than “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”? Don’t bet against either proposition.

— Sting Will Open Landmark Indian Auction: A rare sale of antiquities and artworks — including an orientalist masterpiece by J.M.W. Turner, a painting by M.F. Husain, and design objects by Étienne Drian, René Lalique, and others — staged by Bangalore-based auctioneer Bid & Hammer will feature an even more improbable opening act. The three-day sale kicks off on Thursday with a performance by rock legend Sting. "Auctions in India are moving away from gallery spaces to luxury venues to fit into the lifestyle segments of the upend buyers who make up the bulk of the collectors of rare art and antiquities in the country," Bid & Hammer chairman and managing director Maher Dadha explained. [South Asia News Service]

— Teenager Arrested in Dutch Art Heist: A 19-year-old Romanian woman was arrested by the Dutch police yesterday in connection with the theft of works by Picasso, Monet, Matisse, and more from Kunsthal Rotterdam last October; she is said to be the girlfriend of one of the two men arrested in Romania in January, and would have stashed the paintings in her apartment until they were removed from their frames and taken to Romania. The investigation, which is proceeding with help from the Romanian police, has yet to turn up the missing masterpieces. [Reuters]

— Google Launches "Art Talks" Video Series: Not to be outdone by the Met's "82nd & 5th" and PBS's "art21," the tech giant has launched the video project "Art Talks," a new online series in which curators and staff from major museums including MoMA, the London's National Gallery, L.A. MOCA, and Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art discuss important artworks, issues like art education, or themes like the history of the female nude. "We hope that Art Talks is the next step in bringing art to your armchair, wherever you are in the world, with just a click of a button," said Lucy Schwartz of the Google Cultural Institute. [Google Blog]

— Keystone Cossacks Disrupt Pussy Riot Play: The plight of art rockers Pussy Riot remains too hot to touch in Russia without controversy. Swiss theater director Milo Rau says that his project to re-enact the trial of jailed group at Moscow's Sakharov Center — done with the participation of Yekaterina Samutsevich, a band member who was later released on appeal — was disrupted when immigration officials, Cossacks (that is, "people who claim to be descended from a once-feared Tsarist-era paramilitary group"), and several police officers barged into the theater on Sunday. They were thwarted, however, when Rau’s visa turned out to be in order, and it turned out that their warrant had the wrong address on it. "My impression was that they had absolutely no plan – they just wanted to interrupt it and helplessly searched for a reason," Rau said Monday. "It was more Kafka than Stalin." [AP]

— Major Gift Guarantees Free Entry at Bronx Museum: Last night, during the Bronx Museum of the Arts's annual gala, the museum's executive director Holly Block announced that a $500,000 gift from Donald and Shelley Rubin has ensured that the museum will be able to continue offering free admission for the next three years. "The number of people who came into the Museum and the increased community engagement that emerged from the free admission and school adoption programs we began last year was inspiring," Block said. "The Rubins’ generous gift will enable us to expand these programs and give hundreds of young people and members of underserved communities in every corner of the Bronx new opportunities to experience and participate in the arts." [Press Release]

— Indy Museum Slashes Staff by 11 Percent: The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) expects to save some $1.7 million per year thanks to an 11 percent reduction in its staff that the musuem's director and CEO Charles Venable announced this week, which will see 29 jobs cut in almost every department, from curatorial development, conservation, and education to security and grounds maintenance. Venable also wants to shift the IMA away from what he characterized as an over-reliance on its $326-million endowment. "These are difficult changes, but it is imperative that we reduce our reliance on the endowment so future generations can benefit from it," Venable said. "In my opinion, endowments ideally should not be used to support more than 50 percent of operations as a rule with the other half being supported through donations and earned revenue." [Indy Star]

— Met Buys Bargain David Drawing: Eagle-eyed curators for the Metropolitan Museum made off with a steal of a deal at the Swann Galleries's January 29 auction of Old Master drawings, recognizing an ink and wash rendition of Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Socrates" (which the Met owns) that was described in the sale's catalogue as being from the "French school, early 19th century" as an actual David drawing, and snapping it up for $840 — well above its $700 high estimate. "Several curators in the department — Perrin Stein and Stijn Allsteens — noticed this," said Met drawings curator George Goldner. "The drawing style is typical of David. It was obvious we had to have it." [TAN]

— Wallinger Hopes to Spread the Horse Love: UK artist Mark Wallinger has unveiled his latest work, "The White Horse," on a plinth outside the British Council’s London headquarters. The life-size marble and resin replica of a real racehorse is not merely his latest work, however — he also hopes that it will serve a demonstration piece, inspiring confidence in an even larger project, a 50-meter-high horse he had planned for a commission in Kent back in 2008, but that is lamentably in limbo due to lack of funds. "There's only so much the imagination can do," Wallinger explained. "Seeing [the White Horse] is like a very large proof to what the larger one could look like." [Independent]

— Portlanders Perplexed by Art Tax They Voted For: The city of Portland has mailed flyers to tens of thousands of its citizens to remind them that it's time to pay the art tax they approved in November  — which is expected to raise $12 million every year, half of which will go toward hiring arts teachers in k-5 schools with the other half earmarked for specific art groups and projects — though the initiative left many of the 350,000 residents effected by the tax confused. "No, it’s not junk mail," said the city's revenue director Thomas Lannom. "We want to make sure everybody knows there’s a tax that was voted for by Portland voters on November 6th of last year." [KGW]

— "Virgin and Child" Returned: The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany has agreed to give up a 15th-century painting in its collection after researchers were able to trace it back to Max Stern (1904-87), a Jewish dealer who escaped Nazi Germany and later became an art dealer in Montreal. The work in question, "Virgin and Child," is attributed to the Master of Flémalle. Three universities are beneficiaries of Stern’s estate: Concordia and McGill universities in Montreal, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Willi Korte, a researcher who works for the estate, emphasized that there was more work to be done: "We know that a few other paintings from Stern are in German museums." [TAN]

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SHANGHAI — When we reach Christopher Doyle over Skype he’s working at his Kowloon Bay studio. “I don’t know if it’s a studio or a closet or a brothel or a repository of dreams – I’m not sure exactly what it is,” he cackles. “I think it’s a possibility, that’s more or less what it’s about. It’s a living organism. It just keeps on evolving. Every time I try to clean it up I just make more stuff.”

Doyle, who’s been described as the greatest living cinematographer, previously lived near the escalator in central Hong Kong, where he famously made “Chungking Express” with director Wong Kar-wai. Their partnership is legendary, the two teaming up to make seven feature films starring Chinese cinematic royalty including Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, and Leslie Cheung, who was recently made into a 1/6^th scale figurine to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death.

Doyle says the doll “should be ten times bigger than human scale like Leslie is.”

Hong Kong’s Central district is itself a star in many of these films, and it’s with some reluctance that Doyle moved across the bay. Spending so much time abroad, however, he was unable to justify the steep rent, and he likes that the new studio is near the container ports. “It’s back to my roots as a sailor,” he says.

Born in Sydney in 1952, Doyle left Australia as a teenager to join the Norwegian Merchant Marines. He washed up in Hong Kong, and later moved to Taiwan where he studied Mandarin and picked up the Chinese name Du Kefeng (杜可风) – Du after the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, and Kefeng, meaning ‘like the wind’. In 1983, he picked up the camera for Edward Yang’s “That Day, On the Beach”, for which he won the best cinematography prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. It was only then that he went to France to study cinematography.

Thirty years later, Doyle’s filmography is as untidy as his studio, and likewise still evolving. From the Hong Kong art house cinema he grew famous for, he has since worked around the globe, with directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Gus van Sant, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jim Jarmusch. In 2011 he made both the pink musical, Shiniji Imaoka’s “Underwater Love” (“Is the camera a cock, or an orifice?”, Doyle asks us), and a 3-D teddy-bear horror, Takashi Shimizu’s “Tormented”.

Doyle describes the experience of shooting in 3-D as “horrific”. “I think I made it too poetic. I think I’m just not horror enough. I have horror enough in my pants,” he cackles again, “I don’t need it in my life.”

Lately, Doyle has been in Beijing working on a film he can’t yet talk about with his favourite new leading man, Ai Weiwei. “Ai Weiwei is the Tom Hanks of Chinese cinema,” he says. “Ai Weiwei is so fucking beautiful on film because he’s so solid, he doesn’t give a shit. He is the great male star of the future of Chinese cinema. Please quote me. He’s the George Clooney of the new wave. Once he sees [the footage] he’ll either burn everything we ever shot or he’ll embrace it.”

“Beijing was great fun,” he continues. “I’m not sure if he’s pissed, but he fucking shaved my head.” It’s true that Doyle doesn’t have his usual foppish flop of silver hair. “I’m not sure if he’s saying fuck you for fucking me up or if he’s saying it was a pleasure to work together, let me share something from my world.”

Constantly moving forward, Doyle shows us footage of his current project, which he’s showing at literary festivals in Beijing and Shanghai this week. It’s a split-screen unreliable documentary wherein Doyle presents a version of his life – “I was conceived in the back of a Holden sedan” – that’s challenged by his Chinese counterpart, Du Kefeng, speaking Mandarin. “Du Kefeng really takes the piss out of Christopher Doyle as the film goes on,” Doyle says. “Fuck yeah. Who do you think you are? That’s basically the rhythm. I’m not sure we’ve worked it out perfectly but it’s been fun trying to demystify oneself.”

Named “Away With Words” after the first feature film that he directed, Doyle says the performance will be about the relationship between words and images. Doyle is himself a prolific author. “I’ve done 14, 15 books and they’re all out of print,” he says, “and they’re all extremely expensive on eBay and I wish I’d kept hundreds of copies of them, but – ha! – I didn’t.”

That Doyle is still taking chances with experimental forms is a gust of fresh air after recent announcements from Quentin Tarantinoand Steven Soderbergh that they’d sooner bow out of cinema than risk diluting their filmographies with weaker new works. “I love film to be challenged to do something that engages with a different generation who have had different visual experiences, and different life experiences of course, Doyle says. “If we think we have something to say, let’s fucking get out there and talk about it.

“We should fuck up the system, we should fuck up the medium, we should be especially aggressive towards our own so called, you know, gao gao zai shang, how do you say that in English? Our so-called elevated stage, or elevated status. Fuck the elevated status. The kids out there, ‘Gangnam Style’ or whatever it’s called – of course we have to compete with it, with integrity perhaps, but not with fucking arrogance, not with gao gao zai shang, not regarding yourself as a pinnacle of intellectual astuteness and visual acumen. No, come on.

“So many people ask me very often, so, how do you engage with the digital medium. I say the kids are going to teach us. We’re the students. The people who are on Youtube or engaging 24 hours of almost every day of their lives, who are online and having visual digital experience every day, they’re the ones who are going to teach us.”

Regarding the end of his own career, he says, “I know I will die with either a camera in hand or a woman on top – what more could one ask of life ?”

Christopher Doyle speaks at Capital M in Beijing tonight at 7pm, and the Glamour Bar in Shanghai on March 10 at 5pm. Tickets 75RMB.

Check in tomorrow for part two of our interview with Christopher Doyle, when he tells us why the “Life of Pi” Oscar is an insult to cinematography.

Underwater Love A Pink Musical

Formed in 2008, Brooklyn-based group The Men are impossible to categorize: punk, post-punk, hardcore, psychedelic, they are all these things and much, much more. This has never been more evident than on their new album, “New Moon,” which introduces strains of country and classic-rock into their sonic mosaic. ARTINFO’s Craig Hubert sat down with the band – Mark Perro (vocals, guitar), Kevin Faulkner (bass), Ben Greenberg (guitar), Rich Samis (drums), Nick Chiericozzi (guitar, vocals) – at a bar in the East Village to talk about recording in seclusion, getting their songs “down to basics,” and their prolific recording output.

I know you recorded the new album, “New Moon,” in a town called Big Indian in the Catskills. What was the reason for recording up there instead of Brooklyn?

Chiericozzi: We wanted to get out of the city. That was the main goal, I guess. Also, the band had a studio that we did the last record in that got closed down, unfortunately. We didn’t really have a home base. Ben had a friend who had a home up there, a second home like most of those houses are, just people from the city or something, and we ended up going up there and recording for about two weeks.

Did you stay at the house you recorded in? How secluded was it up there?

Chiericozzi: I mean, we were playing pretty loudly at 1 a.m., and no one knocked on the window or anything.

Greenberg: There was one neighbor, one house, literally.

Perro: No cell phone, no Internet up there. There wasn’t much communication.

Chiericozzi: We had to stock up on groceries for a week.

Does being so secluded, outside of the city, change the recording?

Perro: You definitely had to focus on the songs a lot more when you don’t have to go back to your life, when you don’t just clock in and clock out of a studio. We were living and breathing the songs the whole time we were there. I would imagine that has an effect.

Did you have all the songs written when you went up there?

Perro: There were skeletons. There were a few songs we had been touring for a few months, like three songs maybe. The rest was just fragments of ideas, or just parts.

How did you approach “New Moon” that was different than “Open Your Heart” or “Leave Home?”

Chiericozzi: We wanted to do more live sound. Well, we always did live, but we did lots of overdubs and we wanted more of an acoustic guitar compliment to the music instead of just being a layer, or something like that.

Perro: I think that was the idea – a little more down to basics without building all the stuff on it, just have the songs be what they are. No frills on it, really, or as few frills as possible.

The new album has a warmer sound. It sounds more intimate.

Greenberg: We recorded it the same way we did “Leave Home,” but more live I guess. Most of the tracks were live vocals.

Perro: Some songs were one take; nothing was more than two or three takes.

Is the live sound something you want to explore more in the future?

Perro: Yeah, we always mess around with that stuff. It’s important to us. I don’t know what the next step is going to be or anything.

Greenberg: It was really positive all around. Recording live is really important for a band like us because…

Chiericozzi: It just is [laughs].

Greenberg: It’s just what we do. We don’t build things up. It’s already there, that’s the whole point. The idea is for the songs to exist as they are – they can change, or whatever, but they’ll change as we feel it on a given night or given moment, not necessarily in a super planned way.

Perro: Yeah, the way the songs are recorded is not the definite end of those songs by any means. A lot of those songs we wrote up there have changed pretty drastically since we recorded them. They breathe and expand and contract based on what’s going on.

I know “Open Your Heart” was already almost finished by the time “Leave Home” came out, and you said you’ve been playing songs from “New Moon” for a while. Are you always quickly moving on to the next thing?

Perro: We’re actually working on another record right now. We’re like 95% done with it, I’d say. New ideas keep coming up. It’s important – writing, keep practicing. If things exciting are going on it’s crazy to ignore it, so if inspiration hits you just have to go with it.

Have you thought of releasing songs in a more immediate way?

Chiericozzi: I think recording’s the priority; the chips fall where they may. “Open Your Heart” was going to be a double album, so there were a lot songs that didn’t make that album, so those songs surfaced on compilations and singles, things like that. Generally, you can see an album, carve it out, right about now, when you’re about 95% done.

When listening to “New Moon,” I noticed it goes in waves – in begins with quieter songs, and ends on what is the loudest song on the album.

Perro: We’re definitely into flow – I think that was a definite thought in sequencing.

Greenberg: It came pretty naturally, though. It was clear what would make sense first, and what would make sense to follow up. Then when you’re done you do a weed test, a coke test….

Chiericozzi: Are you drinking whiskey right now?  

[laughs]

“New Moon” is out today on Sacred Bones.

August 1914 marks the start of World War I for European nations. There has so far been a lack of film industry involvement around the centenary of the Great War, but one British movie has gone into production. Though set in a part of Flanders where there was ferocious fighting, the subject isn’t combat but the survival of truth and creativity in the face of carnage.

Ben Chaplin and Monty Python’s Michael Palin have been cast as the leads in “The Wipers Times,” which is about the publication of the most famous of the satirical “trench newspapers” produced by British soldiers.

Scripted by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (co-writers of the sitcoms “The Young Ones” and “My Dad’s the Prime Minister”), the movie is currently being directed by Andy De Emmony (“West Is West”) in the Ballywater Park Estate, County Down, Northern Ireland. Emilia Fox, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and Steve Oram co-star.

British soldiers in the front line produced around 100 newspapers and the French over 400. Typically, they were a response to the confident, jingoistic journalism-cum-propaganda issued and frequently self-censored by official newspapers for home consumption. The humor tended to be rueful or biting, reflecting the men’s awareness of their extreme proximity to death.

The website of the Penn Libraries Rare Book and Manuscripts Collection, a substantial repository of trench papers, reports:

“While some were simple penciled sheets reproduced with carbon paper, others were many-page publications made with printing presses, which soldiers sometimes came upon in the war-torn towns of France and Belgium.”

Such was the case with The Wipers Times, printed on a press discovered near the town square of Ypres, the strategically vital Belgium municipality where the British fought the Germans in 1915, 1915, and 1917 (the last battle being Passchendaele). The press was salvaged by a sergeant, who printed a sample page.

Named for the Tommies’ slang for hard-to-pronounce Ypres, the paper was put together by men of the 12th Battalion Sherwood Foresters (Nottingham & Sherwood Regiment), 24th Division. It was edited by Captain F. J. Roberts (who is being played by Chaplin) and sub-edited by Lieutenant F.J. Pearson. Among the writers was the war poet and future novelist Gilbert Frankau, an artilleryman. Only one page could be printed at a time. The print run was 100 to 200 copies.

“Have you ever sat in a trench in the middle of a battle and corrected proofs? Try it,” Roberts wrote, adding that the paper was “produced when the air was generally full of shells…. Often one had to stop writing an article in order to ‘stand to.’”

During its run from February 1916 to February 1918, the paper was sometimes issued under the following titles: The Kemmel Times, The Somme Times, and The B.E.F. Times (for British Expeditionary Force). Two issues called The Better Times followed the November 1918 Armistice, the last billed as “Xmas, Peace, and Final Number.”

Along with samples of poetry, the selection of dark humor published here gives a strong indication of why a movie about The Wipers Times would appeal to a member of Monty Python.   

The papers have been collected in full and published in a book.