The Providence Phoenix Editor's Picks

by Jim Macnie

ART

The University of Rhode Island is in the middle of an Honors Colloquium entitled "Genetic Technology and Public Policy In the New Millennium," and the school's Fine Arts Gallery (Upper College Road, Kingston) is offering Translations/Transgressions, a show that has parallel insights which showcases a range of "recent, compelling, individualistic artistic responses to genetic code developments and biotechnology in general." Nancy Burson's morphed portraits, Bryan Crockett's sculpture of a newborn mouse, Hannah Barrett's painting of a biotech lab, and a 50-foot continuous image of white male rowers should prompt plenty of thought. The exhibit was curated by Judith Tolnick and runs through December 8. Call 874-2775.

DANCE

The Rhode Island College Dance Company is presenting a string of performances this fall, and its collaboration with choreographer Colleen Cavanaugh finds the former artistic director of the Cadence Dance Project back with old friends and admirers. Pieces include Impatient and Demeter's Tears. The program begins at 8 p.m. in the Auditorium at Roberts Hall (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence). Tickets are $12 ($10 for seniors and students). Call 456-8144.

POCKEY HUCKS

The history is all around our capital city. My uncle said that back in the '50s, he and his brother used to remove a few key cinderblocks to gain no-cost entrance to the Reds' games at the Rhode Island Auditorium on North Main Street (which, two decades later, also made room for Cream, the Mothers of Invention, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Jimi Hendrix, among other rockers). He was a kid with a wish to see his guys open up a can of whoop-ass on the ice. Half a century later the Providence Bruins have become our own beloved hockey team, and for the next several months they too will crack open a few cans of the stuff. The first opponents to be sent packin'? The Springfield Falcons. It's the Bruins' first home game, so begin the 2002-'03 season right and get down to the Dunkin' Donuts Center (1 LaSalle Square) at 7:05 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $10. Call 331-6700.

MUSIC

Something nice happens when you get up close during a performance. The cozier the room, the more direct the music's emotional thrust. I can appreciate Keith Jarrett doing the do at Boston's Symphony Hall, but there's something truly attractive about sitting right nearby as he wrestles out his designs -- at a space like North Jersey's Deerhead Inn, for instance. Venues are crucial. Matt Haimovitz believes so, too. The acclaimed cellist is rolling across the country, playing in clubs, cafés, and small theatres. He calls it his "Listening-Room" Tour. The program is comprised of some truly marvelous music, including his take on Bach's Suites for Cello Solo. The unorthodox move has been trumpeted about in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. And The Boston Globe believes that "by all accounts this is the first time a classical musician of stature has ventured outside the hallowed halls of conventional concert venues on a national scale." Want to be swayed by the sound of bow against strings? Want to hear what a master really, truly sounds like? Be at the Blackstone River Theatre (549 Broad Street, Cumberland) at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12. Call 725-9272.

A little bit honky-tonker, a little bit singer-songwriter, Ray Wylie Hubbard has turned heads in Texas for a long time. Though he knows enough to show off his sensitive side now and again, he's usually telling us about tough guys, and the rough 'n' tumble consequences resulting from their actions. Yup, dudes who don't do "what they oughta" seem to have a way of rising to the top in Hubbard's tunes. Driving down 95 the other night, I caught a four-song set on WRIU that stretched from gamblers and marked cards to the rap laid on the devil when ol' Ray found himself (mistakenly) spending eternity in that hellfire down below. He has quite a few up-north fans, so you won't be alone at 8 p.m. at the Common Fence Point Community Hall (933 Anthony Road, Portsmouth). Tickets are $12. Call 683-5085.p>

IDEAS

Native American's weren't using Chris Crafts up there on Lake Champlain. The paddle-powered boats that took them on their adventures were built by hand, and Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology (300 Tower Street, Bristol) is celebrating the ingenuity and design skills in an exhibition entitled Kayak, Umiak, Canoe. Nineteen wooden model watercrafts replicate their life-sized counterparts in both materials and construction technique. Viewed together, they provide a great understanding of what "living off the land" really meant. Demonstrations of birch bark boat building will take place on the hour between 12 and 3 p.m. At 3:30, there will be a panel discussion on how boaters braved wilder seas. "Breaking Waves and Dodging Ice: Perspectives on Traditional Watercraft of the Far North" is driven by a bevy of scholars. The festivities take place from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission is $3, $2 for seniors, $1 for kids. Call 253-8388.

MUSIC

Quick -- name the iconic dude who went from The Ted Mack Amateur Hour to the leather and chains of heavy metal. That's right: Pat Boone. In the '50s our hero was the epitome of white pop, taking black hits such as Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" and Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" to button-downed I-Like-Ikers. Pat had panache, no question. But his momentum was squashed when John, Paul, George, and Ringo exploded pop in 1963. Jesus and C&W were where Mr. Boone headed after the British Invasion. (You'll recall daughter Debby making hay by genuflecting to the lord with "You Light Up My Life.") The devil got a hold of Pat six or seven years ago, however. Proving that he was a good sport, Boone cut a disc of metal tunes, and vamped it up for a season or two. There are still quite a few ancient ears taken with the kind of nostalgia that the singer sells on stage, whether he sports leather or not. He'll perform at 2 p.m. at the Woonsocket Auditorium (777 Case Avenue). Tickets are $40 and $32. Call 762-1258.

The SoCal realm that coughed up No Doubt's Gwen Stefani and Sublime's Bradley Nowell also brings us the fellows who populate Reel Big Fish. A bad experience with their early work left me believing that they were merely a minor spin on Barenaked Ladies, but the new Cheer Up, whose cover art depicts a pissy clown demanding optimism from a somewhat startled kid, has enough imagination and punch to turn your head a few times. It ain't all the ska romping you might think if you haven't paid attention in a while (though the boys do know how to explode a cadence or three); there's all sorts of stylistic action taking place. See where the cheer lives when they roll through Lupo's (239 Westminster Street, Providence). The Starting Line and the Kicks open. Tickets are $15. Call 272-LUPO.

MUSIC

Soulive built its sizable reputation on turning barrooms upside down with old-school organ funk played with new-school attitude. The red zone is never far from their fingertips. If you've only caught them on the radio, you don't have the full story; the discs they've made for Blue Note have been lacking in the oomph department. Not enough liftoff. But when this trio slithers into a gin mill and starts pulling out the stops (literally, in the organist's case), they live up to their name. The Met Café (Union Street, Providence) is the designated party house tonight. Tickets are $15. Call 861-2142.

It's a week that stresses the underdog instruments of classical music. On Saturday night the cello is featured at the Blackstone Valley Theatre. And tonight at 8 in Rhode Island College's Sapinsley Hall in the Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence), the school's Symphony Orchestra will nudge the French horn into the spotlight. Virtuoso soloist Kevin Owen will perform Saint-Saëns's Morceau de Concert for Horn and Orchestra. The rounded, middle-sized valve instrument produces a warm, slippery sound, and Owen's stellar rep precedes him. Edward Markward conducts the program, which also includes Satie's Gymnopédies Nos 1 & 3 and Silbelius's Symphony No. 2 in D Major. Tickets are $7 ($5 for seniors and students). Call 456-8144.

WEBMASTER

Peter Parker's story thrived for decades in comic books. And this year's blockbuster film adaptation of the red-suited, high-flying teenager ratcheted up interest in superheroes across the board. So why not a theatrical spin on Spider Man? With the state-of-the-art mechanics for whisking actors through the air, there's no reason. Expect "trapeze stunts, pyrotechnics, and multimedia effects" to enhance the famed tale when Spider-Man Live! comes to the Providence Performing Arts Center (220 Weybosset Street, Providence) through the 27th. Tickets are $29.50 to $14.50. Call 421-ARTS.

MUSIC

the Mooney Suzuki music the other day. It was only, like, 3:30 or something, but the band's fragged and frantic rawk kind of signaled the end of the work day and the start of beer time. There was some air guitar, some stompin' feet, and then I threw 'em out so I could finish my work. The New York band is one of the best parts of the garage rock scene that'll surely be designated as one of this year's key pop trends. All yelped vocals, crazed riff tunes, and fuzzzzzzzz, they can drive a room nutso. Ditto for Sahara Hotnights, the female fourtet of Swedish 20somethings who have a buzz backing 'em as they open for the Hives at various global fests. They're a hoot, too. Their punky power push is based on rhythm and anxiety. Righteous song title? "Alright Alright (Here's My Fist, Where's the Fight)." Time to get your ya-yas out. The Flaming Sideburns and DJTy Jesso join the fun at he Met Café (130 Union Street, Providence). Tickets are $10. Call 861-2142.

WORDS

It's said that receiving the praise of your contemporaries is the best kind of critical feedback possible. If so, Rick Moody has little to worry about. Writing about the author's The Black Veil, Thomas Pynchon has said that Moody's book was crafted with "boldness, humor, generosity of spirit, and a welcome sense of wrath, taking the art of the memoir an important step into its future." Similar hosannas come from Michael Chabon: "It's Moody's genius to show, with a unique blend of wrenching emotion and intellectual playfulness, how the great black tale of our national history is reflected in the narrative of his own life -- and of that of all contemporary Americans." The Brown University grad is a native of New York City and a resident of New York's Fischer's Island. He will read from his work -- the most recent of which is a short story collection entitled Demonology -- at 7 p.m. in Room 157 of the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences at Roger Williams University's (1 Old Ferry Road, Bristol). Admission is free. Call 254-3867.

IDEAS

The best curators have an enormous breadth of knowledge and a terrific gift for connecting the dots. Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor has proven to be among the top critical and curatorial minds in the world, putting his insight to work in a number of highly esteemed exhibits, including Documenta11, which some consider to be Europe's most important art show franchise. Pushing 40, the worldly scholar is a poet who moved to America in the mid-'80s to study political science at a New Jersey college. A decade later, he founded Nka, an African arts journal with insight and impact. Its publication earned Enwezor a rep as a keen art mind, and requests to curate shows around the world came his way. You'll be sure to learn several of his opinions on the contemporary art scene when he delivers the Gail Silver Memorial Lecture at 6:15 p.m. at the RISD Museum (224 Benefit Street, Providence). Call 454-6500 for details.

LIT

Translating Stein to Spanish can't be easy, but according to pundits around the world, Pura López-Colomé has done an insightful job bringing the verse of Becket, Eliot, and others to the "loving tongue." But of course she's a poet herself, deemed one of Mexico's primary modernists. She will read from her latest work, a collection entitled No Shelter, at 8 p.m. in the Main Lounge at Brown University's Vartan Gregorian Quadrangle (101 Thayer Street, Providence). The reading and discussion that follows will be bilingual. Admission is free. Call 863-3260.

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