I wrote this after visiting the Charleston Artist Guild Gallery last night for their “Painted Palettes” Silent Auction. The Charleston Artist Guild will also be participating in tonights French Quarter Art Walk (which occur every first Friday of the month) from 5pm to 8pm.

The shuffle of feet
Bring the old ones out of their
Faded lawn Chairs
Eyes twinkling
Behind Dusty Frames.

Colors trumpet so they almost
Spring canvas and wood
Off of walls
On their own accord.

Scratches made on paper
Finalizing a well
Thought out
Decision.

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Sometimes we amaze ourselves — as with today when we manage to talk about nearly all things Spoleto, even though it’s coming to a gradual end. But we’ve had fun, right - huh? Of course we have.

The awesome Janet is back in the SpoStudio with regular BritBoy Geoff hosting.

Hear today’s podcast direct by following this link, or why not subscribe permanently here throughout the duration of the festival and get it fed to your MP3 player automatically. There’s also our guide to podcasting here.

Directing the adventure-opera Monkey: Journey to the West has been an epic experience for Chen Shi-Zheng. He’s had to deal with switched cast members and a different conductor for the US version of the show; a smaller space and a different configuration to squeeze the extravaganza into the Sottile; and a lot of hype to live up to.

“It’s been a journey making this production,” Mr. Chen told me just before he left town last week. “From a childhood fascination with the legend to all this.” Appreciating that a show like this becomes bigger than one person’s enthusiasm for a story, he has collaborated closely with his young cast to pass on some of his passion for Monkey to the actors, acrobats and martial artists.

“I forced them to read Wu Cheng-en’s novel Journey to the West,” he grinned. Used to visual stimuli in general and Chinese cartoons in particular, the performers were reluctant to plough through a 500-year-old book. But it was part of their job description, and their appreciation for the tale grew as a result. “It’s a fantasy journey that’s an allegory for Buddhism,” said Chen. “The idea of multiple universes and realities is Buddhist. It will find its place in the world, because the character is one of a kind.”

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As I leafed through the the Spoleto brochure some months back, I knew I had to see The Carolina Chocolate Drops when they came to town.

Last night, I saw them at the Cistern and they did not disappoint. 

The talented trio–Rhiannon Giddens, Justin Robinson, and Dom Flemons–bill themselves as an “African-American String Band,” and although they are often most closely associated with bluegrass, their songs ran the gamut from traditional Piedmont Stringband, to jazz and blues, and even a little hip-hop that doesn’t fall into neat, tidy categories. From Corn Bread and Butterbeans to Salty Dog to Hit Him Up Style, it’s all American music that’s to be enjoyed in a community setting.

My favorites were a gorgeous a capella song Giddens sang in Gaelic as well as the dancing.  They kept things informal and engaging, and I enjoyed the stories behind the music nearly as much as the songs themselves. 

All in all, it was a toe-tapping, knee-slapping, hand-clapping, get-up-and-dancing delight of a performance on on a pleasant evening. 

We knew Spoleto season was upon us last month when people started phoning in Lou Reed sightings a few days ahead of the opening ceremony, and though the former Velvet Underground frontman accompanied wife Laurie Anderson to her official festival house party Wednesday night, he seems generally to have kept a low profile.

But Anderson and Reed had a surprise planned for the audience Thursday night (the second of Anderson’s three Spoleto shows). News of some kind of special guest reached the newsroom at about 3 p.m., and through some mojo I’ll never understand I wound up with a ticket to what appeared to be an otherwise sold-out Anderson performance at Memminger.

The surprise? Near the end of the show, Anderson announced that it was her 61st birthday and called Reed up on stage for a rendition of “The Lost Art of Conversation.” It turns out this isn’t the first time Reed has joined Anderson for a performance of this song from the Homeland cycle, but for what it’s worth, I thought Reed added an electric growl to the piece as it wore on, and for just a moment the five players transformed the relatively minimalistic score into what seemed like a sudden, queasy, blues-rock hallucination, which isn’t exactly an everyday sound when one of your five instruments is an accordion. It surged and faded, but it seemed spontaneous and surprising.

So that’s why I got a ticket. But there was so much more to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »