P4M ANTI-REVIEW: Bill T. Jones's You Walk? (Lincoln Center Festival)

Modern dance icon Bill T. Jones has said that his new work, You Walk?, "strives to stay clear of polemics," even while it is, like much of his previous work, "informed by a myriad of historical facts, ideological conflicts, political tragedies, serendipitous ironies, and significant innovations." And it's true that You Walk?, a full-evening work that had its New York premiere last week at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York, does feel more a product of Jones the big-hearted poetic formalist than of Jones the pissed-off ideologue who is always railing against racism, homophobia, AIDS apathy, and the rest.

Generously showcasing the individual qualities of his dancers, who are of widely different shapes and ethnic backgrounds, Jones sets You Walk? to a series of musical selections reflecting the influence of Latin culture in the New World-- everything from the indigenous music of native peoples (as in Southern Africans and Amazon Indians, as well as medieval Europeans, meaning the Spanish) to "the music of cultures in collision and conquest" (as in a propagandistic opera promoting a conqueror's values, written during the Baroque era by a Jesuit missionary). Though You Walk? was a thrillingly successful piece of dance theater, we're going to be polemical ourselves, in this instance, and decline to review the work-- for the simple reason that we didn't get press comps.

Platform staff is invited to tons of events every day, by marketers and press reps who understand how culture is moving and how Platform's growing audience helps drive that movement. We never take our entree for granted; we feel, rather, that it's our deepest journalistic responsibility to go to events, think about them carefully, and report back to you, our viewers. It's because we believe that so many of Jones's politico-artistic concerns are resonant with yours that we were disappointed when the Festival denied our request for review tickets-- and why, moreover, we question Jones's uncomplaining participation in the Festival. OK, he must accept the fact that it's gonna cost people $38 to see You Walk? at Lincoln Center; that's economics. But must he also endorse a marketing and publicity plan that's all about selling out houses and hardly at all about expanding the critical context for his work and widening the audience for it?

The Lincoln Center Festival, though in many ways brilliantly executed by career arts administrator Nigel Redden and lavishly sponsored by Bloomberg, Lexus, AT&T, Philip Morris, and Time Warner, comes close to embodying certain "conquerors' values" that Jones has always abhorred. Its primary goal, rather than to help culture move forward, seems to be to score as many of those embarrassingly predictable New York Times arts features as possible and to use them to hook up auditoriumfuls of Times addicts with edgey-feeling art that's nonetheless corporately approved. That's one reason why critics continue to gripe about "the structural smugness of big arts festivals"-- and why some Bill T. Jones fans fear the choreographer is headed for a commercially viable revival production of Cats for the Lincoln Center Festival of 2010, to be performed for a uni-cultural audience whose median age is 62.

IS IGNORANCE BLISS? HOW INCOMPETENT PEOPLE STAY THAT WAY

Wanna hear something scary? Incompetent people don't know how incompetent they are. According to the New York Times, Cornell University psychology professor David Dunning has found in studies that incompetent people are "usually supremely confident in their abilities-- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well." Which is why respected heart surgeons, world-famous violinists, and successful CEO's, instead of being comforted by their achievements, do feel a bit of trepidation when embarking on a task-- trepidation somehow improves their performance.

Athletes know when they're incompetent. So do stand-up comics. But what about the unfunny guy who persists in telling jokes? What about ordinary people with desk jobs? Most of us get too little useful feedback on how to improve our personal and professional performance. Worse, in the name of "support" we often get mindless praise that we don't deserve. Think of the last time you smiled politely at the Unfunny Guy's lame joke. Think of the last time you tepidly said "Great!" when Unstylish Girl showed up with a ridiculous accessory.

The skills required to do things well are often the same skills necessary to recognize competence in the first place, concludes Dunning. Which kinda means that, while not wallowing in a mire of self-doubt, we should all be in a constant state of what might be called "positive self-underestimation." Such a state catalyzes clue-seeking, that most necessary aspect of human evolution-- which these days expresses itself in job evaluations, religious observation, and, of course, TV makeover shows.

P4M ART REVIEW: TODD EBERLE AND HARRY BERTOIA AT ROBERT MILLER GALLERY

What is technology but the practical application of knowledge? For evidence of two very different but surprisingly harmonious applications, check out the Robert Miller art gallery in New York (526 West 26th Street), for an exhibition combining the work of the young photographer Todd Eberle and deceased sculptor(slash furniture and jewelry designer slash architect) Harry Bertoia (1915-1978).

Eberle, known for the revealing interior and decor shots he publishes in glossy magazines like Vanity Fair, contributes eerily sensual, large-scale photographs of vintage computer components (think '60s IBM and '80s Apple), while Bertoia is represented by several of his large-scale metal "sounding sculptures." The sculptures are kinda primally geometric and resonate visually with the crisply orthogonal lines in Eberle's computers. But that's a less powerful interplay than the one produced when viewers touch the Bertoias, as they should, and make them "sing" the way the sculptor designed them to do when installed, say, in an architectural plaza and caught in the wind. It's then that the exhibition becomes joyously clangorous, suddenly making you feel like you're in some kind of divine, or at least benevolent, machine. No mere catalog essay could do such an elegant job of describing the deep connection between such different forms of the practical.

P4M "APPOINTMENT TELEVISION" PRE-VIEW: "Nazi America: A Secret History"

Americans often express this smug "It can't happen here" attitude about ideologies they find abhorrent, like Communism and Nazism. Well, it can happen here. As you know, there have been plenty of American Communists-- many of them progressive, well-meaning intellectuals-- and lots of American Nazis-- all of them hateful, misguided assholes.

"Nazi America: A Secret History," showing tonight on the History Channel (9 p.m.), documents the latter from the '30s, when they marched through American cities as the German-American Bund; through the '50s, when George Lincoln Rockwell was promising to "kill every Jew, Catholic, and Negro;" to the present, when Aryan Nationeers march in Skokie, set up web sites, thump The Turner Diaries, and otherwise make things bad for nice people.

Why watch? Well, because the fact that it does happen here, and everywhere, means that we have to be in a constant state of making sure it doesn't happen anywhere. Watching mad-nasty white supremicists on TV can help us stay in touch with some necessary commitment against that shit. According to the New York Times, Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks neo-Nazi movements, "estimates that some 500 such groups are at work." That's a lot of shit to counter.

P4M MOVIE REVIEW: Vin Diesel Slays In Sci-Fi Thriller, Pitch Black

You gotta keep an eye out for the new sci-fi thriller Pitch Black, coming in February. Reports on advance screenings are that the movie out-Alien's Alien by a light year.

Starring Vin Diesel, who played supersexy Private Caparzo in Saving Private Ryan (and also provided the supersexy voice of the robot in The Iron Giant), Pitch Black is about bunch of people on a space liner, crash landing on a sun-scorched, somewhat inhospitable planet that turns, when night suddenly falls, completely inhospitable. There are nasty creatures. The only guy with smarts enough to save anyone is Diesel, who plays a supersexy, primal-yet-poetic escaped murderer named Riddick.

Sounds predictable, but we hear that Pitch Black is so thrillingly plausible at every turn that it sucks you in and keeps you there. (Can you say the same about Alien and its sequels? Getting the little girl out of the alien hatchery in Aliens? Never happen.) You can enjoy the fantastic action in Pitch Black without suspending too much disbelief, which is definitely fresh-- and we hear this from a film reviewer who is as much an armchair scientist as a sci-fi movie junky. The planet's arid ecology and twenty-two-year-long orbital cycle? Plausible. The movie's awesome special effects-- creatures swarming and celestial bodies eclipsing? Plausible. The behavior of stranded space travellers, the look of their salvaged belongings, even the crash landing sequence in which the "windshield" blows out? All pretty plausible.

And if there was ever been a big, bad character to rocket off into the sunset with Major Sequel Potential, it is Riddick. We're told Diesel slays in Pitch Black (the result, in part, of some incredibly smart direction by David Twohy, who also directed 1996's The Arrival). The actor is also a filmmaker, having presented his feature Strays at Sundance in 1997 and currently developing Doormen, based on his experience as a bouncer in New York City. But word is that Pitch Black could make Diesel a major action star, so don't expect him to have too much time to spend in the future as an auteur.