Exact Changes Designer and Filmmaker
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MONTAGE New Line has produced several times, he lyricists who spurn commer- New Line’s 2014 scrounged up a first-person account of an cial norms and turn instead to production of Rent LSD experience to help his actors bring productions focused on social the psychedelic scenes to life. As Miller and political issues. “People does more research, “he gets more and were writing these shows that more excited, and that fuels us,” Dowdy felt like old-school musicals, says. “He’s really about creating a world but with new dark, ironic for the actors to live in.” content,” he says. “It was hap- Miller’s production choices strategically pening all around the country, highlight each story’s social relevance. His but all the little pieces didn’t version of Rent offers one example. For the know about each other.” set’s focal point, he requested a vast round New Line started as one of platform painted to look like the moon. those pieces, a radical Mid- The platform represented everything from western theater lonely in its a table to a dance floor to a state of limbo mission. But after two-plus for characters forced to navigate lives shat- decades operating out of church base- holds a black-box theater, rehearsal space, tered by addiction and disease. He also ments and college theaters, it finally has studios, and offices. New Line inaugurated cast unusually young actors, judging that a permanent brick-and-mortar home. The the space in November with its sold-out the show’s wrenching narrative was much Marcelle Theater is tucked inside a reno- production of Heathers. Next up is American sadder that way. vated warehouse on a gentrified street in Idiot, opening in March. According to Miller, shows like Rent, the city center. Designed especially for As for his dream production of Prom- which debuted in 1996, are part of a new age New Line thanks to local philanthropists enade? Well, Miller says, “We’ll do that one of musical theater created by writers and Ken and Nancy Kranzberg, the facility when we have $20,000 in the bank.” is also a photographer, as well as a graphic Exact Changes designer and filmmaker. Together they run a small press. Their modus operandi is curi- Musicians Damon & Naomi’s many pursuits ous more than cautious, headlong, willing to take a chance on the unknown. by lydialyle gibson The pair formed the influential indie- rock trio Galaxie 500 with fellow Harvard n 2002—the year the Argentine peso col- says, “I have this marvelous Brazilian gui- alumnus Dean Wareham ’85 in 1987: Kru- lapsed, eliminating half the scheduled tar. And it’s changed how I play my other kowki on drums (lacking a drum kit at shows in their South American tour— guitars, how I write songs.” first, he famously borrowed one from class- I husband-and-wife bandmates Damon That episode is not really so unusual for mate Conan O’Brien), Yang on bass, and Krukowski ’85 and Naomi Yang ’86 flew to the couple in their plural pursuits. Kru- Wareham on guitar. They had been high- neighboring Brazil to play the rest of the kowski is also an essayist and poet; Yang, school friends in New York City, listening dates. The trip was a risk; Brazil’s econo- the daughter of photographer John Yang ’54, to punk, post-punk, and New Wave music: my was also faltering, and they knew they might not get paid. But they loved Brazilian music, they’d dreamed of seeing the country, and the promoter who invited them was, in Krukowski’s words, “a lovely man.” Other bands might have canceled, but, Yang says, “I think in general we’re curious.” They went. In the end, the promoter couldn’t pay. He’d guaranteed their fee in American dol- lars, and Brazil’s soaring inflation put it out of reach. As the tour drew to a close and they headed for the airport, Krukows- ki asked the promoter to send him instead a classical guitar that had caught his eye in a São Paolo shop, a beautiful instru- ment with nylon strings and a luminous body. (He knew that the man, who happily agreed, could barter for it.) “And now,” he Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang Photograph by Stu Rosner MONTAGE Krukowski and Yang with their Galaxie 500 bandmate Dean Wareham in 1988, and a still from Yang’s film, Fortune RUKOWSKI K AMON D ANG AND Y AOMI N F ESY O ESY T COUR bands like the Velvet Underground and Joy respectively. They dropped out to give their sures”—like a movie star dying young, of- Division. “When we started, it was the be- full attention to the band. fers Yang, with mystique intact. ginning of indie rock, before it got codified Four years and three albums after it be- Afterward, the couple, based in Cam- by major record labels,” Yang says. “And it gan, the Boston-based Galaxie 500, a pio- bridge, fanned out artistically. They be- was an irresponsible thing to do—there neering influence on “slowcore’s” dreamy gan performing as Damon & Naomi. They wasn’t any way you were going to make sound, broke up abruptly in 1991, when launched their press, Exact Change, reviv- any money. It wasn’t the popular form of Wareham left on the cusp of a major-label ing out-of-print books focused on “Surreal- the day; it was what the freaks did.” At deal and what might have been main- ism, Dadaism, Pataphysics, and other nine- the time, both Krukowski and Yang were stream stardom. “That was the path we teenth and twentieth century avant-garde in graduate school at Harvard, studying were tentatively considering,” Krukowski art movements,” including works by Louis comparative literature and architecture, says, but “it fell apart amid all the pres- Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein—“basically,” Yang says, “books Da- mon was reading in Widener Library and C hapter & Verse couldn’t go buy his own copy.…We wanted to make these available to people.” Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words Meanwhile, Yang moved into filmmak- ing. “All of a sudden it was like being hit Dan Jacobson asks if anyone can pro- d’heure,” and Cartouche’s remark is by lightning,” she says. “It’s a wonderful vide definitive attribution for the as- quoted verbatim in Antoine Servan’s Le thing to discover, in mid life, something sertion, “From the music they love, you Soldat citoyen (1780). that you never thought you would do, and shall know the texture of men’s souls.” to find this passion for it. It’s like, in a used That line, he writes, is quoted in the “My Little Papaya Tree” (January- bookstore, finding a whole other section.” 1949 movie The Passionate Friends, where February). Michael Saxton wrote, “Try She’s directed music videos for other art- the character played by Trevor Howard Googling ‘and a mynah bird in a papaya ists, and in February 2015 released Fortune, states, “I copied it out a book of Gals- tree’ to get a Hawaiian version of ‘The a gorgeous and evocative 30-minute silent- worthy’s to impress you.” Twelve Days of Christmas.’ I heard this film study of filial grief, laid over an origi- long ago on The Midnight Special, WFMT, nal Damon & Naomi soundtrack. With a “a bad 15 minutes at the end” Chicago.” According to a 1979 article by visual sensibility not unlike her musical (January-February). Laurence Senelick Michael Scott-Blair of the Copley News one, Yang’s videos are stylish and emotive, replied: “The quotation seems to be a lit- Service, quoting UCLA folklorist Joan full of metaphorical possibilities. eral if awkward translation of the French Perkal, the list runs: 12 televisions, 11 For Krukowski, who’s published two catchphrase un mauvais quart d’heure. missionaries, 10 cans of beer, nine pounds volumes of prose poems, a consuming in- The notorious highwayman Cartouche of poi, eight ukeleles, seven shrimps a- terest is the digital shift that upended the (1693-1721) is supposed to have re- swimming, six hula lessons, five big fat creative worlds he and Yang inhabit: mu- marked, after he was sentenced to be pigs, four flower leis, three dry squid, two sic and publishing. A fellow this year at broken on the wheel, “A mauvais quart coconuts, and….” Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & d’heure is soon over!” It became prover- Society, he is at work on a book of essays bial very quickly. In his Systeme de la na- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter on that topic. The book’s discussion, he ture (1770), Baron d’Holbach extended and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware says, reaches beyond the much-lamented it to the axiom that “Most criminals en- Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail economic fallout for musicians when lis- visage death as merely un mauvais quart to [email protected]. teners stopped buying albums and began streaming music online—though it covers 56 March - April 2016 SUPPORT HARVARD MAGAZINE HARVARD MAGAZINE‘S GOAL IS TO thoughtful reporting that matters, provided IDENTIFY THE STORIES THAT MATTER in context, such as this issue’s cover story, TO YOU, and to present them in a way “Elbow Room,” which explores how the that will interest and engage you—much Dark Room Collective made space for a as your Harvard education did—with generation of African-American writers. 33% thorough reporting, vigorous writing, OF OUR FUNDING IS and compelling design. 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