I’m excited to announce that tickets are now on sale for upcoming performances of “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” at The Kitchen in NYC. I’ll be screening the film as Yo La Tengo performs their original score live for four shows, April 9th and 10th at 7pm and 9pm each night. Tickets are available on The Kitchen’s website here.
We recently did two sold-out shows at the ICA in Boston, which is one of my favorite venues anywhere. The theater overlooks the Boston Harbor and has these huge curtains that are dramatically lowered at the start of every show.
I’ve been tailoring the piece to include local Fuller connections for each screening. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but Boston was a breeze: Fuller’s story starts there, and it ends there, too. He was born in Milton—a Boston suburb—in 1895, and buried in Cambridge in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
These performances felt to me like our best yet. I think the band and I are getting comfortable enough with the piece that we can now move beyond the sweating-that-we-don’t-fuck-up stage and be much more in the moment instead. I thought YLT sounded fantastic and the audience seemed really responsive.
A lot of great people were there—apparently someone from Mission of Burma at the later show—but the highlight for me was Peter Chermayeff, the architect who worked w/ Fuller to design the dome at the 1967 Montreal World Expo. This was probably Fuller’s greatest work. Peter Chermayeff got onstage after the show and wowed the crowd with some stories—my only regret is that no one photographed him! Argh.
Here are two photos from our performance at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH last week:
The screening at Cornell Cinema last weekend was great. I was really excited to be performing at Cornell Cinema––it’s a great film center and resource, well-known to filmmakers all over the world. And check out the beautiful poster
they produced for the event!
We did a short group Q&A after the performance, and then Georgia, Ira, and James had a longer conversation with the audience, taking requests and playing other work from their catalogue. The student newspaper at Cornell has a nice review of the evening.
Later this month we’ll be screening the film at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH and then the ICA in Boston.
We did two screenings of THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER last week. It was our great northwest mini-tour! The first was at the amazing Moore Theater in Seattle. It was on September 11th, which felt oddly meaningful – I loved the inadvertent poetry of the marquis.
The Moore is a huge joint! But the screening went really well. A lotta good response from the audience. The band sounded fantastic.
The next night was Portland and the TBA Festival – it was a real honor to be included. I’ve been a fan of TBA for a long time. Very cool to be on a program with Laurie Anderson. We did two shows in one night at the fantastic Washington High School auditorium. You could feel the years of talent shows and pep assemblies imprinted on the space. Again, the shows went really. Some notable folks in the house: one of my all-time favorite directors, Kelly Reichardt, and also M. Ward. The Portland Mercury ran a nice review – take a look. And, to the left and below, some fine-looking photos taken by Jodi Darby.
Next week, we’ll be at Cornell Cinema in Ithaca, NY.
