arts & entertainment

Multimedia Fest

The 10th annual Orchard Lake Fine Arts
Show returns to West Bloomfield.

Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer

D

avid Frank's professional atten-
tion has moved between photog-
raphy and Jewish activities.
Frank, formerly a photojournalist in
Michigan, has held out-of-state admin-
istrative positions with NFTY (North
American Federation of Temple Youth)
and CAJE (Coalition for the Advancement
of Jewish Education).
When CAJE disbanded three years
ago, Frank returned to photography with
considerable focus on artistic images,
and a sampling of his artistry will be
featured at the 10th annual Orchard Lake
Fine Art Show running July 27-29 in West
Bloomfield.
"This will be my third year at the fair,
and I will be showing landscape photos:'
says Frank, 63, a New Jersey resident who
graduated from North Farmington High
School and the University of Michigan and

ci w s

New Flicks

lc Opening on Friday, July 20, is The

CV Dark Knight Rises, starring Christian
'mss Bale as Batman and the conclusion
of the Batman trilogy directed by
Christopher Nolan.
Like Superman and Spider-Man,
the Batman comics character had a
Jewish creator (the late Bob Kane).
Joseph Gordon-
Levitt, 30, co-stars
in Dark Knight as a
Gotham City police
officer.
Opening the same
day is the indie
film Beasts of the

42)
to)

Southern Wild, a

Gordon-Levitt

magical fantasy. This
pic comes with a lot
of buzz because it won the Camera
d'Or as best first feature at this year's
Cannes Film Festival and the Grand
Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film
Festival.
In the film, a 6-year old girl named
Hushpuppy lives with her father, Wink,
in an isolated Southern Delta com-
munity. Wink feels he has to be tough
with his daughter to prepare her for
a time-when he is no longer there to
protect her. When Wink gets a mys-
terious illness, the whole world goes
crazy: Temperatures rise, the ice caps

34

July 19 2012

Matthew Fine: Sculpture, cast glass and
granite.

majoring in theater.
"For the fairs, I offer limited editions of
each image. For the larger photos, there
are fewer editions. I work with digital
media because they make better prints!"
Another artist returning to her home
state for the Orchard Lake fair is Stephanie
Pollack, now living in Florida. She special-
izes in watercolors.
"I have representational and abstract
paintings," says Pollack, 66, who majored

David Frank: Rockers, digital

photography.

in painting at Wayne State University. "My
work represents my optimistic and uplift-
ing outlook."
Pollack (nee Gattegno), who often
captures floral arrangements and birds,
prefers watercolors because they made up
her earliest interest as a summer student
at Cass Technical High School. Although
preliminary sales were out of a small shop
along Livernois near Seven Mile in Detroit,
she put art aside until her children were

Multimedia on page 37

l ima I Nate Bloom
own Special to the Jewish News

Lis

has been affiliated with Temple Israel and
Temple Emanu-El.
"Although some of the pictures were
taken in Michigan, knowing the location
is not essential. The scenes have isolated
what interested me and are not recollec-
tions. The photos are invitations to enter
into stories. The overall point of the work
is to show the beauty that is around us if
we look for it."
Frank, who appears in some 15 shows
each year and takes pictures wherever he
travels, also uses a unique approach to bat
and bar mitzvah assignments.
Instead of restricting himself to strictly
celebration albums, he tries to portray
the essence of each youngster by includ-
ing pictures of other aspects of each one's
interests.
"I've been able to bring together my
photographic and Jewish sensibilities,"
explains Frank, whose commitment to
photography developed at U-M as he
taught himself the necessary skills while

Eva and Leon Oziel: Jewelry, using silver
and gold with stones.

melt and an army of
prehistoric creatures
called aurochs roam
Earth. As disaster
looms, Hushpuppy
goes in search of her
lost mother.
The film comes
Zeitlin
from a play by Lucy
Alibar. The screen-
play is by Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, 29.
Zeitlin also directed the film.
His Jewish father, folklorist Steve
Zeitlin, founded and heads City Lore,
a multifaceted, nonprofit organization
that archives urban folklore and advo-
cates for grassroots cultures. Benh's
mother, Amanda Dargan, is a non-
Jewish native of South Carolina and
also works as a City Lore folklorist.
Zeitlin told the LA Jewish Journal
that the central character in Beasts
represents the type of person he
aspires to be: fearless, defiant, good-
hearted and curious.

Tube Notes

The Showtime comedy series Web
Therapy began its second season
early this month. It stars Lisa Kudrow
(Phoebe on Friends), 48, as an incred-
ibly narcissistic and incompetent
therapist. The multitalented Victor
Garber, 63, plays her husband.
The plotline this season has
Garber's character running as a
Republican for Congress, but his cam-

paign is somewhat derailed by a gay-
romance scandal (ironically, Garber
is openly gay in real life). Guest stars
this season include Meryl Streep;
former Michigander Selma Blair, 40;
and Kudrow's Friends friend, David
Schwimmer, 45.
Kudrow recently spoke to the
Jewish Journal about the show and
her personal life: She grew up in an
affluent Southern California family.
Her father is a prominent physician
and an atheist. Her family did not
belong to a syna-
gogue, but she chose
to have a bat mitz-
vah "because I just
felt like I needed to
be counted in. I'm
Jewish, and that's
important to me."
Kudrow
This tradition con-
tinues. Kudrow's only
child, her son, Julian, is now studying
for his bar mitzvah.
Kudrow, who co-created and co-
writes Web Therapy, also was the pro-
ducer and host of the now-canceled
NBC ancestry show, Who Do You
Think You Are, where she explored
her own family roots. Learning the
details of the deaths of relatives in
the Holocaust was, she said, as bad
as she feared. But "a good thing"
happened when she found a cousin
alive in Poland.
Speaking of Friends, Paul Rudd, 43,

who played Mike, the guy who married
Phoebe on the show, will return to
the Broadway stage this September
in a revival of the play Grace, which
was a regional hit in 2004. He plays
a businessman who moves to Florida
to open a chain of gospel-themed
motels. The four-character play fea-
tures Ed Asner, 82, as a bug exter-
minator.
Debuting on July 15 was the new
USA network series Political Animals.
This six-episode series, airing 10 p.m.
Sundays, stars Sigourney Weaver as
Elaine Barrish, a secretary of state
who, like Hillary Clinton, was defeated
by the current president (Adrian
Pasdar) in the primaries.
The strong cast includes Ellen
Burstyn as Elaine's mother and
Farmington Hills native James Wolk,
27, as Douglas Hammond, Elaine's son.
Wolk had a starring role in the
short-lived 2010 Fox series Lone Star
and a large recurring role in this sea-
son's Showtime series Shameless.
He played "Adam," a "nice guy"
businessman who
dated Fiona (Emmy
Rossum, 25).
Shameless viewers
may recall that Adam
dropped Fiona when it
became apparent that
she harbored strong
feelings for her ex-
Wolk
boyfriend. E