Sex & Violence – News Syndication

Dawoud Bey/The Art Institute of Chicago

‘A Woman Waiting in the Doorway’ (1976)

HARLEM IN MY VIEWFINDER

The Art Institute of Chicago,
Wednesday through Sept. 9

Dawoud Bey captured a diverse array of characters in “Harlem, USA.” The 25-work series was first presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. This is the first reunion of the photos since then. Pictured here, “A Woman Waiting in the Doorway” (1976).

BRITISH INVADE NEW YORK

Randall’s Island Park, New York
Friday through May 7

London’s largest contemporary art fair, Frieze, has its inaugural New York edition on little Randall’s Island. 182 galleries will participate; New York’s Lehmann Maupin will offer Tony Oursler’s video projection on fiberglass “Soft 79.”

British Museum, London / Metropolitan Museum of Art

Detail of ‘Cui Hui Stealing the Slipper’

CHINA IN PRINT

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5 through July 29

“The Printed Image in China” has works ranging from the eighth to the 21st century with examples like “Cui Hui Stealing the Slipper,” from the Kangxi period (1662–1722; pictured here, a detail). All 130-plus prints are from the British Museum’s collection.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don’t Miss: April 28-May 4.

By KAREN WILKIN

Washington

The National Gallery of Art’s Dutch collection is among the glories of the nation. A steadily expanding, impressive group of Golden Age paintings—including more than a dozen splendid, securely attributed Rembrandts, four of the 30-odd surviving paintings by Johannes Vermeer and eight bravura efforts by Frans Hals—speaks to the discernment of the museum’s founding benefactors, especially Joseph E. Widener and Andrew W. Mellon, and to the acuity and indefatigable efforts of its current curator of northern baroque painting, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. And we mustn’t forget all the wonderful works by artists such as Hendrick ter Brugghen, Hendrick Avercamp and Judith Leyster, plus a wealth of engaging genre scenes, still lifes, landscapes and marine pictures.

Yet rich as the collection is, two leading Amsterdam painters of the mid-17th century are not represented. There’s nothing by Govert Flinck (1615-1660), Rembrandt’s star pupil and later his competitor, nor by Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613-1670), Rembrandt’s rival for portrait commissions. Conspicuously absent, too, are the large group portraits commemorating the great and the good, so characteristic of the Dutch 17th century. Elsewhere in Europe, the church, the monarchy and the nobility were the leading patrons for art, but in mercantile, Protestant, Golden Age Holland that role was taken by civic and political leaders. Government types, officials of charitable organizations, guild administrators and members of militia companies regularly commissioned enormous paintings of themselves. Rembrandt’s celebrated “The Night Watch,” a deceptively casual depiction of a militia company on its rounds, is among the most innovative and powerful examples of the type; usually, the worthies are shown gathered around a table, as if at a meeting or taking part in some function. It’s not surprising, though, that no painting of this type can be seen in Washington. Of the hundreds of these commemorative works, almost all stayed in Holland, many still in the buildings for which they were originally commissioned.

Until now, that is. For the next five years, two spectacular group portraits, one by Flinck and one by van der Helst, both titled “Governors of the Kloveniersdoelen,” will be on view at the National Gallery, on loan from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Museum, respectively. Remarkably, the pair—the Flinck painted in 1642 and the van der Helst in 1655—both depict the governing board, at different periods, of the same institution: the headquarters of the Kloveniers—Harquebusiers—one of the military organizations, originally formed for defense, that functioned as an elite men’s club. The building had an adjacent shooting range, for target practice, but it was primarily a place for social gatherings. The Harquebusiers to whom it belonged held meetings and festivities there, civic officials rented the space for receptions and dinners, and, we learn, it also served as a public tavern. The governors—a lucrative, as well as an honorific position—were former officers in the Harquebusiers from Amsterdam’s best families; most of the distinguished gentlemen in the two paintings were members of the city council, three of them served as mayor, at various times, and many were related by what the accompanying brochure calls “strategic marriages over multiple generations.”

Both large, horizontal paintings show more or less life-size groups of soberly dressed men in broad-brimmed hats, seated at long tables covered with Turkish carpets. Both groups are shown in the midst of some sort of gathering, and in both pictures one governor turns to gaze at us. There the resemblance ends. Flinck gives us five grave men, four with silver beards and stern expressions; the fifth, no less stern but a little younger—someone’s son-in-law?—has only a dark mustache and a soul patch. Three wear old-style ruffs, while two sport up-to-date flat collars. It’s a serious occasion. The gavel rests on the table. The building’s administrator, hatless, presents the Kloveniers’ elaborately mounted ceremonial drinking horn. We are allowed to admire these dignitaries and note their measured gestures, but we are kept at a respectful distance. The steady rhythm of pale faces, paler linen and curving hands across the dark expanse adds to the solemn mood. Only the upward-reaching arc of the drinking horn and the deep red notes of the carpet and chairbacks provide counterpoint.

Van der Helst presents a lively quartet, with swooping black hats and stylish goatees. Far more convivial than their predecessors, they are shown in animated conversation, turning easily and gesturing energetically, fueled by food and drink. One squeezes lemon on an oyster; shells litter the floor; servants bring refills. The suavely painted protagonists fill the syncopated composition, pressing toward us. The hazily rendered servants—including a marvelous distant head of a boy—suggest transience, intensifying the sense of immediacy, while the glowing carpet and ruddy flesh tones, revealed by recent conservation, further animate the scene.

The differences between the two closely related pictures, painted about a decade apart, provoke interesting questions. Is the sobriety of Flinck’s subjects a response to the stress of the Thirty Years War? Does the informality of van der Helst’s group reflect a new sense of safety after the Dutch Republic finally achieved independence from Spain in 1648?

Perhaps the alteration in mood is a function of location. Flinck’s portrait was hung in the Great Hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, while van der Helst’s, for lack of space elsewhere, was installed in the dining room. Brought together at last, they both look wonderful at the National Gallery.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 3, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Washington Double Dutch.

By PETER PLAGENS

New York

Artists can be classic or romantic, fussbudgets or spewers, cultural radicals or cultural conservatives, and so on. One division that’s always struck me is the one between those for whom art is a disciplining force (say, the photographer Cindy Sherman, or the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth), and those such as the sculptor John Chamberlain (1927-2011), whose art seems to flow naturally from their hands. They make art the way a hawk flies.

In the summer of 1958, Chamberlain rented the painter Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton, on Long Island. He discovered a 1929 Ford delivery van sitting in the back yard, and yanked the fenders from it. Then Chamberlain drove over them with his car. He didn’t do it to be radical, to shock anybody, to be clever, or to indulge in that old modernist trope, expanding the boundaries of art. Chamberlain did it to get the shapes he wanted, which he then welded together to create the industrially jazzy sculpture “Shortstop” (1958). It’s but one of nearly 100 works—mostly Chamberlain’s exhilarating sculpture, but also some adroitly energetic works on paper—in “John Chamberlain: Choices,” an exemplary retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

Chamberlain, the son of an Indiana tavern owner, dropped out of high school and undertook—in the middle of World War II’s gas rationing—a road trip, with the idea of getting some sort of career in Hollywood. (Until he started selling enough art to support himself, he would earn a living as a hairdresser.) Busted in Blythe, Calif., for neglecting to pay a restaurant tab, Chamberlain enlisted—though underage—in the Navy, and served for a couple of years, in the Pacific, on the aircraft carrier USS Tulagi. In the mid-1950s, he made his way to that touchstone for so many of the best American modern artists, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he met and was profoundly influenced by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, the poets who helped run the place. The rest, as one might say, is sculptural history. A half-century on, Chamberlain’s early 1960s sculpture looks as fresh—if not fresher—than anything that opened in a Manhattan gallery last Thursday night.

At first—with such works as “Essex” (1960), a 9-foot-wide wall piece in which Chamberlain uses his almost-trademark found color of crumpled auto-body parts—he was suspected of operating within the boundaries of Pop Art, of having more in common with Andy Warhol’s silk-screened car crashes than with Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. Not true. Chamberlain is practically sui generis—though the idea of his best work (where steel is as malleable as paint) being AbEx in 3-D is a little closer to the truth. While “Three-Cornered Desire” (1979) obeys a couple of art-world maxims—make it big, and make it red—Chamberlain gives you more variety in his found rouges than most painters could stir up in a week of trying. Wonderfully contrapuntal bits of green and aqua punctuate the back side. The guy really knew his color. He also knew scale—his miniatures seem monumental—and could be really funny in where and how he placed hood louvers among his steely folds. Chamberlain’s work is genuine American rock ‘n’ roll sculpture; it looks the way a good garage band sounds.

John Chamberlain / ARS/David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

His works look the way a good garage band sounds.

Only certain full and robust artists can make some mediocre work and still be great. Chamberlain produced his share of middling art—which, on anybody else’s aesthetic scale, is still pretty good. After his breakthrough car-metal pieces and ultranonchalant works in cinched foam rubber, Chamberlain switched in the later 1960s to plain galvanized steel, leaving you (or at least me) with a feeling that something vital had been taken away. The exhibition contains a couple of 1970 works in clear polyester resin that are exotic in a not-good way, and the crinkled, shiny-silver aluminum finale in the rotunda, “SPHINXGRIN TWO” (1986/2010), might be a giant extraterrestrial Gumby.

In “Gondola Charles Olson” (1982), Chamberlain regains his automotive mojo, and right into our current century his oeuvre comprises a plethora of treasures in salvage-yard Baroque, including the atypically small “LEXICONOFFURN” (2006) and “Dictator Taxidermist” (2006), as well as the reassuringly big—about 10 feet tall—”Women’s Voices” (2005). The last three of these by the way, are white and chrome, a combination only Chamberlain could handle without getting precious about it.

“It’s all in the fit,” was Chamberlain’s motto. He was a master at plucking the right part from the scrap heap, and a genius at making it fit—that is, in making it contribute almost effortlessly to the slash and flow of the piece as a whole. It’s been said of Picasso that he was a great painter who basically painted pictures of the sculptures that his paintings could have been. Chamberlain is thought by some to have done the reverse—made sculptures of the paintings that they could have been. But Chamberlain’s forms and volumes and hollows and edges are so good that we joyously realize that they simply constitute some of the best sculpture of the past 100 years.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 11, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looks Like Rock ‘n’ Roll.

By TAMARA AUDI

ONTARIO, Calif.—The Ontario International Airport, 35 miles east of Los Angeles, offers nonstop flights to just 15 cities. Daily departures have plummeted to 62, less than half the number five years ago.

Baseball legend Tommy Lasorda has pitched for the Dodgers and for Rolaids and Slim Fast. Now he’s doing commercials for a struggling regional airport trying to win independence from Los Angeles. Tammy Audi has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

The international airport has one nonstop passenger flight out of the country, a three-hour trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. Security officials stand around waiting for a passenger to screen, coffee shops and bookstores are empty, and the runways are quiet enough to hear the rustle of trees and birds chirping.

Ontario city officials believe part of the problem is the airport’s ownership by Los Angeles and have waged a long battle to wrest back control of it. The campaign hadn’t gained much buzz in L.A., until locals recently brought in a pinch hitter: Tommy Lasorda.

The 84-year-old Baseball Hall of Famer has pitched for the Dodgers, the antacid tablet Rolaids, the diet drink Slim-Fast and 1990s videogame-maker Sega Genesis. Still, Mr. Lasorda’s latest pitch—on behalf of a struggling regional airport fighting for independence from Los Angeles—is out of left field.

Tommy Lasorda

“Hi everybody I’m Tommy Lasorda and I firmly believe without a doubt that Ontario International Airport should be under local control and not managed from a distant city,” Mr. Lasorda says in a two-minute online commercial scheduled to begin airing on local television this month. “Come on L.A., let’s set Ontario free!”

The Ontario campaign has used Facebook, Twitter and old-fashioned lobbying—more than 80 local governments, elected officials and civic groups publicly support the transfer of the airport back to Ontario, according to Ontario city officials.

Then Mr. Lasorda stepped up to bat. “We’ve been at this for over two years and we’ve finally got people’s attention,” says Paul Haney, who works for the public relations firm that represents Ontario.

Ontario has offered L.A. $50 million to regain control of its airport and end a 45-year relationship that allowed L.A. to run its airport.

Ontario mounted a “Set ONTario Free” campaign to convince the Los Angeles City Council to approve the breakup. ONT is the airport’s code.

Last year, more than 62 million people flew through L.A.’s main airport, LAX, as it is known. About 4.5 million came through Ontario.

Los Angeles has managed Ontario’s airport since 1967 and took ownership of it in 1985, in what was thought to be a good plan for both cities at the time.

But Ontario says that under L.A.’s management, its airport has seen traffic steadily decline, showing a 36% drop in passengers since 2007.

Local leaders blame L.A. for ignoring the needs of Ontario in favor of boosting traffic at LAX.

Los Angeles officials say they are committed to Ontario and that broader economic problems are to blame for the dwindling traffic there.

“I’m a Dodger fan. I’m a Tommy Lasorda fan,” says Mary Grady, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles World Airports, the agency that runs the airports. “He is certainly entitled to his opinion, but I would invite him to spend some time with us so we can explain to him the facts about the causes of passenger decline at Ontario.”

Of his pitch for Ontario’s airport, Mr. Lasorda says, “I did it for my friend, and I was happy to do it because I believe in local ownership of that nature.”

He has raised money for charities in and around Ontario—often at the behest of his friend, Chris Leggio, who owns a car dealership in Ontario. They met 15 years ago when Mr. Lasorda was signing autographs at a conference for auto dealers.

Mr. Leggio, who helped to fund Mr. Lasorda’s portrait at the Smithsonian Institution, said he asked Mr. Lasorda to appear in the commercial after Ontario city officials contacted him with the idea.

The city paid $78,000 to film the commercial, including a $10,000 fee for Mr. Lasorda.

The fee is less than the $40,000 or so he usually charges for speaking engagements.

Mr. Lasorda says he has occasionally flown out of the Ontario airport, though he lives in Fullerton, about 25 miles away—and slightly closer to Orange County’s John Wayne Airport.

Like many athletes, Mr. Lasorda has hawked a number of products over the years.

Yankees Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto appeared in ads for the Money Store and fellow Yankees icon Joe DiMaggio made commercials for Mr. Coffee.

Yogi Berra stepped up to the plate for Miller Lite.

But his career as a pitchman has been longer than most, and the array of items more diverse. Mr. Lasorda launched his own spaghetti sauce in the late 1980s, which beat Paul Newman’s sauce in a Los Angeles Times taste test, but ultimately flopped in the market.

He also promotes his Lasorda label of Italian-made wines, with appearances at local restaurants and shops. “If rubies had flavor, this is what it would taste like,” the Lasorda Wine website says of the Lasorda Carmignano.

“You gotta believe in what you’re doing, you gotta believe it’s gonna help somebody,” he said. “I helped a lot of people when I did that commercial for Slim-Fast.”

Mr. Lasorda filmed the Ontario commercial while he was at spring training with the Dodgers.

He has worked for the team in some fashion for 63 years, since it was in Brooklyn.

“In baseball, I led that team right from the dugout, not from outside the stadium,” he says in the Ontario commercial.

The Los Angeles City Council recently decided to study the issue of transferring the airport back to Ontario, though the outcome remains unclear.

On a recent day, Ontario resident Dennis Glassco sat in a mostly empty terminal waiting for a United flight to Houston, his belongings spread across a row of empty chairs.

Mr. Glassco said he hadn’t heard about Mr. Lasorda’s involvement in the Ontario campaign to win back its airport. But he wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of the airport suddenly filling with passengers.

“This airport is one of the best kept secrets around,” he said. “I’d like to keep it that way.”

Write to Tamara Audi at tammy.audi@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 2, 2012, on page A1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Pitching Duel: In L.A., Fight Takes Off Over Struggling Airport.

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

Magic City

Fridays at 10 p.m. on Starz

The promos for the retro drama “Magic City” may have done it a disservice. With their emphasis on the show’s 1959 look—the cars, the costumes, the curves, the huge set of the fictional Florida resort hotel at the center of it all—the ads seem to suggest that the series is more style than substance. It can seem so at first.

For one thing, the cast is huge, so it takes several episodes to figure out which character is which. It’s tempting to just give up and enjoy the clothes and bright colors and period music. The Miramar Playa Hotel may be featuring Frank Sinatra, but the spectacle most real-life viewers will remember is the unending parade of bare bosoms, and the occasional spray of blood. Not only does this series have one of the most terrifying bad guys of all television time, the mob boss Ben “The Butcher” Diamond (Danny Huston). Clinging to the body of Ben’s wife Lily (Jessica Marais), is a spectacular evening dress of white sequins that, once seen, will not be forgotten by women or men.

As for substance, everything revolves around Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a decent but driven man who is now in trouble—though we realize it before he does—that is going to get worse. Years earlier, Ike planned a hotel on his late wife’s family land. But he had to make mobster Ben a silent partner in order to get it up and running. Whatever else happens in “Magic City,” this is above all the story of a man who crawled into bed with the devil and is now paying the price.

Among other blessings, Ike does have an adoring second wife, Vera (Olga Kurylenko); and two sons, playboy Stevie (Steven Strait) and straight-arrow law student Danny (Christian Cooke). But not one of them is safe from the fallout of Ike’s decisions, or their own desires. Over in Cuba, the newly victorious Castro poses a threat to some hotel employees. Closer to home, Ike is in the sights of the crusading but nasty Dade County State Attorney Jack Klein (Matt Ross, who also was wonderfully malign as Alby Grant on HBO’s “Big Love”).

There is much more here, including multiple subplots; the threat of violence (close your eyes and press the mute button when a barking dog makes Ben mad) and lots of sex scenes (some graphic, most gratuitous). But so far—only five episodes were available for reviewing—”Magic City” is a little slow at getting under our figurative skin. Proprietor Ike is the key, the emotional doorway into the series, and he has the makings of an appealingly flawed hero. Yet even Ike, like many of the characters here (Kelly Lynch as his ex-sister-in-law, Meg, is an interesting exception), sometimes seems like a cutout being put through the paces in a set piece.

***

Scandal

Thursdays at 10 p.m. on ABC

ABC’s “Scandal” takes a while to pay off, too—but when it does, it does so in spades. It begins as a drama about a high-voltage team of image-problem solvers in Washington, D.C. Political fixer and former White House aide Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington, as strong in this role as her character is in hers) has assembled a crew of crack lawyer-investigators. Each week, they take on a new client, ranging from a Latin American dictator to a rich CEO with a wild son to the airline pilots who want to know if one of their own really is at fault for a fatal crash. Much of it is TV-land preposterous: Olivia or her team can whip into the White House at will and zoom across D.C. and back in minutes, it seems, all the while hacking into any computer, arm-twisting any witness and seducing any record-keeper, for access to the information they need to get their damage-control job done.

Yet it’s still a fun, fast ride, with lots of twists and turns, murder and menace, and after only a few episodes we know enough back story about most of the main characters to care what happens to them. Team member Huck, for instance (played by Guillermo Díaz), appears to have a CIA past and heavy-duty emotional damage, yet is both more tender and less stable than he first appears.

Beyond all this, though, the big payoff here is a love story—and the most startling on-screen chemistry on TV. “Scandal” is the creation of Shonda Rhimes, who also gave us “Grey’s Anatomy.” So it’s no surprise that Olivia Pope has her own McDreamy. Only he’s not hovering just out of reach: He is her married former employer and current U.S. president, Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). Among many things thwarting their romance are political plotters with an intern story and an audio sex tape, and the president’s intense chief of staff, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry).

But no matter. When Ms. Washington and Mr. Goldwyn stand within a foot of each other (and they rarely get closer), their eyes locked, the chemical effect is off the charts. Oh, and did I mention that among the more-manly action scenes in “Scandal,” somebody gets tortured with a power drill?

***

Big Easy Justice

Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on Spike

How entertaining is “Big Easy Justice,” Spike’s new reality series about bounty hunters in New Orleans? That will be clear from the show’s first 30 seconds, when the chief hunter (and aptly named) Tat-2 gets on his cellphone to try to talk a thief into surrendering.

Tat-2: We got a warrant for your arrest. I’m telling you to come to…

Fugitive: F— you!

And so it goes, as Tat-2 and his team, armed to the teeth and sporting black uniforms with the word “Agent” authoritatively emblazoned on the back, cruise the streets and rural backwaters of Jefferson Parish on the prowl for bail jumpers. The music is loud, the language is dirty and there’s a whole lotta locking-and-loading going on. Busting into a perp’s empty hideout in an abandoned house, one of Tat-2′s associates tries gamely to build suspense after finding an ax and a knife: “He’s stockpiling weapons like he’s getting ready for the zombie apocalypse!”

But the quarry—including a “swamp rat” whom they corner on a bayou boat while his startled girlfriend blinks in the camera lights—usually ends up looking pretty pathetic. It is not a good feeling in another case to watch a young black first-time offender on his stomach on the floor, with umpteen weapons aimed in his direction, pleading, “Please don’t throw me around.”

Then again, most of the catches do seem to be serial predators. So in the end, “Big Easy Justice” may have some of the same crazy appeal of its hometown. “I’ve lived in New Orleans all my life,” Tat-2 says. “It’s a f—-up place, but I love the city.”

By JIM FUSILLI

New York

With the release of “Arkeology” (Seaview), World Party has doubled its output: Since Karl Wallinger formed the band in 1986 after leaving the Waterboys, it has released five studio albums. “Arkeology” is a five-disc set of B-sides, covers, demos and live recordings cut in the studio and in concert.

It’s much more than a collection of miscellaneous outtakes. No one covers a song with as much devotion and thoroughness as the 54-year-old Mr. Wallinger. Here, he includes his versions of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and “Fixing a Hole,” and manages to be faithful to the originals while ensuring his own talents are evident. On those tracks, he plays most of the instruments and overdubs his voice to form a layered choir. No detail of an existing recording is too small for Mr. Wallinger. “I once worked on ‘Penny Lane’ for three months,” he confessed during a late February conversation here. He’s studied Beatles literature so he can record the instruments in the same order they did.

Shore Fire Media

Karl Wallinger of World Party

Even the demos feel complete, as Mr. Wallinger eagerly explores a variety of pop styles—including funk, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, Bob Dylan, ’40s swing—in addition to his usual métier of clever, bright, pop-oriented rock, crafted with loving care yet never sterile. The live readings of his few modest hits—”Ship of Fools,” “She’s the One” and “Put the Message in a Box,” among them—stray a bit from the original versions, illustrating that Mr. Wallinger has a capacity to improvise. Studio tracks recorded last year—”Everybody’s Falling in Love,” for example—have the same vitality as the guitar orgy “Lost in Infinity” and “All the Love That’s Wasted,” recorded in 1998 and 1999, respectively. They suggest Mr. Wallinger is fully recovered from a brain aneurysm he suffered in 2001 that laid him up for much of the past decade.

He acknowledges that were he less of a perfectionist, the World Party catalog might be more extensive. “I know it feels like we hardly put out any stuff,” he said between cigarettes. “But three years is what it takes to do a proper album.” As World Party fans will attest, the band’s discs were worth the wait. Mr. Wallinger is a first-rate songwriter and producer; albums like the Grammy-nominated “Goodbye Jumbo,” issued in 1990, and “Egyptology,” released seven years later, burst with hooks and inventiveness. As for “Arkeology,” 70 songs is a bit much for a primer, but if you know Mr. Wallinger’s work, it’s a must-have.

Mr. Wallinger was born in Prestatyn, Wales. “Piano was the thing at home, and my siblings’ record collections. I’d stack them 10 at a time and listen.” He studied oboe and voice in school, but he sees himself as an intuitive musician.

“It’s an ear thing,” he said. “Some people play music with a math brain, but if you ask them to make up a 12-bar blues, it’s the worst. With me, I’m just making things up. Hopefully, I end up with something worth listening to.”

Most of the tracks of “Arkeology” were culled from 900 cassette tapes Mr. Wallinger waded through after they were transferred to his laptop. He figured all that work deserved a cool package: In addition to background on the songs and Mr. Wallinger’s musings, it contains scores of photographs. Two thousand copies of the special package were printed.

The sporadic recordings, the health problems, and the fits and starts of his touring career have derailed or at least postponed the kind of world-conquering career Mr. Wallinger’s gifts warrant. He said he doesn’t mind very much. “I’ve made a living. I’m not that sad about not being humongously, amazingly famous. I’ve seen what it’s done to some people,” he said. “When I was younger, I was intimidated by success. But I’m probably in better shape than I would’ve been if I’d been incredibly successful. You know, ‘I’m so fab!’ It was never about personal ambition. I just wanted to be part of a vibe. I know it sounds like a clichéd idea, but I wanted to write and record songs to make the world better.”

Mr. Wallinger is eager to get on the road with a new version of World Party. “We’re building up from scratch,” he said, mentioning that his preferred drummers are working with the Gallagher brothers on their new, separate projects. “We’ve put this out and we’ll see what the reaction is.” New songs, he added, “are starting up on their own. I’m more inclined to be rough and ready these days.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared April 25, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Twice the Party.

By J. S. MARCUS

Jorgensen Photography

New potatoes with warm green strawberries and arugula emulsion from Relæ.

A few years ago, when the attention of the food world was about to shift north to Scandinavia, a presiding wunderkind at Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant was kitchen sous chef Christian Puglisi. In 2009, Mr. Puglisi, now 29 years old, decided to leave Noma, along with Kim Rossen, a young waiter and chef, and the two made plans to open their own restaurant.

The result, called Relæ, opened in August 2010 in Copenhagen’s funky Nørrebro district, and was followed last year by Manfreds og Vin, a neighboring wine bar featuring natural wines. Relæ showcases Mr. Puglisi’s eclectic culinary mind-set—the result of a Sicilian father, a Norwegian mother, a Danish adolescence and a stint working at Spain’s El Bulli restaurant—and the partners’ preference for small wine producers.

Although the new eateries share Noma’s emphasis on local produce (carrots are a mainstay at both, just as they are at Noma), neither, stresses Mr. Puglisi, should be described as “Nordic,” the cuisine now associated with Noma chef René Redzepi, whose relentless investigation into the foodstuffs of Scandinavia, characterized by foraging through forests and beaches for ingredients, have arguably made him the most celebrated chef of this young decade.

Jim Henkens

Smoked salmon at the Willows Inn

“When we opened up, we acted like teenagers,” says Mr. Puglisi, speaking this spring in a small test kitchen near his two restaurants, alluding to an effort to break out from under Noma’s long shadow. “So we said, ‘No foraging at all.’ ” He wanted to avoid “the obvious” comparison, so he applied an axiom he had learned from Mr. Redzepi. “To be original,” says Mr. Puglisi, “you need to cook from within.” This spring, Mr. Puglisi’s pan-European instincts were vindicated, when Relæ—which highlights imported Noma no-nos like olive oil—won its first Michelin star.

From the west side of Copenhagen to the West Coast of America, former Noma chefs are making culinary headlines. Taking what they have learned from Mr. Redzepi, and often applying that knowledge to very different conditions or goals, these chefs are finding that there is life after Noma. In the process, the original restaurant has become not just the world’s best—according to the influential “50 World’s Best Restaurants” list, compiled by the U.K.’s Restaurant magazine—but a unique finishing school, training what seem destined to be several of tomorrow’s most important gastronomic talents.

Noma alumni who have gone on to create their own successful restaurants include Blaine Wetzel, a Noma chef de partie who runs a locally sourced restaurant on Lummi Island, two hours north of Seattle, and Noma sous chef Jesper Kirketerp, whose new Copenhagen eatery Restaurant Radio offers an accessible bistro-like riff on Noma’s cerebral approach.

Other Noma alumni are Claus Henriksen, head chef of the restaurant at Dragsholm Slot, a baroque castle an hour from Copenhagen; and Søren Ledet, a partner at Geranium, an upscale Copenhagen practitioner of Nordic cuisine, which also won its first Michelin star this year.

The trend is now in full export mode. Earlier this year, Mads Refslund, a head chef at Noma in its early days, relaunched a onetime Cajun restaurant in lower Manhattan called Acme as a New York outpost of Nordic cuisine. Later this year, Oliver Croucher-Stephens, a young Noma chef de partie who grew up on the Isle of Wight, will return home to the south English coast and prepare to relaunch the fine dining room of the island’s Priory Bay Hotel. And Noma’s own current star import, American-born head chef Matthew Orlando—whose CV includes stints at the U.K.’s the Fat Duck and New York’s Per Se and Le Bernardin—is looking ahead to the day when he will open his own restaurant in Copenhagen.

“I love it,” says Mr. Redzepi, Noma’s 34-year-old co-founder, co-owner and guiding spirit, speaking this spring about his ability to send out accomplished chefs into the world. “The ultimate pleasure is to have a former worker succeed.”

In spite of the joy it gives him, however, employee ambition can mean a higher turnover. “When you have these potential megastars—who are really extraordinary food thinkers—you want them to stay until they die,” he says. Attracting—but then losing—talent is “a double-edged sword.”

Anders Schønnemann

Radio’s dry cake made of green plums, sugar beet syrup and salted caramel ice

Noma—now in its ninth year—is considered a locavore restaurant, but in fact it sources food all over Scandinavia, from Iceland to the north of Norway. The use of unusual tastes, like pine, and the banishment of more familiar tastes like citrus, can make a meal there an intellectual adventure—Mr. Redzepi’s larger goal is to translate the history and geography of an inhospitable region into something transcendentally edible. All this means that Noma is long on ideas but short on comfort food. Many Noma alumni are trying to reverse that.

A signature dish at the Willows Inn—an isolated, century-old hostelry, whose tiny restaurant was taken over by Blaine Wetzel in fall 2010—is ordinary smoked salmon, served fresh from the smokehouse behind the kitchen, and with nothing but a warm towel. “You eat it with your fingers,” says Mr. Wetzel, who turned 26 this year, adding that the dish’s freshness extends to the green alderwood used for smoking.

Mr. Wetzel’s tenure at Noma meant leaving behind a girlfriend back in Washington. They were reunited when he returned home after finding ideal conditions at the inn, whose isolated position on a fertile island meant that suppliers were already in place.

The inn makes its own salt and runs its own farms. “We slaughter chickens four times a year,” says Mr. Wetzel, which leads to the restaurant stocking up on stock. “There are times when we’re making chicken stock six days a week.”

Lower prices and familiar flavors are the bywords at Radio, which opened last fall just west of Copenhagen’s historic center. Like Noma, the restaurant features bread made from wheat grown on Öland, an island off Sweden’s Baltic coast, but Radio serves it with butter mixed with slowly caramelized onions—a homier touch. The restaurant includes ingredients associated with Noma, like local ramson and pickled elderberries, but the result is simple and satisfying, rather than overtly ambitious or amazing. A recent dinner included a creamy dish made of barley, Danish hay cheese, lumpfish caviar and dill—a Nordic twist on risotto.

“Our idea was that there should be space for everyone,” says Mr. Kirketerp, the 32-year-old former Noma sous chef, who shares cooking duties with his co-owner, Danish chef Rasmus Kliim. Radio reverses Noma’s complicated approach—and accompanying sky-high prices. These days, a meal at Noma is 1500 Danish kroner (€202); at Radio, you can get a three-course dinner for 300 kroner (€40).

“We do comfort food,” he says. “We can pleasure a lot of people,” while some diners—even if they could afford it—”just won’t understand” what Noma is trying to do. That said, he admits, “I would eat at Noma every day” but “it’s quite hard to get a table.”