The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 15

Arts B5 El)f Atlanta lo nrnal THE ATLANTA COSSTITITK Monday, October 30, 1989 Inside the Mind of Director Wes Craven Murderer Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi, seated) wreaks havoc with a prison doctor (Janne Peters) during his electrocution in Absurd Collection of Images Wired Together in 'Shocker9 Experimental Composer Welcomes A Challenge By Derrick Henry StaffWriter Percussionist Peggy Ben-keser and pianist Laura Gordy, co-founders of the 20th-century chamber group Thamyris, wanted a piece of music for themselves that was out of the ordinary. So they commissioned versatile Atlanta composer Mark Gresham. As requested, Mr. Gresham came up with something different: the experimental 10-minute composition "Imponderables," in which the pianist must also play percussion and the percussionist must play piano. It premieres tonight at Clayton State College.

"They do normal things with their own instrument but unusual things with the other instrument," says Mr. Gresham, 33. "For instance, the percussionist must play inside and on different sides of the piano." There are also virtuosic cadenzas for each performer. The piece developed after a friend of Mr. Gresham's suggested the title.

"The first thing I did was look up 'imponderable in the dictionary." What he found was: "incapable of being evaluated or weighed with precision." He became fascinated with the challenge of creating music that sounds amorphous but is, in fact, precisely notated. "In. my piece, the more chaotic-sounding sections are actually highly structured," says Mr. Gresham. "They are double canons." The composer, who is best known for his choral works, adds, "It was nice to be able to write something different." Diversity seems to be important to Mr.

Gresham, who is music director for the Unitarian Universalist Church, composer-in-residence for the Gwinnett Festival Singers, editor of a national magazine (Chorus) and the newly appointed music director of the Atlanta Meister-singers, a group specializing in Renaissance music. Essentially self-taught as a composer, Mr. Gresham began By Steve Murray StaffWriter Wes Craven's hills are alive with the sound of cannibalism. His nightmares showcase a razor-fingered child now, his television sets harbor an electrocuted maniac who offs entire families with a jag-toothed knife. Scary, huh? Maybe to you and me.

But want to know what gives the willies to the director of "The Hills Have Eyes," "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Lawsuits from maniacs, those are the things that really scare me," Mr. Craven says during a phone interview from Los Angeles. He's referring to the recent settlement of a suit against him by someone claiming to have cre- ated the Freddy Krueger character of "Nightmare" fame. "It was absolutely fatuous, and it went on for three years," says Mr. Craven, who's also just come through a divorce.

"This picture marked my emergence from that time," he says about "Shocker," which tempers its frights with unexpected flights of satire. "I just started to feel really happy, and I couldn't keep the humor out of it" says Mr. Craven, who wrote the screenplay. "I think it's a nice direction to take, instead of being very heavy-handed." Indeed. What's heavy-handed about a little blond girl swearing like a sailor and trying to kill people with a bulldozer easily the film's wiggy comic highlight? "I thought they would give me an for that," Mr.

Craven says with a chuckle: With his new supernatural villain, Horace Pinker, is he hoping to create a new figure as lucrative as Freddy Kruegei? "I wasn't trying to do another Freddy," Mr. Craven says. "I just -enjoy creating these Freudian villains and pitting an ordinary person against them and having that person come out an extraordinary hero, The more unlikely the better." i "Shocker" depicts the battle between one Jonathan Parker, a square-jawed college type, and Horace Pinker, the TV repairman who killed most of his family and, it seems, most of the other families in a Midwest town. Sent to the electric chair, Horace only gets stronger from the volts. He gains the ability to electrically transmit himself from person to person qr through any ol' ACDC outlet Mr.

Craven says there's a serious foundation to this special effects funfest. "I'm still groping around my own conflict over the Composer Mark Gresham's experimental work, will be performed by two members of Thamyris tonight writing music when he was 12. "I thought it was something everyone did," says the Atlanta native. He entered Georgia State University as a music major, but found the curriculum stifled rather than stimulated his creativity, so he switched to philosophy. After changing majors, Mr.

curtailed his compositional activities until 1985, when he received encouragement from two ministers. He views his distancing from the academic world as a plus. "It is a more diffficult route, but in the long run has made me stronger. I can be more experimental. I write because I want to write." He counts as his major influences composers as diverse as the classic triumvirate Bach, Beethoven and Brahms on the one hand and mddernists John Cage and Elliott Carter on the other.

"I write music that is both straightforward and bizarre. But all my music is concerned with how one event follows another not just individual events. I don't write so people can say, 'Wow, that's a I'm an assembler of sounds, not a dissector. I resent music as anesthesia, just beautiful music all the time. It's a composer's role to make personal aesthetic statements." Thamyris.

Chamber ensem ble performs music by Mark Gresham, Steve Reich, George Crumb, Miriam Gideon and Susan Parenti. 7 tonight, Room G-132, Clayton State College, 5900 N. Lee St, Morrow. Free. 876-9016.

Wes Craven directed American family. It always feels very primal to me to have the killer be after the family in some form. The family is under stress and attack anyway," he says, citing the rising cost of living and the skyrocketing divorce rate. These don't sound like topics you'd expect to hear from a horror master. But there's more.

Asked about the recurrent focus in his films on father-child relationships, Mr. Craven says, "It's the question of how you define your own adulthood and reach a state of quietude about your own parents." Say what? And you thought this was just a splatter flick. Mr. Craven himself is the son of fundamentalist Baptists in Ohio. "I wasn't allowed to see movies when I was a kid, and I didn't see a great deal of television," he says.

Instead, he read. He eventually earned a master's degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He still reads a good deal, "everything from the most advanced modern physics that I can comprehend to psychology to Joseph Campbell," he says. The rich mix shows up in the blood-flecked tapestry of his films. Remember those kids in "Nightmare," trying to stay awake to avoid Freddy? Mr.

Craven says there's a message there for the kids. "Stay conscious," he says. 'Stay alert to whats happening in our world" thte environment, In particular. "I sometimes talk about the necessity of learning a new way of living on this planet," he says. "And I encourage kids to try to dp something locally that has to' do with being nurturing toward people." But will kids want to listen about "nurturing" from somebody who wipes out scores of them? Mr.

Craven "My audiences tell me that I'm doing something that has a lot of meaning to them. They can see that the films aren't anti-life." And that, indeed, is a shocker. HEAPING AID SYSTEMS Shocker. A satire-laced horror film. Starring Michael Murphy and Peter Berg.

Directed by Wes Craven. Rated for violence and gore. At metro-area theaters. By Steve Murray Film Critic "Shocker" Wes Craven's wacky mix of urban paranoia, gobbety gore and comic book mythology offers a weird ride through the scary and the stupid. Sometimes it's electric, sometimes the wattage is wan.

In a small town terrorized by a mass killer, college hunk Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) begins witnessing the murders in his dreams and gets a good look at the murderer, one bald and burly bluto named Horace Pinker. Seems these two fellas are connected somehow. When Horace gets The Chair, thanks to Jonathan's I.D., he comes back stronger. He pops in and out of human hosts and zips through household currents, thirsting for revenge. Plopping pop culture (and other flicks from "Videodrome" to "Poltergeist" to his own "A Nightmare on Elm into the Cuisinart, the director blends up a stew of cultural signifiers that would dizzy even Joseph Campbell, the late mythology expert.

In this world according to' Wes, the leading lady is a ghost of one of the victims, tender tots turn murderous and the climactic fight takes place in a channel-skipping landscape inside the TV airwaves. (The actors are grafted into footage of World War II, nuclear blasts and eek! "Leave It to Art Review dows and woodcuts media that are essays in, respectively, color and form. The stunning window he conceived and executed in 1960 for the Marcel Breuer-de-signed New Abbey Church of St John the Baptist in Collegeville, was the largest such window in the world. Ironically, the woodcuts on view at Gilla Juette are more medieval in their primitivistic forms than his abstract windows. In "Three Monks-Advent" (1958), he exploits the contrasts of black white and positivenegative in an abstracted image of the three figures.

They are ovals on oblongs, brought to life by descriptive interior detail. The upstretched arms of the black singers in the woodcut titled "Spiritual" convey, by similarly simple means, the excite- Delight Bak Experienced in Act of Creation Film Review The scene plays like "Zelig" on acid speaking of which, it also features '60s guru Timothy Leary as a televangelist. Now that's scary. But yelps often take a back seat to giggles in the whirlwind scenario, which honors the genre's time-tested idiocies. For instance, though Jonathan's family has just been butchered by the psychopathic killer, Our Hero blithely abandons his vulnerable blond sweetie so he can make it to class on time.

Cue the psycho music, prep the blood packs! There's something unhealthy but delicious in the film's cheap shots from Horace chewing off a prison guard's fingers to the groaningly cheesy reappearance of that darn ghost, floating through scenes of carnage like a cut-rate angel sidetracked on her way to a Nativity pageant Despite the effusive bloodlettings and electro-spark special effects, the film becomes a spoof as the violence and senselessness escalate. Its centerpiece is a curi-' ous comic roundelay in a public park, as the demon spirit Horace propels himself from one body to the next The scene recalls the romantic-anarchic farces of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar on the Verge of a Nervous Not that "Shocker" is a date-night movie for the art-house minded. It's strictly for the snide, overstimulated, 17-or-older kid in all of us. ment and personal connection Mr. Bak felt upon hearing gospel singers in Mannheim, Germany, after his concentration camp release.

Memories of his five-year incarceration surface in Surreal images he painted near the end of his life. Not exhibited here, they might make an interesting show in themselves. If some of Mr. Bak's efforts appear dated today, the best throb with a delight in artmaking and a respect for life that transcends time. Bronislaw Bak.

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Describing himself in a. video interview (available at the gallery) as a man "without an art philosophy," Mr. Bak was committed only to the act of making art and to expressing his feelings and observations about a life that began in Poland, landed him in Nazi concentration camps, took him to Chicago, Minnesota and, finally, Georgia. Atlantans can glimpse that journey in the miniretrospective at Gilla Juette Fine Art Judgjng No more excuses. If you can't always understand what friends are you wonder what you're missing not find out? Mju nod and pretend you even when you don't.

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