Arts Council Holiday Bar, Open House is Friday night

The Churchill Arts Council’s annual Holiday Art Bar and Open House is tonight at the Art Center from 5-9 p.m.

Two new shows will be on view, so plan on stopping by to check out the new shows and have a cup of holiday cheer.

The Classroom Gallery will feature the Lahontan Valley Invitational, recent works by Fallon artists including pieces by Lori Bishop, James Edwin Buff, Jr., Judy Carlson, Marcia Ernst, Barbara Glenn, Linda Hammond, Edith A. Isidoro Mills, Sheree Jensen, Denise Johnson, Sonya Johnson, Gwynne Matlavage, Larry Neel, Michele Nelsen, April Oakden, Robert Petertsen, Skp Reeves, Sarah Wharton Riggle, Jo Robinson, Tom Robinson, Kimberly Rowlett, Jaime Sammons, Kevin Sammons, Suzanne Slaybaugh and Rhiannon Stephens.

The E.L. Wiegand Gallery will present “Eye Need Nevada,” selected photographic works from four decades of peregrinations in, around and about Nevada by Jack Fulton. Fulton for many years headed up the photography program at the San Francisco Art Institute and the works are in a variety of photographic media, from film and digital to blueprints.

New albums out

Two of our most talented singer-songwriters — Leonard Cohen and Lucinda Williams — have new albums out.

Cohen’s “Popular Problems” (Columbia) is the artist’s thirteenth studio album and its stripped down format presents some of Cohen’s best efforts, similar to his previous album, “Old Ideas” but even more stark, direct and, occasionally, downright hymn-like.

And then there is his use of female back-up singers as a kind of eerie counterpoint to his smoky, middle-of-the-night meditations on a variety of subjects from love, where he wonders if he ever did love you and did it really matter, to matters of salvation, his and ours, which he finds are “almost like the blues.”

One aphorism lands on top of another with a kind of weary and deeply moving grace, he likes it slow rather than fast.

Lucinda Williams new double CD album is “Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone” (Highway 20 Records).

The album is steeped in the music and sights of the rural, American south where her roots, literally and metaphorically lie. And, there’s more than a tad bit of Southern Gothic, good and evil, in her tales of real, but fractured, lives of people who are looking for a kind of redemption way down deep, as the title suggests.

It’s as strong musically, some rock, some blues, as it is lyrically—gritty, literate, to the point and unpretentious — one of her best efforts, and it’s highly recommended

Kirk Robertson covers the arts for Churchill Arts Council.