For every Jaco Pastorius or Charles Mingus, there are countless jazz bass players who never become household names, so most take up the workmanlike instrument for deeper reasons than attaining celebrity.

In the case of Nicki Parrott, it was family.

At age 15 in her native Australia, she started her performing career when her older sister, saxophonist Lisa Parrott, needed a bassist. Before long, though, it was evident that the self-taught musician was clearly playing bass for the love of the instrument.

After studying at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, where she was able to take additional lessons with touring bass dignitaries like Ray Brown and John Clayton, Parrott made her move. In 1994, at age 24, an Australian Young Achievers Award provided her with the funds to move to the United States and study with renowned New York City bassist Rufus Reid. She's now based in Brooklyn, and has only left to tour ever since.

“I’m a permanent resident here, but not a U.S. citizen yet,” Parrott said before her Dec. 21 concert at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace, her Aussie accent still intact. “Citizenship is on my to-do list.”

That being said, she’s certainly mastered America’s musical art form. Now also a breathy, self-taught vocalist, Parrott's recording and performance resume includes work with the likes of Clark Terry, Billy Taylor, Dick Hyman, Randy Brecker, Mike Stern, Howard Alden, Ken Peplowski, Harry Allen, and Bucky and John Pizzarelli. In addition to her recording sessions, she’s played with the New York Pops and on Broadway shows.

For nine years, Parrott also played every Monday night at the Iridium Jazz Club in Manhattan with legendary guitarist Les Paul. When the icon died in 2009 at age 94, Parrott wanted to carry on his legacy at the venue -- which she’s done ever since as bassist and vocalist for the Les Paul Trio, with guitarist Lou Pallo and pianist John Colianni.

“I first started doing vocals while working with Les,” Parrott says, “because he made me do it! I'd never actually sung much before. He was wonderful, and it shocked us when he died because he looked so good. He was very coherent right up until the end, and almost always pretty peppy, and very funny. I'd jokingly blame him for all the technological overkill in recording studios, since he did invent multi-tracking, and he'd laugh and go along with it.

“A guitarist would sit in and play a Gibson Les Paul model and he’d say, ‘If I hadn’t invented that piece of crap, you wouldn’t have been able to play it so loud!’ We’re carrying on Mondays at the club as a tribute to him, and we bring in guest artists every week.”

On recent Mondays, those included Jane Monheit, Frank Vignola and Todd Rundgren. Forthcoming guests in December and January include Bert Jansch, Reb Beach, Mike Stern, Victor Wooten, Jim Hall and Greg Osby.

Parrott's trio for her Tuesday concert in the Jazz Arts Music Society (JAMS) series at the Harriet Himmel Theater at CityPlace includes Italian pianist Rossano Sportiello and Florida-based drummer Ed Metz Jr. The three first recorded on Metz’s 2008 CD Bridging the Gap, and they plan to record a live album for Arbors Records during a late-January date at the Jazz Corner in Hilton Head, S.C. If the CityPlace show was any indication, the live CD should be a must-have item for any fan of the trio.

“I've been playing with Rossano for about 10 years,” Parrott says. “He moved to New York a few years ago, and we've recorded a couple duo CDs within the past six years or so. I think he's one of the most brilliant jazz and classical pianists alive today. I’ve found that European jazz musicians seem to have more of a classical background than American jazz musicians, and Rossano typifies that.

“As for Ed, his CD turned out to be one of my favorite recordings for Arbors Records,” Parrott continues. “So when the three of us played for a week at a club in Switzerland last year, we were really able to home in on our material. Now we're used to playing with each other; we have repertoire, and it’s great fun.”

JAMS president and founder Susan Merritt remembered the joy Parrott exhibited during a previous appearance for the organization, which was part of the reason she was booked for its special holiday concert.

“Nicki first played for us a few years ago with the DIVA Jazz Orchestra,” Merritt says. “I'd also enjoyed her session work on a variety of albums on Arbors Records, and I recently saw her play with Ann Hampton Callaway. She's a great singer and bass player, and just adorable.”

When she left Australia in the mid-‘90s, Parrott left a jazz scene that she remembers as depreciating.

“There was always a jazz scene in Sydney,” she says, “but it seemed like it was more happening in the ‘80s than in the ‘90s. All the major cities there have a jazz scene -- Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane. Sydney was really thriving in the late ‘80s, but Melbourne probably has a better scene now."

She doesn’t tour her native country much, but Parrott also remembers an ever-strong classical scene.

“All the major Australian cities have great symphony orchestras,” she says, “so there's a huge classical tradition there. And jazz is sort of a smaller branch of that. There are occasional festivals that I’ll play there, but otherwise there aren't really that many touring opportunities.”

That may be due, in part, to the amount of gigs Parrott plays in the U.S. Her trio hit the stage in West Palm Beach fresh off a 10-day, jazz-themed sail from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean aboard the Crystal Cruise line. Parrott is also busy within the modern, downsized, do-it-yourself reality that exists within the 21^st-century music industry.

“We all have to deal with the business side,” she says. “It’s not all practicing and performing, because most of us work without managers. Each gig requires a lot of planning between publicity, photos and press in general. So with travel, e-mails and all the other details, there's a lot less time to devote to your craft.”

Some of Parrott’s most time-consuming travel is to the Far East.

“I read a definition of jazz recently in a music union paper,” she says. “It was called ‘America's most original art form; beloved by Europeans.’ I’d add the Japanese to that as well. I’ve been to Switzerland five times this year, and I’ve released four albums in Japan, all with vocals, all of which have done quite well. So I’ve toured there, and I'll be going back again next year for the Fujitsu Concord Jazz Festival.”

Parrott’s latest Japanese release is Black Coffee (Venus). She also appears on this year’s All My Friends Are Here: Tribute to Arif Mardin (Nunoise), which features David Sanborn, Norah Jones, Bette Midler, Dianne Reeves and Willie Nelson and pays homage to the late Grammy-winning producer. Her latest domestic release is the second duo CD with Sportiello, last year’s Do It Again (Arbors).

The versatile bassist has come a long way, both literally and figuratively.

“I was the first female bass student my teacher had at the conservatorium in Sydney,” Parrott says. “My sister and I were always been influenced by a lot of different music, from Brazilian to Eric Clapton. Now I play acoustic and electric bass, and I don’t know many bassists in New York who don’t. I think the more diverse you are as a musician, the better you can be.”

That’s a common mantra for modern musicians in all genres, and for better or worse, it’s likely to shape music in general and jazz in particular in the future.

“I was talking to Harry Allen about that recently,” Parrott says, “and we agreed that it’s all about broadening one’s horizons. Harry will go from a gig playing with the Brazilian group Trio da Paz to recording a ‘James Bond’ record. Jazz has almost always been somewhat of a marginalized art form, anyway; never hugely popular unless you’re someone like Diana Krall.

“I just try to play with people who also play a lot of different styles. That way, I can broaden both my horizons and my repertoire.”

See the Nicki Parrott Trio at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 21, at the Harriet Himmel Theater, 700 S. Rosemary Ave., West Palm Beach (Tickets: $35; call 877-722-2820 or visit www.jamsociety.org.

Kobayashi Four (Facets)

Standard list price: $71.99

Release date: Nov. 23

Facets celebrates its new release of Masahiro Kobayashi’s 2001 film Man Walking on Snow by repackaging three of the director’s previously available releases into a box set titled Kobayashi Four.

Watching these four titles from the criminally neglected Japanese auteur reveals a bracing talent with a thematically cohesive oeuvre who should easily be as recognized in contemporary Asian art cinema as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda or Kim Ki-Duk, all of whom share similar sensibilities.

The obsession that lingers most in Kobayashi’s cinema is the specter of death and its uncertain aftermath. Death incites equal parts grief, jealousy, anger and connection throughout these four titles, arriving in even the most deceptively comic packages.

In the oldest title in this set, Kobayashi’s second feature Bootleg Film (1998), the suicide of a shared lover brings together two of her paramours, a cop and a yakuza, who road-trip together to attend her funeral. Kobayashi directs this sharp, black-and-white Cinemascope journey with hipster detachment and film-school quirk. A manic slapstick comedy on the surface, Bootleg Film is reverential and referential to icons of the past, mostly American pop-culture institutions favored by the yakuza character, an avowed cineaste.

The film channels Laurel and Hardy one minute and Reservoir Dogs the next, with Tarantino’s cult film particularly ingrained in Kobayashi’s script. In one hilarious digression, the yakuza pre-empts the killing of a girl – and fellow Tarantino fan -- to argue with her about the proper way to pronounce Steve Buscemi’s surname.

Bootleg Film only gets weirder, and more supernatural, as it progresses. Characters we assume are dead to this world walk through the epic landscapes once again: Death is elusive and impermanent, a theme that will recur in arguably the director’s most engaging movie, Man Walking on Snow (2001).

In that film, we follow the routine of Nobuo (Ken Ogata), a 70-year-old man whose wife died two years prior and who spends his days wandering the snowy terrain of a remote Northern Japanese village, eventually wending his way to a salmon-breeding pond, where he strikes up an unlikely bond with a woman who works there. It’s a film that very much lives up to its title.

Seemingly endless shots of Nobuo traipsing through the harsh climate are intercut with shots of his two sons’ daily lives, one of whom dotes on his father’s every need while the other, a failed musician, has been estranged and bitter ever since his mother’s passing. The occasion of second anniversary of her death – and of Nobuo’s wavering vow of chastity – attempts to bring the broken family to some semblance of togetherness.

Kobayashi films this discomforting story of familial conflict with subtle formal cues: The way his camera jitters restlessly during the brief close-up shots and only seems steady and comfortable when filming the characters in long shots suggests the distance required for the family to communicate. The film’s depictions of real-life problems are authentic and moving, and its tragic nature creeps up on you – at least until Kobayashi, as in Bootleg Film, seems to negate a key climactic death, punctuating the film with a confounding epilogue.

Kobayashi followed this a couple of films later with Bashing, the harsh story of Yuko (Fusako Urabe), a woman returning home from being held hostage in Iraq, where she had volunteered for the coalition forces. Whether it’s for being captured or simply for volunteering in the first place, Yuko receives nothing but ire and shame from the unforgiving townspeople, from her family and boyfriend to the soup kitchen that refuses to serve her. Bashing is 80 minutes of pure suffering, and this time, there’s no rebirth for the deceased.

If it’s the weakest title in this box set, it’s partly because the film doesn’t have much room to breathe beyond its Issue Movie limitations. But mostly, Bashing doesn’t work because it’s hard for us in the West to relate to the story. It’s not a universal problem. The unforgiving society Kobayashi presents is culturally polarized from how we perceive returning veterans, especially hostage victims, all of whom return as heroes even if no heroism was demonstrated.

The box set concludes, appropriately, with Kobayashi’s most sublime and ascetically rigorous film, 2007’s The Rebirth. We get all the story we’re going to get in the film’s first eight minutes, where we learn that a woman’s daughter stabbed and killed the daughter of a neighboring, widowed man in an act of high-school terrorism. Kobayashi then revisits to these two characters – the mother of the culprit and the father of the victim – one year later, where both have resigned from their previous jobs and generally from life itself.

Until the last five minutes of this 102-minute feature, there is no dialogue or narration. We simply follow the characters in silent observation of their daily rituals: Eat, sleep, commute, work, eat, sleep, commute, work. Morning becomes night, and night becomes morning again. Like ghosts, they never communicate with the world around them, preferring lives of contemplative solitude.

To watch these two principal players (the man is portrayed by Kobayashi himself) for more than an hour and half is to accept the film’s meditative lull with a Zen-like sense of ease and comfort, and it reminds us how much potency can be conveyed without the crutch of dialogue. The characters do eventually meet, partaking in a kind of magnetic ballet of attraction and repulsion throughout the movie’s second half. But the pleasures are more in the soothing routines of their lives than in their wordless, predestined encounters.

This study in repetitive, Warholian banality – the Jeanne Dielman of post-mortem grief – is seemingly as removed as possible from the madcap antics of Bootleg Film, but the two movies share an understanding of the different ways we grieve, a common thread running through all of Kobayashi’s cinema. One solution in the grieving process may be to take solace in the familiar, as the characters in The Rebirth do.

The next time I lose someone close to me, this is the film to which I would most want to return.

Hair High (Microcinema)

Release date: Nov. 30

SLP: $17.99

Cult animator Bill Plympton directed this icky ode to high school, which plays out like an ‘80s John Hughes flick dragged through a dirty, surrealist muck until all sense of logic, decorum and “decency” (whatever that is) have been removed. In other words, it’s customary Plympton, familiarly disgusting for his admirers and instantly repellent for those not attuned to his wavelength. The movie centers on Spud (Eric Gilliland), a nerdy outcast forced to serve slavishly under Cherri (Sarah Silverman), the head cheerleader inevitably paired with hunky boyfriend and quarterback Rod (Dermot Mulroney). When Cherri finally reciprocates Spud’s attractions, their romance sets Rod off, leading to an uncertain death and a skeletal resurrection, with the title of prom royalty at stake.

The self-contained universe of Hair High is not the world as we see it, but the world Plympton sees, and it’s one worth visiting for a respite from conventional Hollywood “realism.” Channeling the anarchy of animation’s early deviants, Plympton utilizes the style’s uninhibited elasticity the way few contemporary animators do, exploiting it in truly visionary ways. Though many of the film’s sophomoric cheap shots suggest the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old male, Plympton smartly uses the tricks of the animation trade to creatively amplify its characters’ intense emotions, from fear to anxiety, anger, love and joy. If most of us felt things the way the characters in Hair High feel them, we’d be living in a very strange world, but it would be a lot of fun for about 10 minutes.

Jaffa (Film Movement)

Release date: Dec. 7

SLP: $24.95

Shot in the titular historic city in Israel, Jaffa is the latest forbidden-love drama between a Jew and an Arab, a romantic conceit that’s become as narratively familiar as it is perpetually relevant. The major players are the strikingly eyebrowed, newly pregnant Mali (Dana Ivgy); her auto-mechanic father Reuven (well-known Israeli actor Moni Moshonov); Toufik (Mahmud Shalaby), the Arab laborer with whom she’s planning on eloping; and Meir (Ro’i Asaf), Reuven’s son and an anti-Arab bigot. You don’t have to be Socrates to predict where these boiling tensions are heading, but nevertheless, I won’t spoil any of the plot’s tragic developments.

Jaffa is best when it probes familial grief and the lasting impact of chance decisions; we’re refreshingly spared any moral lectures about the eternally irreconcilable differences between the ethnic groups in question. But compared with the thrilling, fly-on-the-wall action of last year’s similarly set Ajami, this film’s glacial pacing is not always involving, and an extended epilogue, set nine years into the future, adds little resonance to the drama.

The Zookeeper (Brink DVD)

Release date: Nov. 23

SLP: $17.99

This turgid war drama from music-video director Ralph Ziman won Best Film and Best Actor at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in 2001, which says more about FLIFF’s diminished standards of quality than it does about the merits of this picture. Sam Neill stars as Ludovic, a jaded ex-Communist in an unspecified, supposedly contemporary Eastern Europe country that’s dressed inexplicably in period garb. Ravaged by war, most of the citizens have migrated elsewhere – only Ludovic and his veterinarian companion (Om Puri) have agreed to stay and keep the animals in the city’s zoo alive as bombs explode around them.

Ponderous direction sinks the film’s interesting subject matter, rendered insufficiently compelling by Ziman’s insistence on derailing the narrative away from the fascinating dealings with the animals and toward the trappings of kitchen-sink melodrama. Ziman frees his zookeeper protagonist from the heavy tedium of his position by granting him a seemingly orphaned 10-year-old boy and, later, the boy’s androgynously disguised mother, which conveniently serve as Ludovic’s redemptive parenting lesson and rote romance, respectively.

Worse yet, the film feels epically longer than its 100 minutes, and not in a good way.

Film: There have been plenty of fact-based boxing movies and most get trapped on the ropes with sports clichés. But David O. Russell’s The Fighter is as much about “Irish” Micky Ward’s wildly dysfunctional family as it is about the fight game. Mark Wahlberg plays Ward well enough and it certainly isn’t his fault that he is outclassed by the brilliant Christian Bale as his crackhead, brain-addled brother Dicky, a over-the-hill boxer who devotes himself -- at least when he is sober -- to being Micky’s trainer. Also stealing every scene she is in is the great Melissa Leo as Micky’s manager-mom, and even Amy Adams is first-rate in an image-changing role as his blue-collar, bartender girlfriend. Look for this one to be showered with Oscar nominations. Opening this weekend at area theaters. – H. Erstein

Theater: Karen Hartman’s comedy of opposites, Goldie, Max & Milk, is the tale of a single, unemployed, lesbian who has just given birth and is essentially clueless about how to nurse and raise a newborn child. So she calls on a lactation consultant, and an Orthodox Jewish woman named Goldie shows up at Max’s Brooklyn apartment, completely against Max’s sexual orientation, but obligated to assist her anyway. The play was a hit with the audience at this year’s 1^st Stage Festival of New Works and seems likely to be again with the return of cast members Erin Joy Schmidt, Deborah Sherman and David Hemphill. Opening this weekend at Florida Stage’s new home at the Kravis Center. Call (561) 582-7503 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Music: The Dello Joio family says it has been making music for seven generations, and this weekend at the Kravis Center, there’s a world premiere from Justin Dello Joio in the form of a two-movement cello work dedicated in part to the memory of his father, the eminent composer Norman Dello Joio. Due per Due (Two for Two) will be played by Carter Brey, longtime principal cellist at the New York Philharmonic, and pianist Christopher O’Riley, best-known for his radio work as the genial host of From the Top. Also on the program are works by Bach (the Gamba Sonata in G minor, BWV 1029) and Grieg (the Cello Sonata in A minor, Op. 36). Justin Dello Joio’s work, to judge by the sound samples on his Website, is more modernistic than that of his father, and it has an aggressive energy all its own. Brey and O’Riley perform at 8 p.m. Friday at the Kravis Center. Tickets start at $20. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

The American violinist Elmar Oliveira, who recently joined the Lynn University faculty, is now appearing more often in local concert appearances, which gives audiences a chance to hear this Tchaikovsky gold medalist in recital and with orchestra. Most recently, he gave a big, powerful reading of the Mendelssohn concerto with the Lynn Philharmonia, and this weekend at the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall, he’s on the program of the Sunday Afternoons of Music. Oliveira, joined by pianist Robert Koenig, will play music by Walton (Violin Sonata), Beethoven (the Kreutzer Sonata, Op. 47) and Handel (Sonata No. 6 in E), which begins at 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $35. Call 305-271-1750 or visit www.sundaymusicals.org.

A meeting between Sigmund Freud -- the father of psychoanalysis and a staunch atheist -- and C.S. Lewis, a convert to Christianity and author of the series of religious allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia.

There is no evidence that such a match-up ever took place, but it is the basis of Mark St. Germain’s what-if drama, Freud’s Last Session, opening Friday at West Palm Beach’s Palm Beach Dramaworks.

The pairing is not capricious, but based on the book The Question of God by Dr. Armand Nicholi, which St. Germain pored over a few years ago. As he explains, “In the last chapter, Dr. Nicholi makes the statement that there was a young Oxford don who did visit Freud in the last month of his life,” and suggests that it would be intriguing to think that the visitor was Lewis, a man of such opposite views from Freud’s.

“I constantly read trying to find something interesting to write about,” says St. Germain and when he got to the reference to Lewis, “Bells went off.”

This is not the first time St. Germain has written a speculative drama about famous figures from the past. He is probably best known so far for Camping with Henry and Tom, a fictional tale of industrialist Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison, spending a weekend together out in the wilderness.

“I guess I’m fascinated with history, I’m fascinated with the people who are larger-than-life,” says St. Germain. “It’s really interesting to spend time in their company. To try and put myself inside their heads and experience the world as they see it.”

When started to work on what became Freud’s Last Session, St. Germain considered himself fairly well versed in Freud and Lewis, but still he had to research them both more thoroughly. “I had to find out more about them, about who they were, as opposed to what they said. A year and a half later, I was still reading.”

In the play, Freud and Lewis discuss and debate their attitudes on such subjects as religion, sex, the meaning of life and the existence of God.

The only question St. Germain begs off of is which of the characters he personally sides with on the God question. “I always plead the Fifth on that,” he says, concerned that theatergoers might perceive a bias from him if he divulged his own beliefs.

The play tried out last year at Barrington (Mass.) Stage, where St. Germain help post-show talkbacks with the audience, trying to gauge whether he got the balance right. “And it was really interesting, because there was about a third of the audience that would come and congratulate you because Freud really won this argument,” he says. “And then a third would say, ‘Isn’t it a shame, but Lewis really trounced Freud.’ I like that.”

Even before Barrington Stage, though, Palm Beach Dramaworks asked St. Germain to come to South Florida for a test reading of the script. ““I was very happy to do that, because it was a chance to hear it, watch the audience and do some rewrites on it,” he explains. “The actors did a terrific job, I thought, and it was a good experience.”

So he was equally pleased to grant Dramaworks the rights to produce the show now, even though it is still running off-Broadway. Describing its evolution since that 2009 reading, St. Germain says, “I think it’s a much stronger play. I think the arguments are developed more deeply and I think there’s more of the personalities of the men.”

The play opened off-Broadway in July with the Barrington Stage cast, after St. Germain considered, but ultimately rejected, recasting it with two box-office names and taking it to Broadway.

“I had been approached to do that, but I really felt that if you have a production you’re happy with, it was really crazy to try to do something else,” he says. “You’re always taking a chance that it’s not going to come together in the same way. And funding is so much more difficult, you can wait for years to try to raise the money.”

Besides, he feels that off-Broadway -- or regional theater -- is a better fit for plays of ideas, where audiences go to listen and think. “I think the Broadway audience is mostly lured these days by the spectacle, or the name performers within a play.”

Freud’s Last Session has been an Energizer bunny in New York, running a remarkable five months so far, In part, St. Germain believes, this is due to a renewed interest in spirituality in the nation and a hunger for the answers that Freud himself sought. “I think these are eternal questions, but these are things that most of the time you don’t spend an evening thinking about. Most of don’t put two minutes thought into it a day.”

Still, he emphasizes, the play is “about people, it’s not about debate itself. We have to feel that we’re in the room with people who aren’t simply icons. We have to get them down off the mantel and see them as people who have ideas. To see Freud, who is in the last stages of his life, and Lewis, whose career is just beginning, and just experience them.

Freud’s Last Session, says St. Germain, allows theatergoers “to see the world through the eyes of two geniuses and then to look at their own lives and their own beliefs.”

FREUD’S LAST SESSION, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Feb. 6. Tickets; $47. Call: (561) 514-4042.

To ask an audience to explore unseen works by a popular or a controversial artist is piece of cake. Asking them to come see rare works by a less shocking artist, unknown by most, takes guts.

But that’s precisely what the Norton Museum is doing with John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist, a show consisting mainly of metal and stone sculptures by the Chicago native who happened to be a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright and a student of Auguste Rodin.

Now and then we see a drawing or an abstract painting hinting at the willingness of the artist to explore other mediums or maybe adjust to the hard times. Take these paintings and drawings as Storrs's warm side. Everything else here is rigid, heavy, emotionless, cold and silent, bulky when not elegant and, because of all of this, very modern. We should know.

Enter the first room. A set of three buildings are displayed together. From left to right they are: Forms in Space (c. 1924), Forms in Space (c. 1926), and Forms in Space No.4. They could very well be the work of any artist from today rather than an artist born in 1885.

The sleek structures, which resemble skyscrapers and towers then emerging in big cities such as Chicago and New York, are made of mixed metals including steel and copper. They represent a familiar subject, are straightforward and easy to comprehend, but they don't feel very personal. Even the titles suggest a certain distance.

That doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate the elegant lines, natural color variations from the metals and geometric patterns on the pieces. But as soon as we do, we feel like moving on.

These and larger details can easily go unnoticed if we rush through the brief exhibit.

Watch for the repetition of triangles on the 1924 bronze piece Study in Form (Forms in Space) and for the rhombus pattern on Study in Architectural Forms (c. 1927). Take Abstract Form No. 1 (c. 1917-19), which is the first granite sculpture as we enter the second gallery room. If abandoned too quickly, we would never discover the bird-like creature that seems to be taking flight, and that those straight lines are actually wings.

The cemented coldness and silence found on Storrs's sculptures are not restricted to buildings. Why should humans escape that notion? They don't.

An example of this greets us early on, at the entrance of the exhibit and to the left of the welcome panel. A shiny robot-like expressionless lady stands erect. She is Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and appears holding a bag of grain in her right hand and stalks of wheat in her left hand. Her hair is in a bun and although her breasts are emphasized, the piece as a whole appears very masculine. Storrs created this nickel-plated model in preparation for a larger piece that was to go on top of the Chicago Board of Trade Building. The final 31-inch aluminum sculpture remains over the building today.

Smooth and curvy, My Daughter in Winter Costume is a stone sculpture featuring a young girl, shy or reserved, with her feet bent slightly inward as if she had just asked to go to the restroom and was still holding it. It is too dark in color for such a young subject, especially when compared to the terracotta Modern Madonna next to it.

This one, a much lighter piece, depicts Mary holding baby Jesus; his face buried in her arm while she looks to the side. As the Winter Costume sculpture, she has no facial features, but the lines of her drapery and those suggesting her loose hair let us know she is human.

Along with Figurative Abstraction, these are the warmest pieces of the show. In Abstraction, the central figure, a nude boy, is not yet completely freed from the block of marble. He is walking away from us as if returning to the place of his birth: the block. A hand from the right welcomes him and is placed directly between his neck and back, as if to prevent him from looking back at us. From the left, a hand reaches out and touches his left hand.

The subtle separation here between background and subject reminds me of Michelangelo's bas-relief Madonna of the Stairs and is the reason why I like it the most. It's not just the warmest piece but the one tempting the artist the most. That it appears incomplete is only a sign of the artist's exercised restraint and control in not carving too much. I love how delicate and less studied it seems, next to the others, even if it’s not a feeling that lasts.

The museum did a good thing in bringing to West Palm Beach something rarely shown. One appreciates the thought. If given the choice, I would rather have the John Storrs show than not have it. But that’s just curiosity speaking and curiosity doesn’t need three months to be satisfied. Many museum guests could walk this exhibit in 15 minutes, and that’s the curious ones.

Most will not make it to the gallery room displaying Storrs’ works. Their attention will probably be grabbed by more exciting paintings or the other new show running simultaneously, Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, which couldn’t be more colorful, energetic and alive.

Machine-Age Modernist has, in turn, nothing to do with energy or shock. It has a lot to do with our present day. The mechanization of humanity is after all an ongoing process.

I could say the show is boring except for a few intriguing pieces but then I would be saying our present is boring except for few isolated thrilling events.

Because I don’t want to make you angry (anger is not allowed in a modern perfect world), I'll say the show is as captivating as our present time. How much is that? I’ll let you decide.

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist runs through Jan. 2 at the Norton Museum of Art. Admission: $12, adults; $5 ages 13-21. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.