The 'Cut' dress in threeASFOUR's 2010 spring ready-to-wear collection.

Since 2005, the New York-based fashion collective threeASFOUR, comprised of Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil, has been producing avant garde, almost museum-quality clothing that recalls Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. Indeed, their clothing has been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. This Friday, the designers are coming to the Textile Museum to collaborate on a work of performance art based on Yoko Ono's famous Cut Piece.

Ono has been a major source of inspiration for the designers recently: During the spring ready-to-wear shows last September in New York, the trio featured Ono's drawings in their collection, played music from her most recent album, and re-created Cut on the runway. The models snipped at a dress until the model wearing it was left in nothing but a bra and briefs. Following Friday's performance, Sabrina Gschwandtner, founder of KnitKnit magazine, will moderate a question and answer session with the designers.

The performance will take place Friday, July 23, from 8-10 p.m. at the Textile Museum, 2320 S St. NW. $20. Call (202) 667-0441, ext. 78 for more information.

Photo: style.com

Speaking of Fringe, you should read Chris Klimek's cover story in this week's Washington City Paper on the topic. It starts with this quite sensory lede:

Three weeks before the opening night of the fifth Capital Fringe Festival, its headquarters retains the faint scent of urine.

* When pondering the new, rap-sprinkled, apparently conversation-starting Liz Phair record, only one question comes to mind: WTF? WaPo's heroic Click Track bloggers go one further, asking: Why? Allison Stewart and Aaron Leitko offer explanations, but David Malitz isn't having it. He writes: "Maybe she's just – not that good? She certainly wouldn't be the first artist to fizzle out after a career-defining debut."

* On Yoko Ono's Wishing Tree in the Hirshhorn sculpture garden.

* Hot-shit dance critic Sarah Kaufman reviews Godard's Breathless, whose new (and I hear, gorgeous) new print is showing at AFI Silver. Kaufman is impressed neither by Belmondo's apparent ability to hold a close-up, or Godard's treatment of Belmondo's physical talents:

Belmondo's face, magnificently planed and sloped as it is, tells us zilch in this movie. Newly restored and re-subtitled for its 50th anniversary, the story of a thug marooned in Paris that helped launch a new cinematic style is, in fact, an inadvertent ode not to Belmondo's looks, but to his body.

I say "inadvertent" because, tragically (eh oui, one cannot overdramatize when referring to a French film), director Jean-Luc Godard does not fully exploit Belmondo's gift of physical grace. "Breathless," which opens Friday for a weeklong run at the AFI Silver, loses air every time it opts for close-ups. But let Belmondo saunter downstairs while he's lighting one of his fat cigarettes, or swagger through a lobby, or shadowbox in his underwear, and the film hums with raw, freewheeling elegance.

On the first point, one famous critic—was it Pauline Kael?—said part of Belmondo's appeal in Breathless was his bratty, hypnotic sort of ugliness, so uncharacteristic for a leading man in 1960. Never has a Brando impression seemed so discordant and better for it.

The debut show in G Fine Art's new space, Al Miner's "Naked," closes Saturday, so this week is your last chance to see the artist at his barest. A City Lights pick last month outlined Miner's self portraits—both of his scarred and scabbed chest following a double mastectomy, and of his face in various states of emotional anguish— saying "Naked" "is not gruesome, merely discomforting; but the discomfort is surpassed by an impulse to look closer, to lean in. Miner is naked not just in his films and paintings but stripped emotionally bare, at his most vulnerable. Taken into consideration with the portraits opposite the gallery, which show the artist in states of emotional anguish, one sees how resilient our flesh really is—Miner has survived, and the worst is over."

But just as Miner has figuratively laid himself bare in the paintings, the actual visage of flesh is crucial to Fly 08, Miner's homage to Yoko Ono's 1970 film Fly. In the original, a young woman lies motionless on a bed as flies explore her body, set to the tune of Ono's experimental soundtrack full of gasps and shrieks. In Miner's interpretation (which was filmed by Ron Toole), he takes the place of the girl on the bed. The body the flies crawl across is the same one we've just witnessed in all of its states of healing.

Like Ono, Miner bred his own flies from larvae, and had to devise a way to get them to stay on his body. Ono gassed hers, which made them drowsy, but Miner instead put them in the freezer for a brief period of time before placing them on his body. Each time, Toole had a few minutes to capture the dazed flies walking across his skin before they would thaw out enough to fly away. Then he'd have to catch them and start all over. The soundtrack to the film is unlike Ono's—composed by Richard Chartier, it's a more meditative, pulsating buzz, but unsettling nonetheless.

Reflecting upon her film, Ono once said, "It's really obvious that Fly is the statement of a woman, what women go through. It's interesting that from a male point of view, it's a totally different film—it's about curvature." Miner is in the unique position to have been able to experience the film from both of these perspectives—the mastectomy that produced the raw pain of "From There to Here" is the result of a gender reassignment surgery. But Miner's Fly 08 isn't about curves, and it isn't about what a man—or a woman, for that matter—goes through. It's about what a person goes through, whether isolation or desolation, and the ability to persevere through it all.

Neon Hates You/Smell Anniversary Fest: The Smell is the sort of DIY space that makes a scene. All ages, with a bent toward the experimental and interesting, this L.A. spot is about to mark its 12th anniversary with a weekend festival (Jan. 22 and 23) that seems heavy on the stuff it trades in: Participants include Mi Ami, Lucky Dragons, Foot Village, and Robin Williams on Fire. $10 (we repeat: $10) gets you in for both days.

Sounds Like Brooklyn Festival: We here at Festival Watch can kind of feel the Brooklyn hate. Being based, as we are, in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” we've seen for ourselves what happens when every honky with a tonk feels like they have a right to be a rock musician. Brooklyn, we think, suffers from a similar sort of self-assuredness. Except there, the obnoxious proliferation of honest-to-God musical goodness almost seems to justify that sentiment. Which makes it all the worse.

As if to drive this point home, even academe has embraced the whole Brooklyn-as-the-edgy-Mecca thing—well, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to be exact. Over the last weekend of January and the first weekend pf February, the residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint (and at least some portions of Bed-Stuy) will, for the third time, presumably decamp and witness what BAM believes is a representative cross-section of their borough's sonic creativity. What, exactly, that means is a little unclear. Says press: “BAM's Sounds Like Brooklyn Music Festival celebrates some of the best music from the borough with two weekends packed with concerts at BAM and at clubs all over Brooklyn.” But the organization lists only the shows it plans to host at its own facilities. Performers there include Les Savy Fav, Vivian Girls, and the reunited Anti-Pop Consortium. Tickets for those performances are still available—and will be for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, any of those bands can actually sell out the multitiered opera house that will host their performances.

As for the rest of the weekend, your guess is as good as ours. But if you should find yourself in Brooklyn, upset at the lack of shows that appeal to you, we’d remind you that there’s plenty of other stuff to do.

Noise Pop 2010: OK, so we realize that the last time we did one of these, we told you all about Noise Pop 2010. But that was before we found out that Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band would be playing. And despite the hit-or-miss craziness associated therewith, we still feel like that experience is probably worth the $39.50 admission price. Of course, if you’re planning to be out there anyway (reminder: Four Tet, two nights of Magnetic Fields, and assorted other awesomeness is included), you could just get a badge.

...or, as numerous rock critics as well as the PR wing of Shout! Factory would have us believe, was it the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival in September, 1969?

Yesterday, Shout! rereleased D.A. Pennebaker's film of the Toronto concert (it's been off the shelves since BMG pulled a 2002 iteration), and in a wise marketing move the company has answered the above question with stirring finality: this concert, they assure us, "signalled the end of the Beatles."

Pennebaker knows something about milestones and spent some of his best reel on them, including the game-changing vérité of Monterey Pop and, before that, Don't Look Back, the finest portrait of Dylan ever filmed. One question, then, is why the Toronto film fails so miserably. (Hint: it's cuz Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and others get little to no screentime. Also because of Ono.) But the real question (if we are to indulge Shout!), is: the Beatles broke up for this?

The first segment of the concert plays to Pennebaker's strengths—a lip-service sequence dedicated to the rock 'n' roll legends who formed the pantheon of Lennon's youth. As Bo Diddley's off-camera voice bellows, "We gonna take you back to the year 1955," Pennebaker inches you from Lennon's motorcade to the bikers to the exultant hippie crowd, as Diddley and his co. launch into one of his eponymous anthems. Next is Jerry Lee Lewis with a flip "Hound Dog." (One shot catches the country-roller awkwardly craning his leg around the mic stand to play the upper register with his cowboy boot. Magnificent.) Available elsewhere, but not on this disc, is Chuck Berry's performance, which, according to Robert Christgau, "several experienced Berry-watchers adjudged one of his finest shows ever." Another highlight: Little Richard striding out, caked in make-up, grinning suggestively under his pencil-thin mustache and reveling in his return to rock 'n' roll after remembering that it'd always paid better than Gospel, anyway. Good performances all, but tossed off like a prelude—because, you know, this isn't a festival film; it's a film about John Lennon.

Perhaps as a transitional gesture, easing out of throwback rock 'n' roll into avant garde strokes, Lennon begins his set with covers from the Beatles' very early setlists: "Blue Suede Shoes," "Money," and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy." A lack of mirth is apparent from the outset: John hadn't given a concert since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, and Toronto was his first performance without the Beatles since the '50s...besides which, symptoms of heroin withdrawal had kept him retching for hours leading up to the performance. (Eric Clapton, who flew over to play solos, found himself similarly afflicted.) Next is the new material: "Yer Blues," during which Ono appears onstage, huddles under a sheet, and lets out possessed, Sybilline caterwauling, which she continues into "Cold Turkey." "Primal Scream"? Hogwash; she sounds like a dying sheep. (During "Cold Turkey," even Lennon looks annoyed.)

Thanks to poor lighting and the fact that half of the musicians were too strung out to be having fun, Pennebaker doesn't have much to work with as far as stage presence, and the camerawork suffers accordingly. The homespun, freehand shooting that allowed Monterey Pop's intimate sequences—no fixed camera could ever keep Jimi Hendrix caged in the frame—feels simply sloppy here.

Not as sloppy, though, as the band's indulgences towards Ono—more shrieking through "Give Peace a Chance" (the words to which Lennon half-mumbles; "This is what we came here for, really.... I've forgotten all those bits in between, but I know the chorus," he explains to the audience). Then "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)," a song with more words in its title than it has lyrics, and "John, John (Let's Hope for Peace)," the kind of atonal arrhythmia that passed for "experimentation" on Two Virgins with none of the discipline John would soon apply to his viscerality on Plastic Ono Band. Clapton, dutiful, scrubs his guitar strings against the amplifier to create hissing feedback under Ono's wailing. (The artless distorted theatrics are arguably more interesting from a musical standpoint than Ono's strident "self-expression.")

And into this one, 10-plus-minute "song," any of the early rock 'n' rollers who open the film could have fit half a dozen performances of their economic, knockout singles—the songs that liberated Lennon from his Liverpool fastness in the first place. When Lennon traipses off stage to light a cigarette, leaving his guitar propped against an amp to deliver feedback even after he's gone, it's a big (if inadvertent; remember that whole "YOU are the Plastic Ono Band!" come-on) middle finger brandished at the audience. Forget the Beatles—in Toronto, in 1969, John Lennon abandoned rock 'n' roll.

Lennon's eventual cold-turkey success at quitting heroin was a rejection of the self-destructive behavior that had darkened his last years with the Beatles, and a springboard into Primal Scream therapy and a marriage that doubled as so much pop-psych performance art. But the Beatles' breakup was far from cold turkey—really, this concert is no more useful a milestone than any other Fab Four flare-up one can pinpoint, post-Pepper. Marketing aside, though, Live in Toronto '69 draws a clear line in the sand: This is the sort of rock travesty Paul would've had to stomach if the Beatles were to abide.