Favorite Art Exhibits 2009

Every year I see quite a bit - for a dilettante - of visual art but I never think to post a roundup like I do for music most years and I've done for film a few years.  I didn't see enough movies this year but I definitely think I saw enough museum and gallery exhibits that made an impression on me to do this list.  Next year I'm going to keep better track of books and plays for possible similar lists because I probably read 50 books this year but my memory's so bad about what I read this year versus last year making that more trouble...

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Shows of the Year, 2009 (Draft)

This was a year of seeing some fine, fine music.  Last year A. and I decided we’d missed more shows than we saw and this year we set about correcting that imbalance.  Mission accomplished.  Big thing to bring up is my New Orleans trip which I took out of contention for this list both because it’s forever tied in my brain to my stroke and because it was so awesome it overpowers everything else.  Tony Barba playing at Dragon’s Inn, the Condo Fucks and Redondo Beat at One Eyed Jacks, everything at Ponderosa Stomp especially Otis...

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Favorite Records 2009

I tried keeping a running tally of any record that knocked me on my ass this year, and spent the last couple of weeks adding a couple new releases and separating it into the 20 records right now I can see still being awed by in 20 years and honorable mentions which I’m not quite so sure will make that list but still gave me a lot of pleasure and in some cases it was an incredibly close call between what made the list and what didn’t quite.  I’m a little disheartened to see my list is overwhelmingly white (15 out of 20) and male (11 out of...

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Roots Grown Gnarled and Elegant; Jack Rose, Hideout, Chicago, 09/24/09 and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, Fitzgerald’s, Chicago, 09/25/09

Two shows in Chicago that seemed at first glance to be about as far as ou can get on the spectrum that is “roots music”.  Rose has been doing this since his days in the overtone-laden minimal psychedelia of Pelt and his demeanor on stage is of abject seriousness, staring a hole in his acoustic guitar and barely communicating with the audience at all, letting his instrumental music fill the air and get perceived for what it is, removed from his personality.   Borges has three albums out, two on Sugar Hill, and her voice, like a huskier...

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Mephistopheles Leaves Through Another Door; “An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This, His Final Evening”, Theater Oobleck, 09/26/09

No epigram this time, I think the title of the play took up more than enough space, suffice to say I was in Chicago for a friend’s wedding and looking for some theater.  The Michael Shannon play was tempting, so was the Arthur Conan Doyle thing at Steppenwolf, but the early write-up of this promised just the kind of high=minded literariness and wackiness that I couldn't resist. We all filed into two long rows of chairs on either side of the basement of the Chopin Theater, one man sitting at a chair on one end and another standing nervously,...

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Flickering Shapes, Grief, Rage; Luc Tuymans at the Wexner Center

"Knowing I am going away past the sharp edge of the world, she knows we need magic, we need magic stronger than words since just words cannot save us. I follow her to the place where the machines hum and draw blood since we need strong magic, need to rip the skin, let blood, and change the body for life, so it know."-Daphne Gottlieb, "maps and legends"When you see Luc Tuymans paintings they come up on you slowly, some vaguely impressionist techniques through a new sensibility, and then you start seeing them together and you get the patterns, the...

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Church by Young Jean-Lee, Available Light, Riffe Center; August 20, 2009

"I beg for haven: Prisons, let open you gates-A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.Executioners near the woman at the window.Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezebel tonight.Lord, cried out the idols, Don't let us be broken;Only we can convert the infidels tonight.Has God's vintage loneliness turned to vinegar?He's poured rust into the Sacred Well tonight."-Agha Shahid Ali, "Ghazal"I've always loved old gospel music and Renaissance religious art, but the religious expressions that really move me or raise my hackles are plagued with doubt. Like...

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Gesture/Action/Gesture/Action – Vandermark 5, Wexner Center for the Arts, 08/06/09

“By one-sidedly emphasizing only one aspect of the new, Brotzmann transforms the music into a kind of still life, reducing it to a style without concomitant creative substance.” - Amiri Baraka, review of Nipples in Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music I don’t necessarily agree with the above sentiment but I’ve heard similar things about both the Euro improvisers (Brotzmann, Gustafsson, Bailey, Bennink) and the Chicago crowd exemplified by Fred Vandermark, that what you get is a frozen-moment perspective of the fire music...

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Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time, MCA, Chicago; Cy Twombly, The Natural World, Art Institute of Chicago

“You see half the moon, its crescent, and one of the planets, maybe Saturn, maybe Jupiter, in the early night sky over Berlin, through the windows of a taxicab, near Potsdamer Platz. You think: Beauty. No, this is not beauty, maybe not, maybe, this is the rest of it, maybe not, maybe, the rest of beauty, maybe not, maybe, what remains of beauty,maybe not, maybe, what is visible, certainly, uncertain. Your arms would not be able to stretch as far as necessary to form an adequate gesture for beauty (You know that, don't you?). ...

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All So Much Like Me – Eric Taylor, Red Door Tavern, 07/10/09

“Whether writing is knowing or whether it it singing, the love remains, the joy, the daring, the exaltedness when one approaches, at however far a remove, perfection.  Shake the greatest Art ever, and dross will come out.  But honest effort for its own sake is beauty.  If the writer is talented and lucky enough, then the result may be beautiful too.” -William T. Vollman, “Writing” Eric Taylor is the kind of artist who feels like he’s read every book and heard every songwriter worth hearing, and lived everywhere with this amazing...

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A Deck of Masks, Three Takes on Where Theater is in Columbus – Love Stories and Negotiations, Raconteur Theater, 06/06/09; God’s Ear, Available Light, 06/11/09; Blackbird, Catco, 06/14/09

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with and take the temperature of a theater company, with Raconteur I’m sorry to say it had been an entire year, so last weekend I trekked out to see their one-year anniversary show.  I like the theory that you can pay for one half or the other of this series of one acts (7 in total), and I like the space above Club Diversity, where I hadn’t been in quite a while. The show is basically a series of cute comedy skits and it feels like it’s not sharp enough as comedy and not thought-through enough as...

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Sounds That Need an Audience – Amir-El Saffar and the Two Rivers Ensemble, Wexner Center; ? And the Mysterians with Vegas 66, Rumba Cafe; both 04/10/09

Some music you’re better served listening to you in your room.  The too-delicate pop of Ariel Pink, or the strange soft-focus songs of Blank Dogs who underwhelmed me at the Summit but whose records won’t let me be.  The more ambient side of noise and solo-electronics records that just lead to fidgeting and coughing in concert. A lot of the jazz I first came to love was like that for me, and then I found the descendents of ‘60s free jazz and there was something for me in the ecstatic quality of feeling some thing with everyone else in...

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Lay Down Your Head - Scrambler/Seequil, The Abandoned House EP; Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone – Thin Air

In the last three or so years, the Brooklyn scene I associate with the Tea Lounge and Bar4 and Issue Project Room has taken a turn towards embracing song forms, especially the folk song, with improvisation and extended technique shot through its veins to mutate it into the latest breed of creature sharing lineage with everything from Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s readings of “The Old Rugged Cross” to Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. Scrambler/Seequil, principally the work of guitarist Mike Gamble and vocalist-painter Devin Febboriello...

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The gap between expectation and reality – Continuous City, Wexner Center, April 17, 2009

I remember the moment when I felt like I had to redress the disparity of my friends.  For dozens of folks I would talk to for hours on line, by phone, by e-mail, those were hours I wasn’t meeting anyone, wasn’t even exposing myself to the chance to meet anyone outside.  But at the same time, most of those online friends are friends to this day, and seeing them a couple of times a year or every couple of years is a joy.  So I don’t think there’s an easy answer to how readily we can be connected with technology but how that method...

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Waves of Nostalgia, Undertow Warning – Gaslight Anthem, Newport; Garotas Suecas, Rumba Cafe; 03/30/09

“Well it’s past quarter to three And it’s past the midnight hour Mustang Sally’s left the building And we’re so much worse without her If I could put down this old hammer I’d take you somewhere new” -Gaslight Anthem, “Casanova, Baby!” I’ve said a million times that Gaslight Anthem reads on paper like a band I’d hate, from the pop-punk guitars so bright, clean and sharp you could shave with them to the cliché-riddled lyrics to the delivery that shifts from one influence to another as easily as if it was a G. Love and Special Sauce...

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Saturday Night Desire Comes in All Shades – Larkin Grimm at Cafe Bourbon Street, 02/07/09

“Pouring on the garbage and it’s filling up my car My suffering is meaningless and sticking like the tar That smothers all grass and lets me drive it to the bar" And if you want to handle me, just tell me who you are” -Larkin Grimm, “Dominican Rum” The weather finally broke and broke so hard it felt like I was some kind of desperate explorer staggering over the cracking ice-skin of the world and just trying to keep my footing Saturday night.  But I might have been staggered in other ways, when I think about it. First to Ruby Tuesday...

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The Cry of Dreams – Antony and the Johnsons, The Southern Theater, 02/04/09

“I wonder, in all of science fiction, if there have been two universes this discordant, or what it means that there can be a suffering so intense its balance only exists somewhere in the next life.” -Albert Goldbarth, “The Elements” No, I didn’t go to the Antony show in 2002.  At the time I’d heard that record but thought it was a novelty, it didn’t click for me until the second album but that, and the new one The Crying Light, are both wonders.  So even though he’s playing in NY at Town Hall while we’re there, I wanted...

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Favorite Live Shows 2008

"I bought a whiskey for the gypsyAnd she turned my leather back into skinJust a fleeting sense of that rare suspenseI once thought made the world go 'roundBut now there's no one to talk toWhen the lines go down"-James McMurtry, "Hurricane Party"So yeah, like everybody else, I'm trying to blog somewhere that's not Livejournal. Also, since this is standalone and not principally social networking, my hope is that it'll force me to write more often and more substantially.So if you don't know me, welcome, if you know me, welcome back. This'll be basically...

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