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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