Shows of the Year, 2011

Great year for live music, with only having to travel for work for a few isolated weeks instead of months at a time I saw 125 shows and honestly very few of them were weak.  But these were the 20 that fought for themselves in my memory, that I wanted all my friends to be there seeing and was glad for whatever friends of mine were there, whether it was 100 or 2.  As with the other posts, everything in in Columbus unless otherwise stated. 1.  Tyondai Braxton and the Wordless Music Orchestra, 03/07/11 (Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center;...

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Art Exhibits of 2011

The second of the posts about stuff that turned me on and left me breathless this year.  Every year I get a little more into visual art, with the ravenous hunger of someone trying to catch up because he wasn’t on it enough in his teens (like music or theater).   I’m still a total dilettante, and these are always through untrained eyes but I’m hoping they get trained a little more every year.  I saw some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen this year, all over.  I felt bad I didn’t make it to any new cities – or back to St....

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Theater and Dance of the Year, 2011

This is the first of four blog posts recapping what really turned my crank this year.  Nothing’s comprehensive, obviously everything’s hemmed in by what I managed to see/hear (I got better at cataloging the books I read, but not better enough; hopefully next year will include a fave books and a return of fave movies), which is in turn hemmed in by money/a desire to keep my job, time, and sanity. My year in theater didn’t have the best batting average – sometimes the radar goes wonky.  So I only have 10 things that came to mind for the...

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The Monster needs profit, it cannot stay the same size. House/Divided, Wexner Center, 10/08/11

“Those days like one drawn-out song, monotonously promising.  The quick step, the watchful march march, All were leading here, to this room, where memory stifles the present.  And the future, my man, is long time gone.” --Amiri Baraka, “Letter to E. Franklin Frazier” The Builders Association has a long, fruitful relationship with the Wexner Center, and a dedication to making art that’s deeply tied to the moment.  Sometimes that timeliness works beautifully, sometimes the headlines aren’t digested enough into the...

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I Want it All; Falsettos, Available Light, 09/15/11

After a righteous reading of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformations, Available Light’s season started in earnest this weekend with Falsettos, the Tony winning 1992 Broadway stitching-together of two earlier Off-Broadway one acts, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, with music and lyrics by William Finn and book by James Lapine. This production will look very familiar to anyone who saw last year’s triumphant take on Merrily We Roll Along including at least five of the six cast members, director John Dranschak, and a similarly minimal...

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Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel

“I learned to write I learned to write what might be read on nights like this by one like me” -Leonard Cohen, “The only poem” The Cohen above has been a motto and a signpost for me since I first discovered it my Freshman year of high school and it was the first thing that came to mind while listening to the new Craig Taborn solo record on ECM, Avenging Angel.  It’s a blistering July day where even walking home from lunch will drain and drench you.  I sat down to do some writing and listen to Avenging Angel, and after a...

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Black Swans, Don’t Blame the Stars

“There have been nights, admit it, when you’ve thought you heard your name in the air, your name being sung, a recognition that you’re a part of the star-resplendent sky and the musty vapors of earth – they know who you are, you owe them for this special focus.” -Albert Goldbarth, “Voices” This is a record I had to have so badly I bought the MP3s on Amazon even though we’d already preordered the vinyl (should be here any day, but the turntable isn’t working). The Black Swans are one of the few Columbus bands – at least who...

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The World is Always Ending and Being Born: Two Chicago Revivals

“So sign all your yearbooks, give a last glance We’ve all missed the prom but you’re used to this dance Soon a figureless shadow will drown out the sun Hey baby, it’s the end of the world I hope you had fun” -Slobberbone, “Meltdown” Chicago trip this time was full of the usual suspects of music and dancing and old bars and old friends but had a hard time getting theater into our scheduled.  But the two shows we saw, both revivals, were fucking doozies. Balliwick Chicago held the Midwest premier of Passing Strange, Stew...

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Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Available Light, 04/15/11

“Whether she is writing about what she thinks could, should, or might someday exist or might have once existed, or whether he is dallying with some future fantasia so far away all subjunctive connection with the here and now is severed or is writing about the most nitty-gritty of recognizable landscapes, the writer has still become entranced with and dedicated her- or himself to the realization of what is not.  And all the “socially beneficial functions of art” are minimal before this aesthetic one:  it allows the present meaning: ...

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“Hum” by Sebastian Hawkes Orr, Available Light Theatre, 02/13/11

"I’ve felt so singular, so importantly sorry for myself, or so exquisitely stilled, attuned, that I knew there were night truths unavailable to lovers or the loved thought I might be close to them, and have put off sleep because sleep is social, intrusive… -Stephen Dunn, “Night Truths” “Hum” is the first theatre of the years to move me to tears more than once.  I don’t normally talk about marketing here – at least in part because I don’t know anything about marketing – but this had one of the smartest, most intriguing...

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‘L’effet de Serge by Phillipe Quesne, Wexner Center, 02/03/11

“… And what poet ever sat down in front of a Titian, pulled out his versifying tablet and began to drone?  Don’t complain, my dear, You do what I can only name. -Frank O’Hara, “To Larry Rivers” L’effet de Serge unfolds more gracefully than a clockwork rose and the fine tuning is so precise that even in surface randomness it feels like a fire-born distillation of the audience’s life.  Better, of course, but purer and while in the vein of the mumblecore filmmakers – Swanberg, Katz, Bujalski – it reaches for emotions they’ve...

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Burglar, Skully’s, 01/29/11

I’m not a big one for shit-used-to-be-so-much better.  Because in most ways, it didn’t, every year has its own pleasures and disappointments, but one of the things I was talking about with some pals at work I really do think has change: in the ‘90s people cared enough to say so if something sucked.  I only write about things in this blog that flip that switch in my head, and I don’t intend for that to change, but I figure I’ve got to start walking the walk instead of just ranting to my girlfriend for an hour after a show and leaving my...

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“Sundays, too, my Father got up early…”; Just Kids by Sean Lewis, Available Light, January 16

Writer/performer Sean Lewis has this stunning symbiosis with director Matt Slaybaugh, and it hits new levels of fire and catharsis with their new collaboration Just Kids which is having its world premier at Available Light (in the CPAC for this show).  In a little over an hour, through few props and body language and an added knife in the back of “tapes” of characters who are embodied by Sean and who are not, he draws disparate voices and shows the similarities between them but (and this is every bit as important) he also doesn’t overplay...

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To Each Their Darkness by Gary Braunbeck, Sinister Resonance by David Toop

“We must read their intentions in the puddle of light on the kitchen tiles understand their presence in our home while the neighbors harass them with greetings There are two of them like the eyebrows on one face two guardians of the tide who knock on our walls at every equinox and make our mother and the pomegranate tree bleed” -Venus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker, “Interments” A look at two books that came out within the last year that I loved – unfortunately I misplaced the Toop for a few months so it took me...

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