Screen of Distance

Moises Kaufman, 33 Variations – Available Light

2012-01-16T05:43:00.001-08:00

The day is full of noise and I am
grateful, it’s full of grace
and light that takes me
up and out. I am serious
again, forsythia bloom early
this year, I am going to New York,
goodby. Intense
experience of pleasure has never
moved me as much as expectation
of an end to it. Seems real,
is real. Hello.
-Tim Dlugos, untitled

Before I get into minute details of plot and incident and technicality – go see Available Light’s production of Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations. It’s not here for long, just till next Sunday and if you’ve got any interest in theatre in town whatsoever. It’s one of the most consistently acted, moving productions of a play I’ve seen in town in years – a simple story so beautifully told that I was moved to tears by the time it was over and I have a hard time picturing anyone I know not walking out enjoying it.

Kaufman’s 33 Variations is the an artful braiding of the story of a musicologist, Katherine Brandt, in Bonn researching Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations for what she understands to be her final paper before succumbing to Lou Gehrig’s disease, the story of her daughter torn between helping her and letting her do this, and the story of Beethoven’s composing of said variations.

The stage is hung with era-indeterminate cloth half-obscuring a platform through which you can see a piano and its player; the cloth is also the backdrop for projections, everything from text – announcing which Variation is currently being played/discussed/underpinning the action – to closeups of manuscript paper to character’s faces when the action has them in a specific position where that wouldn’t be visible to the audience. The foreground has a table and a few chairs.

Eleni Papaleonardos directs and does an astonishing job of balancing the little moments with the more grandiose gestures and getting the pacing just right. I used the word braiding earlier but the symmetry in the material can get beautifully messy, more of a tangle, and the moments where simultaneous action in the different periods and locations overlap, even with characters saying the same word at the same time, could’ve been cheap or too easy but it’s built with a subtlety and the choreography of bodies moving is so natural that it has the intended effect, it hits the audience like a thunderbolt: Oh. Of course.

That piano is played by Dave McMahon and he’s the grout in this production. As it should be, everyone is in the shadow of that electric, intense music. Having a piano player instead of recordings not only lets the production use only fragments they want or show Beethoven working through sequences, stumbling or first drafts, but it also provides breath. Another physical voice on stage blending the colors with the actors. To the extent that when the other 7 characters dance near the end, it doesn’t feel like an unevenly matched set for the waltz, the piano player is given his due.

Josie Merkle plays Dr. Katherine Brandt, the afflicted musicologist desperate to get one last thing done, and she’s a marvel. I’d last seen her as a very good Jocasta in an uneven Oedipus Rex but here she soars, mapping out every part of the character as we know it. The journey takes us from her early dismissing of Diabelli’s source waltz as trite and mediocre and trying to really figure out what Beethoven saw in it and ending up at the place of transfiguration. Matt Hermes as Beethoven is always a physical presence even when not on stage, and the energy of his body when he is out is stunning, all the frustration and desire and desperate, searching, ego play out in every bit of his action.

Adam Humphrey is very good as the nerdy, smitten nurse who falls for Brandt’s daughter, Clara, funny and charming when he needs to be and a solid rock, at times delivering exposition in a way that doesn’t feel like an infodump and keeping the audience emotionally invested in what’s going on. Acacia Duncan is first among equals in a cast without any bad parts, she’s luminous, coiled anticipation.

The supporting cast keeps the quality extremely high, from Beethoven’s friend Anton Schindler played by Nate Roderick, Diabelli played by David Tull initially with the broadest comedy possible then slowly given shading, and Emily Bach as Gertrude Ladenburger. Sound and light are always good at Available Light productions, provided here by Dave Wallingford and Carrie Cox, but they have more work to do than usual and it’s fascinating to see a doctor’s visit or the raging currents of tinnitus are implied wholly with sound and light.

A. said this might be the perfect Available Light show, because it’s a crystallization of their overarching obsession about why you make art when the world’s crumbling, when your life is crumbling, and what’s the point of it all. I’d agree with that but what I found even more beautiful here is the academic understanding transfiguration – the derivative work that’s greater because of the greater artist’s hand, but really finds its juice in bringing out all the qualities that were already in the lower-rent art that people danced and drank and fell in love and fought to. It’s a reminder to always work, and always strive, and never settle… but also to keep your eyes and ears open to what real people, not just your fellow nerds/aesthetes, are watching and reading and listening to; you never know when you’ll find that kernel of your next great obsession.

Like Sondheim wrote, “There are prizes all around you if you’re wise enough to see.”

Records of the Year, 2011

2012-01-02T13:18:00.001-08:00

There are always great records getting made, no matter how bad it gets. This year I felt a little disconnected, got a little caught up in trend chasing and my motto for 2012 is fuck that noise. I still found stuff that knocked me sideways and this is only a sampling.

1. Blueprint, Adventures in Counter Culture – Long Columbus’s best producer, maybe Columbus’s best rapper for the last handful of years, but as big a fan as I am? This record is a full-on motherfucker, breaking through to new clarity and new truth and leaving the listener exhilarated. The beats have a new spacious quality, catchy and head-knocking but everything in sharper quality and the little details are more apparent and get stuck in your head – the vocoder and synth bounce of “Automatic”; the kicks and subtle static on “Go Hard or Go Home”; the huge, sparingly doled out snare sound on “My Culture” – everything feels of a piece, as an album, but without sounding samey or monochromatic. And the words are, of course, top notch, and like the beats, the product of the same mind but still varied in tone from the singing anthem “So Alive” to the wry barfly story I think all my friends can relate to “Keep Bouncing” to the clenched fist ars poetica “Radio-Inactive”. Lines you can quote and you’ll find something new every listen.

2. Tune-Yards, Whokill – This might’ve been the first record I wholeheartedly loved this year; a slap across the face, a Graceland for my generation but really synthesizing and really absorbing the African influence instead of just appropriating. Rickety keyboards, fierce lyrics, fiery drumming and that perfect sandpaper voice going from a scream to almost cabaret-style recitation. The use of negative space and dynamics is unparalleled this year or most years, quiet and loud both have aggression and sensuality; dance and protest music at the same time, fist pumping choruses that keep the beautiful release but also undercut it. A record like life, where sex and politics and love and joy are all more complicated then they seem and at first easily digestible slogans twist and obscure and reveal themselves over time.

3. Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin’ –Raphael Saadiq can do almost no wrong in my book. Where his last record The Way I See It was a fizzy Motown riff with some of the catchiest songs of his career, a record very much about leaving other things out, Stone Rollin’ is closer to his classic solo debut Instant Vintage, a big, sweaty all-encompassing look at the world. Beatles strings, Chicago soul horns, greasy organ, bass lines from James Jamerson play with bass lines from Steve Swallow, and Saadiq’s own guitar in the manner of Curtis Mayfield or Waylon Jennings are jumbled up in the song and the record. This a record with songs for every dance step you know and dance steps you need to make up, familiar and warm, with the nuttiness and complexity of the finest bourbon.

4. Tyshawn Sorey, Oblique-I – I heard some amazing jazz this year but this one made it impossible to pay attention to anything else the first few times I heard it. Sorey takes the spare, icy song forms of Koan and puts them in the instrumentation context of more traditional jazz – guitar, alto sax, keys, bass, drums. The songs recall Bartok as much as Paul Motian, contained and folky enough to think you grasp them but wriggling out from that grasp and never letting you get too comfortable. Loren Stillman’s alto sax does a lot of melodic work but just as frequently does an amazing job seeming like it’s supporting the real melody in the rhythm section. Todd Neufield, a name new to me, does a perfect job on guitar, alternating between spreading almost indistinguishable grout between organ, sax and bass with Grant Green ice skating lines and Joe Strummer jagged stabs that really let the texture show. Keys and bass are also more than fine. But Sorey’s drums, of course, carry the day, he sounds like the best parts of every drummer I’ve ever loved – Max Roach, Andrew Cyrille, Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones, Jeff Watts, Paul Motian – but sounds so distinctive he’s a drummer you can pick out from a mile away in a million contexts. Never better than doing his own compositions, sometimes using the snare and hi-hat for expected propulsion, sometimes just painting shadows with the snare, sometimes letting the song hang with the kick like a heartbeat, and usually doing at least two of these things at the same time. Breathtaking.

5. Black Swans, Don’t Blame the Stars – Every time a new Black Swans record comes out I say it, and I don’t see any signs of stopping: Jerry Decicca is the best songwriter in town and one of the best working today. I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about Don’t Blame the Stars but to say again, it’s not only as beautiful as all the Black Swans records but it’s a different kind of beautiful. This is a record more concerned with the outside world and maybe more accessible to people who found the earlier work intimidating or hermetic. All the playing is amazing, from Noel Sayre’s violin – this is the last record of their he worked on before his tragic early death – through Canaan Faulkner’s bass, Chris Forbes’ guitar, Jon Beard’s keys, Brian Jones’ drumming, all recorded crisply and warmly by Keith Hanlon. If these songs let you go, you might be dead inside.

6. Amy Lavere, Stranger Me –Lavere’s always been a good singer and an interesting bass player but for me this is the record where she really came into her own. From the opening track, “Damn Love Song” with its caveman stomp drums, surging organ and guitar stings this record takes old forms and plays them with a simultaneous knowledge of the history and with such fire and confidence that they sound brand new. One of the best breakup records I’ve ever heard, hitting all the moods from sexy to angry to wry with lyrics that lift the narrative above the self and give it independent life. Arrangements are just surprising enough without being showy, as on “You Can’t Keep Me” with a great Pat Place post-disco bass line and mariachi trumpets after “I’m not your pet / I’m gonna break the chain you have / Tied around my neck / I’m stomping out here / I hope the dishes rattle down / Off your shelf / And if I see you first / I’ll run like hell.”

7. Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel –I wrote about this record at some length already. A shuffling of every great jazz piano solo and a meditation with so much life in it it feels breathless.

8. Times New Viking, Dancer Equired – Times New Viking always had hooks, but this warm, clearer record put the lyrics and the melodies a little more easily graspable. Everyone stepped their game up in a more accessible way, Jared Phillips’ guitar, Adam Elliot’s drums, Beth Murphy’s keys, all contribute equally to infectious riffs and sticky melodies and the singing claims a more central space. In sanding the fuzz down, instead of the smoothness being uncomplicated, new contours showed up and the swaggering melancholy that was always there was irresistible now. For what it’s worth, this record also boasted my favorite love song of the year, “Don’t Go to Liverpool.”

9. Now Ensemble, Awake – My favorite bit of chamber music this year. The first track, “Change” was one of the most stunning things I heard all year with pulsing, overlapping cells of horns and piano and little guitar stings building a painting in turns, stops and surges and perfectly controlled splatter. And the rest of the record maybe didn’t better better that but it kept the intensity up for the rest of its length.

10. Jessica Pavone, Army of Strangers – Jessica Pavone comes out just about every year with a record that tops everything she’s done and justifies my fandom, whether it needed justifying in the first place. This record takes her classical work (as on last year’s lump in the throat Songs of Synastry and Solitude) and her improv work (with Anthony Braxton, Taylor Ho Bynum and others) and puts them in a string-driven rock context that no one’s done this well since the first couple of Dirty Three records. Moody washes of ink animated Stan Brakhage style, color rupturing darkness and silence splitting sound apart and vice versa.

11. Hayes Carll, KMAG YOYO (And Other American Stories) – Hayes Carll should be the great hope of mainstream country if the world would pay attention. A thin voice with a tight-enough band but a textbook example of the sum being greater than the parts. The record has a few curveballs, what feels like enough weirdness to keep the writer from getting bored or complacent, as in the cut-up morphine dream rockabilly of the title track and the Eddie Cochrane meets Booker T boogie for the new Depression of “Stomp and Holler”. But where this excels is its takes on traditionalism, the sensitive-but-not-quite-broken Merle Haggard ballad of “Chances Are” and the almost-minimal break up remembered with a smile of “Bye Bye Baby” and the slightly political sex duet with Cary Ann Hearst of “Another Like You.” He writes melodies you’re sure you’ve heard before and lyrics that sound like the bar conversation you always think you had until the next morning’s phone call to rattle off your indiscretions.

12. Gabriel Kahane, Where Are the Arms – Kahane’s second album of pop songs is an ice sculpture of an exposed nerve. It takes up the gauntlet thrown down by those beautiful David Garland records and pushes on the rib cage, connecting the inherent minimalism in rock with the pulse of minimalism and wrapping it around heartbreaking songs sung perfectly.

13. Psychedelic Horseshit, Laced – Matt Whitehurts’s Psychedelic Horesehit project is often the best kind of frustrating. He has a habit of discarding something the second he seems to have it under control, taking that one kernel of truth out of it and putting it in a context where he’s no longer so confident. So this second proper album was a surprise but not a surprise at all. Working principally with percussionist Ryan Jewell, this is a record of pop dance motifs including tropicalia and Eurodisco turned inside out and held together by Whitehurst’s guitar under layers of dirty gauze and that sneering, post-Ron House lyrical sensibility. This record was a breath of fresh air whenever it came on my ipod and I couldn’t help but stop random and let the whole thing play.

14. Anna Calvi, Anna Calvi – This record is a monument to complicated, raw sensuality. As much about the way breath feels in her (for a lot of definitions of “her”) lungs, inside and out as it is about the on-the-page content. That said, the content’s pretty damn good too with songs worthy of Roy Orbison or Nick Cave – it wasn’t a surprise when she opened for Grinderman – with minimal percussion and blankets of harmonium, cut through by oil-spill strings and Calvi’s flamenco guitar. This record has the sexiness of being held in mid-air over curved, sharpened knives.

15. Hunx and his Punx, Too Young to Be in Love – There are few things I like more than girl group music, and no one’s writing better songs in that mold than Hunx.

16. Baby Dee, Regifted Light – Another great, piano-heavy record from one of the great songwriters of this confused, joyful, fucked-up age. A few gorgeous instrumentals around Baby Dee’s always heart-wrenching and frequently hilarious songs, particular attention should be paid to the title track “His blessing glistens on my back / And multiplies / As I regift it to your eyes / Its gentleness increases”.

17. Psandwich, Northren Psych –Every few years, Ron House reappears with a new set of songs that put everyone in Columbus on notice. One of his best bands, and that’s saying something, and they’re firing on all cylinders with Zac Szymusiak’s drums heavy on kick and tom, Bobby Silver’s melodic bass playing and the snaking, searing guitars of Brett Burleson and John Olexovitch building barbed wire sculptures around House’s voice and lyrics.

18. Harris Eisenstadt, September Songs – Eistenstadt’s compositions just get stronger and his drumming continues to blow me away. As much as I love his usual sextet, there’s a lushness and immediacy in this trio – with Angelica Sanchez on drums and Ellery Eskelin on tenor – that I can’t get enough of. Ballads that harken back to the dark-sexy side of ‘60s Blue Note but without ever being a museum piece.

19. Cheater Slicks, Guttural: Live 2010 –It’s a live Cheater Slicks record they thought was good enough to release. Of course I think anyone reading this needs to buy it. This band has been on a big resurgence the last few years and this does an amazing job of capturing the volatile, snarling energy of them on a good night in a little bar.

20. Charalambides, Exile –Everything those of us who are fans expect from a Charlambides record but somehow avoiding the trap of being stale or precious. Christina Carter’s voice still cuts through the guitar landscapes like a knife and oblique narratives float on top of everything, meditative but always unsettling.

21. Follies, Broadway Revival Cast Recording – I’ve been obsessed with Sondheim for as long as I’ve cared about music – the same friend introduced me to Sondheim as, a few years later, introduced me to whiskey; I’m never sure if I should send him a gift every year or punch him – but the original cast recording of Follies always sounded really shoddy, despite the talk (which I believe) being that it was one of the best casts of all time. So I knew the songs but didn’t know them until this new revival. The cast is just about perfect – Bernadette Peters sounding incredibly fragile as Sally Durant, Ron Raines as Ben Stone coming apart – and everything is just clear enough. These are ghosts meant to be seen in close up.

22. Jenny Hval, Viscera –A perfect title for a near-perfect record. This is an accounting of everything inside and everything that keeps a person moving, without obscuring any of the dripping unevenness.

23. Matthew Shipp, Art of the Improviser – A perfect summing up of Shipp’s solo piano and working trio, taking on his compositions from many periods of his career and standards and applying a cubist’s logic to get at the real emotional, structural core.

24. Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges – One of the most stunning solo saxophone composed records I’ve ever heard. Little dashes of electronics and brief guest appearances by Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden help fill out the universe. Just like the stunning Tara Donovan sculpture in my other best-of list I said used mylar to trap the light it’s sculpting with, these are sculptures of pure breath, exorcism via exhalation.

25. Noveller, Glacial Glow –Sarah Lipstate continues the evolution of the Noveller project getting cleaner and more focused but always keeping up that intensity and that mystery. As a solo guitar record this is an interesting companion to the Stetson record on the list, how much feeling can you funnel through that intense, meditative stripping-away and how do you make it flower, how do you make it explode into a night sky?

Shows of the Year, 2011

2011-12-31T13:03:00.001-08:00

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; Manhattan) – The sound of the world cracking open and being born. Playing a record I’d already been in love with but hearing it in a great-sounding room with all the woodwinds and strings and a four-person vocals/kazoo section was eye opening to say the least. Colors bleeding into each other and exploding in the back of my head and this raw, perfect joy. Just joy.

2. JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, 12/02/11 (The Basement) – JC Brooks also appeared on my theater list this year but the first time they came to Columbus doing their set – they were the backing band for my top-rated Numero Group show at the Lincoln Theater a few years ago – reaffirmed their status as the best live band working today. A new lineup with no horns, stripped down and ready for action, with those same great songs that embrace everything from James Brown to the Delfonics to Johnny Thunders to Sonic Youth as dance music. Even with a sadly small crowd – probably 50 people – Brooks didn’t for one second phone it in, a sweat-drenched, perfectly sung performance that had everyone in the palm of his hand, and the band was right there behind him. Music like this is what’s keeping soul alive.

3. Liminanas/Gaz Gaz, 08/19/11 (The Summit) – A band, Liminanas, that comes to the US for the first time (at least for a full tour) and really come out with something to prove. They and Gaz Gaz teamed up to do both sets as a barbed wire wall of 7-piece sound. Great, catchy songs sung in a manner just disaffected enough - caring/not caring blurring into one another. A mix of elements that’s not new – a dash of Velvet Underground pulse instead of beat, ‘60s girl group vocals and drums, Ramones drive, clean and dirty guitars switching prominence between verse and chorus, and a tambourine player who looks like he’s having the time of his life – but all played with such fire and charm that it sounded brand new. The whiskey was sweeter, the smiles grew bigger and by the time we all stumbled into the night slick with sweat we felt washed clean.

4. Budos Band, 02/26/11 (Outland on Liberty) – For all my bitching about poor Columbus crowds, once in a while my city really does me proud and this time they did it again with Budos Band. The last of three shows A. and I made it to that night (and not a stinker in the bunch, I should say, Rodney Crowell acoustic and the Bill Frisell/Greg Leisz tribute to Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant were both top notch also) and it was a scorcher. Promoting their great third record, III, as the sax player said, “It’s the one on the merch table with the fuckin’ cobra”, bari sax melting over the crowd, trumpet raining knives, bass twitching like a raw nerve and walls of percussion and guitar undulating in time. These last three shows on the list, I danced more than I did at any other show.

5. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society and Dan Zezelj, Brooklyn Babylon, 11/09/11 (Brooklyn Academy of Music; Brooklyn) – I was really torn whether to put this in the “theatre” list or the “shows” list, but as good as Zezelj’s images and animation were – and they were very good – this was all about the music for me. Everything perfectly balanced, big, brassy, cinematic music that harkened back to classic Basie and Jones/Lewis but also full of modern riffs and touches including electronics and the whole band playing percussion, no boundaries but always within the realm of the narrative, nothing showy. I was so enraptured I didn’t want this to end; barring a DVD, I’d love a CD of this music.

6. Robbie Fulks, 05/23/11 (The Hideout; Chicago) – Fulks’ Monday residency at the Hideout is a treat everyone who can get to Chicago should experience as often as possible. The joy of seeing Fulks as a player and a songwriter not hemmed in by budget or travel or the third booked night in a row where he’s lucky to get gas money has really brought a flowering of the artist he’s always been. His ad hoc recurring band the night A. and I were in Chicago, The Scavengers, had Robbie Gjersoe on guitar, KC McDonough on bass and organ, and Gerald Dowd on drums and everyone singing. As purely fun a night of music as I had, full of wacky surprises – bebop and funk instrumentals played as perfectly as anyone right now, covers of Jon Hartford and Bobbie Gentry and Bill Fox, some new Fulks originals that were heartbreaking and wry as always, everything good about the last 40 years of pop music in a tiny room played out of love.

7. Hell Shovel and Day Creeper, 10/05/11 (Ace of Cups) – Anyone who’s ever seen one of these lists knows I love Demon’s Claws, but even I was unprepared for Jeff Clarke’s new band. The Riders of the Purple Sage on mushrooms, Old 97s with a taste for meth instead of whiskey, whatever comparisons you want to make the material and playing is more than strong enough to stand up to it. Songs that split the difference between Carl Perkins and Johnny Thunders but with a deep Suicide love of drone; my happiest musical surprise all year.

8. Black Swans, 12/30/11 (house concert) – The Black Swans ending a pretty great year that also had them releasing their best album so far and touring like mad, with the wrap-up at this recorded house concert for an invited crowd. They rolled through 15 songs including new stuff – that sounded fantastic, particularly “Fickle and Faded” – and most of their records, played with characteristic warmth and practiced telepathy. Songs of loneliness and love bringing a community together.

9. Josef Van Wissem with Che Chen and Robbie Lee and Paul Metzger and Mike Shiflet, 06/18/11 (Skylab) – van Wissem’s lute playing’s always extraordinary and this set had him, for lack of a better word, more rock and roll style with a deep Keith Richards rhythm but without ever dumbing down. The flurries of notes all felt perfectly inevitable, and the backing with Che Chen on tapes, percussion and violin and Robbie Lee on a homemade bass clarinet was a wall of sound that cracked my rib cage and left me trying to explain this to people I knew wouldn’t care and not giving a damn. Mike Shiflet’s opening set was transcendent and Paul Metzger’s set after them of bowed extra-string banjo (I wrote down 12 but thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 18) was the perfect thing to send us all back into the night. The kind of thing Skylab does better than anywhere else in town that makes Columbus lucky to have them.

10. Puffy Areolas and Unholy 2, 04/02/11 (Cafe Bourbon Street) – For a while, the Puffys have been leading Ohio’s charge of joyful, anarchic, greasy rock. Damon taking up lead vocals as well as guitar started the concentration and adding Bim Thomas (of legendary Bassholes, Obnox, anything worth playing on fame) turned the flame bright blue. As strong a sweaty, beer-drenched show as I saw all year, the room all leaning in, huddled close as one and dancing simultaneously – that’s right, we were defying motherfucking physics. The Unholy 2 set afterward that turned into an improbably rocking all star jam was also damn fine.

11. Signal Ensemble and Third Coast Percussion, 03/13/11 (Le Poisson Rouge; Manhattan) – Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians at LPR played flawlessly, with rhythms that sank all the way into your skin and made the molecules of the room vibrate in countless different directions at once. The capper on one of the best New York trips I’ve ever had, and after it was over, the four of us took a cab to my favorite bar and toasted the night without words.

12. Orgone, 07/14/11 (Ravari Room) and Gang Gang Dance, 07/12/11 (Double Happiness) – Two shows in the same week that were very different but equally invigorating takes on rhythm. Gang Gang Dance, in one of my favorite new bars of the year almost uncomfortable packed, which makes that kind of music even better. The waves of people mean you can’t not dance and the long neon taffy synthesizer lines and percussion like a dozen heartbeats in a sack put everyone over the top. Orgone, sadly playing to maybe ten people at Ravari Room, where I’ve seen a number of great shows, giving their 100% and swirling their psychedelia through vintage Roy Ayers style smooth funk, occasionally throwing us with a hard break. Bliss.

13. V-Roys, 12/27/11 (Southgate House; Newport, KY) – The Southgate House was one of my favorite venues in Ohio (yeah, I know it’s Kentucky, but it’s the greater Cincinnati area and it doesn’t occur to me in the same breath as venues in Louisville or wherever) which is closing after the 31st. This show did justice to every great memory I had there. Mic Harrison and Scott Miller’s solo projects are fantastic with great songs but there’s a special magic with those two voices and guitars bouncing off each other, which is in no way meant to slight the swinging, driving, supple rhythm section of Paxton Sellers and Jeff Bills. Still nailing everything from slowly blooming explosions of heartbreak and rage like Miller’s “Lie I Believe”, “Goodnight Loser” and “Sorry Sue” and grimy, ragged power-pop like Harrison’s “Amy 88”, “Sooner or Later”, and Miller’s “Guess I Know I’m Right.” Sure, maybe this went on a little too long and had too many midtempo songs but when someone hasn’t been around in 12 years and they just came back for a few drinks and some sweet memories before they vanish back into the ether, indulgence isn’t a sin it’s a blessing.

14. Group Doueh, Chicha Libra, and Mucca Pazza, 06/25/11 (Cleveland Museum of Art; Cleveland) – Every museum fundraiser should be this good, in all senses. Well run, plenty of places to get a drink, lines are managed and the music is perfectly curated, never an afterthought. Group Doueh’s blistering guitar over synth and gospel vocals in twisting mobius strips took my breath away. Chicha Libre’s Peruvian pop takes on everything from classic French ballads to the theme from the Simpsons worked just as well in the midwest under a warm, cloudy sky as in a tiny Brooklyn club. Mucca Pazza worked better in these circumstances than I’d ever seen them.

17. Paradoxical Frog, 11/10/11 (Cornelia Street Cafe; Manhattan) – I saw Tyshawn Sorey twice this year, both in sax/piano/drum contexts; along with being blown away by his playing even more than usual, Paradoxical Frog stunned me with their compositional rigor and ultimate dedication to sound. Kris Davis’ piano sounds better every time I see her and she was a massive gravitational force with Ingrid Laubrock’s tenor swooping in and pulling out, weaving through Sorey’s upside down lightning storms. A band all about tone and feeling but still steering clear of any clichéd way to think about those concepts.

16. Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, 11/18/11 (Wexner Center for the Arts) – The kind of thing the Wexner does better than anyone in town. An invigorating show where the main instrumental voices were ngoni of different sizes (may be called something different, like the difference between a mandolin and a mandocello) ringing out in different ranges with different resonance, under gorgeous not quite gospel vocals, waves of groove and melody melting in and washing over each other and the audience.

17. Six Organs of Admittance and Black Swans, o8/08/11 (Skully’s) – I don’t get a lot of joy out of ragging on promoters or venues but the way this show was handled was a fucking travesty. An act that hadn’t been here in a while, that had always drawn in the realm of 100 people played to 12 by my count not including the opening band, and I can almost guarantee won’t be here again for a long, long time if ever. But beyond that ass-chapping lack of promotion, this was a beautiful, meditative thing with Six Organs (in solo acoustic mode like the first time I saw him) soothing silence and reflection in paintings of his own blood on a rainy Tuesday right as some chill was puncturing the end of summer.

18. Guitar Wolf and Cheap Time, Bottom Lounge, 05/19/11 (Chicago) – Chicago might be my favorite place to see a straight up, do shots and bounce into people rock show as well as boasting some of my favorite people to see that kind of show with. Cheap Time came out and got us all moving with what Ken Hite dubbed “The Pretenders recreated as a Replacements tribute band”, Brit-inflected Pop songs with a rust belt sensibility (and a male vocalist really reviving Hynde’s clipped vocal style and range) played by three people bashing through their instruments at the very edge of their ability like it’s the only thing that matters. And Guitar Wolf came out and destroyed like always, Ramones songs played twice as fast and three times as hard, with stage presence that harkened back to KISS and the Kinks.

19. Doveman, Nadia Sirota and Owen Pallett, 03/09/11 (Merkin Hall; Manhattan) – Let’s have some love shown to Judd Greenstein’s work with the Ecstatic Music Festival, I’m bummed I can’t make the 2012 iteration (just can’t pull off a trip up there till April this year) but it’s always packed with stuff that I’m drooling over. This example from last year was perfect. It started with Owen Pallett doing a number of songs from his mesmerizing Heartland and reaching back to his earlier work under the name Final Fantasy, really reaching into his lungs and playing with his abilities as a singer, enjoying not having to set up loops, really taking advantage of having the string quartet with him. Then Nadia Sirota played some gorgeous viola pieces, slowly reassembling the quartet behind her, including a new piece Pallett wrote for her. And Doveman with his charming banter and intoxicating piano and vocals, backed by everyone who’d been on stage that night playing much of his last record and brand new work with new arrangements.

20. Plastic Crimewave Sound and Psychedelic Horseshit, 01/28/11 (Skylab) – The first time I saw Psychedelic Horseshit’s new material live with Matt Whitehurst and Ryan Jewell building taffy sculptures of JG Ballard cityscapes, layer on layer of synth and guitar and percussion both organic and synthesized. Then Plastic Crimewave came out and did their patented art-rock, Stooges through Hawkwind through earlier Crimson, with those great songs and guitars turned up just loud enough in that little room to pry your third eye open.

Art Exhibits of 2011

2011-12-13T16:24:00.001-08:00

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. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc – but I saw plenty of stuff that sparked me emotionally or got me writing or even made me want to be a better person.

As with the other three, unless stated otherwise it was seen in Columbus, Ohio.

1. Glenn Ligon, America (Whitney Museum; NYC) –I remember pretty clearly the first time I saw Ligon’s work (depressingly recently) at the Wexner Center here in Columbus and how stunned I was. His work still stuns me, both what I’ve seen before and what’s new to me, the potency of the narrative and the politics suffusing the aesthetic but never losing sight of the purely aesthetic pleasures. No narrative, no history, no theory is left unquestioned in Ligon’s work and the drugs all come to you through needles in your eyes.

2. Willem de Kooning, de Kooning: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art; NYC) – I was already a de Kooning fan but this retrospective was perfect. This is a textbook case of how to do a blockbuster exhibition that’s earned its bonafides and even has things around some corners for the true fans/geeks to surprise and awe. For me, this was more about the pastels and sketches and the final room of his late Alzheimer's paintings, all sharper lines and eye-scorching color, but if you didn’t know anything this would show you all you need to know and if you know everything this would be gorging yourself on your favorite chocolates.

3. Josephine Halvorson, What Looks Back (Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery; NYC) – The most stunning new set of paintings I’ve seen in a long time, the kind of work that makes your hair stand up. Generally inert objects: a door starting to rot, a set of channel locks, masonry coming apart, in one of the most arresting moments a splayed rib cage, all in uncomfortable/disorienting closeup. They’re painted very realistically, except for inhuman perspectives, and tiny expressionistic touches – a hole that’s one blob of color – that add to the overall mystique. The color palette is muted and warm but also a little drab, shutting down the sensual eroticism as it starts to rise up. Like a Raymond Carver poem or a Gary Braunbeck short story, the straightforwardness belies other metaphors, the whiff of mortality gets overpowering at times, but even things starting to go still hum with life.

4. Nathalie Djurberg, Human Behavior (Wexner Center for the Arts) – The blockbuster of the Wexner Center’s spring exhibitions was the very fine Louise Bourgeois/Hans Bellmer exhibit but the Djurberg was what I kept going back to and kept stunning me. Her videos – with music by Hans Berg – got chuckles for their vintage claymation format, “the darkest Davey and Goliath episode ever” and it uses that childlike sense to drop the hammer. Sexual abuse, racial violence, the grinding under the wheels of avarice keep pounding at you but there’s such a strong understanding of psychology and the nuance of the medium that it never gets didactic. The audience is engaged while they’re repulsed.

5. David Wojnarowicz, Spirituality 1974-1990 (PPOW Gallery, NYC) – On a slightly smaller, more focused scale than the De Kooning, this was a blistering retrospective with a knife in the eye at every corner. This is a scalpel into the dark, crusted-over cynicism in the heart of belief. Bursting with arresting images – ants climbing over classical art, a crucifix, a gun, a conquistador; the iconic “Silence = Death” with the lips sewn shut; collages with homeless children and headlines and babies and luchadores – that led to the hope inside of all defiance and the defiance inside of all hope. I walked out of this practically in tears.

6. Alexis Rockman, A Fable for Tomorrow (Wexner Center for the Arts) – An environmental cri de coeur, full of acrylic paintings of nature gone wrong. Genetically altered animals ready for slaughter, actual trash between the painting and the surface, but kept from being an airbrushed van or a Heavy Metal cover with the intellectual rigor and deep reality under everything. There’s a playfulness that underscores the horror and a rigorous classicism in the compositions. Every time I saw these there was always more to see.

7. Various Artists, The Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven (Canzani Center at Columbus College of Art and Design) – James Voorhies blew me away with his curation of this group exhibit at the local private art school. The Love and Rockets-based title was a feint, attaching the show to a more obvious nostalgia and lulling you into false comfort before the more rigorous look at the detritus of post-modernism. Highlights included: Mark Leckey’s and Alejandro Vidal’s homoerotic, hypnotic videos, Lara Kohl’s stunning ice sculpture of a remembered fairy tale inside an unadorned old freezer, Mary Lum’s photograph and painting hybrids that re-energized things that might go unseen or unnoticed.

8. Various Artists, Nulla Dies Sine Linea (Instituto Cervantes; Chicago) – A fantastic look at contemporary Spanish drawing. Breathtaking comic strips, Santiago Talavera’s empty but overstuffed with endorsements golf island. Sure, with the 23 artists represented there was going to be some chaff but what was good left me chattering like an idiot and there was a massive bounty of riches here.

9. Frances Stark, My Best Thing (PS1; NYC) – An episodic video of Stark’s online sex chat transcripts “acted” out by what looked like digital Playmobil figures in their underwear with subtitles and read by a text reader. I didn’t expect much either, but this piece was entrancing. Suddenly three chapters later I look around and not only am I still there, four people who were in when I came into the gallery are still there too. A look at what we talk about when we’re trying to get laid and how much deeper that intimacy leads us into everything else we talk about. This was a perfect refocusing after the interesting-but-flawed September 11 exhibit upstairs and a work that gave me a lot to chew on for the trip back to Manhattan.

10. Mark Grotjahn, Three to Five Faces (Shane Campbell Gallery; Chicago) – Grotjahn’s rhythmic, tribal abstractions, layers of paint like stalagmites forming on cave walls was exactly what I wanted to see on a sunny Chicago afternoon right off the Blue line. The kind of ego-obliterating, meditative show I love and don’t see that often.

11. Frank Stella, Irregular Polygons (Toledo Museum of Art; Toledo) – A. was right. She damn near always is. The Toledo Museum took my breath away on a weekend visiting the spots where my better half grew up. And while the main collection was awesome, and the Botero exhibit was a hoot, this reassembling of these Frank Stella canvases blew my hair back and gave me a new appreciation for Stella overall. Bright colors in shapes that created the impression of three dimensions in a way I’d never seen before.

12. Richard Serra, Junction/Cycle (Gagosian Gallery; NYC) – A labyrinth of rusting metal almost reddish-brown, twice as tall as any person and curving in and back so the hallways it created suddenly narrowed. The sculpture puts you back inside your body and suddenly you’re more aware of your own mumbling through the echoes, and every step needs planned out, navigated. It almost begs to be experienced with a stillness but the closeness compels you to move on. I had dinner with one of my dearest friends on that trip and this was the one thing we were both tripping over ourselves to tell the other about.

13. Laurel Nakadate, Only the Lonely (PS1; NYC) – This piece threw me for a loop – 365 “snapshots” of the artist crying, in different circumstances, with different backdrops. It was almost daring the viewer to come up with a story, a unifying narrative for what made her cry every day. And then the other component consisted of videos where Nakadate got college girls to strip while saying in an even voice, “You’re so beautiful. You know, you’re the prettiest one.” Throwing a wrench in assumptions and inherited gender roles even if intellectually you’ve already discarded most of them. Thought provoking and deeply visceral.

14. Tara Donovan, Drawings (Pins)/Untitled (Mylar) (Pace Gallery; NYC) – These two Tara Donovan pieces spread over two branches of the Pace Gallery made my mouth dry and left me stammering. Untitled was Mylar folded into overlapping orbs with the folds visible inside like cauliflower turned inside out. The orbs are asymmetrically lined up so it’s an enormous mass, looking like it’s tumbling over itself or growing like mold, but the way the folds are used – and the combination of skylight and artificial light at Pace – gives the impression that she sculpted with the light, the Mylar’s just there to trap it. It looked like the birth of the universe. Drawings was pins of different sizes and angled different stuck in canvas to give the illusion of shading, a slower burn but incredibly complex and incredibly effective, and again, light’s the subject and the medium, metal and canvas are just the conduit for transference.

15. Uta Barth, untitled (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; NYC) – Like the Donovan, this was also all about light. Photos of a shower curtain which were laid out sequentially so the river of light through the center made a horizon. There’s no attempt to hide the materials or the contrivance, the large format digital photos had some serious artifacting in places and a human hand – the photographer or an assistant – appears in a few pictures, clearly turning the curtain for better effects. But ultimately, it’s just the drama in light shockingly breaking up our everyday that made my heart sing.

Theater and Dance of the Year, 2011

2011-12-10T06:30:00.001-08:00

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 best of the year; I might have had some reservations, but if anyone asked me if they should see any of these things, it was an unequivocal yes. There were a number of things with GREAT, astonishing parts – Laurie Metcalf’s performance and Joe Mantello’s direction in The Other Place; Lily Rabe and Alan Rickman’s work and Sam Gold’s direction in Seminar; the dance sequences to Underworld’s music in Beautiful Burnout; the performances and singing in Falsettos; Acacia Duncan in Hum; big chunks of Thomas Browning’s Burning I’m still processing. But all of those had some unsatisfying element, usually the material. These are ten shows (for lack of a better word, I included opera and dance) I can stand behind… you know, if anyone asked.
1. Satyagraha by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong (Metropolitan Opera, NYC) – The first Glass opera I’d ever seen live though I’d been a fan for a long time, and I was stunned. An orchestra of organ, woodwinds and strings, no brass or percussion, a small cast, a set of headlines and corrugated metal all added up to one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen on a stage. Waves of diamond, glittering sound subsuming you and tossing you up, and Richard Croft’s Gandhi was an injection of pure light in his phrasing and singing, a tenor you’re lucky to see once. I was in tears a few times, and the climax of the second act was an image that I think will always stick with me.
2. Passing Strange by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (Balliwick, Chicago) – The first midwestern production of Passing Strange worked like a charm, partly thanks to JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound in the place of Stew and his band. The band was smaller and tighter and Brooks sank his teeth into the material coming up with a different take: angrier, more physically present, that was electrifying. And the rest of the cast was pitch-perfect, especially Steven Perkins as Youth and LaNisa Renee Frederick as his mother. As with last year’s Merrily We Roll Along this is the rare revival that made me wish so badly there was a recording (any bootleggers, get at me) and when I listen to my original cast recording these are the faces I see.
3. Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Matt Slaybaugh, adapted from Joshua Cotter (Available Light) - A meditation on growing up, with its intertwined braids of sex, pain, and death. The way the town you grow up in can hem you in and suffocate you but always takes you back. With dinosaurs and robot heroes! As pure a jolt of fizzy adrenaline, mainlined sugar with just enough sour to keep its edge, as anything I’ve ever seen. And a great middle finger to anyone who says comic books don’t make good theater.
4. A Short History of Crying by Sanja Mitrovic (La MaMa ETC, NYC) - Sanja Mitrovic’s one woman show at La Mama (as part of a Croatian theater festival in New York) was the most physical, immediate thing I saw all year. If she’d grabbed me by the collar and performed the work right into my face it wouldn’t have been more striking. Different narratives that all illuminate the different reasons for/meanings of crying through epic political tragedy and folk songs. The different ways to be broken are dealt out, seemingly at random, until the mosaic she was building all along is clear. This is hobbled by its last 5 minutes (in this case, celebrity impressions), but everything up to that is so good it can charge that to the game.
5. L’Effet de Serge by Philip Quesne (Vivarium Studios, Wexner Center for the Arts) – This is exactly the kind of thing that makes the Wexner Center invaluable to Columbus. A French play that left me walking out the door (and the couple miles home) skating on air. A gorgeous ars poetica that puts the common every day and simple, childlike play at the very core of art. Which we should all do well to remember, whatever our individual art is.
6. The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane adapted from William Shakespeare (Pan Pan, Wexner Center for the Arts) – I wasn’t the biggest fan of Pan Pan’s punk rock Oedipus that came through town a couple of years ago that felt to me like more sizzle than steak, but this made up for that big. A deconstructed Hamlet with the requisite in-jokes (a great dane that maybe is only there because he’s a great dane, but cute dogs are almost never wrong on stage). However, the look at different interpretations in the first act turning into a really moving, condensed take on Hamlet and the acid trails of interpretations that could have been in the second was satisfying as a riff on Shakespeare, satisfying as a riff on theatrical history, and satisfying as a piece of theatre in its own right (though I wouldn’t recommend seeing it unless you already know Hamlet a little bit).
7. Southern Bound Comfort by Gregory Maqoma and Sid Larbi Cherakoui (Wexner Center for the Arts) - One of the best examples I’ve seen of the way dance can subvert and transcend the body even while making the rest of us more aware that we’re living in our own skin. The noose tree and the noose baby were provocative, powerful images but the way they were arrived at and then worked with was so fresh and the movements so subtle they were even more shocking in the aftermath of the dance.
8. Just Kids by Sean Lewis (Available Light) - Everything I see Sean Lewis in trumps the last thing which already hit me so hard my teeth rattled. And this take on his father through different stages of his life is a damn tour de force. His portrayal of “Rick” is searing but with a deep empathy and massive amounts of charm, and the way tape is incorporated is better than anything this side of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The writing crackles like everything he does but there’s a much stronger use of space and silence this time, the pauses make everything feel lived in and Matt Slaybaugh’s direction balances that without letting the audience catch our breath.
9. How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe by Jennifer Fawcett and Matt Slaybaugh, adapted from Charles Yu (Available Light) - Available Light’s second comic book adaptation in a 12 month period (different seasons) and it’s also a home run. Elena Perantoni-Fehr’s a wonder as always and her work as the computer who is almost as emotionally stunted as the protagonist is funny, flirty, and very moving. Ian Short’s perfect as the nerd forced into becoming an active participant in his own life, a grippingly physical performance. Jennifer Fawcett and Matt Slaybaugh’s adaptation is just about flawless, Dave Wallingford’s technical cues went off seamlessly (except when showing the seams made it more immediate). The work pulls its punches with an easy moral and too much explaining in the last few minutes, but everything up till then is a great Dr. Who episode written by Samuel Beckett. Your inner child is sadder than you remember.
10. House/Divided by James Gibbs, Moe Angeleos, and Marianne Weems (Builders’ Association, Wexner Center for the Arts) - I already wrote at length about this show, but Builders Association attempt to draw connections between the dustbowl (via Grapes of Wrath) and the digital dust bowl the country’s facing now was mostly a worldbeater. The contemporary stuff had some flaws in the specifics but the Steinbeck was perfectly realized and the technology was magnificent. Giant spectacle that was always underpinned by a crushing sadness, the scope only intensified the pain and desperation. Muddy water takin’ back the land.

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

2011-10-22T06:20:00.001-07:00

“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 art – for what it’s worth, I loved Alladeen and mostly liked Super Vision, and I think I’ve written here about my disappointment with their most recent work to play Columbus, Continuous City.

It took me a while to write about House/Divided, partly because I don’t blog about work, I don’t intend to blog about work, and I’d need to get HR clearance if I wanted to blog about work. But I work for a large bank in mortgage servicing. And I’ve had family members and close friends foreclosed on and/or given loans they didn’t have any chance of paying back in the first place. So maybe I had an extra layer of personal resonance with the subject matter, but I think I can review this without saying anything about my work instead of theirs.

House/Divided was developed with the Wexner Center and particularly looking at foreclosures around the Weinland Park neighborhood, just South and East of the OSU Campus. If people out of town know that neighborhood for anything, it’s where the Short North Posse, familiar to readers of F.E.D.S. magazine or Vickie Stringer books, were based. That’s also the neighborhood where Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, recently gave a speech at a newly remodeled elementary school.

Three mostly distinct strands are braided in House/Divided – Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the foreclosure of a specific house in Weinland Park, and the overall state of the financial meltdown (at first symbolized by a handful of cogs in a bundling/mutual fund bullpen and loan originators and then through Alan Greenspan). Obviously, not all of these strands are equal, and they’re not all quite as well-developed, but the effort’s worth a hell of a lot and when they do work together it’s the most moving thing I’ve seen all year.

Grapes of Wrath is the spine of the piece and it’s handled incredibly well, pared down to the perfect moments to show the characters are distinct people but also as representative of conflicted hope and desperation and what happens when hope rots in your throat. Also, it’s good that they knew what of Steinbeck’s structure to not use. They didn’t go through Tom Joad’s killing a man, or that famous speech, which would’ve been incredibly distracting and I had a pang they were going there when they followed it so closely, through Rose of Sharon’s stillbirth.

The set is perfect – a house built in four rotating sections with elements of an actual foreclosed house inside, a bathtub, a wall that’s been stripped (for copper? for wire?), some piles of clothes and rubble, on top and some older furniture on the bottom, and screens that can come down over it for the purpose of video, with a bank of computers over to the side for the contemporary call center/bullpen sections.

In the Grapes of Wrath section, the video is good, the music is very good, and the use of these very specifically minimalist sets is perfect. The beginning of the drive, what many of us remember from the book and almost certainly sticks out from the John Ford movie, is handled with the staircase as the car, perfectly simple and understated but still giving the impression of isolated, cramped, people on top of each other for miles. As well, the moment when Ma Joad tries to haggle with the company store and the representative’s face is projected right above them, bigger than the entire bottom half where the physical action is occurring, and watching his face change as Joad fixes herself in his mind as an individual, watching him soften, is one of the most stunning in the entire piece.

Neither of the modern strands is quite as successful but suggesting the dramaturge/writers with TBA aren’t as strong as Steinbeck seems a little like an unfair comparison to expect. That said, the big picture stuff is mostly excellent. The Lehman Brothers “conference call” could’ve been taken from an actual transcript from one of those conference calls – I’ve no way of knowing if it actually was – and the disposition of Alan Greenspan that ends the piece, which I’m pretty sure is taken from transcripts, where, again, you see his face struggling to maintain composure and explain the comforting aspects of ideology even in the face of such an epic repudiation of his own – “I put too much faith in the bank’s interest in self-preservation” is dead on.

The Weinland Park stuff is okay but feels rushed and more like ciphers than characters. There’s a sequence where a customer is arguing with a “mortgage assistance” call center worker who is trying to tell him that his mortgage is a pool loan that feels incredibly false and in sharp contrast to the incredible wordless dismantling of the house set occurring concurrently on stage. That was my complaint with Continuous City, there were no people to grip onto in the spectacle. There are people here but the modern people aren’t quite thought through enough, it’s closer, but the Steinbeck props it up a lot.

That said, those are minor gripes compared to the way my chin dropped into my lap at the set changes, the company store scene, the images of everything practically drowning in a stock market crawl during the Lehman Brothers meltdown, and especially those closing moments with Alan Greenspan intercut with sound and video of a flood coming. It’s a vital, moving piece I encourage anyone reading this to see if it comes to your town.

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

2011-09-19T02:11:00.001-07:00

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 evocative set. But that’s far from a bad thing, all of those elements are a little more at ease in their roles, a little more fine-tuned, a little more layered and mature.

I had almost no familiarity with this show at all before coming in – I knew of it but I definitely didn’t know it. It’s a jewel-box, a chamber operetta and each part gets to glimmer darkly. The beautiful part of this is the contrast between the small moments, one voice or two coiling around each other, and those seconds where the whole mosaic reveals itself, the greater patterns that vanish into the ether as soon as they pass. The structure upends what you think of for musicals, beginning with all voices in concert and slowly unraveling over the course of the act so each act ends with one voice, not a big, dramatic close.

Falsettos is the story of Marvin, a grim cipher who leaves his wife and child to take up with a man, Whizzer, while still trying to keep everything “normal” in the conception of that he had growing up. The first act set in 1979 and the second 1981, he seems impacted by the changes underway but not so much concerned until Whizzer gets sick in the second act.

Scott Johnson as Marvin is an absolute wonder. It takes a steady hand to make a contemporary audience care about that guy in a play that seems most dated in its dealing with relationships. We see him hit his wife, be indifferent to his son at best (there’s a sequence at a baseball game one song after he complains about only getting his son on the weekends where all he can do is bitch about how much he hates baseball and “Oh, there’s the guy I used to fuck”), it’s stated that he gave his wife syphilis, and he comes off as a raging hypocrite. But it's all handled perfectly; Wilson gets exactly the understated tone he needs to shoot for and his singing is the best in the show. He manages to keep us engaged in this dark star that all the action and other characters swirl around. It’s as good a performance as I’ve seen all year and his shrug in the opening of the second act as he sings “It’s time to grow up, don’t you think?” is something that will stick with me for a long, long time.

Kim Garrison Hopcraft as Trina has kind of a strange, underwritten role, almost there to show the effects that Marvin has on other people, but she wrings every bit of potency and power 0ut of it. Her rage and her joy always bubble through even when the character threatens to be as shadowy as Marvin himself. Even in the more complicated melodies and emotional territory you always feel the character is grounded in something real, something behind everything. Adam Crawford as Jason, their son, is quite good, nailing his songs, especially on his heart-rending part of “Father and Son”.

Chistopher Storer as Whizzer has kind of a thankless role, he gets laughs and appears as contrast to Marvin more than a developed person of his own. But it’s played wonderfully and sung even better, with the strongest sense of timing in the entire piece. Nick Lingnofski has the showiest, most broadly comic part in the show and he destroys with it, it’s a dash of classic musical theater showmanship in the middle of a dark piece but he reins it in just enough that he doesn’t feel out of place among everything else. Danielle Mann and Kate Gersing as Marvin’s neighbors/lesbians who own a catering company in the second act are both very fine, I wish they had a little more to do but it’s nice having different, leavening voices thrown into the mix after the hermetic first act.

The only concern I have with the production is it seems to overplay the dated aspects. With a set as minimal as this – one semi-opaque wall dotted with mirrors, picture frames (for the characters to comment during) and really nicely done nods to Allan McCollum’s “Substitute Paintings”; a few sections of a late ‘70s couch, a kitchen table, a hospital bed, and lights – everything seems to carry a little more importance and everything very specifically grounds the play in the dynamics of its time. Other than that, everything good in the play is great and everything not as good is moved past quickly, it’s a production that really moves and really gets this audience member focused on the gorgeous construction of the songs and the wit on the lyrics. Something anyone interested in theatre should be seeing.

Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel

2011-07-04T04:48:00.001-07:00

“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 draft of a poem what I really want to do is tell somebody how gorgeous this record is. My real life friends thank you for your indulgence because it’s sparing them – or at least buying them a short reprieve.

In a way I associate with most ECM records but ever so slightly askew, this record is a crisp, clear recording of a beautiful haze. The first track, “The Broad Day King”, strings melodic cells together along a rhythm that acquires depth and brings volume to the tune through a combination of a strong left hand and deep spaces. It’s a tune that feels like a day very much like this one.

Much of the record is very modern pastorals. “Broad Day King”, which we discussed in the last paragraph. “Diamond Turning Dream” with its jagged mirror-shard melody. “A Difficult Thing Said Simply”, maybe my favorite song on the record, with a remarkably apt title; a clear melody that stops and stretches the notes out, this Merce Cunningham dance over and among tall pikes, and then slumps into a meditative state, a glowing repetition.

The other tracks – and this is a wild oversimplification – feel like an abstraction of older jazz tradition, a Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline take on technique that’s such a part of the genre of a solo piano record that in most cases seems rarely questioned, only used or not used. The one-two punch of “Spirit Hard Knock” followed by “Neither-Nor” illustrates this, with the first sounding like a Cecil Taylor piece laid over a Bud Powell, that swinging intensity belied by the fact that its swinging in multiple directions and on different axes all at the same time, and the second Art Tatum with a roll of quarters in his fist when you’re not looking. “Gift Horse – Over the Water” plays with Meredith Monk and Jaki Byard with those seemingly off-kilter rhythms that both add up to a whole that makes sense and makes the tune even catchier and even more swinging. The closing track, “Forgetful”, feels like a take on film noir cocktail piano, the kind of thing Sinatra could’ve sung over but it never would’ve occurred to him.

I was already a Taborn fan, going back to college when I heard him on Tim Berne’s Shell Game, Bill Laswell’s Dub Chamber, and a couple of James Carter records (it took me a while to realize the same guy was on these wildly different records I loved for such different reasons), but this gave me such a new appreciation for what he does as a composer and an improviser. There’s so much music here I’ll be digging into it for a long, long time.

Black Swans, Don’t Blame the Stars

2011-06-12T05:11:00.001-07:00

“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 put out more than one record – who’ve never made a bad album. From the lovely sparseness of Who Will Walk in the Darkness in 2004 (and their live shows even earlier) through compilation tracks, another two albums and an EP, up to the new record, every song feels like it needed to come out of singer-songwriter Jerry Decicca’s voice. Beyond that, every song (with few enough exceptions I can count them on one hand and have fingers left over) was exactly what I needed to hear when it came out and is still what I need to hear.

Change! and Darkness were a cartography of every shadow-niche and scar on a specific human heart. Sex Brain was a look at the id without lapsing into rock cliché. Words Are Stupid, besides being a great record full of great songs, feels like an exorcism, “here’s what we’re doing with what you left us, friend;” it feels like it’s at a right angle from the rest of the catalogue.

Don’t Blame the Stars, released last Tuesday, was the last Black Swans record recorded while Noel Sayre – the only other permanent member alongside Decicca since the band’s founding in 1999 – was still alive, and even if it didn’t have that weight on it, it’d still be one of the best records anyone’s going to put out in this year or most years. This is Decicca’s, as a songwriter, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, his Blonde on Blonde, his For the Roses. Not just a breakthrough in the quality of the songs though there are melodies on here you’ll be humming for days, but also a record that’s about the world more than the writer. That moment when the perfectly-crafted self-portraits crack open and become universal but also when all the influences are in service to what’s being said, not defining what’s going to be said or how.

The way silence and space are used on Don’t Blame the Stars includes similar high-wire tension to the earlier records, most noticeably on “Boo Hoo” which feels like a summing up of the previous albums and a thesis statement for the new one, all vibrato and delicacy and moving from “When the world is upside down / And you get buggered by a clown…” to “There’s no way of telling / The world is crying, or if it’s yelling / So raise up your arms / And dance with me”; and “My Brother” where the voice is accompanied only by a fingerpicked acoustic, bass, and a string quartet (and not incidentally, the most beautiful vocal) with pauses between lines especially on the chorus that, as someone said about Count Basie, “You could shave between the beats.”

“Joe Tex”, the tribute to the great R&B singer of the same name, manages to pull off a tribute song that sounds like the subject but doesn’t feel like an ape, with the perfect interplay of Sayre’s violin and Jon Beard’s organ while the chopping guitar leads and guides the groove. Again, space is key, even on a concise 4 minute song, as in the line break inserted into the middle of Tex’s line “The love you save / Might be your own” and that little pause before the last of the chorus, “The fields we plow are gray.” “Blue Bayou” also addresses the joyful possibility of music – roots music in a couple of senses, as Prince and Gregory Isaacs get name checked in something that could drift into cheese but it never does. The violin is particularly strong on this, these minimal cells of melody that rise up and change just before the listener gets a grip on them then showing up again, like memory, like chiaroscuro around the soul vocal and guitar.

There was a Borges essay where he talked about making abstract details specific, that “a rose red city half as old as time” is so much stronger than “old as time”, and Decicca’s lyrics get that. Any clichéd sentiment is punctured and subtly reshaped with concrete detail, as on the gorgeous title track where, after setting up the theme with “With the good comes the bad”, etc, he addresses it, “Listen, my friend / My former girlfriend” and that jolts the listener awake. “So, so tired / I’ve got rocks in my head” on “Mean Medicine” gets that juice from immediately followed by “I never exercise / I just pace in my bed”.

This has been a spring/summer full of records that show great Columbus bands in a new light or at least a clearer light – Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, Blueprint – and so far this is the best of the lot. A record for a long drunken night after the party’s split and a walk on a sunny day and I bet it’ll be a record when the leaves are down or the first snow’s making the air wet.

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

2011-06-02T02:28:00.001-07:00

“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 (with assistance from Heidi Rodewald)’s roman a clef about feeling suffocated growing up in LA and trying to find himself through Amsterdam and Berlin while he grows up the way most of us do, he realizes that hypocrisy goes both ways and everything can let you down, most of all yourself, but that’s how you find something that looks like glory.

As Stew held the role of Narrator himself in the original New York productions, backed by his band, this is a show that lives and dies by the narrator more than any of the other actors. The Narrator has to be (as Harry Chapin sang) “Observer or participant or huckster of belief” all at various points and he has to anticipate and cue the emotional tone of the play as it changes. Balliwick Chicago outdid themselves with Jayson “JC” Brooks, leader of the always-stunning rock and soul band The Uptown Sound (who also appear with a guest guitarist/cellist and a different keyboard player). Brooks is the coiled-spring in the mousetrap; the character’s aware of his own benefit of omniscience and is a sarcastic, needling presence trying to get the protagonist “Youth” out of his own head and to engage with the world. There’s a rage in Brooks’ performance and a physicality that makes for one of the most electrifying things I’ve seen on a stage in a long time.

Brooks’ singing, as I think should go without saying given my previous gushing (he made my favorite live shows list both the last two years) is perfect. He sings hooks with such a layered emotional and rhythmic palette that the one hook that really matters, the one line that shows up in several songs and is the axis of the play’s gravity, “Just when it was starting to feel real”, takes a few repetitions before it hits the audience like a fist in the stomach. Like any great soul singer he knows exactly what to hold back.

Steven Perkins plays Youth with a charm that lights up any scene he’s in (all of them), enough youthful impudence and that about-to-burst feeling of wanting to make art but not being quite sure how to do it or what that entails. The three pieces – one in each setting – of his art the play shows us work on a couple of levels, beyond being among the funniest sequences in the theater, they show the character moving through phases and maturing in ambition and they also give a sense of the art created around him in the three different settings of the play. There’s a beautiful self-awareness in the performance and not in the character that in seeking revelation the real risk isn’t getting hurt or even hurting others, it’s looking ridiculous. Being derivative, pretension, over-earnestness are all chrysalises that need emerged from, and you always come out a little rawer while you grow your next skin.

The other actors are all great and really bring something to the table. Special notice should be paid to Laura Renee Frederick who plays Mother. She has a stunning duet with Brooks and a palpable frustration and love that means she’s a presence suffusing everything that happens even after she’s off stage for most of the Berlin and Amsterdam sequences, and with maybe the best holy-shit-did-I-just-hear-that voice of the entire cast. Also notice to Osiris Khepera who plays a pair of not-quite-ridiculous characters but does them with such warmth and reality that they’re unforgettable, specific people, including the Reverend’s son/music director who smokes Youth up and shows him another world even as he admits he hasn’t seen it. Khepera in this sequence says the line that really cracks the situation open for Youth and the audience, “Slaves have options. They can revolt… or die. Slaves have options. Cowards only have consequences.”

Lili-Anne Brown’s direction is stunning. She understands the sense of stillness in a production where so much is thrown at the audience, where power chords ring and decay and are echoed by the bodies on stage, but she also keeps the grimy diy space energy this kind of theatre needs.

The other play I saw couldn’t have been more different on a surface level, 13 actors playing 15 speaking parts from a writer with canonical status, Lanford Wilson, and written in a post-Eugene O’Neill stylized realism. At the same time, there’s a sense that the Hot L Baltimore can be taken as the other side of the coin, where ambition goes when luck and skill aren’t there to back it up.

The title is obviously a sign, an old hotel with one letter burned out, in what’s implied to be the start of a very hot summer, and the levels packed into that are indicative of the play as a whole. Also key is it being set on Memorial Day, because the fallen – and the falling – are everywhere. The play’s extremely ‘70s in its throbbing on-the-nose-while-still-using-sleight-of-hand arguments that are all really about America even while they’re about the noise down the hall or bad sex or being unable to sleep or or snooping neighbors or a ghost with a sweet voice or a father who never came back and in its layer of beautiful grime over some very solid storytelling even Aristotle could nod approvingly at. Most arcs are resolved as much as they could be without betraying a basic reality but as in most plays, the joy of the verbal jousting and the physical passion is the meat of what to watch.

With this much dense, overlapping dialogue, obviously the actors need to be on point and Steppenwolf never lets me down on that score. Particular standouts are Kate Arrington – so recently seen in The Parallelogram as a crumbling statue of a woman unstuck in time – as Suzy and de’Andre Aziza as April (from Passing Strange on Broadway), two old friends and prostitutes; Jon Michael Hill as the too-studious new night clerk/manager (it’s never quite made clear), James Vincent Meredith as the older manager who seems a little glad to be almost done with all of this, and Mollie Regan as Millie, and endless source of strength wrapped up in fragile lattice work.

MVP is director Tina Landau, who keeps all the balls in the air in this piece and then some, any nuance the play has is highlighted enough that if you’re looking you can catch it but submerged enough that if you don’t see it, the fabric still has that sense of loss, is still colored by that action. It’s a bravura, astonishing feat of soul-gymnastics. Attention should also be paid to James Schuette, Scenic Design, who made the kind of two-story carved out set you can almost smell, and Deb Styer as Stage Manager (with Rose Marie Packer, Assistant Stage Manager).

I love Columbus and I love bragging about our homegrown art but there’s something very satisfying about getting out of town and seeing how other people do it, with casts full of people you don’t have any preconceived feelings about one way or the other.

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

2011-04-18T17:01:00.001-07:00

“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: it allows the future to exist.”
-Samuel R. Delany, “Thickening the Plot”

AVL’s been on a streak through their 2010-2011 season, and Skyscrapers of the Midwest was another ball knocked out of the park. Adapted from the comic book of the same name by Joshua W. Cotter, which I haven’t read, this turns around the standard wisdom that comics don’t work for the stage (anyone remember Violent Cases?). Beyond that, it knocked me back and took the breath out of my lungs with that raw sense of wonder that only theater has for me.

What this production gets brilliantly right about childhood is that, if you’re aware enough and imaginative enough, everything is magnified and while fantasy is a way of coping with things you don’t understand logically yet that fantasy, reality’s also a vehicle for fantasy. The two lives seem almost as large in your head and anything sad or funny is imbued with that same magical light and other things that resonate with that real event also resonate with the fantastic aura, for years sometimes. There are images in this play of death and evil and transformation that are drawn so sharply and shown so plainly that there’s nothing I could do but go, “That’s an amazing way of thinking about X.” I don’t want to give them away, they were so crisp and gorgeously bracing in the moment. Anything with a typical antecedent is twisted just so.

Those fantasy elements are perfectly established and grounded in the sparse set and costume design by – yeah, sorry, I handed my program back to be recycled like an idiot, but whoever it is did a fantastic job – both realistic enough but also just exaggerated enough, clearly products of memory, not representing the here and now. Brant Jones’ video work provides some of the biggest laughs in the production and scores some of the deepest cuts. Dave Wallingford’s sound work (including some voice parts) and Michelle Whited’s cueing of some of the effects is placed right on stage as it should be, clearly a large piece of the overall reality, and Carrie Cox’s lighting is crystalline and haunting.

Unsurprisingly for an Available Light show, the acting’s uniformly solid. Acacia Duncan as young Josh Cotter is perfect, as good as I’ve ever seen her and that’s incredibly good. Drew Eberly is a name you’ll be saying for a long time, I was blown the hell away. Some of the most perfect comic timing I’ve ever seen on a stage, the minute he appears you’re on his side and he takes you across a landscape of emotions, keeping you riveted the entire time. Ian Short is typically good as the grown Joshua Cotter, strong enough that you understand how he got out of that little town and insecure enough without being cloying or drifting into cliché.

But my picks for on-stage MVPs of the show are Jordan Fehr and Elena Perantoni. Over the two hours of the play, they go from the voices of an abusive, toxic relationship (from microphones at the corners of the stage, the visual element played out in Cotter’s comic panels on the screen behind the stage) to, respectively, a tracksuit-wearing dinosaur pal of Cotter’s younger brother and a cheerleader object of Cotter’s affection/obsession/the supervillainess equivalent of same, to the silent manifestations of death and internalized trauma, frequently with only seconds between. Theirs are the kind of performances that sneak up on you and, if you’re anything like me, all you can talk about afterwards.

There are some weak spots, but it’s hard to swing this hard for the fences and not miss a couple. As good as Ian Short is, the adult Joshua Cotter feels really overused. It’s nice to put the story into some context of an overall life and show that art goes on beyond the memoir and life goes on beyond childhood but there are moments where his appearance distracts from the heart of the story instead of complicating it. And the story with the abusive couple is heart-wrenching, but doesn’t quite seem to cohere with the rest of the show, I kept expecting one more scene that either firmly placed it among the other characters/setting or made it echo emotionally with everything else.

Those qualms aside, most of this production is gold and if you’ve got any love for theater or music, go see this. Get your picture taken with a dinosaur. There’s no better way you could spend a couple of your hours this weekend. Through April 23. http://avltheatre.com/1011/blog/category/shows/sky/

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

2011-02-13T07:27:00.001-08:00

"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 marketing campaigns in recent memory. Websites appeared to have gone dark, video clips, tiny excerpts of dialogue, all incredibly well-chosen and really got me excited to see the play without telling me what it was going to be about. So I’m going to try to live up to that and not give much away, there isn’t a lot of plot in this but the revelations are big, or want to be.

First off, Eleni Papaleonardos’ direction is sharp and manages to pull off an incredibly difficult balancing act. With four characters on a small set consisting of three chairs, a chalk board, and one table, where each character has long stretches just shifting in position, in the shadows and not interacting with the others at all, she keeps our attention, frequently keeps us riveted. The play uses the other movement just enough to keep us on the person speaking at the time but we never feel like they’re accenting the speaker, it doesn’t feel obvious.

And the acting is perfect. Tim Browning, who I haven’t seen since he played Macbeth a few years ago in Schiller Park, comes across almost as an homage to the late musician Peter Christopherson but that works beautifully with his character’s growing self-awareness and rambling gravity-weighted monologue about infidelity and a creature that shows up in dreams. Elena Perantoni is hilariously unhinged and keeps peeling away the layers of personality even while getting more laughs than anyone else, as a woman struck by a horrifying image on her way to work who visits the Ohio Caverns and her father.

Jordan Fehr hits the ball out of the park with a role that’s the weakest of the lot, a self-obsessed bookstore clerk who gets a letter from his ex-girlfriend that doesn’t really provoke self-reflection but he thinks it does. Acacia Duncan really shines in this, with her character Calan who gives basic math lectures that veer into discussions of proofs of God and the prisoner’s dilemma and finally the key to the whole piece; hilarious and intense, and among the performances that made those tears spring to my eyes (the other was Tim Browning).

The play has some speeches that are breathtaking, and the overall message of dead people returning to tell us to change our ways and think outside of ourselves is inherently spooky (credit to A. for that line) and a great framework to hang this kind of idea play on. The trouble is, it’s way, way too long. At least a third too long. It uses repetition in this sort of post-Mamet way that turns irritating well before the play thinks it does. Also, being structured as four looks at how people deal – or don’t deal – with the void and including almost no physical action robs the audience of the joy of watching people interact on stage.

With that length, I started looking for logic where I don’t think it’s meant to be, there were a lot of conversations with my faithful companion after that went “Wait, so what about this? Did that make sense?” or “Do you understand what this was doing there?” When that much is thrown at the audience, even when what’s considered important is bolded and underlined, it’s easy to get lost in the swarm of ideas.

It’s a great effort that almost completely overcomes the weaknesses in the material. In five years I want to see a new draft of this play that I'd lay odds is going to kick my ass. Until then, thanks to Available Light for taking a chance on developing work even if it didn’t completely work for me.

Technorati Tags: theatre,Available Light

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

2011-02-05T06:23:00.001-08:00

“… 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 only barely begun to work with, and hits and hits again.

Phillipe Quesne and Vivarium Studios with one set – the living room of an apartment, with glass patio doors and a door on the side, a ping pong table half covered in amateur special effect, magic tricks, and other detritus – conjure a rich inner life and what seems like a pretty thriving social life, and draw a map that show how the two feed each other. The principal actor Gaetan Voruc’h enters dressed as what a child thinks an astronaut looks like, a thin suit of gray and an enormous fishbowl helmet that looks like Pac Man with a light in it, and addresses the audience directly, “Each play ends with a preview of the next. In the last play there were five astronauts, of which I was one,” but also seemingly indifferent, laying the ground rules for the play while roaming the set like some lost alien architecture.

What unfolds is a combination of the physical lovable-cipher comedy of Jacques Tati and a little Samuel Beckett (almost an alternate history Krapp’s Last Tape that shows the character a way out) and a meditation on art that’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Every Sunday, Serge’s friends come over and he presents a carefully conceptualized very low budge performance – choreographing a (borrowed) car’s lights and exhaust to Wagner; a remote control car moving behind the audience members to Handel; setting off two bright red flashpots through a complicated balancing act – and says thank you, graciously but a little uncomfortably accepts their compliments, and then says a quiet “You can finish your drink” and leads them out of the house. Even the ritual of bringing them in and finding seats is carefully considered, only certain doors can be used, and handled very politely but also with this quiet reserve.

Between the performances we see him working with the gadgets, coming up with new shows, playing with what he has until an idea strikes - a flying helicopter that’s more metaphor sitting on the table and pure joy when it flies; a hilarious, gorgeous dance with glowsticks done as glasses and a rope set to a melancholy cover of “Billie Jean” – and engaging in the rote physical activity to distract the brain when ideas don’t come that anyone who’s tried to create something is familiar with, in this case playing ping pong by himself.

The way the process and the product and unformed play all feed each other is the perfectly groomed frosting on this piece, and the spongy cake is the way art connects you to people but also keeps you at a distance. People show up more than once, and clearly like Serge very much, but there’s more small talk amongst themselves than there is with him, and while the effect of the title is bringing people together and into his orbit, even the woman clearly sticking around wanting to know him is led out of the apartment and the world of the play before it’s over. Also key in this piece is the indescribability of art – I’m deeply conscious that the descriptions of Serge’s little shows above doesn’t sound like much, I was conscious of it at a party as I was gushing last night – and you see the audience try to articulate what made their heart sing because it never really works out.

At best, the talk intrigues you enough to see something for yourself. It doesn’t ever replace seeing it or reading it or hearing it. And I hope if anyone reads this, people take another look and see if the schedule can fit a performance of L’Effet de Serge into their weekend (runs through Sunday) because it’s that pure, pure, un-stepped-on theater shit. It’s right in your veins and keeps you up at night and makes you love the world a little more.

Technorati Tags: theatre,Wexner Center

Burglar, Skully’s, 01/29/11

2011-01-30T06:55:00.001-08:00

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 blog with a Pollyanna glow.
I’d been wanting to check out the band Burglar for a while, I’m a major sucker for ‘30 cabaret-style music and Tom Waits, and really want to cheer for a band that’s doing something even a little off the beaten path. So A. and I left the Treehouse after a blistering, joyous set from the Media Whores, a bar full of our friends to go to Skully’s and finally check Burglar out on the night of their CD release show.
We arrived in time to see a large chunk of the Phantods set that sounded great; while I’m on the record as being a little turned off by the Mr. Bungle/cut up quality of their work, it had been over a year since I’d seen them and the edges got smoothed out just enough so all the focus is on the songs. Less showy and full of little knives, I can’t want to see them again.
Burglar did some very quick setting up, aided by the soundman, then left the stage again. Whoever was DJing between sets did an amazing job – Marty Robbins’ “The Story of My Life”, The Supremes’ “Baby Love”, great old doo-wop – to the extent that I joked the band better bring it or we’d see a real life enactment of the Onion article “Band Upstaged by Recording”. And then they didn’t come out for well over 30 minutes. At one point, Zachariah Baird – a name now burned in my memory because he organized this show –came out and said it would be another 10 minutes.
After that little announcement, most of the lights went down and what I assume was intended as “intro music”, moody exotica-styled instrumentals, was played by the DJ. At long last, the band came on, looking like they stepped out of a training wheels version of the Nick Cave GQ article, all dark suits, dark shirts, a good look but nothing snappy except the keyboard player’s fluorescent inserts in his jacket, the women a little more decked out, the mellophone player in a lovely red dress and the singer in a foam-green dress with a Maria Callas neck line and a classic-Cher hemline… and stood there and chatted.
I chalk this up to a young band mistake, it’s easy to think withholding is going to increase the mystery of your band, make the audience think you’re a big deal. Unfortunately, when you’re playing a club all it does it both irritate the audience that wants to like you (and could be having a drink and flirting somewhere with no cover charge and not paying club prices) and create a harsher light for you to be judged in. And after that, you need to come out and kick us right in the face. If you’re going to play the I’m-ready-for-the-enormodome card, you need to back it up by walking on stage and jumping straight into a great song.
They finally start playing and it’s a slow burn, kind of nice, with a sudden rhythmic shift to add some forced drama, but the sound was muddy, not swampy, and the drummer was sloppy, not loose. It’s a fine distinction but the minute you hear it you know. The next five songs all went in the same mode, with the same dynamics. The biggest problem with the songs is no one besides the Mellophone player (who was the highlight of the show) has a sense of space or silence, all the drama is created by sudden tempo shifts which created a career for Ha Ha Tonka but I find cheap and a little annoying.
The singer has a pleasant voice, but it doesn’t have grit, the kind of ugliness that makes it stick in your head. The playing is all okay – again, except for the terrific Mellophone player – but not spectacular. The bassist played an electric upright, but he didn’t use it for any of the sounds you want that kind of instrument for, no arco work, none of the way the woody thunk of an upright slips between the shining silver of an electric, none of the glittering melodic stuff that kind of bass can open up in a band. It could have just as easily been a P Bass and no one would’ve noticed. The guitar player and keyboard player need to learn what makes a solo good – there was a particularly painful keys solo about three songs in, that came out of nowhere, circled around the drain for a few painful bars, and then just sort of stopped – and also decide which of them is going to be the lead instrumental voice because right now, neither of them are doing it, their instruments blur into one mass of indistinct sound and not in good way.
Separate from how the players play, but in another way, not separate from it at all, is charisma. The lead singer is lovely and works her ass off, but she has to do too much of that work and it leads to her trying way too hard. Several times she tried to engage the guitar player in some flirty interplay but he could barely be bothered to look up from his hands. After the band’s been playing for a year, that’s an egregious mistake; if being stoic is his point of focus, he needs to keep staring at the audience, really intrigue us. If he’s going to be her one foil, he needs to Keith Richards it up and really be there for her. Otherwise, she might want to look into switching up who she wanders over and dances with because it’s drawing attention to the guitarist he isn’t interesting enough to keep in a way that might not be so obvious if he wasn’t the only one that’s happening to. The keyboard player and, to a lesser extent, the bassist had the same problem, too much staring at their hands and not enough looking at the audience or each other. This kind of music shouldn’t look so damn serious, or if it’s going to be that serious it needs to back that up with songs that kick our asses instead of just being okay.
I wouldn’t avoid them in the future if they were on a bill I wanted to see – they’re close to kicking my ass, but no part of the package is there yet. Keep fighting the good fight, kids, we’re all rooting for you.

Technorati Tags: music,Burglar

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

2011-01-16T15:13:00.001-08:00

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 the similarities. Seamlessly, and with seconds separating them, he goes from his father Rick, to a series of children in a school that’s “one step up from juvenile detention or a mental institution” he taught at for three months as part of the William Inge fellowship in Kansas, and always back to himself, shifting between observer and participant, his voice always the spine of the piece.

What differentiated this work from his previous, also moving and very physical, piece Killadelphia for me was the wider range of rhythm. It has a very similar tone, death-seriousness with flashes of riotous humor that don’t balance the other so much as throw them into relief, but there’s more space in Just Kids. He lets the characters and the discrete scenes breath just a little more, and the pace of the characters’ speech is more varied. The father isn’t just described as a drinker and a charmer and a man who knew money and love and power and lost it, it’s made incredibly clear through the two versions shown. First up, and directly addressing the audience, is the Rick of Sean’s Youth, half-remembered and invented partly from hearsay but impossibly large with a quick wit, confident gestures and barely repressed rage. Then there’s the Rick of the final scenes, caved in on himself, still echoing the earlier voice that resonates through almost every second he’s not on the stage but smaller, humbled, hitting in-character false notes in a performance that doesn’t hit any.

And the voices of the children Sean works with, observing their day-to-day struggles and his reactions to them, are stunning. Sharply understood and also baffled, slowly realizing their scars aren’t like his, and grasping what made that turn where he was in a very similar place come into the light for him and many of these kids won’t. That he does all of this without being heavy-handed, without yoking it to a tired redemption story, and still ends with hope – and, in the best showcase for Dave Wallingford’s mostly-invisible-in-the-best-way sound design, a King Lear thunderstorm – is a marvel. I laughed harder than I have in a long time and shed not a few tears at this.

Running through January 22. http://avltheatre.com/1011/blog/category/shows/jk/

Technorati Tags: theatre,Available Light,Sean Lewis,Matt Slaybaugh,Dave Wallingford,Just Kids

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

2011-01-09T14:12:00.001-08:00

“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 longer than usual to finish– that approach their author’s primary subject (music for Toop, horror for Braunbeck) through oblique strategies that make the lesson hit harder and the journey more fascinating.

In the prelude, Toop talks about trying to hear, reaching forward or backward to an “unverifyable past”, and reading that sent a shock through me. I know that feeling, that slow shudder that something happened here and wondering what about the air that’s suffused with that joy or that loss. Looking at the way the light hits the brick, but also feeling ears stuffed with thick, slow air, memories trapped like the old SF classic “Slow Glass”. I had a great poetry workshop once upon a time where we had a week’s assignment that required us to focus on one sense, and what I turned in was too literal – it actually name-checked John Cage, for chrissake – but that exercise stuck with me and in the next few months I wrote probably 20 poems using that as a jumping off point, and it surprised me how many of them touched on nostalgia or ghosts. This book put that together so it hit me like a lightning bolt, of course, things you can barely hear are going to trigger womb-memories and also seem ghostly, film sound designers exploit that and so do many musicians whether consciously or not.

Through the book, Toop connects that thesis with the way sound was depicted before recordings and broadcasts – the writing of Virginia Woolf, the paintings of Teniers and Lucas Cranach and Rembrandt– and he delves into how sound is vitally important to certain wholly visual works of art. The sound of the water flowing in the background helps us understand the reclining nymph and the way we naturally combine those senses even when evidence isn’t there for it is very similar to the way we see new colors that aren’t on the canvas in Seurat or Olafur Eliasson’s color wheel, and there’s a discussion on Seurat making that process explicit, throwing the unspoken rule that there are things the painting can’t directly show right in the audience’s face.

Braunbeck’s To Each Their Darkness is also a hybrid form touching on a wide range of sources, parts gorgeous, heart-breaking memoir and parts showing how the sausage is made, the grinding gears behind narrative storytelling, delving into choices that go into his fiction and the fiction of others, and what each does to inform the other. For my money, Gary Braunbeck is one of the greatest short story writers of the last 30 years (I don’t mean to discount his novels, but his short stories are what stab me in the lungs over and over) and there isn’t a single argument he makes in this book that can be easily shrugged off.

Braunbeck takes horror fiction, as most of his work is categorized, and draws a series of threads, going back to Carson McCullers and John Cheever and through The Who (there’s a fantastic elucidation of Quadrophenia, particularly “The Rock”) and the films of Jim Sheridan and Sam Peckinpah, among many others. He puts the names the reader expects in a book about horror: Brian Keene, Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, etc, but he puts them in this broader context of literature and culture. The horror writers exist in that bigger continuum which keeps the wonkier writing about writing from feeling too hermetic, too sealed in.

If there are weaknesses in the Braunbeck, it can get a little defensive. It’s to its credit that it avoids the fanboy reflex – the tendency to point at things like Future Shock or Frankenstein or One Hundred Years of Solitude and shout, “That’s genre work too! You do like genre work, asshole!” – but the writing at times takes on the air of a trapped man, someone as defensive about indiscriminate genre fans as well as ivory tower snobs, in playing both ends occasionally it overreacts a little. Also, there’s some juvenilia in here, especially the reprinted Eldritch Tales columns about Stephen King movies that not only isn’t as good as everything else in the book (which is to be expected), but comes off as way too much ammunition getting unloaded on some movies that weren’t very good in the first place.

Those qualms aside, I came out of To Each Their Darkness and Sinister Resonance with a thousand new ideas swimming in my head. Things to argue about at the bar, and work into my own writing, and things to watch for as I walk down the street or listen for in those rare moments alone. Both are very much worth your checking out.

Technorati Tags: books,Gary Braunbeck,David Toop

Favorite Records, 2010

2010-12-28T16:13:00.001-08:00

1. Camu Tao, King of Hearts – It’s a shame the first full-length solo by this Columbus legend is just coming two years after his death, but we’re all richer for having it. This record is an open wound, an open bottle, and punk as fuck. Full of surging, catchy beats using pop interpolations that always cut deeper than you think at first; the ramshackle lo-fi nature of the record makes it feel more personal but also makes it sound fresher, makes it jump out of the speakers at you. Passion and urgency, time isn’t long on this earth for any of us.

2. Jack Rose, Luck in the Valley – Another beautiful record my life is better for having in it but a damn shame it had to come out posthumously. His most spacious work, a few tracks with the Black Dirt Pickers, old pal Glenn Jones, Harmonic Dan, with amazing warm solo tracks like “Blues for Percy Danforth” and house-party tracks like a version of WC Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” that should make everyone who thinks about covering that chestnut give it up or “When the Tailgate Drops, the Bullshit Stops”. A breakthrough even for someone like me who loved all his records.

3. Victoire, s/t – This eponymous debut full-length by Missy Mazzoli and her primary working ensemble is the most accessible classical/new music record this year – or, I’d say, of a number of years – a series of beautiful, jagged miniatures. There’s something astonishingly fragile about the writing on this but also a strength coursing through the song’s veins, the Bryce Dessner-featuring “Song for Mick Kelly” about the character from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, features a keening, mournful violin line that lacerates the drone of the organ. “Song for Arthur Russell” captures and summarizes everything I love about Arthur Russell’s music better than a million covers I’ve heard, with the mild electronic percussion, more Reich than Paradise garage, the cut-off vocals that reach for ecstasy but are always getting subsumed into the sound, never quite hitting release, and the buzzing strings over the suspended chords from the keys. Now, for next year, a label needs to start putting out Mazzoli’s longer-form orchestral and chamber works so she can keep blowing all our minds.

4. Chocolate Genius, Inc., Swansongs – I like to think in a parallel universe – maybe Lethem’s parallel universe where Gravity’s Rainbow won the Hugo – Chocolate Genius’s Blackmusic won a whole mess of Grammys and a new undercurrent of deeply personal, cliché-adverse R&B rose up in its wake. Everything he’s done since then has been of the highest quality but nothing’s punched me in the gut in the same way until the new one. Indebted to history, check the “Walk On By” referencing intro to “Enough For You”, but not beached on it, still swimming, still surprising, “Now we’re on dry land and you miss the seaside / Say you want another point of view / But when we make love, you wake up so hungry / I wish I had enough for you”. Working images over to create an impression the way Mark Eitzel or Prince or Me’Shell N’degiocello does, and with a variety of moods his leathery, limited voice can wrap around, from that song’s melancholy to “Kiss Me” and “When I Lay You Down” with their lackadaisical seduction through the almost-gospel sunrise of “Ready Now”. Like any record worth a damn, the music tells more of a story than the lyrics, tones warm and foggy for the voice and the songs to drift through, indistinct enough you need to pay attention but everything you need to hear comes right into focus when you listen for it.

5. Current 93, Baalstorm, Sing Omega! – I already blogged about this record at length, but months late it’s still holding up and even growing in my memory. A collection of love songs for the world and time and a record of the light after mourning (not a typo).

6. Anais Mitchell and guests, Hadestown – I remember the first time I heard Anais Mitchell, “Cosmic American” and I was struck by the purity of the voice and the grit of the lyric, and this record – a song cycle in the manner of Randy Newman’s Faust featuring a ring of folk superstars to retell the story of Eurydice – delivers on that promise in spades. Ambition only matched by its self-assurance and quality, helped by crystalline production from Todd Sickafoose. She and Justin Vernon nail the flirty quality of young Orpheus and Eurydice, Greg Brown and Ani Difranco both sexy and ominous as Hades and Persephone, I think I passed this on to more people I know than any other record on my list this year.

7. Unholy 2, $$kum of the Earth –The Unholy 2 in 3D Cinemascope at last, a record that perfectly captures what’s great about this band, the deep groove troughs and Chris Lutzko’s guitar tone that’s all sinew and gristle, Adam Smith’s sculpted delay and electronics, and Bo Davis’ drumming that knows exactly where the beat is in what feels like chaos. What was once easily dismissed - or enjoyed – as a cross between Suicide and Pussy Galore, now shows all of its elements and asserts itself as its own animal, with thanks given to the production work of Cheater Slicks’ Tom Shannon and Guinea Worms’ Wilfoster (who also put out a hell of a record this year) that finds clarity in the murk and puts the gravel back on the road.

8. Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate, Ali & Toumani –Two artists who made an indelible impact on the world and on me in particular when I just started going to bigger concerts, in their second duet record sadly released after Toure’s death. Every note is measured and balanced and still spontaneous and of the moment, a record for prayers and hangovers and that leaves you with a little more hope for the world when you’re done with it.

9. Sharon Van Etten, epic – Where Van Etten’s Because I Was In Love was a perfectly chiseled set of sharp, funny, introverted almost-haikus, this sophomore effort lives in the world. Bigger arrangements with drums, guitars up in the mix that make you nod your head, sweetly moaning steel guitars and multi-tracked harmonies on the vocals, but everything’s used judiciously. What she trades in on the side of the cryptic and the internal she gains in the strength of her voice and a different kind of purity. The year of diligent work and touring has aided in the confidence to come right out and say, “Say it outright / If you don’t wanna see me tonight / And you won’t if you don’t want to / Hide it from me if you must / Hide it from me if you don’t trust / Anything I say to you” and say it with her voice growing higher and stronger, not shirking away, not building a castle in the sand but walking right toward you.

10. Jason Moran, Ten – Everybody’s saying it’s the year of the piano in jazz, and true enough there were great solo records by Vijay Iyer, Geri Allen, a Brad Mehldau that got a lot of attention, and the best record of The Bad Plus’ career but this is the piano record that stuck with me, haunting me. His tone’s never sounded better, the rhythm section of Taurus Mateen and Nasheet Waits still have that unmistakable swing and texture, and the tunes are badass. “Feedback Pt. 2” with its layer of electronic noise filling in the cracks between the notes but somehow making it seem more spacious, the melancholy “Pas De Deux – Lines Ballet” and the hard-charging “Gangsterism Over 10 Years” are favorites, but there’s not a bad track on this.

11. Punch Brothers, Antifogmatic – Chris Thile’s chamber-bluegrass quintet released an unassuming record this year that had the best songs they’ve recorded that drift into more of a Richard Thompson territory, more complicated than the earlier heartbreak lyrics, so many fantastic moments on this. “You Are” tracking the transition of learning to love again over off-kilter harmonies and repetition, the gorgeous ballad “Alex” with its hook “You’re only as good as your last goodbye” and Thile’s mandolin breaking up the pleasantness with a thrash I’ve rarely heard on the instrument. “Rye Whiskey” as traditional as the record gets with a gang-shout vocal, strong straight rhythms on a good-time drinking song and the old blues trick of ending each verse with “Have I ever told you ‘bout the time I ….” and not resolving the line until later when the song sags a little under a mandolin line wrenching the darkness out of the high strings as it moves into “When I took you/ And took her / For granted” and the same chords shift into that seeping dark oil-paint mode. It’s got enough interesting harmonic material to keep a jazz or chamber music fan listening but the songs are so strong you wish there were ballsier bands to cover and propagate this material.

12. Mary Halvorson Quintet, Saturn Sings – Her most conventional record but also maybe her riskiest, adding trumpet and tenor sax, it sounds like a Horace Silver record that came from space. Melodies you could sing along to, and every time the first song comes on the rhythm section of John Hebert and Ches Smith has me nodding along and smiling, but it’s not as simple as that might sound, there’s always something I don’t expect around every corner. This record is a sunrise and snow splitting and liquefying under your boots and the last blooming roses of summer.

13. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty – A record stripped down to prime effectiveness, with old partners (Andre 3000 contributes the wobbly, clattering beat of “You Ain’t No DJ”, Sleepy Brown shows up on “Turns Me On” for his patented off-kilter loverman croon) and new (Janelle Monae’s perfect hook on “Be Still”, Gucci Mane on “Shine Blockas” which would be a massive hit in a better world) doing exactly what they do best. A head nodder that also sticks words in your head for days and with beats full of little touches and hooks that also help it stick to your ribs but never trying to be anything but a great hip-hop record.

14. Janelle Monae, The Archandroid- This is the record where Monae filters and distills the last 30 years of R&B from solo George Clinton to Teddy Riley to Grace Jones to Prince to Angie Stone and recombines the DNA so it never sounds like just a throwback. “Make the Bus”, the collaboration with Of Montreal is one of my favorite tracks and I never liked anything I heard from Of Montreal, she and Saul Williams team up for “Dance Or Die” with should be the year’s perfect club single. The record could’ve stood a little editing, but I found myself smiling every time a song of this popped on my ipod, and I find it very heartening there’s an R&B record taking these chances.

15. William Parker, I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield – There are few things in music I love more than Curtis Mayfield, and this collections of live recordings of William Parker and band taking on Mayfield’s beautiful melodies in post-‘60s fire music style hits the spot. This record took songs I’ve loved for as long as I’ve loved music and let me hear them with new ears, as on the 21 minute “If There’s Hell Below” with Hamid Drake on drums and Parker, telepathic as ever, kicking the rhythmic intensity up just a notch so the horns just boil on top with the vocals and Lafayette Gilchrist’s piano the only thing that lets our ears catch up. Or the gorgeous ballad “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue”, with this Sabir Mateen solo as raw as anything I’ve ever heard him play that only intensifies the beauty. There’s enough familiar to keep us engaged, like the fanfare at the front of “Freddy’s Dead”, but always some new left turn you didn’t think of. Vocalist Leena Conquest has never sounded better than on this, very few singers work over this kind of music, Patty Waters, Fontella Bass, but she never gives up any ground, she works the songs down right to their heart. Amiri Baraka’s poetry and incantations are the flame inside the songs, sometimes retelling the stories of the songs, sometimes filling in an emotional context, sometimes just beautifully riffing where the music takes him.

16. Ashley Paul, To Much Togethers – Anyone who talks about this record in terms of dissonance is the same kind of lame who talks about Rothko in terms of Pantone. Overdubbing her visceral saxophone and mingling it with Taisho Koto and some scraped percussion on “Wedding Song” and probably a few other instruments I can’t place until all I have to focus on is the sound and the feeling. Deeply contemplative but also unsettling, the mood is set of being at ease with the world but also deeply skeptical of it, the Meredith Monk-like loping rhythms of “One One”, the dragging, shadowy lines of “Another Walk in the Park.” One of the most spiritual experiences I had with a record this year. Stunningly gorgeous.

17. Ohneotrix Point Never, Returnal – I was really torn between this record and the new record from Cleveland heroes Emeralds, both on Mego, both very similar records and both major leaps forward, but I just plain listened to this one more. Synth with a warm palette and a perfectly assured hand, from the post-glitch flowering of “Nii Admari” through the orchestral glaze of “Stress Waves” on to the Tangerine Dream-in-a-cuisinart of “Ouroboros”.

18. Demon’s Claws, The Defrostation of Walt Disney – Demon’s Claws take that methamphetamine homemade human torch energy and channel it into something seemingly more placid but also more deadly on this new record. From the opening open-wound stomp of “Fed From Her Hand” through the low-rent swaggering echo and guitar of “Catch Her By the Tail” into the chopped up Western landscape of “Anny Lou”, this record might take a while before you show symptoms, but if you like the rawer side of rock, you’re going to keep coming at it unprotected until you know you’re infected.

19. Parting Gifts, Strychnine Dandelion – After a 2009 where two of my favorite rock bands, the Reigning Sound and the Ettes put out records that weren’t bad but were nowhere near their best work, Greg Cartwright and Coco Hames teamed up on this project that clearly rejuvenated their songwriting. Not straying from the blueprint of their two primary bands, but playing everything with a freshness that makes it feel brand new, from sock-hop standards like “Keep Walkin’” through sexy mud-covered stomps like “Don’t Stop” and tragic ballads like “Born to be Blue”, I wasn’t bored for a solitary second of this record.

20. Scott Woods, Sunset Clause – Maybe the first spoken word record ever to make one of these best of lists? The only other I could think of was Sekou Sundiata’s second record for Righteous Babe but I can’t find a list from that long ago. Columbus’ pillar/exemplar of all things poetic, Scott Woods, made the best record of his career this year, finally stripped down enough it doesn’t need musical tracks, just a combination of live and studio work and that perfect voice. Amazing persona pieces like “6 in da Morning”, “Jesus, Judas and the Case of the Old Woman’s Son: A Murder Mystery”, and “To the High School Thug that Broke into His English Teacher’s Car”, gorgeous lyricism crossed with justified and blue-hot rage on “How to Make a Crackhead”, “The Organist”, “Lamborghini Hickies”, notes on what’s wrong with poetry today including “Lynchings”, and hilarious geek-speak on “Cthulhu Calls for Love”, “Dungeons and Dragons”, “I hate Zombies Like You Hate Me”, and “Bob Ross Loves You Baby”, this shows every aspect of his poetic voice and leaves you assured there’s more coming.

21. Judith Berkson, Oylat – This record finally – and beautifully – captures what I hear the first time I saw Berkson at a back yard show Gerard Cox organized a number of years ago. Unadorned, on a combination of of the reedy thinness of an electric piano and the richness of an acoustic but both played with this almost-clipped touch. Taking classic Jewish cantor material, ‘30s standards and some thorny originals and approaching it all in the moment so it retains a sexuality and a sensuality and an ache that echoes long after the record’s over.

22. Marc Ribot, Silent Movies – A less conceptual solo record than Spirits or Don’t Blame Me, but some of his most gorgeous playing. Really letting the Latin and classical influences come through. Standout tracks include “Delancey Waltz” that sounds like its titular street slick with rain and everyone trying to keep their balance, “Fat Man Blues” with its low-slung swing, and the one-two mournful punch of “Empty” and “Natalia in Eb Major”.

23. Rashied Ali and Henry Grimes, Spirits Aloft – It’s hard for any record of Ali on percussion and a string player to not get compared to his record with Leroy Jenkins, especially since Grimes plays violin as well as his standard upright bass for much of this record. But everything on this live date is perfectly recorded and in the moment but still with everything they’ve experienced and everyone they’ve played with a shadow in their hearts.

24. LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening – Every time I try to write LCD Soundsystem off, they come back with a record I think is even stronger. The dynamics, the singing, the writing, I feel like everything is just that notch stronger than their previous releases, and the hooks on this are monstrous. While there isn’t a song that killed me the way “All My Friends” did, there also isn’t any filler.

25. Sarah Kirkland Snider, Penelope – A very different take on the sequence in the Odyssey that Enda Walsh took on in his play of the same name that also made my best-of list. Played by NY new music ensemble Signal and with vocals by Shara Worden, the melodies stick in my plasma and everything has the weight of myth and the deep sadness of living.

Favorite Art Exhibits, 2010

2010-12-26T07:06:00.001-08:00

1. Paul Thek, Diver, Whitney Museum, NYC – I knew of Paul Thek’s work but I didn’t really know it when I walked in to the museum on a beautiful late October day, but coming in from the street all orange and golden and into this, all blue and pink and meat sculptures, it was like being slapped, The impermanence of every damn thing is driven home all through this retrospective, but so is the truth in transcending the limitations of society, of inhibition, of the body. As moving a collection of work as I saw all year.

2. Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, Museum of Modern Art, NYC – One of the most visceral exhibits I saw this year, but that doesn’t mean it relied on shock value. A fascinating combination of recreations of her earlier performances, videos, ephemera, and of course Abramovic herself sitting at a table making eye contact with visitors for hours on end.

3. Mark Bradford, s/t, Wexner Center for the Arts –Props to the Wexner Center for doing this and going above and beyond to integrate this with the community and get the outside world involved in an exhibit that was a harder sell than, say, last year’s Luc Tuymans. Abstractions wrigglingly alive, color palates that smacked the viewer around, an exhibit I saw three times and wanted to see a dozen more.

4. Catherine Opie, Girlfriends, Gladstone Gallery, NYC –Portrait photography that grabs you by the throat. Few backgrounds but the ones set in a specific place are twice as gripping, the compositions draw you in even more because of that. Women in joy and pain and ecstasy and rage.

5. Peter Brotzmann, Wood and Water, Corbett v. Dempsey Gallery, Chicago – Brotzmann’s visual art which I’d only seen on record covers really stunned me in this gallery. Blake’s giants and classical woodcut techniques and a love of the earth and woods and everything that deforms both, with a rough-hewn look but also a watery dreamlike brushstroke.

6. Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Herbert Ferber, Modern Art, Sacred Space, Jewish Museum, NYC – This blew me away with three takes on modernist reworkings of tradition Jewish iconography, designed for an actual synagogue in the late ‘60s. Whether it was the Curious George thing I saw this year or the Masters of the Comic Book show I saw a few years ago, or a small exhibit of permanent collection work dealing with how artists view the holocaust at this remove, no one sequences or displays art in a more approachable, interesting way than the Jewish Museum.

7. Cyprien Galliard, Disquieting Landscapes, Wexner Center – Photos of buildings right before or right after demolition, this air of impermanence and crumbling modernity but also this beauty of decay. a splash of blue plastic that leads your eye through the rubble so then you see the tiny flecks of color you might miss originally.

8. Various Artists, The Delusion of Eating, The Shelf gallery – My favorite multi-artist show in Columbus this year, brilliantly curated to expose the theme in a variety of different ways, less about sexuality than the early press led me to believe and more about the lies we tell ourselves about what we eat, about the nutritional qualities and also the hedonistic elements.

9. Jan Gossart, Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasure, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – A widely known canonical artist who I had no background in before seeing this show, one of the frustrations and pleasures of being a dilettante striving for autodidact status. Everything in these paintings is suffused with joy and a thick erotic richness, a link between Van Eyck and Rubens. I could’ve stayed here for hours.

10. Various Artists, Chaos and Classicism, Guggenheim Museum, NYC – A mindfuck of a show clean and gleaming like a pristine tooth but bubbling rot not far enough under the surface. Sometimes a regressive movement is just aesthetically motivated, but as often wanting to go back like it was at least leaves you open to insidious forces.

11. William Kentridge, Five Themes, Museum of Modern Art, NYC – Seeing this South African artist’s exhibit full of his animations including stills and storyboards and enormous sketches and prints as well as performances and ephemera around the operas The Nose and Magic Flute was a kick in the teeth. The artist and the audience as a worm burrowing into the banality of evil and coming out a little wiser but with a black eye.

12. John Baldessari, Pure Beauty, Metropolitan Museum, NYC – I walked out of this with an enormous grin on my face, and a new appreciation for an artist whose name I knew but I had no idea he was responsible for this much of what I think of as the conceptual art canon.

13. Sarah Sze, untitled, Tanya Bonakdar gallery, NYC - The framework of a wonderland, all spindly structures and very mundane parts but so enormous I had to delve into every single piece and leave slack-jawed.

14. Various Artists, Abstract Expressionist New York, Museum of Modern Art, NYC- Taking one of my favorite eras of art and showing me things I’d never seen and making me think about it in a new way is no easy task, and this did what the play Red could not even (though I also loved that). It also paid the best tribute to a museum I already loved by reminding us that on a good day its permanent collection floors don’t even scratch the surface of its permanent collection.

15. Rivane Neuenschwander, A Day Like Any Other, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis – This Brazilian artist picks up Baldessari’s fun-gauntlet and throws so much at the viewer that you know something has to stick. And what sticks you have a hard time getting over for days, including constellations made out of hole-punched paper looking over tables with the detritus of a raging night, an installation paying tribute to the movie The Conversation and a series of buckets with holes creating a resonance when they drip into other buckets.

Favorite Theatre and Dance, 2010

2010-12-19T06:25:00.001-08:00

Theatre in Columbus is having something of a renaissance in the last few years, at least to my eyes. I’ve always loved seeing a play but I remember some lean years where there was very little I wanted to catch. I put theatre and dance on the same list this time because – and I know this is wrong – I tend to approach dance in some ways from a text perspective. I respect what it uniquely does, but I still tend to lump it in my head with plays/monologues.

1. Merrily We Roll Along by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Available Light, August 21, 2010 – I think I’ve done enough gushing about this show. But while I juggled and hemmed and hawed over much of this list, there wasn’t even a second when AVL’s take on an under-regarded Sondheim play wasn’t at the top of it. First thing I’ve ever seen Heather Carvel in and she was a revelation. Ian Short was as amazing as he always is. The direction caught both the youthful angst and what happens to the dreams of youth perfectly. And when my ipod runs across the off-Broadway cast recording, these are the people I see and the voices my head hears.

2. Fences by August Wilson, NYC, April 14, 2010 – Obviously one of the greatest plays of the last quarter of the 20th century, and probably my third favorite August Wilson, plus I’d never seen it live. I was planning to see this before I realized it had this perfect cast. For acting firepower it doesn’t get much better than this. Denzel Washington is a hurricane of charm and rage and love all trying desperately to be controlled and to run wild. And Viola Davis matches him note for note but does it with stillness, with silence, and with one gesture to a hundred of his perfectly in-the-moment gesticulations. Mykleti Williamson works the audience’s preconceptions like a master violinist and stabs you right between the ribs when you’re not expecting it. I’d tell you I didn’t cry during this but I’d be lying.

3. Them (2010) by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper and Chris Cochrane, PS122, NYC, October 21, 2010 – I’m a big fan of all three of these gentlemen, but I’d never seen any of them in the flesh, and the original production of this roughly 25 years ago is still spoken of with an incredible reverence. The early solo Ishmael Houston-Jones dances himself jammed my heart into my throat until I thought I’d choke or break into a million pieces, like the first time I heard Amiri Baraka read or Peter Brotzmann play saxophone or Diamanda Galas sing, an utterly unique vocabulary getting expressed so perfectly you’re not sure anyone else can ever use it. But of course, the younger dancers peopling most of this revival/reimagination are fantastic, alone and together and all together and alone again. Cochrane’s electric guitar was all chopped chords, whiplash feedback, emotions exploding before they happen with the dancers and shadowing the explosions, propping the characters up and bridging the dance and the text. Cooper’s text is every bit as good as the other two legs of this triangle, not matching the dance except in brief moments – and those synchronicities as are shocking a gun getting fired – but informing it and showing another perspective on the plague and the desperation we still aren’t out of, told in a dryly funny voice that hits you with a sadness it lulled you into not expecting from the beginning, “I thought what they were doing was love.” Maybe the most harrowing thing in any medium I saw all year but also the most life-affirming.

4. In the Red and Brown Water by Tarrell Allen McCraney, Steppenwolf, Chicago, February 21, 2010 – My only regret with this is that I wasn’t in Chicago long enough to see the other two connected Brother/Sister Plays while we were there, because this was stunning. Set in the projects of Louisiana in a time never quite specified, or perhaps out of time, and focusing on very current despair and joy but also Yoruba ritual. I want everyone writing urban fantasy/American magic realism to see this and see how much juice there still is in the form, how much emotional and metaphoric weight it can still have. Drumming and singing and astonishing acting, especially Rodrick Covington and Alana Arenas, and a script that draws the line between our past that keeps us down, our past that shows a way out, and goes straight through your heart.

5. Pride and Prejudice by Daniel Elihu Kramer (adapted from Jane Austen), Available Light, January 14, 2010 – A great adaptation of one of my favorite all-time novels that opens it up in pacing and modernizes it a little by bringing in the current currents of conversation but keeps its heart and its intensity intact. Eleni Papaleonardos’ direction keeps the threads balanced and keeps the production moving at just enough of a clip to make an impact and keep the audiences engaged. Great performances all around, especially Kim Garrison Hopcraft, Michelle Schroeder and Wolf Sherrill. I was so in love with this I probably convinced 20 people to go who hadn’t seen a play since they were in college.

6. Hughie by Eugene O’Neill and Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, Goodman Theater, Chicago, February 20, 2010 – Two takes on the tragedy of aging, two takes on classic-period modernism, and a showcase for Brian Dennehy that shook me to my core. The moment where he starts to sing in Krapp’s Last Tape is one of those moments where you realize you’re watching one of the great stage actors just sinking into a role, collapsing on himself. Electricity all around.

7. 837 Ventura Boulevard by Faye Driscoll, Wexner Center, November 19, 2010 – A fantastic, hilarious dance trio by Faye Driscoll that opened with her singing Will Oldham’s “I Am a Cinematographer” while shadowboxing and improvising half the lyrics and opened up into a friend-triangle that’s poisoning everyone involved. Taking you from goofy joy right through the rage underpinning the joy, the trying to have a good time mostly to show up people.

8. The Aliens by Annie Baker, Rattlestick, NYC, April 18, 2010 – It took the full first act for this to click for me, but once it did, it hit like a ton of bricks. The three characters on the one set of the back porch of a coffeeshop in Vermont, perfectly directed by Sam Gold, with the viewpoint character, Jasper, learning from the older two through mimicry and through reading behind what they’re saying to see the cautionary tale. Acting’s amazing, there’s as much beauty in the moment when Michael Chernus as KJ said, “Frogmen sing together” near the end of the first act as in anything I saw this year, and the writing takes naturalism and makes it ineffably, miraculously strange.

9. Red by John Logan, Donmar New York, NYC, April 17, 2010 – On paper, there was a lot of reason to worry about this. A two-hander built around arguments about art between Mark Rothko and a fictional assistant by the man who wrote Gladiator? But it was electric and heartbreaking, Alfred Molina gave a tour-de-force performance and Eddie Redmayne actually gave him a run for his money, not afraid to go toe-to-toe with him, to get dirty. And the writing really captures those rhythms and keeps you moving with a few arias that’ll make the hair on your arms stand up.

10. A Free Man of Color by John Guare, Lincoln Center, NYC, October 24, 2010 – Frankly, this play’s a little bit of a mess, three hours long with it seems like 30 characters, spread out over two continents, and in the style of a restoration comedy. But I was both as purely entertained as I’ve been all year, and as in awe as if I was watching a tightrope walk. Jeffrey Wright is amazing (as expected) and hilarious (not quite as expected)as Jacques Cornet in a broader way than I’ve ever seen from him and he’s surrounded by a cast studded with pitch-perfect supporting actors. A whirlwind of euphemisms for Cornet’s penis, leaping behind and out of curtains, and a self-awareness that they’re all in a play that mirrors the time period and the precarious social situation and artifice of New Orleans, most heartbreakingly when the main character in a fit of desperation summons Thomas Jefferson to address his complaints to his new ruler. It made me feel good to see someone going out and making this kind of ambitious antithesis-of-black-box theater.

11. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, Actor’s Theatre, July 24, 2010 – My favorite Shakespeare comedy in a venue I’ve loved since I saw my first girlfriend at 16 in Titus Andronicus, and the best production of this I’ve ever seen. Staged in neo-realism’s Italy, a performance by Eleni Papaleonardos as Beatrice that had my jaw in my lap, a very strong Travis Horseman as Benedick and a stunning Acacia Duncan, there was nothing I didn’t like about this.

12. The Great War by Hotel Modern, Wexner Center, January 21, 2010 – Hotel Modern basically performed a live WWI movie with narration and sound effects exclusively using miniatures. Indelible images and even performances all drawn out of plastic and digital video, affirming the belief in theater being whatever an artist thinks it is.

13. The Absurdity of Writing Poetry by Matt Slaybaugh, Available Light, March 21, 2010 – One of the first Available Light shows which I heard about but didn’t catch at the time, now revived as a once-per-season tradition. A cut up/original text hybrid going through Slaybaugh’s influences, winding through the danger of making art, the double danger that no one will care, and ultimately that if you need to do it you need to do it anyway. I wanted to have a few crybaby Columbus bands/writers who focus (by which I mean whine about, not take steps to actually build it) a little too much on their audience instead of their art watch this, because it’s a perfect example of how good, how invigorating, and how full of and in touch with life this kind of ars poetica can be.

14. Penelope by Enda Walsh, Druid Theatre Company, NYC, October 23, 2010 – There’s definitely a masturbatory element to this, both in the language and in the characters, it’s ostensibly about Odysseus’ wife but she never moves past being “Odysseus’ wife”, she’s a trophy for the four men hanging out in an empty swimming pool drinking gin to fight amongst themselves over. They know the end is coming and their wooing is an all-angles portrait of stinking desperation, not just for their lives but also for an era, and you don’t ever really feel for them but I stayed on the edge of my seat and laughed my ass off.

15. Stop Sign Language by Eleni Papaleonardos, Available Light, September 17, 2010 – One person show premiering this year written by and starring Eleni Papleonardos (who’s made an appearance on this list a few times), about her growing up with dyslexia, her growing up in a bilingual house and how language develops, all braided together because that’s how life works, it’s not easily separated or distilled down to its components. Very funny and incredibly moving.

Favorite Shows of the Year, 2010

2010-12-15T17:35:00.001-08:00

First of a series of four posts of art that really drove me nuts this year, that let me sleep like a baby or disturbed my sleep for days or made me sit down and write something about it or made me write three drafts I just threw out because I couldn’t get it or made me write something completely unrelated. That made me call somebody or send somebody an e-mail even if I just found myself saying, “Man, so it was, I mean, you know… shit.” Everything in all of these posts is in Columbus unless otherwise stated.

Saw around 80 concerts this year, not bad for spending an entire month in the Philippines for work. Great year for music, wish I saw some more local stuff but only so many hours in the week. 2011, I’m ready, my loins are girded, I’ve bought the first ticket to a show next year (Pogues in Detroit, early March, but I’ve already got designs on some January and February stuff).

1. The Oblivians, The Summit, o7/10/10 – Everything you want straight up rock and roll to be – electric energy (and not just because there were some ungrounded microphone issues early on), gospel harmonies and snarling howls, drums that make you want to slam into your best friend in a five foot radius, and guitars like a freight train. Last year’s show in Detroit was wonderful, but this beat your memories like they stole something, better than I thought a nostalgia reunion could ever be.

2. El Jesus De Magico and the 2050s, 01/14/10 – Everything I hope the fringes of rock is going to deliver, even if it doesn’t always, a fitting send-off with friends everywhere. Missed the Cheater Slicks since I was seeing a play that also made this year’s best list for me, but the 2050’s brought the nasty blues-rock but without any of the corny noodling clichés that sometimes entails, more Boss Hogg and Scene Creamers but with a tension you could hang yourself on. But the meat was the best El Jesus show I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen them a ton. Witzky’s howl all melancholy and blue flame, a rhythm section equally adept at the slow-burn narcotic crawls and the ferocious stomps, and organ and guitar that build these swirling expressionist paintings of light and feeling.

3. Raphael Saadiq, The Vibe, Chicago, 08/06/2010 – Goddamn. I mean what else do you say to this? The perfect frontman, knows exactly where to brandish his ego like a sword and where to keep it in check, in a spotless suit with a seven piece band and two back up singers, special guests, I didn’t stop dancing for the 90 minutes he was on stage. 90% of the songs of his I wanted to hear, and a version of “It’s a Shame” with one of the Spinners up to sing with him that almost made me drop to my knees.

4. Budos Band, Southpaw, Brooklyn, 04/16/10 – Boiling trumpet and sax over slashing guitar, throbbing, ebbing bass and drums, and four percussionists. The ingredients for an amazing dance party. Played most of the new record and the crowd didn’t stop moving the entire set, everyone left soaked in sweat, falling asleep on the train back, and perfect, pristine sound still ringing in your head.

5. Cheap Trick, The LC, 07/09/10 and Devo, Ohio State Fair, 08/04/10 – Every year I cheat a little on one entry, and this year it’s this one. Within 30 days I saw two shows that restored my faith in live classic rock. Neither of these bands cheaped out and there was an exuberance in still getting up and rocking an audience. I love Cheap Trick but with the kind of love that tries to pretend most of their ‘80s work didn’t happen, and I’ve seen them a few times and while they’re great, there’s a lot of sleepwalking through a very well-worn setlist, but not this time. With Rick Nielsen’s son on drums instead of Bun E. Carlos, they opened with “Weight of the World”, got “I Want You to Want Me” out of the way four songs in and when a third of the crowd left, they didn’t care. Devo did all the songs you wanted to hear, a couple of things of the new album, particularly good versions of “Girl U Want”, “Good Thing” and “Uncontrollable Urge”, had three costume changes and clearly relished playing the Ohio State Fair.

6. Swans and Baby Dee, Outland on Liberty, 10/08/10 – Every time I’ve seen Baby Dee it’s been a markedly different show: the joyous cabaret five-piece band at Rumba Cafe, the duo with Maxie Moston at Knitting Factory that stabbed the audience right in the heart again and again, and this with cellist and violinist and her restricted to harp, except for one instrumental on accordion, that was a finely sculpted bit of chamber music including a heartbreaking “Anne-Marie Does Love to Sing”. Swans blew away any expectation I might have walked in with, from the more-than-10 minute intro to “No Words/No Thoughts” building up chains of tiny cells to create this grand, shadowy mosaic, but not just accumulating, squeezing the most power out of each of those building blocks and through repetition and slight changes, showing them in new light again and again and again. On through the classic “Sex, God, Sex”, that had everyone nodding along and Gira’s howl at its most potent. They dragged the audience through the depths of the soul on this pure, visceral, muscular but not macho or clichéd music, and they brought you back out into the light on songs like “Beautiful Child”, but all the light has a shadow element and as Leonard Cohen wrote, “Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows”. Breathtaking, exhausting, invigorating.

7. Robbie Fulks/Jenny Scheinman duo, The Hideout, Chicago, 08/09/10 – A two-hour trip through the shadowy alleyways, dead-end curves and bright lights surrounding the intersection between Joy and Pain. Fulks’ “I’ll Trade You Money for Wine” with its hobo narrative and sharp, cold fingerpicking and Scheinman’s pizzicato. Scheinman’s “My Old Man” with its refrain, “I’ll break your little feet” and Fulks’ high harmony. Fulks’ “Goodbye Virginia” soaring to the rafters, her violin giving it wings and chiaroscuro. Jokes and stories and astonishing playing and perfect versions of Grandpa Jones and the Carter Family and Lionel Belasco and their originals that meshed even in their different vocabularies, topped off by Mississippi John Hurt’s “I’m Satisfied”, leaning up against the bar having led the audience out pied piper style.

8. Watershed, Rumba Cafe, 09/10/10 – Good rock is a magpie’s nest and what makes it good is you relating to the shiny baubles, thinking they’re very much like your own or the ones you always wanted. And the show at Rumba this fall, barely rehearsed, is the best Watershed show I’ve ever seen for a couple of reasons, but mostly that. Coming out and leading with “Mercurochrome”, taking its disinfectant metaphor, the stinging pain of leaving being the way you know you’re healing, but here, live, in the middle it turned into a perfect raunchy (has that word ever been used for this band?) cover of Johnny Thunders’ “One Track Mind” with its Chuck Berry bounce and its perfectly-obvious drug metaphor and a whole other level of obsession which amped up the energy of their own song, crashing back into the final chorus, “This time tomorrow / I’ll be gone / The more it hurts / The more it works” and at least three kinds of mythologizing - mythologizing the pain of a decision you haven’t made yet, mythologizing self-abuse as a test of how strong you are, and plain ol’ rock star mythologizing - all blur into this purple bruise and give the crowd whiplash. Celebrating playing together, their drummer Dave of a number of years back in the throne after a year of health hell, they burned through a set of some of their angriest, catchiest songs to a crowd that really cared, everyone dancing, everyone singing along, but not as over-rehearsed as they can be (as, to be fair, you really have to be if you’re playing some of the larger stages they play), just sweaty joy, flubbed notes and scars and all. A victory lap well-earned.

9. Smoking Popes, Reggie’s Rock Club, Chicago, 02/20/10 – A band I liked well enough but didn’t quite get the massive love for just blowing me away. Soaring, wistful vocals, from a guy who sounds like he’s being pulled in two directions at once with a band that snakes through all moods. Rhythm section with crunch and swing, and two guitar lines that got tangled in each other’s flight path like two moths around the same flame. Big and anthemic but winking just enough at that fist-pumping quality, as disarming in its earnestness as in its sophistication.

10. JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, Beat ‘n’ Soul, Off Broadway, St. Louis, 11/06/10 – The crown jewel in a weekend that also featured amazing sets by the Nevermores, Mondo Topless, The Beatdowns, The Bo-Keys and River City Tanlines, One guitar, bass, drums, an organ player who also busted out some beautifully raunchy tenor sax, and brilliant songs. Drawing a continuum they fit into aesthetically through covers of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, the former done with a perfect reverence and the latter switched up from self-pity to a ferocious statement of intent, “This is not a joke / So please stop smiling.” Their originals, and the frontman, are what separates this from a Sharon Jones or an Eli “Paperboy” Reed, both of whom I love but can be a little safe, a little measured. Brooks leads with his chin right into the danger, right into the rage, “I’m glad to see there aren’t any kids under 12 in here, but if there are, bring them to the stage! They need to learn some shit.” Songs that are catchy, especially barn-burning versions of “Want More What” that rotates on the line, “I just want to fuck some more” and the two word hook, “Want more / Want more / Want more” that gets the crowd as crazed as any Parliament chant, or “75 Years of Art Sex” with its keening, heart-broken but also lusty hook, “You stab me in the dark”. Soul music can still hold as much as you can throw at it and if you see a live JC Brooks set and you aren’t blown away, I can’t help you, my friend.

11. Jason Moran/Don Byron/Charli Persip, Jazz Standard, Manhattan, 04/17/10 – The set I always wish mainstream jazz was hitting heights it rarely does in my presence. Byron’s tenor and clarinet keep spiking these already-gorgeous melodies with hints of gospel shouting and a rockabilly croon, Jason Moran playing the piano like a court jester and a percussion ensemble and Cezanne, and Persip (and Don Byron’s dad on bass for a few wonderful numbers) keeping it all together. Even when it went off the rails, it was just to see how high it could jump and still land safely.

12. Cave and Psychedelic Horseshit, Carabar, 06/21/10 – Once in a while a show reminds you why you go out on Monday nights. This was that show for me this year. Psychedelic Horseshit did one of the best concise, song-based sets I’ve ever seen from them, Matt backed by Adam and Beth from Times New Viking for 30 minutes of thorny Buddy Holly pop. Then Cave from Chicago got up and started playing this crunchy krautrock that shed its skin into a much sexier breed of krautrock than I think I’ve ever heard. All about texture getting pulled out to see how much tension they could ratchet us up to, before that giant downbeat that felt like it resolved not just the last beat or the last measure but everything you’ve heard that night. It felt like the air caught fire and the room shifted just a little and suddenly everyone unbuttoned another button, people started dancing, people are giving each other the eye. Their records are very good, but that set was magnificent.

13. Liturgy, Scion Rock Fest, Bernie’s, 03/13/10 – Almost-codified black metal deformed in the best way by some post-minimalism, blast beats leavened with some middle eastern/Sun City Girls drumming and scorched earth guitars given a new Jesus and Mary Chain acid bath. The kind of thing you have to see in Bernie’s because in a more comfortable club you might not believe it’s happening, the moldy claustrophobia keeps you in the moment.

14. Ernest Dawkins, Velvet Lounge, Chicago, 08/06/10 – Keeping fire music alive and staying connected both with its ‘60s forbears/giants and deeply entrenched in what today has to offer, its pain and its pleasures. The composition was far more than just a launching pad for solos, but the solos were as fierce and as sweet as I could’ve hoped and the interaction stopped my heart a couple of times.

15. Home Blitz and Day Creeper, Carabar, 07/29/10 – How close can you come to the carpet and still spring up smiling? This set had a Raging Bull appeal, the scrappy fighter who you get the sense knows they’re in a Sisyphean struggle but they do it anyway. That was Home Blitz for me that summer weeknight. Between every song, it looked like the whole set would fall apart, but every perfect noise-pop gem brought them back swinging with webs of interlaced guitar, nice guy Johnny formerly of Rot Shit on bass keeping everything together, and fierce drumming.

16. Travis Laplante, Zebulon, Brooklyn, 10/20/10 – Probably the best solo tenor sax set I’ve ever seen, and by someone I’m barely familiar with to boot. Unamplified and first on a bill in a packed Brooklyn bar with people just looking to escape CMJ for a few hours with a nice beer or glass of wine, Laplante comes out and his horn starts singing, soul-growls that stretch like taffy into these organ-like landscapes, then get atomized into individual notes that hang in the air. Great sets after, including Glass Ghost’s Stereolab-filtered-through-Serge-and-Jane grimy pop and Sam Micken’s arch, dry take on neo-soul with a falsetto that wouldn’t quit, but nothing else punched me in the gut like this.

17. Noveller and unFact, I Think It’s Open, 08/20/10 – My only regret about this show is that I got there a little late and missed Mike Shiflet’s opening set, heard it was stunning. Second time I’d seen Noveller and this blew that earlier set away, more melodic but also more surprising, sculpting these perfect mountains of glass with her clarity of tone, then setting a fire all ar0und them just to see what they did to the light of the flames. unFact, the solo-bass project of David Wm. Sims of the Jesus Lizard was also a face melter, subtler melodically, a little more song-based, and all soaked in that rich,volcanic tone he’s brought to every band he’s played in.

18. Dutchess and the Duke, Wexner Center, 01/16/10 – Two voices, two guitars, almost no addressing the audience (a welcome relief after a show I was at earlier that evening that literally had as much banter as songs) and this sweet, sweet longing. Nothing particularly interesting to describe, but this show shook me all the way down.

19. Hallogallo 2010 and Disappears, Wexner Center, 09/07/10 - And this show shook me in the exact opposite way, Michael Rother on guitar and synths leading Aaron Mullan of Tall Firs and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and the Crucifucks in a set of Cluster, Harmonia and the eponymous Neu! track. This physical, sweaty, spiritual body music. The only thing I saw/heard/whatever this year that did the same thing to me as this set of music was that Paul Thek retrospective at the Whitney museum.

20. The Beetkeepers, Scrawl, Black Swans, and the Planktones, Rumba Cafe, 12/04/10 – One of those reunions that’s so much better than you ever would’ve thought that everyone feels lucky just to be there. And every single band stepped up their game, as good a set as I’ve seen from Scrawl, Black Swans, the Planktones (the new iteration of the Wyatt brothers’ fun cover project), and I’ve seen some great sets by all three of those bands. And the Beetkeepers kept everyone in the palm of their hands for the entire hour set and played with a free-spirited tightness I never would’ve expected from a band spread across three cities and not having played together in almost 20 years. Goddamn.

At the End You Come Out Yourself; Stop Sign Language

2010-09-19T18:18:00.001-07:00

“I too am minute as ashes with the fine
grain of my feeling running crisscross into dark
where I sight you enviously at the blurred roots
and the ospreys play there, they have second sight
like sponges, loving both canal and river,
commuting as you on water, fearful of this group
of buildings, even going underground.
You like it because your eyes see further,
even as a rock quarry is graceful
with your initials as the sorrowful poem’s end.”
-Barbara Guest, “Even Ovid”

When news of the accident in the newly thawing winter/spring meant Stop Sign Language was postponed, a number of us in town were disappointed, myself included. Eleni Papaleonardos is a force of nature, a rock in this theater community, an asset to any city she’d choose to work in, and as close to a sure sign of quality as Columbus theater has. The delay took no sting out of the production, trust me. It’s already been a great year for her, from directing Available Light Theater’s terrific Pride and Prejudice with the largest crowds in the company’s history to that point (possibly since exceeded by Merrily We Roll Along?) , though her Beatrice in Actors Theatre’s Much Ado About Nothing, and now, this monologue about dyslexia, how we learn, and the nature of language and communication that left my heart sailing, Stop Sign Language.

When I say monologue, I may be doing the show a disservice, because you could just as easily call it a ballet. Every movement, every reaching for a prop, every slow extension of the right foot, in imbued with this richness, both metaphorical and emotional, you can mark what’s being discussed – childhood, the awakening of self, primitive cultures – just through body language, aided by Carrie Cox of the OSU Department of Dance’s subtle lighting. Set design adds a different, complicating layer, a cross between a black box Spalding Grey piece – a chair and not much else for much of it – and a Sesame Street segment, with a creamy blue foam-core letter, variously p, q, d, and b, and stark back projections by Christian Faur.

But the words are what we’re there for, right? Right. And they’re what really drives this, a riveting examination of growing up in a bilingual household (English and Greek) and the difficulties dyslexia presented in learning the way she was told she should learn. Or at least there’s where it starts.

It never surrenders into self-pity or let’s-all-hold-hands platitudes and goes all the way back to the invention of language and how it’s all one great abstraction after another. From the first image, which I don’t want to spoil, how we fit ourselves and what we want to say into forms that often seem arbitrary at best is at the heart of this piece. I would’ve liked to have seen a few more risks taken from the direction, which is perfectly serviceable but could’ve gone more abstract and attention-grabbing. But if that’s the only complaint I can make about something, I clearly liked it quite a bit.

There’s no way I can adequately describe this that’s going to make it sound as funny or as moving as it was, do yourself a favor and go see it, through next weekend. http://avltheatre.com

Merrily We Roll Along, Available Light, 08/28/10

2010-08-31T18:39:00.001-07:00

Available Light never shirked from chances, and their first musical – beating much more established companies in town – doesn’t pander or dodge tough questions in any way. Sondheim’s much-maligned Merrily We Roll Along written with George Furth (book) based on the play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, with its backwards-looking story structure starting at 1976 and ending in 1957, hadn’t been produced in central Ohio in 20 years, and then at Denison University. This production is a wonder, if you’re still doubting seeing it, go. Go. Go.

John Dranschak’s direction (assistant direction from Acacia Duncan) is perfect, using the space exactly right, keeping the focus on the main characters but also throwing you off with the chorus on the transitions, buying the production time to let the year-shifts sink in. Darin Keesing’s design and Dave Wallingford’s sound design are marvels, a minimal set of not-quite-abstracted doors and sound both that place it in its time but not of its time, not leaning too much on the crutch of easy period signifiers.

This show is about the corrosion of youthful ideals and the bitterness that arises when they don’t get corroded, much reminding me of the Cai Guo-Quiang exhibit I saw at the Guggenheim a few years ago, terracotta workers slowly less finished as you walked around the spiral until it was just raw material, raw potential. And because it starts in success and dissolution, the songs (and their mirror-songs) start out knottier and angrier and by the second act as these beautiful songs of optimism and youth ring out you’re looking for the cracks, the dark humor comes from how you know it all ends.

Of course any musical’s going to live and die by its stars, and Available Light’s always had a knack for matching the exact actor to a role, and they outdid themselves here. Ian Short plays Franklin Shepard, the one of the trio who leaves his friends in the dust by – if not “selling out”, because this show doesn’t trade in easy dichotomies without puncturing them at least a little – and another in Sondheim’s list of male leads who are basically ciphers, reactive but not truly active, at least onstage (see also Bobby from Company, Frederik from A Little Night Music, and Giorgio from Passion). The character’s confusion, the enough-self-awareness to understand why he’s being left, enough charm to sell himself the center of attention to the myriad people around him, but also enough awareness to think “Why can’t I just enjoy this success? Why does success need to be a problem?” All of that fuels a terrific performance that sells some of the most challenging scenes and songs in the show.

As good as Short is, even better are the other legs of the triangle, Nick Lingnofski as Charley Kringus, the purist who turns his insecurities outward when he thinks his partner’s leaving him in more than one sense. He hits an absolute home run on one of the sharpest indictments of the ambiguity around success Sondheim ever wrote,“Franklin Shepard, Inc.” and bringing a sweetness that belies the knowledge of what happens next to “Our Time” that keeps it from being all sentiment or swagger.

And best of all is Heather Carvel, lifting the character of Mary above another Dorothy Parker riff, and roaring through her piece of “Old Friends”, “Now You Know” and “Opening Doors”, and breaking every heart for miles on “Like It Was”. The most cutting and the most adrift, but played so it never feels like another cliché, it feels as fresh as tomorrow, and with a voice that slips in and out of joy and rage with the power of a blast furnace but doesn’t ever rely on classic Broadway belting.

Michelle Schroeder as Franklin’s first wife makes the absolute most out of her few scenes, maybe helped by her having the only thing in the show that ever approached a standard, “Not a Day Goes By”. Kim Garrison Hopcraft, as Gussie Carnegie, maybe one of the most misogynistic portraits Sondheim ever painted, even manages to get us close to understanding, manages to make us feel something other than contempt when the character walks on stage, and does it by not judging and giving the character a refreshing self-awareness, and killing her songs. But no one in the 20-person cast is bad, even people who mostly appear in the chorus transitions get moments to shine, particularly Ryan Kay as a waiter with a dream, and Elena Perantoni who damn near steals a scene she’s in with two sung lines and one spoken.

Anyone who’s ever had that feeling like the world’s at your feet, you and your friends are just about to be great, whoever’s watched that feeling disappear and had to try to find it somewhere else, whoever’s had those bullshit sessions on the roof and found one of the other people turned it into a better song or a complete novel and you had to choke back that jealousy. Anyone who remembers how fraught with possibility the summer nights were when they were 20 and how rare it seems you’re in touch with that any more. Anyone who wants to be inspired or just goddamn entertained, go see this. Hell, I’m going to see it a second time before it closes at the end of this weekend. http://avltheatre.com/1011/blog/category/shows/merrily/

Time Turning in on Itself and Turning on You, A Parallelogram, Steppenwolf, 08/09/10

2010-08-10T12:05:00.001-07:00

Saw the premier run of Bruce Norris’s (Clybourne Park) new play in Chicago with Tom Irwin (a little ashamed I still remember him most from My So-Called Life), Marylouise Burke, Tim Bickel, and Kate Arrington, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. This’ll be shorter than usual because I don’t want to give anything away, but t0 start with, Jesus, it’s good. Go see it. Believe the hype.

It starts with an argument about a football game and perceptions, “If you saw this in a television show, a man like me, a white-collar white man, yelling at a woman, where would your sympathies be?” except there’s a time traveller in the room that only one of them – and the audience – can see. For the next two hours, there are several sudden shifts in the timeframe, relationships between those four characters change and deepen, and gaps between expectation and understanding widen but yu never quite fall into them.

What’s great about this play is that the central two or three questions set up in the first few minutes do get resolved but not by bashing the audience over the head, and not without humor. Everything that comes up gets used, like Chekov’s gun, but it’s not nearly as slick as it could be. And the direction is impeccable. Just like with her work on August: Osage County, Shapiro uses the set – one of the biggest wow moments in the play – as a conscious special effect and a break in the pacing but also to reinforce one of the themes, that we’re all trapped in our life, we have the will to change but things basically happen anyway, and only the trappings and the supporting characters change around us, stuck in space.

The acting is impeccable. Tom Irwin manages to slowly win us over while not glossing over the unlikable-at-best qualities of his character, Arrington’s both luminous and completely grounded, Bickel’s more of a cipher but perfectly fine, and Burke hits every note the play asks of her. Playing through August 29. http://www.steppenwolf.org/boxoffice/productions/index.aspx?id=478

The ‘60s, Illuminated Through Different Means

2010-08-07T08:19:00.001-07:00

“The music is like that , makes you see in the dark, cause the dark be you first. Understand. Can you see in your self? See the mission and the magic. The way and the cross. The hope and the double cross. The music is like that.”
-Amiri Baraka, “David Murray, Addenda to a Concert”

Started out this Saturday in Chicago – in a musical sense – after a Cubs game at the Empty Bottle for the Hoyle Brothers honky tonk happy hour: a packed room with $2.50 Shiner Bock on special and a dance instructor giving two step lessons. Exactly the scene you expect. Purely joyous, from a band that’s been doing this long enough they don’t have anything to prove. A drummer singing harmonies who knows the difference between a swing beat and a honky tonk stomp, a guitarist who can soar like a fiddle or snarl like a tenor sax, and a singer with the kind of smoothness that can put anything across.

Because their act is straight late-‘50s to early-‘70s country music, mostly covers but a smattering of originals in the style, it’s built for dancing and hinges on a sometimes-subconscious familiarity with the songs. But just as importantly, it counts on an audience not encyclopedically aware of that music, that’s kept off balance wondering “Is this an original? Is this a cover?” Then, before that confusion gets frustrating, out comes a classic everyone knows, like “Walking After Midnight” done by a lovely rockabillyish woman with a lilting voice, with the band backing her, or possibly the best live version of “One Woman Man” I’ve ever heard. The last ingredient to their success is slipping in a couple of off-genre covers but covers that work in that manner and aren’t just a shock novelty (Yonder Mountain String Band, pick up the red courtesy telephone), once “You Shook Me All Night Long”, last night Springsteen’s “Red Headed Woman”. The kind of thing that makes me glad to be in Chicago on a summer night and send everyone spilling out to dinner or another show or another bar or home dancing and grinning.

Then Ernest Dawkins’ Black Star Band at the Velvet Lounge. I’m ashamed to admit how long it had been since I was last in this south loop shrine to musics holy and ecstatic. With the passing of the great Fred Anderson I was determined to go see something there this weekend, show my support for the mission and drink a toast to the great man. Ernest Dawkins playing Friday and Saturday was even better. Friday night he led/conducted a seven piece band doing his new composition “Homage”, which, as he made clear in some introductory remarks, was both a tribute to the great Abbey Lincoln/Max Roach suite We Insist! Freedom Now Suite which came out in 1960 and begging the question, “Where have the last 50 years got us? What are the problems we’re facing now?” And if the Hoyle Brothers made me glad to be in Chicago, this made me glad to be alive.

If you’re doing something even tangentially related to Max Roach, you need a blistering-hot trumpeter and a fierce rhythm section, and this had both. The opening started with these tiny melodic cells from the guitarist Scott Hesse, bowed bass from the maestro Harrison Bankhead, some soft-focus (but never soft) cymbal work from Vincent Davis on drums, as Dee Alexander’s wordless vocals shot through the veins of everyone there, crying and snarling with this beautiful rage, banging on the walls of the cage of the heart. A little trumpet and bari sax drifting around the edges in the beginning.

It all shifted with three plucks from Bankhead, pulled strongly enough that you thought he was going to snap the strings off his bass, then resonating back with such a thunk you feel the floor move. Then those three notes again. Only then does Davis some in with a crash and this beautiful cacophony starts to bubble up, but with perfect architecture inside the whorls of sound, with Shaun Johnson (MVP of the night) peeling off these acid tones on his trumpet like it’s nothing, then stepping back into step with Hesse and Getsug to shadow Dee Alexander’s vocals. In this section the vocals served as a reminder that “Freedom isn’t free” (variations on that are the only completed lyrics in the piece), said fast, then slow, then amber slow, then fast again, but always with such pure, precise diction that every word hits you like a hot nail and a slap in the face. I wasn’t the only person with eyes closed, rocking back and forth in my seat during this, I promise.

Through the entire piece everyone got solo space to shine, including this perfectly bluesy section by Aaron Getsug on baritone and Dawkins himself flipping from Coleman Hawkins to John Gilmore to Pharaoh Sanders but always staying himself, with that juicy almost-shrill tone on tenor and alto, to Harrison Bankhead reminding us that he’s the pulse and Dee Alexander’s the soul. A perfect updating of the Roach/Lincoln piece to include what’s happened in jazz in the last 50 years but also shining light on how powerful that classic music is, how much it holds sway on our imagination and makes us all want to write a haiku or make a cave painting or write a letter to our congressman or go home and make love. All done by musicians who just looked over the material a few hours before. Given a couple more performances, this is is going to be classic, mark my words.

The cap on the night was a midnight Raphael Saadiq show at the Vibe – the old Crobar space uptown. Eight piece band backing him this time, two guitars, keys, bass, drums, tenor, trumpet and trombone, all in black suits with ties, bringing Saadiq out in classic style with an instrumental, his two background singers came out dancing also in black suits with ties, then Raphael took the stage resplendent in a cream suit with a brown tie already loosened. Opening with “Lay Your Head on My Pillow”, the first batch of the show went heavy on the Tony Toni Tone classics, then seamlessly mixing work off at least two of his solo records (I didn’t hear anything from the Ray Ray disc but then I didn’t ever spend as much time with that one, it wasn’t in heavy rotation for a year or more in my house the way Instant Vintage and The Way I See It were) and of course “Dance Tonight” from the Lucy Pearl project, with his female backing singer nailing the Dawn Robinson part and also the Joss Stone part on “Just One Kiss".

Saadiq is the kind of showman they don’t make any more: dancing well enough but not so well the show stops for the dancing, singing in this gorgeous falsetto but not dipping into showy melisma, playing to the audience but never pandering to us, walking to the side of the stage and getting us on his side, off-mic, like a cross between Marvin Gaye and Iggy Pop. Because he’d played Lollapalooza earlier in the day, this was (he mentioned on the stage) a more hardcore R&B show with some surprises for the true heads. Including bringing up his brother D’wayne Wiggins from Toni! Tony! Tone! on stage to join him on a couple of songs, and best of all bringing out one of the Spinners to join him on his cover of their classic “It’s a Shame”.

For a diverse portfolio of songs spanning 20+ years, everything felt like one continuum of soul, well played and with remarkable humor. A songwriter with total faith in his voice, a singer with total faith in his songs, an arranger and bandleader who knows he’s picked out exactly the right players to kick his ass and he’ll never need to worry about it, and a frontman who has so much confidence he knows nothing’s going to steal the spot light from him. He lets the background singers shine in a way that with any less of an artist, would totally upstage the main act, but they never do. You see his eyes light up when someone else on stage does something spectacular, he and the male backing singer grinning like “Oh my god” during the Spinners’ person’s falsetto (I didn’t catch the name, and its not like there weren’t 30 people in that group over the years). This is the kind of show where you don’t want to move to get a drink or go to the bathroom when he’s on stage, but you don’t stop moving the entire time.

Current 93, “Baalstorm! Sing Omega”

2010-07-05T05:56:00.001-07:00

“Solitude and contentment are the product
of the mystical; we are never
alone and, by rights, never at peace.
Such is a space that, called
into being, or given,
transforms everything from what we
know it to be, mishandled by
the world, to what it never was, blessed.
-Charles Bernstein, “Amblyopia”

When a new Current 93 record’s coming out it’s a cause for celebration in Sanfordtown, and Tibet and his shifting cast of comrades have been on a hot streak the last few years starting with Black Ships Eat the Sky, but this new one, Baalstorm, Sing Omega! feels like a climax, like the moment when a ritual finally makes the sky crack. The title combines a line from an Egyptian monk exhorting to “speak omega and do not let omega speak to you”, keeping your eye on the end, the final gambit, and not letting the world own you, as well as Baal, the Egyptian god of storms/thunder believed to have been introduced by the Semitic cultures and his name which literally means Lord. So you sing omega as the lord’s storm sweeps up, as you feel the wind around you.

Interestingly, a record made without the contribution of Stephen Stapleton or Michael Cashmore, giving it a much more organic feel, less of that gorgeous gauze to rip through, but once I got used to that, I found I didn’t miss it for this particulars set of songs about a very different dream-storm than that on Black Ships. Opening with “I Dreamt I was Aeon”, backed almost exclusively by Baby Dee’s piano and organ and John Contreras’ cello, the two utility players of this piece, “I saw her face, / Glory on the sea / And I have come / To draw you / To me”, words amber-sap-slow and getting more drawn out as the organ wooshes like Messiaen and the piano keeps its steady, measured, royal gait, not setting up the melody so much as standing aside it, arms linked, and the cello playing the real melody, slow and sad and confident.

The arrangements on this give everyone a showcase while still contributing to a cohesive whole, from Alex Nielson’s always note-perfect drums and percussion and Elliot Bates’ oud on the Eastern dance, “With Flowers in the Garden of Fires”, to the vibes, organ, backing vocals and guitar conjuring a cross between an Antonioni soundtrack and ‘60s soul jazz on “Passenger Aleph in Name”, to the fierce tension and almost anthemic quality of “The Nudes Lift Shields for War”.

The thicker arrangements keep all of C93’s work from seeming like a spoken word record, but so does the fact that Tibet approaches all of his songs as songs, not poetry with separate backing, and his albums as specific collections of pieces with one unified intent. My favorite tracks, and I think the album’s centerpiece comes with the one-two punch of “December 1971” and “Baalstorm! Baalstorm!”. Tibet’s vocal on the former is a sermon of doubt and frustration, memory as a way to spur on you and send you packing, driven by Contreras’ cello and Andrew Liles’ guitar playing, all clustered chords and gathering clouds, “I thought of her just now / She is there naked like the water / I cannot touch the punch of her lips / I cannot dare to touch / Lip or skin or fold / I gave gold to buy much less / And gave more / And nothing stayed but the storms”, with child’s – or childlike – voices bursting into the narrative, directing him with their exhortations as his voice rises to a roar then drops back to this hollowed-out melancholy.

And on “Baalstorm! Baalstorm!” with its faster, more insistent rhythms, a more direct love song to a series of women in his life, from his mother to Jeanne d’Arc who saw “the flames in her mane” to an unnamed You being addressed with “’Beauties of the Beast is / Full of grace – don’t you think? / I’d love to talk to you about everything’ / And then ‘Then I remember our days in Roma / Remember all the words?’” conjuring Horace’s Odes and Joni Mitchell’s “Talk To Me” in one raspy breath.

This record is a record of the storm inside David Tibet and the storm inside all of us. A prayer and a trip through the museum of art and memory that makes all of us who we are, and as with everything he does, a profound and moving act of faith in love and God and how you find that in apocryphal knowledge as much or more than anything in the canon.

Back again.

2010-06-20T05:04:00.001-07:00

Being in the Philippines for three weeks and working your ass off will throw off your ability to blog. Heard some records but no kind of a live music/social context. So I’ve been making up for lost time. Last weekend’s music was about how much of what you love is assimilated into your personal language, how much you hang around your neck intact, like a medallion, and the kind of swagger you need to pull that off.

Leaving aside the disappointment of Marah’s last minute (literally) cancellation, since there are conflicting sides to every story, the weekend started with Colin Gawel and the Lonely Bones at Skully’s. I was never the biggest fan of Gawel’s first band, Watershed, and by the time Watershed made some really great records – and believe me, The More it Hurts, The More it Works, is as good a powerpop record as has ever come out of this town, along with Gaunt’s Bricks and Blackouts and the first Pat Dull and the Media Whores record – I wasn’t paying attention.   So I’ve seen his solo work a number of times mostly solo and acoustic, but this was only the second time I caught him with his solo band.

What’s good is Gawel’s increasingly supple, strong voice, a rock solid rhythm section with original Watershed drummer Herb Schupp providing a sturdier crunch and some higher octane propulsion than Dave Masica, and Dan Cochran of Big Back 40 on bass, never overplaying but always knowing what needs to happen next, and at least half the songs. What’s not as good is the second guitarist and organ player who seems only to add an MOR gloss and second everyone else’s lines, arrangements that drift into hokey a little too often, and some of the lyrics.

Some of the songs lose power in the filling out of the details, including “Lonely Bones” where the gripping vocal delivery blends into wallpaper and the pedestrian lyric needs to carry too much weight, and “Chemotherapy” the full-on catchiest of the new material given a shine reminiscent of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Band from Louisian’” and not in a particularly good way. The weaknesses in lyrics, from Lonely Bones (principally the conceit “She’s got lonely bones”) to Superior (which works against its gorgeous, keening hook “Superior is deeper and farther / Superior never gives up her daughters / They stay by the cold, cold water” with verses that drift from hard-scrabble reality into just mundanity, such as “Her husband calls her on the phone / Tells her he’s never coming home / It’s too cold up there / It’s warmer in Milwaukee”), so close to hitting the mix of Springsteen and Raymond Carver he’s clearly going for that it’s harder to take when he misses the mark. Also hurt by the perfect, clear sound mix so every word is front and center, in a way muddier sound might obscure some of the misses.

But when it’s good, as in the new song “The Words We Say”, or a spot-on but not slavishly recreative Tom Petty cover, it’s an eminently satisfying thing. He’s got such a perfect grasp of a consistent tone, and the best gift for a hook of damn near anybody in town I know, hooks that you can’t get out of your head for days, and the voice like the flicker flame of a faraway town, warm and comforting across the dark, with enough confidence and soul to sell his songs with an earnestness that almost never gets cloying. And even in the weaker solo material, hearing an old Watershed song like “I-65” lets you know how far he’s come, grappling with what matters to him where the former song was all received wisdom and tough-guy road movie/Springsteen cliches.

After 45 minutes of that, we bounced to Cafe Bourbon Street for the Savage Pinkos 7” release. Much like Gawel, the Savage Pinkos (born out of the ashes of the Sick Thrills) are one of the few local bands who can headline after a rock-solid bill of touring bands and still have it feel wholly deserved and like it’s the proper order of things. We sadly missed Reverend Deadeye but got there in time for the whole set by Midnight Creeps, who recently came through town opening for and (in part) backing Moto, but here got to stretch out in a way that felt a little constrained by the (admittedly great) Moto songs.

A great pop-metal frontwoman, Jenny Hurricane, barking out tales of love gone wrong and love gone right in the most bruising of ways, and waking up two days later trying to figure out what happened, or just not giving a fuck, going from a grown to a surprising sweetness, often on songs that seem diametrically opposed to that delivery until you realize the tension is the point. Two guitar players who fuse the sleaze-punk garage snapshots speeding past with the bigger crunch of classic ‘70s punk and even pub-rock, riffs that are catchy even while they’re pulling a sleight of hand to convince you they’re not catchy. And the rhythm section who could play anything but strip it down enough that they’re an echoing wall of fire silhouetting everything else. All coming together in an amazing cover of David Bowie’s “Hang On To Yourself” that was all the aggression and sex that almost got lost in Bowie’s original concept record. Shots were poured and people were hugging and flying into each other and all was right with Columbus.

Then the Savage Pinkos came on and they were the icing and some spiked cherries on that cake. Fresh off their European tour, and ready to kick their hometown’s ass, they accomplished that mission in spades. A more complex, thornier band than Sick Thrills was but still with that classic punk underpinning. Held down by Donovan Roth’s always solid bass playing and one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard him with (sadly, Myspace wasn’t any help at finding names for anyone I don’t already know), with a guitarist from Vegetative State who makes even by-the-numbers punk sound fresh, and some slower, multi-part tunes with lacerating surges of guitar feedback (undercut by someone saying, “Fuck Sonic Youth”, defusing accusations of pretension before they started). And Jon Slak’s still an engaging frontman even if sometimes he seems more interested in gesticulating with the mic than singing in it, but he puts it across well and you don’t miss the lyrics that you don’t catch or the vocals that end up buried in the groove when the groove’s this damn good.

Maybe I give Gawel too hard a time for having the guts to put his lyrics up front and center when, for all I know, the lyrics to Savage Pinkos could be much worse, I just can’t hear them. Maybe saying “singer-songwriter music’s more about its words than straight punk” is a cop out giving me license to pick and choose what I’m listening for when. But I think not claiming different kinds of music have different strengths is as big a lie as I know. I want a different thing from a tiny, loud band in a tiny, loud room than from someone shredding his heart on an acoustic guitar. I’ll always want both.

The next day we headed for Cleveland for The Constellations and Eli “Paperboy” Reed and the True Loves at the Beachland Ballroom, maybe my favorite big room in Ohio to hear music (if you consider Southgate House technically in Kentucky, then definitely my favorite big room). I didn’t know anything about The Constellations except they’d worked with Cee-Lo and were from Atlanta, and when they came out with bass, drums, one guitar, two female background singers, and two keyboard players, plus a frontman in a Tom Waits undershirt and leather fedora, hopes were not high… until they started playing.

A fortyfive minute set of songs that avoided being “funky” at every turn but still came out ferocious, funny dance music. The frontman’s rapping closer to spoken word and his singing used his limited voice to the edge of its potential, most obvious on a cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”. The whole set came from the same place as that record – sex surging, breathing underneath melancholy and sadness crusting underneath sex, and virtuosity burned hot enough and run through a wire so it comes out at 120-proof music of a specific intent.

But that’s not to say it was monolithic, every one of those great grooves had interesting textures and left turns, and noir-pop of the late ‘50s breezed through churchy soul of the ‘60s and cocaine disco but with an interesting self-awareness, always twisting and winking at the musical and lyrical clichés, never satisfied with just pastiche. Elements carefully picked like tchotchkes from a junk store and artfully assembled, so the overall impression is this could be the house band for a David Lynch movie if David Lynch made a movie about a cartoon dog solving crimes. One thing the Constellations do better than any band I’ve seen in a while is use of vocals, with the drummer handling the low-end on his harmonies and the two female background singers (also playing tambourine and assorted percussion) not only in the high but sometimes also dipping below the lead singers voice, and occasionally even giving the impression of strings but without doing an impression of strings.

Attention also has to be paid to the lack of ego in this band. Everyone knows they’re great at what they’re doing but no one needs to get too far in front to show that, in a lesser band with this kind of talent, everything would stop for a guitar solo or those greasy keyboard runs, but here it’s just playing their part. The kind of band where a guitar player will only play two bars for the entire song and play cowbell and woodblock for the rest of it, and seem perfectly happy to do it.   And the balls in structuring a set, the first time (I think) they’ve ever played Cleveland, opening with a long intro of shoegaze-kraut-funk, and ending with the Tom Waits quoting “Step Right Up”, what feels like a 9 minute song with spoken verses and a big anthemic chorus that never lets you just embrace it, and their new single “Setback”, “Perfect Day” which I think has shown up on soundtracks and regional hit “Felicia” (their catchiest song by a mile) are buried in the middle of the set. Hell, I’m even braving The Basement in a few weeks to see them with Electric Six.

The headliner Eli “Paperboy” Reed and his band The True Loves came out twenty minutes later ready to prove he’s the headliner for a reason, and he delivered on every promise. The first thing you notice, if you’ve been following his work for a while, is that in his absence the voice has gotten both harsher and sweeter. The horn charts pop more, and the rhythm section latches onto different kinds of classic rhythm. It never stops being a genre exercise but when it’s executed so beautifully, who cares?

Still one of the best frontmen I’ve ever seen, and the best of the new material are the best songs he’s ever written.   Including “Help Me’ which could’ve been an OV Wright Backbeat single, “Every night, there’s an invitation / It gets so hard to resist temptation / But when my mind starts to wander / I’m making love to you / And I know your love / Will see me through” but more than the words, the high note at the end of that line sells the song, between the intro, “I know it’s hard, when you can’t see your lady, even for a day, but when I’m going on the road for months…. I just need to say, ‘Lady, you’re gonna need to help me, and I’m gonna need to help you…’” and the exhortations to the crowd, “I need you all to help me on this!" Or “Name Calling” in the Joe Tex slyly sexy word-playbook, “It went from name calling / To calling my name”.

The early-Marvin Gaye riffing on “Tell Me What I Want to Hear”, using a higher range of his voice – without shooting into falsetto – which segues into a perfect “Twistin’ The Night Away”, not just showing how he knows his place in the history of the music but also that he understands the connections between other artists/scenes in his history. But the best moment of the show came after the band gave him a break and did an instrumental, he and his organ player/harmony singer did “Am I Wasting My Time”, my favorite song off his last album, and it silenced the whole crowd. You strip away the horns and the rhythm section and you’ve still got great songs put across with the kind of sincerity and earnestness that always characterized the great soul singers. He’s not there yet, but he’s got a chance to be that good, and as he gets there, he’s still one of the best live shows you could see.

Exuberance, A Hollow Mask with a Beard Painted On, and the Difference

2010-04-22T13:16:00.001-07:00

“You know Louisville is death
You have to up and move
Because the dead do not
Improve”
-Silver Jews, “Tennessee”

The unifying trend of the music I saw that really affected me in NYC this past weekend was a grappling with tradition, and they either hit it dead on, they transcended, or they flared out in a ball of irony and slavish imitation.

The Nouvellas, still running hot on last year’s self-titled debut record, played the tiny tiki bar Otto’s Shrunken Head on a Wednesday night for the twice-monthly Copycat night, this one themed toward bubblegum, with a set of half covers and half their originals drawn from the record. On their originals they take a more muscular, rougher tack, a little bit Buzzcocks powerpop, a little bit early ‘70s Stax not unlike Columbus’ Nick Tolford, but always with a sassy tongue in cheek.

Watching them in this format you realize that they aren’t just two great voices, two engaging frontwomen, but they might have the best dance-party rhythm section I’ve ever seen, and a guitarist who plays just enough, no bullshit shredding but knows when to turn the sweetness up and when to punk-chop the chords up.And their own songs have the kind of instantly memorable hooks that can stand alongside the well-chosen covers, including “Indian Giver” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, “Sausalito” by the Ohio Express and especially their closer, “Little Willy” by Sweet. Corny? No doubt, and done with an awareness of that, but the winking didn’t derail the delivery, bouncy good time songs done because they were bouncy, good time songs. And there were moments when I could’ve sworn I was seeing the best no-frills rock show I’d seen in maybe ever.

The next day I caught up with Mary Halvorson’s Trio in the Jazz Gallery with Ches Smith on drums and John Hebert on bass, mostly dipping into their debut record as a unit from last year and a couple of brand new pieces. Every time I see Halvorson- and I’ve been seeing her for 7 or 8 years – her guitar tone’s more assured, sharper and her melodies more focused. And this has now pulled past her duo with Jessica Pavone as my favorite format to see her in. This is without a doubt her band, but it never feels like one soloist and two accompanists. Hebert’s bass lines you could ski down and his harmonies you don’t expect, Ches Smith’s color in his cymbal work, the way he shadows Hebert by rubbing the head of his snare, and the way both of them create an ever-shifting tectonic bed of rhythm for Mary to glide around in the cracks.

Friday we missed the Jay Vons but got to Southpaw in time for Budos Band. 10-pieces strong, with fewer horn players than when they played Columbus a few years ago, but more percussionists. The sharpness of the horn section consisting of bari sax and trumpet gave the melodies more urgency, less of the sweeter ‘60s soul of last time I saw them and even more of the late-‘60s Ethiopian bar band, with trading solos like throwing gasoline on the flames the rhythm section got started. The bass player perfect on those circular lines, a river through the percussion that reshaped the rocks and filled in the gaps, and the guitarist right there with him, for these 4-15 minute songs that never turned into mere jams, as much of the packed crowd danced as could without smashing someone into a wall. Perfect, sweaty ecstasy, with where no one walked out unhappy or not sore. I started nodding off on the train ride back, it was so damn good.

Finally hit a sour note on Saturday with the Hold Steady’s just-announced-a –week-before sell out at Bowery Ballroom. And I have my qualms about the bands’ material, most of Stay Positive rubbed me the wrong way. but they destroyed me live a couple of years ago and I thought a hometown crowd might change my mind on the songs that tweaked me. Well, it didn’t happen.

The problem I have with Hold Steady songs that seem to focus on a particular kind of loser is that it’s almost always a particular kind of female loser. And I’ve known those people all my life, the people still stuck at the party years after it’s not funny anymore, the people who never do anything but tell the same stories in the same bars for decades. And I’ve seen as many men in those situations as women. But by the man always being the point of view character, and the man never having any culpability or responsibility for the situation, is at best lazy writing. At worst, and taken in toto, is a kind of insidious misogyny, made all the more insidious by the band putting themselves across as literate, smart guys and therefore a literate, smart alternative to other music.

Beyond the lazy writing of the lyrics, the music also over time has incorporated more and more classic rock tropes but done in an overdone, funny way. Which works if you do it on one song. But when every third song turns into a half-assed Thin Lizzy intertwining guitar lines pastiche but with a less throaty singer, the tension there isn’t interesting. It’s wanting to have your classic rock fist pumping cake but keep your ironic distance you’re clinging to like a lifeboat. And while it might be unfair to brand a band by its fans? The songs that are borderline at best don’t get any better by a sea of backwards-baseball-cap-wearing dudes singing along to “In the bar light, she looked all right / In the daylight, she looked desperate” or “There’s always other boys / There’s always other boyfriends”.

By the time we walked out, it was 9:45 and the next thing we had tickets for wasn’t starting till 11:30 so we needed to get the taste of that out of our mouths. So onto Rodeo bar, and one of the best rockabilly singers the 1980s, Barrence Whitfield. Kind of a dull band, certainly not up to the standards of his classic Savages, but the sax player was righteous and as soon as Whitfield opened his mouth all was right in my world, the shouting of Little Richard, the snarling sexiness of Don Covay, and that scream completely his own, not even Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had such a perfect scream. Enough time for a shot of whiskey, a bottle of Dixie beer, and half an hour of stone jump blues/rockabilly classics, before walking down to the Jazz Standard.

Last show of the night at Jazz Standard with Don Byron on clarinet and Jason Moran on piano in the Ivey-Divey Trio, featuring Charli Persip on drums instead of Billy Hart. Impression I got was that Persip was new to the group – or may have even been filling in – since he only took one solo in the hour-plus set, but great beauty and joy nonetheless in probably the loosest set I’ve ever seen Moran or Byron play. Their interplay ranged from children at play, giddy tumbling and trying to one-up each other to the seriousness of chess grandmasters.

Obviously inspired by the the Lester Young/Nat “King” Cole/Buddy Rich trio of the same name, this is the kind of tribute that takes great liberties but is also done with immense love, not the gloomy elegy I discussed in an earlier blog. The Byron/Young analogue is more apparent now than when I first saw this band several years ago as his tenor sax tone has risen to the level of his clarinet tone and it really sounds like one voice singing in two registers. And Jason Moran is Nat Cole the way Cezanne is Michelangelo, shared DNA, no doubt, with the broken chords and the sweetness of tone, but both more abstract and more invested in the internal landscape. What made this all the more delightful was, after a gorgeous solo clarinet piece, Byron called his father up to play bass, and he ended up playing the entire set. Like I say, fun, and smart, and everything I always wish more traditional jazz was.

Sunday was another lesson in wonderful contrast and the difference between a great genre act and an act that blows the doors off genre. Met a friend of mine, who’s a great jazz guitarist, at the Lakeside Lounge, for some jukebox and bullshit, and the Ramblin’ Kind started at 9:00. Pitch-perfect honky-tonk country with a singer with a great voice and a dead-on guitarist and a great selection of songs, including Billy Joe Shaver’s “Black Rose” and Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” (Solomon Burke singing that is one of the 10 great pairings of singer and song in all history). Nothing new, but if you like that stuff they do it better than 95% of the bands I’ve ever heard do it and a totally satisfying time if you’re looking for it.

After leaving the Lakeside, I saw the Amir El-Saffar/Hafez Modirzadeh Quarter with Mark Dresser on bass and Alex Cline on drums at Le Poission Rouge, rapidly becoming my favorite room in Manhattan to really listen to music. The show divided into two halves of more or less equal length, the first 12 “facets” of Modirzadeh’s “Radif-e Kahyan” and the second the 8 parts of El-Saffar’s “Copper Suite.”

Both compositions seemed incredibly interested in a locus where the natural ranges of all four instruments coincided, creating an opportunity for these gorgeous whirlpool drones that you could barely see your way out of. Modirzadeh’s also seemed to get a lot of juice out of that moment where ecstasy overloads and turns into melancholy and vice versa. El-Saffar’s was a little spikier, thick with sharp thorns and beautiful melodies not showing up or resolving where your ear’s expecting them to, but once you got it it was like you’d run a mile for the first time, that full-chest gladness and exhilaration.

Taking the classic Ornette Coleman – or, if you’d like, John Zorn’s Masada – quartet format and its ability to contain Ginsberg-style long lines and messy beauty and four players more than equal to the task, the El-Saffar/Modirzadeh group laid waste to anything I’d seen before. Not just that weekend, but ever, for at least a minute. While I was watching it, I couldn’t come up with any comparisons, just drifting into the middle of the sound, and you can’t ask for any more than that.

Technorati Tags: music,Nouvellas,Mary Halvorson,John Hebert,Ches Smith,Budos Band,Hold Steady,Barrence Whitfield,Don Byron,Jason Moran,Ramblin' Kind,Amir El-Saffar,Hafez Modirzadeh,Mark Dresser,Alex Cline

Distance and the Gap; Four Photography Shows in NYC

2010-04-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

You all know I love Columbus, but the wider range of interesting cultural stuff – especially visual art - in New York isn’t even up for debate, right?

I’ll try to hit the highlights of my four days in NYC but in a few posts, this one’s grouped by medium. Today’s it’s photographs – Catherine Opie, Robert Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and a variety of other artists after the jump.

Catherine Opie was the biggest find I got from the Wexner Center’s recently closed Hard Targets, somehow she completely slipped under my radar until her photos of high school football players in action and at rest in that exhibit. So I was excited to see a solo show, Girlfriends, at the Gladstone Gallery.

The Opie show is probably the best portrait photography show I’ve ever seen, it almost feels like a show of landscapes but the landscapes are people – sometimes within a natural landscape, sometimes not. Her friends and her partners in a show combining new and archive photos, including k.d. lang, Kathleen Hanna, and women anonymous to the world but clearly not to their documenter. There’s such love for the subjects in these paintings but not sentimentality, the focus is as sharp as a razor and every blemish or hard-won crease, every smirk or glint of the eyes doesn’t just come through, every one of these tiny details grabs you by the collar and makes you look at the photograph in a different way.

“Idexa”, with hiking boots, shorts and no shirt, on a rock formation in the woods, with this perfect look of acceptance and those tattoos lit just right by the filtered light through the trees. “k.d. lang” in a gorgeous simple coat on a barren stretch of landscape, hair perfectly just out of place giving the impression that a strong wind whipped through but she’s still standing, still there. Just as interesting are some of the photos’ names with a parenthetical like “Julie (play piercing)” face covered in the piercings of the title and running black (chocolate? paint? blood?)with her head tilted back in ecstasy or pain.

There’s distance in these photographs, in some ways the distance of a journalist, but the distance isn’t there to keep you at an emotional arm’s-length, it’s there to let you take in everything and get to your emotional connection to the subject on your own terms, not the artist throwing her emotional connection at you. The plethora of expressions, situations, ages, walks of life, with and without backgrounds, I could’ve seen this a dozen times and not gotten everything there was to get.

I also saw another archive-based photography show at Matthew Marks, Robert Adams’ “Summer Nights, Walking”, taken roughly thirty years ago. This is also about landscapes seen through the tiniest details and it all looks wet, you can feel the humidity seeping through the slow glass of memory. As a suburban kid who took a lot of these long walks, unaccompanied, this conjured memories of that feeling like anything could happen – good or bad – and like you were the only person in the world. Not as much to think about as the Opie, but some indelible images that will last with me just as long, like the garage door being overtaken by a branch’s shadows like a creeping terror, or the gas station with a sickle moon hanging over it like a sword of Damocles.

The illusion of Adams’ work is that there’s no distance, you’re right in his eyes as he’s randomly walking around and choosing images. But that’s deceptive, especially with the lush black and white, and the aggressively film noir compositions in about half the photographs, this feels like another world - not just gone but never to be seen again. Like the kind of movie you secretly wish you’d come across on a flickering black and white motel TV but you buy the DVD anyway.

The Guggenheim’s main exhibit right now, Haunted is what on Star Trek or the West Wing they used to refer to as a bottle episode – no guest stars, using only existing sets – and this is almost entirely images from the collection. It’s trying to be about the way past technologies, and the vagaries of memory, still inform modern photographs, which you could say about any art. And for what it is, it’s a little bit of a mess, but there’s plenty of striking, moving work you should see if you haven’t already.

Walead Beshty’s damaged photographs of an abandoned East German embassy in Iraq are especially hurt by the odd, inconsistent lighting of this exhibit, looking like red blurs with reflections of everyone walking by until you saw them at just the right angle, which is a shame because they’re some of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibit. Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements, however, are an excellent example of what the Guggenheim does very well, several photos lined up horizontally of mirrors placed in Mexico breaking up and extending the landscape. A panorama of attention grabbing images that beg you to come in the middle of them and slowly get what’s going on, striking enough to burst through the beautiful drone of the building but subtle enough you need to let it seep through your pores.

Also worthy of additional mention is the video of Merce Cunningham performing “Stillness” consisting of Cunningham performing the choreography to John Cage’s 4’33” (naturally, the dance is sitting still, fitting for a composition of silence). Set up in four projectors that you gradually realize you can’t walk around, you have to disrupt the image and everyone’s viewing experience, and it makes you not just nervous, but incredibly aware of how and where you move. But the thing that seemed to sum this exhibit up for me was Idris Khan’s “Homage to Bernd Becher”, a compression of several Becher photographs into what looks like one half-finished image, entropy combined and turned in on itself, which got me thinking. Is homage always a close cousin of elegy? Does paying homage automatically mean the person tribute’s being paid to is dead to the person paying the tribute, that we’ve learned everything we can learn from them and now we need to reject those lessons? And is it freed up from that serious, elegiac tone if the person being paid homage to is actually dead (I’ll address this in a music post about the same trip).

And of course, the elephant in the room, A. and I saw Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern World at MoMA, And in those photographs you can see the birth of all modern art photography and photojournalism. The antecedents of the documentation of a movement you see in the Opie in Cartier-Bresson’s China and workplace photographs. The rare beauty of a wave hitting a shore in Cartier-Bresson or the way streetlamps make shadows fall from trees in the Adams. And a disregard for darkroom technique that you see show up but tweaked or aggressively played with in many of the works in Haunted. I’m way too much a dilettante to even think I could say something new about this, but an exhibit completely worth seeing.

Technorati Tags: photography,Catherine Opie,Robert Adams,Henri Cartier-Bresson,Guggenheim,Museum of Modern Art

Scott Woods, Women of the World, Killadelphia, The Scion Rock Fest, and the Absurdity of Writing Poetry

2010-04-01T04:01:00.001-07:00

“I’ve driven your highways and backroads, I rode the great dog
Through the snow and the sleet and hail,
Through the sunlight, through the fog.
I’ve heard the ravens call morning up
With their little raw saxophones
But the darkest of ravens was Nina Simone.
Yeah, we’ve all been to hell and come back
Where love cut us right down to the bone
But walking beside us was Nina Simone.”
-Tom Russell, “Nina Simone”

I try to see as much as I can, as time and money (and the corollary effect of needing to keep my job) and sanity and my health will permit. But no matter how open you think you are, there will always be blind spots, always be things that either fly under your radar or consistently get pushed down on the agenda- seeing poetry falls to working late on Mondays, seeing metal falls to seeing a show where you’ll have more friends, locally-produced theater gets the short shrift compared to proven out of town work even when it’s produced by the same company. We all do it.

This is a circuitous way of getting to an apology that I haven’t written much in here in a while. I’ve seen stuff I loved but couldn’t think of what to say about them besides “That was real good” – Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard, In the Red and Brown Water at Steppenwolf, Sarah Jones at the Lincoln Theater, Smoking Popes, etc. Both the last two weekends have included art that didn’t take my excuses:, tired, over-stimulated, whatever the case was.

It shoved me against a wall and gave me that feeling, the feeling I started a blog to try to document - where a spark went straight up my spine and all the hairs on my neck and arms stood on end, and I think I see the connecting thread between all of it. Art that’s intensely personal but also works through and around genres, that shrugs off memoir or persona poem or black metal and cracks those trappings like a shell then paints the pieces of that shell that still cling to the art so it’s recognizable, not trying to disguise its references, but organically changed so the resonance is picked up by the history and the now – the audience - and vibrates us both. Makes you feel a little less -or more – alone –or both, which is a pretty sweet feeling itself.

These weeks of joy started with Scott Woods doing a fundraiser feature at the Poetry Forum on Monday March 8. One of my favorite poets in town at the longest running reading series (at Larry’s for over 20 years, now at Rumba Cafe as Larry’s has become the Sloppy Donkey). Doing two twenty minute sets of greatest hits and some new work, from poems I’ve loved for a long time – including the devastating “How to Make a Crackhead” with orbits around the line, “Grow up” which the person being addressed does and the person named in the title never gets to do; “To the High School Thug that Broke into His English Teacher’s Car” which manages to sketch two complex, complete characters and praise Nina Simone in less than four minutes; and “Elementary”, maybe the best example of the kind of love poem Woods was originally known for in town.

Also working in some work I’d never heard, including the hilarious (and cringe-inducing, it hit so close to who I was at 16) “I Hate Zombies Like You Hate Me”. “Republican Poets” which resonated with a recent blog about where’s the conservative art gone, who’s making it, are they just not on the radar of those of us who aren’t interested in the message or is there something else going on. “Jesus, Judas and the Case of the Old Woman’s Son”, as perfect a mastery of voice as I’ve ever seen. The cut-up/collage “Bob Ross Loves You Baby”, which picks up the thread of his early “Bob Ross, Give Me Strength” but using all Ross’ own words, put “in a blender” as Burroughs and Gysin said, to show the vein of ‘70s loverman underneath.

The open mic was also, as the forum goes, typically solid with some beautiful work – especially Frank Richardson’s poem about two Goya paintings – and some work that’s still clearly in the chipping-away-everything-that-doesn’t-look-like-an-elephant stage. But I walked home and took another crack at a poem I’d abandoned the next day on the bus so the wheels were already getting turned, rust falling off.

Wednesday of that week was the kickoff/pre-party day for the Women of the World Poetry Slam. I bought the $50 all-access pass even though I knew I wouldn’t make some big events of this, because I wanted to show my support. I think Slam’s focus on the audience has been generally good and there’s some beautiful, as well as rhythmic/visceral/whatever clichés you want to use, work to come out of slam land, but I don’t care who scores what. I want to hear a poem, as Stephen Coleman said, “I wanna say yes at the end because I’m sick of saying no” (this comes back later). I want to hear a poem that smacks me in the face or makes me throw some devil horns in the air, that leaves me tapping my feet to its rhythm without any musical assistance. And this event brought some damn firepower. Some of the strongest, most entertaining poets I’ve ever run across and twice as many I’ve never heard of.

The first open mic preceding the Last Chance Slam was like – and I mean this in the best way – the first twenty minutes of a science fiction convention, or the best Wednesday night of Twangfest – people who only see each other a couple of times a year at poetry events hugging and catching up, but also very focused, very intent on hearing out the voices of the people taking the stage. And the stage was big enough for the guy with the three-page free verse choking on its own metaphors (don’t look at me like that, I promise I was exchanging some eye-rolling at the side) but shit, he had the balls to get up and do it anyway.

And some straight-up greatness, including organizers like Mahogany Brown and Louise Robertson (who did a poem that has maybe my favorite opening line ever, “My Mother taught me how to lie. It’s like breaking asparagus. Snap. Pop. Done.”) and a woman who was too young to officially compete did a poem about the corroding effect of love, its ugly-making properties, that blew my hair back. And last year’s champion Rachel McKibbens closed that night’s mic with a Jan Beatty “cover” taking us all back to the Lollapalooza spoken word stage and those MTV poetry segments.

The next day – after a Jameson-sponsored whiskey tasting at the local Fado, A. accompanied me to a first-night bout at Kickstart Coffee, all of us sitting around scooters and motorcycles for sale listening to some phenomenal poetry, including Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s poem critiquing her boyfriend’s drunk song-poem that’s given A. and I a mantra for the ages - “Sandwich, I’m gonna eat you” - and a number of poems there, the Erotica open mic at La Fogata that evening, Zanzibar on Friday, and the First Draft Open Mic at Columbus State on Saturday afternoon that all gave me that elusive feeling, poems by people I knew about (like Vernell Bristow, Laura Yes Yes, and those completely unknown to me (especially Dusty Rose from San Francisco who I saw a couple of times, and a woman who did a persona poem about the mother of a serial killer), and I wish I could write this up better by either having taken better notes or by the participants/nights sheet still being up on the web to jog my memory but suffice to say every one of those shows gave me something to think about and felt like I put my finger in a light socket.

Much like the solo Woods , there were a plethora of genres cut and bent, mutated, reshaped or sometimes just refined to such a pure essence that you could see right through them. Personal work that always eschewed easy memoir even when they put a needle right into the artist’s own past and sprayed the blood in front of light so you cold see a rainbow in it. Just seeing the diversity of perspectives – while also seeing how work grew out of the communal slam history and all its regionally evolved subspecies.

Genre getting its face reconstructed in a back alley surfaced again the same week, at the corporate-advertising multi-venue Scion Rock Fest, four venues full of underground metal for six hours at each and I saw at least pieces of six bands. Obviously, with this kind of show, not everything’s going to burn its impression onto your brainpan. Even those that didn’t quite grab me still did what they did at full speed and ferocious intensity – including 3 Inches of Blood, textbook NWoBHM done very, very well, and Absu whose brand of hybrid black/thrash metal might have sold me if I saw them earlier.

But the four bands that did – again, why this is one War and Peace blog and not something more digestible – didn’t take my excuses, reconfigured, flummoxed and confused my conceptions about rock and metal and ultimately reaffirmed by belief in its potential. I’ve never been a huge metalhead, but I loved those Earache deathmetal bands in high school (my “punk rock” when punk rock was all post-Op Ivy SoCal dross) and Slayer and Motorhead are two of my favorite bands.

Starting with the two bands that worked me over but didn’t fire the kill-shot, Ludicra, in Bernie’s, fronted by two women, one of whom handled mostly the screaming death vocals and the other playing guitar and handling vocals more reminiscent of Black Sabbath-era Ozz, tweaking the metalcore/hardcore trend of a more melodic singer and a screamer, and male rhythm section you feel in your ribcage and your groin before you even realize you’re nodding along. Students of every important trend in heavy music of the last ten years, from the thick grooves of Pantera and Monster Magnet (and maybe even a little White Zombie funk) to stoner’s long song-forms breakdowns that fell between vintage hardcore and vintage Morbid Angel, occasionally shooting to thrash’s velocity as a way to build tension, not to release it. Everything in this set was perfect and attuned to their intent and their mission. You walk out trying to describe this and end with “You know what? This was a great fucking rock band, that’s what this was.”

Hate Eternal with Erik Rutan from Morbid Angel and a bassist/backing vocalist and a fiery, very professional drummer performed a kind of reverse alchemy from the magic Ludicra brought, maybe the defining death metal guitarist taking those death and black tropes (and that monowire guitar tone) and boiling it down into a Motorhead or ZZ Top-style power trio, using the cliches of both areas but infusing them with the energy of the other. When it got too groove-y, he’d spray it with a guitar solo that was chemical flame; when the breakdown got too steady and rhythmic, the bass player would start into a counter rhythm or some beautifully weird harmonics. And conversely, when it got too technical or avant, that giant drummer-led groove was back. And I don’t mean “professional” as an insult to the drummer, because he hit every note they asked him of with aplomb and, a couple of times his cymbals started to come apart but he didn’t miss a beat, he played around the technical difficulty while his tech got it fixed and they didn’t need to stop even one song.

And then the main course. The evening started with more than a bang via Lullabye Arkestra, a husband-wife duo from Montreal playing bass and drums, that started with slow tense bass-plucks and tiny cymbal patterns almost like playing a Ruins or Lightning Bolt 45 on 33 instead, then as though a switch got flipped, it moved through vintage mid-‘80s cusp-of-thrash metal, third-wave rockabilly, ‘70s cosmic soul, all on just bass and drums and those two voices in perfect, smoke-weathered harmony. Most accessible band I saw the entire night, I can’t think of anyone who loves rock and roll who wouldn’t have loved this but that’s not to say it was simple, there was plenty of depth and substance and quirks to dig into.

And Liturgy would have made my going worthwhile even if everything else had sucked. New blog-hyped, Bard-educated black metal from Brooklyn sounds like about the worst thing ever, but I always had a weakness for black metal when I could find something not tainted with the racism/homophobia couched in Teutonic folk or Nietzschean purity and Kyle Gann’s shout-outs got me to check out the record. It was great, but I still had my doubts of how it would be live on a bill of “real” metal bands. So, so glad to be wrong. They came out with wordless vocals, as much doo-wop as the choruses/infernal chants you expect from Black Metal, and it kept going on and on and the three and four note patterns repeated out of sequence by different voices, turning into almost a Steve Reich piece before my eyes. Then the crash of the drums and the first song surges up, and it’s an amusement park ride through everything I love about music of the last half of the 20th century, black metal grooves and snarled vocals, yoked to Ennio Morricone guitars getting dissolved in a Jesus and Mary Chain acid bath and even a little Pavement and AC/DC along with more Reich echoes. Show of the year so far.

And the next week was the work that, as Sondheim said, “sum[med] it all wide up and [blew] it all wide open”, and I hope any of the two of you reading this who get that reference forgive the tastelessness. Available Light holds onto their title of most interesting theater in town by doing a victory lap of previously-produced work that I, at least, missed the first time, both one man shows in an afternoon at the Columbus Performing Arts Center, Killadelphia, billed as a “mixtape” by Sean Christopher Lewis, and The Absurdity of Writing Poetry by founder/artistic director Matt Slaybaugh in collaboration with sound designer Dave Wallingford.

Killadelphia disarms you at first when Lewis walks on with a book of “material”, tells you it’ll be a minute, does some work and then it’s on. This is a mixtape in the sense of putting together things for a teenage love to try to get your feelings across indirectly (one I received as I recall included James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Cake’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes”, and lots of whispers that turned into giggles) or for yourself to try to make sense of these feelings (one I made around the same time that I didn’t send, as I recall, included me reading Yeats’ “Politics” along with Tom Waits’ “Please Call Me, Baby”, a rare recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance All Night” and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s “Lush Life; some things don’t change much). But I don’t mean that connotation to imply that the work is juvenile, it put me in mind of that because sometimes throwing everything experienced around and sifting through it is still the best way to make sense of completely incomprehensible events/people/history, even when you’re an adult.

Lewis goes from his original impression on what he thought he’d be doing in the Philadelphia prison program to document - “The world’s greatest white b-boy prison bonanza” – then the corrections officer he meets and slowly the prison itself and the prisoners start to shift that. But not in the way you’re expecting, no holding hands, no hugging. He comes out knowing some people change and some people don’t and some people only change if their circumstances change and revert immediately if that goes back to the old status quo. And he manages to hit all of these perspectives – and even more, all of these individual people – and these voices in an incredibly entertaining, moving, harrowing hour. No one in the audience, I can almost guarantee, walked out forgetting this show any time soon.

The Absurdity of Writing Poetry takes its title from the Wislawa Szymboraka poem “Possiblities” which is one of a number of poems and other sources (including George Saunders, Margaret Atwood and James Kolchaka’s “The Trouble With Comics”) collaged into kind of a theatrical one-man version of a Rauschenberg combine. Opening with Steve Coleman’s “I Wanna Hear a Poem”, arguably the modern slam poetry ur-text (it got quoted and its words appeared on the screen in the Def Poetry opening credits, for chrissake), which I mentioned about a million years ago in this blog post, talking about the WoWPS, and with a sparse stage littered with props (books upon books, boxes with written fragments, an old manual typewriter, a chair, and a ladder) this show was the shot of adrenaline I was looking for, and I don’t think I was alone seeing the faces in the audience.

The piece traversed through Rosewicz and Mos Def, Saul Williams and two Ferlinghetti pieces, Howl of course and Okerele’s “The Pioneers”, all spelled out in the program, and part of the joy was the way the sourced-work appeared, figuring out the connections and occasionally babe ruthing it, but most of the time being wonderfully surprised. This kind of thing could have so easily been the equivalent of those quotes taped around Harlan Ellison’s typewriter but it was infused with so much soul and humor that it works as monologue and a rallying cry and an ars poetica even if you didn’t have the built-in knowledge, if you didn’t get the references or know the artists Slaybaugh cites in the climactic laundry list that seems like it’s going on forever but delivered so intently you want to throw a fist in the air. And bringing this all back to the Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz rallying cry earlier, “Fuck yeah, sandwiches are awesome!”

I’ll be back soon, with something a little more manageable. Promise.

Technorati Tags: theatre,Available Light,Scott Woods,Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz,music,Liturgy,Lullabye Arkestra,Hate Eternal,Ludicra,poetry,Women of the World Poetry Slam 2010

Gin and… well?; Gin & “It”, Wexner Center, 03/07/10

2010-03-10T03:58:00.001-08:00

Reid Farrington's new media/theater piece Gin & "It" came to the Wexner Center last week, after its premier at the Under the Radar Festival in New York in January and before its first full NYC run at PS122 in April-May. This has a lot of parallels with what I saw in Continuous City last year and, much like Continuous City, I wished I liked it more than I actually did, but it was a hoot, a terrifically entertaining chunk of old theater magic using extremely sophisticated video projection with Noises Off timing and screwball wit.

The piece tries to recreate (in a more abstract way) the methods Hitchcock used in his adaptation of Rope, using tricks to make the film appear as though it was all shot in one single take, which in turn recreated and abstracted the original play which took place in real time on one set. Four performers appear as grips and work behind and around the "scenes" including the ever-present trunk which in the film holds a corpse.

They accomplish this using props but frequently using small, flexible screens or chunks of drywall on wheels to hold the projection, which is also interesting because the more full-frame shots are done on the back of what would normally be part of a backdrop on stage while the dialogue, the taut interpersonal interactions, are done on the individual screens and generally, the projection on those is a cutout with Farley Granger, John Dall, et al against black matte.

The grips' own action tries to mirror what's happening on the screens and this is where the play falters. Often to make sure the projection is clear, the stage is too dark to tell exactly what's going on. And when you can tell, often its too obvious, as in the sequence where the price of a cup of coffee one grip bought is the same price as something being mentioned in the film.

Throughout, there are interesting technical ideas that get used once or twice then discarded (most prominently figures being silhouettes that say “Media Not Found” or a color-test pattern) instead of echoing through the entire piece. The title Gin & "It" refers to the way Hitchcock and Arthur Laurents worked around homosexuality in the original film (based on Leopold and Loeb) and that's mentioned as an allusion in the program note, but there's less of a homosexual subtext in the play than in the original film, and without that or any other emotional core, it's a fun abstraction about making a demanding, intricate movie but it left me a little unsatisfied.

I can't wait to see what Farrington does next, I hope the Werner Center continues to provide resources and support for this kind of art, but I hope whatever he comes up with next has more of the emotional, visceral bite of the best work of his previous employers The Wooster Group or the video-heavy revival of Sunday in the Park with George I saw a couple of years ago.

Technorati Tags: theatre,Wexner Center,Reid Farrington

The crack that runs all the way down the stone statue. Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape, Goodman Theater, Chicago, 02/20/10

2010-02-28T07:13:00.001-08:00

“The drunken truth at midnight
Proves false before the dawn
When you wonder where she is tonight
And what dress she might have on.
Don’t try driving by her house, son,
You’ll find her bedroom light still on.
They say, ‘Man, does it hurt?’
‘No, it don’t faze me.’
Lying is the mother tongue
On the other side of crazy.”
-Tom Russell, “The Other Side of Crazy”

Once in a while you see someone who feels like they were born to interpret a particular writer’s work; William H. Macy doing Mamet comes to mind. I saw that with Brian Dennehy in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie at the Goodman Theatre. The play has every criticism you could levy at O’Neill – ponderous, preachy, a little too on-the-nose, and it’s basically a monologue (a two-hander but the other person, the night clerk in a New York hotel, maybe has 20 lines in the hour he and Dennehy are on the stage) - without the punch in the gut delivered by O’Neill’s best work like The Iceman Cometh or Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which Dennehy won a Tony for). And it needed a better audience, the crowd laughed like they were seeing Caddyshack through about half of it, but that’s no fault of the performance.

Dennehy understood that the classic needed someone who brings that late-‘40s gravitas to it, he needs to read O’Neill like he’s doing Shakespeare or Jonson. Trying to interpret those words and especially those rhythms in what an audience member (by which I mean, as in everything else I write, me) would read as more naturalistic or “realistic” acting, has been the downfall of many a very fine performer, as with Jena Malone and Joseph Cross in last year’s Mourning Becomes Electra (for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed Lili Taylor in that but how much of that is the crush I’ve had on Taylor since I was 16 I’d rather not think about).

He hits just the right balance of self-assurance and self-awareness, deep down he knows he’s a failure tripping from one disappointment to the next relying on the easy love drunks have for strangers to keep his soul propped up. Always in a bluster, always on the verge of storming up to bed in a rage, but always finding a reason to stay and keep talking. By turns conciliatory, ingratiating, and prodding, he oozes through every interaction, and when he finds a weakness, he exploits it, but still loses more than you’d think. Direction, set design and especially the costume, a seersucker suit that as A. said “Mentally I was sure I could smell that jacket,” all worked, and any shortcomings in the play got swept away by watching a perfect performance by one of the true virtuosos of the theater.

After a 15 minute break Brian Dennehy came out to do Beckett’s masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape, and he looked like he’d shrunk six inches and caved in on himself in the intervening moments. Mumbling to himself, alone, on his 69^th birthday, listening to a tape of himself at 39 already talking about watching love slip away, needing to curb his drinking, and the confounding state of his bowels, along with everything else. He laughs bitterly along to the tape; reminiscing on a book he sold 17 copies of to overseas libraries. And no kind of plot description makes this sound as amazing as it is but he nails it, and the moment where he stops cold and starts singing “Now the day is over,” is one of the most chilling, heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen on a stage. I can’t imagine a better version of this play, if you get a chance, please, please take a minute and go to this.

Technorati Tags: Chicago,Goodman Theater,Eugene O'Neill,Samuel Beckett,theatre,Brian Dennehy

The Romantic in shards, modernism slouching toward Bethlehem; Peter Brotzmann: Wood and Water, Corbett V. Dempsey, Troy Richards – The Perfect View, Thomas Robertello

2010-02-28T07:06:00.001-08:00

“The day it snowed on the statues and the light
whispered of coming to grips with the problem, of a thaw
when the sun lit the mounts, the sky grew blue as its
burden fell in drops and over my shoulder a new atmosphere
of comprehension, of desire, of yearning…”
-Barbara Guest, “Biography: Two”

Made it to two gallery shows in Chicago this past weekend (as well as the MCA, which will be its own post if my thoughts start about that start to cohere).

I was looking forward to the Corbett V. Dempsey show before I even set foot in the door, Peter Brotzmann’s record on Okka Disc with Kent Kessler and Hamid Drake was the rosetta stone that made contemporary European free improv make sense to me, in its mix of churning emotion and the tranquility and wisdom of stone, almost ambient textures when played at one volume and a maelstrom of feeling you’re trapped within at another, and that sent me down the rabbit hole I still haven’t gotten out of.

And who wrote the liner notes for that? John Corbett, co-owner of the gallery, whose book Extended Play: Modern Music from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein came out when I was a freshman in High School – I got it a year or two after that, from the Wex bookstore - blew my mind and opened my eyes. I’m not anywhere near the writer or the thinker Corbett is, as should be painfully obvious to the handful of you I’m so grateful read this, but that (and Greg Tate, and Peter Margasak, and some Guralnick, and some Tosches) is the benchmark I’m always striving for.

At Corbett V. Dempsey, Brotzmann in his Wood and Water show uses watercolors, gouache, and woodcuts to drill through layers of inhibition and conscious thought, bringing myth and Jungian archetypes bubbling up from the vein of history. In triptychs brush strokes take shape as a hill, then trees in front, and by the end the trees look like Blake's giants being crushed by Heaven - with the giant being crushed motif popping back up, more literally, in a couple of woodcuts.

He ranges from post-apocalyptic hieroglyphs to abstract expressionist cave painting in the ink and gouache works, but that's oversimplifying. Sometimes he harkens back to the fauve or earlier romanticism, fitting for the self-proclaimed "last romantic", as in the gorgeous reds and blues of Dark Cloud over Kurst on artfully distressed paper or the black and white Shinjuku paintings that are all sensual wide brushstrokes and shades of grey that only reveal the composition as you step back, like buildings turning into - or being reborn from - ash.

The woodcuts reinforce these perceptions but add more figurative, literal work and physical power and momentum, in some ways echoing the Depression-era socialist art but even the nature woodcuts, recalling a rougher-hewn Hokkusai, seem to pulse, getting their energy from the edges where you can see the artist's hand in a very real way. They eschew precision for a movement rippling under the surface. Through Mar. 27. http://www.corbettvsdempsey.com/exhibitions.html

In sharp contrast, we saw Troy Richards' exhibit The Perfect View, which is all precision. If not untouched by human hands, then as close as seems practical. The artist created a computer model of a plane crashing into a modernist house and then took fragments of it, flattened out, and printed onto vinyl with a laser printer. Interesting use of textures, rubble laid on the prints in small strips of vinyl, and same color on color to create depth, as in the first picture of the series of a placid, starless night sky over the trees and the plane in black matte just coming through the background. In whole, as A. said, "It's smashing pretty things together and making them prettier."

The second picture looks like a pattern of white on black until you realize after going through the whole exhibit it's a point of view shot of the moment a window shatters. And the pattern of the shattering glass is recalled a little bit in some geometrics that you realize are samplers, used in the background of the interior. But what bothers me about that p.o.v. shot, is there are no people in any of the pictures, no one on the plane, no one in the house, it's just beautifully crunched shapes. The best hypothesis for this I heard was from A., "It's a comment on those modern houses where people seem extraneous anyway," which I'd buy. But this kind of thing just makes me hear in my head the Diamanda Galas song, "You who mix the words of torture, suicide, and death / With scotch and soda at the bar / We're all real decent people, aren't we, / But there's no time left for talk / Please don't chat about despair / Please don't chat about despair." http://www.thomasrobertello.com/exhibition/view/1715

I was glad to have seen both of these but I'll take the Brotzmann any day of the week.

Punch Brothers, Lincoln Theater, 02/13/10

2010-02-14T16:25:00.001-08:00

“I wanted to salvage
something from my life, to fix
some truth beyond all change, the way
photographers of war, miles from the front,
lift print after print into the light,
each one further cropped and amplified,
pruning whatever baffles or obscures,
until the small figures are restored
as young men sleeping.”
-Ellen Bryant Voight, “The Last Class”

Steve Earle said once, while explaining his decision to make a bluegrass album (The Mountain) that he was looking for immortality, because so few new bluegrass songs were written compared to the number of bands that good material got picked up and replayed ad nauseum. But – and someone correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t hear other bands picking up and running with the great songs on that, “Texas Eagle” or “Carrie Brown” or “The Graveyard Shift”. Too personal, maybe, or too idiosyncratic?

I think Chris Thile’s in the same boat except he’s actually expanding the melodic and harmonic vocabulary of bluegrass and I’ll bet you in a generation or two everyone in the genre will know all his songs, but right now I don’t think fans or other bands are seeing past the different rhythms to process what he’s doing. There was a very clear divide at the concert we saw on Saturday night where probably 60% of the crowd was loving almost everything he and his crack band did, another 20% kept shouting for songs from his previous band, jam-grass crossover stars Nickel Creek, and another 20% only applauded when it hewed closest to more traditional motifs/structures/solos/harmonies including the Stanley Brothers “Lonesome River”, a few of his solo songs, and a cover of the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” from his first post-Nickel Creek record under his own name.

This shift/fissure came most apparent during a new instrumental when a sizable portion of the crowd tried to clap along and made it through about a third of the tune, with dropped beats and barely-perceptible time signature shifts, the lightbulb moment of the show both for that and because it affirmed what a monster the bass player is, his arco work on about half the set gave everything a darker string quartet feeling and even his standard pizzicato plucking sometimes sounded like a thunderstorm on a hot day. But everyone was, of course, excellent from the violinist to the rock-solid guitar player to the banjo player who filled the piano role in the more chamber-music numbers the quintet did, to Thile who obviously knows his Monroe and his McCoury and his Louvin and his Bush but played the mandolin like Eric Dolphy played the tenor sax: turning what you thought it could do inside out, playing it like a drum, playing it like a radio tuned between two stations.

A third of the set was dedicated to newly recorded songs for an upcoming record, which had the virtuosic rave-ups and heartbreak narratives you’d expect but they showed a more assured grasp of tone in the lyrics, the comingling of barroom-weepy and ironic-awareness less jarring and the hooks stronger and clearer but not veering towards radio-friendly, lines like “You’re only as good as your last goodbye” ringing in my head for hours.

The connection between the covers and the history and what they’re doing now seemed more evident but no less surprising in the new material, with the violinist’s use of extremely quiet playing and dissonance learned for a Radiohead cover showing up as the intro to one of the thornier newer songs, and the interesting klezmer and flamenco touches that showed up in the newer material. This’d be better if my dumb ass had remembered to bring a pen and jot down the titles of the newer songs but rest assured if you like this kind of thing at all and they’re playing near you? See them. And I’m willing to bet right now on their next record rocking me.

Technorati Tags: music,Chris Thile,Lincoln Theater

Merce Cunningham Company Legacy Tour, Wexner Center, 02/12/10

2010-02-14T05:43:00.001-08:00

“If I kiss you please
Remember with your shoes off
You’re so beautiful like
A lifted umbrella orange
And white we may never
Discover the blue over-
Coat maybe never never O blind
With this (love) let’s walk
Into the first
Rivers of morning as you are seen
To be bathed in a light white light
Come on”
-Kenneth Koch, “Spring”

Hoping the Koch works as an incantation to bring an early thaw as the snow turns to grey back pain and temporary depression. Plus, one of my favorite love poems and I’m typing this on Valentine’s Day while A. is – sort of, almost – sleeping. Love you, baby. The connection to the actual subject of the post might be a little more tenuous, but the feelings I get from Koch or Ashbery mirror very closely what I get from Merce Cunningham’s dances and, for that matter, the music of Nancarrow and some of Cage, this wild, delighted surprise.

In one of the best-thought-out decisions (in a long line of well thought out things), Cunningham came up with a legacy plan before his death last year which included a two-year world tour before the disbanding of the company. I’d only seen the company once in the early 2000s on one of my first trips to New York, so there wasn’t a chance of my missing this (probably) last chance to see it. That said, if I get the chance to see this in another place, you can bet I’m going to; they’re doing a total of 16 pieces, including things as well-spoken of as “Quartet” and “Ocean”.

We got to Mershon in enough time for the latter half of the pre-concert talk which included two OSU professors, one of whom had danced with the company in the early ‘80s and the other had been the lighting director in the early ‘90s. What came through most strongly in the talk was the collaborative spirit, Cunningham chose people for sets/costumes/light/music and worked up the dance completely independently, rehearsing the company in silence. To have that kind of belief in the people you’ve chosen is a lesson we should all take to heart, and that it comes off so seamlessly is a testament to the choices he and everyone involved made.

The show opened with “Crises” from 1960 with single-color body suits designed by Robert Rauschenberg and several of Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano as the music, with the decor being long curtains and light pouring from the side of the stage, like mid-day Manhattan windows. One man and a variety of five women in different colored suits, the women sometimes danced in space with each other, but when the man entered, he always had a female partner.

A. thought that he was an ominous figure but I got this very sexual energy, this bliss and fun from the women dancing together but almost an S&M playful control – I”m on top, now you, now I hold you down, now you, to me, now I grab you by the shoulders, swing you around a full 360 degrees, then lay you down – sometimes so perfectly in sync with the music it was hard to believe they didn’t rehearse to it and sometimes just separate enough that the music was overlaying a rhythmic bed or a mist of melancholy that colored the movement without forcing it one direction or another. This was the piece that destroyed me of the two.

The second piece was Splitsides, with music by Sigur Ros and Radiohead, and in the most Cagean move of the night, it opened with five dice rolls to determine the order of the sets, the costumes, the sections of choreography, the music bed, and the lighting cues. So the dancers have rehearsed multiple ways and they don’t have anything to lean against or bounce off of, not the emotional content of the music, not a certain cue of light, only their body and their training, which is more than enough. While I preferred certain elements – the first set, the Radiohead piece, the black and white costumes, the second set of lighting cues – obviously the dancing in both was marvelous and again, seeing how it fit together against all odds was as much fun as watching the very virtuosic, very personal movements, there were more group pieces in this, fewer pas de deux, more about how the body relates to society, to the group.

One of those nights you come out grinning and glad to be alive. Thanks as always to the Wexner Center for bringing this.

Technorati Tags: Wexner Center,dance,Merce Cunningham

Dulce et Decorum; The Great War, Hotel Modern, Wexner Center, 01/21/10

2010-01-23T12:26:00.001-08:00

“Someday they’ll probably
Make a movie out of all of this
There won’t even have to be a murder
Just a slow, dissolving kiss…”
-Elvis Costello, “Poor Napoleon”

No way I could literally describe this would make it sound as incredibly touching or awesome as it was, but I have to try or I’m going to hate myself.

Dutch theater troupe Hotel Modern do a WWI movie in real time with scale sets and toy soldiers, including live music and classic Foley sound effects. It opens with a map being unfolded and iconic steam engines and industrial buildings and ships and cigars and the Eiffel tower laid over it, with live narration that gives the impression of a winking parody of a BBC or Time Life movie about the beginnings of the war to end wars.

Then it zooms in and cuts to another “set” of miniature landscape, and the narration is the first of several letters from actual soldiers. Black and white, what’s meant to be a trench, and you can see them manipulating the elements but in five minutes you don’t care more than you don’t notice. And it goes from there in fragments, this transparency of process and storytelling and manipulation so you’re looking through what they’re doing but you’re emotionally engaged anyway. You’re moved anyway.

Outing myself as even more of a geek – I know, I didn’t think that was possible either – a few years ago I helped playtest a White Wolf roleplaying game, Wraith: The Great War. One of the most elegant mechanics I thought that had was “the fickle finger of fate” meant to model how much more likely you were to die from an errant shell or a landmine because of how closely packed together soldiers were. The new mechanized nature of warfare made it feel more like fate, like some unseen force was plucking people out and killing/maiming them. While I know the members of this troupe never played that game, they just as directly show this effect with, well, hands, as in one of the most searing images of the production, in color, with clattering percussion conjuring (because nothing in this show just mimics) gunfire, toy soldiers are set up and then knocked over with a finger, a sparkler and a blowtorch backlighting them in flame, again and again and again.

The other image that stuck with me and seemed to sum up the overall aesthetic of this was a very deliberate dirt, then water turning the dirt to mud, then “corpses” of toy soldiers placed face down in it – breaking from earlier when we always saw them die – then more, then more mud, then white powder for snow, then the snow washed off but no sign of the bodies, too many and too deep underground, then cutting away to another grey figure in a trench singing a folksong, slurring and through static.

Runs through tomorrow, you won’t regret going, I promise.

So much to see and think and feel; Pride and Prejudice, Available Light Theater, 01/14/10

2010-01-16T07:54:00.001-08:00

Playwright Daniel Elihu Kramer and director Eleni Papaleonardos do the damn near impossible with Available Light’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, they take it apart, put the pieces back together leaving some gaps so you lose your familiar footing only to find it again, while referencing the acclaimed movie adaptations and pointing out their slightly different takes which also sheds light on the play’s different take. And in doing all of this, they fit in everything the audience loves about the book and they do it in less than two hours.
The performances are terrific, especially Michelle Schroeder [ed., incorrectly said Joanna at first, mea culpa] (so heartbreaking in God’s Ear and so hilarious here) as Jane, Lydia, Jane Austen and Darcy’s aunt, Acacia Duncan as Elizabeth, and Wolf Sherrill as Darcy and Mr. Collins and the entire cast as modern bloggers and students hashing out the questions behind the story.
One of the feats of structure this pulls off effortlessly is shifting from the action (including actors speaking description such as “Darcy did not speak”) to modern book club/blog/study group questions to Jane Austen’s own letters all through a trick of lighting – naturalistic (at least for whatever that means for the stage) in the narrative sections, harsh talk-show light for the modern and a soft spotlight on Schroder for the Austen letters.
A had a concern that the second half dragged a little bit but honestly I felt that way about the book too, and once all the tools are set up in the first, the second flows naturally and doesn’t need to keep shocking you with another reference or another crack in the fourth wall. The kind of play that’s wholly satisfying on every single level.
Playing in the Riffe Center until January 24. http://bit.ly/4I9gHe

Technorati Tags: theater,Available Light

Truth behind authenticity, heat behind metaphor, love behind motion; H3 by Grupo de Rua, Drake Union, 01/10/10

2010-01-11T02:33:00.001-08:00

“You’ve faked so many feelings
in your time you wonder
if it could have been
the ghost of faked feelings
offering you an authentic sadness,
a gift.”
-Stephen Dunn, “The Song”

Before seeing this – and all thanks go to a friend for passing off the tickets she was too busy to use – I was only vaguely aware of choreographer Bruno Beltran and his Brazilian group Grupo de Rua. And this show, on a miserable, bitterly cold Sunday affirmed so much of what I love about dance while still ducking the grasp of my conceptions, pre- and otherwise.

Beltran’s eight dancers came out to no backing track in a well-lit section of the stage, a rectangle in front of the unfinished backstage you can see in the dark. They break off into duets with no music at all, two move together,then one or both leave and others rotate in but it feels conversational, almost colloquial, it doesn’t feel staged, it’s so well-choreographed it doesn’t seem choreographed. And this section – which continues with no music at all, already taking the audience out of their “hip-hop dance” comfort zone – starts out structured like a break dancing battle but the moves you’d expect breakers to come out of their two-step into are abbreviated, chopped up, the hit doesn’t come where you expect it to.

As music starts to show up, it’s solo distorted drums, and they’re not directly following the beat. Nothing new, but done as well as I’ve seen it done. Through the sections the music turns to techno then back to silence then back to the solo drums until all the musical elements come together in the frenetic finale, the musical bed of hip-hop dance deconstructed and put back together with just enough pieces perfectly out of place to be interesting.

There’s also a sensuality that starts to creep in, an eroticism. as the all-male dance troupe touch and immediately bounce off each other and their moves echo – but don’t directly mirror – each other. Bodies in motion in a celestial sense – orbits, flares, the explosion of a supernova turning into a black hole – and in motion in the sense of just people relating to each other on a physical level and how that conceals or brings out the emotion maybe you don’t even have words to describe, or you’d be too embarrassed to say.

Part of what makes this so interesting is that the hour-long piece broken up into sections, is so cohesive that doesn’t come from a narrative or recurring themes except in the broadest sense: space that hems us in and gets broken by sheer force of will, how we go past physicality and how it restricts us. Basically, what all dance is about. And if you try to read a story, read the dancers as characters, it’s going to shirk from that scrutiny, and if you’re looking for metaphor I won’t say you can’t find it because I don’t have a vocabulary in dance but it’s certainly not the more obvious metaphor of Twyla Tharp or William Forsythe .

There’s a great joy to the dancing here and when they all move in concert, in looping, swinging motions or drifting offstage there’s some Jerome Robbins amongst the Jerome Bel, it’s theatrical and beautiful and hit every button I have. Thanks to Emily for hooking A and I up with tickets, and to the Wexner Center for continuing to bring this kind of thing to town.

Technorati Tags: dance,Wexner Center,Grupo de Rua

The Inbetweens – Quantum Cowboy; Scrambler Seequil – Secret Passageways

2010-01-10T07:05:00.001-08:00

Going to try doing a couple of CD reviews at least once a month, and as Scott Miller sang, "We'll see how long I last." Starting with a couple of CDs that showed up in my mailbox from Mike Gamble, who's been getting a lot of love lately and from the evidence of these it's easy to see why.

Quantum Cowboy is the first album the Inbetweens have released on a physical label, Layered Music, home of Cougar and Youngblood Brass Band, and it's clearly a point where they start sounding like themselves. There were moments of beauty on both of the earlier records - and couple of tour CDRs - and always a cracking live band whenever they'd come through Columbus on tour or I'd see them at Bar4 or the Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, but the compositional intent is much clearer and the improv more focused on this album.

Comprised of Mike Gamble on guitar and loops, Noah Jarrett on double bass, and Conor Elmes on drums; everyone makes their presence known as a leader on this. The New York Times review compared this to Frisell's classic trio and there's certainly something to be said for that, particularly the title track that opens this set's hybrid of Nashville-era and '80s Naked City-era Frisell, with its fingerpicking and sharp teeth distortion. But the best moments of this remind me more of those French Frith Kaiser Thompson records without the vocals, from Conor's always soulful, just-loose-enough drumming to Noah Jarrett's bass lines you could sing that never stop nudging the rhythm forward (not holding it down) through Gamble's stinging, singing tone.

This record hits its stride with the gorgeous ballad "Maia", named for Jarrett's daughter, one of those tunes I can promise people are going to start picking up on and in ten years you'll see dozens of jazz - whatever that's going to mean - acts covering. The electronic glaze spread over the warm notes of this song gives it a comfortable, lived-in feeling, almost a '70s Mwandishi feeling but in the best possible sense of that, with Elmes' best soloing and great, unexpected comping that flows organically right after from the other two players.

That stride keeps it up through my favorite piece on the disc, "Hello Copper", with an easy-going gentle groove that throws in a nice left turn every handful of bars like clockwork to make sure your ears are still working. The bass-guitar interplay on this tune is particularly good and this track best exemplifies what I thought about the Inbetweens back when I first heard them, they're a trio spitting out pure rhythm, every instrument is a rhythm instrument building towering, intricate blocks of motion.

I'm happy to report that on this album, the melodies have caught up to the rhythm and they're almost indistinguishable and I'm going to be listening to this for a long time. Heartily recommended for anyone who wants to take the temperature of jazz guitar trios in 2010, alongside 2008's massive Mary Halvoson Trio record and Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. http://www.myspace.com/theinbetweensmusic

I wrote about the Scrambler Seequil EP last year in this blog, and just got the finished full album, Secret Passageways. I've listened to it maybe a dozen times and almost as many situation - waking up, in the wee small hours, on my ipod trudging through snowy streets, in A's car -and I find it a little confounding, but in the best possible way.

This is a more fully formed statement than the EP (while containing several of the same songs) and, interestingly for a debut, already shows some signs of boredom with the song forms herein. The core duo of Devin Febboriello on vocals and keys, Mike Gamble on guitar, backing vocals, and keys, and augmented by ringers including Ani Difranco's bass maestro Todd Sickafoose (also a damn fine composer in his own right, check 2008's Blood Oranges), reeds player Tony Barba (of the Barbarians, Brooklyn Qawwali Party, and one of my favorite tenor players), and three very different drummers (the highly technical and funk-based Walker Adams, the aforementioned Conor Elmes, and New Orleans soul sensation Simon Lott II), find cohesiveness even as they duck away from the grip of sameness.

The record opens with "Hear the Sound", all multitracked buttery vocals and lilting, slightly-off kilter grooves, but the weirdness is apparent as early as the one-two punch of the '70s-ballad-on-cough-syrup "Thirteen" with its dusty organ and guitar back-and-forth and flute and the blotter-acid-cut-with-hydrochloric "One Design" which in less than four minutes goes from one of Devin's finest lyrics on the record, "If I forget my mind, I'd simply know I am alive", through some wordless girl-group-punk shouts into a tango that gets swept in the undertow of twinkling keyboards and a guitar line that splits the difference between Tsziji Munoz and Carlos Santana

"Rest For Now"'s bucolic, easy-to-digest folksy charm draws the listener back in but the lyrics make sure you stay edge, "Because there's just not enough faith left in all of this madness / to be anything else but mad", well, the lyrics, the woozy organ and that perfect, chopped-up cymbal.

It really hits its stride a few tracks later on "Dead Grass", an inversion or younger folks take on LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends", with repetitive synth and guitar stabs that get under your skin and backwards drums that would make Adrian Sherwood smile; and a narrative about trying to understand and knowing that just around the corner "we rise, we rise / To catch a glimpse of the brightest day to ever dawn / Then we run, we run / To catch up with everything that we've loved". This fades seamlessly into a Gamble solo instrumental "Amidst the Abyss" which could've been a lost Squarepusher track if he collaborated with Fred Frith around the time of Music is Rotted One Note. Then it all comes back with "Us, Be", the mission statement of the entire album, maybe summing up the whole band's aesthetic, "I don't want to live in your hopeless world."

If the object of an artist is to describe their own, idiosyncratic Eden to the world, this does that in the shadows, in a flickering Super 8 document, the way Kore-Eda's movie After Life had amateur theatre versions of a memory for someone to have forever. And the flaws are part of what makes this stick and makes it as entertaining as it is. This record is the sound of a band's reach just starting to exceed their grasp without making a perfect album first and the next one, I'm willing to bet, is going to blow us all away. Until then, there's much, much beauty and fire herein. http://www.myspace.com/scramblerseequill

Tags: music, Mike Gamble, Devin Febboriello, Conor Elmes, Noah Jarrett, Tony Barba, Simon Lott II, The Inbetweens, Scrambler Seequil

Favorite Art Exhibits 2009

2009-12-25T17:30:00.000-08:00

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 than it's worth.

And as with the music, these aren't the only ten things I saw. A number of shows made these a hard call to make, including C. Spencer Yeh, Marilyn Minter, and Anri Sala at the CAC in Cincinnati, Ryan McGinness at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Robin Rhode and William Forsythe at the Wexner Center, Shepard Fairey at the Warhol in Pittsburgh, Constellations at the MCA in Chicago, this year's New Photography at MoMA, Watteau at the Met, Tristan Perich at Issue Project Room, and on and on.

1. Luc Tuymans, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus - I've been to this three times and I'm going at least one more before it closes next weekend. One of the most riveting, unnerving exhibits I've ever seen at the Wex. The colors wrap you in, seduce you and misdirect you, the cinematic motion sweeps you along. Then, when you're not quite expecting it, there's a knife at your throat and a voice saying "Witness. Don't forget. Love life enough to let it worry you."

2. Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago - Sondheim put the words in Seurat's mouth, "Color and light / There's only color and light / Just blue and yellow and white" and this exhibit exploded that, so color and light - frequently just by themselves, teased and tossed with mirrors and projectors became (or already were) nature painting and film and a magic show. If I didn't have my day to day, I'd have camped out in the $10 ecstasy room (the color wheel) until they forcibly evicted me. I went twice taking different people both times and both times I didn't want to leave.

3. Kandinsky, Guggenheim, New York - I thought I knew his work very, very well, but this still showed me things I wasn't expecting and still had pieces I didn't know existed that made me stand, stroking my chin, completely oblivious to the throngs (believe me, it was crowded) going "Holy shit..." I walked four miles to go get some food just mulling this over after I saw it.

4. Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Art Institute of Chicago - An artist I respected but didn't love until this convinced me he might be the best living nature painter. These canvases and a couple of sculptures throbbed with life and flowed with reflected light, and a couple of blurry photographs he used as guides made the lightbulb go off. He's doing what Monet was already trying to do, let the light permeate the object so you're looking through to its emotional life (or your emotional life as it appears back to you). And he's doing it magnificently.

5. Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Someone I never gave any thought to, unlike Kandinsky or Twombly, shook me up and knocked me down. The emotional life through color and light that's rapidly cropping up as a theme here? In spades, and darker and sadder than any of the other artists who've so far appeared on this list.

6. Georgia O'Keefe: Abstraction, Whitney Museum, New York - What I said about the Kandinsky show, x2, spinning an artist I already liked into a different stratosphere of my awareness. The sensual line and the inner/outer landscapes are still predominant but there's a conceptual rigor that I never got from the work I saw before and a grasping at something, at the time, new.

7. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, Guggenheim, New York - A look at how the art of the '40s-'60s, running 1890s-1980s but mainly on those decades, moved past Orientalism (and, in some cases, didn't) and tried to grapple with the bigger questions and philosophical tenants gleaned from Asian art, literature, music and philosophy. The recreated LaMonte Young "Dream House" in the Guggenheim's galleries was enough alone to put it on this list, but there was so much more, from Yoko Ono and John Cage to Georgia O'Keefe and Rauschenberg to Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt and Nam June Paik. The kind of show the Guggenheim excels at and the best of its kind I've seen since the post-minimalism show several years ago.

8. Anish Kapoor: Memory, Guggenheim, New York - I saw this at the same time as the Kandinsky show but I really hope this ran long enough before that opened to get the appropriate (by which I mean a hell of a lot) amount of love from New York fans and critics. A tiny rectangle looking into darkness, within inches the material around it is receding into this perfect void. Then when you get around to the other side of it, it's a massive, room-filling asymmetical orb of thick reinforced copper-colored steel. And you want to slap yourself because the conceit is so obvious and so beautiful. It's memory as time bomb, memory as time capsule, memory you can see into but know you couldn't get out of if you ventured in too far.

9. Things Fall Apart, Winkleman Gallery, New York - The only gallery show on this list which means I'm very disappointed in myself. Next year, more galleries in Columbus, in Cincinnati, in New York, in Chicago, in St. Louis. I promise. This group show was up there with The Third Mind retro and the Bonnard thing A. and I saw on our February New York jaunt, and she might have even given this the edge. This show grappled not only with the Yeats line but also how pervasive references to it are now, this looked at entropy and terror and destruction as reference points for change, opportunities gained and lost. And it was beautiful and moving. Everything in this was good, from Mounir Fatmi's reimagining of flags as brooms cluttered and leaned against the wall, to Joy Garnett's paintings looking at the Three Gorges project in China to Yevgeniy Fiks look at WWII Russian/American propaganda. Worth the trek through Chelsea with the flu on a devastatingly bitter, cold day and worth so much more.

10. Looking In: Robert Frank's Americans, Metropolitan Museum, New York - Impossible to ignore the crowd in the three crammed galleries in the Met this was in but if you could ignore the crowd that would entail missing the point entirely. Familiar with the book and its images mostly as a totem and an important document to the beats, having to engage with each photo individually and contact sheets and out takes and ephemera, I walked out studying everybody's face a little harder, picking up on the empty spaces I just walked by most of the time, and what else do you want from art?

Shows of the Year, 2009 (Draft)

2009-12-18T14:47:00.001-08:00

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 Clay and the Hi Rhythm Section, reunited Flamin Groovies backed by the A-Bones, Dennis Coffey. I mean damn. And the New Orleans Jazz fest with my favorite single moment, after seeing half of Emmylou Harris’ powerful set especially “Return of the Grievous Angel” and “Red Dirt Girl” then walking over to see Solomon Burke open with “Just Out of Reach of my Two Empty Arms” and going into “That’s How I Got to Memphis”. And all the food? My god.

A lot of stuff that was good didn’t make this list – The Supersuckers at Ravari, Leonard Cohen in Detroit, Jack Oblivian (twice), Bonnie “Prince” Billy (twice), Box Elders at Bobo, Wooden Wand at Rumba, Scott Miller at Southgate House, O’ Death at the Southgate House, The Cynics, King Khan and BBQ and Those Darlins (two diff shows) at the Northside in Cincinnati, Garotas Suecas at Rumba, Vandermark 5 at the Wexner Center, the list goes on.

Next year the plan is to reconnect with local music and find a few bands to love that don’t have my friends in them or haven’t been playing for 10 years, only Nick Tolford really blew me away and made me go see him several times this year.

Other trend I’d note that didn’t seem to fit the list proper, this was the year I reconnected with how much I like to go out and dance. My thanks to Funkdefy locally, Windy City Soul Club and Peruvian band Novalima DJ’ing at the much-missed Sonotheque in Chicago, Mr. Finewine and Jonathan Toubin at many locations but together in a huge unmarked space in Brooklyn; all were some of the most fun nights I had this year, where you come out sweaty and sore and horny and feeling very, very good.

1. Numero Eccentric Soul Revue, Lincoln Theater – You want to know how to perfectly recreate a classic music event of years gone by, you should call the Numero people. First, mention has to be made that JC Brooks and the Uptown sound were the consummate backing band with a damn fine singer who had enough presence to command the stage, enough ebullience to be a perfect hype man, and enough humility to just stand aside and sing backup when needed. And what made this great was that Numero is all about not just the eccentric, lost sounds, but they’re about local scenes, so tribute was paid to Marion Black through Brooks doing one of his songs and the Four Mints did a couple of songs including the gorgeous “Gently Down Your Stream”. Renaldo Domino killed on “Too Cool to Cry”, one of the most beautiful songs of the ‘70s (I said most beautiful at the time, and A. put me in my place with “More beautiful than ‘La La Means I Love You’?”). And Syl Johnson set the mother on fire, with his golden suit and raging versions of his hits including “Take Me to the River”, and while I would have liked another few songs (no “Dresses Too Short”?), the final encore of all the acts doing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” nearly brought me to tears. So joyous a night in Columbus you won’t likely see again for a while.

2. Gories/Oblivians, Majestic Theater, Detroit - Two bands I never got to see in their hey day, playing one of two shows in the US, and leaving everybody drenched and talking funny. Oblivians closing their set with "Never Change" with Greg beating the drums like he was Buddy Rich at the end of a long, drunken night, lurching through the biggest gospel rhythm you've ever heard. Mick Collins taking a solo so righteous on “Ghostrider” that he rocked his glasses off.

3. Extra Golden, Rumba – Best drummer I saw all year, propelling a band through the best melodies I heard all year. They played like they threw diamonds up into a starry sky with flames in the background and took long-exposure photograph, all deliciously blurred shapes and acid-trail lines. Anyone who wasn’t dancing was nodding along from their seat. Anyone who wasn’t at least nodding, or who was outside smoking, is automatically suspect.

4. Faust, Wexner Center – Most of the time, you see one of those bands you thought you’d never see and they don’t live up to the expectations you built up. But once in a while it’s better than you would have let yourself hope. This year that happened to me at least twice, with the Gories and with Faust. Regardless of who the lineup was, original members or no, they showed up with a concrete mixer on the rider which they mic’ed and deferred to like a background singer. A long kosmischemusik jam followed by introducing the next song with “This is about the ambiguity between men and women” and then one of the prettiest acoustic-guitar-led pop songs I heard all year. I walked out of this and floated all the way home, wanting to grab people by the shoulders and make sure they know just how awesome what I saw was.

5. Antony and the Johnsons, Southern Theatre -Reams have been written on the angelic properties of Antony’s voice but until you see him live you may not realize how much of a classic soul man he is. The same intensity and humor and joy I saw last year from Jimmy Scott singing from a wheelchair at the Iridium, or Meredith Monk at the Wexner Center or at BAM, or Otis Clay, Solomon Burke and Allen Toussaint in New Orleans this year, he has those qualities in spades. A tight seven piece band that can go from chamber music/art-song settings to ‘50s gutbucket cal and response and Antony at the piano at all times in control, from the rousing “Shake that Devil” and “Fistful of Love” though the heartrending “For Today I am a Boy” and “Kiss My Name” on through the perfect, finding-the-sadness-and-obsessive-qualities cover of “Crazy in Love”. they created a continuum of music that used clichés and tropes but never descended into just cliché.

6. Rafael Toral Trio, OSU Urban Arts Space – Not the first show I saw after getting out of the hospital (that was Leonard Cohen in Detroit) but close, and certainly the first show I took a notebook to and tried to write about, though I don’t think I did anything with it. Before this show I only knew Toral from the record he did accompanying David Toop and his appearance on Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers. Here he appeared with C. Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core, Trevor Tremaine from Hair Police for the first set of a single 20-25 minute improvisation that coiled and glittered, then adding Columbusites Ryan Jewell and Mike Shiflet to make it a quintet that opened the canvas up to different brushstrokes and colors. As hard as the music was to describe – is it noise? is it free improv? is it at times eai? – it was even harder to get out of my head later that night.

7. Eric Taylor, Red Door Tavern - “Just like high school.” That was the oft-repeated refrain Taylor would use in his long, partly-improvised, snaking spoken word interludes between those beautiful songs, both were riveting. A story of his friend drawing wax-crayon hearts on a shopping bag and throwing knives at them starts hilarious and ends ineffably sad and then turns into one of my favorite of his songs, “All So Much Like Me”. For those two sets there was nowhere I Wanted to be and I even regretted leaving before the encores to go see Moto at Bourbon Street (who rocked, of course).

8. Jack Rose, Hideout, Chicago, and Sarah Borges, Fitzgerald’s, Chicago – I wrote these two shows up together in this blog and they’re inextricably linked in my mind, I’m not sure what to say about one without the other, but it was the best Jack Rose show I ever saw and I thought that before it turned out to be the last Jack Rose show I’ll ever see. He’ll be missed but I don’t need to tell you that. And Sarah Borges was perfect in a completely different way, distilling all sorts of roots music (soul, ‘50s R&B, country, whatever the hell NRBQ is) down to catchy hooks and tight playing and a sense of epic fun. A great first couple of nights before the wedding of one of my best friends, which was the best thing we did all weekend.

9. Larkin Grimm, Cafe Bourbon Street - Four of us there in one of the worst-promoted shows in history. Grimm playing most of her excellent Parplar (came out in 2008 but I wasn't hip to it until the beginning of this year) backed by guitar, harmonium, percussion and guzheng with these songs that build their own internally consistent world and at the same time feel wholly other and resonate with your own life. Her voice is a bludgeon and a scalpel when she needs it.

10. Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Roulette, NYC – This was the frosting on a great damn weekend of jazz in New York for me this year, from Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society at LPR to Harris Eisenstadt at Cornelia Street Cafe, but Threadgill was somebody I never thought I’d see live. And the current lineup of Zooid is cracking. Stomu Takeshi on bass, the guitarist and the tuba player are erecting these cracked sculptures of rhythm while still not letting the melody slip and Threadgill’s alto and bass almost recall Bach counterpoint at times, with a terrific drummer. I think Threadgill gets a lot of credit for arranging and putting together awesome bands but you don’t hear much about his compositions – or at least I don’t recall – but my god, these perfect byzantine structures but with gold rivers running through them, every piece held its own weight and could hold anything the players or audience could put into it.

11. Reigning Sound, The Summit – Nothing much to say about this, one of my favorite bands sounding better than I’d ever seen them and playing for an hour and a half to a pretty full crowd on a Tuesday night. It’s hard to get me to stay out after midnight on a weeknight any more but I just didn’t want to leave.

12. Amir El-Saffar, Wexner Center – This and the aforementioned Harris Eistenstadt show fought in my memory for this list, both had excellent tunes and great playing, but I had to side with El-Saffar and not just for Nasheet Waits shit-hot-as-always drumming. I walked out of this glad I was alive. Right after I saw a very good ? and the Mysterians show but I don’t remember it anywhere near the detail I remember El-Saffar and not just because of the shots.

13. Davila 666, Ravari Room – Exactly what you want rock and roll to be, the stripped down-to-basics melodies of Johnny Thunders and the Ramones but also the wild dancing excess of the Fleshtones, with two people who are basically tambourine players and background singers. They got up in front of maybe 70 people on a Sunday night and left an ounce of sweat and plenty of spilled beer on the stage and sent everyone out into the night with a song in her heart. And I’d be remiss to not mention the slinky grooves made up almost entirely of sharp edges that Mannequin Men opened with, and the perfect, raging set El Jesus played to start the night off.

14. Black Swans, Essie Jain, and Bird and Flower, Rumba Cafe, 11/06/09 – There’s an undeniable joy when you see a band develop into its own thing before your eyes, which I saw happen with Bird and Flower; they had one of the most enjoyable sets I’ve seen in a long time and have grown from a band I respected and dug to one I really look forward to seeing. Essie Jain‘s lullaby should have shamed and quieted the barroom party crowd, and would have in a better day, but even in the face of an indifferent audience she brought some wistful beauty to a Friday night. But the winner of the night, aside from the audience, was Black Swans. As much as ever, they were a revelation, a band that references history but is not shackled to it, on the newer songs like “Joe Tex”, “Blue Bayou”, “Thinking of You” and especially the perfect ballad “Don’t Blame the Stars” and the metallic mosaic-blues stomp “Sunshine Street”, they’ve cracked into a new world, one I can’t see enough of.

15. Erik Friedlander, Wexner Center – Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. I’d seen Friedlander do songs from his solo record Block Ice and Propane in Chicago a few years ago in a space over a Chinese restaurant and that was great but the immaculate sound of the Wexner Center and his father’s photographs hammered this home and made it one of the most moving shows I saw all year.

Favorite Records 2009

2009-12-09T14:39:00.001-08:00

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 20), and not so disheartened or surprised to see that it’s less rock-heavy, it was one of those years, I think.
Anyone reading, feel free to argue with the choices in the comments and especially suggest things you think I might have missed.

1. Current 93, Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain – I have to admit I lost Current 93 for a while, let’s say between All the Pretty Little Horses and Black Ships Eat the Sky but what an idiot I was.Black Ships and this new one are two of the best records he’s ever made, two of the best psychedelic records anyone’s ever made and two of the best, most idiosyncratic expressions of flawed, questioning but incredibly potent and tangible faith I’ve ever heard, as much as Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” or Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light” but of course it doesn’t sound like any of those. He takes another stunning list of collaborators and gets them to do what they do but twists it just slightly into a tapestry that doesn’t sound like anything else.

2. Eleni Mandell, Artificial Fire – Part of me just wants songs well-sung, and Mandell made maybe my most listened to record of last year, I don’t think a week went by when I didn’t spin this two or six times. If her last record, Miracle of Five was a February rainstorm of torch songs and woodblock prints and not-quite-trusting the love she’d found, this is that first day in May when the jackets come off, the skirts make an appearance, and the sun isn’t yet filtered by all the leaves so it throws a rare gold over everybody. Her lead guitarist took as much from Ribot as Mandell did from Waits – hear his comping behind her on the title track as she half-snarls “I’m a killer at heart / And I wanted to feel / So I laid out a trap / With my artificial fire”. This sounds like a million things, the aforementioned Tom Waits, early Kelly Willis, classic ‘60s pop, but it doesn’t sound just like any of those things. I defy you to get these songs out of your head.

3. Cynthia Hopkins, The Success of Failure (The Failure of Success) –This is both the first of her records under her name (not her band Gloria Deluxe) and the first of her theater pieces where I just experienced it through the album (I had tickets to St. Ann’s in Brooklyn but a stroke and breaking some toes made that trip impossible). And it doesn’t feel like a band record, it feels like backing is floating around her voice, and Jesus, that voice and those melodies. This isn’t as readily accessible as Accidental Nostalgia or Must Don’t Whip ‘Um but it feels more personal. OR that might be a sleight-of-hand, but who cares with songs that keep rewarding me on every listen? “Evolution” which plays the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a racist, reactionary song, into a paean toward the purging and refreshing of time and change.   “Amnesia is a Myth” which starts as a rock song like she hasn’t done before, with the loud electric guitar and the horn stabs behind her deciding “A requiem is a fiction / Born of wishfulness … / I”m still here, / My mind, my body / In reality / There’s no escaping me”.

4. Sunn O))), Monoliths and Dimensions – Every record they get better and become more like themselves while opening up to show other facets of their obsidian sword and this broke through to a whole new level of sophistication, from more melody to Eyvind Kang’s strings to the choir, all of which kind of sank pieces of James Blackshaw’s still very good new record, it lifts this and shoots through with different colored light. And the last piece, “Alice”, featuring Julian Priester, is hands-down the most beautiful single piece I heard all year.

5. Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, Infernal Machines – Best big band record in years, since Brooklyn Qawwali Party’s debut or that awesome Guillermo Klein record. A record that conjures classic Carla Bley and Maria Schneider and Bob Brookmeyer charts but from the first cajon beat on “Phobos” through the brass like a sunrise you’re trying to outrun on “Transit” on through the flashes of horns that get tangled together then recede as quickly as they appear on the dark “Habeas Corpus (for Maher Arar)”, this is a record no one else could have made.   You could sing these melodies to yourself in the shower but it doesn’t sacrifice depth for catchiness or real soul for some expectation of soulfulness and it never confuses ornamentation for real idiosyncrasy. This is a perfectly-played record with the rough edges intact.

6. Booker T Jones, Potato Hole – Why can’t the Drive By Truckers just be a classic-soul rhythm section? Because this and the Betteye Lavette record they were on a few years ago are the best things they’ve done since The Dirty South. But really, this is Booker T’s show and it’s great to have him back at the height of his powers making the organ moan. The pop covers, “Hey Ya” and “Get Behind the Mule”, don’t seem gimmicky in the slightest – beyond harkening back to the long tradition of Booker T and the MGs engaging with current pop music (like the record of all Beatles songs). But it’s the originals that really swing on this, especially the one-two punch of the acid-tinged “Native New Yorker” and the just-dusty-enough ballad “Nan”. Can’t wait to see him in Columbus in May.

7. Tyondai Braxton, Central Market – Having only been familiar with Battles and a little of his solo looped guitar work, I wouldn’t have expected this in a million years. The first track, “Opening Bell” reminds me of Terry Riley and Julius Eastman with its smaller melodic cells and that’s carried forward through the angrier “Uffie’s Workshop” but it embraces seams, more outwardly “electronic”, for lack of a better word, gestures and it feels completely modern. Bang on a Can’s version of “In C” is my perfect example of what I call “Sunrise Music” - something where I’m on the bus going East on Morse Road into these beautiful magenta, pink and orange sunrises and just put my book down and stare and listen – but this has spent most of the year giving that a run for its money.

8. Tom Russell, Blood and Candle Smoke – With backing by Calexico, Tom Russell found his groove again. His best record since Borderland, maybe since Rose of the San Joaquin. It’s business as usual, sure: hard-bitten, half-ironic tales of his tough-guy past, check (“East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam”, “Criminology”); loser saints stranded in parts south, check (“Guadalupe”, “Crosses of San Carlos”, “Mississippi River Running Backwards”); the circus as looking glass and metaphor, check (“Don’t Look Down”, “Darkness Visible”); but who cares when it’s done this well? And my favorite love song that came out all year, “Finding You”, so I’ll end with a snatch of that:
I need all the blessings
To keep this heart at home
To remember all the troubled nights
When I slept alone
Till I found you
Now I’m blessed and I am pleased
When no one else is looking, I will fall down on my knees
And I’ll pray to any god who leaves the light on late at night
For the miracle of miracles, the one that changed my life..

9. Allen Toussaint, Bright Mississippi – Much like the Tom Russell, this is both textbook business-as-usual but also not at all.    Another great textured Joe Henry production rehabbing a classic figure most people probably haven’t thought about in a while. A perfect acoustic record of jazz and blues standards, from “Egyptian Fantasy” to “St James Infirmary” to “West End Blues”, with a crack band especially Marc Ribot on acoustic guitar and Don Byron on reeds (mostly clarinet). But you’ve never heard an Allen Toussaint record like this, leaving his voice and his lush arrangements behind and really focusing on his piano playing. If his duet with Ribot on “Solitude” doesn’t move you I’m going to look for a pulse.

10. Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens, What Have You Done, My Brother –What I said about “Solitude”? That goes for this whole record. Best soul record of the year. Best gospel record of the year. I find it hard to listen to half of this without tears springing to my eyes, and most of this without wanting to dance.

11. Noveller, Red Rainbows – Most of the time, the “best drone-heavy” distortedly lovely solo electric guitar record would be damning with faint praise, but in a year with, among other things, Kevin Drumm’s awesome Imperial Horizon, that’s damn high praise.   The music on this glistens and twists and dances just out of your reach then evaporates like smoke. Pieces like “St. Powers” come on sounding like an orchestra tuning up, then shift into an orchestra showing off its colors, as in Beethoven’s ninth. Sustained drones and feedback and almost simple folk fingerpicking don’t just exist alongside Drumm’s miasma and Bailey’s alleged lack of idioms, they all inform each other. I know I keep harping on this, but in what’s becoming the theme of this list, a beautiful and beautifully singular work in a genre many, many people have worked in and are working in.

12. Jemina Pearl, Break It Up – In a year of great power-pop/catchy garage rock (The Tripwires, The Almighty Defenders, King Khan and BBQ, The Reigning Sound) this stood out above the others. Flying in the face of prevailing trends, this sets her voice front and center over the steady drumming and the barely distorted melodic guitars like a Runaways record, and this is one of the few records I’d feel comfortable is saying is as good as a Runaways record. Hooks for days I couldn’t get out of my head.

13.. Jessica Pavone, Songs of Synastry and Solitude – MVP of the year if anybody’s asking, Jessica Pavone, who showed up on three records in contention for this list – Taylor Ho Byunm’s Madeline Dreams and her latest collaboration with Mary Halvorson, Thin Air – but this one got its hooks in me and I kept showing up every evening to bleed. A tribute in title at least to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, one of the few records that meant a lot to me in adolescence and means even more now, so I may have been a soft touch for this album, but that all gets silenced by how beautiful it is. Adding a double bass instead of a second violin deepens the sound in a couple of ways, especially adding the darker color to slide under the viola and cello like a river running through the bottom third of a Bonnard landscape. “There’s No Way to Say” is the kind of waltz you do alone, drunk, in your kitchen, when you can’t believe what you said. “Wednesday’s Rules” feels like the cratered person who just walked away from a tragedy trying to get through everything one day at a time. But “Darling Options” seems playful, torn between two lovers but in a flirtatious, fantasy way, and “Here and Now, Then and Gone” feels like a gorgeous hymn for the age of Rothko and Franz Kline. The clarity and simplicity of folk songs aren’t used as a front in this record, they reach for – and almost always attain – the beauty you get from a crystal-clear form used to amplify light on content; in this case, feeling.

14. Julia Wolfe, Dark Full Ride: Music For Multiples - I saw a note where Wolfe said she approached this like a musical equivalent a Rothko painting, working with the tonal color of one instrument in multiples, and though I’d only heard “LAD”, the piece for 9 bagpipes at a CMJ showcase in New York, that was all I needed to hear to be sold, not just loving Rothko but also the few examples I’d heard of multiples of an instrument in composition, especially Eastman’s “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc”. Starting with a bang on “LAD”, which is thick with overtones like foliage, so you get used to the organ-like clouds of notes and drones until this gorgeous folk melody comes through, a blast of red sinking into the browns and blacks. “Dark Full Ride” is similar, in that it’s several percussionists mostly using standard drum kits but it doesn’t really remind you of Reich’s “Drumming”, closer to the Milford Graves’ duo records with other drummers but seemingly more controlled, more about landscape than spirituality. More than the Pavone, there’s a concern with structure in each of these pieces but the structure is integral to getting to that feeling.

15. Polwechsel/John Tilbury, Field – Keeping with the last couple of albums, this feels almost entirely like structure at first. Especially in the second, titular track as shapes form out of scrapes and blurs and tones and then other shapes appear inside those shapes. Best record they ever made with the quintet (John Butcher left after this album) and Tilbury is by no means a hollow guest or window dressing.

16. Sharon Van Etten, Because I Was in Love – Awesome Marissa Nadler record this year, but of records of that type, this stole my heart, plunged daggers into it and placed it back inside my chest to bleed a little more. Minimal accompaniment of herself on guitars and Greg Weeks from Espers on organ, piano, percussion, and (I believe) a little extra guitar, and that voice, swooping through the air, with all the melodies-resolving-unexpectedly and the acid wit I love about Joni Mitchell better than maybe anyone has done this side of , well, Joni Mitchell. The kind of thing you listen to on a summer night on a porch with some whiskey, together or alone.

17. Times New Viking, Everyone’s favorite polarizing Columbus band get better every record and it feels so good to say that. So much has been written about this it seems like anything else is extraneous (or folly), the same mishmash of Pavement, V-3, big sign-along hooks and New Zealand 85 but the songs get stronger every year and what clarity they gain here doesn’t feel like they’re sacrificing anything. Just like on the earlier, fuzzy records, they weren’t hiding anything.

18. Black Joe Lewis, Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is – Neo-soul with a little more punky spirit and a rawer surface than Charles Walker and the Dynamites or Wiley and the Checkmates (both of whom I also like). Standouts include “I’m Broke” which isn’t as witty as Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “What the Hell is This” but reveals its own charms over a simmering groove that feels like it’s going to fall apart at any minute. A band that either can’t play solos or just doesn’t, horn and guitar breaks that stick in your head and a voice that’s just the right combination of sandpaper and sermon.

19. Nadia Sirota, First Things First – From the first track, Nico Muhly’s “Duet No. 1, Chorale Pointing Downwards” through the last, Judd Greenstein’s “The Night Gatherers”, I was utterly captivated by the debut record of this viola player who previously I only knew as the voice and taste behind WNYC (I guess now WQXR)’s Overnight Music. The wisps of smoke coming together you hear in “Live Water” and the lush string section backing on “The Night Gatherers”, the cello and viola striking each other and sending ricocheting sparks around the room on the aforementioned duet. For a record that’s mostly one person alone in a room, the world and all its life is in this.

20. Barry Chabala, An Unrhymed Chord (For 25 Acoustic Guitars) – There are moments where I wasn’t sure any of the sounds I was hearing were made by an acoustic guitar, but when it’s this gorgeous, who cares? This is a record that the moment I heard it I knew this would be on this least, one of the most beautiful records I’ve heard all year or in a lot of years, and I’m as at a loss to describe it as I am a Rothko painting or a Brakhage movie or the entire oeuvre of Gertrude Stein.
Honorable Mentions:

Anti-Pop Consortium, Flourescent Black

Antony and the Johnsons, Crying Light

Blackroc, s/t

Borah Bergman Trio, Luminescence

Brian Harnetty with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Silent City

Chuck Prophet, Let Freedom Ring

Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, Spirit Moves

David Sylvian, Manafon

Dutchess and the Duke, Sunset/Sunrise

El Jesus De Magico, Scalping the Guru

Espers, III

Graham Lambkin, Softly Soflt Copy Copy

Henry Threadgill, This Brings Us To Vol. 1

Jack Oblivian, The Disco Outlaw

Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers, s/t

John Paul Keith, Spills and Thrills

Jonathan Kane, Jet Ear Party

Keith Jarrett, Testament

Kevin Drumm, Imperial Horizon

King Khan and BBQ, Invisible Girl

Knu Gmoon, s/t

Kris Kristofferson, Closer to the Bone

Larry Jon Wilson, s/t

Lightning Bolt, Earthly Delights

Lucero, 1372 Overton Park

Magik Markers, Balf Quarry

Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone, Thin Air

Mono, Hymn to the Immortal Wind

Nels Cline, Coward

No-Neck Blues Band, At 6a.m. We Become the Police

Nouvellas, s/t

Phil Kline, John the Revelator

Polwechsel/John Tillbury, Field

Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx Pt. 2

Richmond Fontaine, We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River

Sarah Borges, Stars are Out

Shackleton, Three EPs

Sir Richard Bishop, The Freak of Araby

Smith Westerns, s/t

St. Vincent, Actor

Taylor Ho Bynum, Madeline Dreams

The Ettes, Do You Want Power

The Juan McLean, The Future Will Come

Tripwires, House to House

Vijay Iyer Trio, Historicity

William Basinski, 92982

Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel, Willie and the Wheel

Wooden Wand, Born Bad

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

2009-10-04T06:42:00.001-07:00

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 Amy Allison or a twangier Dar Williams, is the show, and she’s bending over backwards – at some points literally – to be ingratiating and charming.

The more you see Jack Rose the more you realize how much he’s evolved over time, what on his first solo album was easy to dismiss as post-Fahey, longer forms, some beautiful flat-picking, melodies showing off their elasticity by stretching until they almost broke then snapping right back, or like pools of viscous rainwater on a dirty street running together so you can see the rainbow in the whole.

By the time the first two were collected under Two Originals Of and then the gorgeous Raag Manifestos I started to realize what an original voice you had in Jack, not by eschewing what’s come before but by absorbing it, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Maybelle Carter and Mississippi John Hurt and Peter Walker, and Hawaiian slack key and Indian music and sacred steel and more recently and most intriguingly flamenco runs. His most recent album and the most recent time I saw him, at Terrastock, has him accompanied by the Black Twig Pickers, a more traditional bluegrass/mountain music duo and again it didn’t click until I spent more time with the record and realized he’s integrating his own harmonic language without compromising it into this fabric.

But the show at the Hideout found him back in solo mode and it was hypnotic and uplifting, hitting everything in his catalog and bringing out the melodies more than I think I’ve ever seen him. In that little room, everyone fell to silence and each note hung in the air in an almost Morton Feldman waltz. Decay and generation, birth and age, step one, one-two, one-two-three, heel-toe-turn. I didn’t even stick around to see the headliners, I wanted those songs to keep ringing in my head a little longer.

Borges the next night followed the stultifying Elvis 56 which featured the fantastic guitar work of Eddie Angel and the drumming of Teen Beat from Los Straitjackets but a English singer who did a spot-on Elvis impression and perfect Elvis dancing and mannerisms and sang a set of things from Elvis’s early career including his covers of R&B like “Money Honey” which weren’t that good in the first place. Angel’s muscular guitar playing and Smed’s always lithe and sexy drumming tried mightily to elevate this but it couldn’t get over being charmless, feeling like like you walked into a particularly humorless Civil War recreation, give me somebody who shows up as Dr. Who or something.

Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, included bass player and harmony singer Binky, Robert Larry Delaney on drums, and Lyle Brewer who might be the best lead guitarist I’ve heard for this kind of music since the guitar player in Robbie Fulks’ band, which is high praise by any measure and doubly high when we’re seeing them in Chicago. They came out and in a ballsy move opened with the first song of theirs I ever heard, “On the Day We Met”, which is still think is probably the best song they’ve ever written and it stood as a call to arms, an ars poetica that set up the fun, free-wheeling tone of their set, “I want my old records back / I’m gonna sell them all for trade / It’ll be less lonely hearts club / And more of the hit parade” and went through an hour and a half of their own fine songs, especially good was the ‘60s pop-Latin by way of Dean Martin and the Shirelles “Me and Your Ghost” (“Since you’ve been away I’ve been livin’ / But you know that livin’ like that’s a shame / Me and your ghost both know / We can’t go on this way”), the ragged stomp of “I’ll Show You How”, the Aerosmith-style blues stop (thanks to Anne for pointing that out) aon the song about a prostitute (can’t find my notes where I wrote down the title and I’m not finding it on either of the records I have) and the soaring ballad “Better at the End of the Day”.

Between the seams of this rock-solid original material they wove in enough covers to show their muscle but did it without making the covers seem like they were showing up their own songs and shining light on their aesthetic that can encompass Smokey Robinson’s “Being With You”,. J. Giles Band’s “Cry One More Time”, Charley Pride’s “Just Between You and Me” and Hank Ballard’s “Open Up Your Back Door” (what turned into a rousing 30 minute encore when a certain member of Elvis 56 had to be hooked off the stage, which again proves how fantastic her band is, when he went into “Treat Her Right” they were right there with him on every digression), and still left me wishing they’d done a couple of other covers they’ve recorded (“It Comes to Me Naturally” and “Stop and Think it Over”). Much like Jack Rose, they’ve absorbed all of these genres and styles, amoeba-like without changing their shape or their intent.

Sure there are quibbles, there’s nothing truly new here and the banter went on to the point where it hit a Tammy Wynette-like level of smarm, but those are minor. If you want a well-played, purely entertaining bar band in the best sense with some fantastic vocals, you can’t do better than this. See Sarah Borges.

Technorati Tags: music,Chicago,Jack Rose,Sarah Borges,The Hideout,Fitzgerald's

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

2009-09-28T05:20:00.001-07:00

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, who then walks to the lounge we filed in from and pulls a heavy door shut so we’re in a dark room lit only by two globe lights and an Exit sign. And we’re off.

For the next hour, Colm O’Reilly as John Faustus sweats and stammers his way through boastful justification and not-quite-belied regret, through flights of visual fancy, from Sisyphus tracing hash marks on the rock in mud until the mass is mostly the shell of keeping time to a world pouring out of the hump on the devil’s back like a piñata.

Faustus works to get us on his side, but through it all, you get the impression that what he most wants is to evoke a reaction – something, anything – from Mephistopheles (David Shapiro) who holds all the cards and has nothing to gain or lose by giving in. Shapiro is riveting in a role with one action and no lines, but it’s O’Reilly who keeps making you laugh (“I return with future beer and potatoes!” “I am a very annoyed person!”) and bringing you to tears with the wasted efforts and barely submerged regrets.

Mickel Maher’s text is a wonder and by the time Mephistopheles turns off the lights and leaves through the other door you’re completely taken up. Runs through October 24 at the Chopin Theater in Chicago. http://theateroobleck.com/plays/an-apology-2009

Technorati Tags: theater,Theater Oobleck,Chicago

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

2009-09-19T05:18:00.001-07:00

"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 juxtaposition, and it all comes together when you see he was a film maker. He doesn't try to replicate stills, none of the photorealism of Marilyn Minter, he captures the velocity of film - establishing shot, close up, jump cut to the same shot from a slightly different angle, and not in an old-Hollywood way, all handheld Super-8 that blew their entire budget on a crane shot that makes that look even more devastating as in the shot - the painting - of a couple dancing at the Governor's Ball that's almost touching until you get the political implications and behind it the Presidential Seal seen so close it's blurry, looking new, looking freshly used. It's like you found a storyboard with half the shots missing and had to piece the story together from the faded, munged drawings.

World War II and the Holocaust deeply haunt his work, and the current specters of nationalism, jingoism and racism, with at least two paintings of gas chambers, one an interior with the showers as black uneven splotches, like sunspots, and the roof almost translucent, the sky seeping into this empty room The other looks like it could just as easily be a summer camp, as a companion to The Architect, which is a grey painting of Albert Speer having a skiing mishap, taken from home film footage of a vacation he was on, maybe the summation of the whole retrospective. Banal, and interesting just for the way he uses color, and then the audience says, "Oh, that architect. Damn."

Tuymans uses color in a very subdued way, but that doesn't mean he uses less of it. He has an amazing eye for seeing all the colors in a suit coat, or a sky at ease, reds and blues figure prominently in everything and most of the time they don't draw attention to themselves, just shoot their acid into the veins in your eye and sink in so you start seeing them three or four paintings later, unless something is done for sheer effect, like the strawberry blonde hair of the paratroopers that makes more apparent they don't have any faces.

If you're within a hundred miles of Columbus before January 3, go see this. You won't regret it.

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

2009-09-16T18:24:00.001-07:00

"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 they're working through something to convince themselves. Current 93, Leonard Cohen, and now Young Jean-Lee's new play, Church. Young Jean-Lee has said she tries to make whatever the last show she'd like to make is. It's like she's writing herself into aesthetic corners and trusting that the truth of her approach and the truth of the performances will carry her out. And Available Light, I believe doing the first performance of this not done by Jean-Lee's own troupe, shows up again as one of the most interesting, provocative theater companies Columbus has or has ever had.

The play is about working through her lack of belief, or lack of concrete belief anyway, and it's structured like a televangelist/mega-church's service I used to grow up listening to because I fell asleep too late with the TV on, with gentle words in soothing cadence that explode into almost baffling anger and then recede but somehow feel like they never lost control, never lost the arc of the message. It opens on a darkened stage with Reverend Jose (Ian Short) saying in an even tone that gets progressively more and more of an edge, as it calls out the audience for grasping for tiny things, and talking about our attempts to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit bad relationships and "that's what you talk about when you're trying to be deep." When the lights come up there's Reverend Kate (Kate Watts, so good in God's Ear as the couple's almost-oblivious daughter) asking the audience questions and turning somewhat ludicrous, mocking "prayer requests" into things that aren't so ludicrous.

And it goes through sermons from Kate, rambling and surreal but periodically stabbing you in the heart, Reverend Eleni (Eleni Papaleonardos), working through her addiction to be loved and exploding in an indictment of those who would use religion for bigotry or exclusion, and Revererend Jose bounces off the good will he's already built up and then comes back out and starts discussing mummies and mummies are real and god and the devil are both mummies until he breaks down. Then there's dancing which is perfect, unforced, but well-choreographed, and sone group harmonies by Reverends Kate, Eleni and Casey (Acacia Duncan), and ultimately a choir comes out and takes the stage.

All of the Jean Lee plays I've seen seem to rotate around what you think, what you feel like you should think, what you say and what you're trying to avoid saying, both publicly and privately. This makes no attempt to hide the surface absurdity of some of these concepts (translated as chicken blood and mummies, using the old Bunuel surrealist technique of horror images to hint at a deeper psychological interest), but it flashes back and forth between these and totally rational words and explanations to create this dichotomy and draw you in. Maybe this is a little slighter than The Shipment or Dragons Flying to Heaven, but it might be more moving than either, at least for me.

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

2009-08-09T18:10:00.001-07:00

“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 of the ‘60s, unmoored from the gospel and R&B underpinnings that someone like Ayler had so it looks like action painting. But I stand in front of those Rothkos at MoMA and every time I hold back tears, and Vandermark was my big gateway into free jazz. Really, my gateway was John Corbett’s Extended Play that came out my freshman year in high school, and it’s an easy step to Ken Vandermark from there.

The first live shot of the juice I love in freer improvised music came from the sets of shows Zach Bodish booked in the much-missed rock club Little Brother’s and it was 2000 when both DKV and Vandermark 5 came to Little Brother’s on separate occasions in one of these series. The first time I’d seen un-amplified, not even through a PA, music I think, though I’m a little ashamed to admit it took me until I was 20. And at the time I was just blown away by the interplay. But slowly I drifted away from Vandermark and when I heard he was coming back to the Wexner Center almost a decade later, there was no chance I wasn’t going to go but I was a little nervous that I’d be let down.

And I’m happy to say that was completely unfounded. In the years I haven’t been keeping up, Ken Vandermark’s tone has gotten even more assured and the melodies he’s writing are killer, while the band has gotten even more groove-based. From the opening “Friction” to the closing “Cadmium Red (For Francis Bacon)” I was enraptured. I would’ve liked a few more songs that varied from head-solo-solo-bridge-head (or thereabouts) but the tunes where he deviated from that, “Spiel” with its interlocking sections glued together by Fred Longberg-Holm’s distorted cello, or the gorgeous ballad “Early Color” propelled by Dave Rempis’s sax, were astonishing.

Every memory gets me back to the sheer physical force of the rhythms they churned out, Kent Kessler on bass and Fred Longberg-Holm on cello often both playing pizzicato to create one seamless giant rhythm below everything, or both playing arco to give it a chamber music kick and expanse and Tim Daisy’s drums stop the music short in the most interesting ways when they’re not bringing different, almost orchestral colors out to the fore. I’m glad the Wex is bringing this kind of thing to Columbus, and I intend not to let it be another 9 years before I see the Vandermark 5.

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

2009-08-06T04:39:00.001-07:00

“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?).
So, beauty remains in the impossibilities of the body.”
--Einsturzende Neubauten, “Beauty”

If beauty doesn’t stop you dead sometimes, catch you breathless and reeling, I’d go have your pulse checked or your head examined. Or stay away from me.

It had been a little while since something left me totally speechless but still trying, desperately trying to articulate my reaction to it (maybe God’s Ear at Available Light, or the William Forsythe exhibit at the Wex) and like I knew it would, Chicago came through in spades last weekend. My batteries were in terrible need of a recharge born of whiskey, wine, pizza, some rocking music, and mostly some art.

The Eliasson has been making the rounds from SFMOMA to MoMA but the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was the first chance I had to actually see it. And large chunks of what I knew about Eliasson almost made him sound like Christo, whose work I enjoy but don’t really remember.

This exhibit opens with a series of the most intricate spectrum paintings I’ve ever seen, “Your Eye Activity Field”, showing the 300 nanometers of the spectrum the eye can see, and it’s immediately followed by a long hallway lit in monochromatic yellow. So it’s teasing you, showing all the colors you can see and then bleaching everything into a yellow that’ll drain the aesthetic appeal out of anything and everyone. By the time you get out of the hallway, you’re so grateful to get your eyes back that you’re overjoyed to find… a wall fan hung from a cable in the middle of a room.

The fan’s swinging is entirely propelled by its blowing and it works as a prank but it also has some beauty to it, some swing. You move from this to the bones of Eliasson’s work. Wire models, photographs of nature. And the photographs are in grids that almost but don’t quite tell a story. A river runs through a row but it doesn’t quite match up. A horizon shifts slightly. All perception. There’s a moss wall in this same section, growing and alive over the wires.

The light and the nature come up again in the second half of the exhibit, which has mirror tricks and an inverse disco ball (black matte glass facing out and light and mirror within so it projects these astonishing patterns on the floor directly underneath, not flung like coins of light over the room), and a kaleidoscope hallway (positioned as the opposite of the monochromatic hallway) where you see visions of yourself in other colored mirrors until you stop and look directly at the wall and all you see are other people.

The two pieces in this that bring everything home are A Room With All Colours and Beauty. The former, a 360 degree space that travels across the color spectrum either by colors chasing across the wall or all shifting at once, in what Ken Hite dubbed “$12 Ecstasy”, you actually feel your heart rate slow or speed up and your brain chemistry turn over like an engine. when you get close enough it fills your field of vision. But you need to come to it slowly, standing in the middle and getting the overall rhythm, watching it as a backdrop, then moving in.

And one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen is just called “Beauty”, a dark room with a man-made waterfall running over small jets of air that create sculptural illusions in the water, and two spotlights that make rainbows when the water flows a different way. You feel the slightly-warm mist and you breathe in the humid air and you can’t see anything but the waterfall and maybe yourself. I wanted to live in that room for a week or two.

Staggering out of this into the daylight we made our way to the Art Institute of Chicago and the beautiful new Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing. Still the first museum I fell in love with, still repays that love in spades.

This time there’s a new Cy Twombly show and I’ve always respected his work but I’ve never been the biggest fan, this blew me the hell away. Some blurry photographs and the sculptures and paintings he drew from them, and it’s all nature work, Untitled (paintings and sculpture) is based on a garden with deceptively sloppily blended acrylic, wax crayon, pastels and wadded bits of paper that bring to mind the flowers you made in art class as a child.

But the pieces that really killed me are Gathering of Time and Untitled (Winter Pictures) which are beautiful giant seascapes with this crude dark energy right underneath the surface, and they’re juxtaposed so you can feel the heat and warmth breathing out of the canvases. So glad I saw this.

The rest of the trip was great, good friends, good music (Jack Oblivian was one of the best rock shows I saw all year), good food (Enoteca Roma made the best polenta I’ve ever eaten), and good whiskey (I discovered the reasonably priced but amazingly tasty and cinnamony Templeton Rye on this trip), but both those exhibits alone made this work going. Well, plus seeing a smile on Anne’s face.

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

2009-07-11T06:21:00.001-07:00

“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 storehouse of experiences, all of which he’s remembered perfectly. And it doesn’t come off showy, he reaches through everything he’s built up and pulls out the perfect image, the decisive moment, le mot juste, and then he makes it rhyme.

Crammed in the back of a Grandview bar chasing red wine with Dewar’s on ice, he spun these monologues, with flexible rhythms and room for improvisation, that were fascinating in their own right, and you hit a point where you, the audience, are sure this doesn’t relate to any song, he’s just going off, but all of a sudden his perfect William Burroughs impression leads into “Whorehouse Mirrors and Pawnshop Knives” which he wrote based on his conversations with Burroughs, the story about a knife-thrower writing hearts on a bag with crayon then throwing knives into them because “He know that me and her.. .well, he knew,” turns into the version of “All So Much Like Me” that’ll make you give up making art forever or go right home and paint another canvas. “Billy’s got a girl as cold a switchblade / She walks the wires at night / She was born and raised on a Carolina midway / And she likes my songs all right”. The only time I’ve seen a singer-songwriter get a round of applause for the spoken word section of his set.

You’ll never see a better songwriter who has a more assured grasp on repetition. His lyrics sound purely conversational, but its deceptive in its seeming simplicity, as in the perfect version of “Prison Movie” he introduced with the story that Johnny Cash told him he really liked it and he made the mistake of asking why. “It’s got my name in it!” The song rotates on the axis of memory, dream, and banal existence, and where most songwriters, a lesser talent would certainly place the dream in the chorus, with the lilting music, but Taylor has the chorus reinforce the daily life of the protagonist, “In a line / We all walk in a line”. And it opens with memory, “You learn how to cry in the cradle / And you learn how to lie in jail” and slowly moves towards dream, where he’s sure he’ll be when he gets out but not sure at all, the dreams are impoverished, weak things, “I’ll steal my Mama’s station wagon / Fill it full of whiskey and gas / Drive on up to Macon / And sit in front of Rachel’s house” and even the delusions of grandeur don’t pay off, “They might write a book about me / I could sign a movie deal / And the lawyers can take all the money / Just as long as Johnny Cash plays me” and then it’s back to “In a line”.

If I see a more moving or enthralling performance this year, it will be a great year. Which is saying something in a year that’s pretty great already, with Larkin Grimm and Sarah Borges and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Leonard goddamn Cohen. Thanks go as always to Chip Kobe and Bob Teague for brining this to town.

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

2009-06-17T03:55:00.001-07:00

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 theater. “Plugged In” by David Grant is basically a monologue that’s all reactions to outside forces, characters unseen and unheard-from, showing how a modern college student is distanced from the rest of his life with electronic gizmos while still being a college student who wants to get laid and milk his parents for the money he can and you expect it to build to a punchline or, well, something, and it never does.”Roger’s Beard” by Jimmy Mak is two people about to go on a date with the married couple they’re both sleeping with, and ends in a reversal that has you going “Huh?” more than anything else. “Forever Again” is about trying to move past the mistakes you’ve made and embrace the love you’ve found, with the personification of the two wronged-lovers interrupting an important moment and muddying the action as it happens, the kind of thing theater does great… but you don’t feel like you know the motivations that well. “His Return” is about the return of a soldier but from which war? His uniform looks like World War I or II, the clothes are Victorian, he mentions “joining up with the Canadians” which sounds like Spanish Civil War, and the fact that I’m thinking about all of these things means the text didn’t engage me (though having seen the latest revival of Mourning Becomes Electra with Lili Taylor probably made me judge this a little harsher).

Also, while I realize this wasn’t written for Club Diversity, and there’s a great diversity of ages and races among the characters, every single relationship we see depicted is straight. Who in the year 2009 trying to write about the perils and pitfalls of romance thinks in terms of it being solely heterosexual? In seven pieces? Maybe they didn’t get any gay-themed submissions, but it feels like laziness somewhere.

The acting’s quite good on average in all the pieces, especially Sam Blythe in two pieces, Jennifer Nitri in “Forever Again”, Elizabeth Huff-Williams and Robert Foor in “Fast, Light, and Brilliant”, Heather Fidler in “Rock-a-Bye Bullet”, Shantelle Marie in “Walking Distance”. And the direction of the individual pieces have a surprising amount of grace and creativity with the paucity of things the actors have to actually do, especially “Forever Again” and “Fast, Light, and Brilliant”. But the overall direction seems weirdly sloppy in sequencing the skits, and is plagued with loud, obvious pop songs (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? “Find Me Somebody to Love”?).

But mostly you come out wondering what the point was besides having a night of theater for the sole purpose of having a night of theater. I want to see something else they do, but hopefully with more thought to finding a script.

Available Light continues their trend of bringing emotionally and intellectually risky plays that no one else is bringing to Columbus and Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear is a home run, anchored by a heart-breaking performance by Michelle Schroder who spends most of the play trying to talk long-distance to her husband (Richard Furlong) who always seems like he’s on a plane to somewhere, could be Topeka or could be Purgatory.

He’s collapsed in on himself after the death of their son by drowning, every person he meets also seems to have a dead son, the way when you have a “special circumstance”you suddenly see people with the same circumstance everywhere. She’s coming undone and talking almost entirely in cliches, the ways you perceive the world that give soft comfort but don’t really say anything, they’re placeholders for content, and strung together, as in an amazing monologue, it’s like language is an ice-floe that’s cracking in the heat of her personality and the pieces are falling into the void of her mind, of the world.

By the time GI Joe and the Tooth Fairy have both shown up, the temptation would normally be to shout “Come on!” but it all feels like one mind busting open. The feelings are an open wound and the surface is cracking day-glo, and it’s marvelous. If you leave and you’re able to speak in sentences other than effusive fragments, you’re made of stronger stuff than I am, or you’re dead inside.

Catco this year had two plays I wanted to see, and didn’t make it to Sarah Ruhl’s the Clean House, but I made a point of getting out to see Blackbird. the David Harrower play about the fallout of child abuse and the danger of trying to bury who you are. It’s nice seeing this theater troupe do a piece on one set, with two actors, that’s all tension and ferocity. The language, as everyone’s said, is derived from Pinter and Mamet, but it seems to be less interested in language as a tool to conceal and reveal the way those two writers are and more interested in the lies we tell about our past.

Anna Paniccia is terrific, stumbling over words and losing her nerve then exploding. Jonathan Putnam is fantastic, every word and every nuance seems measured, like a man who’s been keeping everything about himself deep inside. And the rhythms are perfect, especially culminating in the moment full of terrible ambiguity at the end. But I don’t have much to say about this, it’s a good play, well-acted and well-directed. It’s easy to see why Catco’s the gold standard for theater troupes in town, and it’s just as easy to see the joy of the risk=taking the smaller companies are doing.

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

2009-04-19T18:39:00.001-07:00

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 the room, being uplifted and heartbroken en masse, with that physical intensity blended with the thought and concentration it takes a lifetime to get down.

And Amir El-Saffar’s group was the kind of thing where you want to have the record to dig deeper into the compositions and the connective tissue, the fine details, but you want it after the show. I have to confess, as we all have blind spots, of genre, style, and even instrument tonality, I’ve kind of had one against the alto saxophone, unless you’re Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton it’s a rare case that I don’t prefer the dark fire of the bari or the greasy snarl of the tenor. But Rudresh Mahanthrappa comes closer to winning me over every time I hear him and never better than in the set I saw, where he coaxed a gospel purity and a vocal quality at the same time out of his horn, finding ways to dialogue with El-Saffar’s trumpet and santour was as beautiful sax playing as I can ever remember hearing.

And that’s no slight on the rest of the band. Nasheet Waits is a force of nature and an orchestra all on his own, sculpting intros, cueing other players, guiding the shifting, undulating music through a series of very organically-linked parts until it ended up somewhere that felt both surprising and inevitable. The upright bassist and percussionist, whose names I’m forgetting, both of whom soloed tastefully and fleshed out the overall feeling of the works, and Zaafir Tawil on oud, violin, and dumbek, whose music I last heard on the Rachel Getting Married score, plus of course the leader, creating a music seared in the heat of feeling but excavated from layers of knowledge and understanding.

After, all I really wanted to do was go home, it had been that kind of day and that kind of week and I knew nothing else would be as strong musically, but I was already promised to Rumba to see ? and the Mysterians, legends of a different stripe.

First, a brief note on Vegas 66, they have chops for days and can play anything they feel like, and going back to Th’ Flyin’ Saucers you’d be hard pressed to find a better drummer than Rex, of any style. And I understand, with genres like rockabilly, most of us were inspired to get into it by bands several generations down the line. As well, when you’ve got a classic band playing, you want a suitably retro opener who isn’t too much like the headliner.

But when your roots-rock trio does three Stray Cats songs, two Reverend Horton Heat songs, “Summertime Blues” and “Play Something Else”? Really? All of it executed with note-perfection? Exhausting. Fun dance music robbed of its exuberance and chewed till it’s lost its flavor. But the playing’s so good I’m curious what their own songs are like and odds are pretty good I’ll check them out at Ravari next weekend with my pals The Beatdowns opening, after the Dave Alvin show at the Maennerchor.

By the time ? and the Mysterians, featuring original members this time, not the usual well-rehearsed sideman ? picks to tour with him, hit the stage, the room was packed, shots were downed, and old friends had come out of the woodwork, and they didn’t disappoint. Despite the super-modern digital keyboard, it pulled off the farfisa sound just fine, and “96 Tears” and its cousins sounded just as catchy and soulful as ever and the best of the surprises, a cover of James Brown’s “Try Me” that brought the goddamn house down. Lord almighty. I can’t wait to see them again at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans in a little more than a week.

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

2009-04-19T17:59:00.001-07:00

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 with assistance from Walker Adams (and, live, occasionally Ari Folman-Cohen and Conor Elmes) grew out of Gamble’s solo guitar and loops project Scrambler and this debut EP is evenly split between instrument tracks and those with vocals. Forgive me, on my copy, the vocal tracks have names but the instrumentals do not.

One of the great pleasures of The Abandoned House EP is that every time you’ve got it pegged it finds something else in the landscape to which it can draw your attention, without making you feel like you don’t know where you are anymore. When “Rest For Now” kicks in with its playful taunting vocals, lilting finger-picked guitar and loping country rhythm, it’s easy to settle in for another record on the mainstream edge of freak-folk, but by the following instrumental track that rhythm reappears in a haze of reverb and these chopped cymbal sounds worthy of prime-era Squarepusher and you realize it’s a stranger bird flying around your house.

Lyrics about the absence in our lives and the effort to build new experiences out of the building blocks of what we already knew delivered with a voice like old leather cured in bourbon and layers that eschew lo-fi for a series of shifting branches that let the light hit each step down in a different way until its dancing patterns can’t be ignored. The record of a work-in-progress, sure, but watch out: there’s something here that’s going to to be so dazzling when it blooms in full that you’ll be scrambling to figure out how it got there.

I remember the first time I saw Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone as a duo, at the ACME Art Company on one of the fantastic shows Gerard Cox books periodically in town and I was stunned by the sympathetic interplay and also by the bursts of aggression. This was music that deserved to be heard loud and listened to intently at the same time. I’d previously seen Halvorson melt faces with Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant and may have seen Pavone that same trip to NYC in a different group, but the potency of this duo was something else. I’ve seen them a number of times since, together and apart, and I never fail to check in on what they’re up to.

Thin Air, their third album as a duo and first release on Thirsty Ear, drifts through similarly dream-tainted space as the Scrambler/Seequil record, but comes there from a place of having played together and worked with each other’s vocabulary for a long enough time the moves are more intuitive and the timing sharper. The lyrics are almost always sung in unison, and often buried in instrumental harmonies so you have to strain and when you do catch them, it’s an under-layer of orange against the colors of blue and brown you already saw, it’s what’s darkening and deepening the tunes. If you want to remind yourself what it feels like to hear a record and think you’re flying, Thin Air.

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

2009-04-19T04:44:00.001-07:00

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 of connection seems to hollow the connection out. But that was my trouble with Continuous City, that it didn’t feel like it was trying to reconcile those two ideas at all. Or making any commentary besides just stating those things over and over again.

All of the Builders Group pieces are beautiful, and this is no exception, the use of video for distance and time and the differing grain and visual quality to represent different kinds and levels of webcams, and there’s a moment with speed lines like a sunset and the same sentence in three different places at once that’s one of the purest, most beautiful pieces of theater magic I’ve ever seen.

But I wish it had been an installation. The de rigeur new theater technique of addressing the audience as though we’re another person in the room, a group being presented to, is tossed off and the attempts to work in the city where the play is being performed felt tacked on to the rest of the action so it wasn’t bringing the theme closer to home so much as it was the equivalent of a rock start shouting, “Hello, Columbus!” or working Broad Street into a song lyric that used to be about Ventura Boulevard.

The text references Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and in the short descriptions and an amazingly sweet long-distance game of Marco Polo, it almost works but where Calvino can use a brief glimpse to show everything imbued with meaning and magic, the people in this aren’t only ciphers, they aren’t coherent enough to represent anything, they exist to say their lines.

I’m glad I saw it, not unhappy about the ticket cost, and glad the Wexner Center continues co-sponsoring and and bringing things like this to town, but I left bored and surly, when previous productions by this company had me staring at the stars to confirm the world was still in its right place.

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

2009-04-01T00:23:00.001-07:00

“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 record… but the songs are so ingratiating, the hooks so big and swinging and they so adroitly walk the line between wistful and anthemic, between songs of death and desperation sung by what looks like the happiest guy on the planet, between the Saturday night at the party and Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week, that I was charmed when I saw them at Bernies and I’ve been charmed since.

And last night at the Newport, after a perfectly fine Heartless Bastards set - especially the steel-seared soaring title track from the new record, The Mountain – Gaslight Anthem walked onto a darkened stage before a damn-near-sold-out audience, and hit the first notes of “Great Expectations”… then lost the thread.

In their defense, sound was classically Newport-bad, within two songs shrieking feedback and completely dropped out vocals and a snare louder than everything else on the stage all made an appearance. And maybe they were just overcompensating for that. Maybe they’ve been on tour for a while and were worn out and drifting. Maybe they choked on headlining this size of venue and suddenly being that band when a couple of months ago they were opening for We March at venues this size and a month or three before that they were playing rooms a quarter of its size or less (the aforementioned Bernies).

But regardless, everything came out in the same full-bore assault, a torrent of words and riffs and shout-along gang vocals that smoothed everything subtle or reflective out to one impenetrable surface. I was surrounded by good friends to whom I’d, in many cases, talked this band up, and the room was packed with people raising cups and singing along, to a bunch of songs I’ve wanted to hear live since the last time I heard them live and I just couldn’t connect. The guy who’d let the drummer ride the rockabilly swing a little longer, or bring a punk rock club down with “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” was there, but his persona had a face lift. Orpheus got an image consultant.

But maybe it wasn’t cynical, maybe it was them giving a crowd what they think the newer, bigger crowd needs and trying to be all things to all rock and roll kids. And the packed pit crowd, shouting along and eating it all up, didn’t seem to mind. But I couldn’t help but thinking those crazed joy-junkies were singing along to the version of the band in their hearts and minds and not the version on stage.

Needing to believe in rock and roll again, I bummed a ride and made my way to Rumba for Garotas Suecas (Swedish girls), the Brazilian band in the US for SXSW touring behind one 7” and some T-shirts, and heart and balls to spare. Brazil has a particularly rich tradition of taking outside tradition, breathing new life into its lungs and showing it off richer, stronger, and recognizable but also recognizably new, from Villalobos to Jobim to Gil to Tom Ze to tropicalia to baile funk. And this tradition carried on through Garotas Secuas (Swedish Girls) who hit the stage with two guitars, bass, drums, keys, and a frontman who took Otis Redding and James Chance and Greg Cartwright and turned the voltage up too high until Frankenstein’s stitches melted, such a perfect amalgam it didn’t feel like an amalgam at all.

They played to the faithful on a Monday night in a tiny club and if there were 60 people there, 50 of us were dancing, completely lost in the perfect craft of the acid fried songs and the grooves you had to trust your body to follow, give yourself over to or get lost in more than one sense. By the walk home every bone in my body was sore and I wanted to hug anyone I saw and shout, “Did you see this? You need to see this!” First quarter over, already great as showgoing goes.

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

2009-02-11T03:58:00.001-08:00

“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 for the second night of the Lost Weekend 6th Anniversary weekend, after last night’s terrific sets by Night Family and Sandwich, caught the frontman of Moon High doing a solo set that was beautiful. Maybe colored by news of her death, but he carried the sense of a Blossom Dearie or Peggy Lee in his restrained, smoky delivery.

The Beatdowns did one of the best sets I’ve seen them break out in a while, 10 songs, one cover, no fat. In an era where we’re choked with bands regurgitating past trends and genres without any away-from-the-scene conceptualization or care, Matt Benz’s songwriting has taken up Ray Davies gauntlet and grafted heavy emotional content and the weight of his experience to the music of his childhood. That he does this without the songs getting too weighty or didactic is a testament to the songs and the band. They can be inconsistent, but it’s a beautiful thing when it’s working and it was working Saturday night.

After that, trekked north to see Larkin Grimm at Cafe Bourbon Street. Her new record, Parplar, is probably my favorite thing out of the Young God stable since the last Angels of Light record and she stopped in Columbus en route to Knoxville’s Big Ears festival. Through a dismal, largely indifferent turn-out, she and her three band members wrung some beauty out of what was basically a public rehearsal.

And good lord, what a band. Elizabeth Deviln, used her voice for percussion and high-pitched hillbilly shape-note singing, and her autoharp for chiming, mandolin-like runs and percussive thickening behind Grimm’s sweet snarl and guitar. John Houx getting both pizzicato string-section stabs and low-end dulcimer-like plucking recalling Joni Mitchell’s playing on Blue, and bringing a whole drum choir out of a tiny hand-held tambourine, his leg, and a microphone, knowing exactly when he needed to be a conguero and when he was manning tympani. And the violinist introduced as “Sha-nay-nay”, painting backgrounds out of razor-blades and orchids, somewhere between Henry Flynt and Jessica Pavone.

But as with anything, the best band in the world doesn’t matter without the songs behind it, and Grimm’s songs are a wonder. In form, they can conjure Kurt Weill and Indonesian gamelan and echo through Hazel Dickens and Nina Simone but the singularity of the vision and the intensely individual quality never wavers. The songs are full of a mystery that teeters on the precipice of anticipation and dread, never quite knowing where they’ll land when they inevitably fall.

At the same, time, there’s that sense of being in love with the falling, with the tragedy. Embracing everything that matters, spiritual and sensual, while watching the world crumble around you. When she sings, on “Blond and Golden Johns”, “This mouth has wrapped around some things / More delicious than the songs I sing”, followed with a sigh and a hum, it’s boastful as much as or more than seductive, you know exactly who’s in charge, and she doesn’t ever let you think she needs you for anything. The perfect show for a night when the climate shifts suddenly and it looks like everything’s falling apart.

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

2009-02-08T06:41:00.001-08:00

“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 to see him at the Southern and support something like this coming to Columbus in the first place.

Matthea Baim opened on electric guitar and her voice and guitar, including loops and delay, set up a low key expanse of silence and expectation, the rhythms yawned wide and stretched, and I didn’t leave struck by any of the songs specifically but I also left intrigued to hear more of her.

Antony came out on piano and vocals, backed by Julia Kent on cello, Maxie Moston on violin (who I last saw playing with Baby Dee at the Knitting Factory last fall), Rob Moose on violin, acoustic guitar and vocals, Parker Kindred on drums and vocals, Jeff Langston on bass, and Doug Wieselman on reeds and electric guitar.

The arrangements and orchestrations on record, many done by Nico Muhly and Moston, sculpt landscapes and cityscapes out of ice and spun sugar so the songs are light filtering through them, the arrangements sometimes work as a lens and aperture, changing the granulation and field of vision of the writing. In this smallish group, every move had a chamber music purpose, the two violins dueling like two guitars, or one setting up the line while the other scraped dark maroon and brown behind the lit main imagine, like a Rembrandt painting or a Hogarth etching.

The text matters, matters deeply, if you don’t believe in the desire to carve someone’s name on the back of the sun or a boy shedding his self like a chrysalis and becoming a girl, then not only am I sorry for you, but the songs just won’t work. At the same time, it’s a mistake to confuse his keening, swirling vibrato and octave jumps for sadness, the cry in his voice gathers people like the preacher on the mount and as it acknowledges the way the world will fail you and betray you it reaches for the sky because things can be different and better, even if it’s only inside ourselves.

I had chills and gooseflesh all over and found myself in tears during “The Crying Light” and wanted to dance the Slim Harpo hipshake during “Shake that Devil” replete with vintage jukejoint shout-vocals and a sax solo worthy of the late Lee Allen or David “Fathead” Newman. And the cover of “Crazy in Love” may have been the best cover of anything I’ve ever heard. If there’s a better show this year, it will have been a great year. And with Chuck Prophet, last night’s Larkin Grimm, and some top-notch local sets by El Jesus, The Beatdowns, Night Family, and Sandwich, the year’s already shaping up to be aces.

Favorite Live Shows 2008

2009-01-18T05:09:00.000-08:00

"I bought a whiskey for the gypsy
And she turned my leather back into skin
Just a fleeting sense of that rare suspense
I once thought made the world go 'round
But now there's no one to talk to
When 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 about what I'm experiencing culturally, mainly but not limited to the Columbus area. A possible detour or two into what my friends are doing but I can't imagine anyone not me would really be that interested. Not that they're much more interested in what I thought of a concert/movie/etc, but if nothing else, it helps me remember.

Last year was the first year I've felt like I missed more concerts than I went to but even so I had a hard time narrowing this down to 15 and there were definitely shows that in any other year probably would've made a top 10 list (Supersuckers at Ravari, Fleshtones at Bourbon Street, Chris Thile at the Southern, Zakir Hussain at the Southern, David Torn and Tim Berne at the Wexner Center, Gaslight Anthem at Bernie's, Robert Forster at the Wexner Center). Anything you think I'm wrong on or if there's a show I should be kicking myself for missing, leave a comment (already kicking myself about, so you'd just be throwing salt in the wound: Nalle at Skylab, Nelson Slater at Skylab, The Cute Lepers at Bernies, The Black Hollies at Carabar, and both times the Golden Boys played in town).

Without futher ado, my favorite 15 live shows of 2008. Venue is here in Columbus Ohio unless stated otherwise.

1) The Pogues, Roseland Ballroom, Manhattan - A band that first set my hair on fire when Tun Kai Poh loaned me a Best Of while I was in high school but I never thought I'd get to see them live with Shane Macgowan fronting them. And not only did I get my chance after the last few years of reunions not syncing with my ability to get to the East Coast, they were better than I ever hoped they'd be. With Macgowan in strong voice and the band playing with an energy that would make most bands half their age green. Reveling in those songs and just being together, while a crowd mirrored that, people moshing one row away from people making out. Perfect.

2) Jimmy Scott, The Iridium, Manhattan-Much the same, I remember when I first heard Jimmy Scott on Lou Reed's Magic and Loss and the next weekend went to Singing Dog and bought that compilation with "Everybody's Somebody's Fool". I'd never heard anything so ethereal and potent at the same time, with the clean enunciation of Sarah Vaughan and, later, the raspy emphasis of Ray Charles (who produced my favorite Scott record, Love is a Wonderful Thing). And there he was, in a wheelchair with a five-piece relatively anonymous but perfectly adequate and charming behind him, singing "I"m Afraid this Masquerade is Over" with so much force and heat my bourbon aged in the glass. I'd tell you I didn't cry but I'd be lying.

3) Terrastock, Mellwood Arts Center, Louisville - Fou nights of psychedelia in a broad sense but even more than that, all the acts at this festival - the first I'd ever made it to - were creating a personal language out of their grappling with tradition. The tradition of Celtic and Scottish balladry in the case of Sharron Krauss and United Bible Studies, with Krauss sounding the way I always wished Lorena McKennitt did rich and warm and dark and UBS not only joining her for a righteous stomp through her song about mid-Summer but doing a set of thier own that was all mystery and fog and beautiful misdirection. Motorpsycho, I wish would've done a little more of their three-minute Husker Du-ish material amidst the jams, but when the jams are that righteous, who really cares? MV and EE and band taking Neil Young's lead and drip-painting with the raw sonic material, with a rhythm section including the godlike Tim Barnes on drums and a bass player with a tone so rich and distorted it sounded like the tuba in Louis Armstong's Hot Sevens. Weather threatened but never got terrible, the food was good, I got to see Clayton Oliver who I hadn't seen in years, and hang out with some Columbusites I like a lot but that ol' debbil shyness always kept me from really getting to know, a perfect weekend.

4) Jandek, Wexner Center - Friends I talked to after this were to varying degrees annoyed by how little vocal presence there was in this show, with at least one suggesting he was phoning it in to make for easier touring since his bands are always pick up bands. And I think that's a fair accusation, but the songs he did, a linked suite it seemed, were more spacious by their nature. Words bob up and reveal themselves and then disappear in the storm. I thought it was gorgeous, and there couldn't have been a better band for him, with Ryan Jewell on drums and percussion, C. Spencer Yeh on violin and vocals, and Derek Dicenzo on bass. For the hour and a half they were on stage I was somewhere else but also couldn't take my eyes off Jandek.

5) Wiley and the Checkmates, Ravari Room- God bless Funkdefy. Since transitioning from their already great DJ nights to booking shows, they've brought in at least one of my shows of the year every year, usually more. And this, with the great Herbert Wiley backed by as good a band as you'll see everywhere of any genre, tearing through a set from the new record they've done together, his '60s classics, and covers of his contemporaries like Joe Tex and Clarence Carter, including a blistering 10-minute Bo Diddley medley? I don't know anyone there who wasn't losing his or her mind and dancing the whole time.

6) The Dirtbombs, The Basement - One of my favorite rock bands today who had a big year, at the end of a leg of another long tour, coming out and kicking into "Wreck My Flow" off the new record until by the end long free-jazz vamps turned into INXS covers, the opening bands had joined them on stage, and one of the drummers had drug part of a kid into the mosh pit and was hanging from the rafter, keeping time on a cymbal in the middle of the floor? Sweat-soaked and righteous, full of the past but unmistakable.

7) Lewis and Clarke with Jerry Decicca, Surly Girl Saloon - One of the best solo sets I've ever seen Decicca do, followed by a band with members of Rachel's and Man Man playing delicate folk that wasn't shy, keening strings and spacious piano, a drummer playing banjo and beautiful, honey-dark songs.

8) D. Charles Speer and the Helix, Surly Girl Saloon - Speer made one of my favorite records of last year (and what would it take to get his main gig, the No Neck Blues Band, to town?) and his band took what could've been great straightforward baritone-voiced Kris Kristofferson poetic country and opening it up to include a piano player with hints of Art Tatum and Monk in his comping and solos, a guitarist and steel player who understands warm ambience and also played some leads that reminded me of Jerry Garcia in the early '70s, and a boiling rhythm section.

9) Gnarls Barkley, The Newport- THere's no songwriter or frontman I love more than Cee-Lo, and I liked the Gnarls Barkley records, especially the second one, but I wondered how it would work live. Two drummers, two players alternating between organ and guitar, an upright bassist, Dangermouse on everything else, and Cee-Lo taking everybody to church. The songs were recognizable but transformed, exactly what you want a big pop show to do.

10) Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, The Summit - I wish more than 15 people had come to this, but trust me, when the record comes out on Lost Highway produced by the guy from Spoon, you won't forget this voice. Neo-soul with a garage scrappiness that most bands are a little too reverent to pull off. Amazing Don Covay songs and originals, a horn section that wasn't too seamless and a drummer that knows you know more than one kinda dance. Fire.

11) Baby Dee, The Knitting Factory, Manhattan - Baby Dee was great with her full band playing with the Black Swans at Rumba Cafe here in Columbus in March, but this show with her playing piano and harp and accompanied only by a violinist in a small room, produced these hymns of sadness and the joy of discovery. Hearing her sing "Just because I can't have you / Doesn't mean that I won't love you just the same" might have been the most haunting thing I heard all year.

12) Gal Costa, The Blue Note, Manhattan - One of the great Brazillian singer-songwriters of the Tropicalia era and beyond, accompanied only by Romero Lumbambo on nylon string guitar was so phenomenal it overpowered the worst club I've ever been to, swinging and doleful, perfectly simpatico.

13) Raphael Saadiq, SOBs, Manhattan - This year Saadiq found something perfecty fresh and of the momet from a deep devotion to the soul of his childhood, and he executed it so beautifull with his five-piece band and two backup singers in NY that it proved how much his earlier work, with Tony Toni Tone and Lucy Pearl ("Dance Tonight" was a set highlight) was of a piece with and leading up to what he's doing right now.

14) Donewaiting 5th Anniversary Show, Skully's/Carabar - As with anyhting that's a good cross-section of Columbus' music scene, there was as much stuff I didn't like (Miranda Sound) as stuff I did, but what was great was way, way beyond great. Deathly Fighter's narcotic live dubstep and Sinkane's post-Mwandishi pop backed by Slide Machine at Carabar, Blueprint backed by Brainbow and Bob Starker at Skully's making music full of strong rap and real rock that wasn't anything like rap-rock, and Mike Shiflet backed by members of Lambsbread, Scenic Railroads, Moviola and Black Canary doing perfectly subtle soundscapes that filled the room, built on Reich-like cells of melodic invention.

15) Polwechsel, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn- A quartet straddlng composition and improvisation but not in the way you'd expect unless you've been following their evolution. Focused so deeply on the gesture that their abstraction feels like the fractal freezing of nature and the soul-fields of Rothko and the wash of streetlights. I don't know how to describe it, I'm not sure I understand it, but I don't think any other music would take me to this place.