Distance and the Gap; Four Photography Shows in NYC

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

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

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

“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). 

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Punch Brothers, Lincoln Theater, 02/13/10

“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

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

“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

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