Flying Away; Todd May, Rickenbacker Girls

...They'll


never fence the silver range.


Stars are out and there is sea


enough beneath the glistening earth


to bear me toward the future


which is not so dark. I see.


-Frank O'Hara, "Digression on Number 1, 1948"

A. said once (after Steve Earle, in case anyone who googles it jumps my shit), "Todd May is the best songwriter in Columbus and I'd stand on Ron House's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say it." And, you know, while the soil here is rich with candidates - House and Jerry Decicca, Marcy Mays and Sue Harshe, Andy Robertson and Lara Yazvac, all five members of Moviola - I'm not sure I could name three songwriters who move me as consistently as May.

Morton Feldman once said of the poet Frank O'Hara that "Secreted in Frank O'Hara's thought is the possibility that we create only as dead men... Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence... Only the artist who is close to his own life gives us an art that is like death." (found on www.cnvill.net/mfmorgan.htm because I couldn't find my copy of Give My Regards to Eighth St) Frank O'Hara often makes me think of Todd May, or maybe that's the other way around. I've been knocked out by May's songs since I first heard them at 18 - and been knocked out every time, through The Lilybandits and The Plaster Saits and Mooncussers and Fort Shame and a handful of bands he didn't front but were graced with the honor of his guitar playing like Erika Carey and Lydia Loveless - and I've had the honor of calling him a friend for over a decade. But he's hit a new plateau with Rickenbacker Girls, the first record he's put out under his own name.

The title refers to an air base tucked into the south end of Columbus - more of a shell these days, transferred from Strategic Air Command to the National Guard in 1980, but once teeming with thousands of employees and their families - and this title, in conjunction with the airplane over the dark red image of Ohio on the cover speak to a gateway out and the longing of things missed. The songs bear this out - there's a duende soaking through everything here and there's an immense joy in living that doesn't happen without the other.

On "Why Don't You Come Around Lately", buoyed by some of the most subtle rhythm section swing from Steve and Pat McGann and the organ work of Greg Thurman, May addresses the what-ever-happened void in the pit of your stomach when people inevitably peel off from your field of vision, from your childhood, from your college town, singing "Saying that you died / Some Vegas suicide / Don't believe it's true / Nothing I expect from you" and going through "Miss a million, my dearest friend / I really want to see you again / Search the world from end to end" all tied together by the titular line as a hook, repeated and stuttered, lines drop off and the vocal swings back and forth from a croon to a snarl. That highlight's immediately followed by the parking lot dance of "Better Way to Build a Rocket" where the delivery is the kind of seduction that only comes out of truth and humility, a paean to growing up not knowing what the boundaries are wrapped around the image of building a model rocket and wondering what might happen if you never stopped - "Undertake / A glimmer in the radiation / Till the boosters go / Now I'm floating over / The old neighborhood" soars aloft on some of the best, purest guitar work on the record (I'm inclined to say Todd himself with Jamey Ball and Mark Spurgeon playhing those grimy soul chops underneath the solo).

These songs paint the picture of a hard-fought comfort, a joy in settling where you are but not ignoring the pleasure of the rest of the world. This comes clear with "Alphabet City" which rocks like early Steve Earle and the Dukes or the V-Roys or any classic of May's older band The Lilybands - "You're the kind of girl who rides on the hood / Of your cousin's black Camaro in the harvest parade / You're the queen of some vegetable / Bestowed / With a tiara and dress your Mama made" and winking "Nobody's gonna mistake you for Nico / Hell, no one is gonna mistake / Me for John Cale / You and I ain't built for that speed / Or that level of temptation / And that's just as well". And directly following "Alphabet City" is "Better Than You Ever Thought It'd Be" a whip-crack shuffle, sung with a deceptive ease, "Riding out by the station / Make a birthday with my friend / It's a long distance dedication / You're halfway through the end / You're getting old / You're getting old, my friend / Nothing up to now has ever turned out right / Still better than you ever thought it'd be", the specifics of the lyrics are as important but they're reinforced and undercut sometimes simultaneously, by repetition and stopping short, the song sounds like he's smiling all the way through it but with that look in his eyes that what he's saying is important whether you notice or not.

The title track of the record sums up the themes and is the best see-you-around song to come out of Columbus since Tim Easton's "All the Pretty Girls Leave Town" and Watershed's "Anniversary", with a catalogue of fading photographs held up to the older, shabby buildings of the air base - "She flew off to Califonia / Daddy was stationed at the AFB / Transfered out to some Spaniard's beach" or "Took the train out east to live with her Mom / And that sweet one / Was the same rule of thumb" all alternating with the chorus: "That night I did not go home / I drove down to the lock's / The tower splayed the light / Over an MP's watch / So clear, as the sea / Twilight shadow's mocking me".

I think I've given the impression that this is a lyrically focused record and while the lyrics are some of the best he's ever written, the production his voice, handled by Joe Viers who recorded the acclaimed Lydia Loveless record on Bloodshot, gets textures out of his voice that I heard in a million tiny bars here in Columbus but I'd never quite heard on a record before. And everything else, every instrumental voice and color, springs to three dimensional life and plays exactly the part it needs to. Not just the best singer-songwriter record I've heard all year, it's in the running for the soul record to beat. This is the kind of record that makes me pissed off I don't write more and makes me want to call a friend I hadn't seen in a while and say let's get some coffee, that makes me want to be more present in my life and reminds me to love the world more.

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A Story About The Red and The Black, But Not that One; Red, CATCO

At the end of the road there ain’t nothing but fear
Just a big old room with a big old mirror
And the man in the mirror, his hair’s turning grey
And his hands begin to shake in a funny kind of way
He knows everything you bring forth will save your soul
Everything denied will condemn you to the hole
With his hand on his heart, he picks up his pen
And goes searching for the place where the dream begins
-Tom Russell, “Where the Dream Begins”

I not only saw Red on Broadway, it made my top 10 theater productions list that year.  It overcame some surface problems to end up squarely hitting as one of the most invigorating, moving productions I saw in 2010 – an amazing year that also included the first plays I saw by Annie Baker and Tarrell Alvin McCraney, and revivals of Ishmael Houston-Jones’ Them and August Wilson’s Fences.  So there was a little trepidation at seeing CATCO’s performance of it; would I already be irrevocably tainted by the earlier exposure?   Ultimately, I thought to not see this in my home town, both to whet my appetite for the Decisive Decade Rothko retrospective at CMA (an institution which has done more for rekindling my interest in the last three years than the previous 15) and to get a charge and see if the text still holds, would be kind of insulting to me and to a company bringing in something I praised to the skies.

Beyond that, this play is very much in CATCO’s wheelhouse – a two-hander with one set, very naturalistic, very literal.  And in a lot of ways, they rise to the expectations.  The set design by Michael Brewer’s marvelous, Jarod Wilson’s lighting and Ruth Boyd’s costumes are perfect but not distracting, you never feel like the late ‘50s is underlined but it still grounds you in the time.  

Jimmy Bohr’s very kinetic direction seems to take its guidance from the lines in the script about colors pulsing and being held in check.  I feel like part of the reason the lines about the forms in the paintings “pulsing” seems highlighted here is because nothing ever seems static in the production.  More often than not, this works.  Sometimes, it works magnificently – as in the moment where the two characters team up to prime a canvas; the scene where Rothko returns from seeing a pop art presentation and he’s vibrating with rage, circling for a fight; the finale which moves as fast as life, the life-changing sentence getting delivered as though from a moving train.  Sometimes it works less well, there are beats that might hit harder if the audience had a few more seconds to meditate on them.

But this kind of play – a little overwritten, a touch obvious, but with a love for its source material and a connection to its emotional heart that overcomes the flaws – lives and dies with its two actors.  Tim Simeone, as the fictional assistant, found his rhythm and soared.  His character had this wide-eyed sense of wonder, in awe of the boss while trying not to see him as a surrogate father or a teacher.  Everything about him is on the surface, an exposed wound playing at being a cynic, and it’s marvelous to watch.  Kevin McClatchy was more of a mixed bag.  He obviously brought a lot of thought and intensity to the role but ultimately it felt like he was rushing through the lines, he was hammering home the punch lines until it felt flattened.  It kind of worked for 1959 – it’s a performance very much in the style of Sid Caesar or Carl Reiner – but that approach frequently became static and left the darker moments, “When I kill myself…” flatter than I felt they needed to be.

So it’s a solid performance well produced by CATCO, but it stays on base; never quite the home run you know is inside of it.

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Favorite Live Music 2012

This tells a much different story from the records I've been listening to this year. It's much more heavy on rock and it tells the story of Ace of Cups (opened very late summer last year) really coming into its own with Jeff Kleinman's booking. 6 1/2 out of 20 shows that spoke to me enough to list here happened there. Looking at the track I kept, 35 shows out of the 115 I saw this year were there. A lot of money and a lot of nights almost all well-spent, all at least worth taking the chance on.

Obviously this is cyclical and a vacuum never lasts for long, but this year I really felt like a couple of venues took up Little Brother's mantle so I no longer missed much of anything and there were significantly more nights where I was torn between what I should do. Ace of Cups got rock in all its permutations, Woodlands covered the jazz and jam bands that almost no one had booked in Little Brother's absence and booked some of the larger Americana acts that Rumba Cafe had been holding down , and watch for Natalie's Coal-Fired Pizza on the come up. Next year I can almost guarantee that latter will be on here, an initimate listening room that I think will be perfect for some things they've got booked (Carrie Rodriguez, Fred Eaglesmith, Eilen Jewell) in the coming months because the sound and sightlines are terrific and they're going for a more mature vibe.

Let's also take a minute and thank the independent promoters not working with just one venue - Alec Wightman's Zeppelin Productions whose stuff I mostly missed this year because of travel and conflicts but not for lack of quality, and he's upping the ante again with a return visit from Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis and Jesse Winchester, both of whom I'd be surprised if they didn't turn out Show of the Year shows; Gerard Cox, whose free jazz shows have started up again and while I missed a couple is one of the series I'm most looking forward to in 2013; BenCo Presents who came out with some really strong, diverse offerings in 2012 and has an interesting slate lined up; and anyone else I'm forgetting.

Also, before the list, I should take a second to remember two of my favorite New York venues which closed this year. Lakeside Lounge, which was my and A's favorite bar in the city, and while I'd been there a couple of times before she and I were dating it wasn't anything like a regular stop for me until our first trip together. My favorite bartenders, some of my favorite shows. And Zebulon which never failed to show me something on a bill that took my breath away. Sunrise, sunset.

Last but not least, not only did I inadvertently not post this, somehow I didn't do my last save, so only half of these had commentary when I noticed it. Better I delete what was there, post it for memory, and move on to big 2013!

As with the other posts, everything is Columbus unless otherwise noted.

1. 
   

   Firewater, 10/06/12 (Grog Shop, Cleveland)

   
   


2. 
   

   Lee Ranaldo Band, 08/04/12 (LC Pavilion)

   
   


3. 
   

   OBN IIIs, No Bails, and Day Creeper; 05/27/12 (The Summit)

   
   


4. 
   

   Tune-yards, 06/11/12 (Wexner Center)

   
   


5. 
   

   Millenial Territory Orchestra with Henry Butler, 08/23/12 (Jazz Standard, Manhattan)

   
   


6. 
   

   Charles Bradley, 02/22/12 (Skully's)

   
   


7. 
   

   El Jesus De Magico, Guinea Worms, and Unholy 2; 01/27/12 (Ace of Cups)

   
   


8. 
   

   Mary Halvorson Quintet, 12/01/12 (Wexner Center)

   
   


9. 
   

   Joshua Redman Trio, 04/19/12 (Village Vanguard, Manhattan)

   
   


10. 
    

    Gentleman Jesse and Barreracudas; 05/17/12 (Ace of Cups)

    
    


11. 
    

    Dead Kenny G's, 05/29/12 (Woodlands)

    
    


12. 
    

    White Mystery, The Hexers, and Los Vigilantes; 04/11/12 (Ace of Cups)

    
    


13. 
    

    The Hexers, The Girls!, and Betty Machete and the Angry Cougars; 06/23/12 (N8 Glass Studio)

    
    


14. 
    

    Sun Araw, 04/20/12 (Le Poisson Rouge, Manhattan)

    
    


15. 
    

    Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang and SMOD; 07/27/12 (Wexner Center)

    
    


16. 
    

    Kidd Jordan and DD Jackson with Brett Burleson, Roger Hines and Roger Myers (Dick's Den)/Necropolis (Ace of Cups), both 09/05/12

    
    


17. 
    

    Giuda, 09/05/12 (Ace of Cups)

    
    


18. 
    

    Sao Paulo Underground, 09/23/12 (Wexner Center)

    
    


19. 
    

    King Khan and BBQ, 12/04/12 (Ace of Cups)

    
    


20. 
    

    Scrawl and Cobra Verde; 10/27/12 (Ace of Cups)

    
    

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Favorite Records, 2012

This was an odd year for recorded music for me. It wasn't until I was looking over everything I listened to that I realized how many great records I heard this year. Very few of them fell under the rock rubric but this list could have been twice as long and I'd still be cursing leaving things off. It depresses me that this is overly white and overly male but that's not on anyone but me. I need to make sure my ears are open.

1. 
   

   Black Swans, Occasion for Song - Lots of records made me come up short this year, short on description of the depth of feeling and craft, records that made me treasure the world a little more, but none did it as immediately and as often as this Black Swans record. By now it's a cliché for me to call one of their records a masterpiece since I've been doing it since their first album, Who Will Walk in the Darkness With You, but it keeps being true. The best, warmest vocal from Jerry Decicca yet, the always-pristine arrangements have an even deeper level of telepathy, and melodies so ingratiating that the painful subject matter stands in even stronger relief, like the black in a Goya painting. Not one note, not one lyric is out of place here.

   
   


2. 
   

   Jessica Pavone, Hope Dawson is Missing - For the one and a half of you who pay attention (hi Mom), Pavone's a perennial player on this list. Since I first saw her duo with Mary Halvorson in one of the terrific shows Gerard Cox books in town, I've been a huge, drooling fan, and while I wouldn't want to judge, maybe the chamber music work she's doing with Tzadik is my favorite stuff of hers. This expands the string quartet from Songs of Synastry and Solitudewith Halvorson on guitar, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, and Emily Manzo on vocals. A gauzy rumination on what happened when personified hope is just goneone day and you don't know if you'll ever see it again but you keep looking because you don't have evidence of the contrary, that I couldn't stop listening to.

   
   


3. 
   

   Keith Rowe, September - One of the darkest, most beautiful things I heard all year. One 35-minute track recorded live on the anniversary of 9/11. I'm not sure I have words to describe this but from the minute I heard it it was beguiling to me, and it's still jaw-dropping and some of the best music for writing I've heard, ever.

   
   


4. 
   

   Tift Merritt, Traveling Alone -None of the conceptual trappings of the last few records but this is the first Tift Merritt record I've loved since her work with Two Dollar Pistols. Righteous band, led by the dueling lines of Eric Heywood on steel and Marc Ribot, continuing his ascent into a new clarity and sharpness, on electric guitar. And a set of songs that hit all of her modes and do them all justice, not feeling like playing dress-up: particularly the country soul duet with Andrew Bird, "Drifted Apart", my favorite single song all year, the blissfully sensual "Feeling of Beauty" and "Small Talk Relations", the shuddering "Still Not Home", and "Spring" which feels to me like an ars poeticafrom the opening/refrain, "Oh, it is a mystery like a lover's touch / Brings a blossom from a winter's bud" through her snarling "Wilt and will wither with all you've left / Beauty is defiance in the face of death".

   
   


5. 
   

   Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d. City -Sometimes it's nice to see the hype machine/popular consensus/whatever get it really right. This record so stunned me that I found myself, a few beers into the evening, talking to A. and comparing a song on it to an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle but you know, part of me (even as I understand the absurdity and pretension) wants to stand by that. It's a record of deep focus about mastering the art of losing and recombining the raw elements of your life and the pop culture swirling around you into something you can stand on, but still, always, being entertaining. The beats swing and creep and soar and crowd around you and Lamar's mastery of every great West Coast rap style after Egyptian Lover is so ingrained he can play with it. A masterful storyteller and brutal self-critic - "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" is the best 7+ minute rap song since The Coup's "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a 79 Grenada Last Night"- but also unafraid to have lines about wishing "[his] dick get big as the Eiffel Tower / So [he] can fuck the world for 72 hours".

   
   


6. 
   

   Anais Mitchell, Young Man in America - Anais Mitchell reteamed with Todd Sickafoose who produced her fantastic concept album Hadestown for a collection of her best songs yet, no big name other vocalists, no gimmick stealing her shine. Her thin, reedy voice is deployed like a stiletto on a dark, cold night, and her simple, hypnotic guitar and band is perfectly taut behind her. She uses the conventions of the classic folk song, with lines like "Please the god of Abraham / Every day a dying day", and I say usesvery deliberately because she doesn't play withthem, though there's a real sense of playfulness on here, every detail, every chord change, every inflection is chosen and deployed for utmost heartbreak or charm or joy, not necessarily separated by song.

   
   


7. 
   

   Sinkane, Mars - A long contender for first among equals in the Columbus expat done good category, Sinkane hit a new plateau with his record Mars. The kind of future R&B I wish more people did with an immaculate sense of joy and fun, sleek but never slick and sexy but eluding cliché unless it knows the cliché well enough to subvert it while still using its innate juice (like the wah pedal on opening track "Runnin'" or the flute and bongos combo on "Makin' Time"), a record rich in detail but never bogged down by it.

   
   


8. 
   

   Antony and the Johnsons, Cut the World - No surprise this made it on my list. Antony is the one artist I can think of I wish would do moresinging with an orchestra and what this doesn't have from the live set I saw him do a few years ago it makes up for it by providing different, unexpected pleasures. The physical thump of added percussion on "Kiss My Name", the almost unbearable humming tension behind his voice on "Another World" and a version of "Cripple and the Starfish" that outdoes the studio cut in a way I didn't think was possible.

   
   


9. 
   

   Mary Halvorson Quintet, Bending the Bridges -Mary Halvorson's first quintet record blew me away, someone grappling with Horace Silver's language in a fully modern, engaged by other currents of music and art of the last 40 years, way. And this takes that and explodes it. The band feels lived-in, the songs old friends there to be challenged and interrogated because you know that will bring the best out of them. The front-line horn writing for Jonathan Finlayson and Jon Irbagon is thorny and sweet, John Hebert's bass full of melodic surprise and never-less-than rock solid rhythm, Ches Smith's drumming that starts in the pocket and finds other pockets inside of that pocket, and of course Halvorson's guitar playing, going from cubist flamenco through Derek Bailey and Sonny Sharrock and ending up purely her own.

   
   


10. 
    

    Gentleman Jesse, Leaving Atlanta -My favorite straightforward rock record of the year. I've liked the earlier Gentleman Jesse and His Men records but this was a revelation. Songs Nick Lowe or Graham Parker would've been proud to have written, as typical a rock trope as feeling hemmed in by your little town and hating yourself a little for how much you're annoyed by it and merging these angsty lyrics with a bouncing back beat and sharp guitar riffs and a yelp that begs you - or me, anyway - to sing along.

    
    


11. 
    

    Tim Berne, Snakeoil - Tim Berne doesn't make bad records but this feels like a class of its own. The writing's stripped down a little bit, the sound is that rich ECM production so you can hear every inch of every sound but it doesn't feel glossy or airless (like, I'm sorry to say, a few Evan Parker records on that label did). His writing's still redolent of him, the twists and knots, but there's a peaceto it. His alto and Oscar Noriega's clarinets playing perfectly shadow and light one another, Matt Mitchell's piano is the grout adding color and texture, and this is the best showcase for Ches Smith's drums I heard all year (including his fantastic playing on the Mary Halvorson record so you know that's saying something).

    
    


12. 
    

    Blueprint, Deleted Scenes - I'm a sucker for this kind of "process" record, where an artist makes clear the material was intended for something else and it's been repackaged. In every case you can feel the choice that led these songs to not make the cut for Adventures in Counter Culturebut these are better songs than most artists ever write and I was very glad to have the opportunity to hear them, a few of them are among my favorite 'print songs ever.

    
    


13. 
    

    Orrin Evans, Flip the Script -In a year with a very good Vijay Iyer record, a very good Bad Plus record, among others, this was the piano trio record that crushed me and kept me coming back again and again. I heard Orrin Evans in Bill McHenry's band and I'm a big fan of that Tarbaby record with Oliver Lake but I was unprepared for a record where he did this much heavy lifting that moved me so deeply. He and his rythym section, Donald Edwards on drums and Ben Wolfe on bass, go through the gauntlet of moods and even find a way to put a new spin on maybe that hoariest of standards "Someday My Prince Will Come".

    
    


14. 
    

    Traxman, Da Mind of a Traxman- I've talked the last couple years in this space about reinvigorating my love of going out and dancing but this is the year that overlapped with my rediscovery of great dance music, at least dance music as I understood it when I went to clubs a lotat 18 or 19. This is a constantly unfolding tapestry of sounds and moods that touches on every music I've ever loved and still comes out surprising and fresh and new and makes me want to move even when howI'm supposed to dance to it puzzles me.

    
    


15. 
    

    Missy Mazzoli, Song for the Uproar (The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt) -The cast recording of Mazzoli's first opera and I'll be honest, I'm still digesting it but there wasn't a moment's doubt for me that it belongs on this list or that it'll be giving me something to chew on for quite some time. Some songs are already etched into my grey matter like "This World Within Me is Too Small" or the looping, delirious vocals tumbling over each other on "100 Names For God".

    
    


16. 
    

    Liminanas, Crystal Anis -Another snarling, sexy platter from Liminanas, everything a finely tuned clockwork mechanism built out of smoke and good bourbon. This is the kind of record you want to put on at a party or put on alone when you get home from the party and just let it play through and you'll find different things in both circumstances but it's just as good for either.

    
    


17. 
    

    Bill McHenry, La Peur du Vide - I saw this band in a stint at the Vanguard last year and everything clicked for me in a way McHenry's work with Paul Motian didn't yet. At the time I thought a large part of it might have been the first time I saw Andrew Cyrille live with that drum sound that so enraptured me got stars in my eyes but hearing a recorded document from a later week they did reaffirmed everything that was great about that set. Orrin Evans on piano, Eric Revis on bass (whose damn fine 11:11 record from his Parallax project came within a hair's breadth of making this list), know exactly where to come in, where to open up and where to limn the sharp, intricate constructions in. I've talked about "sunrise music" before, something I find on occasion that feels like it makes the world make a little more sense when I'm on the bus into work watching the sun come up over the east side of town, and this was my favorite example of it I've found this year. Maybe that I've found since Tyondai Braxton's Central Market.

    
    


18. 
    

    Fort Shame, Double Wide - Fort Shame were one of my favorite Columbus bands the minute I heard them, and how could they not be, with Todd May from the Lilybandits/Fallow Valley Sinners/etc and Sue Harshe from Scrawl on dueling lead vocals and songwriting duties. Over the last few years they added George Hondroulis from much-missed band The Evil Queens on drums to Jamey Ball's melodic, swinging bass, to complete a rhythm section with as much power and depth as the songs and the two voices started to integrate more into a fusion of Kurt Weill and Whiskeytown that kicked my enthusiasm into high gear. This record is the flowering of all those elements coming together and catching fire. You can dance to it or you can lay on your living room floor, it's got pleasures for days.

    
    


19. 
    

    Bang on a Can, Big Beautiful Dark and Scary -My favorite straight classical record this year. Julia Wolfe's title track was a classical piece that had me ready to shadowbox with angels walking down the street, clusters of strings and a piano beaten like it stole something. The arrangements of Nancarrow's player piano pieces worked in a way that kind of thing almost never works for me. Michael Gordon's "For Madeline" is something I tried to write a poem even in the same stratospherea dozen times. I don't think I could point out a clunker track on the whole double album.

    
    


20. 
    

    Jacob Garchik, The Heavens - Like the Mazzoli, I got this late in the year but it grabbed me by the lapel and said "Change your plans." The subtitle of an atheist's gospel trombone record seemed a little too cute but I'd heard Garchik in a few contexts and his playing's always top notch (especially on the 40Twenty record that came very close to making this list this year) and I heard about ten seconds of that first track, "Creation's Creation" before I was hooked. The harmonies are like the way the light hits a crumbling street at the end of a beautifully exhausting day, the melodies are astonishing. A singular record from a voice I get the feeling is just starting to really come into his own.

    
    

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YOLO! (with thanks to AEC) Best of 2012: Visual Art

Much like my disclaimer on theater, didn't get to see as much visual art as usual - I hit about 45 exhibits all year - and in looking back I'm really surprised to see how much photography's in this top 10. And both heartened and dismayed to see how many of these exhibits are retrospectives - the fact that Alina Szapocnikow or Rineke Djikstra haven't hit my radar before is kind of shaming to me but once I saw their work that string in my heart started vibrating.

As always, everything is in Columbus unless otherwise specified.

1. 
   

   Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman(MoMA, NYC) - One of my favorite artists of all time in a retrospective so massive it was like gorging on your favorite food. Sure, it might have been a little overstuffed and fatigue was bound to set in at one time or another going through it, but her centerfold pictures or her film noir work, all together, was enough to guarantee the top spot on this list, and there were so many treasures besides. How many things can one face be, how many shades, how much of the world?

   
   


2. 
   

   Alina Szapocznikow, Sculpture Undone: 1955-1972 (Wexner Center for the Arts) - My first impression was a female equivalent to Paul Thek (whose work I didn't know before his retrospective that was my favorite art show of 2010). A different plague and a different political machine of death, but very much the same humor and rage as sabre and shield. Working with the plastic materials of the time, the materials of her autobiography and a larger sociopolitical context but still being light in these desperately serious gestures should make everyone trying to make art blush and work much, much harder.

   
   


3. 
   

   Omer Fast, 2001/11(Wexner Center for the Arts) - Two Omer Fast pieces, CNN Concantenated given extra juice by putting it in a very middle-America IKEA bought living room behind a door and his newer 5000 Feet is the the Bestso you need to walk through a seemingly bigger-budget rumination on drone warfare with filmed reenactments of interviews, blurred-face "real" interviews which may or may not be real, and innocuous arial photography suffused with the thick atmosphere of impending doom. A riveting look at how dread evolves over a decade in the same mire that I saw half a dozen times and could have seen a dozen more and still been unpacking.

   
   


4. 
   

   Francesca Woodman, Francesca Woodman (Guggenheim, NYC) - Another photography exhibit saturated with dread and rage. These grim black and white photos are so body focused and so full of a young insouciant rebellion but hiding something darker and also something funnier, there's an acid wit moving in waves underneath. Obviously, a life cut short can give things added weight but I didn't know that part of the story when I walked into the side gallery and my eyes almost exploded.

   
   


5. 
   

   Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama (Whitney, NYC) - I saw Kusama's Fireflies on the Waterat the first or second Whitney Biennial I ever went to and it so stuck with me that I became a huge fan immediately. This retrospective made an asset out of the overstuffed quality of the Cindy Sherman exhibit, the obsessive nature impossible to avoid in Kusama's work exploding in repedition and glee, whether the polka dots everyone talks about or the soft-looking sculptures including boxes that looked like tentacles were wriggling out of them. The kind of things you desperately want to touch and frolic in.

   
   


6. 
   

   Various Artists, Radical Camera: New York Art League(Columbus Museum of Art) - This was one of my favorite surprises all year. Art so upfront about its agenda that the agenda isn't distracting but uplifting, as good a selection of modernist social realist photography I've ever seen. Even when it drifted toward the pedantic, the sensuousness of the aesthetic never let itself be forgotten.

   
   


7. 
   

   Corrine Wasmuht, untitled (Frederich Petzel Gallery, NYC) - A new-to-me selection of paintings that held me rapt, layers of thin paint over polished boards and harshly cropped digital images. The work felt like looking into a different world in the way I wanted modern art to look when I was first reading Samuel Delaney or William Gibson as a teen.

   
   


8. 
   

   David Smith, Cubes and Anarchy (Wexner Center for the Arts) - This was the first time David Smith's work really workedfor me, I saw it and I got Brancusi and Tatlin and throbbing blood below the great narrative of the steelworker artist. I was lucky enough to see this twice, at the Whitney and the Wexner Center, but I have to say the layout in the Wex did a better job of surprising and delighting me and revealing different facets of this strain of Smith's work.

   
   


9. 
   

   Rineke Djikstra, A Retrospective(Guggenheim, NYC) - I've long said any genre, any form can still have juice if it hits a sympathetic pair of eyes and someone up for twisting it till the underlying fibres start to snap. Djikstra's portrait photography drove that point home again. Sociopolitical commentary, honoring and critiquing the subject, and a glorious tension. I got lost in these pictures and didn't want to leave.

   
   


10. 
    

    Various Artists, Triennial: The Ungovernables - The Whitney Biennial left me a little cold this time but the less-warmly-received second edition of the New Museum's Triennial threw me for a loop, largely with understatement. Adrian Villa Rojar's giant robot ruins underscored a deep melancholy before you even see the title - A Person Loved Me-and Mariana Telleria's Days of Truthwith everyday objects pieced together to show a deeper, sadder poetry, were just two of the things that most spoke to me.

    
    

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Best of 2012: Theater and Dance

I know, it's been a while, trying to get my groove back. Please bear with a few posts of me stretching and shaking the rust off. This is the first of five posts highlighting art that shook me like a rag doll. This year really saw a flourishing of interesting Columbus theater which luckily coincided with my not getting out of town quite as much or for quite as long (the first year since I was 18 where I didn't get to Chicago once and one of my two New York trips was mostly for the fantastic wedding of two very dear friends, so no regrets but I was pulled in different directions).

These are the 10 shows I can unreservedly recommend as worth seeing. There might have been some rough parts or a false note here and there, but I came out very glad I was in the room to be part of the experience. There were other things I really liked large chunks of - Jordan Fehr and Drew Eberly's performances in Sleeper; the entire cast in the revival of Vidal's The Best Man; the singing and use of repetition in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart; the interesting, raw arrangements and band, and Josie Merkle's heartbreaking performance in Cabaret - but those shows didn't sing for me all the way. Not like the list below.

Everything is in Columbus unless otherwise specified.

1. Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, Lucinda Childs and Robert Wilson (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) - I love my friends and I love art and I never thought I'd have a chance to see a real production of this. The icing on a fantastic road trip up to Ann Arbor and Einsteinretains its striking weirdness as much as its uncanny beauty. It was fascinating to compare this to the production of Satyagraha I saw at the Met last year: Einstein felt like it reveled in its disconnections, and where the music wasn't as lush it was so loaded with hooks information overload set in within minutes. It sent me into fugue states of color when my consciousness couldn't process for a little while, it made my jaw heavy and my eyes wide, and it fueled overheated conversation about what seemingly nonsensical lines like a "prematurely air-conditioned laundromat" or "we need some wind for the sailboat" or "check the hems" meant. I couldn't have asked a piece of art to do more than this did and I couldn't believe how much this delivered on decades of living only in whispers.


2. Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov adapted by Annie Baker (SoHo Rep, NYC) - Apparently it was the summer of the Vanya revivals in New York this year, but my schedule only let me have a trip that overlapped with Annie Baker's re-imagining. Sam Gold's direction was both constantly surprising and calibrated so that every decision felt inevitable. The translation crackled and the acting was the best I saw on a stage all year - orbiting around Michael Shannon and Reed Birney's two dissolving sculptures of ambition and grief, but no one didn't come with their best game. I had lines stuck in my head for weeks after seeing this, including "Your uselessness has infected us all" and "I've come to believe we're all creeps" and the set design was just the right mix of lived-in and nigh-gothic decay, the unconventional seating was worth exactly the toll it took on my knees and back.


3. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman (Available Light) - In their third year of doing musicals, Available Light synthesized the company's overarching interest in the raw materials of creation and its metamorphosis (and what gets left in its wake) in a show that swung for the fences and just plain swung. The direction from Matt Slaybaugh and musical direction from Pam Welsh-Huggins kept all the spinning plates going a work with this many threads and characters needed, it could have fallen apart but it flew. People I expect to be great - Elena Perantoni, Ian Short, Eleni Papaleonardos, Emily Bach - were as good as I've ever seen them; people who hadn't made the biggest impression on me in their earlier work blew me away, particularly Whitney Thomas Eads; and the whole cast orbited around the swaggering, tragic Nick Lingnofski who was pitch-perfect. Additional attention should be paid to the band featuring Sean Gardner from Winter Makes Sailors and Jeff Wiseman from Mors Ontologica, one of the best uses of a rock band on stage I've ever seen in a musical, and used for one of the biggest fourth-wall-breaking laughs.


4. 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog (Lincoln Center Theatre, NYC) - Jesus Christ. I know I caught grief for comparing this to Pinter, and it's muchwarmer, but Herzog's astonishing play had that deep, tense silence, the real subject was what was behind the words and that same terror of connection. This was the kind of play that reminds me how much I love theater. Gabriel Ebert's Leo, almost crushed under the grief of his friend's death did an amazing job of showing the charm underneath but also trying to consciously eschew it, Mary Louise Wilson's Vera avoided the "sassy older woman who says what everyone is thinking" cliches and was heartbreaking and hilarious, maybe second only to Shannon's Astrov for a performance I just wanted to keep watching for hours. Daniel Aukin's direction was wire-tight and made every moment sing just enough without feeling like underlining.


5. The Past is a Grotesque Animal by Mario Pensotti (Wexner Center for the Arts) - At every turn this could have gone too precious, too cute. Four actors going through scenes from 10 years of a group of halfway-aimless young friends on a stage that rotated like a turntable and it's named after an Of Montreal song? But slowly, like the damaged photographys Pensotti alluded to in his making of the work, each tiny gesture, each banal moment, accrues the sadness that stars seeping into your life in your mid-20s, death and reckoning and the futile efforts to deny - or at least forestall - both. I walked out stunned.


6. Amidst by Pavel Zustiak, adapted from Jerzy Kozinski (Palissimo presented by Wexner Center for the Arts) - Three dancers milling through the crowd, no seats, no clear separation, and one of the most striking dance performances I've seen in recent memory. There's a special electricity with the crowd moving as one to give the dancers space, to keep sightlines open, and no matter how well you think you can intimate where they'll be next, once in a while, you'll find yourself getting shoved from behind or a body right there, as if by magic. Breathtaking.


7. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Matt Slaybaugh, adapted from Cory Doctorow (Available Light) - Slaybaugh followed up last year's (earlier in the same season) How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe with this take on Cory Doctorow's satire. It was a little uneven and a little distant but the good parts were astonishing. Ian Short was a marvel as the flotsam washing up on the shore of the new feel-good reputational economy, and the other two-thirds of the love triangle - Drew Eberly as his baffled friend and Acacia Duncan as his much younger lover suddenly saddled to a sad, old man - were very, very good. Brant Jones' video work was better than I'd ever seen it, Dave Wallingford and Jordan Fehr's sound work was exactly what it needed to be. The kind of production that keeps everyone talking about Available Light.


8. 33 Variations by Moises Kaufman (Available Light) - Kaufman's interlocking tale of losing what makes you - Beethoven's composing the Diabelli Variations and a musicologist writing what's sure to be her final book on same, told in parallel - is a damn fine play executed perfectly. Eleni Papaleonardos's direction is assured, loose enough to let the light and air in but always keeping the forward motion required for something with this many characters, settings and times. Josie Merkle's Katherine is the standout, with special attention to be paid to Matt Hermes (also on this list directing Good People)'s Beehoven, Dave McMahon's pianist, and extra strong sound and light by Dave Wallingford and Carrie Cox, respectively, were even better than the high expectations for this company.


9. Good People by David Lindsey-Abaire (New Players Theater) - One of the things I was happiest to see this year was the emergence of New Players Theater. Everything I saw them do was a home run - their sharp, sexy God of Carnagewas damn near as good - and they're nailing the niche of interesting, very traditionally narrative plays that have been on Broadway or Off-Broadway in the last couple of years but doing them like a professional company. David Lindsey-Abaire's play never really tries to rise above its slice of life but there's so much life in the lines and such a real, lived-in charm and so much love for the characters that I was thoroughly charmed and rooting for them all at every step. Matt Hermes' direction was just tight enough and the acting was terrific, particularly Danielle Mann as Margie, hilarious and deeply sad.


10. Canyon by John Jasperse (Thin Man Dance Inc. presented by Wexner Center for the Arts) - Lines of orange and yellow tape covered the Wexner Center performance space and the dancers went from prone to solo to interaction and prone again around, over and through it. This was the most visceral, even sexy, thing I saw on stage all year. Amidst the grief and the overall theme of stunted, frustrated connection, there were times when it just vibratedwith erotic energy in this hopeless, barren setting. I don't know much about dance but this was a perfect example of why it takes my breath away.

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Uncle Vanya, Soho Rep

"The future hasn't arrived. It is all still


A dream, a night sweat to be swum off


in a wonderland of sand and bread.


When we woke afterward, the houses


were still standing, the green just as green,


but the seaweed had thickened and the lamp


at the end of the dock had cracked."


-Meghan O'Rourke, "Twenty-First Century Fireworks"

Apparently it was the summer of the Vanya revivals in New York this year, but my schedule only let me have a trip that overlapped with Annie Baker's re-imagining. I've read a couple of translations since I fell in love with Chekhov in High School, seen a couple of productions but I've never seen one better than this and I've never hard crisp lines that got it and drove it home as well as this wonder.

Thestage set by Andrew Lieberman with props by Kate Foster had the audience ringing the action and sitting - incredibly uncomfortably - on carpeted risers. The set is a living room with a noticeable trap door and glowing Cyrillic letters on one wall, the title of the play, dotted with furniture. The overall effect was menace and grief but it also felt lived-in, the country estate really does feel isolated and unkempt and a little bit claustrophobic.

Annie Baker's adaptation - and really interesting costume designs - is astonishing. The emotions all feel relatable but strange, of a piece with her original plays but unmistakably Chekov. She chipped away everything Sam Gold's direction was a wonder of marvelous spinning spheres, psychological and physical action and bodies in conjunction with one another and with the oddly laid-out audience. Everything I've seen him do, even things I didn't think worked 100% like Theresa Rebeck's Seminar and Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still, are always marked by distinctive, true performances and a level of constant motion that doesn't feel forced, always fed by the meat of the play.

The acting is superlative. Michael Shannon as Astrov sums up the man collapsing in on himself from boredom and frustration and ennui, every line he says carries more weight as it crumbles off his lips, hitting his mustache. Going from breaking Sonya's heart with "I no longer expect anything of myself and I don't think I'm capable of really loving people" to his acid rejoinder to Yelena, "You have infected us with your uselessness" to the tragic hammer of his summation to Vanya, "You know, I used to think that being a creep meant you were sick or abnormal, but lately I've come to the conclusion that we're all creeps. Everyone in the world, behaving naturally, is a complete creep." Reed Birney as the title character continues his sleeper trajectory started with Sarah Kane's Blasted to being the great stage actor of this moment of fear and instability, broad strokes created by the tiniest of gestures, in this case adding to a man who didn't die early enough to be a tragic figure, he had to keep living with his earnestness and his faith in others and his love of his family and it didn't quite destroy him. The spark is reduced to flickering as the sweetness and decency appear in flashes under a twisting mockery of what he used to be but Birney never plays him hopeless and never lets the audience forget why he's so respected by this gang of misfits.

Georgina Engel, a less ambitious analogue to Vanya and an indictment of how women were perceived in those days, the loving caretaker of the home, is very, very good. Matthew Maher as "Waffles", after his acne scars, gets laughs but communicates an immense amount of pain without going for obvious audience pandering. Merritt Weaver as Sonya was the light bulb moment for me, she holds the production together and is so heartbreaking in her acceptance of her grey state and even more in her brief flashes of joy and hope. The other actors are uniformly fine.

This is the kind of play that makes me love theater more and love life more. It makes me want to be a better person and love all the people who were there and experienced it with me and feel just a little sorry for everyone who didn't see it. It makes me want to be better and make something good.

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