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

“You see half the moon, its crescent, and one of the planets, maybe Saturn, maybe Jupiter, in the early night sky over Berlin, through the windows of a taxicab, near Potsdamer Platz.

You think: Beauty.

No, this is not beauty, maybe not, maybe, this is the rest of it, maybe not, maybe, the rest of beauty,
maybe not, maybe, what remains of beauty,maybe not, maybe, what is visible, certainly, uncertain.
Your arms would not be able to stretch as far as necessary to form an adequate gesture for beauty
(You know that, don't you?).
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.

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

“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.

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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

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.

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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

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.

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

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. 

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

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.

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

“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.

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