Live Music, Films/TV, Exhibits
I know it’s not list season yet but I’m beginning to look back on what I enjoyed this year. This entry covers live music, films/TV, and exhibits. I’ll weigh in on books, records, additional films, and more in future posts.
Jonathan Richman at Brooklyn’s Opera House in October. A highlight of seeing him — and he’s so terrific these days! he has leaned all the way into his sprawling multilingual troubadour Pierrot Le Catskills thing, and it’s magic! — was his update on the Modern Lovers’ “Old World” with new lyrics and commentary about not being blind to the bigotry and violence of the past when we try to romanticize it. And how there are multiple layers of old worlds, and each new world can improve upon or ruin elements of the one before it.
The 65th Street Session: Chris Thile, Brad Mehldau, and Tune-Yards, at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall in October. Collaborative, bonkers great, genre-fluid yet connected by a complex and resilient limbic system of American songform.
The vocal group Ekmeles performing Stockhausen’s “Stimmung” to electrifying effect at Brooklyn’s Mark Morris Dance Center for Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival in April. Throat singing, real buzzy head-voice resonances, microtonal intervals, sound poetry, kind of a Weimar sense of play and absurdism. Also enjoyed elsewhere at the fest: Andrew Cyrille, a Nona Hendryx/Gary Lucas Captain Beefheart tribute, Nate Wooley and Michael Pisaro presenting Éliane Radigue pieces.
More gigs: Roxy Music at Madison Square Garden in September, Knoxville’s Big Ears fest in the spring (Circuit des Yeux! the International Anthem roster! Annette Peacock!), Sons of Kemet and Makaya McCraven and L’Rain at Central Park SummerStage in July, Cate Le Bon at Bowery Ballroom in February, 75 Dollar Bill in any configuration in any place at any time.
David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” (the 2022 one, obv). What do sex and sexuality mean when you change the holes, when you create new possibilities in defining the holes? And if there’s no pain, is “pleasure” necessarily the opposing polarity or is it something else? It’s not “Videodrome” or “Crash” but it scores high in the genre of “fuck it, I’m gonna make a weird, audacious, horny idea-dump” late-career projects. Perhaps it’s Cronenberg’s “Lulu”! And like the maligned Lou Reed/Metallica art-metal collab, and like I dunno, meat-punching Scott Walker, the more this work matures the more defiant and confident it feels.
Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” There’s a lot of “Day of the Locust” (book and movie) in here — Hollywood and its feudalist environs as a place where desperation so readily transmutes into psychosis. Layers of meaning, dread, awe, jokes: Peele is doing a cinema!
“Russian Doll” Season 2. Both seasons of Natasha Lyonne’s DBT-tragicomedy have really resonated for me but this one especially feels like a treatise on contested/occupied territories and what we actually do with the objects and thoughts and people we try to fortify. It takes the show from just being a puzzle box to something much bigger, although some critics say it’s a mess. Not every artistic choice in this season is the best choice! A few are cringe! But the ones that matter? Hell yeah. Trenchant and multivalent and abstractionist and hilarious. I hope Netflix hasn’t canceled it. If it has, Adam Curtis also has some Russians with trauma up his sleeve.
Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone” (popularly just “TraumaZone”). Greed and/or bureaucratic idiocy will always manifest, like scum on the sea. VERY happy to see Curtis’s take on this stuff — an anti–market-neoliberal, anti-oligarch read on the fall of Communism, pro-democracy but cautious not to mistake that word as a synonym for capitalism. (We don’t arrive at Putin without Gorby awarding industry leaders more power. It’s a domino effect.)
Lots of good stuff at Anthology Film Archives this year including an excellent program of materials by multimedia artist, spiritualist, and Harry Smith bestie Jordan Belson. Guitarist and Belson mentee Henry Kaiser videoed in with a new recorded-live score for 1967’s “Samadhi”, which between film and music left me feeling like I’d walked through a dryer cycle of auroras and threads of steel wool. The summer’s “Nam June Paik’s Radical Fun” program was a treat too. Its centerpiece, “Bye Bye Kipling,” exists on YouTube as this video, a remixed/condensed version of its original form. Per the Los Angeles Times, in the Live Aid global-satellite era, the video-effects pioneer produced “90 minutes of arts, entertainment and sports events to be broadcast live from the three world capitals … the only scheduled live U.S. television coverage of the 1986 Asian Games, now under way in Seoul.” It’s just so wildly 1986: Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Robin Byrd, Dick Cavett, Lou Reed. Frank Heath’s “The Hollow Coin” (2016) showed on the Paik program too, an ode to telecommunications infrastructure, U.S. legal tender, and crackpot culturejammers. Someone give Heath money to make a feature because he will do amazing things.
Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Lou’s vinyl collection includes “British Hard Guitar Technique,” “We Are the World,” a bunch of 1980s Dylan, and an ’88 Windham Hill sampler. And Billy Name’s 1994 birth chart for Lou reveals a shit-ton of Taurus placements, meaning we would not have gotten along AT ALL. Big thanks to Laurie Anderson for imbuing this show with humor and geekiness and making it as non-hagiographic as the custodian of a major estate can possibly get away with.
“William Klein: YES Photographs, Paintings, Films 1948–2013,” International Center for Photography. A fashion photographer, an avant-gardist, and a celebrated filmmaker, a shrewd documenter of the absurd, the peripatetic Klein passed away almost exactly when this major New York retrospective of his work was scheduled to end. It’s remarkable, the will to keep living until your soul decides it’s time not to.
