Cake In 15

Gorram end of year, stupid list making end-of the-decade hoo-hah, makes this curmudgeon sit and spit and spin large yarns and look back in reminiscences, adhering to the tyranny of the Julians and journalistic fabrications that make years easily delineated into digestible decades and here we are again and what the cuss have we learned from the years past to get over staring into the darkness of the future? Who knows? Since Staciaann did her year in pictures (and whatever else you want to say about 2009, she did make it look good) here are a dozen stories that were important or most interesting or most fun to write. When going through the lists there was a lot of stuff that I wrote for other people, City Pages and The A.V. Club and I am happy to have done that and grateful for the opportunity, but here are my favorite writings done because they needed to be did. Drive safe tonight, this year shouldn’t end without you.

The Revolution’s in the Details: Rauschenberg at the MIA
“This is a feat of concept and perspective that re-invents the readymade as representation and re-establishes the place of the artists as both revealer and creator of mystery in everyday life; a self-contained explosion on the artists’ continuum.”

Rock Photog Bob Gruen at the Current’s Fakebook
“It’s not all unassuming. When Paul Simonon of the Clash warns you that “we’re cunts” and you tell them that well, they look like cunts, you’ve got some chutzpah going for you.”

Laura Fulk: “Suffocate”
Rock Dreams for High Fashion or Sewing on the Edge

The Alarmists: Disclosures For The Hollow Men
“They played like they didn’t give a fuck. Like it was alright to get hurt and live to tell about it. ”

Michael Jackson 1958-2009
21 Sequined Glove Salute or Let’s Hope Brutus and Antony Were Both Wrong

Phoenix
“Phoenix are a pretty ok band from France mostly notable for making jaunty pop-rock, being named for a city in Arizona and the lead singer’s romantic involvement with Sofia Coppola (mostly notable for ruining Godfather III, redeeming herself via Bill Murray’s sad sack routine and making wine that comes in soda cans.)”

Rejected from ARP!
“I have told my girlfriend that I will be writing this, a verbal warning. “Baby,” I say, “I’m going to write this thing because there ideas flying around and there is a deadline and it may take me stomping around and smoking cigarettes and shouting and listening to Dylan to shake these thoughts out.””

Basilica Block Party: Crisis of Faith
Catholicism WOW! or Hanginaround the Holy Water with my Little Hoodrat Friends

Tornado
“But the actual event demands some retelling, in some hard-boiled form, like a Raymond Chandler bit.”

This Is Not For You
“To fully describe the event would be to undercut it’s secrets and as unfulfilling as the cliff-notes to House of Leaves. ”

Love Is Blind…And Furry
“But, there might be nothing funnier, I suspect,
Than Jon Mac Cole, fully erect.”

The Mountain Goats + Final Fantasy
“Any Fantasies You May Have After This You May Disregard as Fallacious” or “Their Perfection is Absolute and Everlasting”

Since 2006 I’ve kept track of the shows I go and see – whether they be music, fashion, or theater. I keep track because my brain will not remember from year to year which shows were when, and it’s an easy way to index my comings and goings.

In 2009 I was lucky enough to attend around 140 shows. This includes full days at SXSW in Austin, TX, Coachella in Indio, CA & the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, IL. Oddly enough that’s less than 2008, but I feel like the opportunities I’ve had (going to Coachella with Cloud Cult!) have been more interesting & I hope that 2010 can bring me even more travel & excitement.

So without further ado, here’s Staciaann’s 2009 shows list (shows in red were my favorites):

1/4/09 Spirits of the Red City, Nona & Marshall - Bryant Lake Bowl
1/10/09 Caroline Smith & the Good Night Sleeps, Best Friends Forever, Jeremy Messersmith - The Entry
1/14/09 Best New Bands: Look Book, Caroline Smith & the Good Night Sleeps, Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles, The Dynamiters - First Avenue
1/17/09 Chad Weiss Benefit: The Pines, Haley Bonar, Trampled By Turtles, Cloud Cult, Mason Jennings - First Avenue
1/24/09 The Alarmists, Sick of Sarah (early show) – The Entry
1/24/09 Soviet Machines, The Alarmists (late show) - The Entry
1/29/09 Cliché: Avoid the Grey Fashion Show - Old Arizona Theater
2/1/09 Art Shanties on Medicine Lake - Medicine Lake
2/6/09 Solid Gold, Wild Light, Tapes ‘N Tapes - First Avenue
2/13/09 Dawes, Other Lives, Delta Spirit - The Entry
2/14/09 Fuck You I Love Me: A Fundraiser for Lamb Lays with Lion - The Sound Gallery
2/18/09 Alela Diane, Blitzen Trapper - First Avenue
2/20/09 Sweet Colleens, Beausoleil - Cedar Cultural Center
2/27/09 The Airborne Toxic Event - Triple Rock
2/28/09 The Wapsipinicon - 331 Club
3/8/09 2nd Sunday Gospel Brunch: Eliza Blue, A Night in the Box - 331 Club
3/18/09 SXSW: Greg Laswell, Samantha Crain, Shout Out Out Out Out, Loney Dear, The Thermals, Wild Light, M. Ward, Janelle Monae, Ladyhawke, Heartless Bastards, The Avett Brothers, The Decemberists, Black Diamond Heavies, Delta Spirit Austin, TX
3/19/09 SXSW: The Hard Lessons, Lucero, The Hold Steady, Kaiser Cartel, I Self Divine, Amanda Palmer, Elvis Perkins in Dearland Austin, TX
3/20/09 SXSW: The Wrens, Bishop Allen, Passion Pit, The Chemical Brothers, Hot Leg, Solid Gold, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Glasvegas, Echo & the Bunnymen, Jeremy Messersmith, Mark Mallman, Me & My Arrow, The Airborne Toxic Event, Devo Austin, TX
3/21/09 SXSW: Efterklang, An Horse, Voxtrot, Silversun Pickups Austin, TX
3/29/09 Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (LLwL) - Bedlam Theater
3/30/09 Bob Mould - Varsity Theater
4/4/09 Good Old War, Heartless Bastards - Varsity Theater
4/7/09 Von Iva, Glasvegas - Varsity Theater
4/11/09 Andrew Bird - MPR’s UBS Forum
4/12/09 Black Kids, Mates of State - Varsity Theater
4/17/09 Beirut, Paul McCartney - Coachella
4/18/09 P.O.S., Cloud Cult, Fleet Foxes, M.I.A., Atmosphere - Coachella
4/19/09 The Knux, Okkervil River, Gaslight Anthem, Murder City Devils, Antony and the Johnsons, Yeah Yeah Yeahs,Lucent Dossier Experience, Public Enemy, The Cure - Coachella
4/21/09 Laura Fulk’s Suffocate - Black Box Theater
4/24/09 Voltage! Fashion Amplified: Mercurial Rage, First Communion Afterparty, Gospel Gossip, Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles, Maria Isa - First Avenue
4/30/09 Making Music with Dan Wilson - The Whole Music Club
5/2/09 Ice Palace, Maps & Atlases, Cloud Cult – First Avenue
5/2/09 Elvis Perkins in Dearland - 400 Bar
5/11/09 Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band - Xcel Energy Center
5/13/09 10-Minute Play Festival - Bedlam Theater
5/17/09 10-Minute Play Festival - Bedlam Theater
5/17/09 Fall Out Boy - Roy Wilkins
5/28/09 Wild Light, Doves - Varsity Theater
5/29/09 Ssion, Fischerspooner - First Avenue
5/30/09 Grand Ole Party, Yeah Yeah Yeahs - First Avenue
6/3/09 kite&mountain - Red Eye Theater
6/6/09 To Kill A Petty Bourguoise, Lookbook, Dearling Physique - Intermedia Arts
6/7/09 Works In Progress plays - Red Eye Theater
6/7/09 Here We Go Magic, Grizzly Bear - Cedar Cultural Center
6/11/09 Cliché’s 5ive Years of Love Fashion Show - Plaza Verde
6/12/09 The Idle Hands - First Avenue
6/12/09 757s, The (new) Alarmists - Varsity Theater
6/12/09 HWTS 7th Anniversary Party: Dave Campbell is in Big Trouble - Turf Club
6/13/09 Metric - First Avenue
6/14/09 Living Things, Patrick Wolf - The Fine Line
6/18/09 Vita.mn Poolside Fashion Show - Calhoun Beach Club
6/19/09 Hootenanny: A Community (Photos by Tony Nelson) - Fox Tax
6/20/09 Stone Arch Festival of the Arts - St. Anthony Main
6/21/09 Stone Arch Festival of the Arts - St. Anthony Main
6/23/09 Amazing Baby, Phoenix - Varsity Theater
6/26/09 Mute Era, Black Horse, Lookbook, Gospel Gossip (CD Release) - Turf Club
6/27/09 Samantha Craine & the Midnight Shivers, The Avett Brothers - MN Zoo
6/28/09 The Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriputures - Guthrie
6/29/09 White Rabbits - 400 Bar
7/3/09 City on the Make - Bedlam Theater
7/4/09 Haley Bonar - Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
7/5/09 No Doubt - Xcel Energy Center
7/7/09 Jon Auer (Posies), Fountains of Wayne - Cedar Cultural Center
7/9/09 Jeremy Messersmith - Mill City Museum
7/10/09 Serena Ryder, Matt Kearney, Jayhawks, Black Crowes - Basilica Block Party
7/11/09 Tapes ‘N Tapes, The Hold Steady - Basilica Block Party
7/12/09 Romantica, Halloween,Alaska, Le Sans Coulettes Bastille Day – Café Barbette
7/15/09 Dan Wilson (Twitter event) - Mill City Museum
7/18/09 Cymbals Eat Guitars, Disappears, Plants & Animals, Fucked Up, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Bowerbirds, Final Fantasy, Yeasayer, Doom, Beirut, The National - Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, IL
7/19/09 The Mae Shi, Frightened Rabbit, Blitzen Trapper, Killer Whales, Women, The Thermals , The Walkmen, Japandroids, M83, The Flaming Lips, The Very Best - Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, IL
7/23/09 Caroline Smith & the Good Night Sleeps - Mill City Museum
7/24/09 Artery 24 – Carl’s piece - Soap Factory
7/25/09 Brass Kings – One Day in July street festival - Warehouse District
7/31/09 Fringe: Love Me Or Die! - UofM Rarig Xperimental Theater
8/2/09 Fringe: Hogg & the Humors, Best Little Crackhouse in Philly (…or Crackwhore: The Musical!) - Intermedia Arts, Southern Theater
8/3/09 Gospel Gossip - Loring Park
8/6/09 Fringe: Storm Still - Waldorf School
8/8/09 Fringe: Like A Virgin, Love Me Or Die! - Mixed Blood Theater, UofM Rarig Xperimental Theater
8/8/09 Save Canvas: Vacant Spaces Become Art - 10th & Marquette, Downtown Mpls
8/9/09 Fleet Foxes, Dungen - First Avenue
8/10/09 Silversun Pickups - State Theater
8/16/09 Mad Men Party - Jax Café
8/23/09 Cloud Cult - Cabooze
8/29/09 After Juliet - St. Louis Park Jewish Community Center
9/5/09 Clapperclaw Festival: No Bird Sing, Kristoff Krane, El Guante, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Free Energy - Intermedia Arts
9/11/09 Regina Spektor - State Theater
9/12/09 Music & Movies: Low, Jaws – Lake Harriet Bandshell
9/12/09 Jayber Crow- Java Jacks
9/17/09 Making Music with Roma di Luna - The Whole
9/18/09 La Nouvelle Femme: Bella Koshka, Calpurnia Peach, Hilder Victoria - Varsity Theater
9/19/09 Muisc & Movies: One for the Team, Bottle Rocket - Lake Harriet Bandshell
9/19/09 Jeremy Messersmith, Chris Koza - First Avenue
9/20/09 Daredevil Christopher Wright, Caroline Smith & the Good Night Sleeps - Nomad 9/20/09 Ani DiFranco - First Avenue
9/26/09 Music & Movies: Dosh, Time Bandits - Lake Harriet Bandshell
9/27/09 Cliché in-house fashion show - Cliché
9/27/09 Suede & Luxe for Less Fashion Shows - Blessings Salon
9/28/09 Rock N Bowl – Sound Unseen - Memory Lanes
10/1/09 Beatles are in Big Trouble - Turf Club
10/2/09 AFI - Epic
10/2/09 Jeremy Messersmith, Tapes N Tapes - Music Box
10/3/09 Frank Turner, The Loved Ones, Murder By Death, Gaslight Anthem - Cabooze
10/7/09 So You Think You Can Dance - Target Center
10/8/09 Peter Wolf Crier - Secret House Location
10/12/09 Red Chord, Gwar - First Avenue
10/14/09 Pezzettino – The Cake Shop
10/17/09 Alarmists, Two Cow Garage, The Hold Steady - St. Olaf
10/20/09 Ruby Suns, The Dodos - Turf Club
10/23/09 Spaghetti Western String Co., The Pines - Cedar Cultural Center
10/24/09 Henry Clay People, The Airborne Toxic Event - Fine Line
10/24/09 City on the Make -Hexagon
10/25/09 Dawes, Langhorne Slim - 400 Bar
10/30/09 Motion City Soundtrack - Triple Rock
10/31/09 10 Thousand Things: Othello - Open Book
10/31/09 MC/VL - Andrea & Ben’s
11/3/09 Guggenheim Grotto, They Might Be Giants - First Avenue
11/6/09 J. Tillman - Music Box
11/7/09 Final Fantasy, Mountain Goats - Cedar Cultural Center
11/11/09 Fanfarlo - Triple Rock
11/15/09 Roma di Luna - The Cake Shop
11/19/09 Growing, Fuck Buttons - Triple Rock
11/21/09 Prairie Home Companion - State Theater
11/22/09 Mason Jennings - First Avenue
11/24/09 Peter Wolf Crier, Harper Simon - Cedar Cultural Center
11/25/09 CLAPS, Crystal Antlers, The Big Pink - The Entry
11/25/09 The Magnolias, Ike Reilly - First Avenue
11/27/09 Tribute to the Replacements - First Avenue
11/27/09 Grace Potter & the Nocturnals - Pantages Theater
11/29/09 Storyhill - Cedar Cultural Center
11/29/09 Those Darlins, King Khan & BBQ Show - Triple Rock
12/3/09 Zoo Animal, Kaiser Cartel, Jeremy Messersmith - The Entry
12/5/09 Big Bad Voodoo Daddy - Pantages Theater
12/9/09 Dave Rawlings Machine with Gillian Welch - The Electric Fetus
12/12/09 Andrew Bird - St. Mark’s Espicopal Cathedral
12/18/09 New Century Masters - Triple Rock
12/19/09 The Pines, Mason Jennings - First Avenue
12/23/09 Eliza Blue, Roma di Luna – Cedar Cultural Center
12/26/09 Hoot! Jim Walsh & Slim Dunlap, Brianna Lane, Rick Robot, Pete Christensen, Asleigh Sill, Graham Early, Joel Bremer - Java Jacks

Yesterday, the New York State Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have opened up marriage rights and equality to same-sex partners. The 38-to-24 was not only split along party lines, with all 30 Republicans voting against the bill, but also split between urban and upstate New York, the New York Times reports. Although the Times quotes Senator Tom Libous, deputy leader of the Republican Party, trying to deflect the issue of equality by claiming people don’t care about it right now because they are more concerned with mortgages and pocketbooks, Staten Island Senator Diane Savino makes the far more eloquent and far sighted argument for equality in America. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and watch the video below:

With her closing statement, “We have nothing to fear from people who are committed to eachother and want to share their lives and protect one another in the event of sickness, illness or death. We have nothing to fear from love and commitment.” Savino recalls the inspirational phrase of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another person who managed to get important things done in the face of economic hardship. As another man who saw right in dark times, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” The question of civil recognition of equal marriage protection (the churches can sort it out for themselves) is not a matter of if, but when, and it was heartening to see that 7 of 10 female senators voted for the bill, as did the entire New York Senate Black Caucus, especially after some of the statistical analysis from the Proposition 8 vote in California suggesting that evangelical black voters had helped pass that ban on same-sex marriages.

So the arc of the moral universe is long, and that arc’s passage through civil society is not without it’s ironies. Savino makes that point with her anecdote about the pedi-cab driver who sticks his head into her car and their access to marriage; Britney Spears’ annulled marriage is a prime example of the cavalier heterosexual treatment of the marriage contract. The extent to which American society has gone to block what should be a basic legal protection if we are to take “with liberty and justice for all” seriously is at times mind-boggling. In an article on South African runner Caster Semenya in The New Yorker, journalist Ariel Levy nails this point in her discussion of the increasingly complex considerations of how gender structures are important to society. Levy writes, “Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.” That is a tragic irony.

The ability of consenting adults to enter into a civil contract that allows them to care for eachother is something that government should administer and facilitate, not adjudicate or judge. The longer the United States and the institutional forces within it try to block access to equal marriage, the further they undermine the promise of the Constitution for equal protection under the law. Love and commitment are inextricably tied to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and so let us respect that. The arc may be long, but the path has been set upon and the destination in sight. Remember, we have nothing to fear from love and commitment

Local underground rapper Kristoff Krane is a hugger, he’s got a lot of love for a lot of people and is always willing to share it. Now he’s in need of some love of his own. After weeks of shooting the video for the standout track “Miracle” from his This Will Work For Now release, a process that has included over 40 extras, an 80-year-old woman to play the grandma role and a 5-year-old kid to play the grandson, the footage is gone. Not stolen, “gone” but “hard drive crashed” gone. Technology is a cruel mistress sometimes, and Kris needs a hand getting his lost baby back and there are two ways he is asking for help.

The first, is for some cash. He has already spent $1000 in trying to recover the material and this has not been an easy spiritual or financial time for Kris. The e-mail he sent out outlines how his grandmother in in the end stages of cancer while his grandfather has been moved into a care unit for Alzheimer’s, the renters in his home are moving out and he has maxed out his savings. The data recovery process is expensive, and not guranteed, so if you can help out with a couple bucks, click through here to his PayPal account to chip in. Anyone donating over $1 will get a copy of the Mixxy #2 mixtape.

The second is to turn this loss into a community building exercise. He has decided, if he is unable to retrieve the material, he will not re-shoot the “Miracle” video. Instead, everyone is invited to make their own videos for “Miracle” that will be shown at the Triple Rock Social Club on January 2nd for what would have been the “Miracle” release party. And from balloons to ginger root, Kris knows how to throw a party, so help a brother out and make your own mix. Listening to “Miracle” over and over can only be good for you in the wintertime.

Growing up as an exile from Lake Wobegone, about as far away as one could imagine from Minnesota, the tapes of Prairie Home Companion wove magical tales of a far off land of hot-dish and the existential mysteries of lutefisk. On the tape of the 10th Anniversary show, host Garrison Keillor ruminated upon the regrets of his first ten years on the air, including a mis-guided an brief foray on to television. He recalled one of his actresses, who, when asked by a cameraman to move the microphone that was hiding her face, smiled sweetly and told the cameraman in no uncertain terms that it was the camera that hid, while the microphone revealed.

That was 25 years ago now, and though it may be the microphone that keeps the show intimate, to watch the live show is still a revelation. Perhaps the sweetest revelation from Saturday afternoon at the State Theatre on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis was how elegant Keillor could be on his feet. For a 6’4″ Minnesotan who has done this for 35 years, who suffered a minor stroke earlier this year and spent the warm-up part of the show complaining about a life-threatening cold he acquired from a sophisticated woman at a party in New York City (everything has a moral, or at least a punchline) he swung and and bounced, keeping the rhythm in the balls of his feet, with a light wave of his hands. The current acting cast of Sue Scott, Tim Russell and effectsman extraordinaire Tom Keith were polished and endearing, as was singer Andra Suchy who has become a fairly regular guest on PHC and dueted several times with Keillor. Musical guests Steve Wariner and Nellie McKay paid homage to their musical heros, guitarist Chet Atkins and starlet Doris Day respectively, alternately sweet and totally kitschy weird and awesome in McKay’s case. Spending the afternoon in the dark under the high art deco ceiling was lovely and nostalgic, one of those magical bits of Americana that we never ought forget, and the decades cannot improve.

For Staciaann’s slideshow for City Pages, click here.

I haven’t written, let alone put out into the world, any poetry in quite a while. The lapse in poetry coincided with the rise of prose, interviews, reviews and other such works that are intended for clear articulation of ideas, getting down to the point. But so many phrases rack up in notebooks and scraps, and the appeal of imagery and ambiguity has it’s own appeal and nourishment. At a party several years ago where I hurt people, an older writer told me, drunkenly, wisely, “Don’t kill yourself.” The best and bluntest advice I ever got. It was, at that time, meant literally, but contains in it a truth about everyday living- do those things that let you live. So the scraps coalesce, the soul convalesces and words, lost words, wild words, need a home. It was only inevitable that the form would return.

Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Elegy 27
(Sweet Guadeloup)

“Goya agradecido, á su amigo Arrieta: por el acierto y esmero con qe le salvo la vida en su aguda y / peligrosa enfermedad, padecida á fines del año 1819, a los setenta y tres años de su edad. Lo pintó en 1820.”

Give it up, Sweet Guadeloup, you’ll never make it
through a Minnesota winter with a scarf that thin.
Not with bare feet tracking leaves into the library
like sacred offerings made by cats to kin. Keep walking,
find a friend to give you shoes.

Leave it to your eyes to flesh out the giants in the mist,
bit into the soft ground plate that autumn offers
as a masque for the approach and blows away your prints,
your footfalls so delicate.

Shield yourself, love, resist,
mark the well-appointed rooms with mounted mantel-clocks
and un-moulded door-jambs framed with sealing caulk
to keep the wind away
from a vase of roses. That could be you, but for the plate glass.

Sweet Guadeloup, rattling home on the Eighteen
Where you been? Treatment. Me too.
It is good to commune.

Poesy 99
(Edna & Konstantin)

It’s supposed to rain, it was supposed to rain:
Fly away to Maine to stand by the Atlantic,
she wears her sensuousness, infinite,
like a gauze. Crashing upon the shore and pulling
the wolf teeth one by one, tearing the at edges to bind it up,
stanch the leaching out of hurts and blood.

It’s gonna pass by, shake the necklace in the fist,
salt the water, cast spells on the concrete
freeway overpass, busstops, the unending litany of
names names names articulate the possibilities;
Speak the speech as you pray it, haltingly
like dogs unsure of affection, come on home.

Laughing with inexplicable joy opens veins to air. Why would you but
to live. Give them doves, the teenagers in leather jackets
going places with heads of dynamite and pockets full of hinges-
each finger a conductor’s baton, each joint a break to make
the music more personal.

It should never go unspoken, unsung; the gamesmanship of
sufferings mounts up a pale horse that
swiftly rides away from love and life, reigned back
when tongue and heart conceive and name the tune.

Raw Shakespeare or Post-Nothing
Photo courtesy Ten Thousand Things

There is something to the style of a Ten Thousand Things production- with the lights up, seated in a circle, with actors and audience in plain view- that is as much group therapy as it is theatre. The immediacy of text and action presented in the stripped down format enables the critical themes, the subjects that resonate across age, class and race, to take center stage without frivolous theatrical frills. It is through that clarity of vision that Ten Thousand Things makes it’s work matter to their audiences in prisons and shelters as well as to theatre-literate audiences. In tackling “Othello”, playing one more week at Open Book and then one week at the Minnesota Opera Center, co-directors Michelle Hensley (TTT Artistic Director) and Sonja Parks use a neatly streamlined text and a canny and impeccable cast to flesh out the themes of racism and sexism but also to dig deeper into the base motivations of jealousy and deception that are at the heart of all out tragedies.

As Othello, Ansa Akyea throws himself into the performance, all muscle and sweat that ends in tears. Akyea uses his stature to create a man whose fidelity to orders and desire for honesty make him susceptible corruption, posing an existential crisis- if lack of dishonesty makes it impossible to discern dishonesty then how is it possible to maintain honesty- and he is pushed all the way to the edge for it. What makes the push so harrowing is the delightfulness of Luverne Seifert’s Iago. Forget the banality of evil, as the saying goes, Seifert embodies the blitheness of evil. From one stomach-churning suggestion that his own wife has cuckolded him with Othello, Seifert’s Iago spins out plots as lightly as he were making plans for lunch, and it is on the strength of Seifert the actor that we believe Iago the actor, with multiple faces to present to each character. Tracey Malony as Desdemona provides a great foil to Akyea, as slim and light as he is large and dark, with her honesty full of delicate sweetness in counterbalance to his headstrong directness.

With those three at the core of the production, the major themes of jealousy and corruption are played out to their tragic ends, but it is in the canny casting of Christiana Clark, an African-American actress, in the roles of the Duke of Venice, Lodovico (an emissary of the Duke) and especially as Emilya, Iago’s wife, that the major question of race is engaged in “Othello”. In productions where Othello is the only black character on stage, the read on the racism of the play is a relatively simplistic one. Other performances has attempted to broaden and nuance the racism of “Othello” through non-traditional casting, most notably this summer’s co-production by the Public and the LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York directed by Peter Sellars. Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker of that production;

“…Unavoidably…Othello must be black. By casting the light-skinned Latino actor John Ortiz-who could easily be Venetian- in the title role, Sellars says he has tried to shift the focus away from “racial hierarchies” in order to explore what the “realities and possibilities” of the play may be for “the Obama generation.” But would the play really mean less if Sellars had cast, say, Jeffrey Wright in the role? Does having a non-black Othello truly make you confront your own prejudices? Has Sellars unintentionally given in to the racism that sometimes infects the white-oriented theatrical avant-garde?”

In “the Obama generation” the blatant racism of Brabantio (Desdemona’s mother in this production, played by Kimberly Richardson in one of three roles) is a mix of antiquated, like “Colored Only” signs and virulent, but it is also easily identifiable as repulsive. It is obvious and the tack of Sellars to white-wash the cast of “Othello” is antithetical to the diversity of our times. So the casting of Clark enables a whole new body of questions, of which the most contentious are posed by relationship of Iago and Emilya. If Iago could marry a black woman and still cavalierly undercut Othello because of his supposed cuckoldry and use his race against him, have we made progress as a culture against the evils of racism? Or are those social issues so deeply tied to the human shortcomings of jealousy, dishonesty and mistrust that prejudice simply mutates instead of being stamped out? Those types of questions open a truly problematic read on the insidious sublimation of racial- and sexual- hierarchies in the realities and possibilities of contemporary life. All that it takes for Ten Thousand Things to double down on the relevance of Shakespeare to a modern and diverse audience to get down to the text and perform it in the open with a cast that reflects their audience- when you can see yourself on stage, theatre is working its magic.

Time once again to welcome P.O.S. back to town, his star ever ascendant. He has been on the road almost all year- the photo here is from the Coachella music festival where he was a last minute addition but rocked a sizeable crowd, as photographer Staciaann can attest- but he came back even stronger for the journey Saturday at First Ave. He definitely hasn’t lost any sense of humor or eclectic taste in music, joking about the hats that got thrown up on stage and booking a show that included prog-rock (Moonstone), boom-bap (Prof & St. Paul Slim) and dance-noise (Slapping Purses), all of which was local, and all of which worked and all of which was picked by Stef. So don’t be afraid, we may not be for them but you can have all this here, and you can read more at the City Pages blog.

Pray for Saul Williams. The company he keeps indicates some form of Stockholm Syndrome or extreme personality changes or serious lapse of judgement. The Afro-Punk sponsored show at the Varsity Theater started off great with sets from locals Dearling Physique and No Bird Sing, which simply stoked the high expectations for the ground-breaking spoken word and hip-hop artist. As MC Eric Blair of No Bird Sing put it, “Saul-Fucking-Williams!” But it was not to be. In fact, it was to go horribly, horrifyingly wrong. Like Hinder opening for Ani DiFranco, or Prussian Blue fronting Public Enemy. Tragic. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, I already did for the City Pages blog, so check it out there. In fact, I went home and listened to “Our Father”, cried a bit and then got righteously angry, which the Saul Williams in my head would approve of.

The Concrete Pour of Culture or We’re Gonna Die, Let’s Make Art

Standing in Greg Gossel‘s show Broken on view through November 29th, half the fun is counting the references. The pulpy, cartoon women in his works dial a direct line to Roy Lichtenstein, the newspaper images blown up and silkscreened throughout the show are straight Warhol, the occasional blocks of red with text in bold white Impact italics could come from Shepard Fairey‘s OBEY stickers and by extension and more critically, Barbara Kruger. In the piece “Bobby”, the diagonal white and red stripes do what stripes like that do in American art in American galleries- reference Jasper Johns. But one can also read the formalism of Daniel Buren into the equation (see the cover of this months Walker magazine) which slyly grounds these seemingly chaotic Pop assemblages into a minimal formalism, echoed by the precise neon stripes on panels appearing on the untitled wall installations in the gallery. The whole concept of “decades of history that are discovered when one peels back the layers of posters coating time weathered buildings” as the explanatory paragraph states has been used in the ads the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella has been running for years in the pages of Artforum. With all that debt to pay off, it is no wonder the work is priced from $1,200 to $7,200.

But for all that obviousness and borrowing, there is a spark in the individual assembling that makes the end result more than an aesthetically seductive melange. And it’s not surprising that it is selling. Gossel chooses his images critically, from the crisp two-toned series “Michael 1-4″, Hank 1-4″, “Whitney 1-4″ and “Dan 1-4″, (Jackson, Aaron, Houston and a Dan I don’t recognize) to the bits and pieces in the painterly collages. In the collage paintings, none of the elemental images are complete, the overlapping fragments compete for space and meaning and imply a critical brokenness in the culture that produced them to produce pure images. Advertising abuts sex abutting politics, a cacophonous conflict of contemporary priorities fixed in acrylic, a modern challenge to discern meaning. The full wall dedicated to early celebrity shots contain narratives of massive popular success and cultural betrayal and failing- Hank was lost to steroid asterisk, Whitney found crack and enough ink has already been spilled over Michael already. I am sure Dan doesn’t have a happy story either.

In freely admitting the “montage of pop culture history” in the accompanying statement, Gossel frees himself to turn his practice into it’s own critique. The discomfiture of art as practiced when it is obsessed with surface culture poses a question that should be in the mind of anyone engaged in mass culture- is it the fascination with our own entropy that keeps culture moving, and how can any system so internally obsessed be anything but broken? For all the Pop precedents, Gossel may owe more to Robert Smithson than any other artist.

ALSO AT SOOVAC THIS WEEKEND:
OX-OP Arts Presents:
Non Consensual Post Dada
Constructivist Cerebral Warts
Art/Music/Film Festival 2009

Moving into the old Highpoint Center for Printmaking space next door (as Highpoint has handsome new digs on Lake Street) here is a mash-up of art, film and music. Printmaking powerhouses Burlesque of North America and Aesthetic Apparatus will be showing their torch-bearing print work, the mysterious, dangerous local artist and AmRep Records chief HAZE XXL will be showing off the limited run (only 100 made!) individual CD sleeves of the House Of Flies/Gay Witch Abortion record. There will of course, be music and film, and debauchery. The CD release Gay Witch Abortion show is Friday, Saturday HOF performs and Sunday is OX-OP stalwarts The Melvins. $6 at the door, no pre-sales, bring your dancing shoes and knuckledusters, or just go to soovac.org for more info and directions.