Callahan's Kind of Cool

Assured, sharp, cool (tempered, comfortable in his own skin), Bill Callahan took to the stage of the Echoplex at around 11:20 last night and got down to business. Notably it wasn't (Smog) who performed. (Smog) being Callahan's moniker from his earliest days on the indie scene back in 1988. This time around, he's simply Bill Callahan, touring in support of his album "Woke on a Whaleheart." And Callahan, with a company of incredible musicians (bass, violin, and a percussionist who worked it standing up), put on an excellent show.

Callahan's songs all came off well, his trilling, mildly low voice ushered his lyrical loops while the music often started of spare and would build, slowly, to a cacophony made all the more impressive given the presence of only 4 people on stage. At times the sound seemed bigger than all of them. Like how the energy of the more propulsive track, "Diamond Dancer," was palpable. The percussionist, who heretofore was exemplar with his subtlety and controlled erratics and atmospherics, suddenly thundered a hard 4/4 beat, while the violinist hit a higher and more haunting register than she had with other songs, peeling askew and gorgeously shrill, with hints of lamenting vibrato. And of course, Bill, his expressive maw, hollering in this calculating, controlled sense.

And that was the essence of the whole show. It was experimental in that the songs all had the space to lumber and exist on a very mellow level. The music was imbued with a sense of composure, subsumed by the very necessity of the songs. That's what I was ultimately left with, Callahan's necessity. Necessary, as in, it's necessary to hear him sing to you, and because the venue was small and only half-filled, it felt like he was addressing us. It was necessary to hear him sing,"Oh I never really realized death is what it meant to make it on my own," in an excellent rendition of "Say Valley Maker." That was the line that stayed with me the most. He's saying that we're all in this together right now, in this moment (you can be alone when you die).

Africambiguities

Holland Cotter exalts the "sleeper" exhibit, “Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary” at the Met in NYC. Cotter just short of begs museum goers to give up the modernist, western focused ghost, if only for a second, and, like, totally check out this little exhibit, because, you'll totally get something out of it, I swear. Which is an interesting thought because so much of what marks modern art is its lack of substance, or its theoreticalness, or its opaqueness. And suddenly, seemingly rudimentary, savage works, boring pedagogical fodder (thus the traditionally "sleeper" section of the museum) at least in this article, are suffused with meaning. The meaning being the historical connections between African and European treatments of their dead. Cotter somewhat bemoans the need for Euro connections, but hell, the Met has to get people in there somehow. And then:

The show ends theatrically too, though whether with tragedy or comedy is hard to say. One of the final images [above] is also one of the most startling: a reliquary figure from Congo. Standing six feet tall and made from layers and layers of cloth, including red European blankets, the figure is bulked up to resemble a giant female doll, all but nude, with brick-red skin and a smile of what looks like avid glee on her face.

Who is she? What is she? Several things. She is a portrait of someone who has died and also a receptacle for that person’s mummified body. She is an image of a specific category of ancestor, one recently dead. But she will fully claim status only after she has been buried with the relic she holds.

So she's ultimately a kind of metaphysical object, a body within a body that constitutes a whole only when a) she's dead and b) contained within her depiction. Crazy interesting. No sarcasm here. Cotter wins me over at the end of the piece with, " The lesson: In death, as in life, ambiguity rules." Yes! Ambiguity totally rules!

Keeping Watch Over the Dead [NYT]