My Top Ten Cultural Events of 2006

It has been a great year. I've lived in two great cities -- Chicago and now L.A. Both have been good to me.

Here a a few of my favorites for the year:

1. Steppenwolf Theater Company’s 30th Anniversary Season

Artistic director Martha Lavey took big risks bringing the some of most poignant and troubling topics and the leading voices of contemporary fiction to stage. Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, and Cormac McCarthy gave meditations on euthanasia, suicide, and disaster. Bruce Norris’ Unmentionables, a play about moral contradictions deep in the heart of Africa’s missionary and corporate culture, rounded out the season with a direct confrontation with the audience, poking fun at mimesis as the escapism we all seek in the arts. Ultimately though, Love Song, a play about a lonely, troubled loner in love with a creation of his own mind, was the gem.

2. Rauschenberg’s Combines at MOCA, Los Angeles

Pretty much on every visual arts list, this was a stunning show, full of historical resonance and wit. Constructing revolutionary heirlooms between 1953 and 1963, Rauschenberg changed the materials of dada and life into masterpieces of humor and perception. I hope these Combines continue to be over shown as often as possible.

3. Icons of Mount Sinai at the Getty

The making of an icon, Chrysography, means “writing in gold,” and these works, meant as mediators between humans and God, imprint the guilded light of piety and age on your heart. Lovingly crafted and full of the force of tradition and meditation, icons remain the ultimate dream of art. Although that dream is impossible to find these days, great power comes from staring into the eyes of those that dreamt it.

4. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

In McCarthy's own words, “To be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing.” The force of chance and the uncertainty of human nature manifest themselves bluntly in this book. McCarthy’s usual features are present here – almost unmentionable and sudden violence, pithy descriptions of landscape, and sharp, terse dialogue -- but the central story of a father and son setting out to find the sea after the fall of civilization is the lesson that remains most vivid.

5. Zhang Dali at Walsh Gallery, Chicago

The most extraordinary show no one saw, Dali arranged original, unaltered Mao era photographs next to their propaganda counterparts in popular magazines and newspapers. The pliable truth of photographic presentation and the force with which it can compel belief was on view.

6. Mark Strand, unexpectedly at Danny’s Tavern in Chicago

An unscheduled, impromptu reading in a dark bar by one of America’s greatest poets was a treat to the limited few that were present. His methodical and dark verse haunted the air. Also, if you haven’t read his book on Edward Hopper, shame on you.

7. Timothy O’Sullivan and Yutaka Sone at the University of Chicago

These two drastically different views of landscape at the U of C allowed one to dwell without sentiment in both the grandeur of nature and its hyperventilation through tourism and technology. Of course, I prefer O’Sullivan vastly to Sone.

8. Doubt at the Ahmanson Theater, Los Angeles

Instead of more apologies, shame, and silence, this John Patrick Shanley play put some nuance into the priest abuse scandal. There were no easy answers here, no clear way to point fingers or to find a path to salvation. What was present, however, was an insightful study of human nature and an amazing performance from Cherry Jones.

9. Everyman’s Library Edition of Joan Didion’s Collected Nonfiction

The perfect way to be introduced to my new city of Los Angeles, Didion can only grow more and more respected now that readers have this tight volume to refer to, savor, and pass on.

10. Chris Ware at the MCA, Chicago

This was an odd museum show – proof comic book pages hung on the wall, sometimes too high to see, sometimes too low to be comfortable. I lingered in this show. I went back. I went back again. Ware’s understanding of how a person sees is extraordinary. You move through his narratives, always finding the next point and next step without quite understanding how you arrived there visually. If I would have had this small show adjacent to Rauschenberg’s Combines, the visual satisfaction probably would have been too much to bear.