XL REVIEWS

Alejandro Escovedo, the National Poetry Slam, Cross Canadian Ragweed, 'The Sweetest Swing in Baseball', and Carol Bove at the Blanton

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Rock

ESCOVEDO JAMS UNDER A SETTING TEXAS SUN

Aside from the annoying, underlit hike from the parking lot to the venue, the nicest thing about the Backyard and the Glenn is also the worst thing about the Backyard and the Glenn: the fact that the Texas Hill Country is always a few degrees cooler than Austin. A few months ago, Merle Haggard played to a packed Glenn that forgot this fact, wore shorts and shivered most of the time. Saturday night, Alejandro Escovedo played to a far thinner crowd under far more temperate skies. As the 100-plus degree day melted into a cool evening, Escovedo and an increasingly crack band turned his catalog into textured, charged jams.

After a strong set by Lil Cap'n Travis, Escovedo took the stage around dusk, opening with "Put You Down." Joined by the touring band that also played on this year's excellent album "The Boxing Mirror," Escovedo and company proved that the fits and starts of touring that their leader's shaky health has allowed for have juiced up everything about the band. David Pulkingham's solos were detailed and sharp, especially on the album's killer opener "Arizona." Like a roots-rock Velvet Underground, the band's tunes expanded into fierce electric blowouts. (The Velvets are longtime Escovedo heroes; Velvets co-founder John Cale produced "Boxing," a fact Escovedo never tires of mentioning.) On the fan favorite "Everybody Loves Me," Escovedo's fuzzy guitar howl careens into Brian Standefer's cello, Hector Muñoz's maracas recalling a beat somewhere between Yo La Tengo and Los Lobos, a sonic sweet spot in which Escovedo has been most comfortable all along. Now, if they could just nab a tour with Wilco . . .

— Joe Gross

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Poetry

AT POETRY SLAM, A MILE-HIGH VICTORY

Denver won. In the National Poetry Slam team finals at Palmer Events Center on Saturday night, the gang from the Mile High City lead in every one of the three rounds, defeating second-place (and first-time competitors in the National Slam) Austin team Neo Soul by a full point: 87.4 to Austin's 86.4.

At the slam, five audience members are chosen at random to score poets on a scale of one to 10. The high and low scores are dropped, so each poem can earn a maximum of 30 points. Teams have the choice of letting an individual on the team perform or having several members (up to five) perform a group piece.

The recent, controversial switch from four rounds of competition and four-person teams to three rounds of competition and five-person teams emphasizes group pieces over individual. Most group pieces were tightly choreographed poems, often about a political subject (immigration, for example), and they essentially had a unified voice, with some lines being spoken by individuals and others being recited by two or three or five poets. Austin's two-woman conversation/performance about dolls and women's roles was striking in that the poets spoke to and cut across each other, exploiting the "group" setting to create a questioning dissonance.

With the exception of Austin, each of the five teams in the finals — New York/LouderARTS, Denver, Miami, Austin/Neo Soul and Washington, D.C.-Baltimore — had at least one individual performance. New York's Rachel McKibbens turned in the highest score (29.3) and arguably best poem of the night. Many individual poems are recited breathlessly, the urgent need to speak becoming an almost ecstatic utterance. McKibbens' slow unfolding of grief was stunning in its imagery and nuance. The hoarse crowd screamed when she walked on stage — and screamed even louder when she walked off.

— Moira Muldoon

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Country rock

RAGWEED FEVER HITS IDAHO

It's always fun to see hometown heroes perform outside their comfort zone, to see them really earn their encores. Sure, Cross Canadian Ragweed can sell out 2,000-body venues back in Texas and Oklahoma, but let's see how they do up in Boise, Idaho, on a windy, dusty Thursday night. But there were no tumbleweeds blowing when Ragweed (sorry, still can't call 'em CCR) hit the stage of the Big Easy nightclub and about 600 college-age kids went nuts.

OK, that doesn't mean much. Six hundred college-aged kids will pretty much fawn over everything they're supposed to; the "Texas Country Uprising" hype has made it to the Half a Spatula State. We will one day see those same 600 people — or their lookalike replacements — lining up outside the first Freebirds World Burrito franchise in Boise. But you've gotta give it to the quartet of Cody Canada, Jeremy Plato, Randy Ragsdale and Grady Cross for giving the crowd — including a representative of the aging cynic clique — more than they expected.

Even wearing his Shooter Jennings disguise, Cody Canada is a superstar in waiting. As good a guitarist as he is singer/songwriter, he's the John Fogerty of this bunch — and with biker bro attitude to spare. He's the country rebel everyone thought Ryan Adams would be. Kid's got songs to go with a baritone as warm and unfurnished as a couple's first apartment.

I wasn't taking notes — I'm on vacation — but the show's highlights were still tubing around my consciousness the next morning. The band opened with a few sturdy rockers in the early going, and I was reminded of a drawling Rockpile. But then came the moment when the show became special and the band and audience grew tight. During Canada's solo acoustic segment, which opened unimpressively with a clichéd protest song, he started singing "17," a minor hit in 2002. It's a great song of boredom, fear and disenchantment, of growing up Jeff Spicoli in a landlocked town. Canada sang the song as if he wrote it in his bedroom just last week, and the crowd sang along even before he asked them to. (Lotsa singalongs at Ragweed shows.)

The rest of the show was a lovefest, with "Anywhere But Here" adding a defiant flavor, and a cover of Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Wanna Rock & Roll" causing a semi-pogo stir in the packed front of the stage.

So why am I spending the morning of my last day in the spectacular Sawtooth Mountains (this place makes Big Bend look like Stacy Park) tapping out a few thoughts on Thursday's show? I can't wait on news like this: Cross Canadian Ragweed is on the verge of becoming the biggest outlaw band in country — or rock, for that matter.

The band should spend as much time as possible on its next studio album after the upcoming double-disc live CD. Last year's "Garage" and 2004's "Soul Gravy" shot out too quickly. The nextest needs to be the bestest. If Canada can write half a dozen more songs like "17" and "Sick and Tired" and if the band can keep on rockin' at $120 an hour, Cross Canadian Ragweed has the potential to go as far as they want.

— Michael Corcoran

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Theater

'SWING' IS A MISS, DESPITE ITS GAME ACTORS

Rebecca Gilman's "The Sweetest Swing in Baseball," a play that tracks the relationship between notoriety and success, has about as much to do with baseball as Kinky Friedman's gubernatorial campaign has to do with politics (in other words, almost nothing). Instead, "Baseball" — Unlimited Automotive's inaugural production — mines the shadiest points in slugger Darryl Strawberry's troubled personal history for pathos and humor. Because Gilman displays no real affection for her subject, this effort comes off as insincere and arguably racist (the all-white cast had the all-white audience in stitches with jokes about chickens wearing do-rags, Strawberry smoking blunts and drinking 40s and a pretty blonde girl's ability to "talk black").

"Baseball" documents the mental deterioration of Dana Fielding (get it? Fielding, baseball field . . . it's one of those plays), an artist blessed with early success who struggles to live up to her own hype. When her latest exhibit invites unenthusiastic critical response, Fielding tries to kill herself. She's sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she finds solace in the structured lifestyle and reclaims her creative voice. When she discovers her insurance will only cover a 10-day hospital stay, she suddenly develops a second personality — Darryl Strawberry — in order to prolong her inpatient status.

Directed with a judicious but unseasoned hand by Roger Topham, "Baseball" engaged its audience through old-fashioned, uncomplicated storytelling. The cast of five actors (filling nine roles) breathed honesty into Gilman's sometimes-funny script, quite an accomplishment given the author's obvious and mean-spirited connections. Actress Liz Fisher (who also designed the abstract, baseball diamond-inspired set) underscored Fielding with an appropriate measure of self-hatred, although she tended to overemphasize the character's anger. Meanwhile, actor Paul Fielder batted 1.000 in his dual roles as an effete, pompous artist and a compassionate alcoholic who helps Fielding channel her inner Darryl.

("The Sweetest Swing in Baseball" continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Aug. 26 at Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $12-$15 Fridays and Saturdays, half-price Thursdays. 419-7878.)

— Tommy O'Malley

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Visual art

BOVE'S BLANTON WORKS LOOK DATED FOR A REASON

One of my favorite parts of the new Blanton Museum is a single gallery on the second floor next to the eLounge. This area is dedicated to the Blanton's "WorkSpace" series and offers a spot where curators can showcase work by an individual contemporary artist — work like that of Carol Bove.

Based in New York, Bove works in a variety of media. For the Blanton, she created two sculptural installations, described as "sculpture gardens." The larger garden features concrete slabs, pieces of driftwood installed on rods and suspended by string, precisely arranged peacock feathers and what one could call gold metal boxes without walls. One of these boxes serves as a pedestal for a specific sculpture by Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro from the early 1960s. If the other clues aren't enough, the presence of this sculpture secures Bove's concern with the aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the second, smaller installation, the artist used similar materials, but in a different format. The peacock feathers, Brancusi-type sculpture, rocks and wood are presented within a large box, so that the viewer looks in at them at nearly eye level. The entire work is like a giant receding shadow box or curiosity cabinet. Bove harnesses (by literally enclosing) her interests in history and time, randomness and order, linearity and nonlinearity. The curator of this exhibition, Kelly Baum, says Bove makes "sculptures that function as archives and archives that function as sculptures." So when a friend commented, "It looks dated," I answered, "Yes, that's the idea, or at least one of them."

("Carol Bove: 'Setting' for A. Pomodoro" continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (until 8 p.m. Thursdays), 1-5 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 1 at the Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue. $3-$5, free on Thursdays. 471-7324, www.blantonmuseum.org.)

— Erin Keever