Despite trying to attain the best possible return on investment regarding a ridiculous number of streaming services that I pay for, I somehow managed to actually open a few books and also attend some live events in 2023.
- The Summer My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon, by Washington, D.C. novelist and memoirist Frances Park. Set during the U.S. bicentennial, Cleopatra Moon sizzles, launches, and sends the reader’s heart soaring. American teen Marcy Moon narrates this coming-of-age story not through rose-colored glasses but instead through the tie-dyed tinted lenses limited to a time when the country was at its most red, white, and blue, providing enlightenment about a second-generation Korean American teen growing up in 1970s white suburbia.
Photo provided by Scott Saalman
- In Strip: A Memoir, Hannah Sward recounts being molested as a child, shares her past experiences as a stripper and prostitute, and details the role writing has played in her sobriety. It’s a tough, tender tale – told with humility and humor.
Photo provided by Scott Saalman
- My favorite concert experience featured Allison Russell and her Rainbow Coalition band at The Ark in Ann Arbor last fall. Russell’s two critically acclaimed solo albums, Outside Child (2021) and The Returner (2023), are loaded with love, liberation, and self-respect. Two favorite cuts: “Demons” and “Eve Was Black.”
Photo provided by Scott Saalman
- The Sand Bucket List: Lessons For Living Life and Facing Death, by Brownsburg, Ind., resident Brad Fischer. Fischer is both a fearless and funny writer as he takes us on his cancer journey. Originally written for an audience of two – his daughters – this book ultimately proves beneficial to all of us.
- I finally got to see former pugilist turned singer-songwriter Paul Thorn live last winter in Louisville. What’s not to love about a guy who has produced such wink-wink song titles as “I Don’t Like Half The Folks I Love,” “It’s a Good Day to Whup Somebody’s Ass,” “Pimps and Preachers,” and “Joanie the Jehovah Witness Stripper”? Thorn delivered a knock-out performance in Derby City. I hope round two finds him in the Indy area soon.
- In the early 1990s, I personally met a musician I was unfamiliar with, Tori Amos, at a piano plant in West Baden, Ind. Little Earthquakes was just released. Amos visited to meet her newly delivered Bösendorfer piano, shipped from Austria. It was an ethereal experience seeing her in that big, dark, still piano plant (the workers were off for the weekend), straddling the bench in that bold way of hers and birthing sounds from the shiny, black Bösendorfer. Three of us were witnesses. The wood-scented factory air was thick with musical spirits that wafted and danced over us – around us! – through us! It was hypnotic. Thirty years later, in 2023, I saw her perform a full concert, my first, inside Indy’s Murat Theatre. I’m happy to report that Tori Amos remains hypnotic after all these years.
- In NYC, I caught two memorable Broadway productions: David Byrne’s pulsating musical Here Lies Love, and the stark, one-woman play Prima Facie, starring Tony winner and Killing Eve assassin Jodie Comer, arguably our finest living actress.
- Avant–garde, multi-media artist Laurie Anderson’s Four Talks exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. was a glorious chalkboard explosion experience of white-lettered witticisms and profundities. Her imagery covered every inch of black room space, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. I could’ve spent an entire day deciphering her display.
- The Eiteljorg Museum’s We Remember exhibit, featuring Mexico-born artist turned Hoosier transplant Fernando Lozano, paid tribute to those killed by COVID. Social commentator Lozano’s use of death toll figures for each U.S. state proved sobering – and necessary (lest we forget).
Fernando Lozano at his We Remember exhibit at the Eiteljorg Museum. (Photo provided by Scott Saalman)
- Thanks to the always dependable Center for The Performing in Arts in Carmel, I checked off another bucket list performer, Bruce Cockburn. Also there, I enjoyed my favorite musical family, The Chapins, during a Harry Chapin At 80
Photo provided by Scott Saalman
- In You Can Never Go Back to the Turtle Back Inn, the poet and Vietnam War veteran Jim McGarrah recalls a time “fogged with tear gas, dazed by the perfume of napalm and doused with Agent Orange.” His poem, “Agent Orange,” features lush prose harbored within in a poetic hellscape: “Toucans and banyans, bamboo and vipers, elephants and tigers, a few fig trees with rhesus monkeys resting on limbs, the dense beauty of the coffee farms steaming after a Monsoon rain, the scent of breakfast pho rising into a diamond white sky and oh my god the orchids the orchids – disappearing as the planes dusted the white mist like burning snow across the jungle where my squad walked patrols, where mama-sans pregnant with a generation of dying babies tended the poisoned rice paddies.”
- Courtesy of Indy’s Jazz Kitchen, I enjoyed pianist Monika Herzig and NYC vocalist Alexis Cole reimagine Joni Mitchell classics. Check out Herzig’s Both Sides of Joni with vocalist Janiece Jaffe. Remaking “River” was a bold move that paid off. (Sadly, Jaffe died before the album’s 2023 release.) Indulging in the best crab cakes in the area while watching Cuban legend Chuchito Valdés perform was also a highlight.
- PBS’ Once Upon A Time in Northern Ireland provided enlightenment through balanced reportage of the bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the time of “The Troubles.”
- Hulu’s The Bear delivered the best single episode of TV I’ve seen (ever!): Season 2, Episode 6, “The Fishes.” Holiday season family dysfunction most high.
- Alex Borstein’s Corsets & Clown Suits (Prime Video) was pure burlesque comedy genius, and Leanne Morgan’s I’m Every Woman (Netflix) and Nate Bargatze’s Hello World (Prime Video) were real hoots!
Email Scott at scottsaalman@gmail.com.