Engineer's Daughter

put the needle on the record

As long as I'm taking a wee break from going out and seeing music (like, until Sunday) I thought I might as well sit home tonight and watch a DVD about music.  Doug Pray's fantastic 2002 doc Scratch is chock full from front to back with an impressive roster of my idols, from DJ Faust and Shortee (alas, the only female DJ in the whole movie) to former KALX DJ Billy Jam to Cut Chemist to local boys DJ Shadow and Qbert and Mix Master Mike and so many more of my heroes I can't possibly mention them all.  The film briefly provides the origins of scratching within the New York scene before showcasing the techniques and mad skills of the turntablists who were at the height of their powers at the turn of the millennium.  My jaw was hanging wide open for a good portion of the movie when I wasn't squealing with glee at the copious shots of local scenery, including now-archival footage of a Beat Lounge night at Storyville and also a Future Primitive Soundsession at the Justice League complete with Doze Green doing live painting.  I can't beat-match worth shit and certainly can't scratch, but the film just reinforced for me how lucky I always feel to live in the Bay Area, in one of the centers of DJ culture and innovation.

we did porn

By the spring of 2006, when SFMOMA became the first California museum to exhibit Zak Smith's work, he had already taken the Whitney Biennial by storm two years previous with his 755 illustrations entitled Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow.  But I missed the Biennial so it was at SFMOMA that I first encountered Smith's work in person, and I fell hard.  I blogged about it at the time:

And Zak Smith's acrylic and ink drawings, I wanted to just dive in and swim around in them. As I was standing transfixed in front of Life Will Not Break Your Heart It'll Crush It, a loose grid of images of what looked to me like very hot sex, a WASPy blonde woman walked up to peer at the art and quickly left again. "Disturbing!" quoth she. Not really, thought I.

Some of Smith's experiences as alt-porn star Zak Sabbath are detailed at length in his new memoir We Did Porn, with his prose accompanied by full-color sections his amazing drawings, and tonight at Moe's he read a few passages that clearly demonstrated he is just as talented with words as he is with paint or with um other things.  I have always respected Smith for being so upfront about his sex work and the way in which it informs his art, and he talked a little bit about that during the Q&A.  He likes sex with gorgeous women; he also likes to draw those same gorgeous women.  There's refreshing honesty in that.  I was sitting there trying to construct a question that would cleverly and adequately express how his work affects me on such a visceral level, and instead I ended up asking if he had read Pynchon before he did his Pictures.  He snorted, and I don't blame him.

limnology

Sándor Bortnyik, The New Adam, 1924 (Hungary).  That's actually part of an El Lissitzky he's painted behind the main figure there.  Bortnyik was one of a small cadre of Hungarian exiles who studied and worked at the Bauhaus, having settled in Germany after being forced out of his home country for his support of the Communist government that briefly held power there in 1919.  This painting now resides at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, which is also home to another excellent cubist work of his, Red Engine.

kaboom

Before it gets too long past July 4 I should note that I actually made an effort to see the San Francisco fireworks this year, remarkable only because I don't really celebrate Independence Day and any pyrotechnics I happen to witness are usually the illegal ones going on very close to my neighborhood in south Berkeley.  But for whatever reason I felt up to making the journey to the city Saturday night, so I booked a table at Waterbar and wrassled Laura into being my date.  We had dinner at the bar with an amazing view of the Bay Bridge all lit up, but once the fireworks started we were at an angle that only allowed us to see bursts of colored fog.  So we quickly wrapped up our meal and ran outside to the waterfront where we ooohed and aaahed with the rest of the gathered throng.  And honestly it wasn't too crowded there right under the bridge either, with a nice view of the Ferry Building clock tower too.  Maybe I'll do it again next year.

all that jazz

Given that the 4th of July in the Bay Area is most commonly associated with fog and cold, it was nice to have a little bit of sun for my stroll through the Fillmore Jazz Festival yesterday morning.  Many people had already claimed their spots on the astroturf laid out in front of the music stages even though the acts were just getting going when I was there, and this year the art and knick-knack booths had some serious competition from the vendors hawking Michael Jackson memorabilia (and blasting his music non-stop).  Of course I was really there to get lunch, so after doing a round up and down Fillmore I headed right for the weekly Farmers' Market where it spilled onto O'Farrell.  A butternut squash tamale from Donna's Tamales, mushrooms and grits from 1300, and a yummy lemon bar from Mother's Touch Kitchen, and suddenly I was a very happy woman.

show 130

playlist

let the music take you there

The atmosphere was decidedly rave-like (complete with tragically bad dance moves) at Lobot last night as Teengirl Fantasy got the party started with some very perky beats.  Bulbs injected a welcome set of cerebral rhythm and psychedelic noise into the proceedings before Nero's Day At Disneyland picked things up again with a block of wildly frenetic live electronica, well-matched by Adam Hatch's mind-bending floor-to-ceiling video show that was taking up one whole side of the gallery.  Then Extreme Animals jumped on the floor and kept the kids thrashing around as the duo crafted extremely compelling dance music with a keyboard, a mic, some knobs, and live drums.  It was so loud it could melt your brain, which made me glad Lobot is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

this town

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, July 5
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Last night I made my way to the stretch of San Pablo that houses the hopefully-soon-to-be-reopened Cerrito Theater to visit Eclectix, a store that specializes in kitschy accoutrements for your home and person.  They were having an opening in their upstairs gallery for the group show This Town, and in amongst the questionable oil paintings by local artists I found Katherine Westerhout's gorgeous photographs of abandoned warehouse interiors in Richmond, one of which is pictured here.  Peter Tonningsen's striking black-and-white pictures of Bay Area denizens were another stand-out, and I also got a kick out of Patricia Mitchell's psychedelic paintings of Bay Area cultural icons Harvey Milk, Isadora Duncan, Sly Stone, and Billie Joe Armstrong.  Downstairs Eclair de Lune provided a live gypsy jazz soundtrack while visitors browsed racks of Hawaiian shirts, vintage dresses, and tees depicting dive bar Hotsy Totsy's distinctive neon sign.  That's really about as edgy as El Cerrito gets.

lessons in the woods or a city

I got the long weekend started right at the Oven last night with the always-fabulous Tempo No Tempo and High Castle and the quite excellent new-to-me Dadfag.  In between acts in the garage I sat out on the back patio and jumped a foot in the air every time the neighbors set off a bottle rocket.  It was probably a different neighbor entirely, however, who came in to complain about the noise during High Castle's set and effectively axed the last band on the bill.  That band was supposed to be Talbot Tagora, but I heard something about them not actually being there.  There was also talk of some other group going around the corner to play under the freeway overpass, but everything had all gone a bit fuzzy by then if the truth be told.  I'm posting Talbot Tagora's video anyway.

ocean + beach

Except for that one dreary year in Coventry, I have never lived where I wasn't within a few miles of the ocean.  Growing up in southern California I spent a significant amount of time on the beach and still feel happy any time I get to stick my feet in the water on some sandy shore.  Therefore it is no surprise that when I visited the opening last night I felt an immediate affinity to the works on display in the OCEAN + BEACH group show at Needles & Pens, curated by the Mollusk Surf Shop gallery's Serena Mitnik-Miller.  The artists she has selected sometimes reference the ocean outright, as in Mason St. Peter's wonderful ink drawing diagramming the different kinds of waves in the sea, and other times just tap into that dream-like quality familiar to anyone who has ever lived near the coast.  Mitnik-Miller is an artist herself and has contributed the watercolor pictured here as well as an edition of 50 colorfully-painted blocks that invite play and perhaps some virtual sandcastle-building in the gallery.  I also loved Misha Capecchi's piece Beached Pile, not only for art itself depicting a mesmerizing tangle of organic matter but also for the E.O. Wilson quotes that accompany it:

Surely we can agree that each species, however inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at this moment, is a masterpiece of biology, and well worth saving...For every problem in biology, there exists a species ideal for its solution.