Engineer's Daughter

the week that was

agenda 01.16.13

Thursday, January 17:

• Mission Community Market
• SJMADE Mini Mart at the San Jose Museum of Art
• Comedy Drawing School at Eli Ridgway Gallery
• Rene Hell, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma + Paul Clipson, Vallens at The Lab
• Dennis Parlante and Matt Gonzalez in Conversation at Meridian Gallery
• The Statues Walked -- What Really Happened on Easter Island, presented by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo at the Cowell Theater
• End of the Reel: An Oddball Memoriam 2012 at Oddball Films

Friday, January 18:

• The Bensons: Jason Benson and Mark Benson at Royal NoneSuch Gallery
• Thinking Like the Universe at Hatch Gallery
• Taraneh Hemami at the Luggage Store Gallery
• Doron Fishman + Film and Video Selections at The Lab
• Pretty Blue Presents: HotTub DJ set, Unstoppable Death Machines, Laughters and Believe in Oakland
• TWO YEARS HERE: our 2nd Anniversary Group Show at Incline Gallery
• Exhibition: Remembering is Everything at Alter Space
• Artist Talk and Book Signing: Gabriele Stabile & Juliet Linderman, Refugee Hotel at Gallery Carte Blanche
• Portholes to the Past at Oddball Films
• The 13th Annual Edwardian Ball & World’s Faire presents “The Doubtful Guest” at the Regency Ballroom
• Ty Segall, White Fence, Nick Waterhouse at The Fillmore
• Tycho, Christopher Willits at The Independent

Saturday, January 19:

• Sasha Darling's and The BellJar Girls Trunk Show
• Lab Winter Benefit w/ Mike Donovan (Sic Alps), Waxy Tombs, Tainted Pussy, Rheal 'Tea + Dia Dear
• "The Witching Hour" Sequinsomnia Burlesque Show Premier
• Rednecks & Aztecs at 1:AM Gallery
• Claire Fontaine at Queen's Nails
• Punch Card at Catharine Clark Gallery
• Small Gems: Winter Group Show at Crown Point Press
• Periodic Calendar at Electric Works
• Yo La Tengo at Amoeba Records
• Pinback, Judgement Day at Bimbo's 365 Club
• Tycho, Doombird at The Independent
• Temple Saturdays featuring Revolvr

Sunday, January 20:

• Zach Watkins + A Magic Whistle + Protoghost at The Night Light

Monday, January 21:

• S.T.D.W.T.F., Straight Crimes, Surf Shit, John Brothers Piano Company & Exit Bag at RCA
• Quicksand, Title Fight at the Regency Ballroom

Tuesday, January 22:

• Slime City #16 at Radio

Wednesday, January 23:

• SIX: 2013 First Year MFA Exhibition at Worth Ryder Art Gallery
• Claire Fontaine in Conversation with Jason E. Smith at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
• Are We There Yet? at The Rock Bar
• Mandebrot & Skyy, Matthew Dryhurst, Brandon Nickell, Paul Clipson at The Lab

agenda 12.05.12

Thursday, December 6:

• Publication Studio Printing On-Demand at The Popular Workshop
• To Be Determined #2 at new nothing cinema
• Poolside, Blackbird Blackbird, DJ Kele of Bloc Party at the Rickshaw Stop

Friday, December 7:

• Dis/Order: Juried Annual 2013 at Pro Arts
• MFA in Event Planning at Rise Above Graphics
• Mission Holiday Block Party
• MacArthur B Arthur's Final Exhibition: The Home Show
• TALKIES Holiday Show at Lost Weekend Video
• Destroy// 11 dancers + Ava Mendoza, Dominic Cramp, Mike Guarino, Leyya Tawil at Joe Goode Performance Group
• Point of No Return at Southern Exposure
• Cathy Cunningham-Little and Amy M. Ho at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
• RE@DS: Sam Sax at the Berkeley Art Museum
• Quartet San Francisco Plays the Music of Raymond Scott at the Berkeley Art Museum
• MadC at 1:AM Gallery
• Jack White, The Shins, Metric, Two Door Cinema Club, Of Monsters and Men, The Gaslight Anthem at the Oakland Arena
• White Lung, Turbo Fruits, CCR Headcleaner at Bottom of the Hill
• Low End Theory SF at 1015 Folsom

Saturday, December 8:

• PrettyBluePresents: ReligiousGirls, MTNS (Seattle), Laughters, Believe at Purple Haus
• Everything Is Terrible Holiday Special West at ABCO Art Space
• Misfit Toy Factory at Root Division
• M83, Passion Pit, Tegan and Sara, The Killers, Grouplove, Imagine Dragons at the Oakland Arena
• The Polyphonic Spree at Slim's
• John Prine, Justin Townes Earle at the Warfield
• Dispirit//Thrones//Bädr Vogu//Crypt Keeper at 1530 E. 12th St.

Sunday, December 9:

• Points of Departure: Trivial Pursuit at Royal Nonesuch Gallery
• Meshell Ndegeocello, Con Brio at the Great American Music Hall

Monday, December 10:

• Tom Grrrl / Bitter Fruit / Pig DNA / S.B.S.M. at Menage Twat
• White Cloud + Freak Heat Waves + Means Streets + Chief at The Hidden Temple
• David Bazan, Stagnant Pools at the Independent

Tuesday, December 11:

• Jaberi & Deutsch, the Spencer Owen Consortium, Makeunder at the Night Light

Wednesday, December 12:

• Take Off: Kota Ezawa, Kenneth Goldsmith at Kadist SF

agenda 11.28.12

My picks for the next week:

Thursday, November 29:

• Artist Talk & Reading for A WELL STIRS
• First Look Dinner at Headlands Center for the Arts
• Somewhere in the Fold at The Popular Workshop
• Lecture by David Goldblatt at SFMOMA
• Strange Sinema 58: Bizarre Cinema Histories at Oddball Films
• Mission Creek Oakland Presents: Believe, Teenage Sweater, and LESSONS! at the Uptown

Friday, November 30:

• Queer Punks in Conversation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
• Happy Hour/Closing Reception for X Libris at Root Division
• 2012 Annual Holiday Sale at Creativity Explored
• Fairy Tale Frenzy at Oddball Films
• Duane Pitre, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Jesse Sparhawk, and Zachary James Watkins at The Lab

Saturday, December 1:

• Mark Baugh-Sasaki artist talk at Krowswork
• Matt Connors :: Ian McDonald :: Gregory Lind at [ 2nd floor projects ]
• Come Out & Play SF Festival at SOMArts
• Johansson Projects presents Rachel Kaye and Opal Dust featuring Casey Watson
• Taro Hattori, James Sansing at Swarm Gallery
• The Bay Brewed at Public Works
• Simian Mobile Disco at Mezzanine

Sunday, December 2:

• E@RLY: Ikue Mori with Ken Ueno at the Berkeley Art Museum
• Koinonia Experimental Music Festival at the Subterranean Arthouse
• Jonathan Richman at the Great American Music Hall

Monday, December 3:

• No Babies , Ni-Hao! (Japan) and T.I.T.S. + DJ Paul Paul at the Knockout
• Death Grips at Slim's

Tuesday, December 4:

• Werner Herzog at CCA
• The News at SOMArts

Wednesday, December 5:

• The Babies, Twin Steps, Younger Lovers, Wet Spots at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records
• San Francisco Olympians Festival III: Titans vs. Olympians
• Opening Reception for In Formation at the Berkeley Central Arts Passage
• Sufjan Stevens at the Great American Music Hall

What did I miss?  Let me know in the comments!

the speed and eagerness of meaning

Whenever I encounter Richard T. Walker's video work I invariably sit in front of it for several loops, so how appropriate that he literally looped himself for his performance The Speed and Eagerness of Meaning (Longer Longing Version) at SFMOMA last week.  This was the last in the Stage Presence performance series that would take place in the fourth floor gallery (Rashaad Newsome's Shade Compositions will be performed in the atrium next month), and for it Walker stood with his back to us and became the live third channel of his video piece. 

As you try to assemble what is now before you, you mourn a little for what you have lost, for you could never again acquire the not knowing that so beautifully placed you in the center of it all.

As he addressed a series of wild landscapes, first through a recording and then with spoken word and finally through song, I felt the tears welling up in my eyes.  He could have been talking about love, or death, or an epiphany that shifts your perception.  The frisson, no matter what it was about, was undeniable.

He occasionally experiences feelings that are associative to the things in front of him but they exist between and beyond emotions, so translation is impossible.

Walker repeated the piece in its entirety four more times, a study in the subtle differences that occur during live performance.  And it only gained power with repetition.  As I left the gallery I was handed a letter labeled "to whom it may concern".  I purposefully saved it and am only reading it for the first time right now as I write this.  I will not summarize its contents, but I'll leave you with the same benediction that Walker does:

I wish you well, and that your relationship with nature remains as it is.

See also:

• Stage Presence performance series
• Richard T. Walker

the visitor owl

Flash back to last weekend when I took an afternoon break at SFMOMA for the latest in their Stage Presence performance series.  This time D-L Alvarez and Kevin Killian with the help of the San Francisco Poets Theater were in the house to present their collaborative work The Visitor Owl.  The piece integrated video and live performance as Alvarez and Killian reinterpreted Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, With Love, emphasizing some of the films' hidden and not-so-hidden themes of homoeroticism, racism, and Cold War angst.  The acting and dialogue were reliably over-the-top with many shocking and laugh-out-loud moments, and there were scads of familiar faces from the local art scene both onscreen and onstage including Karla Milosevich, Wayne Smith, Cliff Hengst, Christian Nagler, and Anne McGuire.  The whole thing was wonderfully confounding and exhilarating both.

See also:

• Stage Presence performance series
• D-L Alvarez
• Kevin Killian

broke people's baroque peoples' theater

My Barbarian

The Stage Presence performance series continues to be some of the best public programming I've seen at SFMOMA with each week bringing new live art and new surprises.  Last Saturday LA trio My Barbarian hosted a classical dance party in the fourth floor gallery that involved some snippets of their longer piece Broke People's Baroque Peoples' Theater as well as heavy audience participation in the form of games and even some costume dress-up.  At one point I found myself embodying Medusa and then later rocking a striped toga that earned me the moniker "The Tigress."  There are still three more weekends left in the series with some serious local talent on the performance agenda, namely D-L Alvarez and Kevin Killian, Richard T. Walker, and Rashaad Newsome.  There will be poetry, there will be music, there will be drag.  Do not miss out.

See also:

• SFMOMA Stage Presence Performance Series
• My Barbarian

miscellany 08.10.12

This week is brought to you by this postcard I received of a giant cat in Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes.  Thank you, Logan and JD!

• Nate Boyce has two of his wonderfully strange constructions that combine video and sculpted metal installed on the third floor of Japantown's New People building.  See them before the show closes tomorrow.
• Anne McGuire was predictably amazing at SFMOMA last weekend performing alongside electronic musician Wobbly and a video doppelganger of herself.  The museum's Stage Presence live series continues to blow me away, and Cliff Hengst's performances this weekend are not to be missed either.
• The Headlands talk about creating social space last weekend started late and so I was only able to stay for John Bela's and Yukiko Bowman's portions of it, but I'm sure Matilde Cassani was equally as fascinating as those first two based on what I've seen of her work.  Now I'm very much looking forward to Sandra Ono's drop-in workshop on Sunday.  Bioforms ahoy!
• This week I finally made it to the Contemporary Jewish Museum's small-but-mighty group exhibition Do Not Destroy, worth seeing for Zadok Ben David's enchanting Blackfield installation alone.  The show is themed around trees and has many other sublime moments too.  It closes on September 9.
• Meanwhile over in Oakland an old house at 1506 Peralta is currently filled top-to-bottom with art installations for the appropriately-named House Show.  Many artists I like a whole lot are involved, including Facundo Argañaraz, Sarah Bernat, The Center For Tactical Magic, Matthew Draving, Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im, Cybele Lyle, and Zachary Royer Scholz.  To say anything more would ruin some of the site-specific surprises, but do try to visit before the show closes next weekend and at night if you can. 

friday links

Yukiko Bowman at Headlands Open House

Things have been crazy busy around these here parts, but just because I don't have time to write a proper post doesn't mean I can't dump a bunch of links on you:

• Lin Yilin's recent show at SFAI is now closed, but you can visit his website here and watch him interviewed by Hou Hanru here.
• SFMOMA is presenting one hell of a performance series in conjunction with their current Stage Presence exhibition.  So far the last two weekends I've seen Shana Moulton coat her face in peanut butter and birdseed and thrilled to Margaret Tedesco's narration of the 1963 film The Haunting, all on Tucker Nichols's beautifully-wallpapered stage on the fourth floor of the museum.  Next up: Anne McGuire!
• Speaking of Tucker Nichols, run over to see his show at Gallery 16 before it closes tomorrow.
• And last but definitely not least, Headlands Open House was chock full of inspiration last Sunday with plenty of art, music, dance, and Mess Hall food to go around.  Upcoming events out there include a talk this Sunday by Matilde Cassani and Yukiko Bowman entitled Creating Social Space (followed by dinner on the Parade Ground under the fog) and then a hands-on class next weekend with artist Sandra Ono.  Both are highly recommended.

justice & freedom

We Players

I had just been on Alcatraz this summer and genuinely had not expected to go back for a very long time, if ever, but suddenly there I was on a ferry Thursday evening on my way to attend the first evening of We Players' weekend-long symposium on justice and freedom.  The Players have been staging events on Alcatraz for the last three years (I'm still chastising myself for missing their production of Hamlet there last fall), and this symposium wrapped up their time on the island with a series of performances, discussions, and art installations.  On this particular evening things kicked off with a jaw-dropping dance performance that literally used the entire main cell block as its canvas, and then we moved up into the old prison hospital for a blues jam intermission complete with a variety of cozy beverages.  Finally we ended up on the parade ground in the wind-whipped dark, and with the lights of the city winking and blinking behind them two dancers clad head-to-toe in protective suits spun baskets of live coals and hailed down the spirits amidst the flying sparks.  I felt nothing short of pure searing catharsis.

See also:

• We Players
• Alcatraz Island