Engineer's Daughter

the week that was

uxorious

Alan Black, Edinburgh Castle Pub, San Francisco.  August 15,2009.

miscellany 02.04.13

Julia Goodman at Recology

Michael Damm at Recology

Jeff Hantman at Recology

Bill Berkson at Brian Gross Fine Art

Stephanie Young at Brian Gross Fine Art

David Kasprzak at Alter Space, part of Remembering Is Everything

Bill Direen at Aquarius Records

agenda 01.23.13

Thursday, January 24:

• David O'Brien, Andrew Benson + Tamara Albaitis in Pixilated Drift at Johansson Projects
• Grale Live: The Saddest Music in the World: Tenth Anniversary Celebration at the Pacific Film Archive
• How to Move a Mountain at Southern Exposure
• Troller, Thousand Foot Whale Claw, Chasms, Black Jeans, Believe at The Lab
• SIX: UC Berkeley First Year MFA Exhibition at Worth Ryder Art Gallery
• That's what I figure: Four Bay Area Image Makers at Kondos Gallery
• John-Mark Ikeda at Spare Change Artist Space
• 6 Women Poets at Meridian Gallery
• Strange Sinema 60 at Oddball Films
• The Walkmen, Father John Misty at The Fillmore
• Autumn Sky, Jonah Matranga, Sentinel at Red House Studios
• Ken Stringfellow (Posies, Big Star) plus The Maldives and Will Sprott at Brick & Mortar Music Hall

Friday, January 25:

• Paul Kos: Allegories and Metaphors at the San Francisco Art Institute
• Object Oriented: Janiszewska, Lorch-Miller, Pitt at Royal NoneSuch Gallery
• Stillsuit / Styrofoam Sanchez / Little Debbie / V.E X. Xanaxax at Life Changing Ministries
• Adam Friedman: Space and Time, and Other Mysterious Aggregations at Eleanor Harwood Gallery
• Friday Nights @ OMCA Launch
• San Francisco Dump Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Michael Damm, Julia Goodman and Jeff Hantman
• Happiness Is... at Montalvo Arts Center Project Space Gallery
• Carnal Cartoons at Oddball Films
• The Walkmen, Father John Misty at The Fillmore
• Blackalicious at The New Parish

Saturday, January 26:

• Molly Springfield, The Marginalia Archive at Steven Wolf Fine Arts
• Stop/Motion at Interface Gallery
• Wovenhand at Bottom of the Hill

Monday, January 28:

• You Are Not A Loan: A Benefit for Strike Debt Bay Area at the Roxie Theatre

Tuesday, January 29:

• San Francisco Dump Artist in Residence Artist Talk: Michael Damm, Julia Goodman and Jeff Hantman
• Detective, Tall Sheep, JAJA at Hotel Utah

Wednesday, January 30:

• Silence and Rudolf de Crignis / MATRIX 245 at the Berkeley Art Museum
• Take Me Away at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
• Bill Berkson and Stephanie Young: Poetry Reading in the Gallery at Brian Gross Fine Art
• Local Natives at The Fox

agenda 01.02.13

Thursday, January 3:

• CONGRATULATIONS! with Tauba Auerbach at Will Brown
• Sentinel at The Starry Plough

Friday, January 4:

• SHE WORLD: Ursula Brookbank at Krowswork
• Backwash: New Work by Pete Hickok at Aggregate Space
• In The Box Beneath The City and Other Projects at Alter Space
• Speak Your Peace at SOMArts
• Art Murmur at Johansson Projects

Saturday, January 5:

• Excuses + Diesel Dudes + Believe + Horsebladder at Rock Paper Scissors
• Marissa Nadler at The Chapel

Sunday, January 6:

• Multiple Stimuli Overload at Subterranean Arthouse

Monday, January 7:

• The Projected Self: Performance-Based Videos from the Media Arts Collection at SFMOMA
• Ovens at The Knockout

Tuesday, January 8:

• Breaking News: A One-Night-Only Radical Collaboration at SOMArts
• A Benefit for The Riley Center: Tender Buttons/Bitter Fruit/No Bone at The Knockout
• Takin It Back Tuesday at Double Dutch

Wednesday, January 9:

• Bawdy Storytelling's "The 7 Dirty Sins" at Verdi Club
• Rosamunde Oakland Grand Opening Party

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

miscellany 10.26.12

The Tony Cragg Ice Cream Cone at the SFMOMA Blue Bottle Cafe.  The Cragg sculpture after which it is modeled is being de-installed this week after a good run up there on the fifth floor.

Two rounds of illness, a magical overnight jaunt to Chicago (thank you again, Ms m!), and a couple creative-type extra-curricular gigs have kept blogging sparse in the preceding weeks.  I assure you I've been absorbing a lot in my spare time, however.  A brief snapshot of this last week that was:

• Made some money for my favorite radio station during our annual fundraiser.
• Visited [2nd floor projects] to ogle the colorful paintings and sculptural installations by Linda Geary and Danielle Lawrence and walked away with a beautiful print edition by Scott Hewicker besides.
• Blissed out to a brainy and minimalist performance by Bryan Eubanks and Cat Lamb as part of the Mills Songlines series.
• Rocked out to Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Crypts at the New Parish whilst avoiding all the emo bros reeking of Red Bull.
• Enjoyed me some Golden Retriever too.

This weekend's agenda:

• Lisa Carver/Suckdog of Rollerderby Zine fame reads from her new book about Yoko Ono in Oakland tonight.
• Record shopping at Aquarius.
• Fall Open House at Headlands.
• Soliciting more $$$ for KALX.  Sunday 9pm to midnight PST!

an annotated hearing trumpet, preface and figures + surprise!

Chris Kubick

Anne Walsh

Through October 28th - Anne Walsh: An Annotated Hearing Trumpet, Preface and Figures + Chris Kubick: Surprise! at Martina }{ Johnston.  I received the full effect of Kubick's piece by sheer coincidence, entering the gallery's screening room just as a chorus of voices shouted out "Surprise!" and various other bells and whistles went off in my ears.  Kubick has coded these special moments to occur intermittently and never the same way twice, and as the sounds fill the air their file names flash up on a screen in front of you too.  The nomenclature of the files might seem impenetrable to some, but any producer or sound designer will recognize them as the stings and SFX that fill their days.  I took a lot of nerdly pleasure from seeing the names pile up on screen and trying to tag them to the specific noises I was hearing.

Walsh's work is more enigmatic but rewards your attention the more time you spend with it.  Taking The Hearing Trumpet, a work of surrealist fiction written by Leonora Carrington in 1950, as her springboard Walsh invites us into the machinations of her own head and shows us a seemingly random collection of photographs, notes, cast lists, and other ephemera related to a film Walsh intends to make of the book.  Here: pictures of Carrington herself in Mexico City before her death last year, wearing her years and experience with grace.  Here: a list of women's names laser-cut into paper, many of them feminist icons of my own.  Here: a handwritten address and a scripted conversation.  The exhibition is like peering into the creative process itself in all of its messy splendor.  As an added bonus I was able to attend a reading by Walsh and Moira Roth at the gallery yesterday, where Walsh alternated her personal observations on Carrington's list of characters from The Hearing Trumpet with Roth's live enactments of sections of the novel.  As they spoke I thought of how Carrington seems to be looking forward to her own later years in the book, how women age (fighting it/accepting it), how I want to continue growing older (with the grace and wit of Carrington or Bourgeois or Ono or).

See also:

• Martina }{ Johnston
• Anne Walsh
• Moira Roth
• Chris Kubick

animals are people too

Laurel Braitman

 

If I couldn't be up with my friends in Quincy for our recent solar eclipse, Headlands was also a pretty darn great place to observe the celestial phenomenon.  Partly because it was sheer delight to watch all the artists-in-residence freak out over the eclipse, but also because earlier in the afternoon in a completely unrelated public program Laurel Braitman and Rachel Mayeri each gave fascinating presentations about their work with animals.  Braitman has just finished writing a book entitled Animal Madness exploring the history of mental health issues in the non-human set, and she also talked about her experimental "Music For Animals" series in which she tries to pair musicians with animal audiences she think will appreciate their tunes.  I would have paid money to watch Grass Widow perform for the gorillas at the Franklin Park Zoo, I tell you what.  Meanwhile Mayeri, she of the amazing Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater Mechanics installation at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, showed bits and pieces of her Primate Cinema project including footage of how zoo apes reacted when shown video of humans dressed up like monkeys.  Both women play with ideas about the ways we anthropomorphize animals, but they are also genuinely interested in the ways we different species interact with and influence each other.

See also:

• Headlands Center for the Arts
• Laurel Braitman
• Rachel Mayeri

miscellany 12.05.11

Leslie Shows, from her current show at Haines Gallery

I've been taking some time to recover after spending the week of Thanksgiving in Copenhagen, but soon I should have my pictures sorted out and then will do a proper post about the trip besides (sneak peek a video here).  In the meantime I wanted to post a few quick links from some of my recent art and culture intake.

• Leslie Shows: Split Array at Haines Gallery.  Shows is already one of my favorite local artists, and she pushes herself forward into another dimension in this exhibition of new work, creating paintings on reflective metal with complex geological layers.  Next Wednesday 12/14 she and BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder will be discussing her work at the gallery.
• Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International.  Bruguera is in the midst of this ongoing project that explores the rights and identity of contemporary immigrants.  She spoke at the Kadist Foundation Wednesday night and encouraged everyone to participate in the actions that are being planned for International Migrants Day on Sunday 12/18.  She was joined by Adriana Camarena, who read from her essay "The Geography of the Unseen" (included in Rebecca Solnit's book Infinite City) as well as from newer stories she has been collecting on the streets of the Mission.
• Thea Farhadian.  I saw Farhadian perform at the Luggage Store New Music Series Thursday night, beautiful looped violin compositions that merged classical Arabic music with noise and electronica.  No upcoming shows are listed on her website, but you can check out some documentation of a collaborative project she did with artist Silvina Der-Meguerditchian here.
• Frances Stark: the whole of all the parts as well as the parts of all the parts at the Mills Art Museum.  Block out an hour and go spend it with Stark's confounding, moving, and very funny video piece, which as it progresses leads you from screen to screen through the length of the whole museum.  Major bonus points for including an homage to Lady Gaga's "Telephone" as well as use of online avatars and chat conversations.  Stark will be speaking at Mills this Wednesday 12/7, and I would wager she'll incorporate PowerPoint somehow.
• Like Crazy.  Drake Doremus gives us a film not so much about how inextinguishable love is but rather about how it would often be better if we just got over it when it ends.  Move the fuck on, embrace real life instead of fantasy.  That's what I took away from it anyway, in between enjoying the scenery shot in London and Santa Monica.

Want more?

• The Headlands First Look party Wednesday 12/7 is going to be killer, cocktails and yummy bites aplenty plus the chance to be the first to hear who next year's residents will be.
• Scout Niblett is in town this week, playing Vitus in Oakland Wednesday 12/7 and the Hemlock in SF Thursday 12/8.
• And if you don't feel like going out: Errol Morris's Tabloid is available to rent from iTunes and Netflix has about a hundred episodes of No Reservations.