Engineer's Daughter

quidnunc

Jonathan Miller, from Nowhere in Particular, 1999 (UK).  I'm sure I'm not alone in finding the archaeology of postered city walls utterly fascinating.  Like how on the Tube in London there's always some stop where the advertisements haven't been changed for a while, and where they're starting to peel off and fall down you can see several seasons' worth of once-colorful imagery, layers upon now-dingy layers.  Miller's image, one from a book of photographs he took with an inexpensive automatic camera over the course of thirty years, focuses on exactly that kind of scrap that might otherwise go unnoticed in our modern visual overload.  With it he places himself in a continuum of photographers and artists who have made a point of capturing urban detritus like ripped street posters and fading hand-painted signs, who see beauty in the decay.  It encourages me to keep noticing the details.

show 97

playlist

state by state

I headed into the city yesterday afternoon with the intention of making the SF Greek Food Festival (spanikopita! baklava!) my first stop in the Mission, but at the last minute I decided that what I really needed was a walnut tart from Mission Pie.  With fresh whipped cream on top, no less.  Then from 25th and Mission I walked up to Dolores Park, said hi to KALX and Mount Vicious at the Expo for Independent Arts, and then stretched out in the grass to listen to the awesomely rockin' Aerosols for a bit.  Not bad for a gorgeously sunshiney day.

Evening found me over in the Haight for Sean Wilsey's presentation about his new book State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America at the Booksmith.  Using the WPA's old American Guide series as their inspiration, Wilsey and co-editor Matt Weiland recruited an impressive variety of writers to contribute a new piece of writing for the book, one for each of the 50 states.  So just for starters you get Joshua Ferris on Florida, Carrie Brownstein on Washington, Anthony Bourdain on New Jersey, Alison Bechdel on Vermont, William T. Vollman on California.  Wilsey screened a short film produced by Powell's Books that featured 19 of the State by State authors discussing their experience on the project and reading from their work, and then he answered questions and talked about trying to get J.D. Salinger in the book and how Vollman ended up in a San Francisco S&M club in drag as research for his chapter.  If you need a virtual road trip in this election year, I think this is the book for you.

I picked the Booksmith over Film in the Fog's screening of An American in Paris in the Presidio last night, but once I got home I rented the movie from iTunes and happily settled in for two hours of Vincente Minnelli's lavish candy-coated vision of love and art French-style in what was certainly a more cozy environment.  I love all the familiar Gershwin tunes and that final ballet in which Gene Kelly's athleticism and Leslie Caron's elegance serve as perfect counterpoints to each other.  I had forgotten how cool the Toulouse-Lautrec sequence is too, with characters taken straight out of the artist's paintings.  Who cares if the whole thing was shot on a soundstage, it still made me want to run away to Paris and swan along the Seine.

Oh and I sadly won't be able to make it, but you should know that one of my favorite artists Marilyn Minter, she of the uncomfortably-realistic almost-pornographic glamour-shot paintings, is lecturing at the San Francisco Art Institute tomorrow night.  Highly highly recommended.

You should also know that I'm DJing today:
3 - 6pm PST, Sunday, September 28
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

prison ink

Tattoos have been on my mind this week, what with Patrick after years of planning finally getting the Arecibo message on his arm and me starting to research who might be able to do my Kilgallen tree.  I've been thinking a lot about why people choose to permanently mark their bodies, especially as I look through Araminta de Clermont's photos of South African prison gang members that were recently on display at João Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town.  In the prisoners' cases, the tattoos often mark rank in their gang and are improvised with a mixture of burnt paper, ground erasers or brick dust with saliva.  de Clermont actually seems less concerned with capturing the tattoos (though some are crazy intricate and loaded with meaning) and instead focuses on the humanity of the former inmates as they struggle to reintegrate into society, especially as they carry these visible marks of their incarceration.  It doesn't make my own reasons for wanting my tattoo any less valid, but I do feel considerably less badass.

double down

Tonight I watched Barbet Schroeder's brilliant 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada, and what a surreal viewing experience it was.  Made with the full participation of the Ugandan dictator, the film shows a man who is rarely without an effusive smile whether he's visiting a village or overseeing a simulated invasion of Israel.  The filmmakers make sure to point out that everything has been staged for their cameras, but it's the knowledge of what happened offscreen that makes the portrait truly chilling: the murder of hundreds of thousands, the supposed necrophilia.  Sheer evil has never been more disturbingly charming.

Earlier today I stopped by SFMOMA and had to pause and take a breath in the atrium where until last week Sol LeWitt's beautiful wall drawings reigned supreme.  They've been painted over in preparation for a Martin Puryear exhibition later this year, but I will miss them dearly.  I scampered up to the second floor, took a moment to admire the trio of Bruce Conners currently on display at the entrance to the permanent collection, and then headed over to see "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas".  Two videos take turns playing, Stephen Dean's No More Bets and Olivo Barbieri's site specific_LAS VEGAS 05.  Dean's piece spends its time in tight close-ups, abstracting the city's blinking and flashing lights into pure color and sound, while Barbieri in contrast takes a more distant view by flying over the desert in a helicopter, filming in such a way that the cars and buildings look like so many children's playthings.  Both videos are works of art in and of themselves, but by being presented by the Architecture & Design department they draw attention to the space Las Vegas occupies both in terms of physical architecture and in the American psyche.  The last time I was in Vegas I think I was about 9 years old, and I haven't had any desire to go back since.  Outside the room where the videos are playing a gorgeous series of black-and-white photographs by Lewis Baltz lines the hallway, taken in late-'70s Nevada and highlighting the encroachment of development into the open landscape.  And while you're nearby be sure to check out the brand new acquisitions added to the "246 and Counting" exhibit, including a slew of exceedingly lustworthy mid-century advertising posters for Olivetti typewriters.  Yum.

the world according to wallace

I haven't written anything about the death of David Foster Wallace mostly because I've been too embarrassed to admit I've never read any of his writing.  Not from lack of interest, and he's definitely been on my list, I just didn't have a sense of urgency about tackling the likes of Infinite Jest.  The news of his suicide hit like a bomb both among many of my close friends and in the literary world at large, and after reading several of the tributes to Wallace published in the last week I understand why.  My favorite piece is novelist Joshua Ferris's recollection of having interviewed Wallace when Ferris was but a young starstruck reporter for the Daily Iowan:

Wallace was 33 at the time, he knew that he possessed talent and that his new book was likely to make a big impact, and he was more adept than the vast majority of thinkers and writers to spot a fraud. Yet he treated me, the nervous imposter, with graciousness and seriousness. His conversation was animated, thoughtful, witty and generous. He was full of qualifications as he attempted to excavate deeper layers of meaning from his words and better formulations of his thinking. He didn't care about the absence of a tape recorder or, for that matter, the absence of a decent journalist. He was concerned about being understood. He was in it for an honest exchange.

Yeah it's high time I read one of his books.  It's just a shame that I could have appreciated him in his lifetime instead of after he's too soon gone.

passing the dormouse test

I discovered my affinity for dead languages in grade school already, so by high school I had inevitably bloomed into a full-fledged Classics Nerd and of course an active participant in my school's Latin Club.  At the end of every year all of the international clubs would come together for an evening of edibles and performances from our chosen cultures, which meant there was usually a can-can from the French Club and Monty Python sketches from us Junior Classical Leaguers.  Ancient Roman cuisine being questionable at best, my mom came up with the brilliant idea of making faux dormice out of radishes and toothpicks, and they always proved a huge hit at the Latin Club booth.  They also winked at the so-called "dormouse test", a term coined by classicist Mary Beard, basically the idea that the sooner a story set in ancient Rome mentions that most stereotypical of Roman delicacies the more likely the rest of it has very little basis in actual historical fact.  I think HBO's Rome made it to the second episode before referring to dormice, which seems about right given its overall respect for history and detail but still allowing a salacious diversion here and there.  Tom Holland says that Beard's new book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town similarly dispels commonly-held misbeliefs about the doomed city while filling in many fascinating details:

Yet if Beard's book is a vivid demonstration that sceptical scholarship can provide as gripping a read as sensationalism, that does not mean that the author shrinks from providing her own exploration of what life might actually have been like. In many ways, it is an extraordinarily vivid one. Her Pompeii is a city in which dogs howl, late-night drunks carouse, and everyone has bad breath. It is a city in which, as Beard points out with some glee, a household of perhaps some 30 people had only a single lavatory between them, and the crowds at the amphitheatre not even that: "20,000 people and nowhere but the stairs and corridors to take a piss." Above all, it is a city that is infinitely messier and less systematised than the guide books ever allow: where the presence of sexually explicit graffiti on a wall does not necessarily suggest a brothel, and where the baths, as well as providing a bather with "a place of wonder, pleasure and beauty", were so polluted that "they might also have killed him".

And no mention of dormice until three-quarters of the way through, apparently.

dadafest

For a strong dose of inspiration tonight I'm looking through photos of performers in the recent DaDaFest which took place in Liverpool earlier this month.  DaDa in this case stands for Disability and Deaf Arts and featured everything from burlesque to art exhibits to crutch-based aerial dance from Claire Cunningham, pictured right.  I love the description of Aaron Williamson's performance piece in which he set up barriers that gave disabled people direct access to a festival venue but sent able-bodied attendees the long way 'round.  DaDaFest proves that the term "differently abled" goes far beyond mere political correctness.

monadnock

Film still from Week-end at the Waldorf, 1945 (USA).  There is a scene in the first season of Mad Men where Pete Campbell is reluctantly checking out a new apartment in Manhattan at the insistence of his wife, afraid that his account executive salary is in no way going to cover the expense of the purchase.  But in the final shot of the episode the camera swings to the window to show a magnificent view, all of the lights of the city twinkling away, and I found myself shouting at the screen: "Just do it!  Do it!  Sell your firstborn if you have to!"  That's the effect NYC has on me, where the idea of watching cocktail hour approach from a balcony at the Waldorf-Astoria makes me feel all tingly inside.  I'm already scheming a trip to the city this spring, and since I can't afford a room in the hotel I'll happily settle for a shmancy beverage in their terrace bar.  It'll be swellegent.

chicago pics

Was I really only gone five days?  It seems like it was a lot longer than that.  Soon I'll find my equilibrium again (and start working on my Thai in preparation for my Thanksgiving trip to Bangkok), but in the meantime I've uploaded a few pictures from Chicago (and Holland) to my Flickr photostream here.  Please enjoy!