Engineer's Daughter

uncorked

I was very much enjoying running around the city on Saturday in the gorgeous weather, so I used that as an excuse to take a bus across town to Ghirardelli Square to see if I could blag a few glasses of wine at the Uncorked! wine festival.  The bleached-blonde girls and popped-collar boys were out in full force, sporting varying levels of both sunburn and inebriation, and ultimately I decided it was too hot for wine and procured a Ghirardelli sundae for myself instead.  Local wine merchant Cellar360 was giving cooking demos in the Square, so I watched as chef Kasey Passen whipped up shitake mushroom ragout utilizing a fine Stag's Leap Chardonnay.  A little bit of that ragout served on a toast with fried parsley on top and I was a happy woman.

the way of all flesh

I have long been a fan of the SF Recycling & Disposal Artist In Residence program, where two artists at a time get four months to scrounge through the garbage transfer station right next to Candlestick Park and use the materials they find there to make art.  This weekend was open studio time for the most recent artists, Bill Basquin and Jane Kim, and I stopped by Saturday afternoon to see what they had created.  Basquin's engagement with issues around agriculture and soil was evident both in his surprisingly beautiful photos of rotting organic matter and in the containers of earth he had placed around the gallery.  This one turns into that one, he seems to be saying, and then we grow more food with it to begin the cycle again.  Kim has previously worked with sheetrock, reclaimed construction lumber, and discarded paint so I can only imagine how much material she found in the trash during her residency.  Alongside her spare painted-and-collaged pieces she had constructed a cross-section of a house in one corner of the gallery, complete with a patch of growing grass.  After taking the CLUI bus tour to the Puente Hills Landfill last year I remember vowing to never throw anything away that I could reuse or recycle.  I haven't entirely succeeded, but these shows at the dump always offer similar inspiration for me concerning what I choose to discard as waste.

flannel

Ryszard Kapuściński: "Africa Mode" dressmaker's shop, date and place unknown (Poland).  Kapuściński first visited Africa in 1957, early in his career as a journalist, and returned as many times as he could manage until his death in 2007.  Some choice pieces of his reportage from that continent as well as his coverage of conflict around the world is compiled in the excellent collection The Soccer War.  And as you can see from the image here, published posthumously in The Paris Review to accompany a memoir about his time in Africa, he was not just a reporter but also a photographer.  To watch a video of Kapuściński's 2000 interview with Charlie Rose, please click here.

then and now

Berkeley has acquired some sparkling "new" architecture in the form of the just-opened David Brower Center, a building with over half of its components constructed from recycled and salvaged materials.  Named after a late great luminary in the environmental movement, the Center was built to house non-profits as well to provide meeting spaces for community events.  Of course, this being Berkeley, there will also soon be a restaurant serving yummy sustainable cuisine.  But the reason I was there Thursday night was to attend the opening of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's new exhibit in the ground-floor gallery, Then and Now.  Salgado has long been a favorite of mine for his breathtaking images that highlight the beauties and difficulties of the human condition in our global community, and he daringly travels to some truly remote corners of the world to get his shots.  He has long focused on people who experience intense inequities, like the rarely-seen laborers that work gold mines and oil fields, and the show features a number of such images.  Salgado is currently hard at work on an epic multi-year series he is calling Genesis that attempts to capture everything from animals to natural phenomena to human settlements in their most primitive state, and a small handful of those recent pictures are on display as well.  I was powerfully moved by the entire show, especially when I reflected on its title and the implication that some of these animals and peoples stand on the brink of extinction or assimilation, that Salgado is very conscious that his photographic record might end up being all that remains.  This exhibit is the first entry in what the Center is calling its "Art of Advocacy" series, and I look forward to seeing how else they choose to explore the theme if only for another excuse to drop by the Center.

tammy

I was not done with beautiful cacophonies yet after the Mika Tajima performance at SFMOMA Tuesday night, as I headed directly from the museum to 21 Grand for a show that included the Bay/Oslo Mirror Trio, 0th, and Joshua Churchill.  The Mirror Trio was particularly awesome, a total of six musicians from (you guessed it) the Bay Area and Oslo, set up across from each other on matching percussion, upright bass, and guitar and collaboratively concocting some impressive improv.  If I had to pick I think Guro Skumsnes Moe was my favorite musician of the group, not only because of the sounds she elicited from her bass but also due to the way she slung herself across her giant instrument with her entire body.  I also loved Joshua Churchill's brain-melting electronic noisestorm, and the women of 0th who, by incorporating the breaking of glass into their set similar to how Tajima had done back at SFMOMA, gave my evening that great thematic consistency.

show 123

playlist

today is not a dress rehearsal

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, May 17
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

And speaking of music, I was delighted to hear Mika Tajima would be doing a special installation at SFMOMA last weekend called Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal since I had just encountered her work for the first time when I was in New York back in March.  The Dia space in Chelsea is currently being occupied by an arts non-profit calling itself X for one year, during which time they will be presenting exhibitions in four rotations as well as a wealth of associated programming.  For X's first phase Tajima had constructed a series of psychedelic backgrounds and other set pieces that took up the entire ground floor gallery and seemed to be lying in wait for actors and a film crew to come make use of them.  Tajima brought similar sets to SFMOMA and constructed a performance space inside the museum's Schwab Room, and when I arrived Tuesday night filmmaker Charles Atlas was also there to live-edit Tajima with her noise band New Humans.  It did get very loud inside the Schwab Room once New Humans got going, looping sounds of electrical drills and breaking glass into thunderous rhythms.  Tajima watched intently from behind Atlas's edit station at first as multiple cameras (including one mounted on a crane that rolled along a short track laid on the floor) captured footage, but soon she moved onto the set to move the backgrounds and then to start smashing things herself.  I was loath to leave while the music was going on but wanted to see what Atlas was cooking up with Final Cut, so I ran over to the Phyllis Wattis Theater where I was treated to a gorgeously warped, fragmented version of what was being enacted live just a few feet away.  The power blew out halfway through, cutting off the video projection as well as the sound for New Humans, but they got everything restarted within a matter of minutes and went right back at it.

postcards and calendars

Matt Keegan is a clever one.  It took me a little time in his current show at Altman Siegal before I realized that almost all of the pieces on display have a calendar theme.  You'd think the title of show, Postcards and Calendars, would have tipped me off right away.  The works lined up along one wall take the viewer in order from January through to May, noticeable only if you examine the date on the newspaper the individual in the image at right is holding or, in another photograph, the month etched into a multi-sided plastic die.  Days of the week are also represented in additional works in that particular gallery, and the calendar theme continues into the next room where Keegan has displayed calendars taken from the archive of SF's GLBT Historical Society.  Some are inspiring and some are downright scandalous, but again the artist has lined them up in chronological order from January to December.  I very much appreciate Keegan's quirky take on the passage of time, not to mention his sense of order.

eyewitness

North to Alaska 1961
Originally uploaded by aroid

My Flickr friends post the most amazing pictures.  You can see more of my recent favorites here.

souk al amir

As cold and miserable as the winter can be 'round these here parts, once the April showers are over Bay Area residents can pretty much count on sunny days from May all the way through the October heat wave, and there is plenty of outdoor culture planned to take advantage of them.  Case in point: the annual calendar of free performances in Yerba Buena Gardens, a most pleasant place indeed to relax on a weekend afternoon.  This last Saturday the Gardens Festival was co-presenting a program with the Arab Cultural Center of San Francisco called "The Glories of Arab Music", featuring violinist Georges Lammam (and two of his brothers) as well as special guest Naser Musa on the oud.  The musicians took us on a virtual tour of many Arabian countries including Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon, pausing between songs to explain some lyrics or to point out a unique regional rhythm.  The day was beautiful, and the music was divine.