Engineer's Daughter

eyewitness

Josh in a box
Originally uploaded by ! ramblinworker

I don't really know what's going on here; I just like the picture a lot. To see more of my recent Flickr favorites please click here.

she outlived six rich men!

I've been dealing with a touch of seasonal ick for the last day and a half, so I could do nothing more strenuous last night than lie on the couch and revel in Joseph Losey's terrifically bad 1968 film Boom!, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in one of their more inspired pairings.  I had been intrigued recently when I heard SF's Museum of Performance and Design was screening the movie, figuring there must at least be some redeeming production values, and once I found out Noel Coward appears in it as the "Witch of Capri" that pretty much clinched the deal.  Based on the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Boom! features Taylor as a very rich widow, Flora Goforth, living out her final days on an Italian island, demanding injections of painkillers from her drunken live-in doctor and flouncing around in a variety of wild couture costumes.  Burton as poet Chris Flanders literally crawls up Flora's mountain to pay her a visit, the yin to her yang in a samurai robe and sword, and his true intentions remain obscure throughout the film.  But the plot is really beside the point when you have Taylor chewing the scenery with unabashed vigor.  This is camp of the highest order.

fug

Birds in a Sycamore Tree, from the Tomb of Userhat, Ancient Egypt.  My early fascination with the art and rituals of ancient Egypt led directly to my study of classics at university I'm sure, though I never did learn to read hieroglyphics.  I did touch the Rosetta Stone once though.  Not that I was supposed to, but that was back when they had it standing out in the open air at the British Museum instead of inside glass like they do now.  I'm a jerk, I know.  Someday I will travel to Egypt and see the tombs with my own eyes and keep my hands to myself.  For now, I just take virtual tours on Flickr.

pistahan

The first thing I heard when I walked into Yerba Buena Gardens for Pistahan yesterday afternoon was the unmistakable sound of a needle scratching on vinyl, and I was drawn right to it like a bee to honey.  Imagine my delight to find that one of the DJs producing said dulcet tones was a young woman, part of a showcase of female talent presented by local turntablist heroine Deeandroid.  Once I finally pulled myself away from the beats I took a wander through the booths, scoping some seriously awesome tributes to Corazon Aquino and three wheel motion, Filipino style.  Then it was time for a snack or two, namely chunks of fried banana washed down with a coconut popsicle, uber-refreshing in yesterday's heat. 

Speaking of food, founding Bitch herself Lisa Jervis will be at Modern Times on Wednesday presenting her new book Cook Food: A Manualfesto For Easy, Healthy, Local Eating which combines some of the philosophy of Michael Pollan with a much-appreciated DIY vibe.  Just reading about it makes me hungry.

Βάτραχοι

Yesterday afternoon my parents and I went to the woods because we wished to see AtmosTheatre's latest production, The Frogs by Aristophanes.  AtmosTheatre owns a lovely plot of land in Woodside that they have outfitted with a set of small outdoor stages, and they pick material that will suit the scenery, often walking the audience from one scene to the next over the course of a play.  In this case we start with Dionysus and his smart-mouth slave Xanthias outside the house of Herakles, hike down with them to meet Charon and a chorus of giant frogs near the river Styx, sneak past Cerberus into Hades and finally arrive at the amphitheater where a poetry contest between the feuding (and dead) Euripides and Aeschylus takes place.  It is a brilliant incorporation of the material into the landscape, and the performers take many opportunities to improv during the "traveling" bits that I'm sure would have delighted Aristophanes, the playwright who often broke the fourth wall to make the audience laugh at itself and quite possibly invented meta-theater in the process...almost 2500 years ago.  This classics nerd was also very happy with the English adaptation by Stuart Bousel (who also directed), with plenty of obscure Greek references intact and certainly all of the humor and wit.  The shift of male judge Aeacus into Persephone is a relatively minor change, and Katarina Fabic as Persephone owns the stage when she is on it, a domineering queen of the underworld.  Nathan Tucker as an over-the-top Dionysus and B. Warden Lawlor as the more practical Xanthias are also spot-on hilarious, and they are backed up by a wonderful supporting cast of Furies and other residents of Hades.  And a special shout-out to everyone who worked on the production design, full of clever little touches very true to the spirit and art of ancient Greece.  As Aristophanes himself might have said: Yay.

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ibid.

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

Last night Dave and I did a very pleasant Art Murmur meander in the warm Oakland air.  Despite an alarmingly strong police presence (apparently there's nothing else going on in Oakland on a Friday night that requires their attention) moods were running high, and the art was very good indeed.  These were my favorites:

• Jennie Ottinger's ibid. at Johansson Projects (pictured right) - Gallery owner/curator extraordinaire Kimberly Johansson knocks another one out of the park with Ottinger's show.  Timothy Buckwalter totally nailed it when he said Ottinger is "kinda like Marlene Dumas meets David Park" on his blog.  The slightly obscured features of Dumas meet Park's blocks of color and strong sense of composition in Ottinger's work, with subjects freely ranging from racehorses to operating rooms to a line-up of schoolgirls with ruddy knees.
• The Four Corners Tour by Erica Gangsei at 21 Grand - Gangsei has created a wonderland of an installation in the gallery, mounting small photographs, sculptures, and stop-motion animated videos at neat intervals directly onto the walls.  Look closely and you'll see eyeballs staring back at you out of that piece of fuzz, or a rainbow reflected through a tiny piece of plastic hanging from a pin.  Gangsei references Richard Tuttle directly, and her work also brings in elements of Hayao Miyazaki and Tom Friedman.  Utterly unpretentious and completely charming.

I didn't make it to the Best of the East Bay party at the Oakland Museum last night, opting instead for pizza and beers and good conversation at Lanesplitters and then International Freakout A Go-Go over at the Totally Intense Fractal Mind Gaze Hut, but early reports indicate a fabulous time was had by all.  I hella heart my East Bay.

a killer comedy

It's no secret that I am a fan of some seriously intense films, but Man Bites Dog tested my limits when I watched it tonight with its brutal depiction of a veritable catalog of violent atrocities.  I also think it is utterly fucking brilliant.  The movie opens with a scene of a woman being strangled to death in a train car by a young man named Ben, and then cuts straight to Ben sitting with the corpse on the edge of a canal good-naturedly explaining his formulas for how to weight a dead body to make sure it sinks.  Ben, you see, is a psychopath, but he is also the charismatic subject of a documentary by filmmakers André and Rémy, who at first maintain a passive compliance by merely filming Ben's crimes but before too long are committing horrifying acts themselves.  Actors Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde also directed the film back in 1992 when reality TV was only first beginning to gain a foothold in popular culture, and the satire has a very strong message about how media can make itself complicit in the violence or just downright unfortunate behavior it portrays.  I did not exactly laugh out loud, but there is a certain sardonic humor in moments like the one when the film crew encounters their doppelgangers after a shooting spree at Ben's hideout in the form of another crew following the gangster Ben has just killed.  I just don't think I'm going to sleep very well tonight.

imperial

It's almost a standing joke that every story on William T. Vollmann has to mention his prolific output within the first few lines of the piece, and here I am being no different but, seriously, this is a man who has written a seven-volume set about how humans justify their use of violence.  Aimee and I went to Moe's tonight to hear him read from his newest magnum opus, Imperial, which delves deeply into the real-life stories of California's Imperial County near the border with Mexico.  In one passage Vollmann described riding along with U.S. border guards as they struggle to keep people on one side of that arbitrary line, and in another he read the frank words of a friend of his who is a field worker on the farms in the Imperial Valley and who does backbreaking work for mere dollars a day.  As a journalist Vollmann is renowned for seeking out information in often what are very dangerous situations, and with the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee on everyone's mind today an audience member asked Vollmann if he had hypothetically been imprisoned during his time in Afghanistan or Iraq if he would have expected a similar diplomatic mission from the U.S. on his behalf.  Vollmann smiled with genuine humor and said he doubted they would have done a thing for him.

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