Engineer's Daughter

3 million light years from home

Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial occupies a place of great distinction in my personal history as it is the first film I ever saw in a movie theater back when I was six years old.  I vaguely remember completely losing my shit during the scenes when the government quarantines Elliott's house, and one of my parents had to haul me into the lobby to wipe away my tears and reassure me that E.T. was going to be OK before we returned to the theater for the final scenes.  I recently watched the whole thing again here 25+ years later, and my jaded adult self still got chills when E.T. helps Elliott fly through the air on his bike and still sniffled a little at the end when the alien is giving his goodbyes to the humans.  Even though the story is simple enough for a 6-year-old to grasp there are some nice directorial subtleties for the older set as well, like the sweeping panoramas of early-'80s southern California suburbia and how most of the adult characters are so marginalized that you never even see their faces.  Drew Barrymore cracked me the hell up every time she was on screen, already a total ham even at that young age, and it was a nice surprise to see a young Peter Coyote make an appearance as well.  I'll have to watch it again in another 25 years.

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echo test

This last Thursday night was as thick with art openings as any First Thursday due to the fact that half the city was out partying in the desert the week previous, and out of the many choices on offer I quickly honed in on the Mel Kadel opening Echo Test at Fecal Face Dot Gallery.  Kadel works in pen and ink on gently stained, discolored paper, creating a finely detailed world in which female figures wrestle with mountains, struggle to bend and fold dimensions, and cry lakes of tears.  The delicacy of her lines and the repetition of patterns in her drawings remind me of embroidery and quilting, and the fabric-like quality of her work is echoed in the placement of her art in this show, where one whole wall is literally patchworked with her smaller pieces facing a large-scale kaleidoscope of a drawing on the opposite side of the gallery.  I enjoy the rich imagination on display in Kadel's work, and even though her women might not seem to be having an easy time of it they are the ones both creating and upholding this strange universe of hers.

eyebath

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, September 13
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

My plan is to dig into the KALX library and see if we have any Pumice, aka New Zealander Stefan Neville, because after seeing him perform at 21 Grand Wednesday night I am severely hooked.  I hear traces of classic Kiwi lo-fi jangle pop in Neville's music, just tweaked out and gorgeously distorted all to heck.  That whole evening was a sit-down-and-bliss-out sort of an affair, with Common Eider, King Eider and Gregory Hagen's solo viola noise project Pale Reverse as the opening acts.  Bona fide beauty.

asinine

Heinrich Hoerle: cover of the journal Stupid, No. 1, 1920 (Germany).  Dada brilliance for the win.

time for lunch

Lest I spend the entire Labor Day lazing around my backyard, yesterday noon I BARTed over to the city for an epic potluck at the Civic Center to show support for getting real food into kids' school lunches.  Hosted by the local Slow Food chapter, the San Francisco iteration of the 300 eat-ins being held across the country specifically focused attention on the Child Nutrition Act, which is up for renewal on September 30.  And not only did the potluck support a great cause, but in a city famous for its food of course there were some amazing dishes besides.  I contributed two different kinds of vegetarian pasta salads myself and then went buck-wild sampling the bounty of fresh midsummer produce other people had brought.  Biting into a ripe heirloom tomato I remembered how I used to hate 'maters when I was growing up, but who could blame me when the ones I encountered were so bland and colorless.  Every child should have the chance to encounter a Green Zebra or a Cherokee Purple or a Yellow Brandywine for themselves.

ha-hesder

Joseph Cedar's 2000 film Time of Favor is a gripping, politically complicated, problematic movie.  Aki Avni plays Menachem, an Israeli soldier who is stationed in a West Bank settlement and heads a special religious unit in the army.  Menachem and his two compatriots Pini and Itamar study under the Orthodox Rabbi Meltzer, and Menachem also happens to be in love with Meltzer's daughter Michal.  The only problem is that Meltzer wants Michal to marry Pini, one of his best students.  Running parallel to this love triangle storyline is a plot to blow up the mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, an idea that may or may not have been planted by Rabbi Meltzer, and the Israeli higher-ups mobilize forcefully to make sure no harm is done.  Time of Favor went on to win six Israeli Oscars and was the country's entry for that year's foreign film Oscar, but at the same that the movie intelligently addresses the emotions that fuel nationalism and terrorism never once do you see or hear a Palestinian.  Still, even that glaring omission speaks volumes about the continuing volatility of the political situation in the Middle East.

kind of a girl

In addition to all of the noisy stuff I enjoy sometimes this girl craves a serious injection of power pop, which is exactly why I headed to the Great American Friday night for the Tinted Windows show.  As supergroups go this is one of the more random fusings of pop and rock stars ever concocted, with Taylor Hanson of um Hanson, James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, and Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick.  But it so works.  I was heavily, heavily into the Pumpkins all the way up through and including Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness so it was kind of mind-blowing to stand three feet from Iha and watch him demonstrate that he is still a guitar god.  He also still doesn't smile much, which was humorously commented on by Schlesinger.  Hanson has grown from teen pop idol into quite the swoon-worthy young man, and Carlos just looked like he was having the time of his life the entire show.  Me, I danced my ass off.

theory of the unforeseen

Thursday night I walked up Geary in the gloaming to Frey Norris for their opening of new work by Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth, Theory of the Unforeseen.  One of Kluth's amazing watercolor and acrylic paintings is pictured right, and what is difficult to see unless you click the image to make it large is that there are small paintings of photorealistic human figures collaged onto the surface.  They are bent over their equipment and seem unable to see the starbursts of color around them.  In another piece that I kept coming back to a radio astronomer sits transfixed by the small points of light on his computer screen while silhouettes of his telescopes point to the sky and the heavens explode above his head.  Another work depicts oblivious tourists stuck behind their cameras while a fiery landscape seems just out of their view, and in yet another young children poke at a lava pit with a stick.  Kluth's work addresses detachment from the natural world, either due to the need to hyperfocus through the lens of scientific research, the desire to mediate profound experience, or sheer cluelessness.  Roth also examines the complicated relationship we have to modern science, specifically the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which human beings have altered the environment.  She sculpts the bones of domesticated animals from dark, glossy wood and then adds a gilded tooth here and a shimmer of embedded crystals in an eye socket there.  Her bird sculptures are also awesome, whether painted and clothed in small knit jackets or are simply glittering fantasias constructed out of acrylic fingernails and hair clips.  If the artists are sounding any note in the show I feel it is caution rather than condemnation.  Of course we humans want to understand our place in the universe, but sometimes we can be a little clumsy in how we go about doing it.  On the other hand, as any scientist can tell you, sometimes accidents breed astounding results.

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