Engineer's Daughter

an illustrated life

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, November 1
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
This time the Family Man will be joining me on-air to beg for your loose change.  And not only is it my last fundraiser shift, it's my last Sunday morning shift period.  I will be spinning nothing but my favorite tracks again, so don't forget to fall back tonight and be sure to tune in!

Earlier this week I took a long lunch at 49 Geary to see the Charley Harper show at Altman Siegel Gallery.  Harper is probably best known for the strong modernist design sense he brought to his wildlife illustrations for books like The Golden Book of Biology, and the gallery had many original pages from that and other books on display (complete with printing notations) depicting Harper's wonderful rendering of a variety of marine life, a hungry owl, baby animals, dancing pheasants.  But I also adored Harper's vintage takes on technology and industry that were interspersed among the critters, seeing his rigorous geometry applied to a painting of a "hypothetical push-button shopping panel" or a reel of magnetic tape juxtaposed against a tom-tom drum.  Unfortunately the show closed today, but I highly recommend leafing through the massive Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life at your local modern art museum gift shop or just visiting the Charley Harper Art Studio Web site.

right here, right now

I will not tell a lie: it was a bit of an ordeal getting out to the Headlands Center tonight, what with the epic traffic generated by the Bay Bridge closure.  But as soon as I was sitting in the Mess Hall at a table with other friendly faces, enjoying Keith Mercovich's gorgeous Indian-inspired vegetarian dinner, all the exhaust and gridlock was instantly forgotten.  After cones of homemade double-vanilla ice cream the program continued upstairs with a presentation by Aaron Ximm of part of his work-in-progress MARINCELLO UNSOUNDWALK.  Ximm explained that in the mid-'60s a huge development had very nearly been built right across the Gerbode Valley from the Headlands Center, and then he played a series of seven field recordings captured around the Bay Area that demonstrated everyday sounds we might have heard had the dread Marincello come to pass.  Ximm made it clear that we would be the only group of people to ever hear these sounds, so I closed my eyes and brought an extra degree of presence to my listening as wastewater burbled, golfers thwacked balls, traffic zoomed, and children shrieked.  Then as if to drive the point home about remaining in the moment Ximm took shears and cut up the only copies of the recordings right in front of us.  The theme of immediacy continued with a performance by dancer/choreographer Kara Davis in which she did live improvisation with three other dancers and also a trio of musicians to demonstrate the principles of connection central to the martial art Budo.  Similar to aikido, Budo seeks to transform moments of conflict into peaceful resolution, and it was a beautiful thing to behold the dancers and musicians spontaneously play off each other with both music and bodies twisting this way and that.  Afterwards I walked through the starry starry night over to Ximm's project space for a repeat viewing of his RODEO SUNDIAL which I'd seen at the Center's fall open house a couple weeks ago.  Utilizing a 12-hour field recording Ximm made of a full tidal cycle down at Rodeo Beach on his first day out at the Headlands, the piece also features 12 jars of water and sand from the beach set in a circle and tiny LED lights that flicker in the darkened room in response to the sounds of the waves.  Ximm offered to make pancakes in the morning for anyone who wanted to stay for the whole 12 hours, but I relegated my experience to a slightly shorter span of time.

skinny boy

I have seen Amy Millan perform umpteen times with Stars and Broken Social Scene and her rich honey voice is one of my favorite things on the planet, so it was fantastic to see her stand in the spotlight and do her solo thing tonight at Cafe Du Nord.  The material she writes on her lonesome lies firmly in folk and alt-country territory, and tonight she had a whole host of talented musicians with her swapping instruments as various as banjo, lap steel, upright bass, and trombone.  Her twangified cover of Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" is divine (and better than the original, imho), but it was when she sang her own "Skinny Boy" that I melted into a puddle of goo on the floor.  "It's sordid and I can't find my feet..."  Indeed.

orwellian

From Japanese Haiku, Peter Pauper Press, 1955 (USA).  Winter is coming, folks, and I am not happy about it.  Poetry makes everything a bit more tolerable, however.  Click the image to make it larger (and the haiku more legible).

sunday will come

In the fall of 2007 I visited Intersection for the Arts to see 51802, a beautiful and poignant piece that integrated dance and spoken word as it explored the topic of incarceration, and it made me instantly sit up and take notice of its performer/director/choreographer Erika Chong Shuch.  I returned to Intersection Saturday night to see The Future Project: Sunday Will Come, Shuch's new collaborative work performed with musician Denizen Kane and Campo Santo member Sean San Jose, and was intensely moved once again.  The stage is spare and props minimal, but Shuch and San Jose never fail to command attention as they portray a couple trying to decide what to do about their sick goldfish.  They cycle through a range of emotions ranging from hilarity to despair, often using only the movement of their bodies to transmit the inherent ridiculousness of the situation but also the pathos.  Meanwhile Denizen Kane moves on and off the stage throughout, using his music to comment on the action like a one-man Greek chorus and (like all of the performers) diving deep into questions around mortality and death.  The trio also treated us to a ten-minute preview of their next project, an adaptation of Daniel Alarcón's novel Lost City Radio, and I suspect similar themes will play a strong role in that production as well.  I can't wait.

don't call me whitney, bobby

I was taking a mental health day off from work on Friday anyway, so how fortuitous was it that Islands played a free lunchtime set on the UC Berkeley campus that very same day.  The band that was born out of the Unicorns disbandment in this instance performed as a four-piece headed by Nick Thorburn (currently going by Nick Diamonds) who squinted a little in the sunlight but delivered an excellent set in his nasally drawl.  The students too hung back at first but in no time at all were crowding up to the stage and dancing away.  Rumor has it the band was amazing at Bottom of the Hill later that evening as well.

show 145

playlist

Thank you so much to everyone who listened, pledged, and sent texts and good vibes.  Andrew and I made over $1000 for the station, which is crazy good on a Sunday morning.  I have one more fundraiser show next Sunday AM if you'd like to tune in again for more awesomeness.  But right now I need a nap.  I'm done worn out.

psa

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, October 25
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
This is it, the first of my two fundraiser shows!  DJ Andrew will be my partner in crime this week, and we have some excellent stories to tell (and of course some awesome tunes to play).  You don't want to miss it.

lightning fields

I was already familiar with Hiroshi Sugimoto's luminous photographs of architecture and of the interiors of movie theaters, but the pictures in his Lightning Fields series currently on display at Fraenkel Gallery are another revelation entirely.  The huge black-and-white images are so richly textured they could be landscapes or documentary evidence of some as-yet-unidentified fauna, and I found myself openly wondering how the artist had managed to capture the intricate patterns traced by electricity itself.  Turns out Sugimoto used a powerful Van De Graaf generator to put electrical current right on his film, thereby exerting some control over the process but also leaving a lot to chance.  I instantly associated back to the images of direct electric sparks created by Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot in the 19th century that I saw in SFMOMA's mind-blowing Brought to Light show last year, and Sugimoto is certainly paying tribute to the boundless curiosity of early scientific photographers.  In fact the show includes two images from Sugimoto's latest project in which he is printing large-scale photographs from original negatives by William Henry Fox Talbot, the man credited with inventing the negative/positive photographic process in the 1830s.  It's all enough to make a science-oriented photography geek feel a bit faint.

please, accept the mystery

I love Joel and Ethan Coen a lot, and their newest offering A Serious Man is one of their best yet.  The film follows Minnesota physics professor Larry Gopnik, played by the brilliant Michael Stuhlbarg, as he goes through a bit of rough patch in his life.  He is a good man but beset by unfortunate circumstance, and as his certainty starts to unravel he seeks advice from a series of rabbis, each one of them more useless to him than the last.  The trademark Coen black humor is fully present, as are their hilariously over-the-top characters.  Their camerawork is also fantastic throughout, and the scene pictured here where Gopnik perches on his roof and surveys his neighborhood in all of its 1967 Robert Bechtle splendor took my breath away.  But the film is also a rich, multilayered investigation into Jewish identity in particular and the human condition in general, and in the end there are no easy answers either for our hero or for the audience.  A Serious Man might be biblical in scope but is no pat parable, and its complexity is exactly what makes it so great.