Engineer's Daughter

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9pm - midnight PST, Thursday, December 31
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
This is just a one-off, but what a great shift to sub just this once.  I won't be doing my fave songs of the decade or even of the year (I couldn't whittle the massive list down in time) but merely one of my usual guaranteed-eclectic shows.  So if you need someone to keep you company as the clock counts down to midnight you know where I'll be.

prude

Francisco Goya: etching from Los Caprichos, 1799 (Spain).  While the women in the image are commonly seen as a prostitute and her pimp, as it's almost New Year's Eve I could make an argument for their being an allegorical rendering of the wizened old year and the buxom new one.  A fitting end then for a year of images from the Redstone diary's black-and-white edition, and stay tuned in 2010 for weekly posts here from their "Russian Diary" that highlights Russian children's books published from 1920 - 1935.  And I do wish a buxom new year for all and sundry.

oppobrium

Though I often find myself wishing the people I encounter in my day-to-day life would acquaint themselves with some basic manners, one glance at the 1969 edition of Vogue's Book of Etiquette and Good Manners is enough to send the mind swimming thanks to the sheer quantity of rules and regulations it contains.  Toban Nichols has a copy on display in his current show in the Adobe Books gallery, right next to his own tweaked version, and visitors are welcome to flip through both tomes.  Nichols's book is bound like the original and at first glance the text looks the same too, but look closer and you'll see that every third word has been replaced with the word "PUSSY".  It's a reductive prank for sure, but it's also a clever jab at a guide that delineates the roles men and women should play in everything from dinner parties to divorce.   Nichols recently moved to LA after a long stint as a San Francisco resident but is all over the Bay Area right now: besides the Adobe exhibit he also currently has pieces up at the SF LGBT Community Center and recently wrapped up a show at David Cunningham Projects.  And just maybe it was the poorly-behaved people here that drove him away.  At Adobe both books are now wired to the table they rest on because someone swiped the Vogue original right out of the store.  Talk about no manners.

greetings from...

One of the many things John Sayles excels at is creating a world so complete in his films that the viewer feels like a resident, from the Louisiana bayou of Passion Fish to the Irish fishing village of The Secret of Roan Inish to the Texas border town of Lone Star.  He does it again in 2002's excellent Sunshine State, a portrait of a fictional oceanside town in Florida with a history of segregation and which in the film is under attack by land-hungry developers.  The Altman-esque ensemble cast is stellar throughout, but standouts include Angela Bassett as a prodigal daughter returning home and Edie Falco as a woman who runs her father's motor hotel (which just happens to stand in the middle of a piece of prime real estate).  I also loved the Greek chorus of golfers who appear at key moments to offer some oblique commentary on the action.  Sayles masterfully weaves together easily half a dozen plot lines and gives his characters plenty of time to reveal their secrets, and the result is a wonderfully multilayered film that never feels contrived.

ready to make a connection

Though Jason Reitman's latest effort Up in the Air lacks some of the wit and sparkle of his earlier films Thank You for Smoking and Juno, it is absolutely a movie for our time.  I wish I could tell you how many of my friends have been laid off this year or how many rounds of cutbacks my company has gone through (the last of which was last week), but I honestly started losing track somewhere around August.  In the film George Clooney's Ryan Bingham travels the country handing out pink slips to the employees of companies who have hired him to do their dirty work for them, and he revels if not in his job then at least in the familiar anonymity of airports, rental cars, and business hotels.  One of the most gorgeous sequences in the film is the quick succession of shots that follow Bingham as he goes through an airport metal detector.  He's like a ninja of airport security, and frequent traveler that I am I couldn't help but gasp in admiration.  Clooney is his usual charming self even when playing a man who actively avoids any human connection, but he also has impressive female costars here in the form of Vera Farmiga, who plays a love interest, and Anna Kendrick, who plays a coworker.  Reitman is a very capable filmmaker and even throws in a nice Coen brothers moment with a cameo by Sam Elliott, but the story at times feels too predictable and even uncertain of the message it is trying to convey about whether Bingham is destined to be happier isolated in his airborne world or down on earth amongst us screwed-up people.  The many layoff scenes are deeply affecting, however, and I wager I was not the only one in the theater feeling my heart wrench in my chest.  Here's hoping that 2010 is better for everyone.

new china blazers

Was I just referring to my winter blues?  Nothing, and I mean nothing, gives them a solid kick in the shins like a good noisy house show, and tonight's lineup at Apgar did the trick quite nicely.  I have raved before about the flute-and-xylophone-inflected punk of Death Sentence: PANDA! and of the amazing energy the plethora of youngsters in No Babies (who barely made it back from LA in time for this show) bring to their music as they rage away on at least two drum kits and various brass instruments.  Tonight No Babies dragged Busy Lights back with them from southern California as well as XBXRX and KIT's Steve Touchstone to perform solo as snowsuit*.  And this all went down ten minutes from my house.  I heart the East Bay.

dipsomania

Budd Williams: Snow Dancer, 1952 (USA).  It's not by accident that I live somewhere it doesn't snow.  These dark months take their toll on me as it is.  I remember trudging through the slush and interminable cold during my winter in England and thinking, this is exactly why people drink.  Though in retrospect I probably would have been a lot happier with just some proper long underwear.

altered states

Fresh back from LA and after a good night's sleep, Saturday morning I took a drive up to Napa for my first-ever visit to the di Rosa Preserve, and as soon as I pulled into the driveway and saw their hillside dotted with painted cutouts of sheep I knew I was in exactly the right place.  The Preserve is home to Rene and Veronica di Rosa's extensive collection of Northern California art which fills several galleries, their former residence, and the surrounding fields and lake.  On my two-and-a-half-hour tour the knowledgeable docents gave a few brief introductions to the work but then would turn us loose to explore the art at our own pace, and I was impressed with what a broad range of work is represented in the collection.  The di Rosas never shied away from pieces that are political or controversial or just plain funny. 

I do recommend ponying up for one of the tours, but you can also stop by during the week to see the free show in the Gatehouse Gallery featuring a selection of work from the permanent collection.  The current exhibition Altered States is organized around themes of spirituality and the mystical, and even though I knew there were a couple Bruce Conner pieces on display I was still not quite prepared for how beautiful his Butterfly Angel (pictured here) is in person.  His Angel photograms never cease to be a revelation for me.  David Ireland's Nimbus sculpture sits nearby, a vaguely human form shaped out of concrete that though it is anchored to a chair with a utilitarian clamp nevertheless is crowned by a golden halo fit for a religious icon.  The two Lewis deSoto photographs in the show that document some of his light-based interventions in nature reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy and also of the Barry Underwood pictures I just saw at Johansson Projects, while Richard Misrach's image of Stonehenge by night captures the monument's sense of ancient wonder.  One of Jim Campbell's fantastic LED pieces utterly hypnotized me with its constantly-moving wave crashing behind a screen of milky Plexiglass, and Michele Théberge addresses water in a different way in her large-scale Sea of Connections, an abstracted patchwork of painted aluminum.  The Bay Area has long attracted individuals interested in exploring the sacred through both traditional and unorthodox methods (and sometimes all of them at once), and this show is an excellent portrait of that varied and multi-colored landscape.

a bus tour of the urban oilscape of los angeles

I took a quick trip down to southern California on Friday to join the Center for Land Use Interpretation on one of their epic bus tours, this time to check out the urban oilscape of Los Angeles in conjunction with their current Urban Crude exhibit.  We saw oil being pumped right behind Beverly Hills High (yes, 90210), in the middle of busy city blocks, on the campus of Mount St. Mary's College, in parking lots, all over Signal Hill, on manmade islands in Long Beach.  For someone who grew up in Orange seeing those "rocking horse" pumps seemingly on every corner it was a fascinating look at the history and current state of oil extraction in LA.  I of course took a few pictures, and you can see the set here.

blatant self-promotion

I recently composed a short essay for The Present Group, a very cool locally-based art subscription service that delivers a new piece of art to your mailbox four times a year, and it was just published in their edition #12.  I wrote about Whitney Lynn's DIY Survival Kit (pictured here), and if you'd like to see more of it just click the link above.  My piece is called "And I Feel Fine", and you can also read it here.  Now back to your regularly-scheduled Saturday night.