Engineer's Daughter

god's ear

I am officially at the point where I will buy a ticket to anything Erika Chong Shuch is involved with and that's exactly how I found myself at the Ashby Stage Thursday night to see the Shotgun Players' new production of God's Ear, a play written by Jenny Schwartz.  Shuch directed, and her influences are evident in everything from the imaginative stage design to how the actors incorporate movement and music into the script.  The Players have been careful to not give away too much about the play, and the marquee on the Ashby Stage merely reads "A Comedy About Grief."  Even this barest mention of the g-word still might be enough to scare some viewers off, but the play succeeds in defying all expectations.  Schwartz places her characters in a surreal dreamscape where language often seems more a hindrance than a help, and they speak in the cliches and platitudes we use to cope with the unspeakable.  In the hands of a less capable director and cast it could have resulted in a bloody mess, but I was moved not only to tears but also to hearty laughter at several points during the performance.  When I have experienced grief it has never been a one-way path from denial to acceptance; emotions jump all over the place, disappear for a while, reassert themselves months later.  The unique language of performance Shuch cultivates as director is especially suited to communicate this mind-bending complexity.  When an instance of true connection finally happens in the play, and in the most seemingly banal of husband-wife interactions, it becomes the most magical and satisfying moment of all.

building dwelling thinking

Lisa Sigal sculpts with window screens, adding rectangles of color, layering screen over screen, setting them at right angles to each other.  She also uses torn paper, hinges, and other found objects, and the resulting pieces in her current show at NOMA Gallery are often humorous when they aren't merely entrancing.  A loose ring of bricks on the floor of the gallery encircle a piece of black paper to create the semblance of a hole, while nearby Sigal has opened up a panel in the wall to reveal a dusty space normally used to stash fire extinguishers and placed one of her colored screens inside.  Her installations in their three-dimensionality comment directly on architecture, and even her more traditional collages seem to cascade across their mountings and threaten to bust right out of their frames.  I'm not sure I'll ever look at even the most utilitarian window screen in exactly the same way again either.

grads

Sunday afternoon I made my way to the Headlands Center for the opening of their 2009/2010 Graduate Fellows exhibition, and it was exciting to see what the 8 artists (all MFA graduates hand-picked from our local art programs) had done with their year there.  My brief notes on their work follow below, which I'm sure will not be the last time I write about these peeps:

• Tyson Washburn (SFSU) - Otherworldly black-and-white ink jet landscape images taken around the Headlands, one of which is pictured here.  If you click the image to make it larger you might just be able to make out the length of string Washburn stretched along the crack in the structure before taking the picture, and he does similar "activations" in all of his images.  Simple in concept, but really beautifully executed.
• Vera Kachouh (SFAI) - I remember being struck by Kachouh's collection of vintage found photographs of water when I saw them back at the the Fall '09 open house, and she has a large grid of them on display in this show.  She also is presenting a new video she shot inside an abandoned house in Lebanon that she has married to an audio interview with her father in which he describes its significance to their family.
• Joshua Short (UC Davis) - A fully-functioning pirate radio station constructed out of wood, cardboard, and other assorted detritus that visitors are invited to interact with in any way they see fit.  Short's structure is literally bursting with useful details like a coffee maker, a mobile transmitter, a sleeping bunk, a porn collection.  A fantastical highway in a state of purposeful collapse hangs off one side of the building.
• Patrick Gillespie (CCA) - Gillespie spent a significant amount of time in the Middle East in the last year, and his work deals with everything from our presence in that part of the world to ideas around checkpoints and borders and military history (all of which I find incredibly interesting).  He is also showing his Prosthetic For Public Space, a sheepskin suit that completely covers his body and that he wears in performances where he tries to navigate public streets in it solo.
• Aaron Maietta (UC Berkeley) - Maietta has sealed up a long loop of string into cracks in the very wall of the building and then has created a motorized device that very slowly pulls said string out again.  The string twangs suddenly and sharply as it pulls loose, turning the building itself into an instrument, and plaster showers down onto the gallery floor as patterns reveal themselves in the wall.  I could sit and watch that piece for hours.
• Andrew Witrak (Mills) - An oversize mattress constructed completely out of cocktail umbrellas, their stems pointing up and creating a prickly bed of nails.  A huge drawing of Witrak drowning underwater, the blue of the water filled in so completely with colored pencil that it could be mistaken for paint.  Another large drawing of a smashed lawn chair, its outline filled in with silver metal leaf.  There is an element of obsession in Witrak's work I very much appreciate.
• Michael Arcega (Stanford) - Arcega's recent work includes tents he constructs out of modern camping materials like plastic tarp, mosquito netting, and tent poles, except they take unusual forms.  The one in this show is a life-size toilet, entitled Rest Assured (which is also apparently the name of a line of toilet seat protectors).  The "tent" is ostensibly functional, but you will be relieved to hear no one made a move to test it.
• Michael Namkung (SFSU) - A longtime devotee of ultimate frisbee, Namkung has unrolled a stretch of paper on the floor that records the pattern created by his bare feet during a practice exercise.  When creating the piece he first stepped in a frisbee full of ink, and he is also showing a video documenting his process.  The clever part is that to see it you peer into a box where the video is reflected into that same frisbee full of ink.

morton's fork

Cocktail wallflowers: Shanghai Dancers by Koka Yamamura, Japan, 1924.  Did anyone else ever do cotillion?  It's where I learned how to waltz and swing and polka, and how to sip punch with lace gloves on and how to make small talk with boys with sweaty hands.  Skills I use every day, in other words.

a love story in the city of dreams

Mulholland Dr. ranks up there with The Straight Story and all of Twin Peaks (yes even the second season) as what I consider the best of David Lynch's creations, and this weekend I watched it again for the first time since seeing it multiple times in 2001.  I remember having endless discussions back in the day about WTF is going on in the movie and even had myself convinced I had all the pieces put together, though with Lynch any feeling of certainty never lasts long.  For me the key to the entire film is the scene in which Betty during her audition goes from bright-eyed naivete to screen-scorching sultry in the space of a heartbeat, hinting at the many layers of her character that are more clearly revealed much later and at her capacity for invention, and I'm not sure Naomi Watts has ever been as good as she is in this role.  Lynch too is fully in control of his medium here, from the stardust he sprinkles over the moment where Betty and the director played by Justin Theroux first see each other across a crowded soundstage (with angels practically singing in the background) to the intense sense of foreboding he cultivates as the film progresses, stretching the viewer's nerves tight even in Los Angeles' broad daylight.  Along the way there are references to other great films like Persona and Vertigo, flashes of black Lynchian humor, his always-amazing sound design, and of course a whole bucket of red herrings.  Mulholland Dr. never answers all of its own questions, but that's exactly why I love it so.

heavens to purgatory

After a thoroughly rotten week last week (hacked debit card, iPad wi-fi issues, computer virus on my home PC, ruined pedicure, etc) it did my soul good to stay up late at Bottom of the Hill Friday night and rock out to one of my favorite Canadian bands The Most Serene Republic, who were co-headlining with the also-fabulous Annuals.  TMSR's last full-length ...And the Ever Expanding Universe was their best yet, full of imaginative and literate indie rock that is inclined to switch time signatures at a moment's notice.  I'm always impressed with how they pull off their sound live too and even manage to casually throw horns and banjo into the mix.  I did notice the lone woman in the group Emma Ditchburn was conspicuously absent from the stage (and from the current TMSR line-up), and I missed the way her vocals used to twine with those of vocalist Adrian Jewett.  With Ditchburn's departure and the release of their new EP on their own record label the band appears to be at something of a turning point, and I am curious to see where they go next.

show 156

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tonight:
6 - 9pm PST, Sunday, May 16
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

This is just a one-off but omg I have so much good stuff to play.

we they, we they

Last time I saw Clare Rojas she was telling spooky ghost stories out at the Headlands on a full moon night, and it's also been a while since I've seen her perform as her sweetly-singing alter ego Peggy Honeywell.  But she brought out her acoustic guitar last night at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art to celebrate the opening of her new show We They, We They, and anyone who wasn't already under her spell sure was completely charmed by the end of her short set.  The MOCFA always makes impressive use of its compact space and this exhibit is no exception, as almost every available inch of wall area is filled floor-to-ceiling with Rojas's flattened, folk-inspired paintings.  There are wily coyotes, willow branches bending low, hand-drawn sheet music, wizened figures engaging in mysterious rituals, quilt-inspired geometry, smooching pigeons, and much much more.  The title of the show speaks to Rojas's investigations into human relationships and the ways in which they can still be difficult and strange even in this time of intense interconnectivity.  Are the men and women in her paintings from an earlier time, or are they actually our contemporaries?  She deliberately blurs the line and does it in what is already an instantly-recognizable style.  The room bursts with so much color and pattern it was difficult for me to absorb it all in a single viewing (and with the distractions of the opening night scrum besides), but I fully intend to spend a few lunch breaks at the museum before the show closes in August.

surf solar

I slept on getting a ticket to last night's Fuck Buttons show at the Great American through KALX, but the wonderful Bay Bridged came through for me so that I could bliss out at the front of the stage while the British duo played the dreamy crazy music.  Fuck Buttons' Tarot Sport was one of my favorite albums of 2009 (almost topping my love for their debut album Street Horrrsing), and when they opened with the transcendent "Surf Solar" last night my brain summarily exploded.  Facing each other across tables heaped high with effects pedals and other gadgetry, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power used everything from live drumming to toy keyboards to a first-generation Nintendo Gameboy to craft their trance-inducing experimental post-rock.  The strong movement toward electronica evident on Tarot Sport was definitely present in their performance last night as well, but Fuck Buttons remain too noisy to be pure dance music.  And that's why they rule, even if I can never ever say their name on the air when I DJ.