Engineer's Daughter

mountains

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud

I am so lucky to work just down the street from Crown Point Press, especially when they go on and put five brand new prints by Wayne Thiebaud on display in their gallery.  The man is almost 91 and can still knock my socks off with the way he flattens and shifts perspective.  Thiebaud's exquisite drypoints are supplemented by a group of landscape prints by artists such as Tom Marioni, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Bechtle.  California for the win.

See also:

• Crown Point Press
• Wayne Thiebaud

show 218

playlist

Another huge thanks to all who listened and donated during the fundraiser, and to the amazing Marcos and Yours Truly for helping me hold down the fort two weeks in a row.  It was a banner year.

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, October 30
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Last day of the fundraiser, last chance to donate for another year, last chance to get that awesome kitty baseball tee.  I'll have a ton of other awesome packages on offer as well.  Tune in!

days of the dead

Oakland Museum of California

I dropped by the Oakland Museum of California Sunday afternoon after my KALX fundraiser shift for their Días de los Muertos community celebration, and it did my soul great good to wander amongst the marigolds and sugar skulls.  The madcap chaos of San Francisco Halloween always clashes harsh with my seasonal melancholy, so instead I choose to spend time with the carefully constructed altars of the Days of the Dead that so meaningfully capture memories, love, entire lives.  They remind me to celebrate beauty even in the midst of pain and to live life as passionately as I am able.  There are some amazing altars inside the museum proper made by local artists and school groups that will be up through the beginning of December, and they make a contemplative pairing with Richard Misrach's photos documenting the aftermath of the Oakland Hills firestorm that are also currently on display.  Not easy viewing, but highly recommended nonetheless.

See also:

• Oakland Museum of California

eucalyptus quartet

Saturday evening I had that rare opportunity to saunter through the Mission in a dress with no jacket at night it was so warm, all the way up to Noe Valley Ministry for sfSound's last concert of the year.  The program was a really fun one, featuring brand new pieces by sfSoundGroup members John Ingle, Matt Ingalls, and Christopher Burns as well as older compositions by Stefan Wolpe, Iannis Xenakis, and Luciano Berio.  The real treat for me however was Dan Joseph's Eucalyptus Quartet, written a mere month earlier for the sfSoundGroup and performed on clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, violin, and cello.  It is a beautifully layered piece and (as Joseph puts it) "a kind of instrumental version of a mashup audio collage."  Joseph is also a talented performer and sound artist in his own right, his instrument of choice being the hammer dulcimer which he runs through some choice audio processing.  He has a new CD coming out later this year, but in the meantime please enjoy the clips from his Dreams of Seven album embedded above.

See also:

• sfSound
• Dan Joseph

gentlemen's agreement

Claes Oldenburg with giant toothpaste tube, London, 1966 (photo Hans Hammarskiöld)

justice & freedom

We Players

I had just been on Alcatraz this summer and genuinely had not expected to go back for a very long time, if ever, but suddenly there I was on a ferry Thursday evening on my way to attend the first evening of We Players' weekend-long symposium on justice and freedom.  The Players have been staging events on Alcatraz for the last three years (I'm still chastising myself for missing their production of Hamlet there last fall), and this symposium wrapped up their time on the island with a series of performances, discussions, and art installations.  On this particular evening things kicked off with a jaw-dropping dance performance that literally used the entire main cell block as its canvas, and then we moved up into the old prison hospital for a blues jam intermission complete with a variety of cozy beverages.  Finally we ended up on the parade ground in the wind-whipped dark, and with the lights of the city winking and blinking behind them two dancers clad head-to-toe in protective suits spun baskets of live coals and hailed down the spirits amidst the flying sparks.  I felt nothing short of pure searing catharsis.

See also:

• We Players
• Alcatraz Island

falling in

Miguel Arzabe

Miguel Arzabe

Miguel Arzabe

Go to Ampersand right now for an excellent chance to see a small suite of paintings and videos by Miguel Arzabe, a local artist you might have seen me write about once or twice before.  The circle has become an important motif in his current work, whether he is referring to the celestial spheres of the sun and moon or the more earthly pleasure of batting a ball around.  Arzabe's paintings sit just on the edge of abstraction even as he defines some fault lines and boundaries, while his videos use repetition, layering, and some plain old trickery to defy viewer expectation.  I like trying to figure out the rules he is playing by.

See also:

• Ampersand International Arts
• Miguel Arzabe

monir farmanfarmaian & zhan wang

Monir Farmanfarmaian

Zhan Wang

Mesmerizing reflective surfaces abound in the current show at Haines Gallery featuring work by Monir Farmanfarmaian and Zhan Wang.  Farmanfarmaian is an Iranian artist who melds the geometries of traditional Persian art in her wall pieces with a modern abstract edge she integrated after experiencing it firsthand in the New York of the 1940s and 1950s.  Wang's sculptures also reference the artistic traditions of his home culture in China, specifically the rocks that were often displayed in Chinese gardens, even as he updates them for the contemporary world.

See also:

• Haines Gallery
• Monir Farmanfarmaian
• Zhan Wang

show 217

playlist

Huge ginormous thanks to all who listened and donated this morning!  I'll have one more fundraiser show next week, and then that's it for another year.