Engineer's Daughter

show 247

playlist

Feeling all warm and fuzzy this morning after closing out the fundraiser last night with the always-fabulous Sharkey.  The KALX listeners really came through and far far exceeded our expectations.  Thanks again to all who listened and donated, and stay tuned for where I pop up next on the schedule!

miscellany 10.26.12

The Tony Cragg Ice Cream Cone at the SFMOMA Blue Bottle Cafe.  The Cragg sculpture after which it is modeled is being de-installed this week after a good run up there on the fifth floor.

Two rounds of illness, a magical overnight jaunt to Chicago (thank you again, Ms m!), and a couple creative-type extra-curricular gigs have kept blogging sparse in the preceding weeks.  I assure you I've been absorbing a lot in my spare time, however.  A brief snapshot of this last week that was:

• Made some money for my favorite radio station during our annual fundraiser.
• Visited [2nd floor projects] to ogle the colorful paintings and sculptural installations by Linda Geary and Danielle Lawrence and walked away with a beautiful print edition by Scott Hewicker besides.
• Blissed out to a brainy and minimalist performance by Bryan Eubanks and Cat Lamb as part of the Mills Songlines series.
• Rocked out to Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Crypts at the New Parish whilst avoiding all the emo bros reeking of Red Bull.
• Enjoyed me some Golden Retriever too.

This weekend's agenda:

• Lisa Carver/Suckdog of Rollerderby Zine fame reads from her new book about Yoko Ono in Oakland tonight.
• Record shopping at Aquarius.
• Fall Open House at Headlands.
• Soliciting more $$$ for KALX.  Sunday 9pm to midnight PST!

show 246

playlist

Thank you so much to the fabulous Poindexter for being my left-hand woman, and to everyone who listened and donated!  I'll be doing one more fundraiser show this coming Sunday 9pm to midnight, this time with the assistance of DJ Sharkey.  Please tune in!

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9pm - midnight PST, Sunday, October 21
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

It's fundraiser time!  Tune in for three hours of nonstop awesome tunes and valuable cash prizes with me and my very special guest Poindexter.  You do not want to miss.

apostle

Otto Dix, The God of Confectioners, Germany, 1922

an annotated hearing trumpet, preface and figures + surprise!

Chris Kubick

Anne Walsh

Through October 28th - Anne Walsh: An Annotated Hearing Trumpet, Preface and Figures + Chris Kubick: Surprise! at Martina }{ Johnston.  I received the full effect of Kubick's piece by sheer coincidence, entering the gallery's screening room just as a chorus of voices shouted out "Surprise!" and various other bells and whistles went off in my ears.  Kubick has coded these special moments to occur intermittently and never the same way twice, and as the sounds fill the air their file names flash up on a screen in front of you too.  The nomenclature of the files might seem impenetrable to some, but any producer or sound designer will recognize them as the stings and SFX that fill their days.  I took a lot of nerdly pleasure from seeing the names pile up on screen and trying to tag them to the specific noises I was hearing.

Walsh's work is more enigmatic but rewards your attention the more time you spend with it.  Taking The Hearing Trumpet, a work of surrealist fiction written by Leonora Carrington in 1950, as her springboard Walsh invites us into the machinations of her own head and shows us a seemingly random collection of photographs, notes, cast lists, and other ephemera related to a film Walsh intends to make of the book.  Here: pictures of Carrington herself in Mexico City before her death last year, wearing her years and experience with grace.  Here: a list of women's names laser-cut into paper, many of them feminist icons of my own.  Here: a handwritten address and a scripted conversation.  The exhibition is like peering into the creative process itself in all of its messy splendor.  As an added bonus I was able to attend a reading by Walsh and Moira Roth at the gallery yesterday, where Walsh alternated her personal observations on Carrington's list of characters from The Hearing Trumpet with Roth's live enactments of sections of the novel.  As they spoke I thought of how Carrington seems to be looking forward to her own later years in the book, how women age (fighting it/accepting it), how I want to continue growing older (with the grace and wit of Carrington or Bourgeois or Ono or).

See also:

• Martina }{ Johnston
• Anne Walsh
• Moira Roth
• Chris Kubick

protean

LOADED FOR DUCK

"On top of the various discomforts that accompany lock-in syndrome, I suffer from a serious hearing disorder.  My right ear is completely blocked and my left ear amplifies and distorts all sounds farther than ten feet away.  When a plane tows an ad for the local theme park over the beach I could swear that a coffee-mill has been grafted on to my eardrum.  But that noise is only fleeting.  Much more disturbing is the permanent racket that assails me from the corridor whenever they forget to shut my door, despite all my efforts to alert people to my hearing problems.  Heels clatter on the linoleum, carts crash into one another, hospital workers hail one another with the voices of stockbrokers trying to liquidate, radios nobody listens to are turned on, and on top of everything else a floor-waxer sends out an auditory foretaste of hell.  There are also a few frightful patients.  I know some whose only pleasure is to listen to the same cassette over and over again.  I had a very young neighbour who was given a velveteen duck quipped with a sophisticated detection device.  It emitted a reedy, piercing quack whenever anyone entered the room, in other words twenty-five times a day.  Luckily the little patient went home before I could carry out my plan to exterminate the duck.  But I am keeping it in readiness: you never know what horrors tearful families may bestow on their young.  However, the first prize for eccentric neighbours goes to a woman patient who emerged demented from a coma.  She bit nurses, seized orderlies by their genitals, and was unable to request a glass of water without screaming 'Fire!'  At first these false alarms had everyone dashing to action stations; then, wearied by the struggle, they ended up letting her yell her fill at all hours of the day and night.  Her antics gave our neurology section a heady cuckoo's nest atmosphere, and I was almost sorry when they removed our friend to yell 'Help! Murder!' elsewhere.
    Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head.  To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible.  Loud breathing is enough to drown them out.  This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better.  I must have the ear of the butterfly."

--Jean-Dominique Bauby from The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, France, 1997

ann arbor 2012

Wednesday
-Mental soundtrack ---> Hangovers
-Picking up 88.3 WCBN Ann Arbor on the drive from Detroit
-Feeling like a student (in a good way) at the wonderfully homey Inn at the League
-Dinner at Frita Batidos: a black bean frita topped with shoestring fries, Muenster, tropical coleslaw, avocado spread, and chipotle mayo + loaded plantains + a passion fruit batido with a splash of dark rum
-The students are far too young for me, but maybe a professor...

Thursday
-Mental soundtrack ---> Beach House
-I am just destined to have rain on all my vacations this year
-Breakfast at Angelo's: eggs Florentine + fresh-squeezed orange juice
-Handsome men's clothing at Van Boven, a mocha at Comet Coffee, estate jewelry, old maps...all in Nickels Arcade
-A maize and blue fantasia at Moe Sport Shop
-Teeming hordes of students in the Diag, gorgeous reading rooms at both the Harlan Hatcher and Law School libraries, the amazing architecture of the Law School quad (even under construction)
-Lunch at Zingerman's Deli: a Skokie Skidoo veggie Reuben + garlic potato salad + a clementine Izze
-Rain having stopped, an afternoon stroll through the trees by the Huron River in the Nichols Arboretum
-Sangria on the front patio at Dominick's
-Dinner at Pacific Rim: a Hendrick's cucumber martini + taro-mushroom pierogi + a farmers market salad + Thai basil pesto fettuccini + a trio of ginger, vanilla, and green tea creme brulee
-Lori McKenna singing love, loss, and hope at The Ark

Friday
-Mental soundtrack ---> Familia Pilco
-Breakfast at Zingerman's Roadhouse: a chai latte + house-made granola with vanilla yogurt + biscuits with sorghum syrup
-Antiquities galore including a five-sixths replica of Pompeii's Villa of the Mysteries at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
-Rembrandt, Monet, Frankenthaler, Hepworth, Diebenkorn, Picasso, many Buddhas, Jesper Just, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, all at the University of Michigan Museum of Art
-Lunch at Monahan's Seafood Market: a fresh-caught crispy fish sandwich on a Zingerman's Jasper roll
-Zingerman's vanilla gelato for dessert too, dunked in their Spanish drinking chocolate
-Used CDs for tomorrow's drive to Holland from Wazoo Records
-Northville cider outside the Arbor Brewing Company as the clouds gathered overhead
-Dinner at Mark's Carts as the drops started to fall: a ginger ale + a 5-spice tofu banh mi on (you guessed it) a Zingerman's roll from San Street
-Seeing the amazing doc Searching for Sugar Man at the State Theater amidst a crowd who were clearly well aware of the Detroit locations Rodriguez was singing about

Saturday
-Mental soundtrack ---> Oberhofer
-Breakfast at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market: a chai latter from Sweetwaters + an apple batter donut from Wasem Farms
-The drive across the state to Holland through rainstorms, rainbows, changing leaves, and a few highly questionable billboards
-A huge hit with the relatives: the video I took on my iPhone of Chuck and Richter singing for their supper
-Giant cupcakes from the Cakery courtesy of Carla to help celebrate Grandma's 98th
-Honeycrisp apples, apple cider, and photo albums of old family pictures from Kristy
-Back to Ann Arbor in time for dusk
-Dinner at Logan: a Bell's Oberon beer + tomato broth amuse bouche + asparagus tempura + seasonal mushroom gnocchi ragu + truffled goat cheese ravioli + a wee bomb of chocolate mousse with creme anglaise and pistachios

Sunday
-Mental soundtrack ---> Saint Etienne
-Breakfast at Cafe Zola: fresh-squeezed orange juice + a buckwheat crepe with tomatoes, mozzarella, basil
-Goodbye Ann Arbor and thank you for such a lovely time
-The rich mix of historical architecture and abandonment in Detroit's Corktown
-Lunch at Slows Bar BQ: a lemonade + a veggie chicken sandwich topped with slaw and pickle strips
-Asian muscle cars doing the Tokyo drift in a demonstration just next door
-Savoring a Michigan honeycrisp in the Midway airport, and my pecan pie from Slows somewhere in the air between Chicago and Oakland