Through March 13 - Raven Chacon: Landscape & Life at Indexical
I'm always looking for an excuse to swoop down to Santa Cruz, and Indexical has been providing some excellent opportunities recently. Friday evening they presented a live outdoor performance of Raven Chacon's 2018 piece American Ledger No. 1 in conjunction with their current exhibition of his work. The score is printed on a blanket inside the Indexical gallery and is meant to be performed by "many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match." Said players gathered in the Tannery plaza as the sun set on Friday to transform Chacon's anti-colonialist creation story about the founding of the United States into concrete sounds. Let's just say there was a lot of stimulating cacophony, and personally it inspired me to think about how we are still practicing violence when it comes to people and ecosystems in this country.
Other things I liked this week:
- Poison Ivy by Katt Shea. Not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but a fine example of '90s noir shot in L.A. with plenty of style and Gen X moodiness.
- Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott. A heartbreaking and perfectly claustrophobic novel set in occupied Athens during WWII where a Greek family is forced to house a German officer.
- I love walking over to OMCA to arrive as soon as they open on a Sunday morning, and right now they have both a special exhibition about Edith Heath and a tribute to Hung Liu that did good things for my soul when I spent some time with them last week. Topped it off with a delish Impossible meatloaf sandwich from their resident cafe Town Fare, eaten on a picnic bench in their gorgeous garden.