Engineer's Daughter: Music

October 18, 2021

October 17, 2021

lost/found

Through October 30 - Maja Dlugolecki: Lost/Found at Glass Rice

This new body of work by Maja Dlugolecki reads as pure emotion on raw canvas, with the artist's intuition guiding every brushstroke and marker line. I continue to very much appreciate how artists are processing the pandemic, and here the title of each painting includes something lost and something found, taken from anonymous responses Dlugolecki crowdsourced from the internet. Layered on top of Dlugolecki's canvases, where in places the color is more sparse and in others diluted paint almost completely saturates the frame, these glimpses of other people's lives led me to meditate on my personal gains and losses over the last 18 months. And then Dlugolecki invites you to write your own anonymous experience of lost/found on a slip of paper and leave it in a box as you exit the gallery.

Other things I liked this week:

Jennifer's Body directed by Karyn Kusama. I hear from my reliable source in Gen Z that this film is experiencing a resurgence on TikTok right now and rightfully so, with its sharp script by Diablo Cody that centers the female characters in a teen horror movie. There's gore and demonic possession for sure, but also smart things to say about high school friendship.
My Little Sister directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond. Very difficult subject matter here as adult siblings face cancer, but it also has absolutely gorgeous direction that allows Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger to just do their thing. The depiction of family dynamics, and of the magical thinking that accompanies grief, felt very real too.
Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust by James Comey. Nothing in here that's new to anyone who regularly reads Heather Cox Richardson, but worth a look for the entertaining stories from early in Comey's career. He tries to explain some of his more controversial positions from recent times too, with varying levels of success.
I'm grateful to my alma mater UCSC for the online events they've been holding during pandemic, and last week's forum "The 21st Century Revolution in Gender & Sexual Diversity: A New Generation Leads the Way" was particularly inspiring. Psychology professors Phillip Hammack and Adriana Manago made a good case for complicating the media narratives around social media and offered a lot of hope for the future besides.
This year's Litquake is going full blast right now with an impressive hybrid line-up of outdoor readings and online events, and I was able to catch a virtual conversation Thursday evening between Bonnie Tsui and J.M. Thompson Thursday evening about Thompson's book Running Is a Kind of Dreaming. I will never ever be an Ironperson or even a runner of any kind but I do enjoy hearing about athletes' experiences.
I also got to dive into the much-postponed Other Minds Festival 25 this weekend thanks to their excellent livestream that made me feel like I was right there in the theater with the musicians. The line-up includes West Coast jazz and new music from Anthony Braxton & Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, Jen Shyu, Elliott Sharp, Tyshawn Sorey, Darius Jones, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Halvorson, Amirtha Kidambi, Ikue Mori, Myra Melford, King Britt, William Winant, Junius Paul, Mark Dresser, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hamid Drake, and Ambrose Akinmusire.

Posted at 10:14 AM in Art, Books, Discussion, Festival, Film, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 10, 2021

long kwento

Through December 4 - Maia Cruz Palileo: Long Kwento at the Wattis

This extraordinary solo show by Maia Cruz Palileo at the Wattis fuses Filipinx histories with the artist's own unique visual language into a simultaneously fractured and cohesive whole. Drawing both from extensive research Palileo conducted in the Filipiniana collection at Chicago's Newberry Library as well as the artist's own family stories, Palileo's paintings and sculptures refer directly to a violent, colonialist past while at the same time celebrate the vibrancy and craft of Filipinx culture. The complex narrative that emerges defiantly reclaims space and refuses to reduce the diasporic experience to any individual story. In the evocative booklet that accompanies the exhibition, curator Kim Nguyen quotes Grace Kyungwon Hong on the topics of memory and knowledge:

To bring out your dead is to say that these deaths are not unimportant or forgotten, or worse, coincidental. It is to say that these deaths are systemic, structural. To bring out your dead is both a memorial and a challenge, an act of grief and of defiance, a register or mortality and decline, and of the possibility of struggle and survival.

Other things I liked this week:

A Will to Kill by RV Raman. A classic Agatha-Christie-style whodunit set in a remote manor in the Indian countryside, this book gave my brain a lovely rest as I left detective Harith Atreya to puzzle out a murder. Maybe I should have been reading more mysteries during pandemic.
Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu. A gorgeous memoir of a childhood lived all over the world and the lasting effects of a mother's abandonment and a father's death plus bonus colonialism and racism. Loved the geological metaphor Owusu employed throughout too.
While I have been making sure my coffee is bird-friendly for some time now, I hadn't thought about my chocolate until a wonderful presentation this week by Sharol Nelson-Embry about harvesting practices such as agroforestry, wild harvesting, and shade growing and how they connect to some cool bird species. Nelson-Embry offers delicious bird-friendly chocolate options in her online shop Cocoa Case, and you can even pick up a set that benefits the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory during their fall fundraiser.
In yet another brilliant shutdown hack the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is presented as a streamable film this year, beautifully filmed in various locations around the Bay Area...including an elementary school near my apartment! I was able to attend the virtual premiere Thursday evening and hear intros from the presenting artists too, which was super-neat.
The Mill Valley Film Festival also has an impressive online program this year, including Bob Sarles and John Anderson's riveting documentary Born in Chicago about the birth and the enduring influence of the Chicago blues. I watched it last night and was grooving around my apartment to all of its amazing vintage gig footage.