Engineer's Daughter

to do list

Free Oakland UP

Holiday malaise got you down? Have I got some ideas for you!

• Tucked into an unassuming strip mall in Oakland's Dimond district, Free Oakland UP is a wondrous little "shop" where every visitor is welcome to one free item. The project is the brainchild of Jocelyn Meggait, created as a social experiment, and when I visited on Friday it felt like the perfect antidote to the rampant shopping going on elsewhere in the country. Take your time selecting your free item, check out the work in the gallery area by the current artist-in-residence, and buy an artfully-potted plant to help Maggait pay the rent. Then bop across the parking lot to get a quart of lemon chiffon at local ice cream legend Loard's...and I hear that the framer and mechanic in that same lot are awesome too.
• Meanwhile, down in Uptown, Windy Chien has a beautiful show of knots and splices at Local Language called Mutations. Grab a seasonal cocktail from the in-house tasting room to enhance your viewing experience and marvel at Chien's sculptural, textural pieces, which are deceptive in their simplicity.
• Further afield but well worth the drive, the San José Museum of Art has two unique exhibitions up right now I highly recommend. The first is the group show Other Walks, Other Lines, which begins with a quote about walking from Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust and spirals outwards from there to explore the many ways traveling by foot can be a source of inspiration, a form of protest, or a way to inadvertently court danger. The second is an epic solo exhibition on the second floor by Dinh Q. Lê entitled True Journey Is Return, and you could easily spend a couple hours exploring the varied narratives Lê has assembled about the Vietnamese experience.
• Coming up this Thursday, author Jose Antonio Vargas stops by Yerba Buena to chat with artist Jerome Reyes about the art-billboard Reyes currently has installed at the center and probably some other things besides. Alley Cat Books will also be selling copies of Vargas's Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen if you'd like to get a copy signed.
• And last but definitely not least, all this week the Recombinant Festival will be bringing extraordinary sounds and visuals to the Mission. Pick any night to attend; you cannot go wrong.

matokie mix 11.25.18

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matokie mix 11.18.18

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matokie mix 03.25.18

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matokie mix 01.28.18

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agenda 04.19.17

Art

Through April 28 - The New Situationists at Pro Arts Gallery.  Quickly, get thee to Oakland for this amazing group show that encompasses both historical aspects of the Situationist International movement (active 1957-1972) and contemporary interpretations, including a vibrant roster of activations in Ogawa Plaza, films, podcasts, performances and more.  Guy Debord would approve.

 

Theater

Through May 21 - Leni at Aurora Theatre.  Seeing two of my favorite local actors (Martha Brigham and Stacy Ross) face off against one another as dueling Leni Riefenstahls was divine pleasure, and in the intimate space upstairs at Aurora the audience is literally drawn into their dialogue.  Playwright Sarah Greenman covers an impressive amount of ground in 80 minutes, and does a great job of highlighting Riefenstahl's genius while not letting her completely off the hook either for her role in the Nazi propaganda machine.

 

Film

Marlon Brando only directed one movie in his lifetime, the mesmerizing western One-Eyed Jacks (in which he also starred).  Gorgeously shot in locations like Death Valley and Monterey, the film is an intense depiction of one man's quest for revenge, and it features wonderful and complex performances by Karl Malden and Pina Pellicer alongside Brando himself.  Bonus true fact: Brando and Pellicer and I all have the same birthday.

 

Book

Set in mid-'90s Montego Bay and with all dialogue in authentic Jamaican patois, Nicole Dennis-Benn's novel Here Comes the Sun tells the stories of a trio of women, each with her own unique struggle.  Margot has ambitions beyond her job at the local resort, and her sister Thandi is trying to decide what to do with her life after she's done with school...and bleaching her skin to achieve a different social standing.  Meanwhile Verdene must live as an outcast in her own town due to her sexuality.  I get frustrated when a book with this depth gets the standard chick-lit cover, but I encourage readers to look past it and to dive in.

 

Music

The last time I saw Phil Elverum perform as Mount Eerie was many years ago at LoBot, when a small gaggle of us stood in a circle around him and listened as he played his beautiful music.  The scene was similarly respectful at his sold-out show at the Starline Friday night where he performed the newest Mount Eerie album "A Crow Looked At Me" in its entirety, an album on which Elverum processes the recent death of his wife Geneviève Castrée from pancreatic cancer.  For me his grief connected directly to the Ghost Ship fire and other personal tragedy, and that night Oakland stood together, with Phil, and wept.

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agenda 04.12.17

Art

Through May 14 - Henrik Olesen: The Walk at the Wattis Institute.  "Henrik Olesen adds dirt to the neatness and sexlessness of conceptual art...He queers all that is fixed and organized, replacing it with the dissolved and the disorganized, the polysexual."  Which is a great way to describe why I adored this exhibition and its refreshingly grimy take on identity and representation.  It's also very punk rock.

 

Theater

Through April 16 - Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes at the Arabian Shakespeare Company.  Yussef El Guindi does it again with this incisive look at how Muslims are portrayed in the media, made all the more poignant by current events.  Tarek Caan is fabulous as Ashraf, an actor who is being offered the chance to work with his dream film director and a mind-blowing co-star.  There's only one problem: the script is Islamophobic drivel.

 

Film

I accidentally put together a perfect double feature this week when I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and then Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale back-to-back, both films I already knew I loved and had been meaning to watch again.  But I had forgotten Jeff Daniels's Bernard attempts a Breathless reference to Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale at a fraught moment, and it falls dead flat.  Both films: dead brilliant.

 

Book

Every once in a blue moon a book comes along so deeply-researched and written with such intelligence and compassion that it could actually change the course of society.  Every single American should read Matthew Desmond's Evicted to better understand the plight of those living in poverty in our cities, and how those poor are being exploited by the rental market.  I genuinely hope Ben Carson is reading it.

 

Music

As part of the SF International Film Festival, Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy) teamed up with Chicago's Bitchin Baja's and our own Cornelius Boots at the Castro Monday evening to provide a live soundtrack to a trio of avant-garde films by Jerome Hiler, and the result was nothing less than exquisite.  Oldham's music is pretty damn gorgeous all on its own too.

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matokie mix 04.09.17

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agenda 04.05.17

Art

Through April 29 - Won Ju Lim: Casting at Haines Gallery.  If you saw Won Ju Lim's YBCA exhibition Raycraft Is Dead a couple years back you know not to miss this solo show at Haines, full of fragmentation and reconstruction in the form of paintings, sculptures, lightboxes, and film.  Her new work uses Proust and the multiple meanings of the verb "to cast" as jumping-off points, and the breadth of her practice is impressive (I can't wait to see more film from her!).

 

Theater

Every first Thursday - Tourettes Without Regrets at the Oakland Metro Operahouse.  I recently attended my first TWR, their "Fuck Valentine's Day" edition, and as I was standing there packed into a crowd of diverse freaks watching various vulgar and hilarious acts on stage I was just extremely grateful for this Bay Area institution.  The messier it is the better, and this month's "Awesome April" installment looks like it will be quite the beautiful mess.

 

Film

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams might have confounded some of its viewers at the time of its release in 1990, but it reads as pure prescient poetry now, especially with the director's focus on the destruction caused by human ignorance.  Each of the eight "dreams" stands on its own, though there are subtle linkages as well, and it is completely impossible for me to pick a favorite.  I love them all for different reasons.

 

Book

Hans Herbert Grimm hoped his 1928 book about a young German solider during WWI would achieve the same success as All Quiet on the Western Front, but sadly Schlump never took off in his lifetime.  Possibly it was too smart and satirical, with a main character who is relatable but decidedly less than a clear hero.  However, rarely has an author been able to capture the extremes of war as masterfully as Grimm did here, and by reissuing it now NYRB has given contemporary readers a chance to rediscover this gem.

 

Music

Mild High Club played a sold out Tuesday night show at the Starline last night...which means that will probably be the last time I'll be able to see them in a venue that small.  This video gives you a good taste of their weirdo-psych sound; please enjoy!

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matokie mix 04.02.17

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