Engineer's Daughter

agenda 12.12.12

Thursday, December 13:

• Women, Art, and Technology: An Uneasy Access? at the Performance Art Institute
• Kala “Artists’ Annual” Exhibition and Opening
• Thrill Jockey Records 20th Anniversary Show at The Independent

Friday, December 14:

• Marine Hugonnier and Taha Belal "Disrupt" Opening Reception at Highlight Gallery
• SF Cinematheque Year End Party Fundraiser + Auction at Incline Gallery and the Roxie
• Points of Departure: Trivial Pursuit: A nomadic talk series curated by Zoë Taleporos and Pablo Guardiola at Royal Nonesuch Gallery
• The Mountain Goats at The Fillmore
• Psychic TV, Lumerians, King Dude, Youth Code at the Uptown

Saturday, December 15:

• Record Weasels Record $wap at Brownstar Studios
• Small Art Show at Warehouse 416
• Chris Ballantyne, Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery
• Artist Talk with Colpa Press’s Luca Antonucci & Carissa Potter at Kala
• Art Hack Day: Lethal Software Exhibit & Holiday Party at GAFFTA
• Mago with Dohee Lee at Meridian Gallery
• Psychic TV, Lumerians, King Dude, Youth Code at the Uptown
• No Way Back with Optimo, Conor, and Solar at Monarch

Sunday, December 16:

• Flowers at Artists' Television Access

Monday, December 17:

• Dee Dee and Brandon play songs from Dum Dum Girls and The Crocodiles at the Rickshaw Stop
• KMEL Holiday House of Soul with The Weeknd at the Warfield

Tuesday, December 18:

• There's a Song In My Heart: a Holiday Party for Visual Aid at Varnish Fine Art
• Sunn O))) at Mezzanine

Wednesday, December 19:

• Fuzz with Ty Segall & Charlie Mootheart at the Hemlock Tavern
• Psychic Ills, Wymond Miles at Bottom of the Hill

miscellany 12.05.11

Leslie Shows, from her current show at Haines Gallery

I've been taking some time to recover after spending the week of Thanksgiving in Copenhagen, but soon I should have my pictures sorted out and then will do a proper post about the trip besides (sneak peek a video here).  In the meantime I wanted to post a few quick links from some of my recent art and culture intake.

• Leslie Shows: Split Array at Haines Gallery.  Shows is already one of my favorite local artists, and she pushes herself forward into another dimension in this exhibition of new work, creating paintings on reflective metal with complex geological layers.  Next Wednesday 12/14 she and BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder will be discussing her work at the gallery.
• Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International.  Bruguera is in the midst of this ongoing project that explores the rights and identity of contemporary immigrants.  She spoke at the Kadist Foundation Wednesday night and encouraged everyone to participate in the actions that are being planned for International Migrants Day on Sunday 12/18.  She was joined by Adriana Camarena, who read from her essay "The Geography of the Unseen" (included in Rebecca Solnit's book Infinite City) as well as from newer stories she has been collecting on the streets of the Mission.
• Thea Farhadian.  I saw Farhadian perform at the Luggage Store New Music Series Thursday night, beautiful looped violin compositions that merged classical Arabic music with noise and electronica.  No upcoming shows are listed on her website, but you can check out some documentation of a collaborative project she did with artist Silvina Der-Meguerditchian here.
• Frances Stark: the whole of all the parts as well as the parts of all the parts at the Mills Art Museum.  Block out an hour and go spend it with Stark's confounding, moving, and very funny video piece, which as it progresses leads you from screen to screen through the length of the whole museum.  Major bonus points for including an homage to Lady Gaga's "Telephone" as well as use of online avatars and chat conversations.  Stark will be speaking at Mills this Wednesday 12/7, and I would wager she'll incorporate PowerPoint somehow.
• Like Crazy.  Drake Doremus gives us a film not so much about how inextinguishable love is but rather about how it would often be better if we just got over it when it ends.  Move the fuck on, embrace real life instead of fantasy.  That's what I took away from it anyway, in between enjoying the scenery shot in London and Santa Monica.

Want more?

• The Headlands First Look party Wednesday 12/7 is going to be killer, cocktails and yummy bites aplenty plus the chance to be the first to hear who next year's residents will be.
• Scout Niblett is in town this week, playing Vitus in Oakland Wednesday 12/7 and the Hemlock in SF Thursday 12/8.
• And if you don't feel like going out: Errol Morris's Tabloid is available to rent from iTunes and Netflix has about a hundred episodes of No Reservations.

agenda 03.02.2011

Tons of great stuff this week, and this former classics student throws my vote firmly behind the play named after a Greek god.  Friday night at the Berkeley Art Museum is going to rule hard too.

Thursday, March 3:

• HERMES at The Exit Stage Left

Friday, March 4:

• Deborah Oropallo, "Tale Spin" at Gallery 16
• Sonya Rapoport: Pairings of Polarities at Kala Gallery
• Fires of Unknown Origin: Vholtz, Hubble, Kevin Greenspon at the Berkeley Art Museum
• MARCUS 40TH BARFDAY w/MASSAKRO, PYROKLAST, ZBS, ABRUPT at 924 Gilman

Saturday, March 5:

• Saturday Night Soul Party!!! at the Elbo Room
• HERMES Opening Party! at Exit Theatre

ibid.

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

Last night Dave and I did a very pleasant Art Murmur meander in the warm Oakland air.  Despite an alarmingly strong police presence (apparently there's nothing else going on in Oakland on a Friday night that requires their attention) moods were running high, and the art was very good indeed.  These were my favorites:

• Jennie Ottinger's ibid. at Johansson Projects (pictured right) - Gallery owner/curator extraordinaire Kimberly Johansson knocks another one out of the park with Ottinger's show.  Timothy Buckwalter totally nailed it when he said Ottinger is "kinda like Marlene Dumas meets David Park" on his blog.  The slightly obscured features of Dumas meet Park's blocks of color and strong sense of composition in Ottinger's work, with subjects freely ranging from racehorses to operating rooms to a line-up of schoolgirls with ruddy knees.
• The Four Corners Tour by Erica Gangsei at 21 Grand - Gangsei has created a wonderland of an installation in the gallery, mounting small photographs, sculptures, and stop-motion animated videos at neat intervals directly onto the walls.  Look closely and you'll see eyeballs staring back at you out of that piece of fuzz, or a rainbow reflected through a tiny piece of plastic hanging from a pin.  Gangsei references Richard Tuttle directly, and her work also brings in elements of Hayao Miyazaki and Tom Friedman.  Utterly unpretentious and completely charming.

I didn't make it to the Best of the East Bay party at the Oakland Museum last night, opting instead for pizza and beers and good conversation at Lanesplitters and then International Freakout A Go-Go over at the Totally Intense Fractal Mind Gaze Hut, but early reports indicate a fabulous time was had by all.  I hella heart my East Bay.

pastforward

The Lab is continuing its 25th anniversary celebrations with an exhibition that opened tonight called PastForward, and I BARTed over after work to take a peek.  For this show the gallery put out a call for artists (such as Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin, pictured right) to create work that responds to some of the more familiar names the Lab has shown in the past.  I zeroed right in on Andrew Wingler's giant pieced-together photographs, one of the corner in the Mission that now houses the Beauty Bar and another of a punk band performing in what could be one of the old abandoned movie palaces along Mission's main strip, and understood almost on a visceral level how they link to Barry McGee's work, especially his (and Margaret Kilgallen's) graffiti and its way of staking a claim in public space.  I was amused that not one but two artists took on Trevor Paglen, either confirming his trendiness or simply upholding my belief he's doing some of the most interesting and important work out there right now.  Ryan Hendon's large-scale photographs of abandoned turret foundations hold an ethereal beauty that connected with Paglen's interest in the military, while JP Kelly's installation addresses similar concerns through the sinister words and diagrams that trace themselves in light on a glass warhead.  I also really liked Aaron Rosenstreich's series of circular black-and-white photographs of constructed landscapes from around the Bay Area that refers to Rigo 23's cleverly tweaked street sign murals, as well as Jeremiah Barber's performance on video Portrait of My Father Illuminated by Pounding Dry Ground that perfectly captures the feeling of disquiet that Tony Oursler's pieces can inspire.  Even if you didn't know the theme of the exhibition the work of the artists on display absolutely stands on its own, and I look forward to a hypothetical show 25 years from now in which they are the ones whose work provides the inspiration for a new batch of artists.

By the way, if you're reading this you should by all means be attending my 33 1/3rd birthday party tomorrow night.  However if for some reason you cannot reach (or make it across the bridge) I will instead recommend the Flaming Lotus Girls' summer soiree This Is Your Brain...on Fire!  They will be debuting their newest sculpture Soma, which reportedly takes on the form of a gigantic flame-spitting neuron.  I can definitely throw my support behind that.

what's the big idea?

Yerba Buena always throws a good party, and the one last night centered around their '08-'09 season Big Idea "Ritual and Redemption" was no exception.  Mission Street Food brought back their original taco truck for one night only and parked it on Third on the sidewalk right outside the museum's sculpture court.  Brent and I arrived early to sample one of everything on offer (pork belly on flatbread and a duck taco for him, the king trumpet mushroom on flatbread for me, Szechuan eggplant and garlic glass noodles to share), and MSF also built a "night market" in the sculpture court proper with more delicious goodies.  Inside the museum Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence rubbed elbows with art patrons while a few brave souls volunteered for ink from tattoo artists Philip Milic and Andrew Mann at one end of the lobby (oh that hypnotic buzz from the tattoo needles) and trailers from trashy films like Getting It On! screened upstairs.  I hung out for a rockin' set from the Ex-Boyfriends followed by a fabulous drag show hosted by Monistat and Anna Conda, and I also spent some quality time inside the Nick Cave exhibit.  More on that tomorrow.

Also tomorrow if you happen to be in the East Bay Seth Grahame-Smith, author of the much-buzzed-about literary mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, will be doing a reading at Diesel.  Personally I prefer to revisit the Austen in its original form, but Grahame-Smith has clearly tapped something in the cultural zeitgeist.  The undead are popping up everywhere right now.

white elephants

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - 11am PST, Sunday, April 19
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
Then stay tuned at 11am, when Poindexter will be interviewing the fabulous Anni Rossi live and in person.  It's going to be awesome.

I myself will be soaking up the rays in the East Bay tomorrow afternoon, but I highly recommend heading over to Dolores Park for some sunshine, excellent hipster watching, and the 1st Annual White Elephant Gift Exchange.  Regifting, with minimal guilt!

maugre

Map from Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London, 1889 (UK).  "The colour-coding, inscribed at the bottom of the map, runs as follows: 'Black: Lowest class.  Vicious, semi-criminal.  Dark blue: Very poor, casual.  Chronic want.  Light blue: Poor.  18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.  Gray: Mixed.  Some comfortable, others poor.  Pink: Fairly comfortable.  Good ordinary earnings.  Red: Middle class.  Well-to-do.  Gold: Upper-middle and Upper classes.  Wealthy.'"  It's one thing to understand on an intellectual level that Victorian London experienced incredible economic disparity, but it's quite another to see it all laid out in colors.  For the full map, side-by-side with a contemporary map of the city, please visit the Charles Booth Online Archive.

By the way, if you don't already have election night plans Yerba Buena is hosting a kick-ass Freedom of Art party featuring DJs, artists, dance performances, musicians and (most importantly) free pizza when the polls close.  Meanwhile over on my side of the Bay Carla Kihlstedt and fellow Sleepytime Gorilla Museum member Matthias Bossi will be headlining an election night party at the Uptown that also promises a ton of special guests.  I do believe we're going to have reason to celebrate.

you say melodica

Happiness is: seeing Dandeline and Octomutt at the Rite Spot tonight, and also getting to shake Jonathan Segel's hand and voice some of my appreciation to him for his music.  Not to mention quality time spent with friends.  All in a weekend's work.

And not to be the girl who's cried wolf twice already, but my Sunday afternoon shift got extended again and I'm DJing tomorrow:

3 - 6pm PST, Sunday, August 17

KALX Berkeley 90.7fm 

You could even tune me in from your boat on Lake Merritt at the Oaklandish Radio Regatta tomorrow!  Next week I super-duper-pinky-swear I won't be on the air, and I know this because I will be at Outside Lands all day Sunday.