Engineer's Daughter

notes from the weekend

• The new Into the Brightness exhibit at OMCA is absolutely spectacular, featuring artists from Creative Growth, Creativity Explored, and NIAD. Beautifully curated and highlighting art in every possible medium, the show might be the first time a museum-goer has seen work by developmentally disabled artists and what a wonderful introduction it is. It's also just a burst of pure unadulterated joy, so appreciated after these last tough years.
• Meanwhile over at the de Young I somewhat reluctantly ponied up for Ansel Adams in Our Time but ended up being impressed with how well the exhibition was put together. It offers up the famous landscape photography for sure but also plenty of more intimate and lesser-known work, alongside pieces by contemporary artists that create interesting juxtapositions and conversations. And honestly more than a few of the Adams classics still stopped cynical old me in my tracks they were so beautiful.
• Otherwise I've just been watching Oakland Soul win a lot of games. Hooray for local women's soccer!

sports content

Really this post is just an excuse to show off how Stella's cutout, currently seated in row 10 at the A's Coliseum, appeared on TV last week when my dad spotted her in the stands. That's my one-eared cat!

• But I'm also binging The Last Dance this week and it's all kinds of awesome.
• The always-correct Wesley Morris said of the series: “You could call these 10 hours a walk down memory lane. But that’d be like calling Mardi Gras a parade.”
• Check out the fascinating conversation between Eric Eddings and Ed O'Bannon aka The Man Who Beat the NCAA on podcast The Nod
• For more basketball through a nostalgic lens I also highly recommend the documentary After the Game
• And it's not too late to get your own pet a seat in the stands this short baseball season, with proceeds benefiting the East Bay SPCA and Animal Rescue Foundation.

i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life

i am always doing that which i cannot do in order that i may learn how to do it

i have tried in my way to be free

relax as it is

agenda 04.27.2011

Thursday, April 28:

• Curating People at the Performance Art Institute in San Francisco and the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley

Friday, April 29:

• From the Golden West Notebooks - An exhibition and book release event at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
• Ska Night- Union 13, Impalers, Los Dryheavers, Isolated Victims at 924 Gilman
• International Freakout A Go-Go! with Live Fela Kuti cover band Papa Snap at First Church of the Buzzard

Saturday, April 30:

• 6th Annual Walk Against Rape in San Francisco
• Fang, Attitude Adjustment, Scheisse Minnelli, Zero Bull Shit, The Need at 924 Gilman
• Dance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sunday, May 1:

• SF Tweed East Bay Spring Ride 2011 starting at Jack London Square

tour de san francisco

Whenever I do one of my long weekends in another city I always come back to the Bay Area with a renewed energy for all the amazing art and culture going on right here in my own backyard, and the way I'm feeling post-Chicago is no exception.  This weekend I took advantage of the gorgeous weather and hoofed it from one end of the city to the other, taking in street fairs and art installations alike.  Because I'm feeling lazy (and a little woozy from all that sunshine) here on a Sunday night I'm distilling the highlights down to bullet points instead of doing full write-ups for each one.  You will quickly notice that food and drink constitute a strong theme:

• Summerland in Mint Plaza - A grilled shrimp skewer over an artichoke heart and frisee salad from Chez Papa Resto, then a red velvet and an horchata cupcake from Mission Minis.
• Tour de Fat in Golden Gate Park - One New Belgium Hoptober golden ale.  To benefit the SF Bike Coalition and the Bay Area Ridge Trail, naturally.
• Expo for Independent Arts in Golden Gate Park - A chatty stop by the KALX table, and a free scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from Ben & Jerry's thanks to a random benefactor.
• Altered Barbie at Shotwell 50 Studios - Always a fun show, but Alis Cumming's creepy-cool voyeuristic photos of dolls in compromising positions (one of which is pictured above) genuinely knocked my socks off.
• Folsom Street Fair - Plantains with beans and cheese on corn cakes from Pica Pica.  Strawberry salad from the Spencer on the Go truck.  Oh yeah and the kink.com booth.

so you want to be a boxer?

I am no fan of boxing, one of the most elementally brutal spectator sports, but every once in a while it does spawn something approaching poetry: F.X. Toole's short stories, John Huston's film Fat City, and now Nicolai Howalt's series of photographs of young boxers in Denmark.  Taken directly before and after the boys' bouts, the pictures reveal striking physical changes like sweat-soaked hair and smeared blood but also less obvious shifts in the fighters' facial expressions.  Author AL Kennedy writes quite movingly about what she perceives in Howalt's photos:

I can only say what I see. And somehow I am only half-surprised that the first pictures show me boys and the second not men - that would be inaccurate - but adults. Between the two exposures, in their own ways, these faces have learned a lesson of reality: that it is full of physics, torsion, contrecoups, nerves and bones, velocities and meat. They have learned they are meat, fallible and apt to die. Bad things will happen - even in victory - and they will be unstoppable. These are unbearable things to know and yet we should know them, because they are true. The signs of these hurts are how we recognise each other: that we're grown- ups, have a human nature. And we can decide whether our hurts make us predators, or victims, or something beyond those limits - compassionate.

Kennedy seems to me the perfect person to elucidate these feelings, as her novel Paradise similarly created unlikely beauty for me in the midst of something inherently ugly, in that case alcoholism instead of boxing.  And even as Howalt's images hit me in the stomach, I am compelled to look, and look again.  You can see a selection in the gallery here.

jamie hewlett: designs past and present

How in all hell did I not know Jamie Hewlett did a comic adaptation of Pulp's "Common People"?  I was even living in England at the time, heavily obsessed with both Jarvis Cocker and Hewlett's comics, so that was a huge miss on my part.  You can see a page from it in the gallery here along with a brief taste of Tank Girl and several pictures from Monkey: Journey to the West, the opera Hewlett designed that also features music by Damon Albarn.  Hewlett of course also worked with Albarn to form Gorillaz and created the cartoon members of the band.  I have always found his characters dead sexy, snaggle teeth and all, and yes I even dressed up in costume to go see the Tank Girl movie when it came out lo those many years ago.

So 8/8/08 is officially over as I write this.  Los Angeles and New York?  Got a new iteration of the Boredoms's fucking awesome BoaDrum performance today.  San Francisco?  Got World Hoop Day.  Suffice it to say I wish I had been in LA again this weekend.

I also skipped the reception for this year's Altered Barbie show tonight in favor of hanging with friends and watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but the exhibition will be up until August 17th if you'd like to see Barbie and Ken doing multitudes of things Mattel never intended.