Engineer's Daughter

input january 2020

Art

Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected] at the de Young

Chanell Stone: Natura Negra at MoAD

Negative Capabilities at Bass & Reiner

Leilah Babirye: Gwe Is Ye Nze, Lekka Mbele Nze (You Are Not Me, Let Me Be Me) at Rebecca Camacho Presents

 

Books

A King Alone - Jean Giono

Solar Bones - Mike McCormack

Agathe; or, The Forgotten Sister - Robert Musil

Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other Stories - Maxim Osipov

Black No More - George Schuyler

 

Hikes

Stream View Trail/Red Tail Hawk Trail/Grey Fox Trail at Bishop Ranch Regional Open Space

 

Movies

Water Lilies - Céline Sciamma

Hail Satan? - Penny Lane

Tomboy - Céline Sciamma

Girlhood - Céline Sciamma

The Juniper Tree - Nietzchka Keene

Dumbo - Tim Burton

Who's That Knocking at My Door - Martin Scorsese

Smithereens - Susan Seidelman

Desperately Seeking Susan - Susan Seidelman

Cookie - Susan Seidelman

Long Shot - Jonathan Levine

 

Music

Charles Amirkhanian at the David Brower Center

Jennifer Koh/Vijay Iyer/Tyshawn Sorey at the Herbst

 

Talks

Lily Sloane – A Shelter for the Psyche & tamara suarez porras – eclipsis, or a line of totality: the solar eclipses of 1979, 2017, and 2024 at the Prelinger Library

 

Theater

Noura at MTC

How to Transcend a Happy Marriage at Custom Made

 

Travel

Death Valley

the week that was

Things worth sharing:

1. I took a lovely mini road trip to Pescadero last week: Stayed at the Pescadero Creek Inn, had a picnic lunch at Arcangeli Grocery, poked around the Pigeon Point Light Station, dined at Duarte's, coffeed up at Downtown Local, visited the goats at Harley Farms. The perfect fall getaway.
2. The book I took along with me was a slim volume of Vasko Popa's potent poems, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Charles Simic. It's hard to beat sitting in the sun by the sea and reading poetry rich with folkloric and surrealist imagery.
3. Terry Fox: Resonance is a major retrospective of the artist's work, curated by Dena Beard and Constance Lewallen, taking place right now across multiple venues around the Bay Area. It all kicked off last Friday at Grace Cathedral with Fox's 1977 piece The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats, and visitors were indeed invited to walk the labyrinth while the kitties rumbled away. I found a spot on the outskirts and just sank into the sound.
4. I also recommend the group show currently at the Mills College Art Museum, In Plain Sight, curated by Daniel Nevers and featuring work by Weston Teruya, Dario Robleto, castaneda/reiman, and Kathryn Andrews. The artists in the show encourage you to question your own perceptions and look more closely, mainly through objects constructed from a whole variety of materials.
5. I was chilled to the bone watching Alison Klayman's 2019 documentary The Brink, in which she closely follows (and interacts with) Steve Bannon in the time after he leaves the White House. That man is clearly evil embodied, as he stokes hate amongst Americans and meets with far-right leaders in Europe, but you also see the innate charm that makes him so dangerous.
6. Meanwhile thanks to the Criterion Channel I spent a wild week with the films of Lina Wertmüller, the first woman nominated for a Best Director Oscar. Honestly they contain way too much coercive sex/outright rape for me, but are still well worth a look if only to watch stellar actors (and regulars in her films) Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini do their thing. I'm not the first person to notice that the excellent fights in her films are actually better than the sex.
7. Photographer Jonathan Calm was at CCA Wednesday evening to give the Larry Sultan Photography Award lecture (he's also currently a resident at Headlands), and I'm fascinated by his ongoing project in which he is documenting the current state of sites listed in the Green Book. It's an epic undertaking, and as a black man traveling through the America of today he's finding all sorts of resonances with the past.
8. And a quick plug for two great new local businesses: Darling Electric Salon, where my stylist (and good friend) Lindsay will expertly minister to your coif, and Mela Bistro, where you should order the vegetarian platter.

mount shasta

I regain my equilibrium through travel, so the timing was ideal this last weekend to throw my trusty Lonely Planet in the car and drive 4 hours north to do some exploring in Mount Shasta.  In the middle of our first winter storm, natch.  Spoiler alert: I never saw the damn mountain.

24 hours in Mount Shasta:
-Pulling into town at Mount Shasta Pastry and picking out something savory and something sweet for the next day's breakfast: a pesto tomato tart and a generous slice of blueberry coffee cake.
-Lunch at Wassayaks: a rockin' basil tomato panini with a view of the clouds covering the mountain.
-Crystals for days at "metaphysical emporium" Soul Connections.
-Dipping my toe in local climbing culture at The Fifth Season.
-A fascinating peek at local history at the Sisson Museum (including a special exhibit on grizzlies!) before feeding a whole lot of hungry trout at the neighboring fish hatchery.
-A tromp through the rainy forest to Big Springs Creek on the Elsa Rupp Nature Trail.
-Warming back up with a black widow mocha in the snug environs of Seven Suns Coffee.
-Getting overly excited about seeing a glimpse of the snow on the base of the mountain while checking in at Mount Shasta Resort.
-Settling into my amazing Arts and Crafts-style forest chalet before running across the "street" to check out Lake Siskiyou and to take numerous restorative breaths.
-Dinner at Lily's: veggie Mediterranean pasta in an adorable clapboard house.
-Another try before sunset: Still no mountain?  Still no mountain.
-Waking up to the sound of steady rain on the chalet skylight and the scent of coffee percolating in my kitchen.
-Lazy morning reading on the couch in front of my gas fireplace.
-Lunch at the Berryvale Grocery cafe: Asian greens and tofu soup + excellent eavesdropping.
-A chai for the road and one last plaintive look at where the mountain should be.  Next time!

inspiration input

Hilary Pecis

-Art - Hilary Pecis: El Verano at Guerrero Gallery
Guerrero Gallery has relocated to a beautiful new space a block from Islais Creek, in the back of Living Green Design, and has inaugurated it with this wonderful show by Hilary Pecis in which she paints her SoCal backyard, the clutter around her house, her neighbor's bunny.  Her eye for color and composition is highly satisfying.

-Theater - H.O.M.E. (Hookers on Mars Eventually) at The Strand
Campo Santo and director Sean San José bring their always-welcome spirit of risk and experimentation to this debut play by local Star Finch that takes place both in Oakland and on Mars.  Finch expertly builds her world and sets her characters loose in it, and the trio of Lauren Spencer, Britney Frazier, and Michael Wayne Turner III are especially compelling in their roles as family members living on (literally) separate planets.

-Theater - Cabaret at the Golden Gate
50 years after its first Broadway production Cabaret has lost none of its punch and remains painfully current in a time when citizens are yet again being persecuted because of their faith and culture.  This sexed-up production (with Randy Harrison as a very saucy Emcee) captures the grit and glamor of pre-WWII Berlin, and also the sense of impending doom.  Pair it with a few installments of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

-Theater - "Master Harold" ...and the boys at Aurora
L. Peter Callender and Adrian Roberts are magic on stage together in Athol Fugard's microcosmic tale from apartheid South Africa.  Given the time and place you know exactly what turn the action will take, but thanks to the strength of the performances I still caught myself holding my breath at the end.

-Travel - Lodi
This wee friendly gem of a city in the San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by sun-baked vineyards, is a great place to taste unpretentious, award-winning Zinfandels (m2 Wines was a fave), or to stroll down charming School Street downtown (get libations and nibbles at Dancing Fox Winery & Bakery, Brix & Hops, Cheese Central), or to delve into the region's rich history at the exceptional San Joaquin County Historical Museum in Micke Grove Regional Park (said park also includes a peaceful Japanese garden), or to go paddling up the Mokelumne River (Headwaters Kayak will rent you a vessel and launch you from the boathouse on Lodi Lake).  Make it the perfect overnight getaway with a stay at Wine & Roses and dinner at their lovely Towne House restaurant.  That's what I did.

underwater museum in alexandria

The classics nerd in me did a little bounce of joy to see the images that have been released by architect Jacques Rougerie of the proposed underwater museum in Alexandria's harbor that will allow visits to Cleopatra's palace by the scuba-disinclined for the first time since the 5th century.  It's a brilliant idea to construct a fiberglass tunnel to the site instead of trying to move the fragile artifacts (which reportedly also contain remnants of the famous Alexandria lighthouse), though the project faces concerns about funding and whether proper site surveys will be conducted before construction begins.  Jack Shenker talked to Naguib Amin, local site manager for the Supreme Council for Antiquities, about some of the questions being raised:

Amin rejected claims that money would be better spent giving a makeover to the city's crumbling downtown buildings, most of which feature stunning colonial-era architecture. "We view the museum as an integral component of revitalising the city as a whole," he said.

If everything comes together properly the museum should be open to the public within five years, at which point I will be on the first plane to Egypt to go walk under the water.

up, up and away

One of the more curious occurrences in the architecture of modern cities is how everyone seems to want a ferris wheel, with giant structures currently in the works for Beijing, Berlin and of course Dubai.  Stuart Jeffries talked to Jay Pender, commercial manager of World Tourist Attractions, about the appeal of the sky-high structures:

So what is the attraction? "There is something iconic about really big wheels that gives the impression of modern go-ahead cities," says a Visit Britain spokeswoman. "In places like York, a modern, gleaming big wheel can complement the historic sites and architecture." "That's true," says Pender. "We find that in places like Belfast they have become symbols of resurgence, which is a nice thing to be associated with. For instance, we're putting a 60m wheel up at the seafront in Weston-super-Mare in May, which is just the thing the place needs after the pier burned down last year. Even though they aren't designed as permanent structures, people often want them to be permanent because they become so fondly regarded."

Even the London Eye was supposed to be temporary, but it's still holding court there on the bank of the Thames.  Though I adore a good view my fear of heights usually keeps my feet firmly planted on the ground, happy to leave other people to pay $30 to take a turn on the Eye or similar prices for other "observation wheels" around the world.  However, I would someday like to ride the Volksprater Riesenrad Ferris Wheel in Vienna, the site of Orson Welles's famous speech in The Third Man.  I want to see the people scurrying around like ants from up there.

40th anniversary of the jumbo jet

I'm not just an engineer's daughter; I'm also a former Pan Am flight attendant's daughter.  These two threads come together in my fetish for all things flight-related (as well as my travel bug), so I'm excited to note that the Boeing 747-100 jumbo jet celebrated its 40th birthday early last month.  Jonathan Glancey explains why the plane is a genuine design classic:

To say that the Boeing 747 revolutionised civil aviation would be an understatement. Not only was the aircraft huge – a mechanical elephant - but it promised lower fares for millions of people who may never have flown at all, let alone long-haul. For better or worse, the jumbo jet did its bit to democratise air travel. And yet at the time of its debut it was widely assumed that the plane would be built in limited numbers and with a relatively short life in passenger service. Of the 400 Jumbos initially planned, many were expected to become long-distance, heavy-duty freighters as an even more revolutionary generation of supersonic airliners reached for the sky, cutting journey times across the Atlantic in half.

We know how that turned out: The Concorde has been decommissioned, while the newest iteration of the 747 is preparing to enter service.  Click here for a fantastic gallery of jumbo jet photographs, including some classic pictures from the Pan Am archives.  My mom is not featured, alas.

a love letter to new york - in lego

I'm sure all of you Web-savvy types have already seen illustrator Christoph Niemann's fabulous I LEGO N.Y., first posted on his New York Times blog earlier this month, but I'm pointing to it here in giddy anticipation of my upcoming trip to NYC in mid-March.  Niemann distills some quintessential New York experiences into tableaux constructed out of his sons' Lego bricks, and the results are altogether quirky and absolutely charming.  I would love to do a similar project for the Bay Area, as soon as I can figure out how to build a suitable representation of a Pabst Blue Ribbon can to stand in for the Mission hipsters.  You can see Niemann's whole piece at the link above, or click here for a small gallery of highlights from The Guardian.

new york street artist poster boy: on the wall

As culture jams go, my favorites have always been the ones that make bold alterations to existing advertisements and billboards, taking the piss out of consumerism and Madison Avenue alike.  New York street artist Poster Boy has been brilliantly and anonymously tweaking subway ads for about a year now with little more than a razor and a wicked sense of humor.  And, unlike Banksy, he gives in-person interviews.  Ben Walters talked to him for the Guardian:

Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.

To see some examples of Poster Boy's adbusting, click through to the gallery here or check out his Flickr stream.  I love the ones where he pixelates posters using the grids formed by the subway tile as a sort of graph paper, and I also have to appreciate a street artist who can punnily reference Rauschenberg.  I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for his work when I'm in New York later this spring, that's for sure.

art exhibition highlights: indian highway at london's serpentine gallery

I have been thinking a lot about Mumbai and India after the terror attacks that took place there a few weeks back, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  The timing of the Serpentine Gallery's new exhibition Indian Highway therefore could not be more perfect, as it attempts to pack the entire contemporary art scene of an incredibly diverse subcontinent into that cozy former tea house in Hyde Park.  However, Adrian Searle was decidedly unimpressed with the show:

This exhibition makes large claims about including artists who address contemporary Indian society, environmentalism, sectarianism, globalisation, gender, postcolonialism, sexuality and class. This is a wagon train of pieties, and the Serpentine gallery is really not the space for an exhibition that attempts this kind of scope. It can do little more than signal preoccupations, and what is signalled is not necessarily addressed. The show is also described as a "snapshot". Who needs snapshots?

Laura Cumming, by contrast, found much to engage her interest, especially in the art that addresses the legacy of Britain's colonization of India like that of Subodh Gupta (pictured above):

The most immediate evocation of both here and there, though, is the office that fills an entire gallery: a stage set of battered old chairs, worn desks, filing cabinets and cupboards disgorging quantities of mysterious files, all manacled and padlocked as if the system could never be dismantled. Conflating overtones of the Raj administration with the bureaucracy of India's own civil service, it ramifies Rousseau's great lament that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Its maker, Subodh Gupta, is commonly described as India's Damien Hirst, partly because he makes installations but mainly because of his record-breaking prices. His work tends to be one-line, quick-impact and monumental, so it is no surprise that it is bought by collectors such as Charles Saatchi and François Pinault. The Serpentine piece feels less slick than usual.

I myself know next to nothing about contemporary Indian art, so I would welcome the opportunity to get a taste.  In lieu of a trip to London I'll instead just page through the Guardian's online gallery of the exhibition, and dream of seeing the riotous Mumbai nightscape (captured in the show by photographer Dayanita Singh) in person some day.