lies like truth

I often hear people in this country complaining about how pointless the standing ovation has become in a performance setting. Here in the States, an artist need only walk on stage, belch, and walk off again to witness an audience jump to its feet in rapturous applause. But audiences aren't the only party involved in a public performance that's to blame for overdoing things that might be better left underdone. I'm thinking specifically about the tradition of the end-of-show encore in a musical performance: Few shows merit one, and yet the … [Read more...]

Interactivity is so much the rage these days both in journalism and in the arts that it's starting to make things like the business of going to see a traditional play or ballet look really old-fashioned. It's a sign of the times that two out of the three just-announced Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge awards are going to organizations that source content from members of the public. (The third is a university-based project, and therefore also distinct from the regular media setup.) And events in which audience members are … [Read more...]

The Kitchen Sisters – a.k.a. National Public Radio producers Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva -- tell extraordinary stories about ordinary people. Thousands of listeners have tuned in over the years to hear the Sisters’ careening explorations of subjects as diverse as the daily lives of Vietnamese nail salon workers, the history of the country’s first all-female radio station and the myriad ways people interact with their George Foreman Grills. The Kitchen Sisters met in Santa Cruz in 1979 and soon began collaborating on a weekly radio … [Read more...]

Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of cultural life in San Francisco at the present time is how Pop-Up Magazine manages to sell out Davies Symphony Hall, one of the city's biggest venues with nearly 3000 seats, in just 30 minutes. Not even Yo Yo Ma is capable of attracting so many paying customers so fast to Davies, and it's kind of amazing and awe-inspiring that any live performance event not involving a slew of major celebrities could be so popular. For those of you who aren't aware of the phenomenon that is Pop-Up Magazine, here's … [Read more...]

Caught Annie Baker's subtle play about modern manhood, The Aliens, in a beautifully crafted production at SF Playhouse over the weekend. Forgive the concision of this blog post, but I'm dog-tired and want to get at least some brief thoughts down about the experience before hitting the sack. So I'll use bullet points to explain what I liked about it. 1. The play takes place in the garbage can-stinky, cramped and tightly-enclosed back yard of a cafe in Vermont. Bill English's incredibly detailed and realistic set design is full of symbolic … [Read more...]

One of the best things about being a John S Knight Fellow at Stanford is that when a line of thinking tugs at you and you're struggling to reel it in, all you have to do is put the word out to the other 19 journalists in the group and before you know it, you've convened a group of smart people to hash out the idea with, most often in the sun over a glass of wine. This was the case recently for me. I've been fascinated by the slippery link between art and journalism for many years (theres a reason why this blog is called 'lies like truth') … [Read more...]

If the music I heard at the Fifth Annual Switchboard Music Festival can be used as a gauge of the state of contemporary composition today, I would have to say that contemporary music is a lot like my hairdryer. I don't have a very good hairdryer; I adopted it from a friend and I rarely use it. It doesn't bother me that it only has two modes: low and slow, and high and hot. But that the Switchboard Festival, a one day event in San Francisco showcasing the talents of new composers and the hip, young ensembles and soloists that perform this … [Read more...]

Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia 2002 trilogy of plays and Abel Gance's 1927 biopic Napoleon have a great deal in common: They both portray famous revolutionary European figures and explore the sociological, political and personal factors that influenced their actions, are meditations on humans' ability to create and adapt to change, and are both rather long. The Coast of Utopia consists of three, three-hour=long dramas; Napoleon is five and a half hours long. I caught the first part of The Coast of Utopia, "Voyage," in an expert … [Read more...]

"We're toughing it out," the young woman in the gold lamé dress said to my friend and I during intermission yesterday evening at the opening night of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at The Curran Theatre in San Francisco. "We're waiting for the double homicide." The first half of director Christopher Morahan's subtle production of Pinter's classic starring Jonathan Pryce as a craggy opportunistic down-and-outer with a shady past, seemed to leave Bay Area audiences feeling non-plussed. I noticed lots of shrugging shoulders and furrowed brows. … [Read more...]

It was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco and Pierre-Laurent Aimard managed to make it pour and freeze indoors. The French pianist's recital at The Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances was so icy and insular that winter reigned in the gallery and stalls. It was, of course, a technically accomplished performance, and full of subtlety and nuance. Enormous spaces of emptiness opened up in between the notes of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag's Jatekok (Games,) a work composed of shard-like fragments that … [Read more...]