Archives for June 2008

Yussef El Guindi’s new play about a Middle-Eastern actor trying to make his way in Hollywood without being constantly cast as an Allah-praising, virgin-deflowering plane hijacker or suicide bomber has one of the catchiest titles I’ve heard on stage in recent years. Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes presciently ties in with the blockbuster new Indiana Jones movie currently playing in cinemas across the country — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — while at the same time refuting the link to Hollywood by deliberately eschewing any connection to the Harrison Ford franchise in terms of plot, characters and dialogue.

The irony is tidy, but it also unfortunately backfires: I found myself getting impatient with the play’s repetitive central argument (Middle Eastern actor faces off against Hollywood Machine) and longing to find out more about this Jihad Jones character and the adventures he has with the Kalashnikov Babes.

The racial-stereotyping issue the play seeks to expose is a serious one. From Disney’s animated feature Aladdin to the Fox television series 24, unseemly portraits of Arab characters have become increasingly common in U.S. popular culture over the past two decades. In the current political climate, Arab evildoers frequently replace Cold War Russian spies and Nazi soldiers in World War II as the villains in many a TV and film epic. This trend has doubtless affected public perceptions of the Arab World in a negative way.

But back to Guindi’s play, which is currently receiving its premiere under the auspices of San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions. Sadly — and somewhat ironically — for Guindi, the latest Indiana Jones flick doesn’t even focus on Arabs as evil-doers. The bad guys this time around are Cold War Russians, led by a severe-bobbed Cate Blanchett executing one of the worst performances of her career.

Still, I’ll continue to dream about the play that Guindi didn’t write — the one about Jihad Jones. I wonder what kind of character Guindi’s Jones would be? A thug? A savior? A raffish anti-hero who keeps us guessing? I wonder if I’ll ever find out. In the meantime, my essay about the play that Guindi did write appears in next week’s SF Weekly starting Wednesday.

The American Actors Equity Association (AEA) is pulling out of San Francisco.

On June 5, members of the Equity Bay Area Advisory Committee received a letter from Equity’s headquarters advising them of the organization’s decision to close San Francisco’s AEA office. “Over the next several months we will transition the administration of San Francisco/Bay Area Equity companies to our Los Angeles office,” the letter, signed by AEA President Mark Zimmerman and Executive Director John P Connolly, read.

The decision comes as a result of an AEA study into the organization’s business practices. The departure of San Francisco AEA business rep, Joel Reamer, to sister organization AFTRA in May, further prompted the decision.

Bay Area actors are reacting strongly to the news.

“There has been no consultation with the local membership regarding problems maintaining the office, no discussion about why there has been a problem maintaining a local rep, and no conversation at all with local membership,” says Bay Area Equity member, Steven Pawley. “The decision was announced to us by staff members only and it was presented as a decision already made.”

AEA’s head office maintains that Bay Area Equity members were kept in the loop about the decision.

“In consolidating and upgrading our business practices it was decided this year to eliminate the San Francisco office,” says AEA spokesperson Maria Somma. “The study was presented to the Western Regional Board. Then it went to the National Planning Committee and then on to the President’s Planning Committee. We had a meeting with the Bay Area Advisory Committee in the last week of May to inform them of our decision. We then sent a letter out to every single one of our members last week.”

AEA has had a presence in the Bay Area since the mid- to late 1970s. Following the closure of the San Francisco office, AEA will continue to maintain three other main offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

According to Somma, the relocation of Bay Area Equity business to Los Angeles is a positive move.

“The consolidation of our offices on the west coast will give us a stronger infrastructure. The change will be greatly facilitated by today’s high-speed, advanced telecommunications,” she says. “Furthermore, we intend to have not just one but a team of business agents working with Bay Area members in the future.”

Bay Area industry officials have mixed feelings about the decision.

“I think closing the SF office will have a negative effect for both actors and theatres in our region,” says Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, the region’s performing arts umbrella organization. “But I also recognize that this is an internal decision on Equity’s part. They have the right and the responsibility to make whatever staffing decisions they deem fit. I just want to make sure the regional and national leadership understand the many benefits provided by this local office.”

“This is a serious issue for local AEA artists and smaller theatres,” says Kelly Ground, Chair of Equity’s Bay Area Advisory Committee. “The big houses have totally outsourced productions, actors and directors from New York. The only avenues for local artists are the smaller companies. These companies need nurturing to use AEA actors. They benefit in the long run, in terms of quality and the ability to apply for grant funding. They need a local presence. A phone call isn’t going to do it.”

Dance and puppetry are kindred artforms. Dance captures the essence of human behavior and feeling. So does puppetry. Both art forms depend upon physical human dexterity. Given the close ties between the two, you’d imagine that there would be tons of renowned puppet danceworks out there. I guess there’s Petrushka – a ballet with a puppet in the plot. Maybe the doll at the center of Coppelia counts too. But I can’t think of any really well-known works created for puppets off the top of my head.

The innovative Bay Area-based choreographer Joe Goode‘s latest collaboration with puppet master Basil Twist could kick off a new trend for puppet ballets. The duo’s new piece, Wonderboy, which received its world premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts over the weekend, mines deep inside a puppet’s super-human soul.

The piece features just one puppet – a waif-like boy with skinny limbs, large eyes and a white, angular face. The story, if you can call it a story, for the piece doesn’t feature a narrative in the traditional sense of the word, follows the obsessions of an introverted young boy facing the weirdness of the world for the first time.

The puppet sits more or less still for a lot of the time during the 45-minute work, propped up inside a window frame with gauzy, white silk curtains by a couple of dancers as he watches the world. The spectator sport gets a little tiring after a while, especially since the boy is rather dyspeptic and whiny (a fact exacerbated by the high-pitched electronically manipulated timbre of his speaking voice.)

The piece picks up radically when the puppet takes part in the scenes he has for so long observed – the most captivating moments occur when the puppet is completely integrated into the dancers’ choreography. At one point, for instance, a female dancer slides along the floor on her back with her legs raised in the air making slow bicycle movements, while the puppet stands with his feet planted firmly on hers’ moving forwards in time with the dancer’s movements. In another magical moment, the puppet leaps precariously over the dancers’ curled, stepping stone-like bodies, as if trying to negotiate the challenges of life.

Wonderboy had a strange effect on me. I’m not sure I understood it fully, though there is something wondrous about the way Goode, Twist and their collaborators have reunited the two brotherly artforms of dance and puppetry. I loved the interplay between the wood and string-made instruments of the musical score, the wood and string-made puppet, and the wood and string-made puppet soul at the heart of the piece.

On Saturday night, the Berkeley Early Music Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of the largest work of vocal polyphony in the history of western music at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. The 16th century Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his mammoth 60-part Missa Sopra “Ecco Si Beato Giorno” for five choirs between 1565 and 1566.

Berkeley music scholar Davitt Moroney unearthed the manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris in 2005 and it received its world premiere, under Moroney’s direction, at the BBC Proms in London last year.

Hearing it performed by the members of five Bay Area choirs on Saturday together with an ensemble of period instruments (cornetts, sagbutts, organs, harpsichords and a violone) was quite an experience, not least because the work completely defied my expectations. For one thing, it sounds nothing like the other big cannonical choral work of the period — Thomas Tallis’ magnificent Spem in Alium — even though Moroney contends that Tallis was inspired the work following a visit from Striggio. The Striggio is comprised of much simpler and cleaner blocks of sound. For another, it’s a much more modest work than I supposed a 60-part mass would be.

The sound throughout comes at the listener in gently undulating waves, more than a crashing tsumani. Quite often, choirs sing alone or have “conversations” with just one or two other choirs in the group. These conversations often take the form of plain call and response passages.

Only in the second setting of the work’s two Agnus Deis does the whole 60-voice party kick in. At this moment, the choirs come in one after another until every singer has joined the fray. But even then the effect is like a warm caress rather than a barrage of sound. If I didn’t know I was listening to 60-part polyphony, I would guess that there were maybe only 15 – 20 parts.

This warm timbre is one of the most wonderful things about the music. Striggio’s mass may not be as impressive a piece as similar works by Monteverdi or Tallis. But it’s beauty lies in its understated magnitude.

Finally, here is a June 1 article with some interesting background on the work by The San Francisco’s Chronicle‘s Joshua Kosman.

Visiting Oakland Museum of California isn’t like visiting other major museums in the Bay Area like the de Young and SFMOMA. Oakland doesn’t attract much of a tourist contingent, so on any given day, the museum’s visitors are locals. This creates a very different dynamic as many of the people who visit the museum not only seem to hold a powerful affection for the place like it’s home, but also run into each other in the corridors, galleries and sculpture gardens and say hi or stop to chat.

This sensation was powerful when I last visited the museum on Friday evening. I went both to check out the Birth of the Cool exhibition which recently opened in the institution’s art galleries (and runs until August 17) and the latest of the “First Friday” soirees, which the museum runs on the first Friday of each month from 5 – 9pm.

I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the venue. The Birth of the Cool exhibition, which riffed on 1950s Californian art, design and culture and its incluence on American and global style, was quite a relief after having sat through the new Indiana Jones flick the night before. The canned mid-20th century kitsch of the film with its cheesy references to James Dean and soda fountains pale in comparison to Oakland Museum’s mellow-fresh insights into life 60 years ago.

Some of the items in the exhibition seem obvious. What would a retrospective of the period’s cultural influences be without a major section devoted to the design and films of Charles and Ray Eames, or the jazz of the exhibition’s namesake, Miles Davis. Needless to say, the galleries were packed with Eames chairs and William Claxton’s iconic images of jazz musicians.

But my own favorite part of the exhibition revolved around the starkly beautiful images of architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Shulman’s photographs of modernist houses set against stagering southern Californian desert and mountain backdrops are engrossing because they look like still-life paintings and yet feel larger than life. Shulman believed in putting people in his pictures of buildings to make the structures look lived in. He succeeds in this aim, yet the well-dressed couples that occupy his frames are so mannequin-like that they almost seem alien. The effect is powerful.

Another delight of Birth of the Cool is the film footage of Hugh Hefner’s television series from the period, Playboy’s Penthouse. Watching Hef chatting with Lenny Bruce about on-screen drinking while smoking a pipe reminds me that even mainstream American culture wasn’t as straight-laced as I generally thought.

Like Hef, the people of Oakland know how to let their hair down. The First Friday event swirled around me as I walked through the museum. A jazz band played upbeat swing tunes in the packed museum cafe. People of all ages, sexes and ethnic backgrounds hit the dance floor with abandon. Others lounged about, chatting, eating and drinking. The sculpture gardens were busy with people sipping wine and gazing out at the gorgeous sunset across Lake Merritt below.

Oakland is experiencing something of a “rebirth of the cool” these days, a feeling underscored by my evening at the museum.

The morning I left for the East Coast on a business trip last week, I happened to read an extraordinary article in the March issue of Gourmet Magazine. Francis Lam’s piece on the art of omelette-making is one of the most wonderful bits of food writing I’ve read in my life.

The article is brilliant because it’s deceptively simple, like the subject that it covers. We tend to think of throwing some eggs in pan as just about the easiest thing one can do in a kitchen besides making toast, and Lam’s salty-humorous story explains that there’s much more to making an omelette than meets the eye.

Similarly, there’s much more to this philosopher-chef’s article than I first supposed. I was reminded of a few crucial life lessons in the author’s egg-splattered prose. “It was astounding how something so commonplace, so elemental, could have so many variables,” writes Lam, “You just have to learn to see all those variables, to recognize what effect every moment of heat, every motion of the hands has. To get back to that thing I tasted, I would have to know exactly what to look for and nail it every step of the way.”

In just a few short lines, Lam pretty much sums up the eternal tension inherent in gaining experience in any field or activity as we go through life. This tension can also be summed up by the old adage “the more I know, the less I know.”

But Lam’s quest to create the perfect omelette goes beyond merely imparting this truthism in a roundabout way. The journalist manages to find a means of surmouting the problem. It’s not really a happy one, though it’s sweetly Sysiphean. Here is a link to the full article on Gourmet‘s website. Read it and I guarantee you’ll never look at a plate of eggs in the same way again.

Epilogue: A couple of hours after I read the article, I arrived at San Francisco airport for my flight out east. Once I cleared security, I went in search of breakfast. I ended up at an airport diner where I foolishly ordered an omelette. The greasy concoction that arrived on a paper plate after five minutes brought Lam’s description of eggy perfection into sharp relief. Having just read about master chef Daniel Boulod’s intricate omelette-making techniques (which Lam describes in detail in the piece) and imagined the giddy heights to which cooking eggs can rise, I was now confronted with the opposite end of the spectrum. The omelette infront of me was cold, rubbery and radioactive yellow in sheen. Could an omelette get much worse?

I was hungry so I tipped the contents of a little paper sachet of salt over my breakfast, grasped my plastic fork and knife, and tucked in anyway. I feel guilty admitting this, but I polished the thing off and quite enjoyed myself too. Recalling Lam’s article made me smile.