Archives for May 2010

I wonder if there might be an inverse correlation between places of outstanding natural beauty and bad visual art?

When there are mountains and trees and lakes that take the breath away, then who needs breathtaking paintings and sculptures?

The greatest works of art tend to be produced in gritty urban settings, it seems. There are a few exceptions to the rule of course, such as environmental artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, whose works make us see nature in a new way. And there’s a lot of very beautiful Native American art that’s produced away from big urban centers.

Over the past few days, however, all I’ve seen up at Lake Tahoe (where I’ve been sojourning over the long weekend) have been inept life-sized bear sculptures fashioned out of concrete or glazed wood.

Ben Davis’ incisive slide-illustrated meditation on the state of street art in Slate poses fascinating questions about the tipping point between art and commerce. “Part of the lore of street art is that it is about the individual taking on the system,” writes Davis. “Yet today, rather than feeling anti-commercial, the scene represents a kind of parallel-universe art world, with its own thriving cast of stars and set of commercial values. Street art’s anti-establishment posture often shades seamlessly over into scrappy entrepreneurship…These days, it can be hard to tell where marketing ends and art begins.”

Documentation has perhaps been the strongest force in helping to disseminate and turn into “product” what used to be a renegade art form. Without being endlessly photographed and disseminated on the web, a work like Banksy’s 2005 project on Israel’s West Bank separation wall would not pack anything like the same political punch that it does. And yet at the same time, the documentation is killing the lithe, underground nature of street art by making it commercial and turning it into a product of the art establishment.

I mulled over these ideas in a recent article about the Bay Area street art scene for the New York Times, but I think Davis’ illustrated essay is much more thoughtful and penetrating than my own attempt to unpack some of the tensions and forces at play in this realm.

I don’t think street art is over, but it’s perhaps entering the early stages of a slow demise.

It never ceases to amaze me that people who know that I make my living as a journalist share interesting bits of news with me and then are taken aback by the idea that I might like to make the information public.

It struck me the other day as I was flying back to San Francisco from Los Angeles that there’s an art to producing a great airline safety video. I think Virgin America has cracked it with its wonderfully tongue-in-cheek animated film.

The four-minute-thirteen-second film, which was created by Wild Brain animation in San Francisco and produced by Anomaly in New York, was made three or four years ago and I’ve seen it on Virgin flights many times. It’s the only safety video that I’ve ever really paid attention to and the other airlines still have a lot to do to catch up.

The main goal of any airline safety video should be to grab people’s attention as the information on them is important (even if passengers think they know it all.) But few airlines both to create a video that keep eyeballs on the screen.

The reasons that the Virgin film succeeds are:

1. It plays up the fact that people are bored of these announcements and makes a virtue of the yawn factor. For example, the instructions about how to buckle and unbuckle a seat-belt come with narration that’s delivered in a patient tone and goes something like this: “For the 0.000000001 of you who’ve never worn a seatbelt…” And the images on screen show a sweetly clueless matador attempting the maneuver while his bull looks on in vague disdain.

2. The animation is imaginative and whimsical. The characters are very two-dimensional and have a sketchy, pencil-drawn look, but they have funny, incongruous features such as a fish head in a suit.

3. For the two reasons stated above and many more, the film is funny. It managed to turn a dry and boring subject into something entertaining.

The video can be viewed on YouTube, here.

Virgin America released the film in 2007 but other airlines haven’t followed suit with interesting films. I know the airline industry isn’t in a financial position these days to spend a lot of money refreshing their safety videos. But perhaps they should start to make this a priority. Passenger safety is, after all, no laughing matter 🙂

The environmental sculptor Noah Purifoy moved from Los Angeles to the desert in 1988 and set about creating one of the most surreal and startling sculpture parks I have ever seen. The park is located on a 2.5 acre site at Joshua Tree. To get to the remote location, you have to drive down some dirt roads and follow several hand-painted signs carefully. But the journey is well worth the trek to the back of beyond.

The park contains more than a hundred of Purifoy’s works made mostly out of scavenged and donated materials. From a distance, the site looks like a dump, with piles of trash bleached white in the sun. Up close, though, it’s an artist’s playground packed with surprises. Many of the pieces on display, which visitors can roam around freely, are abstract constructions made out of anything from tattered old paperbacks to old toilet seats. Some, such as an enormous executive desk toy made of a metal frame, ropes and bowling balls, are whimsical and display the artist’s sense of absurdist humor.

My very favorite work on display is a small but perfectly formed theatre fashioned from old pieces of mouldering wood. The theatre looks like it can hold an audience of 20 or so. There are two sets of covered wings which performers can walk along by the sides of the auditorium to get to the stage. The stage itself is only slightly raised off the ground. It’s a delightful spot. It would be fun to view a show there.

In fact, the entire park would be a great venue for a large-scale performance art piece. I’m not the first person to have thought of this — according to the friends I visited Purifoy’s site with, various groups from LA have created performance pieces around the artist’s sculptures.

A site like this could only exist in the hinterlands. Anywhere else and the artist would be subject to all kinds of tedious rules and regulations. As bizarre as the sculpture park is, it very much fits into the landscape. The junk feels weirdly organic.

There’s a whole branch of neuroscience dedicated to exploring the healing properties of sound. Music therapy comes in many forms. One of the most fundamental takes the form of simply lying back and letting sound vibrations course through your body for a while.

The hour I spent at the Integratron over the weekend, a sonic experience based in a space-age-looking dome structure in the middle of the desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California, had somewhat of a restorative effect on my body and mind. But the experience left me thinking that sound, though a powerful form of therapy, doesn’t always work its magic on the listener, especially when the environment isn’t perfectly conducive to allowing the vibrations to take you over.

This is how the Integratron is described on the organization’s website:

“The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.”

My friends and I arrived at the Integratron just in time for the public “sound bath” session, which happens just once a month. We each paid $10 and made our way into the dome. We walked up some steep wooden steps and found ourselves in a round room, brightly lit with desert light streaming through the windows. About a hundred people lay on their backs in the space, with their heads facing the center of the room. It was packed. I found a wedge of room near the leader of the experience, a middle-aged woman surrounded by several large crystal bowls. After a brief explanation about what was going to happen next, the leader started playing the bowls.

The sound was intense. It rang through my ears and I could feel the energy of the vibrations thrumming through different parts of my body. But it was hard to immerse myself completely in the experience. I was cold because the floor was cold and by the time I arrived there were no blankets left to borrow. Also, there were too many snoring, shuffling people. Finally, the music didn’t go on long enough, it seemed to me. I would have needed about an hour of continuous play to really fall under the spell of the vibrations. The 20 minutes or so of music wasn’t adequate, though it clearly made quite a few people in the room go beyond a state of meditation and into sleep.

If I ever end up wanting to visit the Integratron again, I think I would arrange a private session (assuming it’s affordable to do this) and I would definitely wear a sweater and bring a yoga mat. As it stood, the experience was a bit like going to see a play or a concert where the air-conditioning in the room is on too high and the people behind you keep coughing and the guy in front is too tall so you only have partial view of the stage.

But I don’t want to discredit the therapeutic properties of this form of healing. I think it can be very effective if experienced the right way.

Some irritating news from the San Francisco International Arts Festival in my in-box this morning. Two of the event’s companies have had to cancel opening night shows owing, according to the organization’s executive director Andrew wood, to local and national bureaucracy of one kind of another.

Al-Khareef Theatre Troupe from Damascus, Syria was scheduled to perform the U.S. premiere of their production, The Solitary, tomorrow, Friday night. According to Wood, SFIAF filed the petition for the company’s visas ahead of most of the other visa applications for this year’s festival. “Three months after USCIS received the application, whilst all of the other artists’ petitions that SFIAF filed later were eventually approved, the Al-Khareef petition remained in the system with USCIS officials saying nothing about the application’s progress,” said Wood. “After much imploring–including from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the members of Al-Khareef finally received their visas on May 10. But then the Damascus Consulate refused to process them for over a week citing unspecified technical difficulties. The result was that the company was only able to fly out to San Francisco on Thursday May 20–the day they were supposed to be doing the technical load-in for their show. As a result the Festival producers had no choice but to do the technical rehearsals on Friday night and cancel the performance. Opening night will now be on Saturday.”

The festival was dealt a second blow as a result of red tape challenges closer to home when the Bay Area-based ensemble, The Foundry, had to move their new show, Please Love Me, from the newly refurbished Monaghan’s Bar on Pierce Street in the Marina District to the Dovre Club. “Monaghan’s was slated for reopening on May 1, but San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspections kept on putting off the bar’s scheduled inspections to approve the work causing nearly five weeks of delays,” said Wood. “The problem in getting a back-up bar was that most alternatives could do one date or the other, but not both, which would have required choreographer Alex Ketley and multimedia artist Les Stuck to completely reconfigure the show in 24 hours for a new venue.
In the end, the decision was made to cancel the Sunday matinee and keep the Tuesday performance at another Irish Bar, the Dovre Club.”

Hopefully these two hiccups will be the last facing the festival this year.

There’s perhaps only one thing about the entertainment world that I dislike more than child actors, and that’s adult actors pretending to be children on stage and screen.

I was reminded of this antipathy yesterday evening when I finally made it out to catch a performance of Peter Pan — a 360-degree CGI-infused production from London adapted from the J. M. Barrie play by Tanya Ronder and directed by Ben Harrison. The show is on the first leg of a U.S. tour and is playing in a tent on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

There’s very little else going on besides people in their 20s and 30s stomping about the round stage petulantly in pajamas, fondling teddy bears and speaking in squeaky voices. Only the few pirate scenes, where the adults get to act their own age, provide relief.

That being said, as the show unfolded with its engaging mixture of high- and low-tech effects, I found my annoyance with the acting fading and felt immersed in the story. There are some lovely moments, such as Captain Hook’s speech about how the only woman that ever felt anything for him is the crocodile that’s trying to eat him. And I enjoyed the simplicity and imagination of some of the staging, such as an underwater sequence in which Wendy’s brothers John and Michael flirt with two mermaids. The mermaids are aerial dancers and their tails are created by the unfurling sheets with which they slowly and gracefully move about the stage.

At two and a half hours, Peter Pan feels a little overly long. But I would definitely recommend the show for families — I think it’s a great treat for anyone aged eight and above.

Here‘s what The Chronicle’s Robert Hurwitt had to say about the show.

Small cultural gatherings in private homes are all the rage right now in San Francisco. I’ve been involved in a theatre salon for several years; the Home Theatre Festival is happening right now in people’s living rooms across the city; the Mugwumpin performance troupe is producing a show in a motel room on June 7 and the San Francisco Parlor Opera is staging Don Giovanni in a private home through May.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly new about this phenomenon, though it seems more prevalent at the moment. In this age of increasing tech-driven isolation, perhaps people have been missing the intimacy of getting together with a few friends and new acquaintances to participate in artistic activities. Or maybe we’re all just tired of the same old formats and want to try something new. 

At the weekend, I attended an hour or so of a lively Salon97 music-appreciation salon. I wish I could have stayed longer at the gathering, organized by a local music lover, Cariwyl Hebert, but I had to be at a concert rehearsal. At any rate, from the short time I spent at Cariwyl’s home in the Upper Haight, I could tell that she and her friends are on to something. The event provides a wonderful high-engagement yet low-key format for listening and discussing music.

I asked Cariwyl (pictured) to tell us about the development of the salon and how it works. She sweetly obliged. Here is what she had to say about it:

In 2008, I visited the South by Southwest Music Festival. Excited to meet many new people and hear a lot of great music of varying varieties, I eagerly added my classical music affiliation to my conference badge thinking this would help pave the way to some great conversations. On the contrary, when fellow attendees saw that I wasn’t involved with indie rock somehow, they looked the other way. This all became rather frustrating after awhile and as the hours turned into days, it became downright depressing. I loved all the music I heard and overall had a great time, but the defeated feeling of the art form I loved the most being irrelevant to everyone else wouldn’t leave me alone. It was time to take matters into my own hands.

What was missing from classical music that made it seem so boring? Why was it that people were willing to stay up all night in crowded over-heated venues to hear indie rock, but not classical music? Was it a lack of intimacy? Community? Informality? Easy access to alcohol? Who wrote the rule that classical music listening couldn’t have all of this?

Two months later I hosted my first classical music listening party. Then another that summer. Every few months I’d pull together a playlist of music constructed around a theme such as American composers (with hot dogs and root beer floats), music in cinema (on Oscar night), living composers, parody in classical music for April Fool’s Day, and scary music for Halloween (with a costume contest). The principles I held to were: a. no experience necessary, b. no question is a dumb one, and c. we’re all here to learn and have fun together.

As time went on, the crowd grew bigger. I started a website, and I named our listening parties Salon97: Classical Music for the Other 97%. The parties were named for the style of event (a salon) and “97” is a tribute to conductor Benjamin Zander’s assertion that perhaps orchestras think three percent of the population likes classical music and that perhaps they strive for four percent. Instead, he says that everyone likes classical music but they just don’t know it yet. I’m after the other 97 percent.

Last Saturday, we celebrated two years of Salon97 with a birthday party that would be typical for any two year old. Balloons, party favors, and Betty Crocker Rainbow Chip cupcakes were everywhere. Our guests wore party hats. We listened to a three piece retrospective of some of audience favorites previously heard at our listening parties. The playlist included:

-William Grant Still’s The American Scene. We listened to the “Southwest” portion of the piece, and everyone was very intrigued by how much the work sounded like a film score to a 1960s western film.

-Arvo Pärt’s Annum per Annum. We discussed the silent portion of the piece and whether it correlated directly to the periods of contemplative silence the composer has taken professionally.

-John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. We talked about Charles Ives’ influence on his life as a composer in addition to the energetic and innovative nature of the piece.

Two years ago, I never would have guessed that one small listening party would evolve into a growing community where people who were previously too intimidated to go to the concert hall or buy a classical album would have so much fun listening to classical music. Nor did I anticipate creating a new environment for people to make new friends and business relationships. All of these have happened.

I have big plans for Salon97. A podcast, concert field trips, a classical music 101 video series and more. But fundamentally, the idea behind Salon97 is a small and simple one. Classical music–in jeans or a tuxedo, sober or drunk–belongs to everyone.

Of all the cultural activities that make the Bay Area stand out as unique, the Bay to Breakers must be one of the most outstanding.

Now in its 99th year, the enormous footrace is a cultural phenomenon not just for the sheer numbers that participate in the 7.5-mile run from one end of the city to the other (there are around 60,000 participants) but also for the inventiveness of the costuming and assorted sideshow activities.

Actually, this year’s costumes were a bit of a letdown. The only truly inventive effort I saw while running in my cocktail dress yesterday morning was a group of synchronized swimmers with flowery swim-caps who kept formation by means of a blue tarp with holes in it which they collectively wore around their waists as they jogged along.

The prize for the event’s greatest inspiration, in my opinion, should go to someone who didn’t even participate in the race itself. My neighbor, Erica, performed an unlikely but welcome public service from her very own studio apartment in Hayes Valley all morning. For the second year running, Erica hosted a brunch geared towards deterring the many weak-bladdered Bay to Breakers participants from relieving themselves mid-race down the narrow back street over which her apartment looks. Every time Erica and her brunch guests saw someone taking a leak down Linden Alley, they threw a water balloon at the offending party. Most people took the onslaught from above well, Erica told me, soon after I turned up at her place post-run in my sweaty cocktail dress to catch the tail end of the party. Only one person, a man dressed up as a strand of bacon, threatened to throw rocks at her window.

Erica feels good about taking the law into her own hands and rightly so: For one thing, the Bay to Breakers organizers provide more than ample restroom facilities en route, making pissing down a back alley unjustifiable. For another, as Erica put it, the balloons she sourced for the proceedings were “of the biodegradable kind.”

Here’s an update on what’s happening with regards to the New York Times‘ Bay Area culture coverage going forward:

Starting on June 1, The New York Times is handing over the editorial content of its Bay Area section (which was launched last fall and runs on Fridays and Sundays) to a new start-up media organization, The Bay Citizen.

The culture column which I have been writing will be tweaked slightly under the new regime. For now, I will be writing every other week for the Bay Citizen. All of the writing I do will appear on the Bay Citizen’s website. Sometimes, my pieces will also appear in the New York Times too. The column will be about the same length as in the past and the topics at least as broad in range. But it will probably have a more “insider-y” feel and “intimate” angle and tone.

The Bay Citizen just hired a wonderful culture editor, Reyhan Harmanci, who used to be an arts reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle among other media organizations.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Think Rent meets West Side Story.