Archives for 2010

The culture column of the Bay Area section of the New York Times, which I write every two weeks, had been a bit of a moving target content-wise since I started the gig nearly a year ago. I’m often asked by arts organizations and independent PR people what kind of stories my editors and I are looking for on the culture front. Here are some pointers to help anyone who feels like pitching me:

1. The idea has to be arts-related. The mandate is broad — I’ve written about everything from the Burning Man Festival’s radio station to the San Francisco Ballet. But for some reason, my editors don’t seem to want to me to cover books. Also, generally (though not always), they have me try to steer clear of topics that are related to culture but don’t necessarily fall into the traditional “arts” categories e.g. dining, travel.

2. The idea must have a strong Bay Area focus. That is, it should not only mention upcoming events happening in the region, but also preferably point to local artists, organizations, trends happening around here etc.

3. The idea should have an interesting/new story to tell or insight to reveal on local culture. It’s not enough that an event is coming up that may be of interest to readers. There has to be a compelling reason in addition to the happening that is worth talking about. I need to have a clear idea of why my readers should care about the particular topic in question. 

4. The idea should preferably provide an opportunity to range beyond the scope of talking about one artist/event/organization and be something that is possible to contextualize and think of in terms of the broader cultural scene.

5. If possible (and this isn’t always possible) there should be more than one event of its kind going on at around the same time or organization / artist to talk about within the same story. This helps to provide a greater sense of context and gives readers more than one thing to go and experience.

Last week’s column about the Oakland Museum’s new exhibition by Mark Dion is a good example of the kind of “ideal” Bay Area arts column for the NY Times. It has the local news peg, leverages not only event/organization but several in order to shed light on a current trend in museums, and even includes a bit of room for critical insight. You can read the piece here.

Watched the second installment in what’s beginning to look like a fab series of educational films about the works of William Shakespeare. This Is Hamlet follows on from This Is Macbeth, which I blogged about in January of 2009 here.

The Hamlet DVD, like its predecessor, is cheeky and irreverent but very informative, though the central conceit is slightly difficult to make sense of at first: The drama’s characters comment on their own behavior in the play, sometimes while they’re supposed to be in an actual scene. But the illogical nature of the denouement soon stops being a problem because the film is otherwise so engaging.

The producers make the play appealing to a young audience (Hamlet spend much of his time sitting in a jerkin checking his text messages) while at the same time homing right in on the poetry, the philosophical, social and political ideas behind the play and the characters’ often complex motivations.

Both movies are the work of Greg Watkins and Jeremy Sabol and include fine performances from a cast of Bay Area actors.

I would heartily recommend the DVDs to any high school English lit or drama teacher. And they make fun viewing for general Shakespeare and theatre buffs too.

The only thing that seemed slightly remiss to me is the costuming. Hamlet and Horatio are in doublet’s and Renaissance shirts, Polonious wears a stuffy Victorianesque tweed suit and Ophelia sports a long, white floral peasant blouse, which wouldn’t look out of place on Haight Street in the 1970s. Not sure what’s going on there.

Werther, the central character in Jules Massenet’s four act opera of the same title based on The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe is an emotional yo-yo. He experiences soaring highs and wallowing lows. If he were alive today, medics would brand him as being bipolar.

Francisco Negrin’s new production, which opened last night at the San Francisco Opera, is similar in character. The singing and acting is all-round superlative. I was extremely taken with the drama and dexterity of mezzo-soprano Alice Coote’s performance in particular in the role of Charlotte, Werther’s paramour. The tenor Raon Vargas was also superb at the titular moper. He combined lightness and gravity in equal amounts. He seemed extremely human.

But the mise en scene left much to be desired. The set, in particular, looked like it had been designed by IKEA, with its brushed steel walls and veneery-looking pale wood. When an oversized, overstocked bed was trundled on stage behind Coote, I almost lost it. And heavy-handed yet obscure symbolism abounded in the fussy use of angry red lighting and video. The design was screaming at us to read meaning into its various fussy details. But what exactly we were supposed to read at any moment, I wasn’t completely sure.

Still, the singing and acting carried Goethe’s yearning tale for me. I left feeling moved.

An interesting question came up over tea this morning with Helene Whitson, the creator of the useful and exhaustive Bay Area Choral Archive and one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable choral bods I’ve ever met. The subject under discussion was to do with professionalism in choral singing, but you could just as easily apply the same thoughts to professionalism in any field really.

What makes a choir “professional”? For Chorus America, and many other organizations and individuals, the distinction between amateur and professional choirs is largely related to finance. If you get paid for what you do, you’re pro. If not, that makes you am.

Helene fervently disagrees with this definition and is in the process of trying to come up with a better way of categorizing choirs. “For me, professionalism is defined not by the amount of money that a chorister makes, but by his or her abilities as a singer,” she says.

Helene’s ideas come from years of watching choirs in action. She thinks that there are many paid choral singers who don’t deserve to be paid and many others who don’t get a dime for what they do, but are worthy of being compensated for it. It is this discrepancy which makes her want to change the way in which her own organization categorizes vocal ensembles.

I agree with Helene. I sing in a volunteer chorus. Many of its members are as good as anyone that gets paid to sing in, say, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. But at the same time, I wonder if it’s time to do away with the professional/amateur categories entirely. They’re just not all that useful anymore. And even if Helene changes her definition in the Choral Archive database, it doesn’t mean that the people who use her resource will adhere to her meaning.

A question I’ve been asking myself lately is this: Why is it that so many choral conductors treat their singers like children? I’m talking adult ensembles here, not ones composed of minors.

I don’t want to over-generalize as I know that the field has conductors that do not behave in this way. But judging by what people who’ve sung with a number of groups over the years have told me, the trait among music directors of patronizing their singers runs strong. It must be part of the job description.

I wonder whether the reason for this (or part of the reason at least) stems from the fact that choral singing is in many cases a pedagogical activity. It’s the one music-making format with universal application possibilities. Many choral directors experienced singing in choirs as kids and many of them have directed ensembles of children, youths, students or maybe adults with no musical training whatsoever. The pedagogical aspect of the job mistakenly makes them think that they can talk down to the vocalists.

But the habit is exceedingly counter-productive, not to mention denigrating and annoying: As far as I can tell, music directors get better performances from singers when they don’t harangue them as one might a naughty schoolchild. Plus, good singers are more likely to stick around than seek other opportunities if they feel like they are being treated like normal human beings.

The weekend went by in a blur. Some highlights:

1. Watching Project Bandaloop’s amazing aerial dancers swoop and glide off the side of a 100 foot tall building in Oakland in preparation for the company’s upcoming world premiere. The piece, which involves six dancers and is choreographed by artistic director Amelia Rudolph, explores the relationship between the different sides of the self and an individual’s relationship to others. It’s appropriately called IdEgo.

2. Hitting opening night of the new Mark Dion exhibition at the Oakland Museum. It’s called Marvelous Museum and it involves the interjection of strange and unusual curios from the depths of the museum’s storage facility into different parts of the permanent exhibition spaces.

3. Chris Kuckenbaker’s weird and wonderful solo show at the San Francisco Fringe Festival all about William Burroughs. Well, to be more accurate, the piece is about the performer’s imaginary relationship with a Burroughs’-like character in his head. Part self-confessional, part homage to the great, madcap author, the piece avoids being too self-indulgent and is full of humor and dextrous switches between characters.

4. Singing all day at a retreat with the International Orange Chorale in Larkspur. The ensemble with which I sing is performing Milton Babbitt’s Music for the Mass among other new and newish pieces.

5. Hitting Pandora karaoke bar in the Tenderloin. Having sung all day, a group of us continued carousing till the wee hours of the morning. We had a private room, which was probably just as well, as we sang songs from The Sound of Music not to mention the Rod Stewart number, “If you want my body and your think I’m sexy…”

6. Enjoying a Sunday morning “gospel brunch” at 1300 Fillmore. The wonderful soul group Future Perfect performed while we ate. Gospel brunches are tacky things really and the prices are elevated. But we have fun anyway. The bottomless pomegranate mimosas (or “pomosas” as the waiter called the sweet fizzy pink beverages) certainly helped.

This morning I awoke to the headline news of an explosion caused by a ruptured gas line in San Bruno (just a few miles from where I live in San Francisco.) The explosion killed at least six people, injured many more and destroyed lots of homes.

In the grand scheme of things, this disaster is small when compared to the floods, tsunamis, famines and nuclear power plant radiation leaks that commonly make the news all over the world. But irrespective of the size of the event, the repercussions never fail to have a devastating effect on a community.

In the face of this, what’s a culture journalist to do? My colleagues on the news desks of the local and national media were probably up all night reporting the story and continue to make sure that people are kept up to date. The local pub that I contribute to, The Bay Citizen, has been at the forefront of the charge. I am impressed by the organization’s coverage of the blast so far.

But what’s my role as a journalist in all of this? No one cares what an arts reporter/critic has to say about a gas pipe rupture.

I suppose ultimately, at this point in time, my role is not a professional one. It’s simply to be a good citizen by helping people in need while keeping a professional eye on how the story unfolds down in San Bruno.

When the proverbial smoke clears, that’s when I can actually start doing my job — making sense of the event and how it impacts people’s lives from a cultural perspective. But that’s down the line.

A note on Jessye Norman’s performance at the season opener for The San Francisco Symphony on Tuesday night: It left much to be desired.

The San Francisco Symphony Chorus did a beautiful job of sustaining Aaron Copland’s long ardent lines in the haunting a cappella choral work In The Beginning. But the soloist’s effort was bumpy to say the least.There was no flow between Norman’s upper and lower registers and she didn’t sing the Biblical text as if she knew what it meant.

The jazz set of songs by Duke Ellington arranged for voice and orchestra by Patrick Russ was even more disappointing. Norman’s voice sounded thin at the top and bellowing at the bottom. She hammed up the sentiment in all the songs, which included such standards as “Come Sunday,” “Sophisticated Lady” and “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing.)” At a couple of points, Norman’s voice cracked.

Maybe the singer is tired. Clearly she needs a break.

The current sorry state of the arts journalism profession was made very visible last night at the San Francisco Symphony‘s home base, Davies Symphony Hall.

Before the season opener kicked off with a program that included Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, Copland’s In The Beginning for a cappella chorus and solo mezzo-soprano (Jessye Norman), a bunch of Duke Ellington standards (also sung by Norman) and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2, the organization’s media relations department laid on a lovely party for the media.

The Davies Symphony Hall press room was remarkably packed and the atmosphere extremely convivial. It was nice to see so many familiar faces there.

But it wasn’t until I took my seat for the concert that I realized that there had actually been precious few members of the press in the press room. It was largely populated by public relations people, funders and other assorted arts professionals and hangers-on. Out of a crowd of about 100 people, I counted maybe 10 journalists. Not an encouraging state of affairs.

Shotgun Players is a Berkeley-based theatre company that never stops innovating. A few years ago it was one of the first – if not the very first – company in the United States to switch to solar power 100%. And it’s never scared to be bold in terms of its programming while usually maintaining high artistic standards.

The company manages to pursue these standards both for its indoor productions throughout the year at The Ashby Stage and for its outdoor productions each summer at John Hinkel Park in North Berkeley.

The current run of In The Wound, a new drama by Jon Tracy at John Hinkel Park is no exception. Instead of playing to most people’s summery expectations of lighthearted Shakespeare and other romantic and/or fun-loving comedic fare, Shotgun Players is staging a violent adaptation of The Iliad. The production also sets itself apart from many others on the non-profit stage by having an enormous cast of more than 30 actors (the company’s biggest cast size to date.) Tracy’s production features committed performances and a strong sense of ensemble, especially during the forcefully choreographed fight scenes which make use of Taiko drumming and Asian war dances involving soldiers butting sticks and drums instead of swords and guns.

Yet for all that, I ended up feeling disappointed by In The Wound. I suppose the main issue I have with the production, which runs at weekends through October 3, is the writing. Here is yet another play which seems to say “war is bad” and little else. The language flits predictably (for a modern play about warfare with classical pretensions) between vaguely poetic cadences and slang. The characters only seem to have one dimension to them and the boomeranging structure of the drama is at times confusing. I couldn’t really understand what was gained by flitting backwards and forwards through time in this telling of the story.

Still, I commend Shotgun Players for continuing to push boundaries in terms of its offerings and can only hope that the second Greek epic-inspired play that artistic director Patrick Dooley has commissioned from Tracy for the winter season, based on The Odyssey, will prove more inspiring in terms of the writing.

I imagine that there are few other places in the world you can go where, within the space of an hour or two, you can:

1. Hear Terry Riley (pictured) play freewheeling proto-jazz compositions on the piano while wandering the galleries of the Berkeley Art Museum perusing 16th century Japanese art from the Clark Center Collection, an exhibition on “Hauntology” in art (a movement which tries to capture paranormal and other ghostly pricklings in our lives) and an installation and movie screening by the filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Brent Green.

2. Stumble across a bunch of students dressed in everything from Egyptian mummy’s bindings to a burlesque dancer in the middle of an evening-length role play adventure based on the Cluedo board game.

3. Watch a legion of stunt cyclists tearing up a plaza with incredible balletic feats including moving very fast backwards like skaters moving on ice, doing pirouettes and hopping down concrete steps, all on two wheels.

The relationship between public relations professionals and (arts) journalists often feels uneven to me. PR people seem to know much more about — and are acutely sensitive towards the needs of — the journalism profession than journalists know are are about PR people, as many PR people have been reporters or editors in the past (journalists rarely come to the profession from a career in marketing). And I think there are a lot of journalists who look down their noses at the PR industry. If a journalist leaves the profession to pursue PR, his or her colleagues will often accuse them of “selling out.”

This is ridiculous, as like it or not, journalists rely upon working with good PR people more than they care to admit. 

A few weeks ago, the head of one of the PR firms in the Bay Area, David Landis (pictured), asked me to participate in a new feature on his company’s website called “Meet the Media.” I had to answer a few questions about my job and send in a photo. I did what was asked and the result can be seen here.

The exercise made me realize how little I know about David Landis, and most of the other PR people I work with regularly for that matter.

So I decided to ask David if he would return the favor and answer a set of very similar questions to the ones he had asked me so that I could find out about what he does and post the findings on my blog. David obliged.

So here’s the first installment of “Meet the Marketer,” my response to Landis Communications’ “Meet the Media”:

David Landis, President & CEO of Landis Communications

1. What’s your top project for today?
Today, our LCI team is pitching a new health-related business in the far reaches of the East Bay.  Pitching new business isn’t the worry, I love learning about new businesses and helping them think strategically about how to communicate their value – the real issue is how am I going to get there and avoid the traffic/construction and arrive on time?  I’m also meeting a former staffer for lunch who now lives out there.

2. Tell us about your dream client.
A dream client is one who truly partners with LCI so that we can be successful.  What does that mean?  That they hold up their end of the bargain – make sure to respond to us with information, honor our weekly meetings, pay on time – and most importantly:  get back to us asap when we have an interview opportunity.  We also want partners who understand that the true value LCI brings to the table is strategic counsel – clients may elect to not implement that counsel, but it’s important to be heard.  Often times, it’s the PR professional who can bring fresh ideas, new directions and a unique way of approaching the business.

3. Describe the wackiest marketing campaign you’ve worked on.
Here are a few from which to pick:
When we launched Old Navy, we did a program to help promote their $5 Flag T-shirts.  We partnered with summer reading programs at libraries throughout the U.S. and had actresses impersonate Betsy Ross (the creator of the flag) to teach kids about the flag.  We launched on Flag Day and then culminated the campaign with small-town parades in cities across the country for July 4th.  The greatest part was that the T-shirts sold out in record time and those T-shirts have become an annual anticipated event.
With a holiday shopping site called Santa.com, we produced the first-ever Santa.com holiday parade with a then unknown singer named Christina Aguilera as the emcee.  She was very young and wasn’t paying attention – and when the music started, she forgot to start singing!
For Match.com, we created a new expert program with the in-house PR person – letting the press know that our expert could address all questions related to the dating world, either online or off-line.  Instead of just trotting her out to the press, we re-named her the “VP of Romance,” and suddenly the press was calling us, asking if they could get expert commentary from her.  As a result, we placed her on the Today Show, in the New York Times and all throughout the country.
This isn’t “wacky”, but it was amazing. With the California Academy of Sciences, one of their researchers found research that would indicate that humans had actually been using tools 1,000,000 years prior to what had been thought before.  When that news broke, it made Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, NPR, New York Times and more – and prompted opposing scientists to immediately question the science – a PR person’s bonanza because controversy always means more exposure!
And years ago, to promote the Symphony Pops, we created the first “champagne cork-popping” contest with area celebrities – to see who could pop a champagne cork the furthest.  SF Chief of Protocol Charlotte Shultz of course won – with her indomitable style and class.
We also did a “Mozart look-alike” contest at the Symphony – partnering with Macy’s – but only got 2 entries:  a guy on a boat with a beer can in his hand and a single Mom from Antioch.  I’d say that one fell a little short of our expectations!

4. What is your journalism pet peeve?
We’ll do our part to make sure we’re pitching you appropriately (i.e., we’ll do the research, make sure we understand your beat etc.)  Just get back to us and let us know whether or not you’re interested in the story.  We really don’t want to be a pest, but if we don’t hear back from you, we’ll assume there’s still a chance for that story.

5. Top trend in the industry you’re currently interested in.
I think social media is already changing and will continue to revolutionize the way we conduct PR and how the business operates.  No longer will a majority of our work as PR professionals be dedicated toward interesting media to write about our clients (although unlike some, I predict this will still remain an important component of our business).  But what social media affords PR and our clients is the opportunity to communicate directly with our customers without the filter of the media.  That is groundbreaking.

6. Tell us a little about yourself.
What most people don’t realize is that I started my career as a pianist.  I studied piano performance at Northwestern University in Chicago and then moved into arts administration, before going into television.  I started the agency business more than 20 years ago in my bedroom and we now have about a dozen employees, are part of an international PR network (Public Relations Global Network – www.prgn.com) but also remain committed to helping businesses grow – and helping the community through our nonprofit work.  I think having a creative outlet – like my music – has allowed me to think differently about business in general and bring some fresh thinking and ideas to the table.  For those going into any business, I think a background in the arts is essential. I also love to travel, love skiing and hiking, can’t get enough of San Francisco’s amazing culinary scene and adore theatre.  Meeting Stephen Sondheim a couple of years ago was a true high point in my life.  I’m married to my now husband of 21 years, Sean Dowdall, who is Chief Marketing Officer for Rabobank and we live in Pacific Heights (and in Tahoe) with our two adorable American Eskimo dogs, Shasta & Whitney.  My other career if I weren’t in PR would be playing cocktail music in an upscale lounge.