Archives for 2011

On Tuesday morning at around 10.30am in Oakland, I became a citizen of the United States of America along with 1202 people hailing from 93 countries.

I was surprisingly moved by the experience. There were some cheesy moments to be sure, including watching a video of bucolic American scenes play on the screen at the Paramount Theatre where the ceremony took place, while “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood blasted across the speaker system. And they had a scout leader from Canada share his story about becoming an American.

But being among all those individuals rising to our feet as the name of our birth-nation was called and then raising our hands and saying the Oath of Allegiance was a powerful thing. And I was relieved to watch Obama deliver a welcome message on screen rather than George Bush, which was the case for a bunch of the people I know who went through the ceremony during the last administration. Plus, the Paramount THeatre is such a gorgeous, art deco building. I can’t think of anywhere more beautiful to receive a new national identity.

There was even a section during the proceedings for cultural inquiry. An official from local government talked about how America has gone from being described as a “melting pot” to a “salad” to, most recently, a “stew.” I don’t have any particular preference regarding which of these terms best describes the nation’s population. Omelette, anyone? Fricassee?

 

I attended two concerts at opposite ends of the scale spectrum this weekend. Both were delightful experiences. Herewith, a few words about each.

1. Verdi Requiem with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, led by James Conlon at Davies Symphony Hall: The Chorus made a huge sound on Friday night, the third of four performances of Verdi’s operatic chef d’oeuvre for the concert hall. It was a wondrous thing to watch Conlon in action — conducting the score from memory, the maestro seemed to be joined to the orchestra and chorus’ sound as if to an umbilical chord. I only wish Sondra Radvanovsky had been on better form. The solo soprano was straining for her notes. I later found out she was was laboring through illness, poor thing. Still, the final movement — “libera me” — was glorious. The chorus and soloist made a jewel-like sound and a feeling of deep peace and stillness spread across the hall.

2. California Music Center cello recital of Irving M. Klein International String Competition winners at the home of Joan Talbert and David Lyon, Palo Alto: I had not heard of the Irving M. Klein International String Competition before I was invited by one of its board members, Tom Driscoll, to attend an early evening house concert at the home of a couple of Stanford faculty members, Joan Talbert and David Lyon. I was extremely impressed by the quality of the musicianship of the two young cellists (David Requiro and Meta Weiss — pictured above) and their accompanist (Miles Graber), the innovative nature of the programming and the conviviality of the setting. Weiss in particular was magnetic to watch. She brought a combination of nervous energy, mournfulness and playfulness to her rendition of Shostakovich’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor. I also appreciated the sensitivity of Requiro’s playing in Janacek’s Pohadka (A Fairy Tale.) However, the biggest highlights of the evening for me were the pieces that the cellists played together. The program began with another short Shostakovich work — Three pieces for Two Cellos and Piano — which sounded more like it was written by a German Romantic composer than a quirky modernist Russian. Weiss and Requiro joined forces again in the second half for a spiky and ethereal world premiere, A Due Celli, by the French film music composer Jean-Paul Bottemanne and rounded out the program by stepping back into the Baroque period for a spit-fire interpretation of Vivaldi’s Double Cello Concerto in G minor. The sun set over the hosts’ lovely living room and wine glasses clinked in the intermission. It was a beautiful evening and I was exceedingly glad to get this introduction to the California Music Center’s work.

Some notes on an an cappella workshop at Stanford and a performance in San Jose:

1. Spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon in the company of the members of Vocaldente, a men’s a cappella group from Hanover, Germany and the members of Fleet Street, Stanford’s premiere men’s a cappella group. Vocal Dente gave a masterclass for Fleet Street on campus and then the two groups gave a performance. I learned some interesting things about the nuts and bolts of a cappella singing from the event including how to best check intonation (build a chord in pieces, starting from the root and the octave, then adding the fifth, then the third and then the melody line) and how learn to sing in time when a song has complicated syncopated rhythms (reduce the song to words spoken in rhythm and walk around in the circle shaking invisible maracas in your hands — the combination of the stamping feet and maraca-shaking gestures effectively act as muscle memory aides.) I enjoyed the performances given by both groups. The 16-member Fleet Street ensemble has a lovely warm sound. It was hard to see half of the group though as they stand in a very tight horseshoe formation which means that if you’re not sitting right in front of them, you get half of their backs. The men of Vocaldente gave very polished performances of popular songs as diverse as Lionel Ritchie’s “Easy,” George Michael’s “Faith” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave.” They also sang a couple of quirky German numbers. However, a 10-minute-long tribute medley to Michael Jackson was so schizophrenic that it quickly became dull and the group’s countertenor (whom I gather has only been with the group for a few months) could use a little improvement. He sings with a very honky, nasal tone and his intonation is terrible.

2. Visited San Jose Stage for the first time last night for a performance of Cabaret. I had three reasons for going to see this production. The first reason was that there are a lot of people on my fellowship program at Stanford who either have never been to the theatre or rarely go. I felt that Cabaret, with its political overtones, great songs, acerbic wit and raunchy energy, would be a good introduction for my colleagues — a bunch of very smart journalists — to the art form. The fact that we could get half-price student tickets and that the theatre wasn’t too far from Palo Alto also made it an easy sell. The second reason was that I was curious to see Jef Valentine, a wonderful performer on the underground scene in San Francisco, in the role of the Emcee. The third reason was (and I am ashamed to say this) that I had never before managed to get to a production at the San Jose Stage. Rick Singleton’s beautifully-cast production doesn’t disappoint. Though there is nothing particularly innovative about it (it’s built very much in the dark and sexually aggressive Sam Mendes mold) the show makes for a pithy and entertaining night out. Besides Valentine, who is a natural for the role of the Emcee and whose work I am already quite familiar with, I was excited to be introduced to a bunch of fantastic local performers who were new to me. Halsey Varady’s Sally Bowles is a perfect mix of misdirected siren and girlish innocent. Her singing voice is sonorous, strong and full of emotion. Brandon Mears makes for a sweet and self-knowing Clifford Bradshaw. The rest of the cast is equally superb, whether they’re singing, dancing, playing musical instruments or delivering the lines in pointed, yet palatable German accents. A great night out, all in all.

Today I have a vapid question and a comment that will probably get me into trouble with my more politically-correct readers. I’ll air my thoughts anyway because, heck, why not. It’s a blog, not the lead story in the New York Times.

First the question:

Is journalism simply a form of storytelling? If it is — and I’ve heard it defined this way increasingly in recent times — then what makes it different to art besides the fact that it’s based on “real” events as opposed to fictional ones? And even that’s a slippery way of distinguishing between journalism and art, because a lot of art is based on real events. Can anyone out there set me straight?

Now the comment:

Without necessarily being conscious of doing so, we often attribute race categorizations in this country to different types of art. I’ve been thinking about this tendency since stumbling upon a couple of ad hoc musical experiences while rampaging around New York this past weekend. The first involved an African-American busker in the subway. He was playing and singing a song by Coldplay. The second involved a vocal, drum and guitar trio consisting of a bunch of Caucasian Frenchmen. They were playing reggae music. Most people would label Coldplay as a “white boy band.” And most people associate reggae music with black culture. The friend I was with during both experiences commented on the “crossover,” reflecting exactly what I was thinking. I guess it’s idiotic to say this as musicians play all kinds of music from cultures that aren’t their own all the time. Yet somehow these two incidents were striking, perhaps because the contrasts were so stark and because my friend and I experienced them in such close proximity to one another. I guess we have biases as listeners that are quite deeply ingrained and subconscious.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are in full swing and I’m at the end of a long weekend in New York, where I’ve encountered a couple of cultural events — one that shed some light on the current feeling in the air quite captivatingly and one which attempted to offer some kind of social insight but ended up providing little more than inane escapism.

It was surreal experiencing The Sun Also Rises, a stage adaptation by the ever-inventive Elevator Repair Service Theatre Company, when just up the street at Times Square, thousands of people were gathering to voice their discontent at the unraveling economy and ever-yawning gulf between the haves and have-nots. A political rally is in some ways a carefully orchestrated mix of sound and movement cues all calculated to create the biggest impact. The Select is similarly structured, with hundreds of brilliantly rendered recorded sounds and choreographed sequences all deftly carried out by the fluid performers. It’s interesting to compare Hemingway’s cast of disenfranchised expats, suffering latent shock in the aftermath of World War one, with today’s hoards of protesters trying to make sense of an equally nonsensical world. Only the bullfights of Pamplona, with their controlled vision of violence, provide a creative outlet for the characters’ feelings in the play as they otherwise do whatever they can to lose themselves in drink and sex. The Wall Street occupiers are channeling their energies in a more positive way, in some respects. But for every person who feels like taking a stand about today’s socio-economic woes, there are a hundred going the sex and booze route. Ultimately, I wonder which is more effective as a means of protest?

How fast the three-and-a-half hours of The Select flew by in comparison to Symphony for the Dance Floor, a tedious 80-minute long music and dance extravaganza created by electronic violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I gather that DBR (as the violinist is popularly known) is a darling of BAM and has been commissioned to create several pieces in the past by the venerable arts organization. I hear some of his other efforts were better than this latest one, which combines some unexceptional violin playing, coarsely derivative club-style dance moves, cheesy screen projections and uninspiring DJ beats and rhymes. In the program notes, DBR states that the piece is a response to the paralysis that the artist felt upon hearing the news of the January 12 2010 earthquake in Haiti. DBR is Haitian. But I was hard-pressed to find a relationship between the artist’s social message about Haiti and the fashion magazine-style portraits thrown up on screen and scenes of simulated sex involving the various parts of DBR’s wooden “instrument” and the crevices of several nubile female dancers’ bodies. Maybe I just lack the necessary imagination.

I am encouraged to see the way in which organizations that care about the media are throwing themselves at trying to find new, sustainable ways of creating and disseminating journalism. What’s going on at The USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program with the creation of Engine29, its “pop-up” arts journalism lab, reminds me of the kind of energy that’s happening here at Stanford with the Knight Journalism Fellowship, where 20 journalists from around the globe, myself among them, are working on an array of projects aimed at innovating the field of journalism.

Engine29 is focused on the arts and lasts just over a week. The Knight Fellowship is much broader in its scope (the participants come from fields as diverse as the environment, documentary film, design, investigative reporting and the arts) and goes on for almost a year.

But in our endeavors to innovate, I wouldn’t be surprised if we all end up using the same basic tool: Brainstorming.

I got a fresh take on this much-used buzzword a couple of days ago, when Tina Seelig, an author of many books about entrepreneurship and the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, led a seminar for my group about brainstorming techniques.

I had always thought of brainstorming as being somewhat useful, but Seelig made me see how revolutionary a tool it can be when you’re trying to figure out innovative solutions to problems.

We made a list of the qualities that go into creating a successful brainstorming session as per Tina Seelig’s thinking on the subject. Here are some of the main ones:

– There are no bad ideas.
– Wild ideas are encouraged.
– Kick things off with a short warm-up exercise e.g. come up with as many words as you can using the letters in the word “entrepreneurship.”
– The problem to be solved in the brainstorming session needs to be framed in such a way as to inspire people. “How do we solve world poverty?” is too big and deep a problem. “What color should the bowls that we buy to feed starving people be?” is too small and superficial.
– Keep reframing the question every few minutes so that the group can sustain its brainstorming activity over a long period e.g. “How should we spend $10 million?” –> “How would a 10 year old spend $10 million?” –> “How would someone spend $10 million in the desert?” –> etc.
– There should only be one conversation going on at any one time.
– A brainstorming group should consist of about six to eight people.
– The group should be cross-functional; ie its members should come from different disciplines (this is where Engine29 might have some difficulties as all of the participants will be arts journalists.)
– Everyone in the group is in possession of a pen and a set of post-it notes.
– Everyone in the group stands throughout the brainstorming session, writes ideas on the post-its and sticks them to the wall.
– People need to be open-minded and build on each others’ ideas rather than criticize them at this stage. The best response to an idea is “Yes. And…?” not “Yes. But…?”
– Refrain from organizing ideas and making decisions about them during the brainstorming process. But give brainstormers the chance to process them a little at the end of the session by allowing people to mark the best or wildest or most likely to succeed ideas with different colored dots.
– A brainstorming session has succeeded if people think that the ideas are the result of the entire group’s work, rather than generated by an individual.

Our session with Seelig culminated with us getting into groups of four or five and brainstorming ideas for “the worst restaurant idea in the world” for five minutes. Then we swapped ideas with other groups and spent seven minutes turning those very same bad ideas on their heads to frame them as “the best restaurant idea in the world” and create a pitch to present to the rest of the class.

This exercise was silly, yet game-changing. In a very short amount of time, we saw how brainstorming can transform ideas. What seemed like preposterous notions for dining out — examples from our session included everything from a restaurant run by toddlers to a virtual restaurant with no website to a restaurant which only serves salt and is run by a hairy, naked chef — suddenly became madly appealing when reframed by a set of creative, open minds. “SAL” the name of the restaurant with the salt and scummy chef actually sounded vogueish by the time the brainstormers who were given that idea had re-tooled it as a place serving rare salts by a famous minimalist, performance-art-oriented chef to models and celebrities.

I’ll be interested to see what ideas the arts journalism aficionados in Engine29 comes up with from their brainstorming sessions — assuming the group has brainstorming sessions. It really should.

Sometimes works of art that don’t go over very well on paper are fantastic in actuality. In the absence of being able to make something sound appealing in the marketing materials, the tricky thing is getting audiences to see past the “product description” and make the leap of faith to buy a ticket.

Such is the case with regards to Clementine in the Lower 9, a play by Dan Dietz with music by Justin Ellington, which is currently receiving a world premiere run under the auspices of Theatreworks at The Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. I wasn’t all that turned on by the idea of the production. But I went along to see the show anyway over the weekend and was completely riveted.

The play seems like it might be didactic and pretentious from the marketing materials: it’s a work that uses Aeschylus’ Agamemnon as a prism through which to explore life in the largely obliterated Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Oh, and with some live blues music thrown in for “entertainment value.”

Yet despite the unpalatable advertising, Clementine in the Lower 9 is moving, multi-faceted and at times witty. Set in the post-Hurricane ruins of the New Orleans home of Clementine, a hardworking former hospital nurse (who before she became a nurse was a jazz pianist), the play uses the metaphor of the hurricane as a way to explore human turmoil as it plays out in the external world as well as internally, inside the characters’ hearts and minds.

Dietz has a strong ear for the rhythm of blues and constructs conversations that are as musical as they are quotidian. The relationship between the live four piece band, headed by the excellent pianist-singer-actor Kenny Brawner who doubles up as bandleader and the play’s Chorus, and the action on stage, is seamless. As in a Greek tragedy, music and drama / pleasure and pain, are different sides of the same dramaturgical coin. Over the course of this intelligent drama, we learn about the limits of human agency and about the constant struggle between accepting one’s fate, and fighting tooth and nail against the status quo.

If the story ventures dangerously into ax-wielding melodrama towards the end, there’s enough control in the storytelling, direction and acting to keep things just this side of over-the-top. Only the set design, with its horizontal, quasi-naturalistic realization of Clementine’s house, feels over-labored: The cast wastes considerable time and energy clanking about between rooms, slackening the otherwise taut thread of the action.

I hope that Clementine in the Lower 9, which has a touch of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, Or Change in it, goes on to great things beyond the current great run in Mountain View.

Last night, I found myself sitting in someone’s living room with around 40 other strangers, listening to Brendan Begley & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, two amazing Irish folk musicians, playing their hearts out on the fiddle and accordion.

It was an amazing experience. The music got into my bones, making me want to dance and clap my hands, or sob uncontrollably. The combination of Brendan Begley’s slightly rough, melodious voice and meticulous accordion keywork and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh soft-spoken and glitter-fingered fiddle playing created an atmosphere that both took me out of the present moment and kept me pinioned within it.

What I didn’t go to the Mountain View House Concert Series prepared to discover is how longstanding the culture of house concerts is down in Silicon Valley. Daniel Steinberg has been putting on monthly concerts of music of wildly eclectic genres series at his home in Mountain View for the last 14 years. His core audience is very blasé about the whole thing. It’s just part of everyday life for them, it seems.

I also found out that there’s a monthly Celtic Singalong session that happens at an assortment of private homes between San Francisco and San Jose. Who knew? I signed up for the mailing list.

Half of last night’s audience seemed to be Irish music enthusiasts. Daniel asked for people in the audience to raise their hands if they played an Irish instrument and at least a quarter of the room responded. Crazy. I felt like I was in County Kerry, not California.

Silicon Valley is in mourning today for one of its biggest heros — Steve Jobs. Unless you’ve been hiding in the basement of an art museum or stuck in rehearsals for a play over the last 18 hours or so, you will know that the Apple co-founder and chief lost his battle against cancer last night at the age of 56.

The news came in when us Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford were just finishing up a seminar. Since then, many of the members of my group have been watching the news unfold intently. There are a number of general assignment and tech reporters among us. It must be strange to have something of such import happen on your beat when you can’t really cover it. (One of the tenets of the Fellowship is that we’re not supposed to do much if any regular journalism work while we’re here for the year.) But I expect some of our number may have been called upon to supply some kind of coverage for their home news organizations.

It was surreal walking around downtown Palo Alto last night. It was business as usual at the Apple Store on University Avenue. People stood outside taking photographs and placing floral and homemade card tributes under the big white Apple logo. Inside the store, by contrast, employees in blue T-shirts continued to sell shiny pieces of digital equipment to customers as if completely ignorant of the passing of the man who made their paycheck possible.

“If I were the manager of this store, I would be throwing a big party for employees and customers to celebrate Steve Jobs’ life right now, not continuing to sell stuff,” the friend I was with said. “The uninterrupted commerce is weird.”

This morning there was a framed photograph of Jobs at the front desk of the main Stanford gym. Even if the Apple store in Palo Alto isn’t acknowledging this key moment in the company’s history, it seems the news has affected much less likely corners of the local community.

The teacher of the French viticulture class I attended yesterday on campus said the following about wine:

Know what you like.
Know why you like it.
Never be afraid to try something new.

It strikes me that this is good general advice for life.

I heard two contrasting Thomas Ades pieces over the weekend, demonstrating the composer’s amazing emotional and sonic range.

As part of a program that included, incongruously to my mind, Mozart’s Symphony No 35 and Stravinsky’s Petrushka Suite, The San Francisco Symphony gave a performance of Ades’ Polaris. The piece was created in collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner and received its world premiere at the New World Symphony’s new concert hall in Miami earlier this year.

That was on Friday night. On Sunday, I attended the Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan’s recital as part of the Music@Menlo winter concert series. Barnatan named his recital “Darknesse Visible” after an Ades piano work he performed in the first half of the concert. Barnatan’s inspired programming choices, which explored the shadowy side of life from the bittersweet to the diabolical, included Debussy’s Suite Bergamesque, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, a Fantasy on Peter Grimes arranged by Ronald Stevenson after Britten’s opera and Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959.

While Polaris suggests the macro forces of nature at work — the effect of the moon and stars on the movement of the Earth – Darknesse Visible conveys a sense of nature in microcosm: Listening to this intense, spectrally beautiful piece has the same effect as staring at a single blade of grass until its contours become ingrained on the insides of your eyelids.

I have to admit that the video component of the presentation left me cold. Rosner’s video montage for Polaris is distracting. With its windswept, romantic shots of two women floating around on a rugged shoreline in swirling skirts and staring into middle distance on rocky promontories, it reminds one of an ad campaign for a middle-of-the-road high street fashion brand like Banana Republic or Zara. But the orchestra, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, still managed to put the glory of Ades’ stereophonic writing across, bathing us in undulating waves of sound through the use of rolling canons of notes, glittering percussion and warm brass. The cosmos-encompassing feel of the work stems in part from the fact that the brass players are placed away from the main body of the orchestra. In this past weekend’s performances at Davies Symphony Hall, the musicians stood at broad intervals in the gallery behind the stage.

I will not forget Barnatan’s performance of “Darknesse Visible” (or indeed his entire recital, which brilliantly fused a broad atmospheric palette with technical mastery) for a long time. Although the pianist brought passion and precision to every piece he played, the standout piece in his program for me was the Ades work. Barnatan plays with an introverted style. He seems to be engaging in an intimate conversation with the keyboard. In “Darknesse Visible,” this attitude comes to the fore. The pianist bends close to the keys, striking each one like it’s a bell. The sound shimmers. based on a John Dowland song which the composer has fractured and dispersed into pieces that extend from one end of the piano to the other, the music feels at once hollow and very full. One can’t but help entering into a deep state of meditation while listening to it. I found my gaze focusing on the inside of the piano lid. It was highly polished so the scarlet, silver, ebony and gold parts of the inside of the instrument — an area that is often hidden when the piano isn’t being used in performance — glimmered against the underside of the lid. The sight was as visual a representation of “darkness made visible” as the haunting sounds coming from the stage.

…does today’s edition of the campus newspaper include a glossy, full-color magazine-style insert produced by the high-end French fashion house Hermes. Move over H&M and Forever 21.

Oh, and here‘s an interesting article by the San Francisco Chronicle’s John King about Stanford’s grandiose and muddled architectural plans.