Archives for 2011

People have been talking about how much they like the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris.

I think people seeing the film in San Francisco are going to appreciate Allen’s movie about the powerful hold that nostalgia has on our lives (a near-constant theme in Allen’s cannon) more than other audiences in cities around the world.

The reason for this is because of the many scenes in the movie devoted to Gertrude Stein’s Paris and the artists and writers that populate her world.

San Francisco is in the midst of a cultural celebration of Stein, with several institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Contemporary Jewish Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, all mounting exhibitions and other events devoted to the iconoclastic art patron and author.

I blogged about our city’s “Summer of Stein” a little while ago, here.

Having visited both the SFMOMA and CJM shows, it felt lovely and slightly surreal to see Picasso’s portrait of Stein and other iconic works created by the members of Stein’s clique in 1920s Paris that are currently hanging on the walls of San Francisco art institutions reproduced in the film.

The portrayal of Stein by Kathy Bates was both hilarious and sensitive. Watching the actress play the art doyenne on screen made the exhibitions about Stein currently unfolding in San Francisco come to life in an even more vivid way.

Midnight in Paris, and Bates’ rendition of Stein in particular, also made me think back to The Lost Generation, one of Allen’s wonderful early standup comedy routines. I guess that Stein — and nostalgia in general for 1920s Paris — has been with the filmmaker for a long time:

The Lost Generation

I mentioned before that I was in Europe. It’s not the first time that I was in Europe, I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d’Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygenist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild new years eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, ’cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was… looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That’s the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth.

 

 

Good night.

I spent the afternoon at Stanford University yesterday observing 20 of this year’s Knight Journalism Fellows deliver short presentations on their visions for the future of journalism.

As someone who spends a lot of time grappling with thoughts about how professional journalism can stay useful and sustainable in these times of media frenzy and economic turmoil, and also as the lucky recipient of a Knight Fellowship for the upcoming academic year 2011-2012, attending the event was a no-brainer for me.

The three-minute speeches delivered by the fellows, who hail from countries as diverse as Pakistan, Cuba and Uganda as well as from all over the United States, had a lot in common with one another. Nearly every fellow sees journalism as a form of social justice. Many are working on projects that engage citizens as journalists in order to tell stories about individuals or groups who they feel often under-represented in the mainstream media (whether women or Latino youth or Nepalese villagers) and many are focused on crowd sourcing content from the public and harnessing social media to bring their projects to life.

I wasn’t clear in some cases about how exactly the project organizers planned to execute their world-saving ideas. And few articulated any message about how they planned to make their projects financially viable.

I also found some of the presentations to be a little canned. Perhaps over-rehearsal was to blame. On the other hand, delivering a speech about a highly personal new idea you’ve been working on for a year in front of a busy lecture theatre when you know you’re being videoed is no mean feat, especially if English isn’t your first language.

A couple of years ago, the Knight Fellowship shifted its emphasis from inviting a bunch of journalists to spend a year generally enriching their minds in order to become better journalists in the holistic sense, to asking those selected to focus on developing projects aimed at innovating the field of journalism using the latest technological tools and cross-disciplinary thinking. Yesterday’s event represented the first time in the 45-year history of the Knight Fellowship (and two year history of its new “Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Leadership” focus) that the fellows had been asked to present their projects publicly. Though the event itself could use some slight re-tooling in terms of finding a way to make it feel more organic, conversational and inclusive, I think that creating a public forum for all the great work that the fellows do is a marvelous thing.

I’m looking forward to participating this time next year.

P.S. On the subject of trends in journalism, here’s a link to an excellent blogpost on the subject by Jeff Jarvis.

What does a choral conductor do — or indeed the music director of any ensemble do — if he or she feels frustrated at the standard of the amateur chorus he or she is leading?

Should she (OK, I’m switching to ‘she’ now to avoid using that cumbersome ‘he or she’ thing throughout this blogpost) get angry at every rehearsal and lecture the choir about how they’re not delivering the goods?

Should she institute more rigorous rules about things like attendance and pre-rehearsal preparation and threaten the chorus members with tortures like forcing them to “re-audition” if they miss more than two rehearsals?

Or should she consider a move into the world of ‘professional’ choruses where financial support supposedly dictates a higher level of focus, commitment and talent?

Theoretically, I actually think that the third option may be best for the conductor who refuses to accept the allowances that have to be made for a choir consisting of people who sing primarily for fun (albeit often to a very high level of musical excellence).

The fact is that no matter how devoted the members of amateur choruses are to their choral organizations, putting in many hours of rehearsal and time on their own preparing their music, they have other obligations like paying jobs that sometimes get in the way of choral activities.

So if a chorus director has been stamping her feet on the podium like an impetuous child one too many times, she should probably consider seeing how she fares in the professional choral world.

If she’s really good, she might be lucky enough to land one of the very few paying chorus gigs available.

And at that point, I’m guessing, the reality check will set in.

The truth is that unless you’re leading a group like Chanticleer, which rehearses every day and whose members do nothing for a living besides singing full-time in that ensemble, issues to do with intonation, blend and other aspects of musical refinement will always be there. Everyone deals with these problems, actually, even the top professional groups.

And let’s not forget that the best volunteer choruses manage, in spite of the competing obligations in their lives, to deliver the musical goods admirably well.

So I’d like to suggest a fourth option for chorus directors who feel they’re at a crossroads and spend too much time in rehearsals haranguing their singers:

Suck it up, smile and work to the best of your abilities with the happy, talented amateurs that you’ve got standing in front of you.

It’s amazing how one’s work can sometimes get co-opted by people who have such a strong point of view about something that it makes them blind to the actual words they read on the page.

This is the case, I feel, regarding the responses I’ve received lately to the recent blog post I penned about an event I attended last week at Twitter‘s headquarters in San Francisco.

I’ve received a deluge of anti-Twitter email congratulating me on taking a negative stance on the social media tool.

But the fact of the matter is that I did not set out to criticize Twitter the social networking tool in my blog post. What I was criticizing was the presentation I attended at Twitter, which was a total waste of time in terms of helping connect the arts world to social networking.

I actually think Twitter has a lot to offer as a tool. The tricky thing is figuring out how to get the most from it without feeling completely overwhelmed.

My advice to anyone who’s feeling disgruntled with Twitter as a method of sharing ideas on the arts front is to find a friend or colleague who’s comfortable with the technology, take them out for ice-cream and have them explain a few basic things about how to set up the tool to best serve your goals and strategize about using it in a way that feels unintimidating.

And despite my annoyance at Twitter for staging such a pointless event the other day, I am still looking forward to being invited to the company’s HQ again in the near future (assuming I’m not disbarred for that last blogpost I wrote) and attending an event for the arts that’s more thoughtfully organized. I hear that such a soiree is currently in the works.

Frankly, I can’t wait, as I’m dying to know how to use Twitter better.

Some brief thoughts on this latest and diverse weekend of culture-vulturing in the Bay Area…

1. Campo Santo presents Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move”: Intersection for the Arts recently decamped from its longstanding Valencia Street base to a multi-use building in San Francisco’s downtown — part of the Chronicle Building at 925 Mission Street. The organization’s resident theatre company, Campo Santo, inaugurated this new phase in Intersection’s life with a world premiere production of the American Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson’s new play, “Nobody Move.” I saw the show, which tells a picaresque story about a happy-go-lucky young man who somehow always seems to find himself on the wrong side of the law and the low-lifes that surround him, in preview. The play’s press opening is tonight so, it’s not really fair to pass judgment on it, though I will offer a few comments cos that’s what I’m trained to do. What I will start by saying in the production’s favor is that the basement space of the Chronicle Building in which the play is performed is a great setting for a contemporary story about a ne’er do well on the lam. The low ceilings add to the feeling of claustrophobia. The triangular-shaped stage area set up  in a corner of the room highlights the protagonist’s attempt to avoid being cornered and the overall sterile feeling of the room (which looks like it serves as a conference space when it’s not been used for theatre) infuses Johnson’s narrative with a feeling of removal from what’s natural and real in the world. Campo Santo has also amassed an A-list cast. Catherine Castellanos and Margo Hall are terrific as a couple of tough-minded broads trying to get by, each in her own unique way. Daveed Diggs (pictured) makes for a wonderfully ditzy protagonist. We never quite know whether he’s actually got a smart, calculating brain on him, or if he’s simply dumb. And Donald Lacy, playing a crook whom Diggs’ Jimmy Lutz shoots in the leg, is a comically angry nemesis to Diggs’ character. All this being said, I found the experience on the whole to be a bit disappointing. The play has strong characters but it strikes me as being a bit like a third-rate Coen Brothers movie with Tarantino-derived gambits. There’s little about it, beyond a forced and poorly-developed sub-current on the theme of Native American community displacement, that makes it feel particularly theatrical. Also, there’s a hell of a lot of shouting, which is particularly headache-inducing in a hermetically-sealed basement space.

2. Dark Porch Theatre presents “Eleanor” as part of Exit Theatre’s DivaFest 2011: The young, San Francisco-based company Dark Porch Theatre’s three-hour-long homage to the powerful Medieval Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, feels about an hour too long. But as a delightfully silly romp through key moments in the biography of one of European history’s most powerful women colorfully embellished with simple but artfully-composed songs, it’s definitely worth checking out. The imaginative play, which is written and directed by Margery Fairchild and voyages away from the history books into the realm of the imagination, draws heavily on Monty Python. It even goes into a protracted search for the holy grail story complete with an obstreperous hermit in a loin cloth and fantastical wig. The actors look like they’re having a lot of fun on stage and, best of all, you come away from the production wanting to read some books about the play’s formidable heroine.

3. ArtPad SF at the Phoenix Hotel: In tandem with the San Francisco Art Fair happening at Fort Mason this past weekend, a bunch of contemporary art galleries from the Bay Area and Los Angeles collaborated on a boutique event at the Phoenix Hotel on Eddy Street. The funky, central location of this event created a welcome opportunity for art lovers unable or unwilling to trek out to the waterfront for the more established Art Fair. The Phoenix also makes for an appealing venue to sample the work of many different galleries. Each organization occupied a small hotel room, transforming the spaces into jewel-like mini-galleries. Wandering between some 35 rooms arranged on two floors of the Phoenix was a bit like attending Open Studios, a regular event in which local artists showcase their work to the public. But the fact that it was the galleries in each case that organized the exhibitions rather than the artists created a different flavor. There was a slightly more commercial feel to the proceedings as a result, but the rooms were more carefully decorated to reflect the brand of the gallery and the work on display. The event provided a good way to get a bird’s eye view on the local gallery scene and what galleries are showing these days. I wasn’t taken with much of what I saw as I wandered from room to room, though I did spot a few trends including scratched out / painted over objects and bird cages filled with unusual things. Spaces presented by Eddie Colla Projects (lurid renegade graffiti), Johannson Projects (heightened-natural sculptures) and Launch LA (faux pastoral landscapes in kitschy sepia) stand out most strongly in my mind. The biggest highlight for me personally, however, was the hotel’s central courtyard. The sunny space, where people mingled for drinks and chat, was the site of a truly lovely installation of metallic orbs of different sizes punctured with tiny plant shoots. The orbs were string over the hotel’s oval-shaped swimming pool and bobbed about in the breeze. They made for a lovely site that merged the natural world of plants with the synthetic landscape of a boutique hotel.

4. Paul Feigs’ “Bridesmaids” at AMC Van Ness: Took myself off to a matinee performance of Paul Feigs’ new comedy about a thirty-something midwestern woman charged with the challenge of putting together her best friend’s wedding celebrations while trying to straighten out her own catastrophic love life. I went to the movie on the recommendation of several friends and a couple of critics and thought it was quite good on the whole. The smartly written script and a winning performance from several cast members including Kristen Wiig as the protagonist, Annie, make this a film to catch, preferably after happy hour with a bunch of girlfriends. It’s full of stock characters and has a Hollywood ending. But the film has a few standout scenes that set it above the average summer “chick flick”: My favorites included the scene in which Annie and her nemesis, Whitney, compete for who can deliver the most winning “best friend” speech at the bride-to-be’s engagement party, the point at which Annie and Whitney try to attract the attention of a wary traffic cop by engaging in a number of illegal driving behaviors, and the gross-out bit where the bride and her bevy of bridesmaids try on expensive couture dresses at a high-end bridal boutique while dealing with food-poisoning.

I’m impressed by Twitter‘s attempt to reach out to local arts organizations here in the Bay Area.

The San Francisco-based social media company invited a bunch of arts marketers and media types (me included) to their offices in the South of Market neighborhood yesterday afternoon for a “Performing Arts and Social Media Discussion.” The hour-long event featured a short presentation by James Buckhouse, the Marketing Director at Twitter, followed by casual drinks and chat. About 30 people attended the event, including communications employees from the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet.

But despite Twitter’s good intentions, the event left much to be desired in terms of making me really understand how Twitter can help to connect artists with their audiences and peers.

Things got off to a shaky start with Buckhouse’s non-sequitur of an opening gambit. He spent the first five minutes telling over-labored hypothetical story about a driver in a car flipping over upon accidentally hitting a deer in the road and then surviving against the odds. He followed the anecdote by saying something along the lines of: “This is what makes me want to work hard. This is why the arts are so important.”

Huh?

I’m not sure what Buckhouse was driving at with all of this. I certainly felt like a deer in the headlights by the end of his monologue. When, much to my relief, he stopped talking and played a video packed with endorsements for Twitter from celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, I was still none the wiser.

Another strange thing: Buckhouse explained the importance of using Twitter to share personalized thoughts and opinions on the arts, rather than sending out institutional-sounding reminders about upcoming performances such as “Blah Dance’s next concert happens on Friday. Visit www.blahdance.org for more info.” But the example the marketing director used to illustrate the kind of re-tweet-worthy, “in your own voice” messaging that he says works well on Twitter was a Tweet from an arts worker quoting someone else! Though I suppose the message was personal in the sense that it didn’t just communicate factual information, it still wasn’t written in the sender’s own words at all.

I spent a little while before I left exchanging pleasantries with a Twitter employee, Claire, who had been sitting in the back of the room the entire time working on a completely different project. Claire told me that she had been interested in attending the session as the company’s expert on the non-profit sector, but once she was in the room, didn’t apparently feel compelled to pay much if any attention to what was going on around her. I tried to find out what exactly it is that Claire does for Twitter as its non-profit guru, but her explanation sounded quite abstract and left me puzzled.

I did however learn one useful thing from Claire: I explained that that I have been having trouble dealing with the onslaught of Tweets from the people I follow in my Twitter feed. She suggested creating “lists” to help manage the madness. I very much appreciated this advice and will no doubt act upon it.

I felt quite baffled by the event, all in all. I would have liked Buckhouse to include a Q&A session in the proceedings. But instead of opening up the floor for a formal discussion to allow the group to share views and ideas en masse, Buckhouse simply urged us to have a drink and chat with our colleagues. I had to leave early to get to an event in Berkeley, so perhaps everyone reconvened at some point after I departed. But I somehow doubt that that happened.

I don’t mean to sound completely negative about Twitter’s arts outreach event. I think it’s a great idea in principle and I felt privileged to have been invited. But I think Buckhouse and his colleagues should give more careful thought in future with regards to how to manage the event in order to really engage those present and hopefully make a difference.

San Francisco is entering a veritable Summer of Stein with two major exhibitions devoted to Gertrude Stein and a slew of performances, salons and related events.

Earlier today, I managed to catch both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s The Steins Collect, an applaudable convergence of the Stein Family’s panoramic collection of early and mid-20th century European artworks, and, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, an informative and nicely-balaned exploration of Stein’s life and impact on the art world.

These two shows operate in perfect synchronicity, demonstrating how two large arts organizations can work together to create parallel experiences that are quite different from one another and yet inform each other beautifully.

The SFMOMA show is well-organized and goes much deeper than simply displaying masterworks by the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Renoir from the Stein’s formidable collection. Of course, it’s marvelous to see so many fine paintings. But what one most powerfully comes away with from viewing this exhibition is a sense of the forces that came into play in shaping the Paris art world of the Steins’ era. From the split between Gertrude and Leo Stein over aesthetics to Gertrude’s eventual championship of artists who would never have as big a name as her early objects of patronage owing in part to being priced out of the market for Picassos and the like, SFMOMA’s show reveals the story behind the art in a way that activates thoughts about history, economics, politics and personal relationships as much as it presents a fiesta for the eyes.

A sign of a great arts experiences is leaving a museum, cinema or theatre with questions buzzing in one’s head. I happily left SFMOMA with many questions about the Steins, such as wanting to know more about their financial situation and how it was that Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, a Jewish lesbian couple with a “degenerate” taste in art, managed to escape being hunted down and killed by the Nazis in Vichyist France.

The show across the street at the CMJ helped to fill in many of the gaps with its quirky, thematic appraisal of the life of Gertrude Stein. Divided into five themed areas covering such aspects of Stein’s existence as her relationship with Toklas and entourage of young, mostly gay male artists and writers, the show rounded-out the experience I’d had at SFMOMA and provided yet more food for thought. I especially loved the section about Stein’s influence on newer generations of artists. A playful wall sculpture made out of thousands of spools of colored thread creating an upside down, pixelated portrait of Gertrude will stay in my mind for months to come.

The SFMOMA show opens on May 21 and the CMJ show only opened a week ago. I advise anyone within driving distance of San Francisco to attend both.

Kink.com, an Internet porn company and the current owner of The Armory, a historic weaponry in the Mission District of San Francisco which was decommissioned in 1973, recently started giving public tours of its facility.

This is a good thing for two reasons:

1) The Armory is an amazing building that’s well worth visiting. I had the opportunity to explore it at close range by joining a Kink.com tour on Saturday afternoon. On the outside it looks like a foreboding Moorish castle and on the inside, it’s a crazy combination of 1930s austerity and contemporary adult fantasia. The hour-long tour takes some 20-25 guests along the 200,000 square foot building with its lofty corridors, marble fringed staircases, high ceilings and dark wooden wall panels and in and out of rooms that have been recently converted to suit the appetites of the S&M crowd. Among other innovations, there’s a meat locker complete with bloodied carcasses and metal hooks, a doctor’s office full of cruel-looking medical paraphernalia, and a room packed with custom-made “fucking machines.” Barrels of lube, boxes of enemas and rows of whips, manacles and chains stock the shelves like reams of paper and containers of printer ink in an office building. Most surreal of all is the presence of Mission Creek, an underground stream which gushes along an open channel in the basement of the building. According to the tour guide, a buxom redhead wearing knee-length silver boots, the National Guard wanted its own water supply so built directly on top of the creek. Apparently, The Armory is the only building in the city which has direct access to this body of water. Oh, and another interesting tidbit: George Lucas shot part of the first Star Wars movie in The Armory’s massive drill court. Some of the rigging from the film shoot can still be seen in the rafters.

2) Kink.com is on to a good thing in reaching out to the public. The adult film industry is viewed by many outside the community as something to keep at arm’s length. It’s seen as shadowy and depraved. In providing a measure of transparency through offering regular tours during the week that can be purchased for $25 through the Eventbrite website like any other cultural happening in town, the company is demonstrating a level of approachability that’s rather commendable in my opinion. The tour I went on was lighthearted, informative and matter-of-fact. It was also weirdly non-titillating, which I suppose makes sense given that you’re getting a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at a working business. It’s kind of great that the tour guides don’t attempt to sensationalize things for the gaping tourists. This is what sets it apart from, say, a Hollywood studio tour. One thing which I found interesting is that Kink.com is looking to develop community partnerships as the facility is huge and the company doesn’t need to use all the space. It might be a while before local schools start holding bakesales in The Armory’s drill court. But I could see The Folsom Street Fair doing more things in the building (the annual alt sex-oriented fiesta has already done joint tours with The Armory and there have been a few other crossover events to date.) The Armory might also be the perfect adjunct home for the Burning Man Festival here in San Francisco.

I don’t suppose that there are many conservatory composition students out there who manage to entice music ensembles from outside of their immediate collegiate community to perform at their graduate recitals.

Aaron Pike is an anomaly in this regard, truly making him a young composer to watch out for.

The 26-year-old’s graduate recital last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music included a performance by the 32-member International Orange Chorale, as ASCAP award-winning, 32-member a cappella vocal group. I was at the recital because I sing in the group.

The reason that so many singers with busy lives turned up last night to support Pike is two-fold. The group is already invested in the composer’s music: IOCSF performed one of Pike’s pieces, “Peace,” an emotionally-understated musical tribute to dead war heroes set to a poem by Louise N. Parter, at a Conservatory Composition Choral Competition last year. “Peace” won first prize at that event and went on to become the composer’s first published work.

The second reason is that Pike is a promising composer. The two pieces of his that IOCSF performed last night — “Peace” as well as “Alleluia!”, a setting of the title word with a rich, cinematic (albeit slightly cheesy) chorale section sandwiched between jubilant, dance-like passages.

Hearing the composer’s other pieces served to confirm my group’s widespread belief in Pike’s work. My favorite piece on the roster was a guitar duet, “Impulses,” performed last night by the Conservatory students, Ramon Fermin and Chris Hague. It had heavy rock motifs and glittery-quiet runs dusted with harmonics. A violin, clarinet and piano trio, Child’s Play, was equally captivating. Performed by Kevin Rogers on violin, clarinetist Brenden Guy and Nicholas Reynolds on piano, the piece, which was reminiscent of Debussy’s Children’s Corner in some respects, showed signs of rhythmic vitality, programmatic playfulness and a fluid feeling for melodic line that felt very much the composer’s own.

I spent most of yesterday at a symposium at Stanford University all about career prospects within the tech industry for students graduating with humanities Ph.Ds from American academic institutions.

The organizers invited a lineup of high-powered speakers from silicon valley to address the audience at the Bechtel Conference Center. Luminaries included Marissa Mayer, VP of consumer products for Google, June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media, Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital and the CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne.

There was lots of Stanford brass on the docket too, such as John L Hennessy, the university’s president, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the institution’s chair of graduate studies, comparative literature.

Neither side had much of consequence to say to each other really, despite the fact that the conference organizers must have ransacked every corner of Silicon Valley to find people in top positions at big companies who also happened to have earned Ph.D’s in humanities subjects at some point in their fabulous careers.

Throwing words like “empathy”, “right brain” and “innovation” around, the techies in the room tried their best to argue a case for why people who’ve studied 17th century French drama or post-feminist literary theory for six years would make great employees at firms that manufacture semiconductors or sell cut-price designer shoes. But the arguments were basically thin.

The idea that humanities students can inject a spirit of innovation into tech-centric environments is somewhat plausible. But one can also argue easily that adding a person from any contrasting intellectual background to a team where everyone else shares similar skills can help to shake things up. The fact that there are so many arts projects happening these days through collaborations between artists and scientists speaks to this idea in reverse.

It’s also telling that even the invited speakers aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to hire humanities grads. Patrick Byrne admitted to having just one arts-type person in every team of 10 at Overstock.com (the rest are engineering types etc) and spoke of this “innovation” in hiring as a sort of wild bohemian experiment, rather than something that made sound business sense or could in anyway be construed as a normal practice.

The academics in the room, for their part, mostly looked blank.

It’s a lovely idea to think that Silicon Valley could maintain its competitive edge as a leader in innovation by taking advantage of the vast humanities brainpower on its doorstep at Stanford. This first conference on the subject definitely opened up a conversation that hadn’t heretofore taken place in any formal sense. But the event ultimately paid more lip service to some theoretical notion of new hiring practices rather than paved the way for anything lasting, tangible and widespread to happen.

Gertrude Stein was unkind about the Bay Area. “There is no there there,” she once famously said of her home town of Oakland.

Nevertheless over the next few months, the region is going to be abuzz with cultural matter centering on the grande dame of 20th century art.

With the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts all hosting Stein-centric exhibitions, performances, talks, salons and other events, it feels like we’re in a Stein Moment. Meanwhile, across the country in New York, the Jewish Museum is presenting an exhibition about the Cone Sisters of Baltimore. They were in Paris at the same time as the Stein Family and were also major collectors of Picasso, Matisse and co.

It’s sort of weird when all this cultural confluence happens around a single subject or figurehead and there’s no obvious reason for it. It’s not like there’s a Stein anniversary happening this year, which would be the obvious explanation for all the hooplah.

A phone conversation with a contact at SFMOMA revealed that coincidence is really the main reason for SteinFest San Francisco. SFMOMA, which holds Matisse’s iconic canvas “Femme au Chapeau” in its collection — a painting which the Stein family bought and championed after its first, controversial showing in Paris — had been mulling over doing a Stein exhibition ten years ago. Five years ago, the Contemporary Jewish Museum decided that it too wanted to do a Stein show. When the curators there found out that SFMOMA was also planning a Stein exhibition, the organizations, together with YBCA (which is presenting a production of the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts in August) thought it would be a good thing to go Stein mad at the same time.

I’m sure that Stein, who loved abundance, would have approved of this surfeit of attention. And it’s sort of fitting for Stein, whose slippery writing so often resists meaning and categorization, to be the cause of a sudden spurt of cultural tribute that is happening just because rather than as a result of a major anniversary or new discovery.

Spent yesterday pottering about at Taliesin West, the winter residence and school of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, located in Scottsdale, AZ.

What’s remarkable about the place, is how much it owes cheap student labor for its beauty and largely even for its mere existence!

According to my tour guide, the first question that the famous architect would ask of people who came to interview for a spot in the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture was apparently: “Can you pay $650?” — the fee for being an apprentice at Taliesin. A few scholarships were given out, but basically the program catered to the independently wealthy, as $650 in the late 1930s and 1940s was a considerable sum.

Wright not only used his apprentices to help develop architectural plans, but he also had them undertake quite a lot of the  construction work on the property itself. Wright had them knock down and erect walls and build doors, among other things. This must have been a great education for the students. It also allowed Wright to build whatever his whims dictated (and his whims changed frequently) without having to pay much of a price.

The school at Taliesin still exists. Each year, the first thing that each scholar builds is a shelter for him or herself on the property. The Wright Foundation owns many acres of desert land surrounding the main buildings at Taliesin West and this provides an amazing canvas for cutting-edge building designs. I was completely entranced by the photographs I saw of various student dwellings couched in the sand among the cacti. (The desert shelter tour at Taliesin West is only available from November though April without making a special appointment.)

Ultimately, it is the presence of the school that makes Taliesin West relevant today. It contributes an innovative quality to what is otherwise really just a museum.