lies like truth

Although arts institutions would never go as far as to ban small children from attending exhibitions, a trip to the De Young Museum today with my friend Laetitia and her toddler, Gabriel, made me believe that some museums might as well put up a sign saying “no kids allowed.”

The main problem is that parents aren’t permitted to take strollers into the galleries. So Gabriel walked around on his own, got under people’s feet and excited the ire of several docents when he tried to eat Cheerios and climb under a barrier separating one of the art works from the hoards of visitors. When his mother tried to carry him around, Gabriel squirmed and moaned and eventually made such a racket that we had to take him out into Golden Gate Park and go for a walk.

I don’t really understand why strollers are forbidden. It’s not like they take up much room. And with the low lights and masses of people visiting the museums, having a stroller makes it much easier for parents to enjoy the art works while keeping their kids safe.

Depending on how you look at it, I am either a very bad or a very busy arts journalist.

I’ve been keeping my eye on The Bay Lights — a massive light installation that spans the 1.8 mile long Bay Bridge by light installation artist Leo Villareal — for months and have very excited about the project.

It opened last night. And I wasn’t there.

An evening meeting at Stanford overran and then it started pouring with rain. By the time I got back to San Francisco, I was exhausted from the difficult drive. My car had almost run out of gas and I decided it was best to skip the festivities.

Early this morning, I ran from Fort Mason to The Ferry Building and back, hoping to catch the lights in their post-opening-night glow. But by the time I got down to the water, dawn had arrived and the bridge was back to its unlit self. (The lights are turned off during the day time.)

I guess I don’t need to panic about missing out. The lights will be going on every night for at least the next two years. And there’s plenty of information and coverage to be found of the opening all over the Web. Still, it does feel odd not to have been there last night and to have failed to catch the lights in a quieter frame of mind this morning. Kind of like being a Bay Area sailing enthusiast and flaking on The Americas Cup.

From the coverage I’ve explored today, it looks like the opening went very well, in spite of the rain. Between the beautiful orange of the Golden Gate Bridge and the sparkling white lights of the Bay Bridge, this part of the world has just become an even more vibrant, colorful place.

I spent part of yesterday evening attending a listening party / lecture presented by Salon97‘s Cariwyl Hebert about John Cage at the Booksmith bookstore on Haight Street, and another part at The Hub experiencing a series of two-minute presentations given by a group of people who just won (or were finalists for) grants from The Triangle Lab to pursue a range of “artist-investigator” projects. The idea of the projects is to think of artistic process as one of “scientific” investigation and to use art as a method of inquiry rather than as a means to create tidy / fixed answers to life’s issues.

Cage was the archetypal artist-investigator. He questioned practically every premise that people in the western world held dear about the nature and function of art. The discussion at Booksmith, though quite basic, was lively in this regard, especially following our collective performance of Cage’s 4’33”. (You can see us performing the piece in the image above, with an audience member by the name of Neil conducting the three-movement mini epic.)

The conversation explored the nature of silence and how the piece illustrates Cage’s point about the impossibility of achieving an absolutely noiseless environment, as well as notions about how no two performances of any artistic work can ever be the same. Even silence is different from one performance of 4’33” to another. The more we talked, the more questions came up.

Conversely, as far as I could tell, most of the projects that have been selected for artist-investigator grants from The Triangle Lab seem to be more interested in providing answers than asking questions. Perhaps the investigatory nature of the ideas was better outlined in the grant proposals. But the presentations mostly fell short in this regard.

One or two projects, such as Michelle Wilson’s plan to “sell the animal-based carbon credits in her body in order to scrutinize and critique environmental issues, food systems, and alternate economies,” seem to be open-ended. But interestingly, the very few projects that appear to be genuinely inquisitive in purview are quite far removed from the world of art. Wilson’s is a piece of environmental activism at heart.

The majority of the winning projects take the form of artistic responses to various social ills like murder, drug abuse and racial tension in downtrodden Bay Area neighborhoods. Arielle Julia Brown, for instance, intends to use her grant money to “curate a series of site-specific performances…featuring testimonies from Bay Area mothers who have lost children to systemic violence.” This, like many of the other winning projects, sounds very socially conscious and noble, but it doesn’t strike me as being geared towards the pursuit of new knowledge.

It’s perhaps unfair of me to judge a bunch of artistic endeavors based on two-minute presentations. And perhaps the completed projects will undermine my current skepticism. Still, I think The Triangle Lab should remind themselves of Cage’s legacy when they pick their next round of awardees.

There wasn’t much of an audience outside San Francisco’s City Hall at 11am yesterday when the roughly 20 teen musicians from Herbert Hoover Middle School’s jazz band struck up the first notes of a swinging jazz standard.

But by the time the assorted wind, guitar, drum, keyboard and other instrumentalists were done, the crowd had mushroomed.

I stayed for a while watching and listening with a smile on my face in the mid-city sunshine as different groups of local school children traipsed in a very organized fashion across the street from City Hall, where they had been quietly sitting on the steps waiting to sing, play instruments and dance as part of this year’s San Francisco Unified School District Arts Festival.

In addition to the jazz band, whose players all took themselves quite seriously, there was a lively group of fourth graders from Longfellow Elementary who danced proto-hip-hop style to Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor.” These kids seemed to be having more fun than the musicians and their enjoyment of the experience was infectious. The crowd burst into rapturous applause and whoops and cries of “One more!”

The dancing was followed up by a marching band of mostly older students from Sala Burton School. They played Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in a determined by proficient manner. Again, though, the musicians seemed to take themselves very seriously. They could learn a thing or two from a field trip to the Stanford campus to watch the antics of the band that plays at the university’s sports events. Stanford goes a little too far, but their spirit is inspirational.

Anyway, the main point I want to make about all of this, is that it’s great to see kids getting out there and doing creative things in groups in public. The quality doesn’t matter all that much. It’s the participation that’s key. Having fun is also important — and those fourth graders from Longfellow showed us how.

PS For anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has no soul, you’re wrong. Go to San Jose this Friday evening to check out South FIRST FRIDAYS. Running from 7-11pm, SFF is a self-guided art walk through galleries, museums, and independent creative businesses featuring exhibitions and special performances. San Jose Stage Company is presenting synth pop by Containher and the Star People; there are artists talks and interactive instalations at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana; Phantom Galleries and Cinequest are doing a live art event connected to their annual Cinequest 23 Film Festival; there’s a Miles Davis tribute presented by San Jose Jazz at Pagoda Restaurant and Bamboo Lounge…and a bunch of other cool-sounding stuff. Info here.

Yesterday, I paid a visit to Herb Myers, the curator of the historical instrument collection at Stanford, in order to try out a Baroque oboe.

Herb’s office in the Braun Music Center is windowless and disheveled but by no means cheerless. There are reproductions of paintings depicting music-making scenes of yore on the walls, historical music treatises on the bookshelves, and harpsichords, violins and recorders taking up almost every other bit of available space. And Herb himself is a congenial chap who plays many instruments and is a particular fan of one of the oboe’s ancient predecessors — the shawm.

I’d never played a Baroque oboe before I visited Herb yesterday. It was remarkably light and reminded me more of a tenor recorder in terms of its size and feel. Some of the fingerings are comparable too. The reeds that Herb had for the instrument were quite old and cruddy, but I got some OK-ish sounds out of them.

The thing that blew me away (forgive the pun) about the Baroque oboe — and this isn’t unique to the oboe as other period wind instruments have this too — is how symmetrical the instrument is. The holes and metal plate systems at the bottom of the instrument match on both sides, even though they produce the same notes regardless of whether you use  the keys / holes on the right or the left of the instrument.

Why? According to Herb, symmetry was big in the Baroque and people felt that the even arrangement of keys was more aesthetically pleasing. And there’s also a practical reason for the mirroring, which I find astonishing: Having keys on either side of the instrument means that you can play it if you’re left-handed. Modern oboes created for lefties are almost non-existent. Lefty instruments in general are pretty rare these days. And considering the fact that being lefty-handed was seen as socially unacceptable for hundreds of years (the Medieval world equated leftiness with the Devil, the early music scholar Jesse Rodin told me when I ran into him just after my session with Herb) the idea that a musical instrument would be built to aid left-forward players seems amazing to me.

Puts a whole new spin on the famous description of the oboe as “the ill wind that blows no good.”

I’m not left-handed. Needless to say, however, it’s going to take quite a bit of practice on the Baroque oboe to achieve anywhere near a good sound and the requisite technical dexterity necessary to perform the duets that I recently started playing with a Stanford colleague of mine, Byron Sartain. Byron plays the Baroque flute. We’ve been doing quite well so far with me playing my contemporary oboe, so I think we’ll be sticking to that as I don’t think I’ll be acquiring a Baroque instrument anytime soon.

Finally, while we’re talking about the oboe: My positive thoughts go out to Bill Bennett, principle oboist with the San Francisco Symphony, who collapsed on stage in the middle of performing the solo part in the Strauss oboe concerto with the orchestra on Saturday night at Davies Symphony Hall. Bill, 56, suffered a brain hemorrhage and is in hospital in critical condition. The oboist made a great comeback in 2005 after doing battle with tonsil cancer…Get well quick, Bill.

Undercover Presents is a startling Bay Area-based music presenter that curates concerts based on seminal studio albums. The organization invites a few different local ensembles of assorted musical sensibilities and genres to present one song from an album in front of a live audience. Previous series have been presented on Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, among other rock music history gems.

Last night I attended a sold-out soiree dedicated to Radiohead’s Kid A at The Rickshaw Stop in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. I won’t forget the experience in a hurry. What I loved about it was the wild eclecticism of the offerings. The scope ranged from a kinetic flamenco/Balkan take on “How to Disappear Completely” performed by the evening’s guest music director Elizabeth Setzer (of the Eastern European women’s choral ensemble Kitka), flamenco dancer La Tania and band, to a trippy, gamelan-infused version of “Kid A” from the Burning Man-esque ensemble Gamelan X.

The album came alive for me in a new way last night. It wasn’t just that the groups involved in the presentation strove to put imaginative, personalized spins on the songs from Radiohead’s great 2000 album while paying homage to the original. It was the exuberance of the performances that made me smile broadly as I watched. No one played an ondes Martenot on stage last night (an eccentric early electric instrument that the band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood brought back into the public conscience through incorporating on various tracks on this album.) Nevertheless, I think Radiohead would thoroughly approve of the way in which the instrumentalists approached its music in a spirit of loving experimentalism. Besides the gamelan (played by eccentrically-costumed musicians), vibraphones, synthesizers, percussion instruments of all kinds, classical string instruments, myriad ways of using the voice and regular pop instruments were employed in service of the project.

Other things I love about the Undercover concept:

It celebrates the album, a form which has largely been undermined since the advent of iTunes with its singles focus. Like a novel’s arc, albums have a specific trajectory. To bring that aspect of the craft to the fore is commendable.

It puts all kinds of musics on an equal footing in a concert program. Because the tracks are performed in the order that they appear on the album, the idea of the “headline” and “supporting” act is removed. It was great, in the case of last night’s event, to see classical musicians performing in the second half of the show. Normally, when classical (or other ‘acoustic’ / rarified) music is incorporated into a mixed-genre event, it appears near the start of the performance, the idea being that people would prefer to get the quirky stuff over with in order to leave the “real” business of a rock concert towards the end. Or they might choose to skip the “artsy fartsy classical nonsense” completely, grab an extra drink at a bar, and then walk through the club doors once the string quartet is clearing out. How refreshing it was, then, to attend a music event where so many different kinds of sounds were so gloriously mixed up together, and whose presence at any particular point in the proceedings was dictated by where the track they chose to play appears on the source album.

Just one quibble: It takes too much time for the changeover between bands to happen.  The issue is that each band plays about five minutes worth of music and there’s a good 10-15 minutes of turnaround time between each one. The predictable interstitial DJ sets and creative, if pointless, short video interviews with the artists don’t quite work as solutions to this problem. It’s hard to know what a good solution might be as part of the fun of the event is the variety and the fact that so many different types of instruments are involved. Setting up a gamelan takes time, yo. If I hadn’t been on my own or if I’d had more to drink, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed the slow-ticking minutes between album tracks.

Undercover Presents is finding a wonderful niche for itself and I am looking forward to attending many more skillfully-curated concerts. It’s a great way to explore music history while exposing audiences to many amazing local artists.  The album I want to see them do next time around? U2’s The Joshua Tree. Or maybe The Smiths The Queen Is Dead.

PS Check out musician and blogger Brian Bergeron’s blog post about the Kid A event here.

Why are so many Q&A sessions around arts events so utterly pointless and/or grating? I rarely attend a talkback following a performance or other event which doesn’t feel stilted and where the line of questioning is fruitful. Post-event talks are so ubiquitous and yet yield such slim rewards.

Attending a particularly painful example of the format over the weekend prompts me to question whether it’s time for arts organizations to re-think the traditional Q&A, wherein artists and other relevant experts answer questions about their work fielded by some credible-ish journalist or administrator and the general public.

One of the main problems is the tone that’s set between the moderator, audience and artists. It’s usually ridiculously sycophantic, as the moderator and audience spend more time lavishing praise on the artists and trying to show off their own deep expertise than asking pithy questions.

The moderator is the first person to speak at these things, so he or she should be responsible for setting a smart tone. Unfortunately, the person who was charged with moderating the Q&A I attended committed both faux pas mentioned above.

Things got worse when the key artist at whom most of the questions were directed  — one of the country’s most well-respected theatre directors — palpably demonstrated her lack of patience with the moderator and her line of questioning. Instead of being polite and cordial, the director snapped, snorted and did everything she could to derail the proceedings.

For a bit, the scene was quite fun to watch. But after a while, I got bored and started feeling slightly queasy.

Following an inane question from a female audience member which was less a question than a breathless panegyric about how much she admired the director for being so successful and experimental and, gosh darn it, a woman to boot, I decided I couldn’t sit there a moment longer.

I fled, seeking momentary refuge in an adjacent room where a screening of a brilliantly weird and macabre animated narrative about a woman in an Arctic landscape who kills a walrus, guts it and climbs inside its skin, was being shown. The piece was part of a quintet of video artworks on display by artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

Perhaps arts organizations should give the time they would normally spend running these kinds of tedious exchanges over to ritually disemboweling a mammal on stage. A papier mache walrus will do. And I suspect  the thoughts that arise as a result of the experience would be way more profound than those that usually percolate.

Melodrama was once a staple of live performance. Then it went out of style. Now it seems to be coming back in again, with theatre-makers experimenting with it in different ways.

This weekend I’ve attended two productions of works, both coincidentally at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which take contrasting approaches to dealing with melodrama: Opera Parallele’s take on Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s 2003 chamber opera Ainadamar, and The Wooster Group / New York City Players’ song-tinged adaptation of three of Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn Plays written between 1914 and 1918 — Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff and The Long Voyage Home.

The Wooster Group and The New York City Players deal with the large amount of sturm und drang in O’Neill’s early short plays by going for a very unemotional, “straight-toned” approach to the dialogue. The characters speak mostly in monotone, regardless of whether they are in celebratory of funerary moods. The dissonance between the heavy-handed plots / high-stakes interpersonal dynamics and the “flatness” of the way in which the action is communicated is very strange and disquieting.

Contrastingly, the creators of Ainadamar run full tilt at the dramatic story about the relationship between the famous exiled Catalan stage actress Margarita Xirgu and the murdered poet Federico Garcia Lorca, milking the histrionics for all they are worth. The heart-pumping rhythms of Golijov’s music, Hwang’s unabashedly tragic lyrics (“How sad it was in Granada / The stones began to cry”) and the pungent imagery of Lorca being led to his death alongside two other men like Christ’s crucifixion scene, combine to overwhelm the senses.

Which approach is better? I kind of like both of them. But getting the melodramatic dynamic right is very tricky. There are moments in both productions where the action spills into kitsch.