Masked Ball, Venetian Masters, and trippy mashups at the de Young, Zyzzyva

Posted on February 24, 2012 by

Gerhard Richter’s enormous mural Strontium glowered over Wilsey Court. The mural, made from a collection of blurred photographs representing the atomic structure of strontium titanate (a substance used to make artificial diamonds), might have been interpreted as a bit of a symbolic downer on the festivities, which celebrated both the high and the low fruits of early-Renaissance wealth. Projected on an adjacent wall was the flashier and less demanding 1964 Vincent Price horror flick, Masque of the Red Death. Downstairs, the lauded exhibition, “Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power” was open to any partygoer who wanted to view it, and at any other time that might have been more tempting, especially considering these were its last days in San Francisco. After all, how often can one see Titians, Tintorettos, Giorgiones, and Veroneses in this hemisphere? But the people who came out for the masked ball at the De Young that night seemed reluctant to defer to any artwork other than that which they had made of themselves. People concocted different “fancy dress” iterations of the past 400 years, and wore or even painted on elaborate carnival masks, a combination that evoked the formal glamour of opening night at the opera with the DIY exuberance of Halloween. There were tables holding different kinds of brie and bars serving pink and orange drinks with edible flowers and blood orange slices. Caterers with trays of mini tiramisus dodged patrons whose peripheral vision was mask-obscured; there was a lot of “Pardon me,” “oops, so sorry,” and “oh dear, can I get you another one of those?” that night. (continue reading)

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SF Ballet’s “Onegin”, Zyzzyva

Posted on February 22, 2012 by

photo by Erik Tomasson

Often, the thing we love about the work of a great author is the ability to describe a moment, an emotion, some nuance of experience, in such a way that it is immediately recognizable to us, however foreign to our experience it actually is. We feel they somehow rummaged around in our mind and conveyed our lives back to us with different plots and more elegant language. The months after I graduated from college and was struggling to find work, feeling like I was both fabulous and doomed to uselessness, was probably the worst time to read The House of Mirth. And who would not recognize his own moments of mortified infatuation in Tolstoy’s description of Levin: “He avoided long looks at her as one avoids long looks at the sun; but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”

Ballet can elicit the same recognition: it doesn’t matter that most of us are too stiff, short-limbed, paunchy, or weak to even think without strain of the movements we see performed. Though we speak a different language, we can “read” dance and transcribe its expressions as our own. In Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Romeo has left Juliet’s bedroom and fled the city, she pulls the window curtain aside, arches her back, thrusting her chest toward the dawn light streaming into her room. Somehow, we know she is asking the gods to assist her in her helpless, entirely vulnerable state, that this is the physical manifestation of heartfelt entreaty. Though dancers portray human experience in a way that most people couldn’t and wouldn’t do themselves, they are able to evoke sympathetic experiences through their movements; we (ballet lovers, at least) watch and think, “Yes, this is what love/lust/fear/jealousy/etc. looks like,” and momentarily, feel it along with them. (continue reading)

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Joan Baez at Yoshi’s, Zyzzyva

Posted on February 15, 2012 by
Image

Joan Baez with her son, Gabriel Harris on the cajon, and Marianne Aya Omac. Photo by Jamie Soja

As diverse as the music performed in concerts is, so are the appearances of the audiences. James Mollison documented a spectrum of what he calls the “tribes” of attendees in his photography project and book The Disciples, a rough census of personae that converge around the archetypes represented by the musical acts Mollison followed. The grouped images of said disciples invite one to guess, before reading the captions, which performers each had come out for. It’s not hard: men in trucker hats and denim overalls, Merle Haggard. Men holding up sagging jeans by the crotch and women whose skirts barely reached their own, P Diddy. Union Jack mini-dresses, leopard print and afros? Spice Girls. Cinched lumberjack shirts, curly blonde wigs and feathery cowboy hats? Dolly Parton, obviously. Kiss makeup? You got it.

Recently at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Joan Baez performed as a guest rather than as the main act, but the audience distinctly appeared to be of the Baez tribe. The restaurant side of Yoshi’s seemed to be patronized by slick young things coifed, Spanxed, and pressed into coy “my-eyes-are-up-here-jerk” cocktail attire. But inside the jazz club, the tone was far less bothered. The patrons were older, their dress casual and accented by the occasional ethnic jewelry piece. The shoes were decidedly comfort-oriented, the hair natural in color and texture, the makeup minimal on gracefully senescent faces. Sure, they could have been there for the comparatively unknown headliner from Montpellier, France,Marianne Aya Omac, but it seemed more likely that these were the people (or a small portion of them) who for the past five decades have been following Baez, rapt by her ever-burnishing voice, loving the ground whereon she stands. (continue reading)

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This is fun.

Posted on February 2, 2012 by

Did you know that Russians have been in California longer than San Francisco has been a city? In 1812, the tsarist government (which didn’t have much going on that year) chartered Fort Ross in what is now Sonoma County, to control exploration, trade, and settlement in the North Pacific. San Francisco’s own Russian Center is celebrating Fort Ross’s 200th anniversary in this year’s Russian Festival, showcasing musical acts like songstress Marina V and folk/jazz/blues/comedy team Limopo, performances of ballet, folk dance and singing, gymnastics, operetta, a gallery of the work of contemporary émigré artists, and food. (leave your diet and your vegan requirements at home). Loosen up for the dance party Friday night at the “World’s Greatest Vodka Bar” and find your Valentine’s Day gifts at the amber jewelry boutiques. At its Sutter location since its
founding in 1939, the Russian Center has held this family-friendly event every April, but has regular performances and classes for children and adults, a state certified pre-school Teremok, the offices of Russian Life Daily Newspaper, and a Russian library, in case you ever wanted to read Notes from Underground in the original cyrilic. (more information)

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The Edwardian Ball got Balmy on the Crumpet, Yo. SF Weekly

Posted on January 29, 2012 by

San Franciscans are serious about partying. We’ve been to a lot of fancy dress events, and a lot of events that weren’t “fancy dress” per se, but which were treated as such, apparently just for kicks. But the Vau de Vire Society’s Edwardian Ball last weekend inspired the most spectacular — and thoroughly thought-out and executed — costumery we’ve ever seen donned by so many people in one place. The playboy mansion would blush at the amount of cleavage on display, blossoming over a whale graveyard’s worth of boned corsets, and framed in taffeta, lace, and feathers. Men wore top hats and fedoras and multiple-piece suits. The Edward Gorey theme inspired more macabre features such as white contact lenses and cadaver-glam makeup. A striking and slightly confusing element was the pervasion of steampunk – goggles everywhere, leather hip holsters, and jewelry made of old watch parts.

People dressed to party like it was 1909, and many also had the dances down. This was most apparent in the earlier portion of the night, when the ballroom floor wasn’t filled to capacity, and many couples took advantage of the free space to perform elaborate and antiquated ballroom moves while the rest of us gawked enviously and wondered whether Arthur Murray’s still existed. One couple danced an energetic skipping jig around the floor in circles; later that night they huffed through an escalatingly tempo’d Lindy to the honky-tonk trio in the basement. Many couples waltzed, most in a traditional box step, but one intrepid male couple swung a fearsome Viennese — fearsome in that both parties executed complete 180 degree turns with every measure without spiraling into the wallflowers or crashing and rolling into inadvertent flagrante delicto on the dance floor. (continue reading)

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I’m going to this tomorrow. Are you?

Posted on January 27, 2012 by

So you want to “get fit.”

 But prolonged periods of training are dangerous; you eventually find yourself sporting a Borat leotard and kissing your own biceps in the mirror. When you’re finally sick of post-workout Jamba Juice and hating the entire contents of your ipod, you quit—but you don’t make a clean break with your training. You tell yourself you’ll go back; you just don’t feel like going today. Or tomorrow. Or all next week or year. But you’re still paying your monthly dues, because this is San francisco, where only the dead don’t exercise. Surely you’ll go back.

Why not try something new? Dance—any sort of dance—demands consideration of an aesthetic end as well as physical rigor, so it can wipe the floor with physical training in terms of keeping your mind engaged. You’re tasked with not only completing a complex set of movements while sweat streams into your eyeballs, you also have to make it beautiful, and every dance has its own ideal of beauty. If your legs have no turn-out, maybe ballet isn’t for you, but jazz is more forgiving. If jazz involves too much jumping around, maybe the smoothness of belly dance is the right fit. I’ve heard from particularly fearsome and sexy friends that Zumba is both fearsome and very sexy. It must be a conflation of “zoom” and “rhumba.” My hips hurt just thinking about it.

You can try out these and many others for $5 (all-day, as many or as few classes as you wish) on January 28th at Lines Dance Center in the old Oddfellows Hall building off Market street. Please don’t show up in your Borat leotard. (info here)

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Paul Madonna’s Everything is its Own Reward, Art Practical

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

In 1955, the French theorist, writer, and filmmaker Guy Debord defined the term psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”1 The art that charges our imaginative sense of place conveys not only a story but also a rhythm of life—a convergence of personalities, ambitions, and attitudes that could only have taken place there and then—traces of which rise off the changed, sometimes unrecognizable streets decades later. It is why, despite George Gershwin’s intent for Rhapsody in Blue to be heard as a “musical kaleidoscope of America,”2 his composition became associated with and still evokes New York, a city whose glories and debacles have become synonymous with the American Dream. It is also why, in the din of Paris cafés, one can imagine oneself a reveler in Hemingway’s A Movable Feast and why the term Dickensian is still used as shorthand to describe the peculiar squalid charm of London’s old working-class neighborhoods. The artists who limn the embedded myths of our cities are master interpreters of psychogeography, the profound and nuanced influence of place upon person.

The monograph Everything Is Its Own Reward (City Lights Publishers)—the artist and writer Paul Madonna’s continuation of his popular San Francisco Chronicle weekly series, All Over Coffee—actually includes images of other cities (Buenos Aires, Rome, Paris), but it initially feels like San Francisco’s book, both in focus and in spirit. Even though Madonna’s ink-and-wash drawings depict a city without people or cars (and it is not typical that one can paint a successful portrait of a place without some attention to its people), his empty streets are nevertheless rich with signs of life and psychic resonance. Madonna captures the kind of serenity with which San Francisco seems perpetually blessed and that other cosmopolitan cities only evince in the very early morning. This strange illusory relief from the usual urban neuroses is one reason that people continue to fall in love with San Francisco when they visit and that compels them to stay, even after the illusion has been recognized as such. (continue reading)

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