Category: Art & Culture

Seen at today’s Power to the Peaceful Festival in Golden Gate Park.

The good folks from Bedrock Music

A DJ collective called < ahref="http://www.tribalsouls.net/home.html">Tribal Souls putting down some serious grooves.

Refuse and Resist distributing some excellent literature on protecting oneself from the slimy tendrils of the American Police State.

Indy Bay: An independent media collective and online presence.

California’s Swing State Initiative to get the vote out for John Kerry in the state’s where it counts.

San Francisco Clean City Coalition who gave me a really cool biodegradable garbage bag for my kitchen.

Miles and miles of hippie chicks in long skirts. I wish Suzan wasn’t at work.

Former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards will host his own show on XM Satellite Radio every morning at 8 AM. Though I’m waiting a few years for the next generation of XM (where you can download from it to your Ipod), this is a big step for XM, a reach towards traditional radio and NPR listeners and not simply music wonks looking for, say, an all-klezmer station and Buddy Guy basement tapes.

Writer par excellance (and Gen. Text contributor) Meghan Daum just launched her website and wrote a very funny article about it (via The Elegant Variation).

Fresh Yarn: The Online Salon for Personal Essays features 6 real-life stories by writers, performers and filmmkaers. My friend Pamela Holm is in this new one. Looks neat.

I happen to be obssesed with series finales. I’m sure you are as well. I absolutely must know how every television series ends even if I’ve never seen a single episode of it (like “St. Elsewhere.” Something about a snow globe, right?). I’m sure you have the same problem.

Enter TV Tome, the Idiot Boxes answer to the IMDB. They log every television show you’ve ever even or even thought of (“It’s Your Move” is a long forgotten favorite). I’ve now wasted untold hours wondering exactly what happened to “Gimmie a Break” and when “L.A. Law” when off the rails. It’s been time blissfully, frivolously well spent.

Suzan and I took a drive northward today that evolved into a treasure hunt for some of the area’s better art work. We visited Florence Ave. in Sebastopol, where found-object sculptor Patrick Amiot had installed his pieces on the lawns of his neighbors. In front of his house is an enormous jukebox with Elvis Presley crooning on top. The whole thing is made of scrap metal and coffee cans.

On a tip from Bay Area Backroads (where we first heard about Patrick’s work), we also took in the Quicksilver Mining Co., a gallery specializing in Northern California artists. Their upcoming show features Monty Monty an assemblage artist who makes vehicles, animals and devices out of vintage antiques and collectibles. Isn’t this stuff great?

Suzan has informally banned me from buying anymore three dimensional as we’re practically out of shelf space but I see this sort of thing and drool. It reminds me of what beauty there is in everything, so long as you have an eye for how it all hangs together.

Ishle Park rocked the muthafriggin’ house! MJM and Jason invited me at the last minute to see her read and sign books at Galeria De La Raza. She read maybe 8 poems of astounding beauty and literary zest and even sang a few Korean folk songs which worked with the poems instead of sounding like an I’m-the-evening’s-entertainment-so-I-can-do-what-I-want indulgence. The crowd there heavily drew from the sponsoring organizations, The Kearny Street Workshop and Locas Arts, revealing the considerable depth and power of the Asian-American arts community in San Francisco, something I knew existed but didn’t now to that impressive extent.

Man, I need to get back to writing poems.

Does anyone know of a good magazine about documentary film? Not just for the makers of but those who like to watch as well?

Avenue Q is a dippy, corny little musical my mom and I went to last night. It had been years since I’d seen a show on Broadway and, puppets? I’m always down for puppets.

Avenue Q is about a street in a forgotten part of Manhattan and everyone, puppets, monsters, and humans alike who lives on it. Everyone is in their mid to late 20’s trying to figure out like. The puppeteers are visible as as actors on stage. Their facial expressions mimic those of their puppet friends.

It’s creative and clever as hell and lots of fun. It ain’t much of a musicial if you care about stuff like that (I don’t). The songs are bland and barely necessary. You’ll learn nothing about life you didn’t know after one semester in college. But the puppets, man! God bless those puppets. And mega dap to Rick Lyon, the genius who designed them all.

Oh and there’s a character named Gary Coleman. Who is Gary Coleman in the story. Played by someone who is not Gary Coleman. Don’t ask.

With my parents in town, I took it upon myself to take us all the the Art Deco retrospective at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Art Deco for me has always been some catch-all for “really cool shit from like the 20’s or 30’s with great geometry, shiny surfaces, and everything streamlined to look like a rocket. I also dug that, true to its birth at the dawn of the 20th century, Art Deco influenced mass market consumer good as much as it did fine art.

I can’t speak to the quality of curation (although both Suzan and my dad had problems with the exhibit being on two floors with no discernable flow between them) but the stuff is amazingly, breathtakingly, say-it-out-loud beautiful. Ignore the web site slide show (the link marked “exhibition preview”) as it features 19 slides of the least interesting pieces.

Some Art Deco artists I hadn’t heard of before that I’m going to look out for now…

+Sargent Johnson. A black San Franciscan who mined African forms to create amazing masks, sculptures and sketchings.

+The mathmatical precision and whimsy of Scotch architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

+Delicious pieces of Lalique Glass.

+My favorite. A clock from Dutch silversmith Jan Eisenloeffel that would have made Faberge hide his head in shame.

+ “Skyscraper Furniture” from Paul Frankl.