Category: Art & Culture

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.

So I’m the proud owner of a new printer, something I haven’t had in a very long time. Since I hooked it up on Sunday night, I’ve been on a tree-murdering frenzy, printing articles, essays and blog posts from the far reaches of the web. I’m envisioning an orgasmic morning in the near future where I wake up before dawn and read away at my pile of articles until I fall asleep again.

But then what? A termite mound of read-over paper to be thrown away or even recycled seemed so 20th century. So I had this little idea…

I’m going to take my pile of articles and divide it into four. Then, borrowing a page from Bookcrossing, I’m going to leave these piles in cofee shops, on the bus, in the library, somewhere public. Attached to each will be a note that says something like…

“Hello friend. You’ve found a packet of articles and essays left behind for your reading pleasure by Kevin, local media junkie. Please read as much or as little as you like then leave the packet somewhere for someone else to enjoy. Please let me know what you think and where you left the packet when you were done”

And then my email address.

Whatdya think?

Gems from this month’s Bitch Magazine.

• Snazzy jewelry from Karin Jacobson.
• Gothamist–All Things New York.
• A new album from the Bay Area’s premier female hiphop collective Sisterz of the Underground.
• A hilarious ad from the Guerilla Girls.

So Loveline finally has something resembling a website, even if it’s this token page thrown up by their mother station. The show’s only been on the air for what, 15 years now and still doesn’t have a website? What are people thinking?

I’m a few days late here but Tourettes Without Regrets fuckin’ rocks! Min Jung invited several of us to this monthly variety show of poetry slammin’, hip-hop battlin’ and a game show featuring suicide and serial killer trivia. The whole thing is held together by host Jamie Kennedy who swears a whole lot but keeps the rowdy crowd surprisingly upbeat.

The show clocked in at nearly 4 hours but about 90% it is solid–entertaining, smart, well-thought out. Much of this is thanks to Daniland, the East Bay promotional outfit behind much of the Tourettes talent. Dani has a remarkable eye and seems to select artist beased not only on content and performance but professionalism as well. And despite the teenage silliness of it (short skirted-chicks grinding, bras thrown at the stage), there’s a workmanlike discipline to the event that I’m defining as East Bay because I don’t have any other word for it.

It goes like this. Artists in San Francisco are remarkably proud of their own opression and think nothing of running, say, a Gay-Latino Letter Carrier’s open mike night for 3 hours with bad lighting, stiff chairs and so-so talent because everyone’s voice should be heard and artists are all second-class citizens anyway so they need a space that’s theirs. That’s fine if you’re on stage but sucks if you’re looking to support events like this and the organizers, through hubris or neglect, make it a horrible way to spend an evening. I’m guessing (based on nothing. That’s why it’s a guess) that the ethic in the East Bay, particularly a hip-hop influenced young arts scene like Tourettes is hard work and proving yourself. Got something to say? Grab a mike and do it. But go too long, indulge the audience in your guts spilling, think you don’t have to prep because your lover is the host? Forget it, you’re done. The stage belongs to those who can command it.

Low Culture referrs to James Liption, host of Inside the Actor’s Studio as a “Professonal Starfucker” and that may not be far from the truth when you consider the pathetically lightweight list of guests on this upcoming season. Naomi Watts? Jay Leno?

I must have been the only person stupid enough to think that ITAS had some measure of credibility in mind when it hit the air, something to do with discussing acting as an art instead of a career choice for blandly beautiful people who want to wear designer clothes and make out with each other. That sounds less like a job than senior year at Beverly Hills High School. But I was wrong wrong wrong. Lipton aparently gave up that pretense long ago (the first season included guests like Ellen Barkin and Stockard Channing whose public personnas are about being good actors, not about sitting next to Kid Rock at the MTV Movie Awards) and has contented himself with spending pointless hours worshiping the creative souls of the likes of Pierce Bronson (I wouldn’t call Remington Steele and James Bond acting. I’d call it looking good in a suit) which only he can see. And after a perfunctory nod at Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the show has blatantly overlooked young talent like Lily Taylor, Steve Buscemi and Michael Rappaport, old lions of the craft like Ossie Davis and Jason Robards and has booked precious few actors of color that haven’t wielded a gun in a summer blockbuster (no Angela Bassett, Ruby Dee or Cicely Tyson is an abomination).

Let’s please cut the crap and stop calling this prgram Inside the Actor’s Studio when it’s obvious what it really is: The Tonight Show with low lighting, an hour of Starfucking with lamely manipulative foreplay (link via Gawker).

Gems from Utne Reader’s Indie Culture 2004 issue (includes a CD!)

• Temporary Services: A Chicago-based artists collective that, among other supercool projects, secretly placed 100 art books on the shelves of the Chicago Public Library and gave them call numbers so they could be checked out.
• Storage Artspace: A non-profit art center and the locus of the rapidly growing newest artists neighborhood in New York, the South Bronx
• Princeton Architectural Press: Has nothing to do with Princeton Univeristy and only partially to do with architectural. Instead publishes beautiful books on design and material culture such as visual studies of lost pet posters and homes built from found materials.
• Oi-Va-Voi: Klezmer meets techno meets loungy jazz.
• Magic Carpet/Home: A giant magic carpet sculpture in a public park in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. You’re supposed to climb on it.
• A fantastic interview between Ani DiFranco and Bruce Cockburn.

The SF Fringe Festival is a load of fun. Sarah and I and 2 friends from her office took in “I Can’t Believe They’re Not Oriental”, from the Asian-American sketch comedy troupe OPM. They’re based in L.A. but remind me of the Latino Comedy Project whom I used to see perform when I lived in Austin. There’s probably a social trend here. Is there a 4 Funny Jews or We Laughing Lakotas somewhere out there?

Anyway, the Fringe is cheap quality, modern theater and runs through this weekend. I highly recommend checking it out.

Lit at the Canvas, the monthly reading series I host at the Canvas Gallery returns this evening. Tonight’s theme will be “Odd Jobs,” and we’ll be hearing from five writers and the strange things they’ve done to support their artistic careers.

The bill:

Charlie Anders (who I believe has got something about masterbation and male breast enhancement)

Leslie Harpold (who answered fan mail for White Snake in the 80s)

Jason Thompson (who rode out the dot com bust by demonstrating toys at FAO Schwartz)

M.I. Blue (who I think has spent a bunch of time working with dead people)

and

Michelle Tea (who is always great so I don’t care what jobs she’s had)

Showtime is at 7:30. The Canvas is at 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco.

“Acting is all about honesty.
Fake that and you’re in!”

—Samuel Goldwyn, seen on the marquee of a Goodyear Tire joint in San Francisco.