comedy of the craft of improvisation

"There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre. The cinema flashes on to a screen images from the past. As this is what the mind does to itself all through life, the cinema seems intimately real. Of course, it is nothing of the sort – it is a satisfying and enjoyable extension of the unreality of everyday perception. The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present. This is what can make it more real than the normal stream of consciousness. This is also what can make it so disturbing."
– Peter Brook, The Empty Space

In Commedia Dell'Arte, all of the masks are grotesque. Commedia delights in sin, in vice, in appetite. It is, in the words of my teacher, "a celebration of humanity in all of its indecency." There is no shame, no repentance, and no salvation. There is no narrative arc for the characters, no transformation. "The one thing that's true of every single Commedia plot is that nothing happens." Yet it deals with love and despair and social inequality and avarice and hunger and sex. A lot happens. Nothing matters.

I found the whole thing almost indescribably liberating. I performed characters who were grosser, more vulgar, more visceral that anything I've done maybe ever and I had a helluva good time.

In theatre, people look deep into each other's eyes and speak without blushing about the work being sacred. People then might roll around on the floor, and then discuss the rolling around. People open a door and enter a room differently. This is all before even putting on a mask.

Tell me how I can do this all day.

ladies who ink

The hard data seems hard to come by, but all the anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that the tattoo world is pretty seriously male dominated. The women tattoo artists interviewed in this New York Times article have pretty mixed feelings as to how pervasive sexism in is in the industry, as well as the value of a tattoo artist convention solely for female artists. (Marked for Life is an annual conference that gets women tattoo artists together.) Which reminds me that I'd really like to do some extended thinking on female separatism soon. But probably not right now, because I'm sleepy.

Meanwhile, here in the Bay Area, we've got Diving Swallow, Black and Blue Tattoo, and Sacred Rose Tattoo, for starters. There may be more, but it's a weirdly hard search to do. P.S. Hey Yelp: What's up with that? Why can't I search for "women-owned business"? Thanks. Actually, that's a great point. I just searched for "women-owned businesses" on Google and came across this helpful site for women who'd like to open a business, brought to us by the Small Business Administration, who also maintain this (warning: glaringly ugly!) directory of women-owned businesses around the country. It's impressively long and the index isn't even alphabetized, so I can't believe I haven't used it before. Right. This information should be free and friendly, people. No reason why not.

Want to know more? The SBA also maintains this handy page of recent studies and research on women owned businesses. Neato!

dedication

(Okay. I am behind. Two today & two tomorrow, and then we're back on track.)

Let's kick it off with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum! When I was in New York about two years ago, I made a beeline for this place. Why's it so awesome? Couple reasons: For one, their mission is "to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions, to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art, to maintain a dynamic and welcoming learning facility, and to present feminism in an approachable and relevant way."(ahem, HELL YEAH!) They're also the permanent home of Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party," a work of art I'd dreamed of seeing since, geez, sometime in high school. This is the only permanent, dedicated space for feminist art in a major museum in the U.S. (Anybody know any good ones elsewhere in the world?) When I was there, they were also showing some work by Kiki Smith, so that was cool.

Women continue to be wildly underrepresented in art museums, even modern and contemporary ones. To quote Chicago, "We've made advances, but not enough. I hope the fight for the recognition and validation of feminist art will be seen as part of a fight for larger diversity in our art museums and in art history."

Kiki Smith

at the de Young. So delightful. 

Also, some of my favorite things at the de Young are the strange views.


Just moving spaces around.

no dodos

Today, at the Maira Kalman exhibition at the Jewish Contemporary Museum. This wasn't there, but a lot of great things were.

My favorite things, though, were her books. (Of course, says housemate Davis. I'm so g*&d#@$^ predictable.) I intend to acquire some soon. Hopefully the ones about Max. They are whimsical, rhyming, and (need I add) beautifully illustrated.

and I mean good design

Community organizations and graphic designers collaborating on public service/social justice projects – can I get a hell yes?

dancing with myself

is not something I've ever minded (and if you know me at all, you know that already). I also like to take myself out on a nice date from time to time. And so it was that Friday night found me at the de Young, listening to some opera, drinking wine. There was a circus performance, which involved a contortionist act by two tiny girl-child acrobats, one so young she stuck out her belly, beaming all the while, cheeks like tangerines. Once their act was over, she danced twitchily on the side of the stage, while two dancers performed a ballet duet to a soft-rock/adult contemporary cover of "Don't Stop Believin'." I kid you not. Sometimes things like this really make me want to make art, in the most combative way. Sometimes they make me want to never make art again. Then I bought myself a nice dinner.

museum of fine arts, boston

My art education was always a gradual and ad hoc thing. Untaught in what is strangely called "art appreciation," I was somehow always a classicist (in form, in technique, in metrical scheme – I was writing sonnets regularly by seventh grade) and it wasn't until entering high school that an odd assignment for world history found me studying Picasso. With a hard heart and a harder head, I can admit it; I was convinced his art didn't interest me. But here of course is the wonder of immersion, the complete unseating, shifting, the changing of a heart; and that was the beginning of it all for me, as far as I can tell.

I continued to carry around tiny pockets of art knowledge until later in high school when my involvement in Academic Decathlon (the Olympics of nerd-sports) found me studying art again, with a truly incredible art teacher. The way the competition works is this: each year, the selection committee (whoever they are) choose several pieces of art from a specific U.S. art museum, and the lucky contestants study the pieces, their makers, their eras, techniques used, &tc., &tc. And the first year that I was on the team, the pieces were selected from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

I took a redeye from San Francisco to Boston and arrived on the 15th, beat tired and kind of hazy in my mind. I dropped my bag off at the hotel, took a nap in Boston Common, and headed over to the MFA, a place I'd been hoping to get to for about ten years now.

By now of course, things are somewhat different than they were when I was sixteen. I moved from the Sacramento suburbs to la città dell'Arte, and have had the ridiculous good fortune to spend time in some of the best art museums of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, the U.S., and the Netherlands. And yet the MFA was one of the pleasantest art museum experiences I've ever had. I would enter a room, look around at its contents, and then find myself startled to see something so familiar that I'd also never seen before, in person at least. A bit like meeting a pen pal, I imagine.* It was surprisingly soothing, comforting, casual.

My thanks forever to Ms. Jill Pease for her inspiration and infectious enthusiasm.

*when I was a child, I had a pen pal for about four years. His name was Karthik and he lived in India. We have never met.

banksy never did this

watch you like a tigerer/watch you like a fox

This recently appeared across the street from my house. My new favorite poem, maybe?

well, are you?

You totally want/need one. Deep breath. It's okay. They're now available for purchase. Written by Ryan Lewis, designed by Anna Hurley. And the proceeds support 826 chapters across the country. Mmhmm.

brushstrokes and biceps

Artemesia Gentileschi (March 23) was an Italian Renaissance painter. How many other Italian Renaissance painters do you know who were also female? Right. That again. 

She was raped by one of her painting tutors, and during her trial was literally tortured. As a way of making sure she was telling the truth. The rapist? Questioned. But ultimately found guilty and required to serve one year in jail. Artemesia went on to be an extraordinary painter. 

Just look at the arms on her Judith:

 Now check out Caravaggio's: 

Or how about this one by Francesco del Cario?

Some people seem lest interested than others in offering up realistic depictions of female violence, I would suggest. And this during the Renaissance, when the study and realistic depiction of the human form, especially musculature, was supposedly in its heyday.

sidewalks are for chalking

I kind of inadvertently (but totally willingly) protested sit/lie because I was restless Sunday night. And I had some chalk. (Thanks, Tim, for the loan of your camera!)

backlog

I've been meaning to get to this for some time.  I saw it at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.  It's also pure Monty Python.  Clearly, what we have on our hands here is a classic chicken/egg problem.

Friday in the park with Kim Epifano

Going for my usual jog around Dolores Park Friday morning, I saw a small crowd of people gathered on the park side of the bridge over the train tracks, near the statue.  I stopped to see what they were seeing and that was how I stumbled onto part of the Trolley Dances performance.  Amazingly, even though this is something I saw in a public place, it is not yet on youtube, although you can watch this clip to get an idea:

What you absolutely cannot get from this clip is how lovely it was to just encounter this for the space of about three or four minutes, with a group of strangers and school children, silent, at the top of a hill, the city spread out behind us.

innovative uses for construction equipment

The weekend continued the merry trend of happy (and free!) adventures in San Francisco. On Saturday, good friend Matt and went to Roadworks: Steamroller Printing which was put on by the San Francisco Center for the Book, a place where I've been volunteering semi-regularly in hopes of eventually collecting enough credits to take a class. There were lots of vendors with neat & usually book-related handicrafts, but I am poor and for the most part resisted their charms. Besides, the main attraction was the periodic making of prints via ink, block, and steamroller rolling down on top of them, pressing them evenly and without a doubt thoroughly. For extra fun, you could make your own prints with pieces of foam board. If they'd only had fingerpainting, my life would be complete.

inking in progress

an inked printing block, pre-steamroller

so magical!

non-steamrolled prints on display

(note: if all goes according to plan, more on this topic will soon be available to you at this exact location. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the delay.)

Sunday was a different kind of delight, involving the preparation of roasted squash-&-zucchini-&-heirloom-tomato-bruschetta accompanied by new friend Grant's homebrew as a picnic at Shakespeare in the park. Presidio, sunny day, Comedy of Errors à la slapstick mayhem, lots of housemate friends. Later, a nap.

the new talkies

On Friday, I went to see the neo-benshi/the new talkies performance at the De Young (free with student ID!). What might this be? Well may you ask. In the De Young's rather elegant cinema (elegant, that is, except for the overly flatulent leather chairs. Did no one test them out before they were installed? They're too new to be this noisy), a podium was set up stage right of the screen, and for 10-12 minutes a poet performed a piece over/in response to a scene or clips from a film of their choosing with the volume low or muted. I actually think that this could be huge in Poland, since they're already accustomed to having tv narrated. At any rate, there were 5 different pieces on Friday night. Far and away my favorite was Rodney Koeneke's interpretation of part of The Golem. I wish I had taken notes throughout. Instead, I sat there in dimly lit awe and enjoyment until I finally broke down and scribbled nearly-illegible notes in pencil on the edge of my program. Writing in the dark is a very special (and incredibly useful!) skill which I have yet to fully master. I managed to get:

"Moses begat laughing", and
"silence is asthma for moderns"

He periodically put on a quite good German accent, with a liberal dosing of Ah so's.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed the lyricism of this piece so much that nothing else cut the mustard in quite the same way. Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson's take on Fantasia will prevent me from ever watching the section with the demon city in the same way again. They wittily re-imagined this part of the movie as a late, unfinished D.W. Griffith sequel to Birth of a Nation entitled Death of a City. Jen Hofer's reading of On the Beach left me chiefly with a desire to watch the original film, and Andrew Choate's piece on The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover made me chuckle (yes, there are times when I laugh without guffawing) with:

"canned food is anxiety/in its pure state./In the future/the things I need/will not be available/but I will be here" (line breaks mine; an asshole move, I know, but I think it reads better if you can imagine the pauses), and
"language is food./This is not a metaphor."

Lamentably, this is not a weekly or even monthly event, but apparently an annual one.

I feel I am being misrepresented.

re: density and vacuousness

"...margaret was saying that the unique value of paintings is in their ability to do what photographs cannot do, in the same way that the unique value of the novel lies in its ability to do what films cannot do."

I think the fault lies with the plural. I did not mean to argue that paintings or novels were better than films or photos, respectively. Nor that some ideas or topics belong to or are even best expressed by any particular form. Rather, I was musing whether the modern value of these seemingly out-dated and old-fashioned art forms, having been surpassed in the pursuit of "realism" (in the popular imagination if not in point of fact), is that through a sort of non-literal interpretation of something (mood, moment, manatee), a different way of seeing things is made manifest. Is this what all good art does? Probably, yes. But the point, the point being that a great novel is essentially a novel, and not a film. That a film adaptation of a great novel will never be able to express the same essence as that novel. (I tip my hat to Milan Kundera's Immortality for addressing this exact question.) And, though it is less often attempted, vice versa. Of course there are excellent photos and mediocre novels. Taken as read. However, a great work seems to me to have something in it that links it, I would suggest inextricably, to its form.

quote of the day*

"He writes of avoiding his desk when inventing, avoiding the connotations of serious endeavor, of earning a living. 'I wish instead,' he writes, 'to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.' Which seems, to me, about the right strategy for our times."

- Allison Arieff on Stephen M. Johnson, "Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas"

(pictured above: bike vest)

*not a daily feature

I'm inspired by Ikea

a little song, a little dance, no soft-shoe and no hard hats.

16th century "Where's Waldo?"

This was painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger sometime in the late 1500s or early 1600s. Can you find the people playing Eisstockschissen?