Silverlake Blvd.

San Francisco itinerary

Friday

• Felt bunny pencil holders at the SFMOMA gift shop.
• The Morphosis castle at Mission & 7^th Street. Next to a neoclassical Federal Building and the U.S. Court of Appeals. And across the street, a club with brilliant stencils indicating complete disdain for it all:

• A mob lined up for Bi-Rite’s ice-cream.
• Union Made on Sanchez, was kind of a heaven of recycled wood, comfortably funky furnishings, and exquisitely detailed versions of no-fuss men’s shirts, jeans, and etc. Nothing flashy, but everything a very, very fine example of its type. Stuff from all over, but reflecting a distinct personal sensibility. I really liked the Filson bags, but the only thing I bought was an issue of Kinfolk magazine, which I had never seen before.
• Cervecería de MateVeza, 3801 18th Street, opposite Delores Park was full of San Francisco Beer Week people. There are SUVs bigger than this place, but what a treat to have this been your neighborhood pub. And the brewery tour of Denmark sounds like a really great opportunity:

 

Saturday

• The Ferry Building Farmers Market. 

• We ate homemade jelly doughnuts and chocolate pistachio scones from Les Elements Patisserie. On my second trip to the Elements booth, I was wondering if the girl had change for a $20 bill, and discovered her sorting out a bushel of cash that looked like my laundry basket.
• Walked along the front, past the baseball stadium, China Basin, the houseboats on Mission Creek. Discovered the Dalek hiding place (there was also Lohengrin's swan boat moored on the other side):

• We managed a quick visit to AD at the Antiquarian Book Fair. Another amazing world, with marvels everywhere you looked.
• Off to Fort Mason for the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. I assumed this would be a white-linen-tablecloth Northern California wine snob event. In fact it was Coachella in a giant old barn. A total blast. Completely insane din punctured intermittently by the sound of glass shattering:

• People wearing wine glass holder necklaces!

• A scrum of chefs on the patio feverishly preparing nibbles (with a view of Alcatraz island in the background, for inspiration):

• A massive crush at the Stella Artois beer counter—leftover Beer Week people? Out of the chaos I recall the Aglio di Mirabella garlic dip, and girl. dog. truck. There was a last-call scramble for freebies and un-shattered glassware. We perched at the exit and watched the crowd stagger out—perhaps the highlight of the event:

• Dinner at Greens: Warm cauliflower salad with capers, mint and mustard vinaigrette; Mushroom gratin with leeks, green garlic, thyme, gruyere custard and pinot noir mushroom sauce; Huckleberry upside-down cake with zest sherbet. One of the best meals I've ever had.

 

Sunday

• Wandering up and down Valencia Street So many beautiful, quirky shops: Paxton Gate, the pirate-themed 826 Valencia writing center, Dandelion Chocolate, Taylor Stitch bespoke clothing. Viracocha took the totally-styled-environment idea a bit too far. We spent a long time looking around. It was beautiful: rough wood tables, old typewriters, an old electric organ. There was a DIY lending library in the back corner. Some piles of t-shirts and homemade audio cds seemed to be on offer, but it was impossible to say what, if anything, was for sale. Was it even a store? Or was it a community center?

• We wandered around the Castro, ending up at Delores Park, which was packed with people drinking and smoking dope. There was no special event, nothing special happening. Just hundreds and hundreds of people enjoying a bit of good weather on a Sunday afternoon (it was actually getting pretty chilly), A college town atmosphere, amazing to find in a city.

 

Monday

• A bike tour from Fisherman’s Wharf to Sausalito. I wish I had worn long pants, but it was exhilarating. 

• I had this idea that we would be stopping a lot on the bridge to take pictures. Not a chance. The main thought was avoiding hypothermia. At the base of each pillar there was a huge extra burst of wind. 

• In Sausalito, we had fish and chips at Scoma. On the left, a table of ladies having lunch. On the right, a table of Brits who had been in for the Book Fair.
• Sausalito kept reminding me of Dartmouth, which is a very positive thing. It’s the kind of little fishing village where the local movie theater advertised the upcoming Metropolitan Opera screencast on its marquee.

• By the time we got back to L.A. we had used every form of transportation that day except a hot air balloon.

Ada Louise Huxtable

 

Most of the obituaries give prominence to the piece Huxtable printed in the Wall Street Journal six days after 9/11, in which she outlined how the rebuilding and commemoration process would unfold:

 

And yet one can almost predict what the New York process will be. The city can show its compassion, and its resolve, as it is doing now, but it is also a city incapable of the large, appropriate gesture in the public interest if it costs too much. That, too, is something that can be debated. What are our values? How do we count the cost of those lives? Under these circumstances, does ‘the highest and best use of the land,’ the gospel according to real estate, really hold? Traditionally, that has mean filling the land to the maximum permitted by law, for the greatest return, while ignoring every social or human factor.

 

If the usual scenario is followed, the debate will lead to a ‘solution’ in which the principle is lost and an epic opportunity squandered. With the best intentions the Municipal Art Society, a conscientious watchdog of the city’s urban quality, will announce a competition to determine what should be done with the site. The results will make a nice little exhibition, and discussions and lectures will be held. All this will be ignored by the movers and shakers making big building plans under the expedient banner of physical and symbolic reconstruction. There will be a fuss in the press, with letters to the editor, pro and con. City Hall in a split political decision between greed and glory, will come out for the builders and a memorial—a monument or a small park, something financially inoffensive in the larger scheme of things. This is the Compromise. Or the trade-off, to put it more bluntly. A properly pious, meaningless gesture that everyone can buy without loss of face or obvious shame.

 

There will be another call for a competition—this time for the big building—it will be specified that this is to be a ‘world-class’ work of architecture. The most conservative design will be chosen by a consortium of potential investors. No one will pay much attention to the token park, which will be a blank spot on the plans, eventually done in a faux retro style for brown-bag lunchers. There will be world-class nothing.

(“The New York Process"—the World Trade Center Site, Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2011)

 

Of course no one heeded her warning, and this is pretty much what has happened. An amazing performance, but not unusual for Huxtable. A lot of her work takes the form of eulogy:

 

There is no art as impermanent as architecture. All that solid brick and stone mean nothing. Concrete is as evanescent as air. The monuments of our civilization stand, usually, on negotiable real estate; their value goes down as land value goes up. … The logic and mathematics are immutable.

("Anatomy of a Failure," The New York Times. March 17, 1968)

 

But eulogy is probably inevitable when a critic positions herself squarely in middle of public debates. And she operated in public, for the public. Huxtable did not take any of the professional, academic, economic or other special interest groups in the field as the whole of architecture.

 

She dealt with specific cases, looked at them in the round, with an open mind. Best of all, she took you along in her unexpected enthusiasms. Being a self-described “unrepentant modernist” didn’t hinder her from relishing the Miami hotel uniform designed by Morris Lapidus as “an exploding gilded eggplant.” Who writes like that about architecture? Nobody else.

 

Met Live presents Maria Stuarda

 

It’s all the worst absurdities of the historical melodrama—a vast pageant of British history squashed to the intrigues of a few aristocrats. But Donizetti’s music transforms Elisabetta and Maria into irrefutable realities. The objection that they share only the names and costumes of the historical Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots couldn’t be less relevant. Who knows what those ladies were really like?

 

Musical necessity—especially the need for contrast and variety—encourages a type of psychological portraiture that leaves run of the mill literary realism and plausibility in the dust. Elisabetta and Maria loose themselves in coloratura arias rather than giving necessary orders, or preparing for death. Roberto proclaims his pity for Maria, and Lord Guglielmo Cecil proclaims his hatred of her, and Elisabetta proclaims her jealousy and fear—all simultaneously, standing next to each other. There is only the slightest hint that any of the three hear or acknowledge any of the others. The characters on stage are completely absorbed by their own passions and completely deaf to the passions of the other characters. Sometimes this gives rise to comedy. Here it’s tragedy. It also seems to be what you see happening in the world today, with everyone absorbed in their personal devices.

 

The anger, frustration, and awe at the prospect of death are expressed with a vehemence and directness that are not part of our everyday reality. Which might be our misfortune. The spectacle of such vehemence on stage is probably tonic. The last half is a dramatization of the preparations a person makes before dying. Whether this has anything to do with the historical Mary Queen of Scots could not matter less.

 

Joyce De Donato obliterated everyone else on stage—musically, dramatically, visually—which was appropriate. Her Maria’s tragedy is to be at the mercy of an oafish politician like Elisabetta and in love with a second-rate specimen like Roberto.

 

Anne Carson, Antigonick

 

I’m a Carson fan. She’s the only author whose books I buy automatically, as soon as they come out. I know I will want to own them before knowing what they are.

 

However Carson doesn’t always make it easy. Nox came out in 2010 and I’m still trying to figure out what to make of it. Sometimes I pick it up and I find the account of her long-lost brother searing. Other times I am put off by the preciousness of the elaborate accordion-fold collage presentation. It’s sitting on the shelf looking at me right now. It's just a matter of time before I give it another look.

 

And now this version of Sophocles. Again the visual aspect is stressed.I like the faux ancient-manuscript look of the text by Robert Currie: all caps, minimal punctuation, minimal spacing. Bianca Stone’s illustrations, however, are annoying irrelevances. As for the translation, Carson generates a big jolt by putting the famous chorus as

 

MANY TERRIBLY QUIET CUSTOMERS EXIST BUT NONE MORE
TERRIBLY QUIET THAN MAN

 

Quiet customers?! That’s quite an inspiration for déinos (terrible, amazing, as in dinosaur).

 

Her most unambiguous triumph is a passage inserted after Antigone’s final exit:

 

HOW IS A GREEK CHORUS LIKE A LAWYER
THEY’RE BOTH IN THE BUSINESS OF SEARCHING FOR A PRECEDENT
FINDING AN ANALOGY
LOCATING A PRIOR EXAMPLE
SO AS TO BE ABLE TO SAY
THIS TERRIBLE THING WE’RE WITNESSING NOW IS
NOT UNIQUE YOU KNOW IT HAPPENED BEFORE
OR SOMETHING MUCH LIKE IT
WE’RE NOT AT A LOSS HOW TO THINK ABOUT THIS
WE’RE NOT WITHOUT GUIDANCE
THERE IS A PATTERN
WE CAN FIND AN HISTORICALLY PARALLEL CASE
AND FILE IT AWAY UNDER
 
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49

 

[Image: John Ruskin, Cyclamen, 1873]

J. T. Barbarese, “Politics”

 

One of the most powerful things I’ve read recently is J. T. Barbarese’s description of a little parish church. It’s probably Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, but that doesn’t really matter: it could be any American blue-collar neighborhood that has seen better days.

 

 

Only the women among the parishioners seem fit to do any actual work. … They have less trouble kneeling because they are simply tougher than the men. … They enter in heavy plaid zipper jackets, ballooning sweaters and with banded sleeves. … Their fingers hang like chewed bamboo over the pews.

 

Read it here.

 

[Image: David Jones, 1956]

 

Brahms & Lieberson @ Disney Hall

 

What is it about Brahms? The year I was born Françoise Sagan titled an intergenerational love story Aimez-Vous Brahms?, tweaking the composer’s respectability—the sense of his being admirable without being very interesting.

 

There’s no denying that Brahms lacks the standard Romantic composer’s tragic life story (Schubert, Schumann, Chopin), and lacks literary/theatrical associations that sustain all the Italian opera composers from Rossini to Puccini. He wasn’t interestingly tormented like Mahler. He doesn’t even have the benefit of controversy from being associated with the Nazis, like Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.

 

But you can’t drive to work for 30 years listening to KUSC without getting familiar with Brahms. And, after a while, something, for me, clicked.

 

It was prompted by the fact that his music is insanely attractive. Bernard Shaw denounced Brahms as “a sentimental voluptuary,” and he’s got a point. However as the years go by, drama and theatrics become less and less interesting, and Brahmsian refined hedonism becomes more and more an ideal.

 

I was thinking about all of this last Sunday evening when the Master Chorale was singing the German Requiem. True, Johannes doesn’t worry about being concise, and isn’t afraid of repeating a good thing over and over. But even the longeurs seem in retrospect homely and humane. The Chorale sang beautifully. The baritone soloist, Brian Mulligan, was powerful and precise.

 

The first part of the evening was the West Coast premiere of Peter Lieberson’s next-to-last work The World In Flower. The texts were a New Age anthology, and the musical illustrations were sometimes dumb (the hooting owls), but it created a real journey. 

 

L.A. Art Book Fair @ the Geffen

 

It was overwhelming. I went Friday afternoon, and stayed long enough to realize that I had to come back and spend hours there. I was expecting Saturday to be insane, and it was packed, but not oppressively so. I confess that I didn't do justice to the whole 'zine wing, and a lot else.

 

The people at Printed Matter were already heroes to me for providing a venue for resolutely non-commercial non-book booklike things. Then Hurricane Sarah flooded their basement in Chelsea, making a mess of their inventory. And now they blow into L.A. with 200 of their buddies and fill the space of the Geffen with DIY photocopy books, exquisite letterpress books, amazing antique art books from the past and stuff being made before your eyes.

 

Among the things that caught my eye were Metabolic Studio’s Preserving a Home for Veterans, presenting in a seriously beautiful chapbook format a strange and serious story of war and property.

 

Ed Ruscha did it forty years ago (see image above), but something about these low-tech publications suits nutty documentation projects, and the joke is still funny. At the fair I found books documenting all sorts of odd things:

• Frederic Post's beautifully tactile Anonymous Engravings on Ecstasy Pills
• Tom Variso's Spoiled—color photographs of refrigerators abandoned on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina
• The 2012-13 edition of the London Bookshop Map, featuring a hilarious poem/project about mirages seen on the Great Lakes by Hannah Rickards
• Ryan Mungia’s Pot Shots, by Boyo Press—color photographs of Southern California pot dispensaries
• The guy at Total Luxury Spa gave me buttons, and zines, including Eric Yahnker’s disturbing 15 Get Wells & 1 Sorry for your Loss. Yes, documentation of commercial message cards.
• Louise Menzies, Local Edition—a set of sheets reproducing the mastheads of a different world newpapers. Distributed by the New Zealand’s DDMMYY.
• Steve Roden’s I listen to the wind that obliterates my traces, featuring vintage photographs of people with musical instruments plus a music CD

 

One of the things that was especially moving about the fair was the vivid demonstration of how many talented, creative people are still engaged with physical books. All this stuff was supposed to be dead. It obviously is not. This is especially clear in another perrenial genre--the hybrid of pure typography and concrete poetry. In this vein I particularly liked Colophon Foundry of Brighton’s No Cash Value supergraphic tabloid. And who could resist Lawrence Weiner’s Afloat at the Mercy of the Waves Tote Bag, proceeds benefiting Printed Matter?