Biked over to the new Libeskind designed art museum here in Denver. It looks like a boat from a Japanese animé comic — titanium skin like the Gehry buildings, but no curves, all acute angles. It was drizzling, and I wondered how those titanium flaps are going to manage keeping out the water. If water gets in via the thousands of joins and flaps, it will be a little visit to financial hell trying to sort it out.
The building has been criticized for not being very art-friendly, which is not a good thing for a museum. There are quite a few walls that lean in or out and there are pretty much no 90º angles anywhere. It’s a little bit of a funhouse. Oh well, architects and their egos know no limits. And the idea was probably not so much to make a place to show art as to make a cultural logo and draw for the city, following the Bilbao example. Rumor has it that now the museum is more than a little tight on funds, and staff have been laid off and asked to work fewer hours.
That said, these walls that are sort of unfriendly to hanging art were the exception. There were plenty of traditional upright walled galleries, although even in those, there were no right angle corners. The odd shape of the building combined with these angles effectively creates continuous disorientation, not entirely a bad thing.
This being Denver, half a floor is devoted to Western art, something we Yankees don’t see much of. We see the Hudson River School, such as Bierstadt and the others, who also painted the West and had a hand in luring settlers and travelers out there, but we don’t see much beyond that. And there is a lot beyond that. Western art goes for high figures, prices that are comparable to the contemporary art that gets all the headlines. OK, not the Bacon and Hirst prices, but well, up there.
Here’s one by one of the major Western painters, Charles M. Russell, called In The Enemy’s Country.
Russell memorialized the Native American culture as it was almost completely wiped out. In a funny way, I really like this stuff. It strikes a chord. They’re like movie stills maybe, scenes from a mythical film that never was. The color, the light, the “noble savages.” The mythology is potent, even when we realize it’s bogus. I recognize the same mythological impulses at work in the galleries lining the streets of Park City, where paintings of bears, mountain lions, and sweeping vistas celebrate the world that is being destroyed by the ski villages and condos that patronize these galleries. San Diego had similar galleries; in their case, with scenes of seabirds and windswept empty beaches. It’s a recurring theme — celebrate it as you cut it down. Do we all do that in different ways?
Here’s a lovely almost conceptual touch. Russell would borrow books from friends to read, and return them with little watercolors painted in the spaces where the chapters ended. I wonder if I doodled in a borrowed book, would the lender appreciate it?
Beautiful, no?
In another Western painting, it was pointed out that part of the propaganda effort was to portray the oppressor (the white invaders and settlers) as victims. Not that the settlers weren’t ever attacked, but the fact that they were usurping the land of others is conveniently left out of the mythology. Here, an Indian kidnaps a white baby while the father shoots one of the raiding party.
Something tells me these oppressor-as-victim stories are not unique to the settling of the West. As expansion propaganda and invasion justification, they seem to recur fairly regularly.
In one of the contemporary galleries (one of which was named the Hugh Grant Gallery!), I watched a couple of videos by a German artist named Bjørn Melhus. In one 3-monitor video, a man with a shaved head lip-synched to the re-edited words of a female TV newsperson. Occasionally typical corporate news graphics would explode behind his 3 heads.
The more popular video, Captain, used 3 actors — two men and a boy — who lip-synched to dialogue from Star Trek. They stand awkwardly on a crummy lunar set with space effects (planets and stars) green screened behind them. A little as if theater director Richard Maxwell had done a sci-fi piece. It was quite long, vaguely ominous, portentous and completely hilarious (though I was the only one laughing…why?).
Sometimes the little boy character was given the voice of the ominous
alien being who would threaten the crew in a deep voice; sometimes the
bearded man with the potbelly would be given the voice of a woman
speaking seductively to “Captain Kirk”.
The night drive over the Rockies takes longer than planned, due to the light snow and slightly icy roads. We’re running at least a couple of hours late, more like 3, which is OK for us in the band; I’m typing this and having a morning coffee, but for the truck and crew, it means they’ll be later than is comfortable getting to the venue. We’ll have to push soundcheck back and see if the union guys in the hall will cut us some slack. At some point in the middle of the night, we were in the mountains at a Flying J truckstop and Arlene (the crew bus driver, just ahead of us) got on the CB radio and said, “Stay where you are, the road over the mountains is closed.” Ice and frozen snow. A few hours later, the road opened up again but soon we came to a stop as a truck had jackknifed on the icy road ahead. As we sat there, our bus began to slide backwards on the ice, coming quickly to rest. Once the road was cleared of the truck, it took a few tries and some spinning tires to get us moving again.
It’s absolutely gorgeous outside though. Snowy mountains, fir trees and high treeless valleys.
The night we arrive it snows. Quite a change from the deserts and the Mediterranean climates we’ve been in for the past couple of weeks. I go out early and buy socks and a wooly hat. There’s not enough snow on the ground to ski, as it’s the first snowfall they’ve had up here, so Mark and I opt to go for a hike in nearby Deer Valley. We follow some of the soon-to-be-covered-in-snow ski trails up to the top of the mountain — 9000 feet. It’s still snowing lightly, so there isn’t the great view that there must be from up here on a clear day. We take an alternate route down and end up on the other flank of the mountain; the hotel van can’t locate us so we walk. There is no one around at the “village” and condos at the base of the mountain stand empty, as the season has yet to start. The Park City shops, many of them, don’t even bother to open until the ski season begins.
Our hotel rooms are spectacular. Mine has 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and a pool table! The night we arrived, a group of us play pool (badly) in Graham’s room. Mark D checked the room rates; in the high season, our rooms would go for $3000 a night! Jeez, will anyone be able to afford those rates — the cost of getting here; ski passes; etc. — when the economy bottoms out?
Went for another hike in Marin County; this time down Tennessee Valley on the way up north to our show in Santa Rosa. It’s a lovely easy hike through coastal hills to a secluded beach. There were maybe a half dozen folks on the beach. Up on the cliffs were the remnants of bunkers to defend against the Japanese invasion. This is maybe 15 minutes and a 45-minute hike outside of downtown San Francisco, which never fails to amaze.
Jenni asked the others on the walk about their divorces. I didn’t even know that Mauro has been married. It was only a few months before he and his bride realized it was not going to work. C described hers and I did mine.
Jenni then told us an amazing story about a car crash she was in when she was younger. She was in a coma, and her mom, the singer Maria Muldaur, suddenly became born again while Jenni was out. Well, she said, everyone was doing it in those days — Bob Dylan (famously), T Bone Burnett and a bunch of others. So, when Jenni came to, she opened her eyes and saw Bob Dylan’s gospel background singers surrounding her hospital bed, praying and singing with her mom. Jenni thought maybe she’d really gone to heaven and Bob’s band was there. Her head was swathed in bandages, stitches were all over her face, and she had a plate in her head. Someone cautiously asked her if there was anything she wanted (partly just to see if she could hear and respond). She answered, “Blistex.”
Some rode the bus on the long drive to Park City, Utah, and some rode there with boyfriends. And some, like C and I, returned to the city and opted to fly to Utah after a day off in San Francisco. We met John Waters for lunch the next day and went gallery hopping. Jack Hanley Gallery in the Mission and then Paule Anglim, Fraenkel and Rena Branston near Union Square. Fraenkel is sort of an old school photo gallery and they had a show of Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, and other 60s and early 70s street photographers. I wonder if that kind of photo taking is even possible anymore. In some of the pictures GW had obviously planted himself in the middle of a busy city sidewalk and must have been snapping off shots right in people’s faces. Wonder if folks wouldn’t get upset about that now.
John’s apartment in SF isn’t as chock-a-block with items as his other places, at least not yet. There was a lovely embroidered pillow that his mom did of a burning police car. He’d given her a photo from the Dan White “riots” (Dan White is famous for, among other things, his lawyer’s “Twinkie” defense.) On the way to the galleries, we stopped at a used book store that specializes in pulp and porno paperbacks organized into arcane categories: stewardesses; prison; cold war; A-bomb themes; nurses; soldiers; teens; etc. I got presents for the band but no one wanted the book titled Rock Group Roadie. John tipped me to one that I got for C, Girl Artist.
Later, we rode the loaner bikes to catch Ron Sexsmith and band at the lovely and ornate Great American Music Hall. Wow, what a songwriter! I got choked up a couple of times. His songs are sad but dangle a line of hope and beauty; they almost revel in their sadness. He’s a little nerdy and chubby, not a typical rock star or even singer-songwriter by any means, but man can he write (and sing). The room was sadly not full, and the management there initially gave us the royal treatment, but we quickly opted to pull some unused chairs onto the floor. The sound was better there than in the VIP section. Ron, it seems, is going out with Colleen, who used to babysit and look after Malu sometimes! Colleen’s great — I hope it works out and they are happy.
C flew in from New York and met us in Santa Barbara, and after the show, she joined us on the bus to San Francisco, about a 5-hour ride. We took the back lounge, which sounds nice, but it turned out to be a bad idea. The lovely back lounge is the noisiest and bumpiest part of the bus; we got very little sleep. I was worried that our drowsiness would mess up the plans for the upcoming day off — a bike ride with Dave Eggers, Danielle, and her boyfriend around Tiburon Peninsula — but we were OK. It was a beautiful day and we circled around the peninsula. A pregnant Vendela and young October joined us later for sandwiches and salads.
The next day, Jenni organized a bike trip to Muir Beach and Muir Woods and then a lunch at the Pelican Inn over there. It was gorgeous, even if Muir Woods are a teeny bit crowded at times.
A representative for Specialized, the bike company, generously lent us 4 bikes here in San Francisco to complement those that we’re carrying — so, no one in our group is without one. The hills (and our hotel is on top of one) are a bear, but one can get around the other areas of town relatively easily.
At sound check the next day, Miranda July and members of the Extra Action Marching Band joined us — not at the same time. I had an idea about our dancers teaching audience members some steps and phrases, and Miranda seemed like she would instinctively know how to structure something like that, having done something vaguely similar in a performance piece I saw last year. I was right about her instincts; she instantly emphasized that it would be important to put the audience participants at ease, not to make them feel like they’d end up being made to look foolish.
The marching band is, as far as I’m concerned, a San Francisco institution. They’d joined us on a few dates a couple of years ago (Hollywood Bowl, Fillmore) so when they contacted us recently, I immediately suggested they pull out their horn charts for “Burning Down The House” and that we rehearse it together at sound check. (Before this went into motion, it had to be cleared by the symphony hall folks, as the marching band would enter from the rear lobby. It being SF, the hall was game.)
Kelek (one of the Extra Action pom pom gals) suggested they teach some of their routines to our dancers, which seemed like a perfect idea to us. Lily, Natalie, and Steven were issued regulation silver pom poms (and skimpy sequined outfits the second night!) and it went off, well, incredibly. Jon P turned on the house lights illuminating the whole theater when the song kicked in and the entire symphony hall was on its feet, dancing wildly.
John Waters came backstage afterwards and said he saw a rather large elderly lady shaking with shocking abandon. Jerry Harrison and wife came backstage too. We were planning on having drinks afterwards, but he said he was feeling under the weather.
The marching band crashed a nearby restaurant after the show but by the time I got done saying hellos backstage and went over to see how it was going, most of them were out on the street, wandering around in their spangles and hot pants. The restaurant was pretty fancy, so maybe they were done — perhaps playing on the bar was not welcome at that place.
I, Nero
Every morning the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times give fresh reports of the spreading financial and economic collapse now spreading to Europe. It feels at times as if we’re fiddling while Rome burns. I suspect the repercussions will spread out a lot further before this thing settles down. Some CEOs are still bailing out with hundreds of millions in bonuses — for lying and fucking up — it’s disgusting. They get rewarded for bilking millions and doing a lousy job. There is no shame.
Iceland, the country, has just gone bankrupt (their banks invested heavily and ended up in serious debt). I wonder how Russia and China are weathering this crisis. I know Russian politicians have been gloating as the US economy falls off its pedestal, but the ripples and fallout are spreading fast, so we’ll see how long they can keep laughing. If they and China (and, who knows — Brazil, Dubai, Venezuela and others) can get through this relatively unscathed, then the era of US world hegemony will be incredibly short lived. Russia and China will be the two giants still standing, with the oil monarchies holding the rest of the world’s feeding tube, at least for the time being.
While billions a week were being spent on a “War on Terror,” the US, and the whole world, were becoming increasingly vulnerable to this economic collapse and no one in power sought to regulate or put a stop to it. I feel that though the link is not linear, the connection between the Iraq invasion and the collapse of the US economy is inescapable.
The next afternoon C and I biked over to 826 Valencia, bought some pirate supplies, and went to Ratio 3 gallery to see a Barry McGee show he has under the name of Lydia Fong (some great ball point pen drawings, but out of our price range). We stopped at Darcy’s Heartfelt store in Bernal Heights and had a pork taco and tamarind juice at La Taqueria on Mission Street, which was wonderfully fresh. I know Mission taco fiends all have their favorite places, but this place has to be up there.
The 2nd show at Davies Hall went just as well as the first night. We tried out the Miranda gag, which worked, but we’re not all sure it adds significantly to the show. Maybe it just needs some refining. It wants to pull the audience into our creative process somehow, at least that’s what I imagine it could do, and be entertaining as well.
Afterwards some of us made our way to Place Pigalle, a nearby bar, where the marching band was also headed. By the time C and I got there, they were in full swing. In the close quarters of a bar, the band is even more transcendent and most of us ended up on the dance floor with pom poms in our hands.
Malu and China drove down from Los Angeles and met a few of us at the beach in the afternoon. The waves were powerful — good for body surfing but not much else. At sound check, we begin rehearsing “Burning Down The House,” as we’ll add it as an encore on the San Francisco dates, where the Extra Action Marching Band will join us. By the end of half an hour, it sounds almost ready to play! Mark had spent part of the day programming keyboard sounds and Paul, Graham, and Mauro already knew it, so it came together quickly. We’ll have an hour to work with the marching band at sound check before the SF show. And they, the marching band, have suggested that they teach our dancers the steps they’ve worked out for that song. Perfect! All told, that means there’ll be about 36 people on stage when they join us at the end of the show.
Latecomers
At some of the recent shows, some percentage of the audience, I guess assuming that there will be an opening act, straggle in during the first half hour of our show. It’s a little disconcerting to walk out and see scattered empty seats…seats that get filled after these stragglers arrive. All I can assume is that these audience members think they’re being clever and missing the opening act, but there is none. We have suggested to the local promoters that they add information to their ads that say, “No Opening Act,” and “Show Starts Promptly” — but we’ll see.
After sound check, Malu, China, and I go for a walk along the seaside, which is right next to the San Diego venue. Pelicans stand on the breakwater. We pass a picnic where they’re playing my music. There’s a gorgeous sunset.
LA
Malu and China join us for the bus ride to LA. We spend most of the ride watching YouTube favorites (the bus has wi-fi). A fight between water buffalo, lions, and an alligator. The butt-sniffing monkey. A one-man history live performance montage of pop dance. A Steve Coogan character doing a duet with Björk. China texts some friends in LA to enquire regarding suggestions for a place for us to hang out and meet friends after we get kicked out of the Greek Theatre’s backstage. The bus drops us off at the LA hotel at 1 a.m. The next morning, I wake up and go out for a New York Times and breakfast. Duke’s coffee shop is walking distance. On the side street where the hotel is located, there is an attractive blonde woman in a skirt and heels. I do a double take when she begins to walk towards Sunset Boulevard; her tits, in a tight black sweater, are as big as those of 50s girly cartoons, completely unrealistic and exaggerated out of all proportion. Welcome to LA! As usual there is no one about, the blonde and some Mexican road workers and myself, but there’s lots of traffic. The night’s mist has yet to be dissipated. The young Goth guy at the counter at Duke’s says he’s coming to our show.
Last night was the Biden/Palin debate. I listened in, but only a bit. Palin tries to throw out key phrases and push the buttons the voters want to hear (lower taxes, less government, economic security) while Biden gives hard evidence. Her platitudes are mostly lies, as is the Republican style. They often rightly assume that no one will actually check or call them on their bullshit. Sadly, their technique of lying till people think it’s true often works — a pathetic reflection of the American voter. I sort of wish the Democrats would take off the kid gloves and call these people on their bullshit. I mean, the Republican policies and the Bush administration facilitated the credit-banking mess, the attendant economic decline, oil-friendly energy policies, the huge debt the US is saddled with, and the expenditure of billions a week on an endless illegal war. The McCain camp has appropriated the Obama “change” mantra, but their behavior says more of the same.
“Lack of utility and rarefied exquisiteness are seen as the shortest paths to being art.” — Roberta Smith of The New York Times recently reviewing a show at the Museum of Art and Design in which many artists use everyday objects in their work. She doesn’t agree with the statement and by paraphrasing it, she doesn’t mean it as a compliment.
I would argue that art does, in fact, have a utility, but not always in the obvious functional way that, say, my bike racks for NYC do. Of course in Asia, functional objects like screens, teacups, tea wisks and other paraphernalia have traditionally been the closest to our notion of fine art, but they are also utilitarian objects. They are a version of a household item that is also a tool to focus and refine attention — a changed awareness that then resonates out into the world. And the objects are completely utilitarian, which makes the mundane daily activities they are associated with into small focused performances, little rituals. Tea ceremony is a refined example, but many more ordinary practices and activities are focus pullers as well. One performs the act, and is aware of performing the act at the same time.
While viewing art, at least in the western sense, is not the road to self-improvement some still claim — art is not “good” for you — it still has practical and psychologically positive functions. Making it, performing it (in the case of some art forms) and the various social links and connections that arise (or don’t) in the whole world of surrounding activity are where much of the usefulness comes from. Participation (whether making it, dancing it, singing along or being together) is so obviously psychologically cathartic that it’s hardly worth mentioning. It facilitates talk, flirting, hanging out, travel, and money exchange. Isn’t that useful? The object itself might be useless, but, like paper money, it has a kind of agreed upon exchange value — it’s a kind of social currency.
On the way up, I commented that our audiences, who are pretty much universally loving the dance elements, would probably, most of them, never go to see a contemporary dance performance if it was in town. We agreed that somehow this context removes any sense of pretension and fear from the viewer. There is none of the intellectual questioning and pondering by the audience that often occurs at a dance or at a performance context. No one is asking, “What does this mean? Do I get it? Do I like it? Is this over my head?”
Somehow mixed with popular music, these elements in the show bypass those critical and questioning centers and people receive them as part and parcel of the total performance. If they are enjoying it, then it must be OK. Lily suggests that dance, often marginalized but now increasingly so, needs to insert itself into other places and join with other media, as this show does in its own way. She mentioned some places dance might fit: fashion shows (which is a great idea to make those events a little more acknowledged as performance); film; fine art; and elsewhere.
Orpheum Theater
The renovated Orpheum Theater here in Phoenix is beautiful, as is its namesake in Memphis. I hope that with the changing fortunes and structures in the worlds of music and performance, these places, ornate palaces for performance, will flourish once again. Maybe, as people crave the authenticity of a live show and music in a world of virtual and limitless interconnectivity, these places will be increasingly well attended.
This one had a built-in lighting effect that mimicked clouds passing over the starlit sky. The giant murals are of Monument Valley/Sedona-type landscapes — God’s theater.
At 10 a.m., a group of six of us left on bikes to hike up nearby Camelback Mountain and the climb was strenuous, fun, and exhilarating. After a while, the Echo Canyon Trail we took got rockier and steeper; we had to use installed railings to help pull ourselves up some parts, and then other parts were a long scramble up towards the summit.
A man named Claude came up behind us when we were not quite halfway up and asked if we needed water. This guy was going to offer us his own water!? It seems Claude is a self-appointed Good Samaritan on this trail. He has gone up and down every other day for 20 years now! He said we really needed more water than we had with us (one small bottle each) so he topped us up and directed us when to bear right or left.
At the summit there was a lovely breeze and one could see the immense sprawl of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the many extravagantly green golf courses scattered here and there.
When I commented on how much water it must take to keep those yards and golf courses green, Claude offered that the golf courses at least use gray water — recycled from toilets — but it’s still water that’s got to come from somewhere, and those somewheres are drying up fast.
Lily organized an early morning trip for a group of us in a hot air balloon. Six a.m. is a little early for us, but 6 of us got up and were met by Jeff Hooten. He drove us to a field behind a pre-fab church on the northern outskirts of town where we could see others in neighboring fields also dragging large wicker baskets, propane burners, and balloons out of small trailers. A fan blew regular air into the unfurled balloon, which inflated it, but didn’t make it rise. It was a weird whale lying beached.
The basket, now attached, lay on its side. We were enlisted to hold towropes and keep the opening open for the fan. When it was well engorged, like a strange cave-shaped tent in a vacant lot, the propane blowers were directed away from the fabric and the thing began to rise. Jeff’s assistants held more cables and as the basket righted itself, the balloon rose above it and we clambered in.
Barely a few minutes after, with another blast of the flame, we rose into the air, silently above the church and towards the trees and brush of the Rio Grande floodplain. We could see suburban sprawl and early morning traffic and the sun was just rising over the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance.
It was strangely not terrifying — even though we could have easily leaned out over the waist high wicker basket and tumbled out. We could now see the river and the levee that we’d biked on, and not too far away we could see other balloons rising.
The balloon would rise and fall in a delayed reaction as Jeff blasted the flame from time to time. When he didn’t blast, there was a beautiful silence as the light breeze caught us and carried us downstream following the floodplain. The balloon seemed, at times, perilously close to going into the trees — and Jeff intentionally let the basket touch the uppermost branches a couple of times. Then we’d silently rise up again. On one stretch, he let the basket drop low enough that it dipped into the river; the river water flooded the bottom of the basket.
Up we went again, about 3000 feet above the land. We could see beyond the suburban sprawl to the desert surrounding Albuquerque, including some small volcanoes and mesas in the distance.
As the propane level in the tank began to shrink, it was time to think about where to “land.” Jeff’s assistants had been trailing us on the ground in their SUV, and I suspect that the wind currents and therefore the balloon trajectories are fairly similar day to day. Jeff radioed them that the St. Pius X High School ball fields in the near distance looked like a likely spot. He prepared us for a balloon landing, which depending might mean the basket hits the ground, bounces, and then tips over.
We landed in a baseball field, after a couple of bounces and slowly, as the balloon gradually cooled, we could get out of the basket. But we still had to hang on to keep our weight holding the thing down. Jeff’s assistant’s SUV was in a parking lot on the other side of the 12-foot ball field fence and the balloon guys said it sure would be better to have the balloon and the basket on that side…so…Jeff reblasted the balloon one more time and we all hung onto the outside (the outside!) as the balloon rose just enough to drift over the fence and into the parking lot on the other side.
