Morning sunshines,

I hope your Halloweens all were spectacular. Me, I didn’t get too much of a Halloween, on account of having to get up at the crack of dawn (4:30am) to drive to the San Francisco Half Marathon. It was fun, but seriously?

Anyway, my column last week was a (for me, at least) loving profile of a person whose view on art online is completely opposed to mine. I’m for art made through community, and she says that community devours art.

It took me quite a few tumblr pages to find everything I needed to write that column. Below, you will find them attached.

Where I started: Kung Fu Grippe

Where that led me: A guy on my side (sorta)

And then to Theremina herself, the source of the argument.

This might help for context: some sort of skeleton

This tumblr thing can suck away lives. Be careful where you click!

At what point to historical relics become art? For this post, the word “art” as I’m using it means something that is worthy of thought, an appreciation for the time and place in which something is produced, and acknowledging the care with which it was executed. Under this definition, a doodle you scribbled with a Crayola in your fist at age three or the lampshade your grandmother decorated with seashells and glass to sell at a souvenir shop in lobster country have the potential to become a work of art.

I was inspired by this notion when I paid a visit to Sherman co-op this weekend. Amidst a whirl of warm color that otherwise covered the mantle above the fireplace, my eyes zeroed in on two clear-cut figures occupying a black and white photograph, housed by a Lucite frame. “Who’s that?” I asked my hostess. (Click here to read more…)

Having thought I had fractured my foot with a fifty pound suitcase, I found myself with a leg stretched up in the air as I lay on a check-up table in the Tang Center. Very few medical check-up facilities are what I would describe as cheery, but as I tried to feel as natural as possible as the nurse made small talk while examining my foot, I let my eyes wander to the ceiling and almost giggled by the cute decoration dangling above my head. Here it is, discreetly shot with my cell phone:

Drifting in the ceiling vent’s current was a little blue-spotted cow, leaping over fluffy white clouds and a golden sliver of smiling moon. (Click here to read more…)

I just joined the Daily Cal this semester, so not expecting to get a sweet complimentary press ticket, I bought my tickets to the Treasure Island Festival like a normal person in August. I didn’t get a fancy shmancy press pass with all the luxuries. No internet access, no free water, no private bathrooms, no smug sense of superiority. I was roughing it. But I got to capture a perspective from the front lines: I wiggled my way through the crowd to get closer to the stage, I was part of the conga line at the end of Dan Deacon’s set, I wandered through the art booths and midway games, and I danced my face off pretty much all day. So here’s a wrap up of the true festival-goer experience:

For one, getting to the festival is a little bit of a task if you don’t have a car and a VIP parking pass. I left my house around 1040am to take Bart to the city and walk to AT&T Park, and by the time we got off the complimentary shuttle to the island, it was 1:15.

Still, it’s hard to even let bumps like this affect your mood at a place like the Treasure Island Festival. How often do you get to spend a day listening to fantastic live music surrounded by a conglomeration of artists, students, hippies, ravers, weirdos, and normal people who all share a love of music? It’s a pretty fascinating sociological phenomenon, and always a spectacle. Today’s weirdness included old-timey midway games, a few guys riding around in motorized cupcakes (literally, cupcake cars where you could only see the driver’s head poking out of the top), and about a dozen people dressed up in rubber robot and monster costumes who would run around and dance with people. The last one was probably pretty terrifying for the few handfuls of people tripping on acid.

These weird elements are typical of any major music festival these days, but Treasure Island is particularly unique for a few reasons. For one, Treasure Island sells out at 12,000 tickets, which is dwarfed by the 40-60,000 people the larger festivals like Coachella and Outside Lands attracts. It’s so small that you can hear the music playing from almost anywhere on the island. The art booths seem to spill towards the music into distances you would normally stand from the stage at Coachella. But it’s still large enough to provide a similar experience to these festivals, but small enough to feel significantly more intimate. Also, there are only two stages, and the schedule is designed so that when one band finishes on one stage, the next band starts on the other. This eliminates one of the worst things about music festivals: having to choose between two of your favorite acts playing simultaneously on different stages.

And thank God for that. With a lineup like Saturday’s, you don’t want to miss a thing.

(Click here to read more…)

The first thing you may wonder when you first hear about the Nervous Magic Lantern is, What in the world is it? At its most basic level, it is a special projector invented by New York avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs. At the PFA last week, Jacobs gave a performance on his Lantern, which he set up in the back row of the theater, right behind audience members. Jacobs gradually moved superimposed slides of abstract textures and colors, and, thanks to an exaggerated flicker effect from a slow-moving shutter, created the sensation of fluid motion (it seemed to work like a zoetrope).

The stunning images had a very tactile, 3-dimensional quality to them. One moment, I thought I was in someone’s intestines. Or perhaps that was magma I saw? The next moment, it felt like I was viewing objects encased in sap. And so on. Jacobs’ Lantern hearkens back to a time when creating moving images by projecting light through stills—that is, inert objects, not film strips playing at 24 frames a second—was a magical experience. And there was something magical in the way Jacobs pored over his device, his face warmly lit by the projector’s bulb, as he manipulated his slides, like an alchemist working on his craft.

Here is a brief clip of Jacobs performing on his Nervous Magic Lantern: (Click here to read more…)

Earlier in the week I wrote an article for the Berkeley Art Museum’s exhibition of the Fernando Botero Abu Ghraib series. Botero was born in Colombia, and though not as recognized in US art circles as some other Latin American artists, focuses on globally significant events in his work. I’ve always been curious how politics play out in an artist’s ability to share his or her visualization of reality. Now is my chance to potentially find out a little bit more about the process!

Saturday, October 10 at 3 p.m. in the BAM/PFA Museum Theater, writer Daniel Alarcon and artist Carlos Motta will be speaking about how contemporary Latin American artists are influenced by their countries’ unique political history and revolutionary activity.

Link: www.dailycal.org

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful kingdom that’s streets were paved in gold. No–Seriously! There were billions of dollars pouring into the streets–$35 billion annually, as a matter of fact. This was the magical kingdom (empire?) of Walter Elias “Walt” Disney and the enterprise that he built, from cutesy cartoons to marvelously marketed merchandised goods, to worlds within worlds at his amusement parks.

Now, at the Walt Disney Family Museum, which just opened at San Francisco’s Presidio, you can learn about the business-whiz who got his start as an artist .

You all are quite familiar with Disney’s films. Perhaps your first exposure to death was when Bambi’s mother went to roam wilder, freer places in the afterlife. Maybe you first dreamed of space flight when Buzz Lightyear reached for the skylight. Maybe you were inspired, at the age of three, to join PETA’s army when you thought you could commune with animals after watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella. (Click here to read more…)

I am an optimist. Hence, I frequently try to see the value in everything that has ever been labeled as “art.” Admittedly, this is not always an easy or enjoyable task. Sometimes it’s downright puzzling (try paying vast sums of money to attend a concert where the most talked about piece was played in absolute silence or going to the SF MOMA to observe large blocks of petroleum jelly chilling in the middle of the gallery floor).

With enough information or the ability to pick an artist’s brain, I can at least appreciate the creative value of a work. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it or understand it. Apparently this has been on other people’s minds as the film “(Untitled)“, opening in San Francisco October 23, peers into the often ill-understood forays of the contemporary art world for a comical commentary.

What’s your take on the modern art scene?

Links: www.hulu.com, www.sfgate.com

Wednesday evening, I had the privilege to attend a Q&A with renowned Colombian painter Fernando Botero, an artist indelibly canonized into the Latin American art tradition. Well known for his farcical, beautiful aerobics of the imagination, Botero recently donated his stark, provocative Abu Ghraib series, comprised of 56 paintings, to the Berkeley Art Museum. He provided insight into the impeccable methods to his wonderful madness and also express humility as he accepted an award from the university Chancellor.

A series of hyperbolic yet deeply humane meditations on the tortures in the eponymous Iraqi prison, the Abu Ghraib paintings are a testament to art’s power as a language and as a vital sociocultural medium of expression. Within each painting are bizarre, highly volumetric brushstrokes that stress the musculature of human flesh as it is subject to pain. Botero’s work reaches emotional planes inaccessible through the written word, or even through photography. The strangeness and the horrifying aesthetic beauty of these paintings defy the canvas. These painted moments, in their stunning tragedy, leap out of their visual confines and somehow manage to implicate us all.

The exhibit will run until February 7, 2010. I will certainly see it a few more times.

Image source: www.pierretristam.com

As a child, I thought it was the coolest thing ever to play with a Polaroid camera and watch a photo develop right in front of me. Then there was the family camera, an old Olympus point and shoot contraption. My parents would snap dozens of photos of my sister, the dog and me. It was always quite a feat to get all of us–generally in a restless blur of motion–in one clear photo. We wouldn’t know how the photo turned out until after we retrieved it from the neighborhood Kodak lab. Since my dad invested in a digital camera, however, we get results in a jiff! Not only that, my dad could edit a pet unicorn into family photos or change the background to exotic locales, much to my sister’s and my delight. The technology for digital photography has come a long way since then, transforming what was once simply a convenience factor into a high art.

Take a couple seconds to admire the luscious images below:

Eric Larson-”On McAllister St.”

(Click here to read more…)