Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The Gauntlet

I was overfull with excess of everything.  I sat on a wooden chair with a straight back and a cushioned seat, and they came over and sat on either side of me.  They bore expressions of earnest concern and reserved skepticism.  The evening lay heavy on my lap.

The one turned toward me, placing her elbow on the table.

You know, we’ve got Jews here too.

She leaned in almost imperceptibly.

They bury their own.

She paused, briefly, respectfully.  Her face was wrinkled like recycled wrapping tissue.

So, she continued: you want some pie?

I, too, paused. 

What kind of pie?

The other responded immediately:

That’s okay, we’ll get you some of each. 

They returned with a plate bearing a quarter each of four different pies.  The matter was closed.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Wide Wide World of Weekend

ITEM: We netflix’d Kung Fu Hustle this weekend.  It was a hoot - lots of wire-fu rockem-sockem action, mixed with a healthy dose of classic Warner Brothers cartoons.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it’s good exercise to suspend one’s disbelief for so long.  The most similar film that comes to mind is Big Trouble in Little China, which has long been one of my favorites.  But if you are liable to rent this puppy at some point, here’s a hint: I usually prefer to read subtitles than to listen to lip-synched dubbing.  This time, however, I’d recommend the dub - we ran subtitles under the dubbed dialogue and the spoken words were much funnier, more detailed and more interesting.  The subtitles were terse and almost misleading sometimes.  Also, the dubbed dialogue was very well voiced and well edited.  Curious, but there you have it.  Like a flaming palm of buddah, dude. 

ITEM: also on the media beat, and this time on the local front (outlanders, you can skip this item), KPIG radio is now broadcasting in San Franscisco on am 1510.  I almost never listen to the radio except for NPR and classical music - not even those ostensibly comedic morning shows.  However, the pig is where it’s at.  Great music - the only place I really can get into country, plus blues, bluegrass, and all sorts of cross-breeds; Elvis Costello, Blind Boys of Alabama, the Waifs, and loads of treasures from their live archives; also, funny parody commercials and very mellow on-air personalities.  They used to be only audible in their home stomping grounds of Santa Cruz; then they went on line for a while but I think they got in trouble for it somehow.  And now they’re back on the air here in SF.  This means I no longer have to bring my iPod in the car.  The pig will attend to all my aural needs. 

ITEM: On the international front, I could not help but notice that last week the french press exhumed criticisms of Lance Armstrong, the egocentric ubermench who actually won the world’s toughest bike race seven times in a row.  Now they’re saying that his 1999 urine sample tested positive for steroids.  Lance is remonstrating in appropriate ways (ie, not by providing more samples for his detractors to wash out of their chemises), but I think the story itself demonstrates its own weakness.  In it, the primary spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, is Dick Pound.  That’s right, Dick Pound of WADA is complaining about tainted seven-year-old urine.  And who can blame him.  If my name was Dick Pound and I represented WADA, I bet old urine would be about the only thing I’d be able to concentrate on.  At least we know now why the leader’s jersy is yellow.

ITEM: Local media again, but with an international appeal - when we took a stroll in the park on Saturday we were delighted to discover that the museum concorse had been opened to pedestrians and the new De Young Museum was open for tours.  Though there is as yet barely any art in it, the building itself was a significant draw.  The old De Young was a venerable egyptian-inspired design, ultimately redesigned and upgraded to a more austere renaissance-styled structure.  This was slowly stripped of all personality until it was little more than a clumsy exhibition hall, literally supported by an external skeleton of girders in case of earthquakes, for which the building was very much underprepared.  Eventually this eyesore was destroyed, amid great outcry over the demise of the city’s architectural heritage.  Really, it wasn’t such a great building anymore, though it once had been; we couldn’t even get major international exhibits anymore because of excessive underwriting costs.  So we’ve been several years now without a real fine arts museum, and once they started letting us see the new facility I was excited to see what they’d come up with.  After all, it’s only about five blocks from my apartment.

Well I’m not too impressed.  It’s a big shiny box with an interesting twisting tower, nicely-textured copper cladding, and some provocative geometry.  However, it’s also stark, brutal, and a rejection of all that this beautiful victorian park has meant for a century.  In a quest for modernism, even simple truths about the park have been ignored - like that there are birds here.  Pigeons are already roosting at the roofline, which drops sheerly to a narrow pedestrian pathway along the front of its long, featureless facade.  Now artlovers are going to be subjected to guanobombings before and after their visit to the galleries.  They could have built a small inward-curving coping against the front edge, or angled the wall, or done any number of things to break this facelessness and help avoid the falling birdturds, but instead they’ve opted to put loudspeakers on the roof and play, at high volume, the calls of birds that attack pigeons.  These birds already exist in the park but are not availing themselves of the squab harvest opportunities that this museum presents to them.  Instead, it’s just goddamn noisy.  And the pigeons could not possibly care less. 

They are going to finish the landscaping now; the museum will reopen for real in October.  These guys used to be scattered around the grounds of the concourse; now they’re huddled in committee amidst the construction equipment till their new pedastals are ready for them.  I like how they are congregated.  So far it’s my favorite thing about the museum.  But this cabal will be broken up soon enough.  Oh well, maybe this Costco of Art will evetually grow on me.  Meantime, this has gone on long enough.  Back to work with you, goldbricker.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Room with a View

I’m sitting in the conference room - a long, narrow chamber filled with several rows of banquet chairs, just barely comfortable enough to endure for 90 minutes at a stretch.  I’ve been here for about an hour, and my ass is starting to get tired.  “Oh relax,” my brain tells it, “at least we scored a good spot here.” Most of the people strugging to stay awake in this room are starting to run low on oxygen and are getting uncomforably warm as they listen to the panel discussion; they’re trapped in interior loocations with insufficient air circulation and too many bodies heaving too many sighs for the hotel HVAC system to accomodate them.  But me, I’ve got the sweet deal - I picked a chair right next to a window that’s letting in the cool fresh outside air, keeping me refreshed and alert as the speakers drone on.  Plus, I can probably look out this very window next to me and see something - maybe even something interesting.  Perhaps I’ll give it a try.

My eyes are tired of staring at the four people behind the long table set crosswise at the front of the room, so I gently shift my gaze ninety degrees to the left.  That’s not so interesting, after all. It’s another hotel, and since it’s just slightly downhill from us, I’m looking straight across, not to an ornate lobby or elaborate facade, but to residential floors, mostly curtained, mostly devoid of personality and activity.  It’s a solid wall of little curtains in little windows, filling my range of vision as I look out across the street.  It’s almost as boring as the panel discussion I’m attending, and to which I feel obliged to return my attention. 

But even as I look back at the talking heads, I notice movement at the corner of my peripheral vision.  There is a little something going on at the hotel across the street.  I can’t see much of it, but I can see this: