sixty+ minutes of sound: november

November 2011 Playlist

Pumped Up Kicks  -  Foster the People

Atomic  -  Blondie

P.Y.T (Pretty Young Thing)  -  Michael Jackson 

Young Folks  -  Peter Jorn and John

The High Road  -  Broken Bells

Tell It Like It Is  -  Aaron Neville

Box of Rain  -  Grateful Dead

Claudine  -  The Rolling Stones

Tobacco Road  -  Edgar Winter

Jump In The Line  -  Harry Belafonte

Green Onions (Live)  -  Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Dance Hall  -  My Goodness
New York City Serenade  -  Bruce Springsteen

 

sixty+ minutes of sound: october

October 2011 Playlist

Cruel To Be Kind  -  Nick Lowe

Honey Bunny  -  Girls

Better Way  -  The Soft White Sixties

Lonesome, On'ry and Mean  -  Waylon Jennings

Because The Night  -  Patti Smith

Feelin' Dank  -  Friends

C'mon Everybody  -  Eddie Cochran

Maneater  -  Hall & Oates

Casino Boogie  -  The Rolling Stones

Dog Days Are Over  -  Florence + The Machine

Stay Up Late  -  Talking Heads

All The Money or the Simple Life  Honey  -  The Dandy Warhols

Que Sera  -  Wax Tailor

Me and Jane Doe  -  Charlotte Gainsbourg

You're So Vain  -  Carly Simon (with Mick Jagger)

Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)  -  The White Stripes

Sleepwalk  -  Santo & Johnny

Everlasting Light  -  The Black Keys

Next To The Trash  -  Punch Brothers

Wild Man (featuring Big Chief Bo Dollis)  -  Galactic

You're My Main Thing  -  Billy Hanks Band

Down in Mississippi  -  North Mississippi All Stars

Panola County Line  -  Kudzu Kings

I Gotta Go  -  Robert Earl Keen

Is This Sunset For Real? An Amazing Night on My Roof

The roof of my building has views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, the Transamerica Building, North Beach and Russian Hill. I love it and am so lucky.

The deck is fully exposed to the Northwest, so it can be cold and windy. 

But some nights, it is breathtaking. 

I also love my Canon G11 camera, which took these amazing pictures. 

Oscar the Grouch loves the roof

You Should Really See These Films

A librarian and a postal worker, using only their government salaries, build one of the greatest contemporary art collections in modern history.

Herb and Dorothy

A $25 billion dollar art collection is wrestled away from its owner and taken over by his sworn enemy.

The Art of the Steal

A brilliant Oscar-winning screenwriter's career and life is unalterably changed after he is blacklisted by the U.S. Senate.

Trumbo

These three films are definitely worth watching.

Herb and Dorothy

The Art of the Steal

Trumbo

All are available to stream on Netflix. 

Richard Serra and Creating His Huge, Awesome Sculptures

Cycle, 2011. Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo from Modern Painters.

Richard Serra's Drawing Retrospective opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, October 13 for a member preview. The exhibit traveled from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it opened in April 2011. 

Serra is most famous for his large-scale steel sculptures, yet this exhibit goes behind the scenes of his process and into a different style of his art. Fifty drawings, some taking up a full wall of the museum, as well as the artist's private notebooks allows visitors a window into the early stages of Serra's creativity and planning.  I was very happy to receive a membership to the museum for Christmas, so I was able to visit on a quiet afternoon. 

Drawings after Circuit, 1972. From Modern Painters.

Serra explains the 18 drawings from the photo above, which are very large and take up a full wall in the SF MOMA exhibit. "The Circuit drawings are the result of mapping. They were an exercise for me, in that they recorded what I saw as I moved 360 degrees around the periphery of the room looking at the openings between the four plates of the sculpture." 

The San Francisco exhibit coincides with two other exhibits opening this month, one at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain called "Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra" and an exhibit of two new works at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Cycle, 2011, in the photo at the top of this post, is at the Gagosian. Serra is on the cover of the September 2011 issue of Modern Painters magazine, and the article in the magazine gave me context for the SF MOMA exhibit.

My Curves Are Not Mad, 1987. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas

 Last year, I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and loved Serra's huge steel sculpture, My Curves Are Not Mad, in the museum's garden.  I have sometimes struggled to really understand sculpture. The Drawing Retrospective as well as the recent press about Richard Serra have helped me to see that his sculpture is about space and how space can change with the addition of a sculpture. 

Checking the echo in My Curves Are Not Mad

The drawings opened my eyes to the thought that goes into Serra's work and when I left the museum yesterday, I was exhausted. That is usually a sign that I have learned something that may take some time for me to process. 

Open Ended, 2007-2008. From Modern Painters.

The photographs of Serra's work in this post are from pictures I took of the pages in Modern Painters.

Read an interview with Serra from ARTINFO, the website for Modern Painters: 

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38449/richard-serra-memory-time-and-the-value-of-inquiry/

Read an article from ARTINFO about the Drawing Retrospective when it opened at the Met in New York: 

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37489/draw-it-black-a-qa-with-richard-serra-on-his-daring-new-retrospective-at-the-met/

sixty+ minutes of sound: september

Broken Social Scene at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival 2011

September 2011 Playlist

Gone, Gone, Gone  -  Nikki Lane

The Next Time Around  -  Little Joy

The Birds They Circle  -  Karen Elson

Jolene  -  Dolly Parton

Ain't No Sunshine  -  Bill Withers

I'm on Fire  -  Bruce Springsteen

Nashville Skyline Rag  -  Bob Dylan

Lebanese Blond  -  Thievery Corporation

Halfway Home  -  TV on the Radio

Groove is in the Heart  -  Deee-Lite

Champagne and Reefer (Live)  -  The Rolling Stones featuring Buddy Guy

Here Comes the Sun  -  Richie Havens

Written in Reverse  -  Spoon

Tighten Up  -  The Black Keys

California Sunrise  -  Dirty Gold

Bizarre Love Triangle  -  New Order

I Feel Love  -  Donna Summer

Ride Like the Wind  -  Christopher Cross

Superheavy  -  SuperHeavy

Right Place, Wrong Time  -  Dr. John

Tonight, I'll Be Staying Here with You (Live)  -  Bob Dylan with Rolling Thunder

Too Young to Burn  -  Sonny & The Sunsets

Empire State of Mind  -  Jay Z & Alicia Keys

Look No Further for San Francisco Neighborhood Information!

Paseo Properties is a Bay Area real estate firm that was recently founded by my friends Rob Santo Domingo and Porter Farthing. They asked me to research and write about neighborhoods in San Francisco and Marin County for the local information section of the company's website. 

Since I've only been in San Francisco for about two years, it was a great project that inspired me to learn more about the city and surrounding towns. I hope it is helpful for anyone looking for more information about this beautiful and special part of California. 

Check out my writing on their website: 
http://www.paseopropertiessf.com/neighborhood-info

Shambala (1975) by Three Dog Night

To get your Thursday morning started off right!

Art in the Streets

 
Is Banksy a brilliant social commentator, an artist or a criminal? His 2010 Oscar nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop doesn’t answer these questions, but it takes viewers on a wild ride through the history of street art in Europe and America. Just when it seems like a stylish contemporary documentary, the film switches gears to focus on a fascinating pseudo artist named Thierry Guetta, or as he prefers to be called, Mr. Brainwash. Any doubt or suspicion the audience may have about street art is personified in the manic Frenchman. I don’t know if the film is real or a satire, but I loved watching it. 
 

 

I wasn’t the only one interested in learning more about these artists. When the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) made the controversial decision in April 2011 to hire New York gallerist Jeffery Deitch to lead the museum, he made a bet that street art would put the struggling museum on the map. 

I visited the Street Art exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in June 2011. It was housed in a cavernous space in downtown Los Angeles. I found it visually overwhelming and in order to take it all in, I wish I had more than the few hours I spent there. Unlike many museum exhibits, photography was allowed and it seemed that everyone was taking pictures.

This is how the museum described the event:
“Art in the Streets is the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. The exhibition traces the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today, concentrating on key cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo, where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved. The exhibition features paintings, mixed media sculptures, and interactive installations by fifty of the most dynamic artists and emphasizes Los Angeles's role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to seminal local movements such as cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture.”