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"content": "\u003cp>The Swedish film director Roy Andersson uses his camera like a Medusa in reverse. Every character is made of stone until his gaze animates the steadied, careful composition he’s assembled inside the frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his latest film \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.magpictures.com/apigeon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence\u003c/a>\u003c/i> (2014), he arranges his scenes the way a painter does. His lighting, set, makeup and costume designs all borrow color palettes from artists like Balthus and Lucian Freud. And, at the same time, Andersson shares their sense of damaged humanism, inexplicably managing to create \u003ci>tableaux vivants\u003c/i> in which every person appears to be psychologically fragile or incomplete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8EJL2FZ45U\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under a constant wash of sunlight that’s turned a shade of hospital green, something prevents \u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i>, and all of Andersson’s oeuvre, from becoming studies in anomie and despair. At first glance, there’s a caustic comic sensibility conveyed in the way the actors deliver their few, lingering lines. Even if you don’t speak Swedish, this errant way of speaking asserts itself on the English or American ear. You can easily recognize the risk an open mouth takes as it cracks the vast, frozen pause of an awkward conversation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10973504\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10973504\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/1_pigeon-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Per Bergqvist and Solveig Andersson in 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.' 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We want people to have fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their idea of fun: novelty items like plastic vampire teeth and a hideous face mask of a wizened man they’ve named, “Old One-Tooth.” Not even Willy Loman could have achieved this nadir of professional denial. The salesmen are, of course, stand-ins for the director, but cheap effects don’t inspire any willing suspension of disbelief in Andersson’s other characters. Those briefcases have long been emptied of their magic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i>, conversely, comes to life with eerie, fraught visuals excavated from the director’s unconscious mind. Several short scenes punctuate the plot, which Andersson himself states (perhaps oversimplifying) as, “I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human and to be alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is this humanity? Caged birds mesmerize the patrons at a taxidermy exhibit; a woman on a park bench nibbles on her baby’s toes; dancers in a flamenco class snake their arms into the air and clack their feet in unison; a royal soldier from the 18th century enters a modern day café on the back of a black horse; a laboratory scientist chats impassively on her mobile phone while a monkey endures an experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10973505\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10973505\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Viktor Gyllenberg in 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.' (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon-400x225.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Viktor Gyllenberg in ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.’ (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But what are they doing to the monkey, and why is the scientist so indifferent to its pain? These, and a hundred other questions, remain unanswered. \u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i> is the visual record of one man’s series of dreams, if those dreams were perfectly recalled in a cinematic maze. The sounds of a recurring waltz is the connective tissue that fades and overlaps over each disparate scene. But we, the audience, never enter the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We feel for the characters without seeing or sharing their varied points of view. We only observe — dumbfounded and uncomprehending — like a pigeon staring down from a tree branch at a high and distant remove, readying our wings for flight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence\u003c/i> opens Sept. 25 at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.roxie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Roxie Theater\u003c/a> in San Francisco and the \u003ca href=\"http://rafaelfilm.cafilm.org/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rafael Film Center\u003c/a> in San Rafael.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"headline": "'Pigeon' Reflects a Comic and Eerie Vision of Humanity",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Swedish film director Roy Andersson uses his camera like a Medusa in reverse. Every character is made of stone until his gaze animates the steadied, careful composition he’s assembled inside the frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his latest film \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.magpictures.com/apigeon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence\u003c/a>\u003c/i> (2014), he arranges his scenes the way a painter does. His lighting, set, makeup and costume designs all borrow color palettes from artists like Balthus and Lucian Freud. And, at the same time, Andersson shares their sense of damaged humanism, inexplicably managing to create \u003ci>tableaux vivants\u003c/i> in which every person appears to be psychologically fragile or incomplete.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/N8EJL2FZ45U'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/N8EJL2FZ45U'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Under a constant wash of sunlight that’s turned a shade of hospital green, something prevents \u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i>, and all of Andersson’s oeuvre, from becoming studies in anomie and despair. At first glance, there’s a caustic comic sensibility conveyed in the way the actors deliver their few, lingering lines. Even if you don’t speak Swedish, this errant way of speaking asserts itself on the English or American ear. You can easily recognize the risk an open mouth takes as it cracks the vast, frozen pause of an awkward conversation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10973504\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10973504\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/1_pigeon-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Per Bergqvist and Solveig Andersson in 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.' (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/1_pigeon.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/1_pigeon-400x225.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Per Bergqvist and Solveig Andersson in ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.’ (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In this largely narrative-free film, there are two recurring characters: a couple of downtrodden traveling salesmen who carry their briefcases as if they were anvils. When asked by potential customers about their wares, this is their unexpected reply: “We’re in the entertainment industry. We want people to have fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their idea of fun: novelty items like plastic vampire teeth and a hideous face mask of a wizened man they’ve named, “Old One-Tooth.” Not even Willy Loman could have achieved this nadir of professional denial. The salesmen are, of course, stand-ins for the director, but cheap effects don’t inspire any willing suspension of disbelief in Andersson’s other characters. Those briefcases have long been emptied of their magic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i>, conversely, comes to life with eerie, fraught visuals excavated from the director’s unconscious mind. Several short scenes punctuate the plot, which Andersson himself states (perhaps oversimplifying) as, “I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human and to be alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is this humanity? Caged birds mesmerize the patrons at a taxidermy exhibit; a woman on a park bench nibbles on her baby’s toes; dancers in a flamenco class snake their arms into the air and clack their feet in unison; a royal soldier from the 18th century enters a modern day café on the back of a black horse; a laboratory scientist chats impassively on her mobile phone while a monkey endures an experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10973505\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10973505\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Viktor Gyllenberg in 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.' (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/2_pigeon-400x225.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Viktor Gyllenberg in ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.’ (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But what are they doing to the monkey, and why is the scientist so indifferent to its pain? These, and a hundred other questions, remain unanswered. \u003ci>Pigeon\u003c/i> is the visual record of one man’s series of dreams, if those dreams were perfectly recalled in a cinematic maze. The sounds of a recurring waltz is the connective tissue that fades and overlaps over each disparate scene. But we, the audience, never enter the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We feel for the characters without seeing or sharing their varied points of view. We only observe — dumbfounded and uncomprehending — like a pigeon staring down from a tree branch at a high and distant remove, readying our wings for flight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence\u003c/i> opens Sept. 25 at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.roxie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Roxie Theater\u003c/a> in San Francisco and the \u003ca href=\"http://rafaelfilm.cafilm.org/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rafael Film Center\u003c/a> in San Rafael.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Colombian Photography Captures an Unfamiliar ‘Fourth World’",
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"content": "\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/fourth-world-current-photography-from-colombia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Jaime Ávila, Zoraida Díaz, Luz Elena Castro and Andres Felipe Orjuela.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Sept. 10 – Oct. 24, 2015\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">SF Camerawork\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/fourth-world-current-photography-from-colombia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia\u003c/i> at SF Camerawork presents the multi-generational work of four Colombian photographers, from journalists working in the 1980s to a conceptual artist born in that same decade. The exhibition is nominally about Colombian life in general, but decades of armed conflict, fueled by ideological differences and drug policies, govern Jaime Ávila, Zoraida Díaz, Luz Elena Castro and Andres Felipe Orjuela’s portrayals of the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One lively image of Colombian life is seen in \u003ca href=\"http://www.luzelenacastro.net/Sitio/Welcome.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Luz Elena Castro\u003c/a>’s \u003ci>Guardians\u003c/i> (1981), a black-and-white photograph of six young children smiling as they stand around a statue of a bloody and beaten Christ gazing heavenward. Grim religious imagery notwithstanding, the photograph captures a moment of apparent tranquility, one maybe only children are capable of enjoying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10963171\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 397px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10963171 size-medium\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-397x600.jpg\" alt=\"Jaime Ávila, 'Talento Pirata Plaza De Bolivar,' 2013. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"397\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-397x600.jpg 397w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-400x605.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 397px) 100vw, 397px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jaime Ávila, ‘Talento Pirata Plaza De Bolivar,’ 2013. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This photograph, along with Jaime Ávila’s work, however, are rare examples of peace in an exhibit that more often depicts the country’s 50-year-long armed conflict. Most of Castro’s other works document soldiers, rebels, politicians and life under war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Sacred Mountain\u003c/i> (1993), a disturbing companion piece to \u003ci>Guardians\u003c/i>, pictures a presidential bodyguard surrounded by women in a remote Andean town. A baby stretches from a sling to inquisitively reach for the guard’s submachine gun as if it were a toy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The marriage of violence and childhood is made more clearly in \u003ca href=\"http://www.ksteinmetz.net/centroamrica-1-1-1-1-1-1/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zoraida Díaz\u003c/a>’s series of documentary-style photographs. In one, a boy draped in an oversized sweater smiles as he points a gun, possibly a toy, in the viewer’s direction. His puffed cheeks suggest a moment of joy as he plays desperado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10954378\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10954378 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_Bonga%CC%81Sierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14.jpg\" alt=\"Luz Elena Castro, 'Sacred Mountain,' 1993. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"640\" height=\"517\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_BongáSierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_BongáSierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14-400x323.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Luz Elena Castro, ‘Sacred Mountain,’ 1993. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Two children run alongside an armored vehicle in \u003ci>Jugando a las Carreras\u003c/i> (1988) while a man gripping a mounted machine gun looks askance at them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a boy in another one of Díaz’s photographs, conflict is much less of a game. Only a teenager, he is seen in a jungle wearing battledress with a gun at his side. It is unclear whether he is in training or combat, Díaz captures what could be either confusion or fear in his eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Castro and Díaz’s small and intimate works are powerful, their dark subject mateer can be disheartening for the viewer. \u003ca href=\"http://www.andresorjuela.co/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Andres Felipe Orjuela\u003c/a> does not alleviate this situation, but through his work, scattered throughout the gallery, he strives to take some control over the narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10954380\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10954380 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos.jpg\" alt=\"Zoraida Díaz, 'Los Muchachos,' 1988. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"640\" height=\"410\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos-400x256.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Zoraida Díaz, ‘Los Muchachos,’ 1988. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Orjuela reanimates large archival photographs of traffickers and victims of government violence by illuminating them with pigments, resulting in Technicolor-like reimaginings of Colombian history. This process makes it difficult to passively consume the images, resulting in reflection rather than unquestioning acceptance of media imagery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All four artists emphasize the Colombian people, mostly setting aside specific \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">casus belli\u003c/a> or historical events. By doing so, they avoid sensationalizing the decades of conflict, often creating accounts of war that are more personal than encyclopedic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times, Ávila’s work feels out of place, but depictions of life outside of conflict are ultimately necessary if a less spectacular representation of Colombia is desired. Daily life does not cease during such long conflicts, and for Colombians like Ávila, who is the youngest in the exhibition, the on-going but ebbing conflict may be of dwindling preeminence to their national identity.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/fourth-world-current-photography-from-colombia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Jaime Ávila, Zoraida Díaz, Luz Elena Castro and Andres Felipe Orjuela.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Sept. 10 – Oct. 24, 2015\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">SF Camerawork\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/fourth-world-current-photography-from-colombia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia\u003c/i> at SF Camerawork presents the multi-generational work of four Colombian photographers, from journalists working in the 1980s to a conceptual artist born in that same decade. The exhibition is nominally about Colombian life in general, but decades of armed conflict, fueled by ideological differences and drug policies, govern Jaime Ávila, Zoraida Díaz, Luz Elena Castro and Andres Felipe Orjuela’s portrayals of the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One lively image of Colombian life is seen in \u003ca href=\"http://www.luzelenacastro.net/Sitio/Welcome.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Luz Elena Castro\u003c/a>’s \u003ci>Guardians\u003c/i> (1981), a black-and-white photograph of six young children smiling as they stand around a statue of a bloody and beaten Christ gazing heavenward. Grim religious imagery notwithstanding, the photograph captures a moment of apparent tranquility, one maybe only children are capable of enjoying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10963171\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 397px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10963171 size-medium\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-397x600.jpg\" alt=\"Jaime Ávila, 'Talento Pirata Plaza De Bolivar,' 2013. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"397\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-397x600.jpg 397w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar-400x605.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AVILA_PlazaDeBolivar.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 397px) 100vw, 397px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jaime Ávila, ‘Talento Pirata Plaza De Bolivar,’ 2013. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This photograph, along with Jaime Ávila’s work, however, are rare examples of peace in an exhibit that more often depicts the country’s 50-year-long armed conflict. Most of Castro’s other works document soldiers, rebels, politicians and life under war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Sacred Mountain\u003c/i> (1993), a disturbing companion piece to \u003ci>Guardians\u003c/i>, pictures a presidential bodyguard surrounded by women in a remote Andean town. A baby stretches from a sling to inquisitively reach for the guard’s submachine gun as if it were a toy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The marriage of violence and childhood is made more clearly in \u003ca href=\"http://www.ksteinmetz.net/centroamrica-1-1-1-1-1-1/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zoraida Díaz\u003c/a>’s series of documentary-style photographs. In one, a boy draped in an oversized sweater smiles as he points a gun, possibly a toy, in the viewer’s direction. His puffed cheeks suggest a moment of joy as he plays desperado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10954378\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10954378 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_Bonga%CC%81Sierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14.jpg\" alt=\"Luz Elena Castro, 'Sacred Mountain,' 1993. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"640\" height=\"517\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_BongáSierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Castro_BongáSierra-Nevada-Koguis-93_11x14-400x323.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Luz Elena Castro, ‘Sacred Mountain,’ 1993. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Two children run alongside an armored vehicle in \u003ci>Jugando a las Carreras\u003c/i> (1988) while a man gripping a mounted machine gun looks askance at them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a boy in another one of Díaz’s photographs, conflict is much less of a game. Only a teenager, he is seen in a jungle wearing battledress with a gun at his side. It is unclear whether he is in training or combat, Díaz captures what could be either confusion or fear in his eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Castro and Díaz’s small and intimate works are powerful, their dark subject mateer can be disheartening for the viewer. \u003ca href=\"http://www.andresorjuela.co/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Andres Felipe Orjuela\u003c/a> does not alleviate this situation, but through his work, scattered throughout the gallery, he strives to take some control over the narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10954380\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10954380 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos.jpg\" alt=\"Zoraida Díaz, 'Los Muchachos,' 1988. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\" width=\"640\" height=\"410\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Diaz_los_muchachos-400x256.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Zoraida Díaz, ‘Los Muchachos,’ 1988. (Photo: SF Camerawork)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Orjuela reanimates large archival photographs of traffickers and victims of government violence by illuminating them with pigments, resulting in Technicolor-like reimaginings of Colombian history. This process makes it difficult to passively consume the images, resulting in reflection rather than unquestioning acceptance of media imagery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All four artists emphasize the Colombian people, mostly setting aside specific \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">casus belli\u003c/a> or historical events. By doing so, they avoid sensationalizing the decades of conflict, often creating accounts of war that are more personal than encyclopedic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times, Ávila’s work feels out of place, but depictions of life outside of conflict are ultimately necessary if a less spectacular representation of Colombia is desired. Daily life does not cease during such long conflicts, and for Colombians like Ávila, who is the youngest in the exhibition, the on-going but ebbing conflict may be of dwindling preeminence to their national identity.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Primus Puts 'Willy Wonka' To Bed Before Another Hiatus [Photos]",
"headTitle": "Primus Puts ‘Willy Wonka’ To Bed Before Another Hiatus [Photos] | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>“This is the Palace of Fine Arts. Do you know what that means?” Primus bassist/singer Les Claypool asked during their first set Friday night. “We, Primus, are now considered fine art. I’ve gone from being the guy that wrote the song about a beaver, to fine art.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Now let’s play that song about the beaver!” Claypool yelped, before the band kicked into one of their biggest hits, “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To a cheering crowd, the song would be followed up with other alternative-era classics like “My Name Is Mud” and “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver.” The three-piece also revived a handful of tracks from their debut studio album \u003ci>Frizzle Fry\u003c/i>, which the band — Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb the Ginseng Drummer” Alexander — recorded in San Francisco 25 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967133\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"The Martins, L to R: Sophia, Ella and Tawnya, who dressed up for the Primus & the Chocolate Factory show\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967133\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Martins, L to R: Sophia, Ella and Tawnya, who dressed up for the Primus & the Chocolate Factory show \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The concert at the Palace of Fine Arts served as the last in San Francisco before the band takes another hiatus. The break comes after the band’s strange recycling of their first two drummers: when Primus decided to reform back in 2010, Alexander wasn’t interested, and so Claypool recruited the group’s real first drummer, funkmaster and living pot chimney Jay “Jayski” Lane (whose return led to the groove-heavy 2011 LP \u003ci>Green Naugahyde\u003c/i>). After touring and playing for about three years, Lane returned to playing with Bob Weir in Further, but by then, Alexander was ready to get back behind the kit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before re-joining the band that he recorded so many landmark albums with — \u003ci>Pork Soda\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Sailing the Seas of Cheese\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Tales From the Punchbowl\u003c/i> — Alexander spent time working in the percussion-heavy performance troupe \u003ca href=\"http://www.blueman.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Blue Man Group\u003c/a>. The experience sparked a new interest for Alexander in unconventional percussion, which he wanted to incorporate with Primus. Claypool had the perfect idea for it: a reworking of the music to \u003ci>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had been talking about doing a project, some sort of sacred cow, and I had always wanted to do the Wonka thing,” Claypool said in an interview before the show. “It was basically ‘Herb’s back, let’s keep going,’ and they were up for this project.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Friday night’s show was the second-to-last performance of \u003ci>Primus and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i>, as their license to play the songs and use footage from the original movie in their stage show is running out. This is a shame, for the hallucinatory experience that is \u003ci>Primus and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i> should be had by so many more people than what the Palace of Fine Arts can seat. I was glad to see some parents bringing their kids, because the show has the same goals that the movie did: provide a new view on something familiar, be it life in poverty or a classic film. Hopefully some of them had their minds blown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But mind expansion was definitely not in short supply during that show — I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palace repaints its walls to cover the up fresh layer of pot resin that’s surely coating the theater’s interior. But those weed-toking fans were out in force — moreso, it seemed, for the \u003cem>Chocolate Factory\u003c/em> portion of the night. And I could understand why: though I was looking forward to hearing songs I’ve always enjoyed, it was the Wonka portion that hasn’t left my thoughts since I left the venue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In our interview, Claypool told me that since his days in \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oysterhead\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oysterhead\u003c/a>, he’s toned down his stage energy in order to concentrate more on his playing. So even though you’ll hear the hits, don’t go see Primus expecting the bass player from the festivals of yore (the ’90s) to be hopping all over the stage while kicking out his left foot (which some fans describe as the “Les Claypool”). But it appears the physical slowing that comes with old age has opened up a new instrument for Claypool: the stage set. The total experience that was the Wonka set — the lights, the warped movie footage, the men in giant Oompa Loopmpa heads — is a sign that, like the bass, Claypool has mastered it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are a few photos for proof:\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967117\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Primus starts the show\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967117\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Primus starts the show \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-1-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Band 1\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967116\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967132\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-800x450.jpg\" alt='When I arrived at the venue, I was asked \"You here to speak to the Colonel?\" It appears Claypool takes that title seriously' width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967132\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When I arrived at the venue, I was asked “You here to speak to the Colonel?” It appears Claypool takes that title seriously \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967135\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Alexander was given time for his own solo...\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967135\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alexander was given time for his own solo…\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967128\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"...Which was then interrupted by Claypool in a monkey mask playing a 'Whamola'\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967128\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">…Which was then interrupted by Claypool in a monkey mask playing a ‘Whamola’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967136\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"After an intermission, it was time for 'Primus and the Chocolate Factory'\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967136\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After an intermission, it was time for ‘Primus and the Chocolate Factory’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Primus Feature\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967131\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Cello & LEs\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967119\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Les-solo-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Les solo\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967127\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Ler Cello LEs\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967124\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"dark primus feature2\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967121\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Good LEr playin\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967122\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"LEs big nose\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967126\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967118\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Cellist Solo\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967118\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cellist Solo\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"LEr Singing\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Just wow\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967123\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "After five years since their last hiatus, it's time for Primus to take another break — but they're ending this round with the last performances of their psychedelic tribute to 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.'",
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"description": "After five years since their last hiatus, it's time for Primus to take another break — but they're ending this round with the last performances of their psychedelic tribute to 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.'",
"title": "Primus Puts 'Willy Wonka' To Bed Before Another Hiatus [Photos] | KQED",
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"headline": "Primus Puts 'Willy Wonka' To Bed Before Another Hiatus [Photos]",
"datePublished": "2015-09-19T10:32:49-07:00",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“This is the Palace of Fine Arts. Do you know what that means?” Primus bassist/singer Les Claypool asked during their first set Friday night. “We, Primus, are now considered fine art. I’ve gone from being the guy that wrote the song about a beaver, to fine art.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Now let’s play that song about the beaver!” Claypool yelped, before the band kicked into one of their biggest hits, “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To a cheering crowd, the song would be followed up with other alternative-era classics like “My Name Is Mud” and “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver.” The three-piece also revived a handful of tracks from their debut studio album \u003ci>Frizzle Fry\u003c/i>, which the band — Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb the Ginseng Drummer” Alexander — recorded in San Francisco 25 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967133\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"The Martins, L to R: Sophia, Ella and Tawnya, who dressed up for the Primus & the Chocolate Factory show\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967133\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-MArtins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Martins, L to R: Sophia, Ella and Tawnya, who dressed up for the Primus & the Chocolate Factory show \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The concert at the Palace of Fine Arts served as the last in San Francisco before the band takes another hiatus. The break comes after the band’s strange recycling of their first two drummers: when Primus decided to reform back in 2010, Alexander wasn’t interested, and so Claypool recruited the group’s real first drummer, funkmaster and living pot chimney Jay “Jayski” Lane (whose return led to the groove-heavy 2011 LP \u003ci>Green Naugahyde\u003c/i>). After touring and playing for about three years, Lane returned to playing with Bob Weir in Further, but by then, Alexander was ready to get back behind the kit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before re-joining the band that he recorded so many landmark albums with — \u003ci>Pork Soda\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Sailing the Seas of Cheese\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Tales From the Punchbowl\u003c/i> — Alexander spent time working in the percussion-heavy performance troupe \u003ca href=\"http://www.blueman.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Blue Man Group\u003c/a>. The experience sparked a new interest for Alexander in unconventional percussion, which he wanted to incorporate with Primus. Claypool had the perfect idea for it: a reworking of the music to \u003ci>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had been talking about doing a project, some sort of sacred cow, and I had always wanted to do the Wonka thing,” Claypool said in an interview before the show. “It was basically ‘Herb’s back, let’s keep going,’ and they were up for this project.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Friday night’s show was the second-to-last performance of \u003ci>Primus and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i>, as their license to play the songs and use footage from the original movie in their stage show is running out. This is a shame, for the hallucinatory experience that is \u003ci>Primus and the Chocolate Factory\u003c/i> should be had by so many more people than what the Palace of Fine Arts can seat. I was glad to see some parents bringing their kids, because the show has the same goals that the movie did: provide a new view on something familiar, be it life in poverty or a classic film. Hopefully some of them had their minds blown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But mind expansion was definitely not in short supply during that show — I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palace repaints its walls to cover the up fresh layer of pot resin that’s surely coating the theater’s interior. But those weed-toking fans were out in force — moreso, it seemed, for the \u003cem>Chocolate Factory\u003c/em> portion of the night. And I could understand why: though I was looking forward to hearing songs I’ve always enjoyed, it was the Wonka portion that hasn’t left my thoughts since I left the venue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In our interview, Claypool told me that since his days in \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oysterhead\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oysterhead\u003c/a>, he’s toned down his stage energy in order to concentrate more on his playing. So even though you’ll hear the hits, don’t go see Primus expecting the bass player from the festivals of yore (the ’90s) to be hopping all over the stage while kicking out his left foot (which some fans describe as the “Les Claypool”). But it appears the physical slowing that comes with old age has opened up a new instrument for Claypool: the stage set. The total experience that was the Wonka set — the lights, the warped movie footage, the men in giant Oompa Loopmpa heads — is a sign that, like the bass, Claypool has mastered it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are a few photos for proof:\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967117\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Primus starts the show\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967117\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-Begins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Primus starts the show \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Band-1-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Band 1\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967116\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967132\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-800x450.jpg\" alt='When I arrived at the venue, I was asked \"You here to speak to the Colonel?\" It appears Claypool takes that title seriously' width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967132\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/The-Colonel-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When I arrived at the venue, I was asked “You here to speak to the Colonel?” It appears Claypool takes that title seriously \u003ccite>(Photo: Kevin L. Jones/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967135\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Alexander was given time for his own solo...\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967135\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Tim-Solo-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alexander was given time for his own solo…\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967128\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"...Which was then interrupted by Claypool in a monkey mask playing a 'Whamola'\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967128\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Monkey-Whamola-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">…Which was then interrupted by Claypool in a monkey mask playing a ‘Whamola’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967136\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"After an intermission, it was time for 'Primus and the Chocolate Factory'\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967136\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Willy-Begins-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After an intermission, it was time for ‘Primus and the Chocolate Factory’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Primus Feature\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967131\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Primus-Feature-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Cello & LEs\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967119\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cello-LEs-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Les-solo-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Les solo\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967127\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Ler Cello LEs\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967124\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Ler-Cello-LEs-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"dark primus feature2\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967121\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/dark-primus-feature2-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Good LEr playin\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967122\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Good-LEr-playin-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"LEs big nose\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967126\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEs-big-nose-960x540.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10967118\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Cellist Solo\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10967118\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Cellist-Solo-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cellist Solo\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"LEr Singing\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/LEr-Singing-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"Just wow\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10967123\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-400x267.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Just-wow-960x640.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "theater-junkie-amelie-at-berkeley-rep-act-takes-on-guirgis-auroras-mud-blue-sky",
"title": "Theater Junkie: 'Amelie' at Berkeley Rep, ACT takes on Guirgis, Aurora's 'Mud Blue Sky'",
"publishDate": 1442602856,
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"headTitle": "Theater Junkie: ‘Amelie’ at Berkeley Rep, ACT takes on Guirgis, Aurora’s ‘Mud Blue Sky’ | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>The first day of school is tricky business and what you choose to wear is even trickier. You want your clothes to say something, anything: who you were, who you are, who you’d like to become. It’s a balancing act between the weight of history and dreamy aspirations, and it all must rest easily in the present, as if none of this were planned, as if it were all just happening by chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For theater companies, the opening production of any season is that first outfit. You can feel the desire to hit big, to come out of the gate running at full speed and fully formed. Yet that outfit is always provisional. It contains a myriad of other messages, contrary and perplexing — future promises that may or may not get realized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the last two weeks, American Conservatory Theater (ACT), Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the Aurora Theatre Company have all opened their seasons. Their current work provides an intriguing glance into the present and potential future of these well-established institutions. Of course, this is just one passing moment, but like all first days it can be a telling one.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem> Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em>: Closer to a pilot for premium cable than necessary theater\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Maria Wegrzyn’s \u003cem>Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em> is a quintessential Aurora play: aesthetically conservative, humane, and served with a slight glaze of social consciousness. Most of these plays seem designed to disappear. And especially \u003cem>Mud Blue\u003c/em> \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em>, which feels closer to a pilot for premium cable than necessary theatre. The writing is professional rather than passionate. So you watch the plot unfold in dutiful fashion without ever having to think, or feel, or engage in any meaningful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/mud-blue-sky/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Mud Blue Sky’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Marisa Wegrzyn’s drama opens the new season at Aurora.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 3\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Aurora Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/mud-blue-sky/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Written in the soft comic tones that have become the \u003cem>lingua franca\u003c/em> of mainstream American theater, the play details a difficult night in the slow, downward spiral of Beth, an aging flight attendant. With her prospects dimming both financially and emotionally, she is the symbol of the extraneous American—still vibrant enough to be of use and dream of a better future, but barely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wegrzyn should have believed in the force of that story. Instead, she drowns it in a wave of soft drama and clichéd characters. Beth’s fellow stewardess and frenemy, Sam, is, of course, sassy. Her high school weed dealer, Jonathan, might be exacting, but he is also sensitive and confused. And her old friend and colleague, Angie, fired for being too fat, is, well, more than she seems. Wegrzyn makes a few attempts at farce, but her concerns are not with the dizzying possibilities of misunderstanding and escalating action central to that form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Wegrzyn wants is emotional reconciliation and so Beth must eventually stand in for Jonathan’s dead mother. She must believe in him as something more than a convenient source of weed and lead him to his better self. Yes, he is a closet artist! Together they will start a “microbrewery” and Jonathan will design the labels. In \u003cem>America\u003c/em> and in \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em>, happiness is the slightest glimpse of entrepreneurial success.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10960918\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 680px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10960918 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg\" alt=\"Mud3\" width=\"680\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg 680w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3-400x265.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sam (Rebecca Dines) tries to cajole Beth (Jamies Jones, left) into joining her for a little fun in the city. (Photo: David Allen)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If you care about sense, then \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em> is the type of realist drama that makes the absurd seem reasonable. Still, and rather absurdly, I have been unable to shake one image from Aurora’s production and that is Jamie Jones’ face. Her performance as Beth, against all the odds of the script, is searing. Jones is expert at listening, and when freed from Wegrzyn’s writing, her face registers a history, situations, and feelings of wrenching complexity. It is a face that could stand in for a new economic type: the almost done, a frieze of numbing disbelief. And so one wonders what might happen to a performance like that in a real play? It’s something to imagine. Somewhere deep in Aurora’s mission the dance of disbelief, hope, and fear that races across Jones’ face is screaming to get out.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem>Between Riverside and Crazy\u003c/em>: about as good as it gets these days\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The physical fact of ACT’s Geary theater—it’s size, it’s stunning beauty, so much red and gold—is a problem considering the prevailing trends in American theater and playwriting. The Geary should burst with hundreds of characters and thousands of extras. It should speak to us in the biggest way about America and the world we live in. It’s that type of space. But the theater world around it has become pinched, crabbed, and small.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/between-riverside-and-crazy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Between Riverside and Crazy’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">A new play by Stephen Adly Guirgus at ACT.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 27\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Geary Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/between-riverside-and-crazy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>So, I imagine play selection — especially \u003cem>new\u003c/em> play selection — must be quite difficult for ACT, and that when they came across it, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ \u003cem>Between Riverside and Crazy\u003c/em> must have seemed a beautiful gift from another era. Guirgis is a rare beast in the American theater. He has a gift for complex character, raucous comedy, and political debate. He’s neither avant-garde nor mainstream. He’s his own thing, and because of that Guirgis feels closer to our experience of people, the world, and our country than we normally get in the theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10960920\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 399px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10960920\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-399x600.jpg\" alt=\"The Church Lady (Catherine Castellanos) prays for Walter “Pops” Washington (Carl Lumbly, left) in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dark comedy, Between Riverside and Crazy. Photo by Kevin Berne\" width=\"399\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-399x600.jpg 399w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-400x602.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1.jpg 532w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 399px) 100vw, 399px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u003cem>The Church Lady (Catherine Castellanos) prays for Walter “Pops” Washington (Carl Lumbly) in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dark comedy, ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’. (Photo: Kevin Berne)\u003c/em>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> is a broad, loose-leafed fable set in New York City about Walter “Pops” Washington, an African-American ex-cop living in a rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment with his son, his son’s pregnant girlfriend, and his son’s pal from prison. Over the next couple of days, a lot of Washington’s past is going to come to a head: eviction notices, his lawsuit against the city for suffering a brutal assault at the hands of a fellow police officer, a visit from his old partner accompanied by her wonderfully slick and mournful fiancée (also a cop), and a church lady looking to save his soul and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like George Bernard Shaw, another complex polemicist, Guirgis’ plays are about arguments. Not to the audience, there’s no preaching going on here, but from character to character. He knows that people are both advocates for the truth and nimble liars—that we are expert at shading facts to our advantage, even when or especially when we see lying as serving a greater cause. In a play like \u003cem>Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em>, argument is merely a means of keeping people on stage, advancing the action, whereas in \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> arguments meander. They float back and forth between important social and political truths, silly anecdotes, self-serving justifications, and the fun of being around those you love and hate and sometimes at the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are witty rejoinders, but they don’t feel false and are not for our benefit. Instead, they are for the benefit of those who wield them. Go to this play and you’ll see moments when the audience and the characters laugh at the same time. It’s a common occurrence in \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em>, and an odd and jolting one. Audiences often laugh at meticulously constructed jokes, but they don’t often get a chance to laugh with the characters when the jokes aren’t that good and the joker cracks up out of sheer delight. Guirgis allows us to join his crowd in all their pettiness and we can’t help being amused when they hit the mark, or, even better, miss it badly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT’s production is more than fine. It will get better as the run progresses and the actors fall into Guirgis’ rhythms. Carl Lumbly is super as Washington, as are Stacy Ross and Gabriel Marin as soon-to-be-married cops a little too interested in “Pops” well being. \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> is not a perfect play, I’d like to cut the first two scenes, but it’s alive to the world and people. That’s about as good as it gets these days.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem>Amélie, a new Musical\u003c/em>: the stage equivalent of Bobby McFerrin’s bullying 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>I don’t think an artist would come up with the title “Amélie, a new musical.” It screams of corporate contracts and you wonder if the overlords of this project will rebrand it in five years when time turns the “new” into a lie. But the title clues you in to the real issues here. This is not art, but product, and an especially brutal one at that. The Berkeley Rep can point to the mass of talent behind this production and take pride in the slickness of its presentation. But professionalism and talent are no guarantee that what you end up with is anything close to art.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/amelie-a-new-musical/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Amelie’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">A new musical version of the hit French movie opens Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2015-16 season.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 18\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Berkeley Repertory Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/amelie-a-new-musical/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Adapted from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 hit film, this musical version of \u003cem>Amélie \u003c/em>is about a young woman determined to help friends, family, and strangers fulfill their dreams. Through her unseen ministrations, she shows all the lost souls of the world, or at least those in her Montmartre café, that if they only stop denying who they are and what they need, they can get everything they want. No wonder the film did so well in America; Andrew Carnegie would approve. Yet our heroine, so keen to the unfulfilled desires of others, is even more emotionally stunted than the people she’s helping. She, too, will have to overcome herself and learn to accept the love and happiness that are her due. Despite its self-help veneer, there’s nothing wrong with the story, and it makes for a decent enough movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10958429\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 560px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10958429 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg\" alt=\"AM2_lr\" width=\"560\" height=\"373\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg 560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr-400x266.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amelie (Samantha Banks) celebrates with a few friends in Amelie, a new musical. (Photo: Kevin Berne.)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The problem is that everyone involved in this enterprise—composer Daniel Messé of the pop group Hem, librettist Craig Lucas (a playwright of note and talent), the much lauded director Pam MacKinnon, designers of the first rate, producers, everyone—have reduced Jeunet’s thin fable to one lesson: open yourself to the chance of love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this lesson is delivered to maximum effect over and over again. There is no development, nothing to free you from the grip of this single emotion love machine. In the movie, the supporting characters mattered, but here they are just fairy dust to the grinding march of joy. It’s the stage equivalent of Bobby McFerrin’s bullying 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” You want to ask if there’s another path, another way this could go, but this musical\u003cem> \u003c/em>is a labyrinth of love that you cannot escape. It will not allow for complex emotions and it will not tolerate any opposition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every once and a while art tries to sneak its way past the guardians of the message, most prominently when Bretodeaux, the painter who lives across the street from Amélie, begins to sing about his painting. Finally, we are off course — something that \u003cem>From Riverside to Crazy\u003c/em> does naturally. But within seconds, the song is high jacked and we are back to the one and only purpose of this show: you must open yourself to love and you must love this show for telling you that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many musicals by pop artists, Massé’s score sounds more like an album than a piece of theater. After about 12 minutes and 37 seconds, the music feels undifferentiated and flat; every song hits the same notes. It goes without saying that the jokes here are both insistent and juvenile. There are goofy talking goldfish, plumbing/sex jokes, and worst of all: a pointless sendup of Elton John’s tribute to the late Princess Diana. It’s an easy shot, like game show parodies. But a video montage of Diana’s life and the memory of John’s “Candle in the Wind” reminds you of what art is capable of and what this musical wholly rejects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I was leaving the theater with the buoyant opening night crowd, the man in front of me threw his program violently into the air and strode down the street in obvious disgust, his wife meekly following behind. The usher at the door and I made knowing eye contact: he’s crazy; that’s no way to act. But as I ambled my way to BART, I thought, shouldn’t that be the appropriate response to \u003cem>Amélie, a new\u003c/em> \u003cem>musical\u003c/em>? The Berkeley Rep, capable of amassing and deploying ridiculous levels of talent and resources, opens its season with a production that celebrates the worst type of corporate propaganda. And we clap, and then cradle our programs as we leave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last season, the Rep produced a brilliant and terrifying version of Molière’s \u003cem>Tartuffe\u003c/em>. Dominique Serrand’s production made clear that no one is really fooled by the fascistic clown at the center of Molière’s poison pill of a farce. But by simply doing what they always do, they allow Tartuffe and the terror he unleashes to flourish. For one moment, I almost went back to the theater to throw my program violently in the air.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Theater Junkie: 'Amelie' at Berkeley Rep, ACT takes on Guirgis, Aurora's 'Mud Blue Sky' | KQED",
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"headline": "Theater Junkie: 'Amelie' at Berkeley Rep, ACT takes on Guirgis, Aurora's 'Mud Blue Sky'",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The first day of school is tricky business and what you choose to wear is even trickier. You want your clothes to say something, anything: who you were, who you are, who you’d like to become. It’s a balancing act between the weight of history and dreamy aspirations, and it all must rest easily in the present, as if none of this were planned, as if it were all just happening by chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For theater companies, the opening production of any season is that first outfit. You can feel the desire to hit big, to come out of the gate running at full speed and fully formed. Yet that outfit is always provisional. It contains a myriad of other messages, contrary and perplexing — future promises that may or may not get realized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the last two weeks, American Conservatory Theater (ACT), Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the Aurora Theatre Company have all opened their seasons. Their current work provides an intriguing glance into the present and potential future of these well-established institutions. Of course, this is just one passing moment, but like all first days it can be a telling one.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem> Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em>: Closer to a pilot for premium cable than necessary theater\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Maria Wegrzyn’s \u003cem>Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em> is a quintessential Aurora play: aesthetically conservative, humane, and served with a slight glaze of social consciousness. Most of these plays seem designed to disappear. And especially \u003cem>Mud Blue\u003c/em> \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em>, which feels closer to a pilot for premium cable than necessary theatre. The writing is professional rather than passionate. So you watch the plot unfold in dutiful fashion without ever having to think, or feel, or engage in any meaningful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/mud-blue-sky/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Mud Blue Sky’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Marisa Wegrzyn’s drama opens the new season at Aurora.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 3\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Aurora Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/mud-blue-sky/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Written in the soft comic tones that have become the \u003cem>lingua franca\u003c/em> of mainstream American theater, the play details a difficult night in the slow, downward spiral of Beth, an aging flight attendant. With her prospects dimming both financially and emotionally, she is the symbol of the extraneous American—still vibrant enough to be of use and dream of a better future, but barely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wegrzyn should have believed in the force of that story. Instead, she drowns it in a wave of soft drama and clichéd characters. Beth’s fellow stewardess and frenemy, Sam, is, of course, sassy. Her high school weed dealer, Jonathan, might be exacting, but he is also sensitive and confused. And her old friend and colleague, Angie, fired for being too fat, is, well, more than she seems. Wegrzyn makes a few attempts at farce, but her concerns are not with the dizzying possibilities of misunderstanding and escalating action central to that form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Wegrzyn wants is emotional reconciliation and so Beth must eventually stand in for Jonathan’s dead mother. She must believe in him as something more than a convenient source of weed and lead him to his better self. Yes, he is a closet artist! Together they will start a “microbrewery” and Jonathan will design the labels. In \u003cem>America\u003c/em> and in \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em>, happiness is the slightest glimpse of entrepreneurial success.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10960918\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 680px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10960918 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg\" alt=\"Mud3\" width=\"680\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3.jpg 680w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Mud3-400x265.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sam (Rebecca Dines) tries to cajole Beth (Jamies Jones, left) into joining her for a little fun in the city. (Photo: David Allen)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If you care about sense, then \u003cem>Sky\u003c/em> is the type of realist drama that makes the absurd seem reasonable. Still, and rather absurdly, I have been unable to shake one image from Aurora’s production and that is Jamie Jones’ face. Her performance as Beth, against all the odds of the script, is searing. Jones is expert at listening, and when freed from Wegrzyn’s writing, her face registers a history, situations, and feelings of wrenching complexity. It is a face that could stand in for a new economic type: the almost done, a frieze of numbing disbelief. And so one wonders what might happen to a performance like that in a real play? It’s something to imagine. Somewhere deep in Aurora’s mission the dance of disbelief, hope, and fear that races across Jones’ face is screaming to get out.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem>Between Riverside and Crazy\u003c/em>: about as good as it gets these days\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The physical fact of ACT’s Geary theater—it’s size, it’s stunning beauty, so much red and gold—is a problem considering the prevailing trends in American theater and playwriting. The Geary should burst with hundreds of characters and thousands of extras. It should speak to us in the biggest way about America and the world we live in. It’s that type of space. But the theater world around it has become pinched, crabbed, and small.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/between-riverside-and-crazy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Between Riverside and Crazy’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">A new play by Stephen Adly Guirgus at ACT.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 27\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Geary Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/between-riverside-and-crazy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>So, I imagine play selection — especially \u003cem>new\u003c/em> play selection — must be quite difficult for ACT, and that when they came across it, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ \u003cem>Between Riverside and Crazy\u003c/em> must have seemed a beautiful gift from another era. Guirgis is a rare beast in the American theater. He has a gift for complex character, raucous comedy, and political debate. He’s neither avant-garde nor mainstream. He’s his own thing, and because of that Guirgis feels closer to our experience of people, the world, and our country than we normally get in the theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10960920\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 399px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10960920\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-399x600.jpg\" alt=\"The Church Lady (Catherine Castellanos) prays for Walter “Pops” Washington (Carl Lumbly, left) in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dark comedy, Between Riverside and Crazy. Photo by Kevin Berne\" width=\"399\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-399x600.jpg 399w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1-400x602.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Riverside_11_Web-1.jpg 532w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 399px) 100vw, 399px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u003cem>The Church Lady (Catherine Castellanos) prays for Walter “Pops” Washington (Carl Lumbly) in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dark comedy, ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’. (Photo: Kevin Berne)\u003c/em>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> is a broad, loose-leafed fable set in New York City about Walter “Pops” Washington, an African-American ex-cop living in a rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment with his son, his son’s pregnant girlfriend, and his son’s pal from prison. Over the next couple of days, a lot of Washington’s past is going to come to a head: eviction notices, his lawsuit against the city for suffering a brutal assault at the hands of a fellow police officer, a visit from his old partner accompanied by her wonderfully slick and mournful fiancée (also a cop), and a church lady looking to save his soul and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like George Bernard Shaw, another complex polemicist, Guirgis’ plays are about arguments. Not to the audience, there’s no preaching going on here, but from character to character. He knows that people are both advocates for the truth and nimble liars—that we are expert at shading facts to our advantage, even when or especially when we see lying as serving a greater cause. In a play like \u003cem>Mud Blue Sky\u003c/em>, argument is merely a means of keeping people on stage, advancing the action, whereas in \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> arguments meander. They float back and forth between important social and political truths, silly anecdotes, self-serving justifications, and the fun of being around those you love and hate and sometimes at the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are witty rejoinders, but they don’t feel false and are not for our benefit. Instead, they are for the benefit of those who wield them. Go to this play and you’ll see moments when the audience and the characters laugh at the same time. It’s a common occurrence in \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em>, and an odd and jolting one. Audiences often laugh at meticulously constructed jokes, but they don’t often get a chance to laugh with the characters when the jokes aren’t that good and the joker cracks up out of sheer delight. Guirgis allows us to join his crowd in all their pettiness and we can’t help being amused when they hit the mark, or, even better, miss it badly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT’s production is more than fine. It will get better as the run progresses and the actors fall into Guirgis’ rhythms. Carl Lumbly is super as Washington, as are Stacy Ross and Gabriel Marin as soon-to-be-married cops a little too interested in “Pops” well being. \u003cem>Crazy\u003c/em> is not a perfect play, I’d like to cut the first two scenes, but it’s alive to the world and people. That’s about as good as it gets these days.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cem>Amélie, a new Musical\u003c/em>: the stage equivalent of Bobby McFerrin’s bullying 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>I don’t think an artist would come up with the title “Amélie, a new musical.” It screams of corporate contracts and you wonder if the overlords of this project will rebrand it in five years when time turns the “new” into a lie. But the title clues you in to the real issues here. This is not art, but product, and an especially brutal one at that. The Berkeley Rep can point to the mass of talent behind this production and take pride in the slickness of its presentation. But professionalism and talent are no guarantee that what you end up with is anything close to art.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/amelie-a-new-musical/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Amelie’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">A new musical version of the hit French movie opens Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2015-16 season.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 18\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Berkeley Repertory Theatre\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/amelie-a-new-musical/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Adapted from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 hit film, this musical version of \u003cem>Amélie \u003c/em>is about a young woman determined to help friends, family, and strangers fulfill their dreams. Through her unseen ministrations, she shows all the lost souls of the world, or at least those in her Montmartre café, that if they only stop denying who they are and what they need, they can get everything they want. No wonder the film did so well in America; Andrew Carnegie would approve. Yet our heroine, so keen to the unfulfilled desires of others, is even more emotionally stunted than the people she’s helping. She, too, will have to overcome herself and learn to accept the love and happiness that are her due. Despite its self-help veneer, there’s nothing wrong with the story, and it makes for a decent enough movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10958429\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 560px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10958429 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg\" alt=\"AM2_lr\" width=\"560\" height=\"373\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr.jpg 560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/AM2_lr-400x266.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amelie (Samantha Banks) celebrates with a few friends in Amelie, a new musical. (Photo: Kevin Berne.)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The problem is that everyone involved in this enterprise—composer Daniel Messé of the pop group Hem, librettist Craig Lucas (a playwright of note and talent), the much lauded director Pam MacKinnon, designers of the first rate, producers, everyone—have reduced Jeunet’s thin fable to one lesson: open yourself to the chance of love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this lesson is delivered to maximum effect over and over again. There is no development, nothing to free you from the grip of this single emotion love machine. In the movie, the supporting characters mattered, but here they are just fairy dust to the grinding march of joy. It’s the stage equivalent of Bobby McFerrin’s bullying 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” You want to ask if there’s another path, another way this could go, but this musical\u003cem> \u003c/em>is a labyrinth of love that you cannot escape. It will not allow for complex emotions and it will not tolerate any opposition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every once and a while art tries to sneak its way past the guardians of the message, most prominently when Bretodeaux, the painter who lives across the street from Amélie, begins to sing about his painting. Finally, we are off course — something that \u003cem>From Riverside to Crazy\u003c/em> does naturally. But within seconds, the song is high jacked and we are back to the one and only purpose of this show: you must open yourself to love and you must love this show for telling you that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many musicals by pop artists, Massé’s score sounds more like an album than a piece of theater. After about 12 minutes and 37 seconds, the music feels undifferentiated and flat; every song hits the same notes. It goes without saying that the jokes here are both insistent and juvenile. There are goofy talking goldfish, plumbing/sex jokes, and worst of all: a pointless sendup of Elton John’s tribute to the late Princess Diana. It’s an easy shot, like game show parodies. But a video montage of Diana’s life and the memory of John’s “Candle in the Wind” reminds you of what art is capable of and what this musical wholly rejects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I was leaving the theater with the buoyant opening night crowd, the man in front of me threw his program violently into the air and strode down the street in obvious disgust, his wife meekly following behind. The usher at the door and I made knowing eye contact: he’s crazy; that’s no way to act. But as I ambled my way to BART, I thought, shouldn’t that be the appropriate response to \u003cem>Amélie, a new\u003c/em> \u003cem>musical\u003c/em>? The Berkeley Rep, capable of amassing and deploying ridiculous levels of talent and resources, opens its season with a production that celebrates the worst type of corporate propaganda. And we clap, and then cradle our programs as we leave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last season, the Rep produced a brilliant and terrifying version of Molière’s \u003cem>Tartuffe\u003c/em>. Dominique Serrand’s production made clear that no one is really fooled by the fascistic clown at the center of Molière’s poison pill of a farce. But by simply doing what they always do, they allow Tartuffe and the terror he unleashes to flourish. For one moment, I almost went back to the theater to throw my program violently in the air.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>China’s Cultural Revolution was a period of political turmoil, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, a dark decade that many in Chinese society would prefer to forget. So it says something that Zhang Yimou’s new drama \u003cem>Coming Home\u003c/em>, which is set during those years, has been a big success in China.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film opens with a cold-war propaganda vignette — a military ballet, young Chinese girls dressed as soldiers pirouetting with prop guns. One of the dancers is the ambitious daughter of Lu Yanshi, a disgraced professor who, she will soon learn, has escaped from a “re-education” camp. Hoping to advance her ballet prospects, she informs on her parents — tells the police that her mother Feng Wanyu plans a secret rendezvous with Yanshi at the train station.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is, however, a very crowded train station, where the only way a hidden Yanshi can find his wife is to come out into the open. Though certain he’ll be caught, he steps from the shadows, waves his arms and shouts his wife’s name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wanyu, standing high on a platform, sees him, and at that same moment, sees soldiers coming for him. So she screams at him to run — to run away. Instead, he runs toward his wife. And seeing that he’ll be caught, she runs toward him as soldiers close in on them both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoea7Cz3Hj0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many films this scene would be the climactic finale. Here, it just sets up the real story — the “coming home” of the title, years later after the Cultural Revolution’s excesses have brought about its end. Yanshi, now declared rehabilitated, returns to his family, which should be a happy moment, but is instead a puzzlement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That day at the train station, his wife suffered a head injury and has been left with an intense desire to see her husband again — and an utter inability to recognize him when she does. What she sees when Yanshi shows up is a man trying to take her beloved husband’s place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nobody wants to see you,” she tells him. “Please leave.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Staggered at being in the presence of the love of his life, but seemingly unseen by her, he can only mumble, “What’s happening?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now there are two ways to understand the rest of \u003cem>Coming Home\u003c/em>, a standoff in which he struggles to reawaken his wife’s memory, as she struggles to remain faithful to the husband she thinks she remembers. One is as a six-hankie weepie of the sort that, say, Nicholas Sparks churns out regularly. The other is as a broader social commentary about a time that required resilience and internal strength in China.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Zhang Yimou, who has said in interviews that the suffering and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was a formative period for him, appears happy to have it both ways. He’s cast as the wife the actress who has been his muse in eight films: Gong Li. And as her eyes glisten with both pain and hope in a gray world of muted emotions, her amnesia comes to seem a sort of collective denial in \u003cem>Coming Home\u003c/em>: a survival strategy for those who can only soldier on after losses too painful to recall.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many films this scene would be the climactic finale. Here, it just sets up the real story — the “coming home” of the title, years later after the Cultural Revolution’s excesses have brought about its end. Yanshi, now declared rehabilitated, returns to his family, which should be a happy moment, but is instead a puzzlement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That day at the train station, his wife suffered a head injury and has been left with an intense desire to see her husband again — and an utter inability to recognize him when she does. What she sees when Yanshi shows up is a man trying to take her beloved husband’s place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nobody wants to see you,” she tells him. “Please leave.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Staggered at being in the presence of the love of his life, but seemingly unseen by her, he can only mumble, “What’s happening?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now there are two ways to understand the rest of \u003cem>Coming Home\u003c/em>, a standoff in which he struggles to reawaken his wife’s memory, as she struggles to remain faithful to the husband she thinks she remembers. One is as a six-hankie weepie of the sort that, say, Nicholas Sparks churns out regularly. The other is as a broader social commentary about a time that required resilience and internal strength in China.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Zhang Yimou, who has said in interviews that the suffering and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was a formative period for him, appears happy to have it both ways. He’s cast as the wife the actress who has been his muse in eight films: Gong Li. And as her eyes glisten with both pain and hope in a gray world of muted emotions, her amnesia comes to seem a sort of collective denial in \u003cem>Coming Home\u003c/em>: a survival strategy for those who can only soldier on after losses too painful to recall.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Editor’s Note: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/series/the-spine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Spine\u003c/a>\u003cem> is a new book column covering the literary scene of the Bay Area in reviews, interviews, guides, event previews and more. Guiding us is award-winning writer \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/author/lclark/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Leilani Clark\u003c/a>, who’s contributed to Mother Jones, Civil Eats, Time Magazine, the Rumpus and the North Bay Bohemian, in addition to KQED. Running biweekly, \u003c/em>The Spine\u003cem> is your smart check-in on what’s happening in the region’s book world.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10905230\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Review: ‘Better Than War’ by Siamak Vossoughi\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>In the title story from Siamak Vossoughi’s debut story collection, the narrator intones to an Iranian-American teenager who’s come to him for dating advice: “You’re going to have to be better than war.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Love, psychic and geographical distance, spirituality, and the different ways of navigating the experience of immigrating from Iran to America are the varied forcefields that surround the characters in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em>. It’s a promising debut from San Francisco-based Vossoughi, filled with quiet and deep undercurrents about the basic goodness of people, the immutability of love, and the power of learning to create your own narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em> — published this month by University of Georgia Press as winner of the\u003ca href=\"http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/series/FOC\"> Flannery O’ Connor Award for Short Fiction\u003c/a> — are told by a series of erudite, heady narrators, the type that would likely trip on a crack in the sidewalk from staring at clouds, or at the very interesting man sitting at the bus stop across the street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vossoughi was born in Tehran, and many of the stories are embroidered with threads of the Iranian-American experience. In “Take Our Daughter to Work Day,” the narrator, a former teacher in Iran, doesn’t want to bring her daughter to the hair salon in the U.S. where she now works. She wants her daughter to see the mother who lived and worked in Iran, where she believes she left her true self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>And she thought of how her daughter would never see her where she had been most herself, where she could move with so much certainty, where she knew the ins and outs of everything — the city itself and the school and relationships and family life. She would never see her walk with the city as her background as though it was hers alone, having earned it, having earned it from another day of aiming to be exactly who she wanted to be.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Yet despite its glum theme, this story, like many of the stories in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em>, ends on a note of optimism. While the mother cries at the thought of her daughter watching her sweep up other people’s hair in a salon, and goes mute at the dinner table for about a week, she ultimately entertains her family once again — like the passionate storyteller that she is, like the former teacher self she holds in such high esteem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Vossoughi’s writing veers towards the philosophical, with narrative structures influenced by the best of Russian literature, there are no murders of old women here, or suicides by train. On a whole, a sense of common humanity ties the book together, a sense that everyone is part of something one and the same. Strangers meet strangers and instead of feeling animosity, they embrace each other, include each other in their performances. At a bar, a man offers to fly another man to New York to see his faraway love, but only if the Giants win a particularly hopeless game. The Giants lose, and the man doesn’t end up going to New York, but everyone, at least, goes home with a sense of having connected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a sentiment best encapsulated by a moment from “The World is My Home,” where a young German woman takes in two young Iranian men traveling through Dresden, treating them like her own family for the entirety of their stay. After the girl confesses her dreams of a life spent gardening, reading and visiting her grandmother, the narrator muses:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Sometimes the world felt too big to be his home. If there were girls wondering and dreaming like that in Germany, then they were doing so everywhere. He couldn’t sit and listen to all of them. Even when he sat and listened to one of them, the world was just barely his home. It was the infinite depth of one person, more than miles they had traveled or distances between cultures — that was the greatest obstacle to the world being his home. Yet somehow it was the greatest opportunity too.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-10905230\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Q&A with Vanessa Hua \u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Vanessa-Hua-e1441996241905.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-10951532 alignright\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Vanessa-Hua-e1441996241905.jpg\" alt=\"Vanessa Hua\" width=\"277\" height=\"231\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Vanessa Hua, an Orinda-based freelance journalist and novelist, was announced this month as winner of a prestigious 2015 \u003ca href=\"http://ronajaffefoundation.org/\">Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award\u003c/a>. Her work has appeared in the \u003c/em>New York Times\u003cem>, \u003c/em>The Atlantic\u003cem>, Guernica, and elsewhere. Previously, she was a staff writer at the \u003c/em>San Francisco Chronicle\u003cem>, the \u003c/em>Los Angeles Times\u003cem>, and the \u003c/em>Hartford Courant\u003cem>. She was a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing and a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award for Fiction. She reads from her latest work on Sept. 20 at the California Institute of Integral Studies as part of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/hazelreadingseries\">Hazel Reading Series\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Can you talk a bit about your writing background, specifically as it connects to the Bay Area?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I grew up in the suburbs east of San Francisco, and have been writing stories since I was a child. The Bay Area — gateway to the Pacific Rim and perched on the edge of America — continues to offer much inspiration and exploration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did you transition from journalism into fiction writing? Or have you always done both concurrently?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Stanford, I majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing, joined the school newspaper, and interned at newspapers and magazines. After graduating, I focused on journalism for a few years, and was a staff writer at the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> when I began taking evening fiction workshops. I wrote fiction before work, on weekends, and at lunch. Eventually, I left daily news to earn my MFA at UC Riverside. These days, my focus is fiction, but I regularly freelance essays and features. I’ll spend months working on a short story, years on a novel, and I deeply enjoy the quicker turnaround of journalism. I cherish the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity, interview fascinating sources, and to shine a light on untold stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What role does Asia and the diaspora play in your writing?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I have long been fascinated by the complicated relationship people hold with their ancestral and adopted homelands. My fiction builds upon my years of reporting about Asia and the diaspora. I have rolled dice with factory girls in China, dined with a teenage prostitute in Burma, and flown kites with Chinese diplomats in Panama. I tailed guerilla reporters in South Korea, chatted with rebellious kitchen ladies at a dim sum palace in San Francisco, and investigated a Chinese-American fundraiser for campaign finance violations, which led to the resignation of the California Secretary of State. Motherhood has also opened my heart and my writing in ways I didn’t foresee before having my twins. More vividly than ever, I can imagine the generational and cultural conflicts of my characters, the clash between self and society, tradition and change. In my novel-in-progress, a Chinese factory clerk travels to America to deliver her baby, giving the child U.S. citizenship. After her married lover betrays her, she flees, setting off a hunt for her and the baby. The novel chronicles the lives of Chinese immigrants and the American-born who straddle the Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What will the Rona Jaffe Foundation award enable you to do?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This generous grant will allow me to pay for more childcare and scale back my freelance work while I complete my novel. Half of this year’s six winners cited childcare as an expense that the grant will cover. I’ve had many conversations with writers who are mothers of small children, about our ongoing struggle to carve out time and space. I’m extremely grateful to the Rona Jaffe Foundation and am humbled and honored to be counted among past winners who include luminaries such as ZZ Packer, Eula Bliss, Rachel Aviv, and Lan Samantha Chang.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What do you love best about being a writer in the Bay Area?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love the Bay Area’s amazing community of writers, who are supportive and whose compelling work inspires me every day. I am fortunate to have trusted friends with whom I trade manuscripts, tips, and advice. We commiserate and celebrate successes. I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in reading series such as \u003ca href=\"http://writerswithdrinks.com/\">Writers With Drinks\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.babylonsalon.com/#!\">Babylon Salon\u003c/a>, and events such as LitQuake and the Oakland Book Festival. The seed of my novel was published in \u003ca href=\"http://www.zyzzyva.org/\">ZYZZYVA\u003c/a>, a Bay Area literary institution, and I’ve attended local creative writing conferences at Squaw Valley, Napa Valley, and Voices of our Nation (before its move to Miami.) The support of the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and the Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State has been vital to this project. I also work and teach at the\u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgrotto.org/\"> San Francisco Writers’ Grotto,\u003c/a> a wonderful group of writers, journalists, and poets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What books, articles, or other publications have inspired you lately?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laila Lalami’s \u003cem>The Moor’s Account\u003c/em>, which artfully fills in the gaps in history, bringing to life the first Arab explorer in America. Julia Scheeres’ chilling \u003ca href=\"http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/children-of-the-tribes\">exposé\u003c/a> about a religious cult in \u003cem>Pacific Standard\u003c/em> magazine. Jennine Capó Crucet’s \u003cem>Make Your Home Among Strangers\u003c/em>, a poignant and funny debut novel about a first-generation Cuban American college student. Roxane Gay’s \u003cem>Bad Feminist\u003c/em>, an entertaining and thought-provoking collection of essays. Mia Alvar’s \u003cem>In The Country\u003c/em>, haunting short stories about the Filipino diaspora. For research related to magazine assignments, I’ve been reading oral histories collected by UC Berkeley and Voices of the Manhattan Project that provide an illuminating look at America during World War II.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-10905230\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Not-to-Miss Author Events: Sept. 16 – 30\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10951548 alignright\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png\" alt=\"Alcott-headshot-round\" width=\"195\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png 300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-32x32.png 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-64x64.png 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-96x96.png 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-128x128.png 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-75x75.png 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Petaluma-raised Brooklynite \u003cstrong>Kathleen Alcott\u003c/strong> is the special guest at the\u003ca href=\"http://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/oakland-celebration-fall-issue-zyzzyva\"> release party\u003c/a> for ZYZZYVA’s fall issue at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland. Other readers include Mauro Javier Cardenas, Molly Spencer and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Caille Millner… \u003cstrong>Elizabeth Egan\u003c/strong>‘s debut novel \u003cem>A Window Opens\u003c/em> is a compulsively readable glimpse into the life of a middle-class mom who leaves her part-time book editor position at a women’s magazine to work at a creepily sadistic and monolithic online company that bears a striking resemblance to Amazon. Egan \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookpassage.com/event/elisabeth-egan-window-opens\">appears \u003c/a>at Book Passage on Sept. 22… If you haven’t read \u003cstrong>Ann Beattie\u003c/strong> yet, get thee to a bookstore! And why not make it Kepler’s, which \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2082373\">celebrates\u003c/a> its 60th (!) anniversary this month, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1818023\">hosts\u003c/a> the prize-winning short story writer in conversation with Nick Taylor on Sept. 23… On Sept. 24, Aunte Lute Books \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/events/1019792008051619/\">presents\u003c/a> ‘Our Indigenous Flesh,’ a reading with \u003cstrong>LeAnne Howe\u003c/strong> and \u003cstrong>Ire’ne Lara Silva\u003c/strong>. The two writers will read from their newest books, followed by a discussion of indigenous literature, indigenous queerness, and the ‘mystique of women of color writers’… \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10951546\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg\" alt=\"GROFFBK\" width=\"273\" height=\"204\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg 504w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK-400x298.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 273px) 100vw, 273px\">\u003c/a>That same night, legendary short story writer Joy Williams\u003ca href=\"http://www.greenapplebooks.com/event/9th-ave-joy-williams\"> appears\u003c/a> at Green Apple Books’ Ninth Avenue store to celebrate the release of \u003cem>The Visiting Privilege\u003c/em>, a story collection spanning her entire career… And finally, \u003cstrong>Lauren Groff\u003c/strong>‘s latest ambitious novel \u003cem>Fates and Furies\u003c/em> has received accolades \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/lauren-groffs-fates-and-furies.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_bk_20150911&nl=books&nlid=61911809&_r=0\">left\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lauren-groff/fates-and-furies/\">right\u003c/a>. The \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> recently called her — rightfully so — “a writer of rare gifts.” Groff \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/event/lauren-groff-fates-and-furies\">reads \u003c/a>at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Sept. 27.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Editor’s Note: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/series/the-spine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Spine\u003c/a>\u003cem> is a new book column covering the literary scene of the Bay Area in reviews, interviews, guides, event previews and more. Guiding us is award-winning writer \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/author/lclark/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Leilani Clark\u003c/a>, who’s contributed to Mother Jones, Civil Eats, Time Magazine, the Rumpus and the North Bay Bohemian, in addition to KQED. Running biweekly, \u003c/em>The Spine\u003cem> is your smart check-in on what’s happening in the region’s book world.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10905230\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Review: ‘Better Than War’ by Siamak Vossoughi\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>In the title story from Siamak Vossoughi’s debut story collection, the narrator intones to an Iranian-American teenager who’s come to him for dating advice: “You’re going to have to be better than war.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Love, psychic and geographical distance, spirituality, and the different ways of navigating the experience of immigrating from Iran to America are the varied forcefields that surround the characters in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em>. It’s a promising debut from San Francisco-based Vossoughi, filled with quiet and deep undercurrents about the basic goodness of people, the immutability of love, and the power of learning to create your own narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em> — published this month by University of Georgia Press as winner of the\u003ca href=\"http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/series/FOC\"> Flannery O’ Connor Award for Short Fiction\u003c/a> — are told by a series of erudite, heady narrators, the type that would likely trip on a crack in the sidewalk from staring at clouds, or at the very interesting man sitting at the bus stop across the street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vossoughi was born in Tehran, and many of the stories are embroidered with threads of the Iranian-American experience. In “Take Our Daughter to Work Day,” the narrator, a former teacher in Iran, doesn’t want to bring her daughter to the hair salon in the U.S. where she now works. She wants her daughter to see the mother who lived and worked in Iran, where she believes she left her true self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>And she thought of how her daughter would never see her where she had been most herself, where she could move with so much certainty, where she knew the ins and outs of everything — the city itself and the school and relationships and family life. She would never see her walk with the city as her background as though it was hers alone, having earned it, having earned it from another day of aiming to be exactly who she wanted to be.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Yet despite its glum theme, this story, like many of the stories in \u003cem>Better Than War\u003c/em>, ends on a note of optimism. While the mother cries at the thought of her daughter watching her sweep up other people’s hair in a salon, and goes mute at the dinner table for about a week, she ultimately entertains her family once again — like the passionate storyteller that she is, like the former teacher self she holds in such high esteem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Vossoughi’s writing veers towards the philosophical, with narrative structures influenced by the best of Russian literature, there are no murders of old women here, or suicides by train. On a whole, a sense of common humanity ties the book together, a sense that everyone is part of something one and the same. Strangers meet strangers and instead of feeling animosity, they embrace each other, include each other in their performances. At a bar, a man offers to fly another man to New York to see his faraway love, but only if the Giants win a particularly hopeless game. The Giants lose, and the man doesn’t end up going to New York, but everyone, at least, goes home with a sense of having connected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a sentiment best encapsulated by a moment from “The World is My Home,” where a young German woman takes in two young Iranian men traveling through Dresden, treating them like her own family for the entirety of their stay. After the girl confesses her dreams of a life spent gardening, reading and visiting her grandmother, the narrator muses:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Sometimes the world felt too big to be his home. If there were girls wondering and dreaming like that in Germany, then they were doing so everywhere. He couldn’t sit and listen to all of them. Even when he sat and listened to one of them, the world was just barely his home. It was the infinite depth of one person, more than miles they had traveled or distances between cultures — that was the greatest obstacle to the world being his home. Yet somehow it was the greatest opportunity too.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-10905230\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Q&A with Vanessa Hua \u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Vanessa-Hua-e1441996241905.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-10951532 alignright\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Vanessa-Hua-e1441996241905.jpg\" alt=\"Vanessa Hua\" width=\"277\" height=\"231\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Vanessa Hua, an Orinda-based freelance journalist and novelist, was announced this month as winner of a prestigious 2015 \u003ca href=\"http://ronajaffefoundation.org/\">Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award\u003c/a>. Her work has appeared in the \u003c/em>New York Times\u003cem>, \u003c/em>The Atlantic\u003cem>, Guernica, and elsewhere. Previously, she was a staff writer at the \u003c/em>San Francisco Chronicle\u003cem>, the \u003c/em>Los Angeles Times\u003cem>, and the \u003c/em>Hartford Courant\u003cem>. She was a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing and a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award for Fiction. She reads from her latest work on Sept. 20 at the California Institute of Integral Studies as part of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/hazelreadingseries\">Hazel Reading Series\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Can you talk a bit about your writing background, specifically as it connects to the Bay Area?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I grew up in the suburbs east of San Francisco, and have been writing stories since I was a child. The Bay Area — gateway to the Pacific Rim and perched on the edge of America — continues to offer much inspiration and exploration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did you transition from journalism into fiction writing? Or have you always done both concurrently?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Stanford, I majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing, joined the school newspaper, and interned at newspapers and magazines. After graduating, I focused on journalism for a few years, and was a staff writer at the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> when I began taking evening fiction workshops. I wrote fiction before work, on weekends, and at lunch. Eventually, I left daily news to earn my MFA at UC Riverside. These days, my focus is fiction, but I regularly freelance essays and features. I’ll spend months working on a short story, years on a novel, and I deeply enjoy the quicker turnaround of journalism. I cherish the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity, interview fascinating sources, and to shine a light on untold stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What role does Asia and the diaspora play in your writing?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I have long been fascinated by the complicated relationship people hold with their ancestral and adopted homelands. My fiction builds upon my years of reporting about Asia and the diaspora. I have rolled dice with factory girls in China, dined with a teenage prostitute in Burma, and flown kites with Chinese diplomats in Panama. I tailed guerilla reporters in South Korea, chatted with rebellious kitchen ladies at a dim sum palace in San Francisco, and investigated a Chinese-American fundraiser for campaign finance violations, which led to the resignation of the California Secretary of State. Motherhood has also opened my heart and my writing in ways I didn’t foresee before having my twins. More vividly than ever, I can imagine the generational and cultural conflicts of my characters, the clash between self and society, tradition and change. In my novel-in-progress, a Chinese factory clerk travels to America to deliver her baby, giving the child U.S. citizenship. After her married lover betrays her, she flees, setting off a hunt for her and the baby. The novel chronicles the lives of Chinese immigrants and the American-born who straddle the Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What will the Rona Jaffe Foundation award enable you to do?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This generous grant will allow me to pay for more childcare and scale back my freelance work while I complete my novel. Half of this year’s six winners cited childcare as an expense that the grant will cover. I’ve had many conversations with writers who are mothers of small children, about our ongoing struggle to carve out time and space. I’m extremely grateful to the Rona Jaffe Foundation and am humbled and honored to be counted among past winners who include luminaries such as ZZ Packer, Eula Bliss, Rachel Aviv, and Lan Samantha Chang.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What do you love best about being a writer in the Bay Area?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love the Bay Area’s amazing community of writers, who are supportive and whose compelling work inspires me every day. I am fortunate to have trusted friends with whom I trade manuscripts, tips, and advice. We commiserate and celebrate successes. I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in reading series such as \u003ca href=\"http://writerswithdrinks.com/\">Writers With Drinks\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.babylonsalon.com/#!\">Babylon Salon\u003c/a>, and events such as LitQuake and the Oakland Book Festival. The seed of my novel was published in \u003ca href=\"http://www.zyzzyva.org/\">ZYZZYVA\u003c/a>, a Bay Area literary institution, and I’ve attended local creative writing conferences at Squaw Valley, Napa Valley, and Voices of our Nation (before its move to Miami.) The support of the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and the Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State has been vital to this project. I also work and teach at the\u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgrotto.org/\"> San Francisco Writers’ Grotto,\u003c/a> a wonderful group of writers, journalists, and poets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What books, articles, or other publications have inspired you lately?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laila Lalami’s \u003cem>The Moor’s Account\u003c/em>, which artfully fills in the gaps in history, bringing to life the first Arab explorer in America. Julia Scheeres’ chilling \u003ca href=\"http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/children-of-the-tribes\">exposé\u003c/a> about a religious cult in \u003cem>Pacific Standard\u003c/em> magazine. Jennine Capó Crucet’s \u003cem>Make Your Home Among Strangers\u003c/em>, a poignant and funny debut novel about a first-generation Cuban American college student. Roxane Gay’s \u003cem>Bad Feminist\u003c/em>, an entertaining and thought-provoking collection of essays. Mia Alvar’s \u003cem>In The Country\u003c/em>, haunting short stories about the Filipino diaspora. For research related to magazine assignments, I’ve been reading oral histories collected by UC Berkeley and Voices of the Manhattan Project that provide an illuminating look at America during World War II.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-10905230\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Not-to-Miss Author Events: Sept. 16 – 30\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10951548 alignright\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png\" alt=\"Alcott-headshot-round\" width=\"195\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round.png 300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-32x32.png 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-64x64.png 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-96x96.png 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-128x128.png 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Alcott-headshot-round-75x75.png 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Petaluma-raised Brooklynite \u003cstrong>Kathleen Alcott\u003c/strong> is the special guest at the\u003ca href=\"http://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/oakland-celebration-fall-issue-zyzzyva\"> release party\u003c/a> for ZYZZYVA’s fall issue at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland. Other readers include Mauro Javier Cardenas, Molly Spencer and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Caille Millner… \u003cstrong>Elizabeth Egan\u003c/strong>‘s debut novel \u003cem>A Window Opens\u003c/em> is a compulsively readable glimpse into the life of a middle-class mom who leaves her part-time book editor position at a women’s magazine to work at a creepily sadistic and monolithic online company that bears a striking resemblance to Amazon. Egan \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookpassage.com/event/elisabeth-egan-window-opens\">appears \u003c/a>at Book Passage on Sept. 22… If you haven’t read \u003cstrong>Ann Beattie\u003c/strong> yet, get thee to a bookstore! And why not make it Kepler’s, which \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2082373\">celebrates\u003c/a> its 60th (!) anniversary this month, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1818023\">hosts\u003c/a> the prize-winning short story writer in conversation with Nick Taylor on Sept. 23… On Sept. 24, Aunte Lute Books \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/events/1019792008051619/\">presents\u003c/a> ‘Our Indigenous Flesh,’ a reading with \u003cstrong>LeAnne Howe\u003c/strong> and \u003cstrong>Ire’ne Lara Silva\u003c/strong>. The two writers will read from their newest books, followed by a discussion of indigenous literature, indigenous queerness, and the ‘mystique of women of color writers’… \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10951546\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg\" alt=\"GROFFBK\" width=\"273\" height=\"204\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK.jpg 504w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/GROFFBK-400x298.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 273px) 100vw, 273px\">\u003c/a>That same night, legendary short story writer Joy Williams\u003ca href=\"http://www.greenapplebooks.com/event/9th-ave-joy-williams\"> appears\u003c/a> at Green Apple Books’ Ninth Avenue store to celebrate the release of \u003cem>The Visiting Privilege\u003c/em>, a story collection spanning her entire career… And finally, \u003cstrong>Lauren Groff\u003c/strong>‘s latest ambitious novel \u003cem>Fates and Furies\u003c/em> has received accolades \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/lauren-groffs-fates-and-furies.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_bk_20150911&nl=books&nlid=61911809&_r=0\">left\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lauren-groff/fates-and-furies/\">right\u003c/a>. The \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> recently called her — rightfully so — “a writer of rare gifts.” Groff \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/event/lauren-groff-fates-and-furies\">reads \u003c/a>at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Sept. 27.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "SF Opera's Darkly Witty 'Sweeney Todd' Chafes at Amplification",
"headTitle": "SF Opera’s Darkly Witty ‘Sweeney Todd’ Chafes at Amplification | KQED",
"content": "\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/sweeney-todd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Sweeney Todd’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">San Francisco Opera’s take on the Stephen Sondheim favorite about a murderous barber.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 29\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">War Memorial Opera House\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/sweeney-todd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>On the surface, Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> has a lot in common with your garden variety opera: a convoluted plot, tons of singing, madness, a singular obsession with revenge, class warfare, love triangles — all capped off with a very high body count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco Opera opened a production of this funhouse thriller about the murderous spree of a barber in Victorian London (popularized a few years ago in a Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp) on the War Memorial Stage last weekend. It’s yet another example of musical theater infiltrating the opera house worldwide. \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is the third Broadway-oriented production that San Francisco Opera has staged in recent years, following \u003cem>Porgy and Bess\u003c/em> in 2009, and \u003cem>Show Boat\u003c/em> last year. While this latest musical is both compelling and spectacular, one wonders what the presentation of musical theater pieces like this on the opera stage means for the future of the operatic art form as a whole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Agonize all you want about whether or not \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is an opera or a musical, but the piece already has a venerable history in the opera house starting with a 1984 production at Houston Grand Opera under none other than San Francisco’s outgoing general director David Gockley, who was at the helm in Houston at that time. The work has been performed at major houses like London’s Royal Opera House and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. San Francisco Opera’s co-production, first seen at the Paris Theatre du Chatelet in 2011 and subsequently at Houston Grand Opera in April, is directed again here by Lee Blakeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s no surprise to see Sondheim co-opted by opera companies. Sondheim has a huge following, and for good reason, as his work is sophisticated and wry. \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> clearly brings in a remarkably attentive audience to San Francisco Opera; there was complete silence for most of the performance last Saturday, which is not the case normally at the War Memorial Opera House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings me to my main concern about \u003cem>Sweeney Todd: \u003c/em>Musical theater usually amplifies the voices of the actors to enable the words to carry over instruments like drums and electric guitar, and because the performers often work eight shows a week without a night off. Conversely, opera singers’ voices are rarely amplified. They’re trained to project their voices to the back of a 3,000-seat hall. But for this production, the performers are all miked. This is no surprise as \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is musical rather than operatic fare. Also, the words in Sondheim are paramount, and San Francisco Opera wants to make sure that everyone can hear them properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though uncommon, microphones have shown up at the San Francisco Opera on occasion. Children and those playing ghosts are routinely miked. There are also composers, like John Adams, who appreciate the sound of the amplification. His \u003cem>Nixon in China\u003c/em> at the War Memorial in 2012 used microphones to good effect. The flattening of the voices was part of the aesthetic and didn’t sound like a mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, in the case of \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em>, the amplification does not serve the music well at all. The balances on the night I saw the show were off and very distracting. It isn’t the sort of sound I go to the opera house to hear, and I doubt I’m alone in that. There’s something very special about the human voice and the body microphones used are unwelcome mediation to be sure, especially for the world-class opera singers of the cast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the amplification issues, the performers acquitted themselves well. Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is charming as the lovesick but evilly practical Mrs. Lovett. Every gesture, movement, facial expression — a cocked head, a shoulder shrug, a half-smile — communicates her character’s thoughts\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Blythe is a consummate actress and then there’s the earth shattering voice that conveys emotions with such immediacy. Meanwhile, baritone Brian Mulligan explores the full emotional despair and madness of the title role dramatically. Mulligan seems at times possessed; his fiery glare is palpable. His voice has a wonderful richness that inspires sympathy but can also crackle with anger and craziness. These singers do not need mics to be heard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This show is likely to be the hot ticket this September for San Francisco Opera, especially given the tepid season opener \u003cem>Luisa Miller\u003c/em> (a Verdi rarity and apparently for good reason). It looks like musicals are here to stay in the Bay Area’s main opera house, edging out more obscure, experimental pieces. But to bring off these operas with true flair, San Francisco Opera must grapple with the technical problems of amplification, preferably before the next opening night.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/sweeney-todd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Sweeney Todd’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">San Francisco Opera’s take on the Stephen Sondheim favorite about a murderous barber.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 29\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">War Memorial Opera House\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/sweeney-todd/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>On the surface, Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> has a lot in common with your garden variety opera: a convoluted plot, tons of singing, madness, a singular obsession with revenge, class warfare, love triangles — all capped off with a very high body count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco Opera opened a production of this funhouse thriller about the murderous spree of a barber in Victorian London (popularized a few years ago in a Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp) on the War Memorial Stage last weekend. It’s yet another example of musical theater infiltrating the opera house worldwide. \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is the third Broadway-oriented production that San Francisco Opera has staged in recent years, following \u003cem>Porgy and Bess\u003c/em> in 2009, and \u003cem>Show Boat\u003c/em> last year. While this latest musical is both compelling and spectacular, one wonders what the presentation of musical theater pieces like this on the opera stage means for the future of the operatic art form as a whole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Agonize all you want about whether or not \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is an opera or a musical, but the piece already has a venerable history in the opera house starting with a 1984 production at Houston Grand Opera under none other than San Francisco’s outgoing general director David Gockley, who was at the helm in Houston at that time. The work has been performed at major houses like London’s Royal Opera House and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. San Francisco Opera’s co-production, first seen at the Paris Theatre du Chatelet in 2011 and subsequently at Houston Grand Opera in April, is directed again here by Lee Blakeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s no surprise to see Sondheim co-opted by opera companies. Sondheim has a huge following, and for good reason, as his work is sophisticated and wry. \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> clearly brings in a remarkably attentive audience to San Francisco Opera; there was complete silence for most of the performance last Saturday, which is not the case normally at the War Memorial Opera House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings me to my main concern about \u003cem>Sweeney Todd: \u003c/em>Musical theater usually amplifies the voices of the actors to enable the words to carry over instruments like drums and electric guitar, and because the performers often work eight shows a week without a night off. Conversely, opera singers’ voices are rarely amplified. They’re trained to project their voices to the back of a 3,000-seat hall. But for this production, the performers are all miked. This is no surprise as \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em> is musical rather than operatic fare. Also, the words in Sondheim are paramount, and San Francisco Opera wants to make sure that everyone can hear them properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though uncommon, microphones have shown up at the San Francisco Opera on occasion. Children and those playing ghosts are routinely miked. There are also composers, like John Adams, who appreciate the sound of the amplification. His \u003cem>Nixon in China\u003c/em> at the War Memorial in 2012 used microphones to good effect. The flattening of the voices was part of the aesthetic and didn’t sound like a mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, in the case of \u003cem>Sweeney Todd\u003c/em>, the amplification does not serve the music well at all. The balances on the night I saw the show were off and very distracting. It isn’t the sort of sound I go to the opera house to hear, and I doubt I’m alone in that. There’s something very special about the human voice and the body microphones used are unwelcome mediation to be sure, especially for the world-class opera singers of the cast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the amplification issues, the performers acquitted themselves well. Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is charming as the lovesick but evilly practical Mrs. Lovett. Every gesture, movement, facial expression — a cocked head, a shoulder shrug, a half-smile — communicates her character’s thoughts\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Blythe is a consummate actress and then there’s the earth shattering voice that conveys emotions with such immediacy. Meanwhile, baritone Brian Mulligan explores the full emotional despair and madness of the title role dramatically. Mulligan seems at times possessed; his fiery glare is palpable. His voice has a wonderful richness that inspires sympathy but can also crackle with anger and craziness. These singers do not need mics to be heard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This show is likely to be the hot ticket this September for San Francisco Opera, especially given the tepid season opener \u003cem>Luisa Miller\u003c/em> (a Verdi rarity and apparently for good reason). It looks like musicals are here to stay in the Bay Area’s main opera house, edging out more obscure, experimental pieces. But to bring off these operas with true flair, San Francisco Opera must grapple with the technical problems of amplification, preferably before the next opening night.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "New Film Asks: Were Steve Jobs' Flaws Uploaded To His Machines?",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine\u003c/em> hit theaters last week. Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney’s documentary joins a growing list of biopics and biographies that have come out since \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/123826622/apple-visionary-steve-jobs-dies-at-56\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jobs’ death in 2011\u003c/a>. But, it adds a new perspective on the increasingly well-known facts of his life. Gibney’s thesis seems to be that Jobs’ flawed character was infused into the machines he made, leaving us perhaps a little more flawed if we use them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2013 biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, the authorized \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141653658/steve-jobs-a-computer-icon-on-life-death-and-apple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Walter Isaacson biography\u003c/a> and the more recent \u003cem>Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader\u003c/em> all touch on how the Apple co-founder was often cruel in the pursuit of his vision to spark a personal computer revolution. But, they don’t question the good of what Jobs invented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzyq1t-SjcM\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibney, fresh off his last documentary, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/03/26/395579453/church-of-scientology-calls-new-hbo-documentary-bigoted\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Going Clear\u003c/a> — a take-down of Scientology — now turns that critical lens on Steve Jobs and his products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.magpictures.com/stevejobsthemaninthemachine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The new documentary\u003c/a> opens on the day Jobs’ death is announced. We see mournful people all over the world placing flowers in front of Apple stores. There are clips from online video tributes. In one, a young man is weeping and he admits “it seems really ridiculous because I’ve never met the man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enter Gibney’s voice as narrator: “Why did so many strangers weep for Steve Jobs?” It’s a question Gibney sets out to answer in his more than two-hour film that mixes archive footage, interviews with old colleagues, and even a never-before-seen video deposition of Jobs from March 2008, when he was being investigated for backdating stock options.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the people interviewed for this documentary knew Jobs from his earliest days and had rightful gripes against him. Among them, Daniel Kottke, a college friend who traveled with Jobs to India and then went on to be part of the original founding Apple team. Even though Kottke worked intimately with Jobs to get Apple off the ground, Jobs notoriously refused to give him stock options when the company went public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibney also interviewed Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ former girlfriend who gave birth to his daughter Lisa out of wedlock. Jobs denied paternity for years. Gibney shares legal transcriptions in which, among other falsehoods, Jobs claimed he was sterile and couldn’t have a child. Only a court-ordered paternity test forced him to acknowledge his daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, Jobs once told his teacher, the Soto Zen priest Kobun Otogawa, that he was enlightened. Kobun says as proof a young Jobs brought him an early Apple computer board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Be Here Now\u003c/em>, a book that Brennan and Jobs loved, author Ram Dass talks about the problem of becoming enlightened while still being attached to ego. He calls it “the golden chain,” says Brennan. And Brennan believes this is what happened to Jobs. “He blew it,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Steve Jobs blew it?” Gibney wonders how anyone could say that. The documentary acknowledges Jobs’ extraordinary successes. He was pushed out of Apple but went on to found Pixar. He returned to Apple and brought it back from the brink of bankruptcy and with one great success after another — the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad — he turned it into the most valuable company in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Gibney’s film ponders the cost of those products — not only on the people directly surrounding Jobs but on the world writ large. There’s news footage about the suicides at the Foxconn factories in China which helped build Apple products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an interview, Jobs is seen acknowledging the suicides are unacceptable and yet he’s also strangely dismissive. Jobs has to point out that the percentage of the U.S. population that commits suicide is higher than the percentage of Foxconn employees that do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apple factories also leave behind dangerous pollutants, and while Jobs was running the company he refused to meet with Chinese environmental activists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jon Rubinstein, an engineer who helped design the iPod and the Mac, tells Gibney that Jobs really did believe he was doing good for the world. But, Gibney brings in well-known skeptics to question just how much good Jobs has done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Techno-utopian critic and MIT professor Sherry Turkle believes iPhones are isolating us from one another — “more of what I call the alone together phenomenon,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This film lacks interviews with the people who have been closest to Jobs in recent years and might have had a more positive perspective on him. We don’t hear from his wife Laurene or Tim Cook, the current CEO, and Jony Ive, the brilliant industrial designer whom Jobs called his “best friend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apple Vice President Eddy Cue sent out a tweet calling the documentary “inaccurate” and “mean spirited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many of the same people have also critiqued Walter Isaacson’s biography, which was authorized by Jobs himself. And Gibney makes a well-documented case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine\u003c/em> has a personal and poetic quality. Visually and structurally it sometimes feels more like an essay. Gibney ends it with questions that sound a little like a Zen koan. “Perhaps I should spend a moment… asking myself what in buying and using this product am I doing? What is the full nature of my transaction with the maker of this magical and intimate machine?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I doubt Gibney was thinking we should all throw our iPhones into the sea. But, his engaging documentary raises some questions we should all be asking ourselves as we move on to the next phase of the computer revolution. Among them: Do these objects shape our character in ways that are a little too much like the person who made them?\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine\u003c/em> hit theaters last week. Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney’s documentary joins a growing list of biopics and biographies that have come out since \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/123826622/apple-visionary-steve-jobs-dies-at-56\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jobs’ death in 2011\u003c/a>. But, it adds a new perspective on the increasingly well-known facts of his life. Gibney’s thesis seems to be that Jobs’ flawed character was infused into the machines he made, leaving us perhaps a little more flawed if we use them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2013 biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, the authorized \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141653658/steve-jobs-a-computer-icon-on-life-death-and-apple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Walter Isaacson biography\u003c/a> and the more recent \u003cem>Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader\u003c/em> all touch on how the Apple co-founder was often cruel in the pursuit of his vision to spark a personal computer revolution. But, they don’t question the good of what Jobs invented.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/lzyq1t-SjcM'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/lzyq1t-SjcM'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Gibney, fresh off his last documentary, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/03/26/395579453/church-of-scientology-calls-new-hbo-documentary-bigoted\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Going Clear\u003c/a> — a take-down of Scientology — now turns that critical lens on Steve Jobs and his products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.magpictures.com/stevejobsthemaninthemachine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The new documentary\u003c/a> opens on the day Jobs’ death is announced. We see mournful people all over the world placing flowers in front of Apple stores. There are clips from online video tributes. In one, a young man is weeping and he admits “it seems really ridiculous because I’ve never met the man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enter Gibney’s voice as narrator: “Why did so many strangers weep for Steve Jobs?” It’s a question Gibney sets out to answer in his more than two-hour film that mixes archive footage, interviews with old colleagues, and even a never-before-seen video deposition of Jobs from March 2008, when he was being investigated for backdating stock options.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the people interviewed for this documentary knew Jobs from his earliest days and had rightful gripes against him. Among them, Daniel Kottke, a college friend who traveled with Jobs to India and then went on to be part of the original founding Apple team. Even though Kottke worked intimately with Jobs to get Apple off the ground, Jobs notoriously refused to give him stock options when the company went public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gibney also interviewed Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ former girlfriend who gave birth to his daughter Lisa out of wedlock. Jobs denied paternity for years. Gibney shares legal transcriptions in which, among other falsehoods, Jobs claimed he was sterile and couldn’t have a child. Only a court-ordered paternity test forced him to acknowledge his daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, Jobs once told his teacher, the Soto Zen priest Kobun Otogawa, that he was enlightened. Kobun says as proof a young Jobs brought him an early Apple computer board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Be Here Now\u003c/em>, a book that Brennan and Jobs loved, author Ram Dass talks about the problem of becoming enlightened while still being attached to ego. He calls it “the golden chain,” says Brennan. And Brennan believes this is what happened to Jobs. “He blew it,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Steve Jobs blew it?” Gibney wonders how anyone could say that. The documentary acknowledges Jobs’ extraordinary successes. He was pushed out of Apple but went on to found Pixar. He returned to Apple and brought it back from the brink of bankruptcy and with one great success after another — the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad — he turned it into the most valuable company in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Gibney’s film ponders the cost of those products — not only on the people directly surrounding Jobs but on the world writ large. There’s news footage about the suicides at the Foxconn factories in China which helped build Apple products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an interview, Jobs is seen acknowledging the suicides are unacceptable and yet he’s also strangely dismissive. Jobs has to point out that the percentage of the U.S. population that commits suicide is higher than the percentage of Foxconn employees that do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apple factories also leave behind dangerous pollutants, and while Jobs was running the company he refused to meet with Chinese environmental activists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jon Rubinstein, an engineer who helped design the iPod and the Mac, tells Gibney that Jobs really did believe he was doing good for the world. But, Gibney brings in well-known skeptics to question just how much good Jobs has done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Techno-utopian critic and MIT professor Sherry Turkle believes iPhones are isolating us from one another — “more of what I call the alone together phenomenon,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This film lacks interviews with the people who have been closest to Jobs in recent years and might have had a more positive perspective on him. We don’t hear from his wife Laurene or Tim Cook, the current CEO, and Jony Ive, the brilliant industrial designer whom Jobs called his “best friend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apple Vice President Eddy Cue sent out a tweet calling the documentary “inaccurate” and “mean spirited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many of the same people have also critiqued Walter Isaacson’s biography, which was authorized by Jobs himself. And Gibney makes a well-documented case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine\u003c/em> has a personal and poetic quality. Visually and structurally it sometimes feels more like an essay. Gibney ends it with questions that sound a little like a Zen koan. “Perhaps I should spend a moment… asking myself what in buying and using this product am I doing? What is the full nature of my transaction with the maker of this magical and intimate machine?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I doubt Gibney was thinking we should all throw our iPhones into the sea. But, his engaging documentary raises some questions we should all be asking ourselves as we move on to the next phase of the computer revolution. Among them: Do these objects shape our character in ways that are a little too much like the person who made them?\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you want to measure a society’s political health, two films from Latin America slyly suggest, look at how it treats the help. Sebastian Silva’s gleeful 2009 black comedy, \u003cem>The Maid\u003c/em>, drew on his own experience as the cosseted son of a well-to-do Chilean family propped up by its housekeeper. Brazilian filmmaker Anna Muylaert began writing her new film, \u003cem>The Second Mother\u003c/em>, two decades ago, when she hired a nanny to care for her first child. It’s a quieter, more ruminative comedy, but like Silva, Muylaert is as alive to the comic possibilities of liberal guilt as she is to the plight of the ill-paid maids who quietly run innumerable households all around the Americas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second mother in Muylaert’s film is Val (a very good Regina Casé), a middle-aged housekeeper who keeps everyone on track in the home of an affluent Sao Paulo family. She cooks, cleans and openly dotes on their son, Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), a spoiled wastrel who still runs to Val to get his hair stroked whenever he’s crossed. If Val is the help, her employers are the helpless. Clearing the table is beyond them, and their friends are no better: At a birthday party for her employer, Dona Barbara (Karine Teles), we follow Val as she goes around with a tray of appetizers, receiving not a word of thanks. A willing accomplice to this lopsided arrangement, Val fetches and carries without complaint, pausing only to grab bits of power here and there that serve only to keep her locked in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOrbWcObwR4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smugly playing the enlightened employer, Dona Barbara takes a fleeting interest in Val’s life only when it costs her nothing. She talks a good game, but to fully understand the warped political economy of this household, you have to follow the camera as it trails after Val like a faithful dog, lingering on the kitchen door that both connects and cordons off her domain with the family’s, or on the hallway that leads to the guest room, significantly more lavish than Val’s cramped quarters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There, a Disruptive Force has set up operations that will trigger a rising tide of violations of the unwritten code that has made this well-oiled system of servitude work well past its sell-by date. Val’s estranged daughter, Jessica (Camila Mardila), has blown into town to take her entrance exam at a prestigious local university, where — to the family’s barely suppressed disbelief — she plans to study architecture. A cocksure beauty bearing a massive grudge against her mother, Jessica is also the distillation of a new generation of Brazilians unbound by the archaic hierarchies that hold her mother hostage. Aghast at Val’s collusion with her masters, she sets about breaking every rule in the house, while Val, appalled in her turn, strives unbidden to restore the status quo. In the ensuing chaos, the patriarch (Lourenco Mutarelli), a trust-fund baby with more money than sense, floors Jessica with a bizarre proposition that quickens the pace into farce, plunging the entire house into a crisis that will bring down its \u003cem>ancien regime\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There may or may not be metaphor at work here regarding Brazil’s relationship with its autocratic past. Either way, it’s hard to begrudge this warmhearted movie its crowd-pleasing ending, which bestows on every player the gift of a new beginning. One way or another, everyone gets out of jail, but no liberation is more gratifying than that of hard-working Val, who opens her eyes at last and takes her cue from a daughter pugnacious enough to insist on her own destiny.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you want to measure a society’s political health, two films from Latin America slyly suggest, look at how it treats the help. Sebastian Silva’s gleeful 2009 black comedy, \u003cem>The Maid\u003c/em>, drew on his own experience as the cosseted son of a well-to-do Chilean family propped up by its housekeeper. Brazilian filmmaker Anna Muylaert began writing her new film, \u003cem>The Second Mother\u003c/em>, two decades ago, when she hired a nanny to care for her first child. It’s a quieter, more ruminative comedy, but like Silva, Muylaert is as alive to the comic possibilities of liberal guilt as she is to the plight of the ill-paid maids who quietly run innumerable households all around the Americas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second mother in Muylaert’s film is Val (a very good Regina Casé), a middle-aged housekeeper who keeps everyone on track in the home of an affluent Sao Paulo family. She cooks, cleans and openly dotes on their son, Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), a spoiled wastrel who still runs to Val to get his hair stroked whenever he’s crossed. If Val is the help, her employers are the helpless. Clearing the table is beyond them, and their friends are no better: At a birthday party for her employer, Dona Barbara (Karine Teles), we follow Val as she goes around with a tray of appetizers, receiving not a word of thanks. A willing accomplice to this lopsided arrangement, Val fetches and carries without complaint, pausing only to grab bits of power here and there that serve only to keep her locked in place.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/SOrbWcObwR4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/SOrbWcObwR4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Smugly playing the enlightened employer, Dona Barbara takes a fleeting interest in Val’s life only when it costs her nothing. She talks a good game, but to fully understand the warped political economy of this household, you have to follow the camera as it trails after Val like a faithful dog, lingering on the kitchen door that both connects and cordons off her domain with the family’s, or on the hallway that leads to the guest room, significantly more lavish than Val’s cramped quarters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There, a Disruptive Force has set up operations that will trigger a rising tide of violations of the unwritten code that has made this well-oiled system of servitude work well past its sell-by date. Val’s estranged daughter, Jessica (Camila Mardila), has blown into town to take her entrance exam at a prestigious local university, where — to the family’s barely suppressed disbelief — she plans to study architecture. A cocksure beauty bearing a massive grudge against her mother, Jessica is also the distillation of a new generation of Brazilians unbound by the archaic hierarchies that hold her mother hostage. Aghast at Val’s collusion with her masters, she sets about breaking every rule in the house, while Val, appalled in her turn, strives unbidden to restore the status quo. In the ensuing chaos, the patriarch (Lourenco Mutarelli), a trust-fund baby with more money than sense, floors Jessica with a bizarre proposition that quickens the pace into farce, plunging the entire house into a crisis that will bring down its \u003cem>ancien regime\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There may or may not be metaphor at work here regarding Brazil’s relationship with its autocratic past. Either way, it’s hard to begrudge this warmhearted movie its crowd-pleasing ending, which bestows on every player the gift of a new beginning. One way or another, everyone gets out of jail, but no liberation is more gratifying than that of hard-working Val, who opens her eyes at last and takes her cue from a daughter pugnacious enough to insist on her own destiny.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Shotgun's 'Eurydice' Finds Love in the Land of the Dead",
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"content": "\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/Eurydice/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Eurydice’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Shotgun Players presents a bold, physical production of a play by Sarah Ruhl.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 4\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Ashby Stage\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/Eurydice/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area theater scene is smitten with Sarah Ruhl. The upcoming seasons at Marin Theatre Company, San Francisco Playhouse and the playwright’s usual haunt, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, all boast new works by Ruhl in their local or West Coast premieres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area’s love affair with Ruhl’s work began in 2004 with Berkeley Rep’s luminous production of \u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> directed by her frequent collaborator Les Waters. A half-dozen smaller companies around the Bay have performed the play since then. But that first breathtaking introduction to Ruhl’s fanciful, bittersweet vision, packed with humor, tenderness and magical realism, remains impossible to forget.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A more sinister new production at Shotgun Players proves somehow to be equally indelible. Part of a season entirely made up of works by women, the Shotgun version is directed by Erika Chong Shuch, a choreographer who’s worked a lot with theater companies. Shuch’s staging is bold, aggressively physical and packed with stunning imagery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10928163\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10928163\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg\" alt=\"Megan Trout, James Carpenter, Peter Griggs, Jeannine Anderson and Beth Wilmurt in Shotgun Players' Eurydice. (Photo: Pak Han)\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9-400x267.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Megan Trout, James Carpenter, Peter Griggs, Jeannine Anderson and Beth Wilmurt in Shotgun Players’ \u003ci>Eurydice\u003c/i>. (Photo: Pak Han)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> is a love story, but not the kind you might expect. The titular character is best known from Greek myth as the wife of the great poet-hero Orpheus who becomes the object of his quest when Eurydice dies and he goes down to the Underworld to retrieve her. Orpheus is told to head back home and his spouse will follow right behind him. But if he turns back to look at her, Eurydice will be lost forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The love between Megan Trout’s lively Eurydice and Kenny Toll’s dreamily preoccupied Orpheus is palpable. They talk philosophically of books and music while doing a playful, passionate dance involving wrestling, biting, choking and kissing. But this is not Orpheus’s story, and he fades into the background as soon as Eurydice descends into the Underworld.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This play is also a story about the love between fathers and daughters, and Eurydice’s touching reunion with her long-dead, nameless dad lies at its heart. James Carpenter exudes tenderness and stoic reserve as the father who has somehow managed to retain his memory of life and human language despite the requisite dunking in the river of forgetfulness that all the dead have to undergo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eurydice is not so fortunate. At first when she tries to speak, all that comes out are cacophonous bursts of thundering noise (the work of sound designer Matt Stines.) She doesn’t recognize her father either, or even the concept of a father. But he patiently teaches her. After all, they have all the time in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10928162\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10928162\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg\" alt=\"Megan Trout as Eurydice in Shotgun Players' Eurydice. (Photo: Pak Han)\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8-400x267.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Megan Trout as Eurydice in Shotgun Players’ \u003ci>Eurydice\u003c/i>. (Photo: Pak Han)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The land of the dead is far from a nice place. Sean Riley’s spectacular set is reminiscent of the interior of a very old ship, its rusty walls corroded green. There are metal pails everywhere, in tall stacks and on an elaborate pulley system that the father uses to create an outline of a room for his daughter in a land where rooms (and fathers) are forbidden. We know all the dos and don’ts because of a fretful chorus of stones who are always chiding father and daughter to knock it off and behave properly. There’s nothing particularly stone-like about the trio of grimly comical busybodies embodied by Jeannine Anderson, Peter Griggs and Beth Wilmurt in Christine Crook’s gaudy Burning Man-chic costumes, unless it’s their obstinate insistence on maintaining the status quo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eerily unnerving music pervades composed by Nils Frykdahl of the cult art-rock bands Idiot Flesh, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Faun Fables. Frykdahl also performs a major acting role in the play, perfectly cast as the Nasty Interesting Man, who stalks Eurydice with a predatory leer and insistent questioning about “interesting people.” Equal parts comical and menacing, Frykdahl morphs marvelously into the baby-talking, tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the humor and compassion that permeates the piece, it’s more chilling than heartwarming. Like the will-he-or-won’t-he conclusion of the original Orpheus myth, Ruhl’s version hinges on free will, an especially remarkable thing in the afterlife, where choices are supposed to be a thing of the past. The play also explores the notions of fate and inevitability. After all, you can’t cheat death forever. Even if somehow Orpheus were to succeed in bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living, it would mean tearing her away from the touching, unlikely new home she’s built with her long-lost father in the land of the dead. It’s a heartbreaking piece, and Shotgun’s production drives the tragedy home with unforgettable emotional rawness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> runs through Oct. 4, 2015 at Ashby Stage in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"https://shotgunplayers.org/Online/eurydice\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shotgunplayers.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/Eurydice/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Eurydice’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">Shotgun Players presents a bold, physical production of a play by Sarah Ruhl.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Oct. 4\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">Ashby Stage\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/Eurydice/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details and tickets\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area theater scene is smitten with Sarah Ruhl. The upcoming seasons at Marin Theatre Company, San Francisco Playhouse and the playwright’s usual haunt, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, all boast new works by Ruhl in their local or West Coast premieres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area’s love affair with Ruhl’s work began in 2004 with Berkeley Rep’s luminous production of \u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> directed by her frequent collaborator Les Waters. A half-dozen smaller companies around the Bay have performed the play since then. But that first breathtaking introduction to Ruhl’s fanciful, bittersweet vision, packed with humor, tenderness and magical realism, remains impossible to forget.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A more sinister new production at Shotgun Players proves somehow to be equally indelible. Part of a season entirely made up of works by women, the Shotgun version is directed by Erika Chong Shuch, a choreographer who’s worked a lot with theater companies. Shuch’s staging is bold, aggressively physical and packed with stunning imagery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10928163\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10928163\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg\" alt=\"Megan Trout, James Carpenter, Peter Griggs, Jeannine Anderson and Beth Wilmurt in Shotgun Players' Eurydice. (Photo: Pak Han)\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice9-400x267.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Megan Trout, James Carpenter, Peter Griggs, Jeannine Anderson and Beth Wilmurt in Shotgun Players’ \u003ci>Eurydice\u003c/i>. (Photo: Pak Han)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> is a love story, but not the kind you might expect. The titular character is best known from Greek myth as the wife of the great poet-hero Orpheus who becomes the object of his quest when Eurydice dies and he goes down to the Underworld to retrieve her. Orpheus is told to head back home and his spouse will follow right behind him. But if he turns back to look at her, Eurydice will be lost forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The love between Megan Trout’s lively Eurydice and Kenny Toll’s dreamily preoccupied Orpheus is palpable. They talk philosophically of books and music while doing a playful, passionate dance involving wrestling, biting, choking and kissing. But this is not Orpheus’s story, and he fades into the background as soon as Eurydice descends into the Underworld.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This play is also a story about the love between fathers and daughters, and Eurydice’s touching reunion with her long-dead, nameless dad lies at its heart. James Carpenter exudes tenderness and stoic reserve as the father who has somehow managed to retain his memory of life and human language despite the requisite dunking in the river of forgetfulness that all the dead have to undergo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eurydice is not so fortunate. At first when she tries to speak, all that comes out are cacophonous bursts of thundering noise (the work of sound designer Matt Stines.) She doesn’t recognize her father either, or even the concept of a father. But he patiently teaches her. After all, they have all the time in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10928162\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10928162\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg\" alt=\"Megan Trout as Eurydice in Shotgun Players' Eurydice. (Photo: Pak Han)\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/eurydice8-400x267.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Megan Trout as Eurydice in Shotgun Players’ \u003ci>Eurydice\u003c/i>. (Photo: Pak Han)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The land of the dead is far from a nice place. Sean Riley’s spectacular set is reminiscent of the interior of a very old ship, its rusty walls corroded green. There are metal pails everywhere, in tall stacks and on an elaborate pulley system that the father uses to create an outline of a room for his daughter in a land where rooms (and fathers) are forbidden. We know all the dos and don’ts because of a fretful chorus of stones who are always chiding father and daughter to knock it off and behave properly. There’s nothing particularly stone-like about the trio of grimly comical busybodies embodied by Jeannine Anderson, Peter Griggs and Beth Wilmurt in Christine Crook’s gaudy Burning Man-chic costumes, unless it’s their obstinate insistence on maintaining the status quo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eerily unnerving music pervades composed by Nils Frykdahl of the cult art-rock bands Idiot Flesh, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Faun Fables. Frykdahl also performs a major acting role in the play, perfectly cast as the Nasty Interesting Man, who stalks Eurydice with a predatory leer and insistent questioning about “interesting people.” Equal parts comical and menacing, Frykdahl morphs marvelously into the baby-talking, tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the humor and compassion that permeates the piece, it’s more chilling than heartwarming. Like the will-he-or-won’t-he conclusion of the original Orpheus myth, Ruhl’s version hinges on free will, an especially remarkable thing in the afterlife, where choices are supposed to be a thing of the past. The play also explores the notions of fate and inevitability. After all, you can’t cheat death forever. Even if somehow Orpheus were to succeed in bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living, it would mean tearing her away from the touching, unlikely new home she’s built with her long-lost father in the land of the dead. It’s a heartbreaking piece, and Shotgun’s production drives the tragedy home with unforgettable emotional rawness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eurydice\u003c/em> runs through Oct. 4, 2015 at Ashby Stage in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"https://shotgunplayers.org/Online/eurydice\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shotgunplayers.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "San Francisco Seen Through an Analog Lens, One Hour at a Time",
"headTitle": "San Francisco Seen Through an Analog Lens, One Hour at a Time | KQED",
"content": "\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/project-24-san-francisco/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Project 24 San Francisco’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">One photographer per hour per SF neighborhood over the course of one day.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 10, 2015\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">The Dryansky Gallery\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/project-24-san-francisco/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Using only hand-printed black-and-white photographs, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://project24sanfrancisco.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Project 24 San Francisco\u003c/a>\u003c/i> seeks to catch a glimpse of San Francisco’s essence without digital manipulation or interference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The traveling exhibition, now on view at The Dryansky Gallery, employed twenty-four artists to go back to the basics and photograph San Francisco, one hour at a time, during the 2014 winter solstice. Whether analog photography is more honest or not, the participating artists create a poetic dossier of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some works channel the dreamy pictorialism of late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography. \u003ca href=\"http://www.auerfoto.com/erikhome.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Erik Auerbach\u003c/a>’s photograph from Potrero Hill drew me in. The misty thicket pictured is almost old world and mystical. But an enormous concrete structure, presumably a freeway at the edge of the image, disrupts this initial impression. Homeless encampments and litter emerge amongst the trees and brush upon closer inspection. The photograph oscillates between an ethereal natural setting and an urban dystopia — an apt metaphor for San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10912271\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10912271 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill.jpg\" alt=\"Erik Auerbach, 'December 22, 2014 | 9:03–10:03am | Potrero Hill.' (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\" width=\"640\" height=\"642\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-400x401.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-598x600.jpg 598w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-75x75.jpg 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Erik Auerbach, ‘December 22, 2014 | 9:03–10:03am | Potrero Hill.’ (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many artists focus on the architecture of their settings, often favoring anonymous places or neighborhood joints over iconic buildings. \u003ca href=\"http://www.forrestdylanbryant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forrest Dylan Bryant\u003c/a> captures light shining through a chaotic array of window blinds in the nighttime darkness of Sea Cliff. \u003ca href=\"http://photo.yzdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yelena Zhavoronkova\u003c/a> takes an alternate view in her Lone Hill photograph, looking out a window at an old building obscured by bare wintry tree branches and reflections on the glass. Like a San Franciscan adaptation of Edward Hopper’s famous \u003ci>Nighthawks\u003c/i> (1942) painting, \u003ca href=\"http://www.gabrielahasbun.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gabriela Hasbun\u003c/a> documents two people sharing a late-night snack at a bubble tea shop in Little Russia as gleaming lights illuminate the deserted sidewalk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10912272\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10912272 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff.jpg\" alt=\"Forrest Dylan Bryant, 'December 21, 2014 | 6:03–7:03pm | Sea Cliff.' (Photo: The Dryasnky Gallery)\" width=\"640\" height=\"445\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff-400x278.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Forrest Dylan Bryant, ‘December 21, 2014 | 6:03–7:03pm | Sea Cliff.’ (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco wouldn’t be itself without its cast of 800,000 characters, some of whom make cameos in the exhibit. Pedestrians populate Fisherman’s Wharf, and a couple cozies up in a North Beach bar. Like the unrecognizable Sea Cliff house, however, the most striking portrait is \u003ca href=\"http://mcnairevans.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">McNair Evans\u003c/a>’ closeup of a man who does not make the photograph’s location obvious. The subject’s eyes are closed and a hand-rolled cigarette or joint is tucked snugly into his glasses. He tilts his head upwards as if he were praying, but late at night in the Mission, he is more likely sleeping on a bus or resting his eyes. The photograph intimately focuses on his nose, glasses and the light falling on his face.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Viewing \u003ci>Project 24 San Francisco\u003c/i> is like taking a jaunt around the city through twenty-three sets of eyes (one of the scheduled photographers didn’t show). Some of the scenes are familiar, maybe even nostalgic, while others are unknown or unexpected. The raw quality of black-and-white film translates the artists’ experiences with a powerful lyricism that is close to, if not entirely, truthful or authentic.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"event-info alignright\">\n\u003cfigure>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/programs/the-do-list/\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/themes/KQED-unified/img/thedolist_icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\">\u003c/a>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/project-24-san-francisco/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Event Information\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003ch2>‘Project 24 San Francisco’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-desc\">One photographer per hour per SF neighborhood over the course of one day.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-dates\">\n\u003ch4>Through Sept. 10, 2015\u003c/h4>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"event-venue\">The Dryansky Gallery\u003c/div>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/the-do-list/project-24-san-francisco/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Using only hand-printed black-and-white photographs, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://project24sanfrancisco.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Project 24 San Francisco\u003c/a>\u003c/i> seeks to catch a glimpse of San Francisco’s essence without digital manipulation or interference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The traveling exhibition, now on view at The Dryansky Gallery, employed twenty-four artists to go back to the basics and photograph San Francisco, one hour at a time, during the 2014 winter solstice. Whether analog photography is more honest or not, the participating artists create a poetic dossier of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some works channel the dreamy pictorialism of late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography. \u003ca href=\"http://www.auerfoto.com/erikhome.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Erik Auerbach\u003c/a>’s photograph from Potrero Hill drew me in. The misty thicket pictured is almost old world and mystical. But an enormous concrete structure, presumably a freeway at the edge of the image, disrupts this initial impression. Homeless encampments and litter emerge amongst the trees and brush upon closer inspection. The photograph oscillates between an ethereal natural setting and an urban dystopia — an apt metaphor for San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10912271\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10912271 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill.jpg\" alt=\"Erik Auerbach, 'December 22, 2014 | 9:03–10:03am | Potrero Hill.' (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\" width=\"640\" height=\"642\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-400x401.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-598x600.jpg 598w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/1.-Erik-Auerbach-0903-Potrero-Hill-75x75.jpg 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Erik Auerbach, ‘December 22, 2014 | 9:03–10:03am | Potrero Hill.’ (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many artists focus on the architecture of their settings, often favoring anonymous places or neighborhood joints over iconic buildings. \u003ca href=\"http://www.forrestdylanbryant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forrest Dylan Bryant\u003c/a> captures light shining through a chaotic array of window blinds in the nighttime darkness of Sea Cliff. \u003ca href=\"http://photo.yzdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yelena Zhavoronkova\u003c/a> takes an alternate view in her Lone Hill photograph, looking out a window at an old building obscured by bare wintry tree branches and reflections on the glass. Like a San Franciscan adaptation of Edward Hopper’s famous \u003ci>Nighthawks\u003c/i> (1942) painting, \u003ca href=\"http://www.gabrielahasbun.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gabriela Hasbun\u003c/a> documents two people sharing a late-night snack at a bubble tea shop in Little Russia as gleaming lights illuminate the deserted sidewalk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10912272\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10912272 size-full\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff.jpg\" alt=\"Forrest Dylan Bryant, 'December 21, 2014 | 6:03–7:03pm | Sea Cliff.' (Photo: The Dryasnky Gallery)\" width=\"640\" height=\"445\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/2.-Forrest-Dylan-Bryant-1803-Sea-Cliff-400x278.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Forrest Dylan Bryant, ‘December 21, 2014 | 6:03–7:03pm | Sea Cliff.’ (Photo: The Dryansky Gallery)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco wouldn’t be itself without its cast of 800,000 characters, some of whom make cameos in the exhibit. Pedestrians populate Fisherman’s Wharf, and a couple cozies up in a North Beach bar. Like the unrecognizable Sea Cliff house, however, the most striking portrait is \u003ca href=\"http://mcnairevans.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">McNair Evans\u003c/a>’ closeup of a man who does not make the photograph’s location obvious. The subject’s eyes are closed and a hand-rolled cigarette or joint is tucked snugly into his glasses. He tilts his head upwards as if he were praying, but late at night in the Mission, he is more likely sleeping on a bus or resting his eyes. The photograph intimately focuses on his nose, glasses and the light falling on his face.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Viewing \u003ci>Project 24 San Francisco\u003c/i> is like taking a jaunt around the city through twenty-three sets of eyes (one of the scheduled photographers didn’t show). Some of the scenes are familiar, maybe even nostalgic, while others are unknown or unexpected. The raw quality of black-and-white film translates the artists’ experiences with a powerful lyricism that is close to, if not entirely, truthful or authentic.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Generation Y Satire Meets Screwball Comedy In 'Mistress America'",
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"content": "\u003cp>Brooke is a New York spin-class instructor who plans to open a restaurant that will also be a hair salon and a community center, and furthermore has an idea for a TV show called \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>. This sort of aspirational multi-tasking is also characteristic of the movie that shares the name of the imaginary TV program: It’s a contemporary Gen-Y satire, a throwback screwball comedy, and a notebook of random jottings by writer-director Noah Baumbach and writer-star Greta Gerwig, all stuffed into 84 minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z8MCW16uZY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gerwig, of course, plays Brooke, who is in some ways similar to the character she and Baumbach created for their previous collaboration, \u003cem>Frances Ha\u003c/em>. But Brooke is not this film’s central character. It’s Tracy (Lola Kirke), a Barnard freshman who’s quickly adopted and then abandoned by Brooke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The college student also has goals. She wants to be a writer, but her first submission to the college literary society is ignored. In Brooke, Tracy sees the material for a fictional breakthrough. So she begins a short story, also titled \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>. This text is written overnight, and becomes an issue between the two sisters-to-be almost immediately. None of the movie’s developments is given a moment to breathe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That quickness is a hindrance to \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>, in which relationships develop and decay at a pace that rivals Gerwig’s speedy delivery of the overly theatrical lines. The movie’s stilted centerpiece is a ’30s-Hollywood-style roundelay at a Connecticut mansion where Brooke has traveled to make a desperate financial pitch for her zeitgeist-defining eatery. She’s accompanied by Tracy and two of her classmates, and ultimately the crowd grows to eight chattering actors — including a cameo by soundtrack co-composer Dean Wareham, who also had a small part in Baumbach’s \u003cem>While We’re Young\u003c/em> earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baumbach and Gerwig don’t go all Preston Sturges all the time, however. The movie also features passages of mumblecore-non-sequitur dialogue, a synth-rock score (by Wareham and Britta Phillips) that could be flirting with a copyright-infringement lawsuit from New Order and a poster for Claude Chabrol’s \u003cem>Les Biches\u003c/em>, recalling \u003cem>Frances Ha’s\u003c/em> French new wave homages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The script does smartly throw Tracy and Brooke together. The former’s mother and the latter’s father are about to marry and make the young women stepsisters. Brooke is perhaps a decade older, affording her the big-sisterly authority to dispense advice. Given her overbearing personality, though, Brooke would take surely the same role even if she had just a few weeks on Tracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some tiny episodes are telling. Brooke instructs Tracy to buy some pasta, and it turns out that the 18-year-old naif is lost in the supermarket. But other asides, such as a Faulkner-discussing book group whose members are all pregnant, are haphazard or pointless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baumbach and Gerwig actually rely on a psychic to keep the story moving, and — in an absurdly timely touch — make Brooke’s dreams subject to Greece’s economic crisis. There’s even a reference to female genital mutilation. In both details and tone, \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em> is a jumble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her small role in the recent \u003cem>Eden\u003c/em>, Gerwig was distractingly actorly in an otherwise naturalistic movie. While that seemed possibly the result of having an English-language part in a film that was mostly in French, she’s just as artificial here. Perhaps that quality should guide her and Baumbach’s next undertaking. They could forgo their taste for mocking today’s mores and commit to a screwball-comedy era period piece, Gerwig might seem more natural than she does in \u003cem>Mistress America.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Brooke is a New York spin-class instructor who plans to open a restaurant that will also be a hair salon and a community center, and furthermore has an idea for a TV show called \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>. This sort of aspirational multi-tasking is also characteristic of the movie that shares the name of the imaginary TV program: It’s a contemporary Gen-Y satire, a throwback screwball comedy, and a notebook of random jottings by writer-director Noah Baumbach and writer-star Greta Gerwig, all stuffed into 84 minutes.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/6z8MCW16uZY'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/6z8MCW16uZY'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Gerwig, of course, plays Brooke, who is in some ways similar to the character she and Baumbach created for their previous collaboration, \u003cem>Frances Ha\u003c/em>. But Brooke is not this film’s central character. It’s Tracy (Lola Kirke), a Barnard freshman who’s quickly adopted and then abandoned by Brooke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The college student also has goals. She wants to be a writer, but her first submission to the college literary society is ignored. In Brooke, Tracy sees the material for a fictional breakthrough. So she begins a short story, also titled \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>. This text is written overnight, and becomes an issue between the two sisters-to-be almost immediately. None of the movie’s developments is given a moment to breathe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That quickness is a hindrance to \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em>, in which relationships develop and decay at a pace that rivals Gerwig’s speedy delivery of the overly theatrical lines. The movie’s stilted centerpiece is a ’30s-Hollywood-style roundelay at a Connecticut mansion where Brooke has traveled to make a desperate financial pitch for her zeitgeist-defining eatery. She’s accompanied by Tracy and two of her classmates, and ultimately the crowd grows to eight chattering actors — including a cameo by soundtrack co-composer Dean Wareham, who also had a small part in Baumbach’s \u003cem>While We’re Young\u003c/em> earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baumbach and Gerwig don’t go all Preston Sturges all the time, however. The movie also features passages of mumblecore-non-sequitur dialogue, a synth-rock score (by Wareham and Britta Phillips) that could be flirting with a copyright-infringement lawsuit from New Order and a poster for Claude Chabrol’s \u003cem>Les Biches\u003c/em>, recalling \u003cem>Frances Ha’s\u003c/em> French new wave homages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The script does smartly throw Tracy and Brooke together. The former’s mother and the latter’s father are about to marry and make the young women stepsisters. Brooke is perhaps a decade older, affording her the big-sisterly authority to dispense advice. Given her overbearing personality, though, Brooke would take surely the same role even if she had just a few weeks on Tracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some tiny episodes are telling. Brooke instructs Tracy to buy some pasta, and it turns out that the 18-year-old naif is lost in the supermarket. But other asides, such as a Faulkner-discussing book group whose members are all pregnant, are haphazard or pointless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baumbach and Gerwig actually rely on a psychic to keep the story moving, and — in an absurdly timely touch — make Brooke’s dreams subject to Greece’s economic crisis. There’s even a reference to female genital mutilation. In both details and tone, \u003cem>Mistress America\u003c/em> is a jumble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her small role in the recent \u003cem>Eden\u003c/em>, Gerwig was distractingly actorly in an otherwise naturalistic movie. While that seemed possibly the result of having an English-language part in a film that was mostly in French, she’s just as artificial here. Perhaps that quality should guide her and Baumbach’s next undertaking. They could forgo their taste for mocking today’s mores and commit to a screwball-comedy era period piece, Gerwig might seem more natural than she does in \u003cem>Mistress America.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
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