Next Thursday evening (Oct 11), the duo piano team of Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa will give a benefit concert for Other Minds in San Francisco. I'll be there. The concert will feature Philip Glass's Six Scenes from Les Enfants Terribles. And, Philip Glass will be present for a pre-concert talk with Charles Amirkhanian, Other Minds Director, at 7.

I never could understand art criticsm.

In general, what can you really say about a photograph or a painting, other than "I hate it" or "I love it"?

Sure, you can try to explain why the work affects you, or what it means in a historical or cultural context. But some critics really do carry on a bit. They inflate their opinions to fill sentences and column inches, without making much sense.

Take today, for example. Venerated SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker caught my eye this morning with this about the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky:

A print such as "Iberia Quarries #9, Cochicho Co., Pardais, Portugal" (2006) presents an astonishing wealth of detail, allowing us to see clearly equipment and workers hundreds of feet from the camera.

Meanwhile the quarry's towering, steeply terraced walls form a kind of negative architecture, reminding us how much marble has ended up as the substance of buildings and sculpture. The thought of sculpture and architecture may also bring out the odd echoes of Picasso and Braque's analytic cubism in Burtynsky's quarry views.

Looking at "Iberia Quarries #9 ...," like many of Burtynsky's others, entails thinking about distance: about how it frustrates or enlarges understanding, depending on whether it provides context or exempts us from dwelling on disturbing states of affairs.

Burtynsky's work represents sustained thinking about distance, and the power to shrink it, as realities that define privilege and individual fate in our era, and about the camera as a tool for making this historical fact less deniable. That he has persisted in this reflection, while producing images of memorable impact and elegance, qualifies him as a major artist.

Huh?

Here's the image he's talking about:

Now here's a picture, Philip Glass in a tux! 

And he's with Other Minds artistic director Charles Amirkhanian at the opening night of Appomattox at the S.F. Opera.

(Photo by SF Mike) 

The first rains of the season have come. It's raining quite hard at this moment. It hasn't rained like this since March.

Actually, it's quite wonderful. The air smells like perfume.

Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain. 

Philip Glass appeared at the Crowden School in Berkeley today and talked to the combined student body for about an hour. He was introduced by Berkeley resident John Adams, who also prodded him with a few questions of his own.

The Crowden School, now celebrating its 25th year, is one of the few music-centric elementary/middle schools in the country. There are about 90 students in grades 4-8, with a rigorous music program as well as the normal academic curriculum.  (My daughter Nora is a Crowden graduate, as are John Adams' two children).

Glass, whose opera Appomattox  is happening this week at the SF Opera, is in town for a run of concerts, including our own Other Minds benefit tomorrow night (scroll down for info). So it was a great surprise to hear that he had some time to visit with the students at Crowden, who have just started their own composition program.

Tonight's concert with Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa was a great success! What a stunning duo!

Everything went well. And the audience seemed to enjoy all of it.

This was a benefit concert for Other Minds, so many thanks to Dennis and Maki.

We did make a recording and hope to have it available soon. 

Kosman's review in the SF Chronicle is here. 

What happens when your visual memory of a place confronts the visual reality of today? The discord can be a bit unsettling.

I frequented and lived in Greenwich Village (New York City) from around 1958-68 before moving to California. Even tho I only expected to stay in Berkeley for a few years, that's turned into nearly a lifetime now, with only occasional visits back to the "old country".

My photographs of the 60's in the village are out there on the web for all to see, and I'm digging up more and releasing them to the internet tide. (See my photo blog.) 

Two photographs from that period have caught a number of viewer's imagination... Sheridan Square in 1970 ... which were taken during an emotionally charged trip back to NY from Berkeley. I was 26, and not sure if I should move back to the city, or stay longer in California.

I've gotten a lot of email from people all over the world referring to these images. And I've used Google Maps to see the street views of what that spot looks like today.

And today I got an email from a New Yorker who was moved to go to that exact spot and capture the same images as they look now. So here they are. You can compare and contrast. Click on each to open a larger image in a new window.

First, the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue in October, 1970  and today.

Sigh. The first image is the one that is permanently in my mind. I crossed that street so many times, in rain, sun, snow, in the dark. And I can remember clearly the sound of cars over those ancient cobblestones., and what it felt like to walk across them.

The image today looks so ... boring. Except for the Village Cigars sign (where I bought my Gitanes and Gauloises), little of any character remains. It looks so ... suburban!

Here's the other image. Looking east down Greenwich Avenue over to Sixth Avenue:

The big hulking Women's House of Detention is gone, replaced by a park. Also gone is the Traveler's Garage and the banjo bar "Your Father's Mustache". So are the 19th C tenements on the left. And, you can hardly see down the street to 6th avenue. 

It is painful to try to superimpose then and now in my mind. Only emphasizes how lost in time those impressions are now. So much happened on those streets, at least in my lifetime. They seem wiped clean, along with the cobblestones.

Thanks to Tim Donovan for the photos of the scene today. 

Now here's really something.

Acclaimed Czech performance artist, violinist, singer, and actress, Iva Bittová, will be at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley on Thursday November 1st.

This is a great opportunity to hear a major European avant-garde artist in an intimate setting like F&S.

Bittová combines the immediacy of today's performance styles with folk and improvised music from Eastern Europe. She is also well know for her interpretations of Janácek as well as her own music.

There's a wonderful video of one of her solo violin & voice performances here.  And singing Janácek here.

Don't miss this one.

»Freight and Salvage, Berkeley 

One of the editors at Popular Photography's online site stumbled upon my photo pages (All I've Seen) and blogged about it here, giving the title Time Travel to the entry.

It's always nice to know, clear out of the blue, that someone's looking at my efforts.

The point being that I've been taking (pretty good) pictures since I was 20. (The pictures taken before then were really not very good.)  That would be 1964. And I've been methodically putting them on my All I've Seen photo blog, along with recent pictures. (I'm still taking pictures, BTW).

So, as far as the pictures taken between 1965 and, say, 2000, it really is time travel in a strange sort of way.

Up until recently, taking pictures was, for me, more a matter of capturing the moment; documenting this life. But a few years ago I took an hard look at those pictures and realized that some, certainly not all, but some -- about 10% -- were really interesting. In fact, they were pretty good as photographs. 

So here's some time travel:

1965  1966  1967  1968  1969  1970  1971  1972  1973  1974  1975  1976  1977  1978  1979  1980  1981  1982  1983  1984  1985  1986  1987  1988  1990  1992  2000  2001  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007  

Don't miss this!!  Other Minds Presents
In association with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco

John Cage: 18 Microtonal Ragas
“Solo for Voice 58” from Song Books (1970)

Featuring dhrupad vocalist Amelia Cuni

Friday, November 2, 2007 8:00 pm

St. John’s Presbyterian Church
2727 College Avenue (3 blocks north of Ashby)
Berkeley, California
Tickets $25 (available now from Brown Paper Tickets or by calling 1.800.838.3006)

Amelia Cuni, dhrupad vocals
Werner Durand, drones/electronics
Federico Sanesi, percussion
Raymond Kaczynski, percussion

John Cage wrote his 18 Microtonal Ragas after years of immersing himself in Indian music and philosophy. Nearly forty years later, Italian-German dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni, with extensive training in both the European and Indian classical traditions, interprets this work that could have been written for her special artistry. She will perform the complete Solo 58 from Song Books, combined with numerous performances of other solos from the same collection, with percussionists Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Sanesi, and Werner Durand establishing both the traditional Indian drones specially created to accompany the microtonal ragas, and performing on electronics.

“Amelia Cuni’s world premiere of Cage’s 18 Microtonal Ragas was certainly on the outer fringe of experimentation ... Illustrating a unique relationship between tradition and experimentation, the performance pointed a way out of the ghetto of serious art music in an investigation of cultural cross-fertilisation between east and west.” —Deutsche Welle Kulturmagazin, 2006

“Amelia Cuni and her accompanists turned the cycle into an enjoyable and humorous Happening. They offered up Cage’s music in such a wholehearted way that both devotees of Cage and Indian music were equally satisfied.” —Deutschlandradio Kultur, 2006

“These pieces seem to be written for Amelia Cuni: a classical trained Indian singer, who is able to improvise on ragas in a new music context—a very rare combination indeed!” —Ulrich Krieger

Complete information is at the Other Minds website. 

I will be there. Stop by and say hello.
 

Next week is going to be a busy one:

Thursday Nov 1: Iva Bittová at Freight and Salvage  »Freight and Salvage, Berkeley

Friday Nov 2: Amelia Cuni performs John Cage's 18 Microtonal Ragas at St John's in Berkeley. Complete information is at the Other Minds website

also on Nov 2 in Sacramento: Sarah Cahill plays Pauline Oliveros as part of the Festival of New American Music 

Saturday Nov 3: Iva Bittová is at Noe Valley Ministry   

and, I'm sure there's more I don't even know about. Typically in the Bay Area, everything seems to happen all at once.