Every year (pandemic excepted), San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is host to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a three-day free (!) extravaganza of American roots and roots-derived music. I live close to the park, and marvel that many years — including this one — I get to walk on over and see Nick Lowe play outdoors. Today, the first day of the festival, I caught two acts: Margaret Glaspy and, shown above, the great Marc Ribot. The week’s fog and rain had disappeared overnight, and these sets made for a fantastic start to the weekend. Glaspy (in a trio) and Ribot (solo) were just two of numerous acts on two of the festival’s six stages, the others much larger than this one.
I had a darn good time at the Stork Club in Oakland on Friday, September 26. Caught two performances:
Sachi’s Mirror, a local band, is either violinist/vocalist Shaina Pan’s project with supporting musicians, or the name of the trio, but in either case was thoroughly engaging. She routes her electric violin through a variety of guitar pedals, and the drummer did a great job of playing in a manner that sounded trip-hop-ish, the way it resembled precisely sampled beats, while the guitar player provided texture and patterning. Pan’s voice had a shoegaze-y quality to it, and the songs were well-constructed. You could really hear what they are working toward.
There were three other acts on the bill that night, one earlier and two later, and of them I only also saw Angoisse Magazine, a quartet (though often described as a trio, so perhaps they expanded for the tour). If you’re familiar with pop-psychedelic movies of the 1960s and early 1970s, then you have a sense of a certain type of louche score (essentially, stylish background music) and how those films might also feature a rock’n’roll band at some key point (like the Yardbirds pop up in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup). Angoisse Magazine is as if the score and such a band were one and the same, and they segued charmingly back and forth between the two modes.
Ragnar Kjartansson's installation ends its recent, extended SFMOMA run
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
I don’t carry slips of paper much anymore. I photograph them, and if they’re needed for regular reference, then I add them to my phone’s favorites. This one has been on my phone for almost a year.
The document lists the show times for Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation The Visitors, which has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the last few years. (At some point in the past, I was asking the ticket salesperson at the museum when the next showing was, and she pulled out this sheet. With her approval, I took this quick shot of it.)
That extended stay at SFMOMA came to a close on Sunday, September 28. I managed one last visit on Thursday, when the museum is open late. If you’re not familiar with The Visitors, look it up. It’s a fantastic, hour-long work in which members of a musical ensemble, led by Kjartansson, perform a single, slow piece of music. Each musician in the group is given their own screen, showing a different setting in a massive old home — equal parts dilapidated and stately — and there’s an additional screen that shows a view of the building from the outside, where an audience has gathered on the porch. The whole thing was recorded in real time in one take.
I notice different things in the sound and the images every time — at this point countless — that I take in The Visitors, and two things stood out this visit:
One was that the roadie seen at the very end of the hour is also there at the opening. I love the closing bits of the experience, as he walks around the house, thus making it possible for the audience to, finally, connect the various screens’ relative proximity based on his path.
The other was that the audience at SFMOMA came, at the end, to collectively focus on that outside-view screen, and in turn came to resemble the audience within the work. By watching together, we had, in effect, turned the gallery into a porch. When I noticed this, I stepped back into the furthest corner, took a photo of what I was witnessing, and recognized that Kjartansson has engineered a scenario in which is audience became a tableau just like the one he had filmed.
I can’t wait to see The Visitors again, likely in some other city, and to see how the audience responds there.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ I can confirm that the 4.3 earthquake that occurred at 2:46am Monday morning, September 22, did significant damage … to my sleep.
▰ I wish more experimental music venues around the world had subscription services for folks who lived far away but liked what the places did, sort of like what Cafe Oto is up to in London. You pay something, it supports them, you get recordings, maybe live feeds, maybe a zine, or a newsletter, “merch,” etc. You’re in the loop, informed. “Patreon for clubs.” “Bandcamp for venues.”
Thanks to responses to the above comment, I learned about several venues, and also about something called venuecms.com, which is, per the name, a content management system for venues, and the person who told me about it said that this sort of subscription model is, in fact, the “next feature on the list.”
▰ On a positive note, if I’m getting targeted ads for Go boards featuring noticeably antiquated laptops, the Algorithm is telling me I’ve made some OK life decisions
▰ I acknowledge that when I opened this article in New Scientist, I wondered if I could listen to it.
▰ Oblique Strategies are generally right about what to do on a given day
▰ Another week during which I read a ton in a variety of books but did not complete one of them.
