Side By Side, A Bold Opening for Frey Norris

March 10, 2011 The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

Raman Frey and Wendi Norris, co-owners of the Frey Norris gallery — which just moved into a spectacular South of Market storefront space —are not fans of predictability.

Peek into one window of the gallery and you’ll see a large, sleek teardrop-shaped sculpture by the contemporary Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis.
Look around the corner, however, and a 20th century Surrealist painting —Remedios Varo’s magical nightscape, “Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez,” from 1957 — comes into view.

Hung in adjoining areas, the two side-by-side shows of contemporary and modern works are a bold announcement of Frey Norris’s much-anticipated arrival in the Yerba Buena Arts District.
 (more)

On Stage and Afterward, Spotlight on Apple in China

February 26, 2011 The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a provocative monologue that challenges Apple Computer over labor conditions in the factories in China where the iPhone and other devices are produced, ends a successful run at Berkeley Repertory Theater today.

But Mr. Daisey is only beginning a long conversation about what he called “a charged ethical dilemma that is literally in our pockets.”

From the lobby of the theater after the show to technology blogs to the Apple Computer shareholder meeting, the monologue has provoked intense debate. Leander Kahney, editor of the Cult of Mac blog, said posts about the show had received twice the normal volume of comments, most of them negative about the show. (more)

Steve Wozniak on ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’

February 28, 2011 The Bay Citizen

THE BAY CITIZEN: I am eager to get your impression of Mike Daisey’s show at Berkeley Rep. As you know, it’s kicked up a lot of debate in the Mac community.  On Cult of Mac, editor Leander Kahney urged Mac “fanboys” to see the show.  But he also said he felt guilty using his iPhone later after hearing about the working conditions in the Foxconn factory. As co-founder of Apple, what did you think?

STEVE WOZNIAK: I will never be the same after seeing that show. I cried during it and I'm crying right now. I have a seed of concern and sorrow in my head that may never go away. So many things that were so important to me seem much less important now. (more)

Relics of Film and Paper Retain Their Grip Even in a Digital Era

November 27, 2010 The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

I recently saw some of my family’s home movies from the 1940s and 1950s for the first time.

The scenes were captured on color film, but I fired up my laptop to watch the men felling Douglas fir trees and my teenage dad skiing the slopes of Mount Hood. I got this new look at my own history because my highly organized sister had transferred the old reels onto DVDs.

If I have my sister, San Francisco has Rick Prelinger, one of the country’s premier archivists and an outspoken advocate of open access to information.

Mr. Prelinger is the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a celebrated collection of “ephemeral film” -- industrial, educational, amateur and other film and video footage.... (more)

Onstage interview with Ingrid Betancourt

On January 4, 2011 I spoke with former Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt about her six-year ordeal as a political prisoner held by the FARC guerrilla in the jungle of Columbia.   The interview was organized by the International Museum of Women in San Francisco.   You can see the whole conversation here.

Ingrid Betancourt, left, in conversation with me.

Digital Maps Don’t Always Tell the Whole Story

October 16, 2010 The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

Thanks to Google Earth and MapQuest and GPS and all the other digital mapping products, an image of where we are, or where we are headed, is always just a click away. These geographical services are so omnipresent, in fact, it would be easy to assume that there’s nothing left to map.

 But the blanket of digital geographic information doesn’t contain the whole story about the physical world we live in, nor does it necessarily offer an objective, value-neutral view. Bay Area map aficionados are pushing the boundaries of mainstream mapping conventions, and their work is both beautiful to behold and fascinating in the questions they raise about how knowledge is defined.

Rebecca Solnit, author of a new atlas of San Francisco called “Infinite City,” sees Google Maps and services like it, with their emphasis on retail outlets and driving data, as painting “a middle-class, consumer version” of a place.... (more)

Bold Ideas Inspire New Life for Magazines

September 8, 2010 The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

Media innovation in the Bay Area is not hard to come by, with the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter continually reinventing the way we produce and consume information.

Yet one of the venerable media forms that is threatened by the digital tsunami — the magazine — is experiencing something of a renaissance here, too. The New York-based glossy magazine business may be in upheaval, with bellwether Condé Nast shuttering five of its titles, but the art of editing, writing and visually crafting an editorially coherent, beautiful and engaging experience is not dead.

Some of the foment is made possible by MagCloud, a Web-based print-on-demand service from Hewlett-Packard that dramatically lowers the financial barriers to magazine publishing... (more)

Latest Advance in Robotics – Folding Towels!

July 19, 2010 The Bay Citizen

Humans can fold complex origami, but for a UC Berkeley robot, folding laundry is revolutionary 

In a massive breakthrough, a UC Berkeley scientist has built a robot that can … fold a dish towel.

Since Dr. Pieter Abbeel first posted a video of his team’s PR2 robot folding towels on YouTube in March, over a half million viewers have watched the industrious robot pick up, smooth out, fold and stack a messy pile of towels.

Although fascinating to watch, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed. Folding? A towel? Human origami experts can make a snake with 1,000 scales folded out of a single piece of paper! They can fold 3-D tessellations that would make M.C. Escher cross-eyed!

Hasn’t robotics advanced beyond the laundry room yet? ... (more)

Do Dogs and Pigeons Like Art?

June 20, 2010 The Bay Citizen

Animal brains are musical and visual, says Temple Grandin. Some human artists take note.

Pigeons can tell the difference between a Monet and a Picasso, according to Dr. Temple Grandin, the author and professor of animal sciences known for peering into the souls of cattle and other species.

Likewise, the hundreds of canines who brought their human companions to Laurie Anderson's "Music for Dogs" concert at the Sydney Opera House recently were genuinely moved to the point of howling and tail wagging.  Anderson, who composed the pieces in honor of her beloved rat terrier, Lollabelle, wanted the dogs to enjoy the music - composed primarily of sounds not discernable to the human ear.

"There is a connection between animals and music," says Grandin. It's not hooey." ... (more)

The Civility Algorithm

May 31, 2010 The Bay Citizen

Ken Goldberg and the Clinton State Department launch Opinion Space -- a game-changing online community tool

Ken Goldberg, the U.C. Berkeley professor of engineering, robotics expert and Internet artist, has disabled comments on his blog. Like many individuals and news organizations, he’s grown weary of the petty sniping and vitriolic attacks that too often overwhelm what are supposed to be useful and open Internet conversations.

"I just can't handle it," he says, somewhat sheepishly, referring to the uninformed postings on his blog at SFGate.com.

Bad online behavior, what former Well moderator and online community pioneer John Coate calls "sport hassling," isn't new.  But it's more prolific, and moderation tools have evolved suprisingly little over the years....(more)

New Report: More Sex in the Pulpit

February 10, 2010 Religion Dispatches

From Tiger Woods’ marital infidelity to same-sex marriage to the ‘Octomom,’ when sexuality issues dominate the headlines, there never seems to be a shortage of religious commentary—most of it from the right.

While conservative pastors preach against homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and abortion, in the nation’s more progressive pulpits, church leaders offer little or no guidance regarding human sexuality, leaving their flock without spiritual guidance as they grapple with these often wrenching issues in their private lives.

A new report by the progressive Religious Institute on Sexual Justice, Morality and Healing raises the alarm about this “disconnect between sexuality and religion in America.”... (more)

Election of New Lesbian Bishop Reveals Tensions in Anglican World

December 11, 2009 Religion Dispatches

Rev. Mary D. Glasspool doesn’t see herself as a “one-issue person.” But history may not agree with her self-assessment. At least not yet.

On Saturday, as the world knows by now, Glasspool, 55, became only the second openly gay bishop in the Anglican world after New Hampshire’s V. Gene Robinson. Chosen as their suffragan (similar to assistant) bishop by the diocese of Los Angeles, Glasspool’s election must be consented to by the wider Episcopal Church leadership before she is consecrated on May 15, 2010.

While her long résumé as a beloved parish priest and skilled church administrator who has worked both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line is impressive, it’s Glasspool’s lesbianism that made her an international news item....(more)

Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd separates facts from fantasies about the Iranian protests

June 25, 2009                                                                                                                            Salon

"A friend once told me that I was the only person he knew who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian," writes Hooman Majd in his book on Iranian culture, "The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran."

The consummate insider and outsider, Majd served as the English-language translator for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's now infamous 2006 speech at the United Nations, and also wrote about the experience for the New York Observer.

The son of an Iranian diplomat under the shah, and grandson of a powerful ayatollah, Majd grew up mainly in the United States where he worked for many years in the entertainment industry before launching his career as a journalist and author. Although openly linked with the reformists -- he wore green Iranian slippers on Bill Maher's program last week and has also translated for former President Mohammed Khatami (to whom he is related by marriage) -- Majd's views on Iran are distinguished by their nuance and fierce independence.... (more)

A big gay Mormon wedding

October 31, 2008                                                                                                                 Salon

The Church of Latter-day Saints has pumped millions into Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage. But for one devout family, the politics are personal. 

"Love each other, be selfless, negotiate," George E. Redd III said to his son Jay on his wedding day recently. Gazing at his 36-year-old son standing next to his beloved, in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco, Redd III quoted Paul, Ringo, John and George: "All you need is love, love is all you need."

It was hanky time inside the chapel, a cozy wooden Arts and Crafts building that could have been airlifted in from a village in Scandinavia, or perhaps the Shire. There's nothing like the father blessing the son at a wedding, with Irish folk musicians strumming in the background, to get the tear ducts flowing. Especially when the son's gorgeous spouse is another man.

A few weeks after the wedding, Jay, a movie director based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, told me that his father's Beatles reference had taken him totally by surprise.... (more)

Why Churches Fear Gay Marriage

 November 25, 2008                                                                                                 Salon

The crusade for Proposition 8 was fueled by the broken American family, explains gay Catholic author Richard Rodriguez

For author Richard Rodriguez, no one is talking about the real issues behind Proposition 8.

While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriguez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

Rodriguez, who is Mexican-American, gay and a practicing Catholic, refuses to let any single part of himself define the whole. Born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised by his Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant parents to embrace mainstream American culture and the English language, he went on to study literature and religion at Stanford and Columbia. His first book, “The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” explores his journey from working-class immigrant to a fully assimilated intellectual — angering many Latinos with his view that English fluency is essential. “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993, continued his investigation into how family, culture, religion, race, sexuality and other strands of his life all contribute to the whole, a complex “brownness” of contradictions and ironies. “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” completes the trilogy — but not his insatiable intellectual curiosity, which he is now shining on monotheism.

Rodriguez’ stinging critiques of religious hypocrisy are all the richer for his passionate love of Catholicism and the Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco, where he and his partner of 28 years are devoted members. Today, Rodriguez is at work on a new book about the monotheistic “desert religions” — Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ever since Sept. 11, “when havoc descended in the name of the desert God,” Rodriguez said in one of his Peabody Award-winning radio commentaries for PBS’s News Hour, he has been trying to understand the strands of darkness that run through these religions. (More)

 

Voyage to the top of the trees

June 8, 2007                                                                                                            Salon

Just as Jacques Cousteau opened up the oceans, amazing tree-climbers are discovering a new frontier in redwood canopies 35 stories above the forest floor. 

Flying around the planet via Google Earth, it’s easy to despair that there is nothing left for humans to discover. Having mapped every inch of the planet with satellites, we can type in London or Darfur or Redwoods National Park and see pigeons circling above Trafalgar Square, a tent city spreading out across the desert, or the green expanse of the forest canopy. This ability to instantly possess images of almost any place on any continent, to zoom in on a certain tree or building (hello, Dick Cheney!), then zoom out as if piloting a plane, can make the world feel like an entirely known quantity, bereft of mystery. 

Then comes Richard Preston’s thrilling, wondrous book “The Wild Trees.” Trees — the most familiar and beloved of all plants — turn out to be as unexplored by science as Tibet was by the West before Alexandra David-Néel dressed as a man and sneaked over the Himalayas into the forbidden kingdom. The tree of life may be the archetypal symbol of the human experience, but we don’t know as much as we thought about the life of the tree — especially that of the redwood, the tallest species of tree on the planet. Higher than the W Hotel in downtown San Francisco, redwoods can grow to be 370 feet tall, and until very recently nobody thought, or dared, to climb them. 

But a new breed of tree-loving eccentrics — some of them are scientists, others have an almost mystical attraction to the species — has discovered a world above the forest floor, an aerial forest 250 feet aboveground teeming with biodiversity that is largely “undescribed” by science. “The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean,” Preston explains, “and it is inhabited by many living things that don’t have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.” (More)

 

Cellph Portrait / Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery

May 28, 2004                                                                                                       SFGate

Inn the post Abu-Ghraib era of digital photography, what stands out about the Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery in the Tenderloin is the abundance of G-rated images: photo-booth-like head shots, portraits of kids and pets, quirky close-ups of half-eaten meals and untied shoelaces, dreamy landscapes, classic tourist attractions, silly signage -- in short, casual visual jottings from inside the quiteness of daily life.

 Another thing that stands out is the insubstantiality of the images, the sense of impermanence. This is not an exhibition of framed photographs to be purchased and hung on your wall, but a show that emphasizes the communication aspect of the new wireless photography, the thrill of zapping a photo to a friend in Brooklyn as you stand on a street corner in London. Who knows if you'll ever look at that photo again?

The cell phone is already the ultimate personal communication device, but now, in addition to sending voice and text messages, it can snap low-resolution photographs and, using the same wireless technology, instantly deliver them to e-mail in-boxes or "moblogs" (photo and text blogs updated via mobile phone) or to other cell phones -- making possible the continuous circulation of the visual documentation of one's life.

Not surprisingly, as Susan Sontag pointed out in her essay on the Abu Ghraib photos in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, this endless flow of personal imagery, made easier by digital photography and the Internet, and accelerated further by wireless camera-phone technology, means photographs have become "less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated."(More)

Project Aims At Genetically Engineered God

 Oct. 20, 2004                                                                                                            SFGate

 SF artist tries to find Almighty on tree of life beside bacteria, slime mold

Researchers in San Francisco have announced that they are on the verge of genetically engineering God.

 Hailing the effort as a "major simultaneous breakthrough in the fields of science and religion," the International Association for Divine Taxonomy (IADT) has "developed a novel method of genetic engineering that may soon allow scientists to place God on the tree of life alongside every other species, including slime molds, fungi and humans." 


 The goal is "accurate placement ... of all deities worldwide, including the god commonly known as Yahweh, Jehovah and/or Allah," -- or, for scientific purposes, Divineus deus -- in order to end centuries of often violent conflict between faith and reason.

No, this isn't something out of an article from The Onion. It's the latest "thought experiment" by San Francisco art critic and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, 33, whose recent projects include selling shares of the 6 billion neurons in his brain ("Brain Trust," 2003) and trying to convince the Berkeley City Council to pass an unbreakable law, Aristotle's A=A (Every Entity Is Equal to Itself, 2002).
In his newest brain game, "The God Project," which opened at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco on Sept. 29, Keats reappropriates the core principles of science and religion in the name of art. (More)

 

Content/Discontent

SFGate

I'm an editor on the Web. Everyday I go to my cubicle, strap on my wrist brace, and put content onto the Internet.

You know -- "content" -- that stuff on the Web. It used to be called short fiction, or news, or movie criticism.

Now it's just pillow stuffing.

These days, content is supplied by "content providers," a term about as inspiring as a new mouse pad. Content is also being "repurposed" and "leveraged" all the time. And to handle all this content, we have, of course, "content managers" and "content producers."

But for anyone who takes their craft seriously, the idea of lumping together the arts with stock prices and government statistics under the generic category "content" is just plain silly. If not offensive. The word "content" has blundered its way into the Web world, linguistically blotting out the subtlety, life, and passion in the arts and all creative pursuits. It's so generic that it erases notions of quality and craft.

So, although many artists and writers do thrive on the 'net, we're obviously not having much influence on its lexicon.

All "content" is not created equal. (More)

Interview with Spaulding Gray

 SFGate

America's "talking man" dropped by The Gate's offices recently to, well, talk. 

Spaulding Gray was in town to perform his acclaimed monologue about learning to ski in the midst of an emotional meltdown -- "It's a Slippery Slope" (reviewed by the Chronicle and Examiner). He looked exactly as he looks on stage: neat checkered shirt, billowy silver hair, playful eyes. Over the last two decades the motor-mouthed New Englander has chronicled his life in 15 monologues (Including "Swimming to Cambodia," "Monster in a Box," and "Gray's Anatomy") and elevated autobiographical storytelling to a high art. He is already at work on monologue number 16 about one day in his life in Sag Harbor, Long Island where he currently lives with his sons Forrest and Theo and their mother Kathie.--JC 
Jeanne Carstensen: Is it true that you're claustrophobic? I've heard that. So I thought, my god, I'm going to put him in this little room...

Spalding Gray: I've had attacks of claustrophobia, but this room wouldn't bring one on. This is still a big room to me. I've probably had two or three of them in my life.  (More)