The Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library has been transformed for the month of June into a giant conceptual art space, beginning with a piece of red masking tape at the entrance...
...extending and branching out to quotes that have been attached to the floor that reflect on FESTAC '77, which was the Second World Festival of Black Arts and Culture held in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977.
As an explanatory brochure notes, "An estimated total of 70,000 artists, performers, thinkers, and writers attended, from at least sixty countries, including the United States. Although it was a life-altering experience for many participants and attendees, FESTAC received little mainstream press coverage, and most of the prominent writers who were present did not publish about their experiences in Nigeria. The festival's history is still to be written."
The library "intervention" was created through SFMOMA by Ntone Edjabe and Stacy Hardy, two members of a Cape Town, South Africa collective called Chimurenga that "produces a pan-African journal of culture, art, and politics."
Their explanation continues: "The Chimurenga Library is an ongoing intervention that seeks to re-imagine the Library as a laboratory for extended curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying and random perusal. The Chimurenga Library embodies the process of 'finding oneself,' as South African jazz musician Moses Molelekwa put it, on the shelves of other libraries and archives; in other spaces; or quietly encroaching upon classification systems; or proposing a new navigation system, clearly subjective and affective."
Though I find most conceptual art underwhelming and pretentious, this "intervention" is marvelous and fascinating in every respect, never lecturing or telling you how to think but instead encouraging onlookers to explore and make their own connections.
The quotes on the floor tend to be pungent and contradictory and immensely entertaining, such as Brent Hayes Edwards' description of Sun Ra above:
The pianist and composer Sun Ra had been invited at the last minute to bring his big band the Arkestra to FESTAC. The festival offered no money up front, and many of the members of the band had been sceptical, but Sun Ra apparently chastised them: ‘Your ancestors came to America without a cent. How much money do you have?’ ‘Fifty cents,’ answered one of the musicians. Sun Ra said, ‘That’s fifty cents more than your ancestors had,’ and insisted they make the trip. Musicians in the Arkestra later reported that when a Nigerian at the airport yelled, ‘Welcome home, Sun Ra!’ as the Arkestra got off the plane, Ra responded acidly, ‘Home? Your people sold mine. This is no longer my home!’
The "intervention" covers all six floors of the library, and possibly its greatest innovation is leading curious onlookers to library stacks...
...where an obscure volume will be highlighted if you want to explore a particular byway in more depth.
Photography exhibitions about poor and exotic "Others" at modern art museums have always struck me as borderline offensive, but the San Francisco Main Library is a whole different story.
With a huge percentage of black patrons every day of the week, this "intervention" feels integrated with the building to a remarkable degree. It is not only an exquisite repurposing of the library, but offers a creative template for a building-wide examination of any subect. Check it out before June 29th, and give yourself a couple of hours to explore.
The San Francisco Symphony concerts this week pair Shostakovich's 1953 Symphony #10 and Beethoven 2nd Piano Concerto with the 35-year-old Russian-American soloist Kirill Gerstein above.
Beethoven tends to bore me at concerts, partly from overexposure on classical radio stations over the years, but the playing of Gerstein and the orchestra under Charles Dutoit was playful, lively and completely absorbing. Gerstein's playing of familiar tunes was almost jazzy at times, bringing out elements of the music never heard before.
The second half of the concert was devoted to Shostakovich's monumental, hour-long "Stalin Is Dead" Symphony #10, and the orchestra played the stuffing out of it. The symphony alternates between extreme depressive moodiness to rhythmically crazed marches and waltzes, sounding rather like a Russian Mahler. It's a great, ambitious work, and though Dutoit had a problem keeping the energy taut during the quieter sections, the manic moments were thrilling and the overall performance a real accomplishment.
There will be two more performances on Friday and Saturday at Davies Hall. Highly recommended.
San Francisco felt weirder than usual on Monday. Unhappy about an upcoming contract negotiation, MUNI bus drivers staged a sickout.
The slow and unreliable MUNI bus system became effectively useless all day, with NextBus signage indicating that the next 47-Van Ness bus at 2PM would arrive in either 48 or 49 minutes, maybe, depending, and it would probably be packed like a tin of sardines.
So I walked up Van Ness to Jackson Street, the site of a bizarre, intense FBI stakeout and search this weekend at the apartment of Ryan Chamberlain II, a local political operative who likes to play dirty for the powers that be in this city, and who was something of a specialist in using social media for politics and marketing.
There was little to no information in the media all weekend about what was actually happening, so I had lunch at the Bell Tower pub/restaurant which is across the street from Ryan's apartment. "Was he a regular?" I asked the staff, and they said he wasn't exactly a regular but they knew him, and the wild charges by the FBI through the media that he was armed and dangerous and a domestic terrorist didn't read right at all from their encounters. What struck everyone as totally weird was the behavior of the FBI setting up a containment area and putting on Hazmat suits without bothering to evacuate anyone from the neighborhood. "Should we close the front door so we don't get poisoned?" one of the patrons who had been there on Saturday afternoon asked at the time. The response was "We're all doomed if it comes to that."
Later on Monday afternoon, the supposedly armed and dangerous fugitive was seen having a drink at the appropriately named Mad Dog in The Fog pub in the lower Haight, where he was spotted and somebody sent out a Twitter alert. At around 6PM, Chamberlain was spotted at Crissy Field in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, where he was arrested by a whole phalanx of law enforcement. (Click here for a phone video at San Francisco Citizen by some passerby that's priceless in its peanut gallery narration.)
None of the story makes a bit of sense. Since both the FBI and the San Francisco Police Department have proven themselves to be extremely untrustworthy over the decades, nobody is buying their story without some proof, which has not been offered so far. That doesn't mean Chamberlain is an innocent character either, since he was leaving clues left and right online about how dark his life had become over the last year. We shall see.
In the Saki short story, Reginald on Christmas Presents, the eponymous young London aesthete declares, "People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die." That quip came to mind at last Friday's San Francisco Symphony concert which featured three Catholic choral works from the 20th century by Poulenc, Stravinsky, and Faure respectively. Though I may despise the Church for its misogyny and gay-bashing, the religious system that has inspired such great music will also probably never really die.
The Poulenc was the alternately bouncy and serene Gloria from 1960, composed a few years before the composer's death. Charles Dutoit conducted the orchestra and Symphony Chorus in a wonderful performance, abetted by the soloist Susanna Phillips above. The young soprano has one of the purest, most unforced voices I have ever heard in Davies Hall, and by the end of Gloria, some in the audience were ready to kneel in a "we are not worthy" diva worship posture.
The Poulenc was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to the memory of its great conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms in 1930, which was the second piece on Friday's program. As you can see above, the violins have vanished and been replaced by two pianos, an eccentric orchestration to accompany a chorus of three Psalms sung in Latin. The piece is characteristically Stravinsky spiky, alternating with more serene sections and an uncharacteristic sweet, soft, ethereal finale.
The SF Symphony Chorus, celebrating its 40th anniversary as an organizational mixture of professionals and gifted amateurs, is one of my favorite musical groups in the world. Under their director Ragnar Bohlin above, they seem to be getting better every year. Their ability to sing at every possible dynamic, and their wide range of repertory, from Bach to John Adams, is one of San Francisco's serious cultural treasures.
The final piece on the program was Faure's gentle Requiem, where there was more singing from the superb Susanna Philips and not-so-superb bass-baritone Hanno Muller-Brachmann. My concert companion thought the conducting by Dutoit above was a little too serene, wanting a bit more dramatic shading between the seven movements, but I thought it was a masterful job by everyone, and the final In Paradisum really did take us through the Gates of Heaven.
