Tricolor City Hall

On Tuesday, November 3rd, San Francisco City Hall was lit red, white, and blue for Election Day, complete with a flashing white light to add extra pizzazz.



Tonight at 5:30 PM City Hall was lit exactly the same, minus the flashing white light, and my first thought was, "Is there another election somewhere?" before realizing the recycled lighting scheme was expressing solidarity with the terrorism victims today in Paris. To add to the apocalyptic atmosphere, there were a pair of helicopters hovering nearby capturing disaster footage for local TV stations of a tour bus gone berserk near Union Square which caused a chain reaction crash involving a bicyclist, cars, trucks, and scaffolding. Friday the 13th lived up to its reputation.

Stuart Canin and Sarah Cahill Performing This Friday

This Friday the 13th at Old First Church on Van Ness and Sacramento at 8PM, violinist Stuart Canin joins pianist Sarah Cahill for a joint recital, and if it's half as good as their collaboration last year, this is a concert not to be missed. Tickets are $15-$20 and you can buy them online or at the door.



The program features sonatas by Brahms and Prokofiev, the Duo Concertant by Stravinsky, a few violin showpieces by Kreisler, and to mix it all up, a world premiere for solo piano by Luciano Chessa above. See you there.

Recology and Divine Surrealism at the O'Farrell Theatre

The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre strip club has been covered with extravagant paint jobs since at least the 1970s.



A couple of years ago, the outside back wall was adorned with a striking Mike Shine mural of a band where the banjo player was "first to leave."



It was replaced in May by an 80'x35' wheat paste collage mural by John Vochatzer, whose day job is actually working in some capacity at the strip club. It was John's boss who offered the commission and the result is spectacular, a quartet of surrealist female divinities. For a very entertaining interview with the artist about the trials and tribulations of installing the piece, click here for a post at Street Art.



By the way, I have tried on two separate days to take a shot of the full mural, but there always seems to be a Recology garbage truck parked in front of it. Thankfully, the blue and green truck highlights actually match the mural's color scheme, but it does make one wonder if the employee benefits program at Recology includes Happy Hour at the O'Farrell Theatre.

Looking East at the Asian Art Museum

One of the best traveling exhibits to ever appear at the Asian Art Museum has just been installed through February 7th.



Compiled from the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the show's name is a mouthful: Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists. The 1888 painting above by Frenchman Louis Dumolin, Carp Banners in Kyoto, is a literal "inspiration" of the French fad for everything japonisme.



The exhibit is smart and subtle in charting the cross-cultural explosion that occurred when Japan was forcibly opened to international trade in the 1850s, and Boston's collection is so deep in both Western and Asian art that it can illustrate the affinities, cultural projections, and contradictions in fascinating detail. By the way, you are allowed to take photos without flash at the exhibit, a generous and enlightened decision by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.



The installation is well done, pairing Japanese works like the 1857 woodblock print Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge by Utagawa Hiroshige I with Monet's 1900 painting, The Water Lily Pond.



Mary Cassatt's 1902 painting, Maternal Caress is flanked by the early 19th century woodblock print Otome by Kikukawa Eizan illustrating the same subject.



Sometimes the correspondence is more a matter of attitude and style, as in the woodblock prints of famous Japanese actors in their roles by Utagawa Kunisada paired with a striking Van Gogh painting from 1988 of Postman Joseph Roulin.



A new security guard was patrolling one of the galleries during the press preview, and he mentioned that he had never been around such famous European paintings before as I stopped in front of Matisse's 1924 Vase of Flowers.



The Western art in the exhibit isn't all European, though, and there are representatives of Boston area artists depicting the Oriental art collections of Boston Brahmins, such as the 1921 painting above, The Silver Screen, by Frank Weston Benson.



The cultural influences were bidirectional, and it is sometimes difficult to guess whether a piece is Western or Japanese without looking at the wall labels. The 1925 print of Yosemite's El Capitan, for instance, was created by Yoshida Hiroshi. It would be interesting to see a mirrored exhibit, Looking West, examining the European influence on Japanese artists during the same period.