Worshipping at the Shrine of the Beat

San Francisco, they say, is the literary mecca of the United States, or at least, that of the Western Pacific seaboard. And deep in the heart of San Francisco, admist the tourists and seed of North Beach, lies the holy Kaaba of American literature, City Lights Bookshop. This is the place where the Beat Poets gathered, condensed, and poured forth a unique stream of writings.

Alas, the most famous of the Beat Poets have passed on, Kerouac, Bukowski. Yet there are some that are left. The other night, I went to my first reading at City Lights. It was advertised as a gala event, a poetry recital from Gary Snyder, one of the surviving Beats. Surprisingly, this, was the first time Gary had been invited to read at City Lights. His poetry is suffused through with the terse and concrete quality of Zen. Indeed, Snyder explained that he spoke fluent Japanese and had spent 10 years in Japan. Yet, his is not a blind devotion. When asked about the haiku form by a young lad (who wanted to know because, he, the young lad wearing a hat and waistcoat, had written many haiku's in his past, but that now, he just stopped and wanted to know why - don't make me puke), Snyder answered that a haiku doesn't really work in English, the play of grammar in haiku is unique to the Japanese. Nevertheless, he admires the concision of haiku's, and that, he brings to his poetry. His concerns are epic, mountains, volcanoes, life, death and the burning towers of new york. I was almost brought to tears.

I had not realised how popular the reading was going to be. When I arrived, the door had just closed as there were so many people that they would have spilled onto the street. Having nothing better to do, I hung around outside. And sure enough, some weak-willed folks walked out before the event started and so I managed to be one of the last to sneak in. I squeezed into the hordes of people crammed into that bookshop, sandwiched between the books, listening to the Poet. It was so tight that my leg was starting to go dead from my awkard stance. I could feel the breathing of the person in front of me. I dared not move for fear of falling over someone. But at some point during the recital, during a moment when I got lost in the poetry, I realised that I had achieved communion with the fibrous vastness of the American imagination.

Election Fever reaches Boiling Point

I have been granted the fortune to be in the United States during an election year. As a citizen of the world, we get to see, from the outside in, the United States go through its 4-yearly epileptic fit known as the election for the POTUS (President of the United States). I remember being in Australia staring numbly at the TV screen gamely trying to remeber the names of the 50 states. Now I've almost got all the States memorized, their names associated with bits of political trivia (No republican pres has won without Ohio). From within, you can see the full treatment, the constant buzzing of the commentary, from talkshows to newsshows to newspapers.

Of course, USA is a b-i-g country, and where you are will determine what you see. Here, in San Francisco, one of the two poles of American liberalism (the other being that pit of sin - NYC), one gets a skewed view. Most folks around here are self-identified liberals, and people seem acutely embarassed by their POTUS. Most are politically blinkered and believe that Kerry will definitely win because they can't understand how anyone could vote for Bush. Others are defeatist simply by extrapolating from the target audience of American TV programming.

Just today, we had an impromptu politics discussion, where someone volunteers the information that although Dad and sis will vote for Bush, he and his mother will counteract that with votes for Kerry. Unfortunately, with the subtelties of the electoral college, votes in the solid blue Democratic chunk of California will make little difference. It could very well come down to the Jewish retirees and blacks of Florida, or the steel workers of Ohio.

Free Improvisation is Free for a Reason

There is a reason why Free Improvisation is free. Because there is no way I will ever pay money to see free improvisation again. I'd never seen any before and I managed to finally catch some last night.

Free improvisation is well, free. No rules. Dance, dialogue, happening, it's all there and it's all very serious. Se--Ri-Ous.

I now understood why there are divisions in art. There are dancers, and singers, and actors, script writers, and comedians. Some people can dance well, some can write well, some can improvise well. But it is impossible to do all these things well at the same time. I saw a man and a woman, clearly on the other side of 40, frollicking around the stage like two 5 year olds, making blubbering nonsense noises, throwing bodies around in big motions, tell a pointless story, and destroy a microphone. Frankly, I would have preferred to watch 5 year olds do the same things. At least they would have done it with joyous childful abandon.

You know that a piece of theater is bad when the artist halfway through his "routine" stops to tell the audience that this is, in fact, an improvisation. Duh! As if we couldn't tell that from the half-arsed unstructured mess that we had just witnessed.

Film Art as Insult

Last night, I watched some of the worst art films of my life. It was at the "Cabinet of the Muses", an inter-genre festival organized by Berkeley-heads and took place in a theater here in the Mission. We had sat through some okay poetry and an interesting dance piece. And then there was film.

With a measured pace, our projectionist, a thin emaciated man, with a gaut face, and displaying delicate manners, took command of the room. He spoke passionately of the three films he was going to show us, and informed us that he had planned half an hour of film pleasure. Little did we know that it would be half an hour of his hideous celluloid slapping us in the face until we had submitted ourselves to the will of film art.

The first film was "based" on some Gertrude Stein writings - "The Making of Americans". It starts off okay, a slow sweeping camera movement over a tableau of objects, some with obvious American resonances. This then cuts away to the torture. It doesn't start off as such. Imagine the scren is cut into six boxes. In each box is a woman. Each woman thus repeats a phrase, some kind of pathetic sociological pusing like, "More and more, americans repeat themselves". Then for the next 15 minutes, we watch these women say this, in different combinations, in different ways. For the first 20 seconds, it's kind of amusing, then you try to search for a pattern - maybe there's some kind of rhythmic pattern, but 20 seconds later, you realize to your horror - there isn't. The film maker couldn't possibly have that much imagination. We sit through the most mind-numbingly boring 10 minutes watching these women repeat themselves. Suprisingly, there was moderate applause at the end - probably due to the Gertrude Stein references.

Film two was a very average film, not shockingly bad, but incoherent - some hokey dialogue scratched onto the film as text, played over some background imagery. References to spermicidal creme and vaginas provoked laughter in the adolescent teenager dancers from the dance piece earlier in the show. After the end of this film, the organisers turned on the lights lights thinking "golly gee - let's start the break and give the audience some mercy" But no. Our film projectionist quickly barked out in a haughtingly hurt tone, "No. The films aren't finished yet. There's one more" I could hear the audience groan as the lights were dimmed once more.

Called Photoheliograph, this last piece is one of the worst things I have seen, and I have seen some pretty bad things. It starts off with 5 minutes of black and a humming track. Then there is a few more minutes of black with some slivers of color. Then a horrendously lurid pattern writhes on the screen - something with the attractive patterning of vomit. We were privileged to witness this for a few more minutes where the pattern changed in an epileptic-fit-inducing manner. Finally, it ends and there is relief.

Life as lived watched

I haven't been watching films recently but in the last 5 days, I have managed to watch a film a day. When you do this, you lose somewhat your grip on the reality of your own life. You are awake, let's say 16 hours of the day, and a movie is say 2 hours. Assuming that 1/2 the time you a zombie, then for the last 5 days, 2 out of the 8 hours of my waking time was absorbed in a fantasy world. that's a quarter of my waking time.

Here's a rundown:

Friday night, I went to see the "Yes-Men", a modern update on the theatre of the absurd. A bunch of jokers leverage their satiric web-site of the WTO by accepting invitations from humorless conference organisers that mistake the fake web-site for the real thing. They are invited to the conferences where they have carte-blanche to say and do things to an audience that the Yes-men have not one iota of respect for. The highlights include a gold-lame suit and some not-so-hidden freudian imagery. unbelievably funny.

Saturday night at the nearby Dolores park, I saw the ever-popular "Harold and Maude". Come to think about it, it seems to be ever-popular mainly with the womens. This is a classic film about the romance between a 20 year old boy and a 80 year old woman. Kind of like a "As Good as it gets" in reverse. Apart from the over-acting and the look-at-me-I'm-being-so-rebelious tone, the Cat Stevens soundtrack managed to beat me into submission. Now, I'm a bit of a sentimentalist and will go for a well-placed acoustic guitar song somewhere just after the climax of a good story arc. But surely there can't be 20 different arcs in the one story. Or can there? There was a Cat Stevens song, regular as clock-work every 10 minutes. A plaintive rhythmic strumming of chords and then the soothing sounds of Cat Stevens poetically summing up what you had just watched in the last ten minutes since the last song. Although our young protagist manages to get it on with our octogenerian friend, all this is shown quite discretely in a very buorgeios kind of way. Oh, what some of these new-wave violent-femme french directors would have done.

Sunday night, "Maria Full of Grace" was a Columbian movie I had wanted to see for a very long time. I managed to go by dragging my only Columbian friend and his entourage with me to the cinema. It's the story of a Columbian woman who becomes a mule - a human drug carrier. This film is the type of film making I most admire. Nothing flashy, no special effects - just a taut story, grounded in highly believable characters, revealing a real world that ostensibly exists but is just out of sight. No need for artificial plot devices, absurd elements, or edgy characters to make it interesting. The movie moves a measured naturalistic pace so that you can truly experience the nerve-racking middle of the film. And I think the scipt-writer judged the tone of the ending perfectly - not too down, not too up, a sort of unresolved hope.

Monday Night, I saw the delirious "Angels in America: Part One". Adapted from the Tony Award winning play, this was an all-star HBO production. Some guilty delights - Al Pacino playing a wheezing, duplicitous homosexual politician and Emma Thompson in a cameo as an Angel (of death?). The film is a sprawling look at homosexuality and aids. The conceit of the film (which works wonderfully) is the seguing of magical realist elements into the world. The writing is top notch and gives the actors plenty to showcase their talents in the full three hours. I eagerly await the next 3 hours of Part Two.

Tuesday Night, at my french film course, I saw "Le Gout des Autres", a sly comedy of manners involving a variety of characters floating around the world of art. Le gout, or taste, is the tenous thread that runs through the movie, whether it be in art, in people or in interior decoration. The film poses questions about how we use taste, the funny moment when you decide that you really really like something or someone. An irrevocable act that cannot be changed as you watch your life veer off in pursuit of it.

Cyber-Geek Fashion Police

Mercy on ye who use not gadgets of the ORTHODOXY. I learnt this painful lesson at work from J, our resident hi-tech junkie. J spends much of his disposable income on the latest hi-tech toy. He has not just a phone, but a flip-screen fully-featured computer. A flip of the screen reveals a full qwerty keyboard underneath, albeit one for tiny little hands. When he talks into his phone, it looks like he is talking into a palm-pilot . He can telnet to our servers at work 24/7. And he does. He was the first to buy an iTrip, a Powerbook, an iSight and he's probably going to buy an iLife.

Last but not least, J has a iPod. Or at least I assume that he has. But considering that he probably carries his Powerbook everywhere, he may treat his laptop as a very large MP3 player.

I had recently arrived in our lab and penniless from travelling, I had bought a cheap-ass hand-held radio. Listening to my radio with my headphones on, I passed by J's office. As is his custom, he glances up to see who walked past. On seeing my radio, his face passed through a series of expressions, from puzzlement, to approval, to disbelief, and finally to disgust, with a little slight upcurl of the edge of his lips. "Is that a.. a.. a.. radio?" he asks. I answer yes, and he just shakes his head like a father discovering that his son is gay for the first time.

Later, I managed to fish out of him what had gone on in his head. "Well,", he explained to me. "First, I saw that you had a music of device of some sort -evident from the earphones trailing out. I looked a bit closer and then realised it was a radio receiver. Now that couldn't be because that's just so wrong. [puzzlement] So then I thought you couldn't be that sad and so it must be an MP3 player with a retro design [approval]. I look a bit more and then relief that it really was a radio [disbelief]. That is just too sad. [disgust]."

The Apple Powerbook is art - it's official

What is art? An eternal question that I came to closer to answering the other day when I visited the SF Museum of Modern Art.

I visited SFMOMA for lack of something better to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The last time I was there, I was sorely disappointed mainly because I had just spent two afternoons roaming the glorious Metropolitan Museum of NY city. SFMOMA was a country-fair rock garden in comparison. That was a bit unfair as this time around, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. SFMOMA is a respectable museum with a reasonable number of the usual suspects: a couple of Picasso's, some Monets and a Mondrian or two.

So I wonder around and finally get to the section called the Art of Design and Architecture. Arranged in a sombre room are exemplary articles from the last few decades of American manufacturing. These are objects that have exceptionally beautiful design, and some of them are. Others are just bad acid trips from the 60's. And there, in the halcoyn holy shrine of Modern Art sits an Apple Powerbook, sealed by a thick clear plastic box, clearly to protect it from the ravages of Age. An unkind friend suggested that as Apple is a company based just outside San Francisco, an indecent donation to the SFMOMA may have helped the curators see the art in the Powerbook.I, on the other hand, believe in the purity of the Ideals of Art.

I fully expect to see an iPod enshrined, the next time I visit SFMOMA.OMA.