Alchemy

San Francisco isn't much of an art buying town. Art creating? Yes. Art appreciating? Certainly. Art buying? Not so much. If an artist wants to make a career of it, the sad fact is that they have to leave the Bay Area, and head to one of the big art cities: New York, LA, Chicago, or Miami. San Francisco runs a distant (and depressing) 5th.

As unfortunate as that may be, it shouldn't be too surprising, really ... more than anything, San Francisco has a storied tradition of bleeding edge creativity, rugged entrepreneurship, and flying in the face of the norm ... oftentimes swinging wildly at it. Our strength is thus in underground and emerging artists who aren't aiming at the mainstream unless they're doing so through a set of crosshairs.

When that's combined with the laid-back attitude and studied casualness for which the Bay Area is known, it can be understood why audacious spending on a scale commensurate with serious art collection just doesn't happen here. San Franciscans value one another more for what they create than the price tag of the art they hang on their walls.

What the Bay Area needs is an innovative structure for its art market that takes this reality into account, and works with it -- augmenting its strengths and offsetting its weaknesses -- to enable Bay Area artists to make a semblance of a living creating exactly the art they want to create, without having to compromise their vision. Otherwise, artists whose work deserves to be seen, and whose voices need to be heard, will forever while away their days as your neighborhood barista.

I'd like to see this new market become a reality, and to that end, I've been curating art exhibitions for a variety of events featuring an eclectic mix of emerging artists, styles and media. The most recent was part of False Profit's Alchemy, an interactive art event at San Francisco's CELLspace. It hosted over 600 attendees, all of whom seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves as they took part in the various interactive aspects of the evening. The gallery featured a variety of oil paintings, pen and ink drawings, photography, collage, print-making, sculpture (works in steel, vinyl and cement), video, and an interactive site-specific installation. The represented artists ranged in age from 21 to 50+.

It was great working with the smart, driven folks at False Profit, and to have the opportunity to exhibit a strong showing of emerging artists to an appreciative crowd. Now ... to just get that crowd to put their money where their appreciation is ....

The Crucible's "Firebird" Fire Ballet

I just wrapped up stage management duties for a two-week run of The Crucible's latest fire ballet, this time it was their take on Stravinsky's Firebird.

I say "take" loosely, of course, since I have a feeling the traditional presentation of Firebird didn't include disco, funk, fire, a stunt motorcyclist, a flaming tutu, and an actual (not a prop) Pontiac Firebird being flown onto the stage. Yep, for reals.

It's always a good time working on the Crucible's productions. You missed this one? Sucks for you. Big mistake. Next time, go. Good cause, good show, good time ... you won't be left wanting for "You have got to be kidding me, they did not just do that. Good lord, they did just do that."

Big props to the Cru crew and their raging talents, constant innovation, and big hearts.

Yuri's Night

Billed as the annual celebration of Yuri Gagarin's being the first human shot into space (the first terrestrials sent were fruit flies ... followed by a dog, which died a panicked, painful death within hours of launch ... brutal, but I digress), Yuri's Night World Space Party is a collection of 198 parties taking place in 51 countries on 7 continents around the world on April 12th. The Bay Area, certainly no slouch when it comes to parties, stacks the deck by throwing it at the birthplace, home and retirement community of awesome: NASA's Moffett Field.

If you're lame, like me, and get your tickets late, like I did, you really take it in the pooper. At $50 a pop, that's a tall order for getting your money's worth. At the very least, there had better be singing frogs and free-flowing booze and mile-high porn if I'm shelling out $50. Sadly, none were in attendance. And yet ...

It was way cool. Long story short, Yuri's Night was simply the closest thing to Burning Man off playa. It was like somebody had taken the coolest parts of Black Rock City (the art, the scientific innovation, the music, the interesting smart people), combined it with long beer lines, and paved it.

Instead of artists slaving away on large-scale art installations all year long, Moffett Field's freakishly large, awe-inspiring buildings, mongo planes and gigantic signs warning of various ways you can be killed more than provided the recommended daily allowance of WTF? Plus, looking around and seeing a NASA logo when you've got a head full of whatever (and many seemed to, I might add)? That's pretty cool.

Next year, check it out. Get your tickets early.

Sound Check: Anatomy of a Theatrical Debacle

I arrived at the theater, and as I walked up the stairs, Tim came around the corner towards me, looking calm. Tim's my partner in running Everyday Theater, and our company's artistic director. Tim looking calm before one of our shows is unheard of ... the fragility of his pre-show psyche is legendary. Something was wrong.

"What's up?" I said.

"Well, we have no monitors," he said, way too matter-of-factly. "The monitors are gone."

"Gone?"

"Gone."

I looked at my watch. 9:15. Doors were at 10:00. We had 45 minutes to get set up, sound check all the performers, and open up what was going to be a sold out show. And there were no monitors.

Monitors are the speakers on stage that point towards the performers so they can do important things like hear themselves. They are critical for any musical act, but even more so for beat boxers, and we were producing the Vowel Movement's Bi-Monthly Beat Boxers Showcase ... or trying to, anyway.

The previous group's performance had just wrapped up, and the audience was filing out as I waded upstream into the theater. I reached the sound booth and met Dan, our sound technician who was replacing our normal sound guy, who had been called out of town that day. Dan, I was assured, had worked this theater before, and knew the system and the board.

I found Johnny, the guy who oversees the physical theater and the gallery-cum-event space that occupies the adjacent room, and asked him about the monitors. That day, they'd taken them down and removed all the wiring to create a "screening room" for their event in the gallery that night. Apparently he needed reminding that we're a musical show, requiring monitors, just as we had for the last dozen shows we'd done at that very same theater. Johnny just scratched his head and looked genuinely bewildered, like we hadn't been doing shows there for the past 12 months. It felt like talking to a crackhead about geopolitics.

After making some pointed requests through clenched teeth, we got the monitors back. But no cable ... rendering them useless. We scurried to jury rig the system, running an XLR cable (borrowed from one of the performers) down to a single JBL speaker we propped on stage. It was 10:00. We sound checked quickly, and everything sounded pretty good. We'd dodged a bullet. We opened the house at 10:15, unaware that the real trigger had yet to been pulled.

Despite the sound check, the sound started off buzzy and hissy. Dan rationalized it with a somewhat random, but vaguely plausible explanation. I asked him to try and correct it. From that point on, things went off the rails for Dan. The sound was too quiet, then too loud, too much bass, then not enough bass, feeding back, tinny -- in short: all over the place, and constantly changing. The beat boxers didn't know what to do ... and their frustration was so palpable you could touch it from the back of the room. There were a handful of moments where Dan lucked into a sweet spot where it actually sounded good, the performers rocked it, and the audience went nuts. I told Dan that whatever he did, to just. leave. it. right. there.

But it got bad again. Really ... embarrassingly ... bad. I winced. I gritted my teeth. It became clear that the closest Dan had ever come to being an actual sound technician was hauling speaker stacks and setting up mic stands. Eyeball deep in frustration, I leaned in and calmly said to him, "You really have no idea what you're doing right now, do you?" He wouldn't admit it, but he was clearly in way over his head ... he was just twiddling knobs at random, hoping for something to go right. And it wasn't. And Dan, truth be told, was dumb as bricks. To this point, the only dumber people I've ever had to deal with were mopping the floors in my high school, or pumping my gas. He had absolutely no hope in this situation, which required some intellectual acuity ... or at the very least an ability to follow a finger.

I ran back stage and grabbed Tim, telling him I was booting Dan off the board, and he had to fix it. Tim struggled to untangle the system as Dan had left it, and managed to get it somewhere close to sounding decent. But by this time, the sound had run out of ways to suck.

And while my night felt like that nightmare where you're driving a car from the back seat, and you can't quite reach the pedals or the steering wheel, and you're heading for a wall -- the audience absolutely. loved. the show. At the end, they were screaming for more and more encores ... true testament either to the absolute brilliance of these performers, or the myopic perspective of a producer.

I will say this: the post-show cocktail that night tasted particularly good.

Edwardian Ball 2008

I had the distinct honor of curating an art gallery for the Edwardian Ball last weekend. I've been going to the Ball since ... what ... 2003? As I've always been a big fan of this excellent event, it was very cool to be invited to curate a Hall of Fine Arts for their Edwardian World's Faire, new this year.

It was especially fun to curate for a specific genre ... particularly one that can't be found in the average art gallery. People aren't exactly clamoring for Edwardian era artwork these days, as you can imagine. I was humbled and flattered to be working alongside Paxton Gate, who created the Hall of Natural Sciences; Dark Garden, who did the Hall of Fine Fashions; and Kinetic Steamworks, who brought their steam engines to the Hall of Industry. Really the best company with whom to be working.

I received a lot of great compliments on the gallery, which was really gratifying. All in all, a great success!

Big thanks to Ann Jastrab, manager of San Francisco's RayKo Gallery, who helped me out by hooking me up with the artwork of Kenn Coplan, an amazing Los Angeles-based artist.

Hot Couture at The Crucible

I work a variety of gigs and events throughout the year. Big ones and small ones, from underground to corporate. This could be curating an entire art gallery, stage managing, running theater productions, or producing full events ... it varies widely, which is the way I like it. Never a dull moment. And with any luck, I'm actually able to schedule them such that they don't overlap too much.

By far my most favorite gigs to work are events at The Crucible. First and foremost, that's because of the crew there. These are easily the most affable, solid, and capable people with whom I've ever worked. You need a 20' welded steel ball to catch fire, zip-line from 200' onto a stage crowded with fire performers, explode in pyrotechnic bliss, and not kill anybody? Sure, we'll have that for you in 10 minutes. For an event producer, it's like being a kid in a candy store.

Second, the quality of the productions is inevitably top-notch ... they put on show that are some of the most innovative and outlandish creative efforts around, particularly with regard to taking traditional mediums and melding them (sometimes kicking and screaming) with the fire arts. As you can imagine, many of these, like ballet and opera, aren't used to that kind of partnership, but it creates theatrical magic every time.

Finally, these are fundraisers for a great cause. The Crucible does more than most organizations in the Bay Area to help people in our community grow their artistic skills, expand their horizons, and build their self-confidence through an impressively extensive offering of classes in the industrial and fire arts.

This weekend, I'm helping to stage manage the Hot Couture Fashion Show, celebrating their 9th anniversary in business. As expected, it's an incredible show that leaves no stops unpulled, and no opportunity for spewing fire left by the wayside. The combination of beautiful models catwalking the creations of some of the most innovative designers in the Bay Area you've probably never heard of but by all rights you should know ... together with the pyrotechnic skills of The Crucible is simply not to be missed.

Big props go out to Danielle Cohen of Missing Piece for her formidable skills in co-producing this event, making manifest the fashion side of the show ... in spades.

(photo credit: The Crucible)