Final Trip Report

As I mentioned in a previous report, in late October I visited a number of Holy Shrines in the Bay Area. Here's the second half of my itinerary.

Start with pre-Halloween festivities at Orchard Supply Hardware with Ken, where one can still purchase many lengths of 2-52 nuts and bolts, in contrast to my local Ace Hardware where I'm lucky to find anything smaller than a miniscule selection of 4-40's...

punkInHead.jpg

Later that week I BARTed to SFMoMA for some more culture. Besides a lovely Weston Pepper print they had an installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer -- whose pieces I'd just seen at Bitforms in NYC:

Voice Array

and

Last Breath

Ed Osborn's Night-Sea Music -- which I'd seen in a SF gallery some years ago before he was famous...hah hah...and didn't know was on display here:

And the last day of Jim Campbell's Exploded Views, which I just happened to be viewing when he arrived to do an artist's talk:

After a march down Market Street to The Zuni Cafe I managed to scam onto the prow-window-seat for dinner with Ken and Brian. I was too busy eating everything on the appetizer menu, including oysters of course, to take any photos. But I'll always have the memories, won't I?


Then down to Santa Cruz for a tour of the Art, Music, and DARC -- Digital Arts Research Center -- facilities with Sudhu, who is collecting keys and access codes at an alarming rate (he is also angling to get my old job running the electronic music studios). It took about 45 minutes to finally find the tiny buildings I remembered, hidden away in the forest.

On the way out I stopped at Waddell Creek, one of my favorite beaches just north of Santa Cruz, and touched the Pacific. There I found this small rivulet draining into the sea. I was too lazy to go back to the truck for the real camera so all I have is this schmutzy cell phone image:

Scale Free Image

Three days in the sun at Jasper Ridge with Brooke and Deanna were capped by a Horse Vaulting Halloween party in Saratoga. Here's Natasha as Doctor Who getting some air on a barrel:

natashaJump.jpg

I got all setup to get some good photos of the main event but unfortunately she was always just getting into position as she passed my frame, so I didn't get a good picture on a real horse. However the place was chock-a-block with cute young devil-eared things so I managed to snap one of her team mates instead:

vaulting.jpg

Then the excrutiating drive home via Eisenhower's lovely Interstate system. I hit Mojave at sunset just in time to see the full moon rise over the Eastern desert and found this in my Barstow motel room. I think it's a dog, but it could be a bunny:

towelDog.jpg

Night two was spent in Flagstaff's Hotel Monte Vista:

http://www.hotelmontevista.com/

 which features two bars. I selected the wrong one for my first martini(s) and then felt it necessary to sample the "correct" one. So the next day's drive to Santa Fe was a bit more challenging than it really needed to be...

But all in all it was an amazingly scenic and reasonably painless trip.
We now return you to our regular programming.

The Trip So Far

I'm in the midst of a road trip from Santa Fe to the Bay Area -- and presumably back. I took the scenic route through southern Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. The leaves were turning:

view from Kiva Coffee on Utah Highway 12

and there were only a few Romney-Ryan signs to be seen in the clutter of local election trivia. I have not seen a single Obama-Biden sign, even here in Berkeley though. It could be that we just don't care anymore?

Following the grueling ups and downs of NV Highway 50, I over-nighted at Circus Circus in Reno. I can definitively say that I have now seen the present and it is omnipotent:

underground dividing line between Circus Cicus and Eldorado casinos

The downtown casinos seem to be connected via mazes of underground passages full of flashing lights and bleeping sounds, all watched over by security cameras of amazing grace (one camera got facial shots of everyone who entered a particular restroom complex). In a cultural full-court-press, I was served all-you-can-eat-average-sushi by an tiny older Japanese woman, sporting a "Godzilla" name tag, working in a place called Kokopelli's Sushi at the back of Dos Geckos Cantina somewhere underneath Circus Circus. I also couldn't figure out how to give them any of my money because there are no longer coin operated slot machines. I think you need to plug your credit card directly into all the devices so as to make the draining of your accounts more efficient.

Thankfully, I got out of town the next morning and through the Sierras to the b.Area without further incident. The Berkeley Art Museum has a show of graffiti-street art stuff which I found to be mostly uninteresting. The mechanized spray-boys sprinkled around the space were kinda fun -- variously sized figures with mechanical arms holding spray cans, pretending to tag whatever they could. However...upstairs:

Barry McGee's head

The same motor-crank mechanism is used to bang this guy's head against the wall with a satisfying clunk-clunk-clunk. And on the top floor is a review of recent acquisitions which are well signed and in many cases actually thoughtful and interesting. I'm off to the real Maudlin Art Museum in da-city later today -- there may be more art reportage later. I also found one of the Hans Haacke books I wanted at Moes, so all is not yet lost.

Then I went to the old Berkeley Bowl:

an acre of fruits and vegetables at Berkeley Bowl

And nearly broke into tears...

All this plus oysters at Cafe Rouge, Sushi at Uzen, a Sazerac at Cesar, and the Zuni yet to come.

Turbulent Hans Haacke

Last Saturday I went to the New York New Museum's Ghosts in the Machine show and found that Hans Haacke has already done it all. In 1965. On show were two of his pieces using wind blowers to move objects around in much more mesmerizing ways than my packing pellets.

http://mlkshk.com/r/4WH6

The first, Blue Sail is a big, well not to put too fine a point on it, blue sail of light fabric tethered and weighted at the corners. A household variety oscillating fan underneath makes it billow and flow in apparently random ways. The second, Kugel in Schragen Luftstrahl, is a small helium weather balloon bobbing around in the mid-air Bernoulli effect of a hairdryer blower. When the guard wasn't looking I waved my hand over the blower outlet and got it to bobble even more. Way nicer, and quieter, than the volley-ball-in-traffic-cone version we had at the Explo, which, while doing all this putzing around, I didn't think of either.

Fortunately no one knows about Haacke and his hot air, aside from the hundreds of tourists that go to NYC Museums, so I may be safe.

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/cone/Images/cone8-6-11.jpg

Right next to Haacke's balloon was a piece by Gunther Uecker called New York Dancer IV -- also from bloody 1965. A human sized shroud of canvas pierced through all over with various sizes of iron nails. It just hung around until 4pm when I was lucky enough to stumble into the room in time for it's daily demo. A stunningly gorgeous young woman came darting into the space, uncovered a red switch-box in the corner, meticulously donned cotton curatorial gloves, and with a fairly bored expression pushed the button to make the thing slowly spin. As it got up to speed the fabric billowed out and the nails flailed around in pleasant wavy ways. Then some bit would get bound up in the mechanism causing the whole thing to slam crashing around, at which point our Muse let off the gas for a bit to slow it down. And...Repeat.

<sorry...no photo>

Grasping for a conversational gambit afterwards, I asked her if it had been the artist's intention to have those transitions from simple waving to complex crashing. She said he had actually demonstrated it being operated as such, although she described it as, "Really stomping on the switch..." So it's not entirely clear if complex behavioral transitions were a consciously desired result or just serendipity.

The rest of the show was a mixed bag of mechanical objects and mechanical drawings, all owing their raison to Duchamp's Bachelors -- if one is to believe the curatorial introduction in the catalog. Much of it was fascinating historically and some was still engaging. However, while there was a bit of work from the post-1970's, it stopped short of the Software show debacle and Burnham's subsequent Panacea that Failed analysis of the whole ArtTech scene. This may, by its absence, provide another leg for my hypothesis -- that all we got out of the era was MTV -- to stand upon.

Anyway....I get the Axle truck in about an hour to start the actual installation...