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Grotto Works Rocks

The first-ever Grotto Works celebration was hot--literally--thanks to the 300 or so guests who packed our sweltering, surprisingly under-air conditioned offices on a warm Saturday night. Everyone crowded in to the conference room for two rounds of reading--first at eight with Christopher Cook, David Ewing Duncan, Melanie Gideon, and Kaui Hart Hemmings; and then at nine with Caroline Paul, Peter Orner, yours truly, and Jason Roberts. Our emcee, SF Chronicle book review editor Oscar Villalon, kept the evening rolling with his usual charisma, and everyone partook amply of the wine.

Thanks to everyone who came, to Oscar, and to A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, on hand with the goods. As I noted mournfully during the readings, Clean Well-Lighted's much-loved store on Opera Plaza is closing. Apparently, they've got a few more weeks of business, and could use help closing out their inventory. If you'd like to say your goodbyes to this store whose great readings series has done so much to get the word out for good books, drop by during the next week and pick up that novel or poetry collection or biography you keep meaning to buy.

UPDATE: Leah Garchik reports in Wednesday's Chronicle that locally owned Books Inc will take over Clean Well-Lighted's space at Opera Plaza, with management looking forward to hosting more and bigger readings than they've been able to in Books Inc's smaller stores. So stop by Opera Plaza now to say goodbye, and again in mid-September to say hello.

June 26, 2006  ·  05:14 PM   ·  Misc.   ·  Comments (1)

Today is the 20th anniversary of my father's death.

June 22, 2006  ·  10:45 AM   ·  Personal   ·  Comments (3)

Baryshnikov's Young Talents

Mikhail Baryshnikov's latest touring project, Hell's Kitchen Dance, is an absolute delight, mostly thanks to the talent of young Canadian-born choreographer Aszure Barton. From my review in today's Chronicle:

"It used to be Mikhail Baryshnikov kept getting older while the dancers around him kept getting younger. But with his latest project, Hell's Kitchen Dance, the ballet superstar is younger, too -- at least on-screen, where footage of him as a nimble Kirov Ballet student looms as oversized as his fame.

Onstage at the intimate Zellerbach Playhouse, where this Cal Performances engagement continues through Sunday, the present-day Baryshnikov took one look at the pliant knees and fearless jumps of yesteryear and shrugged in joking defeat Thursday night, even though his current physical state is hardly impoverished. He looped through the deceptively slouchy phrases of Benjamin Millepied's "Years later" with consummate control, and even chanced a high-flying moment or two. At 58, his kinesthetic intelligence is so refined that it is possible to choose a single element of his dancing -- his hands, for instance -- and spend an entire night fascinated by the choices he makes with them.

And yet his performance is not the primary reason this program rates a must-see. Hell's Kitchen Dance is named after the Manhattan neighborhood of the recently opened Baryshnikov Arts Center, where Millepied and Aszure Barton are the first beneficiaries of Baryshnikov's initiative to foster fresh dance-making talents. Millepied may be gifted; it was difficult to tell from "Years later," which was enhanced greatly by Olivier Simola's extensive videography, but lingered in mind more as a clever star vehicle than a statement of choreographic originality.

Barton is clearly brilliant.

This became obvious toward the end of "Over/Come," the work for 13 dancers (sans Baryshnikov) that opens the evening. It's set to love songs one might imagine spilling out of a Bohemian cafe on a warm summer evening and populated by romantically disaffected hipsters in casually chic clothing. But it's the punchy movement rather than the atmosphere that keeps the dance compelling. Barton dissects phrases into tiny parts, rearranging and manipulating them into physical non-sequiturs. The result is an unpredictable chain of precise motion, punctuated by physical explosions more complex and outrageous than the best Jim Carrey impersonation."

Click here for the whole review.

June 17, 2006  ·  05:13 PM   ·  Dance   ·  Comments (0)

Everybody Loves Remy

The feedback I'm already receiving on this article in today's Chronicle just further confirms how beloved Remy Charlip--choreographer, founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, children's book author and illustrator--is in the Bay Area:

"The first time I saw Remy Charlip, he was 71, wearing a yellow raincoat and hat, and riding aloft upon the hands of a dozen beaming, stark-naked men. The work was "A Moveable Feast," Charlip's commission for the 2001 Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival, and what truly made the dance memorable was not the contrast of muscled bodies with Charlip's lightly liver-spotted skin, not the perfect comic timing as Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" swelled. The unforgettable element was the youthful joy radiating from Charlip's face. The crowds loved it.

San Francisco choreographers have loved Charlip since he moved here in 1989. A founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the author and illustrator of 33 children's books, Charlip quickly became a mentor, advising the risk-taking collective Contraband, collaborating with Margaret Jenkins, lending choreographic ideas to everyone from Axis Dance to Oakland Ballet.

Naturally, then, choreographers were the first by Charlip's side when he suffered a potentially debilitating stroke last Halloween.

"He's not connected to his family of origin," said performance artist Keith Hennessy, one of a dozen friends on a roster of 24-hour attendants who cared for Charlip after his release from the hospital. "What we discovered after the stroke was, guess what, we're his family."

One of Remy Charlip's "Air Mail Dances." The drawings show the dance's key moments. The performers are then free to choreograph the spaces in between.

At first Charlip could hardly speak or move. The friends set up a committee to make decisions about health care and living costs, provide physical therapy in the Alexander Technique -- of which Charlip is a practitioner -- and to visit and read to him. Today, Charlip can speak and write, though he often confuses words and numbers, and is beginning to use the telephone. But his admirers are not content to stand idle. "The way we know how to help," Hennessy said, "is to put on a show."

The range of performers in Saturday's "Every Little Movement: A Benefit for Remy Charlip" testifies to the breadth of artists he's inspired. The lineup includes everything from the raucous political diatribes of Dance Brigade to the serene aerial work of Joanna Haigood to the quirky dreamscapes of former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Julia Adam. The dancers hope to offset Charlip's medical bills, but just as passionately, they want to spread appreciation for a singular artist they adore. "

The story includes a great photo of Remy in all his irrepressible whimsicality; for the whole thing, click here.

June 15, 2006  ·  10:04 AM   ·  Dance   ·  Comments (0)

When a friend of mine who edits San Francisco State's alumni magazine asked me to interview the Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle, I couldn't resist. By coincidence, I had just seen the mesmerizing Bechtle retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I knew it would be an honor to talk to him. The resulting story isn't my most stylish writing, but it was wonderful to stretch myself beyond dance, and apparently Bechtle approved. Here's the top:

"On a rainy March afternoon, Robert Bechtle stands in the basement studio of his Potrero Hill home, impatiently considering a canvas. Just months ago, Bechtle's name flew on banners around Union Square, and thousands had visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see the first large-scale exhibition of his work. But for Bechtle, who taught painting at SFSU for more than 30 years, the buzz of celebration has been replaced by the frustration of getting back to work.

On the canvas, brown lines sketch a row of suburban homes. "This is revisiting an earlier painting, which is something I'm interested in doing, because it will come out totally different," he says in a soft voice, touching his wiry white beard.

He doesn't just mean that the trees are now taller, and that a blue car is now parked on the street. The differences will be both more nuanced and more personal. After all, Bechtle does not draw and paint freehand, but projects his photographs onto canvases before meticulously filling in the details -- a process that, when he first adopted it four decades ago, struck him as "slightly naughty." He is the leading figure of the Photorealist school of painting, one of the most noted art movements of the late '60s and '70s. But while his works entrancingly re-create the look of an old family snapshot, the photograph is just a starting point for his art, opening up myriad choices about color and proportion, texture, and what Bechtle calls "a certain amount of fakery that is just technique."

His subjects are as distinct as his methods -- placid streetscapes and '60s-era cars, backyard barbecues and other outtakes from middle-class family life, all awash in pale California sunlight and suffused with a subtly sad nostalgia. The paintings impart a strange feeling of loss, but they began as an attempt to avoid emotionality."

Click here for the rest, and more gorgeous paintings.

June 08, 2006  ·  02:58 PM   ·  Misc.   ·  Comments (0)

June 07, 2006  ·  05:18 PM   ·  The Lost Night   ·  Comments (0)