Making Mothers Invisible at the Library

Three weeks ago a series of large, striking, black-and-white photos of women appeared plastered around the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.



I followed the website address on one of the posters (click here) to the Inside Out art project, a global initiative spearheaded by the Paris-based Tunisian photographer JR with a $100,000 TED Prize grant. Here's a description from the site:

"INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually."

There was an interesting article on JR in The New Yorker in November last year (click here for an abstract):

In the spring, JR launched a million-dollar global participatory project called “Inside Out,” for which he will not take a single picture. Instead, he is encouraging people to take their own portraits, which they can send to him with a statement of purpose; he will print the photos on a large scale and return them, so that participants can paste them wherever they choose. “The idea is that you have to stand for what you care about,” he explained on Al Jazeera.

This San Francisco Main Branch library wasn't on the project website, so I went to the library and asked if anybody knew who had sponsored this particular installation and why was it all women? Nobody at the information desk in the lobby could tell me a thing, and the installations and public relations office on the sixth floor was mostly empty, and the few people who were there didn't seem to know anything about it either.



I finally received the information from library curator Everett Erlandson who told me that the photos had been installed by something called the International Museum of Women. On their website (click here), they explain that the installation is called Making Mothers Visible San Francisco, but they haven't been very good at getting the word out. I was hoping that the exhibit was simply pictures of my Civic Center neighbors, and the fact that it was supposed to be about making mothers "visible" never crossed my mind.

The Stink of Corruption at the Ethics Commission

Late Tuesday afternoon, a long line formed in front of Room 400 at San Francisco City Hall to watch the Ethics Commission as they made up the rules in their continuing public inquisition of deposed Sheriff Mirkarimi during a contentious six hour meeting. (Click here for a background story.)



The crowd was large enough that the overflow of about 100 people were put into an adjoining hearing room that featured a large screen where the meeting was being televised.



Though the crowd was mostly quiet and attentive, there were also plenty of groans and derisive laughter when the City's unctuous attorneys, such as Peter Keith above, laid out the need for an encyclopedic list of expert witnesses that have nothing to do with the core issue of whether Mirkarimi committed "official misconduct" when he got into a domestic argument with his wife, Eliana Lopez.



Provoking the most derision was attorney Sherri Kaiser above who was reminiscent of the Dolores Umbridge character in the Harry Potter series. That was the teacher at Hogwarts who wore big pink bows and was a stickler for good behavior and propriety while not so secretly torturing children. Ms. Kaiser kept intimating that there were deeper, darker secrets that had not yet been revealed, and the only way she was going to get to them was if Mirkarimi essentially stopped defending himself and declared himself a dastardly woman-beating criminal. "We have so few resources and time," she kept complaining, which was one of the more patently absurd lines of the evening.



The City and County of San Francisco has an annual budget of nearly seven billion dollars which is somehow not enough to fix potholes without a special public bond, but does seem to be enough to pay "expert witnesses" millions of dollars to testify about law enforcement practices around the state of California. Meanwhile, Mirkarimi is going bankrupt trying to defend himself, with Shepard Kopp above as one of his lawyers. (Click here for another thorough, brilliant article by Larry Bush at CitiReport about the dubious ethical track record of some of these expert witnesses.)

Bush also points out how grotesquely skewed the media coverage has been from day one with this damning set of statistics:

"In the first sixty days of the Mirkarimi case emerging publicly, the Chronicle ran 98 news stories, gossip column items, editorials and other materials. The Examiner ran 55 stories and editorials and gossip columns in the same period, and the SFAppeal and BayCitizen each ran just under 20 stories.

The Chronicle, which led the coverage, never mentioned the District Attorney’s conflicts, never covered Mirkarimi’s longtime romantic partner’s claim that Ross was never violent, never covered the District Attorney’s failure to pursue nearly 1,000 domestic violence referrals in the past year, and never covered other issues such as the potential lack of impartiality on the part of the judge hearing the case.

Unsurprisingly, the paper backed its coverage by rushing out a poll with an unknown client and with no reporting on the questions to say that public opinion has turned sharply against Mirkarimi."

Update: The Mayor, The Ethics Commission, and the San Francisco Chronicle proceeded to digitally publish the Eliana Lopez video today in an act so personally invasive and disgraceful it beggars belief.



It appeared fairly obvious that the fix is in for the commission to do whatever Mayor Ed Lee tells them to do, and when angry outbursts from the audience got out of hand, Commission Chairman Benedict Hur above adjourned for a quick recess.



The entirely pro-Mirkarimi crowd in the hallways started chanting what I thought was "Shame on You!" at the city lawyers as they came out for a break, but which has been reported elsewhere as "Shame on Lee!" Either one would have been appropriate because the stink of brazen corruption at San Francisco City Hall these days is getting a bit ripe.

Writhing Lotus

Breathing Lotus, the Asian Art Museum's giant outdoor installation in Civic Center Plaza, is situated in a wild wind tunnel.



Spring and summer, when the sculpture is slated to hang out, are traditionally the windiest times of the year.



The piece is constantly writhing and changing shape...



...sometimes even imitating the Rolling Stones lips logo.



Let us hope that the flower doesn't get blown off its pedestal and take out a doubledecker tour bus, like the 1991 Christo death by a giant yellow umbrella in Los Angeles.

Finland Station at the San Francisco Symphony

Last week's San Francisco Symphony program was devoted to Finland and Russia, with Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska conducting Minea by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, followed by music by Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Minea was written in 2008 for the Minnesota Orchestra where Vanska is the Music Director, and was meant to evoke the city of Minneapolis, but if you were given twenty guesses about which American city this music was meant to portray, the chances are that Minneapolis would probably not be one of them. The twenty-minute work for large orchestra builds to a loud climax about halfway through, and then just gets louder for the next half. Though I liked the bongo drums that kept popping up, Minea mostly sounded like particularly bombastic film music.



The Prokofiev First Violin Concerto, with the composer at his most gentle and lyrical, came as a welcome relief. Hilary Hahn, in one of the most beautiful concert gowns ever seen at Davies Hall, gave an amazing performance of the upside-down concerto which starts off ethereal and dreamy in the opening movement, turns spiky in what is usually the slow movement, and then drifts off softly and beautifully in the third.



Hahn has been commissioning 27 contemporary composers to write new encore pieces for the violin, which she has begun playing around the world. On Thursday afternoon, she played a new piece by Nico Muhly, and on Friday evening it was Tina Davidson and J.S. Bach. On the Saturday evening we attended, it was the turn of composer Lera Auerbach, whose encore piece didn't make much of an impression.



The second half of the concert was devoted to Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, which I heard for the first time when the Cleveland Symphony brought it as part of its West Coast tour. At the time, I wrote that the Clevelanders' playing of the long, slow first movement was beyond compare, but that they didn't seem to get the wild, rhythmic pulses of the two short final movements.

With the San Francisco Symphony, the opposite was true. They played the first movement very well indeed but it didn't quite take one to the holy places where Cleveland had journeyed. San Francisco's playing of the final movements, though, was everything that the Cleveland performance was not: rhythmically precise, brilliantly fun, surprising and sarcastic all at once. So between the two orchestras, I have now heard a perfect Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

The Return of Narkissos

Narkissos, the last great collage completed by the San Francisco artist Jess has made a welcome return to the permanent collection gallery on the second floor of SFMOMA.



Jess was born Burgess Collins in Long Beach in 1923, was drafted into the military after studying chemistry at Cal Tech, and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War Two. He followed that with a three-year stint at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington where he became completely disillusioned with his scientific career and its role in the atomic destruction of the world. In 1949 he enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and began referring to himself as "Jess". He met the Berkeley poet Robert Duncan in 1951 and the two became lovers until Duncan's death in 1988.



Duncan and Jess were central spokes of San Francisco gay bohemia in the 1950s and 1960s which culminated in the Beat and Hippie movements, along with whatever we're calling the digital revolution that also flows from their work.



A Wikipedia entry on Jess notes that his collages are known for themes drawn from chemistry, alchemy, the occult, and male beauty, which pretty much describes Narkissos to a T. He worked on the piece from 1976 to 1991, and it's great to have it back out of storage.