For you friends who are wondering what I'm doing, here's the latest . . .
First, some other random observations:
- Tons of people here have iPhones, and I'm not talking about those who just bought them today or yesterday, like at least two of my friends have. The market share on these is far higher than it is in Phoenix. Besides the fact that Apple is down the street, maybe that tells you something . . .
- Barbers wear surgical masks here, and I've seen bartenders wearing latex gloves.
- It's far easier to figure out how to get into the city from the Oakland airport than it is from SFO. Surprisingly, my Southwest airlines flight was cheaper to fly into SFO.
Now for the update:
Yesterday, I spent most of the day at the de Young museum. In particular, I wanted to focus in on contemporary art. They had a fair selection of this, along with several other galleries of art from the americas. While I wasn't as interested in this, I really enjoyed seeing it. The architecture of the place is stunning, and that's another reason why I wanted to go see it.
Whenever I go to art museums in other cities, the thing I most treasure is seeing famous artworks that are recognizable to anybody who paid attention in high school. I'm not knowledgeable about art whatsoever, so my ignorance level is high. Yet, when I see pictures done by Picasso, Rothko, Matisse, Pollack, O'Keefe, Dali, or other world-renown figures in the art world, I'm just amazed and honored to be able to look at pieces of history like this.
Percussion Concert
Last night, I attended an avant garde concert in some type of warehouse district - either in the Mission or close to it. It was centered around percussion, and much of it was improvised, or greatly improvised from minimal composer's notes. The most amazing thing about this was that there were probably about 35 people in attendance. After hearing the first couple of numbers, I was surprised that the concert would draw this many people, or that the musicians performing in it would make enough of a living to spend as much time gigging as they seemed to.
The first piece featured a barefoot girl kneeling on the ground, playing a large bass drum with various mallets and a snare drum turned on its side, along with banging or bowing several found objects. I wasn't impressed, since the piece did not seem to be planned whatsoever, apart from simply assembling the somewhat ordinary "instruments".
The next performer was a man who did all of his work with various drum machines, samplers, and mixers, hooked up to various processors, including guitar distortion pedals and other effects systems. The guy looked like he'd spent a few too many weeks attending Star Trek festivals around the country (I thought he was kinda cute, which scares me a little), and his music was expectedly repetitive but also very bland, and his number seemed to go on and on forever.
The second half of the concert was a real treat, though. The next number featured a girl playing an electronic drum pad, singing, and sampling her voice, along with interspersing a number of sampled and looped sounds she had preset before the concert. Part poetry and part banging, she exhibited a great deal of thoughtfulness and artistry in this very edgy performance. The highlight was a song she said she'd literally written at 3AM the night before- with verses about knowing the pills by the sound they make. The choruses featuring rambling, half-awake, and slightly psychedelic lyrics were aptly descriptive of contemporary urban obsessions with prescription medication to cure all ailments. These choruses were interspersed with ethereal synth sounds, drum patters, and real-time sampled and looped recordings of her beautifully austere soprano voice. Of course, the connecting factor with all of these was her shaking of her various prescription and over-the-counter medicines she was taking. An amazingly thoughtful work in progress. Her other pieces were equally well-developed and enjoyable.
The fourth artist on the program was another percussionist and performance artist who offered one of the most shocking pieces I've seen. He began his performance by rubbing rubber balls on the ends of metal rods along the hardwood floor of the art gallery, causing them to make a low squeals slightly out of tune with each other. He also rubbed these rubber ball sticks against a large cylindrical tube. The tube was connected by two taut 4 foot pieces of masking tape to a snare drum and a tom-tom (?) drum from a drumset. After the rubber balls dragging, he rubbed his fingers along the length of the tape, magnified by resonance of the cylinder and vibrating the snares.
It pretty much got crazier from there, as he rumbled the tom tom over the hardwood and concrete floors, beat on a large bass drum with various mallets, stepped on old cymbals on the floor with his boots, and wacked the hell out of four de-stringed and de-necked violins. His performance grew more and more intense as he rapidly beat upon more and more objects. It was furiously crazy, reaching its zenith with him wacking on old vinyl records laid on top of grey acoustical foam. One-by-one, the records broke in half, which he then proceeded to wack those, producing even more sounds as he changed patterns on the fly in response to the broken pieces. Eventually, the records were all shattered into a hundred pieces each, with parts literally flying into the audience. (Sometimes the audience would throw some of the flying objects back to him, which he would then catch and beat on for a while.)
The point of all of this is that what's considered New Music in Phoenix is nothing like what I saw here in San Francisco. The line between art and crazy-ass crap is obviously a pretty fine one here.
Oh, before I forget, I saw a Yahoo employee last night at the restaurant I went to before the concert. I was tempted to ask him about the state of the company, but I thought that would be gauche at best. I should add that I really wanted to go down to San Jose this trip and try to take in some of the whole tech culture down there, but I cancelled those plans because of the hot weather. I'm hoping that I can schedule another time to take in some of that scene, find out what companies are doing tours, etc.
This hotel is one of the nicest I've stayed at, but the neighborhood is the worst I've stayed in. I've had to make a conscious effort to take certain routes home at night to avoid potential problems. And- while I was eating pizza for lunch this afternoon, I'm pretty sure I was watching several drug deals go down across the street. Also, there are tons of prostitutes in the neighborhood. They seem to be around at all hours, also, although maybe not as actively looking for johns.
Of course, this is a colorful city - and it is, I think, the capital city of the western United States. While some, including myself, may not like it as much as other cities, it's a joy for me to be here in this culturally rich, progressive, and truly cosmopolitan environment.
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