Contemporary Jewish Museum

On Friday, J and I headed to Saul's for some eats. A celery soda, pastrami sandwich on rye, and side of coleslaw later (latkes and eggs for J.), we made our way to the city.

Daniel Libeskind's Contemporary Jewish Museum: The room in the twisted cube featured "Jews on Vinyl" (my favorite part). What a relaxing room; no museum guard asking you to step away from the sculpture- just some headphones, hava naglia and plush carpet. Architecturally, the level of interior detailing was a little disappointing, with messy, unsightly seams. The track lighting looked like a terrible after thought, and the generally cavernous, dark galleries were unpleasant.

Returning home, I picked up a used copy of The Book of Imaginary Beings and we took a short early evening nap before enjoying sushi and Bowfinger.

Ah, what a life. I love working four days a week.

Synesthesia OR Something like fireworks

Any fan of Borges should visit the world of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist.

Matching with the novel's poor review on Amazon.com, it is not necessarily a work of a literary talent. Alex Rose is a filmmaker, and this is his first novel. Regardless, his work is clever and provoking; Rose simplifies theories and science, but that is part of its magic- it reads like a fairy tale. Fairy tales have little regard to explaining their simplified truths. Details and explanation destroy the concept of illusion. Reading requires a suspension of disbelief.

The book is set in the Library of Tangents, an underground archive of treasures, places where you the reader become an exhibit yourself. The final exhibit is the story of the musical illusionist, Phelix Lamark. The story leaves me dreaming of it as a film where the narrative unfolds in the same nature of Perfume and Dustin Hoffman plays Lamark's patriarch.

I now find myself hitting the wind chimes on way to lunch at work, or listening carefully to the sound of the electric motors on BART. I also find myself attempting to associate colors with sounds, inspired by Lamark's final orchestration entitled Chromatica.

Avedon

I went to see the Richard Avedon exhibit at the SF MOMA. I didn't know how to feel about Avedon before going. Part of me wanted to hate his work- to look at the images as contrived attempts to create the human being as a one-dimensional specimen, pinned to the white void like a dead buttery in science museum, a stuffed ancient mammoth to gawk at. (As you may or may not know his work for In The American West was highly manipulated- carefully picked "working class, average" Americans, worked into poses and shots he controlled.)



However, I loved his work as an event, an activity, an engagement. You go into these white rooms filled with super-sized prints of humans, giant action figures. The room, for all its starkness, is filled with stories. A odd form of people watching that creates a stage for oral histories. You can hear the spectators, reading into the images, spinning tales about the person's life based upon the a frozen glimmer in an eye, the muscle tone in of a belly, a scar on a stomach, or an endless speckling of sun damage on the bridge of a nose- these things are not contrived.

Never have I seen a photography exhibition so filled with sound. For this I commend him. (And for the above Malcolm X shot, that happens to be my favorite.)


And just because, the bridge in the SF MOMA. The use of bar grate is my favorite part. A sense of solid floor, and then, yikes, sudden vertigo as you look down and discover you can see down to the people on the bottom level.