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Urban Design Exhibit:
Architecture: the Other Pleasure
Saturday, January 6th
11:00 PM
Image Gallery @ AIA
130 Sutter St. Suite 600
San Francisco , CA 94104
"Environmental numbness, a symptom of over-stimulation and over-saturation, renders the subtle as un-see-able. By raising awareness of the ephemeral, architecture helps reengage the marginal and nuanced qualities of environments."
-Quoted from a backgrounder essay by one of the curators, Mallory Cusenbery, a Sonoma architect, who will guide us through the artwork on display.
Be sure to read Mr. Cusenbery's essay on the Places and Pleasure page.
Commissioned and presented by LINE (www.linemag.org), the design journal of American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, the exhibition offers an interdisciplinary exploration into the relationship between pleasure and design featuring works by contemporary architects, designers and artists.
Works by international talents, such as Shigeru Ban (Nomadic Museum), David Adjaye (Idea Stores), Predock_Frane (Center of Gravity Foundation Hall), pd DESIGN STUDIO (skin light bulb) and Slade Architecture/Ga A Architects/Mass Studies (Dalki Theme Park), complement local practitioners, including Kate Pocrass (Mundane Journeys) and Brian Barneclo (A Food Chain).
Map and directions: http://www.aiasf.org/...
Some Background:
Raise the subject of pleasure and design, and it is difficult to avoid the well-worn threads of amusement parks, retail entertainment, themed restaurants, and other commercial spectacles. It's hard to broach the subject of pleasure and its relationship to the built environment without feeling the dominance of marketplace forces. This exhibit seeks to resist those very pressures.
Rather than add to the abundant statements on the commodification of delight, experience, and memory, the artists cast light on the less-explored relationships between pleasure and our designed environments to consider what exists outside the realm of market-driven, predigested, and deceptively limited pleasure choices. What are the other pleasures, not dominated by economic imperatives, and what are their relationship to design?
The answers, which reveal the phenomenal, political, and social dimensions of pleasure, fall into three subcategories: the intimate (everyday, personal pleasures), the transgressive (pleasures that are pursued in the margins or in spite of the design intent), and the purposeful (pleasure harnessed for social benefit).
Surprising, empathetic, joyful, and often humorous and rebellious--these are some of the qualities of pleasure we find when we pull away the constraints of focus-group-driven design and commercial ambition. Design for pleasure can engage us, challenge our sense of the built environment, and set in motion positive change.
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After viewing the show,
we'll slip next door to a cafe
to discuss our impressions.
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12th Annual
Berlin and Beyond
Film Festival
New Films from Germany Austria & Switzerland
January 11-17
http://www.berlinandbeyond.com/pages/welcome.html
The Castro Theater
Castro @ Market Streets
http://www.thecastrotheatre.com/directions.html
tickets: $9
We've chosen Sunday, January 14th for our trip to the German speaking countries. Come to one or all. Eats next door.
RASCALS ON THE ROAD
MEIN NAME IST EUGEN
Michael Steiner
11AM
From the literary classic by Klaus Schädelin, RASCALS ON THE ROAD is a coming of age story set in the 1960s. In it, we share 12-year-old Eugen and Wrigley’s last summer of boyhood adventure. When Wrigley’s parents announce their intention of packing him off to boarding school, the boys run away, hoping to find Fritzli Bühler, the "King of Rascals," who supposedly lives in Zurich. On the train there, Eugen and Wrigley come across their Scout group, which they feel they must join—at least until they make another getaway in Ticino, from which they attempt to cycle back to Zurich. By now their parents are on their trail, and as the boys continue on their precarious journey over the Alps, they begin to doubt whether Fritzli Bühler really lives in Zurich and whether he actually exists at all.
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SHORT FILM PROGRAM I
1PM
LEROY CLEANS UP / LEROY RÄUMT AUF (17 min.) by Armin Völckers: A groovy 70s Leroy wanders the streets of Berlin and ponders on the odds of being black and living in Germany.
EGO SUM ALPHA ET OMEGA (7 min.) by Jan-Peter Meier: Ego Sum is thrown out of the nowhere into a world in which he follows his way obliviously because it appears the only way possible to him.
EXPLODING BUDS / KNOSPEN WOLLEN EXPLODIEREN (20 min.) by Petra Schröder: Kate needs her friend Echo because she is lovesick. She loves the eccentric artist Bruno, who uses the energy of young talent for his ecstatic parties. But will Echo be able to help her?
PROMENADE D’APRÈS MIDI (4 min.) by Claire Walka: In this black and white with a dash of red, a young girls life is literally turned upside down.
DELIVERY (15 min.) by Till Nowak: An old man gets a little box that contains more power than he would have ever thought.
MOZART MINUTE (32 min.) 26 well-known filmmakers residing in Austria have been invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006 organisation to create associative miniatures on the subject of Mozart. The task: an artistic short film of one-minute duration.
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THE BOY WITHOUT QUALITIES
DER JUNGE OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN
Directed by Thomas Stiller
3:30PM
Tim’s life has a peculiar, slow rhythm, and he can’t quite distinguish between real life and fantasy. Perhaps the bullet lodged in his head is to blame; it’s a vestige of his father’s attempt to destroy the entire family when Tim was very young. When he meets Claudia, whose life is also overshadowed by her father, they immediately connect, but the bond is broken by another act of violence. Now Tim must finally confront his childhood trauma in order to learn to live in reality
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Best First Feature MK AWARD
VALERIE
Directed by Birgit Möller
6:30PM
Completely broke and without a job in the pipe line, Valerie, a model spoiled by years of success and luxury, is stranded in Berlin’s Hyatt Hotel. It is Christmas Eve, her friends are busy and Valerie has nowhere to go. Incapable of dealing with her new situation she pretends to be a paying guest of the hotel. But when the manager discovers that she is using an invalid credit card, she can not show up at the front desk any longer. She sneaks into hotel rooms to take a shower and steal food until that does not work any longer. She ends up living in her car in the hotel’s parking garage until the parking attendant discovers her illegal domicile and tries to put an end to her double life.
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Jonathan Franzen in conversation with Steve Winn
- Presented by City Arts & Lectures
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- Herbst Theater, SF
- Thursday, January 18
- 8:00 PM
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Novelist Jonathan Franzen develops vast, multifaceted plots with modern characters dealing with intensely personal issues. Sprawling, socially engaging, and highly readable feasts, Franzen?s books include The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and the essay collection How To Be Alone. This dramatic intersection of personal stories with larger social themes resonated strongly in Franzen?s highly praised novel The Corrections. The sweeping social panorama of life in our times included broad themes as well as specific details of contemporary culture through the portrayal of the most authentic characters. Winner of the National Book Award and The New York Times Editors? Choice for 2001, The Corrections is a stunning, funny, altogether heartbreaking book about the complexity of one American family. Franzen?s first foray into memoir is The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. Illustrating the common yet painful conflicts of his adolescence in 1970s suburban Missouri through his adulthood as a series writer, Franzen reveals himself to be one of America?s smartest and most entertaining social critics in The Discomfort Zone. Franzen is an avid bird-watcher and his writing appears frequently in The New Yorker, Harper?s, and elsewhere.
Afterward, we'll go to Max's next door for a nosh and some conversation.
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Tickets: $19
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Go to http://cityboxoffice.... for tickets
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SFMoMA exhibit:
Anselm Kiefer on Heaven and Earth
Sunday, January 21st
11:00 AM
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco , CA 94108
If you missed what SF Chron Art Critic Kenneth Baker called "the museum event of the year", join us for another last day of display in S.F.
Born in Germany in 1945, Anselm Kiefer is widely recognized as one of the most significant artists of our time. Kiefer belongs to a generation of Germans for whom, he has said, "there is always hope, but that must be combined with irony and, more important, skepticism.". So as history changes, so do the symbols that allow us, or not, to make sense of our experience.
The first American survey of Kiefer's work in almost 20 years, the show features more than 40 paintings, sculptures, books, and works on paper created between 1969 and the present. The selection emphasizes the layers of meaning in the artist's work, specifically his career-long meditation on the relationship between heaven(God or the cosmos) and earth(politics or the individual). Using symbolically potent materials such as clay, lead, ash, and gold leaf to masterful effect, Kiefer embraces a complex array of subjects, including alchemy, mythology, and Jewish mysticism.
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"In Kiefer's work, imagery at almost cinematic scale predominates, and we have to work our way to relishing his handling of materials, which has all the authority of Serra's.
Look closely at a painting such as "Melancholia" (2004), "Aschenblume (Ash Flower)" (2004) or "Leviathan" (2005) and you find a surface as absorbing in its physical details as one of Jackson Pollock's great drip paintings, though suffused with intention in a very different way.
Besides alluding to Albrecht Dürer, from whom he borrowed the polyhedral form he attached to his painting's surface, Kiefer may have intended his "Melancholia" to evoke the tension between everything ideal -- even inwardness itself -- and the merciless materiality of existence. The picture, one of Kiefer's masterpieces, gives to this antithesis what seems like inexhaustible form.
That sense of inexhaustibility -- so rare in contemporary art -- that the viewer takes away from "Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth" makes it count as the museum event of the year."
-Kenneth Baker
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Be sure to utilize the museum's
INTERACTIVE FEATURE:
http://www.sfmoma.org...
Explore 40 years of art by German painter, sculptor, photographer, and bookmaker Anselm Kiefer. This interactive program includes compelling interviews with the artist, as well as dozens of images from Kiefer's career-long meditation on the relationship between heaven and earth. Video interviews with the artist are presented alongside dozens of images of artwork and documentation from the artist's studio.
And download the curator's commentary using your MP3 or itunes software. It will increase your insight while gazing on the artist's work. http://www.sfmoma.org...
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After we tour the exhibit,
we'll cross the street to
have brunch at the new and
highly regarded B Restaurant
http://www.yelp.com/biz/jfeOjuMf-kaQm5aaJEGWKA
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Event fee: $12.50 or membership plus brunch
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Martin Amis
In conversation with Barbara Lane, JCCSF Director of Lectures & Literature
Wednesday, January 24
8:00 PM
Jewish Community Center
3200 California St.
San Francisco , CA 94118
415.292.1200
Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Martin Amis delights in lampooning the excesses of Western society. His best-known works are the the acclaimed Time's Arrow and the trilogy that includes Money: A Suicide Note, London Fields, and The Information. Another book, Dead Babies, has been called a combination of the Marquis de Sade and P.G. Wodehouse. A lightning rod for controversy, Amis promises a stimulating evening.
$18
Tickets: 415.292.1233 or
https://maven.jccsf.org/singleTickets.aspx
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Vali Nasr on:
How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
Wednesday, January 31,
Reception: 5:30 p.m.
Program: 6:00 p.m.
World Affairs Council
312 Sutter St. Suite 200
San Francisco , CA 94108
Vali Nasr, Senior Adjunct Fellow on the Middle East, Council on Foreign Relations; Professor of Middle East and South Asia Politics and Associate Chair of Research at the Department of National Security, Naval Postgraduate School [a superb and incisive commentator ]
In The Shia Revival, Vali Nasr offers an analysis of the ancient struggle between Shias and Sunnis for the soul of Islam. The book sheds light on historic moments of Shia/Sunni competition over power, as well times of collaboration between the two sects against outside oppressors. Nasr believes that the sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni, and the historic marginalization of Shias throughout the Islamic world, will come to play a large part in determining our collective future. Nasr believes Westerners have too often conceived of the Middle East through a Sunni perspective, and that in these changing times the Western world must now learn to understand the history, motivations, and philosophy of the Shia as well.
Event fee:
15.00 per person
Tickets: http://www.itsyourworld.org/authenticate.php?page=
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