Staff planner Steven Turner dropped a bombshell this morning at the close of the HRB meeting: uber-owner and self-proclaimed “parking czar” Charles J. “Chop” Keenan III has submitted plans, not yet viewable electronically but agendized for historical review as soon as August 20, to turn the ground floor of the historic and beloved Varsity Theatre at 456 University in Palo Alto into “creative work space” / “group meeting space” / “private dining club” for a large software company already located here but who knows a good thing when served them on silver non-Democratic platter.
When Borders the national chain book store pulled out in Fall, 2011 City Manager Jim Keene did instruct staff to look into briefly the concept of finding a qualified prospective tenant to bring a cultural amenity to what most people think of as a movie house, where they saw “Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “Treasure of Sierra Madre” for instance. In actuality, live music acts who played the Varsity included: Stanley Jordan, Count Basie, Social Distortion, Tuck and Patty, John Fahey, and Bill Evans. In Berkeley, where Keene worked prior to coming here in 2009, there were at least two precedents for non-profits to build or expand cultural offerings: Freight and Salvage, who raised or borrowed $16 million to move from North Berkeley to a Downtown Theatre District, and The University (like The Varsity, once part of the Landmark Theatre chain), where former Bill Graham Presents executive David Mayeri leads a new non-profit to present live rock music, coming soon.
Within 48 hours meanwhile of being instructed by his boss to assess our prospects for something similar here, then-assistant city manager Steve Emslie instead told the Daily Post that a downtown theatre in Palo Alto, and 456, was a non-starter. (Steve Emslie who collects a pension from us but is also on staff as a “strategist” he told me, not a lobbyist and not a pr guy, for Goodyear Peterson, a Public Affairs company representing the developers). (see also staff report #1979 of August 1, 2011)
When I spoke to the same HRB at the time urging support for preserving The Varsity by having local leadership — elected Council, appointed Commissioners and Board, and our paid but besieged staff — work with Keenan, who after all owns numerous other properties and is always asking for a break here and there or friendly – to him, not We The People — interpretation or grandfathering — to find such a tenant, David Bower actually told me that I was Un-American to suggest what could be done with another’s property — this was reported by Gennady Sheyner in the Weekly (October 7, 2011).
Unbenownst to anyone — accept the majority of said- and alleged-leadership — uber-uber-owner John Arrillaga had already presented staff his proposal for a 10-story office tower at 27 University — not his land, it belongs to Stanford. Guess what happened? Staff said: hey, maybe this would go over better if you, um, put a Theatre beneath your giant office space tower and monument, maybe Theatreworks will put on a little show for you, wink wink nudge nudge.
In actuality numerous people said, for example on the Weekly site, when in March, 2012 news of the Arrillaga Towers plan finally were allowed to see light of Democracy –of a sort: wouldn’t the Varsity be a better place for Theatreworks downtown? I personally spoke to venture capitalist, Theatreworks board president (and my fellow Dartmouth alum, his kid brother was in my dorm) Jeff Crowe, in line at Coupa, about getting them on the cultural team, at 456, and he said “Good idea, I will bring it to my board”.
In my humble opinion, and having written a 500-word white paper on the topic, which staff economics development Tom Fehrenbach read or was asked to read, by Keene, leadership did a dis-service to the project and basically, in soccer parlance, kicked the ball out of bounds. Staff, council and commissioners, in my opinion, were afraid or unmotivated to challenge the will of Keenan. Chop meanwhile had told a Stanford undergrad, for her thesis, that the 1994 community uproar about converting the theatre to retail, was “a bunch of bitching.”
Nancy Shepherd, our current mayor, said during announcements: I have been getting a lot of calls about the Varsity Theatre (my heart started pounding, watching at home, channel 26, at 1 in the morning). What can I do to tell people that “we are not allowed” to help?
In my opinion, as evidence by this August, 2011 public document, Karen Holman is the only member of the Council at the time that took my white-paper seriously. I met with Fehrenbach and gave him phone numbers of eight leading regional concert promoters, the type of people qualified to book a 600-capacity room like what the Varsity could be. (My company, Earthwise Productions had produced 150 shows at 300-capacity Cubberley Community Center and the list included people I had spoken with about Palo Alto’s lack of a music venue).
What did she mean, council member Shepherd, a future mayor, potentially running for re-election this November 5, 2014, that in response to your concerns and suggestions, as Palo Altans, and real Americans, that she is not “allowed” — is this something, in private, that was agreed? Is this part of a group of secret, and serial meetings she held with Keenan, or was that part of the John Arrillaga sessions, the ones that were subject of a June 6, 2014 Grand Jury report?
I only speak for myself, yet, as Michael Franti would say: I know I am not alone.
I am going to the August 20 to give them my 3 minutes worth, about what is the proper role of citizen, leadership and “owners” in a Democracy.
I think of this as Save the Varsity: Part 3.
As architect and board member Bernstein was leaving this meeting, after I had a few minutes of Steven Turner’s time to feel this out a bit, he told me that it would not bother him if he, for example built a theatre and and came back, 60 years later, to find a huge corporation using it a a really hip lunch-room. (I should have asked: do you hear back from some of your residential clients that they like to take a crap in their new living rooms?) What I actually said was this:
In the 1970s David Brower (the arch-druid, founder of Sierra Club, not our local yokel jingoistic board member) and Howard Gossage opposed a plan to damn the Colorado River, which would partially flood The Grand Canyon; they wrote a clever headline:
WOULD YOU FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL, TO GET A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CEILING?
Brower & Gossage, 1966
edit to add: I did send a version of this to a few local organizers and activists, although it still needs a wee bit of editing; meanwhile, I’m not sure where else I archived this, posted on the Weekly’s excellent coverage of 27 Uni — I posted months later, when I heard of the Grand Jury report:
Posted by Mark Weiss, a resident of Downtown North
on Jun 20, 2014 at 10:33 am Mark Weiss is a registered user.
I also disagree with Weekly columnist Steve Levy’s suggestion that staff would engage Arrillaga and Stanford about bringing dense housing to this mostly park land, and historic monuments — war memorials — site.
I’ve been saying these things for quite some time now, about defending status quo from developers:
1. Commercial real estate developers have too much say and sway; leadership –council, commissioners and staff – should listen to RESIDENTS first;
2. Planned Community (PC) zoning is the most concentrated form of abuse of the system in recent years and should be amended, enforced or outlawed;
3. The 27 University project, “Arrillaga Office Towers” should be vigorously opposed by residentialists, as part of taking the town back from these powerful, oligarchical special interests.
Mark Weiss, November 2, 2012 (on his own website, running for Palo Alto City Council)
Without any knowledge of a grand jury, I have been saying various versions of this, in private, at meetings, on Palo alto Weekly comments board and in my blog “Plastic Alto” consistently for three years, probably 20 posts and 10,000 words.
I also link what happened or didn’t happen at 456 University to 27 University.
Democracy is on the ropes getting pummeled here. Are we Rope-A-Dope (like Muhammad Ali, and leadership will start fighting back) or merely dopes?
Which of our current 9 council members, if any, are not actively engaged in working their influence to personally profit and enhance their real estate holdings?
Why doesn’t the Weekly break down the 9, and PATC for good measure, by their role in real estate: what they own, what they do professionally, maybe cross-referenced by what they’ve said or voted on various issues?
Go ahead and vette the candidates for 2014 election by the same algorithm…
Also, break down who the major players are in the the real estate industry here.
The local Palo Alto borders commercial real estate industry I estimate is a $1B per year industry and therefore dwarves certainly municipal budget ($150 M) but total public sector, and when you consider what percent of our civic budget regulates it, about $10 M maybe, and that the attitude of staff is to appease, please, abet and be of service to them and not We The People, the industry, the special interest is largely UNREGULATED.
edit to add: This item was agendized even sooner, Aug. 6, maybe because Steven Turner, after 16 years here, is moving on, to RWC. I am writing you from that event, in real time. There is a 10-page staff report by Steven Turner, Advance Planning Manager, one of his last acts before moving on, after 16 years here, to Redwood. I spoke at the meeting, during orals, about 261 Hamilton; I said “I’ve spoken my piece / peace about 456″. I should probably try to reach the tenant and feel them out and maybe influence how they do the stage part of their project: why 100 cap, I had it as 600 all-in? Also, I spoke to Chop Keenan, the owner, for about 30 minutes last month and he convinced me to give him benefit of the doubt about the HANAhaus. I will, for about six months after curtain is up. Remember: Roy Orbison is watching!
I just watched the replay of a song from “Rocky” the musical on Letterman and it set me to suss around a bit about Chuck Wepner, Sylvester Stallone, the Rocky franchise and this new musical.
More to come.
I must have seen the 2006 Times article about Wepner suing Stallone for $15 million. I remember Wepner, in that from age 8 thru 18 or 28 I was an avid Sports Illustrated reader, and remember the guy who fought Ali.
I think there is a certain amount of racism in the hagiography of Wepner, white standing up to Ali, black and Muslim.
The Bayonne Bleeder, Wepner was called. I looked it up and find that it is closer to Staten Island than Philly.
It would be interesting to do a Bayonne Story or Chuck Wepner the Musical and musical influences could include the guitarist from Ozzy, the guy who wrote “Sweet Georgia Brown” and Clem Burke the drummer for Blondie who is also an associate of Mark Stewart, whose life story reached Broadway as “Passing Strange.” Maybe Stew could be the one to do Don’t Weep For Me, the Wepner Musical. I also had a riff on Eugene Robinson and I creating a truer (i.e. more black) version of what became “The Set-Up”, a good Robert Wise boxing film — and a source methinks for Tarantino “Pulp Fiction” — although they make the fall guy Pansy Jones white not black.
The song I saw on Letterman was a little too Christian rock, with the “you” referring either to Adrian or Jesus, and him crossing himself. It kinda reminded me, it’s still standing them, of the September 11, 2001 incident, which I guess is truer to the original Wepner story or myth in that it is New York not Philly.
What inspired Sly is that Wepner hung in there, bleeding. Others were psyched that Wepner knocked down Ali, with a body blow although there is photo evidence that he stepped on the champ’s foot.
Jack Wilkins is a jazz guitarist celebrating his 70th birthday this weekend at a hit at the Jazz Standard, although he is actually a Gemini.
His “Red Clay” cover of a Freddie Hubbard song is also sampled by a few hip hop composers and thiefs.
So it goes.
I remember sitting in his office to settle when Henry Butler my then-2002-client played a week there, Seth Abramson the music director, of Jazz Standard, and recalling also meeting his brother Todd Abramson of Maxwell’s of Hoboken at a different club, Mercury Lounge. I also recall going to see Steve Lacy at Jazz Standard with some of the staff from Anthology Film Archives — and as I write this I am also thinking about time-travel slash Alice Thru the Lookingglass article on brain picking blog by Maria Popova my bestest new imaginary friend (in that she has 400,000 readers and has never heard of me)
We picked up one excellent word–a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word–‘lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish–so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen.’ It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop– or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know–he finishes the operation by saying–
‘Give me something for lagniappe.’
The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor– I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely.
When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans–and you say, ‘What, again?–no, I’ve had enough;’ the other party says, ‘But just this one time more–this is for lagniappe.’ When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his ‘I beg pardon– no harm intended,’ into the briefer form of ‘Oh, that’s for lagniappe.’ If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says ‘For lagniappe, sah,’ and gets you another cup without extra charge.
I got to this from this. tempted to cut and paste the artwork: A Southerner talks music drawing. It’s actually about the inflection, not about music per se.
I have a copy of Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain and hope to re-read it, just as I pulled from my shelves Roughing It. I do think about Life on the Mississippi apropos of environmentalism and the emphasized point of the foolishness of building too close to the banks. Mother nature bats last.
I think this one is a floater:
and our little cultural lagniappe to this post is to say that cover art of that edition of Twain Mississippi reminds of Terry’s teacher Altoon Sultan, who we visited in Vermont in 2011, and her recent paintings, close cut captures of largely industrial things. see here.
Maria and Popovi are a mother and son set of collaborators who made some of the most coveted San Ildefonso Pueblo Pottery from New Mexico (as we call it), mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. I found a bit from Antiques Roadshow about them or their work. Think black on black:
Maria Popova meanwhile is a writer from Bulgaria based in Brooklyn with 400,000 social media followers, as in, she doesn’t need the plug from Plastic Alto.
Thanks to Nin Filip, I cribbed from her writing, heretofore uncredited, on Alain De Botton. Maria and Popovi signed their work on the bottom. And in a twist of fate — and boy do I crack myself up although I am quite careful around Pueblo Pottery, although come to think of it I did knock over my girlfriends monument to St. Francis — even though it looks like I posted three days ago and did not credit Brainpickings for the bit about De Botton — and worse yet I try to make it seem like something Nin said and not just unsurfaced — I am actually writing this elaborate credit line before I cut and paste the offending philosophy shards.
The photograph understands the longing to become a more polished and elegant version of oneself
Maria Martinez the San I potter, photo by Adombe of Santa Fe
Civil Disobedience in Thoreau’s sense is more like a combination of civic engagement and move-on.
I’ve been meaning to organize my thoughts about Our Palo Alto, and the workshop I attended last week, at the Elks Club. I was seated, via purportedly random processes, at a group of 7 that included insiders Steve Levy and Ray Bachetti, as well as announced-candidate for City Council Tom Dubois and staff person Elena Lee.
The overall context is my incredulity about the process: How is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 subsidy of the developers? Or, how is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 slush fund for the re-election of incumbents, especially commercial real estate lackeys Greg Scharff and Nancy Shepherd?
Elena Lee, who has been on staff for 7 years and worked for San Jose before that left me two items in need of follow up: 1) she seemed a little fuzzy on a document I saw or have on file called “California Avenue – Ventura Plan” — I asked whether this document is obsolete or just obscure, and her answer was unconvincing. 2) she made a vague reference to a court case coming out of Petaluma about the limits of zoning, and how the public sector is bounded by law. I am concerned that City Staff is being told that Democracy does not include the right of citizens to band together to fight special interests, and the real estate industry.
Let’s keep in mind that in Palo Alto itself the commercial real estate industry is a billion dollar industry; it’s largely privately-held so data is a little sketchy but a quick calculation would show commercial values here approaching $30 billion such that a 5 percent return on investment would describe a $1 billion in yearly activity; while not monolithic there are clusters of properties held by certain families and individuals, and they seem to communicate, correspond and organize, if they are not a RICO-enforceable racket outright. They are certainly better organized and have a greater incentive than the so-called Residentialists. If you consider that our civic budget is about $150 million, and maybe $10 of that is to regulate development, you can see why and how, at a basic level, the industry has so much momentum in recent years. And to the extent that staff seems to want to serve industry –at The Development Office — rather than regulate it on behalf of We The People, you could argue that this special interest is largely unregulated or out of control.
The Grand Jury Report of June 6, 2014, which is limited in scope to two deals and one developer, would support the idea that there is a compromise in the ability of the people -thru leadership, staff, elected Council and appointed Commissioners and Boards — to assert its will. How much of the apple bushel is corrupted by the rotten apple it is difficult to say, but we’d probably better ask. Be wary of bureaucrats too willingly offering you a nice yummy spoon of apple-sauce.
Meanwhile, I was struck by something Steve Levy set in our little exercise, in which we had about 90 minutes to pretend to be city planners and practice not standing up to these special interests. He muttered something about “property rights” having priority over rule of law, in reaction to something I said about whether it is time, beyond the commercial real estate rout, to enforce a moratorium on Monster Homes and tear-downs.
Likewise, Ray Bachetti, a former Stanford University vice provost who now lives in town, says he promotes “smart growth” or something but I seem to doubt he speaks on behalf of the little people who might benefit from below market housing and is more about helping or siding with developers who make money hand over fist even when they throw a bone to the middle class, as evidence, in certain ways, by the proposal to upzone a certain property on Maybell for the Palo Alto Housing Corporation.
My table also included two people, a husband and wife, who live in or near Barron Park and were involved in the referendum that became Measure D. I counted nine tables of seven or eight people each, and maybe ten staff and free-lancers working for the Our Palo Alto thingy (I called it a Dog and Pony show, below), or about 70 people all in — hardly a mandate. And I did wonder to what extent the proceedings were rigged so that the two or three “trusties” at each table were more about indoctrination than outreach or this being a dialogue.
I used the opportunity (and not just to bait Levy and Bachetti) to practice stumping for my proposal to try to zone the Fry’s Property as a park rather than more housing. Would a park in Ventura be a gentler way to gentrify that area, where average home values are about 60 percent of Palo Alto average? I flipped thru my Parks of Palo Alto booklet (produced by PAHA) to suggest that Greer Park could be a precedent for Ventura Park (and why not call it, working title Gary Fazzino Park?). Greer Park came about when the Palo Alto drive-in folded and the taxpayers reached out to keep the land a public amenity. So if Fry’s is falling victim to the disruptive nature of the internet (Ebay et al), why not move them downtown — perhaps to 456 University — and I bite my tongue saying this — and use that land for public benefit. As it stands the momentum is with the large South Bay developer getting their way to bring housing and the citizens nodding their consent. It would take quite an effort to not give this 400 pound gorilla what it wants.
But we can at least talk about it, right?
Meanwhile the four choices the Our Palo Alto workshop people were given were two types of growth and not much discussion to “doing nothing”. I said that even “doing nothing” takes a huge amount of effort to stand up to the industry, like standing in front of a tank. The fourth choice was a magic type of non-development that would use “green thinking” and hypothetical new technologies as rationalize to slow growth. I find that in 20 years as an environmentalist the “green-wash” forces have advanced a lot faster than green thought itself. (I founded my small concert company, Earthwise Productions, as a type of spin-off of Bay Area Action, where Peter Drekmeir cut his activist teeth).
A letter to an editor today suggested that a June, 2014 directive by Council, to include electronic vehicles charging in all multi-unit housing proposals, was some sort of special industry concession. I will have to think about that. I wasn’t at those meetings. But I did notice that the oversized and under parked building at Lytton and Alma, the so-called Lytton Gateway, has the insult to injury effect of having fewer street-parking than you would expect, partly due to locating the chargers on our not their property, and partly by their landscaping — between the street spaces. It’s like they are saying their building is too nice for mere mortals to park in front of it, or there is a quota on us.
I had also asked for an accounting and or pro forma about the $325,000 Our Palo Alto campaign, which I mistook for a private sector event at the first meeting. Too slick. Too much cheese –literally. No answer after more than a month. By the way, the Grand Jury report also faulted Palo Alto for its shabby response for request for information.
Maybe I have to send a more formal request to City Clerk Donna Grider for my request to be officially heard. I sent a response to someone, presumably on the public payrolls, who sent me mail, from “Ourpaloalto@cityofpaloalto dot org”. I also wonder about how it helps transparency for civil servants to operate behind pseudonyms. Curiously a particular city staffer, who I met at a meeting and then ran into in from of City Hall last week, who works on Our Palo Alto, it would seem, told me that I was not receiving info about subsequent events because someone had lost the sign-in sheet that my name and address were on. (If so, how would she know that?)
There are about 130 days until an election here and things are getting, in my humble opinion, curiouser and curiouser.
Another way to say it: sixty years after The Founding Fathers, writer scholar patriot Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay suggesting that then-current leadership should either step it up to the level of the Founding Fathers, or step aside and let a new group try this experiment called Democracy, and America. (The essay was called “Civil Disobedience” by the way, not by Thoreau but by his editor, although in today’s terms it is probably better called “Civic Engagement or Move-on”; it’s more about dissenters with enacting a type of constructive engagement with leadership than some type of gathering in the streets, as it was taught to me at Dartmouth College, back in the 1980s).
There’s a book by George Packer called “The Unwinding” that is quite recent and instructive here. By his model Democracy is something that we must attend to, or it will run down.
Gunn graduate George Packer, of the Palo Alto Stanford Packers writers clan
Stay tuned.
Our Palo Alto does not speak for me. It seems, among its faults, to beg the question that both high density housing AND commercial office space will continue and offers us a narrowly framed pseudo-choice of types of reactions. Further: is it debatable whether we even need to revise let alone amend the Comp Plan, or is that another orchestrated interpretation of what we the people have wanted and are working on? Likewise, the Downtown Cap is a promise we made to ourselves, why are they making it seem archaic, why give it mere lip-service? And I think there are many of us who would stand up for what is best for 60,000 current Palo Alto residents and risk a bureaucratic response from pseudo-governmental (and probably biased, or tainted) regional entities like ABAG, pushing for more housing.
As a liberal arts graduate, still liberating and continuing my studies even 30 years past the granting of my diploma, I think we need to question a lot of what is served up.
edit to add: one mitigating factor in my otherwise jeremiad little speech, and I can just here Steve Levy and his little mocking fake laugh — he actually did this aloud when I suggested to the table that Ventura could use a park — is that I ran into someone I met 40 years prior, at Hebrew School, Charlie Knox, a free-lance strategist for Our Palo Alto, who is a Paly grad and son of former City Manager Naftali Knox. I’d rather see a product of our system in full-time permanent position of authority here rather than some of the ringers brought in by City Manager Jim Keane who seem united by ideology rather than having effervescent merit. Or, if the special interests our that pervasively corrupting, at least if they corrode one of our own we know who to blame for it: ourselves.
edit to add: at 4:33 on Monday, June 30, 2014 I posted a 99 percent verbatim version of this under Steve Levy’s latest column, at Palo Alto Weekly and TS town square –comments board. I will check back to see how he edits or responds. Who knows, maybe he is right that “property rights” trump the will of the people, but I would have to have that broken down for me, and or wait for the courts to say it.
Posted by Mark Weiss, a resident of Barron Park,
0 minutes ago
Aha, it took me two weeks to figure out that when you say “TS” you mean “town square” — there are about six other uses of that TLA search-able.
Meanwhile, I’s been thinkin’:
‘ve been meaning to organize my thoughts about Our Palo Alto, and the workshop I attended last week, at the Elks Club. I was seated, via purportedly random processes, at a group of 7 that included insiders Steve Levy and Ray Bachetti, as well as announced-candidate for City Council Tom Dubois and staff person Elena Lee.
The overall context is my incredulity about the process: How is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 subsidy of the developers? Or, how is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 slush fund for the re-election of incumbents, especially commercial real estate lackeys Greg Scharff and Nancy Shepherd?
Elena Lee, who has been on staff for 7 years and worked for San Jose before that left me two items in need of follow up: 1) she seemed a little fuzzy on a document I saw or have on file called “California Avenue – Ventura Plan” — I asked whether this document is obsolete or just obscure, and her answer was unconvincing. 2) she made a vague reference to a court case coming out of Petaluma about the limits of zoning, and how the public sector is bounded by law. I am concerned that City Staff is being told that Democracy does not include the right of citizens to band together to fight special interests, and the real estate industry.
Let’s keep in mind that in Palo Alto itself the commercial real estate industry is a billion dollar industry; it’s largely privately-held so data is a little sketchy but a quick calculation would show commercial values here approaching $30 billion such that a 5 percent return on investment would describe a $1 billion in yearly activity; while not monolithic there are clusters of properties held by certain families and individuals, and they seem to communicate, correspond and organize, if they are not a RICO-enforceable racket outright. They are certainly better organized and have a greater incentive than the so-called Residentialists. If you consider that our civic budget is about $150 million, and maybe $10 of that is to regulate development, you can see why and how, at a basic level, the industry has so much momentum in recent years. And to the extent that staff seems to want to serve industry –at The Development Office — rather than regulate it on behalf of We The People, you could argue that this special interest is largely unregulated or out of control.
The Grand Jury Report of June 6, 2014, which is limited in scope to two deals and one developer, would support the idea that there is a compromise in the ability of the people -thru leadership, staff, elected Council and appointed Commissioners and Boards — to assert its will. How much of the apple bushel is corrupted by the rotten apple it is difficult to say, but we’d probably better ask. Be wary of bureaucrats too willingly offering you a nice yummy spoon of apple-sauce.
Meanwhile, I was struck by something Steve Levy set in our little exercise, in which we had about 90 minutes to pretend to be city planners and practice not standing up to these special interests. He muttered something about “property rights” having priority over rule of law, in reaction to something I said about whether it is time, beyond the commercial real estate rout, to enforce a moratorium on Monster Homes and tear-downs.
Likewise, Ray Bachetti, a former Stanford University vice provost who now lives in town, says he promotes “smart growth” or something but I seem to doubt he speaks on behalf of the little people who might benefit from below market housing and is more about helping or siding with developers who make money hand over fist even when they throw a bone to the middle class, as evidence, in certain ways, by the proposal to upzone a certain property on Maybell for the Palo Alto Housing Corporation.
My table also included two people, a husband and wife, who live in or near Barron Park and were involved in the referendum that became Measure D. I counted nine tables of seven or eight people each, and maybe ten staff and free-lancers working for the Our Palo Alto thingy (I called it a Dog and Pony show, below), or about 70 people all in — hardly a mandate. And I did wonder to what extent the proceedings were rigged so that the two or three “trusties” at each table were more about indoctrination than outreach or this being a dialogue.
I used the opportunity (and not just to bait Levy and Bachetti) to practice stumping for my proposal to try to zone the Fry’s Property as a park rather than more housing. Would a park in Ventura be a gentler way to gentrify that area, where average home values are about 60 percent of Palo Alto average? I flipped thru my Parks of Palo Alto booklet (produced by PAHA) to suggest that Greer Park could be a precedent for Ventura Park (and why not call it, working title Gary Fazzino Park?). Greer Park came about when the Palo Alto drive-in folded and the taxpayers reached out to keep the land a public amenity. So if Fry’s is falling victim to the disruptive nature of the internet (Ebay et al), why not move them downtown — perhaps to 456 University — and I bite my tongue saying this — and use that land for public benefit. As it stands the momentum is with the large South Bay developer getting their way to bring housing and the citizens nodding their consent. It would take quite an effort to not give this 400 pound gorilla what it wants.
But we can at least talk about it, right?
Meanwhile the four choices the Our Palo Alto workshop people were given were two types of growth and not much discussion to “doing nothing”. I said that even “doing nothing” takes a huge amount of effort to stand up to the industry, like standing in front of a tank. The fourth choice was a magic type of non-development that would use “green thinking” and hypothetical new technologies as rationalize to slow growth. I find that in 20 years as an environmentalist the “green-wash” forces have advanced a lot faster than green thought itself. (I founded my small concert company, Earthwise Productions, as a type of spin-off of Bay Area Action, where Peter Drekmeir cut his activist teeth).
A letter to an editor today suggested that a June, 2014 directive by Council, to include electronic vehicles charging in all multi-unit housing proposals, was some sort of special industry concession. I will have to think about that. I wasn’t at those meetings. But I did notice that the oversized and under parked building at Lytton and Alma, the so-called Lytton Gateway, has the insult to injury effect of having fewer street-parking that you would expect, partly due to locating the chargers on our not their property, and partly by their landscaping — between the street spaces. It’s like they are saying their building is too nice for mere mortals to park in front of it, or there is a quota on us.
I had also asked for an accounting and or pro forma about the $325,000 Our Palo Alto campaign, which I mistook for a private sector event at the first meeting. Too slick. Too much cheese –literally. No answer after more than a month. By the way, the Grand Jury report also faulted Palo Alto for its shabby response for request for information.
Maybe I have to send a more formal request to City Clerk Donna Grider for my request to be officially heard. I sent a response to someone, presumably on the public payrolls, who sent me mail, from “Ourpaloalto@cityofpaloalto dot org”. I also wonder about how it helps transparency for civil servants to operate behind pseudonyms. Curiously a particular city staffer, who I met at a meeting and then ran into in from of City Hall last week, who works on Our Palo Alto, it would seem, told me that I was not receiving info about subsequent events because someone had lost the sign-in sheet that my name and address were on. (If so, how would she know that?)
There are about 130 days until an election here and things are getting, in my humble opinion, curiouser and curiouser.
Another way to say it: sixty years after The Founding Fathers, writer scholar patriot Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay suggesting that then-current leadership should either step it up to the level of the Founding Fathers, or step aside and let a new group try this experiment called Democracy, and America. (The essay was called “Civil Disobedience” by the way, not by Thoreau but by his editor, although in today’s terms it is probably better called “Civic Engagement or Move-on”; it’s more about dissenters with enacting a type of constructive engagement with leadership than some type of gathering in the streets, as it was taught to me at Dartmouth College, back in the 1980s).
There’s a book by George Packer called “The Unwinding” that is quite recent and instructive here. By his model Democracy is something that we must attend to, or it will run down.
Our Palo Alto does not speak for me. It seems, among its faults, to beg the question that both high density housing AND commercial office space will continue and offers us a narrowly framed pseudo-choice of types of reactions. Further: is it debatable whether we even need to revise let alone amend the Comp Plan, or is that another orchestrated interpretation of what we the people have wanted and are working on? Likewise, the Downtown Cap is a promise we made to ourselves, why are they making it seem archaic, why give it mere lip-service? And I think there are many of us who would stand up for what is best for 60,000 current Palo Alto residents and risk a bureaucratic response from pseudo-governmental (and probably biased, or tainted) regional entities like ABAG, pushing for more housing.
As a liberal arts graduate, still liberating and continuing my studies even 30 years past the granting of my diploma, I think we need to question a lot of what is served up.
edit to add: one mitigating factor in my otherwise jeremiad little speech, and I can just here Steve Levy and his little mocking fake laugh — he actually did this aloud when I suggested to the table that Ventura could use a park — is that I ran into someone I met 40 years prior, at Hebrew School, Charlie Knox, a free-lance strategist for Our Palo Alto, who is a Paly grad and son of former City Manager Naftali Knox. I’d rather see a product of our system in full-time permanent position of authority here rather than some of the ringers brought in by City Manager Jim Keane who seem united by ideology rather than having effervescent merit. Or, if the special interests our that pervasively corrupting, at least if they corrode one of our own we know who to blame for it: ourselves.
edit here as you see fit, answer that and stay fashionable, or do what you will:
Why would property rights trump the will of the people?
edit, more edits, always more edits: here is a link to a 2005 interview with Naphtali Knox, note the correct spelling, who started in civic life here in 1972 and was a chief planner if not City Manager. And I don’t think it nepotism to select for a generational continuity in civic service — Charlie described briefly a civic resume with stints in Telluride, Colorado and the East Bay. Similarly, I recall thinking at my Gunn 30th that I would trust my average classmate in leadership here relative to what we got or get. Sometimes I think a random process, like with jury duty, would better serve us than the Democracy for which we have settled, by which we have been saddled. There is a type of vacuum of inaction that the Machine — Ginsburg’s Moloch if you will — requires.
another: “answer that and stay fashionable” is the title of an AFI album, during the time they played Cubberley Community Center. I have a weird habit, being a former North Beach ad guy and SXSW concert promoter, of slipping rock and pop references into my dialogue, mainly to confuse people. When I am feeling inclusive I restrict such to 40-year-old Dyanisms: Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters, which to me means don’t send a gadget to do a job that requires heart.
or if you have 40 minutes for deep background, here apparently is the full-album, by AFI:
Hannah May Allison, the Palo Alto and Nashville singer-songwriter, plays Tuesday in Los Gatos, at the historic The Cats. It is a happy hour show, 6 to 9. If memory serves, there will be victuals.
Speaking of memory, I am working on explicating — the English major word for decoding — my notes from Hannah’s performance Sunday at the California Avenue farmer’s market, in Palo Alto:
What little girls made of shotgun Hard to think about something about summer might time pass us by We drove pass no trespass sign not going to jail cop car Kurban No one to send this letter to soldiers coming home Troubles of my own Packing it in baggage claim That girl in the red dress sweet sin Luke bryan news today Cant believe your really gone Southern sky there are stars in seven bridges Trailer for rent Cheaters only care until their bored Stay fm (that one’s easy — Fleetwood Mac, she played “Landslide” although one of her originals also reminded me very much of “Dreams”) rumors Sometimes people stay BEST THING (no reason for the all caps, I am just not very good with my Stupid Cell Phone — my handwriting is much worse) Talk in this small town I did was leave Cover we sang bob mage on hood my car (Bobby McGee) Landslide I getting older too
This might be a clue, or set of clues: Hannah May, and her parents Craig and Reena Allison, of Barron Park (Palo Alto, the country part of Palo Alto, you might say) were handing out free copies of her demo or EP, which included these four originals: “The Best Thing,” “Summer Nights,” “Empty Hearted” and “Stay”.
I watched the show from load-in (dad lugging most of the gear) past the part where she started repeating songs, the “Cop Car” cover, which I thought she played at two different tempos, the second time to my ear sounding deliberately like the strumming pattern and the chords from “Franklin’s Tower” — the Grateful Dead song (“roll away, the dew”) and I thought she would medley into it or at least allude to it. Cop car…roll away.. it kinda works for me, especially here in Billy Kreutzman’s hometown, and where Jerry met Bobby (and actually where Graham Lesh met Brody Jenkins…and by the way, I am the guy who if I didn’t introduce Papa Mali to Kreutzman, backstage at La Tortuga, did tell Malcolm in 2003 that he would remind Deadheads of Jerry AND hired him to play Art 21 on Alma at
Lamentable that there are no good 650 venues for Hannah May Allison
Lytton for a belated Jerry Garcia Tribute, and I apologize to Hannah for the egregious “plastic” digression).
Ok, I will go on record that even based in Nashville a Palo Alto-bred singer-songwriter could milk that Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter-Bobby Weir mojo for some 650 cred: do learn a couple GD covers and maybe, if the math pencils out, a Luke Bryan>Robert Hunter medley. And if you don’t know you should that if you like Fleetwood Mac then maybe Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Menlo-Atherton class of 1968 did indeed leave something hiding in the bushes for future artists to find, or y’all at least breathed the same air, more or less, give or take a couple decades. (Maybe we are all channeling some sacred Ohlone vibe…)
I did meet Hannah and her parents at this event, unlike last month at World Music Day where I got close enough to read the small print of her EP but did not stick around long enough to realize that they were giving them away. I had met Hannah during her senior year at Gunn, at the 2012 version of the street music event. Terry, my GF, Terry Acebo Davis the former Palo Alto Arts Commissioner eventually came along and met Rina and took a photo of Hannah that I will post here later, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
The Allisons — Team Hannah May — recognized my name from my previous post. Surely this rising talent deserves better treatment from the music bards. It’s a mixed blessing, I admit, to be run thru the Plastic Alto filter.
I started to say this below: I’d be curious to hear Hannah’s reaction to three titles, that our precedent in certain ways, that happen to be in my glove-box that I was tempted to pass on, as a type of homework: Marcia Ball, Michelle Shocked, and Sasha Dobson.
I’m not sure how much of this to keep in confidence and how much is either fair game or “Fair Play”, but if you are wondering how a young lady from Palo Alto would go country and stake her claim in Nashville, at Belmont University, in a program apparently funded by Mike Curb, rather than Austin or Santa Barbera or something, Mom is from Oklahoma, and sang back-up with Garth Brooks, and also had or has a relative in country music by the name of Patsy Bale Cox.
As someone who ran a new bands / new artist showcase in the 1990s here, at Cubberley Community Center and has managed about a dozen small nationally-distributed recording artists, of course I am rooting for the girl next door gone to Music City. She’s already in the Country wing of the Palo Alto Rock and Roll Archive (which almost exists, in Steve Staiger’s office) along side: Steve Jenkins of Third Eye Blind (Gunn 1983), Tommy Jordan of Geggy Tah (Paly 1981), the drummer from Maroon 5 (Gunn), Alex Wong who writes and performs with Vienna Teng, The Donnas (Tory, Alison, Maya, Brett — all Paly ’97s, and their debut was at a Jordan talent show), Gregg Rolie a founding member of two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bands, Santana Band and Journey, who attended Cubberley for two years, some guy whose name I never remember from Pablo Cruise, Kreutzman, Jenny Scheinman (although she is more jazz than singer-songwriter), Chris Appelgren the former owner of Lookout Records and the bands PeeChees and TK, who attended Palo Alto schools one year, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Minor Threat and The Evens who attended Terman one year when his dad was a fellow at Stanford. (I think I also inducted Remi Wolf and Chloe of Remi and Chloe into the Jazz wing, see below).
Part of my motivation for Earthwise Productions is a sinking feeling that there is an imbalance and over-emphasis on computers such that there are missing creatives of Palo Alto, who get sucked into the hunt for the next big $19 Billion App. For the record: I would rather PAUSD has mandatory songwriting curriculum than computer coding.
My understanding is that Hannah May Allison, the Trisha Yearwood of Barron Park, is hereabouts for about a month before heading back to Nashville (for example, a Monday at Commodore Grille, and also, her junior year at Belmont) so keep your eyes and ears peeled for her, y’all.
And check back here to see how I explicate and unfold my notes above: It’s mainly the titles of five or six originals and four or five covers. Who knows, maybe in ten years some of her three word phrases will be part of the Americana lexicon.
edit to add: Have not made much progress separating my Luke Bryan references from Hannah’s actual lyrics, but I wanted to add, as sort of a preview for tomorrow’s pre-firecracker of a little show at The Cats, something about my history of that venue (and I will flat out declare that a feature of Plastic Alto is that when I am talking about Hannah May Allison I am also talking about myself, natch): 1) is that I recall, upon moving to California from South Side of Chicago, with my parents and sibs, back in 1968 that my parents told the story of getting lost and pulling over when they saw the mysterious Cats landmark – I presume it is the same mysterious stone markers where the current restaurant perseveres, on life number 5 or 6 of its proverbial nine lives; when you approach the venue, you have to veer off when you spot the cats lest you continue on towards Santa Cruz on Hwy 17; 2) in recent times, relatively speaking, I recall that the last time I was there was to scout Dean Markley, the famous string entrepreneur who does or did also have a duo project of acoustic music and would play The Cats; I recall getting invited to a big birthday party for him, maybe a surprise, his 50th or 60th — this is about 10 years ago, but could not attend; Markley started his music store in Santa Clara in 1971 although if you call his 408 number it now rings thru to Glendale, Arizona the new corporate headquarters. But — and here we are back to an actual Hannah May Allison detail –whilst fact-checking that part of my story, I learn-did (that’s the past tense of learn, with a voice suffix, like in Shakespeare’s iambic, plus a pseudo-Twain-like faux-country patois, I am really saying “learn-nid”, for “learned”) that the electric guitar side-person performance on her demo is by Larry Chung, who is — and I might have known this, if I were a better guitar student, and I am barely in the school at all — a Gryphon regular and even has product named for him. Thuslike:
Gryphon Larry Chung custom banjo set
Inspired by super duper musician (and Gryphon teacher) Larry Chung, we had our pals at GHS put together this custom set, as per Larry’s preferred gauges in stainless steel (9.5-10-13-20W-9.5)
I had noted, on first inspection, David Phillips name, as pedal steel, and recall him backing Steve Yerkey at the Cub in 1995, although that is probably the least of his credits. Craig Allison, besides lugging his daughter’s gear and tables and all, plays keys on the demo; he told me he was in a jazz combo as an undergrad, at Rice University and admires more trad style jazz like by the late George Shearing — although in my head, as a Austin-wanna-be, I was flashing to father-daughter combo of the Gimbles, who I spied partly and heard about in MoMo’s of, same-like what I heard of Warren Heard. (It’s not the worst ideas, when evaluating emerging talent to ask politely something about the bloodlines). Champ Heard? Will have to check back and edit that: I recall standing under a shrine, perhaps at The Continental on South Congress, someone telling me what I could not observe that the young buck on stage was kin to the dearly departed, on the wall. That’s actually Warren Hood, like the car Hannah and her song set on, above, not “Heard”, a fiddler son of legend by name of Champ Hood.
The other point about the demo – Free EP — is that Remy Felsch, who plays on it and appears with Hannah at shows, as a side-man, is a fellow Gunn grad and a current music student at the prestigious Berklee School of Music back east (alma mater of among other Bruce Cockburn, John Mayer and my friend and former client the jazz trumpeter Jack Walrath).
I found this amusing review of the Steve Yerkey cd, “confidence, man” on Sf’s Heyday Records, produced by Lee Townsend, the cd, (who is also Bill Frisell’s long-time manager and producer), by Parry Gettelman, formerly of the Orlando Sentinel and now apparently some kind of civil servant in Austin, that confirms my recollection of David Phillips, who plays on Hannah’s demo. Although he is plenty busy, I would think Lee Townsend might be an interesting producer for a future Hannah May Allison session. Lee Townsend who lives and works in Berkeley, but told me he comes to Palo Alto sometimes for his son’s soccer matches (or those of his daughter??), and I ran into him not so long ago at the memorial for Nathan Oliveira. And it’s also worth noting that Wayne Horvitz, of Seattle, who grew up in Los Altos, produced a Nashville-session for Bill Frisell called “Nashville”.
Regarding The Cats per se, it is a pulled pork and ribs place, for full meals if not for bar food — I would think, if the show is free, you should prepare to do as the locals do and eat something. They have a named oak fire tender, if that tells you something. They re-opening after wrestling with local government and grand-father clauses (as distinct from Santa Clauses, if you excuse the Marxism), in 2008 and their website has a menu form December 2011 which may be current. I would lump it in their with potentially fun little music dives like Rancho Nicasio of West Marin (owned by Huey Lewis’s manager, Bob Brown, whose son went to culinary school and runs the kitchen –we saw Jerry Hannan there recently), or Blue Rock Shoot of Saratoga, or Applejacks of La Honda, where Hershel Yatovitz was rumored to be sitting in recently — he of Chris Isaak and Paly 1982 notability. And all this, and nearly everything I do, begs the question: where is a good live music play in Palo Alto?
edita, frthur: for instance, and I looked this up, while we Palo Altans have a 20 minute drive to see Hannah May Allison in Los Gatos, ribbed or not, South Austinites have, among numerous choices, at The Continental Club, on South Congress, Toni Price and James McMurtry shows, I’m just sayin’. And if you notice a subtle comparison or tug of war or cutting contest between Austin Texas and Nashville, you are correct sir. I think of Nashville as beyond a genre a corporate culture distinct from New York and Los Angeles but if a lot of Earthwise Productions has been a comment on the industrialization of the spirit, in the form of creation, rehearsal and performance of music, my observation, from between 500 and 3,00 miles away, is that Nashville adds in many ways an extra layer of non-music, non-artist infrastructure. Be aware! Bakersfield, California is also, like Nashville, on my list of places to visit and check out the talent.
“Don’t Happen Twice” is a Kenny Chesney song Allison covers, the lyric is “we sang Bobby McGee on the hood of my car”. The song is by Curtis Lance and Thom McHugh, whereas “Me and Bobby McGee”, sung most famously by Janis Joplin, is by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. The Keith Urban song, “Cop Car” meanwhile is by a trio of Nashville writers, Zach Crowell, Sam Hunt and Matt Jenkins, while my red herring suggestion “Franklin’s Tower” (which is actually F C A D and not C G) is by Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreutzmann. Reading all this is not a very fitting preview of the Hannah May Allison show Tuesday in Los Gatos, nor, frankly, is writing it.
She performs an appropriate mix of things she has written and things she has heard. I looked it up to learn that Stevie Nicks was 27 when she wrote and recorded “Landslide” and the lyric “I’m getting older too” while Hannah is about 20. But she has grown considerably since her senior year at Gunn, it seems obvious. It will be fun to see where all this takes her, and us.
Danny Goldberg, manager, on Stevie Nicks his client, quoted in Times review of his book, “Bumping into Geniuses”, in 2008: “magnetic … compelling … an autodidactic mystic.”
Miranda Lambert song, “Gunpowder and Led”, song about what little girls made of and shotgun.
“Seven Bridges Road” is by Steve Young and I did not recall that it is probably most famously an Eagles song –with a five-part harmony — but is also done by Tracy Nelson and Joan Baez so I would wonder exactly where Hannah May picked it up from. I’m kinda giving up on my little game of sussing my notes to current songs on the country charts I don’t actually know and will have to just ask for the set list next time, excepting having to admit here that I think there is a lyric I heard “something about” that I highlighted here to make a strained allusion to the movie that stars Cameron Diaz and features Jonathan Richman.
Kristen Strom will appear at the Stanford Jazz series, performing a tribute to Stan Getz. It’s a matinee, 2 p.m. July 13 Sunday. Info here. The show is at Dink, with tickets ranging from $15 to $35, which actually seems a little pricey, especially for a matinee, featuring all local musicians. She’s playing for no cover at Rosewood Sand Hill — the famous “cougar bar” on or near Stanford campus, the following Saturday evening, from 7 to 11, and has several other area appearances, plus her teaching at Stanford and other camps, according to her website. (My ambivalence about Stanford Jazz is hard to conceal, huh?)
Part of the back story for the Strom gig is that Stan Getz had a residency at Stanford, an event which inspired the university developing a jazz program involving: Larry Grenadier, Jim Nadel, Joey Oliveira, Andy Geiger, Ted Gioia, Nathan Oliveira and more. Joey played a Getz tribute a few years back. Nathan made a portrait of a sax player at Smith-Andersen titled “The Man”, that I saw in a private collection.
There’s a story in the East Bay Express by Sam Levin about Ellen Seeling of Montclair Women’s Band complaining that there are few spots for women in the area’s jazz festivals, and she recommends blind auditions. Strom is quoted in that story, as is Jason Olaine, who is producing a Fillmore Jazz festival. Reminds me of Nat Hentoff in his 2010 book commenting on, and validating, Joan Bender who in 2001 protested about the lack of women in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
I think of Strom as a local musician, but am unsure of her Palo Alto ties. Provisionally I include her in my list of 500 Palo Alto jazz memes.
Here is Montclair band video(I remember seeing them in the East Bay, when Allison Miller was their guest artist):
Not to confuse matters, or deflect from the Kristen Strom hit, but here is Joan Bender, with Brian Gari and Michael Wolff somewhere back east playing “Chocolate Eyes”. I met Joan in IAJE in New York, and actually had a meeting with Wolff that same week, as a candidate to join his enterprise.
And while I am near the subject, the Palo Alto Twilight Series has finally been announced and includes Mads Tolling, a Danish-American violin player gaining material, August 16 at Mitchell Park. Back to Our Ms. Strom, her band includes Scott Sorkin, Jason Lewis and John Shifflett, — and Fred Harris, piano — plus in this case, for the Getz book, singer Jackie Ryan.
I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time.
But the new non-Dionysiac spirit is most clearly apparent in the endings of the new dramas. At the end of the old tragedies there was a sense of metaphysical conciliation without which it is impossible to imagine our taking delight in tragedy; perhaps the conciliatory tones from another world echo most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once tragedy had lost the genius of music, tragedy in the strictest sense was dead: for where was that metaphysical consolation now to be found? Hence an earthly resolution for tragic dissonance was sought; the hero, having been adequately tormented by fate, won his well-earned reward in a stately marriage and tokens of divine honour. The hero had become a gladiator, granted freedom once he had been satisfactorily flayed and scarred. Metaphysical consolation had been ousted by the deus ex machina.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Sugimoto show at Fraenkel Gallery in SF, thru July 2 LAST DAYS
fraenkel gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Acts of God, to be presented May 1 – July 2, 2014. This exhibition is the first U.S. presentation of Sugimoto’s The Last Supper: Acts of God (1999/2012), a five-panel photograph, more than 24 feet in length. The artist first created this work in 1999, from a life-size wax reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, which he photographed at a museum in Izu, Japan. In 2012, while the work was stored in the artist’s basement, it was damaged by the storm surge and flooding that occurred when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. Sugimoto chose to retain the dramatic marks, colorations and ripples that have changed the character of the photograph.
These are glamorous photographs of antique mathematical and mechanical models, which Hiroshi Sugimoto came across in Tokyo. The swooping, angled forms evoke Brancusi and Arp; Man Ray photographed some of these same models for similarly abstract purposes. Mr. Sugimoto’s aesthetic is, in various ways, a throwback to the machine art of their era, the 1920’s and 30’s, but it also engages 19th-century craftsmanship and empirical philosophy.
Three-quarter views shot from slightly below, these large photographs (size matters here) turn their practical subjects into big-screen cinematic presences, curvaceous and potent, lighted to emerge from the half-shadows as if for their close-ups. The nostalgia, entailing both form and content, is, like everything Mr. Sugimoto does, balanced by a taste for simplicity. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (2005 in New York, Sonnabend)
I first read about Sugimoto Joe in New York Times, then called the Pulitzer Foundation via phone about it, then toured the facility (Ann Hamilton show, something with gloves), and took home two copies of the book)
I also saw a big Sugimoto show at the DeYoung in summer, 2007
The exhibition includes examples from the series that Sugimoto began in the mid-1970s, Dioramas andMovie Theaters, as well as images from Seascapes and Portraits, started in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The eight photographs in Portraits were taken in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London, and Sugimoto painstakingly “remade” them to look like the original paintings from which they were modeled, employing lighting techniques similar to those that the painters might have used. The show also presents Sea of Buddha, 1995; Sugimoto’s more recent Architecture series; and images from Conceptual Forms, a series on which he is currently working.
This is not a sugimoto caribbean sea image of 1980: this says 650 words but fewer than 100 are written by me, by my hand, the rest are written, it would seem, by god, as a new type of deus ex machina, god and machine. And this on a Friday. Night. Shabbat. We did not eat with ceremony but I did cook up some burgers on the grill, and corn and some sausages. Terry boiled some beets but we’ll have to save them for another day, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 