Succumbing to the ‘exploding trajectories’

There is so much to soak up and gasp at in “Refuse the Hour,” the William Kentridge multimedia chamber opera we saw on Friday, Nov. 10, that when you’re engaged, you follow a string of reasoning, the idea that everything you’ve ever done exists somewhere in space, for example ... and while you’re walking down that mental path — lined with dioramas of your own memories — that maybe leaves you having missed the next thought, or the philosophical assumption implied in the thought after that. But maybe by “you” I mean “me,” and that’s a confession. I was rapt, and at the same time, there was so much I wasn’t quick enough to grasp.

In the words of SFMOMA’s media arts curator, Rudolf Frieling, who curated Kentridge’s “The Refusal of Time” there, the artist’s work is a “maze of cross-references and exploding trajectories.” At a post-performance reception, Kentridge explained that “Refuse the Hour” had arisen from that piece when its musical composer Philip Miller had persuaded him to participate in it live.

So there he is onstage, a man in a rumpled white shirt, a real person, running through time, honking on his tuba, cranking the hurdy-gurdy ... until the end, on the shores of the River Styx, a person stands “with a suitcase full of teeth and glasses, thoughts and stories.”

Neal Benezra, a Kentridge aficionado, said he thinks SFMOMA has more Kentridges than any other museum in the world. Carey Perloff said her daughter had seen “Refuse the Hour” at Yale last year, and she had dreamed of bringing it to San Francisco, even though “it seemed a foolhardy idea to bring something this immense and complete in the middle of the season.” That afternoon, she said, Kentridge had met with ACT students, and “I say to my students, every once in a while, you meet such a person ... and he has infinite curiosity and can stop time.”

Three days before, on Nov. 7, guests and patrons, several holding large gray books, gathered to meet Kentridge at Arion Press. The artist had illustrated the press’ 2015 publication “The Lulu Plays,” by

Frank Wedekind, whose work was the basis for Alban Berg’s opera “Lulu.” The limited-edition book includes 67 drawings by Kentridge, black-and-white images made from brush-and-ink drawings he did for a production of the opera. Booktoting guests — Sako and Bill Fisher, Jon and Betsy Root, and Sally Fay — had brought them along to have Kentridge sign them.

The artist arrived at the reception nearly straight from the airport, with one unplanned detour when his driver mistook Hays Street in the Presidio for Hayes Street in the Civic Center area. Before joining the reception, he’d taken a 10minute tour of the type foundry and presses downstairs, his first time seeing the operation. He seemed elated, saying there is letter-press printing in South Africa, but no casting of type.

The press’ Andrew Hoyem spoke, as did Kentridge. Then to the signing, a task for which he employed a Montblanc pen and a graceful curling script. When I asked whether the fountain pen had given him any trouble on the plane, he held out a finger smudged with ink.

“You have to spend a lot of money to get a pen that leaks as bad,” he said, so he’d taken it back to the company. “‘That’s an entry-level Montblanc,’ ” this master of ink — and pen and brush and everything else he touches — was told. “‘What did you expect?’ ” Wrapping up, three cheers: Sponsorship and ticket sales for last week’s Dreamfest concert — featuring Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz — raised $15 million for Salesforce.org, which benefits UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. Congratulations for that, and for sharing the setup with Band Together Bay Area, which raised $23 million for fire victims.

Squeezed in one movie in the New Italian Cinema festival: “At War for Love” on Saturday. What the program had described as “broad slapstick, swooning romance” packed in a portent of postwar Sicily, and salute to any movie that won’t be crammed into a box.

The Fifth S.F. International Boogie Woogie Festival had SFJazz jammed and, by the end of the show, jamming. We were seated just behind the pianists. I not only listened, but also watched a whole separate show of pianists’ feet tapping, stomping, shaking and pounding in time with the music. So bravo for all, especially jazzmen visiting from Spain, Hungary and Germany ... sharing the sound and the piano benches.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “If I want to shower with my colleagues, I’ll do it on my own time.” Man responding to corporate memo advising him of g ym on premises, overheard by Cory Warren