Off the page and onto the Davies stage
Before we attended the Friday, April 17, version of Pop- Up Magazine at Davies Symphony Hall, Douglas McGray, its producer and also editor of California Sunday magazine, explained that the live show, “almost a multimedia version of reading,” was the mother that gave birth to the print/ online version ( which is available by subscription and also distributed with The Chronicle once a month). That makes the founding of these new storytelling formats almost like an Escher drawing, an idea within an idea within an idea. The live performance is an homage to reading, the written version is an homage to the live performance.
If that sounds complicated, the event is simple. And simply a huge hit. At Friday’s show, followed by one Saturday night at the Nourse auditorium, every seat was taken, and afterward people were abuzz when they spilled from the hall to the lobby, most lingering to drink. The first of these shows was at the Brava Theater on 24th Street. When it moved to Davies, friends told McGray that he couldn’t “call it a hobby anymore.”
The point, he said, is “stories for leisure time.” Each performance includes about a dozen short stories, a few first- person but most of them reported.
Most of the stories had local connections: The Kitchen Sisters talked about Wall Street, a longtime San Quentin convict who shares his financial savvy with fellow prisoners; Dana Goodyear talked about Barry McGee, and the artist’s marriages to Margaret Kilgallen, then Clare Rojas.
But for me, the magic moment came during Sam Green’s “A Drink With Louis Armstrong,” in which documentarian Green described examining the contents of the Armstrong Archive, at the library of Queens College in New York.
The trumpeter was in the habit of taping himself not only playing, but also in conversation. Green uncovered a tape of him talking with his wife, after an all- night drinking and talking session with friends. They debate whether to have sex, which Armstrong says always “makes your horn percolate.” When she realizes he’s been taping the conversation, she asks him to turn it off. He doesn’t. And finally, she goes to sleep and he pours himself a drink and sits quietly in his chair while drinking it. All the while the tape recorder is on.
At this point, Green apologized for soliciting audience participation, but suggested that people close their eyes and ... He was right, we could hear Armstrong breathing. “We’re sitting in Louis Armstrong’s kitchen as the sun comes up, and he’s in the room with us tonight,” said Green, and that “us” was every person in the hall. “Thank you very much,” said Green, and the moment was over.
We were away last month when “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter” opened at the Richmond Art Center, so we went instead to the Sunday, April 19, walk- through conducted by curator Jan Wurm. The art center is a roomy facility that offers classes in all kinds of art forms. Its exhibition space is airy and bright, and in the lobby Wurm had set out coffee and refreshments for the art lovers. It all felt very welcoming.
Howard was born in 1945, the youngest child in a large African American family that came up from Texas to work in the shipyards during the war. Her parents were political, as is she. They were antique dealers, who passed along to their daughter their skills at making things, fixing things, using and restoring.
The hand skills are reflected in the work, as well as a reverence for history and hope for the future. The show includes direct references to the past (“A Salute to Sojourner: Still Water Run Deep” includes a first edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stitched through its pages) — as well as the present (“Worldly Matters” includes a Barack Obama action figure with a globe). Howard is as adept at carpentry and sewing as she is at painting and sculpture, and she uses those skills in service of her ends.
The installation “Safe House,” created for the opening exhibition of MoAD, dominates the room at the Richmond exhibition. In front of a wall of knives, an array of silver servers, pots and platters is sprawled in a metal house. Nothing is safe, the piece — which makes reference to violence against women — says.
But in Howard’s world, the unsafe beckons. The exhibition is open through May 24.