Sidelong glances at the Oscars
The 90th Academy Awards may have been in Hollywood, but there is a local angle. Venture capitalist Jim Swartz, who lives part time on Russian Hill, part time on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, is co-producer (along with Dan Cogan and David Fialkow) of “Icarus,” the documentary on Russian athletes doping. Swartz and his artist wife, Susan, are founders of Impact Partners film company, which focuses on films that deal with social issues.
The Oscars dresses, as always at the awards ceremonies, were stunning, the political statements heartfelt. But did anyone notice that although Gal Gadot was beautiful as “Wonder Woman” and beautiful as an awards presenter, she had one body shape in the movie and another onstage?
The movie was welcomed and reviewed joyously as a modern fable for girls needing role models. But watching the Oscars, it became clear that Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” chest was a Barbie-like add-on. What I’m calling out here is not Gadot, but Hollywood, where Wonder Woman needed to add a Wonderbra to her lasso of truth.
More in the continuing debate: Are we more or less weird than we used to be, and do we like it that way?
“Being strange in San Francisco was a badge of identity,” says Mickey Hart, “and was encouraged for its uniqueness and vision. The call of the weird was a blessing from where we came from.” This view is in line with what Holly Bennett overheard someone say at the Chocolate Fusion event in Grass Valley (Nevada County): “He wore big balloon pants, blue with yellow stripes. But he’s from the Bay Area, you know. The Bay Area.”
Weirdologist Scott Wright says, “San Francisco stopped being weird back during the first dot-com boom . ... Now it’s like Kansas, but more expensive. If you want weird, you have to now go to places like Vallejo. I compare it to San Francisco in the late ’80s. Grungy but hip.”
As to teachers tormenting students, it must be noted that the most dramatic examples were cited by former students in parochial schools. Tom Ammiano says the nuns in his school would force boys to wear bows in their hair if they’d forgotten to wear ties to school.
Since he had a brush cut, the nuns would tie the ribbon around the earpiece of his eyeglasses. Thus, said Ammiano, in a tone not at all regretful, fueling his own lifelong affinity to drag.
Artist John Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana and lives in London, was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last week for the opening of his “Sublime Seas.” That exhibition includes “Vertigo Sea,” a three-channel video installation tucked away behind the elevators on the seventh floor, and J.M.W. Turner’s painting “The Deluge,” which is said to depict the biblical flood, and which the artist selected to be paired with the video installation
A day before the formal opening, Akomfrah was at the museum in conversation with curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling. Right off, the artist proclaimed himself “tired of Aristotelian cliches of cinema,” which, best as I can figure out, refers to the classical formula of drama that revolves around a hero.
“I have become more interested in the chorus than the protagonist,” said the artist. This was before we’d seen the work, which involves three screens and images that weave in and out of each other, back and forth with each other, “in the liminal space between the art world, cinema and TV,” said Akomfrah.
The adjacent films create “a chorus” of proximity, he added, “where things melt into each other.” Although those things may “appear to have no relationship,” the artist “forces them into dialogue with each other.”
Akomfrah’s films portray, among many things, “the history of whaling in Newfoundland, and the history of slaves dying at sea,” obviously some of the footage real, some staged. “Nigerian refugees at sea made me think of ‘The Raft of the Medusa,’ ” Géricault’s depiction of a wreck off the coast of Africa. Like the Turner painting, that work depicts people as victims; “Vertigo Sea,” perhaps, turns that inside out.
As to the process of describing the work, Akomfrah was expansive in his answers but mindful of his personal goals. As an artist, he said, “You work so hard to achieve a kind of wordlessness. Then as soon as you finish, you’re forced on stages and asked to explain it.”
Customer: “What a shame. Such a waste of paper.” Clerk: “Oh, don’t worry about it. They have their own trees.” Conversation after checkout clerk has handed customer a long roll of coupons, overheard at a CVS by Beverly Robbins