San Francisco Arts Festival: "HERE"

Several friends are featured in the San Francisco International Arts Festival taking place today through June 5. This weekend CALI & Co and Matt El bring there HERE show to Cowell Theater.

CALI & CO dance/
Matt EL
with guest collaborators
Kyoungil Ong and
Sooyeon Lyuh (USA, Korea)

HERE

Friday May 20, 7:00pm
Saturday May 21, 9:30pm
Sunday May 22, 2:30pm
Duration: 80 minutes (both companies)

Shared bill with Dana Lawton Dances

Cowell Theater
Tickets: General Admission
$20 in advance, $25 at door

HERE captures the rapture of existence through a new piece de resistance by CALI & CO dance/Matt EL music with guest collaborators Kyoungil Ong/Ong Dance Company and Sooyeon Lyuh. HERE is a rare, creative amalgamation of identity and culture through traditional Korean dance and music with American modern dance and rock music. Coursing shadow and light through its structure, HERE seeks to highlight the beauty and soften the pain of existence. 

10 Ways to Get Unstuck & Finish What You Started

Making stuff — songs,  stories, magazines...pies — has been my through line for most of my life. Creating is for me one of the coolest things about being alive. How amazing it is that humans can make things out of 'nothing?' How much one can find out about themselves through doing.  Now I chart my fluidity, or my stuckness, by how my projects are proceeding. Usually there's a match up to what I'm feeling.  I'm likely stuck if I'm feeling frustrated, cranky, oppressed somehow or over-tired (in a way that sees sleep as a way out rather than as a restorative). I'm usually stuck if I'm feeling fear of some kind,  or that my circumstance is compromised. Over the years I've been fortunate to find several practices that have worked for keeping me, or getting me, back on track when I'm stalling out. As I've been working on getting my arms around a big project that has eluded me for some years — years in which I've actually completed lots of projects (albeit other projects) — I've been turning to my favorite ways — that don't involve plane tickets or other large purchases — to get unstuck a lot!

10 Ways to Get Unstuck & Finish What You Started

1. Do some yoga. Even five minutes of breath and movement can change your perspective. If you've never done yoga, try a beginner class or commit to learning sun salutations. I have a regular yoga practice so this has become built in. Now, if I'm resistant to my yoga practice,  I do what I consider my 'minimum RDA:' 20 minutes of my regular practice, including sun salutations, a few standing and some seated poses.
2. Vocalize. Another built-in for me as I regularly chant and I sing.  When I was going through a low period, I found these were things that made me feel better. Sound vibration and music affect us physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. Make a sound=shift in consciousness.
3. Go for a walk outside, preferably up a hill. For most of my life (until recently), I've lived near some geographic feature I could ascend. Going for a walk + changing the view +breathing the air = gear change. But you don't need a hill. A walk around the block can do wonders. My new15 minute loop near my house gets my blood moving and... doesn't take me too far from what I'm working on.
4. Make/bake something easy. Often my stuckness is a result of being daunted by a project. Making something edible reminds me I can complete a project and also make something useful. When I was young, I liked to bake. Now I've been more into raw, vegan snack type things, that don't take all day and are truly nourishing.
5. Set a timer. Sometimes thinking/worrying about the thing I'm resisting — making that call, writing the next paragraph, paying the bills,  learning the new song that hasn't been getting in— than actually doing it. Setting a timer for a amount of time that's not overwhelming — 10 minutes to half hour — helps gets me started, which is key, and usually leads to completion.
6. Dance. Blast a favorite tune and go to town...even if town is in your living room. Dance is play and counters the over-seriousness business.
7. Mix up your usual routine so your usual sequencing is different.  Perhaps it won't offer up any resistance when approached at a new angle.
8. Take part in a challenge. I'm a big proponent of 'write a [novel, album] in-a-month' type challenges or Instagram # sharing challenges. They're manageable, they're contained and it helps to know you're not alone.
9. Reach out. Connect to another maker, or someone who is doing what you aspire to, or simply an old friend. Up the ante by writing a real old-fashion letter.  Write as a fan or to say thank you. Or write your friend to tell them the things you love about your life right now. Make it equal parts gratitude list and reconnection. Put your letter in an envelope with a real stamp. Walk it to the real mailbox.
10. Take time from social media. See what the vacuum left by Twitter and Facebook yields. 
11. Make a list. 10 projects you admire.  5 next steps to take. 15 things you've already completed. All the things you do well. Wow, look at that!

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Creativity might be playful – but it's also work

by David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
The view that art is essentially unworldly and creativity is play has a long history, dating back to the Romantics in the 18th century. According to this view, art must be kept separate from money, lest it be corrupted, and creativity must be unshackled from the machinery of work. The economist John Maynard Keynes perhaps expressed it best when he said:

Everyone, I fancy, recognises that the work of the artist in all its aspects is, of its nature, individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled. The artist walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself.

This is an appealing construction. The artist is pictured as someone unconstrained by rules or expectations, and free too from need or want. He is pictured, that is, as the kind of gentleman artist that Keynes regularly encountered in his own life as a member of the famous Bloomsbury set.
Yet there are important forms of creativity for which Keynes’ picture does not hold true at all.
There are two kinds in particular that lie almost at the other end of the spectrum, demanding focus, planning, and resources. They are:

1. Creative works which require a sustained effort over time
2. Works whose scope exceeds the personal capacity of the individual author/artist.

Think of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume sequence, Remembrance of Things Past, or the 39 years (and counting) Robert Caro has spent researching and writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, or The Hobbit trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, which employed an estimated 3,000 people over a three year period.
These forms of creative work are characterised by their resource intensity and the high level of collaboration required to bring them off. They are as far from the undisciplined, free-flowing Keynesian model as might be imagined.
They are also fundamental to the great human project of knowledge creation and expression.

Economic rights in creative works

Creativity may be playful but it is also work. Since it creates value and consumes resources, we must consider it as a form of economic activity.
Historically the value of creative work has been fixed in the form of intellectual property rights, where the creator is granted a legal right of exclusivity in the work they have created. This gives them an asset around which to organise the people and resources needed to bring the work to fruition and then to market.
To those who favour the Keynesian model of free, uninhibited creativity, the idea of intellectual property may be anathema – at best unnecessary and at worst a dead weight on the free expression of ideas. The American economists Michele Boldrin and David Levine have described it as “an obnoxious combination of medieval institutions” and called for its abolition.
They have a point. Rights such as copyright have grown far beyond their original legislated form, both in scope and duration. They have also become entrenched in global treaties that make them almost supra-national in force.
On The Conversation recently Dan Hunter asked what kind of law would encourage creativity, and answers his own question, saying “it wouldn’t look like copyright”.
He goes on to argue that copyright has negative effects for creativity, drawing on research showing artists do their worst work when they are commissioned. Humans, he says, “become creative when they’re internally motivated by curiosity or interest or desire” and become “demotivated” when money is introduced into the equation.
Hunter is right: money cannot describe the whole equation of creativity.
Yet to wish it out of the equation is surely a step too far.
For moneyless creativity is creativity without means. It is creativity with one hand tied behind its back. It is skimping, pulling back, and people going unpaid. It is ambition deferred and vision cut short.
We need to accept that creativity takes place in an economy and makes claims on its resources. It does not somehow float free of economic gravity, miraculously aloft. It may be playful and exuberant and done despite constraints – but it is still work. Very often it is hard work, and it takes time and money and many people working together to pull it off.

Cashless creativity is elitist

To argue for a cashless creative economy is not simply wishful thinking, benign and well meaning.
For if there is no money in creativity, then the kinds of creativity I have described become, by default, the privilege of the wealthy – elite pursuits from which most of the third world and many in the first world are excluded.
They become something that rich people do and poor people read about.
It’s the Bloomsbury model all over again: art as properly the province of the upper middle class.

Read other articles in our Creativity series here.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

More Inspiration from Mad Scientist Mind

Not long after my post referencing my love of mad scientists, I happened into a shrine to mad scientism, The Huntington in San Marino, CA. OMG! Founded by railroad tycoon and evident honorary mad scientist, Henry E. Huntington, in 1919, his namesake institution fully expresses his "special interest in books, art, and gardens."
"Start with the library," I was advised by the woman at the welcome desk.
"The Huntington Library is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States in its fields of specialization. The Library’s collection of rare books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, and other materials in the fields of British and American history and literature totals more than nine million items."
We're talking manuscripts and first editions from Shakespeare and Chaucer, Thoreau and Audubon. I was blown away. Thankfully, the Huntington Gardens beckoned and I cleared my mind with an eye-boggling meander through the 120 acres of cactus, bonsai courts, rose gardens and lily ponds. I was so glutted on beauty and wonder, I didn't make even it into the galleries to view the extensive collections of British and European art.
"Your first time?" the cashier at the gift store asked after I'd done a quick, slightly dazed holiday shop.
"Yes," I said, explaining that I was from out of town. "I had no idea."
"Yes," he nodded, "We're one of LA's best kept secrets."

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

1151 Oxford Road

San Marino, CA  91108

626.405.2100

Deborah Crooks | A more diverse form of Americana | Latest Cds

Rainy day museum visit

"When you put a seed in the ground, it doesn't stop growing after eight hours. It keeps going every minute that it's in the earth. We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day that we are on this earth." -- Ruth Asawa

I left the uber rainy SF Bay Area for equally wet LA this week to hang with my sweetie, work on some writing, and dig a little deeper in my yoga practice. I still found time for an afternoon at the Norton Simon Art Museum which was so, so pleasing. I was delighted both to see a special exhibit of Ruth Asawa drawings and prints as well as an extensive Asian collection.
Throughout I kept coming upon paintings of flowers, studies, drawings, etchings. I loved the fact of visual artists coming back to  simple, ordinary captures of floral beauty through the ages. These flower paintings, from Asawa, Latour and de Heem, span 350 years. 

Hawaii Postcard: Wherever you go...

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Wherever you go, there you are....it was fun to happen upon several paintings by Georgia O'Keefe at the Honolulu Art Museum this week. The Dole Company paid for O'Keefe to fly here in 1939 in exchange for two paintings (on any subject) they could use in their pineapple juice ads. She produced 20 paintings inspired by her time in the island landscape, and the three I saw were lovely and so immediately recognizable as her work. Even though Hawaii is 180 degrees different than New York, where she was living, and Santa Fe, where she settled. It reminded me what I've been feeling this latest bit of travel, and what I've learned in the past: wherever you go there you are
For a long time, my urge to travel was to get away. But my need to escape myself was cured  by my last trip to India. Both knees injured, yoga practice compromised (physically), far from my love, I felt finally a big 'uncle' in me. Realizing once and for all, I was not going to transmogrify into a fantasy of myself that had it all together and was pain (physical, emotional, you name it) free. No I was me, that wasn't going to change fundamentally, this lifetime. So when I came home, I really came home, and started to put down roots for the first time in years. I've travelled a little in the past three years, but it's been pretty west-coast centric, road-trippy and domestic.

So flying to Hawaii this week was the longest I've been on a plane in a bit. Still it felt pretty natural and familiar and I arrived curious for perspective rather than looking for escape.  Flying out over the Bay Area, getting a clear picture of my home territory: the small island of Alameda we call home, the vast, bridge- becrossed San Francisco Bay as well as Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, and Pt. Reyes jutting out furthest west fromthe mainland as if it wanted to go to Hawaii, too, was the literal broad overview. And being here has been a balm and extension of that. It's been great to mostly unplug and not do too much -- not try to see everything, everywhere, or play out or what have you, going to the yoga studio in the a.m., writing and strumming a little, albeit augmented by warm water, acai bowls and sand. Mm mm Mmmmm.

Island living: In the stream

“When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor's gift” —Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

When I lived in Santa Cruz while attending UC Santa Cruz, I'd meet a friend at the harbor three mornings a week to row a zipper out into the bay for a good hour. Sitting atop the water in a kayak feels like being a duck or scoter. You're pretty much in the stream with everyone else, short of committing to swimming, eye-level with otters and seals, pelicans and gulls. But while I've enjoyed kayaking on and off in the years since, mostly on vacations to warm lovely places like New Zealand or Hawaii, I hadn't ever thought to get my own. Then I married a man with a decidedly nautical bent—if guitars aren't been played or read about boats are.  Late last year, he read about Oru Kayaks, which makes origami kayaks. Yes, you read that right. Origami. Oru makes kayaks out of single sheets of plastic that fold up into 25-lb boxes you can put in the car, on the boat or carry up a trail.  Their motto is 'from boat to box in 5 minutes' and since two boxed up Orus arrived on our doorstop we've started taking them out around Alameda, which between the bay and the estuary offers a lot of kayaking options.  The kayaks were a little stiff first out of the box —I've needed help getting mine fully assembled so I'm still aways from 5 minutes— but once together are light and watertight, and glide beautifully and silently over the water...like a duck.  

A couple weeks ago, I noticed a new mural while driving over the Park Street bridge. A few days ago I was visiting a friend who lives in Jingletown, the warehouse, live-work space, art and mosaic- (IMA used to be based here) filled neighborhood just over the estuary,  and discovered the mural was right up the street. Painted on the side of the Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale Warehouse, and within a few wing beats of the Peregrine Falcon-housing Fruitvale Bridge, it depicts several, mostly non-native species: a tropical bird I don't recognize, a chameleon and some elephants as well as the head of a condor.  The mural is bright and compelling as murals can be, but I'm flummoxed by the choice of subject matter (save for the elephants, given the building that serves as its canvas).  How cool would it have been to focus on native species? In any event, it's right by a waterfront park and the UCB boat launch so getting up close makes for a pleasant outing. Bring your binocs and look up for the falcons while you're at it— they're going to fledge soon — as well as the herons and gulls and ducks and other birds that frequent the estuary.

Yoga: Art of Transformation Exhibit @ The Asian Art Museum

“Vishnu Vishvarupa,” India, Rajasthan, Jaipur, circa 1800-1820

Saturday, we took the ferry to SF and spent half a day at the Asian Art Museum, catching the next-to-last-day of the Yoga: Art of Transformation exhibit. A much-buzzed-about-in-yoga-circles show (there were many accompanying events that drew on the vibrant and diverse Bay Area yoga community), the curators of the exhibit created a compelling narrative in 135 artworks that serves both as visual feast and food for thought, tracing the roots of yoga as a practice of renunciates in ancient India, to its overseas sensationalization in Europe and the US, and present-day popularity, and commercialization, worldwide. A winding narrative of paintings, sculpture, drawings, photos and video, including South Indian temple-derived sculptures of multi-armed yoginis, pages from a 16th century treatise“Ocean of Life" (some of the earliest examples of asana  illustrations),  large early-1800 paintings of the chakra system from the Jodhpur court that carry both religious and political associations, and footage of Krishnamacharya and Iyengar practicing asana, very clearly showed how captivating, and widely interpreted, yoga has been throughout the ages. Fittingly, the show culminates with a wall-size piece by Pardon My Hindi, #WhitePeopleDoingYoga in the Education Resource Center:

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga / *Pardon My Hindi from *Pardon My Hindi on Vimeo.

The Yoga: Art of Transformation exhibition next travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art (June 22, 2014–Sep. 7, 2014).

ancient yogini

Beyond such special exhibits, the Asian Art Museum, now housed in the former SF Publication Library that was built in 1917,  is truly a treasure trove of Asian art and culture.  Every time I've gone to a special event here, I take solace from the inevitable crowds in one of the upstairs galleries. This time, after viewing the yoga exhibit, we popped into a gallery filled with Japanese Buddha sculptures and then just stood a while in the beautiful interior court.