Backstage Common Ground: Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Kronos Quartet at YBCA.
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
The Beautiful and Damned
Backstage Common Ground: Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Kronos Quartet at YBCA.
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
The Beautiful and Damned
The City: North Beach Sutra (Columbus Boulevard)…
We’re not our skin of grime,
we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive,
we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment — bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset,
spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad
locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a three-day wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. aWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Ken Kesey lived at #9 Perry Lane (just to the right of the telephone pole) while enrolled in the non-degree program at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center from 1959 through 1963. At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, where he later worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT) on human subjects. During this time, while living on Perry Lane, Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in 1962. Perry Lane was notorious for street parties and Hawaiian-style cookouts. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh often performed at these street parties.bLesh, Phil Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Often these parties were broken up by police on account on account of the attendees being racially mixed.cPaul De Carli: Hanging out with Ken Kesey on Perry Lane Probably the most famous of those parties was the Perry Lane Olympics which opened with a naked woman holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag stuffed in the cup as she was driven up and down the lane while sitting on the back of a convertible.
In August of 1963, Perry Lane #9 as well as some of the other cottages were torn down by developers and replaced with ranch style homes, forcing Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to relocate to 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, CA.
References
One of hundreds of RVs in Palo Alto housing families who can no longer afford rent in Silicon Valley. State and City laws require they move every 72 hours. This family parked in the foothills 50m from Tesla and SAP HQ.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity,
nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor
by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
Alonzo King and David Harrington (LINES Ballet and Kronos Quartet) discuss their collaboration on Common Ground
Disruption Town: Emerson Street Chairs
I had three chairs in my house;
one for solitude,
two for friendship,
three for society.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Speculation: Alonzo King LINES Ballet rehearsal Common Ground with the Kronos Quartet live in the studio.
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness,
of a world which had an eternal value
and the substance of which was divine
had been given back to me today by this friend of mine
who taught me dancing.
Hermann Hesse
Iphone Xs release at the Apple Store Palo Alto…
After all,
if you do not resist the apparently inevitable,
you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
Apple CEO Tim Cook made an appearance at an Apple Store in Palo Alto, California, helping to open the store and welcoming the first people from the queue into the store to pick up their iPhone XS order.
Christopher Chen: You Mean To Do Me Harm at San Francisco Playhouse. Directed by Bill English and Set Design by Angrette McCloskey.
That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than
his fellows, and who records more than he has seen.
Edward Gordon Craig
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez
The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood
with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd;
ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez
Saturday, September 8th, at 2pm
The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood
with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd;
ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
Speculation: work, work, work. Site responsive theater work for the upcoming performance of the remaining fragments of Sophocles Phaedra at Sutro Baths San Francisco
I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Resistance: The Community Meeting for the Bayview Hunters Point Environmental Justice Response Task Force.
Presentation by BUILD LLC
Update on the India Basin Mixed Use Development Project
Presentation by Amy Brownell of the San Francisco Department of Public Health
followed by a review and discussion of SFDPH’s work in the Bayview Hunters Point Shipyard
and the Shipyard Land Use Restoration of Parcel A
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, 2017
Alonzo King LINES Ballet Site Specific Dance San Francisco.
Captured in multiple locations around the city…