To Look Without Looking

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There are 93 Starbucks in San Francisco and on any given night 8,000 people living on the street. I don’t know anything about causation or correlation, but in at least one encampment there is a Starbucks patio umbrella being used to shelter a tent. I admire the cleverness of its architecture as I pass by on my way to the museum, wondering whether Howard Schultz is a patron of the arts. Inside, I renew my annual membership with a woman who speaks through a mask and a fuzzy intercom. I can’t understand a word she says but I can read the codes well enough to know when I am meant to apply my credit card.

On the photography floor they’ve pulled many pictures out from the archives. I spend extra time in a room where Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones document the flooding of a small town to make way for Lake Berryessa, a place where I’ve swam and where a Zodiac murder took place. All the photos are in black and white but I know the land there and can see the color in my head, golden hills and purple wild flowers. The series is called Death of a Valley and includes interviews with the people forced from their homes. One woman said it was sad, “but that if it makes life better for more people, then it is a good thing.” What equanimity, I think.

On the wall outside the Diego Rivera exhibit the museum gives gratitude to the show’s fiscal sponsors. It is a list of banks and old white men associated with banks. Odd sponsors for an avowed communist. I love Diego Rivera’s art and so need little to be won over. The bright colors, the politics, the flowers; how simple and important he makes humans out to be. In one room, they commissioned a contemporary puppet maker, Toztli Abril de Dios, to recreate costumes Rivera had designed for a modernist ballet. I walk around the tobacco and banana people over and over. I move through the rest of the exhibit slowly, pausing wherever feels right, spending extra time with his calla lilies, thinking ahead to the early Spring when they will bloom all the way up the coast. 

I ride the elevator down with a small abuelita and a tall granddaughter speaking in Spanish. I wonder if they are Mexican and if they are, what Diego Rivera means to them. Leaving by the side, I pass the mural he’d painted for an international arts fair on Treasure Island. It is called Pan American Unity and is a utopic story of industry and art defeating fascism and repression, a world not separated by culture, but brought together by it. The whole thing is seventy-five feet long and weighs 60,000 pounds. I can’t imagine that if Diego Rivera were alive today he would see the world he hoped for in the world that came to be.

Outside, walking empty downtown streets, shadowed by skyscrapers, I think about Peter Schjeldahl who died this weekend. He was my favorite of the New Yorker critics, who wrote art reviews from within them, who let himself be changed by the experience of seeing art, who wanted to be changed. In what might be his last review for the magazine, of a Wolfgang Tillmans’ retrospective called To look without fear, he wrote:

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These photographs shouldn’t amount to much, but to me they are stunningly lovely and, with only trace elements of melancholy, poetically more telling of communal ecstasy than any shots of the originating events could be. Think about mornings. They’re when the purest sense of what we are doing, or not doing, with our temporary habitation of the Earth sinks in.

I will not be in New York to see this show and these photos, but I know something of mornings, how today’s started slow and sunny, with a game of tennis and the growing awareness that I was meant to spend the day alone. Think about mornings. If seeing art is a travel story, then you must write about art as if it were a travelogue. I go to an ATM and tap my card, withdrawing sixty dollars from the bank, thinking how sad it is that the museum isn’t free even though there is enough wealth in this city that it could be.

Driving out of downtown in my little blue car I hit a man on a scooter. I am merging right and don’t see him, only hear the thud. “Bro!” he shouts. I roll down my window and say sorry. “It’s all good,” he says like a bodhisattva and zooms away. I’ll take his word for it I guess, letting a line of cars pass before I merge back into traffic.

I drive to the Tenderloin for a Bahn Mi at L&G Sandwich. It is a dystopic part of the city if you are not prepared for it. As I’m parking, a street cleaning truck goes by shooting water out of its sides. A man in soiled clothes runs into the street and lets himself be washed by it. We make eye contact briefly and he has that exuberant look on his face I remember from the hospital. I must have had that look once too. I park and hide my camera in the glove compartment.

I keep my eyes to the ground as I walk to the sandwich spot, noticing the orange caps collected at the curb. I pass a couple men wearing Kevlar vests and carrying cleaning supplies. They are street volunteers and have radios attached to their hips. I practice being invisible even as I know that in a neighborhood like this, I am the one who doesn’t belong.

The restaurant is a hole in the wall kind of place. I order sticky rice and a Bánh Mì and wait in a corner as a group of friends laugh easily in Vietnamese with the owner as she prepares my sandwich. It is a slow Sunday afternoon and there is no big lunch rush, everyone is just hanging out. I remember a painting from the show, of a ferry filled with people, the oarsman going only so fast as the canal will take him. To me it was a painting of time itself, passing as it sometimes does, patiently and without apology. Outside, I watch a man pick up a cigarette butt and put it in his back pocket. The sidewalk scintillates in the sun.

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Back at my car I see that the passenger side mirror is off-kilter. I adjust it and pay extra attention as I pull back onto the road. Vehicular manslaughter is a great fear of mine. I drive towards the Presidio and park in Cow Hollow, not far from the Palace of Fine Arts poking its head above the buildings. I push my seat back and eat the sticky rice in my car while listening to a segment on the radio about Malala Yousafzai. The world is an odd menagerie when you look at everything next to each other: a little girl across the world shot because she wants to go to school while tomorrow two people will be killed in a school shooting in St. Louis making it thirty eight such shootings for the year. When you leave out summer vacation, that is more than one per week. I eat half the sandwich and put the rest in the glove compartment, trading it with my camera that I sling across my shoulder.

I walk slowly towards the Presidio, past restaurants with eight-dollar beers and eighteen-dollar sandwiches, past outdoor tables filled with afternoon people and their afternoon drinks. I overhear one woman tell her friend about an unhoused person who lives near her office. “And I have to experience seeing him every day.” I repeat the words out loud to myself so I can remember them and can consult a semantics professor if I should ever meet one. How does one experience seeing? If I knew, I don’t know that I would be writing this.

Crossing an intersection, I make eye contact with a young man wearing a hat that says Starlink, a company whose CEO later this week will purchase the world’s digital town square for forty-four billion dollars. In public comment, he’ll say he bought it “to try to help humanity, whom I love.” I don’t know anything about launching satellites or dealing in great sums of money, but I do have a love for humanity, whom I would never have wished this man upon. For my own part, I am wearing a hat that says West Virginia, a state that I would not want anyone to think I represent. And yet, most days of the week its name sits upon my head.

I stop at a restaurant in the park for a glass of wine and a moment’s break from walking. On the patio under a heat lamp, I read an article about state lotteries. They are every bit as cynical as I thought they were, rising in popularity hand-in-hand with the growing wealth gap. I tune in and out of reading so I can listen to the couple behind me. Their daughter is newly matriculated at Barnard. “She’ll like it once she’s there longer. It’s New York, you have to have that part of your life.” 

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Taking the final sip, I pay and leave by the back gate that goes directly into the park. There is a murder of crows cawing from the roof tops, black blurs decorating red terracotta roofs. Below the crows is a dumpster with a large mirror sitting gently on the top, I pause to look at myself standing in the trash.

I walk along Crissy Field towards the bridge, the sun a few minutes away from setting. There are kites flying and couples holding hands, some joggers slowing down into walks, some speeding up into sprints. In a small estuary there are many families of birds holding a conference. I watch as the pelican delegation decides to leave early. When the day’s colors are in their fullest, I turn around, making sure to give myself time to make it back to my car before it is really dark. Facing the city now and the Salesforce tower in the distance, I pass a placard giving thanks for making all this possible to a man who sold a lot of jeans. I wonder how far my gratitude is meant to extend. Is it for the park alone or the entire San Francisco Bay, what about the sunset turning the whole city pink? Maybe I owe this man the moment itself. At the very least, I should probably thank him for the pants I wear most days of the week, a good and comfortable fit.

The marina is full as I walk back to my car along the path, small boats bobbing almost imperceptibly in the evening water. On the stone shelf above the boats there is a woman around my age sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her body is very still and her gaze even stiller. What do statues see I wonder, when the world never moves in front of them, but also never seems to stop. I pass a woman pushing a dog in a stroller and in a few more steps a man using his legs to walk his wheel chair, pushing himself backwards. His eyes have a lot in them as he tries to catch everyone’s attention. I walk by invisibly, a man with a camera around his neck, pretending not to see. 

Dan Deacon @ The Fillmore

Sometime early on at the Dan Deacon show at the Fillmore, I remember that when confronted by a sticky dance floor, the thing to do is seek out the puddles of freshly spilled beer. If it is a choice of clean sneakers or smoother footwork, it’s not a choice at all. Later in the show, when Dan Deacon has us kneel around a dance circle, he tells us not to worry, that it’s not beer, it’s vaccine. Every so often, he stops the show to remind us all how weird everything is.

The second song Dan Deacon plays is my favorite, Crystal Cat, and I am briefly disappointed, not in the song itself, but that it has come so soon. I was hoping it would be near the end, when I will be most loose, most uninhibited. But I let that disappointment go in a second, why not become loose right now when there is an invitation to do so? I push my way closer to the front, where the crowd already knows the score and the dancing has commenced in earnest. I flail and pulse and realize this is the first time I’ve done so in years. I first saw Dan Deacon at an afternoon show in a small parking lot in Baltimore. This was thirteen or fourteen years ago now and it was part of the summer DIY music festival he threw back then called Whartscape. What I remember of those shows is cheap beer and sweat and being twenty, I remember elaborate and interactive dance games. Mostly, I remember feeling ecstatic, and every time I’ve seen Dan Deacon since, I’ve felt the same. Dan Deacon is an electronic musician whose songs become living things when performed live, the record versions serving more as landmarks than pre-established trails. The physics of a good electronic dance show are as simple to understand as an ocean wave: somewhere, out where the water is deep, a swell begins, it builds momentum by alternating troughs and peaks, the peaks

grow steadily larger and larger, and finally, when a wave grows so large it can’t hold itself up any more it breaks with crashing kinetic energy. And so tonight we move the same, following a pitch or a tempo to an unsustainable height and then crashing cathartically when the beat finally drops.

On stage, Dan Deacon is behind a laptop and a magic board with glowing knobs and wires, the instruments of his trade. While performing, he alternates playing that board and stepping back to sing with pitched up vocals, holding the mic in one hand and with the other raising it to grab the air above his head. His strobe lights make him glow in red and green and pink. At other shows, I’ve seen him play right on the floor, surrounded on all sides by the dancing crowd.

The joy of a Dan Deacon show stretches beyond the music. I am not someone who gravitates towards crowd participation but when he orchestrates a game of dance telephone, I adherently follow the moves of the person in front of me, when he tells us to dance like voter suppression for Black and Indigenous people can be erased in our country, I stamp the ground hard as hell. There is philosophy in a Dan Deacon show: that personal release can be accessed through silliness, that joy can be shared with strangers, that happiness can be elevated into collective action. To me, the man on stage is immensely likable with red framed glasses and discursive banter. At one point, he asks the crowd if any of us know Lenny Kravitz personally and then he makes up a story about how Joe Kramer from Aerosmith defrauded Mr. Kravitz of a fortune in cryptocurrency. He spends another couple of minutes imagining himself practicing his stage talk in the mirror at home, something about Odie the dog from Garfield; his being dumb, lets us all be dumb.

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But joy is a complicated thing, constituting its own kind of wave, with troughs and all. In the middle of the show, Dan Deacon brings the lights up. He thanks the crowd for welcoming him back so warmly, this being only his second show since the pandemic. He tells us he is happy that we can spend the night with him but he also tells us that he wants to acknowledge that that happiness, in him and us, is only temporary. It is an odd thing to say in the middle of a show that is at least partially about escape, but the proposition he is making is an important one: that joy cannot exist out of context. For the first time anywhere, I hear someone say out loud that there is a collective grief we as a country have not yet contended with, that there is a cloud above our heads still unpierced by the sun. When the next song begins slowly, he tells us to root our feet into the ground, to feel the dance floor holding us. He tells us to think about a person we may have lost during this pandemic year and maybe not had a chance to grieve over; he tells us that it is okay to grieve for that person right now, that we can do so by dancing as a collective body of strangers; and because I am sweating, because I have been temporarily dispelled of cynicism, I choose to believe him, I choose to dance for the person I lost; I dance in anger, I dance in grief, I dance in all the ways I’d have him know I love him; and at the end of the song, when the wave crashes and everything is allowed to release, I dance without thinking at all. When that song ends he thanks us for being there, he thanks everyone working at the Fillmore, he thanks the opening acts, and most emphatically he thanks everyone in the last year he’s met who has welcomed him with softness and kindness, he makes me think maybe I can welcome people in that kind of way too.

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The show moves on, from heaviness back to lightness, as if the latter is always accessible by way of the former if you know the right person to show you the way. He plays the songs I want to hear: Sat by a Tree, When I was Done Dying, Fell into the Ocean. To all of them I dance, finding the spilled beer and sliding my feet through it, dancing for a time with a man who looks like Andy Warhol, he is wearing cowboy boots and a thin blazer with skulls on it and when the song ends we squeeze each other’s shoulders goodbye as if to say, I see you. With a couple songs left, Dan Deacon breaks in one last time to explain why there will be no encore. Like, it’s so silly, all I’ll do is walk to the side of the stage and look at my phone for forty seconds. He thanks us again, apologizes that he has to close with something so capitalistic as a pitch for his merch table, reminds us that if we should ever see him out in the world, we should stop him to say what’s been up with Lenny Kravitz lately, any lie you can come up with is good. He tells us this is the last song, Feel the Lightning, and that we should start jumping now, he says that tomorrow when our friends ask what we did tonight we can say we did calisthenics with a fat forty-year-old man, but I think I’ll tell them something different, I’ll say that thanks to a man and his magic board I joined a crowd of people all letting everything go, I’ll say that I danced in a puddle of vaccine, and when the last wave crashed, I rode it all the way into shore.

Joan Mitchell @ SFMOMA

In art, abstraction has always made sense to me. You take a thing and deconstruct it. What makes less sense, is how I am to write about it.

The Joan Mitchell retrospective at SFMOMA is organized thematically by what the curators say were the obsessions of her life: cities, water, poetry. Those are also the obsessions of my life, so maybe I am tuned for this. The most establishing point of chronological narrative in the show is at the very beginning in a painting called Figure and the City from 1949. In it, a woman in industrial blues and greens stands at the forefront of a cubist city that also is blue and green. Of the painting, Mitchell wrote, I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint. I just knew. And it was. In the painting, the woman’s body still holds sculpture, but in her bent head you see the action of her personhood dissolve into the abstractness of the city. Art historians place Mitchell squarely with the abstract expressionists, a style and period in which a handful of men in New York City sucked up all the air in the room. Those names are hardly mentioned in this show, and so too they will be absent here. A good retrospective is one that decontextualizes, and this is that, the canvases themselves doing the narration, thick in paint and texture, unexhaustive in color. I walk through the rooms of the show slowly, first cities, then water, and last of all poetry. I keep track of all the blues I see: dark dreaming blues, cold morning ones, deep oceans. If there is red it is disruptive but meaningfully so. If I am to be here, I will be here, and it will be fine. In some places her paint is built up in a kind of topography, in others it is wispy and taciturn.

Everywhere I look there is motion. Everywhere I look I am made agreeable to a discordance that is first welcomed and then resolved. Shapes, forms, colors, movements, textures —brushstrokes on canvases eight feet high. I understand these things, when combined together, to be the experience of one woman one time somewhere, maybe in Paris, maybe on a sailboat, maybe reading John Ashbery. Beyond that, objectivity falters. What I can tell you is that the show makes me calm, better aware to the proportions of space in the gallery, to the sound of footsteps, to the quietness of my own contemplation. This is one way I felt, one time, in San Francisco at the beginning of fall in my thirty-second year on a day I’ve dedicated to walking around the city without a specific direction in mind. When it’s time to go, I go, back into the city, where life awaits. My legs steer while my eyes wander, noticing the red in a storefront awning and the way the sun makes a cream-colored building appear golden. Eventually, I arrive at the ocean, where the waves undulate and the Golden Gate Bridge stands guard. Joan Mitchell wrote that she carries her landscapes with her wherever she goes, and for today anyway, I carry them too.

Waxahatchee @ Gundlach Bundschu

My schtick at the concert is walking by people who are drinking wine and saying loudly to AJ, it’s crazy they’re not serving wine tonight. The show is at a Vineyard in Sonoma and they are definitely serving wine. AJ gets us a bottle of rosé that matches her summer dress on today the last day of summer.

We’re here to see Waxahatchee in a valley filled with grapevines nearing harvest. It’s a small stage set up on a small hill. We find a place close up on a patch of dry grass and compliment the forethought of everyone else in the crowd who thought to bring blankets. We sit on our jackets and appraise the crowd while the light still carries. Our assessment: high levels of norminess. AJ asks whether it’s the venue that brings them out in such volume or the band. I say the latter, she says the former, and we both admit to our snobbiness. When the sun goes down and the band begins to play, we all become the same, a collection of human shapes dark against the hillside, here to share in music and wish the summer an easy goodnight.

Waxahatchee is the project of Katie Crutchfield who released an album St. Cloud and then there was a global pandemic. Almost two years later and this is her first tour to perform it. Her support is a four-piece from Detroit called Bonny Doon, two guitars, bass, and drums, traditional for the folk rock that this is. Like AJ and half the crowd, she is in a summer dress and barefoot.

From the first song, her voice is full and resonating. St. Cloud was my favorite album in the pandemic year and I am happy to hear it live, to witness her voice travel beyond the confines of a recording. And it does that, vibrating outward from her place on stage. More often than not, she sings with her eyes closed and when she is not playing guitar dances expressively with her hands, arms, and shoulders.

One by one, all the songs I want to hear empty from her, the music matching well to the idyll: a grove of eucalyptus trees, a bat diving for bugs, rows and rows of grapevines.

I am not a music reviewer and I cannot tell you to like Waxahatchee, but what I like about her music is how in it I hear a clear legacy in The Band and Joni Mitchell, but updated convincingly to our times; I hear Americana music that is more parts ripping than strumming and lyrics that hold meaning without relying on understanding. Her music makes my shoulders sway without awareness and that is as much of a review as I can give.

I drain the last of the wine right from the bottle and close my eyes, enjoying just the music, wanting only that her band let the songs breathe more, give space for Waxahatchee’s voice to find its edge and maybe even push beyond it. But who am I to wish someone go beyond themselves? That would be like asking the summer to extend into the fall. In some years that will happen, and in others it won’t. The show ends and we blend into the crowd of normies walking towards their cars. A couple times I say loudly to AJ, that was great, but I wish she’d played Red, Red Wine. My year-round friend in her summer dress just rolls her eyes.

James Blake @ The Greek

I forgot I was meant to be emotional or something on the occasion of my first concert since this all began. I wasn’t that, but I was a little sauced, having put a few back at a bar right beforehand. It was a millennial cocktail place playing noise music though the vibe was more Fleetwood Mac. I wasn’t as against it as my drinking colleagues were, but this isn’t a bar review, it’s a concert review: James Blake @ The Greek in Berkeley.

Direct from the bar, AJ and I bike to the UC Berkeley campus where the outdoor amphitheater resides on the hillside. We lock our bikes and wander in, showing first proof that we are vaccinated and second that we brought with us no guns or water. The stage faces stone seats that climb upwards and outwards on the hill. We direct ourselves to the grass lawn above all that. At the nearby bar they sell a beer for $11 and a large for $12. It is an easy decision to make. We share a joint as the last of the sun disappears and I graduate from just sauced to now twisted.

We’ve timed it well, both our arrival and the joint. As we cash it, all the lights go off except for the moon and a few darkened figures populate the stage. The lights come back on and James Blake is there along with two compatriots, each housed on a raised square platform, like little music islands. There is one for drums, one for keyboards where Mr. Blake sits, and a last that looks like a lit-up treadmill. I don't know how electronic music works.

The music begins and it registers quickly that maybe sitting this far away and above the rim of the stage does not make for the best auditory experience, even with the add-on of chemical modifiers. Sometimes a joint makes it easier to fall into something, other times it shows you the box in which something exists. At least tonight, the box is clearly in outline.

If I were a real music critic maybe I would mention the setlist, remark on a certain song, or even situate James Blake within the context of our times. But I am not that, I can only report that from where I sit, the music escapes unimpactfully into the atmosphere. Probably it is better to see a James Blake concert inside, where the music can bounce off the walls and ceilings and fully envelop you.

James Blake (JB) makes sad electronic music, a kind of dubstep Jeff Buckley (JB). Even though I could have predicted that a James Blake concert would lean more into the Buckley than the dubstep, I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case. When he asks the crowd early on if any of us have been heartbroken this last year, the mood is set. If I wasn’t already sitting I would have fallen over laughing. Yes, but fuck you for presuming, I think, as he melts into one of his broken love songs, I’m not sure which one, it’s his whole discography. AJ says something to the effect that if you’re going to play sad and slow music at least your visuals should be cool, but the light installation at the back of the stage is basically an EKG machine without the suspense. I close my eyes to enjoy the music more, sometimes falling into it, sometimes not. The night goes on pleasantly and undramatically. He plays old songs and new songs, some I know, others I don’t. Every so often he talks awkwardly to the crowd, apologizes that the new album isn’t out yet, compliments us on our behavior, explains that his songs come from anxiety and depression. The music performed live takes on no life beyond Spotify, but I am happy merely to be here and buzzing, looking over to San Francisco, looking over a crowd that sways back and forth in something that is short of dancing but more than stillness. When the encore is over, AJ and I walk back to our bikes. The departing crowd has taken over the street and many are still singing. I overhear one person tell his date that the show was sublime. I wonder what show he went to. We pedal through the crowd and I pretend to AJ that I only came tonight to mow down pedestrians afterwards, the pickings here are easy. The night is perfect for biking and we take residential streets home. I bike silly because I’m feeling silly. It makes AJ both laugh and worry. When I get home, I put James Blake on in my good headphones, I like him better this way.