Another Party, Another Planet

Just to continue a line of thought that my fine, thoughtful commenters already advanced, there's a huge difference between a scene and a community, and if I get a vote I opt for the latter. After our somewhat off-putting experience Thursday night at Nights at the SBMA, on Friday night Amy and I attended the Fundraiser for Fire Disaster Relief for all the folks who lost their businesses and homes and cats a month ago. Local businesses pitched in donating food and drink; Spencer the Gardener with Nate Birkey played two terrific sets of music; people chatted and had fun and even John Palminteri made an appearance and joked about his very own Prime-Time-ness (he's such a big silly fish in the small Santa Barbara media pond). The mayor was there, as was Councilman Brian Barnwell, dancing with his wife Camilla Cohee as the accordion and horn-led sounds of the band echoed out from the historic Casa de la Guerra courtyard and bounced off the ever-increasingly distant News-Press building (it really seems to be merely a historic relic at this point). People seemed to be there because they cared, because they knew their $10 donation would help someone, not like the night before when it seemd as if people thought their $25 ticket would enter them in the "let's get laid" lottery of the very well dressed. Sure enough, David from Frameworks said a few words and stressed how their goal with the gallery was to make a community, to get around the idea that art was too expensive and too exclusive. While the fire certainly made things much harder, their dream has far from gone up in smoke--the community they made was there for them, hoping, helping, having a blast just a few blocks away from where everything had seemed to go so terrible wrong.

Blog of Our Nights

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art puts on this event called Nights every third Thursday from May to September and Amy and I finally decided we needed to see what all the hoopla was about. (Edhat has photos.) It helped that we won the tickets from KCRW, fully aware of how weird it is for Santa Barbarans to have to call an LA radio station to win tickets to a SB event. Supposedly we were going to be able to "Revel in the spirit of ancient and modern Mexico, inspired by the exhibition Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted," but mostly we got to stand around, look at the people being gorgeous or trying hard to be gorgeous (so often botox and plastic surgery does leave one with a hard look), listen to KCRW DJ Jason Bentley over a really loud sound system (and see him on stage, if we could draw our eyes past the firedancers--this was outside and not in the museum itself so no canvas was threatened), and drink mixed drinks with whacky names like The Sauza® Red Mask Tequila-tini or whatever mine was called, I think it was Picasso's Penis or something (I don't want to know if it was his blue or rose period).

I have to admit these kind of things--Santa Barbara's beautiful looking beautiful for each other--isn't really my cup of martini, even if you get to do it standing next to a Chagall (if you wanted to pick up someone who could be rugged under their Friday night finest even on a Thursday, you could cozy up to them in the Ansel Adams gallery, I guess). When you're married, that kind of thing sort of loses its charge. The kind of fun part is there are arts and crafts stations set up throughout the galleries, so you can make stuff like the still-life folk altar I threw together pictured up top. Maybe it's my generally ornery nature, but making art in groups, dressed up, while drinking, where everyone gets to watch your process and you have to reach over each other's art-in-progress to get the glitter glue...it's fun and all, but makes art a parlor game. As parlor games go it's better than Monopoly, but has about as much to do with art as Monopoly has to do with becoming a real estate tycoon.

I know, I know, just relax already and have another $7 cocktail, which isn't a terrible price, but when you spend $25 to get in (we were glad we won our tickets), and the event has alcohol sponsors, I expect something more (at least more food--very paltry presentations, if you ask me). It's the kind of thing the Film Festival pulls off so well, for free, but to a much more exclusive audience. (Although the amount of Film Festival folks wandering around was quite high--guess they're missing the jacked-up party scene.)

Then again, it might be cool to hear someone do a slightly different cover of Jonathan Richman at one of the Nights events:

Some people try to pick up girls
And they get called an asshole
This never happened in front of a Pablo Picasso

Religious Art: Once More with Feeling

Just as the poor Neanderthal deserves some paleo-historic love, even if it turned out to be an evolutionary dead end, it's good to stop and give Tintoretto--who led to no one and barely left his Venice--an artsy cheer. I was reading the latest issue (subscription required) of The Nation last night and Arthur Danto praises Tintoretto and a curent retrospective in Spain he called a "beautiful and unforgettable show, and a reason to visit Madrid this spring, in case you needed a reason." I've never been to Madrid, but his encomium made me want to book a flight pronto.

Then again, it's hard to imagine any traveling Tintoretto show topping his show-stopper "installation"--the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. It's not necessarily the first thing people think of when they consider the city that is as wonderful and romantic as you might imagine, without any Disneyfication (knowing the city is all at best wearing away, at worst slowly sinking into the lagoons knocks flat any cheap sentiment). I mean there's St. Mark's--the square and the basillica and the dueling coffee shop orchestras and the campanile a bit askew and St. Theodore astride his crocodile (you have to know your Pound for that one)--, and the canals, and the Doge's Palace, and the Bridge of Sighs, and Harry's (most expensive cocktails I've ever had), and Murano (gee, why does every demo end with the audience in the salesroom?), and for relief from the "old stuff" there's the Guggenheim. San Rocco can seem like an afterthought's afterthought.

But to tell the truth, it was perhaps the place I found most inspiring in all of Italy (ok, we only visited Florence and Venice, but...). The danger with any such trip is at a certain point you're about ready to scream if you see one more blasted cherub. Enough with the damn religious subjects. But Tintoretto must have felt that too, and you learn very quickly why he earned the nickname "Il Furioso." I've drifted much from the church, but looking at a Tintoretto you get gobsmaked by this artist's faith--it's living, and so are his paintings. Things are seen anew, over and over; one simple example is while every other Last Supper has the table square (rectangular?) in the frame, Tintoretto runs his at a diagonal. Different just to be different? Well, yes and no--the unique perspective makes the event seem possible, animated, and Jesus and his disciples quite possibly actually people. And if we get moved to believe that, then the story gets really interesting.

Danto quotes John Ruskin's response in a letter to Ruskin's father:

I have had a draught of pictures today enough to drown me. I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret [that's the Anglicized version of his name, which is thanks to his father, a dyer or tintore: he's the little dyer]. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, & put him in the school of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line underneath him to stop him off from everybody--and put him in the school of Intellect, next after Michael Angelo. He took it so entirely out of me today that I could do nothing at last but lie on a bench & laugh.... M Angelo himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell beside Tintoret's.

San Rocco's walls and ceilings attest to Tintoretto's genius--52 paintings in all, with ones you have to view in a mirror on the ceilings. That crucifixion at the top of this entry (just trying to play catch up with Good Friday, I guess) isn't just a painting, it's practically CinemaScope with dimensions of 17 1/2 feet by 40 feet. It's ten years this summer I saw these works and they still seem vivid to me. Whenever anyone wants to think art is purely an intellectual exercise, I want to ship 'em to Venice and make 'em tremble before that.