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  • "An Afternoon with Aasif Mandvi"

    Aasif Mandvi, writer and star of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival’s opening night film, Today’s Special, charmed the audience during an interview with Festival Director Chi-Hui Yang.

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Topic: sfmoma

Painting the White House red: The Cockettes' "Tricia's Wedding" (1971) put a new spin on the First Daughter's nuptials. (Photo by Scott Runyon; courtesy of Fayette Hauser).

Experience

The Cockettes' celluloid afterglow still strong at 40

As a performing ensemble, The Cockettes were relatively short-lived. (So, sadly, were many members due to the AIDS crisis a decade later.) But their influence has been large, and seems ever more recognized. At present next-generation alternative S.F. theatre troupe Thrillpeddlers is passing the six-month mark with its surprise smash-hit revival of the Cockettes’ camp operetta Pearls Over Shanghai, currently extended through January 23.

It now includes an “Afterglow Floorshow” reprising numbers from other original Cockettes shows to honor the 40th anniversary of the troupe’s founding. That same milestone is marked Thursday by a one-night-only SFMOMA program you might kick yourself from here to eternity for missing.

The Cockettes on Film, at 40! sounds as good as it could possibly get for those of us too young or geographically disadvantaged to have experienced the group’s heyday in the flesh.

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Remote control: Alexander Hahn's "Luminous Point" (2006-7, represented here by a still) at SFMOMA is initially reminiscent of treasure-hunt video games. (Photo courtesy the artist)

Experience

Room for thought at SFMOMA

A film in a darkened theater commands our undivided attention, but a video installation in a museum doesn’t have the same effect. Living so long with the insidious remote control, plus the steady erosion of attention spans, has made us impatient and intolerant of any program that isn’t entertaining us NOW! Frankly, we’re so allergic to boredom that a mere instant of stasis or confusion is enough to send us hopping to another channel, or fleeing to another room. The adjacent installations of computer-generated video by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer currently on display at SFMOMA require more time than most to reveal themselves, and it’s the rare visitor who sticks around that long. Are the peripatetic hordes missing out on some fantastic secret of the universe? I daresay no. Yet I consider it my public duty to encourage anyone who checks out the show in its last month to slow down their meter and get on its rhythm.

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