Tuesday, April 4
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Frederica von Stade and Samuel Ramey California Theatre; 345 S. First St, San Jose; 408.286.2600; Tue - 8pm; $60-$100 Two of the most respected opera soloists around—mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade and bass Samuel Ramey—converge on Saratoga for a recital. The evening's vocal fireworks include arias by Viardot and Ravel, selections from Copland and American popular songs by George Gershwin, Sondheim, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. Martin Katz will provide the piano accompaniment. (MSG) Gary Hart Tuesday, April 4, at Book Passage. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 1pm. Free. 415.835.1020. Finally, someone is standing up to the religious right, and he's even a Democrat. Gary Hart, former Colorado senator, presidential candidate and theologian, has a svelte, substantive new book out. God and Caesar in America: An Essay on Religion and Politics (Fulcrum Publishing; $9.95) is a rigorous rumination on just what makes separation of church and state so goddamned important, and why the religious right is wrong to try to unite the two. The Kansas-born Hart actually graduated from the Yale Divinity School in 1961 before changing direction to become a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice and eventually going into politics. This early theological experience gives his argument in God and Caesar extra weight as he carefully considers the specific project of the religious right. One subtlety he ponders is how the religious right operates in a democracy that mandates majority rule. Because a majority of Americans voted for God-aligned Bush (or did they?), then isn't the religious right an appropriate ruling power? Hart concludes that's not the case, because it's doubtful that the "majority of those who voted for Bush," he asserts, "were of the same mind on the very wide variety of religious and social issues promoted by the religious right." Pushing the thought further, Hart writes this scary prognosis: "The religious right in America, empowered by compliant elected officials, some of whom are intimidated by that element, is seeking a dictatorship of the minority. There are more than a few authoritarian and totalitarian examples in the world where this has taken place, but not in a constitutional democracy such as the United States." Peppered with meaty observations and analyses about what happens when church and state blend together (they both degrade) and how the religious right schemes to bring its evil plan upon the heads of us all (by packing the courts with the approval of James Dobson), Hart's little book aims to have an impact before it's too late. Gary Hart discusses God and Caesar on Tuesday, April 4, at Book Passage. (Brett Ascarelli) Robert Brady Sculpture: 1989-2005 Palo Alto Art Center; 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto; 650.329.2366; The show runs through April 23 After a long and successful career working in ceramics, Bay Area sculptor Robert Brady switched his primary material in 1989. Entranced by wood in its natural state—striving trunks, columnar branches—Brady creates attenuated figures that evoke Giacometti's skeletal studies. Brady's figures are often caught in aspects of worship or submission—kneeling, praying, bending to higher forces. The wooden surfaces are either stripped down, skinned of bark or painted in glossy colors. Angel (1991) is a penitential form, resting on one jointed knee. The streamlined torso is armless; the head marked only by two black dots for eyes. Our attention is drawn to the spectacular paddle-shaped red wings, scored with white lines as if they were made of brick. Another Angel, from 1993, boasts a stretched-oval head from a Modigliani painting and green-tinted wings for arms. Fledgling (1992) is a female figure balancing on her knees like a diver. Her arms are made from swooping curved pieces of wood arching backward. The arms are whiplike, as if about to propel the woman forward with a rush of potential energy. Nash (1995) is a spiderish man-chair resting on the point of his legs and arms, his ribcage lightly delineated with surface carvings. More explicitly metaphoric, Yolo (1989) consists of a large two-piece headless figure twisting at the waist. The arms are clutched behind, forced to drag a stone weight; the feet are buried in the base. This female Sisyphus is eternally poised between pulling and being pulled. Brady also favors pod shapes—giant cocoons with blank eyeholes and Celtic tracery carved on their surfaces. Fid (1993) is hermetically sealed, hiding secrets we can't penetrate. The King's Journey (1993) opens with a hinge to reveal a scooped-out yellow gourd filled with a stamen of sorts and three green seeds. The Brady retrospective is nicely complemented by Deborah Barrett's "Wildlife" show, which runs concurrently. Barrett is a pack-rat artist, happily collaging away with assorted snippets of material and creating pieces that combine the look of great age with disturbing currents of modern madness. For Man in Profile (2000), Barrett has drawn in gouache and pencil an exquisite portrait bathed in white light. The torso is a simple outline from which a piece of cloth in the shape of a sleeve hangs. Monkey on a Horse (1999-2000) reproduces styles from several eras—a Dürer stag beetle, a Japanese monkey, a Persian horse. Rendered on heavily soiled and creased linen, this drawing looks like a lost volume from a Babylonian library. (MSG) Heavenly Bodies San Jose Museum of Art; 110 S. Market St, San Jose; 408.294.2787; Tue - Sun, 11-5pm; show runs through April 9 In an affront to the static quality of oil painting, the video works in "Heavenly Bodies," in the historic wing upstairs at the San Jose Museum of Art, all embrace notions of time and change. In essence, the pieces in the show are experimental video shorts turned into installations pieces. In You Called Me Jacky, a four-minute-long video, artist Pipilotti Rist lip-syncs with exaggerated gestures the title song while indistinct images flow and mutate behind her. The work may be a comment on bad music videos or it just may be a bad music video. In similar fashion, Drew Brandt's Dance, Video, Dance (2002) subverts a battling-warriors video game called Soul Caliber into a disco video. Instead of attacking each other, two armor-plated Voldos with knife-blade hands engage in an intricate dance routine in the halls of some Lara Croft underworld full of columns, vaults and dragons. Two large installations resonate to much greater effect. In one darkened corner, Ajna Joy Lichau's San Shi (Dispersion) consists of a large, faint wall-mounted photo of Angel Island on the wall; on the floor, a color image of a nude woman floats face down in the water. Subtly, the shifting reflections of light create a rippling surface. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the video is being projected on a bed of sand, which gives it a 3-D quality. Is this a murder waiting to be solved or the beginning of a transformation? The shimmer in the dark remains a mystery. Ruth Eckland's Star Fields (2005) casts a six-minute montage of star bursts and silhouettes of persons and landscapes unknown. In time to a an electronica score, the video turns red, blue and yellow. The video is projected on a series of hanging translucent scrims before falling on a wall. The result--fragmented and layered--is like a hologram journey through deep space with flickering memories of Earth. Local computer artist wiz Jim Campbell offers a Self-Portrait With Disturbances. A small black-and-white TV with its innards exposed broadcasts a grainy shot of the artist's head. As the viewer walks past the screen, a video camera records the movements and adds them to the feed, creating a ghostly trail of pixels, like an animated Etch-a-Sketch. New media offers lots of possibilities, including the chance to flop. Bjorn Melhus' No Sunshine (1998) is a short video about two yellow-wigged proto-humans conversing in baby-talk gibberish until interupted by a pair of more (supposedly) evolved hairless beings in body suits. It is exactly this kind of avant-garde art-school indulgence that gave rise to the SNL parody Sprockets. As Dieter used to chide, "Your story has become tiresome." (MSG) 'Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places' Oct. 15-May 2006 at the Children's Discovery Museum, 180 Woz Way, San Jose. (408.298.5437) Horton, the Cat in the Hat and a plethora of other Dr. Seuss characters will be the main attraction as the Children's Discovery Museum's newest exhibit, "Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places.' This hands-on fun zone, borrowed from the Children's Museum of Manhattan, honors the great kids' book author on his Seussentennial. A Wealth Of Ideas Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion; Stanford University Campus; 650.723.3563; Runs Jan. 31-May 6; open Tue-Sat, 11am-4pm; free Liberal it ain't. Stanford's Hoover Institution is the gold standard of conservative think tanks. The well-endowed (with money—despite the phallic symbolism of the Hoover Tower) institution possesses a deep collection of unusual historical documents on the topics of revolution, politics and world leaders. As a prelude to a book about the institution's archives by fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude, the Hoover library is mounting an exhibit of some of its rarest holdings. (MSG) Calendar Home | Metroactive | Back | Next