The Cocktail Glass Collection: Matteucci's in San Anselmo

It's been more than two years since I last posted an example of a neon cocktail glass I've seen. With the pandemic, I've hardly been out anywhere far from home. 

Recently, however, I saw this one in the window of a bar in San Anselmo. This is at Matteucci's, at 114 Greenfield Ave. 

For more, click the "Cocktail Glass Collection" label at right toward the top of the page.

Rain: Rain!

Rain is on my mind. We've had 7.75 inches of rain so far since the rain we had last week (last Sunday, October 17 we had about half an inch, which was the first rain this rainy season). All the drainage channels in the garden are actively flowing with run-off this afternoon, which I haven't seen here for several years. As  historical annual average rainfall in Santa Rosa is just over 36 inches, we've already had more than 20% of our annual precipitation in the past week (although mostly last night and today). A steady, spread-out pattern of winter precipitation is ideal (because flooding is less likely and we need water as late in the rainy season as possible), but I hope this will go some way toward restoring historically low reservoir levels. At Lake Ralphine recently here in Santa Rosa, you've been able to walk over to the little island by the boathouse—which I've never seen before. I'm guessing the island is already an island again. And it's still coming down.  

[Edit: Checking the rain gauge this morning (Monday, October 25), we appear to have received a total of 9.95 inches in the storm of yesterday and the night before. With that and the rain last week, our total so far for the current rain year (October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022) is 10.45 inches--which is nearly a third of our annual average rainfall in the past week. Let's hope it continues.]

Art I'm Looking At: Joan Mitchell at SF MOMA

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting an art museum for the first time in many months. I went to see the Joan Mitchell show now on view at SF MOMA. Masks were required, but showing vaccination status was not. I had my card ready to go, just in case. Much of the space is shut down, especially on the second floor near the photography galleries where the little coffee shop always has been a cozy spot to take a break in. The only photogrphy on view was a set of four panoramic photos of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. No matter. I had come to see Joan Mitchell, whose work I have noted before here and there but I really knew little about the trajectory of her career. She seems to have spent most of her life bouncing back and forth between New York and France, sometimes in Paris, sometimes on a large estate in the south. She is often considered an Abstract Expressionist, but doesn't seem to have cared much about the label. Apparently she spent much more time with like-minded painters in France (including Sam Francis and Pierre Soulages) than with the painters in New York most closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.  

I enjoyed the show. I'm glad I went, but I had mixed feelings about the work (as I always have had). Some of the paintings I liked very much, others left me rather cold. A great deal of her work has an unfinished, messy feel to it. For me at least, the thick, discrete strokes of paint don't always come together into a whole greater than the parts. Rarely are there open planes of color that give the eye a quiet place to dwell.  

The wall notes kept referring to views of the spaces that she lived in (particularly her gardens and the local landscape) and memories of experience as the wellsprings of her compositions but also to Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh as sources of inspiration. That was a bit puzzling to me. Monet, yes—in the brush strokes and the garden-inspired abstractions. Van Gogh, maybe—perhaps in one image that put me in mind of his crows over a wheat field, but Cezanne was nowhere to be seen. I was frequently reminded of Pierre Bonnard, actually. Both Mitchell and Bonnard seem to have been fond of cadmium yellows and oranges. 

The garden-inspired pieces seemed most successful to me, but I particularly liked the very large "Salut Tom" of 1979, on loan from the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington D.C. (bottom photo). It is monumental in scale, like Monet's largest water lily paintings, and similarly requires time and space to stand back in to appreciate. Some of her drawings I enjoyed as well and it was interesting to see a case full of  paints, brushes, palette knives, and other tools from her Studio. Worth a visit. The show runs through January 17, 2022 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Music I'm Listening to: The San Francisco Symphony, with Pekka Kuusisto

I attended a live San Francisco Symphony concert Friday night (October 22)—the first live performance I've been to since February of 2020. Vaccination card and ID checked at the entrance. I was happy to comply. It was good to know that everyone in the building was vaccinated. Generally, the orchestra members did not wear masks (there were one or two exceptions), neither did conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen or the soloist in the US premiere of Bryce Dressner's Violin Concerto, Pekka Kuusisto, a Finn like Salonen. 

The concert opened with Beethoven's Second Leonore overture, which was both familiar and unfamiliar. It's not the one (of the four, I think) that we most commonly hear.

According to the program notes, the Dressner Violin Concerto got its world premiere on October 1 this year, in Frankfurt. The performances in San Francisco this weekend have been the first in the United States. It's hard to put into words the feelings that music evokes—which is why writers of notes to recordings and concerts frequently resort to descriptions relying heavily on music theory that I suspect goes over the heads of most readers, including me. Suffice it to say that it was a gripping performance. The Dressner concerto grabs you by the throat and rarely loosens its grip until the very end. The soloist gets a real workout. The score involves a lot of extended technique such as bowing very close to the bridge or rubbing the bow along the strings the long way to produces novel sounds (which is not to say the piece is gimmicky). Despite a few lyrical passages and an extended cadenza toward the end (that appeared to be improvised; Kuusisto played from the score on a tablet with a foot switch to turn the pages and during the cadenza he was no longer looking at the screen), the general impression was one of driving forward movement based on extended near-repetitions that evolve through continuous small variations. Percussion plays a large role. At the pre-concert talk, the composer said "You could almost call it a concerto for violin and percussion." He also said that he thought the San Francisco Symphony percussion section "the best in the world." He seemed to mean it, saying that he'd worked with orchestras all over the world and that the SF section was the best he'd ever worked with. Very enjoyable. I hope Kuusisto records this soon. It's music that will bear repeat listening. 

As an encore, Kuusisto played a sarabande from one of the Bach solo partitas/sonatas—very familiar, but out of context I can't say which one it was from. Kuusisto played it in a rather tender, fluid way that was a sharp contrast to what preceded it. He relied heavily on rubato, which some people think has no place in the music of Bach, but it was a persuasive interpretation. About a third of the way through, someone's phone rang. He took it in stride. He stopped playing momentarily and said "That's the wrong key", laughed (and the audience laughed with him), and went back to playing. 

After intermission, the orchestra gave us Schubert's Symphony No. 5, my favorite (everyone's favorite?) of the Schubert Symphonies. After the concert, finding good food was a challenge. Because of pandemic restrictions, our go-to place, Absinthe, is now closing its kitchen at 9:00PM, even on Friday and Saturday. Ended up at a Mexican–French place that sounded much better than it tasted. Some research will be required ahead of the next SF Symphony concert—to which I'm looking forward. It was a real pleasure to hear live music again.