The Pocket Square

Jack, Michelle, Queen Rose, King Silas and David Shepherd from NBC's Kings.

I’ve watched the first two episodes of NBC’s Kings now, and I confess that I’m both intrigued and puzzled. Though the show is meant to be a kind of update on the Old Testament story of David and Saul from the last half of 1 Samuel, the overriding tenor of the show is less Biblical than Shakespearean. Ian McShane, who so masterfully played Al Swearingen on Deadwood, is back in essentially the same role, though his floridly profane oratory has been cleaned up for network TV and he’s traded in his frontier saloon for Shiloh, the rebuilt capital of his kingdom in this alternate history of the 20th century. He lords over his subjects and court as King Silas, the sometime protector sometime adversary of the transparently-named David Shepherd, a lily-white soldier who saved Silas’ son, Prince Jack, on the battlefield.

Though it’s still early in the goings, this Biblical retelling employs a cast of dozens (courtiers, bankers, generals, a pair of security guards out of the first scene of Hamlet) whereas David only really had to contend with Saul, his son Jonathan and his wife Michal. Kings aims higher, employing a kind of pan-Shakespearean architecture, aesthetic and verbal style, quick to embrace the soliloquy, overly-florid speech–Deadwood laid the groundwork for this device, though did it with greater panache–and a smattering of the Bard’s best characters: King Silas is an amalgam of Saul, Claudius and Falstaff (if only because, surrounded by characters each more sober than the next, he’s in sole possession of anything remotely resembling a sense of irony); Prince Jack is Jonathan and Prince Hal; Princess Michelle clearly some merger of Michal and Cordelia; Queen Rose a Lady Macbeth (sorry Rose, no mention of you in the Good Book so you’re all Shakespeare); and her brother the viperish financier a blend of Albany and Cornwall.

I confess that I’m highly curious about what will come next. I surely understand that in terms of storytelling and the foibles of the court no one did it better than Shakespeare. As a cribber of history he certainly pillaged existing tales to compose his masterpieces, but I wonder at what point the conceit will buckle. When will Biblical story cease to work within the Shakespearean structure? Though at the outset the premise has promise: Take a beloved Bible tale, filter it through Elizabethan drama, leaven with a first rate actor, McShane, and unleash it on the small screen. Perhaps the thing most likely to keep Kings from regicide is quitting before the formula bursts, though American TV has always had trouble with that. Though we like our politics democratic, our TV shows always aim for dynasty.

Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a queer mid-flight find.

I flew to Washington DC last week on Virgin America. I love flying VA out of San Francisco International Airport because it leaves out of the International Terminal and one gets to skip all the turgid fits and halting starts of the rest of the airport. I also adore the little TV that awaits you in the back of the seat just ahead. Though getting all the channels over the course of a flight is a dicey proposition, the music selection is often pretty good–a solid mix of listenable pop and indie rock that won’t scare the parents.

As I went through my listening options I came across the occasional nugget, like a smattering for tracks by Frank Zappa including “Camarillo Brillo.” The classical music catalog was far smaller than the pop, and populated mainly by what you might expect: Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Chopin and Brahms. I was impressed to see a bit of Philip Glass, quite a bit of Steve Reich and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Boilerplate for 20th century music to be sure; when I met her, Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette called Pärt ”NPR approved” classical music, and not NPR in an “Isn’t Ira Glass just the coolest” sort of way. I liked her appending the derogatory “NPR” tag to classical music as well, particularly because I’m so fond of slighting NPR rock. Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird can all spend the rest of their lives playing to a festival of ever-rotating 40-somethings in Bennington, VT for all I care.

So I had Reich, Glass and Pärt to choose from in the adventurous listening category, but as I paged through my options I came across a wholly unexpected choice: Karlheinz Stockhausen. Difficult in an extreme sort of way, I’ve only really dabbled in his music. Gruppen was appealing, perhaps more so in premise than execution, but I found myself immediately drawn to what was there. Virgin America mustered only two or three tracks, as opposed to all of the Daniel Variations and Drumming by Reich, but nonetheless here was a chance to have a swig of the hard stuff free of charge. 

I later sent a note about my find to Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical critic, whose book and website The Rest is Noise which are, by my lights, required reading. He was pleasantly surprised at my find, but lamented being stuck on Continental, “which has yet to discover the twentieth century on the audio channels.” I can’t say that the Stockhausen, which pieces I can’t even recall now, was the most pleasurable listen, but good on VA for giving me the opportunity. Better yet, well done to the music curator who has clearly slipped one past the goalie here, while still serving all the Bloc Party, Brad Paisley and Alicia Keyes a wider audience craves.

I confess that after some Reich, Mahler and Tchaikovsky, Reich was especially pleasant for reading, though my book–A Nervous Splendor, on imperial life in Vienna 1888-1889–demanded Mahler. Eventually I turned to the music videos, a thin group whose only standouts are Beyoncé’s If I Were a Boy and Jennifer Hudson’s Spotlight. The things we do, and find, when ESPN isn’t available.

The 15th St. NW entrance to the Washington Post building.

One of my favorite things about my two and half years of living in Washington DC was waking up every morning to the Post on my doorstep. It’s hard to imagine a finer paper, one that is as stellar a national and international journal yet still serves it’s community as well as the Post does. Sorry, New York Times, you’re a lousy local rag. So imagine my glee yesterday as I got a tour of the newsroom and chance to chat finally meet cultural critic Philip Kennicott, who has become something of a pal, in person. He toured me around the fourth and fifth floors before showing me his desk, where I met classical music critic Anne Midgette, whose forthcoming Post blog Classical Beat I await impatiently. The New York Times is lauded perpetually for its arts coverage, and though it’s often quite good, those who think the Post is just a vehicle for Tom Toles should really peruse the arts and culture writing.

As Philip and I wandered around the fifth floor, admiring a massive aerial photo of the city and stumbling across a large poster of Shirley Povich, longtime Post sportswriter and a cousin of mine by marriage, I even further lamented the fact that I no longer rise to the dulcet prose of Ghivan, Robinson, Applebaum and yes, dare I say it, bellicose old Krauthammer.

I’ve long been a Post devotee, but wandering around the offices and then chatting with Philip about music, the city and architecture in a nearby Caribou Coffee (a most Washingtonian of rituals) my love for not just the Post but for papers soared. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle has been a delight and the prospect of my city without it is a deeply worrying thought. Any major city without a proper paper is a strike against it. Bad for the arts, bad for we citizens, bad for our democracy.

My new Bialetti Moka Express and a bottle of grappa.

I was talking with a colleague earlier this week about our mutual love of grappa, a potent digestif I only came to appreciate during a bone-chilling January week spent in the Veneto. She told me that when she was in Venice, also during a very cold January, she would drink caffè corretto literally “corrected coffee.”

The drink is a mixture of grappa and espresso, sometimes with sugar, though the sweetened version is usually drunk in the morning, she said, by very old men. I bought a three-cup Bialetti Moka Express the next day and aim to start working on my own caffè corretto . I’m nearing the bottom of a bottle of excellent Sarpa di Poli grappa I bought from Plumpjack in Noe Valley, so I may very well need to invest in some more.

In Italy there are variations on the caffè corretto such as sipping a few drops of grappa just after a sweetened espresso-ammazza caffè-or adding a bit of grappa to the last little bit of espresso left at the bottom of the cup-resentin. Commence experimentation!

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Drew and I took a wonderfully long walk today, hiking all over town in this glorious San Francisco weather. After browsing in shops, lunching in Russian Hill, having coffee at Stella Pastry on Columbus (yum!), and stopping into Fog City News for the latest issue of Wired and the winter edition of Antenna, our feet were sore and home we went. All told our urban hike was 5.5 miles. Exercise for the day, I’d say.

Dwell.com relaunched Thursday morning and is the best the site has ever been.

I’m very pleased to announce that at long last the redesigned and better-than-ever dwell.com is up and running! Our web team has been hard at it for months, and under the gimlet eyes of online editor Sarah Rich and others it’s looking quite wonderful. Previous iterations of the site have been tough to search and felt like imperfect resources for those interested in modern design. As all of our content migrates onto the site and the inevitable glitches get worked out, dwell.com will become the premiere site for modern architecture and design.

I’ve been blogging quite a bit as part of my daily duties as an editor. Here are a couple of late that I think came off pretty well: This one is about how giant ferris wheels look to be replacing the requisite Gehry building as the way to architecturally re-brand a city; another deals with how architecture functions in the rather poor film “The International;” still a third appreciates John Updike as an architecture critic. Keep checking back as the site is only bound to get better!

This Saturday, I sat down at Ritual Roasters Coffee with graphic designer and blogger Robert Hold, the man behind the blog Mr. Peacock for an interview. Oddly enough, he wanted to interview me, rather an unusual turn of events in this journalists’ life. We chatted for nearly two hours about fashion, our mutual affection for early British punk and how we both really like Washington DC. After I finished my coffee and he his chai, we went outside and Robert took my picture to run along with the interview on his site. Here’s the interview, which came out pretty well, I’d say, along with the photo of me (though my pants look a bit short when I put my hands in my pockets, I fear). Good job Robert, and I’m very pleased to have met you!

A photo of me at Valencia and Liberty taken by Robert Hold.

Could it be that there’s a vogue for bass clarinets in the San Francisco avant-jazz and contemporary classical scene? Could these over-sized woodwinds be the pork belly, the cabinet of curiosities, the handlebar mustache of the band camp set?

The last three concerts of this kind I’ve attended, two of which featured Aaron Novik (he’s second from the left in the photo above, and he played a regular clarinet at my wedding) and others on the instrument playing a kind of left-field brand of jazz and cabaret.

The third was tonight: I went to the last night of the SF Sound Microfestival of New and Experimental Music only to find each piece featuring the thing. It was used to greatest effect during the Elliot Carter composition Triple Duo (the reason I went in the first place), though the pair of musicians who played it over the course of the evening did manage to ellicit all manner of puffs, skwanks and trills out of it. It’s a lovely instrument capable of both rich tones and enough breathy dissonance to make any fan of experimental music sing.

Any thoughts on this, team? I’ll be monitoring developments closely.

The apartment blocks in which much of Gomorrah takes place.

I saw the wonderful gangster film Gomorrah directed by Matteo Garrone yesterday, and was struck at the level of decay and desiccation presented. The film was set largely in Scampia, a suburb of Naples apparently riddled with the criminal activities of the Camorra crime organizations. It’s a fascinating portrait of how deeply the organization penetrates the lives of both average Scampians, Neapolitans and the thugs themselves, but it’s also a staggering use of architecture and landscape in filmmaking.

The literally crumbling apartment blocks, terraced half-ziggurats paying homage to nothing, tell only half the story of paranoia and a life without opportunity. An earthquake in the early 80s terribly damaged the region, and this film suggests that things, socially, culturally, politically and architecturally, have been left to slowly rot ever since.

Eyesores of post-war brutalism, the facades of these buildings tell only half the story. Within their concrete passageways, crevices and bombed-out hollows lie passageways, hiding places and caverns prime for lookouts, hidden caches of weapons and the kind of subterranean malfeasance that so often surfaces.

Still from Gomorrah of Gaetano being killed by rival gangsters.

Continuing on this theme of endemic, toxic rot, Gomorrah tells the story of Franco and Roberto, two more polished arms of the Camorra who launder money through large waste disposal contracts with European businesses (see this story from Reuters last year for more on how the Camorra do this). Acting with no fear of governmental oversight, they collect toxic waste and bury it in quarries, literally poisoning the very ground from which the buildings and their inhabitants spring.

It’s both a potent symbol and a very real demonstration of how the Camorra is so deeply entrenched with what impunity it operates. The end of the film says that cancer rates are up 20% in areas where the Camorra controls the waste management and than in the last 30 years they’ve killed one person every three days.

I’ve been reading Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, which takes great strides and overweening prose to make the rather facile point that our spaces effect the way we feel, but this film is an exemplar of that notion. The film has an utterly hopeless, claustrophobic feel that wasn’t won through shaky, hand-held cameras or an unnerving score. Gomorrah is a portrait of a doomed landscape, one stripped of the built environment’s capacity to ennoble or inspire. This is squalor writ large, and if one accepts de Botton’s thesis, Scampia has managed to build, not build or disregard to the point of obsolescence, a society that strongly echoes its surroundings.

Marco and Ciro testing out stolen guns at a swampy beach in Gomorrah.

One does start to wonder though, on a massive infrastructural scale, what micro-societies will spring up in these wastelands, and how to combat them through opportunity, attention and design. Housing projects in tough parts of American cities are often pointed to as isolated, and some would suggest, fixable, examples of design that has lost its sense of humanity, but happens when whole cities, right down to their toxic groundwater, lose their sense of progress, momentum and morality?

This is the first post on The Pocket Square, a name I’ve taken from the men’s style column I write for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s the most recent column on vintage shopping in San Francisco, something I do often, to my wife’s and bank’s dismay.

I suppose I’ll start using this blog as a way to post complimentary content to the column as well as give myself a bit more breadth and leeway to write and comment on the arts, architecture, film literature and style. Bear with me as I get this blog up and running.