Tell me a story, but it’d better be good
The storytelling series the Moth, which takes place live all around the world and is broadcast in the Bay Area on KQED and KALW, had its Moth GrandSlam Championship at the Castro Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 18. I was a newbie audience member, but the place was packed with longtime fans.
Competitors are given a topic that’s supposed to be the focus of a story — in this case, it was “the tipping point,” pretty much ignored — and then five minutes each to tell a tale. Jurors assign numerical scores to each performer. In this case, the winner was Jane Gideon, who had been adopted as a child and whose story was about her search for her birth family. Brava to Jane, who said at the end of her presentation that her birth family had come from Oklahoma to be at the theater. She/they received a huge round of applause.
Truthfully, I am put off by the competitive aspect of the storytelling. How do you measure a story that tears your heart out (most of them did) against a bonbon of a story about some minuscule aspect of first-person foolishness? Whose story do you like better, Susan Sontag’s or Sarah Silverman’s? And to me, the childlike bliss of listening to a story is marred by forcing oneself to consider whose is best. But the size and enthusiasm of the audience was evidence that mine is a minority opinion.
The competition that most intrigued me was alluded to by KALW’s Chris Hambrick, a producer who’s on the station’s development team. In welcoming the audience, she mentioned that the station’s softball team, the McLaren Park Mashers, were that night playing the last game of the season. In nine seasons of play, she said, they had an 8-64 record.
I couldn’t resist following up, and it turned out the Mashers beat the SF Swingers, 9-6. Let storytelling be storytelling, and as for softball, just wait until next year. Game on.
Question at top of press release written by someone who’s perhaps examined a thesaurus or dictionary too closely: “Are you tired of cruciate lines or having to pay someone to trim your beard?” (The product is the Beard Bros Beard Shaping Tool, and I ignored the offer of a free sample.)
Down and dirty: Paul Slater sent along a clipping of a story from the East Bay Times about a fine that had been levied on a debris hauling firm that was found to have been responsible for spreading dust through a neighborhood. Nearby residents, said the story, “complained about medical complications such as persistent coughing, eye and throat irritation and lightheartedness from the dust.”
On Nov. 9, photographer Carrie Mae Weems will deliver the Bransten Lecture at the de Young Museum. Weems’ work has been shown widely around the Bay Area, where she once lived (and danced with Anna Halprin), and among her many national and international awards is a MacArthur Fellowship. But the lecture organizer’s stroke of luck was that she was described, in the Sunday, Oct. 21, New York Times Style Magazine, as “perhaps our best contemporary photographer.”
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “This house was designed by Gavin Newsom.” Tour-taker to tour-taker, overheard while looking at house designed in the 19th century by the Newsom Brothers, on the Victorian Alliance house tour by Steve Finacom
“Change: The Banned Countries,” the Kronos Quartet concert at Stanford University on Saturday night, Oct. 20, featured music from the seven countries whose residents were banned by President Trump’s order: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Among the pieces played, notes fan David Roche, were Aftab Darvishi’s “Winds From the South.” Darvishi, 31, was born in Iran, and now lives in Holland. She is a citizen of the Netherlands and a citizen of Iran.
The concert included the world premiere of the piece, the second of her works that the quartet has played. In April, she’d bought a ticket to be at the quartet’s performance of her “Daughters of Sol.” And then she applied for a visa.
That request was put on hold by U.S. officials, and is still on hold, neither accepted nor turned down. Composer-performer collaboration on the music has been done via Skype.
“Unfortunately,” wrote Darvishi in the program notes, “we are living in a time in which, as an Iranian-Dutch artist, I, as many of my fellows, am not allowed to enter the United States of America. But I feel blessed to have a voice called music, and it is probably stronger than any presence.”