San Francisco: 1981 - 2007
Strictly some highlights, the details are everywhere else.
I moved to San Francisco from Fullerton, a SoCal Orange County suburb North of Disneyland, itself a once proud keeper of American Myth. In the summertime, as kids, we watched the colorful nightly fireworks from the roof of our house. The SoCal smog eventually got so thick that they all looked orange. After a while we stopped looking. I had an unusually familiar knowledge of Disneyland, for a non-employee. Maybe not. My dad worked for a business that provided regular parts to Disneyland so "extended" family discounts were a real thing. Living near meant going regularly and eventually I had family and friends that worked there so once the dazzle wore off and I could walk in to meet someone for lunch I began studying the methods and became enthralled with understanding the astonishing effect of fully immersive theater on the public. It's a power to reckon with. It never occurred to me that I could ever work there doing the job I wanted so I directed my efforts to stage craft and guerrilla marketing and their equally astonishing effects on the public. After considering the options I chose San Francisco over Seattle, Chicago and NYC to master my craft because it met two big requirements for an adult community I'd want to mature into, neither of which Fullerton could provide; I could make a living in contemporary theater & not be forced to commute in order to earn my bread or be with my community. San Francisco also met a third less critical but important requirement. The graffiti here was smart and funny and about something, unlike the territorial tagging in SoCal. Punk was about a lot more than just music and wearing clothes that could inspire a beating on the right bus route.
Though I didn't know it before I got there, I also happened into town at the start of the 2nd wave of the notorious SF punk scene when Dead Kennedy's were already kings and Flipper ruled, or know that both would be in my living room eventually. The spirit of D.I.Y. with a Conscience was in the air like spray paint, no matter what art or craft was on stage and it provided an exciting environment of cross fertilization among the many renegade performing arts in town. Back in the day it was possible to live by bouncing around the many theaters that were, then, producing original work in San Francisco, making friends, networking, the whole toot. Decades later I met artists working at the same time when we were all so busy no one could keep up with what everyone was producing and we always knew common people we worked with and remembered fondly, some dearly. My sense of the continuum of the craft and it's importance was made even more profound. I have performed so many stage-craft jobs that even I find it doubtful I could have performed half of them well but I was consistently praised for my contribution and recommended by peers as our careers took us into more exotic places including international festivals in Stuttgart, West Germany, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Wroclaw, Poland and White Plains, NY and showcases at the War Memorial Theater & Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, the Lincoln Center in New York, NY and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. On off nights we were more likely found working in alleys, bars, basements, beaches, libraries, lofts, clubs, cults, sidewalks, storefronts and so on. In the doing of it all I had the honor of working with a great many theater companies and producer/creators and most of them were relatively historic before I got there including Magic Theatre, The One Act Theatre, The Eureka Theater, The Jullian Theater, The Lorraine Hansberry Theater, Encore Theater, Soon 3, George Coates Performance Works, The People's Theater Coalition, The Bayfront Theater, The Cowell Theater, The Fifth Floor and more. It was an honor because of the hundreds of people our shows represented and the very many thousands in the audiences over decades as we did our part to keep the continuum of theater intact and relevant. Between 1981 and 1988, through hard work living the life and with the support of the community I often lived with in the spaces we worked in, including the partners I had and the epicenters like the A-Hole on 3rd and Studio 4 on Potrero and Shotwell we congregated, I became part of the technical or design staff for, among others, the following theatrical companies, presenting in excess of 150 productions in just the first 7 years; as in 150 productions times X = all the nightly performances, which is well into the thousands of individual performances just in those 7 years. Once I began designing theatrical sound and composing scores for dance in earnest, the press took notice and bothered to comment, though the most important notice was by a friend and colleague from my first days at the Magic Theatre. Honorable Mention Roll Call
1985 - 2005 Tangents into the straight World
Until the Dot Con debacle and other cultural factors made it impossible, I was able to earn a humble living primarily working in the experimental side of the craft while free to pursue my many interests, collaborative and otherwise. Nestled in between my 1984 exhibit and 1988 hiring at the Exploratorium was a stint at the one and only Hamburger Mary's on Folsom. It somehow qualifies as a straight job despite the obvious and kept me afloat between being anchored at the Magic Theatre and finally again in 1986 at George Coates Performance Works.
The single person, the one I consider responsible for the greatest many opportunities I enjoyed creatively and professionally between 1982 and 1996 is Pamela Winfrey with Patricia Fostar a close 2nd. I admired Pam greatly, professionally and personally. In 1984 Pam invited me and Nat Fast, a designer I often worked with and with Terry Hunter apprenticed under, to produce an interactive sound installation for Theater Day at Exploratorium (the world renown museum of science, art and human perception), where she was, then, the volunteer coordinator, soon to be head of the Performing Artists In Residency Program. It's when and where I met Frank Oppenheimer. Nat and I produced "Sound Experience", that in retrospect was a foreshadowing of immersive virtual reality, and a good time was had by one at a time every 5 minutes or so.
That 'in' to the Exploratorium allowed me to be, among other things, a minuscule part of the video documentation team for the late Frank Oppenheimer performing exhibits on the floor of his museum. Eventually I started getting tech support jobs from one or another of the various arts and science or educational programs within the museum which lead to a permanent position in 1988 as Projectionist for the Film Program in McBean Theater so I could be around as needs I could fill were being discovered. My first official staff job was setting up tech for the staff memorial for a coworker lost in Lockerbie Scotland. In the early '90s I went from Projectionist in McBean Theater to Technical Coordinator for the museum. There was no typical work day I can describe as every day, every few hours typically, brought a new need and set of circumstances serving either a teacher, a physicist, an exhibit builder, an exhibit developer, a resident artist, a program director, a performing artist, a corporate renter and finally still, every weekend, as projectionist for Liz Keim's Film Program. Liz was heavily involved in her craft, sponsored many terrific events bringing the film making process to the public and many collaborators and local celebrities into the mix. We set up scaffolding and projected films onto the historic Flood Building on Market St and once onto the sails of a schooner anchored off a beach near Sausalito. The museums film collection was Avant-garde, full of Norman McLaren, Bruce Connor, Jon Else and Les Blank but the best for me was the encouragement of local filmmakers to present both their work and their process to the public. The Exploratorium then was still devoted to inspiring personal curiosity with a shared passion for discovery. In 7+ years, I provided presentation support to over 300 international lecturers, teachers, physicists, performance artists, installation artists, film makers, videographers and musicians (including MacArthur Grant winners, best selling Authors, Nobel Prize winners, Emmy winners, Grammy winners… well, those hardly compare but you get the idea) plus 7 years of Film Programs in the 172 seat McBean Theater, the 1000 seat Palace of Fine Arts Theater, the, then, hundreds of thousands of people on the internet & the, then, average 6,000,000 annual visitors to the Exploratorium floor. I also provided tech support for the meetings in McBean during the unionization processes that led to the creation of SEIU 790A, the result of a leaked memo that a junior executive was getting a $20K bonus for laying off employees for the first time in the museums history, a place that under Frank's watch was more inclined to have the staff volunteer pay cuts rather than lose a position essential to the community capable of actually producing the things the managers tried to control and take credit for. Besides working to present the discoveries of visiting guests, part of working at Exploratorium included my involvement in the development of exhibits. Most were related to the artists and scientists I worked directly with but through friendships with the staff I worked on a much wider variety of creative and technical exhibits facilitating a wide variety of artistic interpretations of scientific principles and perceptual anomalies. Eventually I submitted exhibit ideas of my own and in the early 1990s I was asked to teach informal classes for the public on the subjects of unusual MIDI input devices and sampling in the, then, fledgling field of computer music. In addition to official activities (and a few straddling the line) the resources and staff of the Exploratorium were used to produce stagecraft off-site. In spite of itself but wholly in the spirit of the place, the weird science ranch co-produce dance scores, sets, props, video backdrops, puppet shows, street happenings, songs, music videos, stereoscopic animation and, peripherally, a short lived multimedia agitprop band, Sunz of Alien Teknowledgy.
I estimate that in those 7+ years of official activities, in excess of 3,000,000 people saw or heard work I had a hand in presenting including the ? number who heard work I engineered for the Exploratorium sponsored Speaking of Music series for KPFA. The numbers witnessing the unofficial activities are a humble fraction but they ultimately mean more to me. Since leaving the Exploratorium in 1996, I've been reduced to working outside of my craft, though the occasional theatrical design still pops up from time to time; the last was 2018 with "UK Underdog" by Steve Spiro premiering in West Hollywood at Zephyr Theatre and in 2022 premiering at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The meager HTML that I taught myself in 1994, so my band could have a cutting edge web site, turned into a bona fide revenue stream when I became a contractor at Visuals, my ePimp for the digital economy. After dicking around with a few fly-by-night start-ups South of Market early 1999 I became a regular contractor for the Corporate Communications division of the Charles Schwab corporation on the 28th floor above the Crocker Galleria, just in time for a cat-bird-seat experience of the Dot Com bubble burst, which was well after it had begun displacing most of the old school independent arts community from whence I sprang. My non-disclosure agreement prevents me from saying any more than that I was initially brought into the Corporate Communications department as a part-time code-monkey and became a preferred web designer and Flash developer.
Once it was clear to the staff that I wasn't looking to go Perm everyone relaxed around me and despite the HUGE cultural differences (and thanks to unending Reggae & Punk on my Walkman) I came to appreciate the collaboration despite the result of my lone purpose; to meet at 8 AM with the Editors and Writers before preparing the layout and art for the 5 PM publication of the company wide daily Schwab Employee Newsletter. No shit, the straightest job in the straight world I could never imagine having and excelling in over 6 years because I could play well with others, unlike the Dot Con Kids fresh out of fly-by-night Internet Schools honing their sense of entitlement. I was there for the apex of expectation and returned throughout the bitter adjustment to the new paradigm as new job descriptions and responsibilities settled for the actual employees as Schwab too, under my watchful gaze, was laying off long time and devoted employees for the first time in their history.
I believe I'm allowed to mention that this occurred as the company began a string of brutal restructurings. As more employees were let go and responsibilities thrown up in the air, I picked up the slack until jobs could be absorbed by others, until it happened again. Peppered throughout the above were smaller achievements worth noting, many made with the aid of computers and not all related to theater.
Las Vegas: 2009 - 2013
After a hiatus from all things Performing Arts I moved to Las Vegas in 2009 to partner with Dina Emerson, a performer at the Cirque du Soleil show Mystere at Treasure Island. Between 2009 and 2013 we hosted seven house concerts under the banner The Westwind Academy featuring members of the casts and crews from various show on the Las Vegas strip. Besides being successes in their own right, the playful/experimental nature of the house concerts launched several new acts and recording projects. On the road 2013-2017
Apparently nothing was accomplished.
Las Vegas 2017
July 2016 I returned to Las Vegas to resume my life in The Craft. May 2017 I began working on a revolutionary way to develop collaborations between artists and July I launched a campaign to solicit interest in my revolutionary vision to revitalize the performing arts across the valley. Tony Hsieh thought it was cool for a millisecond.
To be continued... Venice Beach 2017-2018
Cyndy Fujikawa, the Producer and Actress from Encore Presentations back in 1985, asked me in 2017 to design the sound for her stage Directorial debut of "Tongue of a Bird" at a Pacific Resident Theater in Venice Beach where she was a Co-Op company member and had access to a black box theater, much like 1985 at 450 Geary in S.F. It was an honor and she arranged to fly me to California and paid for my accommodations in Venice Beach so I could be present for the process.
The production was seen by another company member, Ann Bronston, who appreciated my work for Cyndy and happened to have among others things a show coming up with intense sound design requirements and another where I was invited to compose music. The next year Ann arranged to fly me to California and paid for my accommodations in Venice Beach or kept me in her home so I could be present for the process and the premiere in West Hollywood. It was a thrill. Earth 2019
...There's been a hiccup.
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